Jewish Current Issues

Against the Nothingness of Non-Distinction

American Thinker has published a moving and powerful piece entitled “Against Nothingness,” by the indispensable Anne Lieberman (author of “Two Jews” and “Six Days Remembered”). Here is how it starts:

In Jewish tradition, rabbis try to discourage those who seek adoption as converts; they're supposed to be turned away either three or four times, I forget which. In my case, it took a total of four rabbis and at least ten years to adopt -- and be adopted by -- the Jewish people. Most of the rabbis tried to discourage me by pointing out the dangers inherent in being a Jew. I was told that my decision, should it be carried out, could put not only me but my family at grave risk. I accepted that risk even though I didn't -- I couldn't -- yet fully understand it.

It was not until some years later that this risk was brought home to me, when I watched one of those Hamas "martyr" videos. You know the ones I mean, the recordings made by suicide bombers before they went off to detonate themselves among Jews in the hope of a "successful" mass murder. The first one said his message to the "loathed" Jews was this:

"...we will chase you everywhere. We are a nation that drinks blood and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries."

The second terrorist spoke on camera as his mother helped him dress for "battle" prior to his suicide mission. To the Jews this one said, "In the name of Allah, we will destroy you, blow you up, take revenge against you [and] purify the land of you..."

Having once been a non-Jew, I realized that not everyone would feel as personally threatened by this language as I did. Simultaneously I realized -- to the extent I was able -- what it felt like to be threatened by hate. This hate was neither passing nor superficial; it was as permanent, uncompromising and deep as it could be. I realized this was what the rabbis had warned me of, that there were indeed people in this world who didn't know me from Adam but because of my adoption, my choice, my love of a religion, a tradition, a people and a land, they literally "thirsted" for my blood.... because now my blood was Jewish blood. Its DNA, pretty much all White Anglo-Saxon, had nothing to do with it.

I wrote about my reaction at the time: "When you read that 'there is no blood better than the blood of Jews,' you are tempted to laugh and cry and vomit all at the same time, but you end up doing none of those because you can't really wrap your mind around it. I guess this is what shock feels like, an odd sensation of lack of sensation."

Over time the shock wore off and I came to accept as a fact of my life that -- like it or not -- I had enemies, and very determined ones. I learned not to distance myself by saying "you" instead of "I," so that now I can own all of it -- my birth, my history, my families and yes, my Jewish blood.

What enables a Jew to live like this? What gives us the strength? For me, it is …

Continue reading here. The most important part comes right after the above excerpt. 

Too Many Candles

This short video of the Yeshiva Boys Choir singing “Daddy Come Home,” will make you cry:

 

The song and the candles remind me of the remarks that Joel M. Geiderman, Vice Chairman of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, made in 2009 in the Capitol Rotunda, before the leaders assembled there on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

He compared Hitler’s threats to those being made openly less than 65 years after the end of World War II, and he called on the leaders and the rest of the world to assure that no country that make such threats ever obtains the means to carry them out:

By my articulating these words to you in this building, in this great hall of freedom, I am reminding all of you that what we do and don’t do matters and will be remembered. It would be far too easy to light twelve candles for twelve million murdered rather than six candles for six million. The harder work is to make sure that that does not happen. No more candles. Not anywhere. Never again.

Unappeased at a Possum's Death

Published in this week’s Jewish Journal, Gerald Stern’s poem, “Behaving Like a Jew”:

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds—just
seeing him there—with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking through the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
---I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevys passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

Gerald Stern has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among others.

The Most Important Question in the World

Rabbi David Wolpe’s Rosh Hashanah sermon this week was entitled “The Most Important Question in the World Today” -- a sermon he said every rabbi in America should be giving -- in which he announced that this year he is a single-issue voter: “I will vote for whichever candidate seems likelier to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”  

Time posted an abridged version of the sermon; the full sermon is available at the Sinai Temple website and it is worth listening to in its entirety, since it includes several important points not set forth in the shorter published version.  

One is his single-sentence response to those who think Jews are obsessed with the Holocaust: “What can it possibly mean to be too concerned with the fact that a half century ago a third of your people were killed -- and the only reason they were not all killed is that you won the world war?” He continued as follows: 

How can you think about that too much? Especially when those enemies have not disappeared from the earth. This is what everyone should be talking about. There is nothing more important. ... If you have not made noise about this; if you have kept quiet, you have a role to play. 

Rabbi Wolpe made an observation whose implications have not yet been fully addressed: “I warn you ... the Western world is becoming accustomed to the idea that Iran will get a bomb ... And once Iran gets a bomb, the world will never be the same.” The sermon closed as follows: 

From the perspective of Jewish history, there is no possibility that the enemies of the Jews could be given a weapon of such potency and that any Jew could sleep well at night. … We don’t have the luxury of a shameful obliviousness or indifference. …

Abba Eban, the great Israeli diplomat, said there are things in Jewish history too terrible to imagine, but nothing too terrible that it hasn’t happened. This is too terrible to imagine, but that does not mean that it cannot happen. So I beg of you: don’t forget this; don’t ignore it, and don’t keep quiet about it. …

This isn’t a small threat; this is everything. And even if it starts with Israel, as we know from history, it never ends there. The enemies of the Jews become the enemies of the world. That is an iron law of history. So don’t think this will go away. It is not only our task, but it is surely our task.

I leave you with two words: Never Again.

The sermon is 19 minutes long. Listen to it all. And then act accordingly.

 

Special Presentation – Jabotinsky, Begin, Netanyahu – The Evolution of the Israeli Right

Thursday, August 23, 2012
7:00 p.m.
Luxe Hotel Sunset
11461 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA  90049

CJHS is proud to present an evening devoted to exploring the historical roots of the Israeli right, from Vladimir Jabotinsky to Menachem Begin to Benjamin Netanyahu, and a discussion of its current relevance to what is happening in Israel today.

Vladimir Jabotinsky was a journalist, essayist, translator, author, novelist, orator, military leader, and head of the Revisionist Zionist movement, which attempted to return Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s to its Herzlian roots. Menachem Begin was one his principal followers, the head of Jabotinsky’s youth movement in Poland and later the leader of its military wing, the Irgun. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has frequently cited Jabotinsky as an influence on him in considering the current threats against Israel.

Understanding the current status of the right in Israel requires an understanding of the connections – and also the differences — between these three historic figures. It may also provide some insights into the approach of the current Israeli government as it faces a continuing existential threat.

We have three speakers who will devote a short presentation to each of these figures, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with the audience. The speakers are:

Rick Richman is editor of Jewish Current Issues. His articles and posts have appeared in American Thinker, Commentary Magazine, Contentions, The Jewish Journal, The Jewish Press, The New York Sun, and PJ Media. He holds an A.B. cum laude from Harvard and a J.D. cum laude from New York University Law School.

Steven M. Goldberg is National Vice Chairman of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the U.S.  representative on the Executive Board of World Likud, a member of the Extended Executive Board of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), and Vice President of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He is a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Russ, August & Kabat, and a graduate of Harvard University and New York University School of Law.

Professor Louis Gordon holds a J.D. from Yeshiva University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California. His work has appeared in the Forward, Studies In Zionism, Midstream, Haumma, the Jerusalem Post, the Jerusalem Report, Middle East Quarterly, Tradition, and numerous other publications.

The evening will also feature an excerpt from the documentary film, Flames of Revolt: The Story of the IRGUN, which includes rare footage of those who participated in the events leading up to the re-creation of the modern State of Israel.

The Recurring Voices of Jewish History

At the Washington Post, Rabbi David Wolpe writes that it is a mistake to treat Ahmadinejad’s latest labeling of Israel as a “cancer” as mere rhetoric, because the logical result of designating something as a “cancer” is to irradiate it, and Iran is pursuing the weapons necessary to do so: 

And as Abba Eban memorably said, there are things in Jewish history too terrible to be believed, but nothing too terrible not to have happened.

Do you suppose the world community will stir at this outrage? … No, this is what will happen: The furor will abate, the world will persuade itself that he doesn’t really mean it, or he doesn’t really have power. He will be applauded on the streets of Arab capitals, and the nations will swallow some sleeping draught composed of complacency, indifference, foolishness and a pinch of anti-Semitism.

Rabbi Wolpe writes that thousands of years of Jewish history have taught that “when evil speaks it is always in earnest.”  

Earlier this year, at the Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony in Jerusalem, Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that “those who dismiss Iran’s threats as exaggerated or as mere idle posturing have learned nothing from the Holocaust.” He recalled the time when Ze’ev Jabotinsky tried to warn his people that time was running out:

There have always been those among us who prefer to mock those who tell uncomfortable truths than squarely face the truth themselves. That is how Zev Jabotinsky was received when he warned the Jews of Poland of the looming Holocaust. This is what he said in 1938, in Warsaw:

“It is already THREE years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry, who are the crown of World Jewry.  I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer.  I became grey and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brother and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit its all-consuming lava… I see that you are not seeing this because you are immersed and sunk in your daily worries… Listen to me in this twelfth hour: In the name of G-d! Let anyone of you save himself, as long as there is still time, and time there is very little.”

But the leading Jewish intellectuals of the day ridiculed Jabotinsky, and rather than heed his warning, they attacked him. This is what Sholem Asch, one of our nation’s greatest writers, said about him: “What Jabotinsky is now doing in Poland is going too far. His statement is detrimental to Zionism and to the vital interests of our people… It is disgraceful that these are leaders of a nation.”

I know there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people. To do so, they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims. I totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable truth – that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of Jewish people – that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims and that is to ignore the lessons…

I will continue to speak the truth to the world, but first and foremost I must speak it to my own people. I know that my people is strong enough to hear the truth. The truth is that a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat of the State of Israel. The truth is that a nuclear-armed Iran is a political threat to other countries throughout the region and a grave threat to the world peace. The truth is that Iran must be stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons.  

It is the duty of the whole world, but above and beyond, it is OUR duty.

UPDATE: Another remarkably insightful comment from Mannie Sherberg:

The link between cancer and irradiation is unmistakable. There's a second link we should also take to heart: the link between cancer and metastasis -- wild, uncontrollable growth. This is, of course, one of the oldest themes in the Jew-hater's Catalog of Lies: that one of the world's smallest peoples has a voracious lust to expand, and -- unless destroyed -- will spread rapidly and soon dominate the planet. 

Almost surely, the Czarist forgers who gave this theme its classic articulation in the "Protocols" did not believe it, but used it for purely cynical purposes. But other propounders of the theme -- like Hitler -- believed it utterly. The mullahs and Ahmadinejad apparently believe it with the same fervor.  

What is deeply ironic here is that all the historic modern advocates of the theme of Jewish metastasism -- Hitler, jihadis in every country, and, I would argue, Stalin in his later years -- have been guilty of the very crime they tried to pin upon the Jews: the crime of wanting to overtake and subjugate the entire world.  

In every instance, it has been the Jews -- one of the world's tiniest peoples -- against enemies much vaster in size, and, in every case, the vast enemies have feared their tiny "opponent" -- who, in truth, sought nothing more than the right to live unmolested. I will leave it to JCI readers much wiser than I to ponder the metaphysical implications of this fact -- but there can be no question that it is a fact: The Jewish cancer which is NOT a cancer must be excised to make room for an unacknowledged cancer (Naziism, Stalinism, Islamism) that truly IS a cancer.  

This is the fearsome irrationality with which we are dealing.

 

Great Writing and Bad Writing

A letter to the editor in the August 18 Wall Street Journal, commenting on an article about Winston Churchill’s speaking skills, recalled a class the author had taken long ago on the art of writing:

The teacher had a formula for counting word syllables and sentence length which he called the “Gunning fog index,” an index from one to 12 which he found correlated very well with the ability of 1st to 12th graders to understand the text he or she was reading. He analyzed Winston Churchill's speeches and found that in all his writings, the fog index was about six. Everything Winston Churchill wrote or spoke could be understood by sixth graders. No wonder he was so great.

Now compare that with the kind of writing that is unfortunately common in our universities today: “Bad Writing, Universities, and Zionism.” Bad writing that tries to mask bad thinking with big words and pompous prose. 

UPDATE: The following is from the remarkable comment to this post by Mannie Sherberg: 

Churchill, like all great speakers, understood the power of monosyllables. So did Lincoln. In what is arguably the greatest American political speech -- the Second Inaugural -- Lincoln delivered a message of such profundity that we have not yet plumbed all its meanings. He did this in only 700 words -- four paragraphs. Of the 700 words, 505 are words of one syllable (and 122 contain only two syllables). 

Lincoln, of course, knew his American history -- and he was aware that one of the most memorable sentences ever spoken by an American statesman, Patrick Henry's "I know not what course others make take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death," contained only one word longer than one syllable. Churchill, obviously, knew this too. 

Take the key paragraph in his famous speech of June 1940 (called by some "England's Darkest Hour" speech); it is really one long succession of common English words, most of them monosyllables: "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." 

Notice how the short words create a pounding effect -- like the sound of marching feet. Churchill understood, perhaps better than any other speaker of our time, that language is (or should be) music -- and that great rhetoric can stir emotions just as great music can. He knew how much the music of English depends on its rhythms, its cadences, its beat and flow and meter. And he understood how all of this required the adroit use of short words easily understood. 

Of course, Churchill was, before anything else, a clear thinker. From that … everything else flows.

A Sampler from Jewish Ideas Daily

Jewish Ideas Daily is the premier aggregator and originator of Jewish ideas on the web, with a feature article every day and five or so other important articles of Jewish interest from around the Internet.

Here are a few from this week that are worth perusing (you can download and print out a compendium by clicking here):

Accounting for Anti-Zionism Efraim Karsh, Israel Affairs. The equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is often dismissed as “Zionist propaganda.” But the claim challenges one of the fundamental tenets of Zionism.

Iranian Jewry Today. By Shai Secunda. Numbering approximately 30,000, Iranian Jewry constitutes the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel.

Holocaust Reparations: The Back Story By Michael Pinto-Duschinsky On July 10th, dignitaries from the U.S., German, and Israeli governments attended a curious ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

What are Israel's Rights in Judea and Samaria? Two Views By JHH Weiler, Yaffa Zilbershats, and Avi Bell Two differing views of a controversial report on the legality of Jewish settlements in territories seized in the Six-Day War.

Caroline Glick on Israel and the U.S. Election

Last week Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors presented Caroline Glick, speaking on “Israel on the Eve of U.S. Elections.” You can watch the video here -- and it is worth watching just to see the sustained standing ovation she got at the beginning or her presentation, and her reaction to it. 

Here is my introduction of Caroline that evening, followed by the first few paragraphs of her presentation, which should make you want to watch the rest, since she made some very insightful comments on Romney's Jerusalem visit, which had occurred the day before, and then went on to cover even more important issues.

It was a remarkable presentation, and it is worth watching in its entirety. 

INTRODUCTION 

I think we all recognize we are at an important point in history, and I want to introduce Caroline Glick by making a making a brief comment about the difference between history, on the one hand, and living through history on the other. 

With history, you know how the story turns out. You read it wondering how it all happened, fascinated to learn all the details, but you are rarely personally invested in the outcome. You already know it. On the other hand, when you are living through history, it is exactly the opposite: you are immersed in the details, day after day, but you have no idea how it is all going to turn out. 

It would be nice to have a prophet on hand, someone who could tell you what is going to happen. 

Except that is not the definition of a prophet -- at least not in Jewish tradition. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible specialized not in prophecy but in first principles, knowing that if you paid attention to first principles, the future would take care of itself; and conversely, if you didn’t, it wouldn’t. The Hebrew prophets rarely predicted the future; more often, they excoriated the people about the present, based on first principles. 

Norman Podhoretz in his book on the prophets wrote that those who chose appeasement in the 1930s might not have done so, had they remembered the warning against it by Jeremiah, who wrote “They have healed … [by] saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Podhoretz took that warning forward -- applying it to the new terror war against Israeli civilians -- writing that Jeremiah’s words “blazingly articulated the dangers of pursuing peace when peace is not at hand,” and warning against “prematurely and unilaterally [trying] to make peace with an enemy who had not the slightest desire to make peace” with you. 

This evening we are in the presence of two prophets, in that deeper sense of that word. The first is the woman who daily reminds us that “Never Again” is now, and that the phrase was intended to be not merely a slogan, but to have operational significance – Doris Wise Montrose. Almost single-handedly, she has brought a series of speakers to us of surpassing importance, has established the important new Internet venture MyEretz to support Israeli business while others boycott it, and has worked tirelessly to insure that what her family and her people suffered will never happen again. 

And the second is Caroline Glick. The words once applied by an Israeli colonel to Ruth Wisse of Harvard also apply to Caroline: she is “worth a battalion” -- because what we are engaged in is a war of ideas, and a contest of moral stamina, no less than a physical conflict. She has displayed not simply physical courage -- she was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq -- but intellectual and social courage, taking positions that gain her no popularity with elite opinion and few invitations to their cocktail parties. She writes an indispensable column every week, has produced an indispensable book, and has just joined the David Horowitz Freedom Center as the Director of its Israel Security Project. 

Back in 1994, the great American writer Roger Shattuck listed his basic rules, and one of them was this: “Everything has been said. But nobody listens. Therefore it has to be said all over again -- only better.” It is a great privilege to present to you someone who says what has to be said, over and over again – and each time says it better: Caroline Glick. 

CAROLINE GLICK 

I figure probably the best place to start is with presumptive Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney’s visit this past weekend to Israel -- and then move back a little bit. 

So yesterday Romney was in Jerusalem, and he gave a speech in Jerusalem, and he was incredibly well received in Israel. And it is interesting, in a way, that he was so well received in Israel, because he didn’t seem to say that much in his speech. 

We are used to American presidential candidates coming in and saying ‘I am going to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem myself. You know, January 21st -- I’m there, I’m there, and I am going to start building it, brick by brick -- whatever." They constantly are making these pronouncements --and Romney didn’t do that. Romney did not do that. 

So why was he so well received? He didn’t make any of the usual routine promises of a presidential candidate who is seeking support of Israel supporters in the United States, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. I think that he was such a success because, more than anything else, the underlying message of his speech in Jerusalem was that [click here to keep watching].

 In the Q&A session that followed her presentation, Glick was asked if she thought the Israeli people "are prepared for the very real pain that they'll face if there is a war?" You can watch her answer here.

Daniel Silva at Sinai -- Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Daniel Silva, author of The Fallen Angel, the latest novel featuring Gabriel Allon, art restorer and retired Israeli spy, will be at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. for a conversation about the novel with Rabbi David Wolpe.

Last week, Hugh Hewitt broadcast a two-hour interview with Silva; the interview preceded the terrorist attack in Bulgaria on Israeli tourists, but is particularly relevant and important in light of it. The transcript is here.

Here is the first paragraph of the new novel:

It was Niccolò Moretti, caretaker of St. Peter’s Basilica, who made the discovery that started it all. The time was 6:24 a.m., but owing to a wholly innocent error of transcription, the Vatican’s first official statement incorrectly reported it as 6:42. It was one of numerous missteps, large and small, that would lead many to conclude the Holy See had something to hide, which was indeed the case. The Roman Catholic Church, said a noteworthy dissident, was but one scandal away from oblivion. The last thing His Holiness needed now was a dead body in the sacred heart of Christendom.

It is the body of a beautiful woman, a curator in the Vatican. The Pope’s private secretary concludes that there will have to be two investigations, one for public consumption and the other for his own. To conduct the private one, he calls on Gabriel Allon, “a man much like himself. A fallen angel in black. A sinner in the city of saints.”

The Hewitt interview is worth reading in its entirety. Here is an interesting excerpt:

HH: You were a reporter, for the benefit of our audience, before you were a novelist. When you were a reporter, and you started to pick up the pen and start to write your first book, did you think that you would end up being involved in the history of the state of Israel to the extent that the Gabriel Alon books have made you?

DS: No. I did not. In fact, Gabriel was not supposed to be a continuing character. … He was at the second tier. And then as I got into the book and started working, he just took it over. And by the time I finished that novel, I knew that I’d created a special character, but my instincts told me that there was, you know, far too much anti-Israel sentiment in the world, far too much anti-Semitism, frankly, for an Israeli character to ever work in a truly mass market way. And thank goodness, a very smart woman named Phyllis Graham, who was then the publisher of Putnam, told me that I was wrong.

HH: Boy, were you ever wrong. Is there any way to communicate to the audience how commercially successful this is, because it’s what, thirty countries around the world that carry it?

DS: It is. It is at least that, and I think that, and countries that are frankly not friendly to the state of Israel. I think that there are just certain universalities to Gabriel Alon’s story that make him attractive to a wide audience. And I do do things in the types of stories that I tell, and the way that I tell them, to make it work for a broad audience. But I’m stunned by it. No one is more surprised to see Gabriel Alon at the top of the bestseller list than I am.