Fiddler on the Roof with a New Ending

Tevye the dairyman is packing his family's belongings because the tsar has just expelled the Jews from Anatevka. As he prepares to leave, a younger resident of the shtetl says, "Reb Tevye, look at the bright side. Beginning in about 50 years, our descendants will do the same thing to the people of Palestine. Won't that be wonderful?"

 Tevye smacks the kid in the face, sheds a tear, and heads for New York.

TGIF: Separation, Not Association, Requires Force

Whenever I write about Palestine, Israel, and Zionism -- especially when I point out that American Reform Jews en masse gagged on the thought that America was not their "homeland"; they insisted they were Jewish Americans not American Jews -- I am lectured on Facebook about how "keeping to one's own kind" is a natural inclination and that inclusion, not exclusion, requires aggression. We shouldn't be surprised, then, that alt-right-types who may dislike Jews nevertheless respect their expressed desire to live among themselves in a Jewish State. Why wouldn't the alt-right take this position? Israel is a (pseudo)ethno-state. It is identitarianism run amok.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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