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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 2 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 2 weeks ago
- More updates...
Alien nation
Shkoyach to J Street’s Isaac Luria (still the best name ever) on his cogent op-ed in today’s Forward, “In Machers vs. Obama, the Youth Have Voted.”
Jewish communal leaders should consider that the more aggressively they criticize this president’s sensible pro-Israel policies, the more they will alienate us from their aging institutions.
Amen, amen.
You’d think you wouldn’t have to spell it out for them, and frankly you don’t. Our elders of Zion seem to be fully aware of this schism and some are fighting tooth and nail to repel the paradigm shift, issuing endless denunciations of our generation’s liberal values as contrary to Israel and the Jewish people’s interests. Commentary’s narishkeit last week is only a recent, albeit embarrassing, example.
As such divisions become more pronounced — raising the stakes for a faction which has enjoyed uninterrupted dominance of the collective Jewish public agenda for longer than our age cohort has walked the earth — expect the rhetoric to ratchet up another notch or twelve.
Sometimes I think that we should follow the footsteps of some early reformers. Leave this whole “Jewish nation” thing to the zionists and create a new religious identity. We could reclaim the term israelitish Americans” or “Americans of the mosaic persuation”. Or better, comandeer judaism for ourselves, and start calling the old folks Israelis, zionists, or anything but Jews. A real schism may be just what the doctor ordered.
How’s that for continuity, bitches?
I’ve been saying that for over a year now!
“Jewish communal leaders should consider that the more aggressively they criticize this president’s sensible pro-Israel policies, the more they will alienate us from their aging institutions.”
Anything but Amen. As a proud Jew and contrite soon-to-be-former Israeli, God willing, I am perfectly willing to alienate anybody who supports this presidents “sensible” pro-Israeli policies. So long as this country supports Israel in any way (except for accepting refugees from it, both Jewish and Arab), it will stand firmly opposed, as is Israel, to all morality and humanitarian principle.
And to those Jews who blindly support an entity that does slander on them daily, I have to say that everything worthwhile about Jewish tradition, religion, and history, is negated by Israel’s conduct and what it has turned its Jewish citizens into: a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic mob. Israel is a stain on the reputation of every Jew, and an ever darker stain on the morality of any person who supports it.
Which is not to say that Israel isn’t home to many good people; I still have a good number of friends who have managed to retain tselem enosh — their human image. They fight vigorously against the State and its atrocities. There are also many good folks (same as here) who have acquired a blind spot — due to fear, propaganda, and that innate human instinct that served our people’s enemies so well in the past, the ability to cease to see one’s enemies as human, and call them “rats” and “vermin” instead — both common epithets for Palestinians in Jewish Israeli society. It is a sad sight to see good people who ought to know better succumb to this evil.
And yet this is what Israel does to its citizens; by incessantly fanning the flames of conflict, by inflicting enormous violence upon the Palestinian population, by building walls to hide their suffering, and building the world’s largest ghetto — Gaza — and then bombing it to “show them what happens.” You should have seen what was going on in Israeli news websites and Internet forums last January. Oh, wouldn’t it have brought you back.
There are many examples. If you know Hebrew, look at the language on comment threads on even left-of-center Israeli news websites, or try suggesting to an Israeli that Palestinians are human, or entitled to rights and respect (a friend on facebook said I was being “ridiculous” when I protested a particularly odious bit of humor). If you don’t, try reading some reports from Amnesty, or even the old race-traitor, Goldstone.
Well.
Pardon the tirade. I know that my criticism is somewhat misdirected and a bit off-topic, since it comes from the opposite direction of the subjects of the quote, and addressed in large part to a more adamantly pro-Israel audience than is likely to read this blog, but I am very frustrated by the “centrist” position of even liberal Jews in this country regarding Israel. I believe that Israel, certainly since January and arguably since much earlier, does not merit a moderate position.