Earlier this month, the RAC co-sponsored a screening of the documentary “The Invisible War” about sexual assault in the military. This wasn’t the first time I had heard of, or even seen parts of, this film. It wasn’t the first time I was appalled by the injustices, angry at the violations or moved by the testimonies. But it was the first time I left feeling that, finally, others were paying attention.

There has been a flurry of news stories in the past few weeks regarding this atrocious trend in our armed forces. A Pentagon report released earlier this month estimated that there were 26,000 military sexual assaults last year. The Air Force official in charge of the sexual assault prevention programs was arrested for, ironically enough, sexual assault. An army sergeant working in their sexual assault prevention office was investigated for similar charges. And the manager of the prevention program on a military base in Kentucky turned himself in for stalking his ex-wife. It is perhaps possible that this month has been an anomaly – that it was a freak of coincidence that all of these cases arose in the same few-week period. But it is also possible, and indeed likely, that this month was a mere snapshot of military life. That these sorts of abuses of power and abuses of privacy and humanity and dignity occur every week, and that now is just the first time we – as a broad American community – are paying attention.

It is easy to get lost in the statistics of this issue – in the horrible realization that one in three women in the military are sexually assaulted over the course of her service, or in the appalling understanding that there was an average of over 70 sex crimes per day in the military this past year. Yet our Jewish tradition reminds us that “if you save one life, it is as if you have saved a world.” Yes, this is the story of an institution with a broken reporting system and a problematic rape culture. But it is also the story of the women whose narratives I heard about in the movie. It is also the story of our neighbor, our classmate, our friend who risks her life to protect her country yet isn’t granted the same protections herself. Let us seize this all too rare moment of attention on this crucial issue to raise up the stories of these valiant women and share their stories to help advocate for change.

Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham Jail is one of the most powerful and stirring documents of the Civil Rights movement in America—in some ways more compelling than the now legendary “I Have a Dream” oration, which electrified the historic March on Washington 50 years ago.

Unlike the Dream speech, which was aimed at the conscience of all Americans, the jail speech was deeply personal and directed specifically at the leading clergymen in Birmingham who had called on King to abandon his public Birmingham campaign and content himself with the small, non-controversial steps that the clergymen were promoting behind the scenes.

One of the named clergymen was Rabbi Milton Grafman, Reform rabbi of the large and distinguished Temple Beth El. I knew Rabbi Grafman and visited with him at the temple several times in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, when I spent much of my time as co-director of the new Commission of Social Action of Reform Judaism in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida, trying to implement the strong Civil Rights resolutions adopted by the then UAHC and CCAR in support of the landmark desegregation decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Many of those meetings with temple boards were tense, with our side emphasizing the imperative of justice in Reform Judaism and urging temple leadership to prepare for tomorrow’s South, not the anguish of yesterday and today’s racial cruelty. Board members in the Deep South resented our appeals, argued that behind the scenes progress was being made in their communities, and our public advocacy of civil rights endangered them locally and stirred up Anti-Semitism, and, in essence, “you should stick to religion and stay out of ‘politics.’”

Rabbis in the Deep South during that era faced soul-searching challenges. Many communities in the area were dominated by White Citizens Councils, a “genteel” version of the KKK. Many Jewish businessmen felt especially vulnerable to pressure—whispering campaigns, boycotts, even threats of violence. Some opted out and also demanded that their rabbis and Jewish organizations lay low as well. A small number of rabbis in the Deep South—like Rabbi Jack Rothschild in Atlanta—simply rejected such counsels and stood literally with Martin Luther King, willingly taking the public heat along with the acclaim of civil rights advocates within the temple and beyond. Critics of course proclaimed “I told you so” when the temple was bombed, ignoring the fact that several synagogues that were attacked had been conspicuously silently on civil rights matters. One or two rabbis—like Julius Feibelman of New Orleans—may have gone public too soon and got burned by a vicious newspaper assault. Some rabbis avoided the public arena but—like Rabbi Charles Mantinband of Hattiesburg, Mississippi—worked tirelessly and effectively behind the scenes, strengthening inter-religious support systems, reaching out to black professionals in the community (not one of whom had ever voted or expected to vote), and helping national agencies to be more sensitive to communities under stress.

Some rabbis became tragic marrano-like figures—silent on the outside, torn with guilt on the inside—knowing that Judaism is based on principals of social justice but certain that their community could not abide his speaking out on civil rights issues locally. I had great affection for one rabbi so afflicted—Rabbi Eugene Blachsleger of Montgomery, Alabama—who confessed to me: “When I shave in the morning, I cannot look at myself in the mirror because I know as a Jew what is right and what is wrong, and I cannot say it.” Nobody had to remind the rabbi that, in that very town, a predecessor Reform rabbi had bravely defended the Scottsboro boys, one of the most infamous cases of injustice in American history, and that rabbi had been run out of the congregation and the town virtually on a rail.

Several Southern rabbis became so conflicted that they joined their angriest lay-persons in lashing out at the national Jewish agencies and especially the then-UAHC and CCAR, threatening to silence them by withholding funds or even quitting the parent body. Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath faced down these threats, inviting Martin Luther King to address the UAHC biennial assembly despite a two-year campaign to cancel the invitation. To Eisendrath, a commitment to equal justice was the very heart of Reform Judaism and could not be compromised at any price.

Rabbi Grafman, who was scolded by King in his rejoinder from jail, was respected by the clergy community and his own members who included several of the heavy hitters of the Birmingham business community. But when I visited with him during the demonstrations in Birmingham, he boiled over: “Listen, you can just go back to New York and leave us alone. Frankly, I would not give one hair of one of my members for all of your damn shvartzes put together.”

Decades later, I read in the New York Times, an eye-catching report that this same rabbi had proudly presided over a conference on race relations in Birmingham in warm tribute to the work and words of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That story struck me as ironic, but cities and nations and people are capable of drastic change. When I was invited to speak at the temple in the 80s, Rabbi Miller had helped to establish a lively Social Action Committee which was esteemed in the temple and in the community, reaching out to the black community, in a new Birmingham which had a black mayor and a striking network of civil rights memorials and monuments to that historic era of Martin Luther King and the traumas of change.

Indeed, Birmingham has much to remember, good and bad. It was once one of the most infamous symbols of an America gone wrong—Bull Connor, the vicious chief of police, deploying fire hoses and snarling dogs against children demonstrating for human rights; Governor George Wallace, parlaying every racist trick in the book; shadowy racist cowards blowing up a church and killing small children. Yet, ironically, it was precisely this catalogue of horrors in Birmingham which tipped the scales of history, provoking President Lyndon Johnson to embrace the civil rights revolution in Washington with its heart-stopping and incredible promise: “We shall overcome!”

And the culmination of all this history was the adoption of basic civil rights laws which were drafted by black lawyers from the NAACP and Jewish lawyers from the Commission on Social Action, working as a team at the tables in the conference room of the newly-established Religious Action Center in Washington, D.C. If the walls of the Religious Action Center could speak, they would recall the work of those who labored in a holy cause, notably Martin Luther King and the rabbis and laypersons who marched with him. Yet, after all, what moved and inspired all of them to enable the miracles of change which have followed—for people of color, for women, for persons with disabilities, for gays, for immigrants—is nothing more or less than the Hebrew prophets and a Jewish hunger for justice, alive and well in bad times and good.

Al Vorspan is the Senior Vice-President Emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism and for 50 years served as the Director of its Commission on Social Action.

If there’s one new sleight-of-hand term we’ve learned in the past few months, it’s “flexibility.” Last week, flexibility gained a new meaning, as the House of Representatives passed the so-called Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013. Flexibility in this bill, though, actually means less flexibility, less choice, less time and less money for working families.

This bill proposes to grant workers more flexibility by allowing them to convert overtime hours into future vacation time, instead of earning extra pay. Speaker John Boehner says that this would grant working parents the flexibility to choose more time off when they need it: “This week, we’ll pass [Representative] Martha Roby’s bill to help working moms and dads better balance their lives between work and their responsibilities as parents.” In reality, though, this bill is nothing but bad news for parents.

As a letter signed by over 160 advocacy organizations lays out, this bill is just a smoke-screen:

• The Working Families Flexibility Act offers a false choice between time and pay. The bill’s supporters claim H.R. 1406 would give hourly workers more flexibility and time with their loved ones by allowing them to choose paid time off, rather than time-and-a-half wages, as compensation for working more than 40 hours in one week (“comp time”). But the irony is that workers will only get more time with their families after they’ve spent long hours away at work. And there is nothing in H.R. 1406 that guarantees that workers will be able to use the comp time they have earned when they need it.
• The worker flexibility offered by H.R. 1406 is nothing more than a mirage. That’s because this proposal gives the employer, not the employee, the “flexibility” to decide when and even if comp time can be used. The bill permits the employer to deny the request entirely if the employee’s use of comp time would “unduly disrupt” operations or to grant leave on a day other than the day requested by the employee. This means that H.R. 1406 provides no guarantee that workers can use their earned time when a child falls ill, to attend a parent-teacher conference, or to help an aging parent settle in to a nursing home. Employers can veto an employee’s request to use comp time even in cases of urgent need.
• H.R. 1406 would put workers at very real risk and provides an interest-free loan to employers. An employee who does not accept comp time could be penalized with fewer hours, bad shifts and loss of overtime hours. And because it is cheaper to provide comp time than to pay overtime wages, there is a significant incentive for employers to hire fewer people and rely on overtime hours – paid for in future comp time – to get work done. It would permit employers to defer compensation for unused comp time for as long as 13 months, creating an interest-free loan for employers and hardships for workers.

The Torah teaches, “You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, but you must pay him his wages on the same day, for he is needy and urgently depends on it” (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). Even though the Torah was written thousands of years ago, there is no stretch of language or imagination needed to apply these ancient words to today’s legislation. The Working Families Flexibility Act clearly gives employers the ability—and the incentive—to not pay their workers on the same day, and to save that pay in the form of a long-term, interest-free loan to the detriment of the employee.

Workers do need flexibility, but not “flexibility” if it means cheating them out of hard-earned time and money. There are other options already on the table and introduced in Congress—ways to give working parents the supports they need to balance work and family. These include paid sick days, expanded access to the Family Medical Leave Act, a fair minimum wage and paycheck fairness. Unlike H.R. 1406, these are policy solutions that have been proven to work. So let’s use them!

Image from Forbes

On June 14, Iranians will go to the polls to elect their next president. While the world watches to see what course the next Iranian government will take, we at the RAC thought that it might be helpful to break down the Iranian election in advance of the vote.

While the president of a country is generally regarded as the most important figurehead of the country he or she governs, Iran does not fit this generalization. In Iran, power rests with the Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Khamenei. In addition to controlling the country’s media and appointing the head of the judiciary and leaders of Iran’s armed forces, the Ayatollah is responsible for appointing half of the 12-member Guardian Council. The Guardian Council exercises a veto right over any legislation and, importantly, is responsible for vetting and approving all presidential candidates.

Although the Guardian Council has not yet announced its list of approved candidates (which will be shortened from the nearly 700 that declared their candidacy), the main presidential contenders are relatively clear. According to a Guardian Council ruling, we should not expect to see any women among the contenders, as they are outlawed from running for office by the Iranian constitution.

The list of likely candidates can be broken into three camps. Camp 1 (indeed the only camp with multiple contenders) is comprised of the Supreme Leader’s picks. These include the Iranian Speaker of Parliament, the Mayor of Tehran, a senior advisor to the Ayatollah on international affairs, and the chief nuclear negotiator of Iran.  Camp 2 is held down by one man, Esfrandir Rahim Mashaie. Mashaie is President Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff. President Ahmadinejad is currently under fire for illegally accompanying Mashaie to register his candidacy. Under Iranian law, Ahmadinejad could face up to 74 lashes of 6 months in prison. Whether or not he will be held accountable for such an infraction remains to be seen. Camp 3, another singular outpost, is represented by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. A late entry into the race, Rafsanjani, who serves as President from 1989 to 1997, and lost his bid for a third (disconnected) term to Ahmadinejad in 2005.

New reports from Iran indicate that the Guardian Council is disqualifying both Mashaie and Rafsanjani, leaving only the Ayatollah’s picks as major contenders.

While the Iranian election is very much focused on domestic issues, the international community is eager to see if Iran’s next president will be a more formidable diplomatic partner than President Ahmadinejad has been, potentially improving nuclear negotiations with the West and their relationship with Israel. Stay tuned to RACblog as we closely follow the election.

Image courtesy of Salem-News.

Talk radio is very popular in Israel. Animated debates on every topic under the sun fill the airwaves every day. One station, Kol BaRama, a station with a large Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) listenership, has the practice of not allowing women to speak on air. They say this is to respect the feelings of all who tune in to hear them. We, at IRAC, have been saying for two years that it is simply illegal and immoral to silence a woman’s voice on publically funded airwaves. After months of debate, it seems Israel’s politicians are starting to agree with us, and not just about this one case, but also about gender segregation in general.

Our struggle against gender segregation and the exclusion of women has taken many forms. We have fought this phenomenon in the courts, and thanks to our Supreme Court victory, coercing women to sit in the back of public buses was declared illegal. We have fought segregation in the streets, in public transportation, public services, and in shared spaces, such as cemeteries and health clinics. Through our Freedom Rider program, our volunteer riders have helped desegregate thousands of individual bus rides. Finally, we fight segregation by lobbying the Knesset and government ministries.

We have worked hard for years to try to convince the government that this is a serious problem that needs their attention. It is fundamentally unjust to force women out of sight and to deny them access to public services simply because of one group’s extreme interpretation of modesty.

Last week, a report was published by a ministerial commission from the Justice Ministry that accepts nearly all of IRAC’s recommendations relating to gender segregation in public transportation, public services, and the public sphere. The report also includes important recommendations on improving enforcement methods against gender segregation. Israel’s Attorney General, Yehuda Weinstein, has said he will adopt the recommendations of the ministerial commission.

This is a great victory. Within six months, the practice of women faxing their questions to Kol BaRama to have them read on the air by a man will end and they must enable women’s voices to be heard without restriction. They will also be obligated to hire female broadcasters.  Female mourners will no longer be prevented from eulogizing their deceased loved ones and segregation will end at official ceremonies held under the auspices of the state (except for religious services).

To read a summary of the ministerial committee’s recommendations click here.

We are thrilled to see this kind of progress, but if we have learned anything about gender segregation it is that as soon as we turn our heads it returns and often worse than before. We will continue to work with the government to keep them aware of the problem and we will hold the Attorney General to his word that gender segregation in the public sphere must end.

In this week’s Torah portion, we are exposed to one of the Torah’s more troubling stories. Miriam, who has been a character around which the Israelites have gathered and rallied through the exodus from Egypt, speaks poorly of her brother Moses. As a result, Miriam is cursed with leprosy. While there are many problematic elements in this story, one of the key takeaways is that words – both in the Bible and today – have a lot of meaning.

Tomorrow, we as Jews have an opportunity to use our words to affect change. We will be holding a call-in day on immigration reform to tell our Senators that we demand reform to fix our broken system. We will encourage our Senators to support reform that includes:

• Family reunification policies that significantly reduce waiting times for separated families, who currently must wait many years to be reunited with loved ones, and that reunite all family-members including siblings, children, parents and spouses;
• Border protection policies that are consistent with American humanitarian values and effective against illegal migration, allowing the authorities to carry out the critical task of identifying and preventing entry into the United States of terrorists and dangerous criminals;
• A pathway to citizenship that creates opportunities for hard-working immigrants who are already contributing to this country to come out of the shadows, regularize their status upon satisfaction of reasonable criteria and, over time, pursue citizenship;
• Wage and workplace protections for those already living in America and contributing to our economy and for those who migrate here;
• Legal avenues for both high- and low-skilled professionals and their families who wish to migrate to the U.S. to enter our country and work in a safe, legal, and orderly manner that meets the needs of employers.

To get a reminder text about the call-in day, text “GESHER” to 877-877 or click here. And tomorrow, make sure to use your words to speak truth to power – call your Senators at 888-897-0174.

Back in September, we blogged about the scary prospects of 3D printed weapons. Fast forward eight months: the first fully printed weapon works, and its designs have been posted and can be downloaded for free over the Internet. Although the State Department moved quickly to shut down the host-site, the ready-to-print and fully functional design had been downloaded over 100,000 times.

Since the tragedy at Sandy Hook, we have worked tirelessly to advance sensible laws to prevent gun violence. We continue to work hard to improve our system of background checks, and believe it is necessary to keep those who are dangerous, including violent criminals, from getting weapons. Even those who do not want to expand our system of background checks agree that background checks work in preventing many criminals from getting weapons (they just ignore the loopholes that make our current system fallible). As if we needed any greater loophole than already exists, add the printed weapon to the list.

If criminal access to weapons wasn’t already scary, consider the fact that plastic weapons can’t be detected by metal detectors.

Recognizing the grave threat of the printed weapon, the State Department told Defense Distributed (the non-profit set up by a Texas law student who designed the weapon) to take the blueprints off of their site.

However, the blueprints are now being recreated and shared all over the web.

U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY) are working to create new legislation that would ban 3D printed weapons. So how will we effectively stop people from downloading the designs?

Image courtesy of Defense Distributed

This post is part of a weekly feature on RACblog. Check in at the end of the week for a roundup of stories in which the RAC has been featured!

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Featuring the RAC,” written from the offices of the Jerusalem Post’s 26^th most powerful Jew in the world! In all seriousness, we were immensely proud to see Rabbi Saperstein on JPost’s list, and equally proud of our friend Anat Hoffman who scored the #5 spot.

This week, Rabbi Saperstein also joined the Interfaith Alliance, National Council of Jewish Women, and other religious organizations calling for the inclusion of a ban on religious profiling in the immigration reform bill. Here at the RAC we’ve been hard at work advocating for comprehensive immigration reform more broadly, as well.

Rabbi Saperstein also voiced concern this week over the status of the Jewish population in Hungary by signing a letter with several other leaders of American Jewish organizations. The letter, addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador Michael Kozak, read in part: “Given the growth of hatred against Jews and other minorities (particularly the Roma) in Hungary, we urge you to keep the issue of intolerance and discrimination squarely on the US-Hungarian bilateral agenda…We also encourage you to raise the matter personally in your direct dealings with Hungarian officials.”

“Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?” (Isaiah 58:3). We know these questions as those of the Israelites in the book of Isaiah dismayed that God had not responded to their penance, but in light of today – the 100^th day of the hunger strike at the prison at Guantanamo Bay – these questions take on a new relevance. 102 of the 166 men currently detained in Guantanamo are participating in a hunger strike to challenge their treatment and their continued detention. The questions confront us today: do we not see? Do we pay no heed? And, perhaps more pressing, is this the fast that we desired?

The first detainees arrived at the U.S. Military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in early 2002. Since that time 779 men have been detained there, most without ever being charged with a crime. 86% of the detainees held at Guantanamo were turned over to U.S. forces in exchange for cash bounties; according to government data 92% were never al Qaeda fighters. 166 men remain there today, 86 have been cleared for transfer. 102 are hunger striking, 30 are being force-fed. While there has been outcry among Americans about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, it has never been strong or sustained enough to finally close the prison. Is this the fast that we desired?

Despite the successful transfer of over 500 detainees during the Bush administration, in recent years Congress has increasingly blocked attempts to transfer detainees and close the prison. One such obstacle, known as transfer restrictions, prohibits the government from transferring anyone from Guantanamo to the United States for trial. Another, known as certification requirements, dictates that any country that the U.S. might wish to transfer a prisoner to for trial must meet very strict requirements, making it incredibly difficult to transfer detainees to most countries in the world. These restrictions have been renewed every year for the last four years in the National Defense Authorization Act and may be proposed again in this year’s bill. Is this the fast that they desired?

However, despite these roadblocks the President could still do more to fulfill his promise, made during his first campaign and reaffirmed numerous times, to close Guantanamo. A number of advocacy groups have tried to increase pressure on the President to act, outlining two concrete actions he could take. One is to appoint a senior point person so that the Administration’s Guantanamo closure policy is directed by the White House. The other is to order the Secretary of Defense to start certifying for transfer detainees who have been cleared despite the added burden of the certification requirements. While he has given vocal support to Guantanamo’s closure, the President has yet to take these actions. Is this the fast that he desired?

The passage from Isaiah ends with a list of concrete, material actions that our fasts should motivate us to do. Will the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay be enough to mobilize us as citizens and motivate our leaders to finally take steps to end this dark chapter in American history?  To mark the 100^th day of the hunger strike the National Religious Campaign Against Torture – of which the Union for Reform Judaism is a founding member – is sponsoring a “Weekend of Action.”  Check out their resource page for suggestions on how to make this goal a reality.

Image Courtesy of Spencer Platt, Getty Images

Earlier this month, RJV hosted its annual Advocacy Day in Albany and with our voices raised as one, we spoke on behalf of New York State’s vibrant Reform Jewish community urging state legislators to support the Women’s Equality Agenda and implement fair election reform.  Our actions were noted by legislators, staff and the local press:

• Capitol Confidential (Times Union): Reform Jewish group pushes for women’s agenda
• Capital Tonight (YNN): Here and Now, May 6^th

Just one day after RJV was meeting with legislators about the need for fair election reform, the state Assembly passed a public financing bill by a wide margin (88-50). The measure would implement a 6-to-1 public fund matching program similar to the one in New York City. The bill now proceeds to the Senate. If you are a New York resident, you can see how your member of the Assembly voted here and take a moment to send an email to your Senator urging them to support public funding of elections now!

All New Yorkers can also continue to take action on the Women’s Equality Agenda and encourage legislators to support the 10-point plan, especially the provisions intended to safeguard women’s reproductive health decisions and ensure pay equality.

Take a look at some of our pictures from the day and check out our new website here to learn more about RJV’s work on the Women’s Equality Agenda and fair elections.