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JVPs “Young, Jewish, and Proud” is the gift that keeps on giving. In my original posts (here and here) about their anti-Israel manifesto, I neglected to note another unintentionally hiarious comment by a Young, Jewish, and Proud supporter.
So, it seems that Young, Jewish and Proud isn’t just a group of passionate defenders of justice, they are nothing short of modern day prophets! They see eternal truths that us mere Zionist mortals can’t and, in their divine wisdom, lay salvation for all humanity.
Moreover, based on the comment, it looks like a thorough revision of the Haggadah is in order. Here’s my suggested text for the Maggid:
What makes this night different from all [other] nights?
On all nights we eat sitting upright or reclining, and on this night we all recline!
The tray is restored to its place with the matzah (organic, and made with union, and non-exploitative, labor) partly uncovered. Now we say “We were slaves. . .”
We were slaves to
Pharaohconservative Jewish thought in Egypt, and theL-rd, our G-dyoung progressive Jewish community took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm. Ifthe Holy One, blessed be Hethe anti-imperialists had not taken our fathers out of Egypt, then we, our children and our children’s children would have remained enslaved toPharaohneocons, militarism, & capitalismin Egypt. Even if all of us were wise, all of us understanding, all of us knowingthe TorahThe Communist Manifesto and the Israel section of the Guardian, we would still be obligated to discuss the exodus from Egypt; and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.
Hey, its only a draft.
The ethnic, national, and racial diversity in the Ulpan (intensive Hebrew) class I attended shortly after becoming a citizen of Israel, is a legacy of the cultural diversity and far-flung nature of the Jewish Diaspora: it is said that Jews have come to modern Israel from 103 countries and speak more than 70 different languages. In my class alone, there are Jews from Ethiopia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Moldova, the UK, Italy, Germany, and the U.S.
In addition, other nationalities represented in this global melting pot of Israel are Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Libya, Syria, India, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Canada, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, and others.
Because our instructor used English while conducting class, she would, throughout the day, when explaining something of special importance, often ask the Russian speakers in the class who are fluent enough in English to translate what she said for the Russian non-English speakers, and would ask the same of the Spanish speakers. In the case of those who speak other languages that don’t have a companion national compatriot in class, they had nobody else to rely on other than whatever little English they knew and whatever body language and other non-verbal communication the instructor used. For instance, the Ethiopian in our class, Hanoch, who spoke hardly any English, had nobody else in class to ask for assistance, as nobody speaks his native language of Amharic.
However, on the first day of class, when we were all gathered into the assembly room for an introduction to the Ulpan and to the staff, and we sang Hatikvah, Hiney Ma Tov, and Oseh Shalom, almost everyone was familiar enough with the tradition and spirit of the songs, if not the Hebrew lyrics, that it was as if we were all speaking the same language – the language of the dream we all had to live in Israel, to make Aliyah, and to fulfill the ideals articulated in Hatikvah of being “a free people in a free land.”
The unity of the Jewish nation, which often eludes many Jews and non-Jews alike, the common narrative we share – despite our differing languages, cultures, religious affiliations, and nationalities – of thousands of years of struggles, dreams, and destiny, makes Israel, by almost any measurement, among the more unified nations in the world.
(Indeed, in a 2009 survey, 88% of Israel’s Jews said they were proud to be Israeli, and 95% of them were willing to fight for their country, according to the patriotism survey, making Israel among the most patriotic nations in the world. Indeed, such results places Israel second only to the United States in surveys measuring patriotism and overall sense of national purpose. While Israelis, like citizens in all countries, differ on my things, there simply is no crisis in Israel on the meaning and significance of being an Israeli.)
This is a guest post by Akiva
This week’s Torah reading, “Lech Lecha” recounts how G-d told our father Abraham to move to Israel, and various difficulties Abraham faced while settling there. The first two words “Lech-Lecha” literally mean “Go to yourself” or “Go for yourself”. Why does the Torah teach us that going to Israel is going to yourself?
Rashi (the medieval commentator) explains that our rabbis teach that G-d told Abraham that the move would be for his own pleasure and benefit, and there he would have children and become a great nation.
We go to the trouble of uprooting ourselves and moving for various reasons: to attend university, a new job, be near family, retire in nicer weather. Whatever the instant reason, the underlying intention when we move is to fulfill our purpose, so it gives us pleasure despite the hardship of moving.
G-d told Abraham that moving to Israel was for his pleasure and good because there he could fulfill his purpose of becoming a great nation. We know that Israel is the home of the Jewish people. Without a home, you cannot build a family, let alone a nation. The opportunity to fulfill your true purpose is the greatest pleasure.
For 2000 years most Jews were homeless, and only in the past 120 years has G-d allowed us to begin to come home and rebuild our nation. However, many of us, both inside Israel and abroad, don’t really appreciate what this means to the Jewish people. We are coming home, and this is not merely a move to get an education, a job, or to retire on the Med – this is to fulfill our ultimate purpose - to be a great nation. To be a light unto all the nations. This is the purpose of the Jewish people and the purpose of the world. And working towards this purpose is our pleasure.
Going to Israel and building and defending our nation is so vital because it is our true pleasure and our real purpose. Even if we are not literally moving right now, we can engage in this purpose from where we are. The Ramban (Nachmanides) teaches that a person truly exists where his or her thoughts are. By thinking about Israel and the Jewish people, becoming informed about the issues facing Israel, and speaking out to educate people and defend Israel, you are helping to achieve our purpose. And, as the Torah teaches us, this is our pleasure.
Shabbat Shalom!
This was published by Barry Rubin, at Pajamas Media. (Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal)
It’s always fascinating to find historical parallels to contemporary events. When one discovers an obscure gem of this type, cutting the stone to let it reflect the light of truth is irresistible.
For well over a century, the Jewish people have been beset by an eleventh plague inside their own house: extreme left-wing intellectuals who urge they throw away their own interests, concerns, and even lives for the supposed higher ones of humanity or the chimera of being morally perfect.
According to this view, their supposed true interests lie in bringing about utopia for everyone, paved by abandoning their own aspirations, dissolving their identity while other groups are encouraged to do the opposite.
While I admire Bertram Wolfe for things he did in later life, he spent thirty earlier years campaigning for Communism. During that period he produced one of the greatest examples in this genre of left-wing calls for Jewish suicide. On April 6, 1939, Wolfe made a speech to the Keep America Out of War Congress, opposing U.S. involvement in the looming war in Europe against the Nazis, the worst persecutor of the Jewish people (so far) in modern times.
Wolfe was then an exemplar of what has become known recently by the name “As-a-Jew.” That is, those who never identify as a member of the Jewish people or religion except when bashing some aspect of it, usually in our era, Israel. So they start their rant by saying, “As a Jew…” I oppose this or that thing. (With the implied meaning: Aren’t I a great and noble person!)
In this tradition, Wolfe’s speech ordered Jews to sacrifice themselves for a left-wing cause based on a distorted left-wing view of reality:
The element that makes the war party [who want to fight Nazi Germany] so much larger in New York than elsewhere in this country, [are] those whose anguish blinds their visions as each day their spirits are bruised and shocked afresh by the daily budget of news of Jewish persecutions throughout the world. Profiting by their anguish which amounts to hysteria, there are those who would sell them the coming war as a war against antisemitism. And this is the more dangerous delusion because the growth of militarism and reaction in this country is bringing with it the growth of antisemitism.
In those days, “New York” was a code word, often used by anti-Semites, for Jews. True, he expresses sympathy to gain credibility but only uses it to warn that the worst thing Jews could do was to advocate a war against Hitler.
Why? The left always portrays the true threat to Jews in America as being from the right-wing. Of course, historically there was real truth in it — Charles Lindbergh made a similar antis-Semitic speech at the time — and of course it was quite true in Europe at the time. Still, everyone remembers that conservative British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain practiced appeasement; nobody remembers that the Labor Party voted against Chamberlain’s last-minute reversal of that policy to rearm Britain’s army.
The threat to the east came from fascism, but the danger in the west came from not fighting fascism. You are free to make a modern-day parallel to that sentence.
Those conservatives in America — as well as the more numerous liberals doing so — advocating the United States ally with Britain and France to fight Nazi Germany weren’t anti-Semitic. On the contrary, the isolationists were anti-Semites. And those anti-Semites on the extreme isolationist right held precisely the same view as Wolfe and the Communists or pacifists on the left. Both extremes were enemies of the Jews, not just one. And you are also free to make a modern-day parallel to that paragraph.
This was published by Ruth Wisse in Jewish Ideas Daily
The problem of the Arab-Israel conflict begins with the term itself, which misrepresents the unilateral Arab war against Israel as a bilateral dispute. Unilateral aggression is not unheard of—when did Poland ever aggress against Germany or Russia?—but nothing in United Nations history compares in intensity or fixity with Arab belligerence toward Israel, a UN member state.
The Arab war has less to do with the scant physical space occupied by the Jewish state than with the opportunity it offers Arab leaders to consolidate their power and prestige by organizing against an external target, especially one trailing so long and encrusted a history of religious and ethnic vilification. This same politics of blame has been no less useful to Westerners like, most recently, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their 2006 indictment of America’s “Israel Lobby.” Had these two respected academics set out to study dispassionately the role of American special-interest groups in the making of Middle East policy, they might have unearthed a fascinating contrast in the disparate way that Arabs and Jews operate. Instead, by single-mindedly fingering the Jews, they neatly drew attention away from the larger story of Arab influence-peddlers.
Now at last comes the information missing from Walt and Mearsheimer’s screed. In Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby, we see how, in contrast to the altogether transparent workings of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobby supported by tens of thousands of American citizens across political lines, the Arab lobby truly does merit being called, in Bard’s subtitle, an “invisible alliance that undermines America’s interests in the Middle East.”
Ahmadinajad apparently distraught over Castro's recent criticism
Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Castro in Havana, and while you should read the whole thing (linked below), here are some surprising nuggets:
[Castro] began this discussion by describing his own, first encounters with anti-Semitism, as a small boy. “I remember when I was a boy – a long time ago – when I was five or six years old and I lived in the countryside,” he said, “and I remember Good Friday. What was the atmosphere a child breathed? `Be quiet, God is dead.’ God died every year between Thursday and Saturday of Holy Week, and it made a profound impression on everyone. What happened? They would say, `The Jews killed God.’ They blamed the Jews for killing God! Do you realize this?”
He went on, “Well, I didn’t know what a Jew was. I knew of a bird that was a called a ‘Jew,’ and so for me the Jews were those birds. These birds had big noses. I don’t even know why they were called that. That’s what I remember. This is how ignorant the entire population was.”
“He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.”
As Goldberg noted, one should remember that “Castro is the grandfather of global anti-Americanism”, and he has been a severe critic of Israel. He has, also, denied his own populace even the most rudimentary civil and political rights.
However, its hard not to take at least some pleasure in the fact that his comments to Goldberg will no doubt pose a dilemma for Iran’s apologists and radical lefties the world over.
Gosh, given Castro’s statements about the Holocaust denying Iranian President – and this seeming new feud between such respectable “revolutionaries” – what are decent, respectable anti-American, anti-Zionist, anti-Imperialists to do?!
h/t ModernityBlog
This is cross-posted at NewsRealBlog
By Phyllis Chesler
Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism hosted a major conference in which I was privileged to be a participant. “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity” was envisioned by Professor Charles Asher Small who founded the Initiative. The conference was also sponsored by the Issac and Jessie Kaplan Center for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town, in association with the Vidal Sasoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University; The Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University; and the Rabin Chair Forum, George Washington University.
My plenary panel was the only panel which focused on women and anti-Semitism. It was chaired by Jerusalem based scholar, Jennifer Roskies. My co-panelists included Thyme Siegel, whose speech was titled: “Sisterhood was powerful and Global. Where Did it Go?” and Dr. Nora Gold whose speech was titled: “Fighting Anti-Semitism in the Feminist Community.”
We had the very best time when we met the previous afternoon. Thyme, Nora, and I go back, way back, to the 1960s in feminist America. These days, Thyme, an independent researcher and Women’s Studies teacher, is holding an Israeli flag at Berkeley when her former friends stand holding a Palestinian flag; she has come a long, long way from her matriarchal, lesbian separatist days in Eugene, Oregon. Dr. Nora Gold is using her Toronto-based research to educate feminists about racism against Jews. She is often successful. I look forward to working with them and with our very gracious Chair Jennifer, soon again.
Make no mistake. Others also enjoyed what we had to say and indeed, said the most complimentary things to us afterward. This is no small feat given the greats who were in attendance. I want to thank both Jennifer Roskies and Charles Small for this amazing opportunity.
The History and Psychological Roots of Anti-Semitism Among Feminists, Their Gradual Palestinianization and Stalinization
YALE AUGUST 25, 2010
By Phyllis Chesler
Four score and ten years ago women won the right to vote in the United States. And thirty years ago, in 1980, I stood with the Israeli delegation in Copenhagen at the United Nations conference on women—the true precursor of the anti-Zionist conference in Durban in 2001. Twenty-nine years ago, right here in Connecticut, at the University at Storrs, I convened a panel at the annual convention of the National Women’s Studies Association to challenge American feminists about both their anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
I had been doing this since the early 1970s but even I could not have predicted the rapid and extreme Stalinization and Palestinianization that would take place among academics and activists in general. I could never have imagined that the western intelligentsia, the “good” people, including feminists, would make so tragic an alliance with Islamic barbarism and misogyny.
I became a feminist leader in 1968-1969. I remain one. Most of the other feminists of my generation are no longer engaged in the historical moment.
Are women racists? We might as well ask: Are women human beings?
But are women also anti-Semites?
To do justice to this subject might require another conference. Women have internalized the same prejudices as men have. Like men, women are also sexists and racists. Women are also consummate bystanders at the crossroads where evil meets its prey. The majority feminist view has viewed women as “weak” or “innocent” non-actors, powerless to affect the destiny of nations. This is a fantasy and bears no relationship to reality.
Women are also consummate collaborators. Women try to choose powerful men as protectors. They do not ask them what they do at the office or at the concentration camp.
Are educated women, human right activists, feminists, lesbian feminists, Jewish lesbian feminists anti-Semites too?
Hell yes. Neither education, talent, ambition, privilege—nor vulnerability, pariah status, or a sense of grievance—seems to inoculate people against the virulent virus of anti-Semitism.
Thus, I have lived to see the day when feminists—most, but not all of whom, are women—seem to care more about the alleged “occupation” of a country which does not exist (Palestine) than they care about the real Islamist occupation of women in “Palestine.” American and European feminists are postcolonial, postmodern, anti-interventionists; in the name of “political correctness,” “cultural relativism,” and “cultural sensitivity,” they no longer believe in men and women’s universal human rights and no longer take a stand against apartheid—at least not when it is practiced by Muslims.
Instead, many feminists scapegoat Israel as an apartheid state and refuse to understand that Islam is the largest practitioner of gender and religious apartheid in the world.
Anti-racism, not anti-Semitism, is the feminist priority—except where Israel is concerned. To such feminists, Zionism still equals racism. They do not understand that precisely the opposite is true: Anti-Zionism equals racism. And that it is the new anti-Semitism—that and its Islamic version.
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