Category — Forward

For a long time, many of us have grumbled that Jewish victimology is a dead end, or worse. That promoting Holocaustism and lashing out at all critics of Israel and American Jewish policies were taking us to a place we do not want to go.

The Forward elucidates these concerns in its editorial, “Joe-Bashing and the Jews.� We can rail at anti-Semitism, or note it privately, or we can spend our energy and focus correcting where we have gone wrong communally. As always, defense groups who claim to speak for the Jewish community are disproportionately at fault. They have no right to speak on the Jewish community’s behalf. They are causing us serious harm.

The Forward notes,

Ironically, when Israel’s foes successfully present themselves as underdogs and victims of Jewish bullying, the very attempt by Jews to fight back becomes evidence for the prosecution. And the more the Jewish community’s advocates try to respond with their old, familiar weapons of self-defense — the historic claims of victimhood and vulnerability — the less effective the weapons become.

American Jews have long presented themselves as fighting allies of the embattled Jewish state. Now the other side is firing back, using the Jewish community’s own weapons. American Jews are caught off guard, unprepared for the counterattack[...]

American Jews still have vast resources. They have many more friends than enemies. But a critical milestone has been passed: The post-Holocaust taboo on demonization of Jews is very nearly gone.

Pretty astute, huh? Too bad the Forward didn’t take a more explicit shot at the Neocons, the Jewish defense organizations, and Jewish communal “leaders� and laymen who act like a bunch of whiny, hypersensitive crybabies. That would be badass, but I guess even the independent Forward doesn’t quite have the sack to…oh…oh wait…oh, my.

It doesn’t help when the biggest Jewish representative bodies allow themselves and their community to be identified in the public eye with a discredited administration and a larger conservative movement in terminal meltdown. It doesn’t help when Jews ignore or deny Israel’s genuine shortcomings. It doesn’t help when they overreact to criticism — hostile, benign or just clumsy — and intimidate their critics into resentful silence, reinforcing their enemies’ worst stereotypes.

This week’s Forward had an editorial supporting expanded hate-crimes legislation. The Forward is usually responsible about noting the reasons why people differ from their editorial position, but they omitted the most important one as to why some of us do not support hate-crimes legislation, and in fact, prefer it be repealed, and perhaps replaced with extra sentencing for unprovoked attacks.

I do not support hate-crimes legislation because there are serious concerns over implementation on a fair and consistent level. I believe it is just as bad if someone harms a person because he is a white Christian as it is to harm a person because he is black or gay. Now, I have no doubt that the Forward believes the same thing.

So I am disappointed that the Forward did not even discuss this issue. Because there is a real concern that hate-crimes are being selectively enforced to protect only “minorities,� and are not being enforced the same way for the assailants of whites that are targeted by those who, well, hate white people.

And perhaps, this is the problem with special legislation protecting minorities in the first place. It suggests that hatred towards regular white people isn’t as bad somehow.

It’s just as bad, it most certainly happens, and it may be happening more than we would like to publicly admit. And there certainly appears to be reluctance to prosecute it as such.

As I think most of you know, the Forward is by far and away my favorite newspaper. Not my favorite “Jewish” newspaper; just my favorite newspaper period. But the one thing I like more than reading the Forward is reading about ME in the Forward.

I was invited to join some rather heavy hitters for some blog punditry in reaction to the new Forward 50 list, an annual listing of Jewish machers determined by the staff of the Forward. There should be a bit of back and forth over the next few days, so please do check it out.

I am an American Jew. So when the esteemed rabbi of my country — of the founding congregation of America (an Orthodox congregation, mind you) speaks…I listen seriously to what he has to say. To those of you prefer the ancient paradigms of “the old country,â€? remember that his congregation, Shearith Israel, was established before your movement(s) existed. In 1654, The Baal Shem Tov would not be born for over fifty years.

Anyway, Rabbi Marc Angel, shlita, writes in the Forward,

Sadly, the RCA leadership capitulated to the demands of Rabbi Amar. The RCA agreed to establish regional rabbinic courts to handle conversions in line with the dictates of the chief rabbi. This means that individual RCA rabbis may no longer perform conversions and expect them to be sanctioned by the RCA — or by the chief rabbinate. Power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and only into the hands of those who agree to adopt stringent and restrictive positions. The result is that many non-Jews who considered halachic conversion will turn to non-halachic means of conversion, or will give up on conversion altogether.

This is a tragedy — and an unnecessary one at that, since there is no halachic reason why the chief rabbinate’s view should carry the day.

Rabbi Angel asks,

Rabbinic tradition teaches that one who oppresses a convert is violating 36 Torah laws. How many laws will be broken by the Orthodox rabbinic establishment in causing torment to halachically valid converts and their children? How many tears will be shed by victims of religious narrowness? How many would-be converts will be turned away from any possibility of a life of Torah and mitzvot due to the intransigence of certain rabbis?

Plenty. A river full. Loads.

The Forward wins big with the WebAward for Best Newspaper Site! Amazing. And guess who won a second tier award? The Frederick News Post! (That’s important, because I am from Frederick, MD).

Young machers according to Heeb Magazine in the Heeb 100 of 5767.

First of all, I should mention that my post, “The Luftmentshen of Jewcy,� was not representative of Jewschool in any way. I left Jewschool, at least for now, and though Kurtzman had no way to know that, really, I did publish the piece on The Kvetcher, not on Jewschool.

In his response, “The Daily Foxman: The Luftmenschen of Jewcy�, Kurtzman argues,

The Jewish community has worked very hard to instill in its young the sense that bearing witness to genocide is virtually a sacred responsibility, that denial of genocide is the final step of genocide, that the “criminal indifference� of the world to the genocide of European Jewry was a cataclysmic moral failure that must never be repeated, and that only by remembering the past can we prevent its repetition. So no, you don’t get to switch horses now that recalling someone else’s genocide conflicts with a strategic goal.

True, this is promoted by most of the organizational Jewish community. However, it is not a goal that I endorse. Hence, I am not bound by its logic, nor are others who disagree with it. Quite frankly, I don’t think that remembering the Holocaust will prevent anything from happening. I consider such a strategy most speculative, and already proven wrong to a large degree.

Kurtzman invokes a Jerusalem Post op-ed that declares,

Never Again has been exposed as an empty mantra, most recently in Rwanda and Darfur,� and this has happened because we have not “sufficiently internalized� the lessons of tragedies such as the Armenian Genocide.

No. Never Again is an empty mantra because we are not in control of everything. We can “internalize� whatever we want. But terrible things, including genocide, will still happen. The Mandaeans are being exterminated this very instance. Where is the Jewish community? Why isn’t/wasn’t Kurtzman and Jewcy raising hell? Perhaps Kurtzman needs to go “internalize� the Armenian genocide more “sufficiently.� That will surely help the Mandaeans. We could help them a lot more than the Armenians killed in WWI.

Kurtzman argues,

“If this is the direction you want to take the Jewish community, then go ahead and raise the next generation to believe that genocide is a trifle that can be ignored when politically convenient to do so.�

This is not the choice. The Holocaust can be viewed internally by the Jewish community as quite a bit more important than a “trifle,� but still not be the paradigm for which all policy must be crafted.

Kurtzman asked,

What sort of ideological shakeup is taking place in the Jewish community that Jewcy sides with the Jerusalem Post for the universalist luftmenschen against the tough-minded ethnocentrists of Forward and Jewschool?

I obviously don’t speak for the Forward, but I would guess that it is the same “tough-mindedness� that has frequently placed the Forward historically on the opposite side of the utopian Luftmentshen for most of its past 110 years.

Some things change. Some things don’t.

The U.S. is out of line with other Western countries in terms of its attitude towards circumcision.

But things are changing.

The Forward reports,

The highest-level case in American history involving the right to circumcision is slated to be heard this fall, when the Oregon Supreme Court rules on whether a father can have his 12-year-old son undergo the procedure[…]The acceptance of the case by Oregon’s highest court is surprising, because judges generally grant a wide degree of latitude to custodial parents — so much so, in fact, that the state’s Court of Appeals rejected the mother’s case without issuing an opinion. If the Oregon Supreme Court decides to review the merits of the father’s plan for circumcision, it will almost inevitably weigh in on two related issues: the right of custodial parents to guide their children’s religious upbringings, and the weight that religious considerations should be given when considering the welfare of a child.

“Are parents only authorized to make decisions that a secular decision-maker would make?� asked Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, which is filing a friend-of-the-court brief in support of James Boldt. “We have to win this case, and win it big, in my view� Stern said.

And what would Marc Stern say if the child expresses a preference to not be circumcised? This is not the case…the child’s wishes are not clear.

But would he argue that he should still be circumcised?

What would you say?

The JTA reports,

New members of JTA’s senior staff, from left, are: Daniel Sieradski, director of digital media; Ami Eden, managing editor; and Uriel Heilman, associate editor.

This is a great sign for the JTA, but it is also critical for the health of Jewish media.

Back in the day, the Forward and The Tag slugged it out, and that competition was healthy for the Jewish population. We need such competition now as well.

Now, perhaps, we will have it.

This is good for the Jews.

Thanks to the JTA for letting me *borrow* their photo.

And good luck, fellas.

Ostensibly, our progressive and liberal friends who support mass immigration of Muslims both here and wherever they seek to live should be heartened by this week’s op-ed in the Forward by Eric Frey. The title of the piece is, “A Racist Stench Rises Out of Cologne,� and the end warns European Jews that,

The future of Islamic life in Europe does not lend itself to simple answers. If Jews find themselves too close to demagogues who want to rid society of all minorities, they should know that they are on the wrong track.

So it appears that the Forward is giving voice to those who categorically reject “racism� against Muslim immigrants.

But is that what is happening?

Let’s look at some of the actual content of the essay itself, apart from the specific building of the mosque in question.

“Why would a man who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a cellar in Hamburg and who spoke out forcefully against racism and antisemitism by neo-Nazis in the early 1990s allow himself to be associated with such company? Giordano’s answer is that radical Islam and its totalitarian creed, not the remnants of European fascism, are the main threats to liberal democracy today.

He finds himself in a similar bind as French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who was widely condemned as a racist when he told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in November 2005 that the French Muslim community was itself to blame for the social and ethnic tensions that led to the riots in Paris’s suburbs earlier that year. Finkelkraut’s arguments echoed those of Nicolas Sarkozy, then-interior minister and now president, and even National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. The mainstream leftist position, by stark contrast, was that French society had failed the immigrant youth because of a lack of integration and economic opportunity.

All across Europe, one can see liberal Jewish thinkers parting ways over the issue of Islam with their non-Jewish peers, among whom criticism of Islam is often frowned upon. Their willingness to speak out may have to do with a special Jewish abhorrence of totalitarian thinking, or concern over the widespread anti-Israel and antisemitic views among Europe’s Muslims, or (at least in Germany’s case) a feeling that Jews can speak out where others feel inhibited by their history.�

Emphasis added.