When BDS Drops Its Veil: Campus Anti-Semitism

...but the problem won’t be dealt with by ignoring the clear connection between the worldwide BDS—boycott, divest, sanction—movement and anti-Semitism. That’s a stand that many supporters of Israel have refused to take believing that crying anti-Semitism will cloud the issue and make it harder to advocate for Israel. But divestment advocates are making it increasingly obvious they have no scruples about the link between Jew hatred and treating Israel as a pariah state. BDS isn’t about a political dispute within Israel, its borders, or sympathy for the Palestinians. It’s a war on Jews.

Molly Horwitz, a Stanford
student council candidate, 
Jim Wilson/The New York Times 

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
15 April '15..

The most telling comment about the story of a Stanford University student who was quizzed about her Jewish faith when she tried to run for office came from her friend and campaign manager. Molly Horwitz, a Stanford junior, was running for the Student Senate and her campaign manager and friend Miriam Pollock told her what she had to do. According to the New York Times, Pollack advised Horwitz to “scrub” her personal Facebook page and remove anything that related to Israel or her support for the Jewish state. But that didn’t stop the Students of Color Coalition from demanding to know whether Horwitz’s “Jewish identity” impacted her stand on divestment—the economic war being waged against Israel. The episode in which some black and Latino students now think it is acceptable to treat Judaism as a disqualifying characteristic is a horrifying example of the way anti-Semitism—thinly disguised as anti-Zionism—has established a secure foothold on American college campuses.

Horwitz may have removed Israel from her Facebook persona but couldn’t escape being classified as a Jew and was therefore suspect in the eyes of those who have come to treat support for the war on Zionism as a litmus test of liberal bona fides. But the significance of the incident lies not so much in the snub of a Hispanic student (she was adopted from Paraguay and considers herself both a South American and a Jew) by a coalition that is supposed to exist to support such persons simply because she is also Jewish and unwilling to disavow Israel under questioning. Rather, it is the insouciance with which the members of the student group—including the chapter president of the NAACP—regarded the inquisition of a Jewish student about her faith as being not only acceptable but something that should be expected.

Horwitz has demanded a public apology, but she shouldn’t hold her breath waiting for it. Nor should she expect much comfort from the university that has also been asked to investigate what happened. The reason is that so long as support for a movement that singles out the one Jewish state in the world and its supporters for discriminatory treatment and opprobrium is not merely tolerated as an opinion but treated as a reasonable point of view about which decent people may differ, we can’t be surprised that Jew hatred is being normalized.

Had the coalition merely asked Horwitz about her stand about divestment without connecting it to her faith, that might pass the anti-Semitism smell test even if it would still be troubling that blacks and Hispanics have adopted the attack on Zionism as their own cause. But by linking this issue to Judaism they have acknowledged the fact that the divestment cause is not merely a political criticism of Israel’s government or its policies but primarily focused on singling out Jews for biased treatment.

President Obama, Judaism, and the Holocaust

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
25 September '12..






In June 2009, President Obama addressed the Muslim world in a speech in Cairo. About Israel, he said this:

America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.

At the time, there were objections from Israelis and from many Jews in the United States that he appeared to believe Israel was the product of the Holocaust, period. The “tragic history” to which he referred appeared to be not two millennia of anti-Semitism but the Holocaust alone, and he seemed to ignore two millenia of Jewish longing for a return to Jerusalem.

Bataween - How a Tunisian Muslim became an orthodox Jew

Zipporah with her ​​husband Joseph
and baby Sophia (Photo: Reli)

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
19 January '12..

It's always moving to read stories of people who convert to Judaism out of conviction and against all odds. But you will find few more extraordinary stories than that of Zipporah (not her real name), who was born a Tunisian Muslim. Zipporah came to Israel from the US with her Honduran husband Oscar, who converted from Catholicism. Here is an abridged, rough translation from the Hebrew feature in Maariv (with thanks: Sylvia) :

As the world marked a decade and three months since the September 11 attacks, Zipporah (full name kept confidential) recalled how in the midst of tragedy Tunisia, her homeland, changed for her in front of her very eyes. Like the rest of the world, the North African country was considered relatively moderate, but instead of having compassion for thousands of victims, a wave of religious extremism and hatred of the West washed over it.

"Tunisia before the attack was not a particularly religious country," recalls Zipporah, who was still called by her Arabic name, Asma. "Most of my friends were secular, not people who pray five times a day. But in the days after the attack people on the street felt a tremendous sense of pride in Muslims. A sense of unity.

"Suddenly the world was divided between the followers of Islam on the one hand and Western countries on the other. It was amazing. A few days after the attack I came to school and I saw more girls wearing head coverings. Students went about with pictures of Osama bin Laden in their wallets. The blow the West took was a moment of elation for Tunisian people. "

Asma's father, an economist educated at Syracuse University, New York, was employed by the UN and was working with international relief organizations. The relationship with Israel was characterized by an uncompromising disgust. "My father is a full-fledged antisemite," she stresses. "On the one hand, an educated man who went to university in New York and on the other hand, he hates Jews. Deep down he believes that all Jews a bad smell, they are not clean. He watches the news on Al - Jazeera and keeps saying he does not understand why the world did not fight against Israel, why it allows it to continue the occupation, why it does not destroy them.

"Despite the hatred of Israel father was a true intellectual," she says. "A curious man who travelled all over the world. Very open. He worked with many Americans. He knew them intimately and felt a great affinity for American culture. After the attacks he was afraid we were going for the hard bloodshed, polarization between East and West.

Fresnozionism - Slanderous essay wins Carnegie-Mellon award

Fresnozionism.org..
16 January '12..




Ben Zoma says:
Who is wise?
The one who learns from every person…
Who is brave?
The one who subdues his negative inclination…
Who is rich?
The one who is appreciates what he has…
Who is honored?
The one who gives honor to others…
(Talmud – Avot 4:1)

I lived for some years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is not a bad place at all, although the winters are very cold and once the sun didn’t come out for 43 days (I counted). It has several top -notch universities, including the University of Pittsburgh where I was a graduate student, and Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU).

Every year CMU runs a contest for student writing about racial issues, on the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. This year’s high school winners were a African-American girl, Erika Drain, and a Jewish boy, Jesse Lieberfeld. They are both juniors at the Winchester Thurston School, a private school whose main campus is located in the city’s Shadyside neighborhood. Tuition for the 11th grade is $23,600 at Winchester Thurston, so one assumes that they have only the best teachers and facilities available to them.

Their essays were published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, here. Erika Drain’s, about being called “not black enough” because of her academic achievement, was perceptive and nuanced. Jesse Lieberfeld’s was notable for several reasons:

- His clearly expressed disdain for Jews and Judaism

- His completely one-sided understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

- The fact that his parents, teachers, rabbi, etc. didn’t succeed (or try) to introduce at least a bit of reality into his thinking

- The fact that CMU chose this offensive piece as one of the top two high school essays

He begins with an arguably antisemitic statement:

Moty & Udi: Zionism and religion

Fresnozionism.org
05 March '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/03/moty-udi-zionism-and-religion/

A couple of years ago a guy asked me to contribute to a project to make a film about why Israel should hold on to the territories. “We’ll give strategic, political and biblical reasons,” he said. I disagreed — I thought biblical arguments would hurt his cause. “After all, anyone who will listen to them is either an Orthodox Jew or an Evangelical Christian, and almost all of them are already on our side,” I told him. “You’ll just turn off the secular people.”

But now I’m not so sure. Because this is actually what the conflict is about. There is a reason that we haven’t been able to reach a compromise on borders, refugees, Jerusalem, etc. There is a reason that Arabs are prepared to die for al-Aqsa and Jews want to live in Hevron (other than “why shouldn’t they?” which is also a pretty good reason). There is truth in the remark of PLO official Abbas Zaki, whom I quoted in my post “The Jews and the Land”, that Zionism will collapse if we leave Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, because our relationship to these places is at the heart of Zionism.

Secular Europeans — which today is most of them — and Americans don’t get it. To them, religious beliefs, especially religious beliefs that affect real actions in the world and not just abstract talk, are irrational or worse. But these beliefs are among the strongest motivators of human behavior.

Religious wars are stupid and pointless, they say. But war is rarely rational, despite the attempts of politicians to make it so. Religious belief is the model for all ideology — today’s progressive secular humanism that animates many of Israel’s left-wing critics is no more rational or better examined than Judaism or Islam.

The struggle for Jerusalem is an ideological one — and the struggling ideologies are religious.

An aside: People often distinguish between ‘religious’ (dati) and ‘secular’ (hiloni) Israelis. What I think they really mean are ‘observant’ and ‘not-so-observant’. I think a majority of the so-called ‘secular’ Israelis, as I wrote previously, have a strong — I would even call it ‘religious’ — connection to the Land of Israel, even if they rarely go to a synagogue and drive on Shabbat.

If we want to make people see our side of the argument, we have to be honest about what we are fighting for and why. We have to be honest about our ideology and our values, and about our story.

The most convincing of the spokespeople for the Arabs are the Islamists. That’s one reason their philosophy has been wildly successful in recent years. I was once told by a Palestinian Muslim (who at least purported to favor coexistence between Jews and Arabs) that he felt much more comfortable with religious settlers than left-wing academics. Why? “They believe in God,” he said.

The story of the Jewish people is written in the Torah. You can treat it as concretely or abstractly, as literally or allegorically as you wish, but it is the most fundamental source of the Zionist idea (even if Herzl wouldn’t have agreed).

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Judaism, Islam, Eretz Yisrael and Stones

Avraham Reiss
JC Watch
25 October '10
H/T Daphne Anson

In a Jewish Chronicle blog post named “Palestine Campaign head visits anti-Israel protesters outside Ahava” RichMillet brings a quote from the Koran as follows:

[quote]
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
[unquote]

[ Sahih Muslim, 41:6985, see also Sahih Muslim, 41:6981, Sahih Muslim, 41:6982, Sahih Muslim, 41:6983, Sahih Muslim, 41:6984, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:56:791,(Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:52:177) ]

I wish to juxtaposition this with the attitude of Judaism towards those same stones and trees, for the sake of comparison.

——————————————————————

Throughout history, different nations have received different levels of public relations. To give just two examples from Jewish (biblical) history, let’s look at Amalek (Exodus Ch. 17) and the Amorite (Numbers Ch. 21).

Most people can talk fairly knowledgeably, at least for a minute or two about Amalek; we read about him in the Torah every year on the Shabat before Purim, and again later on during the year. We are commanded to remember what he did to us, and to wipe out his name.

As for the Amorite, few can say much about him. As some American Jews summarize most Jewish Holidays and festivals: “they tried to kill us, we beat them, let’s go eat …”.

In actual fact the opposite is true. We know practically nothing at all about the Amalekite beyond what he did to us on a one-time basis at the time of our exodus from Egypt. I once spent an entire evening combing several Toranic databases looking for all available rabbinical material on Amalek, and all I came up with was the opinion that Amalek originated in the Arad area (in the Negev desert). [I once managed to dehydrate there while on military maneuvers. Amalek’s revenge?]

(Read full post)

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Afraid of Freedom

Moshe Feiglin
Manhigut Yehudit
11 Tishrei, 5770
(Sept. 19, '10)

Translated from the NRG website.

Nobody has to worry about the allegiance of the religious officers and soldiers who are crowding the ranks of the IDF today. IDF documents made public after the expulsion from Gush Katif show that statistically, it was actually the soldiers who were not connected to a religious framework who refused to obey orders - and that phenomenon was negligible.

There is a different phenomenon though, that should be worrying those people who view freedom of thought, freedom of choice and freedom of conscience as a threat to their hegemony.

Polls and in-depth studies unequivocally prove that Israeli society is rediscovering its Judaism. The fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is that the younger generation of Israelis is actually closer to traditional Judaism than their parents. This Yom Kippur, more young people fasted than their adult counterparts. In the past, the opposite was true. The synagogues and community leaders were relegated to the "old generation," while the youngsters wanted nothing to do with "religion". But now, Israeli society is becoming more and more faith-based, with the younger generation blazing the trail.

Israeli society is becoming more faith-based - not more "religious." The phenomenon that we are experiencing is much broader than the "repentance movement" in its strictly religious parameters.

In the days of entertainer-turned-rabbi Uri Zohar, to "repent" meant to turn from a "secular Jew" into a "religious" or "haredi" Jew. But these definitions do not reflect reality. The question that actually defines the status of a given Jew on the faith continuum is: Is G-d present in your life or not? There are Jews who observe the commandments, but have left G-d out of the picture. There are even "progressive" movements that excel at that. On the other hand, there are Jews who still have not connected to Jewish law in its entirety, but experience G-d as very much present in their lives.

On this fundamental level, all of us are returning to G-d all the time. This ongoing experience is not a move from one end of the social spectrum to the other, but a gradual cohesion of the two extremes- together with G-d.

Only a person who fears G-d benefits from true liberty:
"And the midwives feared G-d and did not do what the king of Egypt told them, and they let the children live." (Exodus 1)

Two Hebrew women whose lives were worth no more than dust in the Egyptian gulag refuse to obey the orders of the greatest king in the ancient world - the Egyptian Pharaoh - and don't throw the Jewish baby boys into the Nile River. Their fear of G-d preserved their liberty.

As part of my sentence for "sedition" against the Oslo Accords government, I did community service in a state nursing home. One of the old gentlemen there told me his own story about a different gulag:

"When I went to first grade in the Stalin-era public school in Russia, I made sure never to ask permission from my teacher to let me use the bathroom. It was very important to me to be sure that when I would need to ask permission to go to the bathroom, she would believe me and let me leave the classroom. I knew that I would need to use this escape route when the state nurse would come to check the personal hygiene of the students. If she would find the tzitzit (ritual fringes) that I had under my shirt, she would report me to the authorities and my father would be sent to his death in Siberia."

My friend in the nursing home told this story very matter-of-factly. But it gave me the goose bumps. I was in awe of the father who would risk his life for his faith and the little boy whose fear of Heaven made him truly free at the ripe old age of six.

The wave of return to G-d that Israeli society is now experiencing will necessarily lead to liberty for our Land as well. That is what the people in the ivory towers have to watch out for - not for the religious soldiers.

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Liberal Jewish anti-Zionists get together — and stay confused

Fresnozionism.org
23 July '10

Every time I think that I can’t be surprised by the things Jews do and say, I come across something like this:

A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she’d attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund. “I want to de-Zionize my synagogue because it’s not about being a Zionist, it’s about Judaism,” Lehr said. “There’s a generation that’s ready to go back to those religious and spiritual spaces. I want to say to my rabbi, ‘I want to come back to my spirituality and I want there to be space for all of us because we’re all Jews.’ ”

Yes, yet another group of anti-Israel Jews. Described as “first major gathering of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network,” the 2010 “U.S. Assembly of Jews” was held in Detroit this summer.

Since the founding of the Jewish state, Jewish anti-Zionists have fallen mostly into two groups: observant Jews who believe that Judaism teaches that they may return to the land of Israel only when the Mashiach takes them there, and highly secular left-wing ideologues who think that Jewish nationalism is just another bourgeois detour away from international anti-colonial solidarity.

But these people, although closer to the latter than the former, insist that they are Jewish not just by culture or tradition, but because they observe some form of Judaism:

(Read full post)

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Torah as Jewish Culture

Manhigut Yehudit
04 Sivan 5770

If you ever go to the Jaffa flea market in the afternoon, you will be treated to a unique experience. At a designated moment, the peddlers stop hawking their wares, the shoppers stop inspecting the merchandise heaped in piles on the sidewalks and all gather for an open-air mincha (afternoon prayers) session. I love this marketplace prayer. It has a special grace. I always prefer to pray with working-people who stop in the middle of their toil to praise G-d than to recite the prayers in the synagogue. When the Torah becomes our national way of life, a culture that bursts forth far from the walls of the study hall, it carries the whisper of redemption on its wings.

The Scroll of Ruth that we will be reading on the holiday of Shavuot this Wednesday is the story of the Jewish People living their Torah culture in their Land. Boaz is not a yeshiva head or a famous rabbi. He is a Jew who works his land. The working people in the Scroll of Ruth remain in their Land despite the famine and abandonment by their leaders. They conduct themselves according to the cultural code of faith and loving kindness that they absorbed from the Torah and that is part of their lives.

That is also our goal; to turn our Torah into our culture. "You know," said one of the senior managers of the Knesset channel after I finished last Wednesday's interview with Atila Shomfalvi, "all sorts of religious MK's come through our studio. I am secular - I try to understand them, but I just can't. You are the only person with a kippah on his head that I can understand."

I do not think that he meant that the religious MKs are not expressing themselves with enough eloquence. I think that he sensed the connection that Manhigut Yehudit makes between Judaism and reality.

The Scroll of Ruth teaches us that this authentic connection bears the secret of redemption. Many we merit to bring it soon!

Happy Shavuot,

Moshe Feiglin

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Simhat Torah

George Eliot and the Essence of Zionism

Melanie Phillips
Jewish Chronicle
21 May 2009

Against the current backdrop of rampant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice, we find ourselves once again asking the age-old question: why are people antisemites? What is it about the Jews that makes some people hate us so much?

But we might also ask ourselves the reverse question: why are other people philosemites? Why should certain people have such a deep love for the Jews? And what might be learned about the Jews from such love?

Alongside the long history of Jew-hatred in Britain, stretching back to medieval times and rooted in Christianity, is another history of profound affection for the Jews, rooted in first the Puritan and then the evangelical movements.

It was the latter that, in the 19th century, gave rise to the Christian Zionist movement, of which Arthur Balfour — he of the eponymous Declaration which committed Britain to the restoration of the Jewish national home in Palestine — was a leading light.

The Victorian novelist George Eliot is often spoken of in the same breath. In 1876, she caused a sensation with her novel, Daniel Deronda, which not only had a Jewish hero and delineated Judaism with extreme sympathy but embodied a passionately Zionist message — 21 years before Herzl addressed the first Zionist Congress in Basle.

But, as a new book points out, George Eliot did not actually fit the template of Christian Zionism. Although she went through an evangelical Christian phase, by the time she wrote Daniel Deronda she was a committed atheist. So why was she so pro-Jew and pro-Zionist?

In her brilliant and moving book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, the distinguished Victorian scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb concludes that the essence of the attraction lay in Eliot’s perception that Judaism, although unique, was inseparable from the culture and history of all mankind.

The key point Himmelfarb makes is that, for Eliot, Zionism was not a response to antisemitism. As a self-evidently natural correlative of Judaism, it was something positive, noble and good in and of itself.

This is surely a vital point for today’s Jews to grasp. For so often they present Zionism in a defensive manner. They justify it on the basis that Israel is an essential refuge for a people which uniquely has been persecuted in every country in which they have settled. In similar vein, the founding of the state of Israel is misleadingly represented as Europe’s response to the Shoah.

But Zionism’s roots are far deeper. Zionism is simply the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people. And its significance is greater than any other movement of national liberation because Judaism itself rests upon three legs — the people, the religion and the land. If one is lopped off by having its legitimacy denied, the whole thing collapses. That is why anti-Zionism is far more than an unpleasant political position. It is a direct attack on Judaism itself.

As Himmelfarb writes, what was so remarkable about the character of Daniel Deronda was that Eliot had him emigrate to Palestine, not out of fear of pogroms or persecution, nor even because of the drawing-room antisemitism of England, but instead to fulfil a proud and unique heritage.

What she was therefore saying was that Judaism is not principally a story of persecution and that Jews are not in their essence victims, survivors or martyrs. It is not the antisemite who defines the Jew. It is Judaism, the religion and the people, that has created the Jew and Jewish statehood.

In grasping this, George Eliot’s achievement was all the more notable because she was repudiating some of the most powerful ideologies of her time: noxious anti-Jewish prejudice; aggressive, atheistic hostility to all religion; and the secular humanism of ‘enlightened’ liberals who were in fact anything but.

Ring any bells? Himmelfarb’s book could not be more perceptive — or more timely.

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