JustASC

From NJJN’s Israel anniversary supplement:

My family and I were living in Israel in 1998, when the country celebrated its 50th anniversary of independence.

That same year, Israel had an entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, a wildly popular television pageant that combines elements of the Olympics and American Idol. Israel’s official entry was sung by a performer named Dana International, a sultry Cher look-alike with an interesting back story: Ms. International was a transsexual who underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1993.

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New Voices, the indispensable Jewish students magazine, is out with a new issue, featuring a fascinating report on the the University of California at Irvine, and a divide between campus Jewish activists and outside Jewish groups over the extent of anti-Semitism at the 25,000-strong state institution. Some student leaders say the problem is being exaggerated, or is at least no worse than at other state universities. The ZOA begs to differ, of course, and may have cost one student leader a leadership role.

Daniel Schroeter, a professor of Jewish Studies, has a key quote:  

“I think part of the reason it’s such an issue is the outside organizations, on both sides, reaching in and making it one. A whole lot of allegations get blown out of proportion.”

Writing in Slate about the new dovish and self-described “pro-Israel” lobbying group J Street, Shmuel Rosner says it’s time to dump the term “pro-Israel”:

Defining someone as “pro-Israel”- or, for that matter, pro-anything or anti-anything – is a way for people to simplify complicated questions when searching for a political party, a candidate, or an organization they would like to support. The problem is that along the way the term has been used so often – to describe so many conflicting positions – that it has become practically meaningless, more confusing than clarifying.

So maybe now, for Israel’s 60th birthday, there’s one last position that the “pro-Israel” camp can agree on: It is time to dump the term. Those Democrats might be right when they tell William Daroff: “We are all pro-Israel.” But Republicans are also right when they insist: “We should still talk about the specifics.” Without specifics, being “pro-Israel” is almost like being pro-great-weather or pro-tasty-food.

Rosner misses something here: J Street needs to call itself “pro-Israel” because so many of its opponents will question not its policies, but its very commitment to the security and future of a Jewish state. J Street probably welcomes a debate on “specifics” ; but they know that too often you can’t have that debate with any intelligence because the right will cry “anti-Israel” if you cross any of the lines they have drawn in the sand.

“Pro-Israel” is the rhetorical version of the flag pin: You don’t need to wear one to be patriotic; but if you don’t wear it, you can bet your opponents will point it out.

And there is a difference between a left wing position that would like to see U.S. pressure on Israel to make  a deal with the Palestinians, and a left-wing position that propsoes a “single-state” soultion for Israel and Palestine. The former stands for a Jewish democratic state; the latter does not. “Pro-Israel” establishes a baseline, which J Street states nicely when it talks about being committed to “U.S. support for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state [as] an historic and legitimate commitment” and “maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge.”

This has got to be the stupidest attack on Obama yet, and that’s saying something.

According to Newsmax, Reverend Otis Moss, Jeremiah Wright’s successor at Trinity United is “Just As Controversial” because he states in a sermon that:

 Noah was a “thug” who “was drinking much gin and juice and got drunk on the eve of reconstruction.”

Abraham “pimped his own wife.”

Jacob was a “hustler” who “stole his own brother’s birthright.”

Moses was a “thug” and “if he got mad would give you a royal beatdown.”

Sampson was a “thug” and a “player.”

David was a “thug,” a “shot caller,” and a “player,” and a man after God’s own heart.

A 12-year-old exegete would quickly figure out that “thug” is, in this context, a synonym for “sinner” — and that the entire sermon, like so many in Christian tradition (let alone in mussar), is about the redemption of sinners.

But never mind — let’s review the biblical record:

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A perhaps surprisingly nuanced Yom Haatzmaut essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, via University of Richmond law prof (and sabra) Shari Motro. Writing about her plans to return to her native land on sabbatical after many years in America, she writes of Israel:

I come from a place – from streets I remember when they were still unpaved, from the house where I lost my first tooth, from the beachside terrace where my grandmother taught me how to tell time, from the cemetery where we buried her.

I didn’t choose these places, and I didn’t expel anybody. But that doesn’t change the fact that my joy is someone else’s pain. My home is someone else’s home, a home they can’t return to, because of me. I can’t reconcile this, but running from it doesn’t reconcile it either.

I put her essay in the a category of Israel writing I’ll call Zionist Realism. It is both fully supportive of the Jewish state and honest about its challenges, and yes, failings. It chooses neither to mythologize nor demonize Zionism, nor dismiss its vailidity on the basis of its unmet challenges and moral flaws. Other examples include David Remnick’s recent review of Benny Morris’s book, 1948, and Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story for the Atlantic.

Tom Segev uses “Zionist Realism” to refer to a mindset that he says many Israelis abandoned after 1967. Such realism “advocated settlement,” but

it had always done so with one major caveat: capturing more territory would mean serious demographic dangers. Accordingly, the movement had adopted a basic strategy known as “maximum land, minimum Arabs,” and most of its thinkers had favored maintaining a solid Jewish majority in Jewish-controlled land over ruling vast areas populated by Arabs.

Zionist Realists “struggled with the questions of where to draw the line and… how much new land can be settled without endangering Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.”

Zionist Realism describes a place where I find myself, in between the Propagandists, for whom pro-Israel equals an inability to acknowledge Israel’s flaws, and the Furies,  who treat the Jewish presence in Palestine as a regrettable, even criminal, mistake of the 20th century.

A.P.’s obit for Irvine Robbins, the Robbins in Baskin-Robbins, has this fun tidbit: 

Robbins opened his first ice cream store in Glendale, Calif., in December 1945, following his discharge from the Army. He used $6,000 from a cashed-in insurance policy his father had given him for his bar mitzvah.

Wall Street Journal reporter Sarmad Ali blogs about his experiences with Jews in the United States and his native Baghdad. Interesting aside about irreverence among Jews (lots) and Muslims (not so much):

A few weeks ago, I flew to Michigan to join my close friend’s family in celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover. It was my second time going to a Seder and it again stirred memories of how Jews were regarded in Iraq in my childhood.

The first night we had a fairly big table with a dozen people or more. My friend’s grandfather sat at the head of the table and led the readings, asking others, including me, to recite some passages from a Passover booklet. When a reference to the Euphrates River came up, I leaned over to point it out to my friend. “These are my people,” I whispered, chuckling. The reading was punctuated with jokes and questions as we went around the table telling the story of how the Jews were slaves and then left Egypt. I found that part interesting.

 In Islam, it’s very unlikely for people to joke during religious ceremonies and readings. It’s considered inappropriate and forbidden. When I first came to the U.S., I heard many people, some even observant, making jokes about religious figures like Moses and Jesus. I found it at the time very inappropriate and offensive, and I remember asking them how they could speak so lightly of these “guys,” whom we Muslims revere and refer to as prophets of Allah. 

This week in the NJJN:

Jewish War Veterans give the boot to suspected mole.

Rabbis reach out to Methodists over divestment – but are the Methodists reaching back?

Israeli Iranian expert: ayatollahs “are open to reason.”

Dissing Ben Stein:

Stein might also explain why he agreed to a film that makes bizarre and unseemly comparisons between evolutionary biologists and goose-stepping fascists. Expelled draws a direct line between Darwin and Hitler, between natural selection and the Selektions of the Holocaust. It’s like blaming Shakespeare for the English major who committed the Virginia Tech massacre.

Interesting split among Jewish activists: 185 rabbis and other Jewish leaders urge world-wide boycott of Summer Olympics in Beijing:

We remember all too well that the road to Nazi genocide began in the 1930s, with Hitler’s efforts to improve the public image of his evil regime. Jews should not be party to the whitewashing of such a regime.

But the ADL is opposed to a boycott:

While there is no doubt that China has an extremely poor human rights record and that its actions in Tibet and Sudan are to be condemned, we believe that asking the Jewish community to engage in a boycott of the games could be counterproductive and would not produce any tangible result.

In calling for a boycott, some have drawn parallels with the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. We believe that these comparisons are inappropriate. China is a complicated society that is changing and opening up in many ways, and one simply cannot equate the Beijing Olympics with those games in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.

[UPDATE: I wasn't sure what I thought of this issue, and then I figured out what was bugging me. Implicit in the ADL statement is what I'll call the Nazi Standard: If a country's behavior doesn't rise (or sink) to the level of the Nazi Holocaust, we must be hesitant to use tactics that we would have applied against Hitler.  (I don't mean to single out the ADL -- the rabbis also applied the Nazi Standard in their statement.)

That's placing a very high bar on Jewish advocacy -- implying that we should call for extreme measures only to the degree that an issue stands up to the most exteme comparisons. And it hobbles our ability to judge a crisis on its own merits. So China is not engaged in genocide, just repression, human rights abuses, stifling the press, silencing its opposition. If the Nazis win the gold medal for World's Worst Totalitarians, we need a way to talk about the silver and bronze medalists.

I haven't made up my mind about the boycott, but let me propose that we have the conversation without referencing Nazism, and limiting the debate to China. Is it a bad player? Would there be a symbolic or tangible benefit -- measured in the improvement of conditions for those living under Beijing's thumb -- if a boycott was in place? Will individuals and countries compromise their own principles by taking part?

Slate had a good piece about the boycott, and asked questions like these.

The one question not to ask is this: Are [fill in the blank] as bad as the Nazis?]