WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A Reform rabbi rightly wrote this week that a public letter by 93 non-Orthodox rabbinical students during the last Hamas war unfairly criticized Israel. I appended a reader comment that misleading language in the Reform movement’s and others’ own public letter had contributed to these students’ misperceptions. It’s not just we lay grassroots American Jews who are being misled.
This Week in the Word Warriors’ Workshop: Divining the Cause of Reform Rabbinical Students’ Unholy View of Our Homeland
New York Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch had a Times of Israel op-ed this week, provoked by a long New York Times Magazine article titled Inside The Unravelling of American Zionism. The New York Times can wish, but what provoked the Rabbi’s ire was the article’s focus, “93 rabbinical and cantorial students enrolled in multiple non-Orthodox American seminaries who published a letter during the May hostilities between Israel and Hamas, harshly criticizing Israeli policies and actions.”
The Rabbi both defended Reform Judaism as a Zionist movement and deplored how it was possible “for future Jewish leaders to write an open letter to the public in the middle of a war, missiles raining down on our people, without ever mentioning Hamas, the instigator of the war.” He lamented that “the Reform movement does not speak enough about our people’s enemies … who seek to destroy us” with their refusal “to accept a Jewish state within any borders.”
But while the Rabbi acknowledges that “we have a right, and an obligation, to teach future leaders our values and commitments,” my take on his op-ed is that values and commitments which open-letter-writing students learn from their teachers include not just those in classroom lectures, but as well those in their teachers’ own open letters. I posted this comment to the Rabbi’s op-ed:
“The fault is not all with the rabbinical students. In 2019 the Reform and Conservative movements, Rabbis and all, joined in an open letter to President Trump calling for a ‘two-state solution’ with borders that would ‘hew precisely to the 1967 borders’ save for any agreed ‘territorial adjustments.’ Those ‘1967 borders’ were 1949 ceasefire lines expressly declared in their defining document NOT to be borders, without prejudice to either side’s border claims. Requiring agreed ‘territorial adjustments’ to them just reinforced that mischaracterization.
“The Reform and Conservatives et al’s open letter went on to oppose ‘annexation’ by Israel in ‘the West Bank.’ ‘Annexation’ (see Encarta) refers to taking over another country’s territory, and Jordan renamed Judea and Samaria (the names used by the UN in 1947) to disassociate that part of the land of Israel from Jews.
“We just celebrated Hanukkah, commemorating for the two thousand one-hundred something year rededication of the Temple on the Mount that would be outside Israel in borders ‘hewing precisely to the 1967 borders.'”
Both the Union for Reform Judaism and Central Conference of American Rabbis, the synagogue and rabbinical arms of the U.S. Reform movement, were among the signatories of that multi-group open letter to President Trump.
There’s a link in this week’s Rabbi Hirsch op-ed back to that public letter last May by the 93 rabbinical and cantorial students. If you don’t think these Reform students learned something from that URJ-and-CCAR-signed letter to Trump about what the US Reform movement considers would be “annexation” by Israel of “Palestinian territories,” read this paragraph of the rabbinical students’ letter:
“As American Jews, our institutions tell stories of Israel rooted in hope for what could be, but oblivious to what is. Our tzedakah money funds a story we wish were true, but perpetuates a reality that is untenable and dangerous. Our political advocacy too often puts forth a narrative of victimization, but supports violent suppression of human rights and enables apartheid in the Palestinian territories, and the threat of annexation.” [emphasis added]
Ask yourself whether their teachers calling the 1949 ceasefire lines Israel’s “1967 borders,” with Judea-Samaria being a “West Bank” applying Israeli civil law to which would be “annexation” [Encarta – “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state”], leads to students seeing such a status as one that “enables apartheid in the Palestinian territories, and the threat of annexation.”
Rabbi Hirsch strongly answers the students’ charge that American Jewish institutions are silent when “racist violence erupts in Israel and Palestine.” He calls it “preposterous” to equate “American racial problems” with Israel’s war with Hamas. He points out that “most Israelis are not of European descent” but are “Jews of color,” not “white colonial Jews whose sole purpose is to exploit and oppress” Palestinian Arabs.
But beyond denying that “racist violence” is involved, Rabbi Hirsch does not seem troubled by the students’ placement of that violence as erupting “in Israel and Palestine.” And he himself refers to “the Palestinians.” As then-Prime Minister Begin pointed out in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, the names “Palestine” and “Palestinian” don’t belong exclusively to Arabs. There’s Jewish equity in them. “Palestine” refers to the entire territory embraced in the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate (i.e., today’s Israel and Jordan), and the United Nations itself in its 1947 western Palestine partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” Referring in parallel to “Israel and Palestine” expels Jewish content from “Palestine,” which ironically is what the Romans millennia ago renamed what had been Judaea in a reference back to the extinct Philistines to disassociate what had been Judaea from Jews.
So let’s sum up this week in our Jewish homeland word warriors’ workshop. Jonathan Tobin told me many years ago that the biggest victims of anti-Israel media bias are American Jews. I took that to mean we lay grassroots, but it embraces non-Orthodox rabbinical students and their mentors: “1967 borders” and “territorial adjustments” thereto; “West Bank” and “annexation”; “apartheid”; “Israel and Palestine … Palestinian territories … the Palestinians.”
PS: We invite readers of this to join those who’ve taken the “Word Warrior” pledge (full text in #1084 under Media Watch on our www.factsonisrael.com), not to use Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words, to object to such use by organizations to which you belong, to seek to correct such use by fellow grassroots American Jews and others with whom you converse, to post comments to internet articles using Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words, and to share your actions with others. Just reply to this email or email me, jverlin1234@verizon.net: “I took the pledge.” And, if this #1090 was forwarded to you, we invite you to subscribe, just say that word, to these weekly emails. j