Welcome, everyone, to our panel discussion on repairing the world.

Stories from the Tree of Life.

I'm your moderator this evening.

Janine Carambot Santoro Pronouns are she her.

And I currently serve as the director of Equity and Inclusion for the City of Bethlehem.

It is my honor and privilege tonight to introduce our panelists for tonight's discussion.

Leaders that work everyday not only for inclusion and belonging in the Lehigh Valley and beyond, but for justice and our community.

I'm going to start here to my left with Miss Esther Lee.

Esther M. Lee is a Southside Bethlehem native, a Liberty High School graduate, and one of five children born to Jessie G and Baylor, Brandon Grimes.

Her community experience has been invaluable and began when her children entered public school.

Her leadership in the Madison parent teacher organization grew as she fought for equity for all children.

She became a member of the Madison School PTA, the city PTA group, and then became the president.

It was this membership of parents that encouraged her to seek a seat on the Bethlehem Area School Board as their continues to serve as Bethlehem President of the ACP.

Folks call her the eyes and ears of the Lehigh Valley, a partner of several organizations, including Bethlehem, YWCA, Bethlehem Area School District Superintendents Diversity Committee, Northampton County Diversity Committee, organizer of African-American parent group for Liberty and Freedom High Schools.

The NAACP counsels youth councils at Freedom and Liberty High Schools, and she was a former board member of PBS's Please Give Madam Esther Lee a round of applause.

Next, we welcome Muhammed Said Selmanlar who's the executive director of Peace Islands Institute, Pennsylvania, where he leads peacebuilding efforts through interfaith and intercultural dialog, along with educational and youth programs.

A dedicated community builder and organizer, Muhammed fosters collaboration across diverse groups to promote mutual understanding and respect.

Before his current role, he served the Lehigh Valley community through his work at the Lehigh Dialog Center and as vice president of the Bethlehem Interfaith Group, where he played a key role in facilitating dialog and cooperation among different faith communities.

His commitment to building bridges between cultures and communities remains central to his mission.

Please welcome Mohammed.

Next, we welcome Ashley L Coleman.

Coleman.

Pronouns are she her.

And she currently serves as the executive director of the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center since January 2023.

She has been a fixture in the LGBTQ plus community in Philadelphia for over ten years, having previously served as executive director at GALAEI and senior events manager at Mazzoni Center.

She holds two degrees from Temple University, B.S.

in Education and a B.A.

in history.

And her activism and advocacy began as a youth in the Lehigh Valley, leading queer youth initiatives while providing large scale events for nonprofits in northeastern Pennsylvania.

She went on to serve as the general conference coordinator of the world's largest transgender specific conference from 2016 to 2019, and she led GALAEI through the production of Philadelphia's 50th Pride Parade and Festival in 2022.

Please welcome Ashley.

And, of course, Rabbi Michael Singer.

Rabbi Michael Singer has been the spiritual leader of Congregation Brith Shalom in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, since 2014, where his talents, skills and insights continue to successfully build a warm, innovative and dynamic conservative congregation.

In 2003, he earned his M.A.

and was ordained from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York with a double concentration in pastoral counseling and Talmud in rabbinic.

In addition to his pulpit work, Rabbi Singer is engage in community leadership both locally and nationally.

He founded the Bethlehem Interfaith Group, which we know as BIG, which now engages over 22 houses of worship in Bethlehem.

Rabbi Singer sits on the Bethlehem Community Advisory Council with NAACP Bethlehem president, Esther Lee the mayor and City Council, which addresses racial, educational, economic and other social justice issues in the city of Bethlehem.

Rabbi Singer is the international chair of the Social Justice Commission of the Rabbinical Assembly, which is a voice of masorti conservative Judaism on issues of social justice.

Please welcome Rabbi Michael Singer.

So I want to honor the heaviness of the film.

I know many of us, we're not looking at something that happened years ago.

We're actually looking at something that ripples into our present day.

We're seeing the current rhetoric.

We're feeling the anxiety of the moment.

So I want to take a second and just acknowledge that many of us are feeling that.

And so as we proceed with the dialog, please feel free to pause and to be fully embodied in the moment.

So we've gotten a question.

The question is how do we hold public figures and news programs accountable for inciting violence and discrimination by demonizing others through hateful rhetoric or misinformation?

And we hear that in the documentary as well when they say where is the line between First Amendment and then the way that incites folks to violence and bias incidents.

So how do we hold folks accountable and how have your organizations handled that?

And I'll go to if we could start with Ashley.

Has that been something that whether Bradbury Sullivan or GALAEI has ever really focused on Head first or.

I am blessed to be in a position that I can have one on one conversations with political figures.

So I listen to the community, I take your words and directly go to them and say, we need to have a real conversation about what's happening in our communities and the policies that are being pushed forward.

However, we are in an era where many news outlets, many folks in the media or even on your own Twitter page can say pretty much whatever you want without fact checking anything.

And so we have to continue to push as an overall community.

So going to community leaders and saying, hey, I noticed that there is something absolutely absurd that was said by someone in a public forum.

Who can I go to to have a conversation about correcting this?

There's also an option of doing op eds in our newspapers, finding those trusted reporters that are willing to get your voice into those spaces, collaborating with other folks that have already have community buy in and saying these are not accurate, and here is what actually is happening in our communities.

So I think that's the number one goal is to get that your voice to those who can then amplify it even louder.

I'll tell you what I do.

I call them up, make them accountable, even though they may be telling a lie.

You know, and the other piece that I've done, and I'll do it again, I'm not past calling a protest, which seems to get their attention temporarily, but that will start a discussion.

And I think we need to do that to that, to just keep people's attention on the issues that confront us, because otherwise, you know, we suffer with this.

Envy, I think comes from the scriptures that man, mankind, we're envious people and because of envy, we tend to harm one another.

So we need to go back to our beginnings and we need to work together.

You know, just because I'm older doesn't mean that I'm not aware of what's going on.

You know, most of the things are and I think I was talking to you about that.

They're coming along now, have been done before in the in the forties.

I remember a preacher from Philadelphia came to Bethlehem to pastor a white church that came to the black church where I belong, and we had a united service that was in the forties.

So if we did it in the forties, you know, you know, we could do it now.

And what it means is that we have to make ourselves available to correcting the wrongs that are happening in our in our city.

You know, I don't know what else we were expecting or who we expect to correct our problems, but we have to do it.

And everybody sitting here has a right to what they're doing now.

I went to school with Jewish kids.

There was not any issue made about what we were.

We all came together.

We enjoyed life.

You know, these these shenanigans that are going on these days, I don't know who's a proponent of it, but it needs to stop.

But I think we there's a lot of people in this room, so we're everyday, I'm sure we're not all neighbors in the context of that word, but we have to come together and work to eliminate the hate going on.

Yeah.

And so we we arrive here right in this need for collaboration and for a dialog and talking to each other.

But we also got a question from the audience that's about the origins of how we got here.

So the question from our audience is, do you believe that the hatred and othering such as we've seen in the documentary, is a learned product of nurture or is something that is innately part of our being?

And secondarily, how do you think our youth learn this?

How do we help promote unity from a younger age?

Again, being proactive versus reactive?

So I’m Rabbi Singer I like to sing, You have to be taught to...

It's South Pacific, right?

Rodgers and Hammerstein.

You've got to be carefully taught.

In essence.

I don't think anyone when you they've done plenty of studies like babies playing together, they don't care the color of one's skin or what, you know.

I mean, you have to be taught it.

And right now, social media is the viral sort of teaching point of interface that our youth are consistently on and engaged in.

And if you've ever been on the Internet and if you've ever seen social media, it can be on the one hand connecting people.

On the other hand, it is a cesspool.

And we need to be present and aware as parents and as educators and as community members about what our kids are seeing and where they're going.

They may be in your house, but they are connected to the world.

And so we have to be careful there.

The second thing I would say is that we have to build stronger, communally communal institutions.

We are in an epidemic of loneliness.

We are in an epidemic of un belonging.

And we need to change that and find and connect to belonging.

And so we need to have institutions like our churches, mosques, synagogues, religious institutions, if that's your flavor or other civic, engaging institutions that pull us all together, that give us a sense of strong identity and belonging, where we can meet people from all different economic and racial and religious walks and and come together in those ways.

Failure to do that means those echo chambers echo louder, and they divide us more.

Great.

Thank you.

And I think there's a follow up question to that from our audience, because we've talked about our faith communities coming together.

And I think there's a there's a misunderstanding oftentimes.

So if we have, like the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT Community Center, if it's a faith community, that somehow anyone that doesn't identify as such is somehow not welcome in those spaces.

And we know that's not true, but sometimes that there feels sometimes like a distance.

We have a question from the audience.

What nonpolitical organizations in the Lehigh Valley Address Community Building and Anti-Discrimination Peace Islands is is outside the Lehigh Valley.

But we know that you had your you had your collaboration and your leadership here in the Lehigh Valley starting.

So this question is open to anyone non political organizations that you think are very organic for these kinds of movements and conversations to take place.

Jump in really quick.

I think that anyone that is taking care of marginalized communities as is inherently political, are my identities.

All of the multitude of identities that I hold are political.

They've been politicized, often villainized politically.

So I think that's sort of a complicated question because I would say that the vast majority of our organizations are political because they're forced to be externally, right?

We are not a political organization by any means, but our identities have been politicized.

And then there was one other thing that I wanted to mention from earlier.

And in teaching our children, I think we also need to remind them that their rights end where another's begins and it is not okay to push your rights on top of someone else's and say that mine are more important than yours.

So we absolutely need to start teaching them from that that younger level.

But again, all of its political.

I have to confess, I was watching myself when the president, the national president, stood up with the president of the United States.

It put a question mark in my mind, you know, are we are we not?

So I would say that maybe we're not nonpolitical, political.

So we we have to be careful.

And, you know, maybe there's a difference between, a little bit.

And, you know, we come through as U.S. citizens, we get caught up in these isms without making any too much attention being drawn to them.

But we got to be honest.

Yeah.

And I know this question was focused on like the political, nonpolitical, and sometimes the line is very thin, especially actually, as you mentioned, you know, once your identity is politicized, it's hard to go back from that.

And so politics aside, we now delve into the next topic, which we know the two topics you never talk about at the dinner table are politics and faith.

There's a question from our audience that they often see people misuse their religious beliefs in God to justify anger, hatred, violence and harm.

And so what are the best ways to counteract this when faith justifications are so deeply rooted?

So going back to the way we learn when we're young, right.

And and what that looks like as we grow older, how do we counteract that?

So I would start by saying there was one earthling.

The word Adam.

Adam means earthling from the earth.

That's the word Adam comes from.

Adam are one earthling and we are all created in God's image and God loves what God creates.

And so what we have is obviously religion can be used to as as a wedge, to divide people and to to, to form foment and other ism of those outside.

But I believe religion at its best in its truest intention is to glorify God's name.

And the way we do that is by treating all the creations of God with love and dignity.

And that I think, as the main message of almost every faith.

It is about love, dignity and and and an understanding of something greater than ourselves, however it may be defined.

And so I think it's a corruption of religion.

It's a defamation of God's name to hate.

In order to get past it, we need to sort of knock down those walls.

We need to come together.

We are a nation of many faiths and cultures and peoples and stories, and that is not a weakness.

That is the diversity that I believe God intended in creating a humanity that we are all human, which is the same, and yet we are different.

And that's beautiful too.

We have to first find the good interpretations.

As you mentioned, the we can find all different interpretations about religion.

So as a muslim, as a practicing Muslim, I believe that Islam comes from peace, and that's how I try to practice my love and that's how I dedicate my life for peace.

And I can quote a lot of a lot of different verses like one is all mankind.

Indeed, we have created you from male and female and made you people's tribes race, you know, different religions and languages so that you can know and others.

So it's it's about, you know, dialog that actually ever arose about that.

And so instead of having one type of human being, we divided into different species, different, you know, so that diversity that you can learn different things and you know, it's more colorful.

And so this is what religion commands us to know each other.

And so on the other hand, you can find another word saying if you are a person, if someone kills one person, one human being, it's like killing your whole humanity.

So we are not allowed.

They want killing an end.

But unfortunately, we see all different interpretations and misunderstandings about Islam.

And so that's why I think it's important to learn from the right sources, because otherwise we see how the religion is being used as a tool, as for extremism, and it's unfortunately very dangerous both for the community and also how it returns.

As a muslim, I'm so many times seeing the news and how they're the stereotypes just because of some some other people's actions is unacceptable for me as a as a muslim and trying to live it in a right way.

So I think that's an important thing.

There is a question in the audience, is there a dialog in the Lehigh Valley right now between the Muslim community and the Jewish community?

Has that been something you've seen in the Lehigh Valley in the recent months?

We have a big meeting every month, usually the first Thursday, but with Rosh Hashanah coming, the entire group voted to move it to the second Thursday of the month.

So, yes, we are in dialog.

It is.

And after October the seventh, there has been so much suffering and so much loss, so many lives broken.

It's a cycle that feeds a violence upon violence.

It's a cycle of hate.

It's it's kind of what fuels the extremism is is this sort of it's it's hate instead of love, right?

So we try to at BIG model the opposite, right?

There's always what you're against, but what are you for?

And we are for working together.

We are for trying our best to bring our faiths and our Bethlehem Interfaith, you know, religious communities together.

And we need to see that model everywhere.

We need to see it flourish everywhere.

It is not a time to withdraw.

It's a time to hear.

Listen to hold each other's pain and hurt and at the same time stand with one another, that this is not the world that we want to live in.

We're going to try to build the world we want.

And it's a world of peace.

It's a world of respect and it's a world of love.

I want to give everyone just 60 seconds, if you have last words, our last remarks for our audience.

So I want to just briefly talk about what's next, because I think that's important after all these conversations.

So I think the critical point is that I'm sure who all our audience tonight have come here voluntarily, and it's usually like that when we have this kind of initiatives.

People who come are actually open to dialog or open to this kind of initiatives, but people who are not open to this dialog or have prejudices will most probably won't come to these initiatives.

So that's why we all have a responsibility to go to their door, knock on their door, and invite them and make sure they understand why it's important and help them break the up.

As we have to break that, we have to make sure that they take that first step.

I'm sure that they will love it.

They will see the value there.

But we all have a responsibility to knock those doors.

That's, I think, one key point that I want to mention.

Second one is we have to build committees which we can give the example like BIG and other task Force whatever we could call them and make sure that every neighborhood, city board or whatever we are living in has a task force or a committee that comes together regularly, not make sure it's not a one time enthusiasm.

It just goes away, but make sure it's an ongoing work.

And leaders from different committees come together, authorities from different sectors come together.

And so that's how we are going to discuss the problems and create solutions all together.

So this will not only fight hate, but also help us live in more peaceful and prosperous communities because we'll be dealing with the problems in our community all together.

So that will be really helpful.

I think that's one thing that we have to do and create that collaborations in our communities.

You know, Janine, years ago there was a group that was founded out of the same kind of circumstances as we're having, as we see happening now, community civic league, that that was the name of it organized by an African American Methodist preacher.

Now that went on and was really people that came to it where people are really interested, people from the community, they had professors, Bethlehem Steel executives, etc., and that that went on for some time.

There was a white man who was in leadership in the Bethlehem Steel who came out in support of various accomplishments working toward the black, black mankind.

He was fired from his post because of the association and what he was doing within the community.

Now, do these things happen?

You know, you can envision envision them, believe what you want, but was it because he was helping the black Cause but out of it?

Moreover, I believe envy took place because they couldn't stand that this black preacher would organize such a group that was really bringing accomplishments to reduce what was happening to us as a people.

Now, I tell you, I stand firm behind and what I see happening to our young people are young blacks, Negroes that are trying to get through life.

And because of lack of education and inclusion in the city of Bethlehem, and I speak of it specifically that these organizations, you know, we could organize one tomorrow but didn't want to, in fact, contract love for mankind inclusively that black people I'm too old to belong because you know, I can be taken any minute.

But there are those that are around that we could help save if we're willing to do that.

But just just believe there's somebody in that group wanted to not see it flourish and it folded.

And unless we do something about what we say we want to do, Brother Mohammed, you know, and I understand what you're saying, none of it's going to work.

So we've got to give of ourselves.

I continually take calls day after day where are children are not able to flourish in schools.

And if they can't, you know, learn, where are we going?

Yeah.

So that's my story.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And another minute for Ashley and Rabbi.

So we are living in one of the most divisive times on earth.

There is more anti LGBTQ legislation than ever before.

There is more hate based bills that are being put forward against our own greater good.

So, number one, please vote.

Please go out and vote, Vote, vote, vote.

Tell young folks to vote.

Right.

That is our voice in the moment.

So that's number one.

Two, call.

Please don't wait until I have to put a call to action.

Come to the center, join some of the programs, take advantage of our care cupboard.

Come and be part of our family because we're already part of yours.

We're now required to finish the task, but nor are we free to neglect it.

Rabbi Typhon.

Look, I think one way to look at it is one soul at a time in one, once a lot of time, one conversation at a time, one knock door on at a time, one call at a time.

It's going to take that.

I am not so naive, although I am incredibly idealistic.

I'm not so naive to think that we're going to be able to now, in this moment, solve what's going on.

And it is right now worse than it's ever been for the Jewish community.

But for many communities.

But that doesn't mean we stop, because in the end I believe we owe it to our our children and our grandchildren.

And if you don't even have children to your neighbors kids and to the future of our country and our world, we owe it to them to keep at it.

And and that's what I believe we're going to do.

And I think you saw what the healing power of community can be, even in these in these horrible moments.

There are good things that can come.

And so we're just not going to give up.

And I think that is a great way to end this panel discussion, is that we are just not going to give up and we are going to pray with our feet and we are going to come together and collaborate.

Friends, you can find more resources at PBS 39 dot org slash repairing dash the dash world and please don't let this be the end of the conversation.

Let this be the beginning.

Please reach out to our panelists and their organizations to continue the conversation.

We thank you all for being here tonight.

And we thank our panelists so much for leading the conversation.

Than