1. religion and spirituality
2. judaism

A Progressive, Secular Bimonthly
$5.00 • January-February, 2009
The Magazine of The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring
A Tradition of Solidarity
Rokhl Kafrissen
Israel Looks at Obama
Amy Klein
Uniting To End the War
Conference Proceedings
Tu B’shevat? Why Not!
Linda Gritz
LETTERS
Names will be withheld from publication on
request. Jewish Currents reserves the right
to edit letters to restrict their length.
Jews in France
I was suprised that in Jewish Currents, of all places, the article by
Nadia Malinovich, “Jewish Secularism
in France” (November-December),
should make no mention, even in passing, of the very active Yiddish cultural
activities in Paris centering on the
French Arbeter Ring and the Medem
Library/Yiddish Cultural Center. The
latter institution has recently purchased
its own building, enabling it adequately
to house its large library and to expand
its already impressive offerings of
Yiddish language classes, concerts,
lectures and workshops of every kind,
and publishing activities that include
the superb Yiddish-French dictionary
of Yitshok Niborski and Berl Vaisbrot (an English version is currently
being prepared), the Tam-Tam journal
for young Yiddish readers and much
besides. Secular yidishkayt is alive and
well in Paris.
Yiddishists and Jewish secularists
in America need to know more about
what’s happening in France, and to
learn from the French example.
Solon Beinfeld
Cambridge, Massachusetts
America, Bleeding
The description of the damage done
to our beloved country by the Bush
Administration, in your editorial
Vol. 63, No. 1 (652)
January-February, 2009
www.jewishcurrents.org
Editor: Lawrence Bush
Editorial Board: Adrienne Cooper, Joseph Dimow, Henry Foner,
Esther Leysorek Goodman, Rokhl Kafrissen, Milton Kant, Lyber Katz,
Judith Rosenbaum, Yankl Stillman, Tamar Zinn, Barnett Zumoff
Contributing Editor (from Israel): Amy Klein
Editorial Advisory Council: Isak Arbus, Henrietta Backer, Paul Basch,
Anne-Marie Brumm, Alvin Dorfman, Shaurain Farber, Gordon Fellman,
Eric A. Gordon, Abbott Gorin, David A. Hacker, Estelle Holt, Nicholas Jahr,
Carol Jochnowitz, Robert Kaplan, Michael Katz, Robert Kestenbaum, Arieh Lebowitz,
Miriam Leberstein, Ira Mintz, Bennett Muraskin, Marie Parham, Peter Pepper,
Sam Pepper, Sheldon Ranz, Eugene Resnick, Sid Resnick, Martin Schwartz,
Rhea Seagull, Ralph Seliger, Paul G. Shane, Joel Shatzky, Ruth Singer, Harold Sosnow
Website Editor: Rokhl Kafrissen
Website Resources: Ira Karlick
Management committee: Stan Distenfeld, Nina Gordon, Ira Karlick, Elaine Katz,
Bernard Kransdorf, Ruth Ost, Fred Rosenthal
Cover: “Tricycle on Freedom Road: Thirty-Five Plus One” collage by Lawrence Bush.
JEWISH CURRENTS (ISSN #US-ISSN-0021-6399), January-February, 2009, Vol. 63, No. 1 (652).
Published bimonthly by The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, 45 E. 33rd St., New York, NY 10016.
Phone: (212) 889-2523. Fax: (212) 532-7518. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.
jewishcurrents.org. Single copies $5. Subscription $30 a year in U.S.; elsewhere, $40. Periodicals
postage paid at New York, N.Y. Copyright © 2009 by Jewish Currents.
“America, Bleeding” (November-December), was succinct, incisive and
deeply moving. The metaphor of the
United States as an individual suffering from “multiple wounds” needing
“intensive care” was an excellent way
to underscore just what sorry shape
this country is in right now.
Unfortunately, it will take a great
deal of sacrifice and suffering on the
part of millions of innocent people
before our country can be restored
to health and regain the position of
respected international leader that it
once held.
Claire Howard
Bayside, New York
Jews and the Left
Regarding: “Jews and the Left: A
Natural Alliance?” (September-October issue): Trying to fully correct my
friend Bennett Muraskin’s misreadings
of Jewish history — left, right and
center — would require more effort
than I have time for and more space
than Jewish Currents can afford.
Let me, therefore, highlight just a few
egregious errors.
Bennett writes: “The tried and true
survival strategy of Jews in medieval
and early modern Europe had been to
seek the protection of the powerful...”
Had he consulted the Jewish Currents Reader (1966), he would have
found an extensive discussion on the
issue of the dual trends — accommodation and resistance — in Jewish
history up to and including the khurbn
(Holocaust), which include these comments by Ber Mark, former director
of the Jewish Historical Institute in
Warsaw, translated (uncredited) by me:
“It is generally untrue that the Jews
from the Middle Ages to the middle of
the 20th century were a ghetto-element
with a ghetto psychology. It was not
so even during the medieval ghettos.
Even then Jews generally showed their
resistance and always looked for allies
in their struggle against the common enemy . . . Jews had supported
the Hussites [15th-century Protestant
rebels] in their struggle against . . .
Continued on page 37
Editorials and Viewpoints
Editorials
2 Letters
3 The Tenacity of Jewish Liberalism
4 21st-Century Participatory Democracy
Rich Feldman
7 Olmert Allies Himself with Peace Now
Steve Scheinberg
The Tenacity of Jewish Liberalism
M
ore than three quarters of Jewish voters chose
Barack Obama on Election Day. That is one
Articles
of many achievements wrought by our Com11 Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America:
Conference Proceedings
munity Organizer-in-Chief even before his inauguration.
Ann Toback, Rabbi Ellen LIppmann,
No other minority group but African-Americans heeded Obama’s
Elizabeth Holtzman, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz,
call for change in such resounding numbers. The tenacity of
Rabbi David Saperstein, Rabbi Arthur Waskow,
American Jewish liberalism was once again affirmed, and
SarahLeah Whitson, Lilly Rivlin,
Jeremy Ben-Ami, Diane Balser, Diane Balser,
our neoconservative courtiers — who mounted what Jeremy
MJ Rosenberg
Ben-Ami, executive director of the progressive peace lobby J
Street, has called a “two-year, multi-million dollar campaign of
Columns
baseless smears and fear” — were once
8 The View from Israel
again rejected.
Israel Looks at Obama
More than three quarters of
For our magazine and its parent orgaAmy Klein
nization,
The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter
Jewish voters chose Obama
26 New Jewish Rituals
Ring,
this
display of Jewish liberalism is
on Election Day. That is one
Tu B’Shevat? Why Not!
tremendously heartening. Throughout the
Linda Gritz
of many achievements wrought
conservative onslaught of the past three
30 Our Secular Jewish Heritage
by our Community Organizerdecades, we have argued repeatedly that
Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the
in-Chief even before his
Jewish identification with the have-nots is
Construction of Modern Hebrew
more consistent with our people’s history,
Yankl Stillman
inauguration.
tradition, self-interest, and prospects for
34 Concealed/Revealed
Essays about Justice, Justice
continuity, than the currying of favor with
the powers-that-be — especially when those powers resemble
44 The Rootless Cosmopolitan
A Tradition of Solidarity:
nothing more than Pharaoh, the imperial oppressor of Biblical
Black-Jewish Relations in Jewish Currents
Egypt.
Rokhl Kafrissen
Apparently, a large majority of our people agree with us.
Poetry and Art
25 Pushke
Sherman Pearl
29 Two Poems
Jacob Staub
32 Shnipishok
Aron Reis
37 Yoshiwara in the F Train
Aron Stavisky
48 Yarmulke, 1960
Lawrence Bush
ABOUT OUR ANNUAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Three years ago, Jewish Currents switched our double
issue from November-December to March-April. This year,
thanks to the economic turn-down and the scheduling
needs of the magazine, we are returning to our end-of-theyear format. Readers will be asked to send in greetings for
that special issue later in 2009 — which will give us all the
time to benefit from the achievements (we hope!) of the
new Administration
and recover
January-February
, 2009from the domestic “shock
and awe” that our country is suffering.
But now the population of have-nots is increasing — and, as
happens in many serious economic crises, the voices of antiSemitism and racial and ethnic prejudice may soon be getting
louder. All the ingredients for backlash politics are on the table:
the anti-immigration passions that have been cultivated by Republican politicians and conservative media over the past three
years; the spread of unemployment, foreclosures and economic
suffering (Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have already been
shouting on radio and television that the financial crisis should
be laid at the feet of the subprime mortgagees — code language
for “Black homeowners” — and the Community Reinvestment
Act — code for “liberal urban policies”; the perception of the
unpopular war in Iraq as being fought on Israel’s behalf; the
progress of gay and lesbian Americans towards gaining their civil
rights, despite Election Day setbacks in California, Florida, and
Arizona; the increase in the numbers and influence of the Latino
community in America — and, of course, the presence of a Black
family in the White House. (Obama received only 43 percent of
the white vote, after all, despite the very obvious failure of con
servative Republican policies and his own careful campaign
as a “post-racial” and moderate candidate.)
It is also possible, however, for the liberalism of the Jewish
community to become normative for the American majority
over the next four years. The key is for the new president
to remain our Community Organizer-in-Chief and help
mobilize working America (the so-called “middle class”)
to demand that the current crisis of American capitalism
become an opportunity for social democratic reforms. If we
pressure Obama make sure that it is Main Street as well as
Wall Street that gets its potholes fixed, that it is the union
hall as well as the board room that gets refurbished, that it
is the working majority rather than the elite minority that
gets some government support, we may be able to save our
country from the intensive-care unit in which the BushCheney administration has landed us, set ourselves on the
road to recovery, and create a revolution in expectations of
the kind evoked by the New Deal in the 1930s.
Many on the left have been complaining about Obama’s
cabinet and other appointments as being too centrist and
“old school.” For now, we prefer to reserve judgment, and to
allow ourselves to take bask awhile in his ground-breaking
victory, his obvious intelligence and decency, and our sheer
relief at seeing the end of the Bush-Cheney years of political horror. We fundamentally agree with the assessment of
Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the American Prospect,
that while some actions need to be immediate — “such as
economic stimulus, closing Guantanamo, and a plan to get
out of Iraq” — the building of a “new political era” requires
“the long view, gambling on patience, and carefully putting
into place the pieces that win lasting majorities for progressive policies, just as [Obama] won a majority of delegates
and a majority of votes in the election. . . . No president has
ever spoken as clearly and openly about coalition-building
as Obama” — so let us take him at his word, even as we
stand prepared to mobilize to keep him oriented towards the
JC
“change” that was his campaign promise.
Viewpoints
Rich Feldman
21st-Century Participatory Democracy
The Perspective of a Veteran Auto Worker
O
n the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I watched
the last Ford Expedition roll off the assembly
line at the Wayne Michigan Truck Plant where
I worked for thirty years, on the line for twenty and as an
elected union representative for ten. Back in the mid-1990s,
that plant produced in one year more than 300,000 large
SUVS and earned more than $3 billion in profit for Ford.
Some profit-sharing checks were larger than my dad’s annual income of $5,200; he died in 1970.
Many of my co-workers have since retired. Some live
on incomes of only $3,000 per month, which includes their
pension and Social Security checks. Others took buyouts and
returned to school. Some who are still working will transfer to the truck plant in Louisville, Kentucky or Dearborn,
Rich Feldman ([email protected]) is a member of the National
Executive Board of the Workmen’s Circle and active in the
Detroit district. He writes frequently with Grace Boggs and
can be read at www.boggscenter.org.
Michigan, and still others will begin working on the Focus
assembly line at our sister plant, the Wayne Assembly Plant.
Coworkers have said to me, “I will keep on working, so at
least I can help my two kids and their families because they
are not working,” or, “I need to be able to help my son or
daughter when they return from Iraq.” Without the United
Auto Workers, even these narrow opportunities would
be unavailable to them. As I have always said, Without a
union, you have nothing; with a union you have a voice and
a responsibility.
Still, it has been almost forty years since the auto industry,
the middle class and the realities of American prosperity left
Detroit, Youngstown, Gary, Flint, and so many other towns
and cities between Western New York and Iowa. Only in the
last two years, however, have we seen the regional wake-up
call become a national and global wake-up call.
We hear it, but we keep going back to old language, ideas,
dreams, and solutions. We say that there are no quick fixes
Jewish Currents
and that we cannot leave it all to Obama,
but deep inside we want answers from
the past and someone else to fix the mess.
We define ourselves as breadwinners and
consumers, not citizens. We do not see
ourselves as making the decisions or engaging in conversations with one another
about our future.
Some say, “Stop the bailout of the banks!”
while others yell, “Stop the foreclosures of
the millions of families who are losing their
homes and jobs.” Some say, “Buy GM,
Ford, and Chrysler,” while others yell, “The
government hates blue-collar workers and
is committed to destroying unions.”
I say, “Let’s use our imaginations to
create a New American dream of selfgovernment.”
The middle-class lifestyle of credit cards, consumerism
and using 25 percent of the world’s resources when we are
only 5 percent of the world’s population is over!
Whether the U.S. automotive industry ends up in bankruptcy or now, it will have a smaller slice of the world auto
market, and Charles E. Wilson’s idea that “What’s good for
the country is good for General Motors and vice versa” will
become a part of ancient history. Instead, in post-industrial
America, it’s the global banks that get the easy bailout
because we live in a global economy and we do not have a
vision for a 21st-century national economy.
This is not only an economic crisis, but a spiritual and
cultural crisis. It is also our opportunity and challenge to
create a new 21st-century American Dream
What can we do and when do we start?
We need to break our silence. We need to stop waiting
for them to fix it. We need to look in the mirror. We need to
unleash our imaginations.
We should put a human face to this economic meltdown.
While we celebrate the Obama victory, we should bring
hundreds of thousand of people to Washington, D.C. and
every state capital and let them know that we care enough to
stand up and speak out. We have to stop acting like subjects
and start acting like citizens!
We should be burning our credit cards and boycotting
shopping malls and big box stores. We need to declare that
Sundays are not shopping days but family days, citizen
days, when we come together to create an economy for our
children and grandchildren.
We need a national discussion in every house of worship,
union hall, city hall, and community center, to help us define
the principles and policies for the creation of a 21st-century
January-February, 2009
local and national economy. We need new concepts and
policies based on solidarity economics that unite communities with workplaces. We need to ask: How do we create
dignified local economies within a globalized economy?
What can we produce locally on our land, in greenhouses
and in abandoned factories, for local and regional purchase
and consumption? What kind of transportation do we really
need for our cities and our regions?
How can artists paint murals, play music, and use technology to engage our communities in a culture of hope? How
can every union and religious community accept responsibility to ensure that within a five-mile radius no person is
foreclosed or thrown out of their home? Why don’t we care
enough about each other to make sure that everyone has
a place to live? Why don’t we initiate local health clinics
so that every community takes care of its own and stops
relying on massive hospitals for all our health care needs?
Why don’t our schools become centers where community
residents meet and carry on intergenerational dialogues to
devise ways to make our neighborhoods safe and clean?
We proudly tell stories of the Montgomery Bus Boycott,
the union movement of the 1930s, the sit-ins and protests for
rights for women, people of color, and folks with disabilities
that we and/or our forefathers and foremothers have engaged
in. They are our heroes and heroines. We can become the
heroes and heroines to our children and grandchildren!
Our nation looked the other way when the deindustrialization of Detroit warned us that we had come to the end of the
20th-century American Dream. Let us look in the mirror and
take responsibility for the dream of today and tomorrow!
In our desire to reduce the pain and uncertainty of these
perilous times, let us not act in fear and desperation but in
a spirit of hope and vision.
JC
WHERE WE STAND
THE WORKMEN’S CIRCLE/ARBETER RING POSITION ON CURRENT ISSUES
A Letter to President-Elect Obama
O
n Sunday, November 23, 2008, more than 350
participants and presenters at the “Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America: Organizing for
Action” conference in New York City signed the following letter to President-elect Barack Obama. Through
an e-mail campaign conducted by The Workmen’s
Circle/Arbeter Ring and the Shalom Center in the
weeks following the conference, several hundred more
people signed. The letters were taken to Chicago and
presented to officials of the President-elect’s transition
team. We still encourage you to copy and sign the letter
and return it to us. After the inauguration on January
20th, it will be just as important for President Obama
to hear from you.
YES WE CAN —
END THE WAR AND HEAL AMERICA
Dear President-elect Obama:
I am writing to join with participants in “Jews Uniting to End the War and Heal America,” a gathering
of hundreds of Jewish community activists, community leaders, academics, and individuals in New York
City on Sunday, November 23, 2008, called together
by The Shalom Center, the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter
Ring, and Jewish Currents magazine, with support
from Am Kolel, Brooklyn for Peace, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Camp Kinderland, Jewish
Council on Urban Affairs, Jews Against the War, Jews
for Racial and Economic Justice, Jvoices, Meretz
USA, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace
Chapter 21, Veterans for Peace Chapter 34 and Zeek.
We honor you for the hope you have brought and
helped to create, and the visions for change you have
articulated, and send you our best wishes and blessings for a successful Administration.
In particular, we ask you to move forward in these
areas:
1. To move as quickly as physically possible to
bring safely home all American troops and contractors in Iraq, and to redirect the huge amounts of resources being squandered there to meet the urgent and
critical needs of American society for schools, health
care, green jobs, and excellent care for veterans.
2. To end all uses of torture and violations of human rights and civil liberties by the U.S. government,
including warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of
peaceful advocacy organizations, and to secure the
immediate end of “extraordinary rendition” and the
return of all U.S. prisoners turned over to other governments for detention.
3. To move forward as quickly as possible to prevent looming global climate disaster by taxing and
radically reducing carbon-dioxide emissions, creating green jobs by building swift and energy-efficient
railroads and a national clean-energy distribution network, by strongly assisting the development of solar
and wind energy technology, and by ending subsidies
for Big Oil and Big Coal.
4. To shift emergency economic recovery aid to
prevent home foreclosures, protect and expand jobs,
and insist that all money made available to banks be
used at once to restore credit fluidity; if necessary to
ensure these results, taking voting directorships for
the government in the corporations receiving aid.
5. To move quickly for a comprehensive peace
settlement in the broader Middle East that involves
all the Arab states and that includes: full peace agreements and security for Israel, along with a new and
viable Palestinian state; a diplomatic resolution to
tensions with Iran; and a political solution for the war
in Afghanistan.
In peace / B’sholem,
Signature
Comments to [email protected]
Jewish Currents
Steve Scheinberg
Olmert Allies Himself with Peace Now
And Settler Terrorism Heats Up
A
t the end of September, a pipe bomb exploded
outside the home of Peace Now activist Zeev
Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel Prize
winner who is one of the world’s leading authorities on
fascism. Fortunately, he was only slightly wounded, but the
bombing began a round of violence, and violent rhetoric, that
the radical wing of the settler movement is using to enforce
its will on Palestinians and to silence its Israeli critics. Authorities discovered fliers near Sternhell’s home offering a million shekels to anyone killing a member of Peace
Now. Sternhell and Yariv Oppenheimer, director general of
Peace Now, were at placed under police protection, Oppenheimer having been targeted by graffiti threatening, “Yariv
the pig, the end is near,” and “Kahane was right.”
Former Education Minister Yossi Sarid saw the attacks
as evidence that “Peace Now is undergoing a renaissance.
All those wondering where the movement is today, where
it has disappeared to, have received a thundering Zionist
answer. The movement is here, alive and well and exerting an influence — and it’s really bothering someone up
there on the hilltops.” (Some of the most radical settlers are
“the hilltop youth” occupying illegal outposts.) Outgoing
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert drew a direct line from the
1983 killing of Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig to the
1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and now the attack on
Sternhell. “An evil wind of extremism, of hatred, of malice,
of running amok, of breaking the law, of contempt for the
institutions of the state is blowing through certain sections
of the Israeli public,” Olmert said, calling the attackers
“wild, violent law-breakers, who disregard all frameworks
of proper, democratic life.”
Olmert, in fact, has virtually joined ranks with Peace Now.
In a rather startling Rosh Hashanah interview in the daily
Yediot Aharonot, he dared to say what no other prime minister
has ever said: that a far reaching accord with the Palestinians
is an absolute necessity. “We have to reach an agreement with
the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that, in practice, we
will withdraw from almost all the territories.”
Olmert acknowledged that while the main settlement
blocs would remain as part of Israel, Israel will, in exchange,
Steven Scheinberg is a professor emeritus at Concordia
University in Montreal and co-chair of Canadian Friends of
Peace Now.
January-February, 2009
“have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because
without that there will be no peace . . . we will have to give
compensation in the form of territories within the State of
Israel at a ratio that is more or less 1:1.”
The former mayor of Jerusalem, Olmert also challenged
the shibboleth of an undivided holy city. “Whoever wants to
hold on to all of the city’s territory will have to bring 270,000
Arabs inside the fences of sovereign Israel. It won’t work,”
he said. East Jerusalem, in his view, is destined to be the
capital of a Palestinian state. “Whoever talks seriously about
security in Jerusalem . . . must be willing to relinquish parts
of Jerusalem. I was the first person who wanted to maintain
Israeli control over the entire city. I confess. I’m not trying
to retroactively justify what I’ve done for the past thirty-five
years. For a significant portion of those years I wasn’t ready
to contemplate the depth of this reality.” Some commentators have characterized this as a remarkable about-face by a formerly ardent Likudnik, but
they should recall his words of last November, when he
warned that the failure to reach a two-state deal would yield
“a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and
. . . American supporters would abandon Israel, saying they
cannot support a state that does not support democracy and
equal voting rights for all its residents.” It is difficult to judge Olmert’s motivation in turning to
such rhetoric. He may be concerned about his historical
legacy, or even laying down markers for a future return to
politics. Since he is leaving office under a cloud of corruption charges, perhaps he is trying to salvage his reputation
within his own family (his wife and children are associated
with Peace Now). “In a few years, my grandchildren will
ask what their grandfather did,” he said to Yedioth Aharonoth, “what kind of country we have bequeathed to them.
. . . we have a window of opportunity — a short amount of
time before we enter into an extremely dangerous situation
— in which to take a historic step in our relations with the
Palestinians . . .”
It is less important, however, to judge his motives than
to assess the impact of his words. An Israeli prime minister
has now clearly stated that his state’s rule over the Palestinian people must end, and that the questions of borders and
Jerusalem have readily apparent solutions. It will not be easy
for future leaders of Israel to retreat from these positions
without raising grave concerns about their own integrity and
Continued on page 10
Rabbi Amy Klein
The
View from Israel
Israel Looks at Obama
Facing Its Own Difficult Election, Israel
Asks If Obama Will Be “Good for the Jews”
H
ow many Israelis favored Barack Obama for
President of the United States? According to the
popular comic strip “Rishumon” by Ilana Zafran
(in Akhbar Ha-Ir, “The City Mouse,” a weekly entertainment guide), the only Israelis who went for the Democrat
were lesbian owners of black cats. In a pre-election strip,
Rafi the black cat (with lesbian owners) insists that Obama is
perfect: He is against the war in Iraq, he supports same-sex
unions, abortion rights,
and consideration for the
needs of the poor. “But
Tzipi Livni is the only candidate
he’s black!” interrupts
running who has clean hands, and an orange-and-whitestriped cat. “And he’s
she certainly has journeyed far to
black!” finishes Rafi.
the left of her political origins.
During the primaries,
the word on the Israeli
Jewish street was, “Only
in America can a charismatic yet completely inexperienced
candidate win the presidency.” Yet Israeli Jews were not immune to that charisma themselves; before Obama’s visit to Israel in June, they polled in favor of McCain, 36 to 28 percent;
by the first afternoon of his visit, when Obama visited a house
in Sderot that had been hit by Gaza missiles, the numbers had
switched, 37 to 28 percent in favor of Obama.
Palestinian opinion in the occupied lands, unsurprisingly,
moved from endorsement to indifference (Obama “did not
bother mentioning the occupation or illegal settlements,
not even once in all his speeches,” complained Al Jazeera’s
senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara). Nevertheless,
Ibrahim Abu Ji’ab, a 24-year-old Palestinian communications student living in Gaza, broadcast a pre-election message to American voters using Skype. He doesn’t speak
English, so he learned to declaim the following message
(reported in Ha’aretz): “I am Ibrahim Abu Ji’ab from the
Gaza Strip. I support Senator Barack Obama from Gaza. I
think that Senator Obama will achieve peace in the world
and in the area. For peace, please vote for Senator Obama.
Thank you very much.”
On November 5th, the morning after the elections, I actually
forgot at first to turn on the radio to hear the results. I had
spent half the night scrunched into the bottom half of my
feverish two-year-old’s toddler bed and had awakened in a
fog. After seeing my older boy off to school, I remembered
what was happening and ran home to learn what the rest of
the world knew: that the U.S. had overcome prejudice and
fear to elect a black president (Israelis don’t say “AfricanAmerican,” it is too politically correct and too complicated).
Even as my heart swelled, there was mention of the fact
that the president-elect would have an enormous security
detail, and I remembered that November 5th was also the
anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin zikhrono
livrakha (may his memory be for a blessing). But it can’t
happen this time, I whispered.
That morning, Razi Barkai, a veteran radio broadcaster
with a morning political show on Ga’alei Tzahal (Israeli
army radio station, the closest Israel has to NPR), assembled
a diverse array of guests to talk about Obama’s victory.
First, Barkai himself tried to convey its meaning as “a real
celebration with tears of joy on the part of so many people
unconnected to politics. . . . Justice has been done; balance
achieved. After all, we were youths when in Alabama they
didn’t let blacks sit with whites on buses.” Barkai then cautioned that Obama “is charismatic and smart but he can’t
change Washington in one stroke.”
Political analyst Tali Lipkin-Shahak was more optimistic:
“He reflects the change people want.” Much was made of
Obama’s words of caution, in his Chicago victory speech,
about the pace of change. Lipkin-Shahak, however, insisted that the president-elect, based on the effectiveness
of his campaign and his ability to choose the right people,
had programs and plans “in the drawer” that will address
America’s multiple crises.
Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian Israeli MK (member of the
Knesset), said that Obama’s election represents the “victory
of the ‘other’ and the ‘different,’ and a defeat for racism.”
From what could be considered the other side of the political spectrum, Rav Menachem Fruman, from the West Bank
settlement of Tekoa, was also excited by Obama’s victory.
He had supported Obama very early on and had made films
in support of him and given interviews to help convince the
elderly Jews in Florida. Fruman liked Obama’s fundamental
message of change. “For many years,” he explained, “the
Jewish Currents
problem between us and the Palestinians has been not only a
problem of territory but of a cultural divide. The Palestinians
see Western culture as an insult to Islamic culture. America
is the big Satan and we (Israel) are the little Satan.” The path
to peace, Fruman said, must be different than any previously
tried, and Obama has both the commitment to change and
the realism to blaze that new path — as well as a deeply
personal understanding of the problem, based on his having
a Muslim father and an American mother.
Former Foreign Minister and current Likud MK Silvan
Shalom said, “I believe that this (Obama’s election) can
bring world change — he is the leader not only of the United
States but of the free world.” Shalom, of Mizrahi descent,
noted Israel has never had a Mizrahi prime minister, despite
a 50 percent Mizrahi Jewish population, compared to the
mere 13 to 14 percent of African Americans in the U.S.
Others thought his comparison to be off the mark: Racism
in Israel does not come to the level of that in the U.S., they
said. We have, for instance, Shaul Mofaz (who recently lost
the primary election to lead the Kadima party by a handful
of votes) and other Mizrahi Jews in high positions. A more
accurate comparison, they said, would be to speak about the
chances of a Russian immigrant becoming prime minister.
On the major question of the day — “Will Obama be
good for the Jews (and Israel)?” — MK Shalom said that
the worrisome point is Obama’s position on Iran, a country
he has promised to engage with diplomatically. However,
Shalom said, once Obama starts receiving the intelligence
reports, he will begin to think differently, and he will be
held accountable on Iran by the many supporters of Israel
in Congress. Ha’aretz columnist Aluf Ben wrote similarly
before the election: The Israeli left wants to see in Obama
a savior of the peace process just as the Jewish right sees
McCain as the one who will bomb Iran and prevent another
Holocaust. Neither will get what it desires, Ben said, as the
world is not so simple.
At the end of the broadcast the station played “Bye Bye
Miss American Pie.”
Following the euphoria of the U.S. elections, it is disheartening, at best, to talk about the upcoming Israeli elections
on February 10th — made necessary when Tzipi Livni (of
Kadima) refused to bow to the Shas Party demand to take
Jerusalem off the negotiating table before it would join a
Livni-led government. My discouragement is rooted in a
basic political problem in Israel: the inability of any one
party to form a government. Our parliamentary system
thus empowers the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) well beyond
their numbers and makes it impossible for anyone to stay
in a position long enough to have a positive impact; a government minister who keeps his or her portfolio for three
January-February, 2009
Tzipi Livni and Barack Obama in Israel
years breaks records. Obama’s election slogan of “Change”
would be farcical here, given these systemic problems.
I would like to be excited that a capable woman is running
for prime minister. Livni is the only candidate running who
has clean hands, and she certainly has journeyed far to the
left of her political origins. She understands that for Israel
to determine its own destiny, it must withdraw to viable
borders and be a partner in the creation of a Palestinian State.
She was one of the only voices, and certainly the strongest,
calling for an early end to the 2006 Lebanon War, once the
diplomatic goal of self-defense had been achieved. Livni is
an intelligent voice for the center — analogous, perhaps, to
Hillary Clinton. In Hillary’s case, however, Barack Obama
stood to her left, especially at the start of the primary campaign. He was a more-than-viable opponent who inspired
hope for change and a new era of less racism, less of a richpoor economic divide, and an approach to global politics
with a real understanding of the cultural differences and
motivations that underlie national conflicts. To the left of
Tzipi Livni sits only the other “Barak,” former Prime Minister Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, who is as uninspiring
as Obama is inspiring.
Later that morning of November 5th, I switched the radio
from Ga’alei Tzahal to Reshet B and heard political analyst
Ayala Hason-Nesher interviewing two other women, Dr.
Orit Galili, chair of Tel-Aviv University’s political science
department, and Michal Aharon, a public relations expert,
about Tzipi Livni’s chances to benefit from “effect Obama.”
Hason-Nesher began by asking if Tzipi Livni “represents
the ‘other’ like Obama?” His guests said no, that despite her
gender, which she downplays, there is nothing new in what
Livni is saying, and she herself is not new to the political
scene. More important, continued Hason-Nesher, is not
whether Livni presents something new but whether Israel is
ready for something new. According to Michal Aharon, the
“others” who need representation in Israel are the Mizrahim,
Ethiopians and haredim. Galili argued that both Russians
and women must definitely be included on that list, but noted
that Livni is not running a campaign that focuses at all on
the advancement of women. Galili would also take haredim
out of the group of unrepresented “others,” since they do not
believe in democracy and hence should not be included as
part of a solution they oppose. The unhappy conclusion of
all three women that morning — correctly and unfortunately
— is that Israelis, both individually and collectively, are not
inclined towards political change right now.
Indeed, if economic crisis was a key factor in Obama’s
success, it is having the opposite effect for Livni. Her
reputation does not include the capability to take charge
of the economic situation, and she has not been speaking
on the matter at all. By contrast, former Prime Minister
Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu (Likud), Livni’s chief rival in
the elections, made sure to announce publicly his support
for the economic safety plan being put together by Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and Finance Minister Roni Bar-On.
Notwithstanding all of his past mistakes, Netanyahu seems
in tune with the Israeli hunger for stability and security, and
has projected a successful message of experience. He is well
ahead of Livni in the pre-election polls.
Since I am not permitted to vote separately for prime minister and for the party I want to receive the most Knesset
seats, I will not vote for Livni. Her party is not interested in
closing the income gap or overcoming discrimination against
the Arab sector, and has no plans to overhaul the poorly
run education system or to help at-risk youth. Ironically,
Ehud Barak’s Labor Party has a strong list of candidates
who do care about these issues, which is one of the reasons
I uncharacteristically voted last time for Labor after Amir
Peretz surprisingly won its leadership position and promised
change. Peretz failed to deliver, however, so given the options, I will return to my natural home and vote Meretz.
Right after the American presidential election, a close
friend was visiting at an absorption center in Beer Sheva.
She noticed that some of the Ethiopians there were preparing for a party and asked what was the occasion. Obama’s
election victory, of course! Barack Obama has, indeed, given
hope to many, worldwide, including in Israel. Unfortunately,
there are likely to be no such post-election celebrations,
JC
outside of rightwing circles, on February 11th.
10
Olmert and Peace Now . . .
Continued from page 7
the commitment of Israel to democracy and peace.
Meanwhile, Israeli papers report each day that groups
of settlers are assaulting Palestinian farmers during the
olive harvest. The Israeli army, so vigorous in its pursuit of
Palestinian lawbreakers, seems helpless to prevent militant
settler youth from attacking poor farmers who attempt to
take in their crops. Instead, Peace Now, by continuing to
advocate for dispossessed farmers and for the relocation of
those parts of the wall that have no security function, has
become a large thorn in the settlers’ side.
Radical settlers have burned Palestinian orchards and
fields, stoned Palestinian vehicles, and vandalized Israeli
army positions and equipment. A very few settler leaders
have spoken out against these violations of Israel’s democratic norms, but their voices are weak compared to those
who rage against the Palestinians for continuing to exercise
claims to their own lands, and against the peace activists
who treasure democracy, the rule of law, and the lives of
their loved ones more than they love the possession of the
JC
entire biblical land of Zion.
March 3rd, 2009 will be
the 150th anniversary
of the birth of Sholem Aleichem!
It may also be your last chance
to purchase the Sholem Aleichem
Bobblehead Doll!
(Supplies are running out.)
$18 plus $6 shipping. www.jewishcurrents.org
Jewish Currents
November 23rd • New York City
Organized by The Shalom Center, The Workmen’s Circle,
and Jewish Currents
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN AMY GOODMAN
ANN TOBACK JEREMY BEN-AMI LESLIE CAGAN
SAMMIE MOSHENBERG JEFF COHEN
RABBI DAVID SAPERSTEIN ESTHER KAPLAN
PENNY COLEMAN ROKHL KAFRISSEN
CHARLES KOMANOFF RABBI DAVID SHNEYER
DANA SCHNEIDER RABBI REBECCA ALPERT
MYRIAM MIEDZIAN ADRIENNE COOPER
GARY FERDMAN RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW
MARK JOHNSON RABBI RACHEL KAHN-TROSTER
MJ ROSENBERG DARA SILVERMAN
LIZA FEATHERSTONE DAN SIERADSKI
RABBI ELLEN LIPPMANN BILL LIPTON
SARALEAH WHITSON MARC SUSSMAN
ROBERT KAPLAN EMMAIA GELMAN
MELANIE KAYE/KANTROWITZ LAWRENCE BUSH
RABBI PETER KNOBEL STEVE KRETZMANN
CANTOR JONATHAN GORDON WILLIAM K. TABB
RABBI NINA BETH CARDIN TAMMY SHAPIRO
STACEY BOSWORTH MARTIN SCHWARTZ
APRIL ROSENBUM BASYA SCHECHTER
LILLY RIVLIN RABBI MICHAEL ROTHBAUM
DIANE BALSER CYNTHIA GREENBERG
MARK JOHNSON PHARAOH’S DAUGHTER
RABBI SIMKHA WEINTRAUB JAN BARRY
RABBI MARLA FELDMAN JEFFREY DEKRO
Conference
Proceedings
January-February, 2009
M
ore than 350 activists participated in the “Jews
Uniting” conference at Central Synagogue in
New York City. Plenary sessions and workshops examined the impact of the war in Iraq on American society,
the environment, and the Middle East; analyzed the
roots of Jewish organizational reticence in protesting the
war; and strategized about building an anti-war movement, with strong Jewish participation, that can help
pressure the new administration to end the war swiftly
and reverse the human rights abuses and preemptive
war policies of the Bush years.
On the pages that follow, and in a subsequent edition of
Jewish Currents, we are publishing edited transcripts
that air some of the many viewpoints and controversies
that enlivened the conference. More photos and video
clips can be viewed at our website, www.jewishcurrents.
11
Organizing for Action
Conference Schedule
Opening Remarks/Opening Plenary
Why the Jewish Community Must Take Vigorous
Action to End the War and Heal America
with Adrienne Cooper, Workmen’s Circle;
Stacey Bosworth; Workmen’s Circle; Rabbi Ellen
Lippmann, Shalom Center; Melanie Kaye/
Kantrowitz, poet and scholar; Elizbeth Holtzman,
former Congresswoman, attorney; Rabbi David
Saperstein, Religious Action Center of Reform
Judaism; Ann Toback, Workmen’s Circle;
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Shalom Center
Concurrent Morning Workshops
Impacts of the War on the Broader Middle East
with Sarahleah Whitson, Human Rights Watch;
Lilly Rivlin, Meretz USA; Jeremy Ben-Ami,
J Street; Diane Balser, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom;
MJ Rosenberg, Israel Policy Forum
Impacts of the War on Human Rights and Civil
Liberties in the U.S. with Rabbi Simkha Weintraub,
Rabbis for Human Rights; Elizabeth Holtzman;
Rabbi Rachel-Kahn-Troster, Rabbis for Human
Rights
Oil, War and Climate Crisis with Marc Sussman,
The Climate Project/Air America; Rabbi Nina Beth
Cardin, Baltimore Jewish Environmental Network;
Emmaia Gelman, Center for Working Families;
Steve Kretzmann, Oil Change International;
Charles Komanoff, Carbon Tax Center
Healing Veterans, Their Families, and Families
of the War Dead with Myriam Miedzian, author; Jan
Barry, Veterans for Peace; Penny Coleman, author
Lunch Plenary
Views to Capitol Hill and Beyond with Rokhl
Kafrissen, Jewish Currents; Jeremy Ben-Ami,
J Street; Leslie Cagan, United for Peace and Justice
12
Afternoon Plenary
Confronting the War in the Jewish Community
with Lawrence Bush, Jewish Currents; Rabbi
Marla Feldman, Commission on Social Action
of Reform Judaism; Rabbi Peter Knobel, Central
Conference of American Rabbis; Sammie
Moshenberg, National Council of Jewish Women;
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Shalom Center
Concurrent Afternoon Workshops
Economic Impacts of the War with Gary
Ferdman, Common Cause; Bill Lipton, Working
Families Party; Liza Featherstone, The Nation;
William K. Tabb, scholar and author
Jewish Values, Texts and Organizing with Rabbi
Ellen Lippmann, Shalom Center; Rabbi Rebecca
Alpert, Temple University; Rabbi David Shneyer,
Am Kolel; Rabbi Simkha Weintraub, Rabbis for
Human Rights
Building a Jewish Anti-War Activist Network
with Marty Schwartz, Workmen’s Circle; Jeffrey
Dekro, Jewish Funds for Justice; Mark Johnson,
Fellowship of Reconciliation; April Rosenblum,
author; Rabbi Michael Rothbaum, Hillels of
Westchester; Tammy Shapiro, Union of Progressive Zionists; Dara Silverman, Jews for Racial and
Economic Justice
The Media and Changing Jewish Public Opinion
with Esther Kaplan, The Nation Institute; Jeff
Cohen, Park Center for Independent Media; Dan
Sieradski, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Closing Keynote
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Also: Dana Schneider, Workmen’s Circle; Jeffrey
Dekro, Jewish Funds for Justice; Robert Kaplan,
Workmen’s Circle
Jewish Currents
Opening Plenary: Why the Jewish Community
Must Take Vigorous Action to End the War and Heal America
Ann Toback
Executive Director, The Workmen’s Circle
In February of 2003, on the eve of the war in Iraq, there were ten million
ences among us, we are sure there will
be lively, informed, and thoughtful
discussions that ask new questions, inspire creative solutions, and ultimately
shape a new movement. . . .
All of us here come prepared for
the hard work that is required in
creating a successful movement that
will work to bring our troops home.
Although we must celebrate that we
have elected a new president who
supports a withdrawal of troops from
Iraq, it will become our movement’s
responsibility to galvanize support
for the incoming administration and
to hold them accountable for thoughtfully and quickly fulfilling this critical
campaign promise.
people protesting worldwide — about fifty thousand of them here in New York
City, including hundreds of progressive Jews marching behind the Workmen’s
Circle banner — demonstrating against
the arrogant and immoral new U.S.
strategic policy of military preemption. In March of 2003, immediately
after the U.S. wrongly chose to pursue
this unjust war, the Workmen’s Circle
publicly condemned the invasion and
occupation of Iraq. Five and a half
years later, with the majority of Jews
in America opposed to the war, most
of the mainstream Jewish community
has remained silent.
We must also take an honest look
Right now, we of the progressive
at why so little public dialogue and
Jewish community have the potential
protest by the organized Jewish comto positively influence the U.S. withmunity has taken place while this war
drawal from Iraq. We have a progreshas raged. Now, I’m a thirdsive president-elect who has
As a community we cannot afford silence on Iraq.
generation labor activist — I
already indicated a commitcame to the Workmen’s Cirment to ending this war. Our The war’s impact upon Iraq, and upon our own
cle after nine years as a leader
country is in the midst of an country, has been devastating. For President-elect
in the labor movement, most
economic crisis that demands Obama to begin to heal this wound to America, we
recently as assistant executhat our national resources all must advocate a comprehensive solution.
tive director of the Writers
be consolidated and carefully
Guild of America, East — so
directed to addressing our
it’s
second
nature for me to be on the
increasing domestic needs. And the sponsoring organizations, but from
world around us is calling for a change activists of the Jewish mainstream, streets to protest injustice. Yet I must
in the policies that have been enacted as well as activists whose work is not tell you that even though my opposition
in Iraq. Now is the time for us to finish contained within Jewish organizational to the war has been a leading priority to
the work that began six years ago and life, and leaders in government as me as a progressive American, when it
has progressed so slowly.
well as community life. We are proud has come to joining the demonstrations
The organizers of today’s conference and excited to have gathered so many and loudly protesting the U.S. invasion
deliberately scheduled this event for extraordinary voices joining us both and occupation of Iraq, I have found it
after the election, so as not to interfere on the podium and in the audience to- hard to join in as a Jew.
The early anti-war protests often
with electoral activism. And we sought day. With so much expertise, so many
participation not only from the three different perspectives and life experi- featured contingents attacking Israel
As of mid-December, 2008, 4211 American troops have died in Iraq...
January-February, 2009
13
and Zionism, which both made me
extremely uncomfortable and curtailed
my public involvement. And if that’s
true for me — if a person with few
inhibitions about voicing her point of
view, and nothing to lose professionally in doing so, felt constrained from
joining in public protest against this
war — then we can begin to understand the broader Jewish mainstream’s
silence or, at best, muted voice, on
this war.
How do we participate in struggles
for social justice if it brings us in
contact with messages that we find
problematic or even offensive and
unacceptable? Do we allow such
messages to become wedge issues
that divide Jewish and non-Jewish
progressive communities? Or do we
find ways to work through these obstacles? One of the objectives of this
conference is to take a serious look at
these questions and, I hope, resolve
that the Jewish community must never
again withdraw into offended silence
and lose our opportunity to be a force
for political change.
As a community we cannot afford
silence on Iraq. The war’s impact upon
Iraq, and upon our own country has
been devastating. Its financial costs,
and the unaccountable way the war
monies have been spent— unacceptable. The destruction of thousands of
young American lives, and the killing
of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents — intolerable. This war has
done immeasurable damage to our
country’s economy, security, and col-
lective spirit. And for President -elect
Barack Obama to follow through on
his campaign pledge and begin to
heal this wound to America, we all
must advocate a comprehensive solution. Without our steady and fervent
protest, the era of perpetual war that
the Bush administration set in motion
will not end.
That’s why we’re here together today: to reclaim Jewish courage, to reclaim our anti-war solidarity, to create
a space in which Jews are comfortable
to speak their minds and express their
consciences. I urge you to meet one
another, to network together, to listen
respectfully to each another, and most
importantly, to commit yourselves to
ongoing activism against this terrible
war.
Rabbi Ellen Lippmann
Shalom Center Board member, Rabbi of Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives
Seven years ago, in the aftermath of September 11th, I went back to these
verses in Deuteronomy, chapter 20: “When in your war against a city you
have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy
its trees . . . Are trees of the field
human to withdraw before you into
the besieged city?”
The trees of the field are understood,
in commentary after commentary in
our tradition, to be a hedge against
vengeance, against wanton violence,
against all of the ways that our country behaved after September 11th. I’m
here because I want to remember those
trees and, through them, the people
who are that much more vulnerable.
If trees can’t be cut down, how can we can leadership. We can greet with
cut down men, women and children in joy the advent of leaders who, with
violence and vengeance?
our help, can put an end to our long
I’m here because, as the Shalom national nightmare of self-destrucCenter’s director Rabbi Arthur Was- tive war, worsening climate disaster,
kow writes, “We can see the seeds that enrichment of the super-wealthy,
now are sprouting into a new Ameri- impoverishment of the middle class,
and attacks on human rights and civil
liberties.” But this day will leave us
with unwatered seeds if we leave the
necessary change to the leaders alone.
We need to re-empower a grassroots
community to plant and nurture these
seeds if they’re going to grow into
trees. If the American Jewish community becomes part of that effort, the
movement for serious change will be
greatly strengthened.
Through the Shalom Center, one
seed being watered is a Martin Luther King Day/Inaugural Day time
of rededication to the vision of an
America beyond racism, militarism
and materialism. Another is our preparation for the Fortieth Anniversary
Freedom Seder. Learn more at www.
shalomcenter.org.
Roadside bombs have caused 25,000 casualties ... The Brookings Institution
14
Jewish Currents
Elizabeth Holtzman
extravagance? Instead, we have to
be in a discussion about what is
Former Congresswoman, Attorney, Nazi War Criminal Prosecutor good for society, what is good for
the rule of law, what is good for
We cannot wait for the organized leadership in the Jewish community to democracy.
It is imperative for us to act. This
do something about this war and the devastation it has brought to human
beings, to our economy, to Iraq and its economy. We are our own leaders; war has wreaked such damage, not
only in human costs, but in cost to
we can make the change. When I
our democracy. We came perilously
came to Congress in 1974, I learned
close to a military dictatorship in this
that thousands of Nazi war crimicountry, and we have to admit that
nals had been living here in the U.S.
fact. Who is assessing responsibilsince World War II, and nobody
ity for that? The Constitution says
had done anything about it. Where
that we should impeach a president
was the organized Jewish commuwho puts himself above the rule of
nity then? But we were able to do
law. We have a criminal code, Title
something about that problem then,
18, that has many statutes that may
and we can do something about this
well have been violated by highwar now.
level officials in this administration,
including the president and the viceWe have to do something, in part
president. I’m not judging them here,
because some Jews played a critical
but on the face of it, there’s a U.S.
role in bringing the war about — in
statute — not U.N., but U.S. — that
our own government and society,
says that it is a felony, which carries
among members of Congress and
the death penalty, if you torture
top-level administration officials.
anyone abroad.
We have to ask ourselves why it We came dangerously close to a military
We will bring this war to a
is that one of the only countries dictatorship in this country, and we have
close.
But will we resurrect our
in the world that still welcomes to admit that fact.
democracy? What frightens me
George W. Bush is Israel.
is the silence with which the
“Was this good for the Jews?
Was this good for Israel? Was to happen next week? And to our abuses of power and the restriction
this good for me?” As soon as we children? It’s “good for us” to live in of our democracy has been met. If
indulge in that kind of narrowly homes that waste energy — they’re we constrict our democracy, what
focused thinking, as Jews, we’ve very comfortable — but do we want have we left for our children and our
lost. Something may be good for us our children to live in a world of grandchildren?
for two seconds — but what’s going depleted resources because of our
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
Writer and Activist
Ten reasons we need a new war:
1. Because this one is going so well.
2. Because, preemptively speaking, someone, some day,
might make war on us.
3. Because we are the USA and we kick butt.
4. Because people who worship Allah, even though Allah
is just God in Arabic, are dangerous.
5. Because they don’t care about life like we do.
6. Because corporations are clamoring for contracts.
7. Because there are still so many unused weapons, some
even untested.
8. Because otherwise people might mobilize to demand
estimates 117,000 Iraqi war deaths; Johns Hopkins School of Public Health says
January-February, 2009
15
national health care.
9. Because warmakers never study the stumps of amputees.
10. Because we forget the Roman Empire is in ruins.
c
When Dave Dellinger, one of the great pacifists of the
20th century, died, at his memorial, Tom Hayden said
that he had learned from Dave what it means to actually
use your body to stand up to, or at least to slow down,
evil. I dedicate this poem to Rachel Corrie, who used
her body in exactly this way.
BODIES
was it when social security got declared legally dead
was it when unions were identified as
terrorist organizations
when 85% of TV ads pushed drugs for bellyfat
wrinkles depression sex
as if we should always be cheerful, moist and erect
was it when subways cost $4.75 a ride, and were
92% less likely to be on time
was it when the rate of asthma for children of color
tipped into more than half
was it when one third of African children lost a
parent to AIDS
was it when every single member of Marivel Gutierrez’
family had some form of cancer
was it when the 500th Palestinian child in need
of medical care
died at an IDF checkpoint
was that when Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube summoned
a special session of congress
and 2400? 4400? 6700? American bodies
came home in coffins
while 5000 American legs and 7000 American
arms slept in the once-fertile crescent
detached from the bodies that grew them
was it when we never managed to count the Iraqi bodies
or their missing legs and arms
was that when graffitti appeared on sidewalks and walls all
over the nation saying
bring them home alive
was that when young women dug out their mothers’
old tshirts and put on
the one that said our bodies our selves
was that when middleaged parents took their
softening bodies
to block the doorways of recruiting stations
when they said
no way you’re not going
he’s still dead
was that when thousands of people of all ages
planted their frightened brave bodies
across highways train tracks bridges boulevards
runways
and another week crowned by Benedict
the newly infallible German
when they took their bold radiant bodies into the jails
and all gave the same name
when the pope’s death absorbed an entire week of news
he’s dying
he died
he’s dead
while the Tigris and Euphrates, beloveds of civilization,
thickened with shit
presente they said
presente
presente
650,000; Human Rights Watch, over one million... The war has cost each American
16
Jewish Currents
Rabbi David Saperstein
million displaced all over the region,
and an almost equal number displaced
Director, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
within Iraq itself. This is the fault, of
course, not only of the U.S. and the alWhen the war began, we in the Reform movement were very conflicted about lied troops but also of the terrorists and
what to do. We believe that force can have a moral use: We had been a leading insurgents who so often have targeted
advocate for military intervention in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Rwanda, in Sudan, civilians. Let’s be clear: The responsito stop genocidal ethnic cleansing from
bility is on both sides here.
going on. Based on what we thought
A third criterion for just war, emwere the actions of one of the great
phasized in the Jewish tradition, is
evil dictators in the world, Saddam
the fair treatment of captives. This is
Hussein — who had developed nonfundamentally irreconcilable with the
conventional weapons and used them
torture at Abu Ghraib.
against his own people and against
Where does this leave us today? In
his neighbors in the Iran-Iraq conflict,
Jewish law, we have the obligation to
and who had massively, systemically
intervene when someone is in danger;
oppressed his own people — we took
in American law, we do not have
the position that this was what the
that obligation; but in both systems
Jewish tradition would call a “war of
of law, if our intervention makes the
permission,” a discretionary or presituation worse, we have a moral and
emptive war.
legal obligation to act to right it again.
There was no imminent threat to the
Therefore, the obligation we now have
U.S.; that was made clear by almost
in Iraq is different than the obligation
every one of the Iraq war commissions.
we had before entering into war. How
Now, in Judaism, a war of permission
to extricate ourselves is now the central
has to be declared not just by the
challenge for us.
One of the fundamental traditional Jewish
king but by the ‘congress,’ the SanMeanwhile, we know that this
hedrin, which was the traditional laws about warfare was violated from the
war is a major distraction from
legislative body of the Jewish start — the law of baal tashkhit, not to destroy
the domestic challenges we
people. The Reform movement did things that are required for normal life to
now have; it draws enormous
not think that the authorization the resume afterwards.
resources, indebting our children
Congress gave to President Bush
and our grandchildren for generawas a valid authorization to make
tions to come.
war, and we were the only Jewish
of baal tashkhit, not to destroy things
As for the Jewish relationship to
group in 2002 that worked closely with that are required for normal life to this war — I’m always hesitant about
Senator Edward Kennedy in shaping a resume afterwards. Our failure to pro- applying the sins of certain individuals
resolution that would require the Presi- tect the civilian infrastructure in Iraq to the group. But let’s be clear: It later
dent to come back to Congress before led to such devastating damage that came out that Ariel Sharon actually
launching a war.
today — today! — the country is still warned Bush not to enter into this war.
In addition, we called for him to not back to where it was at the point That’s been confirmed by advisors both
use every possible means to avoid of invasion.
in Israel and the U.S. Unfortunately,
the war, and to pursue preemptive
Sharon didn’t have the guts to say that
policies with as broad an international A second imperative of just war theory publicly. Had he done so, the entire
mandate as possible. These criteria for is the protection of innocent civilians. debate would have been different. Even
declaring this a justifiable war were Clearly, this has not been met: There though no Jewish organization came
not met. And one of the fundamental are well over a hundred thousand out in favor of the war, the impression
traditional Jewish laws about warfare Iraqi civilians who have been killed, that the Jewish community wanted the
was violated from the start — the law hundreds of thousands wounded, two war and thought it would be good for
household nearly $5,000... One in four Iraq vets serving two tours of duty now
January-February, 2009
17
Israel gave the war a kind of moral and
strategic sanction. That would have
been removed had Sharon broken his
silence.
Let’s also be clear about what this
war has meant for Israel. It has been
a distraction from Israel’s peace process that has greatly harmed Israel’s
security and well-being. By the time
the Bush Administration had turned
to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking,
enormous damage had been done.
Secondly, as Madeleine Albright has
said, we went into Afghanistan to de-
stroy the terrorist training networks of
2001; we went into Iraq and created
the terrorist training networks of 2008.
The terrorists have steadily developed
the technologies and strategies to hurt
us. Both we and Israel are going to be
living with this for decades to come.
Finally, our war in Iraq has greatly
strengthened Iran’s influence in Iraq
and in the region — which Israel will
be living with as well. On almost every
count, Israel is worse off because of
what has happened in Iraq and will be
contending with its long-term impact.
My mentor, Al Vorspan, defines the
difference between an optimist and a
pessimist as being that the optimist
says this is the best of all possible
worlds — and the pessimist agrees. As
eternal optimists, Jews do not believe
that we are the prisoners of a bitter and
unremitting past, but the achievers of
a better and more hopeful future. This
gathering is a signal that this historical
role of the Jews is possible again at this
crucial moment of history.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
come together! — to end the war.
So let us deeply take in what it means
Director, The Shalom Center
to say “Shalom, salaam, peace.” Let
us think of all the Jews around the
Shalom, salaam, peace. For the last two years, I’ve been making it a spiritual world, the Jews newly self-discovered
and political practice to use all three of those words when speaking to an audi- in Uganda, the Jews of Tel Aviv, the
ence — whether all or practically all Jewish, or all or practically all Christian, Jews of Sderot, the Jews of New York
and of the southside of Chicago, the
or all or practically all Muslim. Our
Jews of Ukraine . . . some desperately
three different Abrahamic traditions
poor, some overwhelmingly wealthy,
have, for most of our history, acted as
some terribly frightened, some full
if we were in separate rooms. But our
of rage and even hatred, some full of
planet is too small and too endangered
compassion. And let us think, as well,
for that to continue, for us to think that
of the billion and a half Muslims of
only Jews, or only Christians, or only
the world, in all their differences as
Muslims, are in any room in which
well, living every where from Chicago
we gather.
and Detroit to Cairo to Islamabad . . .
At this moment, the United States is
in India, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Saudi
at war with two nations that are deeply
Arabia . . . some desperately poor, some
Muslim. And the State of Israel is, de
overwhelmingly wealthy, some filled
facto, at war with a community that
with fury, some seeking dialogue,
is mostly, though not entirely,
in all of those different communiMuslim. The Christian-Jewish- Our planet is too small and too endangered for
ties. And the nearly two billion
Muslim agonies, anguish and us to think that only Jews, or only Christians,
Christians in the world — also
passion about that whole region or only Muslims, are in any room in which we
incredibly varied.
in which Abraham and Hagar gather.
The shock of 9-11 drove our
and Sarah and Jesus and Mary
country into craziness. It drove
and Mohammed and Fatima and
Ishmael all walked — that passion has three communities in the United States us to forget the spiritual depth, the
been one of the forces that has given — where it is possible, thank God, spiritual abundance that we have, along
the war in Iraq such a destructive im- for at least large parts of the Jewish, with our material abundance, which
pact. And it will require, I think, those Muslim and Christian communities to would otherwise have inspired us to
suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder...Three quarters of Baghdad
18
Jewish Currents
say, “Wait a minute,” about this war.
And then the war itself drove us further into craziness: We have accepted
torture — and we have accepted an
expenditure of at least a trillion dollars from an America that is privately
affluent but publicly poverty-stricken,
with schools, roads, health care, firefighting, all of the ordinary fabric of a
society, in disrepair.
For me, one of the saddest and most
upsetting aspects of the failure of large
parts of the official Jewish community
to act against this war has been the attempt to split, in people’s minds, social
justice from the issue of the war itself
— as if you could work effectively
for social justice in America while
a trillion dollars was being spent on
destruction. The Jewish connection
to this war, however, is not just about
the money that could be spent for real
needs, both here and around the world
— but about power, about taking power
from Pharaoh. That’s a connection that
goes back thirty-five hundred years:
Every Jewish festival, every shabbat,
everything we do, every act, is about
ending the tyranny of Pharaoh and undertaking the exodus from slavery.
Pharaoh was the embodiment of an
imperial, military empire. The horse
chariots were the jets bombers of that
era, the most advanced weapons of
aggression of that day. They were used
against peoples who could not afford
horse chariots. And Pharaoh’s coercion, internationally, was reproduced
at home. He took over ownership of
the land. Our tradition teaches that it
was Joseph, an Israelite, who taught
Pharaoh how to do it so effectively
— there’s the neocon of that period!
And Pharaoh turned workers into
slaves, impoverishing and making
them miserable and coercing them
through internal military force.
Look again at our story. Look again
at the whole experience of the Jewish
people: Egypt, Babylonia, Rome, the
Inquisition, the tsar . . . and then look
at the conditions of extreme danger
that we’ve been living under for the
past eight years. Thank God — the
Jewish God, the Christian God, the
Muslim God, the Buddhist Beyond
God — thank God the American
people have gotten at least to the stage
of saying, No, this is not the future
America we seek.
We have to be clear that this doesn’t
mean turning power over to a new
group of leaders and trusting them to
do it right. With all the decent will in
Question: I’m very uncomfortable with the fact that there
is no mention in today’s program of the war in Afghanistan,
where civilians are being killed every day, and future terrorists are being created every day.
Arthur Waskow: One of my recent Shalom Center reports
begins the following way: “Do not try to occupy Afghanistan. Signed,the British Empire, 1842. Do not try to occupy
Afghanistan. Signed,the Soviet Empire, 1979. Do not try to
occupy Afghanistan. Signed, the United States, 2012.” Yes,
I do think there is a danger that Afghanistan could replace
Iraq as this bottomless pit. How you get out of that decently
is even more complicated than how to get out of Iraq decently. I could see NATO calling together all the factions
the world, the institutional pressures
from structures already in place are
going to be pushing hard to keep there
from being any basic change even
if the new president and administration do outlaw torture and do end the
American military presence in Iraq
and do undertake other policy changes
— even then, moving in a profoundly
new direction at home and abroad is
going to depend on us.
When President-elect Obama said at
Grant Park — as he said over and over
again in the campaign — that his election is not the change, it only makes
change possible, he was in some ways
making a promise, and in some ways
giving us a warning: that there won’t be
really serious change if we don’t make
it happen. That’s why this gathering is
so crucial, and other gatherings like
it must be organized. There’s a story
about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that
in the midst of the Great Depression, he
called together the leaders of the new
industrial unionism and said to them,
“You have got to organize the workers
to demand that I do what I would like
to do. Because if you don’t organize
workers to demand it, I won’t be able
to do it.” That is our task today.
in Afghanistan — including the one faction that has had no
voice, the women’s groups of Afghanistan — and saying
to them, “You figure out a decent government that you can
put together — and if you do, we’ll pay millions of dollars
a month to support you.” Call it a bribe or call it foreign
aid. “And if you don’t form that government, we’re out of
here, and you can have your civil war.”
Elizabeth Holtzman: Not only has our sense of democracy shriveled over the past eight years, but our ability to
conceive of resolving problems without force has shriveled.
Let’s not only ask about Afghanistan: What about Somalia?
What about other places in which our efforts consist of supporting one side or another of an armed conflict? We need to
residents have had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003 ...
January-February, 2009
19
understand that there are ways to pursue our policies aside
from military force. They may be very hard to use, they may
require tremendous sophistication, but our immediate resort
to force has been so counterproductive that these alternatives
are worth investigating.
Workshop: The
Workshop:
The Impact
Impact of
of the
the War
War on
on the
the Broader
Broader Middle
Middle East
East
Sarahleah Whitson
Director, Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Division
I have spent a good deal of time studying the impact of various wars and poli-
girls faced all kinds of new discrimicies, including sanctions, on Iraq. I call the most recent war in Iraq the “95 per- nation and new policies keeping them
cent disaster” — not 100 percent because there’s a 5 percent hold-out for hope. from school. And from an economic
It’s been a disaster on a human scale,
perspective, the war has resulted in
which unfortunately is the least talkedmassive unemployment, a massive
about impact of the war, and it’s been
drop in imports and exports aside from
a disaster for Iraq on a national scale,
oil (which the U.S. has managed to
for the region as a whole, for the U.S.
keep pumping and flowing).
in its geopolitical strategic standing
There’s also been a very serious
and its moral standing and authority,
regression in women’s rights. Under
and on a global scale in terms of the
Saddam, for good or for ill, there was a
prospects for humanitarian intervensecular government that had gone along
tion anywhere in the world.
with progress in women’s rights. With
Over a million Iraqis have died as a
the takeover of various parts of Iraq
result of this war, and there is at least
by religious sectarian forces, women’s
ten times that number of injured and
rights have come under attack. Many
maimed. Yet none of the presidential
women are not allowed to leave the
candidates, including Barack Obama,
home for school or work, and morality
made mention of this great human
codes are imposed on them that
catastrophe — which is coming The war has been a disaster on a human scale, are not very different, in parts of
on the heels, of course, of the which unfortunately is the least talked-about
Iraq, from those imposed by the
prior Iraq war and ten years of impact — and on a global scale in terms of
Taliban in Afghanistan.
sanctions, and prior to that the
Notwithstanding the surge,
the prospects for humanitarian interventions
Iran-Iraq war, which killed over
there is real insecurity, violence
a million Iraqis. Generally speak- anywhere in the world.
is pervasive, and the sectarian
ing, Iraq has seen nothing but war
divides are all-encompassing.
outside of Baghdad, notwithstanding Yet there is underway an experiment
and disaster for over twenty years.
The war has been a catastrophe for the hundreds of millions of dollars in in democracy — this is my 6 percent
Iraq’s infrastructure. The health sec- contracting money that was supposed hold-out for hope — an experiment
tor, in particular, has been completely to be used to rebuild the infrastructure. that is the first in the Arab world (if
devastated; there are so few doctors Education has been severely hurt: we don’t count the Palestinian Authorleft in the country to serve the needs University students have not been able ity elections). The question is, Will it
of the population. Water purifica- to attend university continuously, and stick? Will it spread? If so, this war will
tion continues to be intermittent, and public schools have seen tremendous not be a 100 percent disaster, it may be
electricity is sporadic, particularly drop-out rates as boys went to fight and only a 95 percent disaster.
Eight detainees have been tortured to death under U.S. custody; at least 200
20
Jewish Currents
Regionally, the war has brought a
shift in the power balance to the Shi’a.
Iraq is now the only Shi’a-dominated,
Muslim-majority Arab country in the
region, notwithstanding the sizeable
Shi’a populations, including a majority in Lebanon, in the Arab world. Of
course, this is causing a lot of tension
and increased militarization among
the Sunni-dominated neighbors of Iraq
— and a lot of antagonism with Iran,
which is seen as having an increased
role to play with the Shi’a majority
in Iraq.
There are over two million refugees
in the region as a result of the Iraq war,
which for a country with a population
of five million, like Jordan, is no laughing matter. Twenty percent of Jordan’s
population is now composed of Iraqi
refugees — just imagine what such percentages of war refugees from Mexico
or Canada coming to the United States
might mean for our society.
Finally, in terms of U.S. interests,
this war has been pretty much a disaster. We still have a hundred and
forty thousand troops there, who have
largely failed to bring what they promised to bring to the country, peace and
democracy. Geopolitically, America’s
unilateral intervention earned almost
Lilly Rivlin
Writer, Filmmaker, Meretz USA Activist
When the war broke out in 2003, Israeli public opinion was strongly in favor;
after all, Saddam Hussein was feared and loathed, especially since he had fired
SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv in 1991. Iraq had been an active participant in every Arab-Israeli war, sending battle
contingents to the front, even though
it shared no borders with Israel. Iraq
was also traditionally regarded as the
great threat that could easily swallow
up Jordan and invade Israel from the
east.
The left was against the war in Iraq,
but not loudly. Israeli Jews were generally pleased to see the U.S. invade. An
interesting exception was Amoz Oz,
the author, who wrote in the New York
Times, February, 2003. In summary,
he acknowledges the wave of antiAmerican and anti-Israel sentiment
washing across the world, and suggests nationalism. America, Europe and the
that “lost within the clatter is that many moderate Arab states must work to
people of enlightened and pragmatic weaken Saddam Hussein’s despicable
views oppose an invasion against Iraq, regime, but they should do so by helpeven many who supported the Persian ing those who would topple it from
Gulf War. . . . I feel that extremist Is- within.”
Of the millions of protestors against
lam can be stopped only by moderate
Islam. An extremist Arab nationalism the war around the world, Oz said,
can be curbed only by moderate Arab “The protestors have it wrong. The
nothing but scorn and resentment,
and the lies about weapons of mass
destruction and the torture policies at
Abu Ghraib have certainly resounded
to its moral discredit. It is also not clear
whether humanitarian interventions in
general, in such places as Sudan, are
going to be permanently discredited
as a policy tool as result of this war.
It should be noted that Russia justified its intervention in Georgia as a
humanitarian intervention in order to
save those South Ossetians who are
Abkhazians.
war campaign does not emanate from
oil lust or from colonialist appetite. It
emanates primarily from a simplistic
rectitude that aspires to uproot evil by
force. But the evil of Saddam Hussein’s
regime, like the evil of Osama bin
Laden, is deeply and extensively
rooted in vast expanses of poverty,
despair and humiliation. Perhaps it is
even more deeply rooted in the terrible
raging envy that America has aroused
for many years. If you are envied by all,
you should be careful about wielding
a big stick.”
The United States, in fact, asked Israel to refrain from openly backing the
invasion of Iraq, lest its blessing damn
the U.S. in Arab eyes. This was the
situation when Ariel Sharon, as David
Saperstein has pointed out [see page
16 —Ed.], told Bush in no uncertain
terms that if he insisted on occupying
Iraq, he should abandon his plans for
implementing democracy in this part of
the world. “Be sure not to go into Iraq
without a viable exit strategy,” Sharon
added, according to the Forward, “and
ready a counter-insurgency strategy
if you expect to rule Iraq, which will
eventually have to be partitioned into
have been subjected to “extraordinary rendition”... A federal report based on
January-February, 2009
21
its component parts.” And remember,
Sharon told Bush, “that you will conquer, occupy and leave, but we will
have to remain in this part of the world.
Israel does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by regional radicalization
and the spillover of violence beyond
Iraq’s border.”
For all of his faults, Saddam Hussein was, to the Israelis, an implacable
enemy of the Iranians and wouldn’t
let Al Qaeda get a foothold in Iraq.
He let a 20 percent Sunni population
dominate a 60 percent Shi’ite population and the Kurds. Now the Shi’ites
are the dominant factor in Iraq, and
although they have problems with the
Iranian Shi’ites, who are not Arabs,
they have welcomed their leaders and
created an alliance with them. This
serves to strengthen Iranian support
for their allies in the Arab world on
Israel’s border, Hezbollah in Lebanon
and Hamas in Gaza.
Jeremy Ben-Ami
Executive Director, J Street
Established Jewish organizations did not officially take a stand for the war in
the months leading up to the invasion. You cannot go back and find statements
by the traditionally “pro-Israel” organizations stating that they support the war.
There was a very strong perception,
however, that Jewish individuals in the
Administration, Jewish neoconservative thinkers, and activists involved in
Jewish organizations — though not the
organizations themselves — were big
supporters, behind the scenes, of the
concept that drove the war: that you
can solve your problems by the use of
force. This concept drives not only the
neocons here; it drives the Israeli right
as well. But let’s not blame it all on the
Jews: This is a kind of thinking that is
common among far too many people,
too many countries, and too many philosophies around the world, that force
is an answer. Still, there were an inordinate number of Jewish public intellectuals involved in this policy, If the majority of the Jewish people were
which created the perception that against this war, where were we as a
the American Jewish community community? When Congress looked to us,
was “behind the war.”
they saw minimal opposition and maximal
And who was against the war?
individual support for the war.
The Jews! The American Jewish
community, more than any other
white American group, opposed the front in understanding that you can’t
war, as reflected in poll after poll. The solve these problems by force. Diplosame applies to the confrontation with macy, engagement, talking with your
Iran, and to issues of peace between enemies, all of that comes naturally to
Israel and the Palestinians: By and the Jewish people.
But if the majority of the Jewish
large, our community is way out in
people were against this war, where
were we as a community?
I give credit to the Religious Action
Center of Reform Judaism: They were
willing to participate in coalition and
in advocacy and they were at the table
from day one of the anti-war effort.
I give credit to the National Council
of Jewish Women: They also took
part in coalitions and were a willing
participant from within the Jewish
community. In terms of mainstream
Jewish organizations with a real visible presence in Washington, that’s
it. When Congress and the political
establishment looked to the Jewish
community, they saw minimal opposition, and maximal individual support
for the war.
What does this mean going forward? It means that we must find our
voices ­ — the Shalom Center, The
Workmen’s Circle, Tikkun, and so
on, as well as those few mainstream
Jewish organizations that mustered
their voices against this war — we
must make it clear that we, in fact,
represent the majority of the American Jewish community on issues of
war and peace. We must reshape our
validity so that the next time a national
disaster like this war takes place, we
will be prepared to stand up.
500 interviews and 600 audits declares reconstruction to be a $100 billion
22
Jewish Currents
Diane Balser
Interim Executive Director, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom
Our goal for Israel is to have it living in peace and in cooperation with its
Arab neighbors. Often, however, Israel has pushed itself, or been pushed, to
do what appears to be in its short-term interests, with military solutions to perceived or real threats, rather than being
able to pursue and find support for its
long-term interests. Its actions often
represent U.S. foreign policy — and it
also gets targeted by countries within
the Arab world as being the cause of
their problems. That dual role that Israel serves, as proxy and as scapegoat,
presents a tremendous problem for the
region as a whole — and for Jews as we
seek to discuss the situation and try to
figure out how to move forward.
The war in Iraq has been a disaster for Israel, not least in how it has
strengthened Iran — which Israelis
see as their real problem — and in
how it has created tremendous anger the Middle East, we have to focus on
against the United States throughout the region as a whole. We can’t ignore
the world and also produced intensified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes. solve the others, and we can’t solve
The war has also made clear that we the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
can’t have a solution of one issue in ignore the others. Unfortunately, this
war provided an excuse for the U.S.
to move the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
out of the limelight for the past number
of years.
The Bush Administration has been
disastrous on Iraq, disastrous on Iran,
and also disastrous on the IsraeliPalestinian situation, which it treated
with neglect, militarization and nondiplomacy. The concept that you can
solve a problem without negotiations
was particularly discouraging for the
people of Israel and for Palestinians
in the occupied territories, who are
languishing and suffering. Their fundamental conflict can only be solved
through a negotiated settlement.
Barack Obama won the election on
the basis of fresh thinking, including
the rejection of the old policy of seeing military might as the lone tool of
policy. As he examines policy towards
Iraq and changes policy towards Iraq,
he will also have to address the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
M.J. Rosenberg
Director of Policy, Israel Policy Forum
From the Brit Tzedek v’Shalom office window — Brit Tzedek rents space from
the Israel Policy Forum — there is one building that looms. It’s not the Capitol,
it’s AIPAC. It was built by a despicable billionaire named Sheldon Adelson from
Las Vegas, who makes his money in
casinos and dedicates his life to union- answer will be AIPAC. Right now,
busting.
that whole organization is dedicated to
We are represented in Washington, ramping up sanctions against Iran. They
D.C. by AIPAC, whether we like being were basically the authors of a bill, with
represented by them or not. I worked 386 sponsors in Congress — including
on the Hill for twenty years. You go all your favorite liberals —that would
up to any member of Congress and declare a full naval blockade of Iran,
say, “Who represents the Jews?” The including going into their ports and
stopping people whom we don’t like
from getting onto ships and leaving the
country. That would have amounted to
a declaration of war.
The way it works is that few in
failure “doomed by bureaucratic infighting, ignorance of basic elements
January-February, 2009
23
Congress really give a damn about
the Israel-Palestine issue. And that
includes most of our favorite liberals.
They may be great on Iraq — but they
are terrified to say anything on IsraelPalestine that the lobby might object to.
They may be fantastic on gay marriage,
on labor issues, and so on, but ask them
about Israel-Palestine and you’ll get
pure AIPAC talking points. That is in
public. Privately, almost all of them
agree with us. They are just too scared
to say so out loud.
Still, we give them a pass because
they’re liberal on our other issues. Well
over 90 percent of the representatives
in Congress stink on Israel-Palestine,
and the liberals among them are no better. The Jewish liberals among them, in
fact, are worse, since they’re the ones
the ones who serve as the enforcers on
this issue. Other members of Congress
speak with them to find out what the
Jewish community thinks — and on
Israel, they hear the AIPAC line.
The bottom line is that the American Jewish community is not really a
progressive force in this country any
more. We are a progressive force only
on issues that in no way impact on
Question: It’s been said that the war in Iraq put off
prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace for the past few
years. Do you think the forces that supported the war were
intent on that happening?
Jeremy Ben-Ami: On any given day, you can get 70 percent of Israelis to say that they back a negotiated, two-state
solution; you can also get 70 percent of Israelis to agree to
an invasion of Gaza. The overwhelming sentiment in Israel
is: Please, just end this nightmare! Just get us out of this.
If you come at them with a strong military strategy, they’ll
support you; if you come at them with strong diplomatic
leadership — which we haven’t had, politically, in a generation — you will also gain a strong majority.
In America, there is a clear majority sentiment in the
Jewish community against the war in Iraq, and against
starting a war with Iran, too — but when it comes to IsraelPalestine, I don’t think we can say that a clear majority
has a firm point of view on the situation. What counts is
leadership. AIPAC has provided leadership for their views,
but we haven’t had a similar organization working for peace
and diplomacy, giving members of Congress the courage to
stand up for their convictions. If we close the door in many
offices on the Hill, they’ll agree with us! But they don’t
necessarily have the courage to step out front. They need to
be pushed. We don’t need to marshal our arguments about
the war in Iraq — these Congress people know that the war
has been a disaster for our country and for the Middle East.
They also know that attacking Iran militarily is the single
stupidest thing we could do to confront the Iranian threat.
No, what we need is to marshal our forces, to show our
Israel, ever. Barack Obama would put
through a peace deal tomorrow — an
end to the forty-year occupation that
is destroying Israel, and a two-state
solution, now! — if it weren’t for the
American Jewish community, specifically the lobby.
Meanwhile, watch out: The same
suspects who gave us Iraq, the same
people who sustain the occupation,
want a war with Iran. They want the
sanctions to be so tough that we wind
up with nothing but a war. Watch out!
— and when you meet with members of
Congress, don’t let them snow you!
representatives that there really is political support in the
Jewish community for our point of view. That is the challenge for this Congress and for our community.
Lilly Rivlin: We don’t often look at the fact that Israel may
have a different self-interest than America’s. There’s much
more support in Israel, for example, for an accommodation
with Syria than there is in America.
I also want to remind us that the settlers in Israel who
are most militant and loud are mostly rightwing American
Jews. They represent one of the biggest problems that any
government in Israel will have to undertake in developing
a two-state solution: the threat of a civil war.
Diane Balser: The left in the U.S. is also a problem. We’re prone to see AIPAC and the established Jewish community without much nuance. I think it’s really
important for us, as organizers, to see the complexity of
what goes on in the Jewish community. I have rightwing
relatives who, when we discuss the issues, in the end will
say that they believe in a two-state solution. They may
have anti-Arab, racist feelings as well — but it’s my job,
as a political organizer, to capitalize on where we actually
do have agreement.
I especially applaud J Street for its use of technology, in
the mode of the Obama campaign, which combined oldfashioned, door-to-door organizing with social networking
and other parts of the new communications technologies.
This is a key moment of opportunity for those of us in the
American Jewish community who want to take the community in a more progressive direction.
JC
To be continued in March-April
of Iraqi society and waves of violence” (New York Times)...
24
Jewish Currents
Sherman Pearl
Pushke
Blue star of David on a slotlidded can that was half-filled with coins—
each nickel and dime
the seed of a tree that would turn the desert
into a paradise for the dispossessed.
Our pushke stood on a reachable shelf
in the kitchen; when shaken
it rattled like God’s voice, forbade me
to break faith with the land
newly arisen from my people’s ashes.
Naturally I broke in, went to the movies,
waited for ushers to arrest me.
For all the trees I’ve planted since then
there remains a desolate spot
in the half-bloomed desert.
Tanks are hidden in that space. Bodies
are buried there. Mourners weep there.
We’re told it takes one righteous person
to save the world. If I’d planted those seeds
instead of stealing their promise
who knows what evergreens might’ve flourished,
what fruits we might be savoring?
Sherman Pearl is co-founder of the L.A. Poetry Festival
and author of four poetry collections. He is a Workmen’s Circle
member in Los Angeles.
January-February, 2009
25
Linda Gritz
Tu B’Shvat? Why Not?
A Guide to Creating Secular Jewish
Observances for the Ritually Impaired
I
dislike the word “ritual” — which is odd, since I
chair the ritual committee of Boston Workmen’s
Circle. For me, the word conjures up images of unchanging, unthinking religious practices. Yet even secular
Jews may find value and comfort in the ancient wisdom,
deep resonance, and social significance of Jewish rituals
— by adapting their best aspects, turning them into thoughtful and meaningful exercises, and challenging ourselves to
review and revise our rituals each year to keep them from
becoming rote and stale.
Some ask, why not celebrate the Jewish holidays the
way they have always been celebrated?
I say, because they weren’t always celebrated just one
way. Jews have a long tradition of adapting rituals to current
circumstances, from our nomadic days to our agricultural
society to Temple-based worship to rabbinic Judaism.
Secular ritualists are just the latest in a long line of those
seeking to add depth to our understanding and appreciation
of our Jewish heritage.
Others ask, why celebrate these holidays at all, rather
than declaring them treyf (taboo) for secular Jewish atheists?
I say, because religion, though often centered around a
belief in God, is also centered around ethical values. We
don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water: We
can find and transmit some truths of lasting value in our
millennia-old traditions.
If this doesn’t resonate with you, then read the rest
of this article to give your head-shaking and tongueLinda Gritz chairs the ritual committee in Boston Workmen’s
Circle, always looking for ways to express our secular progressive values rooted in yidishkayt.
26
tsking muscles some exercise. On the other hand, if you’re
intrigued by this idea, then read on to hear how we do it
in Boston.
t
Choose a holiday
Jewish observances in our Workmen’s Circle community calendar already include Rosh Hashone, Yom Kippur,
Sukes, Khanike, Purim, Peysakh, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Night of the Martyred Soviet Yiddish Writers, and
Shabes. For many in our community, these observances
are the primary connection to Jewish cultural identity in
an otherwise assimilated daily life in America. Our community gatherings are enriching and inspiring, and actively
remind us of our rich Jewish heritage and its relevance to
our lives today.
Amy Pett, a member of our ritual committee, recently
suggested that we add Tu B’Shvat to our holiday calendar
(February 9th this year). My entire knowledge of Tu B’Shvat
consisted of a vague notion that it was a tree holiday in
the middle of winter. But celebrating trees seemed like a
worthy subject, and gathering during the Boston winter
doldrums was appealing, so we took it on.
c
Form a committee
It’s possible to do it all yourself, but it’s lots more fun and
certainly more stimulating to work with others to develop
the ritual. Of course, that also means being flexible and
open to different ideas. Amy had been to a Tu B’Shvat seder
called “Trees of Reconciliation,” sponsored by Jewish
Voices for Peace. Its major themes were the tree-planting
tradition in Israel juxtaposed against the destruction of olive
trees in Palestine. Amy initially suggested that we do this
seder and raise money to replant olive trees in Palestine.
Then we broadened our observance to encompass other
Jewish Currents
themes that naturally fit the holiday, including protection
of the environment and celebration of nature. Rounding
out our committee was Miriam Habib, who is particularly
interested in environmental conservation.
Useful sources on Tu B’Shvat include:
Celebrating Jewish Holidays, An Introduction for
Secular Jewish Families and Their Communities,
by Bennett Muraskin, Judith Seid, and Lawrence
Schofer
d
Read, read, read!
Here are some of the interesting tidbits gleaned from
source materials from the library, the Internet, my bookshelves, and the bookshelves of my friends and family:
As with many of our holidays, Tu B’Shvat has pagan
origins in the worship of Asherah, the ancient Semitic
mother goddess, whose spirit resided in trees. (There
are forty references to Asherah in the Bible.) There was
a special festival in honor of Asherah halfway between
the winter solstice and the spring equinox, which usually
occurred during the Hebrew month of Shevat. Tu B’Shvat
means the fifteenth day of Shevat, with Tu representing the
Hebrew letters tes and vov. These two letters also represent
the numbers 9 and 6 in gematria (Jewish numerology; see
the box below).
In Temple days, Tu B’Shvat was literally the trees’ birthday for accounting purposes, so it could be determined
when the tree’s fruit could be harvested and which fruit
would be tithed as a Temple offering.
The idea of a Tu B’Shvat seder was developed by 16thcentury kabbalists (Jewish mystics). While it would be
strange to hear that modern mystics had transformed April
15th, U.S. Income Tax Day, into a festival of spirituality,
Rabbi Arthur Waskow notes, that is essentially what the
kabbalists did with Tu B’Shvat: They took the economybased New Year for Trees and turned it into the New Year
for the Tree of Life.
Similarly to a Passover seder, the Tu B’Shvat seder
The Gematria of Tu B’Shvat
“Tu B’Shvat” means the 15th day of the Hebrew
month of Shevat. Jewish numbers are represented
by Hebrew letters: alef = 1, beyz = 2, giml = 3, etc.
Once we hit 10 (yud), we continue to use yud to get
to the next set of numbers: yud (10) plus alef (1) =
11, yud (10) plus beyz (2) = 12, etc. When we get to
15, however, yud-hey (10 plus 5) starts to spell out
the “name of God” (YHWH), which is prohibited
in Jewish tradition. The problem is cleverly circumvented by creating 15 out of 9 plus 6, or tes-vov,
or Tu. Such numerology is also related to why the
word khay (life) and the number 18 are interconnected in Jewish culture, because khay is spelled
khes-yud (8 plus 10).
January-February, 2009
Ecology, the Jewish Spirit, edited by Ellen Bernstein
Seasons of Our Joy, A Guide to the Jewish Holidays,
by Arthur Waskow
www.citycongregation.org/celebrations/holidays.
html#tu
www.shalomctr.org/node/1335
Sample Tu B’Shvat seders are provided at:
www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/artman/uploads/
tubshvathaggadahrevised.pdf
www.humanisticjews.org/tubshvat.htm
www.aish.com/tubshvat/tubshvatdefault/
Kabbalistic_Tu_Bshvat_Seder.asp
www.ritualwell.org/holidays/tubshvat/Primary
Object.2005-04-23.4355
includes four questions, four cups of wine, and ritual
foods. It has been adapted during modern times, initially
by Zionists celebrating the planting of trees in Israel, and
more recently as an opportunity to highlight environmental
issues. Now it’s our turn.
s
Write, write, write!
To create our Tu B’Shvat seder in Boston, we liberally
borrowed (giving full credit in the written hagode) and
added our own spin here and there, while sifting and shaping the raw materials into a flowing, logical sequence:
• Our four questions explain the holiday and delve into
our other major themes: What is Tu B’Shvat? What does
it have to with olive trees in Palestine? What does it have
to do with the environment? What lessons and actions can
we take from our Tu B’Shvat celebration?
• Four traditional cups of wine: The first is white for
winter, the second is white blended with a little red, the
third is red blended with a little white, and the fourth is
red. Each cup of wine is successively more red to suggest
the progression from winter to spring, from potential to
growth.
27
→
Our hagode offers some poetic lines with each cup, such
as: We are grateful for the sun, the earth, and rain that
ripens fruit on the vines, as we weave the branches of our
lives into traditions old and new.
• Ritual foods: The kabbalists ate different foods to
represent what they called the “four processes of creation”
— asiya (action), yetsira (formation), beria (creation),
atsilut (emanation). For our secular seder, we adapted
these ideas to our own needs.
Asiya is represented by fruit with tough shells on the
outside for solid protection, such as pomegranates and
oranges. Fruits that are strong on the outside and sweet
on the inside can represent our own sweat and efforts to
build a better world.
Yetsira is represented by fruit with pits to protect the
heart of the fruit, such as dates and olives. The pits, far from
being a useless by-product, can represent our planting of
seeds and our sharing of values with others and with the
next generation.
Beria is represented by fruits with no shells or pits, such
as figs. Such fruits, which have no protection inside or out,
can represent peace, which is also fragile and requires great
care and attention.
Atsilut was an ethereal force to the kabbalists, but can be
embodied, perhaps, by the scent of a fragrant fruit (citrus,
for example), which delights and benefits the soul.
Our hagode also sprinkles in bits of rabbinic wisdom,
such as:
• Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai: “If you are planting a sapling and you are told the Messiah is here, finish planting
the sapling and then go greet the Messiah” (Avot de-Rabbi
Natan).
• Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah: “One whose wisdom exceeds his good deeds is like a tree with many branches but
few roots: the wind comes and plucks it up and overturns
it . . . But one whose good deeds exceed his wisdom is
like a tree with few branches but many roots: even if all
the winds in the world come and blow upon it, it cannot
be uprooted. May our learning lead to good deeds which
improve our world” (Avot de-Rabbi Natan).
• A Talmudic story is told about Honi, who saw a man
planting a carob tree. Honi asks, “How long will it take
this tree to bear fruit?” The man replies, “Seventy years. I
myself found fully grown carob trees in the world when I
was born; as my forebears planted for me, so I am planting
for my children” (Taanit 23a).
We also welcome wisdom from other traditions:
• Bill Vaughn: “Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.”
• Rabindranath Tagore: “Trees are the earth’s endless
28
effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
• John Muir: “Between every two pines is a doorway to
a new world.”
• Mahmoud Darwish: “If the olive trees knew the hands
that planted them, their oil would become tears.”
v
Sing, sing, sing!
For me, the sure path to an uplifting, even spiritual, experience is singing in a community. As Pete Seeger says,
“When one person taps out a beat while another leads
into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony
they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus
as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they
also know there is hope in the world.”
Possible songs for Tu B’Shvat include the Yiddish songs
“Di Verbe” (“The Willow”), about a big wise willow tree
that knows all, and “Zing Shtil” (“Sing Quietly”), about
finding a lovely melody in our hearts, in the fields, hidden
deep in the woods. Appropriate Hebrew songs include Lo
Yisa Goy (“And everyone ’neath their vine and fig tree
shall live in peace and unafraid”) and Tu-Tu-Tu-Tu-Tu-TuB’Shvat. There’s also Harry Belafonte’s “Turn The World
Around,” Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (“They paved
paradise and put up a parking lot”), and Pat Humphries’
“Peace Salaam Shalom.”
u
Gather the community to celebrate
We sent out a call for volunteers to help publicize the
event, set up chairs and decorations, and organize the food
(potlucks are always a hit around here). Volunteering is always a two-way street, with the volunteer doing a mitsve (a
good deed) and getting a strengthened sense of community
in return, including the inner feelings of satisfaction and
well-being that come with doing good works and contributing to something larger than yourself.
Our plan is to sit in a circle and take turns going around
the room reading our brand-new Tu B’Shvat Hagode aloud.
We will ask participants to share a favorite memory or
story about trees. We will read, sing, eat, learn, enjoy,
connect, and raise some tsedoke (charity) for a couple of
good causes. We will celebrate one more holiday in the
annual cycle in our community, and perhaps be inspired
to action.
Can you help replenish our
Young Writers Fund, which
enables Jewish Currents pay a small fee
to writers under 35?
Contact: [email protected]
Jewish Currents
Jacob Staub
Two Poems
Forget It
When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them. (Genesis 42:7)
Joseph had a choice, his life wasn’t scripted
by the Yahwist until long after he died,
he could have left his father without sons,
ten dead, two missing, he had the power,
and God knows he had reason.
Maybe he did, the redactors cleaned
up the story, or he followed
the Torah of Uncle Esau, flanked
by an army, embracing his fugitive brother.
Effortlessly, under the umbrella
of a sidewalk café, sipping
microbrewed ale, I forgave you,
without reservation, staring
into your honeysuckle eyes,
I fell for you again or would have,
I could not remember my broken heart,
broken no longer, there was no grudge
to hold. Could Joseph have forgotten?
Pray against the psalmists, the liturgists
who claim that God remembers all.
Pray that they are wrong.
Jacob Staub serves as professor of Jewish philosophy and spirituality at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical
College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. He is co-author of
Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach.
His poems have appeared in many journals, including Zeek, Kerem, Presence, Response, White Crane
and Ashe.
January-February, 2009
Third Trimester Prayer
First Voice:
Do not pray for children. Not because
they will fight, but because you will choose
between them, and then, the wrong one, the one
you would keep at hand till you die, will leave
the other behind with you — the one
who reeks like your brother and needs
a suicide watch at every shivah.
Congregation:
The children struggled in Rebecca’s womb,
and she said “Why me?” (Genesis 25:22)
Second Voice:
Do not pretend. Do not deny. Do not renounce
the honeyed smell of your favorite’s hair.
Treasure the tears that well up every time
you see him, like the waters that flooded
your bucket at dusk, when they came to take you
away. Resist the urge to beat
your breast, to repent of your love, fractured.
Love who you can when you can, unequally.
Congregation:
I, the Lord, am not beyond
your adjectives. Call Me Rebecca,
or call her God. As she prayed, I created —
naively. I will not stop up
my overflowing love like a Philistine.
I am unable. I am the Lord your God.
Desperately, they all wish I were just,
favoring them on their merits, or their ancestry,
but I favor incense, the crisp
drippings of meat on the grill. I can’t
resist a halleluyah. Come
over here.
29
Yankl Stillman
Our Secular Jewish Heritage
Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the
Construction of Modern Hebrew
W
Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s quest to revive Hebrew
as a language of daily life was a singular
triumph in the early days of modern Palestine. In his new book, Resurrecting Hebrew,
literary critic, lexicographer and fiction writer
Ilan Stavans seeks to recover his own link to
Hebrew and enters into the realm of memoir
30
a
Tb
k
as well as history.
hen I first picked up Ilan Stavans’ Resurrecting Hebrew
(2008, Shocken Books, 240 pages), I had just finished reading an article in the New York Times about resurrecting prehistoric mammoths. The piece reported that scientists were hoping to collect
sufficient DNA from fossil samples to permit reconstruction of a living,
breathing mammoth. In this context, the title of Stavans’ book alarmed me:
Surely Hebrew, which has remained the loshn koydesh (the holy language)
of the Jewish people throughout the centuries, has never been in such a
state that it needed to be “resurrected.” Yet the story that Stavans tells is
surely one of the linguistic “miracles” of history: a story of reconstruction
and renewal, if not resurrection.
He begins his book by describing a dream: He’s at a dinner party and
a voluptuous, curly-haired woman comes towards him with a tray of hors
d’oeuvres. She tells him about a fanciful creature she had seen at the zoo,
called a “liwerant,” and suddenly he realizes that she is speaking in a foreign
tongue that he doesn’t understand. He goes over to a group of rabbis and
learns that the language is Hebrew. When he returns to his seat, she has
taken off her clothes and “her beauty [is] stunning.” Stavans is inspired by this provocative dream to launch a search for the
historical roots of modern Hebrew — a language he had studied in Israel for
a year and had come to speak fluently, but had not used for years. Included
in his discussion are insights about how the language of the Bible differs
from the Hebrew spoken today on the streets
of Israel, how Sephardic Hebrew differs from
Ashkenazic Hebrew, and what it may mean to
be “Jewish” today when living outside Israel.
Stavans writes that he first learned Hebrew
as a child at the Yidishe Shule, the Bundist day
school he attended in Mexico City — an odd and
interesting fact, since the Bundists were staunch
supporters of Yiddish as a national tongue and
were opposed to the Hebrew-only policies of
modern Israel. (Born in 1961, Stavans is wellaware of the conflict between Yiddishists and
Hebraists that ran on for years, starting with the
end of the 19th century, which would probably
continue today except for the clear “victory” of
the Hebraists.) His Bundist background seems
at play, however, when Stavans describes his
m
Jewish Currents
efforts to live in Israel, where he “couldn’t feel fully at
home. I soon realized that, deep inside, I liked being divided: Mexican and Jewish . . . the concept of difference the
Yidishe Shule instilled in me had permeated my entire
identity. . . . I didn’t fit in — and I liked it. . . . Discomfort
can be a pleasant sensation.”
In addition, he writes, the Israelis were “proud of their
nation, built on socialist principles but capable of making
peace with capitalism. However, their pride had a double
edge. It concealed an element of condescension toward
the Jews who had not returned to Israel. We were in need
of redemption — still in bondage. They perceived the Diaspora as synonymous with backwardness. In their eyes,
that odious vulnerability needed to be eradicated.” Stavans,
whose amazing output as an editor and writer includes a
thousand-page anthology of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, a
multi-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories,
extensive writings on Latino culture, and much more, is
clearly a Jewish diasporist and a multicultural intellectual.
Stavans left Israel in 1980, moved to New York shortly
after, and over the next twenty years, Israel became for him
mostly a news item. His dream, however, and a provocative
interpretation offered to him about “language withdrawal”
and “loss of soul,” made him feel that he needed to learn
more about Hebrew and its origins, variations, and history
of use and disuse.
To begin, Stavans contacts his friend Angel Saenz-Badillos, a non-Jewish scholar who authored “an unsurpassed
history of the Hebrew language, first published in Spanish
in 1983.” Saenz-Badillos tells him that one of the oldest
archaeological relics in a recognizable form of Hebrew, the
Gezer Calendar, consists of six lines that record the labor
involved in the construction of a tunnel. It dates to the 10th
century BCE — the time of King David and his son, King
Solomon, and its existence means that the language in which
it was written was already fairly well developed back then.
(The Gezer Calendar is at the Museum of Antiquities in
Istanbul.)
Saenz-Badillos says that the origins of Hebrew are
obscure, but suggests that its immediate predecessor was
Phoenician, which the Israelites called “Sidonian.” The
Phoenician alphabet greatly influenced the Hebrew letters
and “other Semitic alphabets such as Arabic, and left its
imprint on Greek, Roman and Cyrillic as well,” he believes.
(Other scholars argue that Hebrew arose among the plains
people crossing the Jordan River from the east, more or less
as the Bible says, and they view the proposed relationship of
Hebrew to Phoenician and Canaanite dialects as false.) Just
as the history of English can be divided into an Anglo-Saxon
period, a Middle English period, an early modern English
January-February, 2009
period and so on, Hebrew can be divided into “at least three
distinctive epochs,” Saenz-Badillos informs Stavans: “an
early period, before the consolidation of Israel as a clearcut nation, when the language was a Canaanite dialect; the
language of the Davidic Kingdom, Biblical Hebrew; and
the modern version in Israel” —and they are “as different
as Chaucer’s English is from that of Dickens.”
Modern Hebrew more or less arrived in Israel about a century before Ilan Stavans left both the country and language,
when Eliezer Ben Yehuda came to Palestine in 1881 and
launched what would be a lifetime campaign to “resurrect”
Hebrew and make it the national language of the future
Jewish state. Born Eliezer Perelman in 1858 in Luzhky,
Lithuania, he was a contemporary of I.L. Peretz (1852-1915)
and Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), two of the great Yiddish
classical writers. He graduated from the Dvinsk gymnasium
in 1877 after having been tutored in Russian by his future
wife, Dvora Jonas. This was a time of political ferment in
Central and Eastern Europe’s two large, multinational states,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire,
where the bulk of world Jewry lived. Within a generation,
this ferment would ripen into national aspirations for the
many peoples living in these Empires, including the Jews.
Writing particularly on political topics, Eliezer Perelman
became one of the early proponents of a national home for
Jews similar to the one that Balkan nations were agitating
for after the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-1878. His 1879
article on this topic, “A Burning Question,” was rejected by
the Hebrew periodical The Dawn at first, but then published
after he resubmitted it using the pen-name Eliezer Ben Yehuda. In 1881, he and Dvora Jonas emigrated to Palestine,
where he informed her that thenceforth they would speak
only Hebrew at home. They are widely held to be the first
family in Palestine that spoke modern Hebrew full time.
Religious Jews in Palestine knew written Hebrew, which
they used for religious purposes, but not as a language for
daily life, which is what Ben Yehuda sought. Nevertheless,
as Stavans tells the story, Ben Yehuda tried to become part of
their community by growing a beard and peyes and having
his wife wear a shaytl. The traditional Jews of Jerusalem
soon realized, however, that he was not interested in Hebrew as a holy tongue but as a national tongue for secular
purposes. They eventually excommunicated him, which
confirmed him as a staunch atheist. He turned to journalism
and published, in succession, a few Hebrew periodicals in
which he championed agricultural labor and campaigned
against the khaluka system, which relied on contributions for
the poor in Palestine instead of on earnings from labor.
In an 1894 khanike issue of ha-Tsvi (“The Deer”), one of
his periodicals, an article appeared containing the phrase
31
“let us gather strength and go forward.” Some of his Orthodox enemies submitted this to the Turkish authorities as
an aggressive statement against the Ottoman Empire. Ben
Yehuda was charged with sedition and sentenced to a year
in prison. This scandalized the Jewish world, and a powerful appeal won his release, but his journal was subjected to
severe Turkish censorship. As a result, Ben Yehuda began
to concentrate more on the dictionary for which he had
started collecting material upon arriving in Palestine. A
major objective was to coin new words in sufficient numbers to make the language useful for modern secular affairs.
He wanted to create a simple, popular style in Hebrew and
escape from the flowery rhetoric (called melitse) that was
then prevalent.
In 1910, he began to publish his
Complete Dictionary of Ancient and
Modern Hebrew,
volume by volume, assisted by
his second wife,
Khemda, Dvora’s
sister, who had
come from Lithuania in 1891 and
married Ben Yehuda after Dvora’s
death. Another
assistant was his
a n d K h e m d a ’s
son, Ehud. Mother
Eliezer and Khemda Ben Yehuda
and son continued
working on the dictionary after Ben Yehuda’s death in 1922,
until the work was fully published in 1959, with seventeen
volumes plus an introductory volume. One interesting feature of the dictionary is its omission of all Aramaic words,
despite its all-inclusive title, as well as other “foreign” words
that appear in the Bible, Talmud or Midrash but are not of
Semitic origin. During World War I, when the Turkish commander of
Palestine outlawed Zionism, Ben Yehuda moved briefly to
the United States. In 1919, he returned to Palestine and,
together with Menachem Ussishkin, an early Zionist leader,
approached Sir Herbert Samuel, the newly appointed British
high commissioner for Palestine, to declare Hebrew as one
of the three official languages of the country. The other two
were Arabic and English, and so it remains until this day,
British mandate or not.
Such details make Resurrecting Hebrew an informative
book, and it is written in a pleasant, easy-to-read style. Its
32
Aron Reis
Shnipishok
Was for my grandmother
A comical placename,
A Yiddish ‘Hicksville,”
An all-purpose ‘back of beyond’
When I went to India
I’d gone — she told her friends —
To the end of the earth,
To Shnipishok.
Reading
About the poet
Sutzkever
I learned
That in 1943
200 Jews
Were murdered
In Shnipishok
(many more,
of course,
elsewhere
in Lithuania)
This giving the flattened dough,
The lumpy syllables
Of “Shnipishok”
A filling
(not prune
or poppy seed)
To be baked
In the ovens
Of history.
Aron Reis is a retired academic who lives in Chicago
and has published widely in the U.S. and India.
narrative is also exciting because there is a barely-contained
sense of suspense as Ilan Stavans undertakes journeys into
his own dream — and into the life of one of the great linguistic dreamers of modern history.
JC
Jewish Currents
In Loving Memory of
SID RESNICK
January 17, 1922 — October 24, 2008
Sid was a devoted son, brother, husband, father,
grandfather and uncle, a great friend to many,
a tireless political activist and union organizer,
and a sensitive, rigorous, self-taught intellectual.
He and his wife Arlene, who passed away in 2007,
loved and supported each other for nearly sixty years.
The Yiddish language and the secular Jewish radical
movement were central to Sid’s life. He was on the
staff of the Morgen Freiheit and was part of the
Jewish Currents family for decades. He was a frequent
contributor to the magazine and was a member of the
Editorial Advisory Board from the 1970s until the time
of his death. For the last 20 years he chaired the YaleNew Haven Yiddish Leyen Kreiz, a weekly intergenerational reading group.
Sid was a Smith Act defendant in the 1950s, and was active in the civil rights and peace
movements in New Haven. He was an outspoken member of Local 34 at Yale University
and was a founding member of the retirees’ association. He was also active, most recently
with Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, in working toward a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians, one that would respect the humanity and dignity of those
on both sides of the conflict.
Sid had a wonderful sense of humor and a great enthusiasm for life. His life was animated
by the vision of a more just, humane, and decent world. His absence will be deeply felt by all
those who knew him.
Estelle and George Holt
Bertha Burg
Naomi and Stanley Schwartz
Rebecca Schwartz
Ezra Schwartz
Ben Schwartz
Roger and Ruth Resnick Johnson
Gabe Johnson
January-February, 2009
Ahna Johnson
David Johnson
Eugene V. Resnick
Lenore and Michael Darcy
Sean and Carissa Darcy
Aaron and Amy Darcy
and their children
Cooper, Becket and Sophie
Stanley Burg and Molly Murphy
Eli Burg and Amanda Mione
Avi Burg and his daughter Sheva
David and Jean Burg
Noah Burg and his son Isaac
Abigail Burg
Estelle Burg and Joseph Meyers
and their children
Daniel and Jacob
33
CONCEALED
REVEALED
Justice, Justice
Justice can be as serious as Isaiah or as
humorous as Sholem Aleichem — or
both.
In summer, 1965, I was a volunteer civil
rights lawyer in Mississippi. I had a case
near a hamlet called Hollandale, where
I visited a Head Start program led by a
young Jewish woman from Gratz College in Philadelphia. I met some of her
charges and was duly impressed.
A few days later, the Jackson office was
in chaos about a hearing coming up in
Oxford. The Top Hat Café in Hollandale
was refusing service to Blacks (except
for take-out) and was fighting a request
for a restraining order that we had filed
in federal court. As usual, a last-minute
glitch had come up: Was there proof that
the Top Hat was involved in interstate
commerce?
Amid all the legal hassling, I made a
phone call to my new friends in Hollandale and asked them to do some
shopping at the Top Hat.
In court, the expected defense was offered by the Top Hat’s attorney. Then I
asked the delightful 15-year-old Black
girl who had done the shopping to take
the stand with her brown bag. Relying
on my candy bar-ridden childhood, I
E
Topics and Deadlines for
“Concealed/Revealed”
“Jewish Men” . . . January 21st
“Idolatry” . . . March 21st
“On the Boardwalk” . . . May 21st
Submit to: [email protected]
34
“Concealed/Revealed” invites readers to write essays of up to 300
words that focus on personal experiences that have been transformative, provocative, or just plain unforgettable. Names will be
withheld upon request. Future topics and deadlines will be posted
in each edition of the column (see box, below left). Essays should
be submitted to [email protected] or mailed to us at 45
East 33 Street, NYC 10016. You will be contacted if your essay is
selected for publication.
“One throne was for justice, the other for mercy.” —Sanhedrin 38b
asked her to identify what was in her
bag. She replied: “A Baby Ruth bar, a
Hershey bar and” — triumphantly — “a
package of Hostess Twinkies.” After I
read from the packages where each came
from, they were duly marked Exhibits
A, B, and C.
The judge was a rather ponderous Southerner who did not permit cross-conversation, even between attorneys and clients.
He granted the restraining order “by the
merest of margins.”
Harold Ticktin
Shaker Heights, Ohio
g
The Care and Feeding
of an Underage Moralist:
A Tale of Righteous Vegetarianism
The universe sent me a rare child — sober and funny, analytic and anarchic,
organized and messy, and with a preternaturally developed sense of what is
serious and just. At 18 months, she could
conduct lengthy staring contests. The
concept of holding the gaze of an adult
and appearing thoughtful and serious,
engaged with an equal, was completely
clear to her. And then the crack in the façade, our dissolving into hilarity, and my
glimpse of her baby irony at the absurd
transition from serious stare to laughing
collapse, which I couldn’t have imagined
an 18- month-old conceptualizing. That
gaze was the beginning.
When conversation came, there was
ongoing dialogue about the source of
the food we ate. “What’s that, Mama?”
“It’s beef.” “No, what animal is it?” “It’s
cow.” “What’s that Mama?” “Chicken.”
“Chicken?” We were good with this taxonomy until lamb chop night. Very tasty,
she liked them. “What’s this, Mama?”
“Lamb.” “Lambs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
She dissolved into inconsolable weeping.
It was over. Anything born from mother,
that had ever lived or breathed on land
or in water, anything, as she came to
say, “that had a face” was forever (well,
almost forever) off-limits.
Then came the cajoling and bargaining.
She ceased to eat all flesh foods, but since
the parents persisted, it was incumbent
on her to advocate for animal life. At the
deli, where she was lifted eye level with
the carnivores, she tried role-play. “I’ll
be the deli girl. What would you like
today? Lamb chops? We have some nice
lambs out back, you could take home for
pets. Wouldn’t you rather have a lamb
for a pet?” And the gaze, questioning,
waiting.
Later there were the questions of leather
shoes and fur. She eschewed the snazzy
leather-trimmed sneakers all the kids
were wearing. My mother sent her a
rabbit coat, and the questioning began.
“Pretty. Is that real fur, Mama?” I wanted
that coat for her, wanted her to wear it. I
lied. “No, it doesn’t look real to me.” She
looked at me, quiet. She knew me. She
waited. Later on the phone with Bobbe,
she thanked her and then asked, “Is it
real, Bobbe?” My mother, proud of her
gift, said, “Of course! — only the best.”
It went unworn, untouched.
In her teens, the confrontations heated
up and grew personal: “How arrogant
can you be, to consume another life?”
— linked to my other failings and preJewish Currents
sumptions. I was a liar. I was a meat eater.
She was a crusader. I never worried about
balancing her proteins, about nutrition
deficits; I worried about the balance of
respect, due this child for her thoughtfulness, and due me, her mother, for rolling
with the righteous punches.
Adrienne Cooper
New York, New York
g
I was given 30 to life for a crime of
passion that others got 5 to15 for. I got
more justice from a machine than from
the criminal justice system.
A year before coming to prison, I had an
attack of kidney stones. Two years later,
in prison, it came again: exactly the same
pain, which prompts you to call out for
death or unconsciousness like an addict
calls for heroin.
At the prison hospital, despite my pleas
for mercy and/or morphine, I was diagnosed with severe constipation and
given a little red pill to be taken in front
of this astute practitioner of the nursing
profession. She gave me a promise that
by midnight big things would happen. I
kept insisting that I had a kidney stone.
By eight the next morning, no sleep,
no “big thing,” and I was back to the
hospital.
Finally, heavenly morphine. There is no
joy greater than the surcease of pain.
I was transferred to an outside hospital,
where I was cuffed all the time. A lovely
ER doctor read my records and ordered
my stomach pumped. A very painful procedure: long tube into the nose, crunch,
crash, into the stomach. I kept insisting:
It’s kidney stones. The doctor smiled at
me, no doubt thinking: “Look at this guy,
what does he know?”
Later that day, I was wheeled down
shining corridors for a CAT scan, my
still-inserted tube and bottle wheeled
alongside. I wanted to puke at what was
collecting in the bottle. Some minutes
later, the head of urology came out,
January-February, 2009
introduced himself and said, “Well, Mr.
Berk, how does it feel to be right?” I
replied, stupidly, “Right about what,
Doc?” He said, “The CAT scan shows
a small kidney stone. Let’s get that tube
out of your nose!”
That is the story of how I got more justice out of a machine than I did from the
criminal justice system.
Carl Berk
Dannemora, New York
We celebrate
a new year,
a new era,
and the 100th Birthday of
ERNEST N. RYMER
1908-1986!
We continue
to work for a better world!
g
Not long ago we had an unexpected visit
from Abu Wajdi, a Palestinian stonemason who’d worked for us in the past. He
lives in a village near Jenin and had come
to visit the Jewish friends he’d made
when he worked in Haifa before the first
intifada in 2000. A gentle human being
and very devout, he used to pray on the
carpet in our livingroom, and on Fridays
I’d drive him to the mosque downtown
on his way home. We used to share our
respective breakfasts on the patio and
he’d gently chide me about my flower
garden, saying that land was for olive
and fruit trees and vines.
He arrived unannounced at 7 am. Later,
we found out that he’d come the day
before, not knowing how long he’d have
to wait in line at the checkpoint into
Israel, and having the requisite papers,
he’d stayed at a neighbor’s overnight.
But the presents of henna and spices
he’d brought for his Israeli friends were
confiscated by soldiers. Others with
much larger packages were allowed to
pass with no problem; the confiscation
seemed random and unnecessary.
We felt his unspoken humiliation and
resentment, although his stories were
still peppered with humor. As an Israeli,
it hurts me that it has to be this way.
Where’s the justice for the thousands
like Abu Wajdi who only want to work
in Israel and live in peace. Where’s the
humanity?
And yet – there are terrorist attacks.
I’ve lost friends. That’s why we have
those checks. That’s why we have a
Greetings from
the “All-Family,”
Beijing to Denmark,
California to New York
wall to deter terrorist infiltrators. It’s
that terrible ‘and yet’ factor that I and
other Israelis will have to live with until
there’s a viable peace — when and if.
And it hurts.
Lilian Cohen
Haifa/Melbourne
g
I grew up in a house with the words “Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue” framed
on the wall. In high school I launched
Students for Global Responsibility, and
after college became a union organizer.
Now I teach in a maximum-security
prison. Maybe it’s a genetic thing, but
indeed: Justice I want to pursue.
Years before that school club, I’d already
become a vegetarian. The same impulse
drove me: unnecessary suffering should
be fought. The line does not read, “Justice only for those of your species shall
thou pursue.”
When I was 13, I took a summer fiction-writing class. We read a story that
involved the slaughter of a lamb. I had
always considered myself an animal
lover, and the vivid description disturbed
me. When I said so, a boy across the
classroom said, “Well, are you vegetarian?” I had to reply, “No.”
35
I took the next couple of months to do
some thinking. What did it mean that
I loved my dog but ate other beings?
How did we decide which to pet and
which to slaughter? Was my momentary
pleasure worth a lifetime of suffering?
If I changed my diet, would I no longer
experience pleasure from my food?
Would my family and friends think I
was crazy?
One night in August, I put down my
dinner fork and declared I would no
longer eat flesh. The mulling had been
important, but action was more so.
Wanting justice and working for justice
are two different things, and I could no
longer claim the former without doing
the latter. As I learned more and more
about the ethical, environmental, health,
human rights, and workers’ rights issues
associated with wealthy nations’ addiction to meat, I became firmer in my ideals
and actions. And that decision gives me
deeper and deeper satisfaction as I see
others make the same connections and as
I continue to discover the joys and ease
of veg cooking and baking.
In eschewing animal products, I experience one of the most joyful means to
pursue justice I can imagine. I’m so
lucky: three times a day I can use my
delicious food choices to fight injustice
and show compassion.
As Tolstoy, who knew something about
war and peace, wrote, “As long as there
are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”
Gretchen Primack
Hurley, New York
g
For me, as the mother of two adventurous
20-something daughters who are actively
examining the world with the indignant
eyes of youth, the issue of justice looms
large and personal. As a physician,
writer, and activist, I focus especially
on the struggle for human rights in Israel
and Palestine, and the consequences for
the occupier and the occupied as well as
for those of us who bear witness.
36
Several months ago, in a Boston suburb,
I passed out leaflets for a play, My Name
is Rachel Corrie. This is the moving story of an iconoclastic wild child who goes
in search of meaning and the possibility
of righting wrongs in a small, disastrous
spot in the world and is herself crushed
to death by the driver of a giant bulldozer
who is willfully blind to her presence
and her power. Her writings touch on the
idealism of youth, the bearing of witness
in the face of tremendous tragedy, and the
horrific realization of the human trauma
that is the everyday life of people living
in Gaza. The diary entries and e-mails
also draw us into the century-old conflict
between Jews and Palestinians and the
ugly reality of occupation. In this sense,
Rachel Corrie takes us on an intimate,
youthful journey into the questions of
justice and injustice, and as I listened, I
found myself weeping with the aching
heart of a grieving mother.
Several years ago, I stood in the rubble
of the same demolished neighborhood
in southern Gaza where Rachel was
killed. In every direction, there was
a swath of destruction, with concrete
tumbled at odd angles, wires jutting into
the blue sky, multi-story fragments of
apartments with pictures still standing
vigil on the walls, fragments of doorways
and streets. In this wretched havoc were
hundreds of lost shoes, bits of underwear,
a child’s doll, bright yellow Lego pieces,
a computer game, fractured plates, a testament to the chaos and the rapid flight
of the families as the Israeli bulldozers
came crashing through. I tried to imagine
a residential area: homes tightly clustered, schools, stores, children playing
in the street. For the first time during
my visit to the region, I completely lost
my composure and started sobbing,
filled with a deep sense of shame. I was
ashamed to be Jewish, ashamed of the
behavior of the Israeli government, and
ashamed to be the citizen of the country
that made this possible.
I couldn’t imagine a better method to
humiliate and enrage an entire generation of Palestinians. This seemed such
an obvious recipe for disaster, for despair, for provoking growing militancy.
I couldn’t fathom how such a military
operation made life safer for Israelis
or what combination of fear and blindness made it possible for young Israeli
soldiers to commit these acts of massive
civilian destruction.
As I look to the future, for the children
of Rachel’s generation in Gaza and beyond, it seems to me that creating justice
involves acknowledging the dream of
Jewish statehood and the horrific consequences of the Nazi Holocaust — and at
the same time recognizing that the creation of the State of Israel was predicated
on the destruction of Palestinian villages
and dispossession and expulsion of more
than 700,000 indigenous human beings.
Creating justice begins with honestly
looking at the devastating consequences
of the Israeli occupation both for Israeli society and for Palestinians, and
admitting that current U.S. and Israeli
policies are disastrous and provocative
of the most extremist elements in both
societies.
This we must do for the sake of all of
our children.
Alice Rothchild
Boston, Massachusetts
g
Three haiku about justice, justice:
a besere velt
“justice, justice shall you pursue”
the means and the ends
“It’s not about food —
we must hunger for justice!”
Isaiah shouts out
“Justice,” they call it?
Where is my utopia
with bread and roses?
peace, love, happiness
v’tzedek tzedek tirdof
add people and mix
Dan Brook
San Francisco, California
Jewish Currents
Letters . . .
Continued from page 2
Catholic reaction, and . . . some Jews
were even in the army of the Taborites
[communist-like sect within the
Taborite rebellion] . . . Jews supplied
arms to the Taborites and many participated in the liberation struggles against
the will of the old (Jewish) community
leaders — again: two different lines,
two different traditions.”
Ber Mark goes on to cite historians
who documented the inner struggles
within the Jewish community on that
very issue. Almost all wrote in Yiddish
or Hebrew, so I suppose I have Bennett at a somewhat unfair disadvantage
here.However, he cannot plead linguistic hobbling in discussing American
Jewish history. In a single sentence, he
dismisses two glowing chapters in our
heritage: “Jews were not prominent as
abolitionists . . . and came late to the
labor movement.”
Bennett might have found in Morris
Schappes’ The Jews in the United States
(1966) a detailed refutation of both
those distortions, which are so prominent in “standard” American Jewish history texts and textbooks. For instance,
Schappes notes the participation of Jews
in founding the pro-abolitionist Republican Party and chronicles the conspicuous roles nationwide of Adolph Loeb,
Charles Kozminski, Abraham Kohn,
Isidor Bush, Moritz Pinner, Lewis N.
Dembitz, Moses A. Dropsie, Abraham
B. Arnold, and the early abolitionists
Ernestine Rose, Rabbis David Einhorn
and Bernard Felsenthal, Michael Heilprin — and on, and on. Bennett surely
knows of August Bondi, who fought
with John Brown, if not of Bondi’s
companion-settlers in “bloody Kansas,”
Jacob Benjamin and an early PolishJewish immigrant, Theodore Weiner.
Oh, and Benjamin Nones, whose
1800 declaration of principles Bennett
so rightly quoted, was active in the earliest abolitionist movement, the manumission societies — urging slaveholders
to free their slaves — along with Moses
Judah and Mordecai Myers.
As for the labor movement, it is quite
January-February, 2009
Aron Stavisky
Yoshiwara in the F Train
Closes large lustrous lidded doe brown eyes,
Her entire body absorbed in earphone sound
While the face remains immobile as glass.
I think of a prime mover in the skies
Causing other bodies to orbit round,
Itself unmoved by all that comes to pass,
Like girls in Shunga by Utamaro,
Drained of feeling, timeless, with no thought for tomorrow.
Aron Stavisky works as a
librarian at Bar Ilan University in Israel.
true that the relative handful of Jews in
the U.S. in the first half of the 19th
century were largely not employed
workers and so played no role in the
nascent labor movement of that time.
The same was true in 1866-1872, during the short life of the National Labor
Union, and in the 1878 formation of
the nationwide Knights of Labor. But
Samuel Gompers, the 1886 founder and
first president of the American Federation of Labor, had joined the union of
cigar makers in 1864! And, as soon as
the masses of Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking workers began the flood
of immigration in 1881, their various
small unions began to join the Knights,
whose first Jewish “assembly,” in 1877,
actually preceded the mass migration.
Space doesn’t allow me to detail
37
SID RESNICK
January 17, 1922 — October 24, 2008
The Yale-New Haven Yiddish Reading Circle mourns the loss of its loyal member
and indefatigable leader. Sid was a printer, a translator and teacher of Yiddish,
an autodidact in many fields, a prominent figure in the union movement at Yale,
a political activist devoted to the cause of peace and human rights.
We will miss his enormous exuberance, his tact,
and his remarkable gift for friendship.
that vital early history of Jewish trade
unions and their members which played
such a significant role in the overall
history of U.S. (and European) labor.
Perhaps Bennett will prepare another
article on the subject. I can help by
erasing the linguistic barrier between
him and such books as the two-volume
YIVO-published (1943, 1945) geshikhte
fun der yidisher arbeter bavegung in
di fareynekte shtatn — “History of the
Jewish Labor Movement in the United
States.”
Hershl Hartman
Los Angeles, California
Bennett Muraskin replies:
The historical record does not support
Hershl Hartman’s claim of mass Jewish
support for the Hussite rebellion or its
radical Taborite faction in 15th century
Bohemia. Paul Kriwaczek, in Yiddish
Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (2005), states that most of
Bohemia’s Jewish community “initially
supported the Catholics and opposed
reform,” in part because “the pope . . .
had . . . in the main been a restraining
38
In memory of
Jewish Currents
mourns the loss of
SID and ARLENE
our Editorial Advisory
RESNICK
Council member,
Life Subscriber,
who fought the good fight
always.
frequent writer,
and all-around mentsh —
SID RESNICK
Peter and Frances
Marcuse
influence on the anti-Jewish excesses
of the lower clergy, city burghers and
the fickle common crowd.” Swept up
in the Hussite rebellion, Jews did help
their fellow citizens defend Prague
from armies organized by the Catholic
Emperor, and some rabbis quietly expressed sympathy for the Hussite cause.
Although the Catholic leaders besieging
the Hussites accused Jews of arming
them, I can find no evidence that this accusation was true.
In fact, the preeminent Jewish histo-
A friend to the magazine
and to the many causes
that we have championed
for over six decades.
rian Salo Baron, author of the magisterial Social and Religious History of
the Jews, states emphatically that, “in
general, Jews were innocent bystanders in the protracted Hussite struggle.”
Furthermore, the radical Taborites, who
practiced a form of primitive communism, held little appeal for Jews, who
were mainly property-owning merchants. According to Baron, far from
Jewish Currents
supporting the Taborites, local Jews
were conscripted by them to build their
fortifications but were prohibited from
living in their towns.
Hershl Hartman misreads Morris U.
Schappes. In his The Jews in the United
States, Schappes lamented that “in the
movements for social reform [prior to
the middle of the 19th century] a few
Jews became outstanding. . . . In 1853,
there was only one Jew conspicuously
identified with the abolitionist movement.” Schappes reported an upsurge of
Jewish participation in the abolitionist
movement between 1853 and the Civil
War, due to immigration from Germany,
but he astutely commented that the factors that determined the reaction of the
Jewish population to slavery “were the
same as those operating on the nonJews,” which meant that “in general the
interests of the Jews in the South were
bound up with the slave system.”
Howard Morley Sachar, an outstanding contemporary historian of America
Jews, notes in his A History of the Jews
in America that “even among Northern
Jews . . . as many attitudes were current
on slavery as among Northerners at
large.” In other words, Northern Jews
supported the anti-slavery cause in the
same proportion as other Northerners.
Hartman also errs in calling the new
Republican Party, founded in 1854,
“pro-abolitionist.” Until the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican Party
opposed the extension of slavery to the
Western territories but did not advocate abolition where it already existed.
By the way, August Bondi, a Jew who
indeed fought with John Brown in Kansas, was actually a life-long Democrat
who opposed abolition until the Civil
War changed his mind.
Philip Foner, the labor historian with
the best progressive credentials, dates
significant Jewish involvement in the
labor movement in the U.S. from the
mid-1880s at the earliest. The United
Hebrew Trades, for example, was
founded in 1888. In this case, I don’t believe Hershl Hartman’s views and mine
are far apart.
It would be nice to think that most
Jews were historically on the side of the
January-February, 2009
oppressed. But it would also be nice to
think that the oppressed were historically on the side of the Jews. Unfortunately, until the mid to late 19th century,
neither is true.
The Bible: More Politics
than Archaeology
Barnett Zumoff asks a critical question in his perceptive review of David
and Solomon by Israel Finkelstein
and Neil Asher Silberman (May-June,
2008): When and by whom were the
Biblical stories written? Since he was
reviewing a volume arguing almost
exclusively on the basis of archeology
and exploring only the historicity of
the Books of Kings, there was little
opportunity to address the history of
literary analysis dating to the mid-19th
century.
The authors advance two reasons for
their conclusion that the biblical version was largely invented: 1) the lack
of literacy in the 10th century BCE and
2) the lack of archeological evidence
that the kingdom described existed
outside of the text itself. Zumoff is on
solid ground when he doubts the first
premise because universal literacy is
not needed to produce an epic. The discovery in 1930 of the Ras Shamra texts,
Canaanite works which pre-date the
Hebrew invasion of Palestine, provided
clear proof to the contrary. Written in
Ugaritic prior to the 10th century BCE,
they are quite similar in form and content to the Hebrew Bible, even utilizing
the same poetic device, parallelism, the
repetition of a line in altered terms (I
hate, I despise your feasts. And I will
not smell the savor of your festivals).
The biblical texts are not from a troubadour; they are the work of an editor,
often dubbed “R” for redactor.
The maximalist versus minimalist
dispute among archeologists is considerably more complicated. Zumoff is on
spot when he doubts that Finkelstein
and Silberman have closed the issue.
One huge assumption by the minimalist school is the existence of a sole
Deutoronomist source for the biblical
narrative. Prior to this rather recent the-
On behalf of the
Connecticut chapter of
Brit Tzedek v’Shalom,
The Jewish Alliance
for Justice and Peace,
we salute
the contribution of
SID RESNICK
to Brit Tzedek
and his years of work
towards a just peace
between Israel
and its neighbors.
Rabbi Herb Brockman
Rabbi Alan Lovins
Debbie Elkin
Judy Sparer
Jack Kaplan
Joe Dimow
Steven Fraade
Rhoda Zahler
Aaron Goode
ory, scholars focused (and still do) on
the now-familiar group of four biblical
writers, identified as J, E, P and D.
Whatever the prominence (or lack
thereof) of the David-Solomon kingdom politically, there was an antecedent
political problem, namely the differences among the original tribes. Based
on the disputes recorded in the Torah
39
On the Third Yortsayt of
NETTIE GOLDSTEIN
FARBER
April 28, 1930—December 13, 2005
Gone too soon
Loved and remembered
by her family
for as long as we all shall live.
Sherry, Allyn Ann, and Reuben
Ethel and Catherine
Melinda, Maurice, and Jay
Aaron, Lisa, and Amber
itself, prior to their arrival in Palestine,
the Israelites were a divided people.
J.H. Hertz, a revered Orthodox source,
concludes there was a split antedating the exodus; Salo Baron, a revered
secular source, remarks that Moses’
achievement was convincing the nation
that they all came from Egypt.
A much bigger problem is why,
whoever the editor was, did he repeat
two different creation, Eden, and Noah
stories?
E.A. Speiser, in his authoritative
edition of Genesis in the Anchor Bible
series, states simply that the biblical redactor was quite aware of the differing
nature of the texts but was constrained
from tampering because each was
sacred and unchangeable to its respective adherents. This still leaves open
the question of why this was so. Unity
of the north and south under Solomon,
who divided the country into twelve
districts unrelated to tribal affinity,
is a better thesis than a south bloated
with northern refugees and needing a
rationale for unity. The Book of Kings
is clearly a southern story (essentially
a harem history, so says the Soncino
edition); the Torah is both northern and
southern. The need for a national epic
seems evident — the problem being
there were two versions.
Politically speaking, the push for
40
unity had to overcome the devoted
loyalty of each party to a different set of
principles. The word “shibboleth” exists
in English because it was pronounced
differently by the Ephraim and Gilead
tribes (Judges 12:6). Their accents
were obviously different — long before
Litvaks and Galitzianers. It is far more
logical to assume that Israel brought
its disputes with it than to rely upon an
unprovable flight of northern refugees
after the 722 BCE Assyrian conquest,
a flight for which no archeological
evidence exists.
As Zumoff points out, the David
stele (ca. 835 BCE) points in a maximalist direction. A nation requires an
epic; that is foundational. It is the fusing of two epics at the outset of nationhood that argues for its need. The two
century history of JEPD still speaks
louder than a minimalist archeology.
Harold Ticktin
Cleveland, Ohio
Barnett Zumoff replies:
I thank Harold Ticktin both for his
complimentary remarks about my
review and for his incisive and erudite
additions to it. I would, however, like
to make a small but significant correction in something he writes: that
Finkelstein and Silberman “advance
two reasons for their conclusion that
the biblical version [of the court and
empire of David and Solomon] was
largely invented . . .” In fact, Finkelstein and Silberman do not flatly
conclude or state that the biblical version was invented. Their approach is
much more nuanced: They feel that the
stories were written down in the time
of Hezekiah (8th century BCE) and represent a somewhat distorted version of
events that probably did really happen,
but not in the time or place of David
and Solomon (10th century BCE in Jerusalem) — more likely in the time and
place of the Omride court (9th century
BCE in Samaria). Their reasons for
eliminating 10th-century Jerusalem as
the locus of the events and as the time
they were written down are twofold:
first is the matter of the absence of
universal literacy in the 10th century,
which both Ticktin and I dismiss as an
extremely unconvincing reason; and
second is the current lack of archeological evidence that Jerusalem was
a significant, to say nothing about an
FRIEDA CENTURY SINGER
died in Los Angeles on November 29, 2008, at age 951/2.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Herman Singer,
and daughter, Diane Winter.
Frieda was a warm, compassionate woman
who loved opera and books,
and fervently supported causes of
human rights, human dignity and the environment.
She was a Secular Jewish Humanist, passionate about
Jewish culture, particularly Jewish folk songs.
Frieda was much loved by friends and family.
She will be missed by her daughter,
Bea De Rusha and her companion Kris Yang,
grandchildren David, Joseph, Rebecca, and Leah,
four great-grandchildren,
and the rest of her extended family,
the De Rusha. Winter, Singer, Century, and Soglin Families.
Jewish Currents
In memory of
our beloved cousin
ARTHUR MOOSEN
Sheila Moosen Dimenstein
Morton and Rosalie Farber
Eva Kleederman Fried
Daniel and Vivienne Isaacson
Dorothy and Nancy Isaacson
We readers and friends of Jewish Currents
in the Greater New Haven area and beyond
mourn the loss of one of our long time stalwarts
SID RESNICK
An activist and organizer,
a writer and a true “worker intellectual,”
Sid was also our dear friend.
Vicky Moosen, wife of the late
Morton Moosen
Bonita Cohen
Joe and Lillian Dimow
imperial, city in the 10th century. This
latter point is one that Ticktin apparently thinks should be discounted because
of the (he believes) more persuasive
evidence of the Bible itself. I did say
in my review that Finkelstein’s and
Silberman’s conclusions about the absence of archeological evidence should
be considered tentative, a work-inprogress, rather than definitive, as they
present it, recalling the archeologist’s
old saw: “the absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence.”
Who Was Responsible?
With a great interest I read cover to
cover the September-October 2008
issue of Jewish Currents. Somehow
only now I “discovered” your magazine.
I would like to comment on the reply
of Mr. Bennett Muraskin to a reader’s
letter (page 46).
• Germany attacked the Soviet Union
on June 22, 1941 not in July as printed;
• As to the Soviet-Nazi accord of
August, 1939, for historical correctness
I believe we should give “credit” to
all the governments that in one way or
another provided legitimacy and support
to the Nazi government. Here is a short
list: The Vatican signed the first international agreement with Nazi government
in 1933; France, Great Britain and other
Western democracies prevented the
legitimate government of Spain from
getting aid during the civil war while
January-February, 2009
Alice Ellner
Peter Ellner
Lillian Kaplan
Robert Kaplan
Mr. and Mrs. Pio Imperati
Dan and Inez Lerman
Hilary Lerman
Frances and Peter Marcuse
Ruth L. Rosen
Lillian and Irving Rosenthal
Irene Smith
Augusta Thomas
Anna-Maria Urrutia
George Warburg
Betsy and Jeff Zucker
anti-government fascist forces were actively supported by the Nazis and fascist
Italy; the famous Munich agreement of
1938 conceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, and Poland
participated with Germany in dismembering Czechoslovakia that year; France
and Great Britain didn’t fire a single
shot in defense of Poland when it was
attacked by Germany in 1939, though
they declared war.
There is a lot of “credit” to go around
while discussing who supported Nazi on
their way up.
Moshe Ofer
Stillwater, New Jersey
Politics and Workmen’s Circle
I must respond to the Editorial
Board’s reply to my letter in the November-December issue. You state
that “political activism has always
been a vital part of the organization’s
41
identity, since its founding.” Not true.
As I pointed out in my previous letter,
politics was never intended to be part
of The Workmen’s Circle’s agenda.
We had and still have more appropriate priorities. We certainly cannot and
should not endorse any political action
since our membership runs the gamut
of political affiliations. It is difficult
enough to fulfill the obligations of being a “cultural and educational not-forprofit” organization without attempting
to be all things to some Jews.
You claim that Jewish Currents
“did not become the organ of the
Workmen’s Circle.” How odd. I refer
you to the magazine’s masthead, which
clearly identifies itself as “the magazine of the Workmen’s Circle.”
I once again insist that political
and/or religious positions should not be
taken in a publication ostensibly representing and communicating with all
the members of the Workmen’s Circle.
Let’s remember that we are a social
and fraternal organization dedicated
to the health, well-being, security, entertainment and education of members
and their families together with the
preservation of our culture, traditions
and language.
Bernard Stone
Monroe Township, New Jersey
Barnett Zumoff replies
for the Editorial Board:
Bernie Stone’s newest letter conflates two issues that are separate.
First, in the Editorial Board’s reply
to his first letter, we stated that “political activism has always been a vital
part of our organization’s identity,
since its founding.” Mr. Stone gives
a simple, but inaccurate reply: “Not
true.” Let me cite an authoritative and
definitive source, the Declaration of
Principles of the Workmen’s Circle
(which appears in the front of the
Workmen’s Circle Constitution as it is
published, and occasionally revised,
every two years). The oldest version
we have readily at hand is that of
1963, which is essentially unchanged
from previous and subsequent ver42
Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jewish Currents and
the New York Region of the Workmen’s Circle
are co-sponsoring a shabbes of memory
at which participants will share their personal stories
about the Civil Rights era and the complex reality of
race and ethnicity in America.
Friday, January 23rd
Potluck dinner and shabbes observance at 6:30 P.M.
45 East 33rd Street, Manhattan
Admission: $4 members, $8 non-members.
Register by calling (212) 889-6800 extension 271
sions. It has the following statements:
“Our fraternal order . . . is founded on
a two-fold pattern of service. The first
is service to its members by rendering
material and brotherly aid in moments
of stress or emergency, and the second
is service to the whole community by
working for the abolition of poverty
and social injustice . . . Thus, also, we
devote ourselves to the liberation of all
people from exploitation, oppression,
persecution and dictatorship. We . . .
oppose all totalitarian movements . . .
whether communist or fascist. . . . We
are joined with the labor movement .
. . in lighting the pathway to further
progress and a fuller democracy . . .
We urge every member. . . . to support
trade unionism, to be active as a citizen
and a voter in helping to extend political freedom and economic and social
equality. . . . among all mankind.”
I submit: If that isn’t a statement of
a role for our organization in political
activism in the furtherance of social
and economic justice, what is?!
Second, concerning his wonderment
about the fact that we said the magazine “did not become the organ of the
Workmen’s Circle,” the problem here
is one of semantics, history, and sensibilities. The Workmen’s Circle does
indeed publish Jewish Currents,
support it financially, and select its
editorial board and editor. This makes
Jewish Currents “the magazine of
the Workmen’s Circle,” but calling it
“the organ of the Workmen’s Circle”
would imply something else, namely
that the Workmen’s Circle dictates the
editorial outlook and editorial content
of Jewish Currents so that it reflects
official positions of the organization. In the decades old tradition of
progressive, non-profit publications
that are “owned” by organizations in
our sector, and the Forward is a most
notable example of this, the editor and
editorial board are granted essentially
complete leeway in determining what
they publish (short of urging murder or
mayhem, of course). If there should develop an ongoing, serious, and irreconcilable difference of opinion between
the organization and the publication
(and I hasten to add that this has not
happened between Workmen’s Circle
and Jewish Currents, and we do not
expect it to), the organization has the
ultimate recourse of discharging the
editor and/or the editorial board. Given
this detailed explanation, we prefer not
to refer to the magazine as “an organ”
of the Workmen’s Circle, because that
expression has unpleasant historical
undertones and implies a subservience
and lack of editorial freedom that are
not in fact present.
Jewish Currents
Make Your Favorite Photograph
Look Like a Painting
through JEWISH CURRENTS!
Remembering
JERRY SCHECHTER
June 10, 1918—December 2, 2008
Our Dad was a Workmen’s Circle member for 70 years.
He spent a charity week at Camp Kinder Ring
when it first opened, and walked down to the lake
dressed in white, with candle in hand,
on the night Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.
A graduate of an I.L. Peretz Shule in the Bronx;
Yiddish speaker; garment worker;
ILGWU labor activist; shule parent;
Amalgamated “cooperator”; veteran; sculptor.
He survived the Great Depression and World War II.
He saw it all, told the way it was, and lived a life
that pointed the way to “a besere velt”
— a better, more just world.
He was our “working-class hero.”
He met his responsibilities to his family,
to his community, to humanity.
He was a friend to all,
except those who took advantage of others.
Placed here by
his proud and grateful sons,
Danny and Bill Schechter
Full color!
Printed on canvas with long-lasting,
archival dyes. Available in two sizes:
Large, $36 (16”x12”) or
Medium, $25 ( 10” x 7.5”)
with free shipping!
A wonderful birthday, anniversary
or special-day gift.
All proceeds benefit the magazine.
To order, contact: [email protected]
or (845) 626-2427.
48 pages not enough?
Visit the Editor’s Blog,
The Rootless Cosmopolitan Blog,
our archives and resource pages and more
at www.jewishcurrents.org.
January-February, 2009
43
the Rootless
Rokhl Kafrissen
Cosmopolitan
A Tradition of Solidarity
Black-Jewish Relations
in the Pages of Jewish Currents
I
voted for Obama. If you’re reading Jewish Currents, you probably did, too. Throughout the past
century, American Jews have voted overwhelmingly
for Democrats, and in this election, more than three-quarters of American Jews did so. The surprising statistic is
that my so-called peers, the under-35 cohort, had the highest proportion of Republican voters
among Jews, according to a pre-election article in the Forward, which
attributed the trend to the growth of
the Orthodox and the Russian Jewish
populations in the U.S., both of which
include many young conservatives.
I think there’s another interesting
aspect to the relative conservatism of
young Jews compared to older Jews.
For many younger Jews, there is no
perceived, natural connection between
their Jewishness and any tradition of
the left, New or Old. For many older
Jews, by contrast, political identity is
bound up with a particularly Jewish
political culture and history in which
the fights against racism and antiSemitism are intertwined, and what’s
“good for the Jews” is never isolated
from what’s good for other oppressed groups.
This was certainly the case for the founders of Jewish
Currents.
In 1946, the editors of Jewish Life (the predecessor to
Jewish Currents) declared that their new publication
would “dedicate itself to strengthening the ties of the Jewish
people with labor, the Negro people, and all other oppressed
groups, for a common struggle against anti-Semitism, dis44
crimination, lynching and Jim Crow . . . ” They defined the
fight for civil rights as central to the mission of the magazine,
and so it remained, even when the fortunes of Blacks and
Jews began to diverge as the decades passed.
By identifying the commonalities between Jews and
other minorities (as well as workers) all over the world,
the editors of Jewish Life reconciled their commitment to
internationalism with the potentially problematic imperatives of Jewish nationalism. Over the years, however, newly
emerging forms of Black nationalism, especially militant
nationalism, would test the boundaries of this ideological framework of alliance-building. The mid-1960s and
the mid-1980s saw the greatest tensions — as well as a
rededication to the cause of Black-Jewish solidarity in the
pages of Jewish Currents.
Throughout the 1950s, the magazine reported news about
racism and anti-Semitism as part of its anti-fascist activism. In 1958, a typical “Around the World” column by
editor Morris U. Schappes featured a number of positive
items about similar advances made by Blacks and Jews in
America, juxtaposed with bad news
about anti-Semites and Nazi apologists
in Europe. One typical positive item
noted that Miss Birdie Amsterdam
had become the first female (and Jewish) member of the New York State
Supreme court while Harold Stevens
was now the first “Negro jurist” to become a justice of the appellate division
of Supreme Court of New York State.
This was followed by reportage of a
gathering of anti-Semites in Paris and
of the German government’s decision
to reduce reparations money to victims
of Nazism.
The connection between the vulnerability of Jews and other minorities
(including Puerto Ricans) came up
in a report from March, 1958 about a
“Nordic” gang terrorizing Forest Hills,
Queens. Even the anti-Semitic activity of a bunch of young
hoods from Forest Hills was framed as representing a larger
threat posed by well-established racist and anti-Semitic
groups all over the U.S. and Europe. The writer noted that
the members of the gang were well-positioned young men
from good families. It’s unquestionable, he wrote, that “racism and anti-Semitism among the ‘respectable’ is a greater
danger than [among] the lunatic fringe!”
While some of this might seem alarmist or even paraJewish Currents
noid, in March, 1958, when a synagogue in Miami was
bombed — one of many synagogues and churches bombed
that year — it was widely understood that the bombings
were ‘revenge’ for Jewish involvement in desegregation
activity. Yet most Jewish groups and publications viewed
the systematic terrorizing of churches and synagogues as
random and representative only of an extremist fringe. To
broadly indict American culture as racist and anti-Semitic
was a dangerously ‘un-American’ thing for Jews to do in
1958, and Jewish Currents was a fairly lonely voice in
the Jewish community in pointing to the pervasiveness and
danger of violent racist and anti-Semitic trends.
In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement received
substantial coverage in Jewish Currents, with something
in almost every issue about civil rights activity. At the
same time, however, a new kind of Black nationalism was
emerging that challenged the magazine’s model of crosscultural cooperation. Especially late in the decade, BlackJewish solidarity based on class and ethnic consciousness
gave way to much more overt conflict. Part of this had to
do with the post-1956 crumbling of the internationalist,
communist framework with which many, if not most, of
the magazine’s readers aligned themselves. Issues debated
in the pages of the magazine in this period included the
roots of ghetto violence and the propriety of having whites
(usually Jews) as leaders within the civil rights movement.
The subtext of much of this discussion was: Were Jews
doing civil rights work because they would be among its
beneficiaries — that is, did Jews have a stake similar to
that of Blacks in the fight for civil rights??
In July, 1966, Jewish Currents ran an editorial asking, “Is SNCC racist or radical?” The Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee had instituted a controversial
Black-only leadership policy, which many white liberals
had decried as Black supremacist. Black nationalism and
Black power were beginning to test seriously the limits
of the Old Left’s commitment to cross-cultural solidarity,
but the Jewish Currents editorial board held fast: “It
is particularly important for Jews, who are so alert to the
dangers of racism as it affects them, to avoid misjudging an
idealistic, heroic movement like SNCC, which is dedicated
to abolishing racism.”
Another editorial, in February, 1966, took on the Watts
ghetto riots, which it blamed on institutionalized racism. In
Max Rosenfeld’s Jewish educational column in the same
issue, the focus was on Black-Jewish relations and the illusions of similarity between groups. Rosenfeld made the
point that while there are great sympathies between Blacks
and Jews, it’s dangerous for Jews to fail to recognize the
enormous social capital upon which they had been able
January-February, 2009
to draw to raise themselves out of poverty. To lose sight
of the differences between Blacks and Jews would come
dangerously close to losing sight of the prevalence of institutionalized racism at the heart of the Watts riots and all
the other eruptions of misery in Black communities.
Interestingly, other Jewish publications were using these
same differences between Blacks and Jews as reason to
withdraw from the idea of cross-cultural solidarity. Commentary magazine, in particular, was well on its way to
embracing a neoconservative Jewish nationalism that was
isolationist and based on a new Jewish embitterment coming
out of the American Jewish encounter with the Holocaust.
As Michael Staub describes in his book, Torn at the Roots:
The Crisis of American Liberalism in Post-War America
(2002, Columbia University Press), the splitting of the Jewish community into liberal-progressive and neoconservative
camps was rooted in a shared belief that “the Nazi genocide
was a logical reference point from which to draw conclusions about the situation in the U.S. as well” — including,
notably, about Black-Jewish relations.
Progressives saw the future of Jewish life as dependent
on a world that would not tolerate racism and anti-Semitism. They drew parallels between the racism of Hitler’s
Germany and the pervasive institutional racism in the
United States. Jewish Currents obviously fell into this
camp, as did the American Jewish Congress, one of the few
mainstream groups to hold faith with the analogy between
racism in Germany and American racism.
Neoconservatives drew a radically different lesson from
the devastation of World War II: that the only thing that
would save Jews was Jewish power. Today’s proponents
of Jewish militarism, like Ruth Wisse, Yehezkel Dror and
others, have bluntly put it: Morality must be an afterthought
when survival is at stake. According to Michael Staub,
post-war Commentary writers saw the Jewish zeal for
civil rights work as a waste of time and as imperilling the
future of Jews. They also began to vigorously debate the
idea that there was anything inherent to Judaism or Jewish
identity that demanded “social justice.” (Indeed, the myriad
attempts to justify Jewish activism within a religious
framework, such as Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine,
were themselves a reaction to the conservative insistence
that Judaism and social justice were not related.)
It was a fine thing to believe in equality and civil rights,
a typical Commentary article might say, but don’t fool
yourself that it’s making you Jewish and certainly don’t fool
yourself that it is good for the Jews. In fact, Blacks weren’t
victims — for Jews, they might even be oppressors, like
pogromist mobs of old. In this increasingly narrowed view
of Jewish self-interest, all that mattered was Jewish sur45
vival. It came with a high price, however, which included
the loss of self-respect that comes with turning ones back
on those in need, and the abandonment of Yiddish culture
and other aspects of the old, politicized Jewish culture that
had nourished thousands of American Jews.
Jewish Currents persisted in promoting Black-Jewish
solidarity, even as conflicts between Black and Jewish
nationalism cropped up. The editors wrote articles and
pamphlets, conducted forums and held banquets dedicated
to furthering Jewish empathy with other communities in
struggle, most importantly, with the African-American
community. In 1969, for example, the Jewish Currents
dinner theme was “Negroes and Jews: Interdependent.”
In 1970, the theme was “Jewish and Black Workers: Their
Role in the Labor Movement.”
In February, 1971, however, Jewish Currents had to
confront the rising profile of the Black Power movement
and issued a pamphlet called “The Black Panthers, Jews
and Israel,” featuring an open letter to Panther leader Huey
Newton that challenged the Panthers’ attacks on Israel and
Zionism. “Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party are
beleaguered, harassed and persecuted by every level of
government in our country,” wrote Morris U. Schappes,
declaring it “the duty of progressive Jews to defend the
rights of the Black Panthers. . . . But it is certainly harder
to carry out this duty when Panther publications convey and
stir anti-Semitism and when the Panther position on Israel
allies it with those who call for its destruction.”
For a while in the 1970s and ’80s, many of the magazine’s
articles on Black-Jewish relations took on a more historical
tone, reflecting the waning passion and immediacy of the
two communities’ connections. The 1974 Jewish Currents
banquet honored the tenth anniversary of the “ChaneyGoodman-Schwerner Martyrs” and the “Twentieth Anniversary of the Supreme Court Decision on School Desegregation.”
In November, 1981, Paul Robeson, Jr. began writing for
the magazine. His father had been a truly unique figure in
American progressive history and was often invoked as a
symbol of the harmony between the struggles of Blacks and
Jews. Robeson, Jr.’s first article for Jewish Currents was
about his father’s relationship with Itzik Feffer, one of the
Yiddish poets murdered on Stalin’s order in 1952. Robeson’s
article sparked a firestorm by noting that Paul Robeson,
Sr. knew about the persecutions of Feffer and other Soviet
Jewish cultural leaders but failed to protest effectively in
the USSR — and maintained silence in the U.S.
In 1984, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s presidential
run was marred by his anti-Semitic “Hymietown” utter46
ance, Jewish Currents sought to put it into perspective
against Jackson’s history of dedicated progressive activism.
The magazine reprinted several of Jackson’s speeches and
embraced his apology to the Jewish community.
At around the same time, Minister Louis Farrakhan of
the Nation of Islam was attracting a good deal of media
attention. In October, 1985, addressing an audience of
twenty-five thousand in Madison Square Garden, Farrakhan made headlines with anti-Semitic rhetoric (Judaism
was a “gutter religion” and Hitler was “great.” Jewish
C urrents gave much coverage to this controversy,
criticizing the ways in which the Jewish press was exaggerating Farrakhan’s reputation and influence among
African-Americans and also criticizing the anti-Semitic
distortions of history in which Farrakhan and others in
the Nation of Islam indulged. “To fight Farrakhan,” wrote
Schappes, “means not only to denounce his anti-Semitism
but to resist this racist pressure upon us by resuming and
increasing our support for the Black people’s struggles.”
As an American Jewish historian, Schappes also took on
Black nationalist and pan-Africanist distortions about the
Jewish role in the slave trade. Black anti-Semitism, from
the magazine’s perspective, seemed to be rooted more in
ignorance than malevolence, and could be countered by
debating the facts.
In recent years, Jewish Currents has persisted in focusing on the struggles of African-Americans, particularly
in January-February issues, and has especially sought
to inspire progressive Jewish sentiment through the example of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. A JanuaryFebruary, 2005 editorial, for example, reprinted in some
mainstream Jewish papers, noted that King’s “legacy is
not confined to the accomplishments of the American
civil rights movement, profoundly transformative as those
were. [King] also articulated a perception about the interdependence of humanity and . . . reminded us . . . that the
condition of each . . . is based less on his or her inferiority
or personal failing than on some historical social injustice,
usually enforced with violence, that continues to shape
the present.” Progressive elements of both the Jewish and
African-American traditions, the magazine urged, emphasize human interconnection and are antithetical to racism
and the other forms of prejudice and power that separate
and divide us — and those elements, now that both Jews
and Blacks have made enormous progress in American
society, should be universalized as tools of progress for
JC
the wide world.
To read reprints from Jewish Currents on Black-Jewish
relations, visit our archive at www.jewishcurrents.org.
Jewish Currents
Jewish Currents Honor Roll
a listing of readers who have contributed $25 or more during the past several months
Arnold Abraham, Winnipeg, Canada
Alvin and Joan Abelack, Rockville Center, NY
Isak and Rose Arbus, New York, NY
Marie Ariel, Cambridge, MA
Zelma Axelrod, Tempe, AZ
Bailey Sunshine Committee,
Providence, RI
Rosalyn Baker, Minneapolis, MN
David and Marilyn Balk, New York, NY
Ruth Bardach, West Orange, NJ
Bernard Beck, Deerfield, IL
Daniel Berger, Philadelphia, PA
Jack Bobrow, Silver Spring, MD
Milton and Estelle Bogad, Arcadia, CA
Vivian Boul, Bethesda, MD
Milton Drexler, Stamford, CT
Karen Brodkin, Venice, CA
Lawrence Bush and Susan Griss, Accord, NY
Michael Cantwell, Forest Hills, NY
Joan Hadiyah Carlyle, Seattle, WA
Isidore Century, New York, NY
Bonita Cohen, New Haven, CT
Esther Cohen, New York, NY
Lawrence Cutler, Lawrence, KS
Lionel and Edith Davis, Minneapolis, MN
Shulamit Decktor, Seattle, WA
Joseph and Lillian Dimow, New Haven, CT
Alvin and Rochelle Dorfman, Freeport, NY
Edith and Lewis Drabkin, Boca Raton, FL
Jane Ehrlich, Cambridge, MA
Michael and Judith Elkin,
Hopewell Junction, NY
Marvin Farber, Santa Monica, CA
Roberta E. Feinstein, Richmond Heights, OH
Gordon Fellman, Waltham, MA
Michael Felsen and Tolle Graham,
Jamaica Plain, MA
Leonard V. Fisher, Los Angeles, CA
Richard Flacks, Santa Barbara, CA
Helene Flapan, Coconut Creek, FL
Herbert and Marcia Foxman, Springfield, NJ
Martin Fox, New York, NY
Herbert Freeman, New York, NY
Laura Friedman, New York, NY
William Friedman, Pompton Plains, NJ
Judith Frisch, Bronx, NY
Abraham G. Glenn, Rocky Point, NY
Hyman Gold, New York, NY
Jay Goldberg, Toluca Lake, CA
Milton Goldberg, Coconut Creek, FL
Jack Goldfarb, Media, PA
Herbert Goodfriend, Elizabeth, NJ
Esther Leysorek Goodman, Brooklyn NY
Laura and Abbott Gorin, Millburn, NJ
Seymour and Pearl Graiver, Floral Park, NY
Mel and Ellen Greenberg, Alford, MA
Mel and Ricki Greenblatt,
Monroe Township, NJ
Marvin Greenstein, Beverly Hills, CA
Bernard Greenwald, Red Hook, NY
Susan Gregory, New York, NY
Anita L. Halpern, Great Neck, NY
January-February, 2009
Frank and Troim Handler,
Monroe Township, NJ
Sam Hardin, Berkeley, CA
Martin Hird, New York, NY
Harold and Gertrude Hirschlag, New York, NY
Jack Holtzman, Durham, NC
Victor Honig, San Francisco, CA
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Steve Itzkowitz and Erica Eisenberg,
New Rochelle, NY
Henry and Judy Jacobs, Croton on Hudson, NY
Fannie Jacobson, New York, NY
Joanne Jahr, New York, NY
Ruth Resnick Johnson, Hamden, CT
Marc Kaplan, Chicago, IL
Lyber and Elaine Katz, Bronx, NY
Ida and Sol Kirsch, Great Neck, NY
M. and H. Kleinmutz, Santa Monica, CA
Julius Z. and Irene Knapp, Somerset, NJ
Yala Korwin, Flushing, NY
Martha Kransdorf, Ann Arbor, MI
Ida Kreingold, Whitestone, NY
Dan Lerman, Hamden, CT
Richard and Donna Leroy,
Briarcliff Manor, NY
Donald Lev, High Falls, NY
Jack Levine, North Hollywood, CA
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Beatrice Loren, Valhalla, NY
Roger Lowenstein and Barbara Corday,
Los Angeles, CA
George and Abigail Mandel,
New Rochelle, NY
Raye B. Mann, Brooklyn, NY
David Marell and Patricia Mitchell,
Glenford, NY
Mildred Mauer, Silver Spring, MD
Ruth Meskin, New York, NY
Saul Moroff, New York, NY
Edwin M. Moser, Roosevelt, NJ
Henria Moses, Laguna Woods, CA
Laura Movchine, Delray Beach, FL
Bennett Muraskin, Morris Plains, NJ
Sam and Lola Nash, New Haven, CT
Max Nemerovsky, Brooklyn, NY
Carol Jean and Edward Newman,
Santa Cruz, CA
Harold L. Orbach, Manhattan, KS
Steven Ostrow, Boston, MA
Herbert C. and Selma Ovshinsky,
Oak Park, MI
Irving Pakewitz Revocable Trust,
Hillsborough, NH
Lee Parker, Roslyn, NY
Mark Pastreich, Poughkeepsie, NY
Sherman Pearl, Santa Monica, CA
Ruth Pinkson, Hanover, NJ
Evelyn Primack, Rockville, MD
The Puffin Foundation, Ltd., Teaneck, NJ
Steven Raber, New York, NY
Alice Radosh, Lake Hill, NY
Bernard Rich, Bronx, NY
Stanley and Shirley Romaine,
Great Neck, NY
Ruth Rosen, Providence, RI
Judith Rosenbaum, Brooklyn, NY
Edward Rosenberg, New York, NY
Harry Rosenberg, Charleston, SC
Jeff Roth, Esopus, NY
Miriam Rothstein, Liberty, NY
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Murray Sachs, Newton, MA
Bruce Sager, Jackson Heights, NY
Barbara Sarah, Kingston, NY
Charles Sawikin, New York, NY
Joel Schechter, San Francisco, CA
Dorothy Scheff, Chicago, IL
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Ruth Schwartz, New York, NY
Robert Schwarz, Lantana, FL
Diana Scott, San Francisco, CA
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San Mateo, CA
Ruth E. Seid, Van Nuys, CA
Donald Shaffer, New York, NY
Paul and Ana Shane, Philadelphia, PA
Harold Shapiro, New York, NY
Elaine Sharlach, Samford, CT
Joel Shatzky, Brooklkyn, NY
David Shawn, Stamford, CT
Sholem Aleichem Club, Philadelphia, PA
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Alan and Selma Siege, Brooklyn, NY
Eric and Sara Simon, Houston, TX
Henry and Carole Slucki, Los Angeles, CA
Teddi Smokler, Scottsdale, AZ
Hadassah M. Snider, Oak Park, MI
Mark Solomon, New York, NY
Ethel W. Somberg, Maplewood, NJ
Ann Sprayregen, New York, NY
David Stahl, Manchester, NY
Helen Raynes and Harry Charles Staley,
Albany, NY
Abraham and Rose Stein, New York, NY
Irene Steinberg, Roseland, NJ
Steven and Jeanne Stellman, Brooklyn, NY
David and Beverly (Aviva) Sufian,
Houston, TX
Esther Surovell, New York, NY
David Tapper, Woodstock, NY
Harold Ticktin, Shaker Heights, OH
Joseph Tolciss, Forest Hills, NY
Livia Turgeon, Ann Arbor, MI
Pamela Vassil, New York, NY
Libbe Vogel, Coconut Creek, FL
George Warburg, Hamden, CT
Max Weintraub, Brooklyn, NY
Joan Y. Weisman, Millbrook, NY
Samuel Weitzman, New York, NY
Chic Wolk, Los Angeles, CA
Noah Yucht, Philadelphia, PA
Chaim Zelmanowicz, White Plains, NY
THANK YOU, ALL!!
47
Last Words
Lawrence Bush
Yarmulke, 1960
“Yarmulke
The skull-cap worn so as not to pray
or study the Torah with bare head. The etymology of
this Yiddish word is unknown. The suggestion that it
is derived from yarey malka, “he fears the king’ (by
having his head covered), has nothing to commend it.
In the Orthodox tradition only men wear a yarmulke
but, nowadays, in Reform and Conservative circles
women wear it, too, and women rabbis generally officiate in the synagogue wearing a yarmulke. The yarmulke is, however, simply a convenient head-covering
and has no significance as a religious object in itself.”
—The Jewish Religion, A Companion, by Louis Jacobs
The Workmen’s Circle
45 East 33rd Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10016
www.jewishcurrents.org