In the current divisive political climate, confronting opposing views with an open heart and mind may be harder than ever, but it’s also more vital than ever. That was the message conveyed Aug. 23 at Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom during the Bay Area launch of a movement that seeks to heal the rift between disparate groups.
The One America Movement, founded in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, is a national interfaith initiative that facilitates collaboration through community service projects. The idea is that as people work side by side, they overcome some of the natural boundaries that divide them.
“Refusing to be divided is a profound statement of resistance,” said the program’s director, Andrew Hanauer, at the Berkeley launch.
The movement was created by interfaith leaders last November with the support of Jewish service organization Repair the World to encourage meaningful dialogue about sometimes thorny topics. “Not just talking to people that think like me, or talking to people that vote like me,” Hanauer said.
For Repair the World’s CEO David Eisner, the community service element is an essential tool to help connect groups with very different viewpoints. “That’s the chink in the armor of hatred,” he said.
After volunteers complete the service projects, the day continues with a shared meal and a facilitated conversation to further break down differences. “It’s an amazing feeling,” Hanauer said, “because it’s so easy to hide behind walls.”
He pointed to academic research showing how simply working together, eating together and talking together can shift people’s biases.
“People are more likely to hate each other if they don’t know each other,” Hanauer said.
But after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the rallies planned for this weekend in Berkeley and San Francisco, that kind of feel-good tack can be a tough sell.
“Geographical self-segregation in America is real,” said Rabbi Melissa Weintraub, director of Resetting the Table, who also spoke at the launch.
The problem is enormous enough that we still feel like we’re trying to boil the ocean.
Her New York-based organization uses conflict resolution techniques to build dialogue across political divides. Weintraub just got back from six weeks in Wisconsin and Idaho, where she took a team to “purple” areas that mostly went for Trump. There they sat down across political lines to have conversations focused on listening, not fighting.
“We had to do an enormous amount of work to overcome people’s understandable suspicion,” she said.
Speaking before the event, Weintraub said she welcomes One America Movement’s entry into the world of dialogue-building and bridge-building, where all hands are needed.
“The problem is enormous enough that we still feel like we’re trying to boil the ocean,” she said.
Also speaking at the launch event was Ameena Jandali, a founding member of Islamic Networks Group who develops educational presentations for the organization. ING is a San Jose-based organization that counters prejudice through education and community engagement.
She made the painful point that racism is alive even in the Bay Area, describing a recent occasion when a motorcyclist pulled up next to her car at an intersection and shouted, “Sieg Heil!”
“That was the last thing I expected,” she said.
For Netivot Shalom’s Rabbi Menachem Creditor, who introduced the speakers and is on the advisory board of the One America Movement, the kind of “big, audacious goals” that the movement is promoting fit right in with the work of the congregation, especially now.
“It’s a call we dare not ignore,” he said.
And the call seemed to strike a chord. Congregant and former Netivot board member Joan Bardus said she was there with an open mind and a belief in the power of activism.
“We can’t keep living in two Americas,” she said.
Creditor, who closed the evening with a plea for people to stay involved and stay connected, is hopeful that the One America Movement will be another way to focus on healing divides.
“From a Jewish perspective, the worst sin is hopelessness,” he said.
Yawn, the only “divides” they’re trying to bridge here are those between various left-wing interest groups — the Obama coalition.
The stupidity and hypocracy of these people can best summarized by reading the articles title.
They use the word “confront”
They’re not trying to understand anyone else they’re objective is to confront people with different ideas and values as opposed to listen to them. The rest was just pure condesention. ‘geographic self segregation” and ‘two Americas.”
Why not just say that everyone who doesn’t chose to run away to San Francisco must be racist and stupid.
If you look at an electoral map by voting district the whole country looks the same. Ten miles outside a dense metropolitan area it’s all red. Even the majority of California.
The blue shows up as tiny densely populated islands in a sea of red.
Yeah it’s convenient and typical for lefties to condescend and label everyone else that doesn’t mindlessly buy into their agenda as racist and stupid….but maybe there are other issues in the world other than race and sexual orientation. Maybe everyone doesn’t share your goals in life or your idea of what is truly important.
Maybe those sad people who geographically segregate themselves Ike living in places where average people can afford homes and live in communities where everyone had their own green space for their kids to play in. In communities where their families have lived for hundreds of years.
Where opening a small business doesn’t take four hundred pages of permits and environmental impact statements. Where communities focus on the four rs abd discipline at school as opposed to social engineering so unlike the SF where if you can’t get your kid into “the” one good high School you have to send your kids to private school like pelosi and feingold did themselves …usually parochial btw.
And maybe their ecomonic realites realities and interests are entirely different from yours and the things they need from the government to keep their communities growing and vibrant are different than say San Francisco.
Maybe …just maybe these people left the democratic party because it left them finding it easier to minister to urban areas and issues and ignore the rest of the country cause it was easier to win elections that way. (Before you lost the blue collar vote forever with nafta) And of course you never have to talk to the untermenchen in flyover country. In new yorkese you actually have to-gasp-cross bridges to talk to these people.
So just keep calling them stupid and racist degenerates and condescending to them. That worked so well in 2016.
But you’ll never know because people don’t like to be “confronted” by rude condescending lefties.
You guys are so stupid it hurts. If you actually dropped your agenda and really listened to theirs all you’d have to do to end the republican party as a viable entitiy nationwide is make a few policy tweeks having nothing to do with your issues and then simply stop talking down to people and mocking their beliefs and values.
But you see if the government started working again and there wasn’t a Titanic battle of good against evil you might stop being glued to the news channel. You’d be watching game of thrones reruns like everyone else and who’d be paying the bills over at cnn and MSNBC and fox whatnot.
https://coalitionforjewishvalues.org/op-eds/