“It’s almost laughable,” says M. J. Rosenberg of Media Matters. “The organized Jewish community, which claims to be worried about young Jews defecting in droves, just cannot help itself from doing things that drive Jews (not just young ones) away. Between supporting Netanyahu, advocating for war with Iran and maintaining the occupation, and keeping silent as Israel evolves into a theocracy, it is also in the business of preventing debate on all these things and more.”

The case in point?  New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, which describes itself somewhat oxymoronically as “a living memorial to the Holocaust,” first scheduled and then turned around and canceled a talk by New Republic senior editor John Judis, author of the newly published Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.

As this review in the Boston Globe points out, Judis’ book is no polemic, but a serious historical study.  So why the cancellation?  The book challenges the conventional Zionist wisdom about President Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948, showing him as a hard-nosed politician trailing in the polls in May of an election year, and being heavily lobbied by American Zionists who then helped ensure his reelection.

Judis quotes this from Truman: “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Such were the folkways of American politics: squeaky wheels getting the oil. And with American Arabs and Muslims still generally reluctant to take an active organized part in national politics, such they remain.

As for the irony of a museum banning historical discussion, this is quite the trend among elderly American Jewish poohbahs when it comes to Israel.  When Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism came out last year, Jewish community centers, under pressure from wealthy donors, seem to have all but blackballed him. “Pretty soon,” says Rosenberg, “any institution under any kind of Jewish auspices will have to abide by speech limits set by the Jewish 1%. The 92nd Street Y already does (it will not allow any Palestinian to speak unless ‘balanced’ by a Jew). Brandeis University wouldn’t permit President Carter to speak [on his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid] without a simultaneous rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz. Pretty soon, Mount Sinai hospital will check what books patients are sneaking into their sick rooms.”

Or maybe not. Controversy over the museum’s about-face on Judis’ book is sparking exactly the public debate its donors sought to avoid — and far beyond the presumably hallowed halls of the museum itself. As with the conservative Indian attack on Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, which I posted on here, the desire to squelch consideration of Judis’ book is fated to achieve the precise opposite of what it intended. Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism became a bestseller, and now Judis’ Genesis looks set to do the same.

As I post this, it’s #2 on Amazon’s list of books about Israel and the Middle East. By the time you read this post, it may well be #1.

AIPAC types will doubtless argue that the young Israelis in this video are just clean-cut high-spirited high-schoolers drunk on nationalism on Jerusalem Day, June 5.   But for Jews with better memories, it’s hard not to see the ominous signs of a pogrom in the making.  And the police are clearly doing nothing to break it up.

A  shorter version of the video looks like it’s about to go viral, and ugly as it is, that’s fine by me, since maybe it will shock more American Jews into paying attention to what’s really happening.  Me, I wish I was shocked.  But the fact is that having a screaming mob parading in front of your house and calling for your death at four in the morning is just another part of what Palestinians have to put up with on a daily basis.

———

Note:  The ‘Nablus Gate’ entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem is misidentified in the subtitles:  it’s Damascus Gate.

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.  The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?”  A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.

The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days.  Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice.  And I can smell it a mile off.  When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite.  How else stereotype millions of people that way?   Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.

And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin:  the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few.  That is, prejudice.

So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish.  And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.

I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”).   But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.

So we need to be clear.  We badly need it.

“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11;  eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did.  “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank;   Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.

The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible.  In fact it’s less so.  If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples. Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21^st-century life.

We have to stop this stereotyping.  Now.  All of us.

We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.

We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.

We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite.  And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.

We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.

Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa.  And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.

In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Emily Hauser is sharp, intelligent, and red-hot angry — and she’s absolutely right.  She lived for years in Israel, and now the Israeli government wants to delegitimize her as a Jew.    So she’s doing exactly what American Jews are not supposed to do vis-a-vis Israel:  speaking truth.

An excerpt from her post “Bad Jew“:

Most American Jews are Reform, secular, atheist, Reconstructionist, Conservative — in short: anything but Orthodox. And yet everything about the Israeli handling of religious issues within Israel’s borders is predicated on the assumption that there is but one way to be a Jew, and that is Orthodox. My Conservative wedding? Unacceptable. My friend’s Conservative conversion? Unacceptable. Burial in anything but an Orthodox fashion? Literally impossible (unless you take the body to a friendly kibbutz).

This fact has served to anger me since before my (Orthodox) conversion, and the years have not lessened that anger one iota. It is simply wrong to dictate to the citizens of a democratic state how they may or may not conduct matters of faith, who they may or may not marry, who (in short) they are. You may think you’re a Jew, they seem to say, but you’re no Jew. And I have a law passed by the legislative body paid for by your taxes to back me up.

In recent days, though, my anger has turned to full-on fury as I have considered a fact that long escaped me: These same people? This Israeli government so anxious to hand me and mine over to the tender mercies of the Orthodox rabbinate — the, let’s be honest, ultra-Orthodox rabbinate, peopled by men who follow dress-codes set in (if I’m not mistaken) 16th century Poland — this bunch of secular, nationalist, opportunistic politicians for whom matters of faith matter not in the least? These people?

They are the very same people who tell American Jews, over and over and fucking over again, that they had best be all about official Israeli policy regarding the conflict. They had best be all about the occupation and the settlements and the constant war-footing and the refusal to accept any (any) responsibility for the results of the refusal to actually resolve the conflict. Indeed, American Jews must not only be mentally and emotionally behind all of this — they must also send their money east, to support it, and dog their Senators and Congress members to do likewise.

Else they are very bad Jews indeed.

To summarize: The Jewish State is happy to take American Jews’ money and stir us up to create political pressure to support endless war — but our prayers?

Ashes.

In fact Emily has been speaking truth on her blog for the past year, especially about Israel and Palestine, which is why she’s on my list of Recommended Sites.   But the depth of feeling in this post is something else.

I love her anger.  It’s purifying.  It’s freeing.  And because it comes from someone so deeply involved in Jewish faith, it cuts to the bone.     So read her full post here, and then if she lights the same fire in you, start forwarding it like crazy!