Dana Goldstein: Hebrew Schools and Israel

American Prospect author Dana Goldstein provides some criticism of Jewish day schools in Hebrew Schools and Israel, but the distortions of Jewish educational programs are far worse than she indicates because the Hebrew day school version of Jewish history is not merely exceptionalist but is also taught with complete decontextualization in order to make sure that Jewish children never learn about the legitimate grievances that non-Jews might have against Jews.

For example, in the USA it is hard to learn about the century of Eastern European Jewish sabotage, radical revolutionary violence, targeted assassinations, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that preceded the Holocaust and that forms a continuum with Zionist extremism, racism, murderousness, and genocidalism to this day.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish authors Sholem Aleichem and I.J. Singer wrote about Jewish financial aggressiveness and fraud, but as far as I know, all economic texts -- generally written by Jews -- systematically underplay the role of Jewish networks of trust in creating the Long Depression, the Great Depression, the associated market crashes, and the preceding speculative bubbles.

Unfortunately even the more honest Yiddish novelists and short story writers show blindness, for they only mention the Jewish victims of Jewish financial shysters while the ruined non-Jews receive little if any attention.

This sort of Jewish obliviousness and economic violence forms a continuum with the corruption, conspiracy and manipulation that my wife Karin Friedemann describes in a recent Khaleej Times op-ed and that I discuss in my commentary on her article entitled Chop Shop Economics and Stealth Zionism.

Yet as charming as Goldstein's Hebrew day school reminiscences may be, I cannot overemphasize too strongly that the fault for modern Jewish and non-Jewish ignorance about the backstory of Zionist crimes and atrocities lies more with non-Jewish historians that systematically underemphasize the importance of Jewish history than it does with Hebrew day schools.
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