Category Archives: Jewish identity

Orthodox Judaism treats women like filthy little things

Yossi Sarid explains that when ultra-Orthodox men in Israel push women to the back of the bus because they are not fit to be seen or spit on little girls because they disapprove of their dress, these misogynistic forms of behavior are not an aberration — they are the application of Jewish law.

If you would like to know the source from which your brothers derive their brazen behavior, go over to the study hall and open a page of Talmud. It’s true that the Torah has 70 faces, but the trend of these faces is clear: The source of the pollution is in halakha (Jewish law ) itself. What is happening in Beit Shemesh and its satellites is not “contrary to halakha,” it is mandated by halakha. And the rest will be told to the grandmothers, daughters and granddaughters.

Anyone ignoramus knows that the Torah’s “ways are ways of pleasantness,” that “the honor of a king’s daughter is within,” and that “proper behavior comes before the Torah,” but it’s worth knowing more. It’s worth knowing that a woman is unfit to be a judge, and is also unfit to give testimony. She is unfit for any public position with authority. “Thou shalt appoint a king over thee” – a king and not a queen.

A daughter, commanded the sages, must not be taught Torah, because “the mind of woman is not suited to be taught, but [only] to words of nonsense.” Women are light-minded and have little knowledge.

And if a man and a woman are drowning in a river, first they’ll save the man, “who is obligated to perform more commandments,” whereas a woman’s “wisdom is only in the spindle.” In fact, “words of Torah should be burned rather than being given to women.”

A man must say three blessings every day during morning prayers: He thanks God “that He didn’t make me a gentile, that He didn’t make me a woman, that He didn’t make me an ignoramus.” And it’s not proper to speak to a woman too much, since “all her conversation is nothing but words of adultery,” and whoever talks to her too much “causes evil to himself and will end up inheriting hell.” And let’s not even talk about the fate of someone “who looks even at a woman’s little finger.”

The extremists who spit at women, who call themselves Sikarikim, learned their lesson 101 times and learned it well: A husband would do well not to let his wife go outside, into the street, and should restrict her outings “to once or twice a month, as necessary, since a woman has no beauty except by sitting in the corner of her house.”

Because inside the house – very deep inside – her glorious honor awaits her: “Every woman washes her husband’s face and feet and pours him a cup and prepares his bed and stands and serves her husband. And any woman who refrains from doing any of these tasks that she is obligated to perform – is forced to do them.” Some recommend forcing her with a whip or by starvation “until she gives in.”

And needless to say, she is at her husband’s disposal whenever he is overcome by a desire “to satisfy his urges with her.” And if she continues to rebel, he always has the right “to divorce her without her consent.”

And there are many similar halakhot, only a few of which we have collected here. Nor have we cited everything in the name of the ones who said them, for lack of space. The readers are invited to find the references on Shabbat – and to browse around – on their own; this is a good opportunity for study. We will direct your attention to Tractate Shabbat, which does a good job of summing up halakha’s attitude toward women: “a sack full of excrement” with a bleeding hole.

Some people will seek to console themselves: It’s true that this is the halakha both m’doraita (from the Torah ) and m’drabanan (from the rabbis ), but that is not what is taught nowadays. But it suffices to listen to the sermon the sage Rabbi Ovadia Yosef delivered five years ago, based on the well-known halakhic work “Kitzur Shulchan Aruch”: “A man must take care not to walk between two women or between two dogs or two pigs, and men should also not allow a woman or a dog or a pig to walk between them.”

Treating women as impure and filthy begins with halakha and continues with actions. As long as the religious and ultra-Orthodox parties – Shas, United Torah Judaism, Habayit Hayehudi and National Union, none of which have any women in the Knesset – are not disqualified, their nakedness will continue to sing out and the nakedness of the land will be revealed.

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Israel turning into theocracy

Eric Alterman writes: It is becoming increasingly obvious that a break between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, particularly its American variety, is fast approaching. The reason for this is that Israel is slowly but inexorably turning into a conservative theocracy while the Diaspora is largely dedicated to liberal democracy.

The strategy of the “pro-Israel” camp among American Jewish organizations and neoconservative pundits has been, so far, one of avoidance of unpleasant facts coupled with unpleasant insinuations about the loyalties of those who insist on taking them seriously. But denial can work in only the short term, and only with an American Jewish population that identifies closely with Israel and relates all threats back to the Holocaust. These conditions, like the generation that sustained them, are not long for this world. Once this aging constituency is gone, the truth will prove unavoidable and it will be too late to deny it any longer.

Israel is no democracy, and it never has been with regard to the 4 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. It has always been a decidedly imperfect democracy concerning its own Arab citizens.

Lately, however, it has become less and less democratic with regard to the rights of its Jewish population. For reasons of demography, the Israeli body politic is increasingly dominated by Haredi Jews on the one hand, and secular nationalists, many of whose families emigrated from Russia, on the other. Neither group demonstrates any intrinsic interest in liberal political niceties like free speech, minority political rights or civil liberties.

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When Israel’s guns go silent, its demons roar

Gideon Levy writes: This fall a culture war, no less, broke out in Israel, and it is being waged on many more, and deeper, fronts than are apparent. It is not only the government, as important as that is, that hangs in the balance, but also the very character of the state. Our way of life is about to change, from cradle to grave. For this reason, it could be the most pivotal battle in the country’s history since the War of Independence.

We always knew that a few years without an external threat could strain the delicate seams: When the guns go silent, the demons roar. But no one predicted such an outburst of demons of every kind, all at once. The assault on the existing order is an all-out war, on every front; a political tsunami, a cultural flood and a social and religious earthquake, all still in their infancy. Those who call this an exaggeration are trying to lull you to sleep. The defeats and the victories up to now will determine the course of events: In the end, we will have a different country. The pretension of being an enlightened Western democracy is giving way, with terrifying speed, to a different reality – that of a benighted, racist, religious, ultranationalist, fundamentalist Middle Eastern country. That is not the kind of integration into the region we had hoped for.

The ferocious combined assault is highly effective. It targets women, Arabs, leftists, foreigners, the press, the judicial system, human rights organizations and anyone standing in the way of the cultural revolution. From the music we listen to, to the television we watch, from the buses we ride to the funerals we attend , everything is about to change. The army is changing, the courts are in turmoil, the status of women is being pelted with rocks, the Arabs are being shoved behind a fence and the labor migrants are being forced into concentration camps. Israel is barricading itself behind more and more walls and barbed-wire fences as if to say, to hell with the world.

There is no single guiding hand mixing this boiling, poisonous potion; many hands stir the revolution, but they all have something in common: the aspiration to a different Israel, one that is not Western, not open, not free and not secular. The extreme nationalist hand passes the antidemocratic, neofascist laws; the Haredi hand undermines gender equality and personal freedoms; the racist hand acts against the non-Jews; the settler hand intensifies the hold not only on the occupied territories but also deep into Israel; and another hand interferes in education, culture and the arts.

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‘Israel could lose American Jewry’

The Israeli press is sloppy in all sorts of ways. The headline above comes a Ynet article by Yitzhak Benhorin in Washington. It could be a direct quote from The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg and much of the content of the article could be drawn from recent conversation with Goldberg — the article doesn’t make this clear.

Benhorin bases much of his report on recent posts by Goldberg on the controversial Israeli government campaign appealing to Israelis to return home from the US, but some of the statements attributed to the influential columnist do not seem to be taken from his blog, specifically the following:

Goldberg believes that American Jews are trying to understand Israeli far more than Israelis try to understand them. He states that the average American Jew reads that women in Jerusalem sit on the back of the bus and thinks to himself that he has no connection whatsoever with this country.

He adds that young Israelis from Tel Aviv probably feel the same when they read that the right wing is making alliances with Evangelical Christians.

Goldberg notes that it is obvious that there is a rift, when 80% of American Jews are culturally politically and religion-wise like 25% of Israelis, Jews in Washington can identify with what’s happening in Tel Aviv but not Jerusalem or the settlements.

He adds that there is a large gap between most Jews in the US and most Jews in Israel; Jews in the US are becoming more universal in their outlook while Israeli Jews are becoming more and more tribal in theirs. If the trend continues, he says, American Jews will see Israel as a far off foreign country.

Goldberg also warned of the growing gulf between American Jews and their Israeli counterparts over issues related to democratic values. He said that the things happening in Israel today are like a mystery to the American Jews who scratch their heads and ask themselves what in the world is going on in Israel.

Goldberg also spoke of the recent right-wing legislation, the exclusion of women from the public domain and the harm to freedom of expression. He noted that as American Jews, they were taught that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and that sadly, the recent legislation causes concerns – should Israel lose its democratic values, it will lose American Jewry.

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Israel’s insult to American Jews

Screenshot of the website for an Israeli government campaign encouraging expatriate Israelis to leave the US and return home.

American Jewish leaders sent a blunt message to Israel’s leaders this week: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that blunt, but it didn’t need to be since it’s well understood that an insult to the American Jewish community risks damaging ties between the United States to Israel — ties that ensure the continuation of vital military and financial support for the Jewish state.

Philip Weiss writes:

Is this the week that Israel, the longest running Jewish American TV show, “jumped the shark”? I wonder. Ruth Marcus getting vexed in the Washington Post that restrictions on women in Israel are a “national security” threat because they will alienate American Jews, on whom the country depends. Abe Foxman complaining about threats to civil liberties in the Knesset for the same reason. And now that stupid ad campaign warning Israelis in the U.S. not to marry Americans, but come back home. It disturbed Jeffrey Goldberg among others. Again because it makes their job, propagandizing, impossible.

The Netanyahu government has now cancelled the ad campaign, in embarrassment. The Washington Post rubs it in: “The Israeli government has canceled an ad campaign in which it suggested that Israeli expatriates will ‘lose their national identities’ if they marry Jewish Americans or celebrate Christmas. ”

Goldberg got the scoop, from Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who said, “The Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s campaign clearly did not take into account American Jewish sensibilities, and we regret any offense it caused.”

The funny thing is, even after this high level damage control, the Israeli ministry has only managed to remove one of the offending videos. Maybe the people running the campaign are still not sure what all the fuss is about. As the New York Times reports:

Some Israeli officials were mystified by the belatedness of the reaction; the campaign is a few months old. Attention increased after an item on it appeared on the Jewish Channel, a cable station, and a blog was posted this week by Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic.

“The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic, and also chutzpadik, if you don’t mind me resorting to the vernacular,” Mr. Goldberg said.

“The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the Aipac convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters.” Aipac stands for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group.

On Thursday, the Jewish Federations of North America issued a memo that said: “While we recognize the motivations behind the ad campaign, we are strongly opposed to the messaging that American Jews do not understand Israel. We share the concerns many of you have expressed that this outrageous and insulting message could harm the Israel-Diaspora relationship.”

Steven Bayme, director of contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee, said that the campaign’s skepticism of Jewish life in the United States contributed to the angry reaction, particularly the message that Israelis should not marry American Jews. “We’re talking about one Jewish people, and certainly encouraging marriage within the Jewish people is something everyone would sign on to,” he said.

And who would be the “everyone” Bayme refers to?

Surveys of American Jews over the last four decades indicate that intermarriage (Jews marrying non-Jews) has steadily increased, rising from 13 percent before 1970 to about 50 percent or more currently. (The most recent National Jewish Population Survey was for 2000-01 [PDF] which measured the rate at 47 percent. It seems reasonable to assume that during the last decade the level of intermarriage has continued to increase.)

So, unless those American Jews who choose to marry non-Jews think that other Jews should be discouraged from following their example, it seems like the “everyone” Bayme is speaking for is probably just him and his fellow Jewish leaders.

Beyond this discord between Israel and the American Jewish community, there is another constituency that has reason to be insulted: the rest of us.

The Jewish need to defend the tribe seems like a given. If Jews don’t give birth to more Jews, then before long there will be no Jewish people. But take away the term “Jew” and what are we talking about here? What’s the difference between this notion of ethnic purity and perpetuation and any other?

In the mid-90s, America’s most prominent Jewish leaders issued a statement calling on American Jews to place five values at the heart of “Jewish continuity” efforts. The fourth of these is brith, which means covenant.

From the time of Abraham, Jews have seen themselves as bound to one another and to God through a covenant that distinguishes Jews from members of other peoples or faiths. This covenant serves to differentiate Jews from non-Jews and to ensure that Jews remain a people apart. American Jews, integrated into American society and full participants in its activities, are increasingly not a people apart. As boundaries blur, inclusivity runs the risk of degenerating into a vague universalism that is Jewishly incoherent; for example, non-Jews receiving aliyot. No matter how close the personal relationships between Jews and members of other faiths, Jewish continuity demands that strong, visible religious boundaries between Jews and non-Jews be maintained. Leadership roles within the Jewish community and in Jewish religious life must be reserved for those who accept the covenant — Jews alone.

America’s libertarian spirit embraces the idea that social isolation is a legitimate dimension of personal liberty. The Amish, for instance, are living the American way of life just as much as anyone else.

But just as isolation is a legitimate choice, it also incurs an inevitable price. Those who set themselves apart cannot so easily be embraced, indeed they signal that they do not want to be embraced.

Moreover, those who convey to society at large the message that they see its diversity as threat, should not be surprised if having set themselves apart, they become further isolated by being ostracized.

If most American Jews do not want to be a people apart, then it seems like it’s time Judaism came to terms with this reality. We live in a world that is too small for any tribe to put itself first or strive to set itself apart.

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Israeli gov’t warns Israelis in U.S. not to marry Americans but come home

Philip Weiss found this: an Israeli government advertising campaign that’s sure to alienate a lot of American Jews.

The series of ads includes one that shows the look of dread on the faces of Israeli grandparents when they hear their grand daughter say she’ll be celebrating Christmas. I happen to live in a part of the U.S. where “We still celebrate Christmas” is a popular bumper sticker. No doubt the people who want to send out that message feel threatened by separation of Church and State and also the cultural threat they perceive from secularization. But I also imagine a lot of them would call themselves Christian Zionists, so I wonder how they’d react to the Israeli government portraying Christmas celebrations as a threat to Zionism.

Wow this is great reporting at the Jewish Channel. They focus on the ad campaign sponsored by the Israeli gov’t (which we mentioned last week) which is aimed at getting back all the Israelis who have moved to the United States–as many as 2 million!

Watch the ads from the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, between :25 and 2:40 — they’re cute, mostly, and in Hebrew, so I’m counting on the Jewish Channel’s translation. In one a dad doesn’t wake up when is son says Daddy over and over again, then he does wake up when the kid says “Abba.” The Israeli gov’t’s message: “They will always remain Israelis. Their children will not. Help them to return to Israel.”

Then there’s another one in which Israeli grandparents’ faces fall when their grandchild says on Skype that she’s celebrating Christmas.

The third ad is the craziest/most interesting. It suggests, says the Jewish Channel’s anchor, that “marrying American Jews could make Israelis lose their sense of identity.”

Some of the commenters at Mondoweiss say TJC gets the interpretation wrong for the third video and say the message from Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption points to the threat to Israeli identity posed by non-Jews. Weiss thus hedges on that point by saying “Americans” in the headline.

Here are the videos whose message is fairly self evident even for those of us who don’t understand Hebrew. In the viewer comments under the dangers-of-marriage video, someone wrote (and this is just a paraphrase): American Jews need to be aware that in Israel, the Jewish connection only goes so far.

It appears that the Israeli ministry is busy keeping the comment threads “clean” since that particular comment has been removed.

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U.S. Jewish leader: Anti-democratic laws ‘catastrophic’ for Israel’s ties with Diaspora Jews

Haaretz reports: The leader of the Reform movement in the U.S. warned Sunday, in an exclusive interview with Haaretz, of the damage anti-democratic laws will have on Diaspora Jews and Israel alike.

“The anti-democratic laws that have passed, or that are expected to pass, in the Knesset are not bad only for Israel. These laws could have a catastrophic impact on relations between Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora – especially American Jews,” warned Rabbi Eric Yoffie.

“Commitment to shared moral values and to democracy is what binds Jews to Israel. Without this commitment, ties between the two largest Jewish communities – Israel and America – will be greatly weakened.”

The proposed non-governmental organizations law seeks to limit contributions from abroad – especially from Europe – to non-profit and human rights organizations that operate in Israel.

One of the controversial bills, sponsored by Likud MK Ofir Akunis, would bar political NGOs from accepting more than NIS 20,000 from foreign governments or international bodies such as the United Nations. The second bill, authored by Yisrael Beitenu MK Faina Kirshenbaum, would force all organizations not funded by the Israeli government to pay a 45-percent tax on all donations from foreign states.

Yoffie cautioned that these laws, should they be passed, would cause “tremendous” damage to Israel. “When rabbis and Jewish leaders speak in communities and synagogues about the Jewish State, what they emphasize, with great pride, is Israel’s democratic character. But what will they say if these anti-democratic laws are approved in the Knesset?”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie is about to retire from his position after 16 years as the head of the Reform movement, which is considered the largest of the four streams of American Judaism.

“Non-governmental organizations are an important and valued component of civil society in America, and I view an attack on Israeli NGOs as exceedingly serious,” said Yoffie. “How can it be that Irving Moscowitz and Sheldon Adelson pour money into Israel for political purposes, and so do Evangelical Christian groups, but money coming from abroad to assist leftwing and human rights organizations in Israel is suddenly forbidden?”

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Kissinger in ’72: Jews ‘self-serving bastards’

Ynet reports: Confidential files released for publication in the United States on Friday reveal a new side to the Jewish-American politician Henry Kissinger, which might anger the Jewish community.

Kissinger, who served as the United States National Security Advisor and later as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, had demanded to divide the Sinai Peninsula into “security zones” prior to the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

According to the secret documents released by the State Department, back in 1972 Kissinger wished to put economic and ethical pressure on Israel, calling American Jewish groups lobbying the Nixon White House self-serving “bastards.”

The files also show that Russia had claimed the “Arabs” were willing to recognize the State of Israel at that time.

Kissinger had a huge impact on American foreign policy, helping reach certain degree of conciliation between Washington and Moscow during the cold war. As the relations between both countries grew warmer, the Jewish American lobbyists amped up the pressure on Washington in an attempt to aid their Soviet brothers.

One of Nixon’s advisors, Leonard Garment, reported he was flooded with letters and phone calls from Jews and asked for Kissinger’s advice on the matter.

According to the transcripts, Kissinger, who is Jewish, replied to Garment: “Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish community?”

In response, Garment, also Jewish, said: “None in the world.”

Kissinger responded: “What the hell do they think they are accomplishing? You can’t even tell bastards anything in confidence because they’ll leak it.”

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Palestinian ‘Freedom Riders’ arrested on bus to Jerusalem

The Washington Post reports: Evoking the nonviolent tactics of the American civil rights movement, six Palestinian activists boarded an Israeli commuter bus linking Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Jerusalem on Tuesday and were arrested as they tried to ride through an Israeli checkpoint on the outskirts of the city.

The group, part of a loose network of independent activists in the West Bank, called themselves “Freedom Riders,” taking the name of civil rights activists who in the 1960s challenged segregation on interstate buses in the southern United States and were attacked by violent mobs.

The Palestinian activists said they were demanding the right to travel freely to Jerusalem, to which access from the West Bank is restricted by Israel, and protesting against bus companies running lines serving Jewish settlements. Israel tightened restrictions on entry of Palestinians to Jerusalem after a string of suicide bombings in the city during a violent uprising that erupted in 2000.

“We are using civil disobedience to disrupt the status quo,” Fadi Quran, one of the activists, said before boarding a bus operated by the Israeli Egged company at a stop serving settlements several miles north of Jerusalem. An Arab headscarf on his shoulders, Quran wore a T-shirt that said: “We shall overcome.”

“As part of our struggle for freedom, justice and dignity, we demand the ability to be able to travel freely on our roads, on our own land, including the right to travel to Jerusalem,” said a statement read by Hurriyah Ziada, a spokeswoman for the activists, in Ramallah before the group set out for the bus stop on back roads to avoid army checkpoints.

At the Hizma checkpoint on Jerusalem’s northern outskirts, Israeli police boarded the bus for identity checks and asked one of the Palestinians, Badia Dweik of Hebron, whether he had a permit to enter Jerusalem.

“Why don’t you ask the settlers for a permit?” Dweik replied, referring to the Israeli passengers. “It’s my right to ride the bus. This is racism. I’m just like them.”

“No permit, no entry,” a military policewoman told him. After Dweik refused to get off the bus, a group of officers tried to drag him off, but he went limp at the narrow doorway, thwarting the initial attempt to arrest him.

Nadim Sharabati from Hebron, sitting next to Dweik, was also told to get off. “Do you demand permits from settlers who come to our area?” he asked. A policeman replied, “Those are the laws.”

“Those are racist laws,” Sharabati said. “Tell me, isn’t this racist discrimination between me and the settlers?”

After a standoff, a larger police contingent boarded the bus and hauled off the activists, arresting them for trying to enter Jerusalem without permits.

The bus protest, which organizers said would be followed by more, drew responses ranging from indifference to hostility from Israeli passengers on board.

“Terrorists!” snapped one man.

Esther Cohen, from the settlement of Maaleh Levonah, said that allowing Palestinians on Israeli buses in the West Bank was a security risk and that she feared one could get off and carry out an attack in a Jewish settlement. Tapping her finger on the bulletproof window of the armored bus, she said, “When we can ride in an ordinary bus, then they can get on as well.”

Watching the activists and a crowd of journalists gather at the bus stop near his settlement, a man who gave his name as Hananel said that Palestinians should ride their own buses. “This is a Jewish state here,” he said.

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Young U.S. Jews aim Occupy movement at Birthright Israel

Haaretz reports: As the various “occupy” movements spread across the United States, headed by the massive Occupy Wall Street events, a group of young Jewish Americans is taking the notion of the “99%” against the ruling “1%” to debunk what they see as the hypocritical U.S. Jewish leadership.

In a mission statement titled “Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action,” the Young, Jewish, and Proud (YJP), described as the youth wing of the left-leaning Jewish Voice for Peace movement, called out to young Jews to “stand up to the 1% in our own community, the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people and act as the gatekeepers for our community.”

In one event meant to demonstrate the kind of grass-roots dissent shown in other “occupy” events, YJP members disrupted a New York event sponsored by Birthright Israel Alumni Community, using the now famous “human microphone” to interrupt a speech by venture capitalist and author Steven Pease.

Speaking of the incident to the YJP website, one participant, Liza Behrendt, said the event was meant to protest the Birthright program – in which Jewish youths are given a tour of Israel.

“Birthright is a symptom of a larger structural problem in the Jewish institutional world in which our version of the 1%, a handful of wealthy donors including people like the Schustermans or Sheldon Adelson, is able to dictate the social and political agenda of the 99%. That’s because Jewish institutions are so dependent on the 1% for funds,” Behrendt said.

Behrendt criticized Birthright as “free propaganda trips for predominantly middle and upper class American Jews while urgent needs in the United States and Israel go unmet.”

“At the same time, within the dominant Jewish institutions, like Hillel, critical thinking about Israel is not only discouraged but actively suppressed,” she added.

Another participant, Carolyn Klaasen, quoted on the movement’s website as referring to the event, said that the recent “occupy” movement made her feel that “such actions are far more in line with Jewish tradition than this event, which lifted up as a model of ‘success’ people like illegal settlement builder Lev Leviev who profit from exploitation of others.”

“That is part of the problem we’re protesting in the Occupy movement,” Klaasen added.

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Gender apartheid on the rise in Israel

Women required to sit out of men's sight, at the back of the bus.

The Associated Press reports: Posters depicting women have become rare in the streets of Israel’s capital. In some areas women have been shunted onto separate sidewalks, and buses and health clinics have been gender-segregated. The military has considered reassigning some female combat soldiers because religious men don’t want to serve with them.

This is the new reality in parts of 21st-century Israel, where ultra-Orthodox rabbis are trying to contain the encroachment of secular values on their cloistered society through a fierce backlash against the mixing of the sexes in public.

On the surface, Israel’s gender equality bona fides seem strong, with the late Golda Meir as a former prime minister, Tzipi Livni as the current opposition leader, and its women soldiers famed around the world.

Reality is not so shiny. The World Economic Forum recently released an unfavorable image of women’s earning power in Israel, and in 2009, the last year for which data are available, Israeli women earned two-thirds what men did.

The newly enforced separation is felt most strongly in Jerusalem, where ultra-Orthodox Jews are growing in numbers and strength. The phenomenon is starting to be seen elsewhere, though in the Tel Aviv region, Israel’s largest metropolis, secular Jews are the vast majority, and life there resembles most Western cities.

Still, secular Jews there and elsewhere in Israel worry that their lifestyles could be targeted, too, because the ultra-Orthodox population, while still relatively small, is growing significantly. Their high birthrate of about seven children per family is forecast to send their proportion of the population, now estimated at 9 percent, to 15 percent by 2025.

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Jewish people are just that, people, and far from chosen

In his new book, The Wandering Who, Gilad Atzmon, who was born in Jerusalem, describes his experience of being raised in a society that preferred to disregard the Palestinians in their midst.

“Supremacy was brewed into our soul, we gazed at the world through racist, chauvinistic binoculars. And we felt no shame about it either,” Atzmon writes.

The subject of Jewish supremacy is one that few non-Jews dare touch and those that do are, if not anti-Semitic, then sure to be branded as such. As often proves to be the case, the most courageous voices tend to emerge from inside Israel itself. None is more reliable than that of the Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy:

On Saturday, the prayer was once again read in the synagogues. “You have chosen us from among all the nations” was once again heard all over the land. The idea that we are a special nation was once again specifically expressed, as is often the case in prayers and in the Torah, and not only on Yom Kippur.

But the idea that we are members of the chosen people is planted far deeper, and not only in Jewish tradition and among those who observe it – modern and ostensibly secular Israel believes in it with all its heart. There are not many other ancient Jewish ideas as deeply implanted in the contemporary Israeli experience as the idea that the “Jewish people,” however it is interpreted, is better than any other nation. If you scratch beneath the skin of almost any Israeli, you’ll discover that he really is convinced of that: We’re the best; the “Jewish genius” is the most successful; the Israel Defense Forces is the most moral. Nobody will tell them different, we’re simply the best in the world.

This is not only unnecessary and groundless arrogance, it’s also an extremely dangerous idea that enables Israel to behave as it does, with blatant disregard of the world’s feelings. Nor does it lack benighted ultra-nationalist and racist foundations. It’s good and well that a nation considers itself successful. The Jewish people have many reasons for that, of course, and many accomplishments of which to boast, as does the State of Israel, which is a kind of wonder, almost a miracle. But among all these, prominent in its absence is an equally important national trait: modesty. It is hard to accuse the Israelis of having it.

At the basis of Israeli arrogance lies the idea that this really is a special nation with special traits that are shared by no other nation. You can see that among Israeli travelers abroad; you can hear it from anyone who comes into contact with foreigners; you can sense it in the deeper currents of Israeli policy. The Americans are “foolish,” the Indians are “primitive,” the Germans are “square,” the Chinese are “strange,” the Scandinavians are “naive,” the Italians are “clowns” and the Arabs are … Arabs. Only we know what’s good for us, and not only for us but for the entire world. There is nothing like Israeli ingenuity, there is nothing similar to Jewish intelligence, the Jewish brain invents new ideas for us like no other brain, because we’re the best, bro.

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Why fewer young American Jews share their parents’ view of Israel

Dana Goldstein writes:

“I’m trembling,” my mother says, when I tell her I’m working on an article about how younger and older American Jews are reacting differently to the Palestinians’ bid for statehood at the United Nations. I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians dealing with ongoing settlements construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama’s promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.

“This is so emotional,” she says as we cautiously discuss our difference of opinion. “It makes me feel absolutely terrible when you stridently voice criticisms of Israel.”

A lump of guilt and sadness rises in my throat. I’ve written harshly of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and its assault on Gaza in 2009, and on civil rights issues in Israel. But speaking my mind on these topics — a very Jewish thing to do — has never been easy. During my childhood in the New York suburbs, support for Israel was as fundamental a family tradition as voting Democratic or lighting the Shabbos candles on Friday night.

My mom has a masters degree in Jewish history and is the program director of a large synagogue. Her youthful Israel experiences, volunteering on a kibbutz and meeting descendants of great-grandmother’s siblings, were part of my own mythology. Raised within the Conservative movement, I learned at Hebrew school that Israel was the “land of milk and honey” where Holocaust survivors had irrigated the deserts and made flowers bloom.

What I didn’t hear much about was the lives of Palestinians. It was only after I went to college, met Muslim friends, and enrolled in a Middle Eastern history and politics course that I was challenged to reconcile my liberal, humanist worldview with the fact that the Jewish state of which I was so proud was occupying the land of 4.4 million stateless Palestinians, many of them refugees displaced by Israel’s creation.

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The romance of Birthright Israel

Kiera Feldman writes:

The seekers are young, just beginning to face the disappointments of adulthood. Their journey is often marked by tears. They may weep while praying at the Western Wall, their heads pressed against the weathered stone, or at the Holocaust Museum, as they pass the piles of shoes of the dead. Others tear up in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery, while embracing a handsome IDF soldier in the late afternoon light. But at some point during their all-expenses-paid ten-day trip to a land where, as they are constantly reminded, every mountain and valley is inscribed with 5,000 years of their people’s history, the moment almost always comes.

When Julie Feldman (no relation), then 26 and a Reform Jew from New York City, arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in December 2008, she called herself “a blank slate.” She returned as the attack on Gaza was under way, armed with a new “pro-Israel” outlook. “Israel really changed me,” she said. “I truly felt when I came back that I was a different person.”

It was mission accomplished for Birthright Israel, the American Zionist organization that has, since its founding in 1999, spent almost $600 million to send more than 260,000 young diaspora Jews on free vacations to the Holy Land.

Birthright co-founder Charles Bronfman claims he just provides free airfare and lodging. “Then,” he says, “Israel does its magic.” Indeed, in 2009 Brandeis University researchers found that almost three-quarters of alumni describe their Birthright experience as “life changing.” “If you come here, and you connect to the origins of the Jewish people, the country that forged our existence, our faith, our values,” then–Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu promised in a 2008 Birthright video, “it’ll change your life forever.”

Bronfman’s partner in founding Birthright, Michael Steinhardt, professes faith in Israel as “a substitute for theology.” Steinhardt understands that for a generation weaned on irony, Birthright could offer an opportunity for deep, wholehearted conviction. “My liberal arts education taught me that any distinct concept or ideal will crumble under the scrutiny of too many questions,” laments a recent college grad writing on her Birthright experience, which taught her “it was okay and even honorable to believe in the state of Israel, to adopt, so to speak, the settlers’ original dream.” Her Jewcy.com essay is hardly unique: Birthright has generated reams of effusive essays and blog posts over the years.

Barry Chazan, a Hebrew University professor emeritus and the architect of Birthright’s curriculum, explains in a celebratory 2008 book, Ten Days of Birthright Israel, that the trip is designed so travelers “are bombarded with information.” The goal is to produce “an emotionally overwhelming experience” that “helps participants open themselves to learning.” On my own Birthright trip last year, I experienced the Chazan Effect. Chronically underslept, hurled through a mind-numbing itinerary, I experienced, despite my best efforts to maintain a reportorial stance, a return to the intensity of feeling of childhood.

“This is not a vacation,” a Birthright employee pronounced the first evening, before shooing us to the hotel bar. “You are embarking on a journey.” Just four nights later, my steel trap of a heart was overcome by emotion upon seeing my new Birthright crush dancing with another girl. I fled to my room and cried.

Conceived as “the selling of Jewishness to Jews,” in Bronfman’s words, Birthright trips are offered in dozens of varieties, from secular to Orthodox, from outdoorsy to LGBT-friendly. Crisscrossing the country in rollicking tour buses, Birthright participants between 18 and 26 swim in the Dead Sea, ride camels, visit the occupied Golan Heights, listen to lectures on Zionism and spend their nights boozing and flirting with the IDF soldiers assigned to accompany them. Trips are conducted by a variety of contracted tour providers, each designing itineraries approved by Birthright’s central office in Jerusalem. Itineraries must include core sites (the Western Wall, Masada) and curricular themes (“The History of Zionism”), and Birthright maintains rigorous quality control. Currently, there are seventeen tour providers, with Hillel, the international Jewish campus group, among the largest. Each trip is overseen by two American camp counselor figures, an Israeli guide and a rifle-toting guard.

The free trip is framed as a “gift” from philanthropists, Jewish federations and the State of Israel. Far-right Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is the largest individual donor, having given Birthright $100 million over the past five years. The Israeli government provided Birthright $100 million during the program’s first decade; Prime Minister Netanyahu recently announced another $100 million in government funding. Birthright’s budget for 2011 is $87 million, a number expected to reach $126 million by 2013, enough to bring 51,000 participants to Israel that year alone.

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Most American Jews have starry-eyed view of Israel, poll finds

JTA reports:

American Jews strongly believe in Israel’s commitmitment to peace, and largely think the Palestinian leadership and people are opposed to it, according to a new poll.

Eighty-four percent of respondents in the survey released last week said the Israeli government is committed to a lasting peace, compared to just 20 percent who said the same about the Palestinian Authority. More than half think the Palestinian people are opposed to peace with Israel.

Sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, the poll sampled more than 1,000 American Jews several days before President Obama called for the 1967 borders to be used as the basis for negotiations for a future Palestinian state.

More than 75 percent of those polled said the biggest obstacle to peace in the region is the Palestinians’ “culture of hatred” and promotion of anti-Israel sentiment.

Seventy-eight percent said it was essential for the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and 62 percent did not believe that Israelis would be free from Palestinian terror attacks even if a Palestinian state were created in the West Bank and Gaza.

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‘AIPAC activists beat me’

Only a few months after Rae Abileah was among a group of young Jewish activists who found themselves the target of Jewish mob violence, she was attacked again yesterday, this time while exercising her right to free speech inside the US Congress.

Ynet reports:

Rae Abileah, a woman of Israeli descent who interrupted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the US Congress Tuesday, claims she was beaten by AIPAC activists.

“I yelled ‘Stop the occupation’ and immediately they jumped on me,” she told Ynet.

Abileah, a 28-year old Jewish daughter of an Israeli, is a member of Code Pink, a pacifist organization. She told Ynet that she had disrupted another speech by Netanyahu at the Jewish Federations General Assembly in New Orleans in November.

“We are a young generation of Jews who don’t intend to sit by in silence and allow prime ministers who commit crimes against humanity speak,” she said. “As far as we’re concerned he can speak at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.”

Abileah says she used a card procured by a friend to sneak into the House of Representatives. “When Netanyahu began to speak about Israel and democracy a got up to speak against its anti-democratic operations,” she said.

“I yelled, ‘Stop the occupation, stop Israeli war crimes’ and I called out for equal rights for Palestinians.”

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Can Israel survive without anti-Semitism?

Avraham Burg writes:

In a very short time we will no longer be able to evade the real questions: Are we capable of apprehending our existence without the hatred of others? Do we really need external anti-Semitism as a means to define our inner identity? Think for a moment about a world in which Jews are not hated; about a utopia of peace in the Middle East, fraternity wherever our brethren live. Unreasonable? Definitely not! A hundred years ago, who believed in the existential transformations being played out before our eyes? Few, indeed.

A hundred years ago, Europe was awash in bloodshed that had lasted a thousand years, yet now it is a peaceful continent. Only a few months ago, the Middle East was one of the world’s largest repositories of nasty, bizarre dictatorships, yet today we are on the brink of what appears to be a historic and positive change. And with the world going into this mode, immediately or soon, will the Jewish people be able to survive without an external enemy? It’s not certain.

We have proven methods of coping with persecution, hatred and pogroms. But we don’t have a clue and don’t have experience when it comes to openness, acceptance and full equality for Jews, as for everyone else. That prospect threatens us in the deepest recesses of our being and confronts us with questions about our national existence as such, as “a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” This being so, we tend to return to the sick, pathological molds which are so familiar to us: junkies of hatred, we isolate ourselves from the haters, real or imagined. As though the evil we know is preferable to the potential – and threatening – good.

From this point of view, the establishment of the State of Israel not only failed to solve the problems for the sake of which it was founded but, on the contrary, made them a great deal worse. Israel is the biggest shtetl in the history of the world. One big town around which walls of segregation and resentment rise higher every day, cutting it off from its surroundings. Few of us know any other existential reality apart from our unrelenting war with everyone, all the time and over all issues.

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The racist entity that is taking over Israel must be toppled

Sefi Rachlevsky writes:

The wretchedness of the law in the face of Rabbi Dov Lior has many meanings, and Lior’s refusal to be interrogated over his support for “The King’s Torah – The Laws for Killing Gentiles” – only marginally gets at the heart of the matter.

Thirty years ago, the terrorist organization known as the “Jewish Underground” was set up with the purpose of killing Arabs. The group’s head of operations, Menachem Livni – who was convicted on multiple counts of murder before being pardoned by the regime – testified at the time that the living spirit, the initiator, the religious instructor and the coordinator of the murders was Lior.

This was true for the murders the underground carried out, and was also true for the pressure he put on the murderers to blow up buses and their passengers. The law states that someone who dispatches murders should receive multiple life sentences, along with additional time for organizing the crime. But thanks to instruction from higher up, Lior was never imprisoned, put to trial and or even properly interrogated.

And so he continued: Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, saw Lior as his rabbi and counselor. After the Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre, Lior declared that “Baruch Goldstein was holier than the saints of the Holocaust.” The living spirit behind the religious edicts against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which lead to his 1995 assassination, was also, according to testimonies, Lior. Rabin’s assassin frequented Hebron, where he used to see Lior.

Rabbi Lior is not in prison. He currently serves as a municipal rabbi, the head of a Jewish court and the dean of a large IDF yeshiva. He also heads the Judea and Samaria rabbis committee. Thousands adhere to his commands, hundreds of thousands are taught his ideology, tens of thousands of shekels are paid to him by the Israeli taxpayer every month.

This utter aberration is no accident. The regime chose Lior. Tel Aviv is a dream world. The actual reality that has been instilled in Israel is Lior. Under King Lior, Israel has built a world where the Jews are citizens and the Arabs are not, both in the occupied territories and in Jerusalem; where a Jewish man is a citizen and his Arab neighbor is not. Most Jewish first-graders attend ultra-Orthodox and religious schools. The majority of them are educated along the lines of “The King’s Torah.” A Jew is human. A non-Jew is non-human. “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to non-Jews. And this is not delivered in the form of incitement, but as a simple statement of a fact. As simple as calling a chair a chair.

There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. Either you’re with Lior or you’re against him. The rabbis who chose him are Lior. The education minister – who visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs hand in hand with the convicted terrorist Livni, whom he seeks to put in charge of educating the children who will be brought to Hebron – is Lior. The prime minister, who enslaves Israel to the racist world of the settlements, is Lior.

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