Zionism versus Judaism

From the start, political Zionists identified their program with Judaism the religion (despite their secularism, even atheism).

Also from the start, Jews -- including the most tradition-bound Jews -- vigorously disavowed that identification. They were shamed as self-hating traitors to "their people." As a consequence, many went silent and eventually acquiesced in the creation of Israel, the self-identified "Jewish state." Some even converted to Zionism.

So don't blame non-Jews for being unclear about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

Why I Pick on Israel

People close to me ask why I criticize Israel while ignoring the other bad governments in the world. (I guess they don't count the U.S. government as bad.) I have many reasons, but here's a big one: no other government (besides the U.S. government) claims to act in my name. I object to that. (For the record, years ago I declared my exit from the disparate worldwide collection of people that Israel presumptuously claims to speak for.)

Netanyahu as Haman

The fable of Purim ends with the slaughter of over 75,000 non-Jewish Persians by the Jewish Persians after one official's (Haman's) plot to kill the Jews is exposed when the king is alerted by his Jewish wife. That's a mighty big conspiracy! God makes no appearance. An inspiring story for sure! The closest thing today to the villain, Haman, is Netanyahu and his team. Boo!

Something to Agree on?

Can't we all at least agree that this was an extremely clumsy sentence from Academy Award-winning Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer that invited misinterpretation?

Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.

I assume he meant that they repudiate (why would this British guy say "refute"?) Israel's hijacking both Judaism and the memory of Hitler's victims in a cause that has produced such horrible consequences for both the Israelis and Palestinians.

TGIF: Is Israel Crazy?

Has Israel gone mad? Or has it always been mad? What is the country thinking?

The collective nouns seem reasonable in light of the widespread support in that country for the Israeli government's appalling military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip for the last five months. How can Israel -- and its outside supporters -- cheer on the bombings (compliments of coerced Americans), the ground attacks, the mass starvation, the terror, and the rest of the crimes that we witness every day? The death toll is pushing 31,000, most of them infants, children, women, and old men, not fighters. So many more have been disabled for life. Gazans -- including newborns -- lack food, good water, medical services and equipment, and drugs, including anesthesia. The humanitarian aid is a small fraction of what they need. So many have been driven from their homes, to which they'll never return because the buildings have been destroyed.

And there's no end in sight! Will it take the murder of the last Gazan for it to stop? For clear-eyed observers watching helplessly from afar, it is heartbreaking. We cannot even stop the Biden administration from sending bombs, bullets, and spare parts to Israel -- without which this could not go on.

Those are human beings in Gaza, for heaven's sake! Stop the carnage!

Beinart Tries to Square the Circle

Peter Beinart has written a provocative and courageous article in which he calls on "liberal" Zionist Jews to amend their notion of Jewish identity in order to reject separation from the Palestinians and to embrace equality instead. He has timed the article with the impending though delayed Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, territory seized in the 1967 war and in which Palestinians have no rights whatsoever. Annexation will formalize what Israel has become de facto in the eyes of most of the world: an apartheid state.

Kudos to Beinart for his latest step in placing justice for the Palestinians at the top of the liberal Jewish agenda. In doing so he renounces the two-state resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which he had supported, in favor of some kind of single state--a binational democracy or confederation--in which Jews and Arabs live together with equal rights. As he puts it:

Thought for the Day

What Israel badly needs is for-Prophet Judaism.

What Is Judaism?

From Rabbi Elmer Berger's A Partisan History of Judaism: The Jewish Case against Zionism (1951):

Judaism evolved from a primitive tribalism to as noble a spiritual and universal vision as man has ever attained. This fact attests, even without detailed proof, to the truth that "unity" and segregation may have had their partisans but that there must also have been undiscourageable partisans of another kind through the long history of Jews and Judaism.

For change and evolution rarely, if ever, are born from uniformity. Uniformity is imposed, as our modern world knows, in order to suffocate rather than encourage growth. That the history of Judaism reveals such growth is proof of disunity, of individualism, of liberalism, and of respect for these things in whatever degree necessary; to have accepted their achievements and grafted them into the organism of Judaism itself.

Both traditions and both viewpoints existed side by side. There has been a constant strugge between them. Sometimes the viewpoint of universalism and assimilation of all but religious identity prevailed. Sometimes the segregaton was initiated by separtist Jews. Sometimes it was enforced by segregation-minded people who were not Jews. Sometimes both groups or a combintion of circumstances created by segregationalists of both kinds established the pattern.

But the important fact remains that always, among both Jews and those of other faiths, there were those who respected the individual integrity of people of Jewish faith and the transcending, universal values of Judaism....

For people other than Jews to resist the apparent prevalence of "Jewish" nationalism and affirm that Judaism is a highly personalized conviction about God, the universe, and mankind is not, therefore, to violate either the feelings of Jews or the traditions of Judaism....

In plain English, to oppose Jewish separatism and segregation in our national life, except in the field of religion, is not the equivalent of anti-Semitism. 

TGIF: Why Palestine Matters

Why does Palestine matter? It's a question I ask myself nearly every day. Another way to put it is, "Is the devotion of major attention to the plight of the Palestinians an obsession worthy of suspicion or an appropriate response to a grave historic and continuing injustice? 

No one will be surprised when I reply that major attention is an appropriate response. Palestine matters and should matter. I will try to explain why.

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.

Become a Free Association patron today!

For My Car

TGIF: Please Don't Say "Radical" If You Mean" Violent"

Updated Dec. 14, 2015
It's about time someone challenged the phrase radical Islamic terrorism. The most objectionable part is the word radical since it is now popularly associated with aggression -- violence against innocents -- as an acceptable means to politico-religious ends.

But nothing about the word radical implies approval of aggression or terrorism. Rather, the word signifies an approach that goes to the heart of a matter, or the person taking such an approach. Violence is a tactic that can be used in the service of radical ends but also conservative ends. A radical can be a pacifist, a terrorist, or one who believes that violence is appropriate only in the defense of innocent life. There's simply no necessary connection between radicalism and aggression.

Rough Day

"By the decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse, and damn Baruch [Benedito] de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He... Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him...."

That's what I call a rough day at the synagogue. The cherem, or excommunication, happened on July 27, 1656, at Talmud Torah congregation in Amsterdam.

On Religion

All elements of religion but the love of universal justice and compassion--as found in the Prophets--constitute idolatry, including worship of “God.”

The Easy Way

No wonder allegiance to a state has replaced love of justice as the core value of Judaism. It's easier.

Jews in Tehran

Twenty-five synagogues in Tehran.  Several Jewish hospitals serving people of all faiths. Anti-Semites in Iran? Funny, they don’t look it.

Jewish Life Thrives in Iran

How can this be? Does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not know there are 25,000 Jews in Iran?

Gilad Atzmon's The Wandering Who?

A good way to get me to read a book is to warn me not to read it. Gilad Atzmon's The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics falls into that category. Atzmon is thought-provoking at many levels and therefore controversial. Moreover he makes a valid point -- correction: several of them! I commend the book to anyone interested in the Palestine/Israel conflict, the Middle East in general, Jewish identity, and -- on principle -- fearless open discussion of important matters, especially matters of war and peace. (He answers critics here; need I add that I don't agree with everything he has written?) Atzmon also happens to be a top jazz saxophonist whose music I am just now getting to know. I hope to see him perform someday.

Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism

I arrived home last night to find on my doorstep a copy of the new book Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism by Jack Ross. How thrilling! I knew Rabbi Berger, who died in 1996, and admired him greatly for his courageous work on behalf of what he called “emancipation and integration” and against Jewish nationalism, or Zionism. (I’ve been reading his book The Jewish Dilemma, published in 1945, a well-reasoned yet passionate critique of Theodor Herzl’s program and beyond.) He was truly the last great Classical Reform Jewish rabbi – Classical Reform Judaism having been founded in opposition to nationalism, to the ideas of diaspora and return to Zion. (“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” –from The Pittsburgh Platform, 1885) Berger was a founder and long time director of the American Council for Judaism, which opposed formation of the state of Israel, and later of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism. Among ACJ's members were Frank Chodorov and Murray Rothbard. (ACJ was the subject of Thomas Kolsky’s 1992 book Jews Against Zionism.)

Here is the publisher Potomac Books’ description:

Dramatic changes have taken place in the last decade with respect to the views of the American Jewish community toward Israel and Zionism. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, the involvement of the Israel lobby in precipitating the Iraq War and promoting war on Iran, and Israel’s widely condemned wars in Lebanon and Gaza, large swaths of the American Jewish community have been disenchanted with Israel and Zionism as at no other time since the founding of the State of Israel.

However, anti-Zionism in America has a long history. Elmer Berger was undoubtedly the best-known Jewish anti-Zionist during most of his lifetime, particularly from World War II through the 1967 Six-Day War and its aftermath. A Reform rabbi, Berger served throughout that period as the executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded by leading Reform rabbis.

Author Jack Ross places liberal Jewish anti-Zionism (as opposed to that of Orthodox or revolutionary socialist Jews) in historical perspective. That brand of anti-Zionism was virtually embodied by Rabbi Berger and his predecessors in the Reform rabbinate. He advocated forcefully for his position, much to the chagrin of his Zionist detractors. The growing renaissance of liberal Jewish anti-Zionism, combined with the forgotten work of Rabbi Berger and the American Council for Judaism, makes a compelling case for revisiting his work in this full-length, definitive biography.

Bravo, Jack Ross!

A New Look at the "Jewish People"

Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism reviews a significant book that has been a bestseller in Israel and was translated into English last year: The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University. It is now out in paperback with new material by the author.

Here's Brownfeld's summation:

Shlomo Sand has, in many ways, normalized Jewish history. Instead of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny — expelled, wandering and finally restored to its “homeland” — he has shown us the history of the Jews as a religious group, incorporating men and women of a variety of backgrounds [as a result of mass conversions], joined together by a common religious belief and commitment, not an ethnic identity. The largely imaginary Jewish past constructed by Zionists beginning in the 19th century, has provoked much conflict and, as he shows, is largely an invention.

Where did the idea of Jewish peoplehood come from? Sand traces it to two developments in the mid-nineteenth century: secularization with its eclipse of religious faith and rising German nationalism.

Challenges to the idea that Jews constitute a single ethnic group or people are not new. Rejection of a Jewish peoplehood was at the foundation of Classical Reform Judaism, which held that Judaism is a religious community with a common faith, culture, and set of rituals. Moreover, many have written similarly in the past. As Sand explains:

I encountered scarcely any new findings — almost all such material had previously been uncovered by Zionist and Israeli historiographers. The difference is that some elements had not been given sufficient attention, others were immediately swept under the historiographers’ rug, and still others were "forgotten" because they did not fit the ideological needs of the evolving national identity. What is amazing is that much of the information cited in this book has always been known inside the limited circles of professional research, but invariably got lost en route to the arena of public and educational memory. My task was to organize historical information in a new way, to dust off the old documents and continually reexamine them. The conclusion to which they led me created a radically different narrative from the one I had been taught in my youth.

The implications for the Palestine-Israel conflict are profound. To put the matter briefly, on what grounds can the Land of Israel be said to be more mine than that of a Palestinian Arab whose family has lived there for a thousand years?

For details on the controversy see the Wikipedia entry here. Sand responds to critics at his website here.