Dolly Parton Deserved Better Than This

A second Reform synagogue in Israel had a window smashed this month. Someone hurled rocks through Congregation Darchei Noam's window in Ramat Hasharon overnight Sunday, a week after vandals tore down Pride flags at Jerusalem's Kol HaNeshama. "This wasn't children playing," said Rabbi Eli Levin. Police are investigating both. ¹

A Graham will keep that South Carolina Senate seat in the family. Darline Graham won Tuesday's GOP runoff to finish her late brother's term, 52.3% to Ralph Norman's 47.7%, months after he died suddenly of an aortic dissection at 71. Her résumé: one term on the state's Commission for the Blind. She admits foreign policy "isn't my area of expertise." ²

A Democrat won a deep-red Senate primary by throwing AIPAC's money in the trash. N'kiyla Jasmine Thomas beat Jim Priest in Oklahoma's runoff Tuesday, 59.9% to 40.1%, after posting a video of herself binning a check labeled "AIPAC Funds." She still backs a two-state solution. Oklahoma hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate in three decades, so the gesture cost her nothing. ³

Dolly Parton died Tuesday at 80, after a brief bout with cancer, and she spent her whole life proving generosity doesn't need a theory behind it. ⁴ She built the Imagination Library in 1995 to mail free books to kids in her home county; three decades later it has shipped more than 300 million of them worldwide, and a philanthropist liked the idea enough to copy it wholesale into PJ Library, which now reaches 670,000 Jewish families in 40 countries. ⁴ In April 2020, with the pandemic just starting, she wired $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research and downplayed it afterward: "I got more credit than I deserved. I was just trying to put my money where my heart is." ⁵ That money helped fund the earliest tests behind the Moderna vaccine. ⁵ At Dollywood, the park she opened in 1986, every employee gets free college tuition starting on day one, no seniority required. ⁶ She grew up one of twelve kids in a one-room Tennessee cabin with no running water, and built a fortune out of that without ever asking anyone to admire her for it. ⁵

Then, within an hour of her death, someone rewrote her Wikipedia page: swapped her photo for a swastika, changed her name to "Jew lover." ⁷ Wikipedia caught it and reverted it within minutes. Parton wasn't a political figure, and she wasn't Jewish. None of that mattered to whoever did this. She spent her life being generous to people who never asked what she believed first, and it still wasn't enough to keep hate away from her memory for even an hour. That's the measure of what she was up against.

It's 14 Elul, with Rosh Hashanah closing in. Ashkenazi Selichot prayers start the night of Saturday, Sept. 5 — the custom is to recite them at least four times before the new year begins. ⁸⁹