Huff Post: by Ruth Messinger —
… the most incredible thing about slavery was how it ended. An institution that was embedded into human culture, endorsed by the Bible, promoted by the Qur’an, pervasive in society, and embedded in the global economy was taken on and defeated by a movement started by a tiny number of people. These brave souls had no Twitter or Facebook. They had no Internet or telephones or automobiles, but they organized people across the world and largely stopped slavery globally.
After understanding how slavery ended, I promised myself that if something like that ever happened in my time, I would be part of the group who tried to stop it.
In the early days of the modern feminist movement in the 1970s, we used to make the case for women by reminding everyone that “women hold up half the sky” — and therefore must have equal rights. Decades later, and with so much accomplished and so much more to do to advance justice and end violence against women worldwide, I am proud to be able to write that more men are stepping up and joining with women to “hold up half the sky,” and ensure dignity and equality for women everywhere.
In the past week alone, I have been deeply moved by two men I know, both of whom believe in women, hate the violence perpetrated against them and are doing something about it. One is Ben Horowitz, the highly respected Silicon Valley investor, and the other is Imam Demba Diawara, a village chief in Senegal, whom I visited last week in his community, 90 minutes from Dakar.
Ben, an entrepreneurial genius, mentsh and friend, is a longtime supporter of American Jewish World Service. He just shared the truly amazing news that he will donate the proceeds from his new book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, to AJWS, to support our work to promote women’s rights and end violence against them throughout the world.
In a revelatory blog post announcing his gift, Ben explains why he supports AJWS’s work to end violence against women. He views the current fight for women as a cause as morally significant as the 19th-century movement to end slavery in the United States, which was led by a few people to overcome great odds: