Anyway, here is the published report of the interview of me, followed by my comments on the interview. As noted below, I had hoped that it would focus less on me and much more on the American Jewish Community's commitment to social justice.
Social justice is in David Fishback’s DNA
By Selma Khenissi
David Fishback has a dream. Everywhere he goes, he carries with him a vision of an America where everyone feels safe.
“Only when everyone is safe in America, can Jews be safe in America,” says Fishback, 72, an Olney resident and member of Temple Emanuel in Kensington. For years, he has organized the Reform congregation’s Martin Luther King Jr. Shabbat Service. His steadfastness to the civil rights leader’s legacy has much to do with the time and place of Fishback’s birth.
“I was born in 1947, and my I was raised in an atmosphere in which social justice was the most important part of my identity as a Jew,” he says. “I was acutely aware of being so fortunate to be born a Jew in the United States after the Holocaust, and that good fortune made it an imperative for me to pay back the United States by doing whatever I could to erase our American stains from slavery and its legacy. For me, they are all of a piece.”
A retired lawyer and a grandfather, Fishback grew up in Silver Spring. His own grandfather took a ship from Bremen, Germany, and arrived at Ellis Island in September 1911.
Fishback says his origin story is common among many American Jews. What is less common is what he has done with his legacy as the grandchild of immigrants.
“That is why I did anti-poverty work while in college and then served as a VISTA Volunteer in Memphis,” he says. “And why, once I became a parent, I worked against racial isolation in Montgomery County Public Schools. And why I became a member of the county’s Martin Luther King Commemorative Committee.”
Organizing Temple Emanuel’s King service “has been a way to advance the vision of Dr. King and Dr. Heschel,” he says, referring to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a civil rights activist and colleague of King’s. “These issues go to my core identity as a Jew and as a human being.”
Despite its imperfections, America is home to Fishback. To live anywhere else, he says, would make him feel like he is “in exile.”
Social justice work in much of the Jewish community now goes under the name tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Another aspect of Judaism that Fishback treasures is the Passover seder, with its theme of freeing the enslaved from the shackles of injustice.
Fishback says he is partial to the Freedom Seder Haggadah that Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center, introduced in Washington in 1969.
At that First Freedom Seder, to paraphrase the traditional haggadah, anyone who wasn’t Jewish and wanted commemorate the first anniversary of King’s murder was welcome to attend.
As a law student, Fishback adopted this haggadah, with its passages from King, Mahatma Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau and others. As a parent, he incorporated the haggadah into his family celebration. “It was just perfect,” he says.
Making America a more “perfect Union” involves effort, he says. There will always be “people who harbor prejudices,” which become amplified when leaders “appeal to people’s worst instincts.”
While leaders who do so “can wield great power,” Fishback believes “there are still more of us than there are of them.”
White supremacists and neo-Nazis are damaged people who want to feel a sense of belonging, he says. Undeterred, Fishback continues on, doing his part to create a community where everyone can feel like they belong. “The worst thing to do,” he says, “would be to give up.”
Selma Khenissi is a Washington-area writer.
*********************************************************************************
This is a positive piece, and to the extent that anyone reads it, I hope it will help spur them to action.
However, I am a bit disappointed that the writer did not stress what I had urged her to stress: The American Jewish culture of which I am a part, and that my perspective is the same that infuses so much of our community. She writes, "Fishback says his origin story is common among may American Jews. What is less common is what he has done with his legacy as the grandchild of immigrants." In the interview, I pushed the point that I am not unusual, noting the politics and activism of so many American Jews, including, locally, Jews United for Justice. I am part of that culture, not an anomaly. I had hoped that the piece would use me as an exemplar of a significant portion of the American Jewish Community.
Here is what I wrote to her before the interview:
Selma,
I am looking forward to our chat today. I thought it might be useful to pass this along.
David Holzel [the Editor of the Washington Jewish Week, who asked if the WJW could do a profile on me] asked me “why you continue to organize
the [Temple Emanuel] MLK event year after year? What does it mean to you? Why is
it important to you?”).
I sent him this
answer: “I was born in 1947, and was
raised in an atmosphere in which social justice was the most important part of
my identity as a Jew. I was acutely aware of being so fortunate to be
born a Jew in the United States after the Holocaust, and that good fortune made
it an imperative for me to pay back the United States by doing whatever I could
to erase our American stains from slavery and its legacy. For me, they
are all of a piece. That is why I did anti-poverty work while in college
and then served as a VISTA Volunteer in Memphis. And why, once I became a
parent, I worked against racial isolation in MCPS schools; and why I became a
member of the County's MLK Commemorative Committee; and why organizing the MLK
service has been important to me as a small contribution in my faith community
to advance the vision of Dr. King and Dr. Heschel. In other words, these
issues go to my core identity as a Jew and as a human being.”
A
more succinct answer may be found in my remarks when I received a Heschel
Vision Award from Jews United for Justice in 2015: “As a Jew born after the Holocaust, in an
America reborn by the New Deal and with the promise of becoming a More Perfect
Union through the Civil Rights Movement, I cannot remember I time when I did
not have an acute sense of how fortunate I was, and how much I wanted to be
part of sustaining what is good in our country, and improving what needs to be
improved. I was fortunate to grow up in a family that placed a high value
on the concept of Tikkun Olam – our responsibility to repair the world.”
After we set up an
interview, I thought it would be useful to organize my thoughts in preparation. And after I did that, I thought you might
find it useful, as well. Here is what I
wrote for myself. It may make it easier
for us to chat, without as much furious notetaking.
I hope the focus of the interview will be on the Jewish milieu
which shaped my commitment to public service. My own biography is only
incidental to that broader question as to why American Jews are so committed to
social justice, beyond the immediate interests of the Jewish Community. My life, in which I chose public service as a
career and continually involved myself in volunteer efforts to make the world
better, is not unusual. My own
congregation is filled with such people.
There are so many American Jews whose lives and commitment have been far
deeper than mine. The interesting and
important question is why this is so.
I believe that the American Jewish perspective, which is
dominant in the American Jewish Community (just look at how a vast majority of
American Jews vote and how deeply they are involved in social justice movements)
arose out of both the secular and religious immigrant experience.
Generations of American Jews have simultaneously (1) been grateful
that America provided a safe harbor and enormous opportunities to have good
lives, and (2) taken seriously the "promise" of the best of
America. The way we pay back for the great opportunities and freedoms we
have found here (as opposed to in the "Old Country') is to do what we can
to help America become the society promised by the Declaration of Independence
and the Gettysburg Address. And while this, for me, has always been out
of a sense of altruism inspired by the immigrant experience and, later, by a
deeper understanding of the faith tradition, I am also acutely aware that only
when everyone is safe in America, can Jews be safe in America.
From the religious point of view, it is best exemplified by the
reasons we retell the Passover story at the Seder: "For once we were
slaves in Egypt." We are reminded of that every year not just as a
victory of tribe, but of the revolutionary concepts set forth in the early
scriptures of justice for all -- not just Jews, but for "the
strangers," as well.
Indeed, the parallels between words and practices of the Torah
and the words and practices of the American Revolution (& its emergence
through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights
Movement) are striking: Broad, revolutionary principles of justice and
kindness, never completely fulfilled (and often woefully unfulfilled), but with
the underlying imperative that it is our duty, and the duty of every
generation, to do better on the journey to what Dr. King called "The Beloved
Community." In my generation, Dr. King's words had such resonance in
part because they called us, as Jews, to remember our own stories and
struggles, and to pay it forward.
