These are dark times. Over the course of a single week, we witnessed the massacre of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue by a man who shouted “I just want to kill Jews,” the killing of two African-Americans in Louisville, Kentucky on October 24, 2018 by a man who refrained from shooting a white bystander because in his words “whites don’t kill whites,” and the mailing of pipe bombs to the free press and Democratic leadership of this country by a man who authored anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim tweets in the days leading up to both tragedies.
We, the undersigned faculty and staff of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, are shaken, but we stand by and with the victims of these tragedies, and we stand up to this hatred by committing ourselves to teaching you, our students, how to talk through your differences with others without resorting to violence.
In peace, sorrow, and solidarity.
Sam Boyd, Vanessa Frye, Nan Goodman, Hilary Kalisman, Yonatan Malin, Elias Sacks, David Shneer, Davide Stimilli, Meghan Perea, Eyal Rivlin, Rebecca Wartell, Beverly Weber