The answers to the first three questions are drawn from Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Excerpts are cited with “NJC” and the page number. Question #1 Why does America have the highest incarceration rate of any developed nation in the world? Many factors have increased the incarceration rate, including the War on Drugs, the imposition of mandatory minimum sentencing, and privatization of prisons, which creates financial incentives for keeping people...

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said:  "Moses might not get to see Canaan, but his children will see it. He even got to the mountaintop enough to see it and that assured him that it was coming. But the beauty of the thing is that there's always a Joshua to take up his work and take the children on in. And it's there waiting with its milk and honey, and with all of the bountiful beauty that God has in store...

#1 "Like One Who Left Egypt" - Yehudi Amichai (Translated by Rabbi Steve Sager) What is the continuity of my life. I am like one who left Egypt With the Red Sea split in two and I passing through on dry ground With two walls of water on my right and on my left. Behind me Pharaoh’s force and his chariots and before me the wilderness and perhaps the promised land. This is the continuity of my life. #2Mishnah- section: Pesachim,...