While the death of George Floyd brings up personal traumas for many us, it’s important to remember that part of self-care is finding joy.

More than 1,500 people have signed an open letter published Friday that uses the religious language of “obligation” to demand that Jewish groups reserve 20% of board seats for Jews of color and take other steps to increase their representation at a time of national soul-searching about systemic racism.

While I am so proud to be a queer Jewish woman of color, it has taken an excruciating amount of work to reach this point.

When the Jewish community learned that the March for Racial Justice was scheduled for Yom Kippur (September 30), outraged responses filled social media Read more: https://forward.com/opinion/383226/no-its-not-anti-semitic-to-schedule-your-march-for-yom-kippur/

The lynching death of a 14-year-old black boy in Mississippi awakened the country to the horrors of racism

Two excellent books accompanied me through the darkness of these last months. The first was Wesley Lowery's "They Can't Kill Us All," a devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter, on the first night of Hanukkah and also on the second night, the third night and every other night and day of the year.

I don’t have to agree with every element of the Movement For Black Lives’ platform to advocate loudly and wholeheartedly for racial justice, any more than, fifty years ago, I would have had to agree with Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad to support full citizenship for black Americans. Discussion and dissent have always been an essential part of social change.

It’s personal. Those men, those boys, those women who have been killed for being black, Whose names are a list we read and reread and speak and call out to remember, Those precious lives that matter, They could be my son. They are my son. My son’s life matters.