OPENING PANEL REMARKS August 21, 2004

By Yeshi Sherover Neumann

Intro: I have been a peace activist since I joined my first demo at age 13 for a Sane Nuclear Policy, I have been a midwife for 33 years and have caught over 1000 babies, some of whom are in this room. Currently I am a member of Bay Area Women In Black.
Because this conference is dedicated to Ricky Sherover Marcuse and because I am her sister I would like to offer this story about us and our relationship.

Ricky was the first-born child of a first generation Russian Jewish mother and an immigrant Polish Jewish Father. In 1988 she died of breast cancer. She was 50 years old and had led a life of passionate dedication to social justice. Ricky was a red diaper baby who as an adult combined the study of Marx and the Frankfurt school of philosophy, especially Herbert Marcuse, with the world wide peer counseling practice of Re Evaluation counseling to develop her international workshops in eliminating racism, sexism, classism, anti Semitism and all other forms of social oppression.

Ricky named her work, " the emancipatory practice of subjectivity". She believed it was not a substitute for political practice or theory but an essential component in the achievement of full human emancipation. One measure of the success of such a practice, she said, would be the extent to which it enabled people to act in cooperation with each other in achieving our communal goals of liberation.

Ricky believed that the struggle for personal and communal liberation were intricately linked. As her sister I have an intimate idea of where that struggle lay for her.

Two days before she died Ricky called me to her bedside and with a terror and desperation pleaded with me to do something for her: Of course I said immediately bounding over to her, willing to do anything. She asked me to promise that I would continue the fabrication she had created as a young adult that of the two of us she was the younger sister. In fact she was 2 years older. She was convinced and had convinced me that somehow that fabrication was necessary for her survival. My role as her actual younger sister was to protect her in this fiction, to be fiercely loyal and not betray her. I did this for 30 years. My job became particularly challenging in the last ten years of her life when she moved to my community and lived across the street from me in Oakland. When my friends, knowing I had an older sister, questioned me I would mumble and keep the lie going or quickly change the subject. The thought of "betraying" Ricky was inconceivable.

Many of you may be wondering WHY did Ricky insist on living out this fabrication? Hiding who we really are is one of the key ways that Anti Jewish oppression has been internalized in us as Jews. Ricky was born in 1938, when to be a Jew was in fact to be in danger of extermination. Our own mother whose parents came to America to flee the anti-Jewish Russian pogroms insisted until the day she died that she was not a Jew.

So Ricky, and I both learned all too well that it was not safe to be or show who you actually are. The lesson Ricky learned in our family was that there was not enough love, attention or room for 2 sisters. And that it was far better to be the new adorable younger sister rather than the older difficult one. Her lie was the best strategy she could figure out to resist being displaced.

In that moment 2 days before her death when Ricky asked me never to tell her secret I climbed into bed with her, held her in my arms listened to her fears but then said "No. From now on" I said "I will tell the truth about our relationship. You are safe to be who you really are," I told her "You do not need this fiction for your survival in rest of your life or after you die".

I felt Ricky take a deep breath and in that moment we were both set free.

Did I betray Ricky and myself when I said No to her plea? Or had I been betraying us both for those past 30 years? Am I betraying Ricky now by telling this story?

For me this story is about the way our unhealed grief and terror interferes with our accurate perception of reality, of what is really necessary for our survival as individuals and as a people. As Jews are we betraying the Jewish people when we say NO to the narrative that our survival depends on acting out of more and more fear of being annihilated in an ever increasingly brutal occupation of the Palestinian people? Or are we betraying our historic tradition as Jews, our mandate of "tikkun olam" the healing of the world, when we act as if our own survival requires the dispossession and destruction of another people? , Or that criticism of Israel is treason?

On the other hand can we expect that our criticism of Israel’s actions can change the hearts and minds of our sister and brother Jews if we continue to shout at them from across the room instead of metaphorically climbing into bed with them and putting our arms around them, as we listen to their fears but refuse to go along when they ask us to act on the basis of those fears.


Ricky spent over 1/2 of her life developing a practice of liberation that encouraged every person and every group of people to take up their rightful place in the world. She worked exuberantly and irreverently for all people to have a place at the table. Yet Ricky herself embodied the dialectic which she studied and taught, that we who are engaged in working to achieve full human emancipation will ourselves be "contaminated with the toxins of domination" or what has come to be called internalized oppression. Although she was fervently dedicated to the flourishing of both Jewish and Palestinian people, until the last moments of her own life she struggled with one of the core issues of internalized Jewish oppression, the misinformation that there was no place for her. She didn’t know that there was room at the table for both an older sister as well as a younger one.

What if we honored Ricky’s legacy at this conference by making more space at the table rather than less, space for all the different ones of us here.

The ones who want to holding Israel accountable as an imperialist nation state and the ones who want to hold their organizations accountable for the way anti-Jewish oppression stands in the way of their liberatory missions, and impacts the world-wide conversation about the Middle East. And the ones who came here with many anxieties, uncertainties and questions and the ones who are curious about it all.

If we in this room can go in the direction of acknowledging our fears and having the courage not to act on them, of revealing our true selves and of choosing to cherish all people and their liberation struggles I have reason to believe Ricky would be delighted with us and very proud.