Status Updates From I am Jewish: Personal Refle...

these youngsters semiclones of Danny—talented, curi-ous, principled, and friendly—and I tell myself: Look at the kind of hatred they will be facing when they grow up. They deserve encour-agement. They deserve to be told, “You are OK. You are not the bloodthirsty baby-killing money-hungry imperialists that Danny’s killers and their intellectual sympathizers on college campuses try to portray you as. No. You are Daniel

Military battles are won in two parallel ways: by making your enemy weaker, and by making your troops stronger. The same applies to battles against hatred. In addition to curtailing ignorance in the world at large, we must empower the troops of peace here at home, and I consider your children and grandchildren to be the elite forces of these troops.

“Here we come from Pakistan, a country where, to many peo-ple, the word ‘Jewish’ implies contempt (if not a license to kill), and here we are celebrating the life of a Jewish boy from Los Angeles, California, a descendant of a Hasidic Jew from Bnei Brak, Israel. Ask yourself why we do that! We do it because Daniel Pearl is a symbol of the new alignment, the ‘Coalition of the Decent,’ to which we belong and toward whi

October 10, 2002, we celebrated Danny’s thirty-ninth birthday in the form of a global concert called Daniel Pearl Music Day. Thousands of musicians in over one hundred concerts and eighteen countries around the world played for world harmony and took a stand for tolerance and humanity. This was a modest but significant beginning.
Among the many participants was Pakistan’s number-one rock group, Junoon, who dedicated

By building respect for diverse cultures and values, this “Coalition of the Decent” will strengthen its ranks and will stand up to rising cultures of hate, accusation, and deceit.

It is a unique opportunity because there are not many such legacies around. In other words, there aren’t many faces which both a Muslim and a Westerner can point to and agree: “Here is a man of peace, an emissary of goodwill.”

This is our vision of revenge: fighting the hatred that took Danny’s life.

If you are a decent person anywhere, it was your decency that was betrayed on February 21, 2002.

If you are an American, or a citizen of any democracy, it was your values and your freedoms that were targeted and abducted on that fateful night of January 23, 2002.
If you are a journalist, it was your hands that were chained in Karachi on that terrible night.
If you are a Muslim who struggles to lift his countrymen to new opportunities, it was your head that came under the gun in Karachi in January 2002.

When Danny said “I am Jewish,” I wrote, what he meant in fact was: “I respect Islam precisely because I am Jewish, and I expect you to respect me and my faith precisely because you are, or claim to be, good Muslims.” In other words, “I come from a place where one’s heritage is the source of one’s strength, and strength is measured by one’s capacity to accommodate diversity. Because it is only through diversity that w

inherited no other mental tranquilizer except that chronic urge to question and to understand. “I understand suffering, because the suffering of my ancestors is etched on my consciousness. “I understand justice, because I was distilled by injustice. “I understand Muslims’ suffering as well, for I have seen your people in Kosovo, I have worked with your carpet weavers in Iran, and I have sung with your pearl divers

Danny, “I am Jewish” meant “I must understand.” Or in other words: “I am possessed with a historically-baked obsession to understand and repair things, because my wandering ancestors, hardened by centuries of persecution and discrimination, have taught me to mistrust all dogmas and ideologies and to question authority and the status quo and conventional wisdom. So, as a Jew, I have inherited no other mental tranquil

awareness, however, did not prepare me for the brutality and the brazeness of his killers. I was especially repulsed by how those murderers, instead of hiding their anti-Semitic perversion, proudly displayed their motives in public, boasting in their deformity. But over time, steadily emerging from rage and pain there came for me a sense of pride at Danny’s unyielding dignity in those critical moments.

It hit me right away that this sentence would strike an especially deep chord for Jews everywhere, though I could not fully grasp its scope or significance. It was only a few weeks later that I came to realize that Danny left us a precious gift in those words—a faithful mirror in which we, Jews, can see ourselves. Danny had that mirror too; he was not alone on that fateful day. Danny never concealed his Jewishness

It took a few endless minutes for me to comprehend the meaning of the words the United States Consul General in Karachi was reading to me over the phone. It was a transcript of the videotape the Consulate had received a day earlier; it was taken in the last hours of our son’s life, and the words were Danny’s: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” It hit me right away that this sentence would strike

The categories in which the responses have been organized reflect the major relationships of our lives. • Identity—Our relationship to ourselves, how we define who we are in the most fundamental way. • Heritage—Our relationship to family, community, culture, tradition, and our collective history. • Covenant, Chosenness, and Faith—Our relationship to God, our understanding of the relationship between God and the Jewis

Yes, our parents pass our Judaism on to us,
but not through their race, blood, or genes — it
is through their teaching, their love, and their
spirit. Judaism is not bestowed; it is enacted.
Judaism is not a boundary; it is the force that
breaks down boundaries. And Judaism is the
refusal to let anyone tell us otherwise.”

was the Spanish of
the Inquisition who invented the notion of
Jewish blood, looking for a new reason to
murder those who had converted to
Catholicism. It was Hitler, via Jung, who
spread the idea of a Jewish “genetic memory”
capable of instilling an uncooperative nature
in even those with partial Jewish ancestry.
And it was Danny Pearl’s killers who defined
his Judaism as a sin of birth.
I refuse these defi

It was Pharaoh who first used the term Am
Yisrael [People of Israel] in Torah, fearing a
people who might replicate like bugs

Sadly, I am not actively reading this any longer. Got up to p. 120, about half done. Glad to have it as a reference, though.