The Battle for Decency and Truth Has Begun: Big-P and Little-P Politics

The people of Israel are like a single body and a single soul…
If one of them is stricken, all of them feel pain.
—Mekhilta d’Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai 19:6

 
Can it be that this is only the fifth day since hell emerged on earth? Only five days since Hamas terrorists spilled out of Gaza, slaughtering and beheading and raping and kidnapping, murdering Jewish teenagers and children and elders and adults, gleefully posting the pictures of their carnage on social media, with the lust for Jewish blood dripping from their lips, recalling the festival-atmosphere around Black lynchings in the American South?

Less than a week from October 7, 2023, the day on which more Jews were slaughtered than any other day since the Holocaust? Since the massacre of Kibbutz Be’eri, where Hamas terrorists calmly walked from room to room, executing over 100 children and adults?

In Israel, the names of the 150 Jews who have been kidnapped and stolen away into the dungeons under Gaza are still being tallied and released. The funerals have begun. The hospitals are full of the wounded.

We here in the Diaspora sit with broken hearts, watching our screens with a mélange of helplessness, outrage, grief, and devastation. Many of us are increasingly feeling the dismay and outrage as we see the propaganda war that is beginning against the victims of Hamas’s carnage. Already we are hearing the gaslighting that would turn the victims into the perpetrators.  

The fight will be political, and it will be rough. But I’d like to point out that there are some signs out there that we are not going to be all alone.

I want to differentiate between “Politics” with a big-P and “politics” with a little-p.  

By “big-P” Politics, I mean the actions of our elected leaders and people with power. If it gives you any peace of mind at all—it does for me—I feel inspired by the leadership of many of our officials. Starting at the top, praise must be given to President Biden. Every public statement he’s made has been note-perfect: the message is unequivocal and exactly right, and the tone is genuinely empathetic and honest. And Biden’s speech from Tuesday—please watch it in full—is just the most perfectly toned message that we could ask for.

Further, there is the spectacle of world landmarks being lit up with blue-and-white and the images of the Israeli flag. There seems to be a momentary awareness, for the time being at least, that Israel’s fight against terror is the world’s battle as well. Scroll through these pictures - some of them from cities with grotesque antisemitic histories - and be amazed at what is being expressed:

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin (!!!)

10 Downing Street, London

Bulgarian Parliament, Sofia

Kyiv, Ukraine

Melbourne, Australia

Eiffel Tower, Paris

Baku, Azerbaijan

Ground Zero, New York City

I’m not naïve; perhaps all this goodwill will evaporate as the battle in Gaza rages on. But for the time being, it is good to know that there are leaders out there with moral clarity.

Closer to home, there were hundreds of us at the Boston Common on Monday, and all the senior leadership of Massachusetts was present: two U.S. Senators, the Governor, and the Mayor of Boston. Senator Elizabeth Warren—who historically has not been a champion of Israel—was superb. Her message was crystal-clear and to-the-point: the U.S. Congress will support Israel with the resources it needs to defeat this vicious enemy. What more could we ask for?

If your elected leaders have done likewise, they need to hear from you (and so does President Biden): A short, concise email or phone call that says: “Thank you for the clear and unambiguous support of Israel and the Jewish community in their battle against terror.” Anyone who’s worked in an elected office will tell you:  Critics always make their voices heard, but it is so important to hear encouragement from constituents when leaders do the right thing.

And then there’s this letter that the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis received today from the Black Ministerial Alliance in Boston, representing over 20,000 Black parishioners in the region:

It is breathtaking in its courage and compassion. To each signatory to this letter: Thank you; THIS is what moral leadership looks like.

Which leaves the “small-P” politics, the propaganda wars that spread locally, on social media, and on campus.

Here, too, it’s not all bad. I must tell you: yesterday I was walking the dog downtown, and a stranger approached us. She said, “I see that you’re Jewish. Do you have friends and family in Israel?” (“Yes.”) And then she proceeded to say how horrified she is, and expressed her sympathy and support. It meant so much; I hope you’ve had similar interactions.

Because surely encounters like these counterbalance Twitter (X), Facebook, and Instagram, the cesspools of antisemitism and conspiracy theories that consume the “progressive” left as much as the reactionary right.

American universities, too, have fallen from places of serious discourse to places of Jew-hatred (where we pay hundred thousand-dollar tuitions for the privilege of being scapegoated).  Well-documented, already, is the shame of Harvard University, reminding us that higher education is often synonymous with higher antisemitism. But it's happening everywhere, as cowardly college presidents “All Lives Matter” the Jews by issuing statements that wring their hands over the suffering of “all sides.”

When a “friend” posts anti-Israel rhetoric that blames the victim and sympathizes with terrorists, you essentially have two choices.

If the person is someone with whom you have a real-life relationship and you think actually respects you, you might engage in a conversation that starts like this: “Your post is extremely hurtful right now. This is a community in mourning, and you are compounding their—my—pain with your thoughtlessness. Please remove your hateful words.”

And if the person is someone who doesn’t respect you, and is in no sense a “friend,” you really only have one option: “Your post reveals that you are an antisemite who has no grasp of the situation, and it is hateful. You have chosen the side of some of the most bloodthirsty killers in the world. I have no interest in engaging with you from this point forward. Goodbye.” Unfriend immediately.

I fear we will be living with this into the foreseeable future. And I greatly fear for our students on campus, as well as all of our kids who will be assaulted on social media. But there are also occasional reminders that we are not alone in this moral and righteous fight—and for that we must express our gratitude.

Invigoration and Pride About What Democracy Can Look Like

There’s an old truism: If you want to sound like a fool, just say, “You know, I’m really optimistic right now about the Middle East.”

I don’t want to be a fool. There are deep, possibly insurmountable, divisions in Israeli society. I know that Israel cobbled together the most radical, right-wing governing coalition in its history, and it has a substantial base of support. I know what Israel’s demographics look like, and they aren’t good.

“To those on the ground and in the streets: Thank you. You fill me with Zionist pride and democratic, patriotic inspiration.”

But what can I say? Today I realized that my heart is filled with… if not optimism, at least a sense of invigoration and pride for Zionism and the Israeli people. And it’s thanks to those protesters in the streets of Israel.

Maybe it’s because spring is here and the sun is shining. Maybe it’s because Pesach is right around the corner, with its promises that freedom always wins out against tyrants eventually.

Whatever the cause, I’m full of hope and admiration—yet again—for Israelis. Just seeing the depth and breadth of the protests against Netanyahu’s cynical attempt to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and to strip the nation of its democratic checks and balances gives me an enormous sense of appreciation for the vitality of Israelis.

Just consider some of these astonishing items:

·      The unceasing momentum: For 12 weeks, the streets of Tel Aviv and every other major city in Israel have been filled with hundreds of thousands of protesters, especially on Saturday nights – and the demonstrations are getting larger, not smaller! What endurance and momentum this movement has shown.

·      The size:  Israel has a population of about 12 million people. Hundreds of thousands in the streets, week after week? Can we imagine what percentage of the population has shown up? The photos, of course, are awesome…

·      The breaking news: Monday morning, the embassy and consulates of Israel in the United States are closed – the staff is on strike! All part of the protest against the assault on the judiciary and Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had the chutzpah to suggest pausing the radical legislation in the name of national unity. When have the embassies of any nation ever closed, on their own accord, in an act of protest against their own government?!

·      The flags: The protests are awash in swaths of blue, with Israeli flags prominently displayed and people singing Hatikvah. This is no anti-nationalist movement. The demonstrators are patriots standing up for democratic norms that are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

·      The diversity: Despite Netanyahu and his minions’ desire to paint the demonstrators as anarchists, outside agitators, or worse. The truth is that the protests are the mainstream of Israeli society: reservists refusing to serve; military leaders refusing to show up; members of the center-left and center-right calling for sanity and a return to decency. And now the Histadrut, Israel’s largest labor union—over half a million members, including airport workers, civil servants, and those government officials overseas—adds its voice.

How about this amazing scene: the Israel Philharmonic playing the national anthem at this week’s Tel Aviv protest!

THIS is what democracy looks like. And even though it’s emerging in desperate times, it’s invigorating to see.

This is a culture that is saying yesh gvul, there is a line that has been crossed by corrupt leaders who defy the will of the people—and then try to smear those righteous protesters with lies and propaganda.

As I’ve said, perhaps it will come crashing down tomorrow. The news cycle moves very quickly, and what I’ve written here may be out of date quickly. Netanyahu is corrupt, but he’s far from stupid. Maybe he’ll ram through his reforms, come what may. Maybe he’ll wag the dog with a military strike against Iran, and then call for “Jewish unity.” Maybe a cosmetic compromise will be achieved and the demonstrations will fizzle.

So I don’t want to foolishly say, “I’m optimistic about the Middle East.” But for now, my heart is filled with gratitude to those righteous protesters in the street. They should be an inspiration to lovers of democracy everywhere. We should be supporting their efforts in every way we can, especially in American Jewish and Zionist institutions to whom we pay dues. (We must demand of them: “Where do you stand?”)

To those on the ground and in the streets: Thank you. You fill me with Zionist pride and democratic, patriotic inspiration. And I’m counting down the minutes until I can come and join you!

What "Pro-Israel" Must Mean Today

רִבִּי יוּדָן נְשִׂייָא שְׁלַח לְרִבִּי חִייָה וּלְרִבִּי אַסִּי וּלְרִבִּי אִמִּי לְמִיעֲבוֹר בַּקִּרֵייָתָא דְּאַרְעָא דְּיִשְׂרָאֵל לִמְתַקְנָא לוֹן סָֽפְרִין וּמַתְנִייָנִין. עֲלוֹן לְחַד אֲתַר וְלָא אַשְׁכְּחוֹן לָא סְפַר וְלָא מַתְנִייָן. אָֽמְרִין לוֹן. אַייתוֹן לָן נְטוּרֵי קַרְתָּא. אַייְתוֹן לוֹן סַנְטוּרֵי קַרְתָּא. אָֽמְרוּן לוֹן. אֵילֵּין אֵינּוּן נְטוּרֵי קַרְתָּא. לֵית אֵילֵּין אֶלָּא חָרוּבֵי קַרְתָּא. אָֽמְרוּן לוֹן. וּמָאן אִינּוּן נְטוּרֵי קַרְתָּא. אָֽמְרוּן לוֹן. סַפְרַייָא וּמַתְנִייָנַיָּא. הָדָא הִיא דִּכְתִיב אִם י֙י לֹא־יִבְנֶ֬ה בַ֗יִת וגו׳.

 Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi sent Rabbi Chiyya, Rabbi Assi, and Rabbi Immi to tour the towns of the Land of Israel…
They came to a place where there were no Torah teachers. They said, “Bring us the guardians of the city!”
The locals brought them the political leaders.
The Rabbis responded, “These are not the guardians of the city. These are the destroyers of the city!”

–Talmud Yerushalmi, Chagigah 1:7

 This Talmudic text is resounding today, as the despicable Betzalel Smotrich—incredibly, unbelievably—arrives in the United States as an envoy of Israel and as a featured guest at a Washington, DC, gala for Israel Bonds.

“We will fight to protect her from enemies from without—and within. ”

This is disturbing beyond belief. Israel Bonds, historically, has been the most apolitical of organizations; a trustworthy, mainstream body that markets a fine and secure way to invest in the infrastructure and well-being of the State of Israel.

Smotrich, on the other hand, is a Hillul Hashem, a desecration of Torah and Jewish values. He is a Kahanist, a racist, an inciter to violence. His statement last week that the Palestinian town of Huwara should be “wiped out”—as hundreds of his constituent settler extremists rioted there—is only the latest outrage of someone who has no business representing the State of Israel.

The fact that he is Israel’s Finance Minister and a minister in the Defense Ministry only shows the desperation of Prime Minister Netanyahu to elevate beyond-the-pale extremists to support “judicial reforms” that seem primarily designed to keep Netanyahu himself from being indicted.

This is not about partisan politics, not really. The fact that 300,000 people demonstrated in Israel’s streets this weekend—for the 10th week in a row!—shows that a plurality of left-center-and center-right is saying yesh gvul/there is a limit to what we will accept in a civilized society. Not long ago, Meir Kahane (יימך שמו—may the name of the wicked be blotted out) and his supporters were considered unacceptable, and were barred from sitting in the Knesset. Today, Netanyahu builds his coalition around them.

So what does it mean to be a supporter of Israel in these uncharted waters?

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about for weeks. Consider how astonishing it is: American Jewish leaders, proud and lifelong supporters of Israel, are demonstrating in front of Israeli consulates and the Grand Hyatt Hotel in DC where Smotrich is holed up. We are making our voices heard to local Israeli envoys that this government’s actions are beyond the pale of the normal discourse of left-and-right. Some even considered lobbying the Biden Administration to not grant Smotrich a visa to enter the country.

This pushback is amazing, and completely unprecedented in the 75-year history of Israel. It  also raises some questions about what it means to be “pro-Israel” at this time.

Let’s be absolutely clear: this anguish is coming from a place of desperately caring about Israel’s security, well-being, and, frankly, its soul. This is not coming from the extremist fringe of the American Jewish left, like the Orwellian-named Jewish Voice of Peace, which has long established their de facto support for Israel’s real and intractable enemies.

Israel constantly faces the threat of delegitimization, especially on college campuses and in progressive forums. And antisemitism is still a very real concern in the U.S and around the world. We certainly don’t want to fan either of those flames. So what is a concerned supporter of Israel supposed to do?

Here are my suggestions:

1.     Make absolutely clear: to be a Zionist is to support the righteous demonstrators in Israel’s streets right now. Every Thursday and every Saturday, Israelis have been demonstrating. The press is covering it as a single issue: opposition to Netanyahu’s “judicial reform.” But it’s wider than that: it’s also about deep-rooted fear for what this Coalition of Hate means for Israel’s soul.

We must be using every means at our disposal, including all our social media, to say, “As lovers of Israel, we support the demonstrations and condemn what this government is trying to do in our name.”  

2.     Engage more than ever. This is not the time to disappear from the conversation. Our Israeli brothers and sisters are making it utterly clear (as three prominent centrists made clear in this crucial letter last month): We need you now, more than ever.

That also means putting our money where our mouth is. If engagement begins and ends with kvetching on Twitter—well, that’s the coward’s form of activism. It is imperative that we send our financial support to organizations that are standing up for justice and democracy—not to mention forms of Judaism that are an alternative to the theocrats’ vision.

Personally, I support Hiddush—Freedom of Religion for Israel; the Israel Religious Action Center; ARZA; the Shalom Hartman Institute; and flourishing Reform and Conservative communities on the ground in Israel. Not to mention organizations that are doing the hard work of Jewish-Arab bridgebuilding, such as Givat Haviva and Shorashim/Roots. There are many others—all of them need our support and encouragement in these fractious times.

3.     It’s about Mishpachah. And Love. The Prime Minister and his amen-crowd will call us traitors. That’s the tactic of cowards.

But American-Jewish criticism of Israel must come from a place of love. That is, when I consider the people whom I love (and who love me), I don’t support everything they do. When someone I love is actively hurting themselves or going down a devastating path, it is my responsibility to step in, to let them know what I see, and to urge them—sometimes forcefully—to change course. But I don’t disappear.

If people we love disappear when times are tough, well, we might appropriately question whether they ever truly loved us in the first place. This is true, too, over our relationship with Israel.

The short-term future won’t be easy. Many American Jews will simply want to disengage, exhausted. And others, more perniciously, will say, “See—this is the real face of Zionism all along.”

But it’s about time that liberal Zionists make their position absolutely clear: Israel is our family, an astonishing chapter in the history of Judaism that yields perpetual gifts to contemporary Jewish life.

And we will fight to protect her from enemies from without—and within.

Moreover, the pro-Israel position must be clear. To paraphrase the language of the Talmud: Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and their enabler Netanyahu are not the “guardians of the city.” They are those who would destroy it.

Purim after Huwara

This week, leading up to the holiday of Purim, has been an awful one for anyone who cares about Israel and the Jewish people and the Image of G-d, tarnished and violated as it is. Violence in Israel is spinning out of control.

On Sunday, two brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv from the Israeli settlement of Har Bracha were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

On Monday, another terrorist murdered Elan Ganeles, a 26 year-old Jewish man from Connecticut, in the Jordan Valley on his way to a wedding near Jerusalem.

“The measure of our integrity will be how forcefully, how clearly, we speak out against these forces. To make clear that the filthy ilk of Smotrich and Ben Gvir will not be the defining voices of Judaism and Zionism.”

We mourn them without equivocation. We are pained as part of the interconnected body of the Jewish people, and we insist that their killers be brought to justice.

And then there is Huwara.

After the murders of the Yanivs, scores of radical armed settlers stormed through the Palestinian town of Huwara, rampaging through its neighborhoods throughout the night, burning houses and stores and cars, and leaving at least one man dead.

Even some Israeli military leaders are calling the settler rampage a “pogrom.” And it’s not hyperbole. After all, “pogrom” is the term that was created to describe mob violence against the Jews of Europe with the backing of official institutions like the Church, the government, and the press. Huwara would seem to be the first Jewish-perpetrated pogrom in history, as far as I know. The most radical elements in the government coalition have been seeding settler vioence for a long time—and have spent the past few days since the riot nodding at the perpetrators.  That should make every one of us shudder with nausea and disgust.

After all, perhaps the biggest disgrace is how all this was so predictable. For weeks, it has seemed like Israel is coming apart at the seams, as the most extreme and vicious coalition in its 75-year history gives its blessing to hate. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been pouring into the streets to demonstrate, week after week, show that this government is beyond the pale in it extremism for a huge swatch of this democratic society.

The despicable Bezalel Smotrich—a Kahanist, a racist, and also the Finance Minister who shares responsibility for civilian affairs in the West Bank—says, “Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

The vile Itamar Ben Gvir—another former leader of Kahane’s movement, the man whom Netanyahu saw fit to make National Security Minister with authority over the police in the West Bank—“likes” a tweet from a settler leader saying “Huwara should be erased today.” Ben Gvir is sponsoring a bill calling for the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists, while as of this writing no Israeli terrorists have been arrested for the Huwara violence.

And Prime Minister Netanyahu—who raised these men and others to positions of authority; a disgraced leader who has demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt to have not a shred of decency or integrity—has the audacity to compare hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Israel’s streets to the pogromists in Huwara!

(By the way, as of this writing, Smotrich is still the invited guest of American supporters of Israel Bonds in Washington, DC next week. It is imperative that American Jews make clear: Smotrich is persona non grata; he is not welcome in our communities; he must be denied a U.S. visa. He is a disgrace to everything the Jewish community stands for; a true Hillul Hashem.)

It may feel like Israeli society is imploding. I happen to think Israeli democracy is resilient—but not automatically so. For far too long, Israelis and the American Jewish community have been complacent about the poisonous weed of hate that has sprouted in the Israeli far-right. Now that it has moved to the mainstream, given authority and power by a corrupt and desperate Prime Minister. Will we continue to make excuses for it?

Democracy is a muscle that needs to be exercised or it will atrophy. I, for one, see a battle before us for the soul of the Jewish state. It is of desperate importance that anyone who cares about the Jewish future realize their stake in this, and that we do everything we can to support those hundreds-of-thousands-strong protesters for democracy and decency.

What might we learn from this week’s horrors—and how can we celebrate Purim on Monday night in the shadow of Huwara?

Let’s talk about the Megillat Esther.

Esther, it must be recognized, is a comic Jewish revenge fantasy. It’s not historical; it’s a rich and quite marvelous satire, that takes in lots of targets.

We need to understand the comic dimension of Esther in order to grasp the violent denouement that takes place the end of the book:

For Mordecai was now powerful in the royal palace, and his fame was spreading through all the provinces; the man Mordecai was growing ever more powerful. So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies. (Esther 9:4-5)

…

The rest of the Jews, those in the king’s provinces, likewise mustered and fought for their lives. They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes; but they did not lay hands on the spoil That was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar; and they rested on the fourteenth day and made it a day of feasting and merrymaking. (Esther 9:16-17)

In Esther, Jews who have been terrorized and threatened with mass destruction suddenly find themselves in a position to control their own destinies, with the precious ability to defend themselves against those who would destroy them. And then they massacre their enemies.

Did Esther anticipate Huwara?

We should note that violence—exaggerated, cartoonish violence—is an audience-pleaser. Consider, for example, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. It, too, is a revenge fantasy about a group of American-Jewish soldiers out to wreak revenge against every Nazi they can find in WW2-era Europe. The violence is grotesque, over-the-top, cathartic: at the end, Hitler and Goebbels and the entire Nazi senior staff are memorably executed by the “Basterds” en masse. Whether or not you find this entertaining (I must admit, I do) depends entirely on your sensibilities and your tolerance for fantasy violence.

To understand Esther, you have to understand the genre in which it is written. Esther is operating in this sort of mode. Did the Jews historically—in the name of self-defense and retribution against their genocidal enemies—slaughter 75,000 Persians? Of course not. It’s the projection of a community who heretofore has been oppressed.

And too many people don’t get what the Megillah is trying to teach with its outrageousness.

The theme that permeates Esther is inversion—events turn out to be 180 degrees from what they are expected or supposed to be. “…The very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power, the opposite happened, and the Jews got their enemies in their power” (9:1).

But it’s not just the inversion of events that happens in Esther. There’s also an inversion of people:  And many of the people of the land professed to be Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them (8:17). Can you imagine?! Those Persians were so scared of the Jews that they even pretended to be Jewish!

And perhaps that’s what’s behind the violent retribution of the Jews in Chapter 9 of the Megillah. When the Jewish defense squads of Shushan go wild and kill tens of thousands—is it so farfetched to say that this is the greatest inversion of all? Their enemies act like Jews, and the Jews act like their enemies!

And here’s where I’m going to stop laughing this year.

Because, as we know, humor is often a tool that reveals deeply hidden truths. “If you want to understand a society,” said Rebbe Nachman in one of his greatest stories, “you have to understand its humor.” Humor exposes things that a community strives to keep under wraps.

The Megillah predicted that Jews are just as capable as anyone of behaving monstrously. Huwara proves this to be so. In Huwara, we saw that Jews are just as capable as anyone of behaving monstrously, just as Esther predicted. Is there anyone left who believes that Jews, once in power, are immune from committing horrible acts? Everyone is capable of atrocities, and just because, on the historical balance sheet, Jews have usually been the victims, that is no reason to believe Jews can’t commit horrors. Huwara proves that, Q.E.D.

The measure of our integrity will be how forcefully, how clearly, we speak out against these forces. To make clear that the filthy ilk of Smotrich and Ben Gvir and the rioters crying for blood will not be the defining voices of Judaism and Zionism. Every one of us has to say yesh gvul (there is a limit to what we will allow in our names), and we must be the voice of democracy, decency, and justice—as envisioned by our Torah and by the founders of the State of Israel.

On Monday night, I’ll be with my community and we’ll read Esther again. We’ll boo and drown out the name of Haman; we’ll celebrate Esther’s bravery. We’ll drink a few L’chayims. But I’ll be reflecting on how Purim is ultimately about inversion and disguises—and how those Purim costumes have a powerful way of revealing deep truths about what lies behind the mask of seemingly civilized people.  

Is the War in Ukraine a "Jewish Issue"?

First: I know it’s a crass and parochial question. I don’t mean for it to be. Wherever there is oppression, tyranny, and military aggression by a malignant dictator—and Putin checks all the boxes—a Jew should be anguished.  If it’s a human rights issue, of course it’s a Jewish issue.

But there are a few specifically Jewish dimensions to the Russian assault against a nation that has the 10th largest Jewish community in the world (depending on how you’re counting), a population that has been there for over 1,000 years.

Ukraine and Belarus were homes to some of the most glorious spiritual geniuses in all of Jewish history; the birthplaces of some of the great figures of Jewish modernity, especially early Zionists and Hasidic masters.  Through the end of the 19th century, this region was home to the largest Jewish community in the world, by far.

 
Putin’s gaslighting. “Gaslighting” is a tool of abusers everywhere. It means: to obfuscate a situation by accusing the other person of doing something that the perpetrator himself is doing. (“Election security!” comes to mind.) Gaslighting makes the victim feel like he is the one who’s crazy, like she is the one who is the problem.

Putin’s particular gaslighting is his call for the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. It’s not even clear what that means, but in recent years many people have found it useful to hurl the “Nazi!” epithet at their social and political opponents, which is especially ironic, given the rise of actual neo-Nazis these days.

It's gaslighting not only because of Putin’s tyrannical instincts, but also because his invocation of Nazis implies the persecution and annihilation of Jews—as if Russian (and Ukrainian) history wasn’t soaked with Jewish blood.

One Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said:

They tell you that we’re Nazis. But how can a people that lost 8 million lives to defeat the Nazis support Nazism? How can I be a Nazi? Say it to my grandfather, who fought in World War II as a Soviet infantryman and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Jewish president.  Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in a landslide vote in 2019 after a career as a comic actor and stand-up comedian. (The Times of Israel: “He was catapulted to fame by playing a foul-mouthed schoolteacher on TV who became president after one of his students filmed his profane rant against corruption and posted it online.”) He caught the world’s attention by getting tangled up with Rudy Giuliani’s traitorous machinations and Trump’s first impeachment.

It does not seem that Zelensky’s Jewishness has particularly influenced his political outlook, nor was there a notable surge in antisemitism after his election. But you can be sure that if the Russian-Ukrainian situation devolves, murmurings about international Jewish cabals and conspiracies will be murmured in the dark corners of the Internet and the usual suspects.

Jewish canaries in the coalmine.  But perhaps the biggest fear is one that is linked to the region’s repulsive history. Jews are always the canaries in the coalmine at times of crisis.

Jews have long been identified by European mobs as “others” and outsiders, useful targets for hate. In Ukraine there was a 17th century proto-Holocaust known as the Chmielnicki Massacres; it is estimated that 100,000 Jews were slaughtered at a time when the world Jewish population was about 1.5 million. (Bodgan Chmielnicki, the cursed leader of the uprising, is remembered among Ukrainians and Russian nationalists today as a hero.)

Historically, the Jewish condition in the region was fraught. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (where untold numbers of generations of my ancestors lived until they thankfully escaped) were homes to some of the most glorious spiritual geniuses in all of Jewish history; they are the birthplaces of some of the great figures of Jewish modernity, especially early Zionists and Hasidic masters.  Through the end of the 19th century, this region was home to the largest Jewish community in the world, by far.

In 1881 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated—and the Jewish community was falsely implicated in the crime. Brutal pogroms were unleashed by bloodthirsty peasants with the knowing encouragement of churches, newspapers, and the government. And in a 30 year period, massive numbers of Jews got the hell out—approximately 2.5 million left, most of them heading to the shores of America’s goldene medina.

When the Soviet Union emerged in the 20th century, Jews were perpetual targets of discrimination, deportations to Siberia, and abuse. I know that I am not alone in my generation of Jewish Americans whose appetites for political action were profoundly shaped by the Free Soviet Jewry movement. (And we won—the Soviet Jewry movement has been called the most successful human rights campaign in history!)

There’s a reason why it’s so hard to visit a synagogue in Europe these days. When you go as a tourist and want to drop in on Shabbat services, there are hurdles to jump through; you can almost never simply show up and say you’d like to join the service. It involves calling ahead, always showing your passport, and often driving back and forth searching for a community that is self-consciously trying to keep its head down and not draw attention to itself. Such is the state of freedom of worship in “civilized” Europe.

So when we see this uncloaked Russian neo-Soviet aggression, our basic humanity is triggered and we worry about all the victims. But it also makes sense that we fear for the safety and well-being of Ukraine’s Jewish communities, who are on edge precisely because of the region’s awful history: When times are rough, Jews have always been the convenient scapegoat by oppressors.

Keep them all in your prayers this Shabbat, and for the awful weeks ahead that we surely have in store.

How can we help? Tzedakah Funds have been set up to help the victims of the crisis through the WORLD UNION FOR PROGRESSIVE JUDAISM and the JDC - AMERICAN JEWISH JOINT DISTRIBUTION COMMITTEE.

Have We Forgotten What Good News Looks Like?

Today there was good news in the world. After months of unremitting bad news, I fear we may have forgotten what good news looks like.

Watching the historic peace treaty signings today between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, I felt detached and dispassionate about the proceedings. I’m usually much more emotional when it comes to these things. I have strong memories of September 13, 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn. I was alone in my apartment in Jersey City, NJ, with tears streaming down my cheeks as Yitzhak Rabin z”l intoned, “Oseh shalom bim’romav…”

And I still have hanging over my desk a large photo of Rabin and King Hussein lighting each other’s cigarettes on the occasion of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in October 1994. It makes me melancholy and wistful when I look at the faces of these leaders from a different era. I take these things personally.

Today: no tears, and no goosebumps. Maybe that’s because Trump and Netanyahu are a different species of leader: unvarnished opportunists with grotesque records when it comes to promoting democracy. Or maybe because the UAE and Bahrain have abysmal human rights records, and it feels a bit like making friends with the nasty kid on the playground—he’s cool as long as he picks on others, not us.

But my own sentimentality doesn’t matter. To tell the truth, I am well aware that this is, in fact, a momentous occasion.

I’ve had conversations with lefty friends in recent days who scorned this turn of events. They’ve said that Trump is a self-serving narcissist, and doesn’t care about peace, and this is all about his reelection. They point to his unabashed statement this summer, when he admitted that the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 was “for the evangelicals”—recalling Secretary of State James Baker’s “F—k the Jews, they didn’t vote for us.” They argue that Bibi, too, is an autocrat who is solely bent on self-preservation.

To all of which I say: Point taken, but so what?  It’s not exactly breaking news to say that politicians act in their own political interests.

But I fear there’s something dangerous in my friends’ opposition to these peace deals. I think that they would unequivocally support the exact same deals if they were marshaled together by an American president whom they respected. I think that some left-leaning, pro-Israel people oppose this deal because Trump himself is so noxious, and they imagine that anything that makes Trump look good—anything that he can put in his “win” column—makes his prospect for reelection go up, G-d forbid.

In other words, they say: if it’s good for Trump, we oppose it.

That’s a pretty disastrous way of thinking. It’s just like hoping that the economy will tank, because presidents tend not to be reelected in a bad economy. Or hoping that there won’t be a coronavirus vaccine until after the election. It’s a manner of thinking that says: Trump is so grotesque that I don’t care how many people suffer in the short term, as long as he is booted out decisively in November.

I, for one, hope that in the short term, bad things won’t happen: that the economy won’t completely implode; that there won’t be more slayings of innocent black people by police; that there won’t be any more school shootings; that the fires ravaging the American West will stop.  (Can you imagine someone saying, “I want the fires keep burning until after the election?” That’s just sick.)

And I can hope for all these good things while campaigning with vigor for Trump to lose. You know what they say about broken clocks… 

In that spirit, I can rejoice that finally Israel is normalizing relationships in its “neighborhood.” This is what we’ve been yearning for since at least the Six Day War, when people prematurely fantasized that, due to Israel’s victories, the Arab nations would accept the fact that Israel was a permanent part of the modern Middle East. To hold otherwise is to play right into the hands of those who believe that what is good for them is what’s good for the world—and vice-versa.

What about the Palestinians? Yes, they are going to be the losers here—because of precisely this same logic. People who say, “You shouldn’t be allowed to engage with Israel until there is progress with the Palestinians” miss the whole point. When the PA and its enablers give up the pipe dream of “from the River to the Sea”, and engage with Israel as a permanent neighbor, there will be progress. I’m not absolving Israel of its responsibilities toward the Palestinians—Israel’s policies of dissembling and humiliation have been disastrous. But, frankly, I think that the deals with the UAE and Bahrain (and others that have been whispered) show that this has nothing to do with the Palestinians. Or, if anything, that the Arab world is nearly as exhausted with Palestinian rejectionism as Israelis are.

And while these protagonists make it impossible to feel unmitigated happiness, we should be able to recognize good news when it comes our way. At the end of a year’s ceaseless flow of bad news, this is indeed good news. Kein Yirbu—may it grow and expand in the New Year ahead.

Are We Ever Allowed to Make Holocaust Comparisons?

Wherever you stand on today’s hysteria about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the phrases “concentration camps” and “Never Again” in regard to the mass detentions of immigrant children on the U.S. border probably has been predetermined by your politics.

That is to say, liberals will come to her defense, saying that we face a horrible moral situation and we need language that sparks people to action. Conservatives will decry her, saying her rhetoric cheapens the legacy of the Holocaust. Everyone will retreat to their previously drawn lines.

I don’t want to be guilty of that, so before making one or two points, I want to come clean: I am generally on the political left, but I think it is possible and necessary to be critical of leaders with whom you are sympathetic. The antisemitic blindspot of the left is an outrage, and people who care about the climate change, racism, LGBTQ issues, economic justice, and reining in unfettered corporations had better wake up quickly before the Democratic party slides into full-blown Corbynism. Which would be a disaster for everyone.

So let’s try to back off of how we feel about the messenger, and soberly ask: Was AOC wrong to use those terms? I would make a few points:

First: Being specific in our language is very important, especially when it comes to the Shoah. “Concentration camps” are not the same as “death camps”—and during the Shoah there were both. To quote Deborah Dwork, a preeminent contemporary scholar of the Shoah:

Initially, the Nazis established concentration camps to incarcerated Communists, Socialists, asocials, or other who did not fit into the national community. Their primary purpose was to “teach” these Germans what they needed to know to return to society. Jews, by definition, could never belong to the national community… The many Jews among these political prisoners were therefore treated worse and assigned to the most difficult and dangerous labor details.[1]

These concentration camps were limitless in their brutality, and of course enormous numbers of Jews died there. But they are not identical with the death camps—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno; each name seared into our consciousness—where the singular goal was to use all the technology available to annihilate enormous numbers of Jews as efficiently, and as brutally, as possible.

There have been concentration camps before and since the Shoah. Totalitarian regimes have “concentrated” groups of people into “camps” many times in our awful history. Auschwitz, however, is something different. (See the map below.)

Second:  Is the Shoah a singular event? I believe it is. That’s why I prefer the Hebrew shoah, “cataclysm”, to the English holocaust. This language preserves the Jewish ownership of our history, and it reminds us that while others were persecuted by the Nazis, the Jews were uniquely targeted. Furthermore, there’s something unsettling about the origins of the word holocaust, with its connections to biblical burnt-offerings. As if to say: there was something “sacrificial” about the murders, which of course there wasn’t.

Likewise for genocide, a word that needed to be coined because no linguistic precedent existed for the crimes that the Nazis committed against the Jews. “Genocide” is not a synonym for “murder,” even “mass murder,” and it should not be used as such. But still: There have been other genocides, some attempted and some fulfilled, in the past three-quarters of a century, and we need to identify them as such.

Third:  So, are we ever allowed to make comparisons to the Shoah? We’ve become so accustomed to calling our enemies “Nazis.” (I’ve done it.) Perhaps there is solace in knowing that the nastiest word we can come up with for the scummiest people is “Nazi”—isn’t it an acknowledgment of the evil of the Shoah if that’s the most extreme word we can think of?

But we should usually avoid using that language. Thoughtful people with diametrically different points of view from our own are not “worse than Hitler.”  But still…

Do we really believe that we should never make Shoah analogies? If so, what was the point of all that education, all those Holocaust Museums, all those Yom HaShoah commemorations? I thought the point was: Learn from history. Recognize the signs of creeping fascism in order to cut it off. Don’t let another human being be dehumanized to the point where they are treated like vermin.

I thought that’s what “Never again” meant: “Never again” to us—that’s why we needed Zionism; “Never again” to anyone—that’s why we needed a human rights movement.

Through our Shoah education, Jewish strength has become a Mitzvah (here in the sense of “commandment”). So, too, has Jewish empathy for others’ victimization.

We’ve properly used the Einsatzgruppen analogy when considering the annihilation of the Darfuris. We’ve correctly called the Rwandan devastation a “genocide.” When Arabic textbooks in Palestine and elsewhere show caricatures of hook-nosed Jews grubbing money and drinking blood, we say, We know where we’ve seen this before, and we call it out.

And I, for one, make the connection between those faces on the U.S. border—concentrated as they are into camps—and the faces of Jewish children in Germany during World War II.

So my take on AOC’s comments?    

The humanitarian disaster taking place on the U.S. border is a stain on our country. The Trump administration’s family separation policies diminish our moral authority everywhere. The failure of the other parts of the government to react is a disgrace, although we should appreciate the moral voices on both the right and the left that have spoken out.

If AOC had called it “Auschwitz,” she should be condemned. If she had called it “genocide,” it would be an abhorrent abuse of language. But she didn’t. She called it a “concentration camp” and she said “Never again.” I agree with her on both counts.

[1] Deborah Dwork & Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, 2002, p.356.

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org

Saying No to the Neturei Karta of the Left

 ?הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי.?וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי? וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתָ

Hillel would say: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?  (Pirkei Avot 1:14)

When it comes to Hillel’s famous quote, selective memories prevail. The Jewish left has a tendency to forget the first clause—if we don’t stand up for ourselves, no one else will. And the right tends to ignore the second—if we’re only concerned about our own needs, what happened to our essential human empathy? Hillel knew that living in tension with these two values was the jumping-off point for much of Jewish ethics.

This tension surfaced on Thursday evening, as the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston voted to prohibit Council member-organizations from partnering with or co-sponsoring events with “self-identified Jewish organizations...that declare themselves to be anti-Zionist”. This is a good and proper decision.

Some people may not think so. Some inside-the-tent groups on the Jewish left opposed the measure, arguing that we need to expand the Council, to be inclusive of the widest possibly array of voices that are found in the Jewish community. That dilemma—one which progressive minded people are especially sensitive to—was widely felt at the JCRC meeting.

The JCRC vote became a necessity when one of the Council’s constituent organizations—Boston Workmen’s Circle—suggested that its occasional partnering with anti-Israel groups, such as the Jewish Voice for Peace, might mean that they are not in compliance with JCRC’s membership requirements. This prompted a close look at what, precisely, membership in JCRC means.

The JCRC was founded in Boston in 1944 as a coalition of organizations to act as a unified voice for Jewish concerns. First and foremost among those concerns was combating antisemitism. But JCRC also became the leading Jewish voice in New England for progressive causes, such as the labor movement, civil rights, women’s rights, etc. And fighting for a secure, Jewish, democratic, and peaceful State of Israel—which was a progressive cause then, and, for many of us, remains so today.

Thursday’s discussion was absolutely civil and occasionally emotional. Workmen’s Circle, with its Yiddish-socialist early 20th century roots, was a founding member of the Boston JCRC. Its representative, urging the Council to reject the measure, argued that if some groups haven’t found a place at the Jewish “table”, we should “make a bigger table.”  As JCRC Executive Director Jeremy Burton pointed out, there was an appropriate sadness in the room—because it would be sad to lose organizations of good people, committed to righteous causes, over this issue.

Further, it’s terribly sad when Israel—which once was the great unifier of the Jewish people—becomes the thing that divides.

And it’s sadder still when the State of Israel behaves in such reprehensible ways (not only towards Palestinians, but also towards large swaths of American Jews) that some Jews feel that they have no choice but to abandon the Zionist enterprise altogether.

I felt all those things at the meeting—and I also felt a surging sense of pride to raise my card and vote in favor of the resolution.

Because, as Jeremy also pointed out, boundaries in fact mean something. They don’t merely exclude. They also define: what, precisely, do we stand for?

Granting legitimacy to anti-Zionist voices (which, noisy as they may be, are a microscopic constituency among American Jews) would be a disaster.

After all, among the greatest gifts that Zionism brought was the invigorated notion that the Jews are a people; that we are a cantankerous, often dysfunctional, but nonetheless-in-the-same-boat family wherever we are found.  The State of Israel became the greatest expression of this, and the ultimate experiment in putting Jewish ideas into action (a government, a university, a military, a culture, a society) in two thousand years.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace jettison all that. They made explicit last week what has been obvious for much longer, when they issued a defining statement affirming that they are opposed to Zionism in all its forms. Let’s be clear: this isn’t an academic exercise. If that point of view gains traction in the American mainstream, the direct result will be the killing of more Jews.

It’s difficult to make those boundaries. Progressive-minded people quite appropriately want to be inclusive of as many others as possible; indeed, we are often stronger together.

But there are boundaries. For instance, most Jews recognize that the group known as Neturei Karta—an arm of the ultra-extremist Satmar Hasidic sect—are beyond the pale of mainstream Jewry. They’re the ones who show up and picket community Israel celebrations, or who meet with the most implacable leaders of Israel’s enemy nations to offer their friendship and support. They call Zionism a demonic abomination (and worse) and insist that it delays, rather than hastens, the world’s redemption.

Well, last week the JVP made it official: they are the Neturei Karta of the left. They chose the side of the Jewish people’s enemies, abandoned the notion of Jewish peoplehood, and rejected any awe of being part of a generation for which our ancestors desperately yearned (and often died). Their argument completely misunderstands or ignores history, utterly abandons the work of the Zionist left, and in fact strengthens those who oppose any vision of a peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.

They inhabit that strange parallel universe where the fringiest extremes of the left and right bend around so far that they become ideologically rather close. It’s the sort of place where tiki-torch bearing MAGA extremists dovetail with the antisemitic extreme of elements of the Women’s March leaders, who somehow find it so difficult to disassociate from Farrakhan.

Voices like these are active opponents of the values inherent in the mainstream Jewish community, especially its civil rights elements—the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, the American Jewish Committee, Jewish Labor Committee, etc. Not to mention the wonderful Zioness Movement—“unabashedly progressive, unquestionably Zionist.”

And then there’s Boston’s JCRC itself:  historically standing for decency, justice, human rights, and peace for all. “For all” includes us, too, you know. Our opposition to Trumpism in all of its grotesque forms does not mean we have to join together with other kinds of haters, including antisemites.

Hillel himself would have appreciated the irony.