Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

For Jewish people across the state, thecountry, and the world, the otherwise festive last night of Hanukkah 2019 was punctuated by solemnity and solidarity, in the wake of astabbing attack in New York on a rabbi's home during the candle-lighting to mark the2,200-year-old holiday the night before.

"I'm horrified,"Rabbi-Cantor Patricia Hickman told FLORIDA TODAY Monday, "who could ever imagine that a lunatic would do that, enter a rabbi's home with a machete?"

More: 5 stabbed in 'act of domestic terrorism' at Hanukkah party

"We will need all the light, strength and courage we can muster to dispel the darkness that has insidiously invaded our homes and places of worship," Hickman wrote Sunday in a letter to her congregation.

In it she shared a 1932 photograph from a Jewish home in Germany where a menorah was placed in a window in view of a Nazi flag.The image has recently resurfaced on social media with a modern spin on its original caption: "Our light will outlast their flag".

Chanukah Menorah in the window of Rabbi Akova Boruch Posner, opposite the Nazi Party headquarters building in Kiel, Germany, in 1932. The back of the photo was captioned, in German: 'Death to Judah', So the flag says, 'Judah will live forever', So the light answers"(Photo: Rachel Posner (public domain))

Even before the attackin New York that left five people seriously injured, Jewish residents acrossBrevard Countyhave felt a shared sense that anti-Jewish sentiment is rising locally as much as nationally.

The massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, fliers left by white supremacists at a 'Little Free Library' in Cape Canaveral in May claiming that Jews push pornographyon children, a discussion seemingly promoting antisemitic conspiracieson a talk radio show in August, these events may be disconnected from one another, but they contribute to a collective sense of unease.

Data appears to support the feeling. TheFederal Bureau of Investigation shows that hate crimes have beenon the rise in the United States since 2014 and The Anti-Defamation League's tracking of antisemitic incidents reveals a parallel upwards trend.

Brevard Countyis not immune from the national current. According to the ADL's data-set of self-reported antisemitic and extremist incidents, between 2002 and 2014 Brevard County recorded zero incidents, while from 2015 to 2019 there were seven. In a county where Jews make up less than 1% of the total population, the sudden spike in antisemitic incidents has been deeply felt.

"Anti-semitism is the oldest and most pernicious forms of hatred.We won't put up with it in Florida." South Brevard StateRepresentative Randy Fine tweeted out late on Sunday night.

The presence of armed security at local congregations for weekend services since the synagogue shootings in Pittsburghreflects thesensethat similar events are not impossible here.

"I'm not happy about it," saidJeff Fishkin of the need for a Sheriff's deputy to stand guard outside the doors of Temple Israel on a Friday evening.

But, he added, "having a police officer is essential."

Sheriff's deputies now stand guard outside all ofBrevard's Jewish congregations for every shabbatservice, at the worshipper's expense, a fact that Fine said he plans to change.

"You should not have to pay money to worship in peace," Fine told FLORIDA TODAY, promising to bring up the issue with the Governor.

"You can't say, hey,if you want to be Jewish you've got to hire the police, you've got to rent the police to keep you safe," he said.

While antisemitism has always existed, and manifested locally, such as when Temple Israel's building in Viera was defaced with swastika graffiti in the 90's, there's a feeling that it is far more open than before.

"The general trend is following the national trend, which is that its becoming more prevalent and more open," saidRabbi Craig Mayers of Temple Beth Sholom, the oldest congregation in Brevard, whichdatesback to 1957.

But it's not just more visible, Mayers also saidthat antisemitism has taken on "amore hateful component" than in the past.

For example, he said, past common occurrences such as aJewish kid being teaseda school or an employer not understanding Jewish holidayswere usually a matter of"benign ignorance."

"There's an ignorance ... we make up 1 percent of Brevard population... there was a genuine search for knowledge," he said, but now "its over the top, its beyond the pale."

In August, a social media stir resulted from a Facebook comment telling State Rep. Fineto "go back to Boca." Boca Raton has a high proportion of Jewish residents. Fine is Jewish,but not from Boca.

Related: Anti-Semitic 'go back to Boca' post against Fine creates social media stir

Also in August, WMMB talk radio host Bill Mick kept a caller on air for 10 minutes who peddled in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

In response, 23faith leaders and organisations, including representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Brevard County pennedan open letter in which they joined the Florida Anti Defamation League in their condemnation of the on-airexchange betweenMick and the caller to "Bill Mick Live" and demanded at a minimum, an apology.

Mick declined to comment and neither the station nor parent company iHeartMedia took any action in response to the letters.

Previously: Anti-Defamation League sends complaint, says comments on 'Bill Mick Live' were anti-Semitic

Previously: Brevard faith leaders demand apology in open letter to Bill Mick

For some, blame lies atthe top, whether through silence orinflammatory rhetoric, saying political leaders spanning the political spectrumfrom Republican President Donald Trumpto freshmen Democratic Congresswomen Ilhan Omarand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have contributed.

"I think a lot of it has to do with what's going on in Washington, (D.C.)," saidFishkin.

Fine said "Ill call it out on both sides, neither party has a monopoly on antisemitism."

Randy Fine chairs the Brevard County legislative delegation.(Photo: PROVIDED PHOTO)

Fine was key in signing into state law measures to combat antisemitismin Florida schools. Specifically, it make antisemitism in schools equivalent to racial discrimination.

The law has been criticized for also defining antisemitism in terms that include demonization of the state of Israel, antizionism or applying a "double standard" towards the conduct of Israel,which some, including Jewish community leaders, felt was heavy handed.

The law also defines antisemitism as playing on dual loyalty tropes, which have been the source of several political flashpoints last year.

More: DeSantis says anti-Semitism in Florida schools verboten after bill signing in Israel

For instance when President Trump said "I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.

Fine and other defenders of the President insisted this wasn't a loyalty smear as critics contend.

The statement drew the ire of many Jewish leaders and groups across the country, who condemned it for playing into timeless anti-Semitic 'loyalty' tropes. The same criticism had been leveled in months prior against freshmen democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and by proxy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Notwithstanding his view on the President's controversial remark, Fine said he felt the national trend was reflected locally and the trend is negative, not positive.

"It is the ugliest time I have experienced in my life as a Jewish person," he said.

Rabbi Craig Mayers was recently ordained and installed as rabbi at Temple Beth Sholom in Suntree. (Photo: MALCOLM DENEMARK/FLORIDA TODAY)

For Mayers, the lackof clarity behind Trump's disloyalty comment "Disloyal to what?" he askeddoesn't help.

Rabbi-Cantor Hickman,who has led the nearly six-decade-old Temple Israel congregation in Brevard for 17 years, describes the trend as "extremely disturbing."

"It's part of the life of being a Jew, you know, no matter where you live, it seems thatthere are people who are antisemitic."

While not particularly pronounced in Brevard, where she feels "tremendous support" from fellow non-Jewish faith leaders,she nonetheless sees the county as following national trends.

Rabbi Pat Hickman(Photo: FILE)

"There's always been an undercurrent, but it seems to have been given voice now. And it seems to be coming out more than ever before," Hickman said.

More: Explore the ADL's heat map of antisemitic incidents around the country

In 2018, the ADL recorded 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, among them was a 105% increase in physical assaults against Jewish people, including the Pittsburgh massacre.

FBI data that showsthat hate crimes in Florida spiked by 51% in 2017 from the prior year, rising from 96 in 2016to 145 in 2017.In its annualHate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA)report, the FBI said that nationally hate crimes increased by 17 percent, with a 37 percent spike in crimes targeting Jews and Jewish institutions. In 2018, the number of hate crimes in the state remained steady at 141. The next report covering statistics in 2019 is due in November 2020.

Screen capture of the ADL's interactive Heat Map of anti-Semitic, extremist and white nationalist incidents in Florida 2016-2019(Photo: ADL)

Following successive year-on-year increases in reported incidents to the ADL since 2015, 2018 saw a small dip in incidents across Florida.

According to ADLs 2018 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, there were 76 incidents of anti-Semitism in Florida in 2018. "Vandalism and assaults remained at their 2017 levels, while reported incidents of non-criminal harassment dropped," according to the report.

The ADL's data is based off of self-reported incidents, which are in turn verified by the ADL before being added to their database.

Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida who watches politics locally, refrained from commenting on Brevard County specifically, but said there is at least a "modest uptick" in antisemitic language being used.

"Some of it I think comes from the top down ... there are certainly a number of critics of President Trump that believe he has said or done a number of things that are antisemitic or questionable in terms of support for Judaism," Jewett said, adding that "though he does have his supporters who point out he is a fervent supporter of Israel and that his Charlottesvillecomments were taken out of context."

Yet Jewett's perspective is that out of context or otherwise, Trump's words have "emboldened some anti-Jewish groups."

For him, this also fits more broadly into "acoarsening of the culture that weve seen over the past decade or so, particularly online people feel they can say anything,thats probablyfed into it as well," he said.

Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon is a watchdogreporter at FLORIDA TODAY.

Contact him at 321-355-8144, or asassoon@floridatoday.com. Twitter:@alemzs

Read or Share this story: https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2019/12/31/antisemitism-rise-brevard-county-say-jewish-faith-leaders-adl/2341158001/

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

NEW ORLEANS There have been at least nine anti-Semitic attacks in New York in less than a week, including Saturday's stabbing spree at the home of a rabbi during a Chanukah celebration.

Anti Defamation League regional director Aaron Ahlquish says there seems to be a movement towards the normalization of anti-Semitism.

"We no longer live in a time where we have the luxury of taking a passive approach to our security both within the Jewish community and really within the faith community as a whole," Ahlquist said. "The faith community as a whole is vulnerable right now."

On Sunday, a gunman opened fire at a church near Fort Worth, Texas, killing two parishioners.

Tuesday, Heisman Trophy winner and well known Christian athlete Tim Tebow participated in an Allstate Sugar Bowl volunteer event in New Orleans East.

He talked about the recent spate of religious attacks.

"There is definitely a lot of hurt and harm and bad things that take place," Tebow said. "I still believe the best in humanity because God loves us and he has us here for a reason."

Tebow added, erasing the hate that leads to violence starts with understanding the value of each other.

RELATED: Hate crimes charges against man accused in Hanukkah stabbing

RELATED: Jersey City attack 'fueled' by anti-Semitism, NJ Attorney General says

"We're going to see them as valuable as worthy, as special, as unique," Tebow said. "If we viewed people that way, we treat people that way and we would have a much different society."

The local Jewish community is now taking steps to call out hate, while securing their places of worship.

"I think we've all taken the approach where it's best to be prepared," Ahlquist said. "We're taking active steps within each institution to look at their own practices and procedures for how they secure their facilities."

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

We are in the midst of a dangerous wave of anti-Semitism, hatred of Jewish people, and violent acts against Jewish communities. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 1,879 anti-Jewish acts in 2018 in the United States.

I have created a new four-part plan to combat anti-Semitism. The plan is called the Anti-Hatred Initiative (AHI). The Jewish community must adopt these new and creative proposals to prevent future attacks:

I. Multi-Cultural Jewish Speakers Tour

Many racists and anti-Semites falsely believe that all Jewish people belong to the white race. In addition, some groups promote the idea that white Jews are not real Jews. There are groups that will not accept white Jews as members of the Jewish people. Certain Black Hebrew Israelite groups openly teach that white Jews are fake Jews.

In my opinion, there has not been a coordinated Jewish response to attacks on so-called white Jews.

The Jewish community must recruit Jewish people of color such as Ethiopian Jewish people, Sephardic Jewish people, Persian Jewish people, and Yemenite Jewish people for a multi-cultural Jewish speakers tour. We must demonstrate that Jewish people come in all colors and races.

The Jewish people is a rainbow colored people; we come in all colors. The Jewish community must delve into its diversity to share inclusion, diversity, and multi-racialism. Why not send Ethiopian Jewish groups to Harlem, New York; Compton, California; and the South Side of Chicago to speak at African American schools about Jewish traditions? Ethiopian Jewish speakers can achieve a cultural breakthrough between Jewish communities and African American communities.

II. NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, and World Jewish Congress

Years ago, I was a financial donor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the ADL, and I am a former member of the World Jewish Congress (WJC).

Immediately, the NAACP, ADL, and WJC should launch a Building Bridges between African Americans and American Jews Campaign. The result of this campaign should be the creation of a joint Jewish-African American organization called the African American and American Jewish Congress (AAAJC). The ultimate goal is to build long-term, collaborative relationships between African American communities and Jewish communities.

While living in Jerusalem, I met a well-known Afro-Jewish leader named Rabbi Nati Gamedze who is originally from Swaziland and South Africa. Rabbi Gamedze is a famous Jewish teacher in Israel. Why dont American Jewish organizations invite Rabbi Nati Gamedze to speak to African American audiences about his experiences in the Jewish world?

Barack Mandela talking to a rabbi at the Western Wall (Kotel) in Jerusalem. (Courtesy)

III. United States Department of Racial Unity in 2020

In order to prevent a dangerous race war in the United States, I call upon President Donald Trump to immediately establish a United States Department of Racial Unity with General Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as co-directors.

IV. International Organization for African American Jews

There are thousands of African American Jewish people; some of whom are converts. Why doesnt the World Jewish Congress, Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Federation, and Jewish Community Relations Council create and fund a new organization called African American Jewish Congress (AAJC). Such an organization, if properly organized, can create a positive and optimistic Jewishness or Yiddishkeit among African American communities.

V. Conclusion

As an American American-Jewish Israeli citizen, I believe there is mutual distrust and mutual misunderstanding between some African Americans and American Jewish people. Many African American know little about Jewish traditions. Moreover, many Jewish people do not understand the bitter struggles of African America.

I publicly call upon the following leaders for assistance and support: (1) President Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress; (2) Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, (3) Harriet Schleifer, president of the American Jewish Committee; (4) Sheldon Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands and mega-donor; (5) Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP (6) Arthur Stark, chairman, Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

We need bold and compassionate action to fight anti-Semitism, anti-Israel bias, racism, unfair stereotyping, discrimination, and violence. Let us work together to uproot hatred and violence. Let us adopt the following motto: By standing together, no one stands alone.

Licensed Attorney. Specialist on Jewish Affairs. Former Rabbinical Student: Aish HaTorah College in Jerusalem and Machon Meir College in Jerusalem. Former student of Rabbi Noach Weinberg and Rabbi Dov Begon of Jerusalem. Former Staff Attorney to Governor Pete Wilson of California. Former Assistant Intern to United States Senator Barbara Boxer. Former Intern for Mayor of Jerusalem Ehud Olmert and Jerusalem Spokesperson Haggai Elias. Israel Defense Forces 2000-2005. United States Army 2006-2008. Recipient of National Defense Service Medal, 2006. Israel Defense Forces Inspirational Soldier Award 2001. Licensed driver of the "Merkava" battle tank.Mr. Barack Mandela is a financial donor to: Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, Princeton University, UC Berkeley Law School, UC Hastings Law School, Columbine High School, Sidwell Friends School, Choate Rosemary Hall, Eton College in the United Kingdom, St. Andrew's Episcopal School, and the British Red Cross. He is a former member of both the World Jewish Congress and the NAACP. He considers himself an "honorary graduate" of Columbine High School.

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Action Plan to Fight Against Anti-Semitism in 2020 - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

1. One male, female dead after car shooting at Luther Burbank Park

At about 11:15 a.m. July 13, Mercer Island police were dispatched to the 2200 block of 84th Avenue Southeast after a weapons complaint was made. What officers found was a male and female in a car with gunshot wounds, located in the main parking area at Luther Burbank Park. They were transported to Harborview Medical Center for treatment and later died of their injuries. Officers have determined the shooting was a static incident, according to MIPD commander Jeff Magnan, meaning the incident is isolated to the male and female located in the car. The gun was recovered at the scene and officers were not looking for any suspects. During a day of high traffic at the park, Magnan said there was one witness who heard gunshots while others mistook the shots for fireworks.

2. Remembering a Mercer Island sports icon

State baseball Hall of Fame coach and longtime Mercer Island High School athletic director Gary Snyder died of cancer on Oct. 24 at the age of 80. Snyder grew up in the Magnolia area of Seattle, where he attended Queen Anne High School and played basketball and baseball. After graduation, he went to the University of Washington on a full baseball scholarship and made the UW Hall of Fame along with the other members of the 1959 Husky team. Snyder played in the San Francisco Giants minor-league system before he returned to the Seattle area for years of coaching youth. He landed a job as a physical education teacher at Shorecrest High School in north Seattle in 1962, and by the time he reached his early 20s, he was head baseball coach. For 14 years he coached at the school, and led the team to a state championship in 1975. In 1979, Snyder was hired as associate principal for Mercer Island High School. Soon after, he was made athletic director and spent more than 15 years at the school where he developed a reputation for the way he managed the facilities. In 1988, Snyder became a charter inductee into the Washington State Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

3. Islander, Bothell firefighter remembered

He was a walking angel. Thats how Tinya Anderson, a Mercer Island resident, describes Kirk Robinson, a born-and-raised Islander and lieutenant for the Bothell Fire Department (BFD). Robinson died Oct. 4 at the age of 42. Robinson graduated from Mercer Island High School in 1995. Later, he studied kinesiology and sports medicine at Westmont College. In 1999, he joined Mercer Islands auxiliary firefighting force; then, in April 2001, he was hired to work at BFD full time. Robinson was close to the community he was raised in until his death. In his youth, he served as a lifeguard at the Stroum Jewish Community Center. He was also a dedicated member of the Mercer Island Presbyterian Church. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he volunteered to assist with ground zero cleanup. After Hurricane Katrina devastated Florida and Louisiana in 2005, Robinson and eight other firefighters hailing from Bothell and Redmond traveled to the East Coast to assist the Federal Emergency Management Agency. On Feb. 23, 2017, Robinson was diagnosed with stage four metastatic melanoma. When he went public with his diagnosis on June 4, 2018, on social media, he received support in abundance. Shortly afterward, he was given a Hometown Heroes award at Mercer Islands Summer Celebration parade.

4. Moms, business owners, residents oppose bus intercept

As news spreads of the proposed bus intercept plan that would transfer thousands of Eastside commuters from bus to light rail on Mercer Island, resistance has grown. Hundreds of residents have spoken out against the plan between the city of Mercer Island, Sound Transit (ST) and King County Metro. They cite concerns of crime, traffic congestion, infrastructure and public safety. They also are expressing frustrations with differences in the latest version of the plan to integrate bus with rail from what was previously agreed upon in a 2017 settlement agreement between the city and ST. That agreement specifically outlined that Metro buses would only drop off, pick up and layover on the south side of the street to avoid having passengers cross the street. It also included a 77th Avenue Southeast roundabout designated for bus turnaround. The plan will seriously impact adjacent private homes, including two properties to be acquired by ST on 78th Avenue Southeast and on North Mercer Way. The bus intercept plan is part of an ongoing bus-rail integration effort to eliminate redundant service across the I-90 bridge once the East Link Light Rail station on Mercer Island begins running in 2023.

5. Mercer Island PD hopes sonar will lead to missing boaters

The search for two missing boaters James Le, a 30-year-old Seattle man, and his friend Vanna Nguyen, a 33-year-old woman from Burien continued a week after Mercer Island Police found the empty boat floating near Mercer Island on Labor Day. There was little info on exactly where the pair was on the water before the boat drifted south of Mercer Island. The Coast Guard helped in the investigation and used a helicopter to search the lake and ground. The Seattle Police Harbor Patrol also aided in the search. Other marine units searched the water and shoreline and found a trailer and truck associated with the boat at Gene Coulon Park in Renton. Left behind on the undamaged boat were the pairs cell phones. Police examined the two devices in an attempt to pin down a GPS location of where the phones were last used.

6. Amazon confirms move to Bellevue

Amazon confirmed rumors and numerous reports that the industry giant is planning a big move to Bellevue. GeekWire broke the news after Dave Clark, the senior vice president in charge of Amazons worldwide operations team, sent out an email on April 3 announcing the move. The Seattle-based team will relocate its thousands of employees to Bellevue by 2023. We opened our first office building in Bellevue in 2017, an Amazon spokesperson said. Its a city with great amenities, a high-quality of life for our employees, and fantastic talent and its recognized for its business-friendly environment. We look forward to continue growing our presence in Bellevue and bringing more jobs to the city.

7. Swastikas found on Mercer Island during Jewish holiday

A swastika that had been crudely painted on a concrete riser was discovered Sept. 29 at Mercerdale Park. Police have no idea how long the swastika had been there. There were no suspects. We have not seen anything like this in quite some time, said Commander Jeff Magnan of the Mercer Island Police Department. Obviously well follow up on any lead we can, but at this point we see this as a one off. Someone did something stupid, but we dont necessarily see it as pervasive issue on the Island right now Unfortunately not much we can do on this one. There were more swastikas found the previous week, according to a post on Nextdoor a neighborhood-specific social media website. A photo shows the side of a truck covered in multiple white symbols parked somewhere along Fleury Trail. The Anti-Defamation League confirmed that there was a truck covered in spray paintings with many large, clear swastikas discovered on Mercer Island. Investigators familiar with hate symbols, in their Center on Extremism, confirmed a number of the symbols were in fact swastikas.

8. Community supports local bakery on Mercer Island

Tucked away on an innocuous side street with no visible signage, one would have thought that location and lack of identification alone would put a small business like Shawns Bakery and Cafe at SE 24th St. on Mercer Island out of business, but it didnt. In fact, owner Shawn Huffman argues his low profile actually strengthened the ideals he wanted to see in his community. His bakery and caf is locally supported so his store doors are continually opened by familiar local faces. For the past 37 years Huffman has been refining his craft as a chef, dabbling in an assortment of cooking methods, after graduating from the California Culinary Academy, now the Cordon Bleu Culinary School in San Francisco. I get a lot of people who are looking for anything thats not a Starbucks, Huffman said.

9. Wizard of Oz cast member dies at 98

A retirement community on Mercer Island is mourning the loss of a resident who connected the Island to one of the most beloved movies of all time, The Wizard of Oz. Meredythe Glass was one of the last surviving cast members of The Wizard of Oz. She died on Saturday, Aug. 31, at the age of 98. Glass was 18 when she landed her first acting job as an extra on The Wizard of Oz in 1939. She was one of about 100 green ladies. Glass got the part because her mothers first cousin, Mervyn LeRoy, was the director-producer of the film. When she turned 18, LeRoy got her a Screen Actors Guild card. After The Wizard of Oz, Glass went on to work in Hollywood for a few more years, mostly as an extra or stand-in. She secured a small contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) studio, appearing as an extra in several Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney films, including Babes on Broadway, Strike up the Band, and Babes in Arms. Glass also stood in for Vivian Leigh during the 1940s filming of Waterloo Bridge, Leighs first film after Gone With the Wind.

10. Mercer Island police, U.S. Coast Guard are searching for missing boaters

Mercer Island police partnered with Seattle Police Harbor Patrol and the U.S. Coast Guard in their ongoing search for missing boaters James Le and Vanna Nguyen. Officers who responded in a Marine Patrol Boat found while the vessel was still playing loud music, there was no one aboard the red 20-foot ski type boat. And evidence two open and partially consumed bottles of alcohol and two cell phones pointed to there having been at least two onboard.

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

Its the most famous poster for an election youve never heard of. A mans face stares out from the poster, hands cupped around an open mouth. In Yiddish letters the poster proclaims: There where we live, there is our country. Voters are urged to choose Bundist candidates in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1917-18. Bundist candidates, the poster promises, will ensure full political and national rights for Jews. Sadly, the Bund was crushed in the elections.

For hundreds of years, Jews served as the silenced Other in the imagination of Europes Christians, as well as the first objects of the latters scholarly and ethnographic Enlightenment gaze. Within the Russian Empire, Yiddish publications were long banned, both to enforce Jewish Russification and to squelch Jewish revolution.

Since this is the age of the meme, that striking image has been modified and reproduced again and again, creating the impression of a resurgent, if reductive, neo-Bundism. The British-Jewish anarchist collective Jewdas sells a simplified version as a fundraiser. The NYU chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace produced a modified version to protest a student trip to Israel. The International Socialist Organization used its imagery for a poster promoting BDS incidentally, featuring some truly cringey Yiddish spelling mistakes, artifacts of a designer for whom the presence of Yiddish letters communicates far more than what they may spell.

Why has this 100-year-old election poster been taken up with such enthusiasm in (non-Yiddish speaking) anti-Zionist and Palestine solidarity contexts? Besides just looking really cool (and being easy to reproduce), its slogan rings like a voice of moral authority from the past, shouting in solidarity to the current anti-Zionist moment. Back then, There where we live, there is our country pointed to one of the key aspects of the Bundist movement: doikayt literally, hereness.

As a contemporary rhetorical move, emphasizing hereness mitigates thereness, that is to say, theoretical Jewish obligations to, and responsibility for, the State of Israel. It posits a starkly bad there (no peace on stolen land), while implying an unproblematic here.

But where, exactly, is here? Is it New York? The reconstituted, prosperous capital of global Jewry? Or is here Lenapehoking, home of the indigenous Lenape people, who lived on what is now known as Manhattan, before they were dispossessed (again and again) by European settlers?

Writing in Pacific Standard magazine in 2018, journalist Noah Berlatsky mused on how the Bunds legacy spoke to him as an American Jew: Maybe were home here, wherever we are, because anywhere we are is worth living in, and worth making a better place. Maybe we can see value in our neighbors, wherever they come from, whatever their history, simply because theyre our neighbors now. Our existence in the Diaspora is anti-fascist. Thats something to be proud of, and to build on.

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In order to make his argument, Berlatsky figures Diaspora life as an active repudiation of anti-Semites who despised Jews for their lack of nation and roots. But that requires him to erase the contingencies of Jewish presence in the newly configured post-war Diaspora, places like North and South America, and Australia. And it demands we ignore the ways in which our presence in those places is made possible only by the sufferance of settler-colonial states.

I find it a historical irony that Bundist hereness can, in one breath, be used to condemn Zionism as a fascist settler-colonial state, and in the next breath, be used to proclaim as anti-fascist a Jewish persons mere existence within a different settler-colonial state.

The mechanical meme-ification of doikayt offers no further tools for reconciling modern Jewish life with complicity in North American settler colonialism. Noah Berlatsky can unironically state that Our existence in the Diaspora is anti-fascist because his analysis, despite making nods to the unfolding of historical events, is essentially ahistorical. His and others negative deployment of doikayt, moreover, reads like a superficial burlesque when compared to its original significance.

Though the Bund was strongly against the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel, the original context of doikayt wasnt merely, or even mostly, a negation of Zionism. For one thing, it was a reaction to the dire economic situation in Eastern Europe, as well as rising anti-Semitism. Jews were streaming out of Eastern Europe; over two million left at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The Bundist movement argued that Jews could, and should, stay in Eastern Europe and build a new, more just society.

Theres an argument to be made that the significance of doikayt was much broader a century ago, and its roots deeper, going back to people like the great historian, Simon Dubnow. Dubnow, father-in-law of Bundist leader Henryk Erlich, was notably opposed to Bundism and the suggestion that socialism, and class struggle, was the answer to Jewish suffering. He believed Jews needed to be more rooted in place, and that a renewed sense of Jewish nationalism, across class, offered Jews the strongest identity in the face of a hostile and crumbling empire.

At the turn of the 20th century, Dubnow revolutionized Jewish historiography in Eastern Europe by arguing that the communal institutions of the traditional Jewish kehilah constituted a kind of quasi-national authority. Where historians had previously treated the Jews of Europe as a problem to be described, Dubnow argued that the history of Eastern European Jews be written like that of any other nation by Jews, using Jewish sources, like responsa and pinkasim (communal record books). Dubnow insisted on Jewish subjectivity where previously, only Jewish Otherness had been inscribed by a Christian, European scholarly apparatus.

The unthinking transposition of pre-war Yiddish socialist poetics onto a vastly different world, a century later, is itself a kind of violent Othering. It allows participants to identify as Jews, while remaining distanced from the embarrassments of the past, as well as from the reactionary Zionism of their contemporaries. By privileging anti-Zionism above all else, it attempts to purify Jewishness of its outdated nationalism, cherry picking the past for elements compatible with (a certain part of) contemporary post-colonial left praxis. I am reminded of nothing so much as the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, who used the academic study of Jews to create a new kind of rational, universalized Jewishness, one at home in liberal, Christian Europe but ill at ease with lived Judaism.

Without a substantive, positive, historically grounded vision for Jewish life in the Diaspora, the contemporary vogue for doikayt risks becoming an ironic parody of the Zionist shelilat hagolah negation of the Diaspora but with a demonized image of the State of Israel as its animating idea.

I am deeply inspired by the Bund, and describe myself as a Yiddish-oriented Diaspora Nationalist. However, I find myself disheartened by the sudden enthusiasm of my peers for change to the Bundist past. Rather than an icon of resistance and creative struggle, the man on the Bundist election poster has become a reproducible cypher, mouth eternally agape so that others may speak with his authority, while erasing the history, and people, in whose image he was originally made.

Rokhl Kafrissen is a Yiddishist, playwright and cultural critic who lives in New York.

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

For more than a half-century, public debate in Israel has been dominated by two large sets of issues: externally, how to work for peace while maintaining maximum security; domestically, how to navigate the relationship between religion and state. But when it came to social and economic policy, debate gave way to across-the-board consensus: for decades, it was taken largely for granted that welfare-state economics and heavy government regulation made up the sine qua non of the good society.

The past few years, however, have seen a subtle yet quite dramatic change. Several new issues have become prominent in public debate, and acutely so during the recent election campaigns. The deficiencies and limitations of the regulatory welfare state are now openly discussed. So is the question of how to define Israel as the Jewish nation-state, and how to do so in terms of its national charactera question distinct from the persistent debates about religion and state.

Such issues happen to be central to the concerns of conservatives and classical liberalsand, indeed, more and more openly conservative voices have been making their views known. Thus, for example, a host of young politicians have championed far-reaching free-market reforms. For another example, after years of debate and gestation the Knesset last year passed a law declaring and defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and listing a number of specific manifestations of that definition (among them its flag, anthem, calendar, language, connection to the Jewish Diaspora, and immigration and settlement policies). In May 2019. the first annual conference on the subject of conservatism in Israel, sponsored by the Tikvah Fund, was held in Jerusalem, attracting wide media attention and close to one-thousand energetic and mostly young participants.

Clearly, then, something is in the air. How has it happened, and where is it headed?

Lets begin with a curious fact: while the Israeli governments policies have, for the most part, been anything but conservativesocialist is a more accurate termIsraeli society itself is rather conservative. To understand this latter fact, consider the three key components of what George Will calls the conservative sensibility:

How does Israel score by these markers?

Typically, the conservative sensibility is translated into policy preferences in standard ways. For one thing, to the extent that the state must involve itself in moral matters, it should do so in a way that respects traditional values (though on this point some libertarians might well question why the state must be involved in moral matters at all). For another thing, the state should let free markets function with only the minimum necessary interference. Finally, the state should robustly defend its borders, its citizens, and its foreign interests.

This is where the curious Israeli divergence between society and policy comes most visibly into play. On moral matters, Israel has, for instance, rather loose abortion policies; more surprisingly (to an American observer), these policies engender almost no public debate. As for the economy, apart from the successful high-tech sector it continues to be highly regulated, and both the countrys educational system and its broadcast communications remain extremely centralized. The one area in which Israel does pursue a standard conservative policy is in the defense of its borders and its citizens; but this is mostly because, if it didnt do so, it would soon find itself without the need for any policies at all.

Why has a conservative society like Israel pursued such typically progressive policies on moral and economic matters? The answer is rooted in the very nature of the Zionist ideology upon which the state was founded.

Zionism began as a revolutionary movement. True, this fact alone would not have sufficed to divert Israel irrevocably from conservative values. After all, no less a conservative than Edmund Burke was a great supporter of the American Revolution (though not the French Revolution); sometimes, nothing short of a revolution can preserve tradition and ensure freedom. The more pertinent factor had to do with the problem that the Zionist revolution set about to cure. That problem was, in a phrase, the disease of exile: a disease incubated by centuries of Jewish life under Gentile oppression and discrimination.

To cure this disease, Zionists sought to replace what they regarded as weak and desiccated communities with a strong and vital state, to replace religion-induced passivity with secular self-determination, and to replace horse-trading and huckstering with a return to the land and a centralized economy dedicated to the collective welfare of the citizenry.

These underlying values of the Zionist revolution have persisted until today, and that persistence explains in turn why free markets, and even prosperity itself, are seen by many in Israel as selfish, materialistic, and exilic: throwbacks to the circumstances of the pre-state European Diaspora. Similarly, any state policy that shows deference to traditional Jewish values is widely regarded as a form of religious coercionanother reminder of the claustrophobic circumstances of a segregated existence in which local rabbis might often serve as enforcers of behavioral standards.

These superannuated biases are slowly being outgrown, but policies rooted in them remain in place. Therefore, conservatives who wish to change those policies need to adapt their approach to Israeli sensibilities, and to pick their battles wisely.

With this in mind, we can begin to outline the key points of an Israeli conservative agenda.

The lowest-hanging fruit involves the economy, which is in radical need of decentralization. As things stand now, there are dozens of state-mandated cartels and monopolies still in place, mostly concentrated in the agricultural and food sectors. Israeli conservatives must forthrightly advocate the termination of each and every one of them, as well as the removal of all unnecessary tariffs.

As, again, things stand now, 93 percent of the land in Israel is still either owned or administered by the state. The housing market must be made more competitive by privatizing state-owned land, by reducing and simplifying housing regulations, and by reforming the tax policies that provide an incentive for municipalities to prevent construction within their boundaries.

The economic list continues. As things stand now, one-third of a companys work force can force unionization on the majority. Israel desperately needs right-to-work laws as well as a policy of binding arbitration in the case of vital services, so that striking workers cant shut down the country at whim.

And, as things stand now, the Education Ministry determines almost the entire curriculum for almost all Israeli schools. This must be undone. Restrictions must also be eased on television and radio broadcastingIsrael does not have even one non-state-owned radio station that broadcasts nationally.

All of this, challenging enough in itself, does not exhaust the to-dos. Two other main areas need to be addressed, each of which is likely to be less familiar to Americans.

Ive already hinted at the first, which involves defining the parameters of a Jewish nation-state and defending its special character. Roughly speaking, Israel needs to distinguish itself as a Jewish state through its immigration policies, its calendar, its language, and its symbolsand to do so without religious coercion and without limiting the rights of non-Jews. This is not a simple matter. It is basically what last years passage of Israels nation-state law made feasible, but the hard work of policy-making remains to be done.

Along the same lines, Israel must become more welcoming to olim: Jews returning to the land of their forebears. Here, a top priority is eliminating artificial licensing barriers that have kept many new arrivals out of competitive professions.

At the same time, the state must discourage illegal immigration. Here, too, the Knesset has acted by passing several laws designed to disincentivize such action. But the courts have struck these down.

Which leads to the second matter of special and urgent concern to Israeli conservatives: namely, the need to curb Israels judicial bureaucracy.

It would be hard to overestimate the powers that this bureaucracy has assumed unto itself. All limitations have long since been eliminated on who can petition the court (standing) and what kinds of cases the court can hear (justiciability). The grounds for ruling a law or a government action unconstitutionaland bear in mind that Israel has no constitutionhave been so unreasonably expanded as effectively to allow the Supreme Court to intervene whenever and on whatever grounds it happens to disagree with a given law or action.

Moreover, after unilaterally declaring Israels Basic Laws to possess constitutional status (and hence to form the grounds for striking down ordinary statutes), the Court now threatens to strike down last years nation-state lawwhich is itself a Basic Law. As if that werent enough, the justices of the Supreme Court have turned themselves into a review panel for government appointments of every kind, and, critically, hold veto power over all appointments to the Court itself.

As this unchecked judicial power has been used in the aggressive pursuit of a progressive agenda on every front, Israeli conservatives will accomplish very little until they find a way to restrain the Court as well as the entire judicial bureaucracy and especially the Court-empowered office of the Attorney General.

This, then, is the multifront battleground on which Israeli conservatives must fight.

Up until nowand despite dealing with, by Israeli standards, fairly sympathetic government coalitionsIsraeli conservatives have won a few battles but lost many more. To return where I began, however, there is this encouraging note: in public discourse, and in the war of ideas, conservatives and classical liberals have been gaining ground in Israel for nearly a decade, and are beginning to affect significantly the tenor of public discussion. In the long run, the character of the Jewish state will be determined not by the Supreme Court but, as is proper in a democracy, by the court of public opinion and in the voting booth.

This essay has been adapted from a talk given on November 10 at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York.

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The Rise and Prospects of Israeli Conservatism - Mosaic

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

One of the common and mistaken myths about the Jews is the claim that they did not excel at sports. Zionist leader Max Nordau, in his famous 1900 article about muscular Judaism (Muskeljudentum), a concept he coined in a speech at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, played on this myth to promote the vision of a new Jew: the Zionist with physical might that would also bring spiritual strength.

But the truth is that Jews engaged in sports long before the Zionist era, mainly in Western and Central Europe and in the United States. Daniel Mendoza was the British boxing champion in the late 18th century over 100 years before the First Zionist Congress and was considered the first famous boxer in the world. Two years before Nordaus speech in Basel, Jews won no fewer than 13 medals, nine of them gold, in the first modern-day Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. Representing Hungary, Austria and Germany these medal-winners made their marks in major events including gymnastics, swimming and cycling.

This wasnt an exceptional or one-time achievement. We often talk about the impressive proportion of Nobel Prize laureates who are Jewish, certainly in the sciences, relative to their share of the worlds population, but the number of medals won by Jewish athletes in the Olympic Games is greater than their proportion of the population.

As someone who grew up and was educated in Budapest, and resided in Berlin and Paris, Nordau was probably aware that Jews are also athletes. He may even have known some. His general perception of Jews was not mistaken, and his words were aimed at the masses of them in Eastern Europe, where the Zionist movement flourished, and where Jews tended to be more religious, more galuti i.e., with the Diaspora mentality and didnt engage much in sports.

The idea of combining study with sports, work with physical activity and bodily strength with mental resilience, and harnessing all that to build the Jewish national movement, was certainly not promoted for reasons of public relations alone. It was a genuine zeitgeist. Jewish labor and the redemption of the land probably contributed more than other factors to creation of the antithesis of the image of the Diaspora Jew, but thats already another subject. Whatever the case, Nordau laid the foundations of a different concept.

The next stage in the evolution of the Jewish athlete was the Maccabiah, the Jewish Olympics. It was not Jews lack of success in sports in the early 20th century that led to its establishment: The opposite was the case. Russian-born Yosef Yekutieli, the most important sports impresario in the history of the Land of Israel, who dreamed up and implemented the idea of the Maccabiah, was 15 years old (and a soccer player for Maccabi Tel Aviv hed immigrated to Palestine three years beforehand) when he read about the Olympic Games in Stockholm, in 1912. He discovered that many of the winners were Jews; they won seven gold and eight silver medals, in fencing and gymnastics, swimming and athletics. They came from Hungary, Austria, Belgium and Great Britain, the United States and Denmark.

In the early 1920s, Yekutieli began to envision the participation of residents of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, in the Olympic Games but that door was closed to anyone who wasnt the citizen of an independent country. He thus decided to launch a Jewish Olympics, an idea that German journalist Fritz Abraham had actually thought of even earlier.

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The establishment of the worldwide Maccabi sports organization in 1921 which evolved from a collection of local Maccabi clubs, first created in 1912 was a fulfillment of Nordaus vision. The second-century B.C.E. figure of Judah Maccabee inspired the name of the association: Although he had not been an athlete, he was a legendary warrior with an image diametrically opposed to that of the Diaspora Jew.

Incidentally, there are those who say the acronym formed by the first (Hebrew) letters of a verse of the Song of the Sea in the Book of Exodus was the inspiration behind the name Judah Maccabee but that is apparently another myth: Its been claimed that the verse Mi Kamokha Baelim Adonai (Who is like thee, O Lord, among the gods) appeared on the symbol of the Hasmoneans, but that claim was first made in the 10th century C.E., over 1,000 years after the Hasmonean era. In fact, Judah Maccabee should be translated as Judah the Hammer, since Maccabee derives from the Aramaic maqebba, meaning hammer of war).

Power that corrupts

The concept behind Maccabi, despite an ostensible connection to the Jewish sources, is not related to belief in God per se, but to the physical and spiritual strength of man. The fact that a huge number of Jews today identifies the word Maccabi with the above-mentioned biblical verse is somewhat sad. The Maccabi idea envisioned by Nordau was supposed to involve creation of a new Jew: one engaging in sports, but in matters of the spirit as well.

The first Maccabiah, also called the Maccabiada, was held in 1932 in Palestine. Three years earlier Yekutieli had explained his vision of the event: At this gathering we will not discuss only physicality; spirituality must also occupy a respectable place. At the Maccabiada we should hold competitions in arts, literature and organize exhibitions in all the areas of creativity of the Jewish people all these will add glory and benefit to our gathering.

Although his dream was not fully realized, the first Maccabiahs were a big success and achieved another objective: Jewish immigration to Palestine. With the founding of the state, Maccabi sports clubs chalked up handsome achievements, which were not inferior to those of Hapoel, which were greater in number, supported by the Histadrut Labor Federation and enjoyed political support from most of the public.

The success of Maccabi clubs in various branches of sport led to an increase of public affection for them, but also to an intoxication with power. There is nothing more corrupt than power combined with success and sports are no different. The ultimate example of that in Israel is the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team. In the name of the desire to win at any cost, the Maccabism of Maccabi Tel Aviv has morphed from a symbol of success in sports to a pejorative term for arrogant behavior, trampling of rivals, absolute domination and occasionally genuinely swinish capitalism.

When in 1965 Tal Brody a gifted basketball player who gave up a big career in the United States in order to immigrate to Israel, after the Maccabiah Games that year joined Maccabi Tel Aviv, it was symbolic of everything good in the Maccabi ideal.

A decade after Brodys arrival, the team was already the unquestioned leader of Israeli basketball, and it played well in European championships as well. Success made Maccabi think of itself as undefeatable not only on the court, but in its conduct off the court as well. It began signing on players right and left. Even if they werent necessary, the main thing was that they wouldnt wear the uniform of the rivals. People claimed that the team was giving a bad name to Israeli basketball, which it represents and from which it evolved, in order to pursue its own narrow interests.

Shimon Mizrahi, chairman of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball club since 1969 an Israeli Prize laureate and a man with much to his credit is the new Maccabist symbol. If theres a difference of 10 [points], increase it to 20, but dont stop. If its 20, try to increase the gap to 30, he demanded of his players in 2014, in an aggressive speech before a game against their long-time rival, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

Just like the changes that have taken place over the decades in Zionist ideology we are no longer a just society, we are no longer a socialist society, and lets not forget to mention the occupation over another nation Mizrahis fighting words embodied an ethos that went wrong. The original conception behind the Maccabi idea was to build a different, better society, but it has shrunk to humiliating its rivals. Similarly, a considerable part of the public in Israel now sees life here, even on the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a neo-liberal economic environment, in the same distorted Maccabist manner.

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

After the poisonous response I got to my book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, I vowed to stay out of discussions about Jews and Israel, but I keep breaking my resolution. Most recently it is over the coincidence of the anti-Semitic attacks in New Jersey and New York and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens column on Jews and anti-Semitism, in which he manages simultaneously to reinforce one of the historic tropes of anti-Semitism that Jews are a superior race and blame critics of Israels rightwing government for the outbreak of anti-Semitism.

Two different kinds of anti-Semitism can be found today in the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia. The first is the recurrence of the anti-Semitism inflamed by toxic nationalism that swept Europe in the 19th century and culminated in the Holocaust. It is based on the idea that Jews are an alien presence in nations and exercise power in government, business, finance and the media way out of proportion to their numbers. I suspect it played a strong role in the recent attacks in the U.S. It has re-emerged in Germany in the Holocaust revisionism of some leaders of the Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) and in Hungarys government, which is on excellent terms with Israels right-wing government, but which has evoked centuries-old animosities against Jews with its massive public campaign against Hungarian Jewish ex-patriate George Soros.

The second kind of anti-Semitism can be found among Arab foes of the Israeli Jewish occupation of what was once Palestine. Palestines Arabs (and the Turks who controlled that 19th century region) discriminated against the regions small population of Jews and Christians, but they did not embrace the anti-Semitism that had begun to flourish in Europe. It was religious discrimination, and the Jews of Palestine found ways around it. But after the Zionist movement began in 1890s to settle in Palestine with a view toward establishing a Jewish state in an area where Arab Muslims had predominated for 1400 years, Arab leaders began to embrace a kind 0f anti-Semitism that fused opposition to a Jewish state with opposition to Jews and Judaism. At the 1929 hearings on the riots that shook Jerusalem, the Mufti, the religious leader of Palestines Arabs, can be seen in photographs perusing a copy of The Protocols of Zion. This kind of anti-Semitism, rooted in the Israeli occupation, persists not just in the Middle East but among Arabs who have emigrated to Western Europe. The danger facing Jewry in the U.S. and Europe is precisely from the fusion of these two kinds of anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, the reaction to this renewed outbreak of anti-Semitism has partially served to reinforce it. First, consider Stephens and other Americans or Europeans who now equate harsh opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism. Stephens writes, Its no surprise that Jew hatred has made a comeback, albeit under new guises. Anti-Zionism has taken the place of anti-Semitism as a political program directed against Jews. Personally, I consider a two-state solution, which would allow Palestinians self-government, the best of options, but if Israel continues to rule over the West Bank and indirectly over Gaza, the only other democratic option is to grant the Palestinian Arabs that Israel now subjugates the right to participate fully in Israels political and economic life. That would end the Jewish state as such, but if Israel continues its current colonial policies, it is the only just alternative. What Stephens and the Israeli government do is equate anti-Zionism with opposition to Judaism itself. In doing so, they dont combat, but reinforce, the second kind of anti-Semitism rooted in the Israeli occupation. They are not foes, but enablers, of the growing anti-Semitism.

The second of ill-conceived reactions to the outbreak of anti-Semitism is more common on the left than the right. It is to deny the existence of the re-emergence of historic anti-Semitism and to attack critics of it as being motivated by ulterior motives chiefly the defense of Israels occupation. Instead of naming names, Ill take some of the blame myself. My first reaction to British and American critics of anti-Semitism within the British Labour Party was to attribute their criticisms to defense of Israel or, in the case of Tony Blair-Laborites or Tories, to a partisan attempt to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. I dont doubt these were factors in the criticisms of Corbyn, but what I discovered when I looked into the matter was that there was a left-wing version of anti-Semitism that combined opposition to Israel with historic nonsense about the Rothschilds and Jewish bankers. To deny this kind of left-wing anti-Semitism as French leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon was quick to do during the British election is to reinforce the view of Stephens and the other defenders of Israel who want to equate opposition to Zionism with anti-Semitism. And the circle goes on.

I wouldnt end this discussion without some mention of Donald Trump. I never bought the idea that Trump is an anti-Semite. If anything, he is the worst kind of philo-Semite. He has reinforced the opposition of Sheldon Adelson and Jared Kushner to Palestinian self-determination. He has equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But he has also loosened the bonds of conscience that have kept in check the most violent and irrational impulses in American society. He is not responsible for the anti-Semitic attacks in Pittsburgh or recently in New York and New Jersey to charge that would be to indulge the excesses of Trump Derangement but his contempt for reasoned discourse and public self-control (for which the President is supposed to set an example) has helped to allow the dark side in American politics and life to see the light of day.

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

16th annual conference of rabbis and community leaders

Arutz Sheva

The World Conference for Rabbis and Leaders of Jewish Diaspora Communities from the World Zionist Organization's Center for Religious Affairs in the Diaspora opened today in Jerusalem.

About 150 leaders from 40 countries convened for 3 days of discussions on religion and state, anti-Semitism, the modern family, and more.

On the first day, Israel's Chief Rabbi David Lau, Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz, President of the Consistory in France, Dr. Joel Margi, Head of the Diaspora Brigade at the Foreign Ministry Akiva Tor and more attended.

World Zionist Organization Center for Religious Affairs in the Diaspora Executive Director Ilan Frydman told Arutz Sheva that "we have rabbis from forty countries, there are 189 rabbis in the conference.

Frydman explained the vital role the conference plays in dispelling the perception of isolation and dissimilarity felt in many diaspora communities: "Every time I meet rabbis out of Israel, they tell me 'My community's different.' And I don't want to tell them, 'Your community's actually just like the other different one, and you're both different in the same way.' I don't tell them that until they come here and get together. Then they actually see we're running the same challenges, and we can share the problems and share the solutions."

Increasing attacks on Jews in diaspora communities is an unavoidable subject in a conference of this nature, and, while many authorities have defined that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism go hand in hand, Frydman claims "Anti-Semitism is of course raising all around the world, and often it's not really anti-Semitisim, it's anti-Zionism and anti-Israel." Frydman went on: "As soon as Israel becomes a more and more dominant power around the world or takes more and more action around the world, the rest of the world are aggressively attacking back."

"The rabbi's' role here is first of all they're calming down the communities", Frydman continued, "The way we respond is not to bring violence back to violence. We're bringing happy faces and we're trying to share thoughts with other people around the world."

His message to the Jews of Israel: "It's important that we all understand that people in the diaspora do care about Israel, are interested in what's going on in Israel, and want to be involved in what goes on in Israel.

"It's not only a question of 'yes aliyah/no aliyah'. Obviously the next step will be, the more they want to be involved, the more they want to come. Often our solution is let's strengthen the communities abroad, because the stronger people abroad are those who want to make aliyah later."

Today conference participants tour Samaria led by Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan.

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Posted By admin on January 2, 2020

In a 2018 essay for Mosaic titled Israel and China Take a Leap ForwardBut to What?, Arthur Herman made a timely and consequential contribution to the U.S.-Israel alliance by illuminating some of the dilemmas posed to it by intensifying Sino-American rivalry.

In particular, Herman argued that since mastery of sophisticated, dual-use technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), unmanned systems, and quantum computing are vital terrain in the strategic competition with China, it was incumbent on Israel to establish stronger protections to ensure that its own world-class private-sector companies working in these areas would not be captured by Beijing, through foreign investment, and then leveraged for strategic advantage against the Americans.

In that earlier essay, Herman also flagged the related dangers implicit in Israels opening its infrastructure to ownership and operation by Chinese firms. Despite these undertakings being ostensibly commercial, he explained, Beijing could exploit its access to critical facilities like maritime ports and next-generation telecommunications networks for intelligence gathering and influence operations. In addition to jeopardizing Israels sovereignty, Beijings presence was bound to deter and restrict the U.S. military in its own interactions with Israel.

Now, in The Impasse Obstructing U.S,-Israel Relations, and How to Remedy It, Herman has written a sequel of sorts. Having sounded the alarm about the perils of a laissez-faire approach to Chinese capital on the part of the Jewish state, his latest essay conjures up a more hopeful, alternative vision of Israel as a potential arsenal of innovation from which the United States and other democracies can draw in their techno-military rivalry with Beijing. Rather than a point of vulnerability for China to exploit, he argues, Americas relationship with Israel can instead be a source of asymmetric advantage for Washington and its friends against the PRC.

In its broad strokes, Hermans new essay once again offers a wealth of perceptive observations and provocative ideas. At the highest level, the essay illustrates how mistaken both the Obama and the Trump administrations have been to assume that the elevation of great-power competition in American foreign policy entails a pivot away from the Middle East. In fact, the region is better understood as a vital arena for the global rivalry with China, and also with Russia, rather than a distraction from it. Access to Israeli technology is one reason why.

What is less clear is whether Hermans proposal for a Defense Trade Cooperation Treaty (DTCT) between the United States and Israelmodeled after similar pacts reached by Washington earlier in this decade with Great Britain and Australiais the best mechanism for catapulting defense-technological partnership between the two countries to the next level.

First, at least in the U.S. and also to a great extent in Israel, the most cutting-edge work in the transformational technologies that Herman has highlighted, like AI and robotics, is not being done by traditional defense companies or by government at all. In fact, the technologies themselves are predominantly being developed by profit-minded private companies for civilian applications; indeed, that is precisely why heightened scrutiny around foreign investment in such firms is necessary but also much more complicated than a simple ban on the sale of military products to Beijing. Given that so much of the most sensitive and consequential innovation is taking place outside the conventional defense sphere, Herman fails to explain why a trade agreement to spur greater cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli defense industries answers the needs of the moment.

Second, as Eran Lerman in his own response to Hermans essay has astutely observed, the U.S.-Israel relationship tends to thrive in informality. With that in mind, one wonders whether the intensive bureaucratic, political, and intellectual energies that would inevitably be consumed in order to formulate, negotiate, and pass a DTCT through the U.S. Senate might not be better focused on one or two discrete joint projects. Drawing technological expertise from outside each countrys traditional defense sectors, such initiatives could aim at developing a concrete new capability that addresses a shared and concrete problem, along the lines of Iron Dome.

Third, I fear Herman overestimates the extent to which Israel is likely to align itself explicitly with the United States against China or sign on to an endeavor that is outwardly billed as targeting Beijings military. Israeli foreign policy has traditionally been informed by a healthy sense of realpolitik, and it is far from clear what exactly Jerusalem could gain from adopting a posture of unbridled hostility toward a rising global superpower that has not positioned itself as an antagonist of the Jewish state. Policymakers in the U.S. and China have increasingly concluded that each country poses a first-tier strategic challenge to the other; whatever the wisdom of those judgments, why should an Israeli government reach the same conclusion about Beijing, especially when (as Herman himself acknowledges) Jerusalem has a number of other, much more pressing national-security priorities to deal with?

To be sure, as Elliott Abrams persuasively expounded in a response to Hermans earlier essay, Israel derives overwhelmingly more from the United States than it does from Beijing. For this reason, it is perfectly appropriate for Washington to expect Israel to exercise restraint with respect to the sensitive technological capabilities it makes available to Beijing through commercial channels and also to recognize, as the Trump administration has laid out, how seemingly innocent investments by China today could be weaponized to restrict Israels sovereignty tomorrow. But to expect Israel, as an extension of its relationship with the United States, to declare China an enemy strikes me as a formula for alliance overstretchwith the potential to result in precisely the estrangement that Herman seeks to avert.

Still, Herman is deeply correct in his intuition that Americans would do well to look to Israel as they contemplate their own extended rivalry with China, albeit not in the principal way that he has outlined in his essays.

Historically Americans have responded to geopolitical challengers by trying to overwhelm them with superior resources, both quantitative and qualitative. This is an instinct cultivated over centuries of experience, from the conquest of the North American continent through two world wars and into the modern era. Briefly put, the United States has generally prevailed by having better stuff than its opponents, and vastly more of it.

This approach has led not only to Americas greatest military victories but also to its most searing debacles. The wrenching quagmire of Vietnam, the bloody humiliation of Black Hawk Down, and the unsatisfying stalemate of the post-9/11 wars all illustrate the extent to which nearly inexhaustible reserves of wealth and cutting-edge technology are not necessarily decisive in conflict: a reality that the American imagination still struggles to make sense of.

China, by contrast, presents a more linear problem for U.S. policymakers: namely, the prospect, for the first time in history, of a strategic competitor whose economic throw-weight, industrial base, and scientific expertise are on a trajectory to match and then exceed Americas own. In this sense, Chinas rise not only threatens Americas current preeminence atop the geopolitical wheel of fortune; it also means that, in a straightforward weighing of material resources, America cannot hope to overwhelm Beijing as it did prior challengers. On the contrary, it is the U.S. that, if current trends continue, is in danger of being overwhelmed.

That being the case, one option would be to reverse the trend lines: to preserve and extend the material edge the U.S. still enjoys against Beijing. Unsurprisingly, this has been one of the major themes of the Trump administrations approach to the China challengeattempting to slow and disrupt Beijings transfer to itself of know-how from the U.S. and other advanced economies while simultaneously invigorating domestic research and development in critical areas. And this, indeed, is the conceptual framework that Arthur Herman has applied to his analysis of the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Yet it is worth recalling that the greatest successes of the Jewish state have owed less to the intrinsic superiority of its technology than to the creativity and courage with which Israelis have employed that technology. In many cases, Israel has utilized U.S. weapons systems but in ways never imagined, much less sanctioned, by their designersand has done so to spectacular effect. Precisely because Israel does not enjoy the illusion of having infinite reserves of materiel from which to draw, it has been compelled to be thoughtful, deliberative, and unorthodox in how it uses everything at its disposal.

This, more than any breakthrough algorithm in the realm of AI, is what the United States must now cultivate for its long-term strategic rivalry with China. While Washington has been quick to conceptualize great-power competition as a series of technological arms races, the Israeli experience offers a more nuanced lesson. To be sure, the U.S. must do everything possible to preserve its qualitative military and scientific edge. But in the face of a near-peer challenger, that is not enough.

Instead, like Israelis, Americans must devise ways to stretch their available resources farther and be more intellectually creative in how they project the power they have. Simply put, precisely because the United States is unlikely to be able to outspend or outgun Beijing successfully, it must instead learn how to outmaneuver and outsmart its rival.

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Israel Can Teach America How to Be More Creative in the Face of Powerful Adversaries - Mosaic

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