On Jerusalem Day in the holy city of three faiths, the right-wing grassroots group called Im Tirtzu did their best to incite Israeli public against Peace Now. They hung a “Happy Al-Quds Day” banner in Jerusalem featuring Palestinian flags and Peace Now logos. Im Tirtzu’s logo was nowhere to be found and only took responsibility after a telephone confrontation by Peace Now. The video below features the recorded phone call with Im Tirtzu’s spokesperson.
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In addition to her own distinguished career, Achinoam Nini (aka Noa) has a history of working on behalf of peace and reconciliation. Notably, she has partnered with Israeli-Arab singer Mira Awad, a Christian and resident of Haifa, on a concert tour and as the country’s entrants 2009 entrants into the Eurovision contest. This creative collaboration brought them wide attention around the world, mostly of the positive sort.
On Yom Hazikaron, the acclaimed international Israeli musical artist performed for a gathering of Combatants for Peace, an organization of former fighters and their families on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This recent performance brought on attention of a much uglier, vile sort from extremist corners in Israeli and North American Jewish corners.
Calling her “Garbage” and “Rat” and far worse. They’ve taken to facebook calling for a boycott of Noa’s performances, and Noa has responded.
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My new go-to primer on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine, published by the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME), a team of 24 joint researchers and educators in the region. And though it’s intended more for educators than for armchair historians, it’s supremely innovative and recommended for us all.
This book’s simple yet ingenious innovation is a layout common to every English-Hebrew siddur: the right facing page is the Israeli narrative and the left facing page is the Palestinian side, each describing the same events. As Sari Nusseibeh’s back cover blurb says, it’s a “pioneering effort not only in the context of Israeli-Palestinian politics, but in the writing of history.”
I don’t recommend trying to read both narratives at once, since parallel chapters are real, full histories with footnotes, photos and stories. Trying to do so will give you a headache. But for the first time, opening a chapter to, say, the Balfour Declaration immediately makes both sides’ claims and reactions easy to find. No skipping around, flipping to the next chapter, or trying to keep it all in your head. More »
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This is the final post from our guestposters, Rae Abileah and Ariel Vegosen, Jewish Voice for Peace volunteer youth activist members on the ground at the United Methodist general conference leading up to the divestment vote.-ed.
When it comes to the nonviolent tactic of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, the United Methodist Church now has B and S covered. But without the D, is it just BS? No, not entirely.
Yesterday, May 2, the 2012 General Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) failed to pass a measure to divest from three companies – Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and HP – profiting from Israeli occupation and human rights abuses of Palestinians, but succeeded in resolving to boycott Israeli settlement products. We were in Tampa at the UMC conference this past week as part of a Jewish advocacy team for boycott and divestment, and returned home to the San Francisco Bay Area just a day before the vote took place. Yesterday we watched the UMC livestream, twitter and twitter feed on the edge of our seats. The outcome was a deeply divided church that takes a firm stand against Occupation but isn’t yet willing to put its money where its values are. And “yet” is the operative word here, because the church is clearly now one step closer to a day when this will happen.
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Crossposted to New Voices and davidamwilensky.com
Not to get too overwrought, but here’s my blog post in response to a Zionist Organization of America press release in response to my JTA op-ed in response to their JTA op-ed. Throughout the press release, notice how many of my points are avoided by going on an ad hominem rampage against me.
NEW YORK, May 1 – David Wilensky’s op-ed on “the correct use of Title VI” (Apr. 27, 2012) was an amateurish attempt to condemn an important new legal tool for Jewish students who are now protected from anti-Semitic harassment, intimidation and discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. He claims that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) – which spearheaded the effort to achieve this civil rights protection – is misusing Title VI “to stifle legitimate discourse” and as a “bludgeon” to advance “far-right political viewpoints.” These ridiculous charges are baseless. Wilensky cites no evidence for his claims, merely engaging in silly name-calling.
I don’t know where they got “‘the correct use of Title VI’” from, but it doesn’t appear anywhere on the version of it on the JTA website. Given that they got the date wrong by about week (it was published on 4/18, not 4/27), I’m gonna guess that the mystery phrasing and the incorrect date were taken from the publication date and headline that accompanied my op-ed in one of the local Jewish papers that runs JTA material on about a one-week delay. (I could take a cheap shot at the ZOA for being so web incompetent that they don’t have a Google alert set up for the name of their own organization, but that would be “silly name-calling.”)
Speaking of which, can anyone point me to the part of my op-ed where I engage in “name-calling” of any sort — “silly” or otherwise? (Rest assured, when I do engage in name-calling I take it quite seriously.)
As for my writing being “amateurish,” I guess the “-ish” suffix lends that some validity as an opinion. As it turns out, I make my living doing this writing thing so I’m technically the opposite of an amateur. I hasten to point out that Klein and Tuchman are the amateurs here. I don’t know much about Tuchman, but she’s lawyer. Klein on the other hand is a well-known pillar of the professional reactionary community. I don’t think much of this screed, but since I’m no professional paranoia-peddler, I’ll refrain from passing judgement on its level of amateurishness. More »
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No RSVP required — first-come, first served. And livestreamed via Tablet Mag: www.facebook.com/TabletMag
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This is the second of a three-post series from Jewish Voice for Peace volunteer youth activist members on the ground at the United Methodist general conference leading up to the divestment vote. The second post is from Rae Abileah. -ed.
On Tuesday morning just as the sun rose over the Keys, I touched down in Tampa, Florida to join a team of volunteers and organizers working to support a United Methodist resolution for church divestment from three companies that profit from the Israeli Occupation: Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard. Walking into the Tampa Convention Center only hours later, I asked myself, “What am I, a Jew, doing at this conference, and can I make a difference?” 72 hours later, I know exactly why I’m here. More »
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This is the first of a three-post series from Jewish Voice for Peace volunteer youth activist members on the ground at the United Methodist general conference leading up to the divestment vote. The first post is from Ariel Vegosen. -ed.
As a young Jewish person the words “Tampa, Florida” immediately make me think of bubbes and zadies, clear water, manatees, and a lack of good bagels. This week Tampa is taking on a whole new meaning for me as I join United Methodists at their General Conference in Tampa. You might be wondering what’s a nice Jewish girl like me doing at the United Methodist General Conference?
For many years United Methodist resolutions have called for an end to the Israeli occupation and a sharing of the city of Jerusalem, which along with being a holy city to Jews, is also a holy city to Christians and Muslims. Despite these resolutions, the United Methodist boards and agencies hold stock in companies sustaining the occupation including Caterpillar, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard. At the 2012 10-day conference in Tampa the United Methodists are voting on a resolution that would divest the church from these companies. I am here as a Jewish ally to support divestment and to support my Methodist brothers and sisters as they make this important and historic decision.
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Crossposted to New Voices and davidamwilensky.com.
JTA has published a new op-ed by me, a response to a piece by some Zionist Organization of America honchos published by JTA earlier this week:
Op-Ed: Title VI should be used only on true hatemongers, not political opponents
By David A.M. Wilensky
NEW YORK (JTA) – In the eyes of the Zionist Organization of America, the most depraved enemies of the Jewish people are obnoxious college campus loudmouths. As the editor of New Voices, a national magazine by and for Jewish college students, I have a different perspective.
The ZOA led the campaign to have discrimination against Jewish students recognized as a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, originally passed in 1964 to remedy racial discrimination in programs that receive federal funding. But in its charge to circle the Jewish communal wagons, the ZOA has overreached.
ZOA President Morton Klein and Susan Tuchman, director of the group’s Center for Law and Justice, wrote in a JTA Op-Ed that Jewish college students today face “harassment and discrimination at schools receiving federal funding.” The ZOA pitched a six-year fit about it, which the group credits with this triumph: “The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, finally clarified in October 2010 that Jewish students finally would be afforded the same protection” that other minorities have under Title VI.
The ZOA campaign capitalizes on and needlessly exacerbates the Jewish community’s already unwarranted paranoia about what’s happening to our young men and women on campus. As a member of the class of 2011 and as the editor of New Voices, I can say with confidence that there’s never been a better time to walk the halls and lawns of American academia as a Jew.
[...]
If you’re so inclined you can read the rest of it over here at JTA.
And if you’re not tickled by the fact that the ad below appears on the same page as my op-ed, you’re probably dead inside.
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From FOJ Emily Hauser
For those in the DC area:
Bethesda Jewish Congregation/Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church event with Jen Marlowe
The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker – Sami Al Jundi and Jen Marlowe, co-authors
April 29, 7 pm
6601 Bradley Blvd
Bethesda, MD
As a young Palestinian boy, Sami Al Jundi had one ambition: to help overthrow the Israeli occupation. When a bomb that he was building with friends exploded prematurely, killing one of the teenagers, Al Jundi was sentenced to ten years in Israeli prison. It was while there, unexpectedly, that ideas about nonviolence and reconciliation first took root and changed the course of his battle forever.
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This is a guest post by Naomi Paiss, Communications Director for the New Israel Fund.
Today, a full-page advertisement supporting the New Israel Fund will appear in the New York Times. Paid for by a generous donor who is launching a matching-gift campaign, the ad features a news photo of an actual billboard in Jerusalem, with a poster of a woman’s face that has been clawed and defaced by ultra-Orthodox extremists. The ad specifically references the troubling growth of gender segregation and the exclusion of women in Israel, a phenomenon now in the public eye but not yet defeated.
In his defense of Israeli democracy last week, Ambassador Michael Oren wrote that “gender equality, not prejudice, remains an Israeli hallmark,” and cited the numerous women serving in the Knesset and in other leadership roles. Stipulated and granted. And it was heartening to see, after Secretary of State Clinton criticized gender-segregated buses and other evidence of a troubling turn towards repression of women, that so many Israeli leaders stepped forward to defend women’s equality as intrinsic to Israeli society.
But words and deeds differ. The Israel Broadcasting Authority just permitted Kol Barama, the haredi radio station, to reduce the number of hours of women on the air from six to four – weekly. Groups of ultra-Orthodox men are approaching female passengers on El-Al, requesting to switch seats. Israeli women still earn only 66% of men’s wages, and women with higher education degrees earn 77% of the wages earned by their male counterparts. And a special report commissioned by Cabinet Minister Limor Livnat and an inter-ministerial committee on the subject of exclusion of women is filled with high-sounding declarations, but very little in the way of policy change or budget.
In this atmosphere, the organizations supported by the New Israel Fund are more important than ever. Long responsible for various aspects of feminist social change, these organizations find that their strategies must now take the growth of religious extremism into account. Organizations focused on women’s education are responding to the increase in single-gender schools in the religious sector, or schools that attempt to exclude Mizrachi or Ethiopian students. The Israel Religious Action Center, the activist arm of the Reform movement in Israel, researched and published an exhaustive report on gender segregation. Kolech, the feminist Orthodox organization, staffed a hotline for Orthodox women to report involuntary segregation on buses and other public spaces, and led the successful attempt to persuade the Israeli Medical Association to boycott a conference on women’s fertility issues in which women were barred from speaking.
The new pluralism group Yisroel Hofshit (Be Free Israel) has established local activist groups in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, Haifa and Ra’anana, and is working closely with NIF to restore the sight and sound of women to the public sphere in Israel. Yerushalmim (“Jerusalemites”), a vibrant coalition of secular and pluralistic Jerusalem residents, ran a public campaign to restore images of women and girls to the streets of the city, hanging pictures of women from balconies in the city. (One of these defaced campaign posters is the centerpiece of the New York Times ad.) This campaign was later expanded by New Israel Fund supporters overseas who sent their photos for a “Woman Should Be Seen and Heard” campaign, resulting in another 50 posters of women’s images appearing in Jerusalem.
With the current governing coalition heavily dependent on ultra-Orthodox support, it appears that official measures against gender segregation will be cut to fit political reality. Since many ultra-Orthodox commentators have claimed that the new push to exclude women is a fringe phenomenon, NIF and its civil society groups hope to find ways to work with the mainstream Orthodox community on gender issues in ways that are respectful of the community’s traditions. In the meantime, we continue to monitor, respond to and publicize the continuing and disturbing trend of gender segregation and exclusion in Israel.
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This year, Project Hayei Sarah is using the holiday of Passover as an opportunity to support Palestinian friends in Hebron whose ability to take care of their families is severely harmed by the occupation. Project Chayei Sarah is a group of rabbinical students, rabbis, Jewish educators and lay-leaders who have spent time in Hebron and are grappling with the difficult realities we encountered there. Those, like myself, who have been to Hebron use the annual reading of Parshat Hayei Sarah, the Torah reading in which Abraham buys part of what is considered to be modern-day Hebron, as an opportunity educate our communities about the situation there.
In the H2 section of Hebron, the economy of the Palestinian community has been nearly destroyed due to the presence of Jewish settlers. At seder tables all over Jerusalem, friends of Project Hayei Sarah used matzah covers hand made especially for them by Women in Hebron. Purchased as an act of solidarity and of hidur mitzvah — beautification/elevation of a commandment — the matzah covers remind us of the liberation we need to continue working towards in Hebron.
“While everyone is busy debating about to boycott or not to boycott, we wanted to raise a new question: how might we, as Jews, support Palestinian economies?” relayed project coordinator Alana Alpert.
Fellow activist Moriel Rothman added, “On passover, we recall that we were once slaves in the Land of Egypt. It does not befit a community of ex-slaves to oppress others as Israel is doing in the city of Hebron. Selling the Matzah Covers on Ben Yehuda was an attempt both to support the Women of Hebron, and to encourage Israelis and visitors to Israel to learn about the situation in Hebron, as we reflect collectively on the meaning of freedom.”
To learn more about the situation in Hebron, visit the experts:
breakingthesilence.org.il, rhr.org.il/eng and btselem.org.
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This is my favorite page on Wikipedia.
It’s a called List of Cognitive Biases, and besides showing what a nerd I am, it basically maps out all the ways in which our brain, on a daily basis, screws up how we perceive the world. These aren’t vague ideas, or suggestions – for the most part, they’re laboratory-tested, easily repeatable things that all of our brains do wrong. Some of them are familiar: the Gambler’s Fallacy (“If I just got three heads in a row, the next flip MUST be tails!”); Hindsight Bias (“Oh, yeah, I KNEW she was going to do that.”); and, getting into sinister territory, the Just-World Hypothesis (“Wow, look at that prisoner. He must’ve done something AWFUL! Fuck him.”).
There are well over a hundred of these biases, just listed on the one Wikipedia page; and, as amazing as it is to go through that page and just “click!” “Oh, I do that!” “click!” “Oh my God, that too!” it’s still a tiny amount. We’re juuuuuust starting to understand ourselves. Philosophers posited the atom in India and Greece in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, and the physical world has been studied for as long as we’ve been a species, if not longer. But the social survey didn’t exist until around the 1000′s; many people consider the 14th-century Arab Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun as the first sociologist; and the term sociology wasn’t even defined until 1780, in an unpublished manuscript by French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Saiyes.
Our very own Sigismund Schlomo Freud didn’t start hypothesizing about what makes individual human beings tick until the late 1800s, and the first social psychology experiment, fusing the social with the psychological, wasn’t published until 1898, when Nathan Triplett wrote down his findings of Social Facilitation, the idea that people do better on simple tasks with other people around. The machine gun, the telephone, the automobile and aspirin are all older than the scientific field of social psychology.
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Hey, y’all. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy having a real job instead of blogging here or at my personal blog. Anyway, this has been crossposted to my new blog at davidamwilensky.com, which you should all go check out.
I tip my hat to Philologos, the pseudonymous author of the Forward’s language column, for two reasons:
So bravo to you, Philologos for admitting you were wrong and for making some nicely conceived suggestions for rectifying the problem of “Hatikvah.”
And with that, let me explain why he’s still wrong this time. As identified by Philologos, the basic problem with “Hatikvah” is contained in this rhetorical: “How, really, can one expect an Israeli Arab to sing about a Jew’s soul stirring for his country?” But I’d go one step further: How can one expect a group with an equally valid claim on the land to sing a national anthem that is a clearly not just an Israeli song, but a Jewish song?
He concludes that “Hativkah” should not “be abandoned for another anthem, or sung to the same tune with new words” because “there’s not point in accommodating the feelings of Arabs by trampling on the feelings of Jews.” Again, I’d go even further, but we’ll come back to that. First, Philologos’ specific problems with “Hatikvah”: More »
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| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Co-Occupation | ||||
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Last night, the members of the Park Slope Feed Coop voted 1,005 against and 653 in favor of a [referendum on] boycott of five Israeli products, soundly voting the measure down. Both sides claim victory, of course. The pro-boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) side claims increased awareness for Israel’s occupation; the anti-BDS activists claim a 2:1 ratio of defeat for veiled calls against Israel’s existence. Both, of course, are right. But now they must both do what neither side — pro-Israel nor pro-Palestinian — typically does: deescalate the charged polarization they worked so hard to create. More »
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This s a guest post by independent filmmaker Eli Ungar-Sargon. His first feature-length film, Cut, is about circumcision and Jewish identity. He is currently in post-production on his second feature length film, A People Without a Land.
When Gilad Atzmon blew through Los Angeles to promote his latest book The Wandering Who?, I knew nothing about him. As I sat down to hear him speak I was handed a flyer by a nervous looking young woman. The flyer declared: “LEVANTINE CENTER HOSTS ANTI-SEMITE” and it furnished a series of Atzmon quotes to support its aspersion. The young woman and knit yarmulka-clad man who were handing these flyers out were politely asked to leave and they did so without protest. As I listened to Atzmon first speak and then perform a few musical numbers on his saxophone, it occurred to me that antisemite or not, I was genuinely interested in what this man had to say.
The Wandering Who? seeks to answer the seemingly simple question: “What do people mean when they call themselves Jews?” Near the beginning of the book, Atzmon makes a foundational tripartite distinction between three kinds of Jews. In the first category are people who follow the Jewish religion. The second contain those who were accidentally born to Jewish parents, but see themselves as human beings. And the third category is “Those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits.”
The obvious problem with these categories is that real Jewish people seldom fall into only one of them. I know as many religious Jews who fall into categories 1 and 2 as I do secular Jews who fall into categories 2 and 3. Do their identities contain logical contradictions? Surely they do. But these contradictions do not emerge as a consequence of their Jewish-ness, rather they come from the nature of identity itself. To his credit, Atzmon points out that similar contradictions emerge within feminist and gay identity politics and it could be argued that his categorical distinctions are there for conceptual clarity. Nevertheless, Atzmon includes both ardent Zionists and self-identified Jewish Leftists in his third category, arguing that they belong to the same identity continuum:
“If we redefine Zionism as a modern form of Jewish activism that aims to halt assimilation, we can then reassess all Jewish tribal activity as an internal debate within a diverse Zionist political movement…The Israel lobby and the Alan Dershowitzes of the world are the voices of Zionism; the third-category socialists are there to stop proud, self-hating Jews from blowing the whistle.”
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I wrote a piece for Peter Beinart’s new blog at The Daily Beast called Zion Square. This is the beginning:
I imbibed Zionism at a very early age. My parents had wanted to go on aliyah as soon as they got married (four years before I was born), but my grandmother’s sudden illness kept them in the United States. I often heard the story of my parents’ families sitting around the radio listening to the 1947 UN vote on partition, making a hash mark for every “yes” vote, the whole neighborhood (Crown Heights in Brooklyn) erupting in cheers when it was obvious that it had passed.
The rest is here. (Go there, read, come back, discuss.)
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