I find it impossible, like many my age, to think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. without thinking about his father.
It isn’t easy. Considering the late Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his son together requires a leap of memory but a far larger one of faith.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, right, wife Ethel Kennedy, and children, from left, Bobby, Joseph, and Kathleen, second right, at Kennedy International Airport in New York, July 1, 1964, shortly after they returned from a one-week trip to West Germany and Poland.
Bobby Kennedy sought unity. His son, the secretary of Health and Human Services, is part of the same Donald Trump team that sells national division on every possible front.
Americans of an older generation recall watching the funeral train back in 1968 that carried Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s body from New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Washington, where he would join his brother already interred in Arlington Cemetery.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, back, pauses at the grave of assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery, Nov. 20, 1970, with his wife Joan, right. With them are the widow of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and her five children.
All along the tracks we saw the faces, white and Black, of working people for whom Bobby Kennedy held such promise. His presidential candidacy in 1968 meant an end to the brutal American conflict in Vietnam, an economic shift in our country’s wealth from the war in Southeast Asia to the dire needs of our major cities.
That June Saturday offered none of the pageantry of President Kennedy’s death five years earlier. There were no marching bands, no riderless cavalry horse, no President Charles de Gaulle or Haile Selassie, no heroic “Day of Drums.”
“Senator Robert Kennedy died at 1:44 this morning … June 6, 1968 … He was 42 years old.”
Kennedy had made his name as a U.S. attorney general fighting for civil rights. He took on Deep South governors to desegregate Ole Miss and the University of Alabama. He pushed his brother behind the scenes, to give the historic Civil Rights speech of 1963.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy, right, confers with his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 1, 1962, during the buildup of military tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that became the Cuban missile crisis later that month.
But what made him unique, as New York columnist Jack Newfield once wrote, was that he “felt the same empathy for white working men and women that he felt for Black, Latino, and Native American working men and women. He thought of police officers, waitresses, construction workers, and firefighters as his people.”
Bobby made a call for racial unity a part of his 1968 presidential campaign.
In the Indiana primary, he rode through the streets of Gary in an open convertible, Richard Hatcher (the city’s first African American mayor) on one side, Tony Zale, the middleweight boxing champ, so popular with the city’s white working people, on the other.
“I have an association with those who are less well off, where perhaps we can accomplish something: bringing the country together.
“I think we can end the divisions within the United States — whether it’s between Blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between groups on the war in Vietnam. We can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country. I intend to make that my basis for running,” Robert Kennedy said after winning the California Democratic Primary in 1968, minutes before his assassination.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy waves from the rear platform of the observation car bearing the remains of his slain brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, as the funeral train passed through North Philadelphia Station, June 8, 1968. Others on the platform are unidentified.
And these were the very people who showed up for Bobby when his funeral train passed through Newark and Trenton and Philadelphia and Baltimore that grim Saturday in June.
Stepping out of my apartment building, a neighbor stopped me to say he was sorry for the Islamophobia he felt circulating lately in Donald Trump’s America.
At the post office, the man behind the counter asked if I could write “Happy Holidays” in Arabic for a sign he wanted to hang. I wrote it carefully, conscious of my uneven hand. He thanked me and taped it up. I hope the small sign does its modest work, easing someone without calling attention to itself, doing what such gestures often do best when they pass quietly.
At the bus station, a large man asked to borrow my phone. When he handed it back, he asked where I was from. I said Egypt. He swore, laughed, and spoke with me for a few minutes about the world, about worry, about what people owe one another. Before boarding, he offered a blessing.
These moments remind me how relatively easy my passage as an immigrant has been.
I have not encountered violence directly. What I have met, mostly, is ignorance, and even that only recently.
I have rarely felt compelled to take it personally. I tend to think that most people would not speak as they do if their lives had widened just enough to complicate what they take for granted, if familiarity had been allowed to interrogate fear.
That belief comes from observation over decades and across cultures. People are rarely changed by argument alone. They are altered by proximity, by repeated exposure to what does not confirm the story they have been told about others or about themselves. Knowledge and kindness work slowly. They loosen bias and false certainty by degrees.
I carry sorrow for the violent pain and murderous ignorance that continue to surface where I come from, and far beyond it. The point is not to rank suffering or distribute blame. The point is recognition: We are capable of living far better than we do.
After the recent mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, where 15 people were killed, a Muslim man, Ahmed al Ahmed, intervened by tackling and disarming one of the attackers. He was shot twice in the process and is credited with saving lives. Past narrow religious allegiances, this was a human refusal to stand aside.
In this photo released by the Prime Minister’s office, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets Ahmed al Ahmed at St George Hospital in Sydney on Dec. 16.
That matters, because it interrupts the story we are encouraged to believe about what people inevitably are.
In recent months, reported incidents of anti-Muslim harassment and threats have risen across the country, echoing what many Americans are experiencing in daily life.
Living in the United States for nearly two decades, I am well aware that this country has inflicted violence both inside its borders and far from its shores, for generations, often while renaming it, often while insisting on its necessity.
Any serious reckoning with this asks more of us than explanations shaped for a news cycle.
It asks for patience, attention, and the willingness to trace continuities rather than isolated events. It asks us to notice how harms travel, and how language perpetuates those harms. It asks us to notice how easily whole communities are reduced to headlines, faiths are flattened into caricature, and violence becomes explanatory shorthand.
When we make others suffer, we do not escape the damage. We carry it, often without knowing how it has narrowed us.
But none of this survives sustained attention. What does endure are the small acts that refuse the terms we are handed and the gestures that loosen suspicion.
Goodness is practiced. It appears in ordinary exchanges.
In the traditions that have shaped my thinking, love is not postponed until some imagined future. Mercy is learned here, among people who misunderstand one another, who arrive carrying inherited fear, who fail but try again.
Decency is possible. I encountered it on the street, from ordinary people who spoke plainly and put distance between the human being and the headlines.
As a discipline of perception, it is worth the effort to try to see the Divine in everyone. Much depends on the effort, repeated daily, without witnesses.
Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-American writer and poet, the author of 12 books, including Palestine Wail: Poems. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, The New Arab, NPR, and PBS.
To escape the soldiers, Mai Ngoc Nguyen swam across the Mekong River as Laotian snipers on the riverbank fired into the water. She and four others fled Laos together, but only Nguyen made it to safety in Thailand. The rest drowned before they could reach the opposite shore.
On her first night in Philadelphia, Kahina Guenfoud, an Algerian immigrant eight months pregnant with her first child, was exhausted. When it was time to sleep, she pulled what she could out of her single suitcase and tried to get comfortable on the floor of an empty house.
To this day, Thoai Nguyen remembers how he, his parents, and seven siblings were airlifted from South Vietnam to an aircraft carrier in the ocean. As the North Vietnamese moved into the area at the end of the Vietnam War, there would have been no mercy for his father, who had worked for the American government.
Every immigrant has a story and SEAMAAC can hold them all, serving the city’s low-income and immigrant community in more than 55 languages from its headquarters in South Philadelphia — just blocks from where Guenfoud spent her first night. Thoai Nguyen, the chief executive officer, still lives nearby in the South Philadelphia house where his family found refuge in 1975.
The majority of people who work for SEAMAAC (Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition) are immigrants in an organization that began in 1984 by serving people from countries like Vietnam and Cambodia and now assists all low-income and marginalized people, including immigrants from Asia, Africa, Europe, and South and Central America.
A half century ago, Thoai Nguyen, his parents, and seven siblings were airlifted from South Vietnam to an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Today, he is SEAMAAC’s chief executive officer.
“It’s about the feelings,” Guenfoud, SEAMAAC’s adult literacy and access coordinator, said. “We feel what they feel. We have all left our families. We still have that emptiness inside.”
It’s why staffer Biak Cuai, SEAMAAC’s outreach worker to Philadelphia’s Burmese community, keeps her phone next to her bed at night. Everyone has Cuai’s number and they call when there is an emergency. “They call me and ask me to call 911: `My stomach hurts and I can’t breathe.’”
The hour doesn’t matter, she said, because she understands.
Many of the people who come to Philadelphia from what is now known as Myanmar are illiterate in their own language because education is no longer readily available back home, Cuai said. Here, even the basics, like opening a bank account, using email, or dealing with paperwork from their children’s schools, seem insurmountable.
“They come here because they feel America is the top country in the world, but the problem is that everything is new and unfamiliar,” she said. “They have fear. They are scared.
“I feel the same way because I am an immigrant,” she said.
Biak Cuai, SEAMAAC’s outreach worker to Philadelphia’s Burmese community, works with a client.
“I prayed to my God to guide me to my dream job, so I can serve my people,” she said. “They knock on my door. I tell them, ‘if you have any problem, you can reach out at any time.’”
The stories are dramatic and the help is real.
In broad strokes, SEAMAAC provides education with classes in digital literacy and English as a second language (although for most immigrants, it’s English as a third, fourth, or fifth language).
“It’s about feeling and belonging,” Guenfoud said. “When you learn English you learn the culture, and if you learn the culture, you belong in this country. You’ll find your place here.”
There’s social work and legal assistance to help people obtain benefits or apply for citizenship. A separate stream of funding finances SEAMAAC’s support for children who are missing school due to difficult family situations.
SEAMAAC works with domestic violence survivors and has co-produced a short, animated film offering hope and support in 10 languages — Lao, Cantonese, Hakha Chin, Nepali, Bahasa Indonesia, and Khmer, among others.
Laura Rodriguez, from Colombia, discusses food for the Thanksgiving holiday during an English as a second language class at SEAMAAC. Seated behind her is Leo Boumaza, from Algeria.
Art therapy helps survivors cope with trauma. A domestic violence survivors group produced a collection of mosaics, each with a teacup, surrounded by shards of glass. What was broken, explained Christa Loffelman, health and social services director, can become something beautiful.
Many of the people who come to SEAMAAC have experienced trauma. “Everyone’s been through multiple layers of trauma,” she said. “You are displaced from your home country — not by choice — and you are going to a refugee camp in a different country. Their entire system has been disrupted.”
Traditional Western-style talk therapy doesn’t help. For one thing, the language isn’t there, and secondly, it’s not part of many cultures. What has worked, Loffelman said, is expressing feelings through art, and being together while doing it.
To counter the social isolation of seniors, SEAMAAC organizes meetings of “the Council of Elders.” They gather in a drafty gym at the Bok building, a former high school in South Philadelphia where SEAMAAC offers classes and counseling.
Often, the elders practice qigong, a form of movement meditation, or on a less esoteric level, enjoy multicultural bingo. Languages may be different, but when someone holds up a G-32 poster, everyone understands. If they don’t, Mai Ngoc Nguyen, a volunteer who can speak Laotian, Thai, Vietnamese, and English can help.
She has experienced plenty of trauma and heard plenty of traumatic stories. She’ll never forget the mother who gave her baby medicine so it wouldn’t cry in a boat carrying refugees away from their country. The boat capsized. The baby drowned.
“She comes into the refugee camp and she became crazy, yelling `Where is my baby?’ Her brain got messed up” and she never recovered.
Luckily for Mai Ngoc Nguyen, then age 12, she was a strong swimmer and ready to cross the Mekong as she made her escape. But she had to kick away a friend who was clinging to her, dragging her under. Her friend never made it to the opposite shore.
“If you ask me, I’ll talk about it,” she said. “But if you don’t ask, I won’t talk.”
But she will joke, saying that she knows the Mekong alligators didn’t get herbecause they knew she needed to help her family back home.
It’s a lot of trauma, but every day at SEAMAAC isn’t full of anxiety. The elders coming out of the gym after bingo were smiling. And in a nearby classroom, students practicing their English last month traded jokes as they learned about Thanksgiving.
Fatma Amara, from Algeria, has been here long enough that she’ll serve a turkey on Thanksgiving, but the apple pie she makes will be Algerian, with seasoned apples layered among thin sheets of dough.
For her, SEAMAAC is more than a language class.
“At first, you feel lonely. You’re anxious. It’s stressful,” said Amara, who works in a hospital and is getting better and more confident with her English. “I take the classes, and we talk together and I feel better.
“Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday in America. It’s an international holiday. It’s about food and God and family,” she said. “You thank God for all you have.”
For all the blessings SEAMAAC provides, these days, funding is a struggle.
In 2024, SEAMAAC learned that the federal government had approved its application for a $400,000 multiyear federal grant to improve digital “equity.” But after President DonaldTrump took office, federal staffers targeted “equity” programs. “That’s $400,000 we’ll never see,” said Thoai Nguyen, the executive director. “We would have had some of that money by now.”
Federal cuts since Trump took office have slashed SEAMAAC’s budget by 20%, he said. Hunger relief programs had to be curtailed, with 1,500 families who relied on SEAMAAC for food losing that lifeline.
“We’re in a moment,” he said, “where intentional cruelty is considered an acceptable form of political discourse.”
This article is part of a series about Philly Gives — a community fund to support nonprofits through end-of-year giving. To learn more about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.
For more information about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.
About SEAMAAC
Mission: To support and serve immigrants and refugees and other politically, socially, and economically vulnerable communities as they seek to advance the condition of their lives in the United States. Services include ESL classes, job readiness, domestic violence survivor support, services for low-income elders, food assistance, public benefit counseling, health and nutrition education, and civic engagement.
People served: 8,000 families
Annual spend: $3,360,401 in fiscal year 2024
Point of pride: SEAMAAC plans to increase our impact to serve even more Philadelphians at its new South Philly East (SoPhiE) Community Center on Sixth Street and Snyder Avenue, scheduled to open in December 2026. In January, SEAMAAC, partnering with the American Swedish Historical Museum, will welcome visitors to “Indivisible: Stories of Strength,” an art exhibition showcasing the art and stories of South Philadelphians.
You can help: SEAMAAC provides many volunteer opportunities through our work in beautifying and improving Philadelphia’s neighborhoods through our work in urban gardening, tree planting, neighborhood and public park cleanings, and beautification of public schools and places of worship. Additional opportunities are available through our civic engagement and neighborhood unity events as well as by delivering groceries in our hunger relief efforts.
$40 provides shelf stable foods for a family impacted by the SNAP shutoffs for one week.
$50 provides holiday presents for two children.
$100 helps maintain one plot in SEAMAAC’s community garden for an entire growing season, providing tools, culturally appropriate seedlings, and soil.
$100 covers the full cost of supplies for one youth participant in SEAMAAC’s summer programs — giving young people the tools they need for career and college readiness.
$200 covers four hours of ESL instruction.
$250 provides 50 elders with a freshly made breakfast.
$250 provides a family with emergency food, hygiene items, diapers, and social service support for one month.
$300 supports a domestic violence survivor moving into safe housing, by covering the cost of utility hookups and household supplies.
$300 provides ingredients and cooking supplies for a nutrition education workshop.
$1,000 covers the full cost for one high school student to participate in SEAMAAC’s eight-week summer career exploration program.
Thanksgiving brought a revelation. I was sous-chef to my children and my mother, a sounding board for my son as he completed college applications and my parents as they navigated different doctors, and the planner working around the needs of my children, husband, parents, and in-laws. I now realize what it means to be part of the “sandwich generation.”
My generation is also squeezed between older and younger cohorts in the professional world — especially medicine and healthcare. I am solidly Gen X and lie squarely between the boomers and the millennials.
These days, no matter where you turn, the realities of the U.S. healthcare crisis are impossible to ignore. From access to medications, availability of health insurance, affordability of medical costs, even trust and reliability in the messaging or directives we hear, the situation is daunting at best and overwhelmingly dark at worst.
Perhaps the canary in the coal mine has been the growing healthcare workforce crisis.
Physician burnout and moral injury, worsened by COVID-19, drove millennial and even Gen X doctors and nurses to leave the field. Adding to the dearth of primary care physicians as the U.S. population ages with worsened chronic diseases, the imminent retirement of a large cohort of boomers results in projections of a shortage of a combined 400,000 physicians and nurses by 2037.
I can’t help but feel the weight and responsibility of my generation of doctors in the world of medicine, along parallel lines of my personal life.
The same voices, same perspectives, and same ideas have been echoing across institutions for years — even when not representative of the rest of younger medical professionals, writes the author.
When we were born and grew up shapes the decisions we make and the ways we manifest and execute them. In his book Birth and Fortune, Richard Easterlin, an economist and demographer who researched happiness, posits that the size of the cohort you are born into shapes your generational opportunity.
Large cohorts, such as the baby boomers, face competition, but they also get the benefits of institutions that bend to their size. Smaller cohorts in the shadow of the larger generation ahead of them often contend with fewer resources and less investment. That’s Gen X in a nutshell.
And it models my experiences in the world of Philadelphia medicine almost perfectly.
Even within these cohorts, Easterlin illustrates, there are differences and disparities. Resources and opportunities available to early boomers became scarce to the later boomers, as the systems were slow to meet their needs. Those returning from the Vietnam War later were more likely to feel this dearth of structures and resources — such was the “birth” of homelessness as we recognize it now.
I saw that firsthand in Philly as a member of the Homeless Death Review team — a small group of experts from across the city convened by the Medical Examiner’s Office. We reviewed every death of a person experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia.
The author makes a home visit, as part of Pathways to Housing Philadelphia, in 2018, to care for a client who was at that time part of the Prevention Point community in Kensington.
From a systems-level view, it became clear that a lack of resources decades ago created a disparity that was perpetuated throughout the lives of specific demographics. They contributed to their premature deaths.
Boomers created the healthcare system we know today. Building on advances in science, research, and opportunity, they expanded and deepened training pipelines. They established medical specialties, subspecialties, and leadership roles.
They also continued long-standing practices anchored in hierarchy and compliance, where gravitas comes from the company you keep and not always the merit and competency you demonstrate.
A look across academic medical leaders in Philadelphia shows several with tenures that started in their 40s or early 50s and continued for well over 20 years, ongoing even now. Our city’s medical leadership — whether it be the Philadelphia County Medical Society, Pennsylvania Medical Society, or the American Medical Association — shows many of these same individuals making decisions across organizations.
Years ago, I wrote about how my approach to being an emergency physician evolved as I saw a changing world of healthcare that was not meeting the needs of the patients who turned to me for help.
That same month, the Wall Street Journal reported on the shift among doctors from “GOP stalwarts” to Democratic voters. My Gen X brethren look different from the generation before us: more women, more people of color, a broader range of ethnicities and cultures. It makes sense that we vote differently, in line with our priorities, values, and missions. Just as it makes sense that we lead differently, as well.
As Gen X doctors, we trained under the “old rules” of loyalty, compliance, endurance, and strict hierarchy. We worked with paper charts, well before computers became the central source of our clinical work. We mastered clinical skills and memorized reams of information. We also understood how issues outside the exam room and beyond our control impacted our patients.
My cohort went on to learn to practice medicine as the corporatization of hospitals took hold and our profession took on the additional contours of a business. We met productivity quotas and metrics around how quickly we saw patients and moved on to the next. We eventually even learned to ask corporate conglomerates for permission to get the tests, procedures, and medications our training and expertise, together with our direct evaluation, told us our patients needed, through prior authorizations.
Boomers continued to adhere to their definition of an ideal physician over the last 25 years — fixating on their commanding expertise and a brand of patient care they developed. In the process, they ceded governance of medicine, including financial oversight and systems design, to non-medical stakeholders. They often treated these issues as beneath them.
For the bulk of our careers, we Gen Xers were complicit — through our silent obedience and compliance. Many of us had learned from personal experience that speaking up or being seen as contrarian to those in power was overtly punished or covertly met with retaliation.
Now however, Gen X physicians are positioned to do something the generation before could not: carry medicine’s core values forward while shedding the destructive traditions and practices that broke the system.
We are facing AI in medicine, further decentralization of medical care, technology and innovation, unprecedented availability of our own health data through wearables, simultaneously with more difficult access to the doctors we have always turned to, and fewer hospitals in our communities.
I see us at a critical generational inflection point. And it’s time to assert ourselves in a few tangible ways:
Claim leadership by redefining it. We don’t have to wait to inherit positions when those who have inhabited them for decades finally vacate. Gen X knows well that true leadership doesn’t come through hierarchy or titles. In the words of my dear friend Jeremy Nowak: “Power belongs to the problem solvers.”
Reclaim and own our voice. Our predecessors confused apolitical detachment with impartial professionalism. In the process, the discussions, decisions, and policymaking that shaped physicians’ reality excluded us. It’s time we lean in unapologetically and stop waiting for permission.
Reject passive compliance as a virtue. Our silence has helped no one. The courage we spent decades swallowing is exactly the courage we need now to right this ship. We must be intentional in how we define ourselves, our profession, and our value: clinical integrity, collaboration, dignity, empathy, humanity, all come to mind as our unmatched superpowers.
It feels we are standing at the precipice of the unfamiliar and unknown. Where technology and AI will redefine what is possible, but the needs of our patients will demand practical and accessible solutions.
Sustainable change will come from us — crammed in the middle. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, Gen X believes in fairness, head-down work, and accomplishment. We have learned and adapted throughout our lives. Unlike the boomers and millennials on either side of us, we are “raised analog, fluent digital, comfortable with a rotary phone and an AI dashboard.”
We are the stewards of the medical profession — not its museum guards. We can bridge the meaningful lessons of our past with the awareness of today and the promise of the future, while centering empathy, values, missions, and ethics.
The silver lining is this: Our hard-earned lessons have become the foundation for a new kind of courage. It’s one that refuses passivity, demands better, pushes into all the spaces that exclude us, and insists that we show up not just for ourselves, but for our colleagues, our patients, our community, and the generations coming behind us.
Priya E. Mammen is an emergency physician, healthcare executive, and public health specialist who helps the nation’s most impactful companies integrate clinical integrity at scale.
This Hanukkah season, as Jewish families gathered at Sydney’s Bondi Beach to celebrate the Festival of Lights, terrorists opened fire. At least 15 people were killed and dozens more injured in an attack that has sent shockwaves through Jewish communities worldwide.
For many Jewish families, this attack feels horrifyingly familiar. I know that fear personally. As I wrote in these pages last year, I had to hire armed security for my son’s bar mitzvah — a celebration that should have been filled with only joy, but instead required armed guards and threat assessments. That shouldn’t be our reality. But it is.
Since that bar mitzvah, the situation has only intensified. The Anti-Defamation League documented more than 460 antisemitic incidents in Pennsylvania in 2024. Nationally, the numbers are equally alarming. Jewish families are making calculations our grandparents hoped we’d never have to make: Is it safe to go to synagogue? Should we display our menorah in the window? Will our children be targeted for wearing a Star of David?
Family members of a victim from Sunday’s shooting mourn at a flower memorial made after the shooting at the Bondi Pavilion at Bondi Beach on Dec. 16 in Sydney, Australia.
But amid the horror of Bondi Beach, there emerged an image we cannot ignore: Ahmed al-Ahmad, a civilian, tackling one of the gunmen to the ground and saving countless lives.
When hatred showed its ugliest face, Ahmed didn’t calculate the risk. He didn’t hesitate. He ran toward danger to protect people he didn’t know, celebrating a holiday he didn’t observe, from terrorists who claimed to share his faith.
This matters — not as a feel-good footnote to a tragedy, but as a fundamental truth we must hold onto in these dark times.
The alleged attackers reportedly followed ISIS ideology. But Ahmed al-Ahmad, a Muslim man, risked his life to stop them. This is precisely why we cannot — we must not — paint entire communities with the brush of their worst actors.
When individuals commit acts of hatred, we should hold specific perpetrators accountable — not entire identity groups. Yet, these days: Often Jews are blamed collectively for events in the Middle East and Muslims are blamed for the actions of terrorists, like what occurred at Bondi Beach.
Resisting communal blame is essential to defeating hate. Because here’s the truth: Neither courage nor hatred belongs to any one group. There are heroes and villains in every community. The sooner we recognize this; the sooner we can build the coalitions necessary to fight antisemitism, hate, and extremism in all its forms.
Creating moments of solidarity matter as much as the hate incidents themselves, perhaps more. I am personally grateful for the phone calls and emails that I did receive from allies following the attack at Bondi Beach. They show that the voices against antisemitism and hate are greater in number and in moral force than those who traffic in it.
But solidarity requires more than social media posts and attendance at rallies. It demands courage. Ahmed al-Ahmad showed us what that looks like.
Here’s what each of us can do:
Become an active bystander. When you witness hatred or harassment, you have the power to intervene safely — to distract, delegate, document, or directly address the situation.
Reject collective blame. When acts of terror occur, resist the urge to blame entire communities. Hold perpetrators accountable while standing with those who share a background but not the hatred.
Show up. Share in Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations, attend a Ramadan iftar, join in a Juneteenth event. Our presence in each other’s celebrations builds the relationships that sustain us through dark times.
Report hate incidents. Whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, or any other form of bias, report it to law enforcement and organizations like ADL that track incidents. Silence allows hate to fester.
As we light the menorah this Hanukkah, we commemorate the ancient victory of light over darkness. That light endures not because it was never threatened, but because in every generation, people chose to protect it — people from all backgrounds, all faiths, all walks of life.
Ahmed al-Ahmad chose to be one of those people. The question for the rest of us is: Will we?
Andrew Goretsky is the senior regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia office, serving Eastern Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey, and Delaware.
Public discourse today feels like a shouting match — hostile, polarized, and quick to “cancel” those who disagree.
Yet in the courtroom, there remains a model for conflict that doesn’t turn toxic. There, fierce disagreement unfolds with civility when the stakes couldn’t be higher. The norms that make justice possible serve as an example for the public square.
Shakespeare’s famous line: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” is often quoted as a jab. But in Henry VI, the line is spoken by a would-be tyrant’s accomplice.
Shakespeare understood that to impose tyranny, one must first destroy the lawyers — the guardians of due process and rational debate. Rather than mock the profession, the line underscores the indispensable role of civility in preserving liberty, justice, and our way of life.
Reasonable people can differ
Law is built on the recognition that reasonable, ethical people can look at the same facts and reach opposite conclusions.
One lawyer argues for conviction, another for acquittal. One sees a statute as broad, another as narrow. Their task is not to despise each other, but to argue — forcefully, yes, but intellectually within rules, procedures, and professional decorum.
In court, a lawyer does not shout down an opponent. A judge does not belittle the losing side. Objections are made in accordance with established procedures and professional standards. Rulings are issued without personal attack.
This disciplined approach requires patience, listening, and respect. The process is grounded in fairness and reason. Contrast that with today’s public square — particularly social media. People who differ are demonized. Disagreement is cast as patriots vs. traitors. No wonder our democracy feels frayed.
The legal profession offers a vital lesson: Disagreement is not only inevitable but healthy. Truth is sharpened by opposing arguments. What keeps the system intact is the civility with which those arguments are conducted.
Defense attorney Clarence Darrow (left) and prosecutor William Jennings Bryan talk civilly during the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925.
Picture a trial: The gavel strikes. Two sides rise, ready to battle over questions of fact and law. The plaintiff’s attorney delivers a fiery close. The defendant’s attorney responds just as vigorously.
Afterward, no matter the outcome, the two shake hands. The judge thanks both for their professionalism. Each has fought hard, yet neither has questioned the other’s intent or integrity. Even in profound disagreement, opponents are not enemies. Respect prevails.
Imagine if political debates resembled appellate arguments: sharp, disciplined, but respectful. Imagine if social media mirrored courtroom decorum, where civility restrains the loudest voice and allows reasoned discourse to be heard.
It is possible to disagree passionately without resorting to insults or treating opponents as enemies.
Civility is not surrender
Of course, lawyers and judges are human. They sometimes fall short. Bar associations remind members of their duty of civility because the temptation toward hostility is real. Judicial misconduct, including poor courtroom demeanor, is policed in many states by independent boards and commissions.
But the profession understands that its legitimacy depends on restraint. When civility fails, the entire system suffers. So does democracy.
Civility does not mean surrender. Lawyers cross-examine with intensity. Judges write sharply worded opinions. Citizens, too, can argue with passion. But passion that eclipses respect erodes the common good.
We are living in a moment in time when polarization tempts us to see neighbors as enemies. The courts remind us of a better way. American justice is built on adversaries treating one another as colleagues, with respect and decency, bound by a higher purpose.
That lesson could not be timelier.
P. Kevin Brobson is a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services quietly altered the nameplate on Rachel Levine’s official portrait during the recent government shutdown — replacing her legal first name with the one assigned to her at birth — it might have seemed to some like an insignificant gesture.
But symbols matter. Names matter. And, as we are constantly reminded by the pioneering example of Levine — the first openly transgender person confirmed for a government role by the U.S. Senate — identity matters.
And the deliberate act of using a transgender or nonbinary person’s birth name (or a previous name) after they’ve chosen a new one — a demeaning practice known as “deadnaming” — is more than just an insult to one nationally recognized medical leader. It’s a signal about what our health system is becoming.
It tells every transgender clinician, trainee, staff member, and patient: Your identity is provisional here. Your legitimacy is negotiable. Your name can be taken from you. For a profession that depends on psychological safety, this is no small thing.
Imagine training as a transgender medical resident and watching the federal government manipulate the image of one of the country’s most illustrious physicians — someone who helped lead Pennsylvania through the opioid epidemic, someone who oversaw critical COVID-19 responses, and someone so accomplished that they hold the rank of admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service.
Then-Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine meets with the media at The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Harrisburg in May 2020.
Imagine treating transgender youth in a climate where federal agencies publicly invalidate the very concept of gender identity.
Imagine being a transgender patient, already vulnerable, and seeing your government insist that who you are is, at best, a clerical preference and, at worst, a threat to national security.
We sometimes tell ourselves that culture wars don’t reach the clinic. They do.
They show up when patients avoid care because they fear being misgendered or judged.
They show up when medical students stay closeted to avoid being targeted, derailing careers before they begin.
They show up when clinicians feel pressured to hide their families or their own identities in order to survive training environments already marked by burnout, moral injury, and hierarchy.
They show up in public health, where trust is essential — whether in vaccines, harm-reduction programs, or pandemic response. When government institutions themselves engage in targeted stigmatization, entire communities disengage.
And they show up in professional integrity. A health system that claims to uphold evidence yet endorses policies contradicted by every major medical association — including the treatment of gender dysphoria — erodes its credibility. When science is invoked only when politically convenient, clinicians feel the ground shift under their feet.
Levine showed grace by calling the deadnaming “petty.” In a sense, she’s right: The act is juvenile. But if the rest of us don’t call it out, we risk missing the larger threat.
Professional erasure begins with symbolic gestures — the removal of names, the reclassification of identities, the retelling of who someone “really” is. History is rife with examples of how stripping titles, credentials, or names precedes efforts to diminish authority and restrict participation.
A physician’s portrait is not just a piece of decor. It is a public acknowledgment of service, expertise, and contribution. Altering it is an attempt to rewrite not only identity but legacy.
If medicine is to retain its moral center, clinicians must resist the temptation to disengage. This is not “politics” in the partisan sense. It is professional ethics.
We can start by naming the harm clearly. Deadnaming is not a clerical correction; it is a form of psychological violence aimed at delegitimizing identity.
We must also educate our colleagues, many of whom underestimate the downstream effects of identity-based policies on patient trust, engagement, and health outcomes.
At the same time, we have an obligation to actively support trainees and colleagues — especially those who are transgender or gender-expansive — who may feel newly unsafe or exposed within training environments and workplaces.
Defending evidence-based care is essential: Transgender medicine is medicine. Period. And we must insist that federal agencies speak truthfully about science.
A selective invocation of “scientific reality” is not reality at all; it is ideology masquerading as evidence. Medicine is facing a pivotal question: Are we willing to let political ideology dictate whose identities are valid within our clinics, hospitals, and public health institutions?
Rachel Levine’s portrait matters because deleting her name is an invitation to delete others. It is an attempt to redefine professional legitimacy by biology rather than biography — by chromosomes rather than contributions.
Yet her life is proof that gender identity neither diminishes competence nor negates service.
When a government tries to rewrite that narrative, the medical profession must ask itself: If we do not stand up for the integrity of our colleagues, who will stand up for the integrity of our patients?
Arthur Lazarus is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.
Top federal officials talk about finding a cause for autism, generating more buzz by the day. More substantively, the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles gave an extraordinary sum — $50 million — to a local hospital to discover its cause and develop new treatments.
Each year, more than 120,000 young people with autism turn 18 and “age out” of pediatric medicine. They enter an adult system that is unprepared to help them. They enter a world with no standardized guidelines for care, no specialized training for physicians, and far less support. Families must navigate a cliff, not a bridge. More than five million adults now push past herculean obstacles for what is often worse care.
I view this crisis as a pediatric emergency medicine doctor and as the mother of a transition-age autistic son.
Fear for the future
We parents are terrified by what will happen to our adult children when we are no longer around to care for them. Parents weep — and sometimes wail — when I refer them to an alternate site for adult care. Our system can no longer remove an appendix or mount a crisis intervention once these children cross over.
As a doctor, I know how this change can cause unnecessary admissions and a loss of social work and case management. Caregivers must suddenly educate the provider on the patient’s basic needs. As a parent, I watch my son Alexander and others hop from one tiny island of support to another.
When Alexander broke his arm at age 6, surgeons were called in to pin his shattered bone and clean the wound where the disrupted muscle had burst through the skin. Alexander was ridiculously compliant and poised; I was less so.
His surgeons accidentally cut one of the three main motor nerves in the arm when they tried to stabilize his floppy elbow. It took many visits over eight weeks to get proper attention. By then, his arm was floppy from a medical error.
In our home, we work hard to protect him: Trampolines are forbidden, helmets always on, seat belts firmly buckled. Yet, I failed to anticipate how Alexander’s autism could hurt him. This label — his scarlet letter “A” — kept his surgeons at a dangerous distance.
I continue to teach Alexander to be responsible for his care so he will thrive when I cannot be beside him. In 2023, the National Institutes of Health formally designated people with disabilities as disadvantaged. I am relieved to see a growing acknowledgment of autistic people as a vulnerable group, at risk for health disparities, deserving of tailored care.
Justin Pierce (center), who has autism and is an account support associate, meets with his team at Ernst & Young offices in Chicago.
I have also gained confidence in my voice as an advocate for Alexander. I’ve become a “gang member.”
Senior staffers for Gov. Josh Shapiro respectfully dubbed my fellow autism advocates as “the mom gang.” It is reassuring only in this context that I present as intimidating. Our band of six wants to make sure that half-baked federal plans to create a national autism registry never happen in Pennsylvania without privacy safeguards.
Meanwhile, the autism community holds diverse opinions on what to do. Should profound autism be classified separately from other presentations? Is “cure” the right goal? Is Tylenol a risk factor?
While these conversations pull us in different directions, we must not lose sight of a common purpose to create a better system.
Autistic adults deserve accessible and affirming change. There are models, tools, and innovations in which to invest:
Training emergency, inpatient, and outpatient teams to recognize how autism presents in adults
Designing calming public environments that ease communication
Creating dedicated consult services — including behaviorists, communication specialists, and caregivers — available in person and via telehealth
Prioritizing prevention and de-escalation over restraint
Highlighting the voices of autistic individuals in policy decisions that affect them
And, critically, funding and scaling programs that treat autism across the lifespan
Lack of resources
Resources are scarce. Historic gifts fill some gaps from interrupted government funds pulled from disability and diversity programming. Casualties include the Department of Education’s “Charting My Path for Future Success” transition program, a research-based effort to help high school students with disabilities enter the workforce or higher education.
We may all agree there is an immediate need to build better supports for adults with autism.
I worry for my son. I need to know I have pushed every edge of possibility to smooth his way forward. I do this for my daughters, too, who learned from their earliest days their brother needs the same supports they are accustomed to, but he is often denied.
One day, they will take my place slaying this dragon.
Eron Friedlaender is a public health investigator, an emergency medicine physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a board member of the Institute for Human Centered Design.
The Washington Post recently sparked a familiar debate by ranking the top sports cities in the country — and left Philadelphia off the list. While local journalists rushed to defend our passionate fandom, they missed the most important question: Does our city truly deserve the title of “Best Sports City” if we systematically deny our own children the chance to participate?
If we believe in the power of Philadelphia sports, it’s time for our professional teams and our famous citizens to commit to making every child a winner by funding athletics in the Philadelphia School District.
Angela McIver at the meeting of the Phiadelphia Board of Education in 2020.
I could not, in good conscience, vote for a budget that answered that question by allocating four times the amount of money for school police than it did for athletics programming.
I believe funding decisions like these are an indictment of our priorities.
For our students, the impact of this financial neglect is not abstract — it is a daily indignity. For example, while my children were on the Central High School swim team, the team routinely had to scramble for practice facilities. One of their regular practice pools was a therapeutic pool for children with disabilities, which kept the water temperature above 80 degrees — a condition dangerous for intense athletic training.
A swim team practices at the Marian Anderson Recreation Center, in South Philadelphia in 2022.
Across the district, our track teams often have no actual track, forcing students to run laps in crowded school hallways. Our baseball teams must clear rocks and debris off their own fields just to hold a practice session.
While school districts across this region consistently allocate between 1% and 1.5% of their budget to athletics, Philadelphia allocates a mere two-tenths of 1% (0.2%). Consider the scale: In 2023, when I wrote an op-ed about school budgets for The Inquirer,Lower Merion spent nearly $4 million on athletics for two high schools and three middle schools. Philadelphia spent a mere $9 million for 57 high schools and more than 150 middle schools.
Students and coaches from Steel Elementary, pictured here in March, were hoping to establish a track team —its first Philadelphia School District-sponsored extracurricular activity.
If the Philadelphia School District could allocate funding according to the formula used by our neighboring districts, we could transform thousands of students’ lives. Unfortunately, competing financial realities (like the cessation of COVID-19 funding and the critical need to address deteriorating facilities) relegate athletics to the bottom of the priority list.
A challenge to Philadelphia’s champions
We know the benefits of participation in sports are profound: lower rates of depression, better mental health, stronger self-regulation, and increased confidence. Investing in athletics develops students’ passions and talents.
Moreover, in a city grappling with gun violence, the impact is immediate and tangible: it keeps thousands of our students off the streets during the times when they are most likely to become victims of, or engage in, disruptive behavior.
Unfortunately, the reality is that this funding gap reflects a systemic financial disparity facing our city. I recognize the immense difficulty the current administration faces in allocating dollars while working with far less funding per student than wealthier suburban districts. If Philadelphia truly values its sports identity, it’s time for those who embody that spirit to step up.
My challenge goes out directly to:
Our professional sports teams (Eagles, Sixers, Phillies, Flyers, Union): If our city’s identity is tied to your success, then your success must be tied to our children. Commit a percentage of your organization’s substantial revenues to help close the school district’s athletics funding gap to finally bring parity with suburban districts.
Our celebrities and ambassadors: Every time Kevin Hart, Quinta Brunson, Hannah Einbinder, or Bradley Cooper says, “Go Birds!” on the red carpet, they use their platform to amplify Philadelphia pride. Now, we need them to use their wallets and voices to amplify opportunity. Commit to a sustained, philanthropic effort to fully fund athletics across our public schools.
We have amazing, talented children with gifts to share. A true “Best Sports City” doesn’t just celebrate its pros; it gives every child the chance to become one.
Let’s turn our fanatical passion into foundational funding.
Angela McIver served as a member of the Philadelphia school board from 2018-2021.
We are standing at the crosswalk of a bold new era in street design and management.
Streets make up roughly 30% of a Philadelphia’s land. Yet, most are locked into a single use: moving and storing cars. What if, instead, we treated them as dynamic public spaces capable of changing function and meaning depending on the time of day, the season, or the needs of the neighborhood?
That question guided a recent pilot project I helped lead in Chinatown, which will be unveiled next month. As part of “the Chinatown Stitch” — an ambitious effort led by the city’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems, with state and federal partners, meant to heal a neighborhood long divided by transportation infrastructure. Our team designed a movable market stall, a piece of street furniture that serves as both a vendor kiosk and a community gathering space.
During Chinese New Year or other festivals, when the streets overflow with people and energy, the stall slides into the roadway, transforming asphalt into a festive plaza. When the celebration ends, it retreats, making way for traffic once again.
For a neighborhood starved of public space, this small, movable structure has become a powerful symbol: The street itself can flex, adapt, and respond. It embodies what planners and landscape architects call the Flexible Street Strategy — a vision for cities that recognizes streets as living systems, not fixed infrastructures.
Open Streets
For more than a century, street planning has been governed by rigid right-of-way definitions. Sidewalks for walking. Lanes for driving. Curbs for parking. These rules answer only one question: what belongs where? The flexible street concept asks another: when? When should a street prioritize cars, and when should it belong to people?
Based on research my team completed last summer, the results have been stunning. Foot traffic soars. Businesses thrive. And, perhaps most tellingly, children return. On a normal day, we counted two kids passing through a block in 15 minutes. During one Open Streets event, that number jumped to 39.
It’s not just a statistic; it’s a story of safety, belonging, and joy. For once, the street was everyone’s.
Restaurants take over 18th Street as the streets around Rittenhouse Square are closed to vehicular traffic for pedestrian-only zones for the city’s Open Streets program.
When the Open Streets program began, its organizers expected bureaucratic hurdles — clashes between departments, debates over lost parking revenue. Instead, city agencies from streets to parking embraced it. Post-pandemic, there’s a new understanding: Streets are no longer merely conduits for cars. They are the connective tissue of civic life.
The success of the program, first launched in 2024 and revived last summer, has inspired plans to expand across downtown. But as encouraging as such pilots are, they still exist as exceptions to the rule. But the Flexible Street Strategy holds that flexibility should not require special permission. It should be baked into the DNA of how cities plan, design, and manage their streets.
This means rewriting the system itself. Instead of rigid right-of-way codes, cities need regulatory frameworks that acknowledge streets as time-based spaces — spaces whose use shifts dynamically according to demand, culture, and context.
To move from philosophy to practice, flexibility can now be managed with precision through technology.
Using digital twin models, IoT sensors, and AI-driven analytics, our team is building a data platform that identifies “flex windows” — hours when converting a street from traffic to pedestrian use offers the greatest benefit with the least disruption. The system integrates live data on street anchor activities (schools, restaurants, parks, etc.), traffic volumes, safety, and equity to recommend optimal transformation times.
A community stage
Still, the real power of the flexible street idea lies in its simplicity. It doesn’t require new infrastructure — just imagination, data, and a willingness to test. Its nonpermanent, pilot-friendly nature allows cities to experiment at low cost and low risk. Just like the market stall installed in Chinatown, which amplified existing street events and vividly showed how a street can transform into a stage for community life.
If the official Chinatown Stitch aims to reconnect neighborhoods divided by a sunken highway through large-scale infrastructure, our market stall serves as a micro-stitch — achieving the same goal on the scale of the city block by redefining the street as public space and reconnecting residents, shops, and everyday social life.
Although the Chinatown Stitch funding was cut by the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the project has still secured planning funds. Led by OTIS and PennDot, the whole design team is actively finalizing the design. The market stall pilot project is part of this work and serves as an important advocacy and outreach tool for the overall project, supported strongly by Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation.
At the end of the day, whether they recognize it or not, our cities no longer have the luxury of static infrastructure. Between climate change, social fragmentation, and changing mobility patterns, flexibility is not a design preference — it’s survival. The street of the future isn’t just paved for movement; it’s programmed for life.
If we want streets that truly belong to everyone, we must give them the freedom to change.
Yadan Luo is a landscape architect, lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and the creative director of YH LAB.
