Mayim Bialik Blasts ‘Absurd’ Yom Kippur Date For Racial Justice March
Mayim Bialik. Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Jewish actress Mayim Bialik called out the March for Racial Justice for taking place on Yom Kippur.
In a Facebook post Sunday, Bialik complained that the timing of the march against white supremacy, scheduled for Sept. 30 in Washington, D.C., excludes Jews, who traditionally spend Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, fasting and praying.
“anyone else think that’s absurd?,”she wrote in a mostly lowercase text. “i mean, it automatically excludes a distinct portion of people who historically have stood up for racial equality in enormous ways.”
Bialik, a star of “The Big Bang Theory” TV sitcom who publicly embraces her Jewish identity and practice, doubted that the scheduling was an oversight, saying “And trust me: it’s on every calendar they checked before setting the date.”
Earlier Sunday, March for Racial Justice organizers posted their own statement on Facebook in which they apologized for the “scheduling conflict” and voiced appreciation for the Jews’ history of progressive activism. They repeatedly singled out Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who famously marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
