“They, the children, speak fervently and innocently of this land as the land of “liberty and justice for all’”
This is a quote by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German-American rabbi who was a strong opponent of the Nazi regime and whom spent the majority of his life as a civil rights leader, in his speech at a March on Washington in August 1963. Rabbi Prinz devoted much of his life to aiding both the African American community during the Civil Rights movement and other minority communities, drawing from his own experience as a Jewish person living under Hitler’s regime. Zack Ritter, the Vice President of Leadership Development for the Jewish Federation, mentioned Rabbi Prinz in the Cross Cultural Relations panel I attended at the Holocaust Museum LA this past Friday. During this panel, Zack, Nancy Yap, the Executive Director of CAUSE, and Jordanna Gessler, the Vice President of Education and Exhibits Chief at the Holocaust Museum LA, talked about both the purpose of their respective organizations and about the importance of working across cultural barriers to help other communities. Zack mentioned Rabbi Prinz as he talked about the importance of communities providing aid to one another to foster relationships between them so that when one community is in need, they will be supported by the other. Rabbi Prinz was a strong proponent for fostering relationships between marginalized and minority communities as he believed that, because each of our respective communities are small, minority communities must stick together to aid each other for the betterment of all.
In this quote Rabbi Prinz was trying to galvanize the people of America to live up to the values they so eminently pronounce through the pledge of allegiance their children are forced to stand up and proclaim every morning before school. This “liberty and justice for all” should apply to everyone of the human race, not just white Americans but people of all marginalized and disadvantaged communities. However, this can’t be achieved through only the marginalized community’s efforts against targeted oppression. Marginalized communities must come together, relating to one another because of the hatred faced by each community. Each of the minority groups aided by the organizations the panelists spoke on the behalf for has faced hatred targeted against them ranging from mass genocide of the Holocaust to specific laws of hate like the Chinese Exclusion Act to the efforts affecting the intersection of the communities like the Jewish refugees who were aided and welcomed in Shanghai until Japan seized control in 1941.
When marginalized communities work together to aid each other against this hatred they can both save the lives of the people affected by these targeted efforts and foster a relationship between their communities so that if the other community is targeted later they can seek the help from the other. We have seen this in the past. We saw in the Shanghai Jewish History exhibit that the CLA interns explored in the Holocaust Museum LA, Japanese Imperial Consul Chiune Sugihara gave ten day visas to Japan to hundreds of Jewish refugees from Lithuania as it was the only transit country available for those trying to go in the direction of the United States. Through his efforts, Sugihara was able to save thousands of Jewish refugees over the course of only a couple weeks. Going back to the present day, we continue to see acts of alliance and solidarity between marginalized communities for the aid of a targeted community. This is evident in the Asian Americans for Black Lives resource hub created by the Asian American Advocacy Fund to express both the organization’s support and solidarity with the African American community and provide a way for everyone, regardless of whether you’re a member of the AAPI community, can take action to support the African American community.
This solidarity and distribution of aid between marginalized communities can allow for targeted communities to find comfort and reassurance amongst these communities in their time of need. By aiding one another, marginalized communities can work towards achieving in its entirety America’s proclaimed “liberty and justice for all”.