Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values

Gary Rosenblatt of The New York Jewish Week starkly frames the issue of Harvard Professor Noah Feldman's erasure from the ranks of graduates of Brookline's Maimonides School.

What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews."

Rosenblatt's analysis probably applies even more strongly to Zionism than to Orthodox Judaism. American and Zionist values are simply completely contradictory in many serious ways, and when someone claims that America and Israel share the same values, many Americans and non-Americans become very uncomfortable.

Because American Jews exercise such strong influence over US society and ME policy, non-Jewish Americans have to start paying serious attention to the fundamental disconnect between American principles and fundamental beliefs of Zionists and many if not most Jewish Americans.

[Noah Feldman's essay can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin. Rosenblatt's commentary thereon comes after the following backgrounder.]

Some Background on The Maimonides School and Noah Feldman

Joseph Soloveitchik, who founded Maimonides School was intensely racist, and the school has followed his tradition slavishly. A Hebrew language circle in which I took part asked me to videotape a series of Motza'ei Shabbat lectures given by Rabbi Schacter at the Maimonides School. Schacter used to be the Dean of the School's Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Institute.

 

Schacter misrepresented the history of Jewish and Christian attitudes toward Jerusalem, but when he started to discuss Muslim attitudes he turned viciously racist and spewed lots of essentialist primordialist nonsense.  He claimed that Muslims and Arabs were completely hypocritical liars to feign interest in Jerusalem now that it was once again rightfully in Jewish possession. Eventually, he made me stop recording because he did not want any electronic record of the talk.

Despite Schacter's claims Muslims have esteemed Jerusalem intensely since it first came under Islamic rule, and the city was an intellectual, spiritual and pilgramage center for the whole Muslim world. In contrast, since the 10th century at least (probably earlier) Jerusalem has had much more importance for Jews as a spiritual concept than as a physical place.

Vilna was the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Thessalonika was la chica Yerushalayim. Amsterdam was the Jerusalem of the North. While for Palestinians there is only one Jerusalem, it probably would not be hard to come up with 50-100 cities that Jews called Jerusalem over the last millennium.

I could write a nice coffee table book with several interesting chapters on some of the most picturesque of these "Jerusalems."

The actual physical Jerusalem became, especially for ethnic Ashkenazim, sort of a dumping ground for trouble-makers or eccentrics and not a place of tremendous emotional significance or attachment. A young woman, the Virgin of Ludmir, is getting uppity and trying to play the role of a Tzaddik or Rebbe. The community sends her to Jerusalem in Palestine, and for the most part no one hears of her again.

As for Noah Feldman, he was a junior Harvard fellow and has a D.Phil. (Oxon) in Islamic Thought. The Bush administration sent Feldman to Iraq in the early days of the occupation.  He was to oversee the proper incorporation of Islamic principles into the Iraqi constitution.  He was to take into account the Shiite and Sunni sectarian differences. I doubt that many Iraqis considered such issues so important before Feldman (and thus the Bush administration) told Iraqis that the differences were so critical. Feldman only lasted in Iraq for about a month.  He needed an Iraqi Arabic phrase book to get around. He probably bears some responsibility for subsequent sectarian carnage.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14347

[Note that Rosenblatt's article has vanished from the Jewish Week website.]

(07/27/2007)

Modern Orthodoxy Under Attack

Noah Feldman's intimate critique in the Times seen as raising the question of how to deal with Jews who marry out

Gary Rosenblatt - Editor And Publisher However tempting, it would be a mistake to dismiss Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman's personal and pointed critique of Modern Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday ("Orthodox Paradox") as merely The Big Kvetch. His essay, sure to provide fodder for numerous sermons this Shabbat, is a long and bitter complaint that despite his numerous and remarkable professional accomplishments, he has been snubbed by the Brookline, Mass., yeshiva high school from which he graduated with honors in the 1980s. Despite the fact that Feldman was valedictorian of his class at Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar who completed his doctorate at Oxford in record time and went on to help craft the Iraqi constitution, he and his then-girlfriend were literally cropped out of a reunion picture of Maimonides School graduates published in the alumni newsletter some years ago, and none of the personal updates he has sent in since have been published. Why? Because the girlfriend — now wife — is Korean-American. Not Jewish. And Feldman, who aptly describes the yeshiva's goals of "reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity" as seeking to combine "Slobodka and St. Paul's," maintains that he has been rejected by his community despite the fact that he has "tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere." Poor Noah, one may think on first read. How primitive and unfair for his former yeshiva to refuse to publicly acknowledge his successes. But as one continues to read Feldman's essay, we see that it is he who is unfair in expecting to be lauded by a community whose values he has rejected and in crafting an intellectually dishonest case for himself. Still, the implicit and more lasting question raised by the essay is how should the Jewish community in general, and the Orthodox community in particular, deal with Jews who have married out? Sending a message to our children that we deeply value in-marriage for social, religious and communal reasons is all well and good, but what do we do after the fact, once they've chosen a non-Jewish partner and conversion is not a part of the conversation? Unfair Arguments As for Feldman's arguments, in insisting that Maimonides himself, the 12th century rabbinic scholar and philosopher, believed that knowing the world was the best way to know God, he ignores the fact that it was Maimonides who codified Jewish law, established the 13 principles of faith, and insisted on adherence to halacha. Feldman then goes on at some length to cite Jewish law's tensions over violating the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew. But he fails to mention that the dispute is Talmudic, not practical; no Modern Orthodox doctor would hesitate to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath. Perhaps most upsetting, and unjust, the only allegedly Modern Orthodox Jews Feldman describes in his essay besides Sen. Joseph Lieberman are Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, the American-born physician who murdered 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994. The two are cited as examples of men who took Jewish imperatives to their logical conclusion by committing murder. "That's like judging the peacock by its feces," noted Rabbi Saul Berman, a scholar and former head of Edah, an organization that promoted Modern Orthodox values. Indeed, no serious Modern Orthodox Jew is unaware of the tensions between upholding the Torah law and recognizing the values and benefits of Western democratic ideals. Rabbi Berman credits Feldman with pointing out the need to explore such tensions, which when unrecognized or out of balance can produce an Amir of Goldstein, "but it's not fair to judge the system" by such aberrations, he maintains. Psychic Pain In the end, Feldman's essay is less about Modern Orthodoxy than about his own psychic pain over being rejected. He wants it all: to be embraced if not applauded by the Jewish community whose values he has discarded by marrying out. As Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University's Center for the Jewish Future, noted in a letter sent to The Times, "fealty to Jewish tradition requires more than a 'mind-set' expressing 'respect and love' for its teachings; it presupposes certain fundamental normative behaviors. America is a country of choices, but choices have consequences and not every choice is equal. It is unrealistic for Mr. Feldman to expect to maintain good standing in a community whose core foundational behavioral — as well as value — system he has chosen to reject." Judaism is not alone in this attitude. Witness, for example, the Catholic Church's discomfort with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a divorced Catholic who favors abortion rights, or any religious faith's attitudes toward members who publicly violate its tenets. But Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author and television personality ("Shalom in the Home"), cautions against alienating some of our best and brightest Jews who marry out. Rabbi Boteach has been a friend of Feldman's since he served as a rabbi at Oxford University where Feldman studied for two years in the early 1990s. In an essay in the Jerusalem Post this week, Rabbi Boteach says that in addition to the "ethical and humanitarian considerations" regarding ostracizing those who intermarry, the approach is ineffective, with intermarriage rates so high. He argues that the community has a far better chance of winning over the non-Jewish spouse and the Jewish partner through welcoming behavior rather than shunning the couple. This inreach vs. outreach debate has been part of the American Jewish landscape for a number of years, but there are those who suggest a more nuanced approach. "There is a difference between a personal and a communal response to intermarrieds," noted one Jewish educator who knows Feldman from Maimonides School. It's one thing, he said, to have a personal relationship (and one wonders if Feldman would have felt less hurt if someone from the alumni office had explained the decision not to print his picture). "But for the school not to crow about a graduate who married out — how could he think otherwise?" Cropping Feldman and his wife out of the photo was "unconscionable," according to Steven Bayme, national director of contemporary Jewish life at the American Jewish Committee and a graduate of Maimonides School. But he noted that even Feldman acknowledged every minority group requires boundaries to maintain and preserve its own identity and that marrying out is viewed with disfavor by every denomination of Judaism. "The price for the individual may be tragic," Bayme said, "but the loss is far more destructive for the community in terms of cultural distinctions and communal cohesion if you remove the boundaries." Irreconcilable Issue What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews." Sarna chairs an American Jewish Committee task force on attitudes toward non-Jews in the community, and asserts that with an estimated 1.7 million non-Jews living in Jewish households — to put it another way, about 23 percent of those living in Jewish households are not Jewish — this is "a very important debate" for the community to engage in. Citing the "magnitude" of the issue and the "bitterness that drips out" of Feldman's essay, Sarna suggests that perhaps it is time for the community to reconsider ways to draw people in rather than ignore or shun them, especially when there are indications that many non-Jews are supportive of raising their children as Jews. Others would argue that the community already has tilted so far toward outreach and acceptance of non-Jews that there is little incentive left for them to convert to Judaism. What Noah Feldman has done, consciously or not, is raise some important issues, less about his old yeshiva and Modern Orthodoxy per se than about dealing with Jews who do not see marrying out as leaving the fold. Conversion is the most obvious and desired solution, but for those who eschew that option, we need to explore ways to encourage their positive exposure to Jewish life. Feldman would argue that just because he intermarried does not mean he chose to separate himself from his heritage. But being Jewish means not only incorporating the values and traditions, but also remaining part of a community. For all of Feldman's candor in the essay, he has nothing to say about where he fits into the community, if at all; whether he wanted his wife to convert; whether they are raising their children as Jews or not; or his feelings about all this. He only owes us such information if he wants our understanding and empathy, which clearly he does. He does owe Modern Orthodoxy an apology for pinning it with his anger over rejection, knowing full well the rules of engagement. But we in turn owe him a sense of gratitude for a wake-up call, however unpleasant, about the need to struggle more deeply and honestly with the moral and religious tensions and contradictions in Modern Orthodoxy that can never be reconciled, and about learning how to deal more sensitively with those on the outside who may be calling out — in anger and loneliness — for a way back in. E-mail: Gary@jewishweek.org

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Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary?

The blog entry Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary? contains references both to Michael Kinsley's argument in favor of selecting Larry Summers to be Secretary of Treasury and also to Stanley Fish's oppositional column.

Kinsley's comments on Summers' infamous pollution memo are so silly that they barely merit refutation and are generally completely off target. Among other questionable assertions, Kinsley claims:

The general point is that clean air and other environmental goods are luxuries. The richer a country is, the more of them it can afford. And if rich countries like the United States had had to meet some of the standards being wished upon poor countries today, we would still be poor ourselves.

In point of fact, protectionism, disregard of international intellectual property rights, and encouraging the immigration of skilled scientists, engineers, and technologists were far more important in modernizing, industrializing, or expanding the economies of Russia, Prussia and the USA in the nineteenth century than obliviousness to pollution. Not only does Summer's pollution proposal show a complete inability to think "outside of the box," but it also shows a total lack of historical and technological comprehension or perspective.

On the other hand, as one of the main sources of external tension during Summers' tenure as Harvard University, I certainly agree with Stanley Fish that Summers did not have a clue how to run Harvard University and note that Summers' tolerance of the Shleifers' questionable financial practices sends the wrong message.

Yet, I will grant that serving as Secretary of the Treasure is a role quite different from the presidency of Harvard and that failing miserably at Harvard hardly implies that he would mess up if he returned to his old job.

Summers is an inappropriate choice for the Obama administration because he is an extremist Zionist close to the fanatic Islamophobic and Arabophic racist Charles Jacobs of the David Project.

There are probably at least $3-6 trillion available in Arab and Muslim sovereign wealth funds for potential investment in the USA, but Summers wants to create a special category of Arab or Muslim ownership, which would confer fewer rights than an investment from the Swedish sovereign wealth fund would have.

Could a Secretary of Treasury looking for investment to unfreeze credit possibly entertain stupider ideas?

To put it bluntly, Summers is probably the dumbest smart person on the Harvard faculty* and would be an utterly wrong choice for Secretary of the Treasury in a situation where the USA has to work closely with the rest of the world to undo a financial nightmare that the US created.

Former Harvard Fund Manager Mohamed el-Erian,

• who has returned to PIMCO,
• who knows how to manage, and
• who has a much greater understanding of debt than Summers,

would be the right choice for the sort of globalized economy in which the USA must function.

Note

* Noah Feldman, who wandered around Baghdad for a month with an Iraqi Arabic phrasebook in the early days of the Iraq occupation, is the second dumbest smart person on the Harvard faculty. Here are two blogentries that pertain to him:

1. Feldman and the anguish of the disinherited
2. Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values (Rosenblatt's article seems to have been expunged from Jewishweek archives)

Feldman is debating Duncan Kenned on Wednesday.

THE FUTURE OF US FOREIGN POLICY AND ISRAEL/PALESTINE
A debate and discussion with Professor Duncan Kennedy and Professor Noah Feldman
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19, 7:15 PM
POUND 102, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

According to Wikipedia:

In 1977, together with Karl Klare, Mark Kelman, Roberto Unger, and a number of other like-minded scholars, Kennedy established the Critical Legal Studies movement. Although outside legal academia he is mostly known today for his monograph Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy*[1], famous for its trenchant critique of American legal education, among legal scholars Kennedy is considered one of the most original and influential modern writers on legal theory.

Lama Abu Odeh was a student of Duncan Kennedy when she studied at HLS.

She skewers Feldman in The Yale Law Journal - A Radical Rejection of Universal Jurisdiction.

Fortunately, I have not heard that Feldman is not going to DC, where he would add next to nothing with regard to addressing critical legal or economic problems.

Nowadays Abu Odeh teaches at the Georgetown Law School. Both Kennedy and Abu Odeh are at least an order of magnitude superior in legal scholarship to Martha Minow. Either or better both Kennedy and Abu Odeh would do very well and benefit the nation in leadership positions at the DOJ.

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The New Jew & Mundoweiss: Jewish Christmas Thoughts

The New Jew: Blogging Jewish Philanthropy (http://thenewjew.wordpress.com) and Mundoweiss (http://www.philipweiss.org)  have been discussing Jews and Christmas.

 

The former published  What Were They Thinking? Jewish Community Federation Publishes Pro-Christmas Article.

 

The latter published I'm Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas.

 

The JCF article can be found at: http://www.sfjcf.org/aboutjcf/press/newsletters/emmis/2007/december2007.asp#1 .

 

Here is my initial comment on the New Jew article.

Christmas and Hanukkah are essentially the same Festival of Lights.

 

You can read a very brief summary of my thoughts on the issue at:

 

http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/01/connecting-hanukkah-christmas-and-idu-l.html.

 

To the first approximation, the modern American celebration of Christmas was created by Jewish department store and studio owners out of a mishmash of Jewish perceptions of Eastern European Christian celebrations of Christmas. Very little remains today of traditional Anglo-Saxon, German, or African American celebrations of Christmas.

 

As far as I am concerned, modern American Christmas celebration should be considered Jewish, the hostile reaction to the article from the JCF of SF strikes me as at the very least as prejudiced and xenophobic — albeit not atypical for I remember that fellow students at Harvard and Yale would complain at Hillel sessions that they felt alienated from American Christmas celebrations.

I could have extended the list to include other traditional celebrations of Christmas like those of Irish and Italians.  

 

Anyway, I added another comment.

Christopher Noxon deals with the Christmas issue in a recent Salon article.

 

Please take a look at http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/12/22/irving_the_snowchicken/index.html?source=rss&aim=/mwt/feature .

The discussion then focused somewhat more on intermarriage and I posted the following comment.

Here are two articles of interest to a discussion of intermarriage.

 

http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/blog-SY's.htm (Syrian Jewish view of intermarriage)

 

http://www.forward.com/articles/11308/ (The Noah Feldman Case)

 

Here is my response to R' Lamm.

 

Dear Rabbi Norman Lamm,

 

Rosenblatt in Jewish Week understood Feldman's anguish far more than you did. All during his education at Maimonides School in Brookline, Feldman's teachers told him there was no contradiction between Orthodox Jewish values and American values. They lied in a way that teachers at a comparable Roman Catholic prep school would not have.

 

The reason lies in the Zionist orientation of Maimonides School and of Rabbi Soloveitchik, who founded it. Boston Zionists are some of the most extreme in asserting the equivalence of American values and Zionist values. It ain't true. And not all American values are Jewish values or even Catholic values. The Brothers and Nuns at a Catholic prep school would have been honest, but Boston Jewish leaders are afraid that honesty would make it possible for the larger public to open a discussion whether American and Israeli interests are identical.

 

I have to assume R' Lamm is just being purposefully obtuse about the issue of treating non-Jews on Sabbath, for Feldman's point was crystal clear. If he had wanted to bring scorn on Jewish people, there are far nastier issues in Jewish law. Feldman was pointing out that the Rabbis found reasoning to permit such treatment. Similarly today, modern Orthodox leaders could find logic to avoid such total rejection of Feldman and his family.

 

And Feldman is completely right. I have studied Geniza texts. In the twelveth and thirteenth century in Egypt, people like Feldman were not excluded from the Jewish community. But those were Jews, who were Arabs and not Eastern Europeans, and that fact is a problem because the essentialist and primordialist myths of modern Jews are crafted to support the idea that a single unchanging Jewish people has existed for three thousand years so that today's Jews can believe that they committed ethnic cleansing and stole Palestine from the native population with perfect justice.

 

Guess what. This perverted train of thought turns Judaism into a fossil and justifies all the nasty things Toynbee ever said about Jews.

 

Best,

 

Joachim Martillo

To find out more about Noah Feldman and read some of the original articles, use the following URL:

http://eaazi.blogspot.com/search?q=%22Noah+Feldman%22 .

http://eaazi.blogspot.com is my blog for Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel.

MacDonald's article above deals only with prescriptive issues of intermarriage.

I have noticed disjunction between Syrian Jewish prescription and practice with regard to conversion and intermarriage.

When I was researching the origins of the 1967 war, I discovered an interesting case of a marriage between a Syrian Jewish rabbi (Hakham — I guess) trained in Lakewood and a young Egyptian woman of crypto-Jewish background. Just as money whitens in Brazil, wealth seems to correct questionable lineages among Syrian Jews.

One of the other commenters (Shai) tried to argue that Hanukkah has always been a minor holiday like St. Patrick's Day. Obviously Shai does not live in a very Irish neighbor as I do in Dorchester, but I replied anyway.

The importance of Hanukkah and Christmas have waxed and waned over history. Saadyah Gaon considered Hanukkah as particularly important almost treated Megillat Antiokhos as part of the ktuvim.

 

From the standpoint of the most evolved form of the sacred king myths, it really does not make much difference whether the sacred king is Jesus, who harrows hell and frees mankind from death by dying on the cross, or Judah Maccabee, who dies in battle against unsurmountable odds in order to liberate Judea and to put his brother (tanist) on the throne.

 

While there was already an independent tendency to secularize Christmas from the 19th through the early 20th century (e.g., A Christmas Carol and "The Gift of the Magi"), the commercialization and merchandising of American Christmas is unprecedented in comparison with the UK, France and Germany.

 

To deny that American Jews have a special role in the development of American Christmas celebration is like denying that Jews have a role in the development of Hollywood. Both histories are well-documented and interconnected.

 

We can also compare the American history of Christmas celebration with the sovietization of New Year's after establishment of the Soviet Union.

 

If there is anything sinister in discussing the history of the evolution of the winter holidays, it is the attempt to conceal the role of Jews (or more correctly secular ethnic Ashkenazim) in these historical developments.

Shai's reply is rather interesting and touches one of Philip Weiss's  main issues -- I think.

Joachim

 

Your ideas regarding "sacred king" myths is, I can fairly presume, from an Ashkenazi Jew by the name of Claude Levi Strauss (1955 - The Structural Study of Myth). Since you can't stand "secular ethnic Ashkenazi Jews" (of whom Struass is one), and find them completely without credibility in any other aspect of their existence, perhaps the ethical thing to do would be to stop using their work or work based on their discoveries and ideas.

 

Regarding Sadya Gaon, he lived 1000 years after the events of Chanuka and 500 years after the redaction of the Gemara. The canon was fixed well before he was born. Therefore, it wouldn't have made a difference then what he thought about Migilat Antiocus (which by the way, he dated to prior to the destruction of the Temple - incorrectly), the fact is as I stated, Chanuka is and always was a minor holiday - oddly enough, celibrated in great pomp today by many Jews who are the ideological descendants of the Hellenists, whose defeat by the ultra-Orthodox of the day forms the basis for a Chanuka celebration. Chanuka is not about freedom of belief, it's about freedom to believe the "correct" belief (orthodoxy), and that there IS a "correct" belief rather than one that adjusts for each era and civilization. Not quite as sexy that way as an American Jewish holiday, but that's what's been made of it. And you know what? It's OK by me. The idea of freedom of belief is, I think, a good one.

 

Regarding what you claim as an "attempt to conceal the role of Jews" in making Christmas what it was, your claim is tendentious, as I said previously. You make no such similar claim about the likes of Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, or other non-Jews who were just as involved in advancing the melting-pot assimilationist approach that caused Hanuka and Christmas to merge into an "American" seasonal holiday period, where the message of both holidays has been lost. Why focus only on Jews?

 

I said before in a previous comment that you would do well to analyze the surrounding cultural milieu within which this assimilation occurred - it was not sinister, and certainly did not have Jews playing an overarching role that, without their participation, would have changed anything. The melting pot idea was an attempt to make one country of a myriad of immigrant groups of which Jews were only one part. The idea had its origin well before the immigration of Jews to America (late 1700's). It wasn't a bad idea (well I don't think so anyway). Heck, it even gave your own family a safe haven, if your last name is to be a measure. I bet there weren't any Martillo's on the Mayflower, Joachim.

 

Look - fair people can argue about whether the melting pot idea is the best one. But it was a good idea for its time, and aside from helping American citizens of different backgrounds to join hands and bring America to victory in WWII, it literally saved the lives of millions of Jews escaping for their lives from Europe. Same is true for Irish, Italian, German and Mexican Americans. Jews feel "hakarat hatov" (recognition of the good) for America and for the chance it gave them to live free, safe lives - they want to be part of it in every respect, as Americans, to feel fully a part of it without having their loyalty questioned any more than a person of Italian or Mexican or Irish descent when they are involved. I think that should be respected.

--------------

 

I will put my reply in my next blog entry.

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Commentary: A Wicked Son by Hillel Halkin

Avrum Burg abandons Zionism, and Hillel Halkin wails
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com) 

 

From http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.html?id=10926 [Unfortunately, it is not available free online].

Here are the last two paragraphs, p. 59.

This does not mean that most Israeli intellectuals tend to identify with every criticism of Israel encountered abroad. On the contrary: most, even on the Israeli Left, do not, and many on the Israeli Left have argued vociferously back. Yet one of the less commented-on consequences of today's anti-Israel climate is its spillback into Israeli life. There is a process of attrition that, because it is as slow as it is steady, often goes unnoticed. Even the Israeli intellectual most convinced of the fundamental justice of his country's cause is undermined in his convictions upon hearing that cause repeatedly derided outside of Israel. In this respect, the intellectual war over Israel is being fought not just for European and American minds; the minds of Israelis are at stake, too. Defeating Hitler [by Avrum Burg] is one indication of how badly this war has been going.

One of the greatest dangers facing Israel is that, under this kind of unrelenting pressure, its intellectual elite will eventually "crack" in precisely the same way that Avrum Burg has cracked. A country whose best minds no longer believe in it is a country whose ordinary minds will sooner or later follow. The only way to contain apostasy is, as Jews have traditionally done, to place the apostate beyond the pale. Yosef Burg's son should be made to understand that this is where he now is.

The process of attrition described above sounds like a wonderful process that can finally lead to the abolition of the Zionist State of Israel and justice for the dispossessed native Palestinian population.

Why should any decent person be upset with Avrum Burg's "apostasy" to the pre-1940s norm of Judaism? 

Halkin wants Jews to shun him for renouncing Zionist fanaticism and racism.  The article, which proposes an even more extreme mistreatment than that to which Noah Feldman was subjected (see http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/08/feldman-and-anguish-of-disinherited.html and http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/07/gary-rosenblatt-noah-feldman-american.html), is far more an indictment of Halkin and his friends at Commentary (including the fanatic mass-murder inciter Norman "Bomb Iran" Podhoretz) than it is a legitimate complaint against Burg.

---

Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail!

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Feldman and the anguish of the disinherited

Dear Rabbi Norman Lamm,

Rosenblatt in New York Jewish Week (http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14347) understood Feldman's anguish (see "Orthodox Paradox" after my signature) far more than you did in your article (http://www.forward.com/articles/11308/). All during his education at Maimonides School in Brookline, Feldman's teachers told him there was no contradiction between Orthodox Jewish values and American values. They lied in a way that teachers at a comparable Roman Catholic prep school would not have.

The reason lies in the Zionist orientation of Maimonides School and of Rabbi Soloveitchik, who founded it. Boston Zionists are some of the most extreme in asserting the equivalence of American values and Zionist values. It ain't true. And not all American values are Jewish values or even Catholic values. The Brothers and Nuns at a Catholic prep school would have been honest, but Boston Jewish leaders are afraid that honesty would make it possible for the larger public to open a discussion whether American and Israeli interests are identical.

I have to assume you are just being purposefully obtuse about the issue of treating non-Jews on Sabbath, for Feldman's point was crystal clear. If he had wanted to bring scorn on Jewish people, there are far nastier issues in Jewish law. Feldman was pointing out that the Rabbis found reasoning to permit medical treatment. Similarly today, modern Orthodox leaders could find logic to avoid such total rejection of Feldman and his family.

And Feldman is completely right! I have studied Geniza texts. In the twelfth and thirteenth century in Egypt, people like Feldman were not excluded from the Jewish community. But those were Jews, who were Arabs and not Eastern Europeans, and that fact is a problem because the essentialist and primordialist myths of modern Jews are crafted to support the idea that a single unchanging Jewish people has existed for three thousand years so that today's Jews can believe that they committed ethnic cleansing and stole Palestine from the native population with perfect justice.

Guess what. This perverted train of thought turns Judaism into a fossil and justifies all the nasty things Toynbee ever said about Jews.

Best,

Joachim Martillo

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?ex=1186027200&en=4277230fa9e0780a&ei=5070

 

---

July 22, 2007

Orthodox Paradox

By NOAH FELDMAN

A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.

I didn't want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. "You're kidding, right?" she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. "It wasn't me," he said. I believed him.

Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school's alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say "in contact," but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the "Mazal Tov" section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.

It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school's formal publications, where my classmates' growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League.
To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul's. In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community. The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.

Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school's inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.

Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries. The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.

If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school's attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.

Fitting In

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, "a Jew in the home and a man in the street." Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.

This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the "modern" in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, "I don't think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.") Whatever concerns Lieberman's Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney's Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.

Lieberman's overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in "The Da Vinci Code." Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world. Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory.

Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.

In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer's wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for "work" to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work's taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.

Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.'s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy's condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)

In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.

The Dynamics of Prohibition

For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.

One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor's attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient's life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.

After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school's standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.

Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl's hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.

My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, "in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage." Rabbi Feinstein's legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.

What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — "as though one had contracted the sickness of love." Feinstein's opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides's legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: "Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited." I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don'ts that is Maimonides's Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.

Difference and Reconciliation

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals' predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a "scientific" doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals' sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such "day." Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. "The truth is," he said, "despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys."

This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.

The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.

Us and Them

In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy's line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin's peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)

Because of the proximity of Goldstein's background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God's directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib's policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: "In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands." The Jews' enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, "Clean of hands and pure of heart."

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Lives of Contradiction

Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. "But why not?" I asked. Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.

For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven't lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living. But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.

It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn't think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.

I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn't the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just laughed.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

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[Aljazeera] US-Israel: Unsettled dispute

When Ali Abunimah states in the following Aljazeera interview that the Jewish history of Jerusalem cannot be denied, I as a Harvard and Yale trained specialist in Judaic studies have to disagree.

The Judaic history of Jerusalem cannot be denied, but that history is not congruent with Jewish history which only starts in the 10th century thanks to the efforts of Saadya Gaon and his colleagues.

Among Jews the ethnic Ashkenazi connection to Jerusalem is particularly tenuous. Relevant blog entries are listed below.



Questionable Jewish Connection to Jerusalem

• How Jews Distort Judaic History
• From Ancient to Modern Judaism
• [B & I] Watch Your Language!
• Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values
• Introduction: Jewish Historical Political Economics
• Third Fraud: Longing for Zion
• Collection: Chief Zionist Frauds

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Samuel Gruber's Jewish Art & Monuments: Selling Jews, Judaism, Jewishness and Anne Frank (again)

Samuel Gruber writes the following in Selling Jews, Judaism, Jewishness and Anne Frank (again)

Its one thing when Gene Wilder plays a rabbi and dons payes in The Frisco Kid – a funny film that actually is both an affirmation of Judaism and a historic corrective – since there were plenty of Jews who helped shape the American West. And the case can be made for Barbara Streisand dressing up as Yentl. But it is quite another thing when an Ukrainian café owner encourages customers to dress up as Hasids to laugh and eat and drink on the very site the Lviv’s destroyed Beth Midrash, in the shadow of the ruined Golden Rose Synagogue, whose worshipers were rounded up an murdered. No matter what one thinks of the strictures of the Hasidim, the place of their death is no place for caricature. There is no one to answer back.

Commercializing Holocaust suffering (or stoicism or heroism) – through ignorance or malice cannot be condoned. Even when done in way that is meant to celebrate the victim (Ann Frank), such exploitation actually belittles her. Maybe the apartment owner figured if Broadway, Hollywood and publishers around the world could make money selling their version of Anne Frank “why not me, too.” After all, the Ann Frank House is a big Amsterdam tourist destination. Why shouldn’t the neighbors cash in? For the real Anne Frank apartment, click here.

Not only is it hard to argue with the apartment owner's logic when one is confronted with The Most Important Hanukkah Gift: The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook!, but this sort of commercial exploitation is hardly as evil of the Zionist use of the Holocaust to justify the theft, murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native population of Palestine by Eastern European invaders and interlopers.

Harvard Professor Noah Feldman was employing the Holocaust and lying (probably unconsciously) in precisely this way at Harvard Law School last night. (See the end of Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary?)

Please, don't get me wrong about this subject. I consider it important to restore sites important in Jewish history (just as I consider it important to restore Palestinian sites and even more important to repatriot Palestinians that were brutally ethnically cleansed in cold-blooded acts of Zionist rapaciousness), but to write about "the ruined Golden Rose Synagogue, whose worshipers were rounded up an murdered" simply boggles the mind and is a true rape of history.

The members of the Soviet Ashkenazi Yevsektsia (Jewish Section of the Communist Party) wiped out practically every trace of Jewish religious practice long before the Nazi Germany invaded the Ukraine. They waged a relentless war against Yiddish culture (considered bourgeois and internationalist) in order to prove that Ashkenazi Communists constituted the quintessential Soviet Class.

While Soviet Ashkenazi communists mistreated some Soviet Jews -- mostly the religious and Yiddishists, they treated non-Jews even worse, and some Soviet Ashkenazi Communist leaders were among the greatest mass murders of modern history.

Jewish memorialization of Jewish life in E. Europe is unfortunately a whitewashing of Jewish history, and there needs to be some way to keep some perspective on the positive and negative achievements of Eastern European Jews over the last 400 years if only so that we can discuss Middle East issues rationally.

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From Ancient to Modern Judaism

Here are my blog entries addressing the development of Modern Judaism from its roots in the intellectual, political, and spiritual currents of Second Temple Judaism:

• Modern Identity Creates Ancient Origins [Discusses the relationships between modern identities and beliefs about origins in a comparison of Sudanese African Arabs and E. European ethnic Ashkenazi Jews]
• The Origins of Modern Jewry [Greco-Roman Judea to Seventeenth Century + Genetic Anthropology]
• Les origines des juifs actuels [Same, more supporting material in French]
• Followup: Origins of Modern Jewry [Shlomo Sand's material]
• Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry [Putting Sand's theory in perspective]
• An Earlier ADL/Foxman Debacle [Jews, Christianity and 2nd Temple Judaism]
• Let the Exiles Return Home! [Archeology of Jews]
• Jewish History: Facts versus Delusions [Caveats about Jewish Studies]
• The Lies of Yiddish Studies [More Caveats about Jewish Studies]
• Pre-State Zionism [From ancient Israel to the State of Israel]
• Re: SHK 18.0581 Redheads [Jewishness versus 2nd Temple Judaism]
• Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History [Jewish Arabs versus ethnic Ashkenazim]
• Some Things Never Change [Jewish Arabs and Zionism]
• Non-Ashkenazi Jewish Scholar on Morris [Benny Morris and Jewish Arabs]
• Not the Enemy Israel's Jews from Arab Lands [Jewish Arabs and ethnic Ashkenazim]
• Conundrum of Jewish Arab Identity [Jewish Arabs and ethnic Ashkenazim]
• Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation [Jewish "Reform" in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries]
• Zionazi Racial Science [Genetic Anthropology]
• How to talk about Zionism, a new improved guide [Precise terminology]
• Corrupt Jewish Social Networking Rules! [Three Great Frauds of Zionism -- the distinction between modern Jews and ancient Judeans]
• Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values [Jewish attitudes toward Jerusalem]

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[Followup] Mobilization for Attacking Iran

I attended Charles Small's Harvard Lowell House talk. It was probably meant to put as many Jewish students and faculty as possible on the same page in order to start the fabrication of a fake grass roots movement agitating for an attack on Iran just as the SaveDarfur movement propagandized for an intervention in Sudan.

Altogether attendance was rather pitiful and totaled 14 including the speaker and me. Attendees included

• Ruth Wisse, who seems to be aging rapidly,
• Benjamin Owen, who I thought identified himself as President of Harvard Students for Israel,
• Sarah Bayefsky-Anand, who seems to be president of HSI according to a search of the Harvard website, and
• Albert, whose last name I did not catch and who was a Boston-area Iranian Jew who wanted to make sure Small did not go off the deep end.

Overall the lack of interest surprised me because I remember that Graham Allison and Noah Feldman filled this room in the early days of the War on Terror.

Owen introduced Small by summarizing his biography on the website of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism.

Small started off by acknowledging both Ruth Wisse, who was his former teacher at McGill, and Anne F. Bayefsky, who is a self-described pro-Israel human rights activist and possibly related to Sarah Bayefsky.

Next Small described a letter that was sent to him by a Jewish faculty member who accused Small of creating a perception of Jewish dual loyalty by banging the drum so strongly for action against Iran.

Small is extremely disappointed that US and Western intellectuals in general do not understand the threat of radical (not ordinary) Islam as he and other Zionists do.

Small argues radical Islam challenges fundamental Western values and assumptions whereas he and his colleagues follow the social democratic tradition of Charles Taylor and try to integrate the other into Western society according to human rights principles and in conformance with the Talmudic ethics of Emanuel Levinas.

Small rejects the assertion that modern society must accommodate all narratives and those practices and attitudes which like subordination of women and hostility toward homosexuals are an anathema to modern Western society.

According to Small, it is an abomination for Ahmadinejad to reject Israel's right to exist and to incite the extermination of Jews.

Small and Edward Kaplan coauthored a study that found a high degree of correlation of anti-Semitism (as they defined it) with opposition to Israel.

[According to Small the study used belief that Jews engage in unfair business practices as an indication of anti-Semitism. As an expert in Jewish political economy in the modern period, I object to the use of such an indicator because unfair business practices and corrupt social networking have constituted the essence of Jewish economic life in Europe at least since the 16th century.]

7-9% of Europeans that are anti-Semitic according to the Small-Kaplan criteria are also extremely anti-Israel.

In contrast 56% of anti-Israel Europeans are anti-Semitic according to the Small-Kaplan criteria.

Small then went on to explain that Iran has created a sense of urgency for Elie Wiesel in a way that he has not felt since 1945. Wiesel sees the possibility of another genocide against Jews and considers it an indignity to have to discuss genocide against the Jewish people in this day and age. He is bothered that nobody is doing anything.

Small contrasts the current situation with the efforts that he and other college students (including me) made on behalf of Soviet Jews in the 70s and 80s. He met with Anatoli Shcharanski in 19754-5. Shcharanski claimed to know Soviet Jews would become free because of the efforts of American college students.

[Note that I feel I was scammed in this movement because I later came to the conclusion that even up to the collapse of the Soviet Union the communist leadership remained disproportionately Jewish and that Soviet policy toward Jewish nationalism differed in no way from Soviet policy toward any other form of nationalism.]

After finishing with discussion of Shcharanski, Small listed the usual Zionist sins of the Iranian regime:

1. It is anti-democratic.
2. It consistently blames Jews for everything.
3. It uses the narrative of The Protocols of the [Learned] Elders of Zion, which paved the way for pogroms and genocide.

After some confusion of the 12th Imam with al-Mahdi, Small then accused Shiite Islam of inherent anti-Semitism by associating Jews with najis (ritual uncleanliness equated with tum'ah in Judaism).

According to Small, Ahmadinejad claimed in 2005 that Judaism was a stain of disgrace on the garment of the Islamic world and in 2008 that Israel was like a dried rotten stinking corpse hanging in a tree.

Small also asserts that Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust myth a swindle that is being used to squeeze money out of Western states.

As a consequence Gregory Gordon [Voices on Antisemitism: Gregory S. Gordon (Director, Center for Human Rights & Genocide Studies and Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of North Dakota] and Alan Dershowitz have teamed up in order to bring an indictment against Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide.

According to Small the Iranian regime is clearly out to create nuclear weapons as everyone agreed at the 2008 Pugwash Conference. The conferees only debated when Iran would finally complete development. He then complained that no one has been particularly upset even though Iran has been caught in a lie about its newest research facility.

Small went on to propose the refusal to act was connected with anti-nationalist post-modernism and with a developing Red-Green alliance such as seen at York University (where Anne Bayefsky is a professor of political science).

Small pointed out that the attacks no longer focus on Israel but also on anyone that supports Israel.

Small asserts that American Jews are becoming embarrassed by any association with Israel even as Israeli Jews are becoming aware that anti-Israelism is just the old anti-Semitism reborn.

Small analogizes the current situation with the 30s when American Jews embarrassed by the primitiveness of Shtetl Jews refused to speak up when they could have hindered or stopped Hitler's murderous plans.

Then Small opened up the talk for questions.

Owen explained that he was experiencing something like the email Small received. Members of the Harvard Darfur activist organization often treated him as if they suspected him of an ulterior Zionist agenda. Wisse told him he should quit the group.

The rest of the discussion related mostly to Palestinian terrorism and to the Hamas Charter's anti-Semitism, which is supposed to be clear in the internal reference to The Protocols of the [Learned] Elders of Zion.

I pointed out the the actual text only indicates the Charter writer's total ignorance of the actual content of The Protocols and added that I had confirmed my impression with Hamas supporters that remembered the history of the Charter's creation. Small somewhat indignantly asked me if I would research American racism by consulting someone like David Duke. I said, "Damn right, I would, and when I was researching the Holocaust in the Ukraine, I spoke with people that I suspected of being Hilfswillige [local non-German shooters for the German Nazis]. It is important to get direct testimony on their perspective if possible."

Small claimed that repeated references to Freemasons indicated the indebtedness to The Protocols. I argued that references to Freemasons in ME conspiracy theories is generally the way one describes fellow travelers. The Charter's repeated references to the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like is probably an early attempt to describe the Israel Lobby with vocabulary understood by members of Hamas.

Small asserted that Hamas leaders had an obligation to learn enough about European anti-Semitism to avoid the Freemasonry terminology associated with bigotry against the Jews.

I pointed out

• that I was not sure the Freemasonry terminology was specifically anti-Jewish,
• that Small showed a similar problem in his discussion of Iran because he confused the 12th Imam, the Mahdi and the Masih, and
• that Hamas leaders probably had bigger issues on their mind than learning intricate details of the history of European anti-Semitism.

Small asked, "Which issues?"

I said, "Dealing with the theft of their country by E. European invaders."

Small responded, "Aha, Anti-Semitism."

I replied, "It's their experience and perspective. What do you expect? Gratitude toward Jews."

Albert the Iranian Jew concluded the open forum by calling the Iranian threat a paranoid fantasy because he could safely state as a frequent visitor that Iran was too militarily weak, too backward industrially and too much of an economic mess to represent a danger either to Israel or to the USA.


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