“It settles down into the unconscious,” he says. “I’m teaching a class on emotions this fall, and that’s one of the points—the emotions you feel have to do with how a situation is framed. It’s like the old subliminal advertising thing.”

For Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, threats to democracy from disinformation are vast and real, but voters and election officials have never been more vigilant.

“Look, we know we’re being spun,” says Greenberg, co-editor of Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue. 

“The question is, can we step back for a moment and say, ‘I know I’m being spun. How do I either ignore this and move on to something else, or how do I put this in a category where I know that this is likely disinformation or misinformation and see what I can do to verify it?’”

Here are some tips Greenberg and Davenport shared to help you stay aware of—and minimally influenced by—disinformation this election season.

Be skeptical of new messages about the election—and their messengers.

“Whenever you see new information about the election, really close to the election, you should be suspicious,” says Davenport, who directs Fordham’s Peace and Justice studies program and is a frequent political commentator for publications like Newsweek and America. “If there’s some new news source that you’re just seeing for the first time this fall, and you have questions, google them and find if there are any reports about this source.”

On social networks, he says, keep an eye out for new friend and follow requests from people and groups you don’t know, and “just be conscious that you are being manipulated by algorithms, and their goal is to addict you to hateful content because that’s what sells.”

Greenberg notes that there are laws in place against promoting disinformation related to elections, but they’re hard to enforce without buy-in from private companies. 

Don’t let disinformation lessen your belief in objective facts.

As deepfakes, doctored photos, and AI-generated images flourish, it may feel tempting to dismiss the possibility of objective truth in the media we consume. Davenport cautions against this kind of wholesale skepticism, though.

Disinformation campaigns often try to foster chaos and confusion, Greenberg says, and create the sense that “a country can’t quite hold it together through a transition period.”

“There has to be a counternarrative to ‘we’re doomed, we’re victims,’ she says. “We’re not victims.”  

Be patient at the polls.

No matter how well-trained volunteer poll workers are, it’s going to be hard to prepare them for “any kind of aberrations that come up because of misinformation,” Greenberg says. “Go early … and just be patient.”  

And don’t be deterred, Davenport adds. 

“Don’t be scared away. Even if you see something telling you that the line at your polling place is two hours long.”  

Take advantage of available election resources.

Despite all the worries that election disinformation sparks in experts, Greenberg is heartened by what she says is “an incredible amount of attention” being paid to the issue by voters, law enforcement, and election officials. And she feels confident that voters are, on the whole, savvy enough to have their antennae up. 

To stay informed, she recommends resources like Election Law Blog and Democracy Docket. And Davenport points out that contacting your county clerk’s office—or checking its website—is a good way to get any necessary information about voting.  “We still need to tell people about the threats,” he says, “but then with that, we can say, ‘And here’s how you can find reliable sources on these topics.’”

“Marsh was a tireless advocate and activist for civil rights, rights for workers, worker-owned cooperatives, and social justice,” said John Davenport, Ph.D., a former director of Fordham’s Peace and Justice Studies program, which Marsh helped found. Davenport noted that Marsh was known for his defense of “critical modernism”—a form of critical theory that addresses postmodernist arguments by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul-Michel Foucault.

Born in Polson, Montana, Marsh earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He entered the Jesuit community there but left the order to pursue a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, which he earned in 1971.

From 1970 to 1985, he taught philosophy at St. Louis University. In 1980, he spent a year at Fordham as a visiting professor; five years later, he joined Fordham’s philosophy department full time. On his 20th anniversary in 2005, he was lauded with a Bene Merenti Medal, and was cited for thought that “fuses Marxist critical theory, phenomenology, process metaphysics and transcendental Thomism in critically constructive ways that counter the canon of modern secularism while issuing a sustained, sophisticated argument for social justice.” A year later, he retired from Fordham, his nephew T.J. Campbell said, and was named professor emeritus.

Over the course of his career, Marsh authored and co-edited nine books, including Post-Cartesian Meditations, (Fordham University Press, 1988); Critique, Action and Liberation (SUNY Press, 1994); Process, Praxis, and Transcendence (SUNY Press, 1999), and Unjust Legality: A Critique of Habermas’s Philosophy of Law, (Rowan and Littlefield, 2001). He was involved in numerous professional associations such as the American Catholic Philosophical Association, for which he served as president from 2004 to 2005.

Davenport said that when Marsh joined the Fordham philosophy faculty, he was part of a new generation of lay philosophers, along with Dominic Balestra, Ph.D., and Merold Westphal, Ph.D., to join what had been a department made up primarily of Jesuits.

“Marsh was seen as a new kind of thinker in the critical thinking tradition, but someone who respected transcendental Thomism, and therefore fit with into the department,” he said.

“What he called critical modernism was his own development of critical theory, which is a tradition of thought that goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany just after World War II. It attempts to find new ways defending universal or objective standards.”

Davenport, who was on the faculty with Marsh from 1998 to 2006, said Marsh’s critiques of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas had a big influence on him and his colleagues. A child of the Civil Rights era who was influenced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Marsh was more open to theological themes and inspirations than Habermas. Marsh’s gift, said Davenport, was that he wielded those themes in ways that even non-believers could appreciate. He was also unfailingly polite to those who disagreed with him, he said.

“I think it’s fair to say he was a Marxist,” he said. “He wasn’t an activist professor though. I heard him say on more than one occasion that it was very important that students of all political persuasion felt free to debate openly. He really bent over backward to accommodate students of different political persuasions.”

Robin Andersen, Ph.D., a professor emerita of communications and former head of Peace and Justice Studies, hosted both Marsh and Berrigan for dinners at her home in New Rochelle. Because neither of them drove, she and her husband, Fordham lecturer of biology Guy Robinson, Ph.D., often found themselves in discussions with them on drives back to Manhattan.

“He was very committed in the classroom and the way that he would integrate his pedagogy in his teaching with the philosophy of aligning yourself to the poor. He would give the students a theoretical and analytical perspective about inequalities and global injustices, imbued with a philosophy about the nature of human lives, and how we all need to live with dignity,” she said.

Marsh was a dedicated pacifist and used The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Fordham University Press, 2004), in his classes. The book, which details Berrigan’s trial for civil disobedience at the height of the Vietnam War, features afterward by Marsh and Andersen.

Andersen said she’ll miss Marsh’s thoughtfulness and the ease with which he engaged in conversation.

“Some very thoughtful people can be kind of intense, and Jim didn’t have that intensity about him,” she said.

“Both Dan [Berrigan] and Jim were very much into creating community around them. They had a real commitment to bringing young people into a world that is not easy to find in our culture, one filled with thought, compassion, and deep contemplation about what we’re doing in our fast-paced professional world,” she said.

Campbell said that he and his sister Elizabeth Campbell, Ph.D., benefited tremendously from time spent with their uncle, especially through holiday visits to Colorado, where Elizabeth lives and teaches at the University of Denver. Their education began with books on artists he bought them when they were children and continued through the years.

“Jim had an enormous influence on Elizabeth and me from a young age, particularly in terms of our appreciation for modern art and dance and theater,” he said noting that he exposed them to Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room, which combined several forms of art, including music by Philip Glass, one of Marsh’s favorite musicians.

Marsh was a devoted fan of the UConn women’s basketball team and subscribed to the Hartford Courant newspaper so he could keep up with them, Campbell said. He also devoted two hours a day to centering prayer, a form of meditation where one focuses on a single word such as light or love.

During one of their last visits to Colorado for Thanksgiving, Campbell said that Marsh confided to him that being a bachelor was also an important part of his identity. Despite a penchant for living alone, Marsh nonetheless drew others to him, he said, with a keen intellect, deep insights into modern culture, and a big booming baritone voice.

“His students loved him, and his friends and colleagues loved him as well. When we were at museums, he would comment on a painting, and people gathered around to listen to his commentary like he was a docent,” he said.

“He was so knowledgeable about the artists and how the paintings were constructed, that people would follow along with us.”

In addition to T.J. and Elizabeth Campbell, Marsh is survived by his sister Mary Ann Courtney and grand-nephews Ryan and Grant Karlsgodt. A funeral Mass will be held for him at St. Francis Xavier Church, 46 W. 16th Street, on Friday, Sep. 24, at 10:30 a.m. All are welcome.

The rabbi is Hanan Schlesinger, a Zionist settler who once viewed Palestinians as less than human; the young activist is Shadi Abu Awwad, a Palestinian who grew up hating Israelis. For decades, their countries have claimed ownership to the same land, leading to hostility, hatred, and hundreds of deaths on both sides. But after these two men forced themselves to get to know their neighbors, they reached a simple, yet striking realization—their “enemies” are humans who live, love, and bleed, just like them, they said.

“How could it be that I have lived my life in an area where there are probably nine Palestinians for each Israeli, and for 33 years, I never really met even one Palestinian?” Rabbi Schlesinger admitted to Fordham students, faculty, and guests at the Rose Hill campus last week. “I want to tell the story of how I think that happened … and how that can change.”

The two men shared their stories in a lecture called “A Painful Hope: Seeing the Humanity of Your Enemy,” hosted by Fordham’s peace and justice minor program and Chief Diversity Officer Rafael Zapata, at Keating Hall on Nov. 1. They also spoke about Roots, their organization that has facilitated conversations between Israelis and Palestinians since 2014. Rabbi Schlesinger is Roots’ international director; Abu Awwad is a youth group leader.

Roots is the only organization of its kind in their region, said Samuel Muli Peleg, Ph.D., a longtime peace activist and faculty member in Fordham’s peace and justice studies program.

“Because they are from the West Bank, the most contested area where the friction between Israelis and Palestinians is the biggest,” explained Peleg, “they are the most genuine [peacebuilders].”

“I see it again and again—Palestinians and Israelis coming to our center with hesitancy, with fear, like there’s a red line in the sand,” Rabbi Schlesinger said, his voice rising in a crescendo. “But when the meeting takes place, I often see a sense of liberation on people’s faces, as the fear dissipates, and the disease begins to be healed, and people become, in my mind, whole … and a little bit more human.”

Rabbi Schlesinger’s Story

Rabbi Schlesinger lives in a Zionist settlement in the West Bank, a territory to the east of Israel. In 1967, Israel took control of the West Bank, along with its 2.6 million Palestinian residents. To the Palestinians, the West Bank is stolen Palestinian land. But to Rabbi Schlesinger and his kin, the West Bank is “Judea and Samaria”—the homeland of the ancient Jewish state, he said. It’s the home of many sacred sites, burial areas, and, ultimately, Jewish heritage. If you scrape away the dirt outside his home, he added, you might unearth ancient potshards from his ancestors thousands of years ago.

“When I drive on the roads of Judea, when I walk in the fields, I see the return of the Jewish people to our ancient homeland after 2,000 years of exile. It was only in 1948—three years after the Holocaust ended—that we finally created one little dot [Israel] on the map,” Rabbi Schlesinger added. “What could be more just than that?”

For 33 years, he had viewed Palestinians as background noise, “the gray, drab scenery that passes in the background of a movie, but is not part of the plot,” he said. Four years ago, that narrative changed.

He met Jamaal, a Palestinian man from the town of Beit Ummar. Jamaal told him how Israeli soldiers had made his childhood miserable; how, after shaking hands with an Israeli man, he had run to the bathroom to wash away “the filth of touching an Israeli”; and how he had considered Palestinians who attended interfaith meetings to be traitors. But after hours of meaningful conversations with other Israelis—after “seeing that there’s a human being and a partner on the other side,” Rabbi Schlesinger recalled him saying—Jamaal’s perspective changed.

Rabbi Schlesinger met more Palestinians, and listened to many more stories: a man whose mother was beaten before his eyes by an Israeli, a Palestinian whose brother was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, a group of Israeli and Palestinian mothers who mourned their murdered sons together. He came to a conclusion.

“In living out my life on the basis of only one truth—my truth, and ignoring theirs—I was trampling their rights,” Rabbi Schlesinger told the audience. “Both sides in this conflict are living out identities at expense to the other side, causing injustice, pain, suffering, and death.”

“Neither side is gonna get up and leave. We have to get beyond what I call the ‘hubris of exclusivity,’ as if it’s only us. It’s both of us—together.”

Abu Awwad’s Story

Abu Awwad’s childhood taught him two things: Fear is not an option. And, once you leave home in the morning, there’s no guarantee that you’ll return home alive.

“That was more than enough for me as a child to start to hate Israelis,” said 27-year-old Abu Awwad, who grew up amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2004, an Israeli soldier shot his brother in the leg. Hours later, an Israeli doctor saved the brother’s life. But when Abu Awwad visited his brother in the hospital, he ignored the doctor. His brother stared at him. “You can’t say hi to the one who saved my life?” he asked.

When Abu Awwad returned home, he was angry and disoriented. He despised Israelis, he said, but how could he extend that hatred to the woman who had helped his family? As time passed, his animosity began to dissipate. He visited peace camps, befriended Israelis, and came to a realization: “They [Israelis and Palestinians] are killing each other because they are afraid of each other,” he said. “Now what’s controlling the conflict is fear.”

Abu Awwad recalled a day when he was driving across a junction. He had spotted an Israeli woman who wanted to cross the street, and slowed his car down. But when she saw his Palestinian license plate, she stopped in her tracks. She’s afraid that I will hit her, he thought. Then a nearby Israeli soldier cocked his gun. If I continue driving, Abu Awwad wondered, will he shoot me? If I don’t move, will he think I have a bomb in my car—and still shoot me?

“I’m afraid. He’s afraid. She’s afraid. The three of us could be killed for nothing—just because we are afraid of each other,” he said. “Is this the life that we want?”

Today, he is a youth leader and peace activist at Roots. Every month, he facilitates meetings between teenagers from both sides of the conflict, ages 15 to 18. At this age, he said, the young Palestinians gather in the streets and throw stones at Israeli vehicles and are shot and killed; meanwhile, the Israelis enlist in the army and stand against the Palestinians.

“How can we let them do that without even knowing anything about each other?” he asked. “Talk to him before he has a weapon in his hand. Tell him who you are. Tell him why you have to be in the army. Let him think about it from your eyes.”

He said the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will come from the people—not the government. Therefore, he added, nonviolence and organizations like Roots are key.

“I don’t think that I will see peace in my life,” Abu Awwad admitted. “But I’m sure that what we are doing, one day, will help the people who are gonna live in that land. We never know when. But it’s enough to believe in what we are doing right now.”

The event, “The Roadmap for A Shared Society, or How Jews and Arabs Can Live and Prosper Together ” will feature conversations on how Israeli Jews and Palestinians can successfully create an inclusive society.

It will be held on March 30 in the Flom Auditorium at the Rose Hill campus at 12 p.m., and is part of a series of lectures and workshops at Fordham focused on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The event is free and open to the public.

“It is an event of vital importance,” said John Davenport, Ph.D., an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Peace and Justice Studies program. “It feels as if real dialogue and negotiation toward a two-state peace deal has almost stopped in recent years, despite many rounds of effort to get it restarted.”

“The Givat Haviva group represents a different side of the story and showcases Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, working together.”

Yaniv Sagee, executive director of Givat Haviva, and Mohammad Darawshe, director of the Center for Equality and Shared Society, will discuss Givat Haviva’s programming. The organization is working with Jews and Arabs to build an inclusive society in Israel based on mutual responsibility, civic equality, and a shared vision of the future.

“This is a golden opportunity to really witness a current-affairs issue in real time, with a protagonist who is leading major conflict resolution efforts in Israel,” said Samuel Peleg, Ph.D., a visiting professor of political science who will be moderating the discussion.

According to Peleg, an expert in conflict resolution, previous attempts to resolve the conflict in the Middle East have largely used a top-down approach, which involved politicians, officials, generals and other decision makers working to create a “forced” solution for the people. He said Givat Haviva, which was awarded the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Prize for Peace Education, is instead tackling the issue from the bottom-up by working directly with people on the grounds of the conflict.

“Givat Haviva is bringing together Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians to get to know one another as people first, to get rid of categorical thinking,” he said. “This breaks down the barriers.”

Though the road to reconciliation has been difficult, Peleg said Givat Haviva’s efforts to reduce mistrust among Arabs and Jews through a common identity could help both groups look beyond their national, religious, and cultural differences.

“There is a message here that every conflict—even those that seem difficult to tackle— can be resolved,” he said.

Father Berrigan, Fordham’s poet-in-residence since 2000, died at the Jesuit residence Murray-Weigel Hall on April 30 at age 94. He was an accomplished poet and co-founder, along with his brother Philip, of the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear and Christian pacifist group.

“Dan Berrigan was a giant among us. Whatever one makes of his methods, his lifelong pursuit of peace and justice was both heartfelt and critically important,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham.

“He belongs not just to the Jesuits, but to a significant period in American history. His activism came from a poet’s heart—and indeed he was always a highly accomplished poet, a poet who drew his inspiration from the Prophets and the Gospel. His fluency never failed him, and we were blessed to have him for so long as Fordham’s poet-in-residence.”

The Plowshares group was active throughout the 1960s and 70s, and gained notoriety in 1968 when the Berrigans and seven others used homemade napalm to burn draft files in the parking lot of a U.S. Selective Service Office in Catonsville, Maryland, in protest of the Vietnam War. Father Berrigan was convicted of destroying government property and received a three-year sentence in federal prison.

In 1980, the Berrigans and six others broke into a General Electric nuclear facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, damaged nuclear warhead nose cones, and poured blood on documents in the facility. Their arrest and the legal battles that followed were chronicled in the 1982 film In The King of Prussia.

From 1970 to 1995, Father Berrigan spent an estimated seven years in prison for his peace activism, which included protests against the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In June 2012, he lent his support to the Occupy Wall Street movement with a visit to Zuccotti Park.

Father Berrigan was born in Virginia, Minnesota, in 1921, and entered into the Society of Jesus directly out of high school in 1939. He was ordained in 1952.

In addition to his activism, Father Berrigan was lauded for his writing. His first poem appeared in America Magazine in 1942 while he was a student at the Jesuit seminary St. Andrew-on-Hudson. His first book of poetry, Time Without Number, (The MacMillon Company, 1953), won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957. In all, he wrote more than 50 books and various articles and commentaries.

At the request of Father McShane, in 2006 Father Berrigan penned Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ami: Recitative for Four Voices; Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Peter Faber and Chorus, timed for the Jesuit Jubilee Year. The 2007 performance piece, which was was set to music by  composer Elizabeth Swados, celebrated the genesis of the Society of Jesus, which was founded in 1541 by St. Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Peter Faber.

Robin Andersen, PhD, professor of communications and former head of Fordham’s peace and justice studies program, said Father Berrigan ran seminars for Fordham faculty on how to teach peace, and also taught courses for students such as Poems by Poets in Torment.

She said that he provided great comfort to students whose faith in peace was shaken by the events of 9/11.

“There were calls to bomb Afghanistan, and I remember one of his students asked him, ‘How can you still have a peace attitude after this?’ Father Berrigan told him ‘Well you know, being a peace activist between wars is kind of like being a vegetarian between meals,’” Andersen recalled.

His writing and activism occasionally intersected, as in The Dark Night of Resistance (Doubleday & Company, 1971), which he wrote in 1970 while he was in hiding from the FBI on federal charges.

In interviews, Father Berrigan credited Dorothy Day with piquing his initial interest in antiwar activism. He said, while he was teaching at Brooklyn Preparatory School, Day had sent a student pacifist to him who sought instruction in the Catholic faith and peace. The musings of John Cuthbert Ford, S.J. on the morality of saturation bombing—such as the firebombing of Dresden in World War II—further convinced him to oppose war.

In a 2012 interview for Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan’s Challenge to Catholic Social Thought (Fordham University Press 2012), Father Berrigan was asked to reflect on how things had changed in the 44 years since his arrest for the Catonsville event.

“The mass[es]of our people are victimized by politics and by the media,” Father Berrigan wrote. “We are called to be sensible and realistic about the state of our world without being completely absorbed into it, so that we have nothing to say about it, nothing to do about it.”

“I think, if we stop with just the analysis of how bad things are, we miss the point of the Gospel, which is saying to us in various ways [and]in all sorts of ways what is to be done.

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

The wake and funeral arrangements for Father Berrigan are as follows:
Thursday, May 5:
2-5 pm and 7-9 pm, Wake
Church of St Francis Xavier
46 W. 16th St., New York, NY
Friday, May 6:
7:30 am, Peace Witness and March to Xavier. Assemble at Mary House, 55 East Third St, New York NY
Mass at 10 am
Church of St Francis Xavier, 46 W. 16th St., New York, NY

Donations in his memory may be made to the Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ Fund for Social Ministries, Jesuits USA Northeast Province at sjnen.org/donate. The Province has also has created a memorial Peacemaking Fund, which will directly support peacemaking efforts at a wide range of Jesuit works along the entire eastern United States.