Polio has re-emerged in New York. The virus was identified in late July in an unvaccinated Rockland County man and has since been detected in wastewater samples in at least two counties. It’s too early to tell whether a limited outbreak — or worse, a full-blown epidemic — is brewing, but experts have been concerned about the virus spreading in communities with low vaccination rates. The man who tested positive is part of an Orthodox Jewish community in which vaccine hesitancy tends to run high. Only 60 percent of Rockland County 2-year-olds have been fully vaccinated against polio, compared with 80 percent in most of the rest of the state.
Unless health officials get those percentages up quickly, a virus that has been all but eradicated may become entrenched. That would be heartbreaking, but it would not come as a surprise. Measles descended on the same communities in 2019, Covid ravaged them disproportionately in 2020, and before either of those, mumps and whooping cough were known to pop up at regular intervals. The increasing regularity of these crises has begun to make them feel inevitable: The vaccines are there. The people don’t want them. What are officials supposed to do?
A large, rigorous vaccination campaign feels like an especially tall order now, with public health agencies tapped from the Covid pandemic and even the most receptive groups weary of public health messaging. But in the long shadow of frustration and neglect, an unsung collective has been gathering strength: advocates and health workers from Orthodox Jewish communities. “The last few years have been very intense,” says Nesha Abramson, the outreach director at Community Counter, a nonprofit focused on public health advocacy in Orthodox communities. (Ms. Abramson is Haredi and lives in Crown Heights in Brooklyn.) “But we’ve learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t.” Here’s what she and others like her want health officials to know.
Cultural sensitivity is crucial; shame and stigma don’t work. Orthodox Jewish communities are hardly monolithic. Some are ultraconservative. Others use the internet. They are ethnically diverse, too, and in some cases just as politically divided as the rest of the country. Such nuances have a way of getting lost during public health crises, though. And that’s a missed opportunity: One of the best avenues for addressing vaccine hesitancy in a given community is through pro-vaccine people who already live in the same community. “Haredi communities have a high proportion of moms with graduate degrees,” Ms. Abramson says. “They believe in science and already do so much outreach on their own. But there’s no broader effort to support them.”
What most Orthodox communities do have in common is the intergenerational trauma that comes with long histories of displacement and oppression. “Look at the pandemic through that lens,” Ms. Abramson says. “You have a lot of grandparents that are Holocaust survivors, and this affirms all of their worst fears. They lost multiple family members in rapid succession, they weren’t allowed to say goodbye, and the details of what happened weren’t necessarily explained to them.”
Amid their grief and bewilderment, they were also harassed and vilified. “I had one man tell me that he was pretty lucky because he had only been spit on a few times, only shoved to the ground once and, beyond that, only called names,” says one official who worked closely with Orthodox Jewish communities during Bill de Blasio’s administration. “Imagine how bad it has to be for getting spit on to be considered pretty lucky.” Those experiences were compounded by health officials who often fumbled in their dialogues with ultra-Orthodox groups and by politicians who singled them out frequently — and often unfairly — for criticism.
Painting these communities with too broad strokes and then dousing them in shame and stigma did nothing to quell previous outbreaks. Officials should remember that as they tackle polio.
Religion is not the true barrier to vaccination. A steady beat of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks has created the impression that public health and ultra-Orthodox Judaism are uniquely incompatible. But that’s not true. In the second half of the previous century, these communities achieved a public health victory for the ages. Through sustained, grass-roots community outreach, they turned genetic carrier testing into a cultural norm — long before that happened in other communities. As a result, Tay-Sachs, a rare but fatal genetic disorder that occurs disproportionately among Ashkenazi Jews, was all but eliminated.
There is no reason a similar success can’t be achieved with vaccination, but health officials must start fighting the right battles. “Vaccine hesitancy is not rooted in Orthodox religion,” Ms. Abramson says. “It’s fueled by people who come from outside the community to spread lies and sow fear.”
The measles outbreak of 2019, for example, coincided with a flood of anti-vaccination propaganda aimed at Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox families. Somali communities have been similarly targeted, as have other isolated groups in which vaccine resistance is growing. The goal of these machinations is not just to turn people away from vaccines, Ms. Abramson says, but also to sell them something else. “You go into the pharmacies in some communities and see all these anti-vax products,” she says. “There’s a huge profit motive. But during the measles outbreak, that was largely overlooked while people blamed Orthodox communities.”
At the height of the Covid pandemic, journalists, politicians and health officials in New York focused on Orthodox religious zeal. Less was made of the dense housing in some communities; their jobs, which often made social distancing impossible; or the fatigue they faced after large Covid waves hit early. “Ultra-Orthodox communities were struggling with all of the same challenges plaguing other high-risk groups,” says Charles King, the chief executive officer of Housing Works, a New York City-based organization that advocates housing and health care for people living with H.I.V./AIDS. “But instead of that, we kept hearing about the need to close synagogues and cancel religious events.”
Women are key. “The perception among officials has been that rabbis are the community gatekeepers because they are the ones that drive voting,” Mr. King says. “But men aren’t the ones making the health care decisions for their families. Women are.” And when it comes to medical advice, women aren’t going to their rabbis. They are going to their doulas and kallah teachers. And they are talking to other mothers.
Ms. Abramson and other Haredi women have learned through their battles with whooping cough, measles and Covid how to use these networks to promote public health and persuade the vaccine hesitant. They have started round-table discussion movements in living rooms and kitchens. They have installed themselves in pediatricians’ offices. They have answered questions and given advice. Above all, though, they have listened. “So many people just want to talk,” Ms. Abramson says. “And they will tell you things that have nothing to do with vaccination that explain why they are afraid of vaccination.” You can use that information to drive vaccination rates up, she says.
Ms. Abramson and her colleagues have tried to build on these lessons. She has applied for grants to create information campaigns for WhatsApp, a messaging app used by many Haredi mothers. She has also worked with local groups to get funding for training and other similar initiatives. But those efforts have been to little avail.
“Most of the money went to citywide organizations in the form of large block grants,” Mr. King says. “Those groups have more political experience, but they don’t have the same hyperlocal connections that a group of mothers would have and that you need to actually influence people’s behavior.” Politicians and health officials may want to rethink that strategy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
JUDAISM
Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?
Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.
Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted that it “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.” The A.J.C. and A.D.L. also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report “fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on Earth.”
Defenders of repressive governments often try to discredit the human rights groups that criticize them. A month before the A.J.C. accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019 a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty of being “biased” against that country. In this age of rising authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that human rights watchdogs face mounting attacks. What’s surprising is that America’s most influential Jewish groups are taking part.
For most of the 20th century, leading American Jewish organizations argued that the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle for universal human rights were intertwined. In 1913, when the A.D.L. was founded to stop “the defamation of the Jewish people,” it declared that its “ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens.” In 1956, Rabbi Israel Goldstein, the president of the American Jewish Congress, a Jewish group founded in 1918, explained his support for civil rights by saying that his organization would “act against any evil that is practiced on other men with the same conviction and vigor as if we ourselves were the victims.”
The historian Peter Novick has argued that after World War II, American Jewish organizations fought segregation because they believed that “prejudice and discrimination were all of a piece” and thus Jewish groups “could serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination against Blacks as by tackling antisemitism directly.”
Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”
This began to change after the 1967 war. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians, which fueled anger at the Jewish state from leftists in the United States and around the world. At the same time, assimilation was leading many progressive American Jews to exit organized Jewish life, which left Jewish groups with a more conservative base as they searched for a new agenda now that civil rights for Black Americans had become law.
The result was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two A.D.L. leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a “new antisemitism,” directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life.
Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition, too. The State Department now employs a definition of antisemitism whose examples include opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. This year the Senate confirmed Deborah Lipstadt — a historian best known for fighting Holocaust denial — to be the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Ms. Lipstadt has said that Israel’s “continued holding of the West Bank is problematic,” but when asked at her confirmation hearing about Amnesty’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, Ms. Lipstadt claimed that the report’s language was “part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state” and thus “poisons the atmosphere, particularly for Jewish students” on college campuses. In 2018 several Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to introduce legislation that would grant Palestinians equal citizenship rather than what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “Jewish supremacy.” According to America’s most prominent Jewish organizations and the U.S. government, this kind of call for equal citizenship constituted bigotry.
Now that any challenge to Jewish statehood is met with charges of bigotry against Jews, prominent American Jewish organizations and their allies in the U.S. government have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders because they or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return. But under the definition of antisemitism promoted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the State Department, Palestinians become antisemites if they call for replacing a state that favors Jews with one that does not discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.
But the campaign against antisemitism is being deployed to justify not merely the violation of Palestinian human rights. As relations have warmed between Israel and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, American officials have begun using the struggle against antisemitism to shield those regimes from human rights pressure, too. In June, Ms. Lipstadt met the Saudi ambassador in Washington and celebrated “our shared objectives of overcoming intolerance and hate.” From there she flew to Saudi Arabia, where she met its minister of Islamic affairs and affirmed, once again, “our shared goals of promoting tolerance and combating hate.” In the United Arab Emirates she sat down with the country’s foreign minister, whom she declared a “sincere partner in our shared goals of” — you guessed it — “promoting tolerance and fighting hate.”
This is nonsense. According to a report this year by Freedom House, a human rights think tank funded largely by the U.S. government, Saudi Arabia is more repressive than Iran. The United Arab Emirates is more repressive than Russia. And although Ms. Lipstadt declared that her visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi left her “heartened by changes underway in parts of the Middle East,” both countries, according to Freedom House, are more oppressive than they were in 2017. Less than two months after she lauded the Saudi monarchy’s tolerance, it sentenced a member of the country’s persecuted Shiite minority to 34 years in prison for Twitter activity critical of the government.
When it comes to their own disenfranchised populations, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are as intolerant as ever. What has changed is their tolerance for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. And because officials like Ms. Lipstadt define the fight against antisemitism largely as a fight to legitimize Israel, they legitimize its tyrannical Arab allies as well.
Ms. Lipstadt’s defenders might argue that Jews can’t afford to be picky about our friends. In a world where antisemitism remains a frightening reality, we should look out only for ourselves. In moments of extreme danger, that may be true. But many earlier American Jewish leaders recognized this must be the exception. As a rule, they believed Jews should pursue equal treatment for ourselves as part of a broader effort to secure it for others.
The current alternative — using the fight against antisemitism to defend Israel and its allies — may seem savvy. In the long run, however, it’s foolish. Palestinians do not grow more tolerant of Jews when brutalized by a Jewish state. Saudis and Emiratis do not grow more tolerant of Jews when Israel helps their governments brutalize them.
As part of the rapprochement between Jerusalem and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the Israeli government has apparently authorized its high-tech companies to sell the Saudi and Emirati governments spyware they have used to surveil and imprison dissidents. Which may help explain why recent polls show that more than 70 percent of Saudis and Emiratis oppose diplomatic normalization with Israel. For decades, many in the Arab world loathed the United States for bolstering their despotic rulers. It will not ultimately benefit Arab-Jewish harmony for a Jewish state to replace the United States in that unsavory role.
In a terrible irony, the campaign against “antisemitism,” as waged by influential Jewish groups and the U.S. government, has become a threat to freedom. It is wielded as a weapon against the world’s most respected human rights organizations and a shield for some of the world’s most repressive regimes. We need a different struggle against antisemitism. It should pursue Jewish equality, not Jewish supremacy, and embed the cause of Jewish rights in a movement for the human rights of all. In its effort to defend the indefensible in Israel, the American Jewish establishment has abandoned these principles. It’s time to affirm them again.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also the editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/opin ... 778d3e6de3
"Im Hashem Lo Yivneh Bayit " (Jewish Devotional Song) - Vitaliia Dupliakina
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhqFmyjIgs
Im Hashem Lo Yivneh Bayit
Unless The Lord Builds The House
Vitaliia Dupliakina gracefully sings Jewish devotional song "Im Hashem Lo Yivneh Bayit" accompanied by Natalia Burnagiel (violin), Michalina Jastrzębska (cello), Maciej Erbel (drums) and Jakub Niewiadomski (piano).
"Im Hashem Lo Yivneh Bayit" (The Lord Builds The House) is a Hebrew song inspired by Psalm 127 (Old Testament). The essential message is that God is in control and has the theme of God's sovereignty. No matter what we do or where we are, the Lord is the One who makes things come to pass.
According to Jewish tradition, Psalm 127 was written by David and dedicated to his son Solomon, who would build the First Temple.
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money
New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.
But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
Every one of them failed.
Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.
The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
ImageThe Central United Talmudical Academy spans an entire city block in Williamsburg. All its students who took state tests in 2019 failed. At a public school three blocks away, John Wayne Elementary, more than half of students passed.
The Central United Talmudical Academy spans an entire city block in Williamsburg. All its students who took state tests in 2019 failed. At a public school three blocks away, John Wayne Elementary, more than half of students passed.Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
Warned about the problems over the years, city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.
“I don’t know how to put into words how frustrating it is,” said Moishy Klein, who recently left the community after realizing it had not taught him basic grammar, let alone the skills needed to find a decent job. “I thought, ‘It’s crazy that I’m literally not learning anything. It’s crazy that I’m 20 years old, I don’t know any higher order math, never learned any science.’”
To examine the Hasidic schools, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of public records, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and interviewed more than 275 people, including current and former students, teachers, administrators and regulators.
The review provided a rare look inside a group of schools that is keeping some 50,000 boys from learning a broad array of secular subjects.
The students in the boys' schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.
But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
Every one of them failed.
Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.
The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
ImageThe Central United Talmudical Academy spans an entire city block in Williamsburg. All its students who took state tests in 2019 failed. At a public school three blocks away, John Wayne Elementary, more than half of students passed.
The Central United Talmudical Academy spans an entire city block in Williamsburg. All its students who took state tests in 2019 failed. At a public school three blocks away, John Wayne Elementary, more than half of students passed.Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
Warned about the problems over the years, city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.
“I don’t know how to put into words how frustrating it is,” said Moishy Klein, who recently left the community after realizing it had not taught him basic grammar, let alone the skills needed to find a decent job. “I thought, ‘It’s crazy that I’m literally not learning anything. It’s crazy that I’m 20 years old, I don’t know any higher order math, never learned any science.’”
To examine the Hasidic schools, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of public records, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and interviewed more than 275 people, including current and former students, teachers, administrators and regulators.
The review provided a rare look inside a group of schools that is keeping some 50,000 boys from learning a broad array of secular subjects.
The students in the boys' schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
Children removed from Jewish sect's jungle compound in Mexico
Raffi Berg - BBC News
Tue, September 27, 2022 at 11:20 AM
Children and older teenagers have been removed from the jungle compound of a Jewish sect in Mexico following a raid by police, the BBC has learned.
Two members of Lev Tahor were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and serious sexual offences, including rape, Israel's foreign ministry said.
A three-year-old child removed from the compound has been flown to Israel.
Lev Tahor (Hebrew for Pure Heart) is known for extremist practices and imposing a strict regime on members.
It advocates child marriage, inflicts harsh punishments for even minor transgressions and requires women and girls as young as three years old to completely cover up with robes.
The stricture has earned the group the nickname the Jewish Taliban, because of seeming similarities with the dress code enforced by the Sunni Muslim extremist group which controls Afghanistan.
Police made their way into the compound 11 miles (17.5km) north of Tapachula in Chiapas state on Friday morning.
They had been instructed by a federal judge to detain several leaders suspected of child abuse and rescue members of the sect, following an investigation by the attorney general's Special Prosecutor for Organized Crime (Femdo).
An Israeli source connected to the operation said the boys and girls were quickly separated from the rest of the group, because of fears their lives could be at risk from members trying to prevent them from being removed.
Twenty-six members were found in the compound, among them Israelis with dual citizenships including Canada, the US and Guatemala, Israel's foreign ministry said.
It said a Canadian and an Israeli citizen were arrested, while two other wanted members reportedly left the compound two days before the raid and are being sought. Five more were detained for allegedly breaking immigration rules.
The remaining members are being housed at a facility of the Mexican Ministry of Welfare pending a decision on what will happen to them, the Israeli foreign ministry said.
The three-year-old son of an Israeli, Yisrael Amir, who had previously left the group, was among those removed from the compound. Mr Amir, who was present during the raid, flew back to Israel with his son on Monday.
'Dangerous cult'
The Mexican police worked alongside a four-man volunteer team from Israel, including former Mossad agents, in planning and carrying out the operation.
The elite police unit which raided the compound "very carefully and without resorting to any violence" included both male and female officers because of the number of women and children in the sect, the Israel source said.
"The Mexican authorities did their duty in the best possible way," the source added.
The operation was set in motion about two years ago, when Mr Amir and other relatives of some of those in the group asked one of the former agents for help.
The team travelled between Israel and Guatemala, where the branch had lived since 2014, carrying out surveillance operations and working with local authorities, law enforcement and a Guatemalan private investigator.
In January, about 40-50 members illegally crossed into Mexico, where they continued to be tracked, settling in the jungle north of Tapachula.
The leadership in Guatemala has been at the centre of a kidnapping case since 2018, when two children who had been taken to New York by their mother who had fled the community were snatched back. They were recovered three weeks later in Mexico.
Nine of the sect's members were charged in connection with the case. Four - including the founder's son and current leader Nachman Helbrans - have been jailed, while one was convicted, but freed because of time already served and another is due to be sentenced in November. Two are awaiting trial and one is in custody in Guatemala.
Lev Tahor was formed in Israel in 1988 by Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, who later moved to the US. He served two years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping in 1994 and drowned in Mexico in 2017.
Numbering up to about 350 members, Lev Tahor has been forced to move from country to country in recent years after coming under scrutiny from local authorities. It is currently spread between Israel, the US, North Macedonia, Morocco, Mexico and Guatemala. Between 70 and 80 members are still in Guatemala.
While the group is often described as ultra-Orthodox, it follows its own sets of rules and has been declared a "dangerous cult" by an Israeli court.
Its leaders have denied breaking local laws and say the group is being targeted because of its beliefs
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 37854.html
Raffi Berg - BBC News
Tue, September 27, 2022 at 11:20 AM
Children and older teenagers have been removed from the jungle compound of a Jewish sect in Mexico following a raid by police, the BBC has learned.
Two members of Lev Tahor were arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and serious sexual offences, including rape, Israel's foreign ministry said.
A three-year-old child removed from the compound has been flown to Israel.
Lev Tahor (Hebrew for Pure Heart) is known for extremist practices and imposing a strict regime on members.
It advocates child marriage, inflicts harsh punishments for even minor transgressions and requires women and girls as young as three years old to completely cover up with robes.
The stricture has earned the group the nickname the Jewish Taliban, because of seeming similarities with the dress code enforced by the Sunni Muslim extremist group which controls Afghanistan.
Police made their way into the compound 11 miles (17.5km) north of Tapachula in Chiapas state on Friday morning.
They had been instructed by a federal judge to detain several leaders suspected of child abuse and rescue members of the sect, following an investigation by the attorney general's Special Prosecutor for Organized Crime (Femdo).
An Israeli source connected to the operation said the boys and girls were quickly separated from the rest of the group, because of fears their lives could be at risk from members trying to prevent them from being removed.
Twenty-six members were found in the compound, among them Israelis with dual citizenships including Canada, the US and Guatemala, Israel's foreign ministry said.
It said a Canadian and an Israeli citizen were arrested, while two other wanted members reportedly left the compound two days before the raid and are being sought. Five more were detained for allegedly breaking immigration rules.
The remaining members are being housed at a facility of the Mexican Ministry of Welfare pending a decision on what will happen to them, the Israeli foreign ministry said.
The three-year-old son of an Israeli, Yisrael Amir, who had previously left the group, was among those removed from the compound. Mr Amir, who was present during the raid, flew back to Israel with his son on Monday.
'Dangerous cult'
The Mexican police worked alongside a four-man volunteer team from Israel, including former Mossad agents, in planning and carrying out the operation.
The elite police unit which raided the compound "very carefully and without resorting to any violence" included both male and female officers because of the number of women and children in the sect, the Israel source said.
"The Mexican authorities did their duty in the best possible way," the source added.
The operation was set in motion about two years ago, when Mr Amir and other relatives of some of those in the group asked one of the former agents for help.
The team travelled between Israel and Guatemala, where the branch had lived since 2014, carrying out surveillance operations and working with local authorities, law enforcement and a Guatemalan private investigator.
In January, about 40-50 members illegally crossed into Mexico, where they continued to be tracked, settling in the jungle north of Tapachula.
The leadership in Guatemala has been at the centre of a kidnapping case since 2018, when two children who had been taken to New York by their mother who had fled the community were snatched back. They were recovered three weeks later in Mexico.
Nine of the sect's members were charged in connection with the case. Four - including the founder's son and current leader Nachman Helbrans - have been jailed, while one was convicted, but freed because of time already served and another is due to be sentenced in November. Two are awaiting trial and one is in custody in Guatemala.
Lev Tahor was formed in Israel in 1988 by Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, who later moved to the US. He served two years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping in 1994 and drowned in Mexico in 2017.
Numbering up to about 350 members, Lev Tahor has been forced to move from country to country in recent years after coming under scrutiny from local authorities. It is currently spread between Israel, the US, North Macedonia, Morocco, Mexico and Guatemala. Between 70 and 80 members are still in Guatemala.
While the group is often described as ultra-Orthodox, it follows its own sets of rules and has been declared a "dangerous cult" by an Israeli court.
Its leaders have denied breaking local laws and say the group is being targeted because of its beliefs
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 37854.html
My First Yom Kippur in Exile
By Pinchas Goldschmidt
Rabbi Goldschmidt was, until recently, the chief rabbi of Moscow.
JERUSALEM — This is my first Yom Kippur in exile.
The crisp Moscow autumn air; the illuminated synagogue which I called home for 30 years; my white hat and kittel, the robe Jews wear on the High Holy Days, folded up, in my apartment that now sits locked — it all seems like a dream.
As the chief rabbi of Moscow, I used to prepare for this holiday for weeks. Some of the work was technical — securing cantors and shofar blowers for synagogues across Russia, or guiding the sick on whether or not they should fast on the holy day. Some of the preparation was more lofty: I would prepare my sermon thoughts while walking daily for early morning penitential prayers, past the bustling cafes on Pokrovka Street, down the hill on Arkhipova Street, up the stairs to the pale yellow synagogue, with its dome. In the days leading up to the holidays, one could hear the cantorial choir rehearsing in the wooden balcony of the century-old sanctuary.
For years, we hoped that democratic institutions in Russia would take root. We hoped that Jewish communities could keep their distance from President Vladimir Putin’s increasing authoritarianism. His regime’s social contract, after all, was that the population would not be politically active, while allowing the authorities to conduct their affairs. Our hopes were crushed.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, everything changed. The government began to shift to semi-totalitarianism; the surviving independent media was shut down; protesters were arrested. Soon, I received reports of religious community leaders — priests, imams, rabbis — being pressured to express their support for the military. One day, a government source informed the synagogue that we would be expected to support the war — or else.
It was then that my wife and I decided to leave the country. This will be our first Yom Kippur in true exile from the place we called our home for three decades.
Moscow’s Choral Synagogue has seen many historic Yom Kippurs: In 1933, Rabbi Shmarya Yehuda Leib Medalia, one of my predecessors as chief rabbi of Moscow, gave a sermon from that pulpit. According to the stories passed down by Moscow rabbis, Rabbi Medalia, knowing that every word he uttered was being monitored, delivered his sermon that day in coded language. The Soviet authorities had declared a working day, even though it was Saturday, in order to prevent the hundreds of thousands of Moscow Jews from going to synagogue on the holiest day of the year. However, as the day neared its end, tens of thousands of Jews found their way to Arkhipova Street, to the synagogue.
In his sermon, the tale goes, Rabbi Medalia told the story of two Jews in a small village with one central road, who came to the rabbi with a live chicken. Each claimed ownership. The rabbi decreed: Put the chicken in the middle of the road and untie its legs and we will see where the chicken will go. This was the whole sermon — a veiled parable for the Jews whose legs had been untied, now finding their way to the place they belonged, the synagogue. Shortly after, Rabbi Medalia was arrested and shot by the secret police. This was the legacy I inherited.
Fifteen years after Rabbi Medalia’s sermon, Golda Meir, the first diplomatic envoy of the newly born State of Israel, would visit the synagogue. Tens of thousands of Soviet Jews showed up, crowding around the synagogue just to catch a glimpse of an emissary of their far-off homeland. Meir would later reminisce about the way that the walls of the synagogue would shake, the thousands of Jews chanting, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
I was a 25-year-old rabbi when my wife and I first arrived in Moscow in 1989, during perestroika. Born in Zurich and educated in Israel, I had arrived under the auspices of Moscow’s Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., which established a Center for Jewish Civilization. I had joined the academy officially as a visiting professor, hoping to assist in the rebuilding of Jewish life after 70 years of Soviet repression. A year later, I was called upon to be rabbi of the city’s Choral Synagogue.
I will never forget my first Yom Kippur in that sanctuary. It was a daunting task at times: Serving the thousands of post-Soviet Jews coming to shul, most of whom had no knowledge of Hebrew and therefore could not follow the prayers and couldn’t pray. As a result, people came in for a short time to meditate quietly, independent of the communal prayer, and then strike up a conversation with a neighbor or just read a book or newspaper. I would pause the prayers at certain intervals to explain the liturgy, and then read the prayer word by word. As the years passed, the congregation changed, with more and more community members able to participate and lead.
It is painful to imagine reciting the closing climactic prayers far from my community. Even in my early years there, even when few knew the prayers, we used to shout the final words of the service in unison. It was the sound of a community of survivors — survivors of Communism, antisemitism, the obsessive machine that sought to destroy their identities. And yet, there we were.
This year, I will divide my time between a few Jerusalem synagogues. Here, and across other cities of Israel, I meet new Jewish émigrés from Russia, the tens of thousands of fellow Jews who have fled since the start of the war. We reminisce about our pasts, and look ahead to our future.
It is strange to feel in exile in Jerusalem, in the Jewish ancestral land — but home is strange like that. Over the centuries, rabbis used to sign their names on documents, not as a “rabbi of” a certain city, but rather “as a temporary dweller” of that city. The role of a religious leader is not only to be a pastoral guide, not only to answer questions and lead services and give sermons, the beautiful and glorious moments that fill one with meaning, a sense of purpose and awe. Those are, so to speak, the easy parts of the rabbinate.
The hardest task of religious leadership is to take moral stances in difficult times, no matter the cost.
And this is perhaps what the shofar, the ram’s horn that Jews blow on the High Holy Days, represents. According to the Bible, the shofar blow is the sound of freedom. It was historically blown at the beginning of the jubilee year — the year that freed all slaves and returned all sold ancestral property. The sound of the shofar blow is meant to remind us of both freedom and equality.
When we blow that shofar this year, let us remember how a peaceful world must rely on the fundamentals of liberty and life, not only for individuals but also among nations. For so long, we had assumed these qualities were a given in Western society — until they no longer were.
When we blow that shofar this year, let us remember that it is the role of faith to counter evil, to fight for the basic human rights of liberty and life.
And sometimes, the costs of blowing that shofar are high — sometimes, one is dragged off by the secret police, and sometimes, one finds oneself in exile.
This High Holy Days, let the cries of that ancient horn be heard.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
For Believers, a Day of Atonement. For Others, a Giant Playground
Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, brings Israel to a standstill. For the nonobservant, that briefly turns highways into bike trails.
ALONG HIGHWAY 1, Israel — Highway 1, the main thoroughfare between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is usually snarled with traffic on weekday evenings. Enav Levy, a veterinary nurse, tries to avoid the 6 p.m. rush hour on the road, normally one of the busiest in the Middle East, and certainly would not cycle on it.
But at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Ms. Levy, 38, was quite happy to brave the highway. Riding a folding bicycle, she joined the road just west of Jerusalem, and felt a growing sense of liberation.
Gone was the din of car horns and revving engines, replaced with the chirp of cicadas and the sound of the roadside flags fluttering in the evening breeze. With a few sporadic exceptions, the cars had vanished.
“You’re in the middle of civilization — but without that civilization,” Ms. Levy said in an interview. She added, with a laugh, “It’s like the end of the world.”
This was Israel from just after 5:40 p.m. on Tuesday, when observant Jews began an annual fast of just over 25 hours that ended on Wednesday just before 7 p.m. The roads were emptier than on any other day in the year. Radio stations and television channels were silent. Public transportation was suspended. Except in some Arab areas, shops and restaurants were almost all shut.
For Jewish believers, it was the holiest day of their year — an annual day of atonement, or Yom Kippur in Hebrew, for their sins against God. On Tuesday evening, millions of Israelis switched off their phones, ate their last pre-fast meals and headed to synagogues for the opening prayers of the fast.
Orthodox Jews performed kaparot, an atonement ritual customary on the eve of Yom Kippur, on Monday.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
At the Western Wall for services ahead of Yom Kippur. On Tuesday evening, millions of Israelis switched off their phones, ate their last pre-fast meals and headed to synagogues.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
On Wednesday, many went again to synagogue, often for more than eight hours of prayer, confession and repentance. More than half of Israeli Jews attend synagogue on Yom Kippur for at least part of the ceremonies, according to polling in 2019 by the Israel Democracy Institute.
But the day would not be so silent without the participation of the less religiously inclined. On other major Jewish holy days, secular Jews still drive their cars in Israel, and many do not pray. On Yom Kippur, by social convention, almost all Israeli Jews keep their cars parked. Tens of thousands attend special services, organized by Tzohar, a rabbinical association, for those who do not usually attend synagogue.
“It’s almost something that’s part of the DNA of Israel,” said Rabbi David Stav, the chairman of Tzohar.
Even for secular citizens, the day is a chance for contemplation — in part because it is also the anniversary of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War, when Israeli society was left stunned by an unexpected Arab attack.
As a result, the day offers cause for “reflection on what our life is like as a sovereign country which is fighting for its freedom,” said Rabbi Sivan Malkin Maas, who leads the Israeli wing of a small movement of secular Jews. “At what price? Are we doing it in the right way?”
For Jews who live in highly religious neighborhoods, the roads feel no different to how they do on the Sabbath, when residents also stop driving. “The concept of a non-vehicular weekend is something that we do every week,” said Tali Farkash, a journalist and academic from Elad, a city in central Israel that was built for highly observant Jews.
Asaf Rockman entering the outskirts of Tel Aviv after completing a roller-skating ride.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
For nonobservant Israeli Jews, Yom Kippur is a rare chance to experience their country as a silent, carless playground.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
But for secular Israeli Jews, Yom Kippur is a rare chance to experience their country as a silent, carless playground, and to establish their own secular customs in the process.
For more than a decade, Ms. Levy has cycled the 40 miles to Tel Aviv from her in-laws’ home just outside Jerusalem, along with Asaf Rockman, 39, her partner, and whichever friends feel like joining them. Mr. Rockman travels on roller-skates — an exhilarating if terrifying experience when plunging down the mountains outside Jerusalem toward the coastal plain outside Tel Aviv.
“It’s our tradition,” Ms. Levy said. “Every year, at this time of year, it’s what I do.”
Other bikers and skaters take slightly different approaches.
Tom Itzhaki, a hotel manager, usually tries much longer feats of endurance — this year, he completed a 190-mile journey through three cities in central Israel. Nir Ellinson, a coffee roaster, welcomed a more leisurely group of cyclists to his rural home. After a gentler ride from a nearby city, they shared a picnic of herring and cheese and read a short story together about Yom Kippur by S.Y. Agnon, an acclaimed Israeli novelist.
A group of skaters from Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv Rollers, took the bus to Jerusalem on Tuesday afternoon, rolling back home on the empty roads once the fast began at sunset. To help them reduce speed on the mountain descent, two carried a large flag that they opened when speeding downhill, using it like a sail to brake.
“Real ecstasy,” said Alik Mintz, 66, a leader of the group, who usually makes the trip but stayed at home this year. “Nobody else in the world has this.”
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, who form about a fifth of the population, the day draws a spectrum of emotions, ranging from mild enjoyment to indifference and deep frustration. In Arab-majority cities, life continues almost as normal. But in mixed ones, Arab businesses must often shut.
Most businesses closed during the holiday, but some remained open.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
As Yom Kippur began, bikers, skaters and pedestrians started roaming the empty roads of Tel Aviv.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Some Palestinians appreciate the break. In an Arab part of Jerusalem last year, young Palestinians were filmed holding running races with Israeli policemen on an otherwise empty street.
But to many, the day feels restrictive. Several road junctions in Jerusalem were blocked on Wednesday, making it harder for Palestinian residents to move around. Checkpoints between Israel and the occupied West Bank were closed to workers from the West Bank, depriving them of a day’s income. And in the territory itself, the conflict continued: A gun battle broke out between militants and the Israel Army near Nablus after soldiers came to arrest a Palestinian fighter.
Jack Abdallah, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, enjoyed the day off when he was a driver for a cultural institution. But now he runs his own restaurant in the city, and the day has become a headache, he said. On Wednesday, the checkpoint closure meant one employee could not enter the city, while the road closures and transportation suspensions meant others had to walk several miles to work.
“Before, it was one of the best days for me,” said Mr. Abdallah, 43. “We used to barbecue all night and sleep all day.”
Now, he added, “It makes our life very difficult.”
In Tel Aviv, Ms. Levy and Mr. Rockman had stayed overnight in a holiday apartment, and were recovering from the rigors of the four-hour ride. A friend’s flat tire had delayed their group outside the city, until a passing stranger gave them a spare inner tube.
They went to the beach, where they mentally cast their misdeeds of the past year into the sea, a secular take on a religious tradition. Then they braced, somewhat wistfully, for the return of the traffic.
“Suddenly, boom!” Mr. Rockman said, anticipating the gridlock to come. “The past 24 hours was just a dream.”
Ayalon Highway during Yom Kippur. On the holiday, by social convention, almost all Israeli Jews keep their cars parked.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/worl ... 778d3e6de3
ALONG HIGHWAY 1, Israel — Highway 1, the main thoroughfare between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is usually snarled with traffic on weekday evenings. Enav Levy, a veterinary nurse, tries to avoid the 6 p.m. rush hour on the road, normally one of the busiest in the Middle East, and certainly would not cycle on it.
But at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Ms. Levy, 38, was quite happy to brave the highway. Riding a folding bicycle, she joined the road just west of Jerusalem, and felt a growing sense of liberation.
Gone was the din of car horns and revving engines, replaced with the chirp of cicadas and the sound of the roadside flags fluttering in the evening breeze. With a few sporadic exceptions, the cars had vanished.
“You’re in the middle of civilization — but without that civilization,” Ms. Levy said in an interview. She added, with a laugh, “It’s like the end of the world.”
This was Israel from just after 5:40 p.m. on Tuesday, when observant Jews began an annual fast of just over 25 hours that ended on Wednesday just before 7 p.m. The roads were emptier than on any other day in the year. Radio stations and television channels were silent. Public transportation was suspended. Except in some Arab areas, shops and restaurants were almost all shut.
For Jewish believers, it was the holiest day of their year — an annual day of atonement, or Yom Kippur in Hebrew, for their sins against God. On Tuesday evening, millions of Israelis switched off their phones, ate their last pre-fast meals and headed to synagogues for the opening prayers of the fast.
Orthodox Jews performed kaparot, an atonement ritual customary on the eve of Yom Kippur, on Monday.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
At the Western Wall for services ahead of Yom Kippur. On Tuesday evening, millions of Israelis switched off their phones, ate their last pre-fast meals and headed to synagogues.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
On Wednesday, many went again to synagogue, often for more than eight hours of prayer, confession and repentance. More than half of Israeli Jews attend synagogue on Yom Kippur for at least part of the ceremonies, according to polling in 2019 by the Israel Democracy Institute.
But the day would not be so silent without the participation of the less religiously inclined. On other major Jewish holy days, secular Jews still drive their cars in Israel, and many do not pray. On Yom Kippur, by social convention, almost all Israeli Jews keep their cars parked. Tens of thousands attend special services, organized by Tzohar, a rabbinical association, for those who do not usually attend synagogue.
“It’s almost something that’s part of the DNA of Israel,” said Rabbi David Stav, the chairman of Tzohar.
Even for secular citizens, the day is a chance for contemplation — in part because it is also the anniversary of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War, when Israeli society was left stunned by an unexpected Arab attack.
As a result, the day offers cause for “reflection on what our life is like as a sovereign country which is fighting for its freedom,” said Rabbi Sivan Malkin Maas, who leads the Israeli wing of a small movement of secular Jews. “At what price? Are we doing it in the right way?”
For Jews who live in highly religious neighborhoods, the roads feel no different to how they do on the Sabbath, when residents also stop driving. “The concept of a non-vehicular weekend is something that we do every week,” said Tali Farkash, a journalist and academic from Elad, a city in central Israel that was built for highly observant Jews.
Asaf Rockman entering the outskirts of Tel Aviv after completing a roller-skating ride.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
For nonobservant Israeli Jews, Yom Kippur is a rare chance to experience their country as a silent, carless playground.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
But for secular Israeli Jews, Yom Kippur is a rare chance to experience their country as a silent, carless playground, and to establish their own secular customs in the process.
For more than a decade, Ms. Levy has cycled the 40 miles to Tel Aviv from her in-laws’ home just outside Jerusalem, along with Asaf Rockman, 39, her partner, and whichever friends feel like joining them. Mr. Rockman travels on roller-skates — an exhilarating if terrifying experience when plunging down the mountains outside Jerusalem toward the coastal plain outside Tel Aviv.
“It’s our tradition,” Ms. Levy said. “Every year, at this time of year, it’s what I do.”
Other bikers and skaters take slightly different approaches.
Tom Itzhaki, a hotel manager, usually tries much longer feats of endurance — this year, he completed a 190-mile journey through three cities in central Israel. Nir Ellinson, a coffee roaster, welcomed a more leisurely group of cyclists to his rural home. After a gentler ride from a nearby city, they shared a picnic of herring and cheese and read a short story together about Yom Kippur by S.Y. Agnon, an acclaimed Israeli novelist.
A group of skaters from Tel Aviv, the Tel Aviv Rollers, took the bus to Jerusalem on Tuesday afternoon, rolling back home on the empty roads once the fast began at sunset. To help them reduce speed on the mountain descent, two carried a large flag that they opened when speeding downhill, using it like a sail to brake.
“Real ecstasy,” said Alik Mintz, 66, a leader of the group, who usually makes the trip but stayed at home this year. “Nobody else in the world has this.”
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, who form about a fifth of the population, the day draws a spectrum of emotions, ranging from mild enjoyment to indifference and deep frustration. In Arab-majority cities, life continues almost as normal. But in mixed ones, Arab businesses must often shut.
Most businesses closed during the holiday, but some remained open.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
As Yom Kippur began, bikers, skaters and pedestrians started roaming the empty roads of Tel Aviv.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Some Palestinians appreciate the break. In an Arab part of Jerusalem last year, young Palestinians were filmed holding running races with Israeli policemen on an otherwise empty street.
But to many, the day feels restrictive. Several road junctions in Jerusalem were blocked on Wednesday, making it harder for Palestinian residents to move around. Checkpoints between Israel and the occupied West Bank were closed to workers from the West Bank, depriving them of a day’s income. And in the territory itself, the conflict continued: A gun battle broke out between militants and the Israel Army near Nablus after soldiers came to arrest a Palestinian fighter.
Jack Abdallah, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, enjoyed the day off when he was a driver for a cultural institution. But now he runs his own restaurant in the city, and the day has become a headache, he said. On Wednesday, the checkpoint closure meant one employee could not enter the city, while the road closures and transportation suspensions meant others had to walk several miles to work.
“Before, it was one of the best days for me,” said Mr. Abdallah, 43. “We used to barbecue all night and sleep all day.”
Now, he added, “It makes our life very difficult.”
In Tel Aviv, Ms. Levy and Mr. Rockman had stayed overnight in a holiday apartment, and were recovering from the rigors of the four-hour ride. A friend’s flat tire had delayed their group outside the city, until a passing stranger gave them a spare inner tube.
They went to the beach, where they mentally cast their misdeeds of the past year into the sea, a secular take on a religious tradition. Then they braced, somewhat wistfully, for the return of the traffic.
“Suddenly, boom!” Mr. Rockman said, anticipating the gridlock to come. “The past 24 hours was just a dream.”
Ayalon Highway during Yom Kippur. On the holiday, by social convention, almost all Israeli Jews keep their cars parked.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
There are two main races of Jews. Jacobite and Esau's race. Roman were Esau's race. Aristotle Soqrat and other great philosophers appeared in this race of people and Alexander the Great was a Jew belonging to Esau's race. His father was murdered by Persian Jews and Alexander conquered Persia due to this conspiracy. Jewish conspiracy vibrates life on planet. Alexander's conquest is one good example. It was Roman's official policy not to let Jews settle in and around Jerusalem but Muslim caliph Omer allowed them to settle in Jerusalem despite strong objection from Christians.
Re: JUDAISM
The Conversation
'Untraditional' Hanukkah celebrations are often full of traditions for Jews of color'
Samira Mehta, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies & Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
Fri, December 16, 2022 at 12:34 PM CST
Hanukkah creates opportunities for families to celebrate their heritage. commemorates a story of a miracle, when oil meant to last for one day lasted for eight. Today, Jews light the menorah, a candelabra with eight candles – and one “helper” candle, called a shamas – to remember the Hanukkah oil, which kept the Jerusalem temple’s everlasting lamp burning brightly. Each year, the holiday starts with just the shamas and one of the eight candles and ends, on the last night, with the entire menorah lit up.
But because the reason for the light is oil, Jews also celebrate by eating food cooked in oil. In the United States, most people think of those oil-soaked foods as latkes, or potato pancakes, and jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot. For most American Jews, these are indeed important holiday foods, replete with memories – both of their heavy, greasy deliciousness and of the smells that permeate the house for days after a latke fry.
More specifically, though, these treats are Ashkenazi, referring to Jews whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe. Two-thirds of Jews in the U.S. identify as Ashkenazi, which has strongly shaped American Jewish culture. That Eastern European culture, however, is only one of many Jewish cultures around the world.
In recent years, Jews of color and non-Ashkenazi Jews have been bringing attention to new Hanukkah traditions that celebrate the diversity of Judaism in the U.S. My work as a scholar of gender and Jewish studies often looks at how multicultural families navigate and celebrate the many aspects of their identities.
Many different Jewish stories
Jews of color come from many places. Some people were born into communities that have always been Jewish and have never been considered white: For instance, there are Jewish communities in India, Ethiopia and China. Others are people of color adopted into white Jewish families; adult converts to Judaism; or children of interracial, interfaith marriage.
Many Jews of color have strong ties to Ashkenazi Judaism. Increasingly, though, they are publicly celebrating the range of traditions they bring to the table, making space for more diversity in mainstream Jewish life. There’s been more conversation about the Ethiopian Jewish holiday Sigd, for example, and what role it might play in American Jewish life.
One of my favorite examples is a children’s book called “The Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas,” which features a boy and his little sister, named Sadie. Their dad is Ashkenazi and their mom is Indian or Indian American, as is their live-in grandmother, Amma-amma. In their house, Hanukkah means cooking up a plate of dosas, South Indian crepes sometimes wrapped around a savory filling. The narrator is annoyed by Sadie’s tendency to climb on things, but her climbing skills save the day, and the dinner, when the family is locked out of their house and she can climb in and open the door.
What I especially appreciate about this particular book is that the dosas are not the point of the story. This is a story about an annoying little sister who in the end saves the day, and her family just happens to make dosas as a Hanukkah treat. “The Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas” doesn’t mention whether the Indian side of the family is Jewish, but either way, its message for kids is clear: It can be totally normal to be a half-white, Jewish, half-Indian kid who has dosas for Hanukkah.
‘Kosher Soul’
In real life, one of the most influential Jews of color adding distinctive Hanukkah foods to the communal table is Michael Twitty. This acclaimed food historian is author of “The Cooking Gene,” about the social and culinary history of African American food, and “Kosher Soul,” which brings together traditions from these two sides of his identity.
Twitty notes on his blog, Afroculinaria, that “traditionally African Jewish communities – the Beta Yisrael of Ethiopia, the Lemba of Southern Africa, and groups in West Africa, did not celebrate Hannukah.” That said, in the spirit of celebrating Jewish food from around the world, he shared the Somali dish sambusa, a flaky deep-fried pastry something like a samosa, that can be filled with meat or vegetables. As with dosas, it is not so much that these foods are traditionally associated with Hanukkah but that they could provide Black Jews with a way to celebrate African and Jewish aspects of their heritage with a food fried in oil.
Plenty of people improvise their latke recipes: My former synagogue, like many others, had latke cook-offs in which people brought all sorts of innovations, including black bean and sweet potato latkes and latkes flavored like samosa fillings. For Twitty, pulling from Creole flavors allows him to marry his Jewish religion and his African American heritage – and to offer a path for other Black Jews to do likewise.
In my new book, “The Racism of People Who Love You,” I think a lot about being brown in white spaces and about the innovations that come from blended identities.
I am not from a historically Jewish Indian community, but my own innovation, as a Jew of color, is this. The last Hanukkah before the pandemic, my mom came out to visit me. She is neither Jewish nor Indian but became an excellent Indian cook during many decades of her marriage. I, however, am not an excellent Indian cook and, whenever I am able to spend time with my mom, I want her to make something called aloo puri, which is a chickpea and potato dish served with crispy, puffy fried bread. I have no idea how to make the bread, and it is a “seeing Mommy” treat.
I invited an Indian colleague who was not going home for winter break to join us for dinner. When I happened to mention this dinner to one of my senior Jewish studies colleagues, he commented that he wanted to have my mom cook an Indian dinner for him, and so, with my mom’s permission, I invited him and his husband to join us as well.
My mom looked at me. “Puri are fried in oil,” she said, and all of a sudden we had a Hanukkah party, with a menorah lighting and fried food. For me, having my senior colleague there and excited to join us was a moment of realizing I could bring my full self to the table.
If I were the type to make holiday wishes, that is, perhaps, what I would wish for: a place where all Jews of color could bring their full selves to all the tables where they sit.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Samira Mehta, University of Colorado Boulder.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/un ... 39031.html
'Untraditional' Hanukkah celebrations are often full of traditions for Jews of color'
Samira Mehta, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies & Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
Fri, December 16, 2022 at 12:34 PM CST
Hanukkah creates opportunities for families to celebrate their heritage. commemorates a story of a miracle, when oil meant to last for one day lasted for eight. Today, Jews light the menorah, a candelabra with eight candles – and one “helper” candle, called a shamas – to remember the Hanukkah oil, which kept the Jerusalem temple’s everlasting lamp burning brightly. Each year, the holiday starts with just the shamas and one of the eight candles and ends, on the last night, with the entire menorah lit up.
But because the reason for the light is oil, Jews also celebrate by eating food cooked in oil. In the United States, most people think of those oil-soaked foods as latkes, or potato pancakes, and jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot. For most American Jews, these are indeed important holiday foods, replete with memories – both of their heavy, greasy deliciousness and of the smells that permeate the house for days after a latke fry.
More specifically, though, these treats are Ashkenazi, referring to Jews whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe. Two-thirds of Jews in the U.S. identify as Ashkenazi, which has strongly shaped American Jewish culture. That Eastern European culture, however, is only one of many Jewish cultures around the world.
In recent years, Jews of color and non-Ashkenazi Jews have been bringing attention to new Hanukkah traditions that celebrate the diversity of Judaism in the U.S. My work as a scholar of gender and Jewish studies often looks at how multicultural families navigate and celebrate the many aspects of their identities.
Many different Jewish stories
Jews of color come from many places. Some people were born into communities that have always been Jewish and have never been considered white: For instance, there are Jewish communities in India, Ethiopia and China. Others are people of color adopted into white Jewish families; adult converts to Judaism; or children of interracial, interfaith marriage.
Many Jews of color have strong ties to Ashkenazi Judaism. Increasingly, though, they are publicly celebrating the range of traditions they bring to the table, making space for more diversity in mainstream Jewish life. There’s been more conversation about the Ethiopian Jewish holiday Sigd, for example, and what role it might play in American Jewish life.
One of my favorite examples is a children’s book called “The Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas,” which features a boy and his little sister, named Sadie. Their dad is Ashkenazi and their mom is Indian or Indian American, as is their live-in grandmother, Amma-amma. In their house, Hanukkah means cooking up a plate of dosas, South Indian crepes sometimes wrapped around a savory filling. The narrator is annoyed by Sadie’s tendency to climb on things, but her climbing skills save the day, and the dinner, when the family is locked out of their house and she can climb in and open the door.
What I especially appreciate about this particular book is that the dosas are not the point of the story. This is a story about an annoying little sister who in the end saves the day, and her family just happens to make dosas as a Hanukkah treat. “The Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas” doesn’t mention whether the Indian side of the family is Jewish, but either way, its message for kids is clear: It can be totally normal to be a half-white, Jewish, half-Indian kid who has dosas for Hanukkah.
‘Kosher Soul’
In real life, one of the most influential Jews of color adding distinctive Hanukkah foods to the communal table is Michael Twitty. This acclaimed food historian is author of “The Cooking Gene,” about the social and culinary history of African American food, and “Kosher Soul,” which brings together traditions from these two sides of his identity.
Twitty notes on his blog, Afroculinaria, that “traditionally African Jewish communities – the Beta Yisrael of Ethiopia, the Lemba of Southern Africa, and groups in West Africa, did not celebrate Hannukah.” That said, in the spirit of celebrating Jewish food from around the world, he shared the Somali dish sambusa, a flaky deep-fried pastry something like a samosa, that can be filled with meat or vegetables. As with dosas, it is not so much that these foods are traditionally associated with Hanukkah but that they could provide Black Jews with a way to celebrate African and Jewish aspects of their heritage with a food fried in oil.
Plenty of people improvise their latke recipes: My former synagogue, like many others, had latke cook-offs in which people brought all sorts of innovations, including black bean and sweet potato latkes and latkes flavored like samosa fillings. For Twitty, pulling from Creole flavors allows him to marry his Jewish religion and his African American heritage – and to offer a path for other Black Jews to do likewise.
In my new book, “The Racism of People Who Love You,” I think a lot about being brown in white spaces and about the innovations that come from blended identities.
I am not from a historically Jewish Indian community, but my own innovation, as a Jew of color, is this. The last Hanukkah before the pandemic, my mom came out to visit me. She is neither Jewish nor Indian but became an excellent Indian cook during many decades of her marriage. I, however, am not an excellent Indian cook and, whenever I am able to spend time with my mom, I want her to make something called aloo puri, which is a chickpea and potato dish served with crispy, puffy fried bread. I have no idea how to make the bread, and it is a “seeing Mommy” treat.
I invited an Indian colleague who was not going home for winter break to join us for dinner. When I happened to mention this dinner to one of my senior Jewish studies colleagues, he commented that he wanted to have my mom cook an Indian dinner for him, and so, with my mom’s permission, I invited him and his husband to join us as well.
My mom looked at me. “Puri are fried in oil,” she said, and all of a sudden we had a Hanukkah party, with a menorah lighting and fried food. For me, having my senior colleague there and excited to join us was a moment of realizing I could bring my full self to the table.
If I were the type to make holiday wishes, that is, perhaps, what I would wish for: a place where all Jews of color could bring their full selves to all the tables where they sit.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Samira Mehta, University of Colorado Boulder.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/un ... 39031.html
Re: JUDAISM
Thousands join Israeli judicial protests in shadow of attacks
Israelis demonstrate against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his nationalist coalition government's judicial overhaul, in Tel Aviv
Rami Amichay
Sat, April 8, 2023 at 12:49 PM CDT
By Rami Amichay
TEL AVIV (Reuters) -Tens of thousands of Israelis joined protests on Saturday against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plans to tighten controls on the Supreme Court, despite heightened security worries after two deadly attacks a day earlier.
The latest in a series of protests against the plans, which were paused last month in the face of a wave of strikes and mass demonstrations, come as Israel faces a sharp rise in tensions on several fronts during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Around Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, tens of thousands of worshippers were expected for evening prayers amid concerns over a possible repeat of nighttime police raids this week that were followed by rocket barrages into Israel and Israeli strikes into Gaza and Southern Lebanon.
Israelis were also on edge after a car-ramming in Tel Aviv on Friday that killed an Italian man and wounded five other tourists, hours after a gun attack killed two Israeli sisters and wounded their mother near a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu has mobilised border police reservists and ordered the army to reinforce security positions to head off possible trouble, amid calls for calm from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
In central Tel Aviv, crowds waving the blue and white Israeli flags that have become a hallmark of the protests over the past three months gathered in a show of defiance against plans they see as an existential threat to Israeli democracy.
The demonstration began with a prayer for the victims of the attacks a day earlier but protesters said they would not be put off by security worries.
"Security is one thing but reform is another," said 26-year-old student Amitay Ginsberg. "We're still going to come here and say loud and clear that we will not let this reform pass."
The proposals, which would give the government effective control over the appointment of Supreme Court judges and allow parliament to overrule many decisions of the court, have caused one of the biggest domestic crises in Israel's recent history.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, including army reservists, business leaders, members of Israel's tech industry and leading academics have taken part, facing off against supporters of Netanyahu's religious-nationalist coalition.
The government side, which accuses activist judges of increasingly usurping the role of parliament, says the overhaul is needed to restore a proper balance between the judiciary and elected politicians.
Critics say it will remove some of the vital checks and balances underpinning a democratic state and hand unchecked power to the government.
Before the protests, police had urged people to leave roads clear to allow emergency services to move freely following Friday's car-ramming on a popular shoreline promenade in Tel Aviv.
(Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Giles Elgood)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 16872.html
Israelis demonstrate against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his nationalist coalition government's judicial overhaul, in Tel Aviv
Rami Amichay
Sat, April 8, 2023 at 12:49 PM CDT
By Rami Amichay
TEL AVIV (Reuters) -Tens of thousands of Israelis joined protests on Saturday against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plans to tighten controls on the Supreme Court, despite heightened security worries after two deadly attacks a day earlier.
The latest in a series of protests against the plans, which were paused last month in the face of a wave of strikes and mass demonstrations, come as Israel faces a sharp rise in tensions on several fronts during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Around Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, tens of thousands of worshippers were expected for evening prayers amid concerns over a possible repeat of nighttime police raids this week that were followed by rocket barrages into Israel and Israeli strikes into Gaza and Southern Lebanon.
Israelis were also on edge after a car-ramming in Tel Aviv on Friday that killed an Italian man and wounded five other tourists, hours after a gun attack killed two Israeli sisters and wounded their mother near a settlement in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu has mobilised border police reservists and ordered the army to reinforce security positions to head off possible trouble, amid calls for calm from the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
In central Tel Aviv, crowds waving the blue and white Israeli flags that have become a hallmark of the protests over the past three months gathered in a show of defiance against plans they see as an existential threat to Israeli democracy.
The demonstration began with a prayer for the victims of the attacks a day earlier but protesters said they would not be put off by security worries.
"Security is one thing but reform is another," said 26-year-old student Amitay Ginsberg. "We're still going to come here and say loud and clear that we will not let this reform pass."
The proposals, which would give the government effective control over the appointment of Supreme Court judges and allow parliament to overrule many decisions of the court, have caused one of the biggest domestic crises in Israel's recent history.
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, including army reservists, business leaders, members of Israel's tech industry and leading academics have taken part, facing off against supporters of Netanyahu's religious-nationalist coalition.
The government side, which accuses activist judges of increasingly usurping the role of parliament, says the overhaul is needed to restore a proper balance between the judiciary and elected politicians.
Critics say it will remove some of the vital checks and balances underpinning a democratic state and hand unchecked power to the government.
Before the protests, police had urged people to leave roads clear to allow emergency services to move freely following Friday's car-ramming on a popular shoreline promenade in Tel Aviv.
(Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Giles Elgood)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 16872.html
Re: JUDAISM
AFP
The Israelis set for new Jewish temple on Al-Aqsa site
Claire Gounon
Sun, June 4, 2023 at 11:33 PM CDT
With imported sacrificial cows, ancient hymns and growing support, some nationalist Jews hope to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem's Old City, at a site at the heart of Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
In a suburb of Tel Aviv, a group of choristers were getting ready for the moment they will rejoice at the reconstruction of the Jewish temple some 2,000 years after its destruction, which they believe will accelerate the arrival of the messiah.
But for others, realizing their goal would massively inflame tensions around the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.
Chorister Shmuel Kam said Jews have been "waiting" two millennia for the revival of the temple.
Members of the Orthodox Jewish group claim to be descendants of the biblical Tribe of Levi, which performed hymns and music at the holy site.
"When the temple will be built, we will ask the Levites to come sing and they won't know. They have to learn," said Menahem Rozenthal, director of the men-only choir created a few months ago by the Temple Institute.
Founded in 1987, the institute aims to rebuild the temple, training choirs and clerics and making objects for use in religious rites.
While apprentice choristers come from across Israel to delve into the collection of ancient hymns, the Temple Institute has made all of the objects deemed necessary for Jewish rites according to rabbinical instructions.
These include priestly robes, baking moulds for bread, incense burners and musical instruments.
- 'Matter of time' -
The faithful have their sights set on the large, tree-dotted compound in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City.
Known as Temple Mount to Jews and revered as their holiest site, the compound has for centuries housed Al-Aqsa mosque, the third most sacred place in Islam.
Those seeking to rebuild the temple recall the former place of worship, destroyed around 70 AD during the Roman period.
According to Jewish tradition, their first temple was demolished in 586 BC by then ruler Nebuchadnezzar II at the same location.
For Haim Berkovits, a 50-year-old third temple advocate, "you can say whatever you want (about the Muslim presence), this was the place for Jews".
Jewish worship at the future temple is "only a matter of time", he said.
Berkovits is part of Boneh Israel ("Building Israel"), an organization which according to its website works at "bringing the redemption closer".
In order to hasten their sought-after redemption, Boneh Israel imported five red heifers from the United States last year.
The plan is to sacrifice them and blend the ashes with water, a mixture that will be used to brush anyone deemed impure -- for example those who have had contact with a corpse -- before their ascent to the third temple.
The rare cows are crucial, because the inability to perform this ritual is part of Israeli rabbinical authorities' opposition to Jewish visits to Temple Mount.
The animals' "return is a messianic sign", affirmed Berkovits at a farm in northern Israel where they are inspected by vets and rabbis to ensure that every single hair is red.
"We pamper them, we're keeping them for the opportune moment," he added.
- Spreading ideology -
Berkovits said Boneh Israel had already acquired land on the Mount of Olives in east Jerusalem, so the animals can be burned facing Temple Mount.
For Yizhar Beer, director of the Keshev Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, these "third temple lovers" are in no way marginal.
From a few dozen adherents two decades ago, their ideology has "spread to the centre of the political level -- to the parliament, to the government", Beer said.
Since December, Benjamin Netanyahu has led a government alongside extreme-right ministers who advocate imposing Israeli sovereignty on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The compound is administered by the Waqf Islamic affairs council of Jordan, whose forces were routed from east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Defying the ban by top rabbis, some 50,000 Jews "ascended to Temple Mount" last year, according to a nationalist Israeli organization that carries the site's Hebrew name, Har Habait.
The Jewish visitors include firebrand politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has also visited twice this year since becoming Israel's national security minister.
The United Nations, the United States and the European Union have all pressed in recent months for the status quo to be respected at Jerusalem's holy sites.
Tours by Jews of the holy compound, where only Muslims are permitted to pray, are denounced by Palestinians as a "threat" and an attempt to "Judaise" the site.
- Political 'atomic bomb' -
The compound is a point of perennial tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and any Jewish visit has the potential to become "an atomic bomb", warned Beer.
"A combination of religion and politics... this is a nuclear reactor, so an explosion there blows up everything," he said.
The international community has never recognized Israel's annexation of east Jerusalem, and considers it occupied Palestinian territory.
For Yitzchak Reuven, the Temple Institute's head of communications, "the controversy is stirred up by the Palestinians who use it for nationalistic reasons".
"It's not really a Muslim issue," he said.
Reuven did not specify what would become of Al-Aqsa mosque, a notable anomaly in otherwise detailed plans by organizations focused on the third temple.
However, such groups do assert that it would be impossible to construct the holy Jewish site anywhere but the mosque compound.
"That's the place God chose," said Reuven. "It's a dream, but Jews returning to Israel was a dream -- and then it became a reality."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 18873.html
The Israelis set for new Jewish temple on Al-Aqsa site
Claire Gounon
Sun, June 4, 2023 at 11:33 PM CDT
With imported sacrificial cows, ancient hymns and growing support, some nationalist Jews hope to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem's Old City, at a site at the heart of Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
In a suburb of Tel Aviv, a group of choristers were getting ready for the moment they will rejoice at the reconstruction of the Jewish temple some 2,000 years after its destruction, which they believe will accelerate the arrival of the messiah.
But for others, realizing their goal would massively inflame tensions around the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.
Chorister Shmuel Kam said Jews have been "waiting" two millennia for the revival of the temple.
Members of the Orthodox Jewish group claim to be descendants of the biblical Tribe of Levi, which performed hymns and music at the holy site.
"When the temple will be built, we will ask the Levites to come sing and they won't know. They have to learn," said Menahem Rozenthal, director of the men-only choir created a few months ago by the Temple Institute.
Founded in 1987, the institute aims to rebuild the temple, training choirs and clerics and making objects for use in religious rites.
While apprentice choristers come from across Israel to delve into the collection of ancient hymns, the Temple Institute has made all of the objects deemed necessary for Jewish rites according to rabbinical instructions.
These include priestly robes, baking moulds for bread, incense burners and musical instruments.
- 'Matter of time' -
The faithful have their sights set on the large, tree-dotted compound in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City.
Known as Temple Mount to Jews and revered as their holiest site, the compound has for centuries housed Al-Aqsa mosque, the third most sacred place in Islam.
Those seeking to rebuild the temple recall the former place of worship, destroyed around 70 AD during the Roman period.
According to Jewish tradition, their first temple was demolished in 586 BC by then ruler Nebuchadnezzar II at the same location.
For Haim Berkovits, a 50-year-old third temple advocate, "you can say whatever you want (about the Muslim presence), this was the place for Jews".
Jewish worship at the future temple is "only a matter of time", he said.
Berkovits is part of Boneh Israel ("Building Israel"), an organization which according to its website works at "bringing the redemption closer".
In order to hasten their sought-after redemption, Boneh Israel imported five red heifers from the United States last year.
The plan is to sacrifice them and blend the ashes with water, a mixture that will be used to brush anyone deemed impure -- for example those who have had contact with a corpse -- before their ascent to the third temple.
The rare cows are crucial, because the inability to perform this ritual is part of Israeli rabbinical authorities' opposition to Jewish visits to Temple Mount.
The animals' "return is a messianic sign", affirmed Berkovits at a farm in northern Israel where they are inspected by vets and rabbis to ensure that every single hair is red.
"We pamper them, we're keeping them for the opportune moment," he added.
- Spreading ideology -
Berkovits said Boneh Israel had already acquired land on the Mount of Olives in east Jerusalem, so the animals can be burned facing Temple Mount.
For Yizhar Beer, director of the Keshev Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, these "third temple lovers" are in no way marginal.
From a few dozen adherents two decades ago, their ideology has "spread to the centre of the political level -- to the parliament, to the government", Beer said.
Since December, Benjamin Netanyahu has led a government alongside extreme-right ministers who advocate imposing Israeli sovereignty on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The compound is administered by the Waqf Islamic affairs council of Jordan, whose forces were routed from east Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Defying the ban by top rabbis, some 50,000 Jews "ascended to Temple Mount" last year, according to a nationalist Israeli organization that carries the site's Hebrew name, Har Habait.
The Jewish visitors include firebrand politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has also visited twice this year since becoming Israel's national security minister.
The United Nations, the United States and the European Union have all pressed in recent months for the status quo to be respected at Jerusalem's holy sites.
Tours by Jews of the holy compound, where only Muslims are permitted to pray, are denounced by Palestinians as a "threat" and an attempt to "Judaise" the site.
- Political 'atomic bomb' -
The compound is a point of perennial tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and any Jewish visit has the potential to become "an atomic bomb", warned Beer.
"A combination of religion and politics... this is a nuclear reactor, so an explosion there blows up everything," he said.
The international community has never recognized Israel's annexation of east Jerusalem, and considers it occupied Palestinian territory.
For Yitzchak Reuven, the Temple Institute's head of communications, "the controversy is stirred up by the Palestinians who use it for nationalistic reasons".
"It's not really a Muslim issue," he said.
Reuven did not specify what would become of Al-Aqsa mosque, a notable anomaly in otherwise detailed plans by organizations focused on the third temple.
However, such groups do assert that it would be impossible to construct the holy Jewish site anywhere but the mosque compound.
"That's the place God chose," said Reuven. "It's a dream, but Jews returning to Israel was a dream -- and then it became a reality."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 18873.html
Re: JUDAISM
The Conversation
Jewish denominations: A brief guide for the perplexed
Joshua Shanes, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, College of Charleston
Thu, June 15, 2023 at 7:49 AM CDT
As a scholar of modern Jewish history, religion and politics, I am often asked to explain the differences between Judaism’s major denominations. Here is a very brief overview:
Rabbinic roots
Two thousand years ago, Jews were divided between competing sects all based on the Jewish scriptures, but with different interpretations. After the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., one main group, who called themselves “rabbis” – sages or teachers – began to dominate. What we now know as “Judaism” grew out of this group, technically called “Rabbinic Judaism.”
Rabbinic Judaism believed that God gave Jewish teachings and scriptures to Moses at Mt. Sinai, but that they came in two parts: the “written law” or “written Torah” and the “oral law” or “oral Torah.” The oral Torah is a vast body of interpretations that expands upon the written Torah and is the source for most of the rules and theology of Rabbinic Judaism.
Fearful that these traditions might be lost, the early rabbis began the process of writing them down, culminating in two texts called the Mishna and the Talmud. This corpus became the foundation of rabbinic literature.
The rabbis assured the Jews that although the temple’s destruction was devastating, Jews could continue to serve God through study, prayer and observing God’s commandments, called “mitzvot.” Someday, they promised, God would send the Messiah, a descendant of King David who would rebuild the temple and return the exiled Jews to the land of Israel.
Historic turning point
There were tensions in Rabbinic Judaism from the outset. For example, starting in the Middle Ages, a Jewish group called the Karaites challenged the rabbis’ authority by rejecting the oral Torah.
Even within the rabbinic tradition, there were regular disagreements: between mystics and rationalists, for example; debates over people claiming to be the messiah; and differences in customs between regions, from medieval Spain to Poland to Yemen.
Still, Rabbinic Judaism remained a more or less united religious community for some 1,500 years – until the 19th century.
Around that time, Jews began to experience emancipation in many parts of Europe, acquiring equal citizenship where they had previously constituted a separate, legal community. Meanwhile, thousands – eventually millions – of Jews moved to the United States, which likewise offered equal citizenship.
Three major groups
Competing Jewish denominations emerged, each one attempting to negotiate the relationship between Jewishness and modernity in its own way. Each group claimed that they followed the best or most authentic traditions of Judaism.
The first modern denomination to organize was Reform – first in Germany in the early 19th century, but soon in America as well. Reform Judaism is based on the idea that both the Bible and the laws of the oral Torah are divinely inspired, but humanly constructed, meaning they should be adapted based on contemporary moral ideals. Reform congregations tend to emphasize prophetic themes such as social justice more than Talmudic law, though in recent years many have reclaimed some rituals, such as Hebrew liturgy and stricter observance of Shabbat.
Orthodox Judaism soon organized in reaction to Reform, rallying to defend the strict observance of Jewish customs and law. Orthodox leaders often blurred the distinction between these categories and put particular emphasis on the 16th-century legal code called the Shulchan Aruch. Orthodoxy insists that both the written and oral Torah have divine origins. Contrary views in pre-modern sources are often censored.
Conservative Judaism, which did not arrive in the U.S. until the mid-1900s, shares many of Reform Judaism’s views, such as equal religious roles for men and women. However, Conservative Jews argue that the Reform movement pulled too far away from Jewish tradition. They insist that Jewish law remains obligatory, but that the Orthodox interpretation is too rigid. In practice, most Conservative Jews tend not to be strict about even major rituals, like observing Sabbath restrictions or kosher food practices.
There are also smaller but still influential Jewish movements. For example, Reconstructionism, created by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in the 1930s and 1940s, emphasizes community over ritual obligations. And the Jewish Renewal movement, born out of the late 1960s counterculture, seeks to incorporate insights from Jewish mysticism with an egalitarian perspective, and without necessarily following the minutiae of Jewish law.
Finally, what makes Jewish identities even more complex is that for many Jewish people, being “Jewish” is more of a cultural or ethnic identity than a religious one. Over a quarter of Americans who describe themselves as Jewish say they do not identify with the Jewish religion at all, though Jewish culture or their family’s Jewish background may be very important to them.
From Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox
Of all the Jewish denominations, the Orthodox groups are perhaps most misunderstood. They all share a commitment to Jewish law – especially regarding gender roles and sexuality, food consumption and Sabbath restrictions – but there are many divisions, generally categorized on a spectrum from “modern” to “ultra” Orthodox.
Modern Orthodoxy celebrates secular education and integration into the modern world, yet insists on a relatively strict approach to ritual observance and traditional tenets of belief. They also tend to see Zionism – the modern movement calling for Jewish national rights, today connected to support for Israel – as part of their religious worldview, rather than just a political belief.
The ultra-Orthodox, on the other hand – sometimes called “Haredim” or Haredi Jews – advocate segregation from the outside world. Many continue to speak Yiddish, the traditional language of Jews in Eastern Europe, or to dress as traditional Jews did in Europe before the Holocaust.
This is especially true of Hasidic Jews, who make up about half of the ultra-Orthodox population worldwide. Hasidism is a mystical movement born in 18th-century Ukraine, but today mostly concentrated in New York and Israel. Hasidic Jews are known for being particularly strict about shunning secular culture and education, but they remain also a mystical movement focused on God’s close presence. They are divided into subgroups named after cities in Eastern Europe, and they follow leaders known as “Rebbes,” who wield enormous power in their communities.
Haredim are particularly committed to gender segregation, separating men and women beyond what previous Jewish traditions called for, and tend toward the strictest interpretation of Jewish law, even when traditional understanding of a rule has been more lenient.
Whether modern or Haredi, Orthodox Judaism sees itself as “traditional.” However, it is more accurate to say it is “traditionalist.” By this I mean that Orthodoxy is attempting to recreate a pre-modern religion in a modern era. Not only has Orthodox Judaism innovated many rituals and teachings, but people today have greater awareness that other types of life are available – creating a firm break with the traditional world Orthodoxy claims to perpetuate.
Becoming a nation
Jewish groups are often described as “Zionist.” What is Zionism, and where does it fit in to all these terms?
The first Zionists were mostly secular Jews from Eastern Europe. Inspired by nationalist movements around them, they claimed that Jews constituted a modern nation, rather than just a religion. Traditions and prayers connected to the land – often reinterpreted through a secular, nationalist lens – became all-important for Zionists, while many other rituals and traditions were abandoned.
Most Jews opposed Zionism for decades. Reform Jews and even some early Orthodox Jews worried that defining Jews as a “nation” would undermine their claim to equal citizenship in other countries. Orthodox Jews, meanwhile, opposed Zionists’ staunch secularism and emphasized that Jews must wait for the Messiah to lead them back to the land of Israel.
Within a decade or two of Israel’s establishment as a modern state, however, most Jewish denominations integrated Zionism into their worldview. Still, most ultra-Orthodox Jews today continue to oppose Zionist ideology, even as they hold right-wing political views on Israel. Young liberal Jews, too, are increasingly emphasizing the distinction between Zionism and their own Jewish identity.
Today, most U.S. Jews are either unaffiliated with any particular denomination or Reform. However, the percentage of Jews who are Orthodox – especially ultra-Orthodox, whose members tend to have very large families – is growing rapidly. Almost 10% of American Jews and nearly 25% of Israeli Jews are Orthodox today, although attrition from these communities is also rising.
This trend may continue, or that sector may see mass defections, as it did a century ago. Either way, Orthodoxy is going to continue to play a very important role in Jewish life for many years to come.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.
It was written by: Joshua Shanes, College of Charleston.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 27901.html
Jewish denominations: A brief guide for the perplexed
Joshua Shanes, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, College of Charleston
Thu, June 15, 2023 at 7:49 AM CDT
As a scholar of modern Jewish history, religion and politics, I am often asked to explain the differences between Judaism’s major denominations. Here is a very brief overview:
Rabbinic roots
Two thousand years ago, Jews were divided between competing sects all based on the Jewish scriptures, but with different interpretations. After the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., one main group, who called themselves “rabbis” – sages or teachers – began to dominate. What we now know as “Judaism” grew out of this group, technically called “Rabbinic Judaism.”
Rabbinic Judaism believed that God gave Jewish teachings and scriptures to Moses at Mt. Sinai, but that they came in two parts: the “written law” or “written Torah” and the “oral law” or “oral Torah.” The oral Torah is a vast body of interpretations that expands upon the written Torah and is the source for most of the rules and theology of Rabbinic Judaism.
Fearful that these traditions might be lost, the early rabbis began the process of writing them down, culminating in two texts called the Mishna and the Talmud. This corpus became the foundation of rabbinic literature.
The rabbis assured the Jews that although the temple’s destruction was devastating, Jews could continue to serve God through study, prayer and observing God’s commandments, called “mitzvot.” Someday, they promised, God would send the Messiah, a descendant of King David who would rebuild the temple and return the exiled Jews to the land of Israel.
Historic turning point
There were tensions in Rabbinic Judaism from the outset. For example, starting in the Middle Ages, a Jewish group called the Karaites challenged the rabbis’ authority by rejecting the oral Torah.
Even within the rabbinic tradition, there were regular disagreements: between mystics and rationalists, for example; debates over people claiming to be the messiah; and differences in customs between regions, from medieval Spain to Poland to Yemen.
Still, Rabbinic Judaism remained a more or less united religious community for some 1,500 years – until the 19th century.
Around that time, Jews began to experience emancipation in many parts of Europe, acquiring equal citizenship where they had previously constituted a separate, legal community. Meanwhile, thousands – eventually millions – of Jews moved to the United States, which likewise offered equal citizenship.
Three major groups
Competing Jewish denominations emerged, each one attempting to negotiate the relationship between Jewishness and modernity in its own way. Each group claimed that they followed the best or most authentic traditions of Judaism.
The first modern denomination to organize was Reform – first in Germany in the early 19th century, but soon in America as well. Reform Judaism is based on the idea that both the Bible and the laws of the oral Torah are divinely inspired, but humanly constructed, meaning they should be adapted based on contemporary moral ideals. Reform congregations tend to emphasize prophetic themes such as social justice more than Talmudic law, though in recent years many have reclaimed some rituals, such as Hebrew liturgy and stricter observance of Shabbat.
Orthodox Judaism soon organized in reaction to Reform, rallying to defend the strict observance of Jewish customs and law. Orthodox leaders often blurred the distinction between these categories and put particular emphasis on the 16th-century legal code called the Shulchan Aruch. Orthodoxy insists that both the written and oral Torah have divine origins. Contrary views in pre-modern sources are often censored.
Conservative Judaism, which did not arrive in the U.S. until the mid-1900s, shares many of Reform Judaism’s views, such as equal religious roles for men and women. However, Conservative Jews argue that the Reform movement pulled too far away from Jewish tradition. They insist that Jewish law remains obligatory, but that the Orthodox interpretation is too rigid. In practice, most Conservative Jews tend not to be strict about even major rituals, like observing Sabbath restrictions or kosher food practices.
There are also smaller but still influential Jewish movements. For example, Reconstructionism, created by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in the 1930s and 1940s, emphasizes community over ritual obligations. And the Jewish Renewal movement, born out of the late 1960s counterculture, seeks to incorporate insights from Jewish mysticism with an egalitarian perspective, and without necessarily following the minutiae of Jewish law.
Finally, what makes Jewish identities even more complex is that for many Jewish people, being “Jewish” is more of a cultural or ethnic identity than a religious one. Over a quarter of Americans who describe themselves as Jewish say they do not identify with the Jewish religion at all, though Jewish culture or their family’s Jewish background may be very important to them.
From Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox
Of all the Jewish denominations, the Orthodox groups are perhaps most misunderstood. They all share a commitment to Jewish law – especially regarding gender roles and sexuality, food consumption and Sabbath restrictions – but there are many divisions, generally categorized on a spectrum from “modern” to “ultra” Orthodox.
Modern Orthodoxy celebrates secular education and integration into the modern world, yet insists on a relatively strict approach to ritual observance and traditional tenets of belief. They also tend to see Zionism – the modern movement calling for Jewish national rights, today connected to support for Israel – as part of their religious worldview, rather than just a political belief.
The ultra-Orthodox, on the other hand – sometimes called “Haredim” or Haredi Jews – advocate segregation from the outside world. Many continue to speak Yiddish, the traditional language of Jews in Eastern Europe, or to dress as traditional Jews did in Europe before the Holocaust.
This is especially true of Hasidic Jews, who make up about half of the ultra-Orthodox population worldwide. Hasidism is a mystical movement born in 18th-century Ukraine, but today mostly concentrated in New York and Israel. Hasidic Jews are known for being particularly strict about shunning secular culture and education, but they remain also a mystical movement focused on God’s close presence. They are divided into subgroups named after cities in Eastern Europe, and they follow leaders known as “Rebbes,” who wield enormous power in their communities.
Haredim are particularly committed to gender segregation, separating men and women beyond what previous Jewish traditions called for, and tend toward the strictest interpretation of Jewish law, even when traditional understanding of a rule has been more lenient.
Whether modern or Haredi, Orthodox Judaism sees itself as “traditional.” However, it is more accurate to say it is “traditionalist.” By this I mean that Orthodoxy is attempting to recreate a pre-modern religion in a modern era. Not only has Orthodox Judaism innovated many rituals and teachings, but people today have greater awareness that other types of life are available – creating a firm break with the traditional world Orthodoxy claims to perpetuate.
Becoming a nation
Jewish groups are often described as “Zionist.” What is Zionism, and where does it fit in to all these terms?
The first Zionists were mostly secular Jews from Eastern Europe. Inspired by nationalist movements around them, they claimed that Jews constituted a modern nation, rather than just a religion. Traditions and prayers connected to the land – often reinterpreted through a secular, nationalist lens – became all-important for Zionists, while many other rituals and traditions were abandoned.
Most Jews opposed Zionism for decades. Reform Jews and even some early Orthodox Jews worried that defining Jews as a “nation” would undermine their claim to equal citizenship in other countries. Orthodox Jews, meanwhile, opposed Zionists’ staunch secularism and emphasized that Jews must wait for the Messiah to lead them back to the land of Israel.
Within a decade or two of Israel’s establishment as a modern state, however, most Jewish denominations integrated Zionism into their worldview. Still, most ultra-Orthodox Jews today continue to oppose Zionist ideology, even as they hold right-wing political views on Israel. Young liberal Jews, too, are increasingly emphasizing the distinction between Zionism and their own Jewish identity.
Today, most U.S. Jews are either unaffiliated with any particular denomination or Reform. However, the percentage of Jews who are Orthodox – especially ultra-Orthodox, whose members tend to have very large families – is growing rapidly. Almost 10% of American Jews and nearly 25% of Israeli Jews are Orthodox today, although attrition from these communities is also rising.
This trend may continue, or that sector may see mass defections, as it did a century ago. Either way, Orthodoxy is going to continue to play a very important role in Jewish life for many years to come.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.
It was written by: Joshua Shanes, College of Charleston.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 27901.html
Re: JUDAISM
The Telegraph
Israel condemns Sweden for allowing Torah to be burned outside embassy
James Rothwell
Fri, July 14, 2023 at 10:04 AM CDT
koran stockholm
Salwan Momika was also was granted permission to tear apart and burn the Koran during a demonstration outside a mosque in Stockholm in June - JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images
Israel’s president has condemned as “pure hate” plans to burn a Jewish religious text outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm over the weekend.
Police have approved a request by a man aged in his 30s to burn either a Torah scroll or a Jewish Bible outside the embassy, according to local media reports. He also intends to burn a Christian Bible.
The stunt was described in Swedish media reports as “a symbolic gathering for the sake of freedom of speech”.
The Jewish Bible burning protest is due to take place on Saturday, but Israeli officials have lodged an official complaint, calling it a “hate crime”.
It has also drawn the ire of Israel’s president, foreign minister and minister for diaspora of affairs as well as a string of less senior Israeli politicians.
The Swedish foreign ministry has reportedly responded to Israel by saying that it cannot infringe on the free speech rights of its citizens.
In a statement on Friday, Isaac Herzog said:
David Lau, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, said: “I call on you to do everything possible to prevent this act. Freedom of expression does not mean permitting everything… any desecration of sacred Jewish items is not freedom, but antisemitism,” he said.
The move was also condemned by Eli Cohen, the Israeli foreign minister, who called on Swedish authorities “to prevent this shameful act”.
It comes after Swedish police allowed a Quran to be burned outside a mosque in Stockholm on grounds of free speech after a Swedish court overturned a ban on burning the religious text.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 14067.html
Israel condemns Sweden for allowing Torah to be burned outside embassy
James Rothwell
Fri, July 14, 2023 at 10:04 AM CDT
koran stockholm
Salwan Momika was also was granted permission to tear apart and burn the Koran during a demonstration outside a mosque in Stockholm in June - JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images
Israel’s president has condemned as “pure hate” plans to burn a Jewish religious text outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm over the weekend.
Police have approved a request by a man aged in his 30s to burn either a Torah scroll or a Jewish Bible outside the embassy, according to local media reports. He also intends to burn a Christian Bible.
The stunt was described in Swedish media reports as “a symbolic gathering for the sake of freedom of speech”.
The Jewish Bible burning protest is due to take place on Saturday, but Israeli officials have lodged an official complaint, calling it a “hate crime”.
It has also drawn the ire of Israel’s president, foreign minister and minister for diaspora of affairs as well as a string of less senior Israeli politicians.
The Swedish foreign ministry has reportedly responded to Israel by saying that it cannot infringe on the free speech rights of its citizens.
In a statement on Friday, Isaac Herzog said:
David Lau, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, said: “I call on you to do everything possible to prevent this act. Freedom of expression does not mean permitting everything… any desecration of sacred Jewish items is not freedom, but antisemitism,” he said.
The move was also condemned by Eli Cohen, the Israeli foreign minister, who called on Swedish authorities “to prevent this shameful act”.
It comes after Swedish police allowed a Quran to be burned outside a mosque in Stockholm on grounds of free speech after a Swedish court overturned a ban on burning the religious text.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 14067.html
Re: JUDAISM
Bawaal: Bollywood film accused of trivializing Holocaust
Geeta Pandey and Cherylann Mollan - BBC News
Thu, July 27, 2023 at 9:59 AM CDT
A Jewish organization has written to Amazon Prime asking the streaming service to remove Bollywood film Bawaal from its platform for its "insensitive portrayal" of the Holocaust.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center says the film trivializes the "suffering and systematic murder of millions".
Many in India have also criticized the film for the way it has used the Holocaust in the romantic drama.
But the cast and director have called the criticism unwarranted.
Since the film released on Prime Video last Friday, cinema critics and viewers have criticized some scenes and dialogue that draw a parallel between the protagonists' love story and the Holocaust.
The film includes a fantasy scene inside a gas chamber and uses Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Auschwitz death camp as metaphors.
It stars popular actors Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor in the lead roles as a recently-married couple, travelling in Europe.
He's a history teacher and his aim is to make Instagram reels to teach World War Two to his students and she is hoping to make one last attempt to save their failing marriage.
Websites that track the performance of Bollywood films have declared Bawaal a commercial hit - they say it has already attracted between six and seven million views and, on Thursday, the Prime Video app showed it leading the "Top 10 in India" list.
But ever since its release, the film has been making news for the wrong reasons - it did not get many positive reviews, with critics pointing out that the use of the Holocaust imagery and dialogue was in bad taste.
In one scene, Hitler is used as a metaphor to describe human greed, with the character played by Kapoor saying, "We're all a little like Hitler, aren't we?"
In another instance, she says "every relationship goes through their Auschwitz" - a reference to Nazi Germany's largest death camp where almost a million Jews were killed.
Bawaal controversy
Some of Janhvi Kapoor's dialogue in the film has been criticized
In a recreation of the horrors at the camp, the couple dressed in striped clothing are placed inside a gas chamber, where they are surrounded by people who are screaming and suffocating.
On Tuesday, Jewish human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center also joined in the criticism - it said in a statement that Auschwitz should not be used as a metaphor as it's a "quintessential example of man's capacity for evil".
"By having the protagonist in this movie declare that 'Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz', Nitesh Tiwari [the director], trivializes and demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler's genocidal regime," the statement said.
"If the filmmaker's goal was to gain PR [publicity] for their movie by reportedly filming a fantasy sequence at the Nazi death camp, he has succeeded," it added.
The statement also asked Amazon Prime to "stop monetizing" the film and immediately remove it from its platform.
Though the makers of the film have not responded to the statement yet, Dhawan had said in an earlier interview during the film's promotional tour that people took offence at small things in Hindi films but tended to give more leeway to English films.
Director Nitesh Tiwari had said that films should not be viewed with a "magnifying glass" because then "you'll find problems with every piece of work created".
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ba ... 443042.htm
Note:
Comments: When Hollywood can put steamy scenes in Oppenheimer about Bhagvad Geeta, Quran in Barbie, so why Bollywood be behind decided to put holocaust scenes.
If its ok to burn Quran or Torah for freedom of speech it's ok for this movie to use Holocaust the way,
What about Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza concentration prison camp.
Geeta Pandey and Cherylann Mollan - BBC News
Thu, July 27, 2023 at 9:59 AM CDT
A Jewish organization has written to Amazon Prime asking the streaming service to remove Bollywood film Bawaal from its platform for its "insensitive portrayal" of the Holocaust.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center says the film trivializes the "suffering and systematic murder of millions".
Many in India have also criticized the film for the way it has used the Holocaust in the romantic drama.
But the cast and director have called the criticism unwarranted.
Since the film released on Prime Video last Friday, cinema critics and viewers have criticized some scenes and dialogue that draw a parallel between the protagonists' love story and the Holocaust.
The film includes a fantasy scene inside a gas chamber and uses Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Auschwitz death camp as metaphors.
It stars popular actors Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor in the lead roles as a recently-married couple, travelling in Europe.
He's a history teacher and his aim is to make Instagram reels to teach World War Two to his students and she is hoping to make one last attempt to save their failing marriage.
Websites that track the performance of Bollywood films have declared Bawaal a commercial hit - they say it has already attracted between six and seven million views and, on Thursday, the Prime Video app showed it leading the "Top 10 in India" list.
But ever since its release, the film has been making news for the wrong reasons - it did not get many positive reviews, with critics pointing out that the use of the Holocaust imagery and dialogue was in bad taste.
In one scene, Hitler is used as a metaphor to describe human greed, with the character played by Kapoor saying, "We're all a little like Hitler, aren't we?"
In another instance, she says "every relationship goes through their Auschwitz" - a reference to Nazi Germany's largest death camp where almost a million Jews were killed.
Bawaal controversy
Some of Janhvi Kapoor's dialogue in the film has been criticized
In a recreation of the horrors at the camp, the couple dressed in striped clothing are placed inside a gas chamber, where they are surrounded by people who are screaming and suffocating.
On Tuesday, Jewish human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center also joined in the criticism - it said in a statement that Auschwitz should not be used as a metaphor as it's a "quintessential example of man's capacity for evil".
"By having the protagonist in this movie declare that 'Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz', Nitesh Tiwari [the director], trivializes and demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler's genocidal regime," the statement said.
"If the filmmaker's goal was to gain PR [publicity] for their movie by reportedly filming a fantasy sequence at the Nazi death camp, he has succeeded," it added.
The statement also asked Amazon Prime to "stop monetizing" the film and immediately remove it from its platform.
Though the makers of the film have not responded to the statement yet, Dhawan had said in an earlier interview during the film's promotional tour that people took offence at small things in Hindi films but tended to give more leeway to English films.
Director Nitesh Tiwari had said that films should not be viewed with a "magnifying glass" because then "you'll find problems with every piece of work created".
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ba ... 443042.htm
Note:
Comments: When Hollywood can put steamy scenes in Oppenheimer about Bhagvad Geeta, Quran in Barbie, so why Bollywood be behind decided to put holocaust scenes.
If its ok to burn Quran or Torah for freedom of speech it's ok for this movie to use Holocaust the way,
What about Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza concentration prison camp.
Re: JUDAISM
The Guardian
US Jews urged to condemn Israeli occupation amid Netanyahu censure
Chris McGreal in New York
Tue, August 15, 2023 at 7:30 AM CDT
Hundreds of Israeli and American public figures have called on US Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation of the Palestinian territories as “the elephant in the room” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deeply divisive judicial reforms.
The statement has drawn international attention because of the prominent Israelis who have signed its forthright declaration that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid”, including the renowned Israeli historian Benny Morris, and the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg.
The open letter, which has gathered more than 1,500 signatories since it was released a week ago, comes amid months of mass demonstrations in Israel against Netanyahu’s legislation to weaken the power of the judiciary, widely seen as a battle for the country’s soul. Israeli protesters have drawn support from several major Jewish groups in the US, which have criticised the legal changes as designed to help Netanyahu evade prosecution for corruption – and for rightwing members of his government to weaken individual rights, particularly for women, Arabs, and secular or religiously liberal Jews.
But the statement said Jewish American leaders have failed to speak out on “the ultimate purpose” of the judicial overhaul to “annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population”.
“American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s longstanding occupation that … has yielded a regime of apartheid,” the statement says.
The open letter urges “leaders of North American Jewry” to support the Israeli protest movement while embracing equality for Palestinians who “lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest”.
“There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it,” it says.
The signatories include Israelis, Palestinians, Jewish American academics, religious leaders, musicians and lawyers.
Related: ‘Apartheid state’: Israel’s fears over image in US are coming to pass
The statement in part reflects a concern among some protesters that if they are successful in blocking the judicial changes, Israel will return to the cycle of governments maintaining occupation without end and expanding annexation by stealth, including settlement expansion.
“The problems did not start with the current radical government: Jewish supremacism has been growing for years and was enshrined in law by the 2018 Nation State Law,” it says.
The statement notes that the controversial judicial reforms are being driven in part by “American Jewish billionaire funders” supporting the Israeli far right. In March, a Labour party member of the Israeli parliament, Rabbi Gilad Kariv, travelled to New York to call on Jewish groups to stand up to “rightwing forces in the Jewish community in America and ultra-right players” who, he said, were driving a political coup in Israel.
The judicial reforms were designed by an ultra-conservative thinktank, the Kohelet Policy Forum. Two American billionaires, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, who made their fortunes in part by investing in TikTok, were major funders. Earlier this month, Dantchik said he would no longer donate to Kohelet because Israel has become “dangerously fragmented”.
The statement calls on American Jewish groups to “support human rights organisations which defend Palestinians” and to back an overhaul of the Israeli education system “to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present”.
It says they should also “demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organisations”.
The letter echoes calls made by a growing number of politicians and former diplomats, including Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, who told the Guardian earlier this month that Biden should reassess US assistance to prevent it from being used to facilitate annexation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians.
The open letter adds: “No more silence. The time to act is now.”
Another group of Israelis, including two former military chiefs of staff, an ex-director of military intelligence and a former member of parliament, placed an advertisement in the New York Times on Sunday warning the US-based World Jewish Congress that it is being “misled” by Netanyahu.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/us ... 39611.html
US Jews urged to condemn Israeli occupation amid Netanyahu censure
Chris McGreal in New York
Tue, August 15, 2023 at 7:30 AM CDT
Hundreds of Israeli and American public figures have called on US Jewish groups to speak out against the occupation of the Palestinian territories as “the elephant in the room” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deeply divisive judicial reforms.
The statement has drawn international attention because of the prominent Israelis who have signed its forthright declaration that “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid”, including the renowned Israeli historian Benny Morris, and the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg.
The open letter, which has gathered more than 1,500 signatories since it was released a week ago, comes amid months of mass demonstrations in Israel against Netanyahu’s legislation to weaken the power of the judiciary, widely seen as a battle for the country’s soul. Israeli protesters have drawn support from several major Jewish groups in the US, which have criticised the legal changes as designed to help Netanyahu evade prosecution for corruption – and for rightwing members of his government to weaken individual rights, particularly for women, Arabs, and secular or religiously liberal Jews.
But the statement said Jewish American leaders have failed to speak out on “the ultimate purpose” of the judicial overhaul to “annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population”.
“American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s longstanding occupation that … has yielded a regime of apartheid,” the statement says.
The open letter urges “leaders of North American Jewry” to support the Israeli protest movement while embracing equality for Palestinians who “lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest”.
“There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it,” it says.
The signatories include Israelis, Palestinians, Jewish American academics, religious leaders, musicians and lawyers.
Related: ‘Apartheid state’: Israel’s fears over image in US are coming to pass
The statement in part reflects a concern among some protesters that if they are successful in blocking the judicial changes, Israel will return to the cycle of governments maintaining occupation without end and expanding annexation by stealth, including settlement expansion.
“The problems did not start with the current radical government: Jewish supremacism has been growing for years and was enshrined in law by the 2018 Nation State Law,” it says.
The statement notes that the controversial judicial reforms are being driven in part by “American Jewish billionaire funders” supporting the Israeli far right. In March, a Labour party member of the Israeli parliament, Rabbi Gilad Kariv, travelled to New York to call on Jewish groups to stand up to “rightwing forces in the Jewish community in America and ultra-right players” who, he said, were driving a political coup in Israel.
The judicial reforms were designed by an ultra-conservative thinktank, the Kohelet Policy Forum. Two American billionaires, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, who made their fortunes in part by investing in TikTok, were major funders. Earlier this month, Dantchik said he would no longer donate to Kohelet because Israel has become “dangerously fragmented”.
The statement calls on American Jewish groups to “support human rights organisations which defend Palestinians” and to back an overhaul of the Israeli education system “to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present”.
It says they should also “demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organisations”.
The letter echoes calls made by a growing number of politicians and former diplomats, including Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, who told the Guardian earlier this month that Biden should reassess US assistance to prevent it from being used to facilitate annexation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians.
The open letter adds: “No more silence. The time to act is now.”
Another group of Israelis, including two former military chiefs of staff, an ex-director of military intelligence and a former member of parliament, placed an advertisement in the New York Times on Sunday warning the US-based World Jewish Congress that it is being “misled” by Netanyahu.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/us ... 39611.html
Re: JUDAISM
TIA GOLDENBERG
Updated Wed, September 6, 2023 at 11:11 AM CDT
HERZLIYA, Israel (AP) — A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.
Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.
Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad and Palestinians have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
A handful of former Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have warned that Israel risks becoming an apartheid state, but Pardo's language was even more blunt.
“There is an apartheid state here,” Tamir Pardo said in an interview. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”
Given Pardo's background, the comments carry special weight in security-obsessed Israel.
Pardo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel's clandestine spy agency from 2011-2016, wouldn't say if he held the same beliefs while heading the Mossad. But he said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians — above Iran’s nuclear program, seen by Netanyahu as an existential threat.
Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel's borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews.
In the past year, Pardo has become an outspoken critic against Netanyahu and his government's push to reshape the judicial system, slamming his old boss for steps he said would lead Israel to become a dictatorship. His candid evaluation Wednesday of Israel's military occupation is rare among leaders of the grassroots protest movement against the judicial overhaul, which has largely avoided talk of the occupation out of concern that it might scare away more nationalist supporters.
Pardo's remarks, and the overhaul, come as Israel's far-right government, which is made up of ultranationalist parties who support annexing the West Bank, is working to entrench Israel's hold on the territory. Some ministers have pledged to double the number of settlers currently living in the West Bank, which stands at a half-million.
Netanyahu's Likud party issued a statement condemning Pardo's comments. “Instead of defending Israel and the Israeli military, Pardo slanders Israel,” it said. “Pardo. You should be ashamed.”
In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until 1994. Human rights groups have based their conclusions on Israel on international conventions like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”
Pardo said Israeli citizens can get into a car and drive wherever they want, excluding the blockaded Gaza Strip, but that Palestinians can't drive everywhere. He said that his views on the system in the West Bank were “not extreme. It's a fact."
Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank, but can drive across Israel and throughout the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls. Palestinians need permission from Israel to enter the country and often must pass through military checkpoints to move within the West Bank.
Rights groups point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group since 2007, and its occupation of the West Bank. Israel exerts overall control of the territory, maintains a two-tier legal system and is building and expanding Jewish settlements that most of the international community considers illegal.
Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid and says its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel granted limited autonomy to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It says the West Bank is disputed territory and that its fate should be determined in negotiations.
Pardo warned that if Israel doesn't set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel's existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.
Experts predict Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel plus the areas it captured in 1967 — the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Continued occupation could force Israel into a hard choice: Formalize Jewish minority rule over disenfranchised Palestinians — or give them the right to vote and potentially end the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine.
“Israel needs to decide what it wants. A country that has no border has no boundaries,” Pardo said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fo ... 15939.html
Updated Wed, September 6, 2023 at 11:11 AM CDT
HERZLIYA, Israel (AP) — A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.
Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.
Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad and Palestinians have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
A handful of former Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have warned that Israel risks becoming an apartheid state, but Pardo's language was even more blunt.
“There is an apartheid state here,” Tamir Pardo said in an interview. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”
Given Pardo's background, the comments carry special weight in security-obsessed Israel.
Pardo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel's clandestine spy agency from 2011-2016, wouldn't say if he held the same beliefs while heading the Mossad. But he said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians — above Iran’s nuclear program, seen by Netanyahu as an existential threat.
Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel's borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews.
In the past year, Pardo has become an outspoken critic against Netanyahu and his government's push to reshape the judicial system, slamming his old boss for steps he said would lead Israel to become a dictatorship. His candid evaluation Wednesday of Israel's military occupation is rare among leaders of the grassroots protest movement against the judicial overhaul, which has largely avoided talk of the occupation out of concern that it might scare away more nationalist supporters.
Pardo's remarks, and the overhaul, come as Israel's far-right government, which is made up of ultranationalist parties who support annexing the West Bank, is working to entrench Israel's hold on the territory. Some ministers have pledged to double the number of settlers currently living in the West Bank, which stands at a half-million.
Netanyahu's Likud party issued a statement condemning Pardo's comments. “Instead of defending Israel and the Israeli military, Pardo slanders Israel,” it said. “Pardo. You should be ashamed.”
In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until 1994. Human rights groups have based their conclusions on Israel on international conventions like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”
Pardo said Israeli citizens can get into a car and drive wherever they want, excluding the blockaded Gaza Strip, but that Palestinians can't drive everywhere. He said that his views on the system in the West Bank were “not extreme. It's a fact."
Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank, but can drive across Israel and throughout the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls. Palestinians need permission from Israel to enter the country and often must pass through military checkpoints to move within the West Bank.
Rights groups point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group since 2007, and its occupation of the West Bank. Israel exerts overall control of the territory, maintains a two-tier legal system and is building and expanding Jewish settlements that most of the international community considers illegal.
Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid and says its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel granted limited autonomy to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It says the West Bank is disputed territory and that its fate should be determined in negotiations.
Pardo warned that if Israel doesn't set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel's existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.
Experts predict Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel plus the areas it captured in 1967 — the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Continued occupation could force Israel into a hard choice: Formalize Jewish minority rule over disenfranchised Palestinians — or give them the right to vote and potentially end the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine.
“Israel needs to decide what it wants. A country that has no border has no boundaries,” Pardo said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fo ... 15939.html
Re: JUDAISM
CNN
Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. Here’s what that means
Sofia Barrett, CNN
Sun, September 24, 2023 at 3:33 PM CDT
Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is considered the holiest day of the year for people who practice Judaism.
The holiday technically spans two calendar days, because the Jewish calendar is lunar. Days are marked sunset to sunset. This year, it begins at sunset on September 24 and continues until the evening of September 25.
‘Days of Awe’
Yom Kippur concludes a 10-day period known as the “Days of Awe” that begins with the Jewish New Year, which is called Rosh Hashanah.
Jews around the world are to face their misdeeds and sins over the year through worship and prayer so that they may atone for their wrongdoings. With fear and wonder in facing God’s judgment, Jews seek forgiveness. In doing so, people are called to self-reflect on their failings and flaws.
No matter how you spend the day, it’s a time to atone in your own way, whether in a synagogue or at home. Synagogues hold religious services throughout the day for practicing Jews to come pray introspectively, either asking for forgiveness or expressing regret of sins committed in the past year. Once you atone, it’s thought to be starting the Jewish new year with a “clean slate,” absolved of past transgressions.
According to tradition and lore, the origins of Yom Kippur can be traced to Moses’ leading the ancient Israelites out of slavery, as described in the book of Exodus. He led them to Mount Sinai, where Moses himself went up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God. Upon returning with the tablets, he found that his people were worshiping a false idol, a Golden Calf. Moses destroyed the tablets in anger, but the people atoned for their sin, so God forgave them.
Abstaining for the day
Most observant Jews also fast from sunset to sunset on the holiday, abstaining from food and water. More observant members go beyond fasting and will also abstain from bathing, wearing leather shoes, indulging in perfumes or lotions, and marital relations. Abstinence from earthly and material activities – to whatever degree performed – symbolizes a cleansing of the spirit so that one’s commitment toward repentance is true and pure.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Children (usually under the age of 13) are not required to fast. The sick and the elderly are exempted as well. Pregnant and breastfeeding women can also skip the fast if they feel so inclined, citing legitimate medical reasons. This isn’t a time for true punishment, but rather a time for uninterrupted reflection.
Breaking the fast
After a day of repentance and reflection, it is customary to have a meal to “break the fast.”
In North America, the typical break fast cuisine stems from Jewish deli fare: Bagels, lox, schmears and all the fixings. And don’t forget the coffee cake or Jewish apple cake for dessert.
If you’re not Jewish, and you want to send your well wishes to people who do celebrate Yom Kippur, the typical greeting is, “Have an easy fast.” Or you can say, “Have a good fast.”
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https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/yo ... 05460.html
Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. Here’s what that means
Sofia Barrett, CNN
Sun, September 24, 2023 at 3:33 PM CDT
Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is considered the holiest day of the year for people who practice Judaism.
The holiday technically spans two calendar days, because the Jewish calendar is lunar. Days are marked sunset to sunset. This year, it begins at sunset on September 24 and continues until the evening of September 25.
‘Days of Awe’
Yom Kippur concludes a 10-day period known as the “Days of Awe” that begins with the Jewish New Year, which is called Rosh Hashanah.
Jews around the world are to face their misdeeds and sins over the year through worship and prayer so that they may atone for their wrongdoings. With fear and wonder in facing God’s judgment, Jews seek forgiveness. In doing so, people are called to self-reflect on their failings and flaws.
No matter how you spend the day, it’s a time to atone in your own way, whether in a synagogue or at home. Synagogues hold religious services throughout the day for practicing Jews to come pray introspectively, either asking for forgiveness or expressing regret of sins committed in the past year. Once you atone, it’s thought to be starting the Jewish new year with a “clean slate,” absolved of past transgressions.
According to tradition and lore, the origins of Yom Kippur can be traced to Moses’ leading the ancient Israelites out of slavery, as described in the book of Exodus. He led them to Mount Sinai, where Moses himself went up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God. Upon returning with the tablets, he found that his people were worshiping a false idol, a Golden Calf. Moses destroyed the tablets in anger, but the people atoned for their sin, so God forgave them.
Abstaining for the day
Most observant Jews also fast from sunset to sunset on the holiday, abstaining from food and water. More observant members go beyond fasting and will also abstain from bathing, wearing leather shoes, indulging in perfumes or lotions, and marital relations. Abstinence from earthly and material activities – to whatever degree performed – symbolizes a cleansing of the spirit so that one’s commitment toward repentance is true and pure.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Children (usually under the age of 13) are not required to fast. The sick and the elderly are exempted as well. Pregnant and breastfeeding women can also skip the fast if they feel so inclined, citing legitimate medical reasons. This isn’t a time for true punishment, but rather a time for uninterrupted reflection.
Breaking the fast
After a day of repentance and reflection, it is customary to have a meal to “break the fast.”
In North America, the typical break fast cuisine stems from Jewish deli fare: Bagels, lox, schmears and all the fixings. And don’t forget the coffee cake or Jewish apple cake for dessert.
If you’re not Jewish, and you want to send your well wishes to people who do celebrate Yom Kippur, the typical greeting is, “Have an easy fast.” Or you can say, “Have a good fast.”
For more CNN news and newsletters
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/yo ... 05460.html
Re: JUDAISM
Associated Press
Jews spitting on the ground beside Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land sparks outrage
ISABEL DEBRE
Tue, October 3, 2023 at 2:07 PM CDT·3 min
FILE - Christian orthodox nuns hold candles and flowers as they walk in a procession to bring an icon of the Virgin Mary to the tomb where it is believed she is buried, along the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem, early Friday, Aug. 25, 2023. Since Israel’s most right-wing government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)More
JERUSALEM (AP) — A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.
The spitting incident, which the city's minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.
Since Israel's most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders — including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch — over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community.
Many say the government, with its powerful ultranationalist officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, has emboldened Jewish extremists and created a sense of impunity.
“What happened with right-wing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity,” said Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults. “Even if the government doesn't encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.”
Those worries over rising intolerance seem to violate Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship and sacred trust over holy places, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago. Israel captured east Jerusalem in a 1967 war and later annexed it in a move not internationally recognized.
There are roughly 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today, the majority of them Palestinians who consider themselves living under occupation.
Netanyahu's office insisted on Tuesday that Israel “is totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths.”
“I strongly condemn any attempt to intimidate worshippers, and I am committed to taking immediate and decisive action against it,” he said.
The spitting scene, captured on Monday by a reporter at Israel's left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, shows a group of foreign pilgrims beginning their procession through the limestone labyrinth of the Old City, home to holiest ground in Judaism, the third-holiest shrine in Islam and major Christian sites.
Raising a giant wooden cross, the men and women retraced the Old City route that they believe Jesus Christ took before his crucifixion. Along the way, ultra-Orthodox Jews in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats squeezed past the pilgrims through narrow alleyways, their ritual palm fronds for the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot in hand. As they streamed by, at least seven ultra-Orthodox Jews spit on the ground beside the Christian tour group.
Further fueling the outrage, Elisha Yered, an ultranationalist settler leader and former adviser to a lawmaker in Netanyahu's governing coalition, defended the spitters, arguing that spitting at Christian clergy and at churches was was an “ancient Jewish custom.”
“Perhaps under the influence of Western culture we have somewhat forgotten what Christianity is,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "I think millions of Jews who suffered in exile from the Crusades ... will never forget.”
Yered, suspected of involvement in the killing of a 19-year-old Palestinian, remains under house arrest.
While the video, and Yered's comment, spread like wildfire on social media, the chorus of condemnation grew. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said spitting at Christians “does not represent Jewish values.”
The country's minister of religious affairs, Michael Malkieli, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, argued such spitting was "not the way of the Torah." One of Israel's chief rabbis insisted spitting had nothing to do with Jewish law.
Activists who have been documenting daily attacks against Christians in the Holy Land were taken aback by the sudden wave of government attention.
“Attacks against Christians have 100% increased this year, and not just spitting, but throwing stones and vandalizing signs,” said Harani, the expert.
“Excuse me," she added, addressing Israeli authorities. "But where were you?”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 46566.html
Jews spitting on the ground beside Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land sparks outrage
ISABEL DEBRE
Tue, October 3, 2023 at 2:07 PM CDT·3 min
FILE - Christian orthodox nuns hold candles and flowers as they walk in a procession to bring an icon of the Virgin Mary to the tomb where it is believed she is buried, along the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem, early Friday, Aug. 25, 2023. Since Israel’s most right-wing government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)More
JERUSALEM (AP) — A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.
The spitting incident, which the city's minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.
Since Israel's most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders — including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch — over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community.
Many say the government, with its powerful ultranationalist officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, has emboldened Jewish extremists and created a sense of impunity.
“What happened with right-wing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity,” said Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults. “Even if the government doesn't encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.”
Those worries over rising intolerance seem to violate Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship and sacred trust over holy places, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago. Israel captured east Jerusalem in a 1967 war and later annexed it in a move not internationally recognized.
There are roughly 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today, the majority of them Palestinians who consider themselves living under occupation.
Netanyahu's office insisted on Tuesday that Israel “is totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths.”
“I strongly condemn any attempt to intimidate worshippers, and I am committed to taking immediate and decisive action against it,” he said.
The spitting scene, captured on Monday by a reporter at Israel's left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, shows a group of foreign pilgrims beginning their procession through the limestone labyrinth of the Old City, home to holiest ground in Judaism, the third-holiest shrine in Islam and major Christian sites.
Raising a giant wooden cross, the men and women retraced the Old City route that they believe Jesus Christ took before his crucifixion. Along the way, ultra-Orthodox Jews in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats squeezed past the pilgrims through narrow alleyways, their ritual palm fronds for the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot in hand. As they streamed by, at least seven ultra-Orthodox Jews spit on the ground beside the Christian tour group.
Further fueling the outrage, Elisha Yered, an ultranationalist settler leader and former adviser to a lawmaker in Netanyahu's governing coalition, defended the spitters, arguing that spitting at Christian clergy and at churches was was an “ancient Jewish custom.”
“Perhaps under the influence of Western culture we have somewhat forgotten what Christianity is,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "I think millions of Jews who suffered in exile from the Crusades ... will never forget.”
Yered, suspected of involvement in the killing of a 19-year-old Palestinian, remains under house arrest.
While the video, and Yered's comment, spread like wildfire on social media, the chorus of condemnation grew. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said spitting at Christians “does not represent Jewish values.”
The country's minister of religious affairs, Michael Malkieli, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, argued such spitting was "not the way of the Torah." One of Israel's chief rabbis insisted spitting had nothing to do with Jewish law.
Activists who have been documenting daily attacks against Christians in the Holy Land were taken aback by the sudden wave of government attention.
“Attacks against Christians have 100% increased this year, and not just spitting, but throwing stones and vandalizing signs,” said Harani, the expert.
“Excuse me," she added, addressing Israeli authorities. "But where were you?”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/je ... 46566.html
For Europe’s Jews, a World of Fear
The Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel and a surge in acts of antisemitism have awakened a repressed horror in Jewish populations across the continent.
Observing a minute of silence during a rally in solidarity with Israel in Berlin on Oct. 22.Credit...Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Perhaps not since the Holocaust, which saw the annihilation of about two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish community, have the Jews of Europe lived in an atmosphere of fear so acute that it feels like a fundamental shift in the terms of their existence.
Across a Europe of daubed Stars of David on apartment buildings, bomb threats to Jewish stores and demonstrations calling for Israel’s eradication, Jews speak of alarm as pro-Palestinian sentiment surges.
“There is a feeling of helplessness that has never been experienced before,” said Joel Rubinfeld of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism.
The Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel, often described as the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since Hitler’s program of extermination, has awakened a repressed horror in Jewish populations, now compounded by dismay at the way the world’s sympathy has rapidly shifted to the Palestinians in Gaza being killed under Israeli bombardment.
“What strikes me is there is a wave of antisemitism in the world when 1,300 Jews were massacred a few days ago,” said Samuel Lejoyeux, the president of the Union of Jewish Students of France, which includes 15,000 members.
This feels, to many European Jews, like the same blindness or insouciance that allowed millions of their forbears to be sent to Nazi camps to be gassed. It is precisely to that time that images of slain Jewish babies and grandmothers in the Jewish homeland have transported them.
This month, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, said at a rally held at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that it was “intolerable that Jewish people are today once again living in fear — in our country, of all places.” In the week after the Hamas attack, the German federal agency that monitors antisemitism documented 202 episodes, a rise of 240 percent compared with the same period last year.
“Wir Haben Angst,” or “We Are Scared,” was the headline across this week’s cover of Der Spiegel, the leading German newsmagazine, over photographs of four German Jews, one of them a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, who said, “We Jews are once again easy targets.”
Image
Germany’s president, wearing glasses and dressed in a black suit, gestures as speaks to a crowd. An Israeli flag is in the foreground.
Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, at a rally in solidarity with Israel in Berlin on Oct. 22, said that it was “intolerable that Jewish people are today once again living in fear — in our country, of all places.” Credit...Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Angst is, indeed, palpable across the continent. From Britain to Italy, tensions have risen sharply. In the period between the Hamas attack and Oct. 27, Britain’s Community Security Trust, a charity, said that it had recorded 805 antisemitic acts, the highest number in a three-week period since it began reporting episodes of this kind in 1984.
//Reactions to the Conflict in the U.S.
//A Family’s Pain: From his Los Angeles home, Mohammed Abujayyab has sought to help his grandmother and other relatives survive Israeli airstrikes. Memories and fears of displacement loom large.
//Democrats: Israel’s war against Hamas is exposing deep divisions among members of the party in Congress, as the most outspoken supporters of the Jewish state and vocal pro-Palestinian members on the left are openly at odds.
//In Hollywood: Reactions to Hamas’s attacks, and to Israel’s retaliation, have revealed a schism in the entertainment world that many did not realize was there.
//A Polarizing Debate: As tensions mount on U.S. college campuses, some Republican presidential candidates have waded into the emotional debate that is playing out among students and faculty members.
London’s Metropolitan Police Service said it had scaled up its visible presence after the conflict began, noting in a statement that it had seen a “significant increase in hate crime, particularly antisemitism,” since the war between Israel and Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, began. Thousands of officers are undertaking extra patrols across the city.
At a recent rally in Milan, protesters held aloft a poster with an image of Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh, ostensibly to draw a connection between the fate of the young Jewish girl murdered at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during World War II and the Palestinians’ situation in Gaza.
The spillover into Europe of upsurges in Israeli-Palestinian violence is not new. Tensions between the large Muslim populations in France and Germany, themselves often subject to hatred and violence, and the two countries’ Jewish communities have tended to rise in tandem with regular Israeli incursions into Gaza since 2009.
But the extent of antisemitic acts, and of Jewish fear, feels different this time as the scale of the horror unfurling in the Holy Land has sent everyone, on either side of the conflict, over the edge.
//Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
Nov. 1, 2023, 12:16 p.m. ET40 minutes ago
40 minutes ago
//Here’s why the urban area in Gaza struck by Israel is classified as a refugee camp.
//Bolivia cuts diplomatic ties with Israel over the strikes in Gaza.
//Here’s what we know about the deal allowing some people to leave Gaza.
“France is seeing a wave of antisemitism not equaled since 1945,” said Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French author and movie director.
In France, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, antisemitic attacks have surged since the Oct. 7 attack, with 819 acts registered and 414 arrests made, according to Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister.
Parisians in the 14th Arrondissement, a southern neighborhood of the city, woke up on Tuesday morning to find 65 Stars of David sprayed on residential buildings. “These acts create a lot of fear and dread in the community,” said Carine Petit, the local mayor. “It has awakened terrible things from our history.”
Image
A man enters the brown doors of a white building, on whose walls blue Stars of David are painted.
The facade of a building was painted with Stars of David during overnight Tuesday in the Alesia district of Paris.Credit...Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In particular, it has awakened memories of Jews in France forced to wear yellow stars during World War II under the collaborationist Vichy Government that sent some 76,000 French and foreign Jews to their deaths in Nazi camps.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish president of the French National Assembly, the country’s larger and more powerful lower house of Parliament, says she has received so many personal threats since Oct. 7 that she cannot leave her home without police protection.
“Of course I feel in danger,” Ms. Braun-Pivet told France Inter radio last week, adding that her Jewish ancestry has become a national obsession despite the fact she does not identify personally with her heritage or faith.
“All of a sudden, people see only this,” she said.
Several factors appear to have contributed to the sharp rise in antisemitism coming from both the left and right of the European political spectrum.
With feelings running so high since the Oct. 7 attack that spurred a massive Israeli military response to oust Hamas from Gaza, the fine line between anti-Zionism — opposition to the State of Israel — and antisemitism — hatred of Jews — has appeared more blurry than ever.
The scale of the Israeli reprisal, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry says has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, has stirred fury. Images of dead Palestinian women and children race across social media and feed an anger that has long been festering, particularly among the millions of Muslims living in Europe, over Israeli control of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza.
The Palestinian cause has also changed in nature, especially for young progressives of the left in Europe and the United States, becoming part of what is often called an “anticolonial” struggle. In this intersectional worldview, the fight against Israel — and often its very existence — becomes part of a global battle of the oppressed for justice and equality. In this good-and-evil matrix, Jews are deemed not to fare well.
The fact that Jews have been indigenous to the Holy Land for millenniums and that more than half of Israel’s population are Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have often fled Arab persecution is generally passed over in this prism focused on white imperialism.
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always appeared intractable, it now appears particularly explosive. The unthinkable has come to pass. For European Jews, it seems that something fundamental has shifted since the Hamas attack, as it also has for Jews in the United States.
Image
Lit candles in bottles, leaves, flowers and a small Israeli flag lie on the ground over a sign with red lettering.
Candles were placed over a sign reading, “Against Antisemitism” during a vigil outside a Jewish community center on Oct. 20 in Berlin.Credit...Sean Gallup/Getty Images
“This is what happened to parents and grandparents in Europe, but we thought the era of massive calamity had passed,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal American Jewish organization dedicated to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. “Now the world looks different.”
It is so different that Marina Chernivsky, who runs the OFEK Counseling Center for Antisemitic Violence and Discrimination in Berlin, said that in the six years since she founded the organization, she had never had to deal with so many traumatized people. Since the Hamas attack, her team of seven counselors has received more than 270 requests for counseling, a 13-fold increase over previous months.
“Jews in Germany are faced with real threats in their daily lives,” she said. “Life here seems to go on, but our world is on its head.”
At the opening of a synagogue in Dessau on Oct. 22, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said he was “outraged” at the spread of antisemitic hatred and that it was shameful that police officers were once again needed to protect synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
“We must now show what ‘Never Again’ really means,” he said.
That he felt obliged to make this statement was a measure of all that has changed in Germany and beyond.
Reporting was contributed by Catherine Porter, Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle, Christopher F. Schuetze, Megan Specia, Jason Horowitz, Gaia Pianigiani, Monika Pronczuk, Graham Bowley and Ivan Nechepurenko.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/worl ... hamas.html
Observing a minute of silence during a rally in solidarity with Israel in Berlin on Oct. 22.Credit...Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Perhaps not since the Holocaust, which saw the annihilation of about two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish community, have the Jews of Europe lived in an atmosphere of fear so acute that it feels like a fundamental shift in the terms of their existence.
Across a Europe of daubed Stars of David on apartment buildings, bomb threats to Jewish stores and demonstrations calling for Israel’s eradication, Jews speak of alarm as pro-Palestinian sentiment surges.
“There is a feeling of helplessness that has never been experienced before,” said Joel Rubinfeld of the Belgian League Against Anti-Semitism.
The Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel, often described as the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since Hitler’s program of extermination, has awakened a repressed horror in Jewish populations, now compounded by dismay at the way the world’s sympathy has rapidly shifted to the Palestinians in Gaza being killed under Israeli bombardment.
“What strikes me is there is a wave of antisemitism in the world when 1,300 Jews were massacred a few days ago,” said Samuel Lejoyeux, the president of the Union of Jewish Students of France, which includes 15,000 members.
This feels, to many European Jews, like the same blindness or insouciance that allowed millions of their forbears to be sent to Nazi camps to be gassed. It is precisely to that time that images of slain Jewish babies and grandmothers in the Jewish homeland have transported them.
This month, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, said at a rally held at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that it was “intolerable that Jewish people are today once again living in fear — in our country, of all places.” In the week after the Hamas attack, the German federal agency that monitors antisemitism documented 202 episodes, a rise of 240 percent compared with the same period last year.
“Wir Haben Angst,” or “We Are Scared,” was the headline across this week’s cover of Der Spiegel, the leading German newsmagazine, over photographs of four German Jews, one of them a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, who said, “We Jews are once again easy targets.”
Image
Germany’s president, wearing glasses and dressed in a black suit, gestures as speaks to a crowd. An Israeli flag is in the foreground.
Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, at a rally in solidarity with Israel in Berlin on Oct. 22, said that it was “intolerable that Jewish people are today once again living in fear — in our country, of all places.” Credit...Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Angst is, indeed, palpable across the continent. From Britain to Italy, tensions have risen sharply. In the period between the Hamas attack and Oct. 27, Britain’s Community Security Trust, a charity, said that it had recorded 805 antisemitic acts, the highest number in a three-week period since it began reporting episodes of this kind in 1984.
//Reactions to the Conflict in the U.S.
//A Family’s Pain: From his Los Angeles home, Mohammed Abujayyab has sought to help his grandmother and other relatives survive Israeli airstrikes. Memories and fears of displacement loom large.
//Democrats: Israel’s war against Hamas is exposing deep divisions among members of the party in Congress, as the most outspoken supporters of the Jewish state and vocal pro-Palestinian members on the left are openly at odds.
//In Hollywood: Reactions to Hamas’s attacks, and to Israel’s retaliation, have revealed a schism in the entertainment world that many did not realize was there.
//A Polarizing Debate: As tensions mount on U.S. college campuses, some Republican presidential candidates have waded into the emotional debate that is playing out among students and faculty members.
London’s Metropolitan Police Service said it had scaled up its visible presence after the conflict began, noting in a statement that it had seen a “significant increase in hate crime, particularly antisemitism,” since the war between Israel and Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, began. Thousands of officers are undertaking extra patrols across the city.
At a recent rally in Milan, protesters held aloft a poster with an image of Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh, ostensibly to draw a connection between the fate of the young Jewish girl murdered at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during World War II and the Palestinians’ situation in Gaza.
The spillover into Europe of upsurges in Israeli-Palestinian violence is not new. Tensions between the large Muslim populations in France and Germany, themselves often subject to hatred and violence, and the two countries’ Jewish communities have tended to rise in tandem with regular Israeli incursions into Gaza since 2009.
But the extent of antisemitic acts, and of Jewish fear, feels different this time as the scale of the horror unfurling in the Holy Land has sent everyone, on either side of the conflict, over the edge.
//Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
Nov. 1, 2023, 12:16 p.m. ET40 minutes ago
40 minutes ago
//Here’s why the urban area in Gaza struck by Israel is classified as a refugee camp.
//Bolivia cuts diplomatic ties with Israel over the strikes in Gaza.
//Here’s what we know about the deal allowing some people to leave Gaza.
“France is seeing a wave of antisemitism not equaled since 1945,” said Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French author and movie director.
In France, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, antisemitic attacks have surged since the Oct. 7 attack, with 819 acts registered and 414 arrests made, according to Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister.
Parisians in the 14th Arrondissement, a southern neighborhood of the city, woke up on Tuesday morning to find 65 Stars of David sprayed on residential buildings. “These acts create a lot of fear and dread in the community,” said Carine Petit, the local mayor. “It has awakened terrible things from our history.”
Image
A man enters the brown doors of a white building, on whose walls blue Stars of David are painted.
The facade of a building was painted with Stars of David during overnight Tuesday in the Alesia district of Paris.Credit...Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In particular, it has awakened memories of Jews in France forced to wear yellow stars during World War II under the collaborationist Vichy Government that sent some 76,000 French and foreign Jews to their deaths in Nazi camps.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish president of the French National Assembly, the country’s larger and more powerful lower house of Parliament, says she has received so many personal threats since Oct. 7 that she cannot leave her home without police protection.
“Of course I feel in danger,” Ms. Braun-Pivet told France Inter radio last week, adding that her Jewish ancestry has become a national obsession despite the fact she does not identify personally with her heritage or faith.
“All of a sudden, people see only this,” she said.
Several factors appear to have contributed to the sharp rise in antisemitism coming from both the left and right of the European political spectrum.
With feelings running so high since the Oct. 7 attack that spurred a massive Israeli military response to oust Hamas from Gaza, the fine line between anti-Zionism — opposition to the State of Israel — and antisemitism — hatred of Jews — has appeared more blurry than ever.
The scale of the Israeli reprisal, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry says has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians, has stirred fury. Images of dead Palestinian women and children race across social media and feed an anger that has long been festering, particularly among the millions of Muslims living in Europe, over Israeli control of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza.
The Palestinian cause has also changed in nature, especially for young progressives of the left in Europe and the United States, becoming part of what is often called an “anticolonial” struggle. In this intersectional worldview, the fight against Israel — and often its very existence — becomes part of a global battle of the oppressed for justice and equality. In this good-and-evil matrix, Jews are deemed not to fare well.
The fact that Jews have been indigenous to the Holy Land for millenniums and that more than half of Israel’s population are Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have often fled Arab persecution is generally passed over in this prism focused on white imperialism.
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always appeared intractable, it now appears particularly explosive. The unthinkable has come to pass. For European Jews, it seems that something fundamental has shifted since the Hamas attack, as it also has for Jews in the United States.
Image
Lit candles in bottles, leaves, flowers and a small Israeli flag lie on the ground over a sign with red lettering.
Candles were placed over a sign reading, “Against Antisemitism” during a vigil outside a Jewish community center on Oct. 20 in Berlin.Credit...Sean Gallup/Getty Images
“This is what happened to parents and grandparents in Europe, but we thought the era of massive calamity had passed,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal American Jewish organization dedicated to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. “Now the world looks different.”
It is so different that Marina Chernivsky, who runs the OFEK Counseling Center for Antisemitic Violence and Discrimination in Berlin, said that in the six years since she founded the organization, she had never had to deal with so many traumatized people. Since the Hamas attack, her team of seven counselors has received more than 270 requests for counseling, a 13-fold increase over previous months.
“Jews in Germany are faced with real threats in their daily lives,” she said. “Life here seems to go on, but our world is on its head.”
At the opening of a synagogue in Dessau on Oct. 22, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said he was “outraged” at the spread of antisemitic hatred and that it was shameful that police officers were once again needed to protect synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
“We must now show what ‘Never Again’ really means,” he said.
That he felt obliged to make this statement was a measure of all that has changed in Germany and beyond.
Reporting was contributed by Catherine Porter, Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle, Christopher F. Schuetze, Megan Specia, Jason Horowitz, Gaia Pianigiani, Monika Pronczuk, Graham Bowley and Ivan Nechepurenko.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/worl ... hamas.html
The Hate That Doesn’t Know Its Own Name
When the historian Deborah Lipstadt defeated a libel suit brought against her in a British court by the Holocaust denier David Irving in April 2000, it was almost possible to imagine that antisemitism might someday become a thing of the past, at least in much of the West. Taking a trip to Israel was not an ideologically fraught choice. Wearing a Star of David was not a personally risky one. College campuses did not feel hostile to Jewish students. Synagogues (at least in the United States) did not have police officers stationed outside their doors.
Not anymore.
The Anti-Defamation League recorded 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2013. There were 3,697 in 2022. There was a nearly 400 percent increase in the two weeks after the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 compared with the year before. Last week, “Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter M.I.T.’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety,” according to a public letter from Jewish students there. In Montreal a Jewish school was targeted by gunfire twice in a single week.
Today, Lipstadt is the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, and her battle against Irving (the subject of the 2016 film “Denial”) seems almost quaint. “I never imagined antisemitism would get this bad,” she told me when I spoke with her by phone on Monday evening. “Something about this is different from anything I have ever personally seen.”
One of those differences, I suggested, is that antisemitism is the hate that doesn’t know its own name — that is, that many of those who call themselves anti-Zionists or chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” would vehemently deny that they are engaged in antisemitic behavior.
Lipstadt allowed that at least a few people have no idea what the chant means. But many more do: a call for “a purely Palestinian state without Jews.” She added, “You may want to redefine it, but what it has stood for, for decades, is quite clear.” (Yes, there are those who imagine Jews and Palestinians coexisting harmoniously in some future river-to-sea Palestine. Hamas murdered that fantasy, along with so much else, on Oct. 7.)
As for anti-Zionism (never to be confused with ordinary, even stringent, criticism of Israeli policy), “we have to make a historical distinction,” she said. A century ago, before the creation of the state of Israel, questions about Zionism were “more of a political or intellectual debate. But when you are talking about a state with 7.1 million Jews and when you are saying they have no right to exist and should all go someplace else, that’s something far more than an ideological point.”
What about more specific anti-Zionist arguments, such as the view that the Jews displaced native inhabitants to create Israel? Or that Israel is a racist state that practices apartheid?
Lipstadt made short work of those claims. If Israel ought to be abolished because it is guilty of displacing native inhabitants, then the same should go for the United States or Australia, among many other countries. If Israel is racist, then how is it that more than half of Israeli Jews have non-Ashkenazi roots, because their ancestors came from places like Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia? If Israel is an apartheid state, why are Israeli Arabs in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court, attending Israeli universities, staffing Israeli hospitals?
Then there is the double standard that’s so often applied to Jews. On college campuses, she noted, “when other groups say, ‘We are a victim,’ the default position is to believe them. When Jews say it, the default position is to question, to challenge, to say, ‘You caused it’ or ‘You don’t have a right to that’ or ‘What you say happened to you is not really an example of bigotry.’”
Why is so much of today’s antisemitism coming from well-educated people, the sort who would never be caught dead uttering other racist remarks? Lipstadt recalled that of the four Einsatzgruppen — the German death squads entrusted with the mass murder of Jews in World War II — three were led by officers with doctoral degrees. “You can be a Ph.D. and an S.O.B. at the same time,” she said.
She also pointed to academic fads of the past two decades, “narratives or ideologies that may not start out as antisemitic but end up painting the Jew as other, as a source of oppression instead of having been oppressed.” One of those narratives is that Jews are “more powerful, richer, smarter, maliciously so,” than others and must therefore be stopped by any means necessary.
The idea that opposing Jewish power can be a matter of punching up, rather than down, fits neatly into the narrative that justifies any form of opposition to those with power and privilege, both of them dirty words on today’s campuses. It’s how Hamas’s “resistance” — the mass murder and kidnapping of defenseless civilians — has become the new radical chic.
The challenge that Lipstadt confronts isn’t confined to campuses. It’s worldwide: the streets of London (which saw a 1,350 percent increase in antisemitic hate crimes in the early weeks of October from the previous year) and on Chinese state media (which hosts discussion pages about Jewish control of American wealth) and in Muslim immigrant communities throughout Europe (with Muslims handing out candy in one Berlin neighborhood to celebrate the Oct. 7 attacks).
Lipstadt was clear about where this leads: “Never has a society tolerated overt expressions of antisemitism and remained a democratic society.” What to do? Governments alone, she said, can’t solve the problem.
“I know it sounds ludicrous, but a lot comes down to what happens at the dinner table.” She told me of a friend whose fifth-grade daughter was taunted by antisemitic remarks by her classmates at a “fancy Washington school.”
“Where did they get that? Where did it come from? How did they learn it was OK?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/opin ... stadt.html
With Israel at War, Thanksgiving Is Fraught for Some Jewish Families
Even families that are used to arguing over dinner are feeling new tension this year, as members from different generations disagree about supporting Israel.
Becca Gertler, left, said her views tended to align with that her of mother, Marci Rosa, right, but that the war had caused arguments between them.Credit...Sara Hylton for The New York Times
There will be turkey at Marci Rosa’s family Thanksgiving in New Jersey, and stuffing and sweet potato and leek gratin. But also kasha varnishkes, a Jewish grain dish with roots in Eastern Europe, where her in-laws survived the Holocaust.
All across the country, families like Ms. Rosa’s are gathering on Thursday to nosh, to catch up and perhaps to bicker a little. But this year, with Israel at war and the world sharply divided over questions of justice, some Jewish families are finding that what it means to be a Jew is also on the Thanksgiving table.
Seated around one table will be members of a family whose stances toward Israel since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 and the Israeli military response have sent them to different ideological poles.
At one end is Ms. Rosa’s mother, Esther Rosa, 95, who recalls Thanksgivings during World War II with one seat left empty — her brother was fighting for the United States against the Germans — and is steadfast in her belief in Israel’s right to defend itself. At the other is her daughter, Becca Gertler, 25, who is outspoken in her support for the Palestinians, thousands of whom have been killed in the war. Somewhere in the middle is Ms. Rosa herself, a self-described liberal from Brooklyn who is in her 60s, and who regularly criticized Israel’s policies in the past, but now sees it — and Jews like her — as under threat.
Though the family is no stranger to heated debates, according to Ms. Rosa’s nephew, who is hosting the dinner, this kind of tension is new. “With my family, with politics we kind of know where those lines were drawn years ago; you know what to say if you want to press someone’s buttons,” said the nephew, who asked that his name not be used because of the contentiousness of the subject.
“You are going into a family dinner with a polarizing topic, not knowing where anybody stands,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve ever done that — I don’t think any family has ever done that.”
Raging family debates at Thanksgiving are as traditional as cranberry sauce. For generations, Americans have sat down to dinner divided over politics and taxes, Republicans and Democrats, the Giants and the Jets. At a time when things like protests against Israel’s policies and the tearing down of missing persons signs can feel like personal attacks, some American Jews are experiencing the revelation of differing values across the family Thanksgiving table with acute pain.
These types of identity- and values-based conflicts are the most intractable, according to Tricia S. Jones, a professor at Temple University and director of the Center for Conflict Management and Media Impact there. “They are so much a definition of who we are and need to be that it is very difficult for us to accept an alternate story from anyone — particularly from those we love,” she said.
//Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
Nov. 23, 2023, 9:09 a.m. ET2 hours ago
2 hours ago
//On the eve of a hostage’s 4th birthday, her family waits anxiously for news.
//A four-day pause in fighting will begin Friday, Qatar says.
Israel has made lopsided prisoner swaps before.
Dr. Jones added: “You’ve got people who deeply love one another, and want to understand where their loved ones are coming from, so pretending away the differences and the pain also isn’t workable.”
There are 21 members of the extended Rosa family coming for Thanksgiving, but one matriarch will be absent: Judith Gertler, 89, Ms. Rosa’s mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor who endured the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany as a little girl, and who lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She has dementia and is too frail to make the trip to New Jersey. With the support of Mrs. Gertler’s doctor, the family has kept all news of the Oct. 7 attack from her. She found refuge in Israel after the war, Ms. Rosa said, and the family was afraid the news would trigger post-traumatic stress.
Image
A person reaches for a bowl on a shelf, where various objects sit including a menorah and metal and glass cups and bowls.
Familial conflict that is based in identity can be intractable, said Tricia S. Jones, a professor at Temple University who studies conflict management.Credit...Sara Hylton for The New York Times
There is some relief, too, Ms. Rosa said, that Mrs. Gertler will not be there to hear her granddaughter Becca’s strong criticism of Israel across the table. When Becca, a policy analyst, first shared her beliefs shortly after the attack, her mother was stunned. “I felt physical pain,” she said.
“She only sees one side of it,” Ms. Rosa said of their conversation about the war in Gaza, “and of course she would probably say that I see only one side of it.” Yet at the same time, she admires her daughter’s conviction. “It is important to be able to have your voice be heard, to speak up for the underdog, and to not accept things that you don’t believe in.”
At Thanksgiving dinner, Becca plans to speak her mind, she said, particularly because she feels it is important that her gaggle of younger cousins feasting on homemade bread rolls be exposed to different perspectives — not just from outsiders, but from fellow Jews.
“The weird part for me has been disagreeing with my parents” since the war began, she said in an interview. “On most things we are pretty aligned, but this is the first time where me and my mom have really gotten into arguments where we are not listening to each other.”
She added: “To me there are no sides. The sides are: not killing people.”
On Thursday morning, one of Ms. Rosa’s brothers will pick up their mother in Plainsboro, N.J., to bring her to Thanksgiving. She’s looking forward to the meal, she said, speaking through her daughter because she is hard of hearing.
This year, she said, calls to mind those Thanksgivings during World War II when her older brother was deployed abroad, and the importance of being together as Jews, and as family — no matter what is said over the meal. Then as now, Mrs. Rosa told her daughter, “Even though we knew what was happening over there, we still needed to celebrate over here.“
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/nyre ... ilies.html
Becca Gertler, left, said her views tended to align with that her of mother, Marci Rosa, right, but that the war had caused arguments between them.Credit...Sara Hylton for The New York Times
There will be turkey at Marci Rosa’s family Thanksgiving in New Jersey, and stuffing and sweet potato and leek gratin. But also kasha varnishkes, a Jewish grain dish with roots in Eastern Europe, where her in-laws survived the Holocaust.
All across the country, families like Ms. Rosa’s are gathering on Thursday to nosh, to catch up and perhaps to bicker a little. But this year, with Israel at war and the world sharply divided over questions of justice, some Jewish families are finding that what it means to be a Jew is also on the Thanksgiving table.
Seated around one table will be members of a family whose stances toward Israel since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 and the Israeli military response have sent them to different ideological poles.
At one end is Ms. Rosa’s mother, Esther Rosa, 95, who recalls Thanksgivings during World War II with one seat left empty — her brother was fighting for the United States against the Germans — and is steadfast in her belief in Israel’s right to defend itself. At the other is her daughter, Becca Gertler, 25, who is outspoken in her support for the Palestinians, thousands of whom have been killed in the war. Somewhere in the middle is Ms. Rosa herself, a self-described liberal from Brooklyn who is in her 60s, and who regularly criticized Israel’s policies in the past, but now sees it — and Jews like her — as under threat.
Though the family is no stranger to heated debates, according to Ms. Rosa’s nephew, who is hosting the dinner, this kind of tension is new. “With my family, with politics we kind of know where those lines were drawn years ago; you know what to say if you want to press someone’s buttons,” said the nephew, who asked that his name not be used because of the contentiousness of the subject.
“You are going into a family dinner with a polarizing topic, not knowing where anybody stands,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve ever done that — I don’t think any family has ever done that.”
Raging family debates at Thanksgiving are as traditional as cranberry sauce. For generations, Americans have sat down to dinner divided over politics and taxes, Republicans and Democrats, the Giants and the Jets. At a time when things like protests against Israel’s policies and the tearing down of missing persons signs can feel like personal attacks, some American Jews are experiencing the revelation of differing values across the family Thanksgiving table with acute pain.
These types of identity- and values-based conflicts are the most intractable, according to Tricia S. Jones, a professor at Temple University and director of the Center for Conflict Management and Media Impact there. “They are so much a definition of who we are and need to be that it is very difficult for us to accept an alternate story from anyone — particularly from those we love,” she said.
//Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
Nov. 23, 2023, 9:09 a.m. ET2 hours ago
2 hours ago
//On the eve of a hostage’s 4th birthday, her family waits anxiously for news.
//A four-day pause in fighting will begin Friday, Qatar says.
Israel has made lopsided prisoner swaps before.
Dr. Jones added: “You’ve got people who deeply love one another, and want to understand where their loved ones are coming from, so pretending away the differences and the pain also isn’t workable.”
There are 21 members of the extended Rosa family coming for Thanksgiving, but one matriarch will be absent: Judith Gertler, 89, Ms. Rosa’s mother-in-law, a Holocaust survivor who endured the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany as a little girl, and who lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She has dementia and is too frail to make the trip to New Jersey. With the support of Mrs. Gertler’s doctor, the family has kept all news of the Oct. 7 attack from her. She found refuge in Israel after the war, Ms. Rosa said, and the family was afraid the news would trigger post-traumatic stress.
Image
A person reaches for a bowl on a shelf, where various objects sit including a menorah and metal and glass cups and bowls.
Familial conflict that is based in identity can be intractable, said Tricia S. Jones, a professor at Temple University who studies conflict management.Credit...Sara Hylton for The New York Times
There is some relief, too, Ms. Rosa said, that Mrs. Gertler will not be there to hear her granddaughter Becca’s strong criticism of Israel across the table. When Becca, a policy analyst, first shared her beliefs shortly after the attack, her mother was stunned. “I felt physical pain,” she said.
“She only sees one side of it,” Ms. Rosa said of their conversation about the war in Gaza, “and of course she would probably say that I see only one side of it.” Yet at the same time, she admires her daughter’s conviction. “It is important to be able to have your voice be heard, to speak up for the underdog, and to not accept things that you don’t believe in.”
At Thanksgiving dinner, Becca plans to speak her mind, she said, particularly because she feels it is important that her gaggle of younger cousins feasting on homemade bread rolls be exposed to different perspectives — not just from outsiders, but from fellow Jews.
“The weird part for me has been disagreeing with my parents” since the war began, she said in an interview. “On most things we are pretty aligned, but this is the first time where me and my mom have really gotten into arguments where we are not listening to each other.”
She added: “To me there are no sides. The sides are: not killing people.”
On Thursday morning, one of Ms. Rosa’s brothers will pick up their mother in Plainsboro, N.J., to bring her to Thanksgiving. She’s looking forward to the meal, she said, speaking through her daughter because she is hard of hearing.
This year, she said, calls to mind those Thanksgivings during World War II when her older brother was deployed abroad, and the importance of being together as Jews, and as family — no matter what is said over the meal. Then as now, Mrs. Rosa told her daughter, “Even though we knew what was happening over there, we still needed to celebrate over here.“
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/23/nyre ... ilies.html
Re: JUDAISM
The Evangelicals Trying to Convert Israelis on the Battlefield
Elle Hardy
Fri, December 8, 2023 at 5:00 AM CST read
There was never any doubt that America’s influential band of Christian Zionists would embrace the Gaza war with enthusiasm. Three days after Hamas committed its infamous October 7 atrocities, the most prominent Christian Zionist of all, John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, delivered an ecstatic YouTube sermon. “Good morning, America and the world,” he boomed in his finest Cronkite, “Israel is at war.” This was a battle between good and evil, Hagee said, before vowing to “lift up their warriors and leaders in prayer.”
But some evangelical Christians are looking to uplift with far more than cosmic invocations. Overwhelmingly supporters of Israel both politically and spiritually, some of the most strident of these advocates are using the war to proffer something that is more often left unsaid: In order to fulfill the prophecies these Christians hold most dear, Jews must convert to Jesus. And while the idea of bringing Jews into the tent is as old as Saint Paul the Apostle, it’s not simply American Jews that some of the more nefarious evangelicals are seeking to convert—it’s Jewish people in Israel, the ultimate supersoldiers for their holy mission.
One figure in this milieu particularly stands out. Curt Landry, described by one Israeli writer as “sometimes ‘Pastor’ sometimes ‘Rabbi’ but always missionary,” ministers to a congregation of around 100 in rural Oklahoma—but his true mission field is a long way from the prairies.
Shannon Nuszen, a Jerusalem-based former evangelical Christian missionary turned Orthodox Jewish convert runs an organization called Beyneynu, which monitors foreign missionaries targeting Jews as converts. She recently received a complaint from an Israel Defense Forces soldier on duty in the Gaza war, who claimed that a campaign of proselytizing was underway, seeking to convert Israelis fighting on the front lines.
“His unit was visited by a group of missionaries who brought donations,” she told me, supplying evidence. The soldiers were given a copy of Landry’s book, Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage: How Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity Can Transform Your Faith, which outlines a way that Jewish people can come to Jesus through what’s called the “One New Man” doctrine. “The representative explained to the soldiers that if they would agree to be photographed with the book, the ministry would continue to provide donations to the IDF.”
Landry’s own website boasts about these efforts. “Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage book distribution project inspired 10,000 IDF soldiers,” it says. Further distribution “will bring hope to 12,000 more! Keep the prophetic momentum going.” Each $20 donation to Curt Landry Ministries, it says, gives an IDF soldier a copy of Landry’s book, a hat embroidered with their unit logo, and a bookmark that takes them to a site “that answers their [frequently asked questions].”
Curt Landry doesn’t have John Hagee’s sway in Washington, but his ministry is doing the kind of work that the Hagees of the world cannot. His House of David church in Oklahoma is a Messianic Jewish church in all but name, and Landry’s practices and preaching undoubtedly count him as belonging to this controversial branch of evangelical Christianity—one that is finding new energy in the darkest of times.
Churches labeled as Messianic Judaism have been around since the 1960s, when the charismatic wave of Pentecostalism found new converts through the Jesus People movement that was wildly popular in California. Wearing hippie clothes and producing great music, the Jesus People swept a generation disillusioned by the Summer of Love off their feet. Many of those the Jesus People sought to bring into their fold grew up in Christian homes, but there was a small cohort who grew up in Jewish households too. The latter became known as “Jews for Jesus,” and while they found many converts, in time, a growing number of non–ethnically Jewish people became enamored with finding a way of celebrating Jewish customs while celebrating Christian faith.
Messianic Judaism might follow laws of the Torah, observe Shabbat, and even undertake circumcision, but the ultimate belief that believers must accept Jesus as their savior means that they are not recognized by any of the major Jewish denominations. However, a growing number of mainstream Jewish media, political, and even religious figures are happy to break bread with these congregations, thanks to their unswerving political support for the state of Israel.
Today, there are an estimated 175,000 to 250,000 Messianic Jews in the United States, and some 350,000 worldwide, with a small minority living in Israel. Though Messianic Jews identify as “Jewish Christians,” around half of those attending Messianic services in America are not ethnically Jewish.
Nuszen’s tip-off piqued my interest, because back in 2021, I visited Curt Landry’s House of David, a sprawling mansion outside of Fairland, Oklahoma, to see the modern expression of the movement for myself.
Instead of worshiping on a Sunday morning like most Christians do, House of David conducts its primary service on Friday night, in line with Jewish custom. An amped-up band opened with standard white evangelical devotional music, before a group of men led by a guy in a “WRSHP” baseball cap were called to the altar. There, they raised ceremonial shofar horns into the air and blasted tekiah: a long, deep sound that calls people to attention.
Smooth and syncretic as they come, Landry urged his people to “flow into Sabbath and surrender to the Holy Spirit within, where the supernatural happens: miracles and healings.” It was an unusual experience, to say the least, in a part of the world where traditional Jews aren’t exactly plentiful. Listening to the service, it felt at times as though the congregation worshiped the modern state of Israel as much as it did Jesus.
Landry and his fellow Messianics would argue that this is exactly the point. He rejects the label, writing, “We are an evangelical congregation made up of both Jew and Gentile Believers.” But for all intents and purposes, Curt Landry Ministries is a Messianic Jewish church—and it is at the vanguard of a global, highly political movement with unquestionable evangelical sympathies.
Squaring this merger of evangelical practices with Jewish appearances has been made all the more difficult by a long history of subtle antisemitic tropes existing alongside philosemitic beliefs in the evangelical movement.
A 1972 White House meeting between President Richard Nixon and evangelist in chief Billy Graham—a bog-standard Southern Baptist but one who is revered by Landry—laid these contradictions bare. The Jews “swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel,” Graham told Nixon. “But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.”
The next year, during the Yom Kippur War, Graham campaigned for the largest airlift in U.S. history to aid Israel. His subsequent “Key 73” evangelism campaign made a landmark statement opposing “all forms of coercion, intimidation and proselytizing” to Jews. It heralded a new era of Christian Zionism, where evangelicals would give full-throated support to the state of Israel and ask for nothing in return.
That is to say: in theory, at least. Graham paved the way for the evangelical movement to understand the Jewish people. Usually spoken in hushed terms, this has become far louder since the outbreak of the Gaza war. There are “good Jews”—Israelis going into battle at the ultimate frontier—and “bad Jews,” who are left-wing, college types in the West, espousing socialism and protesting the repression of Palestinians.
“God’s Machine Gun,” as Graham was known, might have established a widespread embrace of Christian Zionism among American evangelicals, but Landry’s work in the Holy Land highlights that for the messianically inclined, political support is a means to an end—specifically, The End.
Landry promotes the One New Man doctrine, which one early proponent described as an “approach in partnering with” those early Messianic Jewish converts. Dr. David Rudolph, director of Messianic Jewish Studies at The King’s University in Texas, offers One New Man as a vehicle for Christians looking to understand their relationship to Jews and Judaism but who “find it difficult to know which directions are healthy” and, critically, “which lead to weirdness.”*
The idea of One New Man comes from a verse in the New Testament book of Ephesians 2, which outlines a vision of Jews and Gentiles finding peace with each other through the Messiah, healing the schism between Christians and the Jewish people—albeit, through the church.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
Understandably, many practicing Jews might think that this looks a lot like supersessionism, or replacement theology. This was an idea developed in antiquity that holds that Jews were replaced by Christians as God’s chosen people and that the promises made to Israel in the Bible are fulfilled through the Christian Church. As professor Mika Ahuvia, a scholar of early Judaism, wrote in the wake of the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, it was only after the Holocaust that people began acknowledging that supersessionist thinking had “violent real-world implications.”
It is simply unconscionable for modern Christians to preach such a theology, but it is easy to see how it gave birth to One New Man. Still relatively obscure in mainstream Christian theology, it is an idea that vibes with the direction of evangelical thought.
For Landry, One New Man is not simply a way of doing church: It’s personal. An adopted kid who was “bitterly disappointed” with the man who raised him, he discovered the Jewish roots of his birth parents and set about forming a ministry that combined his upbringing with his heritage. The ministry he founded in 1996 combines signs and wonders of charismatic Pentecostalism with a quest “to be a bridge of unity and restoration between Israel and the Church.”
As someone who has watched Landry’s ministry for some time, it is clear that he has a deep reverence for Jewish customs and the Jewish people. But Landry and One New Man devotees remain deeply evangelical Christians—and with that comes a conception of the End Times that requires Jews to accept Jesus in order to avoid eternal damnation.
And while sometimes these sentiments get mired in the text, they eventually spill out into the open. Last year, Landry outraged some Israelis by erecting a statue in the Golan Heights that depicted a menorah on top of a Star of David, all being held up by a Jesus fish. The statue, which was removed after the outcry, came on the back of other instances of other Christian groups reportedly infiltrating Jewish organizations in Israel. It led to some members of the Israeli Knesset attempting to pass a bill making religious proselytization punishable by jail time, which was eventually shot down by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who didn’t want to upset American allies.
Landry’s efforts might be a minor skirmish at a time of immense suffering in Gaza, but that evangelicals feel empowered to try to convert Israeli soldiers while they are at war highlights calculations that go well beyond religious lines. Shannon Nuszen says that it is “beyond comprehension that evangelical Christians, who call themselves our closest friends, would capitalize on the pain and uncertainty that has engulfed the Middle East to peddle this unwelcome message.”
Landry’s latest effort shows that, among evangelical Christians of varying stripes, there is an unwavering belief that the Jewish soul must be salvaged, the ultimate prize: If only they understood what is otherwise in store for them. Israel, the nation and all who could call it home, are not merely great allies and custodians of the Holy Land but a counter to Western decadence.
Common ground may have been opportunistically forged in a secular sense between highly political Christian and Jewish leaders invested in Israel overcoming the Palestinian people, but there’s a reason why we don’t see One New Man espoused by Jewish rabbis. Landry and his cohort may provide overt support for Israel, but it’s also where his syncretic faith, which fetishizes Judaism and the Jewish people, becomes creepy. For all of the shofars and tallit prayer shawls, the One New Man doctrine ultimately holds that Jews must submit to Christianity before the End Times—with the war in Gaza serving as a sign from above that it might be happening very soon.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ev ... 00058.html
Elle Hardy
Fri, December 8, 2023 at 5:00 AM CST read
There was never any doubt that America’s influential band of Christian Zionists would embrace the Gaza war with enthusiasm. Three days after Hamas committed its infamous October 7 atrocities, the most prominent Christian Zionist of all, John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, delivered an ecstatic YouTube sermon. “Good morning, America and the world,” he boomed in his finest Cronkite, “Israel is at war.” This was a battle between good and evil, Hagee said, before vowing to “lift up their warriors and leaders in prayer.”
But some evangelical Christians are looking to uplift with far more than cosmic invocations. Overwhelmingly supporters of Israel both politically and spiritually, some of the most strident of these advocates are using the war to proffer something that is more often left unsaid: In order to fulfill the prophecies these Christians hold most dear, Jews must convert to Jesus. And while the idea of bringing Jews into the tent is as old as Saint Paul the Apostle, it’s not simply American Jews that some of the more nefarious evangelicals are seeking to convert—it’s Jewish people in Israel, the ultimate supersoldiers for their holy mission.
One figure in this milieu particularly stands out. Curt Landry, described by one Israeli writer as “sometimes ‘Pastor’ sometimes ‘Rabbi’ but always missionary,” ministers to a congregation of around 100 in rural Oklahoma—but his true mission field is a long way from the prairies.
Shannon Nuszen, a Jerusalem-based former evangelical Christian missionary turned Orthodox Jewish convert runs an organization called Beyneynu, which monitors foreign missionaries targeting Jews as converts. She recently received a complaint from an Israel Defense Forces soldier on duty in the Gaza war, who claimed that a campaign of proselytizing was underway, seeking to convert Israelis fighting on the front lines.
“His unit was visited by a group of missionaries who brought donations,” she told me, supplying evidence. The soldiers were given a copy of Landry’s book, Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage: How Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity Can Transform Your Faith, which outlines a way that Jewish people can come to Jesus through what’s called the “One New Man” doctrine. “The representative explained to the soldiers that if they would agree to be photographed with the book, the ministry would continue to provide donations to the IDF.”
Landry’s own website boasts about these efforts. “Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage book distribution project inspired 10,000 IDF soldiers,” it says. Further distribution “will bring hope to 12,000 more! Keep the prophetic momentum going.” Each $20 donation to Curt Landry Ministries, it says, gives an IDF soldier a copy of Landry’s book, a hat embroidered with their unit logo, and a bookmark that takes them to a site “that answers their [frequently asked questions].”
Curt Landry doesn’t have John Hagee’s sway in Washington, but his ministry is doing the kind of work that the Hagees of the world cannot. His House of David church in Oklahoma is a Messianic Jewish church in all but name, and Landry’s practices and preaching undoubtedly count him as belonging to this controversial branch of evangelical Christianity—one that is finding new energy in the darkest of times.
Churches labeled as Messianic Judaism have been around since the 1960s, when the charismatic wave of Pentecostalism found new converts through the Jesus People movement that was wildly popular in California. Wearing hippie clothes and producing great music, the Jesus People swept a generation disillusioned by the Summer of Love off their feet. Many of those the Jesus People sought to bring into their fold grew up in Christian homes, but there was a small cohort who grew up in Jewish households too. The latter became known as “Jews for Jesus,” and while they found many converts, in time, a growing number of non–ethnically Jewish people became enamored with finding a way of celebrating Jewish customs while celebrating Christian faith.
Messianic Judaism might follow laws of the Torah, observe Shabbat, and even undertake circumcision, but the ultimate belief that believers must accept Jesus as their savior means that they are not recognized by any of the major Jewish denominations. However, a growing number of mainstream Jewish media, political, and even religious figures are happy to break bread with these congregations, thanks to their unswerving political support for the state of Israel.
Today, there are an estimated 175,000 to 250,000 Messianic Jews in the United States, and some 350,000 worldwide, with a small minority living in Israel. Though Messianic Jews identify as “Jewish Christians,” around half of those attending Messianic services in America are not ethnically Jewish.
Nuszen’s tip-off piqued my interest, because back in 2021, I visited Curt Landry’s House of David, a sprawling mansion outside of Fairland, Oklahoma, to see the modern expression of the movement for myself.
Instead of worshiping on a Sunday morning like most Christians do, House of David conducts its primary service on Friday night, in line with Jewish custom. An amped-up band opened with standard white evangelical devotional music, before a group of men led by a guy in a “WRSHP” baseball cap were called to the altar. There, they raised ceremonial shofar horns into the air and blasted tekiah: a long, deep sound that calls people to attention.
Smooth and syncretic as they come, Landry urged his people to “flow into Sabbath and surrender to the Holy Spirit within, where the supernatural happens: miracles and healings.” It was an unusual experience, to say the least, in a part of the world where traditional Jews aren’t exactly plentiful. Listening to the service, it felt at times as though the congregation worshiped the modern state of Israel as much as it did Jesus.
Landry and his fellow Messianics would argue that this is exactly the point. He rejects the label, writing, “We are an evangelical congregation made up of both Jew and Gentile Believers.” But for all intents and purposes, Curt Landry Ministries is a Messianic Jewish church—and it is at the vanguard of a global, highly political movement with unquestionable evangelical sympathies.
Squaring this merger of evangelical practices with Jewish appearances has been made all the more difficult by a long history of subtle antisemitic tropes existing alongside philosemitic beliefs in the evangelical movement.
A 1972 White House meeting between President Richard Nixon and evangelist in chief Billy Graham—a bog-standard Southern Baptist but one who is revered by Landry—laid these contradictions bare. The Jews “swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel,” Graham told Nixon. “But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.”
The next year, during the Yom Kippur War, Graham campaigned for the largest airlift in U.S. history to aid Israel. His subsequent “Key 73” evangelism campaign made a landmark statement opposing “all forms of coercion, intimidation and proselytizing” to Jews. It heralded a new era of Christian Zionism, where evangelicals would give full-throated support to the state of Israel and ask for nothing in return.
That is to say: in theory, at least. Graham paved the way for the evangelical movement to understand the Jewish people. Usually spoken in hushed terms, this has become far louder since the outbreak of the Gaza war. There are “good Jews”—Israelis going into battle at the ultimate frontier—and “bad Jews,” who are left-wing, college types in the West, espousing socialism and protesting the repression of Palestinians.
“God’s Machine Gun,” as Graham was known, might have established a widespread embrace of Christian Zionism among American evangelicals, but Landry’s work in the Holy Land highlights that for the messianically inclined, political support is a means to an end—specifically, The End.
Landry promotes the One New Man doctrine, which one early proponent described as an “approach in partnering with” those early Messianic Jewish converts. Dr. David Rudolph, director of Messianic Jewish Studies at The King’s University in Texas, offers One New Man as a vehicle for Christians looking to understand their relationship to Jews and Judaism but who “find it difficult to know which directions are healthy” and, critically, “which lead to weirdness.”*
The idea of One New Man comes from a verse in the New Testament book of Ephesians 2, which outlines a vision of Jews and Gentiles finding peace with each other through the Messiah, healing the schism between Christians and the Jewish people—albeit, through the church.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
Understandably, many practicing Jews might think that this looks a lot like supersessionism, or replacement theology. This was an idea developed in antiquity that holds that Jews were replaced by Christians as God’s chosen people and that the promises made to Israel in the Bible are fulfilled through the Christian Church. As professor Mika Ahuvia, a scholar of early Judaism, wrote in the wake of the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, it was only after the Holocaust that people began acknowledging that supersessionist thinking had “violent real-world implications.”
It is simply unconscionable for modern Christians to preach such a theology, but it is easy to see how it gave birth to One New Man. Still relatively obscure in mainstream Christian theology, it is an idea that vibes with the direction of evangelical thought.
For Landry, One New Man is not simply a way of doing church: It’s personal. An adopted kid who was “bitterly disappointed” with the man who raised him, he discovered the Jewish roots of his birth parents and set about forming a ministry that combined his upbringing with his heritage. The ministry he founded in 1996 combines signs and wonders of charismatic Pentecostalism with a quest “to be a bridge of unity and restoration between Israel and the Church.”
As someone who has watched Landry’s ministry for some time, it is clear that he has a deep reverence for Jewish customs and the Jewish people. But Landry and One New Man devotees remain deeply evangelical Christians—and with that comes a conception of the End Times that requires Jews to accept Jesus in order to avoid eternal damnation.
And while sometimes these sentiments get mired in the text, they eventually spill out into the open. Last year, Landry outraged some Israelis by erecting a statue in the Golan Heights that depicted a menorah on top of a Star of David, all being held up by a Jesus fish. The statue, which was removed after the outcry, came on the back of other instances of other Christian groups reportedly infiltrating Jewish organizations in Israel. It led to some members of the Israeli Knesset attempting to pass a bill making religious proselytization punishable by jail time, which was eventually shot down by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who didn’t want to upset American allies.
Landry’s efforts might be a minor skirmish at a time of immense suffering in Gaza, but that evangelicals feel empowered to try to convert Israeli soldiers while they are at war highlights calculations that go well beyond religious lines. Shannon Nuszen says that it is “beyond comprehension that evangelical Christians, who call themselves our closest friends, would capitalize on the pain and uncertainty that has engulfed the Middle East to peddle this unwelcome message.”
Landry’s latest effort shows that, among evangelical Christians of varying stripes, there is an unwavering belief that the Jewish soul must be salvaged, the ultimate prize: If only they understood what is otherwise in store for them. Israel, the nation and all who could call it home, are not merely great allies and custodians of the Holy Land but a counter to Western decadence.
Common ground may have been opportunistically forged in a secular sense between highly political Christian and Jewish leaders invested in Israel overcoming the Palestinian people, but there’s a reason why we don’t see One New Man espoused by Jewish rabbis. Landry and his cohort may provide overt support for Israel, but it’s also where his syncretic faith, which fetishizes Judaism and the Jewish people, becomes creepy. For all of the shofars and tallit prayer shawls, the One New Man doctrine ultimately holds that Jews must submit to Christianity before the End Times—with the war in Gaza serving as a sign from above that it might be happening very soon.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ev ... 00058.html
Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?
Some progressive Jews are embracing “diasporism” — reimagining their faith as one that blesses their lives in America and elsewhere.
Last month, on the first night of Hanukkah, more than 200 people packed an old ballroom on the third floor of a restored synagogue in Brooklyn. A few came fresh off the subway from a protest in Manhattan that was organized by left-wing Jewish groups calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
They were there to hear from Shaul Magid, 65, whose long, thin white beard and shaved head made him look more like a roadie than a rabbi. A professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth as well as (yes) a rabbi, Mr. Magid was there to spread the message elucidated in a new book, “The Necessity of Exile,” that Jews today outside Israel — 75 percent of whom live in the United States — should embrace diaspora, the state of living outside a homeland, as a permanent and valuable condition.
“If there’s a diasporic reality where Jews have been able to live as Jews, flourish as Jews, not to be oppressed and persecuted — whether they choose to be a Satmar Hasid or Larry David, it doesn’t matter — if they’re allowed to live the Judaism they want, why would that be a tragedy?” he said.
Mr. Magid’s outlook is one of several burgeoning visions for the future of Jewish life that fall under the umbrella of “diasporism.” The idea has been getting a new look since Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel three months ago and Israel’s pulverizing bombing campaign and invasion in Gaza. Those events have forced Jews everywhere to reckon anew with what they think about Israel and the central role it plays in Jewish life — the kind of charged moment when members of spiritual communities can ask themselves what really matters, and sometimes reach radically different conclusions.
Image
Rabbi Shaul Magid, wearing glasses and a beard, is seen through the a window pane, with buildings reflected in the glass.
Rabbi Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, embraces diaspora, the state of living outside a homeland, as a permanent and valuable condition.Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times
Some versions of diasporism are secular, often hearkening back to the un-religious, anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund that arose in late 19th-century Eastern Europe — the same time and place where political Zionism was born — to agitate for Jewish rights in the European empires of the day. The Bund’s slogan of “doikayt,” a Yiddish word that roughly means “hereness,” has been adopted by younger left-wing Jews.
“This socialist, secular, liberatory philosophy,” said Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer working on a history of the Bund, “whether it was the Bund or the larger world of Yiddish socialism, is deeply interwoven into our heritage,” and “can provide a moral compass and help people reject exclusionary and violent ideologies.”
Other flavors are religious. The Berkeley professor emeritus Daniel Boyarin has called the Babylonian Talmud — a rulebook for living Jewishly, composed in exile — the true Jewish homeland.
Zionism, at least at its most doctrinaire, insists a Jew can achieve total realization as a Jew only by living in Israel. Shlilat ha-golah, Hebrew for “negation of the exile,” was an early Zionist slogan.
Diasporism, by contrast, holds the inverse: that Jews must embrace marginality and a certain estrangement from Israel the country, and perhaps even Israel the place. “Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew,” goes an epigraph to Mr. Magid’s book from the late American theologian Eugene Borowitz, “is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem.”
Image
A crowd of people gathered around a menorah candle lighting at a night-time ceremony outside of a large building.
A menorah-lighting ceremony in Manhattan on the first night of Hanukkah last month. Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
‘Putting One’s Head in the Sand’
In 2024, anti-Zionism is the closest thing organized Judaism has to heresy.
The land of Israel is central to the religion, the foundational narrative of which is about returning from slavery to the Promised Land. Over centuries of exile, Jews have pledged, “Next year in Jerusalem,” and prayed facing that city. Places of pilgrimage dot Israel’s map — many in parts controversially annexed or occupied after war. Synagogues everywhere pay homage to the original, destroyed Temples in Jerusalem, the site of which remains sacred.
Seventy-five years after its founding in May 1948 — and decades following its victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, which captivated American Jews (while also initiating the occupation of stateless Palestinians) — the modern state of Israel continues to draw widespread support among Jews throughout the world.
This is true in countries, like France, where antisemitic incidents have led to increases in Jewish emigration to Israel. But it is also true in the United States, where many Jews have achieved historic levels of privilege and security — and Israel has functioned as a common flag, in a sense, for the community to rally around.
Diasporism, in other words, is a distinctly minority position. It is easily seen as dismissive of the more than 7 million Jews in Israel — more than in any other country, and most of them refugees or their descendants from places from which they understandably fled, like 1930s Europe, or to which they may not be welcome to return, like elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. (Even the satirical diasporism in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel “Operation Shylock” envisions only Jews from Europe going back where they came from.) It can seem a willful blindness to the centuries of persecution and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust, that convinced most Jews as well as the international community that Israel needed to exist.
“To posit the credibility of an early 20th-century ideology that had some impact on interwar Europe until much of East and Central Europe was obliterated by forces diasporism could never have predicted, while ignoring the reality of millions and millions of people, is an exercise in putting one’s head in the sand,” said Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University.
And for most Jews, Oct. 7, in which Hamas killed or kidnapped nearly 1,500 Israelis, provoked solidarity and viscerally reminded them of Israel’s raison d’être. This is one reason most everyone in the American Jewish establishment, from the Republican Jewish Coalition to social justice-minded Reform rabbis, has steadfastly stood with Israel in the months since.
Image
Protesters at night stand in front of a building decorated with several flags. They hold a large banner that reads ”If Not Now.”
Jewish anti-Trump protesters holding a sign that says, “If Not Now” in Washington, D.C., in December 2016.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
But some Jews have been repelled by Israel’s military response, which has killed approximately 23,000, according to Gazan officials. Membership in IfNotNow, an American Jewish group critical of Israel, has more than doubled since Oct. 7, according to a spokesman. The weekly newsletter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, went to 43,000 people on Oct. 4, said a spokeswoman, and to 350,000 two months later.
Mr. Magid, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, favors one state for Israeli Jews and Palestinians, but he said in an interview that he also would welcome a negotiated two-state solution. More than its shape, Israel’s centrality to Judaism elsewhere is what he hopes can be adjusted.
“Israel has become the substitute for Jewish identity,” he said. “And we have at least a 2,000-year history — maybe longer, certainly 2,000-year. A robust history. We have to grab ahold of that and basically take it back from those who took it away from us.”
An Abstract Concept
For Mr. Magid, a thriving 21st-century Judaism without Israel at its core must include a return to religion — “always the thing,” he said, “that’s going to keep us together.”
That religion is based around exile, largely arising after the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70. (Ancient Jewish translators described the dispersion forecast in the Torah with the Greek word for “scattering”: diaspora.) Rabbis fashioned substitutes for holy requirements that could no longer be performed: prayers instead of animal sacrifices; arks for Torah scrolls instead of the Temple’s inner sanctum.
“One of the crucial things diaspora does is shape this idea of Judaism as a portable identity, not wedded to land — you can maintain a vibrant Jewish culture and religion, remain a faithful and observant Jew,” said Daniel B. Schwartz, a professor of Jewish history at George Washington University. Even if this Judaism “incorporated a longing for Zion within its liturgy and law,” Mr. Schwartz added, “how messianic was your average Jew in the Middle Ages? Probably not that much.”
Image
A finger points to part of an ancient text on a page.
A Babylonian Talmud text at Bard College.Credit...Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
But a fully diasporic Judaism — especially in a world in which Jewish exile is, thanks to Israel, no longer involuntary — remains an abstract concept. Mr. Boyarin, the Berkeley professor emeritus and Talmudist, conceives of a diaspora that values its connections to other Jewish communities — including Israel’s, but not privileging it. Mr. Magid in his book examines some Hasidic sects that avoid encouraging emigration to Israel, believing it heretically pre-empts the messianic redemption.
Younger American Jews have their own ideas. Relaunching the left-wing journal Jewish Currents in 2018, then-publisher Jacob Plitman described “an emerging diasporism” that balanced “a critical awareness of Israel” with “a commitment to struggling primarily in the communities in which we live.” The magazine has been forthrightly left-wing, as likely to center the Palestinian as the Jewish perspective.
Simon Schama, a university professor of art history and history at Columbia who has published two volumes of “The Story of the Jews,” rejects diasporism, arguing that longing for the land of Israel is an inescapable aspect of Jewish texts, from poetry of medieval Spain to everyday religious liturgy sung in 2024.
“They would all have been astounded to learn of ‘diasporism’ as somehow the ‘fulfillment,’ as you say their champions put it, of Judaism,” Mr. Schama said in an email of earlier Jews. “And so would most Jews singing of next year in Jerusalem towards the end of every Passover Seder.”
‘The Promised Land’
Diasporism’s limitations emerge starkly when one applies the concept to another people: the Palestinians. The statelessness of the Jewish past, after all, still describes the Palestinian present. The notion that Palestinians ought to accept their lot in the name of a high-minded ideology would strike Jewish diasporists, who tend to favor Palestinian self-determination, as noxious.
“The Jewish refugees from Europe — I think about them stateless, helpless,” said Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian-Israeli writer who now lives in the United States. “This plan of having a state, the modern national state that I’m not a huge fan of, was the only protection. So now it’s the majority of the Palestinians who have replaced the Jewish stateless, defenseless people.”
Citing Hannah Arendt, a Jew born in Germany in 1906, Mr. Kashua argued that talk of human rights by itself was insufficient to protect people. “She writes about how we talk a lot about humanity,” he said, “but when you strip out everything and remain only with humanity, you’re the most vulnerable creature on earth.”
Most likely, diasporism will not triumph among Jewry worldwide or even in the United States. But neither does a return to the monumental stature Zionism enjoyed here after the 1967 war seem inevitable. Instead, a sharp divide is emerging between two increasingly distinct Jewish communities: one in Israel, one not.
Image
Protesters shown from above sit on a floor. Behind them is a sign on the floor that says, “Jews Say Ceasefire Now!”
A rally by members of the Jewish Voice for Peace and the IfNotNow movement in a federal building in Washington, D.C., in October.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
If Oct. 7 inspired closer feelings to Israel for some Jews, for others its aftermath left them alienated from nationalism altogether. Confronted in the days after Hamas’s attack with the notion that dying as a Jew in Israel represented a nobler death, the writer John Ganz said in a newsletter post, “When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.”
Still others yearn for a more moderate diasporism, with the two Jewish communities in productive tension.
Alan Wolfe, a Boston University professor emeritus of history and author of “At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews,” said that last year — as a far-right Israeli government sought to diminish the judiciary’s independence — Jews elsewhere served valuably as connected critics. “The diaspora can provide what Netanyahu and his extreme right ministers can’t,” he said, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “There’s a great Jewish conscience that has kept the Jew surviving so long being risked by the current political trends in Israel.”
But he criticized non-Israeli Jews who did not understand that diaspora is “as much a mental as a geographic concept” — a status that links disparate people — and so failed to perceive the Hamas attack as an assault on Jews everywhere. It is a lesson, he argued, Israel could help teach them.
“If I could create the ideal world, it would be one in which half the Jews live in Israel and half the Jews don’t, and that’s pretty much what we have,” Mr. Wolfe added. “They need each other — especially now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/us/i ... 778d3e6de3
Last month, on the first night of Hanukkah, more than 200 people packed an old ballroom on the third floor of a restored synagogue in Brooklyn. A few came fresh off the subway from a protest in Manhattan that was organized by left-wing Jewish groups calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
They were there to hear from Shaul Magid, 65, whose long, thin white beard and shaved head made him look more like a roadie than a rabbi. A professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth as well as (yes) a rabbi, Mr. Magid was there to spread the message elucidated in a new book, “The Necessity of Exile,” that Jews today outside Israel — 75 percent of whom live in the United States — should embrace diaspora, the state of living outside a homeland, as a permanent and valuable condition.
“If there’s a diasporic reality where Jews have been able to live as Jews, flourish as Jews, not to be oppressed and persecuted — whether they choose to be a Satmar Hasid or Larry David, it doesn’t matter — if they’re allowed to live the Judaism they want, why would that be a tragedy?” he said.
Mr. Magid’s outlook is one of several burgeoning visions for the future of Jewish life that fall under the umbrella of “diasporism.” The idea has been getting a new look since Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel three months ago and Israel’s pulverizing bombing campaign and invasion in Gaza. Those events have forced Jews everywhere to reckon anew with what they think about Israel and the central role it plays in Jewish life — the kind of charged moment when members of spiritual communities can ask themselves what really matters, and sometimes reach radically different conclusions.
Image
Rabbi Shaul Magid, wearing glasses and a beard, is seen through the a window pane, with buildings reflected in the glass.
Rabbi Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, embraces diaspora, the state of living outside a homeland, as a permanent and valuable condition.Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times
Some versions of diasporism are secular, often hearkening back to the un-religious, anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund that arose in late 19th-century Eastern Europe — the same time and place where political Zionism was born — to agitate for Jewish rights in the European empires of the day. The Bund’s slogan of “doikayt,” a Yiddish word that roughly means “hereness,” has been adopted by younger left-wing Jews.
“This socialist, secular, liberatory philosophy,” said Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer working on a history of the Bund, “whether it was the Bund or the larger world of Yiddish socialism, is deeply interwoven into our heritage,” and “can provide a moral compass and help people reject exclusionary and violent ideologies.”
Other flavors are religious. The Berkeley professor emeritus Daniel Boyarin has called the Babylonian Talmud — a rulebook for living Jewishly, composed in exile — the true Jewish homeland.
Zionism, at least at its most doctrinaire, insists a Jew can achieve total realization as a Jew only by living in Israel. Shlilat ha-golah, Hebrew for “negation of the exile,” was an early Zionist slogan.
Diasporism, by contrast, holds the inverse: that Jews must embrace marginality and a certain estrangement from Israel the country, and perhaps even Israel the place. “Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew,” goes an epigraph to Mr. Magid’s book from the late American theologian Eugene Borowitz, “is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem.”
Image
A crowd of people gathered around a menorah candle lighting at a night-time ceremony outside of a large building.
A menorah-lighting ceremony in Manhattan on the first night of Hanukkah last month. Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
‘Putting One’s Head in the Sand’
In 2024, anti-Zionism is the closest thing organized Judaism has to heresy.
The land of Israel is central to the religion, the foundational narrative of which is about returning from slavery to the Promised Land. Over centuries of exile, Jews have pledged, “Next year in Jerusalem,” and prayed facing that city. Places of pilgrimage dot Israel’s map — many in parts controversially annexed or occupied after war. Synagogues everywhere pay homage to the original, destroyed Temples in Jerusalem, the site of which remains sacred.
Seventy-five years after its founding in May 1948 — and decades following its victory in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, which captivated American Jews (while also initiating the occupation of stateless Palestinians) — the modern state of Israel continues to draw widespread support among Jews throughout the world.
This is true in countries, like France, where antisemitic incidents have led to increases in Jewish emigration to Israel. But it is also true in the United States, where many Jews have achieved historic levels of privilege and security — and Israel has functioned as a common flag, in a sense, for the community to rally around.
Diasporism, in other words, is a distinctly minority position. It is easily seen as dismissive of the more than 7 million Jews in Israel — more than in any other country, and most of them refugees or their descendants from places from which they understandably fled, like 1930s Europe, or to which they may not be welcome to return, like elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. (Even the satirical diasporism in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel “Operation Shylock” envisions only Jews from Europe going back where they came from.) It can seem a willful blindness to the centuries of persecution and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust, that convinced most Jews as well as the international community that Israel needed to exist.
“To posit the credibility of an early 20th-century ideology that had some impact on interwar Europe until much of East and Central Europe was obliterated by forces diasporism could never have predicted, while ignoring the reality of millions and millions of people, is an exercise in putting one’s head in the sand,” said Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University.
And for most Jews, Oct. 7, in which Hamas killed or kidnapped nearly 1,500 Israelis, provoked solidarity and viscerally reminded them of Israel’s raison d’être. This is one reason most everyone in the American Jewish establishment, from the Republican Jewish Coalition to social justice-minded Reform rabbis, has steadfastly stood with Israel in the months since.
Image
Protesters at night stand in front of a building decorated with several flags. They hold a large banner that reads ”If Not Now.”
Jewish anti-Trump protesters holding a sign that says, “If Not Now” in Washington, D.C., in December 2016.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
But some Jews have been repelled by Israel’s military response, which has killed approximately 23,000, according to Gazan officials. Membership in IfNotNow, an American Jewish group critical of Israel, has more than doubled since Oct. 7, according to a spokesman. The weekly newsletter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group, went to 43,000 people on Oct. 4, said a spokeswoman, and to 350,000 two months later.
Mr. Magid, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, favors one state for Israeli Jews and Palestinians, but he said in an interview that he also would welcome a negotiated two-state solution. More than its shape, Israel’s centrality to Judaism elsewhere is what he hopes can be adjusted.
“Israel has become the substitute for Jewish identity,” he said. “And we have at least a 2,000-year history — maybe longer, certainly 2,000-year. A robust history. We have to grab ahold of that and basically take it back from those who took it away from us.”
An Abstract Concept
For Mr. Magid, a thriving 21st-century Judaism without Israel at its core must include a return to religion — “always the thing,” he said, “that’s going to keep us together.”
That religion is based around exile, largely arising after the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70. (Ancient Jewish translators described the dispersion forecast in the Torah with the Greek word for “scattering”: diaspora.) Rabbis fashioned substitutes for holy requirements that could no longer be performed: prayers instead of animal sacrifices; arks for Torah scrolls instead of the Temple’s inner sanctum.
“One of the crucial things diaspora does is shape this idea of Judaism as a portable identity, not wedded to land — you can maintain a vibrant Jewish culture and religion, remain a faithful and observant Jew,” said Daniel B. Schwartz, a professor of Jewish history at George Washington University. Even if this Judaism “incorporated a longing for Zion within its liturgy and law,” Mr. Schwartz added, “how messianic was your average Jew in the Middle Ages? Probably not that much.”
Image
A finger points to part of an ancient text on a page.
A Babylonian Talmud text at Bard College.Credit...Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
But a fully diasporic Judaism — especially in a world in which Jewish exile is, thanks to Israel, no longer involuntary — remains an abstract concept. Mr. Boyarin, the Berkeley professor emeritus and Talmudist, conceives of a diaspora that values its connections to other Jewish communities — including Israel’s, but not privileging it. Mr. Magid in his book examines some Hasidic sects that avoid encouraging emigration to Israel, believing it heretically pre-empts the messianic redemption.
Younger American Jews have their own ideas. Relaunching the left-wing journal Jewish Currents in 2018, then-publisher Jacob Plitman described “an emerging diasporism” that balanced “a critical awareness of Israel” with “a commitment to struggling primarily in the communities in which we live.” The magazine has been forthrightly left-wing, as likely to center the Palestinian as the Jewish perspective.
Simon Schama, a university professor of art history and history at Columbia who has published two volumes of “The Story of the Jews,” rejects diasporism, arguing that longing for the land of Israel is an inescapable aspect of Jewish texts, from poetry of medieval Spain to everyday religious liturgy sung in 2024.
“They would all have been astounded to learn of ‘diasporism’ as somehow the ‘fulfillment,’ as you say their champions put it, of Judaism,” Mr. Schama said in an email of earlier Jews. “And so would most Jews singing of next year in Jerusalem towards the end of every Passover Seder.”
‘The Promised Land’
Diasporism’s limitations emerge starkly when one applies the concept to another people: the Palestinians. The statelessness of the Jewish past, after all, still describes the Palestinian present. The notion that Palestinians ought to accept their lot in the name of a high-minded ideology would strike Jewish diasporists, who tend to favor Palestinian self-determination, as noxious.
“The Jewish refugees from Europe — I think about them stateless, helpless,” said Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian-Israeli writer who now lives in the United States. “This plan of having a state, the modern national state that I’m not a huge fan of, was the only protection. So now it’s the majority of the Palestinians who have replaced the Jewish stateless, defenseless people.”
Citing Hannah Arendt, a Jew born in Germany in 1906, Mr. Kashua argued that talk of human rights by itself was insufficient to protect people. “She writes about how we talk a lot about humanity,” he said, “but when you strip out everything and remain only with humanity, you’re the most vulnerable creature on earth.”
Most likely, diasporism will not triumph among Jewry worldwide or even in the United States. But neither does a return to the monumental stature Zionism enjoyed here after the 1967 war seem inevitable. Instead, a sharp divide is emerging between two increasingly distinct Jewish communities: one in Israel, one not.
Image
Protesters shown from above sit on a floor. Behind them is a sign on the floor that says, “Jews Say Ceasefire Now!”
A rally by members of the Jewish Voice for Peace and the IfNotNow movement in a federal building in Washington, D.C., in October.Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
If Oct. 7 inspired closer feelings to Israel for some Jews, for others its aftermath left them alienated from nationalism altogether. Confronted in the days after Hamas’s attack with the notion that dying as a Jew in Israel represented a nobler death, the writer John Ganz said in a newsletter post, “When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.”
Still others yearn for a more moderate diasporism, with the two Jewish communities in productive tension.
Alan Wolfe, a Boston University professor emeritus of history and author of “At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews,” said that last year — as a far-right Israeli government sought to diminish the judiciary’s independence — Jews elsewhere served valuably as connected critics. “The diaspora can provide what Netanyahu and his extreme right ministers can’t,” he said, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “There’s a great Jewish conscience that has kept the Jew surviving so long being risked by the current political trends in Israel.”
But he criticized non-Israeli Jews who did not understand that diaspora is “as much a mental as a geographic concept” — a status that links disparate people — and so failed to perceive the Hamas attack as an assault on Jews everywhere. It is a lesson, he argued, Israel could help teach them.
“If I could create the ideal world, it would be one in which half the Jews live in Israel and half the Jews don’t, and that’s pretty much what we have,” Mr. Wolfe added. “They need each other — especially now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/us/i ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
Gaza War Is Shifting Ties Between Secular and Ultra-Orthodox Israelis
Israel’s Haredim minority has long lived apart from the nation’s mainstream, but fighting has both widened that divide and in some ways helped to bridge it.
Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman meeting in January with military officials at the Shura base in central Israel. The Hamas-led attacks last fall have changed some ultra-Orthodox Jews’ views toward the military.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
In a neighborhood of Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents cheered a soldier returning from military service. At a religious seminary, similarly devout students gathered to hear an officer talk about his military duties. And at a synagogue attended by some of the most observant Jews in the country, members devoted a Torah scroll in memory of a soldier slain in Gaza.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel last October has prompted flashes of greater solidarity between sections of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority and the secular mainstream, as fears of a shared threat have accelerated the integration of some of Israel’s most insular citizens.
As Israel’s war in Gaza drags on and Israeli reservists are called to serve elongated or additional tours of duty, long-simmering divisions about military exemptions for the country’s most religious Jews are again at the center of a national debate.
But now, in the wake of the deadliest day of attacks on Jews since the Holocaust, parts of Israel’s rapidly growing community of ultra-Orthodox Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim, are reconsidering their role in the nation’s fabric. Unusually high numbers have expressed support for or interest in military service, according to polling data and military statistics, even as the vast majority of Haredim still hope to retain their exemption.
Since Israel’s founding 76 years ago, Haredim have had a fraught relationship with their secular neighbors, in part because of the benefits the small ultra-Orthodox community was guaranteed around that time in an agreement between religious and secular leaders.
Unlike most Israelis, for whom military service is mandatory, Haredim are exempt from conscription to focus on religious study. They also receive substantial state subsidies to maintain an independent education system that eschews math and science for the study of Scripture.
Image
A young man stands in a bare room with stacks of books at one end and long wooden seats at the other.
A study room at Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, Israel. Rabbinical leaders in the city remain unmoved by calls for Haredim to serve in the military. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
As the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews has exploded — to more than one million people today, roughly 13 percent of Israel’s population, from about 40,000 in 1948 — those privileges and exemptions have led to resentment from secular Israelis. Many Israelis feel that their own military service and taxes provide both physical protection and financial reward to an underemployed community that gives little in return. Secular efforts to draw the ultra-Orthodox into the army and the work force have angered many Haredim, who see army service as a threat to their lives of religious devotion.
The army may ultimately come for some Haredim whether they like it or not. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a looming deadline to either extend their exemption or begin to include them in the draft.
The decision, which pits some Haredi lawmakers against secular officials like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who wants to increase Haredi involvement in the military, threatens to bring down the governing coalition.
“The security challenges facing us prove that everyone must bear the burden, every sector of the population,” Mr. Gallant said in a speech on Wednesday.
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Polling shows that the Israeli mainstream is keener than ever to force Haredim to enlist, particularly with a growing number of soldiers returning from battle in Gaza and questioning the absence of ultra-Orthodox on the front lines.
But beyond that standoff, some social divides are being bridged rather than widened.
Image
Photographs and names of hostages are displayed in an open space in Tel Aviv, as a man holding a young child walks past.
Posters in Tel Aviv show the hostages seized on Oct. 7. Such displays are much rarer in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
All of Israel was shaken by the Hamas-led raid in October, whose social and political consequences are expected to play out for years.
Some of the most striking consequences are occurring within the more outward-facing parts of Haredi society, according to polling data, Haredi experts and even some of their harshest secular critics.
Nearly 30 percent of the Haredi public now supports conscription, 20 points higher than before the war, according to a poll conducted in December by the Haredi Institute for Public Affairs, a Jerusalem-based research group. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said their sense of shared destiny with other Israelis had intensified since the Oct. 7 attacks.
“We see some change within the Haredi community,” said Avigdor Liberman, the leader of a nationalist party that has long campaigned to end Haredi privileges. “They understand it is impossible to continue without participating more in our society.”
Incorporating more Haredim, a conservative population, into a modern military includes its own set of challenges, like addressing sensitivities involving men serving alongside women. Yet, more than 2,000 Haredim sought to join the military in the first 10 weeks of the war, a tiny proportion of the serving army but two times the group’s annual average. More Arab Israelis join the army than do the ultra-Orthodox.
Those few Haredim already in the military have reported feeling more feted in their communities, leading them to feel more confident walking through their neighborhoods in uniform.
Image
A man with a white beard and skullcap sits facing right, in a room with a computer behind him.
Yitzhak Goldknopf, a Haredi government minister, is prepared to concede that some ultra-Orthodox Jews can join the army — the ones who aren’t likely to make it as Torah scholars.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
“What we’ve experienced since Oct. 7 will come to be seen as one of the great triggers for change in the Haredi community over the next 30 years,” said Nechamia Steinberger, 40, a Haredi lecturer and rabbi in Jerusalem.
Mr. Steinberger’s own experiences since the attacks embody much of what is afoot. He is among what some experts call the modern Haredim — the estimated 10 percent of the ultra-Orthodox who seek to dovetail their devout lifestyle with the values of modern Israel.
Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
March 4, 2024, 10:40 a.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
‘We have reached a stage of hunger like never before.’
U.N. aid agency researchers say Gazans were abused in Israeli detention.
The meeting may cover humanitarian aid and a potential hostage deal.
For years, Mr. Steinberger has worked to find common ground between different parts of Israeli society. Unlike most Haredim, he completed a form of army service three years ago; after Oct. 7 he returned to the military as a reservist, helping to run a command center that assisted the air force.
It was on his return from nearly three months of duty in late December that he realized how much had changed.
As Mr. Steinberger walked in his uniform through Beit Vegan, an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Jerusalem, groups of Haredi children ran after him, showering him with gratitude, he said.
“That was something new,” he said. “I felt like a hero.”
In his absence, worshipers at a nearby ultra-Orthodox synagogue had dedicated a Torah to a soldier killed during the invasion of Gaza — something that would have been unthinkable before the war.
Image
Israeli soldiers wearing helmets and facing toward smoke rising near a building in the distance.
Israeli soldiers in central Gaza in January. A growing number of soldiers returning from battle question the dearth of ultra-Orthodox on the front lines.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
On a personal level, Mr. Steinberger also felt changed by the war. Twelve weeks of service alongside secular reservists had been a kind of intellectual boot camp. Night after night, he and his fellow soldiers discussed politics and religion, exposing one another to alternative perspectives.
Mr. Steinberger said he emerged more sympathetic to heterodox forms of Judaism and more accepting of the secular campaign to legalize civil marriage.
Chana Irom, a Haredi community organizer, experienced a similar transition after Oct. 7.
For much of her career, Ms. Irom, 44, helped run dormitories for Haredi girls who had left home because of problems with their families. The thought of helping secular Israelis never crossed her mind.
Then came the Hamas attacks.
Jolted by the violence against secular communities along the Gaza border, and moved by the thousands of reservists responding to military call-ups, Ms. Irom pondered how to reach across the social divide.
Within three days, Ms. Irom said, she had helped set up a network of roughly 1,000 Haredi women to assist the families of reservists who had gone to fight, and Israelis evacuated from their homes. Some volunteers helped with babysitting, others with shopping and other household chores.
“I don’t think that before the war I could have convinced anyone, or even myself, to volunteer outside our community,” said Ms. Irom.
Image
A woman in dark clothing holds a cellphone to her ear in an office setting.
Chana Irom created an organization run by Haredi women that helps families of Israeli reservists and those who had to evacuate their homes.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Most of Haredi society, however, has resisted such interactions.
In Bnei Brak, a city east of Tel Aviv that is considered Israel’s ultra-Orthodox capital, there are few posters of the Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7 and whose photographs are ubiquitous in secular neighborhoods.
Rabbinical leaders in the city remain unmoved by calls for Haredim to serve in the military. Within Haredi communities, many fear that the fabric of their insular life would begin to fray if men were forced to skip the full-time study of Scripture.
“The way to help is to study Torah,” Meir Zvi Bergman, one of the most revered rabbis in Israel, said during a rare audience with journalists from The New York Times. “No one can give up on the Torah,” he added.
To show how Rabbi Bergman reflected mainstream Haredi opinion, a Haredi commentator took us to meet boys from a nearby school.
“How are we going to win the war?” the commentator, Bezalel Stauber, asked. “With guns?”
“Not with guns,” one boy replied.
“With what, then?” Mr. Stauber asked.
“Just with prayer,” another boy shot back.
“So where are we going to get our soldiers from?” Mr. Stauber said.
“If all the soldiers studied Torah, we wouldn’t need an army,” the boy replied.
Image
An elderly man sits peering at a book, surrounded by four men leaning in toward him.
Rabbi Meir Zvi Bergman, center, a revered religious leader, said the way to help Israel is to study Scripture.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
But Haredi society is not monolithic, and some leaders have hinted at a change in mind-set.
Yitzhak Goldknopf is a Haredi government minister and the leader of Israel’s second-largest Haredi political alliance. In his government office, Mr. Goldknopf sat surrounded by images of the hostages, many of whom are young women. It was a striking juxtaposition in a society where pictures of women, even in advertisements, are often omitted for fear of upsetting ultraconservative sensibilities.
Mr. Goldknopf broke the rules of the Jewish Sabbath for the first time on Oct. 7, he said, when he was summoned from synagogue for an urgent cabinet meeting. It was also the first time he had been to Israel’s military headquarters. As the officials viewed early images of the carnage, Mr. Goldknopf recalled, a fellow cabinet minister broke down in tears.
“It changed me a great deal,” Mr. Goldknopf said, explaining that it hardened his attitude toward Palestinians. “I thought the world was falling apart,” he added.
Now, Mr. Goldknopf is prepared to concede that some Haredim can join the army — the ones who aren’t likely to make it as Torah scholars.
“Those who won’t study should go,” he said.
“The world stands on three things: Torah, prayer and charity,” he said. But, he added, “The reality is that those who don’t study can go to the army.”
Then he paused the interview to proudly show off a photo of a soldier on his phone.
It was a picture of his nephew.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Israel’s Haredim minority has long lived apart from the nation’s mainstream, but fighting has both widened that divide and in some ways helped to bridge it.
Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman meeting in January with military officials at the Shura base in central Israel. The Hamas-led attacks last fall have changed some ultra-Orthodox Jews’ views toward the military.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
In a neighborhood of Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents cheered a soldier returning from military service. At a religious seminary, similarly devout students gathered to hear an officer talk about his military duties. And at a synagogue attended by some of the most observant Jews in the country, members devoted a Torah scroll in memory of a soldier slain in Gaza.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel last October has prompted flashes of greater solidarity between sections of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority and the secular mainstream, as fears of a shared threat have accelerated the integration of some of Israel’s most insular citizens.
As Israel’s war in Gaza drags on and Israeli reservists are called to serve elongated or additional tours of duty, long-simmering divisions about military exemptions for the country’s most religious Jews are again at the center of a national debate.
But now, in the wake of the deadliest day of attacks on Jews since the Holocaust, parts of Israel’s rapidly growing community of ultra-Orthodox Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim, are reconsidering their role in the nation’s fabric. Unusually high numbers have expressed support for or interest in military service, according to polling data and military statistics, even as the vast majority of Haredim still hope to retain their exemption.
Since Israel’s founding 76 years ago, Haredim have had a fraught relationship with their secular neighbors, in part because of the benefits the small ultra-Orthodox community was guaranteed around that time in an agreement between religious and secular leaders.
Unlike most Israelis, for whom military service is mandatory, Haredim are exempt from conscription to focus on religious study. They also receive substantial state subsidies to maintain an independent education system that eschews math and science for the study of Scripture.
Image
A young man stands in a bare room with stacks of books at one end and long wooden seats at the other.
A study room at Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak, Israel. Rabbinical leaders in the city remain unmoved by calls for Haredim to serve in the military. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
As the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews has exploded — to more than one million people today, roughly 13 percent of Israel’s population, from about 40,000 in 1948 — those privileges and exemptions have led to resentment from secular Israelis. Many Israelis feel that their own military service and taxes provide both physical protection and financial reward to an underemployed community that gives little in return. Secular efforts to draw the ultra-Orthodox into the army and the work force have angered many Haredim, who see army service as a threat to their lives of religious devotion.
The army may ultimately come for some Haredim whether they like it or not. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a looming deadline to either extend their exemption or begin to include them in the draft.
The decision, which pits some Haredi lawmakers against secular officials like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who wants to increase Haredi involvement in the military, threatens to bring down the governing coalition.
“The security challenges facing us prove that everyone must bear the burden, every sector of the population,” Mr. Gallant said in a speech on Wednesday.
Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.
Polling shows that the Israeli mainstream is keener than ever to force Haredim to enlist, particularly with a growing number of soldiers returning from battle in Gaza and questioning the absence of ultra-Orthodox on the front lines.
But beyond that standoff, some social divides are being bridged rather than widened.
Image
Photographs and names of hostages are displayed in an open space in Tel Aviv, as a man holding a young child walks past.
Posters in Tel Aviv show the hostages seized on Oct. 7. Such displays are much rarer in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
All of Israel was shaken by the Hamas-led raid in October, whose social and political consequences are expected to play out for years.
Some of the most striking consequences are occurring within the more outward-facing parts of Haredi society, according to polling data, Haredi experts and even some of their harshest secular critics.
Nearly 30 percent of the Haredi public now supports conscription, 20 points higher than before the war, according to a poll conducted in December by the Haredi Institute for Public Affairs, a Jerusalem-based research group. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said their sense of shared destiny with other Israelis had intensified since the Oct. 7 attacks.
“We see some change within the Haredi community,” said Avigdor Liberman, the leader of a nationalist party that has long campaigned to end Haredi privileges. “They understand it is impossible to continue without participating more in our society.”
Incorporating more Haredim, a conservative population, into a modern military includes its own set of challenges, like addressing sensitivities involving men serving alongside women. Yet, more than 2,000 Haredim sought to join the military in the first 10 weeks of the war, a tiny proportion of the serving army but two times the group’s annual average. More Arab Israelis join the army than do the ultra-Orthodox.
Those few Haredim already in the military have reported feeling more feted in their communities, leading them to feel more confident walking through their neighborhoods in uniform.
Image
A man with a white beard and skullcap sits facing right, in a room with a computer behind him.
Yitzhak Goldknopf, a Haredi government minister, is prepared to concede that some ultra-Orthodox Jews can join the army — the ones who aren’t likely to make it as Torah scholars.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
“What we’ve experienced since Oct. 7 will come to be seen as one of the great triggers for change in the Haredi community over the next 30 years,” said Nechamia Steinberger, 40, a Haredi lecturer and rabbi in Jerusalem.
Mr. Steinberger’s own experiences since the attacks embody much of what is afoot. He is among what some experts call the modern Haredim — the estimated 10 percent of the ultra-Orthodox who seek to dovetail their devout lifestyle with the values of modern Israel.
Israel-Hamas War: Live Updates
Updated
March 4, 2024, 10:40 a.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
‘We have reached a stage of hunger like never before.’
U.N. aid agency researchers say Gazans were abused in Israeli detention.
The meeting may cover humanitarian aid and a potential hostage deal.
For years, Mr. Steinberger has worked to find common ground between different parts of Israeli society. Unlike most Haredim, he completed a form of army service three years ago; after Oct. 7 he returned to the military as a reservist, helping to run a command center that assisted the air force.
It was on his return from nearly three months of duty in late December that he realized how much had changed.
As Mr. Steinberger walked in his uniform through Beit Vegan, an ultra-Orthodox suburb of Jerusalem, groups of Haredi children ran after him, showering him with gratitude, he said.
“That was something new,” he said. “I felt like a hero.”
In his absence, worshipers at a nearby ultra-Orthodox synagogue had dedicated a Torah to a soldier killed during the invasion of Gaza — something that would have been unthinkable before the war.
Image
Israeli soldiers wearing helmets and facing toward smoke rising near a building in the distance.
Israeli soldiers in central Gaza in January. A growing number of soldiers returning from battle question the dearth of ultra-Orthodox on the front lines.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
On a personal level, Mr. Steinberger also felt changed by the war. Twelve weeks of service alongside secular reservists had been a kind of intellectual boot camp. Night after night, he and his fellow soldiers discussed politics and religion, exposing one another to alternative perspectives.
Mr. Steinberger said he emerged more sympathetic to heterodox forms of Judaism and more accepting of the secular campaign to legalize civil marriage.
Chana Irom, a Haredi community organizer, experienced a similar transition after Oct. 7.
For much of her career, Ms. Irom, 44, helped run dormitories for Haredi girls who had left home because of problems with their families. The thought of helping secular Israelis never crossed her mind.
Then came the Hamas attacks.
Jolted by the violence against secular communities along the Gaza border, and moved by the thousands of reservists responding to military call-ups, Ms. Irom pondered how to reach across the social divide.
Within three days, Ms. Irom said, she had helped set up a network of roughly 1,000 Haredi women to assist the families of reservists who had gone to fight, and Israelis evacuated from their homes. Some volunteers helped with babysitting, others with shopping and other household chores.
“I don’t think that before the war I could have convinced anyone, or even myself, to volunteer outside our community,” said Ms. Irom.
Image
A woman in dark clothing holds a cellphone to her ear in an office setting.
Chana Irom created an organization run by Haredi women that helps families of Israeli reservists and those who had to evacuate their homes.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Most of Haredi society, however, has resisted such interactions.
In Bnei Brak, a city east of Tel Aviv that is considered Israel’s ultra-Orthodox capital, there are few posters of the Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7 and whose photographs are ubiquitous in secular neighborhoods.
Rabbinical leaders in the city remain unmoved by calls for Haredim to serve in the military. Within Haredi communities, many fear that the fabric of their insular life would begin to fray if men were forced to skip the full-time study of Scripture.
“The way to help is to study Torah,” Meir Zvi Bergman, one of the most revered rabbis in Israel, said during a rare audience with journalists from The New York Times. “No one can give up on the Torah,” he added.
To show how Rabbi Bergman reflected mainstream Haredi opinion, a Haredi commentator took us to meet boys from a nearby school.
“How are we going to win the war?” the commentator, Bezalel Stauber, asked. “With guns?”
“Not with guns,” one boy replied.
“With what, then?” Mr. Stauber asked.
“Just with prayer,” another boy shot back.
“So where are we going to get our soldiers from?” Mr. Stauber said.
“If all the soldiers studied Torah, we wouldn’t need an army,” the boy replied.
Image
An elderly man sits peering at a book, surrounded by four men leaning in toward him.
Rabbi Meir Zvi Bergman, center, a revered religious leader, said the way to help Israel is to study Scripture.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
But Haredi society is not monolithic, and some leaders have hinted at a change in mind-set.
Yitzhak Goldknopf is a Haredi government minister and the leader of Israel’s second-largest Haredi political alliance. In his government office, Mr. Goldknopf sat surrounded by images of the hostages, many of whom are young women. It was a striking juxtaposition in a society where pictures of women, even in advertisements, are often omitted for fear of upsetting ultraconservative sensibilities.
Mr. Goldknopf broke the rules of the Jewish Sabbath for the first time on Oct. 7, he said, when he was summoned from synagogue for an urgent cabinet meeting. It was also the first time he had been to Israel’s military headquarters. As the officials viewed early images of the carnage, Mr. Goldknopf recalled, a fellow cabinet minister broke down in tears.
“It changed me a great deal,” Mr. Goldknopf said, explaining that it hardened his attitude toward Palestinians. “I thought the world was falling apart,” he added.
Now, Mr. Goldknopf is prepared to concede that some Haredim can join the army — the ones who aren’t likely to make it as Torah scholars.
“Those who won’t study should go,” he said.
“The world stands on three things: Torah, prayer and charity,” he said. But, he added, “The reality is that those who don’t study can go to the army.”
Then he paused the interview to proudly show off a photo of a soldier on his phone.
It was a picture of his nephew.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
Where Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism Collide
Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self-determination and control over its own fate,” said one typical recent message. “How is singling out the Jewish people to deprive it of those rights not antisemitic?”
To answer this question fully would take more than a single column, but I want to make a brief attempt, because lately, in reaction to the grotesque suffering in Gaza, two ugly, intertwined trends are gaining steam. Well-intentioned opponents of Jewish nationalism, some Jewish themselves, are being falsely smeared as antisemites. At the same time, antisemitism is cloaking itself in anti-Zionism, with people spitting out the word “Zionist” when they really seem to mean “Jew.”
My own views on Zionism are ambivalent and conflicted. I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. I think the idea of Israel as a colonial entity that will eventually be dismantled is a malign fantasy — most Jewish Israelis don’t have anywhere else to go — but I also recognize that the country’s creation can’t be disentangled from the dispossession of the Palestinians.
Yes, as Zionists often point out, Palestinians were far from the only people made refugees as maps were redrawn in the wake of World War II. After Israel’s creation, more Jews were uprooted from Arab and Muslim countries than Arabs expelled from their homes in historic Palestine. It is not Israel’s fault that some of its neighbors kept displaced Palestinians as stateless refugees rather than integrating them as full citizens. But I could never blame a Palestinian for thinking it obscenely unfair that I have a right to “return” to a country to which I have no family connection, while Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 do not.
I also understand why many Jews, the survivors of millenniums of attempts to destroy them as a people, put their need for national self-determination above other, competing values. But one needn’t hate Jews to make a different moral calculus.
Right now, the relentless growth of settlements in the West Bank has created a one-state reality on the ground, although one in which people have very different rights and freedoms depending on their ethnic and religious background. There are people of good will who think the way out of this insupportable situation lies in the fight for equal democratic rights in a single state for everyone living in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality,” Peter Beinart wrote in Jewish Currents in 2020.
The idea of a binational state appeals to my belief in democracy and multiculturalism, but in practice I fear it would be a disaster that would devolve into a horrific civil war. (It’s hard enough for the Flemish and Walloons to manage sharing a state in Belgium.) Yet as long as the status quo is intolerable and the two-state solution favored by liberals like me seems far out of reach, it is understandable that idealists will grope for an alternative.
That said, I can’t fault Jews who see, in the mounting demonization of Zionism, the replay of an old and terrifying story. After all, anti-Zionism isn’t always antisemitism, but sometimes it is. And right now, some opponents of Israel seem to be trying to prove that the mainstream Jewish community is right to conflate them.
An Israeli American student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent me a photo of graffiti reading “Zionists not welcome,” with an arrow pointing to a mezuza hung in a dorm room doorway. In San Francisco, where artists and activists have insisted that the influential Yerba Buena Center for the Arts purge “Zionist board members and funders,” the center’s Jewish chief executive resigned last week, citing a “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally.”
Plenty of leftists will swear up and down that they’re not being antisemitic when they use “Zionist” as the most contemptuous of epithets. A Salt Lake City bar owner who has banned “Zionists” from his establishment insisted, on Instagram, that Zionism “has nothing to do with the beautiful Jewish faith.”
But the vast majority of Jews disagree, and the longing for a return to Israel is deeply intertwined with Jewish religious practice; rituals for the two most important Jewish holidays, Passover and Yom Kippur, culminate with the words “next year in Jerusalem.” There is a long history of Jews being asked to excise what they see as crucial parts of their identity as a condition of acceptance. There is an equally long history of such acceptance, if it’s granted at all, being fleeting.
As I write this, the literary magazine Guernica is having a meltdown over a searching essay written by Joanna Chen, a British Israeli translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry, about trying, after Oct. 7, to “tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides,” and finding meaning in driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. Nothing in Chen’s writing suggests anything but horror at the carnage being visited on civilians in Gaza, but the piece nevertheless occasioned mass resignations from Guernica’s all-volunteer staff; the magazine’s former co-publisher called it “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism.”
In a cowardly move, Guernica retracted the essay and issued regrets for having published it. On parts of the left, at this fanatically Manichaean moment, Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are allowed their humanity only if they’re willing to explicitly reject the collective. Few other peoples are subject to similar expectations.
The analogy is imperfect, but I’d compare left-wing demands that Jews disavow Zionism to right-wing demands for Muslims to renounce Shariah. There’s nothing wrong with opposing the authority of religious law or criticizing how Shariah is applied in parts of the Muslim world. But treating Muslims as suspect if they won’t break with their own traditions is obviously Islamophobic.
After years of arguing that the intention behind offensive words matters less than their effects, leftists should be equipped to bring a bit of subtlety and sensitivity to discussions of Jews and Zionism. Refusing to do so does nothing to help Palestinians. It just convinces too many Jews that cries for Palestinian liberation are a threat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self-determination and control over its own fate,” said one typical recent message. “How is singling out the Jewish people to deprive it of those rights not antisemitic?”
To answer this question fully would take more than a single column, but I want to make a brief attempt, because lately, in reaction to the grotesque suffering in Gaza, two ugly, intertwined trends are gaining steam. Well-intentioned opponents of Jewish nationalism, some Jewish themselves, are being falsely smeared as antisemites. At the same time, antisemitism is cloaking itself in anti-Zionism, with people spitting out the word “Zionist” when they really seem to mean “Jew.”
My own views on Zionism are ambivalent and conflicted. I’m a secular Jew with no particular attachment to Israel, spiritual or otherwise, though I also recognize that my ability to hold myself aloof from the country is enabled by the great privilege of an American passport. I think the idea of Israel as a colonial entity that will eventually be dismantled is a malign fantasy — most Jewish Israelis don’t have anywhere else to go — but I also recognize that the country’s creation can’t be disentangled from the dispossession of the Palestinians.
Yes, as Zionists often point out, Palestinians were far from the only people made refugees as maps were redrawn in the wake of World War II. After Israel’s creation, more Jews were uprooted from Arab and Muslim countries than Arabs expelled from their homes in historic Palestine. It is not Israel’s fault that some of its neighbors kept displaced Palestinians as stateless refugees rather than integrating them as full citizens. But I could never blame a Palestinian for thinking it obscenely unfair that I have a right to “return” to a country to which I have no family connection, while Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 do not.
I also understand why many Jews, the survivors of millenniums of attempts to destroy them as a people, put their need for national self-determination above other, competing values. But one needn’t hate Jews to make a different moral calculus.
Right now, the relentless growth of settlements in the West Bank has created a one-state reality on the ground, although one in which people have very different rights and freedoms depending on their ethnic and religious background. There are people of good will who think the way out of this insupportable situation lies in the fight for equal democratic rights in a single state for everyone living in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality,” Peter Beinart wrote in Jewish Currents in 2020.
The idea of a binational state appeals to my belief in democracy and multiculturalism, but in practice I fear it would be a disaster that would devolve into a horrific civil war. (It’s hard enough for the Flemish and Walloons to manage sharing a state in Belgium.) Yet as long as the status quo is intolerable and the two-state solution favored by liberals like me seems far out of reach, it is understandable that idealists will grope for an alternative.
That said, I can’t fault Jews who see, in the mounting demonization of Zionism, the replay of an old and terrifying story. After all, anti-Zionism isn’t always antisemitism, but sometimes it is. And right now, some opponents of Israel seem to be trying to prove that the mainstream Jewish community is right to conflate them.
An Israeli American student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent me a photo of graffiti reading “Zionists not welcome,” with an arrow pointing to a mezuza hung in a dorm room doorway. In San Francisco, where artists and activists have insisted that the influential Yerba Buena Center for the Arts purge “Zionist board members and funders,” the center’s Jewish chief executive resigned last week, citing a “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally.”
Plenty of leftists will swear up and down that they’re not being antisemitic when they use “Zionist” as the most contemptuous of epithets. A Salt Lake City bar owner who has banned “Zionists” from his establishment insisted, on Instagram, that Zionism “has nothing to do with the beautiful Jewish faith.”
But the vast majority of Jews disagree, and the longing for a return to Israel is deeply intertwined with Jewish religious practice; rituals for the two most important Jewish holidays, Passover and Yom Kippur, culminate with the words “next year in Jerusalem.” There is a long history of Jews being asked to excise what they see as crucial parts of their identity as a condition of acceptance. There is an equally long history of such acceptance, if it’s granted at all, being fleeting.
As I write this, the literary magazine Guernica is having a meltdown over a searching essay written by Joanna Chen, a British Israeli translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry, about trying, after Oct. 7, to “tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides,” and finding meaning in driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. Nothing in Chen’s writing suggests anything but horror at the carnage being visited on civilians in Gaza, but the piece nevertheless occasioned mass resignations from Guernica’s all-volunteer staff; the magazine’s former co-publisher called it “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism.”
In a cowardly move, Guernica retracted the essay and issued regrets for having published it. On parts of the left, at this fanatically Manichaean moment, Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are allowed their humanity only if they’re willing to explicitly reject the collective. Few other peoples are subject to similar expectations.
The analogy is imperfect, but I’d compare left-wing demands that Jews disavow Zionism to right-wing demands for Muslims to renounce Shariah. There’s nothing wrong with opposing the authority of religious law or criticizing how Shariah is applied in parts of the Muslim world. But treating Muslims as suspect if they won’t break with their own traditions is obviously Islamophobic.
After years of arguing that the intention behind offensive words matters less than their effects, leftists should be equipped to bring a bit of subtlety and sensitivity to discussions of Jews and Zionism. Refusing to do so does nothing to help Palestinians. It just convinces too many Jews that cries for Palestinian liberation are a threat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
What Is Antisemitism? A Columbia Task Force Would Rather Not Say.
Definitions of the term are highly contested, so a group monitoring antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus has avoided picking sides. It is still facing criticism.
A debate over how to define antisemitism is dividing campuses.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.
Competing factions on campus and beyond are pushing for two different definitions. The first, favored by the U.S. State Department and many supporters of Israel, says “targeting of the state of Israel” could be antisemitic, a definition that could label much of the pro-Palestinian activism sweeping campus as antisemitic.
The second is narrower. It distinguishes between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and could lead to criticism that the school is not taking antisemitism seriously enough.
The debate over the definitions has become a lightning rod for the Columbia task force and for other universities around the country. The task force is charged with “understanding how antisemitism manifests on campus” and improving the climate for Jewish faculty and students. But the refusal to pick a definition has also been met with harsh criticism on both sides.
“If you don’t diagnose the problem, you don’t have to deal with it,” said Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor who is Israeli and favors the more sweeping definition. He added, “Saying we don’t want to define it so we don’t have a problem, that’s copping out.”
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist faculty and students, quite a few of whom are Jewish, fear that without a definition, the antisemitism task force could be too sweeping in the speech and activity it seeks to regulate.
Columbia’s dilemma illustrates the broad challenge universities are facing as they attempt to walk a line between protecting free speech and avoiding discrimination lawsuits from Jewish students.
Universities are also facing enormous outside pressure. Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, and the co-chairs of its board of directors have been called to testify at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on April 17. Ms. Shafik did not attend the contentious December hearing where the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania struggled to answer questions about whether a call for the genocide of Jews would violate school policies.
Columbia has already been sued in a federal civil rights lawsuit, filed by more than a dozen Jewish students, which describes the university as an institution where “mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty march by the hundreds shouting vile antisemitic slogans, including calls to genocide.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators dispute that chants like “By any means necessary” and “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution” are antisemitic calls to genocide.
Tensions at America’s Colleges Over Israel-Hamas War
University of California: With tensions rising over the war in Gaza, the regents of the institution are set to vote on a proposal according to which academic departments would be barred from posting political statements on their home pages. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/us/u ... nks_recirc
Harvard: Representative Virginia Foxx, who is leading a House investigation of campus antisemitism, blasted the institution for handing over “useless” documents in response to subpoenas.
College Dorm Decorations: Barnard College has required students to strip decorations from their dorm doors in the wake of protests over the Israel-Hamas war. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/nyre ... nks_recirc
Congress Testimony: At a round table organized by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, nine Jewish students from prominent universities said that they had felt unsafe on campus, but that their complaints of antisemitism had been waved away by university administrations. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/a ... nks_recirc
For the task force, the university chose three Jewish professors as co-chairs because they are seasoned senior faculty who know how Columbia works. They are not academic experts in antisemitism research, however.
The professors argue that their 15-member task force does not need to define antisemitism, because they don’t see it as their task to label things as antisemitic or not. Rather, they want to hear why Jewish students and faculty are upset and see if there are practical solutions that can be found to help them feel more comfortable.
“I get letters from parents every single day, just regular people, students,” one of the co-chairs, Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of the journalism school, said in an interview. He said that many of them ask: “‘Why aren’t you listening? Why aren’t you doing anything?’”
“Our job is not to define antisemitism,” he said, adding, “Our job is to listen to them, make them feel that somebody at Columbia cares about them, and to try to figure out what is causing this great discomfort and distress, and whether anything can be done to ameliorate it that’s consistent with the values of the university.”
Pro-Israel Jewish advocacy groups have been pushing for years for organizations and governments to adopt the more sweeping definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which wraps in anti-Zionist speech. Since 2016, it has been endorsed by more than 40 countries, including Israel.
There is no dispute about the core of the definition — antisemitism, it states, is a “certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred” toward them. But its examples about Israel can be broadly interpreted, in ways that critics say would unfairly silence political criticism.
For example, the definition says that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” could be antisemitic.
Left-wing Jews often support the newer, Jerusalem Declaration definition, which takes a more tolerant approach toward criticism of Israel, including toward boycotts and sanctions of the Jewish state. Another definition, known as the Nexus Document, stands in the uneasy middle.
At Harvard and Stanford, antisemitism task force members have faced harsh criticism for not supporting the more sweeping definition; that tension was one reason the co-chair of the task force at Stanford decided to resign.
At Columbia, the task force chairs are trying to avoid falling into a similar trap. But fighting something without defining it could prove difficult.
“If you want to understand any issue and any problem, you need to have an understanding of what it is,” said Dov Waxman, an expert on antisemitism at UCLA. “You can’t count something if you’re not able to understand what it is.”
He recommended that the Columbia task force refer to more than one definition, as the Biden administration did last year in outlining its antisemitism strategy. The task force has not ruled out such a step, Mr. Lemann said.
Some of the Columbia task-force listening sessions on campus have become tense. At a March 1 session with graduate students, for example, several anti-Zionist Jews demanded to know what the definition of antisemitism would be and whether their views would be included in it.
Ester Fuchs, an urban policy professor and task force co-chair, interrupted them and became hostile, four students charged in a subsequent letter to Ms. Shafik and other administrators in which they called on Professor Fuchs to be replaced on the task force by an anti-Zionist.
Caitlin Liss, a Jewish graduate student who signed the letter, said she is part of a “long Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism” that includes many students at the school. But, she said, “you would never know that on campus from the way that the administration talks about it, from the way that the task force talks about it.”
Professor Fuchs said the students “attempted to disrupt the session and ignore its purpose — to listen to students’ concerns and experiences with antisemitism on campus.”
Joseph Howley, a Jewish classics professor and supporter of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement, was invited to attend a listening session, but didn’t go. “I have no reason to believe I’ll be taken seriously,” he said. In the end, only a few of the roughly 40 faculty members who had been invited to a listening session intended for critics of Israel attended.
In another session, Amy Werman, a professor at the School of Social Work who supports Israel, brought up a question about whether the task force might just be window dressing to appease Congress.
“Ester, oh, boy, she did not take to that kindly,” she said, referring to Professor Fuchs. “I would almost say I felt like she was attacking me.”
Professor Fuchs disputed that and said she had replied: “You obviously don’t know us. We have never been window dressing, and we don’t intend to be now.”
Still, at least some Jewish students who have felt ostracized or unsafe on campus have found the listening sessions helpful, said Rebecca Massel, a sophomore who covers antisemitism for The Columbia Spectator.
“It’s been an outlet for students to raise concerns,” she said.
The task force is now hiring a research director to develop a study on antisemitism at Columbia and recommend training materials for the university.
Earlier this month, it issued its first report. The 24-page document called for additional limits on protests and better enforcement of existing rules, to address a key complaint of Jewish students who say the environment at Columbia has become intolerable.
Protests were the first focus, Professor Fuchs said, because they are the “most overtly disruptive to life on campus and make people feel like they’re unsafe, like they’re unwelcome and they should find another place to go to school.”
As for whether some common anti-Israel protest chants like “Death to the Zionist State” could amount to discriminatory harassment of Jewish or Israeli students, the report largely punted, saying that was ultimately a question for lawyers.
In its report, the task force suggested the university take on the issue. “We urge the university to provide more guidance on the meaning of ‘discriminatory harassment,’ including antisemitic harassment,” the report said.
Under federal law, “our policy definition of discriminatory harassment needs to be general, not tailored only to protect Jews and Israelis,” said David M. Schizer, another co-chair and former dean of Columbia’s law school, explaining why the report didn’t define antisemitism in that context. “Otherwise, our policy might treat protected classes differently, which itself is a problem under federal law.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
Definitions of the term are highly contested, so a group monitoring antisemitism on Columbia University’s campus has avoided picking sides. It is still facing criticism.
A debate over how to define antisemitism is dividing campuses.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.
Competing factions on campus and beyond are pushing for two different definitions. The first, favored by the U.S. State Department and many supporters of Israel, says “targeting of the state of Israel” could be antisemitic, a definition that could label much of the pro-Palestinian activism sweeping campus as antisemitic.
The second is narrower. It distinguishes between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and could lead to criticism that the school is not taking antisemitism seriously enough.
The debate over the definitions has become a lightning rod for the Columbia task force and for other universities around the country. The task force is charged with “understanding how antisemitism manifests on campus” and improving the climate for Jewish faculty and students. But the refusal to pick a definition has also been met with harsh criticism on both sides.
“If you don’t diagnose the problem, you don’t have to deal with it,” said Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor who is Israeli and favors the more sweeping definition. He added, “Saying we don’t want to define it so we don’t have a problem, that’s copping out.”
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist faculty and students, quite a few of whom are Jewish, fear that without a definition, the antisemitism task force could be too sweeping in the speech and activity it seeks to regulate.
Columbia’s dilemma illustrates the broad challenge universities are facing as they attempt to walk a line between protecting free speech and avoiding discrimination lawsuits from Jewish students.
Universities are also facing enormous outside pressure. Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, and the co-chairs of its board of directors have been called to testify at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on April 17. Ms. Shafik did not attend the contentious December hearing where the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania struggled to answer questions about whether a call for the genocide of Jews would violate school policies.
Columbia has already been sued in a federal civil rights lawsuit, filed by more than a dozen Jewish students, which describes the university as an institution where “mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty march by the hundreds shouting vile antisemitic slogans, including calls to genocide.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators dispute that chants like “By any means necessary” and “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution” are antisemitic calls to genocide.
Tensions at America’s Colleges Over Israel-Hamas War
University of California: With tensions rising over the war in Gaza, the regents of the institution are set to vote on a proposal according to which academic departments would be barred from posting political statements on their home pages. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/us/u ... nks_recirc
Harvard: Representative Virginia Foxx, who is leading a House investigation of campus antisemitism, blasted the institution for handing over “useless” documents in response to subpoenas.
College Dorm Decorations: Barnard College has required students to strip decorations from their dorm doors in the wake of protests over the Israel-Hamas war. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/nyre ... nks_recirc
Congress Testimony: At a round table organized by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, nine Jewish students from prominent universities said that they had felt unsafe on campus, but that their complaints of antisemitism had been waved away by university administrations. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/a ... nks_recirc
For the task force, the university chose three Jewish professors as co-chairs because they are seasoned senior faculty who know how Columbia works. They are not academic experts in antisemitism research, however.
The professors argue that their 15-member task force does not need to define antisemitism, because they don’t see it as their task to label things as antisemitic or not. Rather, they want to hear why Jewish students and faculty are upset and see if there are practical solutions that can be found to help them feel more comfortable.
“I get letters from parents every single day, just regular people, students,” one of the co-chairs, Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of the journalism school, said in an interview. He said that many of them ask: “‘Why aren’t you listening? Why aren’t you doing anything?’”
“Our job is not to define antisemitism,” he said, adding, “Our job is to listen to them, make them feel that somebody at Columbia cares about them, and to try to figure out what is causing this great discomfort and distress, and whether anything can be done to ameliorate it that’s consistent with the values of the university.”
Pro-Israel Jewish advocacy groups have been pushing for years for organizations and governments to adopt the more sweeping definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which wraps in anti-Zionist speech. Since 2016, it has been endorsed by more than 40 countries, including Israel.
There is no dispute about the core of the definition — antisemitism, it states, is a “certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred” toward them. But its examples about Israel can be broadly interpreted, in ways that critics say would unfairly silence political criticism.
For example, the definition says that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” could be antisemitic.
Left-wing Jews often support the newer, Jerusalem Declaration definition, which takes a more tolerant approach toward criticism of Israel, including toward boycotts and sanctions of the Jewish state. Another definition, known as the Nexus Document, stands in the uneasy middle.
At Harvard and Stanford, antisemitism task force members have faced harsh criticism for not supporting the more sweeping definition; that tension was one reason the co-chair of the task force at Stanford decided to resign.
At Columbia, the task force chairs are trying to avoid falling into a similar trap. But fighting something without defining it could prove difficult.
“If you want to understand any issue and any problem, you need to have an understanding of what it is,” said Dov Waxman, an expert on antisemitism at UCLA. “You can’t count something if you’re not able to understand what it is.”
He recommended that the Columbia task force refer to more than one definition, as the Biden administration did last year in outlining its antisemitism strategy. The task force has not ruled out such a step, Mr. Lemann said.
Some of the Columbia task-force listening sessions on campus have become tense. At a March 1 session with graduate students, for example, several anti-Zionist Jews demanded to know what the definition of antisemitism would be and whether their views would be included in it.
Ester Fuchs, an urban policy professor and task force co-chair, interrupted them and became hostile, four students charged in a subsequent letter to Ms. Shafik and other administrators in which they called on Professor Fuchs to be replaced on the task force by an anti-Zionist.
Caitlin Liss, a Jewish graduate student who signed the letter, said she is part of a “long Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism” that includes many students at the school. But, she said, “you would never know that on campus from the way that the administration talks about it, from the way that the task force talks about it.”
Professor Fuchs said the students “attempted to disrupt the session and ignore its purpose — to listen to students’ concerns and experiences with antisemitism on campus.”
Joseph Howley, a Jewish classics professor and supporter of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement, was invited to attend a listening session, but didn’t go. “I have no reason to believe I’ll be taken seriously,” he said. In the end, only a few of the roughly 40 faculty members who had been invited to a listening session intended for critics of Israel attended.
In another session, Amy Werman, a professor at the School of Social Work who supports Israel, brought up a question about whether the task force might just be window dressing to appease Congress.
“Ester, oh, boy, she did not take to that kindly,” she said, referring to Professor Fuchs. “I would almost say I felt like she was attacking me.”
Professor Fuchs disputed that and said she had replied: “You obviously don’t know us. We have never been window dressing, and we don’t intend to be now.”
Still, at least some Jewish students who have felt ostracized or unsafe on campus have found the listening sessions helpful, said Rebecca Massel, a sophomore who covers antisemitism for The Columbia Spectator.
“It’s been an outlet for students to raise concerns,” she said.
The task force is now hiring a research director to develop a study on antisemitism at Columbia and recommend training materials for the university.
Earlier this month, it issued its first report. The 24-page document called for additional limits on protests and better enforcement of existing rules, to address a key complaint of Jewish students who say the environment at Columbia has become intolerable.
Protests were the first focus, Professor Fuchs said, because they are the “most overtly disruptive to life on campus and make people feel like they’re unsafe, like they’re unwelcome and they should find another place to go to school.”
As for whether some common anti-Israel protest chants like “Death to the Zionist State” could amount to discriminatory harassment of Jewish or Israeli students, the report largely punted, saying that was ultimately a question for lawyers.
In its report, the task force suggested the university take on the issue. “We urge the university to provide more guidance on the meaning of ‘discriminatory harassment,’ including antisemitic harassment,” the report said.
Under federal law, “our policy definition of discriminatory harassment needs to be general, not tailored only to protect Jews and Israelis,” said David M. Schizer, another co-chair and former dean of Columbia’s law school, explaining why the report didn’t define antisemitism in that context. “Otherwise, our policy might treat protected classes differently, which itself is a problem under federal law.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/nyre ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
Dispute Over Conscription for Ultra-Orthodox Jews Presents New Threat to Netanyahu
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet is divided about whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should be required to join the Israeli army.
Israeli military officers and noncommissioned officers during a ceremony in January at the Shura base in central Israel.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing his most challenging political threat since the start of the Gaza war because of a disagreement among members of his coalition about whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should retain their longstanding exemption from military service.
An unwieldy right-wing alliance of secular and ultra-Orthodox lawmakers, the coalition’s members are divided about whether the state should continue to allow young ultra-Orthodox men to study at religious seminaries instead of serving in the military, as most other Jewish Israelis do. If the government abolishes the exemption, it risks a walkout from the ultra-Orthodox lawmakers; if it lets the exemption stand, the secular members could withdraw. Either way, the coalition could collapse.
The situation poses the gravest challenge to Mr. Netanyahu’s grip on power since Hamas raided Israel on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to invade Hamas’s stronghold in the Gaza Strip. Criticized by many Israelis for presiding over the October disaster, Mr. Netanyahu is trailing in the polls and faces growing calls to resign. But until now, there were few obvious ways in which his coalition might collapse.
The end of the coalition would most likely lead to new elections, and polling suggests that Mr. Netanyahu would not win.
A new Israeli government led by centrists is unlikely to take a markedly different approach to the war in Gaza, but it may be more open to allowing the Palestinian leadership in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to play a bigger role in Gaza after the war. That arrangement could create a more conducive environment for Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, which had edged closer to sealing diplomatic ties with Israel before the war broke out.
The ultra-Orthodox have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel in 1948, but as the numbers of the ultra-Orthodox have grown — and especially in the months since the war began — so have resentment and anger over these privileges.
The issue came to the fore on Thursday evening when the government announced that the coalition had not agreed on an extension to the exemption by April 1, when the current exemption elapses. That news prompted the Supreme Court to instruct the government, as soon as the deadline passes, to suspend special educational subsidies that support seminary students if those students have failed to answer their military call-ups.
Image
A man holding an Israeli flag confronting a man holding a protest sign and standing behind a barricade.
A protester, demanding equality in Israel’s military service, confronting an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man demonstrating in favor of military exemptions for religious seminary students in February in Jerusalem.Credit...Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
The court’s decision spurred outrage among ultra-Orthodox leaders who fear for the financial future of their education system, which depends largely on state subsidies, and are concerned that the funding freeze is the first step toward mandatory military service for their community.
For now, some ultra-Orthodox leaders have said that their parties will remain in the coalition while they wait to see what happens.
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The standoff reflects how a decades-long battle over the character and future of the Jewish state has become graver since Oct. 7. Secular Israelis have long clashed with the ultra-Orthodox minority, known in Hebrew as Haredim, about how religious the state should be and how much autonomy the Haredim should have.
Now, a growing number of soldiers, including those from religious backgrounds, are returning from the front lines in Gaza and questioning why they should be risking their lives for a minority that receives vast educational subsidies, contributes less to the economy than other parts of society and mostly does not serve in the military.
Significant sections of the Haredi public have displayed a greater sense of shared destiny with mainstream Israelis since the attack, with some expressing greater support for the army and a small minority showing more interest in joining it. Roughly 1,000 Haredi men currently serve voluntarily in the military — less than 1 percent of all soldiers — but more than 2,000 Haredim sought to join the military in the first 10 weeks of the war, according to military statistics.
Image
Crowds of people on a roadway can be seen snarling traffic.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys and men blocking traffic this month in Jerusalem during a protest against the expiration of a law preventing them from being drafted into the army.Credit...Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
But the Haredi leadership remains deeply opposed to mandatory military service, fearing that it might disrupt their conservative way of life, which is centered around intensive Torah study in seminaries, or yeshivas.
“If a yeshiva student has to leave the yeshiva to be drafted, for whatever the reason, then we will not stay in the government,” said Moshe Roth, a Haredi lawmaker.
“This is a make it or break it,” he said.
“The only way to protect the Torah and to keep it alive, as it has been for the last 3,500 years, is by having yeshivas,” Mr. Roth added.
The dispute is rooted in decisions made in the years surrounding Israel’s founding, when the country’s secular leadership promised autonomy and privileges to the ultra-Orthodox minority in exchange for their support for a largely secular national project. As well as exemption from the draft, the Haredim are allowed to run their own autonomous education system.
When the numbers of the Haredim were relatively small, their privileges mattered less to the Israeli mainstream. But as their population has swelled to more than one million people, roughly 13 percent of Israel’s population — up from 40,000, or 5 percent, in 1948 — even many observant Jews who serve in the military have expressed resentment.
Image
A police officer holds the leg of a young man lying on wet pavement. Other men can be seen lying and sitting behind him.
Israeli police officers trying to forcibly remove protesters at the demonstration in Jerusalem.Credit...Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The exemption has prompted numerous legal challenges, the most significant of which was upheld by a Supreme Court decision in 2017. Its implementation has been postponed repeatedly to allow successive governments to find a compromise, and the latest deferment will elapse on Monday.
In practice, few expect military police officers to start searching Haredi neighborhoods to arrest seminary students who should be serving in the army. The army is not logistically prepared to absorb large numbers of highly conservative men who, for religious reasons, will refuse to serve in units alongside women.
The Supreme Court has also given the government another month to reach a middle ground acceptable to both its religious and secular members. Officials and lawmakers say a compromise is under discussion in which a few thousand seminary dropouts would be required to serve, but not those still studying.
“There is an understanding that something should be done, especially after Oct. 7,” said Danny Danon, a secular lawmaker in the governing coalition who supports ending the exemption. “We respect religion, and tradition, but at the same time, we realize that we have to change the current situation,” he added.
The threat of a financial shortfall for Haredi schools has injected a greater sense of urgency into the negotiations.
The court order did not say how many students would be affected by the freeze, and Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on whether the government would enforce the order.
But court documents suggested that up to roughly 60,000 student subsidies could be at risk — a sizable part of the seminary system’s budget.
Image
A young man stands next to benches in an otherwise empty classroom.
A studying room at Ponevezh Yeshiva in January in Bnei Brak, Israel.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Dozens of yeshivas “won’t last if they don’t have money from the government,” said Yanki Farber, a prominent Haredi commentator.
Still, the Haredi leadership could yet decide to stay in the coalition: It can wield more influence inside a right-wing coalition than by triggering elections that could be won by a more centrist and secular alliance in which it might play no part.
While still in government, Haredi leaders could press their cabinet colleagues to find workarounds to their funding shortfall, Mr. Farber said.
“It’s a very big disaster for the Haredim,” Mr. Farber said. But, he added, “at the moment they have much more to lose by leaving than staying.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/worl ... ption.html
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet is divided about whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should be required to join the Israeli army.
Israeli military officers and noncommissioned officers during a ceremony in January at the Shura base in central Israel.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing his most challenging political threat since the start of the Gaza war because of a disagreement among members of his coalition about whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should retain their longstanding exemption from military service.
An unwieldy right-wing alliance of secular and ultra-Orthodox lawmakers, the coalition’s members are divided about whether the state should continue to allow young ultra-Orthodox men to study at religious seminaries instead of serving in the military, as most other Jewish Israelis do. If the government abolishes the exemption, it risks a walkout from the ultra-Orthodox lawmakers; if it lets the exemption stand, the secular members could withdraw. Either way, the coalition could collapse.
The situation poses the gravest challenge to Mr. Netanyahu’s grip on power since Hamas raided Israel on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to invade Hamas’s stronghold in the Gaza Strip. Criticized by many Israelis for presiding over the October disaster, Mr. Netanyahu is trailing in the polls and faces growing calls to resign. But until now, there were few obvious ways in which his coalition might collapse.
The end of the coalition would most likely lead to new elections, and polling suggests that Mr. Netanyahu would not win.
A new Israeli government led by centrists is unlikely to take a markedly different approach to the war in Gaza, but it may be more open to allowing the Palestinian leadership in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to play a bigger role in Gaza after the war. That arrangement could create a more conducive environment for Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, which had edged closer to sealing diplomatic ties with Israel before the war broke out.
The ultra-Orthodox have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel in 1948, but as the numbers of the ultra-Orthodox have grown — and especially in the months since the war began — so have resentment and anger over these privileges.
The issue came to the fore on Thursday evening when the government announced that the coalition had not agreed on an extension to the exemption by April 1, when the current exemption elapses. That news prompted the Supreme Court to instruct the government, as soon as the deadline passes, to suspend special educational subsidies that support seminary students if those students have failed to answer their military call-ups.
Image
A man holding an Israeli flag confronting a man holding a protest sign and standing behind a barricade.
A protester, demanding equality in Israel’s military service, confronting an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man demonstrating in favor of military exemptions for religious seminary students in February in Jerusalem.Credit...Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
The court’s decision spurred outrage among ultra-Orthodox leaders who fear for the financial future of their education system, which depends largely on state subsidies, and are concerned that the funding freeze is the first step toward mandatory military service for their community.
For now, some ultra-Orthodox leaders have said that their parties will remain in the coalition while they wait to see what happens.
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The standoff reflects how a decades-long battle over the character and future of the Jewish state has become graver since Oct. 7. Secular Israelis have long clashed with the ultra-Orthodox minority, known in Hebrew as Haredim, about how religious the state should be and how much autonomy the Haredim should have.
Now, a growing number of soldiers, including those from religious backgrounds, are returning from the front lines in Gaza and questioning why they should be risking their lives for a minority that receives vast educational subsidies, contributes less to the economy than other parts of society and mostly does not serve in the military.
Significant sections of the Haredi public have displayed a greater sense of shared destiny with mainstream Israelis since the attack, with some expressing greater support for the army and a small minority showing more interest in joining it. Roughly 1,000 Haredi men currently serve voluntarily in the military — less than 1 percent of all soldiers — but more than 2,000 Haredim sought to join the military in the first 10 weeks of the war, according to military statistics.
Image
Crowds of people on a roadway can be seen snarling traffic.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish boys and men blocking traffic this month in Jerusalem during a protest against the expiration of a law preventing them from being drafted into the army.Credit...Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
But the Haredi leadership remains deeply opposed to mandatory military service, fearing that it might disrupt their conservative way of life, which is centered around intensive Torah study in seminaries, or yeshivas.
“If a yeshiva student has to leave the yeshiva to be drafted, for whatever the reason, then we will not stay in the government,” said Moshe Roth, a Haredi lawmaker.
“This is a make it or break it,” he said.
“The only way to protect the Torah and to keep it alive, as it has been for the last 3,500 years, is by having yeshivas,” Mr. Roth added.
The dispute is rooted in decisions made in the years surrounding Israel’s founding, when the country’s secular leadership promised autonomy and privileges to the ultra-Orthodox minority in exchange for their support for a largely secular national project. As well as exemption from the draft, the Haredim are allowed to run their own autonomous education system.
When the numbers of the Haredim were relatively small, their privileges mattered less to the Israeli mainstream. But as their population has swelled to more than one million people, roughly 13 percent of Israel’s population — up from 40,000, or 5 percent, in 1948 — even many observant Jews who serve in the military have expressed resentment.
Image
A police officer holds the leg of a young man lying on wet pavement. Other men can be seen lying and sitting behind him.
Israeli police officers trying to forcibly remove protesters at the demonstration in Jerusalem.Credit...Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The exemption has prompted numerous legal challenges, the most significant of which was upheld by a Supreme Court decision in 2017. Its implementation has been postponed repeatedly to allow successive governments to find a compromise, and the latest deferment will elapse on Monday.
In practice, few expect military police officers to start searching Haredi neighborhoods to arrest seminary students who should be serving in the army. The army is not logistically prepared to absorb large numbers of highly conservative men who, for religious reasons, will refuse to serve in units alongside women.
The Supreme Court has also given the government another month to reach a middle ground acceptable to both its religious and secular members. Officials and lawmakers say a compromise is under discussion in which a few thousand seminary dropouts would be required to serve, but not those still studying.
“There is an understanding that something should be done, especially after Oct. 7,” said Danny Danon, a secular lawmaker in the governing coalition who supports ending the exemption. “We respect religion, and tradition, but at the same time, we realize that we have to change the current situation,” he added.
The threat of a financial shortfall for Haredi schools has injected a greater sense of urgency into the negotiations.
The court order did not say how many students would be affected by the freeze, and Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on whether the government would enforce the order.
But court documents suggested that up to roughly 60,000 student subsidies could be at risk — a sizable part of the seminary system’s budget.
Image
A young man stands next to benches in an otherwise empty classroom.
A studying room at Ponevezh Yeshiva in January in Bnei Brak, Israel.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Dozens of yeshivas “won’t last if they don’t have money from the government,” said Yanki Farber, a prominent Haredi commentator.
Still, the Haredi leadership could yet decide to stay in the coalition: It can wield more influence inside a right-wing coalition than by triggering elections that could be won by a more centrist and secular alliance in which it might play no part.
While still in government, Haredi leaders could press their cabinet colleagues to find workarounds to their funding shortfall, Mr. Farber said.
“It’s a very big disaster for the Haredim,” Mr. Farber said. But, he added, “at the moment they have much more to lose by leaving than staying.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/worl ... ption.html
Re: JUDAISM
Passover’s Radical Message Is More Vital Than Ever
What do we do with our pain? What, if anything, can we learn from it?
The Bible offers a startling and potentially transformative response: Let your memory teach you empathy and your suffering teach you love.
This week, Jews around the world will mark the beginning of Passover. We’ll gather for Seders, in which we’ll re-enact the foundational story of the Jewish people, the Exodus from Egypt. For Judaism, a religion preoccupied with remembering the past, no memory is more fundamental than the experience of having been slaves to a tyrant and having been redeemed from his murderous clutches by God.
Such a memory, for some, may seem impossible to summon now, in a time of so much trauma and devastation. But it is critical to remember the Exodus precisely at moments of horror and pain because it is the ultimate reminder that the present moment need not be the final stage of history. The status quo, no matter how intransigent, can and must be overturned. Further, we are meant not just to remember our suffering but also to grow in empathy as a result.
The Bible’s emphasis on empathy is particularly poignant in this agonized moment, when Israelis and Palestinians, two utterly traumatized peoples, are so overcome with grief and indignation that they can barely see each other at all. And yet if there is to one day be a different sort of future in the blood-soaked Holy Land, both peoples will need to do precisely that: to hear each other’s stories and histories, to listen to and bear witness to each other’s suffering. The revolution in empathy I am describing is urgently necessary to remember precisely now, when it seems so utterly out of reach.
The recollection of slavery and redemption has important theological and spiritual ramifications. We are meant to live with a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to the God who set us free. We are asked to recall — year after year — that we moved from serving a cruel human master who sought only to humiliate and tear us down to worshiping a loving divine master who blesses us and seeks our well-being. We are called to empathize with those who are exposed and endangered in the present, having ourselves been defenseless in the past.
“You shall not oppress a stranger,” the Book of Exodus teaches, “for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” You know what mistreatment feels like, Exodus says, and therefore you should never inflict it upon anyone else.
Leviticus takes this further. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens,” it tells us. “You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus envisions something radical: a society that actively loves and seeks the welfare of its most vulnerable members.
There are longstanding debates in the Jewish tradition about precisely what loving our neighbor entails, but one thing is clear: The love we owe to our neighbor we owe to the stranger among us, too.
There is nothing obvious about this teaching, particularly in a moment when fear and anger threaten to suppress any hint of compassion.
Suffering can teach us love, but all too often we let it teach us apathy and indifference — or, worse, unbridled rage and hostility. Our afflictions harden us, turn our focus stubbornly inward, make our most aggressive impulses seem both necessary and justified. We come to feel entitled: I was oppressed, and no one championed my cause; I don’t owe anything to anyone. But the Bible encourages us to take the opposite tack: I was oppressed, and no one came to my aid; therefore I will never abandon someone vulnerable or in pain.
Many people who have suffered terribly, whether personally or politically, hear both voices in our heads and have both impulses in our hearts. One voice tells us that the pain we have endured (or are enduring) frees us from responsibility to and for others — justifies our fixating on ourselves — while another voice insists that our suffering must teach us to care more and more deeply for others. Through the mandate to love the stranger, the Bible commands us to nurture the latter impulse rather than the former, to let our suffering teach us love.
At a moment like this, the mandate to love the stranger can seem to be speaking to broad and intractable geopolitical conflicts, and in fact, it is, but it also addresses us personally, at the most intimate levels. I know both these voices only too well. Having lost my father as a child and been left alone with a mother who lacked the emotional tools to parent any child, let alone a grieving one, I struggle at times with feeling entitled to ignore other people’s pain and care for just my own. And yet — having experienced aloneness, abandonment and abuse — I also feel an intensified sense of empathy for and responsibility toward those who are alone, abandoned or abused. It is this impulse that the Bible seeks to nurture in me and in each of us.
This week, when we retell the Exodus story, we must remember its implications: Since we know vulnerability, the plight of the vulnerable — whether among our own kin or among those who do not look or pray or speak like us — makes an especially forceful claim on us.
The commandment to do this work is both individual and communal; it is, on the one hand and at various points in the Bible, very much specific to Jews. But on the other hand, it is fundamental to the heritage of human civilization, and thus it addresses every person and every people who hear it. Perhaps, having suffered, you are tempted to learn indifference or even hate. Refuse that temptation. Let your memory teach you empathy and your suffering teach you love.
To tell the story of our past is always also to internalize an ethical injunction for our present and our future: to love the stranger, for we know what it feels like to be a stranger — we know the vulnerability, the anxiety and the loneliness — having ourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
What do we do with our pain? What, if anything, can we learn from it?
The Bible offers a startling and potentially transformative response: Let your memory teach you empathy and your suffering teach you love.
This week, Jews around the world will mark the beginning of Passover. We’ll gather for Seders, in which we’ll re-enact the foundational story of the Jewish people, the Exodus from Egypt. For Judaism, a religion preoccupied with remembering the past, no memory is more fundamental than the experience of having been slaves to a tyrant and having been redeemed from his murderous clutches by God.
Such a memory, for some, may seem impossible to summon now, in a time of so much trauma and devastation. But it is critical to remember the Exodus precisely at moments of horror and pain because it is the ultimate reminder that the present moment need not be the final stage of history. The status quo, no matter how intransigent, can and must be overturned. Further, we are meant not just to remember our suffering but also to grow in empathy as a result.
The Bible’s emphasis on empathy is particularly poignant in this agonized moment, when Israelis and Palestinians, two utterly traumatized peoples, are so overcome with grief and indignation that they can barely see each other at all. And yet if there is to one day be a different sort of future in the blood-soaked Holy Land, both peoples will need to do precisely that: to hear each other’s stories and histories, to listen to and bear witness to each other’s suffering. The revolution in empathy I am describing is urgently necessary to remember precisely now, when it seems so utterly out of reach.
The recollection of slavery and redemption has important theological and spiritual ramifications. We are meant to live with a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to the God who set us free. We are asked to recall — year after year — that we moved from serving a cruel human master who sought only to humiliate and tear us down to worshiping a loving divine master who blesses us and seeks our well-being. We are called to empathize with those who are exposed and endangered in the present, having ourselves been defenseless in the past.
“You shall not oppress a stranger,” the Book of Exodus teaches, “for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” You know what mistreatment feels like, Exodus says, and therefore you should never inflict it upon anyone else.
Leviticus takes this further. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens,” it tells us. “You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus envisions something radical: a society that actively loves and seeks the welfare of its most vulnerable members.
There are longstanding debates in the Jewish tradition about precisely what loving our neighbor entails, but one thing is clear: The love we owe to our neighbor we owe to the stranger among us, too.
There is nothing obvious about this teaching, particularly in a moment when fear and anger threaten to suppress any hint of compassion.
Suffering can teach us love, but all too often we let it teach us apathy and indifference — or, worse, unbridled rage and hostility. Our afflictions harden us, turn our focus stubbornly inward, make our most aggressive impulses seem both necessary and justified. We come to feel entitled: I was oppressed, and no one championed my cause; I don’t owe anything to anyone. But the Bible encourages us to take the opposite tack: I was oppressed, and no one came to my aid; therefore I will never abandon someone vulnerable or in pain.
Many people who have suffered terribly, whether personally or politically, hear both voices in our heads and have both impulses in our hearts. One voice tells us that the pain we have endured (or are enduring) frees us from responsibility to and for others — justifies our fixating on ourselves — while another voice insists that our suffering must teach us to care more and more deeply for others. Through the mandate to love the stranger, the Bible commands us to nurture the latter impulse rather than the former, to let our suffering teach us love.
At a moment like this, the mandate to love the stranger can seem to be speaking to broad and intractable geopolitical conflicts, and in fact, it is, but it also addresses us personally, at the most intimate levels. I know both these voices only too well. Having lost my father as a child and been left alone with a mother who lacked the emotional tools to parent any child, let alone a grieving one, I struggle at times with feeling entitled to ignore other people’s pain and care for just my own. And yet — having experienced aloneness, abandonment and abuse — I also feel an intensified sense of empathy for and responsibility toward those who are alone, abandoned or abused. It is this impulse that the Bible seeks to nurture in me and in each of us.
This week, when we retell the Exodus story, we must remember its implications: Since we know vulnerability, the plight of the vulnerable — whether among our own kin or among those who do not look or pray or speak like us — makes an especially forceful claim on us.
The commandment to do this work is both individual and communal; it is, on the one hand and at various points in the Bible, very much specific to Jews. But on the other hand, it is fundamental to the heritage of human civilization, and thus it addresses every person and every people who hear it. Perhaps, having suffered, you are tempted to learn indifference or even hate. Refuse that temptation. Let your memory teach you empathy and your suffering teach you love.
To tell the story of our past is always also to internalize an ethical injunction for our present and our future: to love the stranger, for we know what it feels like to be a stranger — we know the vulnerability, the anxiety and the loneliness — having ourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
To Be (Visibly) Jewish in the Ivy League
A student in dark clothing speaks into a bullhorn, with other students behind her.
Credit...Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York Times
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.
“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said a demonstrator jammed a Palestinian flag into her left eye. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.
Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.
But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.
At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”
What do such acts mean for Jews on campus?
There’s a certain eagerness in some media stories to highlight Jewish students who have joined the protests as a way of acquitting anti-Israel groups of charges of antisemitism. But as Jonathan Chait astutely noted in New York magazine, “this does not settle the question of their relation to antisemitism any more than ‘Blacks for Trump’ puts to rest concerns about Republican racism.”
Others have suggested that some of the more aggressive expressions of antisemitism have come from outside agitators rather than from students themselves. Maybe, though there’s plenty of evidence of atrocious student behavior. But that still leaves open the question of why these students regularly chant slogans like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” which (if they didn’t know it before) they know now is an incendiary call to violent action against Jews.
The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?
What goes for the student demonstrators is true of faculties, too. At Columbia, nearly 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that “one could regard” Oct. 7 as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.” Leaving aside the lawyerly language, there’s little question as to where the sympathies of the signatories lie. What are Jewish students — including the Israelis enrolled at Columbia — supposed to do when faced with such militant hostility not only from their peers but also from their professors?
I asked Crispe and Tartak if they had given thought to leaving Yale. “I have to stay,” Tartak told me. Crispe felt similarly. “I’m going to stay around Yale to support my peers as long as I need to,” he said. But he also had regrets.
“I entered Yale extremely proud to be one of the first Hasidic Jews to go as an undergraduate,” Crispe said. “I looked forward to sharing experiences with students from diverse backgrounds while living proudly in my own skin. What I find now, walking around campus, is people flipping me off, yelling at me. There’s no escaping it.”
Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A student in dark clothing speaks into a bullhorn, with other students behind her.
Credit...Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York Times
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.
“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said a demonstrator jammed a Palestinian flag into her left eye. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.
Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.
But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.
At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”
What do such acts mean for Jews on campus?
There’s a certain eagerness in some media stories to highlight Jewish students who have joined the protests as a way of acquitting anti-Israel groups of charges of antisemitism. But as Jonathan Chait astutely noted in New York magazine, “this does not settle the question of their relation to antisemitism any more than ‘Blacks for Trump’ puts to rest concerns about Republican racism.”
Others have suggested that some of the more aggressive expressions of antisemitism have come from outside agitators rather than from students themselves. Maybe, though there’s plenty of evidence of atrocious student behavior. But that still leaves open the question of why these students regularly chant slogans like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” which (if they didn’t know it before) they know now is an incendiary call to violent action against Jews.
The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?
What goes for the student demonstrators is true of faculties, too. At Columbia, nearly 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that “one could regard” Oct. 7 as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.” Leaving aside the lawyerly language, there’s little question as to where the sympathies of the signatories lie. What are Jewish students — including the Israelis enrolled at Columbia — supposed to do when faced with such militant hostility not only from their peers but also from their professors?
I asked Crispe and Tartak if they had given thought to leaving Yale. “I have to stay,” Tartak told me. Crispe felt similarly. “I’m going to stay around Yale to support my peers as long as I need to,” he said. But he also had regrets.
“I entered Yale extremely proud to be one of the first Hasidic Jews to go as an undergraduate,” Crispe said. “I looked forward to sharing experiences with students from diverse backgrounds while living proudly in my own skin. What I find now, walking around campus, is people flipping me off, yelling at me. There’s no escaping it.”
Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: JUDAISM
In response to protests, Brandeis invited students to transfer to its campus.
The university’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, promised in an open letter that Brandeis would provide an environment “free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”
Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in Nov.Credit...Erin Clark/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images
In response to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the country, Brandeis, a historically Jewish university in Massachusetts, announced it would extend its deadline for transfer applications to May 31, and that it was prepared to accept a larger-than-typical number of transfer students.
In an open letter on Monday, the university’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, wrote that “Jewish students are being targeted and attacked physically and verbally, preventing them from pursuing their studies and activities outside of class, just because they are Jewish or support Israel.”
He promised that in contrast to other colleges, Brandeis would provide an environment “free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”
In a Tuesday phone interview, Dr. Liebowitz said that Brandeis students — about one-third of whom are Jewish — have a broad range of opinions on the Israel-Hamas war, noting that many are critical of the Israeli government and in favor of Palestinian rights.
But he also said Brandeis would take action in response to speech that he characterized as “gratuitous” and crossing a “red line,” such as that which argued that Israel did not have the right to exist or that the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 was a legitimate form of resistance.
In November, the university cut ties with its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, preventing it from using the Brandeis name, receiving university funds or hosting events in campus facilities.
This week, as protest has convulsed some other campuses, Brandeis students have been on spring break, to coincide with the Passover holiday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/b ... _id=164745
The university’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, promised in an open letter that Brandeis would provide an environment “free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”
Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in Nov.Credit...Erin Clark/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images
In response to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the country, Brandeis, a historically Jewish university in Massachusetts, announced it would extend its deadline for transfer applications to May 31, and that it was prepared to accept a larger-than-typical number of transfer students.
In an open letter on Monday, the university’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, wrote that “Jewish students are being targeted and attacked physically and verbally, preventing them from pursuing their studies and activities outside of class, just because they are Jewish or support Israel.”
He promised that in contrast to other colleges, Brandeis would provide an environment “free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”
In a Tuesday phone interview, Dr. Liebowitz said that Brandeis students — about one-third of whom are Jewish — have a broad range of opinions on the Israel-Hamas war, noting that many are critical of the Israeli government and in favor of Palestinian rights.
But he also said Brandeis would take action in response to speech that he characterized as “gratuitous” and crossing a “red line,” such as that which argued that Israel did not have the right to exist or that the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 was a legitimate form of resistance.
In November, the university cut ties with its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, preventing it from using the Brandeis name, receiving university funds or hosting events in campus facilities.
This week, as protest has convulsed some other campuses, Brandeis students have been on spring break, to coincide with the Passover holiday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/b ... _id=164745