No one, Jew or non-Jew, has to apologize for standing up against inhumanity, cruelty, or the slaughter of non-combatants seeking food and humanitarian assistance.

(Photo and story from PBS News Hour, July 20, 2025)

One of the most thoughtful writers on Substack—more and more a portal for free, non-corporate owned expression in this country—is Jay Kuo in his column “The Status Quo.”

The author of the book and lyrics for Allegiance: The Musical, which told the story of the United States’ immoral and inhumane incarceration of tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II, Kuo has written incisively about abominable US Supreme Court decisions, which strip away the rights of the individual. A member of the National Board of Directors of the Human Rights Campaign, he is especially eloquent and effective in writing about crimes against humanity.

This weekend, Kuo posted a seering piece describing the methodical murder by Israeli forces in Gaza of another 60 innocent civilians—mostly women and children—gunned down while attempting to alleviate their war-caused starvation as they barely carried themselves to humanitarian centers. This utter brutality followed by a day the Israeli bombing and destruction of the only Catholic church in Gaza, and the murder of the Catholic priest who ministered to that tiny congregation of Christians and chatted with Pope Francis every evening to assure the Pontiff of their continued safety. That priest is dead, the church obliterated, that small Christian refuge in Gaza gone forever.

Jay wondered aloud that if by calling attention to the continuing mass murder of non-combatants in Gaza by Israeli forces, he would be accused by some of his Jewish friends of being “anti-semitic.” As one of his Jewish friends, I assured him he was on the right side of humanity, of history, and of the basic values of Judaism:

Here’s some of what I wrote:

‘Thank you, Jay. I am a Jew–having converted to Judaism 45 years ago.

I am adamantly opposed to the inhumane ultra Nationalism of the Netanyahu Government and his extreme Right Wing enablers.

Their actions are actions of genocide against the Palestinians, and experts on Genocide have defined them as such.

Israel’s actions are also against all of the fundamental teachings of Judaism, a humanitarian, inclusive and loving faith which existed more than 5,000 years before Israel did. Netanyahu has violated the values of Judaism, and the origins of Zionism, flipping it from a humanistic movement to create a safe homeland for Jews and other oppressed minorities, into an Ultra- Nationalist movement of hate, exclusion and constant war.

Israel, since its founding, was not governed by a Constitution, but by 14-separate laws, based on human rights and the protection of human life against murder and genocide. It was intended to be a haven for humanity, ethical behavior and diversity. Netanyahu has reversed and upended those laws, the essential foundation of Israel, and the bedrock of Judaism.

Even the IDF, which had a strict military Code of Ethics which included not killing non-combatants and only responding to attacks in a “proportional” manner, has had it’s Code of Ethics corrupted, its’ reputation for professional integrity politicized, and its place in Israeli history destroyed by Netanyahu and his Ultra- Nationalist extremists, and have turned the IDF into an instrument of brutality and of ethnic cleansing, much as Trump is using ICE in our own country.

The indiscriminate slaughtering of up to 100,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children and non-combatants in Gaza—is not a proportional nor appropriate response to the murder of 1,200 Israelis nor was it ever the intention of Netanyahu to adhere to the IDF Code of Ethics, under which he was trained, and be “proportionate” in his response. In no universe, except the most perverse, is the slaughter of 100,000 Palestinians considered justifiable or proportionate for the lives of 1,200 Israeli’s.

By continuing to kill innocent, unarmed Gazans seeking food, water or medical care—in the absence of attacks by Hamas on Israel—Israel has, like Russia, become a terrorist state. The United Church of Christ could have just as well included Israel in its condemnation of the United States this week, as a State sponsoring terror.

Like Trump, Netanyahu is seeking the domination and the destruction of all whom he judges to be an enemy. A constant state of war against someone is in Netanyahu’s, not Israel’s, best interest.

For many of us Jews, who love our faith but detest how Netanyahu has bastardized Israel and what it means to be a Jew, this is an extraordinarily painful time.

I had the great privilege of meeting in person with the last democratic leader of Israel, Yitzak Rabin, a hero of the 1967 War who later suffered a nervous breakdown from seeing so many young Israelis die under his command, in battle.

Just a few years after Mario Cuomo and I met with Rabin in Jerusalem, the great Israeli leader was assassinated by a disciple of the Ultra Radical Right Wing Jewish convicted terrorist Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born madman who founded the terrorist Jewish Defense League, and still serves as an inspiration and hero to the twisted tyrants of the Ultra Nationalist Right Wing now ruling Israel, pushing it far away from the fundamental values of Judaism.

Rabin was assassinated at a rally for peace, exactly 30 years ago, where he was advocating for a practical, two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Even during that time, while Rabin was sacrificing his life for peace, Netanyahu—at the beginning of his political career— was campaigning against him, and against a two-state solution.

No, calling attention to or bearing witness to the horrors being committed by Israel in Gaza are not anti-Semitic; they are pro-humanity which has, for centuries, been the essence of Judaism. By extension, any inhumane actions are anti-Semitic, and a grotesque violation of Judaism. Netanyahu and his Ultra Extreme Nationalistic government is, at it’s core anti-Semitic, and an enemy of a democratic Israel, and of all of us Jews worldwide. Never, ever apologize for standing up for humanity.

One week after Hamas’ horrific massacre of 1,200 Jews in Israel on October 7, I was struck by the knee-jerk social media posting of many fellow Jews that they “Stand With Israel.” To me, they were missing the lessons taught by our faith. In response, I wrote a poem entitled “I Stand With Humanity.” ( villano.subtack.com., October 12, 2023, “I Stand with Humanity.)

In it, I cited the teaching of the great scholar of Judaism, Rabbi Hillel, the elder, who lived during the time of Christ:

“I stand with equality,

Either real or aspirational;

With the value of each life,

Being, by existence, inspirational.

I stand with Rabbi Hillel,

Who knew well, that, to be human,

When others were not,

Would point the way through hell.”

Like Rabbi Hillel, I stand with humanity, and, while he was considered progressive for his time, no sane person in the present day would call his teaching, his beliefs or his interpretation of Judaism “anti-Semitic.”

Harry Chapin’s sudden death 44 years ago on July 16, in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway, ended his life. But his musical & humanitarian legacies and his family’s devotion live on.

(This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the release of Harry Chapin’s one and only number one song “Cat’s in the Cradle.” The song, written first as a poem by Harry’s wife and partner Sandy, has gained a life of its’ own in movies, television shows, documentaries, and as a mantra for how people can too easily let the lives of those they love slip away from them as they pursue their own dreams.

In Harry Chapin’s too-short life of only 39 years he followed his dreams as a musician, an activist, a humanitarian, a father, and human being who wanted to live a life that made a difference in this world.

Chapin devoted the last decade of his life to his music and to fighting hunger and reducing poverty. He was inspired by his older brother James; the great anti-poverty champion Michael Harrington, author of The Other America; Harry’s spouse & partner Sandy Chapin; and his friend and former Catholic priest Bill Ayres, who followed the progressive Catholic Worker teachings of Harry’s great aunt, Dorothy Day.

The organizations which Harry Chapin co- founded, from WHYHunger to Harry Chapin Food Banks across the nation, continue to serve those most in need more than four decades after Chapin’s death. The tough, day-to-day work of those anti-poverty organizations, and the extraordinary dedication of the Chapin family has carried forward Harry’s hope, and given his social justice work a life that is now longer than the time on earth enjoyed by the singer/songwriter. His family continues to carry on his many legacies.)

When Tom Chapin, the younger brother closest in age to Harry, got a call on that July day in 1981, from the Nassau County, NY, cop who recovered Harry’s charred body near the Jericho exit of the busy Long Island Expressway (Interstate 495), he knew something wasn’t right.

“What’s your relation to the deceased?” the police office asked.

Tom was taken aback. “ Deceased?”

Someone had died in a terrible car accident on the L.I.E. and his wallet was incinerated, destroying all of the victim’s ID.

“We have a body here, and the only way we can identify it is by this pocket watch we found on him with a name inscribed on it,” the Nassau County Cop said.

“What does it say, “ Tom asked, fearful that he already knew.

“It says: “From the Flint Voice. To a great American, Harry Chapin,” the cop said.

Tom Chapin felt as if he had been punched in the stomach, and that the world stopped. He knew that Harry always carried a cherished pocket watch given to him by Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker, before Moore made any films or was known beyond Flint, Michigan.

As a pushy 22-year old, Moore had thrust himself into Harry’s face backstage at intermission of a 1976 Grand Rapids, Michigan concert, begging Chapin to do a benefit for his fledgling, muckraking publication, the Flint Voice.

“He said, ‘sure,’ I’ll do it,” Moore told a crowd at the Huntington, N.Y., Book Review bookstore in October, 2011, some 30 years after Chapin’s death, “and two months later he came to Flint to do a benefit concert for us. Harry came for five years, every year — even when Flint was down and out — sometimes doing two to five concerts a year. When Harry died it sent shock waves through the people of Flint because we kind of adopted him.”

What Moore didn’t learn, until years later, was that it was the inscribed pocket watch he gave to Harry Chapin out of gratitude for his generosity, that enabled his brother Tom to identify the body.

Chapin’s simple act of human connection, of wanting to improve life for the people of Flint, Michigan; his great act of love for a cause championed by another idealistic organizer, and his spirit of making the world a bit better, had survived the fire, even though his body had not. It was a metaphor for how Harry’s social justice work lived on, longer than his 38 years on earth.

“Yes,” Tom said to the cop after he finished reading the inscription on the pocket watch. “I’m Harry Chapin’s brother.”

“Then you may want to come down to the Nassau County Medical Center and identify the body,” the cop said.

The shock of Harry’s death spread slowly, stubbornly, with each call Tom Chapin made, as if, not even the truth could believe itself.

Family and friends flocked to the Chapin home in Huntington Bay, to be with Sandy Chapin and her children — the youngest of whom, Jason, Jen and Josh, were 17, 10 and 8 ½ years old.

Fans flooded the band shell at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow for a benefit concert to fight hunger that Harry Chapin was scheduled to give that same night, refusing to leave for hours, refusing to believe that the news they heard was real.

The day after Harry’s death, thousands of people spontaneously showed up in downtown Flint, Michigan, to pay their respects to someone who’s “greatest gift and the curse he lived with was that he always cared,” about them, and people like them — a lyric Harry prophetically wrote about folk singer Phil Ochs, who killed himself in 1976.

The profound and prolonged reaction to Harry Chapin’s sudden death, and the work of WHYHunger and Harry Chapin Food Banks around the country over the next four decades to pull people out of poverty and make millions of families less food insecure, was, and continues to be, a reminder of why Harry’s life mattered, well beyond his music.

Yet, performing artists like Billy Joel, considered a consummate musician and songwriter who has received every conceivable musical honor, along with selection into the Rock & Roll and the Songwriters’ Halls of Fame, had the highest praise for Harry’s artistry, as well as his activism.

“He wrote the best story songs,” said the singer/songwriter from Hicksville, Long Island, who wrote some pretty good songs himself. “ A lot of people said to me, ‘you wrote Piano Man?’ I thought it was a Harry Chapin song.”

A slight grin brightened Billy Joel’s face, in the sunny front section of his motorcycle shop in the Village of Oyster Bay, Long Island.

“No I wrote that, I would say. Harry’s songs were about human beings, humanity. Whether his career was big enough, that’s not important. It was his impact. And he had an impact upon other songwriters that was all positive, all to the good,” said Billy Joel.

For Harry Chapin, as it was for one of his heroes, Pete Seeger, commitment to a cause, to his family and his craft, made his life full. Bruce Springsteen, who raised $2 million to fight food insecurity during the COVID-19 Pandemic, has picked up the musician’s mantle of social justice leadership carried by Chapin, Seeger, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Chilean folksinger Victor Jara and many others over the decades.

In his comments at the December 7, 1987, Carnegie Hall Tribute where Harry Chapin was posthumously awarded a Special Congressional Gold Medal for his Humanitarian work — only the fourth musician in US history to ever be so honored, along with Irving Berlin and George & Ira Gershwin — Springsteen talked about the legacy of an activist artist like Chapin.

“ Harry instinctively knew it would also take more than love to survive,” he said, before singing a haunting rendition of Chapin’s song Remember When, “it was going to take hard work, with a good, clear-eye on the dirty ways of the world.”

In his own autobiography Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, NY, 2016, by Bruce Springsteen) Springsteen writes about his own “clear-eyed look at the dirty ways of the world,” after beginning his work with food banks and anti-poverty groups around the country in the mid-1980’s, following Harry’s death:

“I never had the frontline courage of many of my more committed musical brethren. If anything, over the years, too much has been made of whatever service we’ve provided. But I did look to develop a consistent approach. Something I could follow year in and year out, and find a way to assist the folks who’d been hit hardest by systematic neglect and injustice. These were the families who’d built America and yet whose dreams and children were, generation after generation, considered expendable. Our travels and position would allow us to support, at the grassroots level, activists who dealt, day to day, with the citizens who’d been shuffled to the margins of American life.” (P. 328).

At the Carnegie Hall Chapin Tribute concert in 1987, Springsteen acknowledged that Harry was one of those with such relentless “front-line courage.”

In fact, Harry was living the line he wrote in his own story song “The Parade’s Still Passing By” about Phil Ochs, the Civil Rights activist and anti-war folk singer who rivaled Bob Dylan for a time in the 1960’s, and killed himself in 1976, at the age of 35: “your greatest gift and the curse you lived with was that you could always care.”

Ochs had traveled to Hazard, Kentucky, to perform for the families of striking coal miners in 1963; to Mississippi in 1964 as part of the Caravan of Music to support the Freedom Fighters throughout the South; to Chicago, in the summer of 1968, to participate in demonstrations against the War in Vietnam at the Democratic National Convention; and to Chile, in 1971, following the election of Democratic Socialist President Salvador Allende to perform with the great Chilean political activist and folksinger, Victor Jara, who was executed four days after Allende was assassinated by Right Wing fascists, in 1973.

Och’s motivating mantra (There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs, by Michael Schumacher, University of Minnesota Press edition, Minneapolis, MN, 2018) could have been written by Harry Chapin, especially since both devoted significant portions of their careers, and earnings, to fighting poverty:

“ I have come to believe that this is, in essence, the role of the folksinger…I feel that the singer almost has a responsibility with political and social involvement. You can’t look at folk music as simply an element of show business, because it’s much deeper and more important than that.” (p. 74)

Harry’s cauldron of creativity and his own curse — similar to, but far more lasting that Phil Ochs’ — was the degree to which he cared about others, how much he desperately drove himself, how deeply he believed in things, and how determined he was to make his time on earth matter, and prove before he died — and for decades after — how much one person’s life could be worth.

When the meaning of Independence Day has been obliterated, and the Constitution and Human Rights are trampled and torched by the Totalitarians within.

(In times of great stress, and when the darkness begins to crowd out the light, or when despair threatens to drown out hope, I turn to thinkers and writers and activists who never gave up, no matter how terrible the times. Viktor Frankl‘s “Mans Search for Meaning,” written by a concentration camp survivor is one such source of strength. So is the writing of James Baldwin, who sees “hope” as a moral imperative, despite the heinous cruelty and racism of our own country. I wrote this piece two years ago for July 4th, a jingoistic holiday I deplore for its’ self-congratulatory smugness and nationalized delusion. The conditions I described then, are multiple times worse now, and assault us everyday in the image of masked ICE brownshirts, and the grinning, greedy faces of Trump and his supporters who take glee in destroying some 60 years of gains in Civil Rights, crushing working families, and making Apartheid Great Again. As a Jew, outraged by the Israel’s abandonment of every fundamental principle of Judaism, and angry at America’s destruction of democracy and any shred of fairness, James Baldwin speaks for me more now than ever before. Holding onto hope is more difficult for me today, than at anytime in my 76 years of civic engagement, public service, political activism, and as an advocate for humanity. Baldwin and Frankl and my granddaughters compel me to continue to do so.)

July 4^th in the USA is jammed with jingoist junk; stuffed with solipsistic slop of self-congratulation and “exceptionalism;” inebriated on the insanity of illuminating the night sky for mere minutes with a fortune in feel-good fireworks, while the people gawking at them below, get ground into the dirt on which they stand.

Nothing illustrates that sharp contrast of Red, White and Black and Blue this July 4^th holiday, than the three-pronged missiles of mass destruction aimed at every person of color, and every person of modest means in this country, by the US Supreme Court of High Executioners.

The High Court’s poison-dipped darts came “in bunches, not as single spies,” as Shakespeare wrote, but their targets were all the same: people of modest means, and people of color, left out of this country’s original contract; shackled, whipped, beaten, robbed and robbed again and again and again. Reparations? Don’t be ridiculous—this rich man’s country and its’ institutions are hell-bent on Decimation of any poor, or Black or brown human different from it’s wealthy, White overlords.

First, the repeal of Roe, and the termination of a woman’s right to have freedom over her own body, comes down like a hammer on the heads of predominantly poor women of color, in the States of the Old Confederacy—which once had laws protecting the rights of Slave owners to rape Black women, and now, in 2023, has laws forcing poor, Black women to give birth to the child of their rapists. How far have we come? In the good ole’ boy days of the Confederacy, that’s just the way Slave owners increased their workforce, with the approval of their Christian churches & governments.

Secondly, the assault and dismemberment of Affirmative Action was an arrow aimed directly at a noble, 60 year movement toward fairness, to level the playing field for many whose ancestors’ labor and the very fields they worked were ripped out from under them, without compensation, or remorse. Affirmative Action—an affirmative, constructive step to approach equality—was a measured, modest, long-term attempt to rebuild some of that stolen wealth over generations, and to overcome the onerous obstacles continually constructed to block Black people—like Black Veterans being denied the right to go to college, or use the GI Bill’s benefits they risked their lives to earn. Affirmative Action was intended to make a minor correction to those crimes against Black humanity; a very mild attempt, not unlike Germany’s, to recompense the families of the six million Jews that German Nationalists slaughtered.

Finally, and much like an assault weapon obliterates the flesh of its victims, the Supreme Court’s malicious destruction of a Student Loan forgiveness program, decapitated one concrete hope millions of striving, working-class Americans of all colors had of building wealth for their families and their communities, by dramatically reducing their college debt. But in this rich man’s corporate playground known as the United States, only big banks, oil & gas companies, and Justices Thomas, Alito, & Roberts are permitted to get bailed out –-by government or billionaires, and multi-million dollar law firms with business before their kept Court.

My anger over these these intentional, pre-meditated acts of murder of poor women, Black people and generations of working families, has unlocked some of my darkest demons. I want revenge; I want to even the score; I want to understand how generations of Black Americans have never lost hope in this goddamned, amoral country.

So, not for comfort, but to learn how to better channel my fury, I turned to James Baldwin, in his brilliant book, The Fire Next Time. The tight, tough book, was first published in 1963, the year Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated; and, republished in 1964, the year that Civil Rights Freedom Riders, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were gunned down in Mississippi by the KKK working in collaboration with local law enforcement officials. The fire, the fury, was all around us; the following year, Malcolm X was assassinated; three years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his powerful and prescient closing pages, Baldwin wrote in 1963:

“ A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the 20^th Century, ‘ wrote W.E.B. Dubois around 60 years ago, is the problem of the color line.”

Baldwin continued:

“A tearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in, must now be reexamined. “

“What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible to consolidate, according to any other principle. Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality. . .

“And, at the center of this dreadful storm, stand the Black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.

“For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion… I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand…

“One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and in American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less, than the achievement of the impossible.”

“If we—and now, I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!’