Description: My shul. My neighborhood. My life.
I struggle with the applicability of language and whether or when a word from one place is more useful or harmful when used in a totally different cultural context. I’ve written previously about how so-called intersectional claims run the risk of “[flattening] all oppression into an amalgam of grievances and rob whole societies of any lasting solutions.” Nevertheless, there are plenty of words or phrases that cross borders, even oceans, and sometimes the borrowing of terminology serves to help crystalize a
As Isabel Wilkerson makes clear in her book Caste , the American caste system that enabled chattel slavery both drew inspiration from Indian caste associations and lent inspiration to Hitler’s Third Reich. In fact, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described feeling “shocked” and “peeved” when he was called an “untouchable” during his and Coretta’s 1959 trip to India to meet friends and family of Mahatma Gandhi. But then he started to think more deeply about the comment and its implications concluding, “yes, I am
Another of these itinerant terms is the word ghetto. This word, which has come to describe concentrated areas of urban blight and despair, has Jewish origins. Or, at least, the word was first applied to Jews when the municipal senate forced the Jews of Venice into a single, segregated quarter in 1516. Over the years, I’ve had discussions with neighbors and friends about the utility of this word as applied to communities like mine, and especially to ones like those to my immediate west (Penn North) or southw