Tucked among the stately Tudor-style homes in the Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit is a beige one with ivy snaking up its facade and a sign on the front lawn that reads, “Peace with justice in Gaza.”
It is the home of the 74-year-old artist, photographer and activist Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a founding member of the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace Action-Michigan, who told me that she is the descendant of Holocaust survivors and her grandparents fled to America to escape the pogroms.
Barefield believes that the war in Gaza is a genocide perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people, “absolutely a genocide,” she emphasizes, and she demands a cease-fire.
And because of that she has voted uncommitted by mail in Tuesday’s Michigan Democratic primary. She sees that vote as a way to send a message to President Biden: “If you are not committed to a cease-fire, we’re not committed to you.”
I heard this often on my first day in Detroit. It was part exasperation and part anger. It felt to me like the lamentation of last resort, people going to extremes because they felt unheard and unheeded.
Barefield said that as a Jewish American, the war horrifies her because “my Jewish values taught me that every life is precious.” And, she said, “it is breaking my heart that this, this inhumanity, this violence, this brutality is happening in my name.”
This line stopped me because I heard it before.
Two weeks ago, I spoke to Dara Silverman, a 51-year-old Jewish woman from Beacon, N.Y., who described herself as white, Jewish and queer. She, too, called what’s happening in Gaza a genocide, is opposed to the Biden administration’s positions on the war and wants a cease-fire. If she could vote uncommitted in New York, she said, she would.
“As a Jew and as an American who pays taxes, it is horrific to me that this is being done with our tax dollars,” she said. “And in my name, doubly.”
Because of her views, Barefield said, she has been called antisemitic and a Jew hater and has even been told that she was not really Jewish. But that hasn’t deterred her, and neither has the prospect that it might help elect Donald Trump.
“If Biden loses, it’s because he didn’t do the right thing,” she said. “He didn’t do the humanistic thing. He didn’t do the right thing for Americans.”
Feb. 27, 2024
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An earlier version of this article misstated Barbara Weinberg Barefield’s role in Jewish Voice for Peace. She is a founding member of Jewish Voice for Peace Action-Michigan, not the national organization.
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