First Things RSS Feed - Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde https://www.firstthings.com/author/jeffrey-j-poelvoorde en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:55:49 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/jeffrey-j-poelvoorde 60 A Letter from the Ku Klux Klan https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/10/a-letter-from-the-ku-klux-klan https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/10/a-letter-from-the-ku-klux-klan Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:15:00 -0400 Several years ago, I received a “personal” letter from the Ku Klux Klan of Upstate South Carolina. A colleague of mine in my college’s Religion Department had asked me to conduct a model Seder for Passover for her students and had invited a reporter from the Spartanburg newspaper to cover the event. A week later, the letter arrived. I was not frightened or disturbed (unlike my poor mother in Illinois to whom I made the mistake of reading the letter. “Get out of South Carolina!” she pleaded), but I was unsettled. Never before had I been singled out as a Jew, even though the course of my life as an academic and as the unofficial “rabbi” in several congregations has often publicly and prominently featured this aspect of my identity. Now I was in the periscope of one of the oldest, most prominent national organizations promoting, among other things, Jew-hatred. It was a depressing moment, but one in which I found some seeds of hope.

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