This Week: THE Most Dangerous Self-Disrespecting Position of American Jews
So what’s (by me) THE most dangerous self-disrespecting position of American Jews? I’ll start with a couple runners-up that perhaps some of you may rank differently from me, but they’ll show at least the gravity of the competition.
Runner-up #2 has me agreeing with a well-to-the-left-of-me well-known American Jew. I was sickened when I rode by a neighborhood synagogue recently and saw that its sign out front for once didn’t announce upcoming congregation events but said rather “Black Lives Matter.” I agree with Dershowitz, a stalwart liberal who’d called on Black Lives Matter back in 2016 “to rescind the portion of its platform that describes Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ involved in ‘genocide … against the Palestinian people,’” and again on Thursday this week wrote in Algemeiner:
“I once again challenge the leaders of Black Lives Matter to rescind their antisemitic and false condemnation of the nation state of the Jewish people. If they refuse, then those of us who care deeply about Black lives, but also care deeply about ending the scourge of antisemitism, must support organizations other than Black Lives Matter that promote racial justice – without also promoting antisemitism.” (Algemeiner, 7/9/20, “Dershowitz: Is the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Platform Antisemitic?”)
This local congregation alas was not the only American Jewish entity this week subordinating (or worse) support of the nation state of the Jewish people to support of Black Lives Matter. The Geller Report on Wednesday this week (7/8/20) headlined “Over 400 Jewish Groups and Synagogues Sign Letter Supporting Antisemitic Black Lives Matter.” Geller wrote that
“The joint letter was an initiative of a diverse group of Jewish activists from across a range of religious, political, gender and racial identities. The list of signatories – from small congregations to major Jewish organizations – represents millions of Jewish people in the United States, the organizers said in a statement.” [emphasis added]
Dangerous self-disrespect runner-up #1 was the subject of Steven Flatow’s article Tuesday (7/7/20, “What Do US Jews Really Think About Sovereignty?”) in Israel Hayom. On what American Jews think about whether Israel should apply sovereignty in Judea-Samaria, Flatow cites the comments of former Reform leader Rabbi Yoffie:
“Rabbi Eric Yoffie, former president of the Union for Reform Judaism, says he knows. Writing in Haaretz this week, he declared: ‘American Jews are not happy.’ Note he didn’t say ‘some’ or even ‘many.’ Rather, ‘American Jews” – all of them, apparently – are ‘not happy’ about any possible application of sovereignty.
“According to Yoffie, all American Jews are ‘shocked,’ ‘panicked,’ ‘puzzled,’ ‘confused,’ and above all, ‘angry’ at what he calls ‘the monumental stupidity’ of extending Israeli law to even the smallest part of the areas that have been at the center of the Jewish national homeland for more than 3,000 years.”
Flatow thinks a poll of American Jews is needed to discern what American Jews really think about Israel applying sovereignty, but what seems to me gravely disturbing here is a leader of what claims to be the biggest sect of American Jews using such arrogant and contemptuous language in reference to the people and elected government of the Jewish homeland of Israel.
But, to me, neither American Jews’ support of an American organization subscribing to “Israel as an apartheid nation committing genocide of The Palestinians” nor leaders of American Jewry decrying in the most disparaging terms the state of Israel applying sovereignty to areas of the land of Israel qualifies as THE most dangerous self-disrespecting position of American Jews. Both of these, by me, wrong positions can be corrected. American Jews can withdraw their support of Black Lives Matter as an organization while still backing support for Black Americans if BLM doesn’t delete its “Israel genocide” provisions, as Dershowitz wrote this week, and American Jews can some fine day decide that applying Israeli law in Judea-Samaria isn’t “monumental stupidity” after all.
What can’t be changed if once agreed to is the delineation of international borders. And that – Palestinian Arab, European Union, British, United Nations and liberal western support for it notwithstanding – is what makes American Jewish support for “the two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps” THE most dangerous American Jewish self-disrespecting position.
Amb. Yoram Ettinger Friday (7/10/20, “Israel’s Critical National Security Zone”) reiterated what we all already well know. Returning Israel to what even America’s Reform and Conservative religious movements incorrectly call “the 1967 border,” nine miles wide in the lowland middle, would be security-wise suicidal, that the natural border of the Jordan River, backed by the Judea-Samaria hills, to all of which Israel has the strongest sovereignty case, is indispensable as Israel’s security border, as Rabin himself said. And, half-a-century after their liberation, for the Jewish people to walk out of Jerusalem’s Old City and City of David? No self-respecting Jew can advocate that.
We have to have a viable meaningful sovereign Jewish homeland of Israel. We have to have it, and by law and history we are entitled to it, not just a defenseless ghetto lowland sliver of western Palestine sans the heart of Jerusalem. And a state of Israel coextensive with the land of Israel still leaves Palestinian Arabs as the majority population of Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate. Our time is among the most momentous in our people’s three millennia history – that of fulfillment of the dream of almost two millennia of persecuted homeless generations for the land of Israel’s sovereign redemption. Our fellow Jews in our homeland of Israel courageously achieved this miracle of redemption, not us. Let us be worthy of them.
Buddy
A couple weeks back, I wrote of a small private luncheon I and a handful of fellow ZOAniks attended awhile back with Lisa Hostein, then editor of the Philadelphia Jewish community-owned Jewish Exponent, at which we all got to tell her something, that I told her our Jewish community’s organized leadership – our Federation, Board of Rabbis, Jewish Exponent – should be in the van in contesting anti-Israel media bias, not least that of own city’s newspaper. Lisa wasn’t the first Jewish Exponent editor I confronted on this. She was the third.
In the years 2001 – 2004, I had the privilege to serve as executive vice-president and then as what had once really been “national president” of the century-old Philly-headquartered men’s and women’s fraternal order Brith Sholom, and represented it in Philly’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), where I routinely engaged in chats with our Exponent’s then editor, Jonathan Tobin. I told Jonathan routinely that his Job In The Jews, as editor of a community-owned Jewish Exponent, was to be at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s (Inq’s) throat like a werewolf. (Years later, I couldn’t picture myself saying this, without smiling, to the not-a-little-bit-liberal Lisa.)
Jonathan didn’t do that, but he did do two things for me. Every winter, with the “bigs” on Brith Sholom’s Board of Governors enjoying the snow season in Florida, those of us who remained in Philly spent most of the funds we had left on a free annual brunch for our members. One year, Jonathan agreed to my request to be our guest speaker. My members having heard quite a bit from me about anti-Israel media bias and the importance of an ethnic community’s newspaper, the editorials of which speak in the name of that community, not just a commercial newspaper’s owners, Jonathan drew a nice crowd, and began with “Jerry doesn’t think I’m tough enough.” That second thing I asked Jonathan was to write an article (which he handsomely did) on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Philly-based fraternal order Brith Sholom. Somebody asked me what I’d had to pay to get him to do that. I had to promise Jonathan to leave him alone for ninety-nine years.
Before Jonathan Tobin was Bertram Korn. I’d met him two decades before when, as just a plain member of Brith Sholom’s Cardozo Lodge, I participated in a three-organization – Philly ZOA, Philly CAMERA and Brith Sholom – anti-Israel bias protest on the sidewalk of what I religiously referred to as “the Inq’s Dark Tower on Callowhill Street (May It Crumble Into A Parking Lot).” As head of CAMERA’s then Philly office, Bertram Korn, known to us as “Buddy,” was the ringleader of that sidewalk protest. So taken was I with Buddy’s leadership of that protest (which Leon Brown told Brith Sholom at its Catskills convention years later had not received support from the community) that I volunteered to help CAMERA. I told Buddy I had three qualifications: I religiously watched the TV network news at 6:30 each night and spent a good part of that half-hour throwing things at the TV set; that I’d just come home from a trip to Israel and spent $160 developing photographs; and that – ultimate test of commitment to Zionism, if unfair to Gold Star – I could drink an entire bottle of Israeli beer.
I learned a great deal from Buddy, who was quite good at it, in analyzing and responding to anti-Israel media bias, so when he later became editor of our Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, I was more than pleased with his obtaining that position. Alas, he wasn’t quite the same person. Eventually, a week that Israel was getting it even worse than usual in the mainstream media and the Exponent ran a big photo of an entertainer on its front page, I wrote the editor of our Jewish Exponent a letter. I said that left to themselves the Inquirers of the media would continue to run roughshod over Middle East history to Israel’s great detriment in the continuing struggle between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, and that in Philadelphia except for our Jewish Exponent our Philadelphia Inquirer had the field to itself. I told him to pause in the morning when he entered the paper’s premises and reflect on the intent of the sign on the door, put there by that paper’s owners, saying “Jewish Exponent,” and that, going in, he should wander around the place with a lamp in the daytime, that maybe he’d find a newspaper reporter, might even find Buddy.
Buddy Korn died this week from the Covid-19 pandemic virus. I will remember him as a champion fighting media bias against Israel, back in the early days when us disciples of the Jerusalem Post’s David Bar-Illan seemed to be only ones concerned about or even cognizant of it, these being the days before Jonathan Tobin wrote an Exponent editorial: “Media Bias – It’s Real.” Thank you, Buddy, you were an inspiration as well as instructor.