Padma Lakshmi is an ACLU Artist Ambassador for immigrants’ and women’s rights, and a host and executive producer of “Top Chef.”
Wednesday night at a rally in Greenville, N.C., a sea of white faces in red hats bellowed “Send her back! Send her back!,” referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee who disagreed with the president on policy.
It was a sickening escalation from Sunday, when the president tweetedat Omar and three other congresswomen of color who were born in the United States: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” It was a longer version of the classic racist taunt “Go back to your country!” During the chanting on Wednesday, Trump watched over the crowd, seemingly satisfied. What followed, too, is now classic Trump — saying briefly that “he didn’t like it,” only to say later those very same chanters were “incredible patriots.” It’s Charlottesville 2.0. He has long been dog-whistling to white nationalists, and as he ramps up for 2020, that whistle has become a battle cry.
Those words, those hurtful, xenophobic, entitled words that I’ve heard all throughout my childhood, stabbed me right in the heart. They echoed the unshakable feeling that most brown immigrants feel. Regardless of what we do, regardless of how much we assimilate and contribute, we are never truly American enough because our names sound funny, our skin isn’t white, or our grandmothers live in a different country.
It’s hard for many white Americans to understand how hurtful the language the president used this week is to many of us.
In elementary school, we used to sing, “This land is your land, this land is my land.” But out in the playground and at the arcade, we heard another tune: that no matter how hard we worked, and even if we kept our heads down, many in our nation were never going to accept us as equally American as our white fellow citizens. They snarled and smirked as they reminded us that they could yank away our identity at will.
On Thursday, July 18, 2019, 2:29 PM, Ilhan <info@ilhanomar.com> wrote:
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise. -Maya Angelou
Last night Donald Trump’s racism and xenophobia was on full display at a campaign rally in North Carolina. His lies and hateful remarks were fueled by white nationalism and bigotry, but coming from a man who ran a campaign for president based on vitriol, we shouldn’t be shocked by his latest display of hatred.
Donald Trump is lashing out at me to serve as a distraction and to rile up his base in an attempt to move the focus away from how his administration is failing our economy and our country.
I will not allow Trump to distract me and I don’t want him to distract you either. I am going to keep fighting each and every day for progressive policies and legislation that will benefit the American people and create a brighter future for everyone. We are building an inclusive movement that is centered on racial, social, economic, and environmental justice for all.
Today I voted ‘yes’ on a bill that passed the House to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour; because every worker should earn a living wage in our country. I recently introduced a bill with Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal to eliminate the $1.6 trillion student debt that is shackling 45 million Americans.
I am fighting for Medicare for All so that we finally recognize health care as a human right, not a privilege for the few. And I am calling attention to the human rights crisis on our southern border, working to hold CBP and ICE accountable for their actions.
Those who want to halt our progress are doing everything they can to ban me from Congress; but I am exactly where I belong. I am in the people’s house and those who want me gone will just have to deal with it.
I am able to keep fighting for the issues that impact the American people because of your support. Together we are building a movement and a campaign that is focused on improving the lives of Americans across our country.
You often hear that in these polarized times, Republicans and Democrats are deadlocked on almost everything. But the real scandal is what both sides agree on. The best example of this might be the defense budget. Last week, the Democratic House, which Republicans say is filled with radicals, voted to appropriate $733 billion for 2020 defense spending. The Republicans are outraged because they — along with President Trump — want that number to be $750 billion. In other words, on the largest item of discretionary spending in the federal budget, accounting for more than half of the total, Democrats and Republicans are divided by 2.3 percent. That is the cancerous consensus in Washington today.
The United States’ defense budget is out of control, lacking strategic coherence, utterly mismanaged, ruinously wasteful and yet eternally expanding. Last year, after a quarter-century of resisting, the Pentagon finally subjected itself to an audit — which, in true Pentagon style, cost more than $400 million. Most of its agencies — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps — failed. “We never expected to pass,” admitted then- Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has identified $15.5 billion of waste. But that is after reviewing only $53 billion of the $126 billion appropriated for Afghanistan reconstruction through 2017. He wrote in a 2018 letter, “[We] have likely uncovered only a portion of the total waste, fraud, abuse, and failed efforts.”
Outside war zones, there are the usual examples of $14,000 toilet-seat lids, $1,280 cups (yes, cups) and $4.6 million for crab and lobster meals. Remember when then- Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted that the Pentagon had about as many people in military bands as the State Department had active Foreign Service officers? Well, it’s still true today.
President Trump says he is a savvy businessman. Yet his attitude toward the Pentagon is that of an indulgent parent. “We love and need our Military and gave them everything — and more,” he tweeted last year. Far from bringing rationality to defense spending, he has simply opened the piggy bank while trying to slash spending on almost every other government agency. The Pentagon is the most fiscally irresponsible government agency, but the Republicans’ response has been to simply give it more.
The much deeper danger, however, is spotlighted by Jessica Tuchman Mathews in a superb essay in the New York Review of Books. Mathews points out that we tend to think about the defense budget as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product, which is fundamentally erroneous. The defense budget should be related to the threats the country faces, not the size of its economy. If a country’s GDP grows by 30 percent, she writes, it “has no reason to spend 30 percent more on its military. To the contrary, unless threats worsen, you would expect that, over time, defense spending as a percentage of a growing economy should decline.”
In February of this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the peak religious authority in the country, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some marriage licenses.
In Israel, matrimonial law is religious, not civil. Jews can marry Jews, but intermarriage with Muslims or Christians is legally unacknowledged. This means that when a Jewish couple want to tie the knot, they are required by law to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate according to Orthodox tradition, which defines Jewish ancestry as being passed down through the mother.
While for most Israeli Jews this simply involves handing over their mother’s birth or marriage certificate, for many recent immigrants to Israel, who often come from communities where being Jewish is defined differently or documentation is scarce, producing evidence that satisfies the Rabbinate’s standard of proof can be impossible.
In the past, confirming Jewishness in the absence of documentation has involved contacting rabbis from the countries where people originate or tracking genealogical records back to prove religious continuity along the matrilineal line. But as was reported in Haaretz, and later confirmed by David Lau, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, in the past year, the rabbis have been requesting that some people undergo a DNA test to verify their claim before being allowed to marry.
For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, but for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in Israel since the 1990s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion. In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness.
Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian-speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million-strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent. This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage.
For almost two decades, Farber and his colleagues have advocated for this immigrant community in the face of what they see as targeted discrimination. In cases of marriage, Farber acts as a type of rabbinical lawyer, pulling together documentation and making a case for his clients in front of a board of rabbinical judges. He fears that DNA testing will place even more power in the hands of the Rabbinate and further marginalize the Russian-speaking community. “It’s as if the rabbis have become technocrats,” he told me. “They are using genetics to give validity to their discriminatory practices.”
Despite public outrage and protests in central Tel Aviv, the Rabbinate have not indicated any intention of ending DNA testing, and reports continue to circulate in the Israeli media of how the test is being used. One woman allegedly had to ask her mother and aunt for genetic material to prove that she was not adopted. Another man was asked to have his grandmother, sick with dementia, take a test.
A protest against DNA testing in Tel Aviv. Photograph: Boris Shindler
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian-speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. “I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we’d like you to do a DNA test,” Shindler said. “They said if she doesn’t do it then she has to sign papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this.”
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian-speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. “It is sad because in the Soviet Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we’re being discriminated against for not being Jewish enough,” he said.
As well as being deeply humiliating, Shindler told me that there is confusion around what being genetically Jewish means. “How do they decide when someone becomes Jewish,” he asked. “If I have 51% Jewish DNA does that mean I’m Jewish, but if I’m 49% I’m not?”
