Different liberalism

With regard to “The myth of ‘American Jewish Liberalism’” (Terra Incognita, May 29), Seth J. Frantzman, asks: “Why did people go on the freedom rides to the American South? Was it because they felt superior and were trying to burnish their ‘good deed’ credentials, or was it because of a passionate belief in civil rights? It was probably the latter. But that has morphed into something else.”

Frantzman is absolutely right to question the “liberalism” of so many Americans who “play such a major role in Israel’s settler movement” and “fight for civil rights for all in the US, but ignore millions of Palestinians who are their neighbors and who lack basic voting rights and civil liberties.” He is wrong, however, to couple the liberalism of the American Jewish community with those West Bank settlers.

Arrested in Jackson Mississippi, in June of 1961, I can’t speak for my other Freedom Rider colleagues, but I think we felt proud to be liberal idealists – not “superior.” Nor did I serve 39 days in Parchman Penitentiary because I was “trying to burnish any good deeds.” Rather, I believe my colleagues and I felt empathy for, and outrage at, the way African-Americans were being treated.

As for my liberalism having “morphed into something else,” I suspect the empathy that inspired me to feel a connection to the suffering and discrimination of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South now moves me and many other American Jewish liberals to feel the suffering and discrimination of Palestinians who daily endure the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Frantzman might want to call such righteous compassion a “myth of American Jewish liberalism.” I call it the reality of proud Jewish liberals whose evolution has aged with the politics and events of our time – an evolution nurtured out of an empathy for those who continue to suffer the heavy burden of discrimination and injustice.

PHILIP M. POSNER Santa Cruz, California The writer is a rabbi.