Kentucky's only Black female legislator arrested in Breonna Taylor protest

WHILE THE BLACK AG HID WITH HIS FOP

FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE BUDDIES

By Elizabeth Joseph, CNN

© Darron Cummings/AP State Rep. Attica Scott speaks during a news conference, Friday, Sept. 25, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. Breonna Taylor's family attorney Ben Crump is calling for the Kentucky attorney general to release the transcripts from the grand jury that decided not to charge any of the officers involved in the Black woman's death. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott, the state's only Black female legislator, was among 24 people arrested Thursday by the Louisville Metro Police Department during Breonna Taylor protests, the Democratic lawmaker confirmed to CNN after her release from custody Friday morning.

Scott -- who in August had pre-filed legislation to end the use of no-knock warrants in Kentucky, known as "Breonna's Law" -- and her 19-year-old daughter Ashanti were charged with unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, and rioting, police records show.

"I'm very traumatized," Scott said. She says she's innocent of all charges and was peacefully seeking authorized sanctuary at a church before the curfew time.

According to police, a group of protestors began "causing damage" in downtown Louisville -- including breaking windows of a restaurant and tossing a flare into a library -- before the county-wide 9 p.m. curfew kicked in.

"Protestors made their way to the First Unitarian Church at 809 S 4th Street. People gathered on the property of the church, which allowed them to stay there as the curfew had expired," a police department statement said.

Scott says she was arrested at 8:58 p.m., two minutes before the curfew started, as she and other protesters crossed the street to seek sanctuary at the church.

"How could I have been breaking curfew before curfew even began?" she asked.

The curfew, enacted by Mayor Greg Fischer on Wednesday ahead of the announcement by Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron on a grand jury decision in the Taylor case, doesn't apply to those commuting to houses of worship.

"In Breonna's name, neither I or my teenage daughter who was arrested with me tried to burn down a library that our people need," Scott said at a press conference earlier Friday morning. "Those are some ridiculous charges that are levied against us."

Scott recorded video of herself walking to the First Unitarian Church of Louisville, showing police officers and police vans on street corners as they walked past a library on their way towards the church.

Five minutes into the video, Scott and fellow demonstrators were blocked by a group of police in the street between them and the church.

"Where do you want us to go?" the video shows Scott yelling out to police, some in riot gear. Three minutes later an officer approaches Scott.  

© Bryan Woolston/AP/FILE Kentucky Democratic State Representative Attica Scott speaks on the floor of the House of Representatives at the Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Wednesday, March 2, 2020.

"Ma'am is your phone recording?" the officer said.

"Yes, it is," she replies.

"You might want to turn it off so it doesn't get broke, OK? Turn it off and put it in your pocket, okay? Alright, go ahead and turn it off and put it in your pocket, I'm trying to be as nice as I can," the officer says before the video cuts off.  

  

© John Minchillo/AP A protester wears a gas mask outside The First Unitarian church, Thursday, Sept. 24, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky.

In a press conference Friday afternoon, LMPD Chief Robert Schroeder explained an "unlawful assembly" was declared because members of a protest group had started damaging property.

"Even though this was prior to curfew, it means people must disperse," he said.


"An extra responsibility" to fight for justice

Scott beat a 34-year incumbent in 2016 to become the first Black woman in nearly 20 years to serve in Kentucky's legislature. She says she's a certified anti-racism trainer and has a background in community organizing and civic engagement.

"That's who I am at core, so it's natural," she says about protesting, but the 48-year-old says she had never been arrested before Thursday night.

"I actively tried never to be in that position," she said. When asked if she regrets getting arrested with her daughter Thursday night, she said, "Absolutely not."

Thursday wasn't the first time Scott and Ashanti, a McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville, protested together.

Scott said the two came out May 29, when outcry over the shooting reached a boiling point. Gunfire erupted during protests in Louisville and audio was released of Taylor's boyfriend's call to 911 the night she was killed.

"That's when I decided to dedicate my everything to seek justice for her, and with Breonna's mother," Scott said.

On Wednesday it was announced the grand jury would not indict any LMPD officers for the death of Breonna Taylor. Instead, one officer who allegedly fired shots into her apartment was indicted on first-degree wanton endangerment charges, because some of the shots went into a neighboring apartment.

"I was, I am heartbroken, disappointed but not surprised," she said when asked about the Jefferson County grand jury's decision. "It's just very clear justice was not served for Breonna Taylor, her family and the community."

"The real heartbreaking thing is my daughter said, 'Mom, I wanted to be an EMT to help people and see things on the ground level but now I don't know that's the case, because being an EMT didn't save Breonna Taylor."

Scott plans to continue protesting.

"I'm a mom, I've communicated with Tamika Palmer, Breonna's mother, and I have the responsibility as a woman, a Black woman, a mother, to keep the fight going," she said.

Scott spoke with CNN before joining Taylor's family, their attorneys and social activists in a news conference that called for the attorney general to release documents related to his office's investigation into the case.

"This is just the beginning of our work moving from protest to politics," she told CNN.

© Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Demonstrators raise their fists as they gather on the steps of the Louisville Metro Hall on September 24, 2020. 

 

© Louisville Metro Police Department Police mugshot of Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott, who was arrested by the Louisville Metro Police Department during Breonna Taylor protests.

AMERIKKKA

How prosecutors are abusing anti-riot laws to punish peaceful protesters

Nick Robinson

© Provided by NBC News

During the Breonna Taylor protests in Louisville Thursday night, Attica Scott, the only Black female state representative in Kentucky, was among a handful of people arrested for felony first degree rioting. A library in Scott’s district had a window broken and a flare thrown inside at the demonstration, though no major damage was done. Scott, an outspoken proponent of racial justice and police reform who authored Breonna’s law to end no-knock warrants statewide, said it was “ridiculous” and “absurd” that she is being accused of trying to burn down a library she has consistently fought to fund.

If someone damages property or injures another person, they can always be prosecuted for those crimes. However, the increasingly aggressive use of anti-riot acts against protesters, such as Scott, is a startling and dangerous development. The ongoing nationwide demonstrations for racial justice are reportedly the largest protest movement ever in U.S. history and, despite some well-publicized incidents of violence, the overwhelming majority of these demonstrations have been peaceful. Yet authorities have been using overly broad anti-riot statutes to arrest nonviolent and violent protesters alike. The power given by these acts urgently needs to be curbed.

U.S. anti-riot statutes trace their origin to English law, where rioting was vaguely defined as a group that engaged in “tumultuous” conduct that threatened the “public peace.” Today, anti-riot acts vary considerably by state. Some require actual violence to bring charges under them, while others just require those in a group engage in still unclearly defined “tumultuous” conduct that might cause “public alarm.”

The expansive language of these statutes makes them an ideal tool for a government that wants to target demonstrators. Consider protesters that hold similar signs or wear similar clothing. If a handful engage in vandalism, like breaking a window, police and prosecutors can potentially arrest and prosecute the entire group under some states’ anti-riot acts.

This is not a hypothetical. During a demonstration in Washington, D.C., on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, some protesters engaged in vandalism. The Justice Department charged about 200 protesters with violating the District’s anti-riot act. Prosecutors didn’t present evidence that individual protesters committed any crime themselves. Yet a Washington Superior Court judge held the demonstrators could be found guilty of “conspiracy” to riot or “aiding and abetting” a riot — which carried penalties of up to 60 years in prison — because the protesters wore similar colored clothing that allegedly made it easier for those who committed vandalism to blend back into the crowd. The Justice Department was ultimately unable to secure a single conviction from a jury, but not after the defendants suffered substantial costs.

More recently, Trump has pushed to respond to the ongoing protests for racial justice with calls for law and order and, specifically, a vow to crack down on “anti-American riots.” Attorney General William Barr has called “rioting” by antifa “domestic terrorism” and triggered the use of Joint Terrorism Task Forces. And in a memorandum issued earlier this month, Trump directed federal agencies to find ways to withhold federal funding from states and cities he claims are not doing enough to combat rioting. Trump has warned that his administration would put down “very quickly” any “riots” on election night if protesters came out to contest the validity of his re-election.

Many localities have seemed happy to follow Trump’s lead. Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott this week announced legislation that would increase penalties for those who participate in a “riot,” require those arrested to stay in jail until they could see a court officer and make it a new felony offense to “aid and abet riots with funds and organization assistance.”

Yet this provides police broad discretion that can easily be abused. Three Dallas women sued the city’s police department in June for wrongful arrest under the state’s relatively subjective definition of rioting after police swept them and other protesters up using tear gas and rubber bullets. Texas law defines a riot as seven or more people who engage in conduct that “creates an immediate danger of damage to property or injury to persons.” The women claimed that they were peacefully protesting and police simply did not like their Black Lives Matter signs.

Compounding the problem, many anti-riot acts also have broad incitement provisions that can also be abused by prosecutors. Earlier this year, a St. Louis activist was charged for incitement to riot by the Justice Department seemingly on the basis of a Facebook post in which he merely encouraged others to join a demonstration the next evening that he described as a “red action” — an organizing term that indicates protesters might be violently confronted by the police or arrested.

Recognizing the danger of overbroad language against incitement, in August a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals based in Richmond, Virginia, unanimously struck out language from the federal anti-riot act that makes it illegal to “encourage” or “promote” a riot (neither word is defined). The panel found that the federal anti-riot act violated the First Amendment right to free speech by criminalizing what it called “protected advocacy.” Confronted with similar concerns, a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles struck down the entire federal anti-riot act in June 2019.

There have been objections to anti-riot laws going back at least as far as the 1960s, when civil rights leaders criticized them for giving law enforcement too much discretion. These two recent federal court rulings affirm concerns about their overbreadth, and the Supreme Court may ultimately have to decide their precise constitutional limits.

The U.S.’s outdated and poorly framed anti-riot acts add confusion and the potential for politicization into an already volatile political situation. They too often create a subjective legal standard that allows police to selectively engage in mass arrests of protesters and allows prosecutors to harass demonstrators with serious criminal charges. State and federal lawmakers should work to either remove these unnecessary acts from the books altogether, or at least better target them to align with our constitutional values.

NBA analyst Jalen Rose shouts Breonna Taylor message before ESPN cuts to break

ESPN analyst Jalen Rose waited until just before a commercial break to deliver the bluntest of his reactions to Wednesday's Kentucky grand jury decision not to indict any of the Louisville cops involved in the killing of Black woman Breonna Taylor with homicide charges.

Rose shouted a refrain familiar to members of the Black Lives Matter movement: "It would also be a great day to arrest the cops that murdered Breonna Taylor." His comment came during coverage of the NBA's Eastern Conference finals between the Heat and Celtics.

Taylor was shot to death by three officers in March after they rammed into her apartment without knocking. They carried a drug-related warrant for her ex-boyfriend, but he was not at the residence and there were no drugs found. Taylor's then-boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired his gun once at the police when they entered, thinking them to be intruders, and struck an officer in the leg. The cops returned fire with a barrage of bullets that killed Taylor and pierced through walls and into a neighboring apartment.


One of the officers, Brett Hankison, was arrested Wednesday and charged with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment for his alleged indiscriminate fire, but the other two cops did not receive any charges from the grand jury announcement. Hankison was released from jail after paying off his $15,000 bail.

Taylor's death was one of several that prompted nationwide protests against police brutality this summer and strengthened a Black Lives Matter activist movement working to increase justice while curbing systemic racism in the U.S. The police killing of unarmed Black man George Floyd in late-May also played a primary role in pushing people to protest.

Police force against Black people has prompted demonstrations on many occasions in recent decades, but few unified stretches of outrage have been as sustained or powerful as the current moment.

Anticipating backlash to the Kentucky grand jury decision regarding the officers who entered Taylor's apartment, Louisville officials announced a curfew through at least Friday. On Wednesday night, however, protesters did not heed that instruction.

NBA athletes have been particularly outspoken about social justice issues this summer, reflecting on their own experiences with law enforcement and empathizing with the stories of others. Many of them feel Black people in the U.S. have long been mistreated by police and are advocating for reforms, such as an end to the no-knock warrant that played a part in Taylor's death.

As a result, Rose was among a series of current and former players dismayed by the choice not to charge anyone involved in the killing of Taylor with homicide.

His method of conveying his message was as strong as any seen in the NBA community on Wednesday — and an unusual remark for a network that has at times attempted to swerve from sensitive political issues.

Annual Lennon tribute, in 40th year, goes online

© Provided by The Canadian Press

NEW YORK — Like many other events, an annual John Lennon tribute concert that takes place in his adopted city of New York on his Oct. 9 birthday has been forced online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

There was no way it was being cancelled, not on what would have been Lennon's 80th birthday, not on the tribute's 40th year.

“The idea of not celebrating John, of stopping after 39 years, never crossed my mind,” said Joe Raiola, the tribute's producer and artistic director of the Theatre Within organization.

Raiola had booked the Town Hall venue for this year's show. With the pandemic forcing it to stream for free from 7 p.m. to midnight Eastern time on the LennonTribute.org website, the event could get more exposure than ever.

Taped performances by Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, Natalie Merchant, Rosanne Cash, Jorma Kaukonen, Shelby Lynne, Taj Mahal, Marc Cohn, Joan Osborne and others will be included — many from past shows but some new.

Without ticket sales, organizers will ask for contributions for programs that benefit people affected by cancer. Theatre Within and Gilda's Club offer free workshops such as songwriting, art and meditation to cancer patients and survivors and to children who have lost parents to the disease.

Raiola and other friends began their informal tribute to Lennon in 1981, less than a year after the former Beatle was shot to death.

It stayed small, at least until 24 years in, when Lennon's widow Yoko Ono read a story about the tribute in the New York Daily News and called Raiola to say, in effect, what are you doing?

Learning more about it, she offered support, and said in a statement issued Thursday that “this is such a wonderful way to honour John and the values he stood for.”

Cash, a fellow New Yorker who was honoured with the John Lennon Real Love Award in 2018, has performed the former Beatle's songs “I'm Only Sleeping” and “Look at Me” at a past tribute.

“It's one of those things that you don't often see where the same people show up every year,” Cash said in an interview. “They're devoted to it. It's not just because of John, it's out of respect for what they're doing and the community they've created.”

Raiola believes Lennon's impact was “seismic” and that the ideals he believed in didn't die with him.

“Peace, love, gender equality and social justice — that stuff never gets old,” he said.

David Bauder, The Associated Press

Orcas knock into sailboats, force Spain to limit yachting

© Provided by The Canadian Press

BARCELONA, Spain — Spain has temporarily prohibited yachting across 100 kilometres (62 miles) of its northwestern coast after orca whales apparently got carried away while playing and damaged several sailboats.

Spain’s transport ministry issued the week-long prohibition for sailboats under 15 metres (49 feet) long starting Tuesday. It said the area covered by the ban meant to protect both boats and maritime mammals and could be extended to “follow the migration routes” of the whales.

Boats can leave port to go into the open sea between the capes of the Prioriño Grande and la Punta de Estaca de Bares, but they must not remain near the coast off the country’s northwestern tip.

The ministry said the first reported incident occurred Aug. 19. Since then, it said an unspecified number of sailboats have been damaged by orcas, with some needing assistance from Spain’s maritime rescue service after their rudders were wrecked.

Biologist Bruno Díaz of the local Bottlenose Dolphin Research Institute said the orcas were most likely just playing a bit too rough.

He said orcas, like other cetaceans such as dolphins, like to swim alongside boats. Running into hulls is rare, but he believed it was likely done by “immature teenage” orcas getting rowdy.

“We will never be in the mind of that individual animal, but based on experience, we think that there is absolutely nothing (threatening about their behaviour). We are not their natural prey,” Díaz told The Associated Press by phone Wednesday. “They are having fun. And maybe these orcas have fun causing damage.”

Orcas are particularly attracted by sail boats due to their size, the waves they make, and the lack of pollution they produce compared to fishing boats, Díaz said. This stretch of water where the Iberian Peninsula juts out into the Atlantic Ocean is both rife with tuna for them to hunt and on their migration route.

Spanish television has shown footage taken by sailors of groups of orcas swimming extremely close to their boats. No injuries have been reported so far.

Even so, the close encounters have put a scare in some sailors and hurt their pocketbooks with repairs that were needed.

British sailor Mark Smith told Spanish state broadcaster TVE that he was “a little” frightened “because they were very big and we couldn’t stop them” from banging into his boat.

Joseph Wilson, The Associated Press

Gender reveal for 'robust' new calf of endangered west coast orca species

© Provided by The Canadian Press

FRIDAY HARBOR, Wash. — Whale watchers in Washington state say they've determined the sex of the new addition to a critically endangered pod of killer whales.

A social media post by the Center for Whale Research says pictures of the roughly three-week-old southern resident killer whale calf confirm it's a male.

The post says the calf, officially named J57, was spotted Tuesday in waters just south of the Canadian border, rolling, lifting his head and upper body clear of the water and swimming beside his mother, J35.

As he rolled on his back, researchers snapped a photo confirming the sex.

The post also says J57 is robust and appears healthy.

The calf's mother gained international attention after giving birth in 2018 because that calf died soon after and she pushed it along the surface of the water for more than two weeks in an effort to revive it.

The centre says just over 70 southern resident orcas remain in the wild and female calves are preferred for population sustainability, but they also say J57 is still a welcome addition to the struggling species.

Researchers are watching J57 carefully because the mortality rate for calves is about 40 per cent, mainly due to recent declines in the pod's preferred food of chinook salmon.

The latest post says J57's mother was actively foraging when the pictures of her calf were snapped but concern remains because the centre says salmon migrations to spawning grounds up the Fraser River have been so poor this year that the whales have rarely ventured into what is usually their core habitat in the Salish Sea.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2020.

The Canadian Press

Auschwitz memorial director offers to share Nigerian boy's blasphemy jail term

#ENDBLASPHEMYLAWS

© Reuters/KACPER PEMPEL FILE PHOTO:

 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz and International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day

LAGOS (Reuters) - The head of Poland's Auschwitz Memorial has written to Nigeria's president offering to serve part of a 10-year jail term handed to a 13-year-old boy for blasphemy.

Piotr Cywinski requested a pardon for Omar Farouq, who was accused of making blasphemous statements during an argument and sentenced by a sharia court in Nigeria's northern Kano state last month.

If a pardon was not possible, Cywinski said he and 119 other volunteers would take on the boy's punishment and each spend a month in a Nigerian jail.

As the director of a memorial to a place "where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity," he said in the letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, posted on the Memorial's Twitter account.

Two spokesmen for Nigeria's president declined to comment on the unusual intervention on Saturday.

The presidency has not commented on the sentence that was condemned by rights groups. The U.N. children's agency UNICEF last month said the sentence was "wrong" and went against international accords that Nigeria had signed.

A special adviser to the governor of Kano said he had seen the letter on social media.

"The position of Kano state government remains the decision of the sharia court," Salihu Tanko Yakasai told Reuters.

Baba Jibo Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Kano State Judiciary, said he had not seen the letter but added that the president had the power to pardon the boy.

Nigeria is roughly split evenly between the mostly Christian south and predominantly Muslim north. Twelve of Nigeria's 36 states apply sharia.

(Reporting by Nneka Chile, Alexis Akwagyiram and Libby George in Lagos, Hamza Ibrahim in Kano and Felix Onuah in Abuja; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Snow cover good for brook trout, study finds


Kevin Yarr

Snow is good for brook trout, and that could be bad news, according to a recent study sponsored by the Ellen's Creek's Watershed Group in Charlottetown.

The group hired Harriet Laver, an environmental biology major at UPEI, to look at how weather impacts the brook trout population. Laver used weather data from Environment Canada — including precipitation, temperatures and snow accumulations — and correlated it with the number of young-of-the-year trout (trout younger than one year) found by the watershed group every spring going back to 2014.

She found a clear connection.

"It turned out that the years that were colder during the winter, and had more snow accumulation as well, they seemed to result in young-of-the-year brook trout," said Laver.

In years of medium to high accumulation more than 100 trout had been captured. In years of low accumulation it was fewer than 75.

Laver thinks there could be a number of factors playing in the trout's favour with snow.

Snow on the ice would insulate the stream. Water temperatures below 4 C can kill eggs. Snow also provides shade, which brook trout prefer, and melting snow releases oxygen into the water, which would keep the fish healthier.
'It would lead to less insects'

There could be an indirect benefit as well.

"It helps with the insects too, which the brook trout rely on for food," said Laver.

"If the insects hatch too soon, if they hatch in the winter during a warm spell, it would lead to less insects in the spring and therefore less food for the brook trout."

Brook trout's need for snow could be bad news for the species on P.E.I., Laver concluded in her study, because climate change is expected to mean less snow on the Island.
More from CBC P.E.I.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was shaped by her minority faith

THE FIRST JEW APPOINTED TO SCOTUS

© Provided by The Canadian Press

(RNS) — A phrase from the Book of Deuteronomy hangs framed on the wall of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court chamber: “Justice, justice you shall pursue.”

For Ginsburg, who died at home surrounded by her family on Friday evening (Sept. 18) at the age of 87, the phrase from the Hebrew Bible, “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” summed up perfectly her calling as jurist and a Jew.

“Our nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in a statement released by the Supreme Court. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”

Ginsburg, who had remained on the court despite suffering a long series of health challenges, rarely attended services, but she was passionate about Judaism’s concern for justice and was shaped in the crucible of its minority status.

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This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.

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Nominated to the high court by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg developed a cultlike following over her more than 27 years on the bench, especially among young women who appreciated her lifelong, fierce defence of women’s rights. Acquiring the moniker “Notorious RBG” as she got older, the 5-foot-1 justice who decorated her robes with lace collars was viewed as a model feminist who successfully knocked down legal obstacles to women’s equality and levelled the playing field between the sexes.

But as a justice, Ginsburg was dedicated to equality not only on behalf of women. She cared as deeply for minority groups, immigrants, the disabled and others.

In this, her identity as a Jew played a big role.

In a 2018 interview with Jane Eisner, then editor of the Jewish daily Forward, Ginsburg said that she grew up in the shadow of World War II and the Holocaust and it left a deep and lasting imprint on her.

“She saw being a Jew as having a place in society in which you’re always reminded you are an outsider, even when she, as a Supreme Court justice, was the ultimate insider,” said Eisner. “That memory of it — even if it’s more from the past — informed what she thought society should be doing to protect other minorities.”

Or as Ginsburg said during that interview: “It makes you more empathetic to other people who are not insiders, who are outsiders.”

Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933, the daughter of a furrier who arrived in the United States from Russia at the age of 13. Her mother was born in the U.S., months after her own parents landed in the country from Austria.

Anti-Semitism was commonly accepted in those days, and families like the Baders confronted the social difficulties of being Jewish while at the same time holding out hope that they could climb into the ranks of the middle class.

THEY FACED THE PREJUDICE OF THE WASP WHITE ANGLO SAXON PROTESTANT

“Both parents were very eager that Ruth learn what it meant to be a good Jew and a good American,” said Jane Sherron De Hart, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wrote a biography of Ginsburg. “That was a goal shared by a large number of Jews in Brooklyn who sought to assimilate in the sense of being good Americans but also retaining their Jewish heritage.”   

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Ruth’s mother, Celia, encouraged her independence and pushed her to excel. She had a list of “women of valour” — a biblical term referring to women who were wise and successful. Ginsburg imbibed those stories and memorized them, De Hart said.

Just as Ruth was entering high school, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She died in 1950, two days before Ruth’s graduation from James Madison High School in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

In keeping with Jewish custom of the time, Ruth was not allowed to say the mourner’s prayer for her mother as part of a minyan or quorum required for public prayer. Only men could be counted for a minyan, a tradition that has since changed in Reform and Conservative Jewish traditions.

The exclusion forever marked her relationship with religious Judaism.

“She was extremely indignant about it,” De Hart said. “She felt it was an affront to her mother, and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the end of her affiliation with the religious dimension of Judaism.”

She married Martin Ginsburg, whom she had met when both were undergraduates at Cornell University. The couple went on to Harvard Law School, though Ruth transferred to Columbia Law School after Martin took a job in New York City. They had two children, Jane and James.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as she was now known, went on to teach at Rutgers and Columbia law schools and in 1972 co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. She argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five.

No firebrand, she pursued a long-term strategy to chip away at discriminatory laws, one by one.

“She tried to work through the system,” said Eisner. “She very much believed in institutions and incremental change. That’s an outgrowth of her experience as a Jew. The law protected minorities — not all, and not equally — but there was a great reverence among the Jews of that generation in the power of government to protect them and pave the way for their achievement.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served 13 years until she was appointed to the Supreme Court.

Behind the scenes she tried in small ways to make the court more hospitable to Jews. Several Orthodox Jewish lawyers had complained that a certificate issued by the court read “In the Year of Our Lord.” For Jews, explicitly framing the calendar year as Christian was offensive. Ginsburg successfully urged the court to excise it.

She also pushed the court not to hear cases on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, a practice that continues to this day.

Although the Ginsburgs were secular Jews, after Martin’s death in 2010, Ruth began accepting more invitations to speak to Jewish groups. In 2018, she received the $1 million Genesis Prize, awarded annually to a Jewish person for talent and achievement. (She donated the proceeds to various Jewish charities.) In 2019, Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History mounted a travelling exhibit of her life.

Ginsburg attended Washington, D.C.’s Adas Israel Congregation once a year for the Kol Nidre service on the eve of Yom Kippur, but she was never a dues-paying member.

Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt of Adas Israel said the Conservative synagogue extends free membership to all the Jewish justices on the court. (Justice Elena Kagan attends on the High Holidays as well.)

In 2015, Ginsburg was asked by the American Jewish World Service to write an insert to its Passover Haggadah. She agreed and asked Holtzblatt to help her research some of the sacred texts about women in the Exodus narrative.

True to form, Ginsburg wanted to write about the figures not mentioned in the Haggadah.

“For her that was all the people who were marginalized, like the women,” said Holtzblatt. “She wanted to highlight the roles they played. She wanted to learn more about the daughter of Pharaoh, Moses’ sister Miriam, and the midwives, Shifra and Puah. She and I talked a lot about people who are not given the spotlight when they do miraculous things.”

Holtzblatt said she never asked for a byline on the essay, because she only provided Ginsburg some source material. Ginsburg, however, insisted.

A private interment service will be held at Arlington National Cemetery, according to the SCOTUS statement.

Yonat Shimron, The Associated Press

“May Her Memory Be A Revolution”: Why We Mourn RBG With Jewish Blessings


Britni de la Cretaz 
 

© Provided by Refinery29

In the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s unexpected death, and while political turmoil abounds, many people are searching for ways to mourn the woman who blazed trails and had an outsized impact on American politics. For many in the United States, this is a moment of collective grief as we remember and honor someone whose legacy was evident even before her death last week at age 87. But the way we mourn Justice Ginsburg still matters.


Ginsburg was —proudly — a Jewish woman, and she held tight to her faith, saying in a 1996 essay for the American Jewish Committee, “I am a judge born, raised and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition.” She had a Torah verse hanging in her office, often cited the fact that she was the only justice with a mezuzah on her office’s door frame, and wore a collar with a Torah verse on the opening day of the Supreme Court last year (it read “Tzedek,” meaning “justice”). She even wrote feminist Torah commentary.

So, as we all grieve this incalculable loss, it is also important to honor Ginsburg’s Jewishness in the way we mourn her in public. “This is a moment when non-Jews can learn about Jewish grief and mourning practices, use Jewish language to offer condolence and honor the dead,” said Rabbi Ariana Katz, the founding rabbi of Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebl and host of Kaddish, a podcast about Jewish mourning rituals. “If you are looking to honor the life and legacy of an incredible person and are wholeheartedly using the prayers of your tradition, that is beautiful and authentic. But it might not be a public act, and requires rigor to make sure the theology you’re putting forward in your prayer does not impose a belief system on the person for whom you are praying.”

There are phrases you might hear people say of Ginsburg, or any other Jewish person who has died. “May her memory be for a blessing” is one of the most common, and it is “a traditional way of noting the ways in which those who have passed can live on and inform our actions and values in the world today,” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Scholar in Residence, the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), tells Refinery29. “It’s ancient, dates back to the Talmud (so, more than 1500 years).” 

Another adaptation of this has also been used to honor Ginsburg: “may her memory be for a revolution.” This phrase actually originated in Israel to honor people who were victims of domestic violence or hate crimes “to make clear that their deaths should spur us to action and changemaking,” says Ruttenberg. The sentiment has now been expanded to commemorate victims of police brutality and white supremacy, which Ruttenberg says “has become a way of honoring the lives of everyone whose memory inspires us to push for a more just world.” Relatedly, NCJW’s campaign to honor Justice Ginsburg’s memory is called Ruth’s Revolution.

The timing of Ginsburg’s passing also matters in Jewish tradition. Ginsburg died on Friday night (Shabbat) which also happened to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. In Jewish tradition, someone who dies on Shabbat is a “tzadik,” or someone who is considered “righteous.” A person who dies on Rosh Hashanah is also a tzadik, according to tradition. Despite it being the beginning of High Holidays season, that night saw a collective outpouring of grief and thousands of people gathered outside the Supreme Court to say the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

“Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish on the steps of the Supreme Court brought honor to the memory of Justice Bader Ginsburg, and was a public display of Judaism,” says Rabbi Katz. “Public displays of Judaism in a time of frightening antisemetic attacks is an act of bravery. It was an act of love through vulnerability, to speak words that are for some the singular prayer they know. Saying the Kaddish on the steps of the Supreme Court encapsulates Jewish experiences of mourning, and is a flag that this death is known and visible.”

As if to emphasize the need to remain educated and appreciate these Jewish values when mourning the late Justice, other public mourning rituals have disregarded or ignored Ginsburg’s faith altogether. Alongside the Mourner’s Kaddish, people outside the Supreme Court sang “Amazing Grace,” a song written by a Christian priest about his Christianity. “Why the insistence on singing that song? There are so many songs that are secular or neutral of this loaded connotation,” Rabbi Ruttenberg notes.

There have also been memes calling Ginsburg “Saint Ruth,” something Ruttenberg calls “profoundly disrespectful” and “a particularly loaded erasure of her Jewishness.” Others have pictured Ginsburg in heaven alongside recently passed celebrities like Chadwick Boseman, though this too goes against Jewish tradition since Jews do not believe in heaven.

And although it should be acknowledged that Jews who were raised in multifaith homes sang both the Mourner’s Kaddish and Amazing Grace, or used both tzadik and saint to describe a person who passed, remembering Ginsburg’s impact on the Jewish community at-large should outweigh the need to honor her in any way but her own religion.

“It’s important to honor and center the religious and cultural perspective of any person who dies, and it’s all the more crucial to remember the larger historical context in which this conversation is happening,” says Ruttenberg. “We live in a Christian-dominated culture in which Jews have always been part of the religious minority, and in which Christians hold power in a particularly unique way. We live in the context of centuries of supersessionism — the notion that Christianity has come to replace Judaism, and centuries of Christian oppression of Jews and myriad attempts to convert us (and, many, many times, our expulsion and/or massacre when we have not done so).”

As Ginburg’s funeral started this morning, Wednesday, and the battle to fill her vacant seat consumes Congress, people will continue to memorialize the justice. But it’s important to do this in a way that also commemorates who she was: a strong, resilient, dissenting Jewish woman. So, you should call her memory a “blessing” or a “revolution; you should learn about the practice of sitting shiva for a week to mourn; and you should honor her legacy as a tzadik — for years to come.

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G7 ministers back extension of debt freeze for poorest nations, urge reforms

© Reuters/KIM KYUNG-HOON FILE PHOTO: Japan's newly-appointed Finance Minister Taro Aso speaks at a news conference in Tokyo

By Andrea Shalal, Tetsushi Kajimoto and Leigh Thomas

WASHINGTON/TOKYO/PARIS (Reuters) - G7 finance ministers on Friday backed an extension of a G20 temporary freeze in debt payments and recognized the need for broad debt relief in the future, while taking aim at G20 member China over a lack of transparency in its lending.

The G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), approved in April, is aimed at helping developing countries get through the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. So far, it has helped 43 countries defer $5 billion in official debt service payments.

However, in a joint statement, the G7 ministers said they "strongly regret" moves by some countries to skip full participation in the DSSI by classifying their state-owned institutions as commercial lenders.

While the statement did not mention China specifically, G7 officials said the message was clearly aimed at Beijing, which has failed to include loans by state-owned China Development Bank and other government-controlled entities in its official debt totals when dealing with countries seeking debt relief.

"China's participation in DSSI is totally insufficient," Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters after a G7 teleconference. "I told (the) G7 that we must apply further pressure on China, that DSSI needs to be extended beyond this year-end deadline, and that we must ensure burdens will be shared fairly by all creditors."

Restrictions enacted to combat the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected nearly 32 million people worldwide, have hit poor countries especially hard and threaten to push over 100 million people into extreme poverty. The pandemic will force many countries that already faced crushing debt levels before the crisis to restructure their loans or face default.

G7 ministers acknowledged that some countries will need further relief beyond the current freeze in official bilateral debt payments, and urged the Group of 20 major economies and Paris Club creditors to agree on common terms for restructuring those debts by an Oct. 14 meeting of G20 finance ministers.

"This is not just a liquidity crisis, we need to tackle debt sustainability and go for debt cancellation," said Iolanda Fresnillo at Eurodad, a network of 50 non-governmental organizations from 20 European countries. "By just postponing the payments you are not solving the problems these countries are facing."

Friday's statement reflects growing recognition that the program has fallen short of its targets. The savings made are far short of the $12 billion initially projected, with some 30 eligible countries choosing not to ask for forbearance for fear of harming their ability to borrow in the future.

The ministers said the initiative should be extended "in the context of a request for IMF financing," a nod to the Fund's strict conditions for global lending, and called for development of a new term sheet and memorandum of understanding to improve implementation of the G20 initiative.

That effort should focus on key features for debt treatment beyond the temporary freeze and "fair burden sharing among all creditors," they said.

In addition, all claims classified as 'commercial' under DSSI would be treated as such in future debt treatments and for implementation of IMF policies, the ministers said, a policy that could leave China's lending more exposed in the event of a future restructuring.

"Pressure is mounting on China," said Eric LeCompte, a United Nations finance expert. "They're being very specific here. All Chinese government entities should stop taking debt payments from poor countries."

The ministers called again on private lenders to participate when requested, noting that their absence from the process has limited the potential benefits for several countries.

The G7 finance ministers' backing for an extension will smooth the way for a decision by the larger G20, with a formal decision likely at their leaders' summit in November.

Writing in a tweet, World Bank President David Malpass welcomed the G7's call for an extension, more debt transparency, and action on debt relief beyond just suspension and urged speedy action to help poor countries.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington, Tetsushi Kajimoto and Leika Kihara in Tokyo, and Leigh Thomas in Paris; Additional reporting by Takaya Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Marc Jones in London; Editing by Gerry Doyle and Rosalba O'Brien)