Volume XXII, Issue IV | www.thejewishvoice.org Serving Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts
CAMP
10 Adar I 5776 | February 19, 2016
Reflections on the Damascus gate attacks BY GILOR MESHULAM A few weeks ago, I was asked to come to Israel – to be interviewed for a Judaic StudiesEducation fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Eventually, after I got the dates that I would be visiting Israel and going to Jerusalem – I was thrilled – thrilled to continue my work with Judaism and education. On Feb. 3, I went to Mt. Scopus for my interview. As soon as I fi nished, I went on my way to see a friend who lives in Jerusalem. While driving through the streets of Jerusalem, and then fi nding a parking spot by the Damascus Gate, I saw it. A huge crowd gathered from all over. Dozens of police were running toward where I was standing. I didn’t know what happened. All I knew is that something probably happened. Since I haven’t been in Israel
in the last few months, I didn’t know what the feelings in the streets are. Even though I read the news more than a dozen times a day, it’s nothing like living in the middle of it. Then I understood: I’m in the middle of a terror attack. People seemed eager to help the police forces, running around, feeling helpless, scared – but not broken. Trying to be protective, the police asked the crowd to move away, since they suspected it was just a decoy to a larger attack, and so we did. I moved away and went to see my friend, who lives right across from the Damascus Gate. He wasn’t scared. After almost seven years in the army, I got scared. He seemed used to it. He said that it is unfortunate, but that’s the routine. These thoughts do not leave me. An hour later, we went to the Kotel, which was almost DAMASCUS GATE | 7
Thoughts of summer
PHOTOS | CAMP JORI
Scenes of Camp JORI have us thinking about camp. See pages 16-21.
REMEMBRANCE
The Supreme Court’s Jewish gentile: My memories of Justice Scalia BY NATHAN LEWIN
Justice Antonin Scalia
WASHINGTON (JTA) – “When there was no Jewish justice on the Supreme Court,” Antonin “Nino” Scalia told me, “I considered myself the Jewish justice.” After Abe Fortas resigned in May 1969, there would be no Jewish justice on the court for nearly a quarter of a century, until President Bill Clinton named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the court in 1993. Scalia had been on the Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan appointed him in 1986, so
there were seven years during which Scalia saw himself as the court’s guardian of Jewish heritage. The New York-raised judge was shocked that he had to teach his colleagues how to pronounce “yeshiva” (Chief Justice Rehnquist William called it “ye-shy-va”) and, Scalia added proudly to me, “I even told them what a yeshiva is.” Scalia’s admiration for Jews and Jewish learning explains the frequent references in his opinions to the Talmud and other Jewish sources, and the significant number of Ortho-
dox Jewish law clerks he hired. We were both in the Harvard Law School class that began in 1957 and graduated in 1960 – only 10 women and no African-Americans were in a graduating class of almost 500. Scalia and I were invited to become editors of the Harvard Law Review at the conclusion of our freshman year; in those days Law Review membership depended entirely on grades. Scalia and I were the highest-ranking bachelors in our law school class. Why was marital status relevant? Because in the 1950s, REMEMBRANCE | 9
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