 I am excited that we're next going to hear from two local religious leaders and a renowned advocate for inter-religious communication and empathy. So please welcome to the stage Rabbi Rachel Timoner, Reverend Eric Thomas, and Joyce Dubensky. Good afternoon. I hear you've had a fabulous day. I'm Joyce Dubensky. I'm the CEO at Tannenbaum, and I want to start by thanking the Brooklyn Museum and Anne Pasternak. For their vision and for the way they are building culture and community in my home borough, Brooklyn. So thank you to them. I'm delighted today because I'm here with two of Brooklyn's much more interesting religious leaders, Reverend Eric Thomas and Rabbi Rachel Timoner. Our focus, as you heard, is on social justice and religion. Clearly an easy subject and one that we'll be able to summarize in just a few sentences. But before we get started, I want to make a few observations. First, the obvious. Across our nation and really across our globe, people are dangerously divided, and that is real. What we call othering has become an everyday reality, and that includes religious othering. So we see Muslims being targeted and mischaracterized as terrorists. We see six mistaken as Muslims and violently attacked. And we see Charlottesville terrorizing for most of us. It also terrorized Jews who haven't forgotten the Nazis. But there are others who are also feeling marginalized, like white evangelical Protestants who in very large numbers report bias in the workplace. Similar numbers to the atheists and the agnostics who are also feeling marginalized when they go to work. Of course, we can blame this on the public discourse. That's real, but it's also fueled by stereotypes which are deeply ingrained in so many of us, even when we consciously don't want to live by them because of the society and culture that we live in. Just to mention too, the stereotype that religion is the cause of the world's great conflicts, that it's fueling all the violence and the wars and creating conflict here at home, or that religion and being LGBTQI are incompatible. These stereotypes are not the whole, and they are certainly not real, but they have real world consequences. So notwithstanding under reporting, we see that nationwide in the recent hate crime statistics, religion-based hate rose 23% in a year, with most of that targeting Jews and American Muslims, whose the rate of hate crimes for them rose 67% in one year. And remember, that's with under reporting. Sadly, but true, New York City, our wonderful city, is not any different. Locally, we're seeing the same trends. So stereotyping and the violence that it fuels are a problem. But what we were charged with today is debunking those stereotypes and suggesting ways to counter them, because the truth is that religion is not only fuel for conflict by those who seek to misappropriate it, but it's also a vehicle for healing, for creating community, and for building a healthy, diverse, pluralistic national identity, something that I think we are desperately in need of today. Religion is variable and different across different traditions, but internally, each faith is also diverse. What's interesting is that notwithstanding that diversity, internally and externally, we have core shared values that we can access for building whole communities like the Golden Rule. I'm looking because we're trying to get you a slide, but that may be on me. I don't know that you're going to get it. Anyway, even if you don't see the slide, I want to go one step further, because it's not only our core values. It's also that we have concrete resources and information that we can offer so that each of you can be part of the solution, not just listening today, but actually taking action and doing something tonight and tomorrow. At Tannenbaum, that includes our combating extremism materials, which are on our website, but there are also a lot of resources we'll be discussing that are provided by religious leaders and houses of worship. That's why I think there are reasons for hope, even as I acknowledge that these are dangerous times and that we have a lot of very real challenges that we have to me. So I want to get us started in conversation by turning to Rabbi Rachel and Reverend Eric and asking my first question, and then you guys can figure out who goes first. We live in one of the nation's most diverse cities, probably one of the most diverse cities in the globe. As religious leaders, have either of you personally experienced bias because of your religious identity? And if not, have you witnessed it within your religious community? Who goes first? So yes, this has been a year, I mean certainly anti-Semitism is not new, but this has been a year in which we've seen an incredible increase in very overt anti-Semitism. There have been bomb threats against Jewish community centers, cemeteries have been desecrated. Just a couple of weeks ago, I heard from our teens in my synagogue, I'm the senior Rabbi of the synagogue, that one teen talked about being at school and having kids throw pennies at him and saying pick them up, you're a Jew. And another kid talked about being with a group of people he thought were friends and one of them said I hate Jews and everyone said I hate Jews too and he just kind of laughed like acting like it was a joke because he did not know what to say. So yes, certainly there is anti-Semitic bias and anti-Semitism is very alive in our society and as it's given permission at the highest levels and you know quietly endorsed at the highest levels, it grows. Have you personally experienced it? In my life, yes. Someone asked me if I had horns and asked to feel them. I had someone say well that person was going to Jew me down, which I didn't ever heard before, I had to say, did you say Jew me down? What does that mean? So yes, I have. What comes to mind immediately is the event that happened at Charleston at the bombing, at the bombing of the shooting at the Bible study where you know someone came in and received the hospitality of the group as one of them and still took life. And so there are ways that that violence is racialized. He might not have looked specifically to target a Christian group but there is something going on with race there. Of course what also comes up is an LGBT religious identity as a bias in and of itself and of course that's layered and complex in the African-American community, in the Protestant community, where this incompatible with Christian teaching kind of thing is something that has to be decolonized from the inside out. And I'm the third in the Presbyterian denomination, the third openly gay African-American minister in the Presbyterian church. The second one is Derek McQueen who is pastoring at St. James Presbyterian church in Harlem and the first is Bertrand Johnson who happens to be the social justice minister at the Riverside Church. So all three of us are here in New York City. Two out of the three of us are in historically African-American congregations and so just our embodying those positions deconstructs, decolonizes, and resists that bias even within Christianity as a whole. I'm going to jump out of the moderator role and just share that I've also had the experience of someone who was inviting me to, recently, to participate in a major conference designed to build inclusion and who said to me, oh, they jude you down when I said something and it was like, and I know I should say something and I was speechless. It was hard, you know, she meant, well, she didn't know what she was saying and she didn't know how it landed. But boy, did that hurt. Okay, next question. Personally, have either of you experienced bias based on, if not religion, another of your core identities? And could you tell us about it? I guess it's just a repeat of the first answer. I mean, because those identities are, they're intersectional and they're simultaneous. So I don't separate my same gender-loving self from my African-American self from my pastor's self, from my PhD self. I mean, and it's situational. So now that I talked about the Charleston, we have to talk about polls and how you had Latinx and African-American, gay and lesbian people and their friends. So not everyone who was at polls is LGBT, but like their friends were there as well. And so again, this, this act of violence, specifically around sexual identity and racialized sexual identity, the perception of racialized sexual identity is an extreme, it's an extreme example of daily kinds of aggressions that happen. Can you give an example? Something that you've experienced? I mean, just as a, as a black gay man, the way that I walk down the street and being called a faggot, you know, it's, it's, it's performative. And so when people see what they could take advantage of as stereotype, they, they try to make themselves large in order to make other people small. Rachel? Certainly I've faced homophobia for many, you know, it's when you are LGBTQ, you face, you face that. I, I want to say something about the relationship between, you know, we're talking about the role of faith communities and social justice. And I think that sometimes people think that religion is the cause of homophobia. And I have faced homophobia in religious institutions. But what I have experienced is that if people are, are homophobic, they use religion as an excuse for it, the validation for it. And when people no longer are homophobic, well, then they reinterpret the biblical texts. And that is true for every difficult biblical text. There are many, not just homophobic, many, you know, there are genocidal biblical texts. There are terrible, terrible, biblical texts that, that are, we, we called when I was in rabbinical school texts of terror. And so, so the project of being a religious person is you have to reinterpret those texts and you have to try to redeem them in some way by finding some other way to read them. And you can do that with the homophobic texts in the, in the Bible, if you are, if you have the will and the interest. And so I think that, again, to your point, that people blame religion for homophobia, I think that people, rather people are homophobic and they use religion to justify it. And if I could just add to that, I teach an introduction to religions in the world class, where I challenge them, what are the underlying issues under these, these bias kinds of attacks? Are we, are we talking about power? Are we talking about economics? Are we talking about land? And we, we just put religion on top of those things and say the Muslims do this or the Jews do that without a deeper kind of reflection or investigation even into what's underneath that. That's right. All right, next question, a key one. You're both religious leaders in Brooklyn. How are you involved in creating social change given these realities in your, our community? Iny, me, me, my, no. We're embodying sharing. So I wanted, I, I think in order to explain it, I have to say I grew up not in a religious household, in a household that was hyper-rational and didn't, my family didn't talk about God. And I did not grow up as a religious person and came to it only, I grew up as a person dedicated to social justice and that became stronger and became clearly my life purpose and did that work not through a faith lens or through a Jewish lens for a long time and then felt that my experience of there being a presence that, that I would eventually call God was undeniable and I had to do my social justice work through a faith lens and I, and so to me these things are really, are really inseparable and, and, and having done a lot of social justice work without being part of a religious community for many years, I was burning out in terrible ways. I was becoming despairing and I needed that work to come from a place of love and I needed that work to be based in hope and I had neither of them really until I had this other experience that, which was around having a sense of the interconnection of all life and some greater source that we're a part of belonging to what's larger than we are. And so, so to me these things are inseparable and if we're wanting to make change in the world, for me it's, it's essential that that, that work come out of a place that is reminding us of our, how small we are in the vast cosmos and what we're a part of that is greater than we are. So one of the fabulous things about being a congregational clergy person is that you have a congregation and that means you've got people and, and people come together around the shared values and highest aspirations and so as a synagogue rabbi I just get to basically use community organizing techniques in the synagogues I serve and, and now I'm here in Brooklyn and we are working on, I mean we're working on issues around systemic racism and mass incarceration and we're working, we do this thing called Get Organized Brooklyn, I don't know if anybody here's a Brooklyn person who's come to that but you know we do these gatherings that are like these mass gatherings of mobilization in response to the election and then all year around all the issues that are being threatened and the next thing we're doing is a big action with Eric Gonzalez who's our acting district attorney in Brooklyn trying to hold him accountable to specific changes that would empty and then close Rikers and so that'll be on November 20th. So I think it is very possible to within faith institutions to have those be centers for real power to make real change and obviously this is not, this is something that we've seen in our history through some of the most important movements in, in this country's history and in human history but it's, we ought to be doing it now. I think for us at, at Cylon Presbyterian Church is a historically African American church and it's on the corner of Jefferson and Marcy in an area that is rapidly gentrifying. I mean what is Connecticut Muffin doing in the middle of Bed-Stuy and so just in a way just surviving and thriving in spite of all of that is a way that we're effecting social change. The Head Start program that is familiar to many of you, one of the first Head Start programs in our country started at Cylon Presbyterian Church 45 years ago and because of changes in federal funding Head Start programs are being closed down in favor of universal pre-K programs and so we're in this period of making our spaces born again as it is to create new opportunities for, for those things to happen. We also have your body as your temple which is an HIV, AIDS testing and prevention ministry that happens there so for that to be happening in a historical African American church is I think amazing and what's next for the future. You're great right? So before we close I'm going to tell you a secret and then give them each one, one sentence if they have anything that they would like to finally share with you. While we were in the back room you were talking about Rikers and this work and the two of you like oh yeah how can we work together but that's powerful and so it's worth hearing and listening to because there are things that each of us and all of us can do. Now you too get the last word you can decide who gets the final last word and then we will wrap one sentence. I think that remembering that we're all interconnected as human beings and children of a creator however we call that creator is of paramount importance to our thriving and our peace and our survival. Amen. Thank you.