Activists, Pacifists and Artists in the Age of ICE
I grew up Catholic in an unusually liberal pocket of downtown New York City. My father, a humanistic psychologist turned Catholic convert, was deeply involved with the Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. It offered hospitality to the poor, nonviolence, and a fiercely personal commitment to social justice. My father was drawn to the Jesus of the Gospels, the one who embraced the broken, the outcast, the forgotten. Catholicism, for him, wasn’t about dogma, it was about balm for the hurting soul.
But there was another part of him I barely knew. My father's family were first-generation Americans descended from Austrian Jewish immigrants. His childhood was marked by tension and emotional distance from his mother and father.
