national / international
Rally Showed Community
Seeking Comfort, Strength
RON KAMPEAS AND
RUDY MALCOM
M ore than 2,000 peo-
ple spent a swel-
tering afternoon in
front of the U.S. Capitol at a
rally on July 11 that denounced
antisemitism as un-American
and made the case that Jewish
identity and support for Israel
are inextricable.

Those were the unifying
messages of the “No Fear” rally,
but there were diff erences
among the speakers and in the
crowd on how precisely Israel
fi gures in the fi ght against
antisemitism. “To stand united as one with
thousands of other voices in a
loud cry against antisemitism
was empowering,” said Michael
Balaban, president and CEO
of the Jewish Federation of
Greater Philadelphia, who
attended the event. “We must
challenge this vile hatred
through collective actions and
our collective unity in support
of a secure Israel and for our
existence as a fl ourishing
Jewish community and, on
Sunday, we did just that.”
Speaker Ron
Halber, executive director of the
Jewish Community Relations
Council of Greater Washington,
stressed the need to promote
unity among the Jewish people
itself. “While we can have
differences, we need to
reaffi rm the basics: that we’re
all Zionists and pro-Israel,” he
said. “What joins us together
as a community is far greater
than what divides us.

“None of us should need
to be at a rally against
12 Shlomo Noginsky, a rabbi who was stabbed in Boston on July 1, addresses the rally
agaainst antisemitism at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on July 11.

antisemitism in 2021,” he
added. “But we do need to
be here. Because we must
again respond to vile rhetoric,
physical attacks and symbols
of hatred against our people.”
Some of the most searing
messages came from people
who have suff ered antisemitic
attacks in recent years. A
recurring theme among these
speakers was that they never
expected to suff er such attacks
in the United States.

Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi
Shlomo Noginsky,
who sustained stab wounds in a July
1 attack in Boston, appeared
with his arm still in a sling and
in evident pain.

“I was born in the Soviet
Union in the city of St.

Petersburg,” Noginsky said
in Hebrew, with his brother
translating his words to
English. “I remember how even
as a young child, I experienced
terrible antisemitism. Never
in my darkest dreams did I
imagine that I would feel the
AUGUST 26, 2021 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
same way here in the United
States, the land of freedom
and endless possibilities.”
The crowd shouted “Hero!”
as Noginsky spoke. He had held
the attacker at bay outside a
Chabad facility where about
100 children were in summer
camp. There was a sense among
some attending the rally that
Jew hatred was closing in from
all sides.

Joel Taubman, a rising
second-year law student
at George
Washington University, noted how, among
both the right and the left,
there is a “growing acceptance
of antisemitic voices that have
always been there but until
recently were less accepted.”
The only instance of
antisemitism being “out in
the open” for Ava Shulman
used to be when Klansmen
marched down 16th Street to
the Capitol in 1965.

“My father turned the
sprinklers on, and their white
outfi ts got all wet,” she said.

“Now it’s just so pervasive.”
Shulman noted that most
of the attendees were older,
which she attributed to apathy
among younger people, who,
she said, don’t “remember the
Holocaust.” Notably
absent were
representatives of more left-
wing groups that were asked
to join but opted out of
attending because some of the
sponsoring groups adhere to a
defi nition of antisemitism that
encompasses harsh criticism
of Israel, including the
movement to boycott, divest
and sanction Israel. Groups
like J Street and Americans
for Peace Now oppose BDS,
but object to defi ning it as
antisemitic. Melissa Landa, who leads
the Alliance for Israel, a
relatively new group with
a central tenet that BDS is
antisemitic, set the tone at
the outset of the event. She
fi rst started planning for the
rally after antisemitism spiked
during the Israel-Gaza confl ict
in May,
She spoke of the “shared
promise for our children, that
they will be free to live as
proud Jews, and exercise their
religious liberties granted by
the United States Constitution,
free to wear their yarmulkes
and Magen Davids and free
to speak their love of Israel
without being attacked in the
streets of New York or Los
Angeles.” Landa, like other speakers,
named lawmakers on the left
or the right who have in recent
months incurred accusations
of antisemitism. Mentions of
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota
Democrat whose criticism of
Israel has been seen by Jewish
groups and others as crossing
into antisemitism, notably
garnered much louder boos
than those of Marjorie Taylor
Greene, a Georgia Republican
who has drawn fi re for peddling
antisemitic conspiracy theories
and for likening coronavirus
restrictions to Nazi laws on
multiple occasions.

Major mainstream groups
like the Anti-Defamation
League, the American Jewish
Committee and B’nai B’rith
International, as well as the
Orthodox Union and Reform
and Conservative movements,
signed on as sponsors, but few
of their representatives spoke.

Elisha Wiesel, son of
Holocaust survivor and Nobel
laureate Elie Wiesel, appeared
to nod to the concerns of
some liberal groups — that
criticism of Israel and support
for the Palestinians would be
confl ated with antisemitism l



YOU SHOULD KNOW ...

Carly Zimmerman
W LISA TRAIGER | SPECIAL TO WJW
hen not on stage
— at Olney, Studio or
Folger Shakespeare
theaters, among others in the region
— Gaithersburg-based actress and
playwright Dani Stoller, 33, coaches
young women on body hatred and diet
culture, to help them overcome eating
disorders. What about the stereotypical
Jewish mother, insisting that
everyone eat?
Oh, yes. And I’m open about it. I
overexercised. I was a binger, not
a purger, so I didn’t throw up. But I
would starve myself or try to eat very
restrictively. I got involved in personal
training and then realized that I was
exacerbating an issue that was really
prevalent, especially among women —
body hatred and diet culture.

Well, we have the Jewish mother
stereotype, but there’s also the Catholic
mother, the Italian mother, the Greek
mother, the Indian mother. Mothers
are always feeding you. No matter our
culture, we all have this same idea of
food as a love language.

Yet, food is also something that,
when you hit a certain age, you’re then
talking with your mother about what
diet she’s doing and how you can hit
a certain weight. That’s fascinatingly
bizarre to me, that the same people
who feed you are also the ones who
are terrified of being bigger. In group
sessions, [I hear about] moms who
were feeding and feeding, yet at the
same time restricting themselves.

What did you do?
What else can we do?
As a woman working in theater,
you are often judged and cast by
your body type. Did you have an
eating disorder?
I did a boatload of therapy, not
specifically for food. It was just therapy,
and I was learning from all these
different people [about nutrition], but
something wasn’t right … until I found
something called intuitive eating. It’s
not an easy path because while it’s
called intuitive, you have to unlearn
what you thought you knew about
eating, nutrition and being intuitive.

In working with other women
on these issues, have you
found that disordered eating
is more prevalent in the Jewish
community, since so many of our
celebrations revolve around food
and either feasting or fasting?
PHOTO COURTESY OF DANI STOLLER
able to relate to one another on food
issues. I do have some clients who are Jewish.

But I think this is a woman issue. Food
issues cross all religious, racial and
ethnic boundaries. The way we eat
ends up being a great equalizer. I see
[women] from different backgrounds
where they might not really have much
in common, but I see in my sessions
that, no matter who they are, they’re
I’ve asked my clients many times,
“What helps you keep going?” Many say,
“Scripture study.” For Jewish women,
that means go back to reading the
Torah, and it becomes their talisman as
they go forward and reclaim how they
want to live their life. It takes a long
time to build these habits.

Tell me about your Jewish life.

As a child, I went to synagogue every
week and to Hebrew school twice a
week. I was bat mitzvahed and went
to Jewish summer camp. The theater
world is very Christian, shows go on
Fridays and high holidays, so I lost
my [Jewish] connection. As I’ve found
in speaking to many Jews, the rise in
antisemitism really sparked my desire
to get involved again. [During the
pandemic], I started going virtually
to Temple Beth Ami. I met with their
rabbi and I’m feeling this incredible
resurgence of my Judaism. When we’re
able to go back in person, my husband
and I are planning to go to synagogue
in person.

What’s next for you?
This fall I’m in “The Thanksgiving
Play” at Olney Theatre [Center]
and I’m working with an African
playwright, Awa Sal Secka, on a new
drama about a Black family and an
Ashkenazi Jewish family.

Back to food,
what do you like?
I don’t like the idea of “bad” versus
“good” food. That’s ridiculous. Food
doesn’t have morality. It’s just food.

I love to bake lemon bars. Citrus in
desserts is really underutilized. l
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