Women's March, Washington,DC, 2018,credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images // Elite Daily

Last week Portside posted a piece by Rosalind P. Petchesky, An Appeal to Jewish Women to Support the 2019 Women’s March and Its Leaders. More than fifteen thousand have viewed this post on the Portside website, and the Facebook and Twitter feeds of portside. Countless others have forwarded the original Portside email. Thousands of these readers have then shared this on social media.

In 2017 the original Women's March was the first major unified opposition to the election of Donald Trump and the coming to power of the Trumpites. The day after Trump's inauguration, nearly half-million women and their supporters took to the streets of Washington, DC. [see New York Times story, Crowd Scientists Say Women's March in Washington Had 3 Times as Many People as Trump Inauguration.] The Washington Post reported that the Women's March on Washington "was likely the largest single-day demonstration in recorded U.S. history," with marches in 653 communities throughout the United States.

"In total, the women’s march involved between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people in the United States (our best guess is 4,157,894). That translates into 1 percent to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population of 318,900,000 people (our best guess is 1.3 percent).

To put this in perspective, the combined armed forces of the U.S. military — including the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps reserves, National Guard, and Coast Guard — comprise just over 2 million people."

[This is What We Learned by Counting the Women’s Marches, By Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman; February 7, 2017, Washington Post.]

Last year, over 1.5 million marched in 486 communities across the country.

Coming after the massive repudiation of Trumpism at the polls in the November election, preserving the unity of the Women's March mobilizations is very important.

In any mass mobilization people join it for different reasons, from different backgrounds, with different levels of development and understanding. It would seem that the Women's March mobilizations are no different.

From the beginning the Women's March was led by a group of majority non-white women, including African American, Chicana and Palestinian women. This was an important organizing point and rallying cry for the marches in it's first two years.

From the beginning efforts were under way to disrupt the unity of this movement, and undermine this leadership. At the same time charges were made that this leadership was anti-Semitic. How this leadership responded to those charges has been subject to debate and criticism.

Now in many cities there are efforts and plans to have two rival marches. This writer echoes the feelings of many that this type of division would only play into the hands of the Trumpites. At the same time, I feel that the bedrock of the movement against Trump must be against the ideology and practice of the right, and its props of racism, chauvinism, male supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamaphobia, anti-immigrant hysteria and anti-Semitism and fascism.

Below are some of the submissions from Portside readers sent to Portside, posted on Portside's Facebook page and Twitter feed from:

Cathy Albisa; Elena Schwolsky-Fitch; Katharina Harlow; Jay Schaffner; Arno Hecht; Kelly Decker; Melissa Estes; Kelly Decker; Regina Kelly; Nick Eliopulos; Julie Cameron; John Kailin; Magali Sarfatti Larson; Peter Gilmore; Irena Klepfisz; Johanna Schulman; Nancy E. Phillips; Teraii Maria Serana

[The views expressed are my personal views. While I am one of the twenty-four moderators of Portside, these are my own, and not necessarily those of the Portside collective.]

Article by my dear friend Rosalind Petchesky...

"It is time to stop letting Farrakhan be a lightning rod of racial division and to get on with the important work of addressing the persistence of white supremacy as well as anti-Semitism within the mainstream women's movement." .... "Who among us has not had to reckon with the contradictions and messiness in our own communities and families? My grandmother-a Jewish refugee in the early 20th century who escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia and a patriarchal father who burned her books-was the first person I heard utter the derogatory Yiddish word "schwarze.""

Its time to heal sisters and allow healing ... Lets all vow to call out anti-semitism, racism, Islamophobia everywhere we see it, but to do so in order to create unity, not to bring down every voice that at a given moment carries some human contradiction. If we do that, we will find all of us, for as Ros notes who doesn't carry some messiness, mute. I am no fan of Farrakhan myself, not by a long shot, but until I cut off every deeply flawed relative and neighbor I have had in my life, I cannot demand repudiation of the person rather than their positions. I can tell you I have argued and fought and been clear, but I can't tell you I have refused to be associated with them. I have still gone to their dinners (and argued and fought some more) and their weddings (where I behaved better) and their funerals. I understand this is more public, the stakes are higher. But these women have been clear. Let them be heard.

Cathy Albisa

Women's March 2019 -- Portside Readers Weigh-In

Last week Portside posted Rosalind P. Petchesky's piece, An Appeal to Jewish Women to Support the 2019 Women’s March and Its Leaders. Preserving the unity and diversity of the anti-Trump movement is crucial. Here are responses from Portside readers.

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