What mattered was how Samantha Woll lived | Will Bunch Newsletter

You don’t live for boredom. You live for the excitement, the pressure, the anxiety, and the extreme risk of the Game 7 that the Phillies play tonight (Tuesday) against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Citizens Bank Park — the first deciding Game 7 of a playoff series in the team’s 141-season history. My money is on the home team, but if we fall, it’s better to have played Game 7 and lost than never to have played at all.

📮 Responding to last week’s question, readers widely panned a GOP bill in Congress that would withhold all federal dollars from universities sponsoring events deemed antisemitic — but their reasons varied. Many thought it smacked of Republican hypocrisy. “As an American Jew who has many problems with the current government of Israel. I do not for one second believe any current Republican officeholder has any sincere desire to combat [antisemitism],” wrote Ethan Reinhard. “If they did they would condemn and disavow Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk and Nick Fuentes.” But Maureen Bierhoff said she would “prefer that these presentations be put on hold until the antisemitism dies down. We don’t need any more reminders of how the world hates Jews.”

This week’s question: As the House Speaker debacle drags on, who is a registered Republican — currently in Congress or not — that you would find acceptable for the job? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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It’s been more than six years since a new American president, Donald Trump, roiled the nation’s immigration debate by imposing what critics called a ”Muslim ban” on U.S. arrivals from a gaggle of predominantly Islamic countries. The chaotic action left some foreigners stranded in limbo at American airports, as protesters rushed to the terminals. Trump’s 2017 move was widely denounced, and not just by Muslim Americans.

In Detroit, home of the nation’s largest Arab-American community, prominent young Jewish leader Samantha Woll joined the liberal-leaning Detroit Jews for Justice in signing a letter that stated: “We will not stand idly by while the administration escalates its attacks on Muslims, Arabs, refugees and immigrants. We pledge to show up: in the streets, at the airport, in our decision-makers’ offices and inboxes. Compelled by Jewish values, history and self-interest, we commit to the struggle against white supremacy and bigotry in all its forms.”

Woll’s call for Jewish-Muslim solidarity was hardly a one-off, despite her otherwise crowded agenda of reviving her historic synagogue in downtown Detroit and her passion for liberal politics, as a campaign aide to leading Michigan Democrats. A profile of Woll, also in 2017, threw a spotlight on her work as “instrumental” in the founding of the Muslim-Jewish Forum of Detroit, a grassroots organization that fosters ties between youths of the two faiths through events such as an Iftar dinner welcoming refugees from Syria.

“We Refuse to Be Enemies” was the name of a similar event that Woll worked on in 2015 at Detroit’s Wayne State University, which again featured essays and artwork from young Muslims and Jews who sought to be “unconventional allies.”

The 40-year-old Woll’s relentless efforts on behalf of peace, love, and understanding drew little attention outside of Detroit — until 6:30 a.m. Saturday, and an utterly shocking and heartbreaking event. The board president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue was found dead on a sidewalk just outside her home in Detroit’s Lafayette Park section, stabbed multiple times. Police believe the crime took place inside Woll’s home before she ran out, leaving a trail of blood.

The murder of a rising young civic leader would likely be newsworthy under any circumstance, but October 2023 has been no ordinary time. With a war raging between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas on the other side of the world spiking political tensions here at home, there was immediate and widespread speculation — especially in the hothouse of social media — that Woll’s killing was a hate crime. Such a crime had already happened the week before in Chicago, when a landlord aggravated by the war stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy to death.

But on Monday afternoon, Detroit police said they are fairly confident by the evidence so far that the killing was not a hate crime or motivated by antisemitism. The uncertainty over who killed Woll and why has created a situation where people are closely following the case but not sure what, if anything, to say about it. The truth is there’s a lot to say now about Samantha Woll, because what mattered most about her was not really how she died but how she lived.

Especially considering the current global crisis.

A quick side point: The people jacked-up on wartime tweeting who refuse to consider that Woll’s murder might be anything else than an antisemitic hate crime are ignoring a huge and different problem in America: violence against women. Nearly 5,000 women like Woll are killed in this country every year; very few are political hate crimes but many — just over a third — result from domestic partner violence. Those sobering statistics are a good reason not to speculate about the motive until more facts are known.

During 40 remarkably productive years, Woll fought against any and all forms of violence in every possible venue — in protests and marches, as a political aide for some well-known Michigan Democrats like U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin and Attorney General Dana Nessel, and through her devotion to her own faith and tolerating the beliefs of others.

Woll’s funeral, which was held on Sunday in the Jewish tradition, was marked by stories about her boundless energy and her many routine acts of kindness towards both friends and strangers.

“She was at every ribbon cutting, every political protest, every campaign event. I think I’d believe it if I saw her picture at a moon landing,” Nessel said to the roughly 1,000 mourners who gathered to remember Woll. “I know that as of this minute we don’t know who was the monster who took her life, [but] her killer will not rob us of the memory of her joy and kindness.”

We’ll never know exactly what Woll had to say about the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza, the war that her death, justifiably or not, somehow got wrapped into. But given everything that came before, it’s easy to imagine she would have wanted dialogue over destruction, and a pursuit of peace with a passion that too many serious men in suits are currently applying to bombing and revenge.

Whatever else we learn in the coming days about what happened last Saturday, the tragedy of Woll’s murder ought to remind us that there are unsung heroes in our communities who toil for peace and for conversation, whom we refuse to hear over the shouting and the falling bombs. If you want to honor this young leader’s short, remarkable life, listen to what she was trying to tell us: that it’s not too late to refuse to be enemies.

Question: Will a vote to certify the [2020] election be treated as disqualifying by the House GOP [in electing a new speaker]? — Via Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel) on X/Twitter

Answer: Marcy, you have to look at the eight or so candidates who are still in the running as I write this on Tuesday morning and say that the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” Most of the undistinguished back-benchers seeking to replace the ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy voted not to certify the 2020 ballots cast by me and my family and friends here in Pennsylvania, while a couple of others (including most prominent hopeful, Rep. Tom Emmer) signed legal briefs supporting Donald Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud. What passes for a moderate today — like Pennsylvania’s Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick or Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon — isn’t running. Eight years of strongman fealty to Trump has left the party devoid of free thinkers. There are no real leaders in today’s Republican Party.

On the night of Oct. 20, 1973, I was a 14-year-old kid trying to cope with the worst news imaginable: My New York Mets had just lost Game 6 of the World Series to the loaded Oakland A’s. Then a news flash snapped me out of adolescent stupor: a wild report out of D.C. that then-President Richard Nixon — mired in the Watergate scandal — had canned his Attorney General Elliot Richardson and then his deputy, until he finally found a guy who would do his bidding and fire the man investigating Nixon’s White House, bow-tied special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Some were already calling it “the Saturday Night Massacre” by the time NBC’s John Chancellor broke into programming on our living-room black-and-white TV and announced “what may be the most serious constitutional crisis” in American history.

This past Friday marked the 50th anniversary of “the Saturday Night Massacre,” and I’m not sure if the fact it was barely noted was a comment on today’s crazy, mixed-up world, or on how jaded and cynical we’ve become over a half century. In 1973, everyday citizens were shocked that an American president would abuse his power to interfere with the Justice Department’s investigation of him. Some dared to call it a coup. Indeed, the outrage channeled, pre-internet, into angry telegrams began a push for Nixon’s impeachment that was the beginning of his end, as the smoking-gun tapes that Nixon was trying to suppress finally emerged. But Nixon’s 1974 pardon left far too unresolved the ultimate question of whether our presidents are bound by the rule of law.

In 2023, a man who staged a coup attempt that was more violent and dangerous than anything that Nixon could have dreamed of, and who rode out two impeachments and hopes to do the same with 91 felony counts, is a frontrunner to return to the White House. And Donald Trump is openly boasting he will use the Justice Department to clear himself, free his supporters, and get revenge on his political enemies. The real moral of 1973′s “Saturday Night Massacre” is how naïve we were about the threats to democracy, and how we didn’t do enough to prevent it from happening again. What may be the greatest constitutional crisis in American history is the one that’s just around the corner.

Once upon a time, “woke” was considered a valid word to describe people’s feelings when they learn about some of the racial suppression and other bad acts that they never taught you about in school. The ultimate example may be the 1921 white rioting and massacre that claimed an estimated 100 to 300 Black lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma — completely omitted from your history textbook. At least before 2019, when the debut episode of HBO’s popular The Watchmen introduced this horror to a new mass audience. That inspired me to write a list of some of the other milestones of U.S. white supremacy that have been overlooked. Check it out: “Lynchings, 1921 Tulsa massacre, and 8 other things school didn’t teach you about race in America.”