New Jewish Agenda 1985

Adrienne Rich, 6/17/2005

I joined New Jewish Agenda and have come to this convention in hope, need, fear, pride, and longing. Those are the voices I can hear within me as a Jewish progressive, as a Jewish woman, in the year 1985. And they are voices I recognize in the conversations, letters, articles, essays, poems of other Jewish progressives, American and Israeli, women and men, the more I listen as a Jew to others who speak from the heart as Jews. And so I would like to ask you to listen with me to some of the things I hear those voices saying. Not because I think my own feelings and reflections are typical who is a typical Jew? We are a breathtakingly diverse and complex people, a character we dare not sacrifice or allow to be taken from us.

Marshall T.Meyer, 6/17/2005

In 1980, when you established New Jewish Agenda, I was passing my twenty-first year of life in Argentina. We had heard in Buenos A ires of your Founding Conference in 1980. That was the time of the fascist regime of Videl

Leonard Beerman, 6/17/2005

I am grateful to the New Jewish Agenda for inviting me to address this convention, and thus providing me with an opportunity to demonstrate my solidarity with all of you who have gathered here. What I have to say will be s

Laura Geller, 6/17/2005

The question that I've been asked to reflect upon is, "If we are only for ourselves, what are we?" I have been asked to reflect upon it as a Jewish feminist. But it is the wrong question because feminism is about wholeness. I

Ed Asner, 6/17/2005

The topic for this evening is "Personal Reflections on Being a Progressive Jew." I used to think that was a redundant term.

A month ago I was out-of-town and I got a phone call informing me that a neo-Nazi group had just painted

Ruth Messinger, 6/17/2005

Although I primarily define myself as a woman, a Jew, a New York City elected official and a Democrat, a big piece of my adult identity came because I spent two years in western Oklahoma in a town of 12,000 people in which

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, 6/17/2005

I would like to pick up exactly where Larry left off. Indeed, the very last line of the story is even richer than most of us usually understand it to be. Elijah the Prophet reports, "God laughed and said 'My children h

Lawrence Bush, 6/17/2005

Since this is billed as a dialogue and not a debate, I hope you will all bear with me as I use most of my 25-minute preliminary remarking to do some storytelling.

Story number one, which I received from Professor Gerry Sori