The pro Israel organization Stand With Us is at the center of a controversy around the participation of Zionists at the US Social Forum. Briefly: A workshop was approved on LGBTQI struggles in the Middle East. Palestine solidarity activists and Arab queers pressed the Social Forum’s National Planning Committee to cancel the workshop.
Yesterday, the Social Forum released a statement confirming that they have cancelled the previously approved workshop:
“…we are grateful for the letters and e-mails from our fellow social justice activists regarding a workshop being put on by the organization Stand With Us. The goals and practices of this organization violate our principles. Far from its claim to represent LGBTQI communities in the Middle East, its purpose is to defend and justify Israeli aparheid. Jewish, Palestine solidarity and queer organizations have witnessed and experienced Stand With Us disrupting events and discussion on Palestinian rights and then claiming censorship when stopped. Their presenter has claimed to speak for the “queer Middle East” when in reality he speaks only for Israel. When asked to include other voices of queers from the region, he has refused.”
[Couldn't find this online - so no link.]
I’m fine with this outcome. I could see a progressive Zionist presentation on Israel finding it’s way to the program, especially if done together with other voices, so as to educate people and ‘problematize’ the often simplistic dismissal of any and all Zionists.
[Zionists! Zionism! Zionists! Zionism! That got the blood flowing, didn't it! It's like verbal aerobics for activists.]
It’s also nice to see that the Social Forum leaders took time to explore the situation carefully. They researched the group, talked to people, and even tried to work with the proposer of the event to include Arab queers. For this reasoned stance, they passed through a few days of shrill verbiage from folks who don’t understand why Forum leaders weren’t faster on the draw.
Just look at what Helem, Al-Qaws, ASWAT, and Palestinian Queers for BDShad to say:
SAY NO TO PINKWASHING AT THE USSF!
We, the undersigned queer Arab organizations, are appalled by the US Social Forum’s decision to allow Stand with Us to utilize the event as a platform to pinkwash Israel’s crimes in the region.
Whoa. Thanks USSF for being thoughtful about this.
And: The way that supporters of Israel use tolerance of gays and lesbians in some parts of Israel as a way to repulse criticism of how Arabs and Palestinians are treated is disgusting. Does San-Francisco excuse the war in Iraq? Pathetic.
IN OTHER NEWS
A commenter on my previous Social Forum post points out that one of Emily H.’s works is featured on the cover of the Palestine folks booklet. That’s great! A big cheery Detroit hello to any Social Forum folks reading these posts. The weather is fine, the lines are moving, and the downtown area at least looks fantastic. Big ups to everyone that helped put this together.
Left-wing Jews in NYC held a debate for and against boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and the whole thing is on YouTube. Voices against feature JJ Goldberg and Kathleen Peratis; those in favor feature Hannah Mermelstein and Yonatan Shapiro.
American Jewish Committee’s David Harris wrote an op-ed in the International Herald Tribute — but what the eff is it saying other than how he can’t stop thinking about the Holocaust? This explains so much.
And in commentary, Gershom Gorenberg says despite American Jews’ dissonance on Israel’s illiberalism, there are now newvenues for the expression of your values. “Don’t give up. Get involved.”
I can only imagine the pitch meeting: “What if the Swedish Chef was a Zionist?” “But the Swedish Chef is kind of a psycho, totally unaware of the havoc he’s wreaking on everyone around him while he’s trying to make his meal.” “Exactly! It’s perfect!”
I’ll admit, after watching the first one I stumbled across (“Jew Bread“), I turned to my office-mate and asked if she tell whether this was anti-Semitic or Zionist. After watching a few more, I think the answer is clearly “both.”
It’s like a train wreck… Each clip I watch repulses me in new and different ways, but I can’t look away…
So the the question is… who’s funding/making/distributing these?
The 2nd US Social Forum will be taking place in Detroit June 22-26, bringing together an estimated 20,000 people eager to see a big shift leftwards. Claiming that ‘another world is possible’ they further insist that it can only happen if the United States undergoes a fair amount of change as well.
I attended the first US Social Forum, as well as the first ever World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a decade ago. I’ve attended as both an Israeli and as an American. What less committed observers need to know is that this is the largest US or international gathering of people’s movements, social justice organizations and left wing political organizations. And by ‘left’ we aren’t talking about MoveOn, we’re talking about organizations that have, or had, words like ‘communist’, ‘socialist’, and ‘revolutionary’ in their name. (See here for a list of the National Planning Committee member organizations.)
At the same time, organizations well within the respectable mainstream of American society are also present, including the AFL-CIO, Jobs with Justice, and the American Friends Service Committee. The end result is a unique event that is simultaneously mass based, politically relevant, and very far to the left of what passes for political culture in the United States. It’s an antidote to all the mechanisms in place that seek to embed political change within the Democrat-Republican spectrum. More »
Ever wonder how to host a sustainable kiddush? How to cut down your kindergarden’s carbon footprint? Thinking about utilizing some of your land or roof-space for a garden at your synagogue or Jewish institution? Realizing you’re wasting too much food and money? Now there’s help, designed just for you.
Hazon has compiled a giant food guide covering everything from ethical kashrut to efficient energy use to recipes and much more. Whether you’re at a 20-something indy minyan in someone’s apartment or a 2000 family suburban synagogue, the quaint and cozy shul around the corner or the local JCC, there’s something in there for you.
Turkey demonstrated the type of restraint in its dealings with the PKK that it has demanded from Israel in dealing with the Palestinians.
From today’s Christian Science Monitor:
PKK attacks: Turkey’s leader vows to ‘annihilate’ Kurdish rebels
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey will not stop until the PKK is “annihilated” after the Kurdish rebel group killed 12 Turkish soldiers over the weekend.
[…]
The AP reports that they killed one Iraqi Kurdish girl and wounded two others. After those strikes, the PKK threatened to expand its reach, saying it would “take our operations to all Turkish cities” if the governmet does not stop its attacks, reports Agence France-Presse.
“Turkey wants to take us towards war,” the group’s spokesman, Ahmed Denis, told AFP. “She is not sincere in dealing with the Kurdish issue and doesn’t want to deal with this issue peacefully.”
Just another day in the Middle East.
Full story here.
Join Habitus editor Joshua Ellison for a conversation with celebrated author André Aciman.
Together we will explore a provocative question: Is New York the Diaspora? With its enormous Jewish population, its creativity and culture, and its unparalleled array of options for Jewish living, should we really think of New York City as part of the Jewish Diaspora; or is it just another kind of homeland?
André Aciman has chronicled a life’s journey across continents and has also emerged as one of contemporary New York’s most astute literary observers. He writes: “New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere…a shadow city.” We will talk to André about being a stranger at home in New York, about the place of the city in his recent work, and what it means to be a Jew here.
André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt and, more recently, Call Me By Your Name and Eight White Nights. He is a Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of New York.
Once again Gideon Levy, Haaretz’s intrepid political columnist, has raised an issue which is sure to make him no more friends. To step back a bit, it has always seemed to me that Israelis, especially secular Israelis, but also Religious Zionist Israelis, have enjoyed attacking the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) a bit too much. There is too much vehemence to be explained by the fact that, lets say, they are “parasites” or that they don’t serve in the army and live off the backs of the country, that they discriminate against women. All this is true in whole or in part, yet it does not explain the uniquely passionate animus that is directed toward them, which is not directed toward other segments of society. My theory (which probably won’t garner me any friends either) is that Israeli society cannot abide the fact that the Haredim are a large community of Jewish non-Zionists. I suggest that the reason that so much energy is spent on castigating the haredi world for not serving in the Army—by the same type of people who, if they lived in the United States would accept conscientious objection as a given—is that they forthrightly, perhaps brazenly, declare that they have no share in Zionist ideology.
Gideon Levy gives an example of this in yesterday’s paper (and expands on it in today’s Haaretz, but today’s column is not translated yet–or at least I couldn’t find it on the English site).
The similarity is striking: two insular and arrogant population groups, different and at times peculiar, powerful minorities with authoritative leaders, both with their own laws and norms. The settlers and the ultra-Orthodox – the former is some 300,000 strong, not counting settlers in East Jerusalem, and the latter numbers about 700,000, including Haredi settlers.
[…]
The Ashkenazi Haredim treat the Mizrahim abominably. It is racism. But at least it is not violent, like the racism of the settlers toward Palestinians. The Haredim put their women at the back of the bus; the settlers not only bar Palestinians from their buses, but from the entire road at times. The Haredim erect barriers between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in their schools; the settlers carry out ethnic cleansing under the state’s aegis, like that of 25,000 residents of Hebron.
So who’s the real racist here? Compared to the settlers’ hilltop youth, the yeshiva boys are models of morality. But who gets castigated? The Haredi of course. When will the courts come out against settler racism as they have against Haredi racism? They themselves maintain different systems for penalizing Jews and Arabs. When will we hear about the thousands of fictitious civil service positions held by settlers – a salaried security official in every mobile home – in the same way that we hear about the Haredi parasites? And what about the thousands of soldiers who have to guard the settlers, the superfluous roads that have been built to serve them, the electricity and water supplies laid for illegal outposts? All of it, everything, paid by us, more than we pay for Torah study as a Haredi occupation.
So let’s call this evil by its true name: a double standard. Cowardice works too.
You kill 10 people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that’s what they do. 20 people, you go to a hospital, they look through a small window at you forever. And over that, we can’t deal with it, you know? Someone’s killed 100,000 people, we’re almost going, “Well done! You killed 100,000 people!? You must get up very early in the morning!”
-Eddie Izzard, comedian
I got back from Europe on Monday. While in Budapest, I had the chance to visit Budapest’s Holocaust museum, the best I’ve ever been to. Everyone who visits Budapest visits the Great Synaoguge, the largest in the world when it was built, but few visit the Holocaust museum, which itself was built around an existing shul from the 1920s. Here’s why it’s a must-see and why it topped Yad Vashem and the one in DC for me.
On June 1st, queer Jewish spirituality outfit Nehirim and NUJLS (the National Union of Jewish LGBTIQQ Students) announced that they were going to merge, becoming one outfit–eventually named Nehirim, with a new Director of Student Programming and Student Programming Advisory Board created to help carry out NUJLS’ mission.
There are some obvious pros to all this queer Jewish convergence: one larger org is able to do more and have a stronger voice than a number of smaller orgs, there are ways to streamline administrative costs and hassles, and it’s much more effective from a fundraising point of view to not have a number of organizations with similar missions competing for dollars–you’ll note that the Schusterman Family Foundation makes an appearance on both press releases, for example. Of course, there are a lot of ways to merge clumsily and at the expense of important parts of an org’s mission–let’s hope no major errors are made on that front–and hopefully there’ll be enough space for each of the visionaries involved to continue to tear it up at the appropriate level. Only time will tell.
JTA reports that thousands of Hareidim went out to protest today, claiming that racism is – apparently- ordained by God, that -as usual- those nasty Supreme Court people are godless atheists in their insistence that they integrate a school, and that a vote for integration is a vote for “flotilla terrorists.”
Just another day in the life:
You have to give it to them, they certainly stand for Torah and are willing to fight for what they believe in, even if it has nothing to do with anything actually in Torah whatsoever, or if in fact, it opposes Torah altogether. No, no, what they say is Torah, it is Torah.
Why are they protesting? Well, hard to say since the Ashkenazi mothers fail to show for jail term, although 35 Ashkenazi fathers show up for their two week sentence. But as we know, they have the god-given, nay, God-demanded right to segregate their daughters from those nasty Sephardi girls, after all, as one mother pointed out, “The court and media don’t understand that this is another world,” a mother who is keeping her daughter out of school said. “The Hasidic program was created because of a different religious outlook. Only pure children attend it,” and we mustn’t forget that, “No court ruling or Education Ministry decision can bring the two groups together,” an Immanuel resident said Wednesday, “It’s like putting Americans and Africans together. They can’t study together with such huge mental differences,” he said.
A message passed along to me through the usual super-secret Jewschool spy network channels…
I would like to invite you all to check out a new online Israel resource… The ALVI site serves as a resource hub ofalternative learning and volunteering opportunities for students and graduates in Israel.
The site also offers information on alternative tourism, unique cultural opportunities, and a guide to learning about and teaching on diverse social and political issues in Israel. Also, stay tuned to ALVI’s “News Updates” for the latest information on job postings, relevant news, and opportunities for direct activism in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
ALVI aims to promote nuanced educational opportunities in Israel and to enlist international support for leading civil society organizations that are working towards a more just, democratic, and peaceful Israel.
Please check out ALVI today at: www.alternativeisrael.org and feel free to pass the site information along to friends, family, and other networks that you think would be interested.
Mosey on over, poke around. This is what the internet is for!
PMO announces plan to ease Gaza siege, but no such decision made
The Prime Minister’s Office announced on Thursday that the security cabinet had agreed to relax Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, but as it turns out, no binding decision was ever made during the cabinet meeting.
The Prime Minister’s Office issued a press release in English following the meeting, which was also sent to foreign diplomats, was substantially different than the Hebrew announcement – according to the English text, a decision was made to ease the blockade, but in the Hebrew text there was no mention of any such decision.
Yossi Sarid at Haaretz has a somewhat fiery condemnation of Haredi attitudes toward the State of Israel.
The ultra-Orthodox public, which has always been cutting down our trees, is now uprooting them. It will destroy basic values, without which a democratic, developed state cannot exist. It will be lost unless it fights back.
He raises some interesting questions: in what ways to Haredim benefit from the existence of the State of Israel as it currently functions? In what ways do they come into conflict with its values? These aren’t questions for which I have anywhere near the requisite authority or experience to give an answer (and I’m not trying to imply one, but they’re worth asking.
In confronting these challenges, will the URJ look to a leader who champions, as Yoffie consistently has, Torah, prayer and the practice of mitzvot? Or will it, in keeping with American Jewry’s larger outward turn, select a leader who will take the movement in a new direction, perhaps seeking to expand Reform Judaism’s involvement in projects of tikkun olam? Whatever happens, the Yoffie era will go down as an important period in the history of the Reform movement. At a “critical juncture in Jewish history,” he made Reform Judaism more Jewish.
Lets ignore the final sentence of this and move on from my aneurysm. I do have some appreciation for what Yoffie has done. Despite Sarna’s point about him growing NFTY (I’m not prepared to give him credit for that anyway), he’s also been openly dismissive of NFTY presidents and overseen the total demolition of the URJ’s college programming and said stuffy nonsense like (I’m paraphrasing here) if you don’t wear a suit to a Reform congregations, you’re a putz.
So I don’t think too highly of him.
But at this point we’ve got a great opportunity to talk about what the right replacement for Yoffie will be like. Sarna’s article explores two possibilities: someone like Yoffie or “a leader who will take the movement in a new direction, perhaps seeking to expand Reform Judaism’s involvement in projects of tikkun olam.”
The new president needs to be able to do two things, neither of which involve being an ideological dogmatician.
Leave tradition and social action to a team of experts and let the new president be the face of a more well-written message. So the first thing the URJ needs is a charismatic salesperson who can tell American Jews why Reform Judaism is good because the URJ has a message/marketing problem.
Meanwhile, the administrative, structural and technological functions of the URJ have to come to forefront of the job of the president of the URJ. The URJ is teaching congregations how to blog, it’s tweeting, it has its own (dysfunctional) blog and it needs someone who understands these things and knows how to grow the URJ with these tools. It needs someone who can be like @daroff with his or her own heavy twitter presence. Last year, the URJ underwent a major restructuring effort. The next president of the URJ has to be an administrator to continue reconsidering the bloated infrastructure of the URJ.
Everyone and your fossilizing bubbe could tell you that Drake, the raucously popular pop-rapper, is “half-Jewish.” Born to a African-American father and Jewish mother in 1986, Drake grew up in a wealthy Jewish neighborhood in Toronto, attended a Jewish Day School and celebrated his Bar Mitzve. Now he’s at the pinnacle of hip-hop stardom, and his lyrical glosses on Jewishness are blaring. Take for example:
By the way I’m Jewish and turnin 22
Gets depressing wen u see yo favorite rappers goin thru it
Tryna re-invent themselves showin no improvement
Gettin crushed by this lite skin youngen on sum new shit
40 just record it and we’ll drop this here
I mean, he did grow up in the predominantly wealthy Jewish Forest Hill neighborhood in Toronto, and now he is umbilically linked with Lil-Wayne, who is currently serving a sentence at Rikers Island for weapons possession. That would confuse me dearly, too.
…And so you might expect a load of hip-hop wise-men analyzing Drake’s pilgrimage from a privileged, multi-racial Jewish child in Canada to a hip-hop entertainer reaping the fruits of America’s urban, black pop-star landscape.
But, surprisingly, Drake himself seems to be the only one not tip-toeing around the issue. In an interview with Heeb, Drake reflects on growing up in the Canadian Jewish mix:
I went to a Jewish school, where nobody understood what it was like to be black and Jewish,” he says. “When kids are young it’s hard for them to understand the make-up of religion and race.” He recalls being called a schvartze, repeatedly. “But the same kids that made fun of me are super proud [of me] now. And they act as if nothing happened.” He wears a diamond-studded Chai (prominently displayed on his Vibe cover) and plans, at some point after the release and promotion of his debut, to travel to Israel. He says his mother has expressed hope he’ll marry “a nice Jewish girl.” As far as public acceptance goes today, by all accounts, religion has been a complete non-issue.
Yet, Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Root dismisses the whole issue:
In a recent profile in Heeb magazine — Drake is Jewish on his mother’s side — Drake himself identifies astutely, if unwittingly, one of the main weaknesses of the album: ” ‘The internet has f**ked the game up so bad, that if I don’t [sell a lot of records], I’m curious to sit back and watch whoever does … I honestly can say, the steps we’ve taken, the way that how passionate we are about this … ‘ He trails off..
So I’ll make a claim The Root dismisses: Drake’s Jewishness is central to understanding his rise, his fame, his appeal and his success. Is he the Moses Mendelssohn of Hip-Hop? Is he translating contemporary Jewishness into a marketable hip-hop vernacular and suggesting a conversation about race and Jewish culture? Or does he just want to celebrate human brotherhood? Will his children convert to Christianity?
If I were going to be in New York City on July 14, which sadly, I’m not, I’d go to this event being held by awesome lit journal 
more friends. To step back a bit, it has always seemed to me that Israelis, especially secular Israelis, but also Religious Zionist Israelis, have enjoyed attacking the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) a bit too much. There is too much vehemence to be explained by the fact that, lets say, they are “parasites” or that they don’t serve in the army and live off the backs of the country, that they discriminate against women. All this is true in whole or in part, yet it does not explain the uniquely passionate animus that is directed toward them, which is not directed toward other segments of society. My theory (which probably won’t garner me any friends either) is that Israeli society cannot abide the fact that the Haredim are a large community of Jewish non-Zionists. I suggest that the reason that so much energy is spent on castigating the haredi world for not serving in the Army—by the same type of people who, if they lived in the United States would accept conscientious objection as a given—is that they forthrightly, perhaps brazenly, declare that they have no share in Zionist ideology.
follow us on Twitter
follow us on Facebook
subscribe to our email