3rd Open Letter to Boulder City Council on Upcoming Muslim Declaration

Dear Mayor Brocket and Boulder City Council and community members,

I can no longer be silent as a leader in Boulder’s Jewish community for 20 years in light of the continuing developments.  It is just a plain fact that many of us in Boulder’s Jewish community simply do not feel safe or supported.  Jews in America have mostly felt the threats of antisemitism from the far right in the form of White Supremacy, yet now many of us have experienced hatred, bigotry and intolerance from progressives, those who many of us have considered friends and allies.  The last time I attended a city council meeting in Boulder, I felt physically and verbally threatened by people screaming anti Israel slogans right in my face. There is an inability or an unwillingness to see any nuance from so many, including Council Member Taishya Adams, and there is no question that anti Zionism has become a pernicious form of antisemitism.  The term antisemitism was first coined in 1879 specifically to designate anything anti Jewish and its definition is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”  Many of us in Boulder have experienced this hatred, even in the hallowed chambers of our city council.  It is true that semitic people and semitic languages span cultural and racial groups beyond Jews and Judaism, including Arabic and Islam, but that is not how the term antisemitism has been used or understood.  

Many of us in the Jewish community have worked for peace and coexistence for decades, building healthy, interfaith alliances and friendships.  In response to some of the anti-Muslim rhetoric of 2016, I was one of the co-founders of MJAB (Muslim Jewish Alliance of Boulder) and we worked closely together to provide mutual support during awful hate crimes in both of our communities.  I was also one of the first clergy members to form the Religious Action Committee of Boulder’s NAACP in the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd. The deafening silence after October 7th to brutal, horrific, hateful acts of violence perpetrated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad has been stunning.  Yes, there were a few statements here and there, and an attempt to reach out to the rabbis in the community, but by October 8th the loudest voices on the left were too busy condemning everything that Israel was doing in response, and the 1200 people savagely murdered, 251 taken hostage and the appalling sexual violence of that dark day, were forgotten, or erased.

I have visited Israel four times since that day and seen the devastating and continuing impact everywhere.  I am writing this from Tel Aviv on a day when four dead bodies, presumed to include a mother and her two very young sons, as well as a man in his 80s, innocent civilians ripped from their homes, and now dead.  They were handed over to the International Red Cross in an obscene and disgusting display of Hamas propaganda that has been condemned by much of the world.  Of course, there has been horrific suffering and loss of life among the civilian population of Gaza that none of us celebrates nor ignores, and yet many minimize and ignore the Israelis, and the citizens of so many other countries, who were killed, kidnapped and raped that day.  This comes from a clear dehumanization and delegitimization of Israel and Israelis that has seeped into classic tropes of antisemitism.  There is so much more to say and I didn’t really want to get into the painful and divisive politics of the Middle East, but I have no choice as members of our city council and public have brought it into our local politics in a deeply divisive way, where it really has no place.  What does have a place is the impact these words and actions have had on so many of us in the Jewish community, as we are left feeling unsafe, unsupported, unseen by some of our elected officials and members of the public.

I do not pretend that the Jews of Boulder all agree and, as a rabbi, I definitely represent a community with very diverse opinions, experiences and relationships to Israel, but as an individual and as a leader, I strongly agree with Rachel Amaru and Bruce Shaffer, two passionate Jewish Boulder citizens and advocates, whose voices are critical in calling out some of the outrageous biases that have been expressed in our community.  I do not have the hubris to claim to speak for the whole Jewish community, but I do speak for much of it and the time for silence and complicity and muted attempts at dialogue is over.  

I urge you as leaders in our community to take seriously what many Boulder residents are feeling right now and to take action and give considerable thought to any statements, declarations and resolutions coming to and from the city council.

With great pain in my heart
Rabbi Marc Soloway

(See Rachel Amaru’s letter here, and Bruce Shaffer’s letter here.)