Week after week on Shabbat, she had whispered his name during the prayer for healing in her shul in Los Angeles and, after his death in February this year, she recited Kaddish for him.
She had come to Europe on a “hope mission”, she said, to “bear witness to the struggles that shaped the last century and to ask what they require of the next”. And to try to recover the international legacy her father had spent six decades building, “to sit with people across communities who are asking how solidarity holds under strain, and to engage the global coalition this work has always needed”.
One of the projects PTNG is piloting is one that will bring Black and Jewish teenagers together in Los Angeles, she revealed.
In her two-week visit to the continent, she had been “immersing myself in the intertwined histories of empire and resistance, faith and doubt, violence and human dignity – histories that have shaped not only this continent but also the moral architecture of the modern world.”
In Paris, she said: “I traced the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, confronting the bureaucratic machinery by which the unimaginable – rendering African lives as cargo and commerce – was made to appear merely administrative.”
She had “wept over atrocities I knew well, and over atrocities I had never before encountered”.
At Anne Frank’s House, she recalled “a young girl living under conditions that defy comprehension, and still, she continued to write. I found myself wondering how one continues writing when their future remains entirely uncertain.”
There, Jackson said, she “realised that hope is often misunderstood. We have a tendency to speak of it as though it were optimism, as though it were merely confidence that things will improve.
“But Anne's diary survived precisely because hope is something deeper than certainty.
“Hope works in two directions. Yes, we are called to keep hope alive – but hope also keeps something alive in us.
“It preserves our capacity to imagine beyond the walls that confine us. It sustains the conviction that cruelty need not have the final word. It refuses to let suffering become the measure of what it means to be human.
“And if hope keeps alive something essential within us, then hope is not simply a gift we receive. It is also a responsibility we bear.”
And that began with “one of the most radical propositions in Torah”, she suggested – a passage “I first encountered through the theological inheritance of the Black church”.
While the commandment to love our neighbour was well known, less so was the one that followed it in the same chapter, to love the resident stranger “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”, she said.
“The memory of our own suffering is not offered as warrant for an exceptional concern with ourselves; it is offered as the very ground of our obligation to someone else.
“Our wounds were never meant to become walls. They were meant to become bridges. Hope widens the circle. It refuses to let our compassion end where our identities begin.”
On her trip, she said, she had also revisited “the history of those who chose responsibility over indifference and solidarity over fear.
“That history lives in those who fought and resisted enslavement and colonisation, in those who sheltered Jews during the Shoah, and in the communities I have met across Paris, Amsterdam, and now London, who continue to insist that memory is not only the preservation of the past but the shaping of the future.”
Ashley Jackson in conversation with JW3 CEO Raymond Simonson (photo: Donatella Jackson)[Missing Credit]
Addressing the present, she referred to the death of an 18-year-old black boy, Nolan Xavier Wells, from Mississippi, whose body was found in the water, days after he disappeared earlier this month along the Mississipi Gulf Coast but whose family are still waiting to know how he died; as well as the stabbing of 50-year-old Moshe Yitzhak Grunhaus outside his synagogue in New York
“Neither of these stories reaches me as a distant headline,” she said. “In one, I recognise myself as an African-American. In the other, I recognise myself as a Jew. But it should not take being both.
“I have come to believe that one of the great failures of our age is not a lack of information about suffering – we are inundated with it – but that we have grown practised at deciding whose wounds we will carry and whose we will leave unattended.
“We have organised our moral lives around ever-smaller circles of concern until we scarcely notice that we are drawing them at all.”
She belonged, she said, to “two traditions whose histories are profoundly different and which I love beyond measure: the African tradition into which I was born and the Jewish tradition into which I have come. I would never collapse them into one another.
“But I believe our destinies are intertwined. Both know what it is to carry memory across generations. Both know what it is to endure persecution without surrendering joy, or learning, or family, or faith, or hope.
“And both have given the world a moral vision that insists our own suffering can never become the boundary of our compassion.”
She had, she acknowledged, been “really scared” before the appearance of her Washington Post op-ed last Friday, in which she revealed her conversion to Judaism in June, fearing the reaction. But 80 per cent of it had been positive, she said.
She had come to Judaism after a period of spiritual questioning, she explained, and while, growing up, she had been to friends’ bar- and batmitzvahs, she attended her first synagogue service in 2024.
She had been influenced by coming across the Youtube channel of Mayim Bialik, one of the cast of the Big Bang Theory, which she had watched during the pandemic. Bialik spoke about her experience “as a Jew in the world and something about it just made me go, whoa, this feels deeply resonant”.
