by
Jonah Geffen, Rabbinical Student
Kelly Cohen, Jewish Educator
We are trapped in a discourse that has no logical end. It has been asserted that the knowledge and life experience of the current generation of Rabbinical students with regard to Israel is cause for great concern and fear. The deans and Presidents of Rabbinical schools have responded to the contrary, stating that though perhaps more willing to “wrestle” with Israel, these students are wise and committed. And yet, this entire conversation remains shallow and paternalistic. The debate has been devoted strictly to the students, their teachers and the methods by which they are chosen and taught. We believe this discourse to be fundamentally flawed. We note with dismay that this conversation about Diaspora Jews and our relationship to Israel has left out Israel, its choices and actions.
It is true, we do have a different relationship with Israel than our parents’ generation. How could we not? The nature of the situation in Israel today is so vastly different than it was forty years ago. The world changes, people’s perceptions change, reality changes and our generation has been raised to understand that we must work to build a better future for Israel and to appreciate but not dwell on its past. We have been raised in the American ideal, that no human being should live subject to tyranny, that every individual should be judged on her or his own merit and to seek out the personal interaction needed for true understanding. We are comfortable and confident Jews – and this reality is not a character flaw. We know what we see with our own eyes. We see injustices, religious and political, that need to end. This is true not only because we refuse to see all Palestinians as our enemies, but fundamentally because we refuse to blind ourselves to the fact that the reality that has been created is bad for the Jewish People as a whole. It hurts us as a people to exist in this reality and creating further divides amongst ourselves is not the answer. We cannot truly be am hofshi b’artzenu until everyone b’artzenu is free. As long as we are perpetuating these injustices, stoking fears and succumbing to anger – we will not achieve this deep collective wish, articulated so beautifully in Israel’s national anthem. More »
(Full disclosure – I’m currently a student in a joint Pardes/Hebrew College MA program)
So, R’ Daniel Landes, Pardes Rosh Yeshiva, published this review of R’ Art Green’s new book, Radical Judaism. I’m not going to excerpt it, because you should just go read the whole thing.
Here’s a leaked response from R’ Green:
To the editor:
Rabbi Daniel Landes’ da’ mah she-tashiv (“Know what to answer the heretic”) approach to my Radical Judaism, protecting innocents from “the dangers lurking in the rhetoric that Green and like-minded thinkers employ,” represents a theological bankruptcy lurking in traditional Jewish circles. The forces of religion fought two great battles in the twentieth century, one against evolution and the other, taken more seriously by Jews, against Biblical criticism. It lost them both, quite decisively. These defeats, plus the Holocaust, are real parts of the baggage that any intellectually honest Jewish theology must confront. My book is an attempt to create a viable Judaism in the face of those realities. Landes may choose to live in a closed circle that pretends these uncomfortable facts do not exist, continuing to play by the old theological rules. For Jews living outside those circles, such an approach does not work. He should know; many of his students are among them. More »
If you had told me three years ago, when I first came to Israel, that I would be spending my Friday afternoons protesting in East Jerusalem, I never would have believed you. If you had told me that the behavior of this country and its residents was going to make it difficult for me to feel comfortable practicing Judaism, I would have believed you even less.
Since I started attending the weekly protests in Sheikh Jarrah, I’ve stopped going to shul on Friday night. In part, it’s logistics – I get home tired and sweaty at 6 or 6:30, and I want a break and a shower before dinner. Partially, though, it’s become uncomfortable for me. There’s something that Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli human rights lawyer who grew up in the Reform community outside of Boston, wrote once, which I increasingly feel in myself:
“Unless I’m with people who I am certain do not espouse Zionism or any form of oppression, I cannot comfortably honor the tradition, or even be sure I want to be part of it.”
Even in my struggle with Judaism itself, the past three years of studying gemara have oriented me toward the world through the lens of text and textual connections. So here’s the gezerah shavah I have to offer:
There is a liturgical similarity between Kabbalat Shabbat and the weekly protest. In L’cha Dodi, the line is “hitoreri, hitoreri, ki va orech kumi ori” – wake up, wake up, for your light has come, arise and shine. In the protest “liturgy,” one of the chants uses the same verb – “ezrachim lehitorer, hafascism kvar over” – residents, wake up, fascism has already passed (it works better in Hebrew).
I’ve been dwelling on those lines as representative of the tension that I’m feeling around typical religious practice (as opposed to, say, Heschel’s praying with his feet). More »
“We are extending our hand in peace,” said Ghawi. “We have lost hope that the Israeli establishment is able to make decisions, so we wish to talk directly to the Israeli public. Also, we are here to say that the prisoners are our sons and we favor their release. It is impossible to talk only about one side of the equation – the release of Shalit also means the release of Palestinian prisoners.”
Neither my wife nor I were able to make it to the rally last night. Before reading this story, it didn’t even occur to us to go. But we discussed standing in solidarity with Nasser – as Bassam Aramin, one of the founders of Combatants for Peace, said to me recently, “they’re all our children.”
I woke up this morning to discover that Nasser, his son, and one of the Jewish Israeli activists who was with him were stopped for questioning on their way to the protest last night. They were detained, searched, and humiliated by the police, for no reason other than being a Palestinian and a leftist walking together in Jerusalem.
“They told us it was their right to search, take our cell phones and interrogate us. I asked them ‘Why are you arresting me,’ and they replied ‘because we hate Arabs, but we hate people like you even more’.”
Yotam Wolf, the Israeli activist who was with Nasser last night, tells his version of the story here in Hebrew.
It seemed to me a profound act, for Nasser to stand in solidarity with the Shalit family – to say that their child, as well as the many Palestinian children currently (and in many cases illegally) held in prison, deserve to be able to go home to their parents. I thought back to the night of the flotilla, when two women who were sitting in the Shalit protest tent outside the prime minister’s house, came to shout at those of us protesting nearby – a protest organized, at least in part, by the Sheikh Jarrah activists. How wonderful would it have been to have been able to say to them that our Palestinian friends protested in favor of Shalit’s release as well – that we want freedom and security for everyone’s children.
But alas, the forces that be seem not to be interested in that kind of solidarity. Ynet reports that Nasser will try again to visit the protest tent in the coming days. I hope the next visit is less eventful.
”In attacking the Freedom Flotilla, Israel has once again demonstrated to the world a heinous brutality. But I know that there are very many Israelis who compassionately and bravely campaign for a just peace. With broadcasting journalists from mainstream television programmes accompanying our boat, Israel will have a great chance to show the world that there is another way, a way of courage rather than fear, a way of hope rather than hate’,’ says Edith Lutz, an organizer and passenger on what is being called the “Jewish boat.”
”Jüdische Stimme,” or Jewish Voice for Peace, along with European Jews for a Just Peace in the Near East, and Jews for Justice For Palestinians (UK) are “sending a call to the leaders of the world: Help Israel find her way back to reason, to a sense of humanity and a life without fear.”
I wonder what the IDF will do with a boat full of Jews.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington in a much-feted effort to restore damaged ties with the United States, new tensions in East Jerusalem threaten to rekindle a diplomatic row over Jewish building beyond the Green Line in the city.
On Saturday lawyers served eviction notices to two Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, a focus of clashes between Arab residents and settlers.
The families were ordered to vacate their properties within 45 days.
Personally, I find the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah to be the best thing that happened to the Israeli left in years. The number of the people present there doesn’t seem that impressive, but the crowd grows each week, and it is clear that the police and the municipality will find new evacuations very hard to carry out. More »
Daoud Nasser is one of my heroes. His family owns a plot on top of a hill between the village of Nahalin and the illegal settlement of Neve Daniel. When you enter the land, there is a stone which reads “We Refuse to Be Enemies.” I’ve been there many times, and I know few other Palestinian families who encourage visiting Jewish groups (I’ve visited the Nasser’s most often with Encounter) to sing and pray, and who take such joy from the expression of all faiths in their home.
Their story is a both typical and unique. The land has been in the family’s hands since the Ottoman times, but beginning in the early 1990s, the Israeli military has sought to confiscate the property. Undaunted, the Nassar family have developed their land and established the ‘Tent of Nations‘ project, whose activities include “educating local children from the refugee camps about rural Palestine, hosting young people for camps and activities such as open-air theatre, and acting as a forum for internationals and Palestinians to get to know each other”. The Nassars have also grown strong links with international supporters, including in Germany, the USA and UK.
Daoud sent out the following e-mail on Thursday:
Today at 2.00 pm in the afternoon, 2 officers form the Israeli Civil Administration guarded by Israeli soldiers came to our farm and gave us NINE demolishing orders for nine ( structures) we built in the last years without a building permit from the Israeli Military Authority. The demolishing orders are for: tents, animals shelters, metal roof in front of both old houses, the restrooms (Shelters) , a water cistern, a metal container and 2 underground renovated cave structures. One officer was writing the demolishing orders and the other was taking pictures with two cameras, Israeli soldiers were following them everywhere and pointing their guns on us. More »
This has started to make the rounds today. Peter Beinart at the New York Review of Books.
The central argument:
For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
I don’t have much to add to what’s already been written at Tablet and Mondoweiss.
Chorus:
City of David, City of Peace
Criminal haven, den of thieves.
Spiritual knaves, as Jeremiah preached
We’re digging our graves with our arrogant greed.
The undivided, eternal, Come all, come one,
never mind the person behind the curtain.
The fix is in, the deal’s sealed, hon.
El-Ad can drill on and steal Silwan
Arab permits to build — you won’t see one
but strike ‘em down, they get stronger like Obi Wan
I’m game to come to Zion, but baby, get real, mon
no game; you can’t steal home like Neon Deion
What kind of pioneer relies on theft and con
your claims of pioneer’s straight frontin’ agwon
A real pioneer is creative, original
integrates indigenous aboriginals
my watchdog clock, tick tock, it don’t stop
I’m such a pioneer that my name is La Rock
You’re liars and thieves, a fake a crock
in the houses that you take in Sheikh Jarrah.
you’re ecstatic — you shock me like sweater static
spastic ’bout the land like heroine addicts
we’ll be the first to die like Crispus Attucks
grow uncontrolled — that tactic’s cancerous
I came into the door; I’ve said it before
I’ll block you like Emeka Okafor
You gladiate with child’s play like patty-cake, I’ll vaccinate
evacuate you, bat your best away like Shane Battier More »
Just a few days after “incitement day,” today’s protest in Sheikh Jarrah was far more tense that have been the protests for the past month or so. Y-net reports:
Violent clashes broke out Friday afternoon between left-wing activists and police forces in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
About 30 protestors were arrested and one demonstrator was lightly injured. She was evacuated to the Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital in the capital, suffering from bruises.
…
At one point, about 100 protestors settled on the road leading to the Simeon the Just compound, which was recently inhabited by four Jewish families armed with a court order following the evacuation of Arab residents.
The police declared the protest an illegal gathering and ordered the protestors sitting on the road to evacuate themselves within three minutes. The activists refused to leave and were forcibly evacuated from the area.
In the same place where earlier this week the police protected 2 days of nationalist, pro-settlement celebration, it was clear today that those of us who do not share that sentiment do not have equal rights to express our views in the neighborhood. What a country.
Last night, I heard Prof. Jonathan Sarna give a lecture on Democratization in American Jewry in the years following the Revolutionary War. He explained, using a couple of fascinating examples, that in that period of time you start to see the waning of the authority of the synagogue, and the Jewish community more generally: break-away shuls, a Kohein marrying a widowed convert against the wishes of the shul leadership, and a learned individual finding halachic solution to issues involving the excommunication of intermarried Jews, against the wishes of the kahal.
During Q&A, someone asked about the relationships of the break-away shuls to the organizations from which they departed. Prof. Sarna explained that, in time, exterior threats would cause these groups to come together. I’ve heard a similar explanation about the relationship of the Hasidim to the Mitnagdim after the haskalah. The modern example given was an Orthodox Rabbi sitting on the bimah of a Conservative shul in Boston during Cast Lead, claiming that differences between them needed to be put aside when Israel was threatened.
I understood his point, but the example made me cringe. I remember there being some level of objection from within the Jewish community, even during Cast Lead, and it pains me that the best example for the uniting of Jewish community is around a mythic threat to Israel (which is not to say that I approve of rockets, either). It being erev Yom Yerushalayim, I’m also reminded of the mythic existential threat from ’67, but I digress.
We’ve done an OK job of covering a number of recent cases of civil rights problems in Israel (here, here, here). Over at Zeek, Moshe Yaroni sums things up beautifully:
Israeli democracy is under siege, and it’s no less stark than that. For years, the peace groups in Israel have been warning that occupation cannot co-exist with democracy without one eventually strangling the other. It is no longer a theoretical argument. More »
MJ Rosenberg, over at MediaMatters, has a great piece on the Millenial-American relationship to Israel, which is, as he says, typified by the worldview of the host of The Daily Show.
And what is the worldview Stewart conveys? It is skepticism about any and all ideology, a belief that racial and ethnic boundaries between people are just plain dumb, and, above all, that true believers in anything are downright funny.
Not surprisingly, Jon Stewart is Jewish and assertively so. Being a Jew is part of his shtick. But he’s clearly neither religious nor an ethnic chauvinist. As for his politics on Israel, I’d classify him as J Street. And that makes him typical of both the late boomers and their kids.
That is why all the free Birthright trips to Israel aren’t changing anything. And it’s why those cheering young AIPAC-ers do not represent anything.
The generation coming up now tries to think for themselves. And, although no smart kid would ever turn down a free trip to Washington, DC or to any foreign country with a beach, they take the propaganda with a grain of salt. It does not matter that they are told that the Palestinians are responsible for their own problems, these kids don’t buy it.
I feel like it’s a pretty decent description of my generation. When my brother was going on birthright, I sent him a copy of Joe Sacco’s Palestine for another perspective (Rosenberg’s grain ofsalt). My own politics aren’t J Street’s, but I appreciate the work they are doing to widen the acceptable conversation within the US Jewish Community – despite the recent witch-hunting in SF and Boston (I thought those were liberal cities!).
Didi Remez at Coteret (which, if you care about Israel, you should be reading regularly), cross-posted a piece from a new blog called Gaza Gateway, about Ahmed Sabah, a Palestinian who has been separated from his family in the West Bank, and is currently camped out at Erez crossing, refusing to enter Gaza. We’re starting to see the effects of the recently passed military order giving the military much broader power to arrest and deport. Sabah’s case is worth following in and of itself, but the kicker from the post is the following:
On the one hand, Israel claims that it has ended its occupation of Gaza and that Gaza is a “foreign” and even “hostile” entity for whose 1.5 million residents – Israel bears no responsibility. On the other hand, Israel has determined, that Mr. Sabeh is a “resident” of the supposedly “foreign” entity of Gaza (through Israel’s control of the Palestinian Population Registry) and that Israel may force him to live there (through Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders).
Compare Mr. Sabeh’s plight with that of Palestinians who entered the West Bank from Jordan, but Israel refuses to “recognize” their residence and issue them Palestinian ID cards. Israel does not try to deport them to Jordan, because Israel cannot dictate who is a citizen of Jordan and cannot force Jordan, a sovereign state, to accept a deportee. Not so for Gaza, part of the occupied Palestinian territory, where Israel decides who is a Palestinian resident and uses its control to dictate where he or she may live (in the case of Mr. Sabeh – thus far with only limited success).
Maybe President Obama and Elie Wiesel should chat about this.
One of the folks on the J Street mission said to me “if it isn’t in the New York Times, it didn’t happen.” Apparently, the Sheikh Jarrah protests are real, now.
Today East Jerusalem exudes the palpable feel of a city occupied by a foreign power. And it is, to an extent — although much of the world doesn’t recognize Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to halt the construction of new housing units for Jewish Israelis in the Arab neighborhoods. “Jerusalem is not a settlement,” he recently told an audience in Washington.
Not all Israelis agree with this policy. For over a year, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Israelis and Palestinians have been gathering in Sheik Jarrah on Fridays to protest the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. Israeli courts have deemed these nonviolent demonstrations to be legal, but this has not stopped the police from arresting protesters.
In a cruel historical twist, nearly all of the Palestinians evicted from their homes in Sheik Jarrah in the last year-and-a-half were originally expelled in 1948 from their homes in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbieh. In the wake of the Six-Day War, Israeli courts ruled that some of the houses these Palestinian refugees have lived in since 1948 are actually legally owned by Jewish Israelis, who have claims dating from before Israel’s founding.
There are two bills in the Knesset that, to my mind, may begin to expose the cracks in the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry. The first is the bill about conversation, about which there’s been ample coverage of late.
The official statement put out by the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements reads:
The bill threatens to alter the Law of Return and consolidate conversion power into the hands of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. Both of these results could have devastating effects on the relationship between Israeli and Diaspora Jewry and thus on the broader unity of the Jewish people. Such concentration of power in favor of Ultra-Orthodox Jewry effectively negates the roles of the non-Orthodox movements both within Israel and abroad, sending the message that only the Orthodox have a place within our Homeland.
As I wrote yesterday, liberal Jews already have less religious freedom than the Orthodox in Israel (why the Reform movement doesn’t make the work of Anat Hoffman a central pillar of its Israel education baffles me and is a subject for another post). Here we have a bill that, if passed, would make it clear to the world what Rabbanut-and-therefore-government of Israel thinks of liberal Jewry, in Israel or abroad. I think in many cases, liberal Jews, out of either ignorance or ideology, support policies in Israel which go against their beliefs about human rights and democracy (not to mention against the way that they practice their Judaism), and I almost cynically hope that this bill will increase the cognitive dissonance amongst the general public.
Last week I attended an alternative beacon-lighting ceremony on the eve of Israeli Independence Day. This ceremony, organized by Yesh Gvul, an organization which supports soldiers who refuse to perpetuate the occupation, honored leaders of the fight for justice in Israel. Those who fight “for an immediate cessation of senseless violence and of the occupation regime that generates it, for a correction of the wrongs caused by Israeli society, for an improvement in our attitude towards the weak and the needy among us, and for peace with all our neighbors.”
After some negotiations with the police (who almost didn’t allow the ceremony to take place), there were songs and speeches from a dozen or so activists (full list here). Among them was Sara Benninga, one of the organizers of the protests in Sheikh Jarrah against the continued illegal settlement in East Jerusalem (background here and here, and especially here). I’ve done my best to translate her speech below. The Hebrew version can be found here.
I see no better way to honor this country than by supporting those fighting for justice within its borders. I hope to see you all at the Sheikh Jarrah protest on Friday. More »
I wanted to take issue with Mort Zuckeman’s recent piece in the WSJ, “Obama Doesn’t Get Jerusalem.” He’s got a bit more detail than the Elie Wiesel ad, so I feel like it warrants a bit more of a substantive response (plus, there have been a number of well thought-out responses to Wiesel, the best among them from the Sheikh Jarrah activists).
Zuckerman writes:
Objecting to any building in this East Jerusalem neighborhood is tantamount to getting the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem before final status talks with the Palestinians even begin.
From the start of his presidency, Mr. Obama has undermined Israel’s confidence in U.S. support. He uses the same term—”settlements”—to describe massive neighborhoods that are home to tens of thousands of Jews and illegal outposts of a few families. His ambiguous use of this loaded word raises the question for Israelis about whether this administration really understands the issue.
“Settlements,” according to international law and almost everyone other than the US and Israel for the past 40-some years, is not a question of size or function. The illegality of these settlements is based on location and location alone – whether or not they are built on land occupied in 1967. It’s not “ambiguous use of [a] loaded word,” it’s specific and correct application of a technical term. More »
I find myself surprisingly saddened by the passing of Michael Jackson. I was never the biggest fan, but I certainly have an appreciation for the musical legacy of perhaps the greatest entertainer of the past 50 years, (truth be told, I’m watching Moonwalker right now). That all said, I was totally surprised to find Eric Yoffie blogging about the Jewish response to MJ’s death:
The most widely distributed article by far from a Jewish source was the one written by Shmuley Boteach, an Orthodox rabbi and friend of Jackson, for the Jerusalem Post. Boteach’s comments were also featured on a number of TV entertainment shows. The Post article was painful to read, and for a rabbi, inexcusable. Boteach congratulates himself for accompanying Jackson to Shabbat dinners and for introducing him to Elie Wiesel. Boteach’s Jackson, far more sinned against than sinning, had no responsibility for his actions. Everything that he did is attributable to the failures of those in his inner circle. More »
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