(RNS) — Three extraordinary women from vastly different religious backgrounds changed our nation forever. Indeed, one cannot understand social movements in America today without recognizing the trio’s achievements and the role religion played in their tumultuous histories. And like today’s social activists, they fought religious bigotry, police arrests, courtroom trials and constant threats of physical violence.

Susan B. Anthony’s conviction that all people were equal under God was an inheritance from her upbringing in the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. A temperance campaigner and abolitionist in her early career, Anthony had by the late 1860s begun to focus on women’s rights. With her friend and fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association that later became the League of Women Voters.

In 1872, the 52-year-old Susan B. Anthony voted in her hometown of Rochester, New York. She was brought to trial for her “crime” and found guilty, but she refused to pay the $100 fine (about $2,000 in today’s dollars), and the prosecution dropped the case.

Anthony’s struggle for the ballot box was never easy in a male-dominated society that had curtailed women’s right to vote since our nation’s beginnings. But she had remarkable courage and an unshakable commitment to transform the role of women in society.

Tom Segev’s voluminous biography, A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, gives new meaning to the Latin phrase – carpe diem – seize the day. That is just what David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) did when he proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.

The now-or-never philosophy of Israel’s “founding father” is captured in the video below, which shows Ben-Gurion confidently stepping out of a Lincoln sedan and proudly saluting the waiting crowd before striding into the Tel Aviv Museum, where he will announce the fateful declaration.

In the video, we see a short, pudgy man with two protruding tufts of white hair crowning his large, balding head. In his left hand is a briefcase, presumably containing the Hebrew text of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a document he personally rewrote the night before because he was dissatisfied with the original draft by his Zionist colleague, Moshe Shertok (Sharett).
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Ben-Gurion’s salute signaled to a skeptical world his steely resolve in the face of opposition from President Harry Truman’s top two cabinet members: Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, misgivings also voiced by his more cautious Zionist comrades, as well as the threat of an imminent war with better-equipped Arab armies.

When the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) convenes its 2019 Biennial this December in Chicago, it will shine the spotlight on a city with a rich Jewish heritage.  

The city’s first congregation, Kehilath Anshe Mayriv (KAM, and known today as KAM Isaiah Israel) established in 1847, was a founding member of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (now the URJ), and four of its rabbis have served as president of the Reform Movement’s rabbinical arm, the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

By 1930, the Chicago’s Jewish population of 275,000 was surpassed in number only by New York City and Warsaw, Poland. Among the many illustrious Jews with a strong Chicago connection were Sears, Roebuck executive and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, world champion boxer Barney Ross, “King of Swing” band leader Benny Goodman, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, advice columnist Esther Lederer a.k.a. Ann Landers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, and Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow.
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No author has portrayed Jewish life in Chicago during the two decades before WWII better than has its native son, journalist-turned-novelist Meyer Levin (1905-1981). His autobiographical narrative, The Old Bunch (1937), follows the lives of 19 young Chicago Jews – 11 boys and eight girls – beginning with their high school graduations in 1921 and concluding with the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934.

(RNS) — In July, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada voted to remove a longstanding prayer from its liturgy that called for the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity.  The deleted wording will be replaced with a new invocation called: “For Reconciliation with the Jews.”

Bishop Bruce Myers warned that persecution of Jews “is not a thing of the past, nor is it restricted to other parts of the world.” He cited last October’s mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11 worshippers.

The bishop urged Anglicans “to acknowledge and repent of the church’s participation in anti-Semitism, to stop singling out Jews as a target for our evangelistic efforts, and to assume a humble and reconciliatory stance with our Jewish elders in the faith … Anglicans should … be ever mindful of Christianity’s deep Jewish roots.”
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Almost from the beginning of Christianity, members of the new faith believed the Jewish people had lost God’s favor because they “rejected” Jesus, a fellow Jew, as their Messiah and Savior. But, of course, since the early followers of Jesus were Jews, there was no mass “rejection;” no vote was taken, no referendum was held in ancient Israel regarding the claims made about Jesus.

Eighty years ago, on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi German “Fuhrer,” began World War II by invading Poland. He hurled 1.5 million troops, 2,000 tanks, and 1,900 warplanes against his neighbor on the east. The outnumbered and outgunned Polish army was no match for the Nazi assault.

The Polish capital, Warsaw, fell on September 17, and 11 days later, Soviet troops linked up with Hitler’s military juggernaut and divided Poland as part of the Berlin-Moscow non-aggression treaty signed a month earlier.

It was a bitter defeat, but for Poland’s 3.5 million Jews, 10 percent of the country’s population, it marked the beginning of the end of an extraordinary community which dated back more than 1,000 years.
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It was because of Poland’s huge Jewish population that the engineers of the “Final Solution” built their largest death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, inside occupied Poland. And once Hitler invaded his former “ally,” the Soviet Union, in June 1941, even more Jews came under his brutal control.

(RNS) — While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently called human slavery America’s “original sin,” he dismissed calls for the federal government to pay financial reparations to descendants of slaves.

It has been 400 years since “20, odd Negroes” in chains arrived aboard the English ship “The White Lion” in Point Comfort, Virginia, in August 1619. A short time later, a second ship, “The Treasurer,” brought more Africans to be sold to the white Virginia settlers who had arrived in Jamestown a dozen years earlier.
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Transporting Africans by ship across the Atlantic Ocean as slaves did not end until 1808, and scholars estimate about 455,000 Africans — including children — were brought to what became the United States. Besides being sold as property, the Africans were also stripped of their original names, languages, cultures and religions. Most slaves were forcibly converted to Christianity, their masters’ religion.

Hitler (Oxford University Press) is the definitive biography of Adolf Hitler.

Author Paul Longerich is a prominent German historian, professor of modern German history at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, and founder of the College’s Holocaust Research Center. From 2003 to 2004, he served as a senior scholar-in-residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Because Longerich has written biographies of leading Nazis Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, it is no surprise that he finally turned his attention to Hitler himself. The result is a 968-page exploration of the Nazi leader with an additional 247 pages of notes and a 70-page bibliography.  
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Despite its length, Longerich’s book is no ornamental “door stopper;” it is, rather, an “eye opener” that sets this book apart from those of many other Hitler biographers.

While the title of Kenneth Stow’s book, Anna and Tranquillo (Yale University Press), may sound like the name of an Italian opera, it is actually the story of the Papal State’s 300-year effort to forcibly convert the Jews of Rome to Catholicism. The officially sanctioned campaign included kidnapping youngsters, harsh incarceration, and mind manipulation.

The book centers on the case of Anna del Monte. On May 6, 1749, Vatican police arrested the 17-year-old Jewish girl at her family home in Rome’s Jewish ghetto. She was placed in solitary confinement for 13 days inside the dreaded Casa dei Catecumeni, the House of Converts.
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Anna was forced to listen to hours and hours of conversionary sermons, a tactic priests, including Cardinals, employed to compel physically and psychologically battered prisoners to affirm “the one true faith” at the baptismal fount.

The U.S. and Israel, allies for more than 70 years, are sometimes at odds on specific policies and actions. Yaakov Katz’s new book Shadow Strike:Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press) details one such disagreement involving a high-stakes threat to Israel in 2007.

As Katz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, tells it, in mid-April of that year, the director of Israel Intelligence, Meir Dagan  “… a short, bald and burly man with a limp and a cane walked into the West Wing of the White House” to meet with President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and members of the national security staff. He showed them photographs of a secret nuclear reactor in a remote part of Syria; it had been supplied by North Korea and was nearing an operational or “hot” stage.
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The Mossad director also made it clear that Israel could never tolerate a hostile neighbor acquiring the capability to produce an atomic weapon. He did not need to remind the Americans that in 1981, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed a nuclear plant in Iraq.