| Book review: "Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership"noreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 23 Jun 04:45 AM I generally abhor divisions in the | | I generally abhor divisions in the Jewish community. There are too few of us to be able to afford partisanship and needless hate for our own.
For those reasons I have been reluctant to criticize fellow Jews outside of the fringe who are anti-Zionist or anti-Judaism. And I have been equally reluctant to criticize the leaders of American Jewish organizations, trying and wanting to assume that they do the best they can with the resources they have.
That position is no longer tenable after reading Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, a new book of damning essays edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser. Betrayal is a strong indictment of those American Jewish leaders, on both the national and local levels.
The single biggest issue that should unify American Jews is the fight against antisemitism. But as Betrayal shows, the mostly self-appointed American Jewish leaders have been more interested in maintaining their positions of power than in going toe to toe with today's antisemites.
Worse, in example after example in this book, when grassroots Jewish groups organize to fight a specific threat to American Jews, these pseudo leaders generally try to dissuade and discourage them. They claim that their connections with other powerful people, and their quiet diplomacy, will carry the day. Their message to ordinary Jews who want to defend themselves from specific threats is...Read More |
From Ian: ZOA to Biden: Rescind 'horrific, frightening' Holocaust museum council appointments The Zionist Organization of America and Mort Klein, its national president, are calling on the Biden administration to rescind its appointment of two individuals to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, which governs the museum. The decision to name Kimberly Marteau Emerson and Alan Solomont to the council is "horrific and frightening," given that the two lead "hostile-to-Israel non-governmental organizations," Klein and the ZOA stated. "Support for a Jewish homeland" is cited as one of the museum's focuses in the 1979 report of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, which Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel chaired. "Thus, the Holocaust Memorial Museum—which by law is mandated to carry out 'support for the Jewish homeland'—should never have board members of anti-Israel organizations on the museum's governing board," Klein and ZOA stated. Emerson is a board member of Human Rights Watch, which is "Israel-bashing and America-bashing" and is "infamous for falsely accusing Israel of 'apartheid,' 'crimes against humanity,' 'persecuting' and 'systematic oppression' and 'inhumane acts' against Palestinians," Klein and the ZOA wrote. Meanwhile, Solomont sits on the board of the "vicious, hostile-to-Israel groups" New Israel Fund and Israel Policy Forum, the latter of which "is so radical that it was...Read More |
What did the world's media call the murderers of four Israelis in Eli this week?
Almost all called them "gunmen."
CNN. Reuters. BBC. The New York Times.
And also Haaretz.
Outside of mainstream Israeli and Jewish media, I could only find Fox News using the word "terrorist."
There are two things that are strange about this.
One is that the EU and US State Department didn't hesitate to call the attack "terrorist."
If the major Western governments consider these attacks to be terror attacks, why does the media have such a problem with it?
The standard answer we always hear is a variant...Read More |
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory. Check out their Facebook page. Tel Aviv, June 22 - A new study confirms what many had assumed or intuited for years, namely that unsavory, unethical, impolite, and, sometimes, illegal behavior on the part of people on the other side of the political aisle from you justifies your adoption of the same or worse behaviors in response. Writing in the journal He Started It, a team of researchers from the University of Racetothegutter in Cellar, Germany, published an article detailing their discovery that when anyone prominent in a political camp, however loosely defined, violates norms that until than many had assumed govern the rhetoric and actions of political expression, that violation gives a moral, interpersonal, and ethical imprimatur for those in the opposing political camp to engage in either those violations themselves, in service of their political cause, or, preferably, to engage in different and more egregious violations of norms. "We found that while norms are supposed to be a good thing," the authors wrote, "in fact they only serve a good purpose if other people, in particular the people with whom you disagree, adhere to them. Norms serve no real purpose once even a single high-profile - or, let's be honest, low-to-medium profile, if you dig long enough - figure on the other side disregards them. Once that...Read More |
From Ian: Melanie Phillips: Israel's American 'frenemy' Whatever the real reason, by minimizing the mortal threat Iran poses to the West, the Biden administration now views Israel as a threat instead because it is determined to stop Iran. The administration therefore regards Israel as a major obstacle to be neutralized. Accordingly, Israel must now view the U.S. as a "frenemy." Of course, the U.S. depends on Israel to be the West's front line of defense in the Middle East, and Israeli intelligence is critical to American security. Israel's biggest potential defense against U.S. perfidy, however, is the American people. American support for Israel is not based on the small U.S. Jewish community but the Christian heartlands of middle America—which would take a very dim view indeed of a political party that was putting Israel at risk. Yet Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who famously alerted the American public to the risks of the 2015 nuclear deal, is now silent. As pointed out by Michael Doran in Tablet, Netanyahu appears to be trapped. The U.S. is projecting friendship with Israel through joint military exercises, working within CENTCOM towards integrated missile defense and dangling the biggest prize of all—the administration's apparent enthusiasm for promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This enthusiasm is false, since normalization would jeopardize the administration's all-important...Read More |
Pottery that contained the argaman dye found at Shikmona
Haaretz publishes a fascinating theory: Israeli archaeologists are rethinking the history of an ancient factory that, thousands of years ago, was one of the largest sites for the production of "royal purple," a dye that adorned the robes of the rich and powerful across the Mediterranean. Tel Shikmona, located on the shore of the modern-day city of Haifa, was interpreted as a Phoenician settlement that produced royal purple from sea-snails. The dye was one of the most sought-after luxuries of the ancient world. But a new paper, putting together information from archaeological digs there over 50 years, reached a new conclusion. For about two centuries, Shikmona was something of a joint venture: an industrial site controlled by the biblical Kingdom of Israel and run by skilled Phoenician workers, say Prof. Ayelet Gilboa, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa and Dr. Golan Shalvi, formerly also at Haifa and now a postdoctoral researcher at Ben-Gurion University. Their study, published in June in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, offers rare insight into the closeness of the ties between the ancient Israelites and the Phoenicians. It also sheds light on the economical background behind...Read More |
Today, the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations will hold hearings on "Responding to Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Bias in the UN, Palestinian Authority, and NGO Community."
Prominent leaders in the field of antisemitism and anti-Zionism will be speaking. Most of their testimonies have been published ahead of time. Here are some highlights.
Natan Sharansky, the famous Soviet dissident, describes how the Soviet Union's pretense of using "anti-Zionism" as a proxy for antisemitism has now been widely adopted by much of the world: In the Soviet
Union, where I grew up,...each time
when official Soviet propaganda starts a new round of attacks
on Israel, every Jew, whether he knows what Zionism means
or not, knows that he has a problem. They are all treated as
not loyal to the Soviet Union, but loyal to Zionist Israel.
Attacks on the Jews have always been a convenient platform
for attacks on Israel and vice versa. Assuming that all this is a
direct result of the dictatorial regime of the Soviet Union,
which needs a convenient scapegoat for accusations, an
external and internal enemy...Read More |
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