JEWISH ETHNOCENTRISM,
RACISM, AND RESISTANCE
TO ASSIMILATION

"There is a debilitating hesitancy around the question of conversion [to Judaism]. It cannot be positively encouraged [by Jews] ... because, well, it can't. Instead, it seems we should concentrate on exhorting Jews to marry Jews -- that is (although it's usually not stated in those terms) born Jews ... A halakhic ruling about the inclusion of certain Jews -- namely those with Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers [i.e., the classical religious ruling of who is a Jew] seems to have been fashioned within a discourse of racial purity into a threatening statement of exclusion. This discourse of racial purity clouds our thoughts continuously, in particular when the question of conversion arises."
Raphael Baaden,
Inside and Outside the Jewish Family, The Jewish Quarterly, Spring, 1996, p. 11


"Is it good to hate? ... Our tradition does not teach us that all hatred is bad. The Bible is unambiguous on this point: We are clearly intended to hate Amalek, whose memory we are instructed to wipe out ... The subject is raised each year in the middle of the Passover seder ... In fact there are few things that can be healthier than merited hatred ... Sitting in a comfortable home today, it is easy to see barbarity in the words of the Haggadah. When we do, we betray our history."
David Wolpe,
Baltimore Jewish Times, 6-18-93, p. 8



"Judeo-centrism is now characteristic of Jews and non-Jews alike ... I ... remain convinced that such attitudes ... are extremely harmful, as pernicious, for the comprehension of facts and situations, as they are for one's ability to influence the facts ... I neither hate nor despise myself. I have never denied my Jewish origin. But nor have I regarded it as a mark of glory that automatically makes me superior to others, that suffices to protect me from intellectual or moral error..."
Maxime Rodinson,
Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question, 1981, p. 9]

"Is Zionism racism? I would say yes. It's a policy that to me looks like it has many parallels with racism. The effect is the same. Whether you call it that or not is in a sense irrelevant."
Desmund Tutu,
South African Archbishop, Nobel prize winner, and activist against apartheid,
Hoffman, Tzippi/Fisher, Alan, 1988


"The etymological history of the word shiksa [Yiddish for non-Jewish woman] itself is instructive ... The Hebrew word shakaytz means to abominate, to utterly detest. In the Bible there are other admonitions not to eat or take the shikutz (masculine noun form), literally, the abominated thing, into one's house."
Edwin Freedman.
The Myth of the Shiksa [in Herz/Rosen, 1982, p. 508]



"'Shagetz' and 'shikse' are always pejorative."
Siegel/Rheins,
The Jewish Almanac,
Bantam Books, NY, 1980
p. 392

"Jews who would rather cut off their tongue than say 'nigger ' or 'spic' and consider 'kike' and 'Hymie' fighting words talk about 'goyim' and 'shiksas' with blithe indifference. They assume that we can't be guilty of prejudice because we are all victims ... But terms like 'shiksa' ... no longer sound like charming Yiddishisms to me; they seem like slurs."
Zev Chavets,
quoted in Brownfeld, A. Growing Intolerance Threatens the Humane Jewish Tradition, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1999, p. 85

"Throughout their history, the Jews ... entertained feelings of superiority over Gentiles ... It therefore became a prevalent notion among Jews that they are supposed to use their heads, while the Gentiles do the dirty work."
Jay Gonen.
A Psychohistory of Zionism, Mason/Charter, NY, 1973, p. 137



"Unlike many religions, Judaism is more than simply a belief system that anyone can adopt. To become Jewish means enlisting in a tribe. The relationship or covenant is between God and the Jewish people, rather than between God and individual Jews. Judaism is a religion with a strong ancestral component."
Steven Silbiger.
The Phenomenon of the Jews, Longstreet Press, GA, 2000, p. 11]

"The existence of Israel is the reaffirmation of Jews as the chosen people ... Israel is suffused for me with a moral meaning absent from the existence of any other nation in the world. If there was a war between the United States and Israel, I would choose Israel. Sometimes I think I am secretly glad for its occasional brutality so that the world will know there is a monster out there -- a monster who will never forget [the Holocaust]. Although in general I believe in nuclear disarmament, I am glad Israel has the atomic bomb, and the continued existence of Israel is the only cause for which I consider it justifiable to use nuclear weapons. Let me put this in its starkest and ugliest light: I am not sure, but I believe that, if the choice were between the survival of Israel and that of the remaining 4

or 6 billion people of the world, I would choose the 4 million [Jews]."

Jane Delynne,
Jewish American author, in Rosenberg, David. Testimony. Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal. Times Books, 1985, p. 65]

"No other people in the world is so attached to its country of origin -- Palestine [i.e., Israel] -- as the Jews, who are bound by feeling and religion, as well as by utterly mystical ties ... [GOLDMANN, N., p. 7] ... The Jews are the most separatist people in the world. Their belief in the notion of the chosen people is the basis of their religion. All down the centuries the Jews have intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have rejected, and still do reject, mixed marriages; they have put up one wall after another to protect their existence as a people apart, and have built their ghettos with their own hands."
Nachum Goldmann,
head of the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organization, The Jewish Paradox, Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.



"We cannot fail to recognize in the claim of Jewish superiority a kinship and resemblance to the similar claims of other national and racial groups which have been used in defense of the imperialist exploitation of the yellow and black man by the whites on the ground that they were the 'white man's burden.' They are the grounds for the German persecution of Jewry, in accord with the Aryan clause of the Third Reich's fundamental law. They were in the past the grounds in which our own people rationalized their conquest and expropriation of the Canaanites ... All such claims to superiority of one race, nation, or caste [are] detrimentnal to the interests of humanity, and [are] essentially vicious."
Mordecai Kaplan,
founder of the Reconstructionist Judaism movement, The Meaning of God in Modern Judaism, The Reconstructionist Foundation, 1947, p. 94-95



"In a thirty page study that examined all Halakhic [Jewish religious law] authorities on the subject, [Israeli rabbi David] Ben-Haim proves that according to the vast majority, the Torah, when speaking about Adam (a human being), never includes Gentiles in this category. He points out that ten recognized Halakhic authorities repeatedly proposed that Gentiles are more beast than human and that they should be treated accordingly; only two authorities recognize non-Jews as full human beings created in the image of God."
Ehud Sprinzak,
The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right, Oxford University Press, p. 273

From a chapter entitled:
What Is It to Be Jewish?

"It's two things," said Nichola, "It's a family thing and a thing that has been imposed on me through blood. It's a genetic thing, if you like."

"It's something that has been imposed on me," said Claire, "It's a blood thing. I can't escape it." "I feel Jewish," said Sophia, "out of history, my blood, and it's just like a nationality.'

[A young man named Guy summed up the common theme more ominously]: "Entertaining any idea about racial purity just stinks of Hitler but it is an issue. I feel all sorts of people have some pride in their roots and they feel racial mixing dilutes your heritage. I think I might feel that. It frightens me."
Quoted by
Emma Klein, in
Lost Jews: The Struggle for Identity, St. Martin's Press, 1996, p. 191

 “Unfortunately -- from my point of view and, it would seem, from the perspective from which this symposium is mounted -- the number of followers of Meir Kahane [the profoundly racist and, some say, even fascist, American- Israeli leader] within the Orthodox movement is not tiny, nor has his

militant doctrine found a positive response among small sections of our community. On the contrary: central aspects of his worldview, or at least his basic attitudes, are shared by large segments of observant Jewry in both Israel and America ... Kahane is merely an unmasked version of what Zionism always was -- racist, brutal, rapacious ... The modern Orthodox community ... exploits... democratic, humanistic modes of behavior ... for its own benefit. Exploiting values cynically, benefiting from them but not committing oneself to them or internalizing them, ought to be unacceptable.”
Gerald Blidstein,
Religious Zionism Revisted: A Symposium,
Tradition, 1994, p. 11, 14

"In the thirteenth century, segregated living quarters for Jews [in Europe] were made compulsory. The fact of the matter is that separate Jewish streets had existed all along ... If the Jews lived together long before segregated living quarters were imposed upon them, then their segregation must have been voluntary. It was. Living apart, no matter how bizarre it may appear in the light of present day concepts and attitudes, was part of the 'privileges' accorded to the Jews in conforming with their own wishes."
Max Weinrich,
The Reality of Jewishness Versus the Ghetto Myth, The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish, p. 105

 


"An estimated 50 per cent or more of American Jews send their children to an ethnic school, and over three-quarters of young men undergo the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony. In contrast, counterpart systems promoting specifically Italian or German language, culture, and history largely have disappeared in most major countries of immigration. Even among inter-married couples ... a large majority claim that most of their friends were Jews."
Joel Kotkin,
Tribes. How Race, Religion, an Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, Random House, 1993, p. 35



"The Talmudic mind is hostile to ethnic equality and to universalism. It is very anxious to enforce an ideal of communal purity. All possible contacts with Gentiles are to be avoided."
Norman Cantor,
The Sacred Chain. A History of the Jews, HarperCollins, 1994, p. 206

"Already at this age, these children knew that goyim represented the absolute other of Yidn [Jews] -- the counterworld. The relation between the two was clear: 'No ideas or institutions that held in the one were valid in the other.'"
Samuel Heilman,
commenting on the teachings in a modern school in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community, Defenders of the Faith. Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, Schocken Books, NY, 1992

"Jewish elitist perceptions of the 'chosen people' were crystallized against a background of humiliation, scorn, hate, and alienation in the diaspora. Only a belief in his unique identity could sustain the Jew ... The selfsame precepts, transferred to a situation where the Jews are the majority, ruling another nation [Arabs], interacting on an equal basis with the [other] goyim, assume a sinister, domineering significance. Ahavat Israel, the love of Israel, the deep sense of affinity and of common destiny, the belief in col Israel haverim (all Israel are comrades) which sustained the diaspora Jews and gave them a measure of security, resulted in xenophobia -- being increasingly perceived as synonymous with sin'at hagoy (hate for the goyim)."
Meron Benvenisti,
former Jerusalem city official, Sacred Landscape. The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, University of California Press, 2000, p. 76

"The native tendency of the Jewish race is against the doctrine of the equality of man. They have also another characteristic -- the faculty of acquisition ... Their bias is to religion, property, and natural

aristocracy."
Benjamin Israeli,
the famed 19th century Jewish prime minister of Great Britain, quoted by Feldman, Bronson; The Imperial Dreams of D'Israeli, The Psychoanalytic Review, Winter 1966-67,
p. 638



"If the notion of [a giant extended Jewish] family is taken seriously, it affirms a biological affinity. No amount of religious mystification can make biological Jews of converts."
Charles Liebman/Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism. The Israeli and American Experiences. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990, p. 24



"But if truth be told, Lazar's anti-gentile sentiment wasn't limited to just Hasidic [ultra-Orthodox] Jews. The Hasidim put into practice what many Jews talked about. Lazar's gentile-bashing reminded me of the Yiddish aphorisms Er shmekt nit un er shtinkt nit ('He doesn't smell and he doesn't stink'), used derisively to describe non-Jews, who are viewed as inconsequential and unimportant. The maxim wasn't very different from the expression my own parents used about the simpleton who's got a goyisher kop [non-Jewish head]."
Stephen Bloom,
Postville. A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, San Diego/London/NY, 2001,
p. 196

In a 1988 survey, "more than a third of Reform rabbis -- traditionally the most 'integrated' and 'outreaching' of the major Jewish denominations -- endosed the proposition that 'ideally, one ought not to have any contact with non-Jews.'"
Peter Novick,
The Holocaust in American Life,
Houghton Mifflin, NY,
1999, p. 181

Favorite Son. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. June 15, 2001
"It was a proud moment for Sam Kermanian when his West Hollywood-based organization, the Iranian-American Jewish Federation (IAJF), welcomed Israeli president Moshe Katzav last week. ... An increasingly succesful sector in the community, Persian Jews are facing challenges familiar to previous generations of Jewish immigramts; among them, dilution of traditional values and assimilation. 'There is no question there is an influence of materialism,' Kermanian said. 'Some of the old values are still holding the community together, but, obviously, this is something that will not last forever. We know that within a generation or two, we will assimilate into a larger landscape. Our goal is to make sure that we assimilate into the American Jewish community rather than the secular American landscape.' Kermanian believes that American Jewish strategies to counter escalating rates of intermarriage and divorce, such as education and programs in Israel, are just beginning to penetrate the close-knit Persian community. 'We’re not waiting for assimilation to happen before we try to correct [these lapses],' he said."


A Gentile and an Outcast. New Statesman, August 14, 1998
"I'm horrified by the attitude of so many Jews towards intermarriage. It's not just in Israel. You come across the same thing in England. Yes, my wife is Jewish. And it follows that a number of my relations are Jewish, too. In fact, coming from a small family and having married into an enormous one, I find that the vast majority of my relations are Jewish ... In the wider Jewish community, sad to relate, gentiles are by no means as welcome as spouses as I have been. The current rate of intermarriage among Anglo-Jews is around 45 per cent. But when this highly contentious subject arises, we outsiders frequently find ourselves disregarded. The focus is never on the people who 'marry in,' but always on Jews marrying out ... There's no need for me to convert. That's the magic of being Jewish: you're born that way, even if you never set foot in a synagogue. If I have children, they'll be Jewish by virtue of having a Jewish mother. They, too, will be entitled to be stoned by the ultra-orthodox in Mea She'arim. I may never become Jewish myself, but my family as a whole will at least be Jewish."


My Sister is Dating a Goy, Jewsweek, Issue 11, 2001
"Out of the blue one day, my sister happily announced to me that she was seeing someone and that this someone was not Jewish. She studied my face for a reaction, but I don’t think the one she got was what was expected. At a time when I was still able to approach the subject without getting yelled at or receiving the silent treatment from her, she had told me that she would never marry someone who is not Jewish ... These were some of the questions that I pondered as I tried to figure out what I could do to influence the situation. Talking to her wasn’t doing any good, and eventually my mother felt that we had discussed all there was to discuss. What would be the point in constantly rehashing it? So, little by little, we stopped communicating about the relationship to the point where it was rarely talked about at all. But it seemed to me that saying nothing merely had the effect of making it easy for my sister to keep seeing him. And while she did, the rest of us more or less lived with it, every now and then having to dodge questions from relatives who asked if my sister was seeing anybody ... Don’t get me wrong, I love my sister very much, but her relationship with a non-Jewish guy did cause a great deal of strain upon our family. Until this point, my mother had always believed that, of the two of us, it was my sister who would never even consider interdating because she had attended and worked at Jewish camps all her life, surrounding herself with Jewish people and practices."

Lastman Slur Hurts Games Bid.
National Post. June 21, 2001
"An 'ignorant, racist' joke by Toronto's [Jewish] Mayor may have sunk the city's bid for the 2008 Olympics, Canadian politicians and community groups say. Before leaving on a goodwill visit to Kenya this month to promote the city's quest for the Summer Games, Mel Lastman spoke to a freelance journalist about the trip. 'What the hell do I want to go to a place like Mombasa?' Mr. Lastman asked. 'Snakes scare the hell out of me. I'm scared about going there, but the wife is really nervous,' he said. 'I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.' The remarks met universal condemnation yesterday."


Gershon Explains His Racist Remarks to Knesset Panel.
Haaretz [Israeli newspaper], July 4, 2001
"Maccabi Tel Aviv's outgoing [professional] basketball coach, Pini Gershon, yesterday offered a full explanation to the Knesset committee for prevention of violence in sport, following the publication this week of racist remarks that he had made several months ago ... . Yedioth Ahronoth's Web site, Y-Net, published a report on Sunday in which Gershon is quoted as telling a closed forum of senior IDF [Israeli military] officers that 'even among blacks there are different colors. There is dark black, and there is mocha. The mocha type are more clever, and the darker color usually come from the street.' The report said that the often overly-vivacious Gershon drew laughter from his listeners. He then continued unfazed: 'I am not joking. You can see the standing of those with a bit more mixture in their color, such as Andrew Kennedy. You can see his personality. He will check you out, he is clever. The other (darker) blacks are stupid. They will do whatever you tell them, like slaves.' Gershon told the Knesset committee that the words were uttered last September and that none of the officers present made any comment to him about his remarks. 'They were happy, we spoke jovially. I spoke about all the players and none of them criticized me,' he said yesterday."


Some IDF Officers Asked for Copies of Gershon's Speech.
Haaretz [Israeli newspaper], July 8, 2001
"Basketball coach Pini Gershon's speech in which he referred to black basketball players as having a slave mentality and the color of their skin as an indicator of their intelligence, so impressed some of the officers who heard it last November that they asked for copies of the videotape of the lecture. Even after the scandal broke out, many of the reserve officers, who were in the course for brigade commanders, don't understand why Gershon's racist remarks caused a scandal. One said 'Gershon's comments were taken as a colorful expression, as humor. We didn't think of it as racist. After all, he didn't incite us against blacks, but just gave an extreme example to make his speech tangible.' The officer called Gershon's speech 'brilliant. He gave a professional talk about leadership and the difficulty of turning a group of very different people, with huge egos, into a winning team. That's part of what we face.' 'I consider myself an enlightened person,' said another of the officers. 'But I have to admit that I didn't fall off my chair when he said what he did. We all hear things like that here.' According to the officers, a divisional commander, Brig. Gen. Yoav Gallant, recently lectured in the U.S. on the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and used the analogy of a dog and its master. Arabs in the lecture complained. 'It all depends on what is said and the context,' said one of the officers."


Jewish Groups Ready for Racism Parley. Jerusalem Post, July 6, 2001
"Jewish organizations from around the world are setting up operations in Washington and Geneva to spearhead lobbying efforts to change the tone of virulent anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic draft resolutions to be considered at a major UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa at the end of August. This was one of the operative decisions that emerged from an international 'emergency' meeting of Jewish leaders held in London this week to discuss how to combat these proposals and plan for the Durban conference .... Israel has become - for some of this community - nothing less then the antichrist. [Irwin] Cotler said that a situation is developing where human rights is the new religion, and Israel is the enemy of that religion in every human rights sphere - whether in dealing with labor, women's or children's issue ... [Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister] Melchior said that the proposals being discussed now are far worse than the UN's Zionism is racism declaration of the 1970s. These proposals aim not only to delegitimize the state of Israel through equations of Zionism with racism, racial superiority, and the 'ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine,' but, he said, they also aim to delegitimize Jewish death and suffering. This was done through repeated attempts by Arab and Asian delegates at the three previous preparatory meetings to replace all references to 'The Holocaust' with 'holocausts.'"


Movie Targets. Arabs Are the Latest People to Suffer the Stereotypes of Hollywood -- and Nowhere More So Than in William Friedkin's New Film.
The Independent [Great Britain], July 30, 2000
"The Arab nations - and the Islamic world in general - have become the new stock enemy, a powerful and unreasoning force in True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1995), GI Jane (1997) and The Siege (1998) - in which Bruce Willis rounded up Arab Americans in an attempt to stop a Hezbollah-type terrorist group blowing up New York. Even The Insider (1999) - a film about corruption in the tobacco industry, for heaven's sake - tacked on a Syrian prologue in which Al Pacino took on a pack of mad-ish mullahs. And Rules of Engagement? 'This film is absolutely off the scale,' says Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a Washington-based pressure group. 'I've never seen anything quite so vile. I felt like I was being physically beaten, which is a reaction I've never had encountering a work of art. It was mind-bogglingly vicious. I'm amazed that a major American entertainment company would actually release such a thing.' He shouldn't be too amazed: the film took $15 million on its opening weekend, a fact which doubtless pleased the chair of the Paramount Pictures' Motion Picture Group, Sherry Lansing - who just happens to be married to William Friedkin [the director of Rules of Engagement. Both Friedkin and Lansing are Jewish].


All the Ironies Bring Germany to Reconsider 'Who's a Jew.'
Haaretz [Israeli newspaper[, June 27, 2001
"Here is ironic historical twist. Before the rise of the Nazis, German Jews regarded with scorn the 'Eastern Jews' who arrived from Poland and Russia and who brought with them traditional Jewish values, but not 'Western' (that is, German) values. Now German Jewry's leaders are demanding that the new 'Eastern Jews' from the former Soviet Union must be 'authentic Jews,' - in other words, that they have a knowledge of (even if they do not observe) Jewish traditions. Two weeks ago, Paul Spiegel, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (CCJG), warned that many non-Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were exploiting the special regulations on Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union in order to obtain permanent resident status in the Federal Republic. Spiegel urged the federal government to undertake measures against immigrants posing as Jews simply to enter Germany."


A People Apart. Haaretz [Israeli newspaper], June 9, 2001
"In addition to being immigrants [to Israel] from Russia, [Tatiano and Viktor Madbaneko's] Jewishness is 'in doubt' and they are forced into hopeless shadowboxing with a society that is practiced in 'hating gentiles.' They so much want to find a way to the heart of this society, with all its prejudices."


College Bars Non-Jews from Education Studies.
Haaretz [Israeli newspaper], July 16, 2001
"Druze residents of the Golan Heights who have tried to register young women to the Ohalo College of Education and Sports in Katzrin are angry because it refuses to accept the students on the grounds that non-Jews are not allowed to study kindergarten and junior school education at the college. The only studies open to non-Jews at the college are courses in physical education, they say. In an interview with Ha'aretz, Hagit Harel, the head of student administration at Ohalo, confirmed that, of the 550 students at the college, 30 percent were non-Jews and none were studying kindergarten or junior school education. Harel said the policy was based on an Education Ministry directive which told the college that non-Jewish students who wanted to take such courses had to do so at the Arab College in Haifa or in a special course for Arab teachers at Oranim College. 'The Arab College in Haifa does not offer a course in physical education and therefore we are obliged to accept the non-Jewish students for this path of studies,' Harel said."


Rabbi Calls for Annihilation of Arabs, BBC, April 10, 2001
"The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. 'It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable,' he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. ['The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them.'] Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as 'vipers.' Through his influence over Shas, Israel's third largest political party, he is also a significant political figure."


Shas Leader Denies 'Annihilate Arabs' Claim. Totally Jewish, April 10, 2001
"The controversial spiritual leader of Israeli ultra-Orthodox political party Shas has claimed that his Passover sermon, in which he said that Arabs should be annihilated, was misinterpreted. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel's Sephardi Jews and one of the most influential religious figures in Israel, said in his pre-Pesach speech: 'It is forbidden to be merciful to Arabs. You must send missiles to them and, with relish, annihilate them. They are evil and damnable. May the Holy Name visit retribution on the heads of the Arabs and cause their seed to be lost.' However, Yosef's aides moved quickly to clarify the remarks after the words sparked public outrage in both Jewish and Arab quarters."


Birthright Israel Gives American Jewish Youth Largest, Most Meaningful Hanukah Gift Ever. PR Newswire [at: findarticles.com], November 22, 1999
"Birthright Israel announced today that arrangements have been finalized for the largest and most extensive philanthropic outreach program ever targeting Jewish youth. This year's inaugural program will take 5,000 North American Jewish students to visit the Jewish homeland for free. Scheduled to take place over the turn of the new millennium, the inaugural ten-day trips are being funded by a planned $210 million in contributions over five years from major philanthropists, the Government of Israel, and Jewish communities worldwide ... At the start of the 21st century, Judaism's adversity comes from within, as assimilation threatens Jewish communities in North America and around the world. Birthright Israel aims to reinvigorate and revitalize American Jewish youth's commitment to Judaism by providing Jewish students (the majority of whom are marginally affiliated Jews) with a profound and lasting experience in Israel. Statistics have shown that Jewish youth who visit Israel at a young age are more likely to retain ties to the Jewish community."


All We Did for Them. The Boston Book Review.
"I later learned that this image of Jews as defenders of the rights of all downtrodden had been carefully cultivated .... The idea that Jewish and liberal American values and interests are perfectly harmonious is a vast and self-serving oversimplification ... Fighting for civil rights and liberties also advanced the interests of the Jewish community as a whole in American society. Bundling anti-semitism with racism allowed Jewish leaders to bring the moral gravitas of African-American suffering to bear on issues of particular relevance to Jews. Though Jews were excluded from some neighborhoods and denied some jobs, the discrimination against Jews was--at least by the mid-1950s--subtle and intermittent enough as to make it difficult to rally politicians to legislate against it and district attorneys to prosecute it. Fighting the far more blatant discrimination against African-Americans was a way to fight Jewish battles by proxy and in extremis. It was thus a way to remove social and economic barriers faced by Jews, without appearing merely self-serving. This accounts for why Jewish civil liberties organization hewed close to issues that were in principle relevant to Jews--free access of 'minorities' to jobs, housing, social clubs and organizations--while they steered away from the sorts of economic restructuring that might greatly benefit African-Americans but offer no gains for Jews."


Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, 1988. bartleby.com
"I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that's unacceptable for many ... For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That's my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it." -- Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris. -AND- Jews and Christians Together, by Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger. 1998 Nostra Aetate Awards and Lecture. Lustiger: "Following the example of the European nations and thanks to their participation in the dramatic evolution of civilization and culture, [Jews] have managed to create the State of Israel by picking up the standards of a particular national identity. They have thus radically renewed the question of the Jewish identity, which is now torn between two poles: on the one hand, the pole of consecrated life whose only true home is given by God at the end of times; and on the other hand, the pole of the secular existence of a people asserting its identity, its language, at long last reconstituted, its ambitions, and its national strength. With Israel the Jewish people has reintegrated the common history of the nations, as a new reference and as a mystery."


Putting Israel First. Sobran's. November 2, 2000
"That is, all New York candidates assume, as a practical matter, the truth of the 'canard of dual loyalty' — that Jewish voters care as much about Israeli interests as American interests. More precisely, they assume that Jews put Israeli interests first. American interests don’t even come up for discussion. Nobody asks whether it’s good for Americans for their government to support a Jewish state, even when that alliance provokes worldwide Muslim antagonism against this country, as witness the bombing of the USS Cole ... American politicians, including Al Gore and George W. Bush, pander shamelessly to the powerful Israel First lobby. In fact such pandering has become normalized, because that lobby wields both the carrot of money and the stick of stigma. All politicians remember the fate of Senator Charles Percy of Illinois and Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, whose long careers ended when they irritated the pro-Israel lobby. That lobby intimidates even journalists, who fear for their careers if they criticize Israel too bluntly."


Mike in Religion Pitch. New York Daily News, August 17, 2001
"[New York] mayoral candidate Michael Bloomberg has mailed glossy booklets to New York households attesting to his Jewish faith and generosity to Jewish causes — an ad his opponent attacked as divisive politics. The mailing, which arrived at homes this week, tells the story of a student who 'broke down religious barriers' by becoming the first Jew admitted to his college fraternity, then went on to found a media empire. It describes the Republican billionaire as 'one of the Jewish community's most dedicated volunteers and most generous donors,' listing organizations he supports, including Hadassah [the Zionist Women's organization], the American Jewish Congress and the Hebrew Home for the Aged — under the heading 'Protecting Our Community' ... Former CUNY board chairman Herman Badillo, Bloomberg's rival in the September primary, feels 'this type of an appeal causes divisions,' said his spokesman, James Vlasto. Badillo 'doesn't feel that is appropriate in a political campaign in a city as diverse as New York,' Vlasto said. 'Everybody is proud of their heritage. Bloomberg is entitled to do anything he wants. But this is something we would not do.' Badillo, who was born in Puerto Rico, 'knows full well the Hispanic community would resent such an appeal.'"


Shiksa. The American Heritage Dictionary (at bartlebycom.)
"NOUN: Offensive. [A Yiddish term] used as a disparaging term for a non-Jewish girl or woman."


What Would a Jewish Veep Say About Intermarriage?, by Philip Weiss,
New York Observer, August 20, 2000
"Talk of Senators Joe Lieberman or Dianne Feinstein being Al Gore’s running mate has raised the possibility of, at long last, a Jewish president. One issue is religious observance. Senator Lieberman is Orthodox and doesn’t work on Saturdays. He has reassured people that the Torah commands one to do one’s duties. In a crisis, he’d be there. That seems like a no-brainer to me. The more interesting question is intermarriage. We live in times of enforced tolerance. George W. Bush was strung up for visiting Bob Jones University, which had a policy against interracial dating. So what about the dating policy in conservative Jewish organizations: the strict stance against intermarriage? This is not something anyone is supposed to talk about. Non-Jews give these issues wide berth. And people like myself, who have intermarried, are sufficiently ashamed about their choice–hastening the destruction of the Jewish people, we’re told–that they rarely speak up to defend it ... The rhetoric and practices surrounding opposition to intermarriage are often so discriminatory they seem to border on racism. The Jewish mistrust of gentile culture is deeply imbedded, and God knows Christians have again and again given Jews ample basis for these feelings. The Yiddish word goy is loaded with negative associations, and the word shiksa, which everyone still uses, comes from Hebrew for 'blemish,' according to Leo Rosten. In ancient times rabbis barred Jews from eating or drinking with non-Jews, lest they intermarry, and such attitudes prevailed widely in the American Jewish community just a generation ago. They treated you like you were dead if you intermarried, they sat shivah for you, they said that you were doing Hitler’s work. Movies like The Heartbreak Kid reminded Jews of what they were losing in marrying out, painting Christian culture as cold and heartless. A lot of the details in that portrait were deadly."

A Life of Pain and Grace. The Age [Australia], August 6, 2001
"Cardinal [Jean-Marie] Lustiger, the 75-year-old Archbishop of Paris, a Jew who might one day be pope, has offended both Jews and Catholics, sparked angry debates and been shunned by those he loved most. The strangest part of his story is not even that he was born to Polish Jewish parents (one of whom would perish in Auschwitz), converted to Catholicism at the age of 14 and rose through the Vatican hierarchy ... 'I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that's unacceptable for many,' Lustiger told The New York Times when he became a cardinal in 1983. 'For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That's my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it. For me, this nomination was as if all of a sudden the crucifix began to wear a yellow star' ... He has publicly criticised priests who indulged in more vicious criticisms of Israel ... Lustiger explained the emotional pull of his origins to Elie Wiesel: 'I feel Jewish. I refuse to renounce my roots, my Jewishness. How could I betray my mother's memory? It would be cowardly and humiliating.' In theological terms, Christianity can accommodate Lustiger's duality. One can be both a believer in the New Testament and Jewish. Says Melbourne's Father Gerald O'Collins: 'A Jewish cardinal is very important because if the College of Cardinals is to be truly Christian there ought to be at least one Jewish Catholic.' But Judaism has no such latitude. According to Jewish law a person who is born Jewish dies Jewish. It is not a club from which one can rescind membership."

Mensch or Maus? Jewish.com, 1996
"Rabbi Harold Schulweis' sermon last Friday evening at Valley Beth Shalom, encouraging outreach to potential converts to Judaism, may draw as much heat as this week's Malibu blaze. Schulweis himself told me that the response has been 'positive' and reassuring. But I have heard otherwise. Orthodox critics are declaring that Schulweis has taken a dangerous step toward proselytizing. Liberal Jews are concerned that he is making a concession to intermarriage, that he is assuming the battle is lost and the only hope of sustaining Jewish life is in emphasizing conversion of the non-Jewish spouse ... It is clear that, for the rabbi, breaking clear of the stigma attached to conversion is a major psychological hurdle. Schulweis conceded that when Rabbi Alexander Schindler, former head of the Reform movement, first suggested reaching out to non-Jews, he objected. 'I always felt this wasn't Jewish. I had to rethink my position,' he said. Last week, Schulweis wrote to Schindler, thanking him for offering a new idea. As his speech made clear, Schulweis considers the bias against converts part of Jewish 'racism,' the notion that even a 'chicken soup Jew' is better than a 'Jew by choice.'"

A Dangerous Beast, by Leonard Fein.
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, August 24, 2001
"But no matter, not any more. Events overtake and overwhelm. [There was a suicide bomber at] King George and Jaffa, a corner just about everyone who has been to Israel knows. Animals. Where is the one among them who will have the decency to say that these horrid actions disgrace the cause they seek to promote, as well as the faith on which they allegedly rest? Well then, what to do? Let us stipulate that they are, indeed, animals, that it is Israel’s sorry fate to be locked in a deathly battle with wild beasts ... But short of uprooting the population of the West Bank and Gaza, loading them onto trucks and dumping all 2 million of them in, say, the Sinai Desert, it is impossible to specify what the targets or the strategic aims of an 'all-out' offensive might be ... Well, then, what of rewards? Bribe the wild beast into domesticity ... Rational persuasion? By definition, a wild beast is not susceptible to rational persuasion."

A Non-Racist Zionism? Al-Ahram [Cairo, Egypt], August 23-29, 2001
"All of this confirms that Zionism is not, as its adherents would have the world believe, merely the national expression of Jewish self-determination, but an intrinsically racist ideology that justifies the most brutal acts of repression against the Palestinians as necessary for the security of one specific racial group. How can the United Nations, which has issued countless resolutions condemning doctrines of racial differentiation and superiority as morally reprehensible and socially unjust, refuse to even consider a resolution equating Zionism with racism? ... And when it comes to equating Zionism with racism, the criterion cannot be what Israel, or the US for that matter, has to say on the issue, but what the parties suffering from the racist practices of Israel have to say, notably the Palestinians, particularly with the present escalation of violence in the occupied territories, where Israel's systematic war of extermination and expropriation against a native civilian population displays all the characteristics of a policy of ethnic cleansing -- which the United Nations has defined as a war crime."

Jewish Ethics. Are They Ethical? Are They Jewish, by Tzvi Howard Adelman,
The Jewish Agency for Israel [The Department for Jewish Zionist Education], August 22, 1999
"For example, the Torah commands the extermination of various peoples (Deuteronomy 7:1-5) in the Mechilta it says, 'tov shebagoyim harog,' 'kill the best among the gentiles' (14:7; cf. Soferim ch. 15:10). There is another discussion about who has priority for drawing water at a well in which some rabbis argued that the needs of the local Jews to water their cattle or to do their laundry took precedence over the lives of strangers (Tosefta Baba Metzia 11:33-36) ... By the time of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, even the strongest defenders of the Jews both among the Christians and among the Jews conceded that the Jews were deficient in their ethical behavior ... The issue of Jewish criminality was elaborated upon by Johann David Michaelis, a German Bible scholar, who noted the high rate of Jewish criminal convictions and membership in gangs ... As other aspects of Jewish practice and belief are abandoned by large numbers of Jews, they are still driven by the desire to prove that Judaism still has something to offer its adherents and the world at large. For these reasons, Jewish Reformers in the nineteenth century began to present Judaism in terms of its 'Mission' which was to bring to the world the idea of 'ethical monotheism.' Such a construction served not only as a response to Christian attacks, but as a way to fill the void for Jews who were dissatisfied with Jewish ritual, communal life, but yearned for a reason to hold on to being Jewish. Many Jews, especially religious Jews today in Israel and their supporters abroad continue to adhere to traditional Jewish ethics that other Jews would like to ignore or explain away. For example, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus/Shechem, after several of his students were remanded on suspicion of murdering a teenage Arab girl: 'Jewish blood is not the same as the blood of a goy.' Rabbi Ido Elba: 'According to the Torah, we are in a situation of pikuah nefesh (saving a life) in time of war, and in such a situation one may kill any Gentile.' Rabbi Yisrael Ariel write [sic] in 1982 that 'Beirut is part of the Land of Israel. . . our leaders should have entered Lebanon and Beirut without hesitation, and killed every single one of them. Not a memory should have remained.' It is usually yeshiva [Jewish religious school] students who chant 'Death to the Arabs' on CNN. The stealing and corruption by religious leaders that has recently been documented in trials in Israel and abroad continues to raise the question of the relationship between Judaism and ethics. Thus literature on Jewish ethics is produced because Jews feel a need for it. Jews still feel a tension between universalistic commitments and the specific obligations of Jewish survival."

A small collection, from scholarly sources, about traditional Jewry's Yiddish views of itself and non-Jews, [What Did Traditional Jewish Folklore Think of Jewish Ethics Before Jews Were Reinvented, Post-Holocaust, as Historical Angels? And What Is the Traditional Jewish View of Other People?]

On the Corner. Village Voice, July 25-31, 2001
"Resentment is high between the Satmar Jews of Williamsburg [New York] and a hundred or so Polish day laborers who clean for them. A half-century after the war, the slaughter of their brethren burns the Jews like a live wire. Ask nearly any Satmar to define the neighborhood and he or she will tell you, 'We're a community of Holocaust survivors.' They're keenly aware that Poland's large Jewish population was annihilated during the war. Ask the Polish women how they like their work, and many ignore the question: 'The Jews blame us for the death camps in Poland,' they say. Echoing the Polish government's longtime position, they add, 'It was the Nazis that killed the Jews. Not the Polish people.' 'We want to be respected,' the Polish women say, fairly seething as they talk about standing on the corner like prostitutes, about scrubbing someone else's floor, about the good jobs they had in Poland before the end of Communism. ('How can they say they are so religious? God doesn't want you to be so cheap about money,' says one disgruntled woman.) Now the Poles are on the street corner, asking the Jews for a job, Jews with numbers tattooed on their arms, Jews for whom the names of Polish towns—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor—are etched in memory. The irony is lost on no one ... [One Polish woman's] grandchildren are back in college. She pays for their education with 60 hours a week, scrubbing and dusting and wiping. She cleans the refrigerator gaskets with a matchstick, as she is asked, but won't scrub the floors on her hands and knees with a shmatte (rag), as the Jews request. She insists on using a mop. This costs her work and is a major source of tension between the Poles and the Jews ... If the sun has already set, and the Jews are proscribed from touching switches or machinery, they ask the cleaning women to turn on the lights and stove before they leave. The Polish women oblige, and then, with throbbing hands, pocket their money and head back to rented rooms."

Jewish Genes, by Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman.
The Tribe. The Cohen-Levi Family Heritage
"Recently published research in the field of molecular genetics – the study of DNA sequences – indicates that Jewish populations of the various Diaspora communities have retained their genetic identity throughout the exile. Despite large geographic distances between the communities and the passage of thousands of years, far removed Jewish communities share a similar genetic profile. This research confirms the common ancestry and common geographical origin of world Jewry ... 'Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level. The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.' (M.F. Hammer, Proc. Nat'l Academy of Science, June 9, 2000)"

On Integrating My Love and Commitment to Judaism and Jewish Community with My Love and Commitment to a Man Who Is Not Jewish, by Sarah Tauber, Interfaith Family (interfaithfamily.com)
"It might be assumed that I would have been pleased, therefore, to read the article reprinted in this magazine from the [Jewish ethnic magazine] Forward entitled, 'Reform [Judaism] allows Hebrew Schools to Hire Intermarried Teachers.' On the contrary. I was saddened and troubled by comments cited in this article. In spite of what the rabbinical leadership may have intended, their words and tone seemed to betray the continuing suspicion held by Jewish establishment leaders towards Jews married to individuals who are not Jewish, even though these Jews demonstrate commitment to Judaism and Jewish life. They describe us in terms akin to criminals on trial: 'Mixed marriage may be evidence that an individual is not the sort of Jew we want as a religious school teacher, and then again it may not. Each case must be judged on its own merits.' As I read those words I asked myself, as a Jew and as a trained and experienced teacher, the following questions: 'Has the Central Conference of American Rabbis ever clarified what 'sort of Jew' they seek as a religious school teacher? Or is it only in the case of a Jew married to an individual who isn't Jewish that suddenly the criteria become urgent? Is it possible that the CCAR views other Jews--for example, untrained college students, inexperienced young singles, homosexuals and lesbians, housewives, older divorced men--as not posing any serious concern to the rabbinical leadership, while Jews who are married to individuals who are not Jewish are put on trial?"

Birthright Israel Gives American Jewish Youth Largest, Most Meaningful Hanukah Gift, PR Newswire [at findarticles.com], November 22, 1999
"Birthright Israel announced today that arrangements have been finalized for the largest and most extensive philanthropic outreach program ever targeting Jewish youth. This year's inaugural program will take 5,000 North American Jewish students to visit the Jewish homeland for free. Scheduled to take place over the turn of the new millennium, the inaugural ten-day trips are being funded by a planned $210 million in contributions over five years from major philanthropists, the Government of Israel, and Jewish communities worldwide ... At the start of the 21st century, Judaism's adversity comes from within, as assimilation threatens Jewish communities in North America and around the world. Birthright Israel aims to reinvigorate and revitalize American Jewish youth's commitment to Judaism by providing Jewish students (the majority of whom are marginally affiliated Jews) with a profound and lasting experience in Israel ... 'The 5,000 North American Jewish youth who begin leaving for Israel next month will be the first in what is planned to be a traditional rite of passage for young Jewish adults worldwide. We hope that by experiencing Israel first hand, young Jews will forge a lasting bond with their Jewish homeland, heritage, and community,' commented Charles R. Bronfman, co-founder of Birthright Israel."

The Jewish Question, National Review, December 21, 1998 [book review]
"The story of how [David] Klinghoffer, a senior editor of NR, came to seek knowledge of God and Torah is undoubtedly unlike that of any other Orthodox Jew ... At age five, David was told by his adoptive parents that his biological parents were gentiles. In eighth grade, he opened a book given to him by his maternal grandmother, To Be a Jew, by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin. The book introduced the boy to the Orthodox understanding of halakha, the body of Jewish laws derived from the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and its traditional interpretations (the Oral Torah). He was struck by 'one of the most unexpected sentences of my reading life': 'A child born to a non-Jewish mother, regardless of who the father is, has the status of a non-Jew according to Jewish law' ... In one of the book's many sorry-I-laughed scenes, the adolescent David, after being told by a local Lubavitcher that he is not a Jew, performs a decidedly unorthodox self-conversion ritual in his bathroom, soaping a razor blade with a bar of Irish Spring, cutting himself to extract the required bead of blood for a symbolic circumcision, reciting the requisite prayer, and dunking himself in a make-shift mikvah-a lukewarm tub standing in for a ritual pool of water: 'I was a Jew now, I thought' ... He tracked down his birth mother. In due course, they discussed why she chose the Klinghoffers as his adoptive parents. 'Well, you know,' she told him, 'my mother was Jewish' by way of a Jewish great-grandfather with the surname Goldkuhl. With a surge of tribalist adrenaline, he 'sat bolt upright. . . . If this was true, I was part Jewish by blood! . . . I realized that, to be precise, my blood was one-sixteenth Jewish. . . . I could walk into a synagogue or a kosher restaurant and return the curious glances,' for the Goldkuhl family was 'my blood link with the Nation of Israel.'"

Doomsday Demographer Gets a Hearing at the Prime Minister's Office,
Jerusalem Report, November 5, 2001
"Haifa University [in Israel] geographer Arnon Soffer was summoned to the Prime Minister's Office on October 15, to brief the committee of directors general of government ministries on his doomsday predictions. Soffer says he got a 'sympathetic hearing,' and believes his proposed solution — unilateral separation from the Palestinians, and from some of Israel's Arabs as well — may now be seriously examined for policy purposes. Government officials comfirmed the meeting, but would not comment on the content or implications. Soffer claims dramatically that current population trends mean that Israel will 'cease to exist' as a Jewish state by 2020, by when he's convinced that only 42 percent of the people in Israel proper, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be Jewish; today, the figure is 50.5 percent. He cites higher Palestinian birthrates — a Muslim mother in Gaza has 7.5 children, on average, while the West Bank figure is 5 (compared to the Jewish mother's average 2.8) — and the constant influx of illegal Arab migration into Israel."

The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography, by Stephen Steinlight, formerly Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee
Center for Immigration Studies, October 2001
"We cannot consider the inevitable consequences of current [immigration] trends -- not the least among them diminished Jewish political power -- with detachment ... We Jews need to be especially sensitive to the multinational model this crowd (many of them Jewish) is promoting. Why? Because one person’s 'celebration' of his own diversity, foreign ties, and the maintenance of cultural and religious traditions that set him apart is another’s balkanizing identity politics. We are not immune from the reality of multiple identities or the charge of divided loyalties, a classic staple of anti-Semitism, and we must recognize that our own patterns are easily assailed, and we need to find ways of defending them more effectively as the debate goes on. Much public opinion survey research undertaken in recent years continues to indicate that large numbers of Americans, particularly people of color, assert that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States. For Jews, it is at best hypocritical, and, worse, an example of an utter lack of self-awareness, not to recognize that we are up to our necks in this problem. This has been especially true once we were sufficiently accepted in the United States to feel confident enough to go public with our own identity politics. But this newfound confidence carries its own costs; people are observing us closely, and what they see in our behavior is not always distinct from what we loudly decry in others. One has to be amused, even amazed, when colleagues in the organized Jewish world wring their hands about black nationalism, Afrocentrism, or with cultural separatism in general — without considering Jewish behavioral parallels. Where has our vaunted Jewish self-awareness flown? I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one."

Make It a "March of Love," by Edward Moskol (president of the Polish National Alliance-USA), Dialogue on Jewish-Polish Relations
"According to the opening words of its Homepage on the Internet, 'The March of the Living is a yearly journey where thousands of primarily Jewish teens from around the world gather in Poland and Israel to mark two of the most significant dates on the modern calendar: Holocaust Remembrance Day and Israel Independence Day. The purpose of this trip is to give students a first hand look at history and the evils of mankind.' In actuality, each year in May, on a day commemorated by the Jewish community as 'Holocaust Day,' Poland surrenders a bit of its sovereignty. On that day in Oswiecim, the Polish town situated near the German-created World War II concentration camp of Auschwitz, Jewish organizers and Israeli agents control the streets, while thousands of young Jews hurl insults and epithets at those Poles who dare come upon the scene. A self-proclaimed 'March of the Living,' the parade from Auschwitz to the neighboring Birkenau camp, has become something more akin to a 'March of Hate.' Ostensibly held to educate the young about a Holocaust they did not experience, it has evolved into an opportunity for Jews to claim singular suffering at the hands of the Nazis and to inculcate anti-Polonism within the participants."

It Is Absurd to Say that Israel Is Not a Racist State, by Charley Reese,
King Features Syndicate (Reese is a columnist at the Orlando Sentinal)
"It was no surprise that the United States and Israel walked out of a United Nations conference on racism as soon as Israel came in for criticism. It is, however, a disgrace. Israel certainly is a racist state. Its own human-rights advocates call it that. The claim that Israel doesn't discriminate against non-Jews is absurd on its face. Suppose, for example, the U.S. Congress passed a law that said the United States is a Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation and that any Christian, Anglo-Saxon person anywhere in the world is automatically eligible to become a citizen. Do you seriously think the Anti-Defamation League would not have a conniption fit and scream racism? Well, Israel has such a law for Jews. Thus a Russian Jew, for example, can become a citizen, but a Palestinian driven out of his own country in 1948 cannot return. Suppose, for another example, a group of wealthy people established the Christian National Fund. This fund would be used to purchase property. Once purchased, the property could never be sold to, rented to or leased to a non-Christian. Would that not be called discrimination? Well, there is such a fund called the Jewish National Fund, which has all of those restrictions on the property it owns. It played a great part in establishing Israel. And, of course, if American officials routinely issued building permits to Christian Anglo-Saxons while denying them to Jews or other groups, that would be considered racist. And neighborhoods that denied non-Christians an opportunity to buy or rent would likewise be considered racist. All of these forms of discrimination are practiced in Israel against Palestinians."

A Chasidic Spokesman Espouses Modernity -- and Race Separation,
[Jewish] Forward, April 13, 2001
"A beloved teacher at Yeshiva University High School for Boys — a Modern Orthodox, not chasidic, institution — Rabbi [Mayer] Schiller also spent years writing and preaching in defense of European culture, group identity and, most controversially, racial separatism. Rabbi Schiller, 49, has made common cause with and spoken before a cast of characters and organizations that would send most American Jews running to the Anti- Defamation League: American white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists, Conrad Muhammad of the Nation of Islam and right-wing European nationalists. In a series of interviews with the Forward, Rabbi Schiller declined to discuss for the record his published views on race. Officials at Yeshiva University High School, also known as MTA, said Rabbi Schiller's silence stems from an agreement that he made with school administrators five years ago, prohibiting Rabbi Schiller from discussing racial issues with students or in any public forum ... Several of Rabbi Schiller's former students and rabbinical colleagues said they oppose his separatist views, but that his fascination with controversial nationalist causes stem not from a hatred for racial minorities, but a rejection of post-Enlightenment universalism and secularism."

Results of Poll Sponsored by Israel Policy Forum, the Jewish Week, and the Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies Studies,
Jewish Week, November 20, 2001
This poll of Jewish Americans found "the most important issue or problem facing the Jewish community in the United States today" to be 1) anti-Semitism [23%], 2) Peace and Security for Israel, 3) Terrorism [13%], 4) Intermarriage [i.e., marrying non-Jews - 12%], and 5) U.S.-Israeli relations [8%]. Public education was 8th, poverty and hunger 9th, and the environment 10th [all with 1%]. 89% of respondents were "strongly favorable' or "somewhat favorable" to Israel. (Another 5% ventured no opinion, 1% didn't respond, 3% were "somewhat unsupportive, and 2% "strongly unsupportive.") 59% were even "strongly favorable" or "somewhat favorable" to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who faces a possible trial in Belgium for war crimes in Lebanon.

In the Genes. Understanding Jewish Genetic Diseases,
Chicago Jewish News
"[A] certain group of conditions are unusually common among Jews of Eastern European or Ashkenazi descent. (We'll come to their Sephardic cousins later.) Although these diseases can affect Sephardic Jews and non-Jews as well, they afflict Ashkenazi Jews more often as much as 20 to 100 times more frequently ... Because for centuries Jews tended to marry within their faith and their community, the relatively high frequency of these genes among Jews stayed within the larger Jewish community. Their effects were not diluted by the introduction of other genes from outside the Ashkenazi Jewish community, nor did the high frequency of these genes among Jews pass into other communities."

Critics Charge Racism as Jewish State Places 'Quota' on Ethiopians,
[Jewish] Forward, December 28, 2001
"Critics are claiming racism is behind what they say is the Israeli government's establishment of a 400-person monthly quota on immigration from Ethiopia — even for those who qualify under the Law of Return. Ethiopian Jewry activists complain that the quota and what they cite as a lack of humanitarian aid from American Jewish philanthropies are doubly offensive because of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent calls for a mass immigration of Jews from Argentina, France, Australia and South Africa. The plight of Ethiopian Jews is being ignored, activists charge, even as Israel and the quasi governmental Jewish Agency for Israel, the main overseas recipient of monies raised by federations within the United Jewish Communities system, are investing millions of dollars to encourage immigration from those countries and the former Soviet Union. 'This is the first time that there is a quota on an ethnic basis,' said Avraham Neguise, head of the Israel-based advocacy group South Wing to Zion. 'In Ethiopia they created an ethnic quota. It's clear discrimination against black Jews.'"

Pol's Bid to Honor Slain Israeli Driving Debate Over 'Transfer,'
[Jewish] Forward, January 25, 2002
"A freshman New York City councilman is winning some powerful endorsements for his proposal to name a street in his native Queens after slain Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, who had urged the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The proposal by Democrat David Weprin, who chairs the City Council's powerful finance committee, has won the endorsement of State Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn, as well as Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx. A representative of the American Jewish Committee said the organization would back Mr. Weprin's proposal if the City Council approves it. The city's Jewish Community Relations Council said it would not object to naming a street after the former major general, who was assassinated by a militant Palestinian group last October. Opposition to the proposed street-naming was voiced by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Americans for Peace Now and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat. 'How in the hell can you name a street after [Ze'evi] and not claim you're embracing his views?' said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of UAHC. 'Honoring him in this way inevitably serves to give an endorsement to his views. Those views were unacceptable to most Jews and most Israelis before his assassination. It is incumbent particularly upon Diaspora Jews to be reminded of what he stood for, and having been reminded, we have to delegitimize him.' Mr. Weprin first announced his plans to name a single city block after Ze'evi at a memorial dinner for the slain Israeli, organized January 6 by the National Council of Young Israel. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the event, praised Ze'evi for his attention to Israel's security. Mr. Netanyahu had refused to admit Ze'evi into his own governing coalition in 1996 because of the extremism of Ze'evi's views. The enthusiasm of some mainstream Jewish organizations for the street-naming proposal may be the latest sign of what communal leaders say is a new era in which it is no longer verboten for American Jews to discuss, or in some cases promote, Ze'evi's platform of 'transfer.' The term 'transfer' has come to refer to the mass removal of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to other Arab countries by means that Ze'evi himself was often vague about. Most mainstream Jewish groups, from left to right, historically have rejected the doctrine as immoral. 'About two years ago I heard almost no one mention the topic of transfer,' said the national president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein. 'Now Jews who would never breathe such a word are saying it.'" [From the Guardian (London), 10-17-01: "[Ze'evi] was widely respected [by Israelis], even by political opponents, for his distinguished war record, but his advocacy of what he called the 'transfer' of Palestinians across the borders into the neighbouring Arab countries was condemned by many as racist ... He sparked controversy in July for referring to Palestinians working and living illegally in Israel as 'lice' and a 'cancer.'" Global Beat Syndicate, 10-21-01: "If you are Palestinian, Ze'evi represented one of the most racist elements in the Israeli political spectrum. His politics openly called for the expulsion of Palestinians from their indigenous homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the rest of the Arab world. His death comes after Israel successfully carried out 60 political assassinations of Palestinians over the past 12 months."

Soldier's Burial as a Non-Jew Adds to List of Israel's Pain,
New York Times, Feb. 23, 2002
"Staff Sgt. Michael Oxman died with five comrades when Palestinian gunmen attacked an Israeli outpost in the West Bank on Tuesday night. On Friday, he was buried apart from them, in the section of a military cemetery set aside for non- Jews. Sergeant Oxman, a 21-year-old immigrant from Ukraine who considered himself Jewish, like his father, did not qualify as such under Jewish law because his mother is not Jewish. For a society with more than enough on its mind already, the separate-but-equal treatment accorded the sergeant introduced a new ripple of consternation. 'He was Jewish enough to enlist, to fight and to die with them,' his commander, identified only as Barry, told Israel radio. 'It is very regretful and very sorrowful for us all.'"

Anatomy of a Conditionally Unresolved Conflict -- A Personal and Philosophical Reflection, Gilad Atzmon, December 2000
"I suggest that uncovering the philosophy behind a number of fundamental Jewish precepts will clearly manifest the terrible truth that the Israeli-Arab conflict is conditionally unresolved ... For many years I have experienced deep feelings of disappointment and disenchantment with my own people. As we all know, identity can be a complicated issue. One does not have a say regarding one's parents, place of birth, gender, racial origin or even religious inheritance. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be born a Jew or an Israeli. Nobody consulted me when I was just eight days old about whether I wanted to sacrifice a part of my body in order to determine my identity. When I was just over a week old, without proving any superiority or excellence in any given domain, I became 'chosen'. I have to admit that most of the Jewish people I have ever came across are more than happy with their given identity and are proud to be Jewish. Unfortunately I am not. On the contrary, the older I get the more I find myself ashamed of my own people and this paper is about my shame ... I would like to address the concept of 'choseness.' I believe that 'choseness' is one of the most fundamental characteristics of 'Jewish understanding'. One can remove a substantial amount of religious law and ritual from Jewish life (e.g. the Reform movement) and one can even remove the whole of religious practice without really affecting Jewish identity (as we know there are many secular Jews). But whenever one removes 'choseness,' there is very little left with which the Jew can identify. In other words, by removing 'choseness,' the Jew, in effect, becomes converted to something else (converted into Christianity or, more generally, into an ordinary human being). The concept of 'choseness' is bound up with many Jewish concepts of self-alienation or even positive discrimination such as Kosher food, Minian as well as the process of conversion. These concepts share a common denominator that suppress any experience of social interaction with the Other. In other words, Jews are discouraged from assimilating with their non-Jewish environment (the Hebrew word for assimilation is Hit-bo-le-lout which comes from the root word Blil which is commonly understood to mean 'mass' or 'confusion', hence le-hit-bo-lel, to assimilate, means to get confused, to be one of the mass, to lose your authenticity ). The result of this is that the possibility of 'loving thy neighbour' is denied. In general, as we shall see, 'Jewish understanding' (unlike Judaism) leads to ignorance of the Other. When I talk about the Other, I refer to that which is conditionally different from myself. The Other is the one with whom one can empathize because, and only because, he is different."

In Israel, Distressed Signals from Ethiopians,
Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 2002
"The gap between black and white Israelis seems, with some exceptions, to be growing. For Ethiopians, it is visible in impoverished neighborhoods, soaring unemployment, and the highest high-school dropout rate of any Jewish group in Israel. Twenty-six percent of Ethiopian youths have either dropped out or do not show up for classes most of the time, raising concerns that the community's current difficulties may become chronic. Drug use, including glue-sniffing, is on the rise, and criminal activity, hardly known among Ethiopians before they came to Israel, has been growing ... to Asher Elias, a staff member at the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews (IAEJ). 'Ethiopians have lots of motivation to become Israelis, but they are not accepted,' he says. 'In jobs, in education, people feel they are discriminated against because they are black. I'm not saying it is right or wrong, but it is what we are feeling, and that is enough.' A low point in the relationship between Ethiopian Jews and Israelis came in 1996, when it was revealed that Israeli hospitals had thrown out all blood donated by Ethiopians. "These were donations to help other Israelis," Mr. Elias says. "[Ethiopians] said to each other: 'What do they think? That we are not humans?' Habad, one of Israel's stronger orthodox religious groups, doesn't recognize Ethiopians as Jews or allow their children into its kindergartens."

Prosecutor Probes Jewish Web Site's Hate Call,
Reuters, August 22, 2002
"The Paris public prosecutor has launched a probe of an extremist Jewish Internet site which published a list of French personalities it deemed 'anti-Israeli' and urged readers to attack some of them. The Web site alleged the celebrities on the list, which included Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche and best-selling writer Regine Deforges, backed a French boycott of Israeli products to protest Israeli government policies ... Daily newspaper Le Monde said on Thursday the Web site ... was run by young French-speaking Israelis living in Israel who were ideologically close to French far-right movements and frequently published racist and anti-Palestinian remarks. Some of the prominent people on the list told Le Monde they had started to receive hate mail."

Chief Rabbi Recants on Religious Tolerance,
Guardian (UK), September 27, 2002
"The chief rabbi [of Great Britian], Jonathan Sacks, has agreed to recant views suggesting religions can learn from each other following a meeting with conservative rabbis who threatened him with a charge of heresy. Dr Sacks, whose latest book The Dignity of Difference, represents a plea for religious tolerance, will have to revise its central message if it is ever republished. The book - extracts of which were published in the Guardian - was praised for its tolerance and open-mindedness by reviewers, but condemned by orthodox and conservative rabbis for the implication that their religion might fall short of complete perfection. In a statement released to the Jewish Chronicle, following a three hour private meeting with 20 rabbis from Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester, Dr Sacks conceded that 'one or two sentences might be misunderstood.' He promised to make 'appropriate amendments' in the next possible edition. The move will anger more liberal Jews already exasperated at previous back-trackings by the chief rabbi in the face of orthodox intransigence. It represents a humiliating climbdown, negating the book's thesis, at the behest of deeply conservative synagogue leaders."

Choking on the stench of journalists worldwide,
by Chana Katz, Jewish Star Times (Miami), October 9, 2002
"I'm ready for the first stage of our long-awaited redemption. Why? Because our sages say then Israel will be free from the yolk of the nations. In the meantime the opposite is happening. The world is tightening its grip. For example, this morning's news brought us America's warning to immediately end the seige of Arafat's compound. By the evening news -- Israel had already stepped back. Only 40 yards so far -- but still . . . we had to punt ... And the head of the United Nations Kofi Anan -- (kof, in Hebrew, means monkey) [JTR notes the subtext of this slur: Kofi Anan is of African descent] -- who made a call heard around the world for Israel to withdraw from 'occupied territories?' Is this man who heads one of the world's most politically powerful organizations really so ignorant of Jewish history? ... Yet sadly, some leaders in Israel's own government are also calling for an end to the 'occupation.' Our sages have also predicted this -- that there would be a time in Jewish history when the leaders of Israel would declare an open war against God and His Torah. I have no doubt at all who will win that war. So, bring on the redemption. And let the nations of the world drop their choking grip around our neck faster than a burning coal. And, if they wouldn't mind, bring me a cup of coffee with one sugar, and take out the garbage." (Chana Katz grew up in Miami Beach and is currently raising her own family in Safed, Israel).

The Making of a Modern Jew,
by Mark M, The Birdman
"Dear John, Recaping on my own Jewish experience, I would like to share it with you and, if you wish, with your readers ... The following is my response to a claim that modern-day Jews are completely ignorant of the age-old Talmudic tenets regarding the the relations with Gentiles, and hence the discussion of those tenets is pointless, confusing and irrelevant ... My Jewish background is more progressive than our progressive age itself: neither my parents, nor my grandparents on either side, had anything to do with the Hebrew faith, observance or synagogue. What then made me a Jew, apart from the names of people around me? The answers abound, of course, citing various cultural elements and phenomena, but instead of listening to the pundits let me listen to my own memory and offer you a handful of bits and pieces of my Jewishness, taken at random: I hope they will help you figure out whether or not the Talmudic heritage is 'irrelevant' to the making of a modern Jew. 1. A cute anecdote from my childhood: Dad brings home a kitten. -- Daddy, let us call him Moyshe! -- No, that's no good. -- Then Khayim! -- That's no good either. Human names should not be given to animals. Call him Hugh or Frank or something. 2. Equally cute anecdote from my college years: -- Guess what: I have decided to take a Gentile wife. -- Why? Why not Jewish?... -- See, a Jewish wife might have poor health, or problems with children, or depression, or something else of that nature; it's too hard for me. -- A Gentile wife might have all those problems as well! -- True, but would I care? 3. Once we are at it, another anecdote, told confidentially as a reflection of typical the pre-war Old World reality: Two Russian kids talking: -- White bread and butter, what a yummy thing! -- Don't you tell me you've ever eaten it. -- 'Course I haven't. Just seen a Jew eatin'. 4. Back to the Talmud and Gentiles. A friend, as non-religious as I was, sent his daughter to a Hebrew school (Maimonides in Brookline, MA) and waxed observant following the demands of the girl's environment. Then one day he told me with a chuckle: -- Can you imagine what kind of news Sarah brought home from school? It's only the Jews whom God created: all others have developed somehow on their own, from shit. His wife strongly rebuked him at that point, noticing that if he wanted harmonious relations with his daughter, he should not ridicule views and opinions which she has acquired at school, 'even though they might not be officially supported'. 5. At a cordial family party (Miami, FL, ca. 1995) the conversation revolved around something abstract: -- Take a very general statement, -- said someone, -- for instance, 'Thou shalt not murder'. It means no one... -- No! -- suddenly objected someone else, -- no one except an Arab! Approving laughter: -- This is, of course, a Talmudic clarification to the Torah. 6. A piece of conventional wisdom: -- When you have to visit, for some reason, a Christian church, drop a coin on the floor in the middle; then, pretending that you are looking for it, turn your ass to the Altar. Doing such a _mitzvah_ (commandment) will justify your coming there. 7. From stories to words and expressions. No wonder that seemingly minor, insignificant bits of everyday speech can leave a profound, lasting impression in a young soul. The following Yiddish phrase was one of them: "A khazer blaybt a khazer, a goy blaybt a goy" (A pig remains a pig, a Gentile remains a Gentile)."

* (Jewish-born) David Ignatiev's web site, http:///wwww.racetraitor.org is getting some sympathetic news attention. His posted philosophy includes these gems:
"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity."
"RACE TRAITOR [his web site] aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race."
[Ignatiev, of course, has an "intellectual" explanation for his call to genocide, whether it's literal, figurative, social, or political. We wonder though. What would public opinion be if the word "white" in these sentences was replaced with the word "Jewish," i.e., "Treason to Jewishness is loyalty to humanity" (a rather reasonable renouncement of the "Chosen People" centerpiece of Jewish identity?) and "RACE TRAITOR aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the Jewish race." Such an anti-Jewish web site would of course be condemned as an expression of fascism, whatever his explanations, and vehemently denounced from every quarter.]

Klan leader may be Jewish,
Montgomery Advertiser (Alabama), October 12, 2002
"The leader of a Mississippi branch of the Ku Klux Klan that has planned December recruitment drives in Autauga and Elmore counties was deposed from his leadership position in another Klan chapter for being Jewish. Jordan N. Gollub of the Royal Confederate Knights of the KKK, which is based in Leake County, Miss., denies he is Jewish but acknowledged Friday he was deposed in 1989 from a leadership role with the Christian Knights of the KKK, another Mississippi-based chapter. Jews are among the groups of people sometimes opposed by the Klan ... Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says Gollub is indeed Jewish. The SPLC keeps tabs on organizations it has labeled hate groups and provides educational materials about tolerance. Potok is editor of the group's Intelligence Report, a quarterly magazine that tracks the activities of hate groups."

Preface to the First Paperback Edition of The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, by professor Kevin MacDonald
"The profound idealization, the missionary zeal, and the moral fervor that surround the veneration of figures like Celan, Kafka, Adorno, and Freud characterize all of the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CofC (see Ch. 6 for a summary). That these figures are now avidly embraced by the vast majority of non-Jewish intellectuals as well shows that the Western intellectual world has become Judaized—that Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. The Judaization of the West is nowhere more obvious than in the veneration of the Holocaust as the central moral icon of the entire civilization. These developments constitute a profound transformation from the tradition of critical and scientific individualism that had formed the Western tradition since the Enlightenment. More importantly, because of the deep-seated Jewish hostility toward traditional Western culture, the Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history—surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people. The present Judaized cultural imperium in the West is maintained by a pervasive thought control propagated by the mass media and extending to self-censorship by academics, politicians, and others well aware of the dire personal and professional consequences of crossing the boundaries of acceptable thought and speech about Jews and Jewish issues. It is maintained by zealously promulgated, self-serving, and essentially false theories of the nature and history of Judaism and the nature and causes of anti-Semitism."

The Culture of Critique Enhanced Entropy,
Etherzone, October 2002
“The Culture of Critique” (C of C) is a well researched and thoroughly documented book on the evolution of the Jewish race. There is a bit of prolixity, some psychological speculation, a dab of repetitive over teach, and a most shocking and cogent explanation for America’s social decline. The Author, Kevin MacDonald is a professor in the Psychology Department at Cal State in Long Beach ... MacDonald traces the collectivist nature of Jewish society. The pressure to marry within the tribe. The persistent attempts to dominate and to be accepted as members of the societies in which they live while at the same time considering themselves superior, lamenting anti-Semitism, and seeking revenge for real or imagined ill treatment. He traces the disastrous societal deterioration which results from the Jewish notion that secular diversity is advantageous to Jews, and how it has been promoted and fostered in America. Though Jews, themselves, do not necessarily believe in gay rights, they promote it, believing acceptance of gays will encourage acceptance of Jews. There is a Communist thread that pervades Jewishness. MacDonald attributes this to the Jewish belief that a classless International Socialist Society would end anti-Semitism and be good for Jews ... Communist Parties in Russia, Poland, Hungary, America, and several other nations have been dominated by Jews. Connections to Russia have been common and attempts to paint Russian Communism as compatible with Jews and a superior governmental form have been persistent and frequent. The brutality of Russian Jewish supremacy during the 1920s and 30s has been suppressed. Slave labor camps were developed by Jewish leaders, Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel."


Baltimoreans May Join To Buy Israel Land,
Baltimore Jewish News, October 14, 2002
"More and more, American Jews feel that Israel is the place they want to be," said Mr. [Paysi] Golomb, who lives with his family in Park Heights. 'But because their lives and jobs are tied to the American economy, they don't think it is a possibility. What we're trying to do is to show people that if they go in together and buy an apartment building, there would be made available to them low interest rates and the economic power of buying as a group.' At least 60 local families have shown interest already, he said, with a smaller group also interested from Chicago. Many of the people that Mr. Golomb has spoken to want to move to Israel but are concerned about finding experienced, trustworthy people to help them. Tehilla, the Union For Religious Aliyah, which has been in existence for 20 years and has helped settle thousands of Americans, including many from Baltimore, is lending advice to Mr. Golomb, an art framer and trumpet instructor who has no financial stake in the aliyah project. 'There are opportunities to buy now, and I think people are excited about that,' said Mr. Golomb. "It doesn't have to be a situation where a family is set to make aliyah [a move to Israel]. We have people who are interested in buying now and renting for a couple of years to someone. We have people who are interested in buying for a retirement home."

As good as gold Elon Gold breaks down barriers by being a Sabbath-observant Jew and starring in a hit sitcom,
Jewsweek, October 2002
"For Elon Gold, life really is a sitcom. The Bronx-born actor, stand-up comedian and producer turned his real-life living situation into TV fodder, particularly his relationship with an intimidating father-in-law à la the Ben Stiller-Robert DeNiro dynamic in 'Meet the Parents.' Gold plays Matt Landis, a struggling would-be chef who moves with his new wife Alex (Bonnie Somerville) into her parents' home, which doesn't thrill Dad (Dennis Farina) ... Gold doesn't want his TV alter ego to follow him into fatherhood right away, but he does have a scheme to thicken the family plot. "I'd like to write an episode where we find out my wife's mom was raised Catholic but is really Jewish, so her dad becomes the outsider,' he outlines. 'I like portraying the Jewish guy, especially in a positive light,' says the 29-year-old Gold ... But, said Gold, 'The only negative thing about my character is that he marries a shiksa [pejorative Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman]. I don't condone it, I don't recommend it. I am playing a character. But it's a reality and it makes for great comedy."

Jewish History, Jewish Religion. The Weight of 3,000 Years,
a book by Israel Shahak, posted in its entirety by Historical Review Press.
Shahak was a "Holocaust survivor" and once was head of the Israel Civil Rights Association. This is THE book to read about traditional racist Jewish beliefs about the non-Jewish Other.

Against Ethnic Panic. Hitler Is Dead,
by Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
(Issue date 05.27.02)
"All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war. This typological thinking defined the historical outlook of the Jews for many centuries. It begins, of course, with the Amalekites, the nomadic tribe in the Sinai desert that attacked the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt. 'The Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.... Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.' From generation to generation: An adversarial role, a diabolical role, was created in perpetuity. And so Amalek became Haman (who actually was an Amalekite), who became the Romans, who became the Crusaders, who became Chmielnicki, who became Petlura, who became Hitler, who became Arafat. The mythifying habit is ubiquitous in the literature of the Jews. In some instances, it must not have seemed like mythifying at all. 'A tale that began with Amalek," wrote the Yiddish poet Yitzhak Katznelson in the concluding lines of 'The Song of the Murdered Jewish People' in 1944, not long before he died at Auschwitz, "and ended with the crueler Germans....' But it is mythifying, and the habit is back; and so a number of things need to be said about Amalek, and about the Amalekization of the present enemy [Palestinians]. For a start, the prescription of an eternal war with Amalek was a prescription for the Jews to be cruel. Here is Rashi's brutal gloss, in the eleventh century in France, on the commandment to 'blot out the remembrance' [i.e., Israelite-inspired genocide] : 'Every man and every woman, every babe and every suckling, every ox and every sheep. The memory of Amalek cannot be said to survive even in an animal, such that someone could say, `This animal once belonged to an Amalekite.'" This extreme of heartlessness was responsible for the most chilling sentence uttered by an Israelite in the Bible: 'What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?' That was what Samuel furiously demanded to know of the poignantly human Saul, the king who could not bring himself to slaughter his enemy completely. So if Amalek is waging a war of extermination against the Jews, the Jews are waging a war of extermination against Amalek. It was perhaps this pitilessness against which some (but certainly not all) medieval and early modern Jewish intellectuals revolted, when they wondered about the precise identity of Amalek in their own day, and proposed various kinds of symbolic action that would allow Jews to acquit themselves of the law about the erasure of the enemy, and deferred the application of the law to the messianic age."

Influential coalition wants to end taboo against promoting inmarriage,
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 5, 2002
"Rena Mello grew up Catholic, but she and her Jewish husband, Eric Lippman, are raising their son and daughter as Jews ... But for a new loosely knit group of influential Jewish lay leaders, rabbis and academics, Mello would be among the prime — and highly controversial — targets of a campaign to stem the intermarriage tide engulfing American Jewry. The group aims to: • advocate Jewish endogamy, or inmarriage; • urge non-Jewish partners of interfaith couples to convert to Judaism; and • ensure interfaith couples raise their children in 'unambiguously Jewish' homes. 'Just as we want to welcome those who want to be Jewishly involved but are married to non-Jews, we must also send out a parallel message that Jews should marry Jews,' says Steven M. Cohen, a professor at the Melton Centre for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who is affiliated with the effort ... These calls for cultural change toward inmarriage and conversion first grew out of a private conference many of the group’s members held at the AJCommittee’s New York offices in March 2001. That session produced a call for Jewish leaders to renew support for inmarriage, conversion of non-Jewish members of interfaith couples and clearly Jewish homes, says Lynn Korda-Kroll, chairwoman of the AJCommittee’s commission on contemporary Jewish life, who organized the event and is involved in the new group."

Judging Judaism by the Numbers,
New York Times, November 20, 2002
"As a Jew who cares deeply about his religion, I have come to the conclusion that our great mistake has been to forget that we are the descendants of a loose amalgamation of peoples united around a new idea, and to replace this history with the view, advanced by our enemies, that we are a race. Zionism, perhaps unintentionally, gave this race a nation to defend; Israel's hostile neighbors kept alive real and pressing questions of survival. It's not surprising, then, that many American Jews have come to understand their Jewishness as an obligation rather than a privilege. By the 1970's, reform Jewish schools and synagogues, like the ones I attended, had begun to emphasize Zionism and the benefits of marrying within the faith over religious education. Every Jewish institution that I encountered as a young man seemed more dedicated to safeguarding the Jewish race than than to teaching Judaism. This has led to a Jewish culture based not on faith or spiritual inquiry but on the mechanics of preservation. Perhaps that is why the worse things get, or the more dire the circumstances are depicted, the more committed and generous Jews become. With each new crisis in the West Bank, tourism to Israel goes down, but donations to Jewish philanthropies go up. In such an environment, the hard data proving the increase in intermarriage and the reluctance of those couples to raise their children in the Jewish tradition is gold. It is in the short-term financial interest of Jewish philanthropies to paint the darkest demographic picture possible. And they do."

Controversy clouds study of American Jews Survey was to reveal health of the religion, but results are being withheld for reasons that no one will fully explain,
by RACHEL ZOLL, The Associated Press, November 29, 2002
"It was supposed to be an important moment in American Judaism. Jewish leaders from around the country had booked themselves into a posh hotel near Philadelphia's historic district for the week before Hanukkah, expecting to hear results of a $6 million, years-long study of U.S. Jews. The findings could be critical, shaping how tens of millions of dollars will be spent to keep Judaism alive in the United States at a time when many Jews are marrying outside the faith. Then, just before its release, the report was withheld. The survey's technical advisers now are in a bitter public fight with the nonprofit agency directing the project, and critics are wondering if the group is trying to bury bad news ... [S]ome say the delay has undermined the credibility of the report even before it comes out. 'They've inflicted a major blow to themselves,' said Egon Mayer, academic director of the North American Jewish Data Bank and a technical adviser for the study. 'It boggles my mind' ... The 2000 study originally was supposed to have been released more than a year ago, but researchers said it was hard to find people willing to participate. The date was pushed back, and speculation continued to grow that the survey was in trouble ... 'I'm hearing people asking, 'What's really going on?' " said Eva Goldfinger, as she worked a booth for the International Federation for Secular Humanist Jews, which has criticized the survey for too narrowly defining who is a Jew. 'Why did they suddenly hold it back? Did they not like the results?' ... Barry Kosmin, who led the 1990 study, said United Jewish Communities left itself vulnerable to such claims by not asking an independent, academic institution to conduct the survey. Hoffman's agency raises and distributes millions of dollars for Jewish community work, and there are interest groups inside and outside the nonprofit whose funding depends on the outcome of the study, Kosmin said."

Grateful for being chosen,
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jewish Media Sources (from Jerusalem Post) June 7, 2002
"No doubt the idea of a chosen people in general, and the Jews as that people in particular, does not sit well with the modern sensibility ... Why is it so hard to believe, then, that God too chose one nation, on the basis of its unique character, to be His partner - the vehicle for His revelation to mankind? ... For some it is hard to believe in our chosenness, if, even after the Holocaust, we still find ourselves in constant peril in our Land. For others, however, it has never been easier ... Groups that denied either the Written or Oral Torah, like the Sadduccees and the Karaites, have disappeared ... No Jewish community, it seems, ever enjoyed 80 years of continuous tranquility. Every Jew living today is the product of an unbroken chain of ancestors, each of whom chose his or her relationship to God over every blandishment that gentile society held out to the most literate members of that society, and in the face of every torture and affliction. That realization struck me in the face more than a quarter of a century ago on the morning of the Entebbe rescue. As complete strangers embraced on the bus, I asked myself why I felt so close to my fellow passengers despite all the obvious differences between us - skin color, language, personal and familial history. Why did these differences count for so little on the Egged bus, when they loomed so large on a New York City subway? The only answer I could give was our common chain of ancestors - great scholars and humble folk alike - who in every place and over thousands of years found in their connection to God the reason and strength to endure as Jews ... Today I am part of that chain of believing Jews who recite every morning, 'Blessed art Thou God, our Lord, King of the Universe, Who did not make me a gentile.' When I do so, I think not of a drunken peasant, but of the most elevated gentile - Goethe or Mozart. No matter how great the achievements of non-Jews may be, the greatest privilege is to have been born into this tiny, despised people, who received His Law and whose every moment is filled with purpose."

Detering Suicide Killers,
by Nathan Levin,
Sh'ma, May 2, 2002
"Terrorism will not be shut down until the individual terrorist is effectively deterred. Israel's campaign of 'targeted assassinations' has tried to prevent suicide bombings by swift nonjudicial execution of known organizers of such deadly attacks. Experience has shown, however, that others take the place of those executed, and the supply of those willing to give up their lives has not dwindled. And Israel's policy of retaliating against political targets - i.e., Arafat's headquarters or Palestinian arms caches - has been a total failure. What threat will effectively deter the individual who is prepared to die so long as he can take many Jews (or, since September 11, many Americans) with him? Studies of Palestinian suicide bombers and of those who, knowing their death was imminent, carried out the September 11 horror indicate that most were closely knit to their families - to parents, brothers, and sisters. Indeed, these family members routinely give press briefings extolling the suicide killers, and they are the recipients of financial bounties from supportive Moslem charities and governmental organizations. What if Israel and the United States announced that henceforth the perpetrators of all suicide attacks would be treated as if they had brought their parents and brothers and sisters with them to the site of the explosion? Suicide killers should know that they will take the lives of not only themselves and the many people they don't know (but nonetheless hate) in the crowd that surrounds them when they squeeze the button that detonates their bomb, but also the lives of their parents, brothers, and sisters. The nation whose civilians are killed or maimed should, by 'targeted assassinations' or other means, be free promptly to execute the immediate relatives of the suicide bombers. This consequence would, I believe, deter most suicide killers - many of whom now anticipate that not only will they be rewarded in a world-to-come, but that their immediate families will be honored and granted lavish benefits on this earth ... Critics will cite the obscene Nazi policy of executing families and entire communities in retaliation for individual acts of resistance. How would the elimination of a suicide killer's family differ from this indefensible Hitlerian practice? This is no easy ethical question, but it is not as one-sided as may initially appear. Weigh the relative 'innocence' of these family members against the 'innocence' of the Israeli adolescents and youngsters killed by suicide bombers at discotheques and cafés or against the "innocence" of those who happened to be on high floors of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. If executing some suicide-bomber families saves the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible ... The policy of family retaliation would also encourage family members to dissuade brothers, sisters, or children who appear to be gravitating toward suicide missions. Finally, can Jewish law and tradition accept this seeming punishment of innocents? The Torah commanded the total eradication - including women and children - of certain nations (Amalek being a singular illustration) because of the continuing threat its members presented to the survival of Israel."

WAR AND PEACE. The Teachings of HaRav Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook,
Rabbi Kook Books,
[Note: Rabbi Kook's writing is influential in today's "Religious Zionism" movement]
"This commentary illuminates Rabbi Kook's writings on the subjects of war and peace. In his penetrating and poetic style, Rabbi Kook teaches that war can often be a catalyst for redemption, uprooting evil, erasing false doctrines, and uncovering Israel's great righteousness. With a love for all of humanity, Rabbi Kook examines the deep, inner causes of war, and illumines the Divine Hand behind all of world history. True peace, he explains, can only be achieved when the nation of Israel is united and guided by the supreme moral light of the Torah. Often startling in its condemnation of Western civilization's moral decline, Rabbi Kook's writings on war reveal a little-known side of his giant Torah personality. Written during the height of World War One, his essays read like prophecies heralding the rebirth of the Jewish nation in Israel, a miracle that began to unfold in the aftermath of the war. Selected Teachings on War and Peace: "When one understands that the Redemption of Israel is the goal of world history, one can discover a new spiritual dimension in all of the world's wars and revolutions." ... "Modern Western culture, with all of its immorality and falsehoods, will disappear from the world. The holy culture of Israel will be established in its place."

A museum of tolerance in a city of fanatics,
by Meron Benvinisti, Ha'aretz (Israel), December 5, 2002
"Only in the holy city of Jerusalem are white elephants tempted to believe they have found their heaven. No matter where they come from, when someone decides to bring them to Jerusalem, the elephants first prosper, stuffed with all the hollow slogans of provincial kitsch, ignorance, and greed that blossom in the holy ground. But sadly, the life span of the white elephants is very short, because the struggle for survival is cruel and ruthless and their importers are interested in the profits resulting from bringing them to the city, not in the fate of the beasts after they've arrived ... Occasionally, when there comes an elephant newer and bigger than the previous, people rub their eyes and are certain nothing more monstrous can come along, but sure enough, an even more grotesque creation shows up, as if it was an iron law of nature: Welcome the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance as designed by Frank Gehry. It is difficult to imagine a project so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac, as the Museum of Tolerance. The mere attempt to stick the term tolerance to a building so intolerant to its surroundings is ridiculous. Others have already referred to the extravagant arrogance expressed in the geometric forms that can't be any more dissonant to the environment in which it is planned to put this alien object. There's no need to waste words on the absurdity of a Museum of Tolerance planted on part of an ancient Muslim cemetery, some of which has long since been turned into a parking lot, and will now be topped by spaces in which people are meant to learn about tolerance, mutual respect and religious coexistence ... Fanatic, brutal Jerusalem, saturated with the ambition to gain exclusive possession over it, will take pride in a site that preaches equality between communities and the brotherhood of nations, and from its rooftops will be seen the homes of Palestinians, whose struggle for freedom is always defined as 'terror.' Neither the project's initiators nor its financial backers deserve the criticism, which should be reserved for the local authorities that allowed this white elephant into the city ... The marginal readiness of Diaspora Jews to be superficially involved, from a safe distance, is exploited by an entire industry of schnorrers and 'funds,' run by various government agencies and institutional interests for the sake of being in motion, without any serious look at the goals or the aesthetic and environmental implications ... The absurdity of the Museum of Tolerance and the danger that this white elephant might actually rise, are so tangible that this time apathy cannot be allowed to take over. There have been successful campaigns waged against destructive projects in Jerusalem and there's no reason why a well-planned campaign won't succeed in this case. The Museum of Tolerance project must be eradicated without any tolerance."

Press Release Discrimination/Racism/Bigotry,
ADL Deplores Comments by Sen. Trent Lott,
Anti-Defamation League, December 11, 2002
[The ADL's hypocrisy in this statement -- when it champions the institutionalized racism and segregation of Israel -- is breath-taking]
"The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) deplores the recent comments of Sen. Trent Lott as 'irresponsible and unacceptable,' saying they could easily be interpreted as endorsing the reprehensible segregationist policies of the past. 'The Senator's praise for a candidacy based on segregationist policies was irresponsible and unacceptable, and unbecoming of a leader of his stature in Congress,' said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. 'Although Senator Lott subsequently disavowed the notion that he embraced these policies, his disavowal only underscores the imperative for responsible leaders to speak about these issues with clarity and sensitivity. 'We call on Senator Lott to reaffirm clearly and forcefully to the American people his commitment to civil rights and his opposition to discriminatory policies.' The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry." [Want to really know about "hatred, predjudice and bigotry?" See Israel, Israel, Israel, or Israel]

Mormons Again Promise To Stop Baptizing Dead Jews. Anne Frank, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler Among Those Baptized,
Local 6 News, December 12, 2002
"The Mormon church has rededicated itself to end the practice of posthumously baptizing Jews, an agreement apparently breached since it was made with Jewish leaders seven years ago, leaders from both faiths said Wednesday. At a meeting Tuesday in New York City, the church reaffirmed its commitment to remove Holocaust victims and other deceased Jews from its International Genealogical Index, said Ernest Michel, chairman of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The index is a list of some 600 million names used by Mormons to perform ceremonies offering proxy baptisms on behalf of the dead. Mormon church leaders requested the meeting after several Jewish organizations complained the faith had broken the 1995 agreement to keep deceased Jews - including those who died in Nazi concentration camps - from being included in the temple ceremonies, Michel said. The Mormon church collects names from records worldwide to use in temple rituals, during which Mormon stand-ins are dunked in water to offer the dead voluntary entry into the Mormon religion. After the 1995 agreement, the church removed 400,000 names of dead Jews, mostly Holocaust victims, from the database ... Independent researcher Helen Radkey, who prepared a report for Michel that alleged the church had broken the 1995 agreement, said her recent research found that at least 20,000 Jews were posthumously baptized. Radkey has been researching Jews included in the Mormon lists since 1999, when she found the famous diarist Anne Frank and her extended family listed as being baptized. She said she is doubtful the church can keep all Jewish names out of the database. 'It is totally unrealistic,' she said. 'Most Mormons who handle the processing, including deletions of Jewish names from the LDS database, would not know a Jewish name from the back end of a hoe.'"

The Jewish State: The Next Fifty Years,
by Amitai Etzioni, Azure, Winter 1999
[Etzioni is a professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC and has served in the Israeli army]
"The Jewish people require a homeland to protect them not merely from physical annihilation, but also from cultural devastation. The Jewish history of suffering and sacrifices secures Jews the right to be shielded not merely from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but also from their own inclination to assimilate and vanish when residing outside the Jewish nation-state. Only a Jewish state, as a tool of Jewish nationhood, can provide the basis for Jewish continuity—in the homeland and elsewhere. It follows that to deny Israel this role is to reject much more than the very troublesome theocratic elements of the existing Jewish state; it is to deny—indeed, betray—the Jewish fate ... If anyone is forced to leave or to comply, who should that be—those who seek to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, or those who wish to turn it into a state indistinguishable from any other, a kind of Lebanon II? All this is not to suggest that if one continues to embrace Israel’s destiny as a Jewish state, one must therefore accept the particular manifestation of Jewishness present in Israel today. Indeed, some of the claims laid by the Haredim are not much more essential to Jewish tradition than are the goyish clothes which the Haredim wear so devoutly. Reforming the Jewish elements of the State of Israel rather than eradicating them is first of all a political matter. It is misleading to argue that Israel, under the thumb of the Haredim, is being undemocratic. "

UA researcher helping explain origin of Jews,
Arizona Daily Wildcat
"UA scientist Michael Hammer discusses the dispersion of the Jewish people based on DNA tests. The discussion was held at Temple Emanu-El Sunday morning. Research of Y chromosome unraveling biblical legend Genetic research on the Y chromosome may help answer questions of biblical significance related to the Jewish Diaspora, or dispersion of the Jewish people. Michael Hammer, a UA [University of Arizona] associate research scientist in the Arizona Research Laboratory has been performing studies on the Y chromosome which, in theory, is passed unchanged from father to son. Occasionally, mutations occur which are inherited by subsequent generations, allowing researchers to construct a kind of family tree that can be used to trace the origin of a people. Hammer and other researchers have used this information to compare genetic data from Jewish groups to host populations. In a seminar hosted by Sisterhood, an auxiliary of Temple Emanu-El, 225 N. Country Club Road, Hammer presented his findings to about 85 members of the Tucson Jewish community Sunday. In the lecture, Hammer said that his findings suggest that the Cohanim - a priestly class of Jews who are said to be descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses - have to a great extent retained their genetic diversity. Hammer and his colleagues surveyed a group of men in the United States who regarded themselves as Cohanim and compared their Y chromosomes to non-priestly class Jewish men. 'This pattern held no matter which community of Jewish men we surveyed,' he said ... Hammer said that his research suggests that the world's Jewish populations closely resemble Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese, indicating a common ancestry originating in the Middle East about 4,000 years ago. Genetic evidence also suggests that the Jewish people have retained their biological diversity separate from host populations - showing low rates of intermarriage. Hammer said that his research is now focusing on understanding the evolutionary reasons for the high occurrence of rare genetic diseases - such as Tay Sachs, an inherited lipid-metabolism disease affecting children - in Jewish populations. Hammer said that it is possible that a powerful, affluent Jews - such as a rabbi - who had these genetic defects early in Jewish history contributed it to the gene pool in the form of several offspring."

H. G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England 1939,
[Excerpts from H.G. Wells]
Neither Aryan, Nor Jew
"{p. 53} CHAPTER V. THE FUTURE OF THE JEWS. I met a Jewish friend of mine the other day and he asked me, 'What is going to happen to the Jews?' I told him I had rather he had asked me a different question, 'What is going to happen - to mankind ?' 'But my people----' he began. 'That,' said I, 'is exactly what is the matter with them.' When I was a schoolboy in a London suburb I never heard of the 'Jewish Question'. I realised later that I had Jewish and semi-Jewish school-fellows, but not at the time. They were all one to me. The Jews, I thought, were people in the Bible, and that was that. I think it was my friend Walter Low who first suggested that I was behaving badly to a persecuted race. Walter, like myself, was a University crammer and a journalist competing on precisely equal terms with myself. One elder brother of his was editor of the St. James's Gazette and another was The Times correspondent in Washington and both were subsequently knighted. Later a daughter of {p. 54} Walter's was to marry Litvinov, who became the Russian Foreign Minister. I could not see that they were at any disadvantage whatever in England. Nevertheless Walter held on to the idea that he was treated as an outcast, and presently along came Zangwill in a state of racial championship, exacerbating this idea that I was responsible for the Egyptian and Babylonian captivities, the destruction of Jerusalem, the ghettos, auto-da-fes - and generally what was I going to do about it? My disposition was all for letting bygones be bygones. When the war came in 1914 some of us were trying to impose upon it the idea that it was a War to End War, that if we could make ourselves heard sufficiently we might emerge from that convulsion with some sort of World Pax, a clean-up of the old order, and a fresh start for the economic life of mankind as a whole. No doubt we were very ridiculous to hope for anything of the sort, and through the twenty years of fatuity that have folowed the Armistice, the gifted young have kept up a chorus of happy derision, 'War to End war Ya ha!" In the last year or so that chorus has died down - almost as if the gifted young had noticed something. But throughout those tragic and almost fruitless four years of war, Zangwill and the Jewish spokesmen elaborately and energetically demonstrating that they cared not a rap for the troubles and {p. 55} dangers of English, French, Germans, Russians, Americans or of any other people but their own. They kept their eyes steadfastly upon the restoration of the Jews - and what was worse in the long run, they kept the Gentiles acutely aware of this."

[It is politically incorrect to say in the following article, but Noel Ignatiev is Jewish.]
Harvard professor argues for 'abolishing' white race,'
Washington Times, September 4, 2003
"Noel Ignatiev, a founder of a journal called Race Traitor and a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute, a leading black-studies department, argues in the current issue of Harvard Magazine that 'abolishing the white race' is 'so desirable that some may find it hard to believe' that anyone other than 'committed white supremacists' would oppose it. In excerpts appearing this week in newspapers nationwide, Mr. Ignatiev, who is white, writes that 'every group within white America,' including 'labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers and white women' has at one time or another 'advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race.' Mr. Ignatiev pledges in the essay that his journal, Race Traitor, intends to 'keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed — not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.'" His colleagues at Harvard seem not to take his proposal entirely seriously. Others cite the article as an example of Harvard's institutional racism ... The university's public affairs office said it had no comment. The article already has stirred anger among some conservatives, who see the article as typical of the liberal climate in academia ... [Ignatiev] writes about what he believes at the Web site of Race Traitor, whose motto is: 'Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.'"

Jewish Pride,
Israel National News, January 1, 2002
"What makes a proud Jew? Most American Jews, if asked, would assert confidently that they are proud to be Jewish. What happens, though, if one tries to probe a little deeper, and asks, 'Why are you proud to be Jewish?' To such a question, these same Jews will very likely pause awkwardly, before offering vague generalities about three thousand years of history, or a commitment to social justice. Why are you proud to be Jewish? It´s a simple question, but for many of us the answer is elusive. Looking around at what the nations of the world have created, one would be hard-pressed to make the case that the Jewish nation can stand among them with pride. Jewish composers, yes, but Jewish music? Jewish artists, yes, but Jewish art? Jewish architects, yes, but Jewish architecture? We find no shortage of individual achievements, but where are the achievements of the vaunted Jewish civilization? Despite our extraordinarily long history, with experience in almost every place and culture in the world, our resume of national accomplishment is notably sparse. The self-defined proud Jew can only wonder embarrassedly, what exactly have we done with our three millennia of history and culture? In honesty, the Jewish nation can really only lay claim to one national achievement. There is only one thing to which the entire people has loyally devoted its energies, one thing it can point to as a realm of accomplishment. What is the Jewish people´s sole accomplishment over the last 3,300 years? The answer is: holiness."

From L.A. to Tel Aviv — A Partnership That Works,
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, January 3, 2003
"The scope and effect of projects in Israel funded by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles have always been broad. But the Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership, with its specialization in hands-on, people-to-people programming seeks to transcend mere philanthropy in order to change the attitudes of Jews in both cities and create a mutual stake in each other’s Jewish life. Most Federation philanthropic money raised for Israel in Los Angeles is still entrusted to the Jewish Agency for disbursement, while some of it goes directly to fund specific pluralism and security-related Jews in Crisis projects in Israel. Programs undertaken through the partnership program, however, are different — partly staffed from Los Angeles, planned and managed jointly with personnel in Tel Aviv and often including exchanges of staff and students. The result, say organizers, participants and even occasional Federation critics, is a remarkably successful program that may change the nature of Israel-Diaspora relations — for the better ... The curriculum was designed to make Israel a more defined part of Jewish identity for Jewish students in Los Angeles, while being Jewish would be a component of Israeli identity for the Tel Aviv participants. Semiannual steering committee meetings, alternating between Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, as well as a communications network that includes videoconferencing and visits to each other’s communities continue to guide the partnership, whose main component areas are described below ... The most visible and probably the most successful of the partnership projects — what Ed Robbins, an initiator of the partnership, calls education’s flagship — is the twinning of 12 schools in Los Angeles with schools in Tel Aviv for programs that include organized, ongoing communication and student exchanges. The twinned schools include many day schools in the Los Angeles area, as well as the public Calabasas High School, whose student population is two-thirds Jewish. At Calabasas, the focus is not on Jewish peoplehood but on Israel’s relationship to the United States. Student exchanges have slowed because of the security situation in Israel, but joint programming in the schools continues to address the subject of Israel-Diaspora relations and Jewish identity ... Curators from museums in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, have been linked for joint programming and institutional exchanges. A master class workshop in filmmaking, staffed from Los Angeles and presented at Tel Aviv University, has also brought some young Tel Aviv filmmakers to Los Angeles on internships in the film industry ... Currently, The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles allocates about $11.5 million of the approximately $40 million it collects annually to overseas projects."


Jews Stick to Their Turf,
by Joel Kotkin, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, January 3, 2002
"Philosopher Martin Buber once wrote that Jews had a 'vocation of uniqueness.' However much Jews may differ around the world, for most of their history, and in most places, they have always been somewhat apart from others in their attitudes, how they live and cope with changing conditions. The most recent census data and a largely unreleased 1997 survey of roughly 2,000 L.A. Jewish households show that this is still the case, perhaps most particularly here in Los Angeles ... Today, more than 40 percent of Jewish households in Los Angeles are in the [San Fernando] Valley while one-third are on the Westside. The Valley continues to register the biggest gains, while the population in the central city continues to shrink. Culturally, think of it as three levels of Yiddishkayt. In the most heavily Jewish areas — Encino, Beverly Hills, Fairfax, Pico-Robertson — its heavy-duty ethnic identity. The percentage of households with mostly Jewish friends rises more than 60 percent while intermarriage stays at roughly 20 percent. The levels of temple affiliation are also the highest in these precincts. In more mixed, but still Jewish areas like Valley Village, where I live, around 50 percent say most of their closest friends are Jewish, while half are intermarried. It’s not a guilded ghetto, but ethnicity has not been twinkie-ized ... [R]oughly one in five L.A. Jews was born abroad, with the largest groupings from the former Soviet Union, Iran and Israel. When their children are added, some 45 percent of L.A. Jews have at least one foreign-born parent. The immigrant influence is likely one force clearly changing L.A. Jewish culture. Many children of Israeli and Iranian Jews, for example, learn Hebrew, Farsi and Sephardic traditions that were relatively rare here a decade ago but are becoming part of Jewish life ... But one thing is certain: Jews in Los Angeles will remain a unique population, and, most important of all, they are also likely to remain."

Top Lawyer Urges Death For Families Of Bombers Lewin: 'A Policy Born of Necessity',
by Ami Eden, [Jewish] Forward, June 7, 2002
"A prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader is calling for the execution of family members of suicide bombers. Nathan Lewin, an oft-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship and legal advisor to several Orthodox organizations, told the Forward that such a policy would provide a much-needed deterrent against suicide attacks. Under the proposal, which Lewin unveiled in the current issue of the opinion journal Sh'ma, family members would be spared if they immediately condemned the bombing and refused financial compensation for the loss of their relative. (Lewin's article appears on the web at http://www.shma.com/may02/nathan.htm.) While a 20-month spate of suicide bombings has been met in the Jewish community with calls for increasingly Draconian preventive measures, Lewin appears to be the first Jewish communal leader to approve publicly of the concept of executing innocent civilians in the hopes of curbing terrorism ... Lewin argued that the biblical injunction to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek serves as a precedent in Judaism for taking measures that are 'ordinarily unacceptable' in the face of a mortal threat ... Several leading Jewish figures, including Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, argued that the plan represented a legitimate if flawed attempt to strike a balance between preventing terrorism and preserving democratic norms. But the proposal was strongly condemned by the head of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, and the executive vice chairwoman of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Hannah Rosenthal ... In an article that appeared in the Sh'ma journal alongside Lewin's essay, Brandeis University Jewish studies professor Arthur Green wrote, 'I only wonder how long it will take [Lewin], by the force of this proof-text, to go all the way and suggest that the Palestinian nation as a whole has earned the fate of Amalek [genocide]' ... Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, rejected the notion that Lewin should be elbowed out of communal life. They argued that his proposal represented a legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism. Foxman declined to take a stand on the actual proposal, citing his policy of deferring to Jerusalem on Israeli security issues. Though they declined to endorse the controversial proposal, top officials at the O.U. and Agudath Israel of America, for whom Lewin has done legal work, expressed sympathy for Lewin's efforts to curb what they described as an unprecedented wave of suicide attacks in Israel. '[Lewin] is not a Kahanist; he is not a nut,' said Richard Stone, chair of the O.U.'s Institute of Public Affairs ... Rabbi William Altshul, headmaster of the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Washington, D.C., told the Forward that he did not regret the decision to honor Lewin this week at the school's annual dinner ... Even as several observers rejected the notion of blackballing Lewin, they offered substantive critiques of his argument. Dershowitz, author of 'Why Terrorism Works' (Yale University Press, 2002), and terrorism researcher Steven Emerson, who both favor the limited use of torture to extract information about an impending terrorist attack, said that they balked at the execution of innocent civilians ... Dershowitz argued that the same level of deterrence could be achieved by leveling the villages of suicide bombers after the residents had been given a chance to evacuate (an idea Lewin disparagingly likened to "using aspirin to treat brain cancer"). Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Orthodox Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., a trained lawyer known for hawkish views on Israeli security issues, argued that a policy of mass deportations, rather than executions, could serve as an effective, but less deadly, deterrent against future attacks. Several observers defended Lewin by noting that the United States killed tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

[When multiculturalism turns against the Judeocentric hand that guided its growth, here's what you get. Arabs -- today's Jewish hypocrite declares -- are taking over France! This reads like a parody of an "anti-Semitic" complaint about Jews, but it's kosher. Don't look for the ADL to condemn this article as "hate."]
Give the French to Canada,
by Arlene Peck, Israel Insider, January 13, 2002
"It’s a good thing that I’m a columnist instead of a reporter. Then I don’t have to be politically correct. I’m allowed to give my opinion of the subject that I write about. Folks, when it comes to the French, my opinion of them is pretty low ... Actually, today, I almost have to smile when I see how they’ve pandered to and embraced the Arabs so much that they are slowly taking over the country. I truly believe that within ten years the French culture will be taken over by mosques and Middle Eastern restaurants at every corner. I wonder how long it will be before the French women will be wearing burqas. Not such an impossible thought when you consider the increasing Islamic influence in French society, and a result of Islam’s thirst for world domination ... Yet we also have power. They have to know that actions have repercussions. We, as a people, have political, ethical and financial resources greater than those of the Jew-haters who are now crawling out of the woodwork and marching in the Palestinian marches. I will never buy anything French again, ever!"

[There are a number of genetic diseases that have comparatively high incidences in the Jewish community. So where did these come from, if not from traditional Jewish marriage patterns?]
Cousin unions addressed,
Star-Tribune (Mineapolis), Jan. 17, 2003
"One of the more talked-about bill introductions Thursday was a proposal to eliminate Minnesota's law against marriages between first cousins. The bill is sponsored by DFL Reps. Phyllis Kahn of Minneapolis and Cy Thao of St. Paul. They say recent scientific studies conclude that children of first cousins are at no greater risk of genetic defects than others. Thao, one of two Hmong legislators, said such unions are not uncommon in that culture. Kahn said the law also is a problem for Somali immigrants. Rep. Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, joked that the bill would appear to conflict with Gov. Tim Pawlenty's oft-stated promise 'not to turn us into another Arkansas.'"

2002 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion,
American Jewish Committee, December 16, 2002 - January 5, 2003
[EXCERPTS]
"The 2002 survey was conducted for the American Jewish Committee by Market Facts, Inc., a leading survey-research organization. Respondents were interviewed by telephone during December 16, 2002 - January 5, 2003 ...
* 2. Do you think that Americans will or will not have to give up some of their personal freedoms in order to make the country safe from terrorist attacks? Will 78 Will not 20 Not sure 2 ...
* 3. Here are some increased powers of investigation that law enforcement agencies might use when dealing with people suspected of terrorist activity, which would also affect our civil liberties. For each, please say if you would favor or oppose it.
* Expanded undercover activities to penetrate groups under suspicion. 86 [FAVOR] 12 [OPPOSE] 2 [NOT SURE]
* Adoption of a national I.D. system for all U.S. citizens. 67, 30, 3
* Expanded camera surveillance on streets and in public places. 65, 33, 3
* Profiling of people and searching them based on their nationality, race, or religion. 35, 62, 2
* 7. How close do you feel to Israel? Very close 29 Fairly close 44 Fairly distant 20 Very distant 6 Not sure 1
* 8. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "Caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew." Agree 73 Disagree 26 Not sure 1
* 9. Have you ever been to Israel? No 63 Yes - once 20 Yes - more than once 17
* 21. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "Regardless of their individual views on the peace negotiations with the Arabs, American Jews should support the policies of the duly elected government of Israel." Agree 61 Disagree 36 Not sure 4
* 26. Which do you think is better for the United States - to encourage immigrants to blend into American culture by giving up some important aspects of their own culture, or to encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture more strongly, even if that means they do not blend in as well? Blend in 61 Maintain own culture 31 Both 4 Not sure 4
* 28. Do you favor or oppose government aid to parochial or other religious schools? Favor 22 Oppose 76 Not sure 2
34. How important would you say being Jewish is in your own life? Very important 50 Fairly important 38 Not very important 12
* 35. Which one of the following qualities do you consider most important to your Jewish identity? Being part of the Jewish people 41 Religious observance 13 Support for Israel 5 A commitment to social justice 21 Something else 18 Not sure 2
38. In your opinion, which is a greater threat to Jewish life in the United States today--intermarriage or anti-Semitism? Intermarriage 31 Anti-Semitism 66 Both equally (Vol.) 2 Not sure 2
* 43. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "Virtually all positions of influence in the United States are open to Jews." Agree 56 Disagree 44 Not sure 0

[A Jewish scholar declares below the difference between Judaism and Christianity: The Jewish faith sanctions "hate." Christianity does not. This is arguably the origin of all Jewish problems. Jews "hate" anti-Semites, and -- by Jewish doctrine -- that is virtually everyone.]
The Virtue of Hate,
by Meir Y. Soloveichik, First Things, January 2003: 41-46.
"An examination of the respective replies of Christians and Jews reveals a remarkable contrast. 'When the first edition of The Sunflower was published,' writes Dennis Prager, 'I was intrigued by the fact that all the Jewish respondents thought Simon Wiesenthal was right in not forgiving the repentant Nazi mass murderer, and that the Christians thought he was wrong.' ... [In Jewish religious tradition] Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. And lest one dismiss Samuel’s and Samson’s anger as exhibitions of male machismo, it bears mentioning that the prophetess Deborah appears to relish the gruesome death of her enemy, the Philistine Sisera, who had, fittingly, been executed by another woman. Every bloody detail is recounted in Deborah’s ebullient song: Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite Of tent–dwelling women most blessed. She put her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workmen’s mallet. She struck Sisera a blow, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple. He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet; At her feet he sank, he fell; there he sank, there he fell dead ... In his At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, journalist Yossi Klein Halevi speaks with Johanna, a Catholic nun who is struck by the hatred Israelis bear for their enemies. Johanna tells of an Israeli Hebrew teacher 'who was very close to us. She told us how her young son hates Saddam. . . . She said it with such enthusiasm. She was so proud of her son.' 'I realized,' Johanna concluded, 'that hatred is in the Jewish religion.' She was right .... During my regular weekly coffees with my friend Fr. Jim White, an Episcopal priest, there was one issue to which our conversation would incessantly turn, and one on which we could never agree: Is an utterly evil man—Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden—deserving of a theist’s love? I could never stomach such a notion, while Fr. Jim would argue passionately in favor of the proposition. Judaism, I would argue, does demand love for our fellow human beings, but only to an extent. 'Hate' is not always synonymous with the terribly sinful. While Moses commanded us “not to hate our brother in our hearts,” a man’s immoral actions can serve to sever the bonds of brotherhood between himself and humanity. Regarding a rasha, a Hebrew term for the hopelessly wicked, the Talmud clearly states: mitzvah lisnoso—one is obligated to hate him ... [A] theological chasm remains between the Jewish and Christian viewpoints on the matter. As we can see from Samson’s rage, Judaism believes that while forgiveness is often a virtue, hate can be virtuous when one is dealing with the frightfully wicked. Rather than forgive, we can wish ill; rather than hope for repentance, we can instead hope that our enemies experience the wrath of God. There is, in fact, no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous. Indeed, Christianity’s founder acknowledged his break with Jewish tradition on this matter from the very outset ... God, Jesus argues, loves the wicked, and so must we. In disagreeing, Judaism does not deny the importance of imitating God; Jews hate the wicked because they believe that God despises the wicked as well. Among Orthodox Jews, there is an oft–used Hebrew phrase whose equivalent I have not found among Christians. The phrase is yemach shemo, which means, may his name be erased. It is used whenever a great enemy of the Jewish nation, of the past or present, is mentioned. For instance, one might very well say casually, in the course of conversation, 'Thank God, my grandparents left Germany before Hitler, yemach shemo, came to power.' Or: 'My parents were murdered by the Nazis, yemach shemam.' Can one imagine a Christian version of such a statement? Would anyone speak of the massacres wrought by 'Pol Pot, may his name be erased'? Do any Christians speak in such a way? Has any seminary student ever attached a Latin equivalent of yemach shemo to the names 'Pontius Pilate' or 'Judas'? Surely not. Christians, I sense, would find the very notion repugnant, just as many Jews would gag upon reading the Catholic rosary: 'O my Jesus . . . lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.” Why, then, this remarkable disagreement between faiths? Why do Jews and Christians respond so differently to wickedness? Why do Jews refuse at times to forgive? And if the Hebrew prophets and judges believed ardently in the 'virtue of hate,' what about Christianity caused it to break with its Old Testament roots? ... [M]y grandfather, a rabbi, joined those on the Israeli right in condemning the Oslo process, arguing that it would produce a terrorist state responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. As a rabbinical student, I could not understand my grandfather’s unremitting opposition. He was, I thought, so blinded by his hate that he was unable to comprehend the powerful potential of the peace process. Now, many hundreds of Jewish victims of suicide bombings later, and fifty years after the Holocaust, the importance and the necessity of Jewish hate has once again been demonstrated."

SA Jews 'ready to work for democratic society',
Monda Paper (University of Cape Town, South Africa), October 4-11, 1999
"One of the survey's notable findings indicated that despite having lived in a racially divided society for about 50 years, the majority of the country's Jews (54%) positively identify themselves as South Africans. Seven percent said that they feel 'more South African than Jewish', while 47% consider themselves 'equally South African and Jewish' ... As regards their Jewish identity, the majority of the respondents indicated that they feel strongly about their Jewishness, with 49% feeling 'extremely conscious of being Jewish', and 41% 'quite strongly Jewish'. According to the report, there is a general trend towards a strengthening of Jewish identity that is taking place alongside the political changes in South Africa. The survey also indicated that South African Jewry is by and large more Orthodox in religious outlook and behaviour than British or American Jewry. Thirty-six percent believe that the Torah is the actual word of God, compared to 15% in the UK and 13% in the US. In addition, 39% of the respondents attend synagogue each week, while 91% fast on Yom Kippur. According to the study, Israel continues to be a point of Jewish communal consensus, a focus of fundraising activity and a force of cohesion. The report said that overall South African Jews are Zionist, 54% feeling a strong attachment and 33% a moderate attachment to Israel. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents have visited Israel at least one."

Jews, non-Jews differ on religion in public life,
Express-Times (Pennsylvannia), February 04, 2003
"A survey of Jews in the Lehigh Valley indicates they are three times as likely as non-Jews to say there is too much religion in public life. Jews want a deeper division between church and state than non-Jews, according to a study by the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. Thirty-seven percent of Jews reported that there is too much religion in public life while just 12 percent of non-Jews thought so. 'Being a religious minority, Jews are much more concerned and cautious about encroachment on the separation of church and state,' said Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg. 'A lot of those longstanding beliefs still hold true, especially in the Lehigh Valley' ... The survey polled 526 Jews in the Lehigh Valley, including homes in Easton, Bethlehem and Allentown. The numbers were matched against similar surveys of non-Jews. Among the findings: ( There is a huge gap between Jews and non-Jews about a U.S. approach to solving the crisis between Israelis and Palestinians. Sixty-six percent of non-Jews said the United States should be 'even-handed' in its relationship between Israel and Palestinians while 65 percent of Jews said the United States should be more favorable to Israel) ... 'Because Jews are traditionally more liberal, you might expect more divergence of opinion about war,' Borick says. 'But I think you're seeing the effect of the safety and security of Israel swaying some of the Jewish opinion on that particular issue.' ( Jews are more liberal than non-Jews on many policy issues. Sixty-three percent of Jews favor the legal marriage of gays and lesbians while just 29 percent of non-Jews approved of same-sex marriages. The majority of Jews (57 percent) also support scientific research relating to cloning while just 29 percent of non-Jews support it. Jews also overwhelmingly support stem cell research (92 percent) and making it possible for doctors to give terminally ill patients the means to end their lives (84 percent) ... ( Jews view evangelical Christians more unfavorably (41 percent favorable) than any of 15 groups and institutions in the survey, including Muslims (51 percent favorable)."

[The curtains lifted on the Jewish collective aptitude to "hate":]
Critics Unforgiving of a Jewish Scholar's Defense of 'Hate' Reporter's Notebook,
[Jewish] Forward, February 14, 2003
"In an article in this month's issue of the conservative religion journal First Things, Orthodox rabbi Meir Soloveichik relates the story of a Catholic nun stunned by the hatred that Israelis bear for their enemies. After witnessing the pride of an Israeli friend whose son exhibited a loathing for Saddam Hussein, the nun concluded, 'hatred is in the Jewish religion.' It is a striking observation, one that might evoke suspicions of historic, theologically based Christian antisemitism. But Soloveichik, a scion of an illustrious rabbinical family, has this to say about the nun: 'She was right.' In an article titled 'The Virtue of Hate,' Soloveichik, a graduate student at the Yale Divinity School, resident scholar at the Jewish Center in New York City and Beren Fellow at Yeshiva University, illustrates the divergent Christian and Jewish attitudes of forgiveness. Christians, taking their cues from Jesus, bestow forgiveness on saints and sinners alike, whereas Jews insist that 'while no human being is denied the chance to become worthy of God's love, not every human being engages in actions so as to be worthy of that love, and those unworthy of divine love do not deserve our love either.' This Jewish tradition comes alive in Soloveichik's references to prominent biblical figures, including Samson, who is portrayed heroically as he smites the Philistines who gouged out his eyes; the prophetess Deborah, joyous in the 'gruesome' death of her enemy Sisera; and Queen Esther who, not content with disposing of her arch-enemy Haman, magisterially calls for the heads of all of his sons, too ... Harvard Divinity School professor Jon Levenson proffered credit to Soloveichik for publishing an article in a non-Jewish journal of religion, given his illustrious last name, but fretted that Soloveichik's overstatement of the differences between Judaism and Christianity could have repercussions for the interfaith conversation. 'I'm worried about readers, especially the mostly non-Jewish readers of First Things, who will say Judaism really does believe in vengeance, an eye for an eye, sinners should just drop dead, and all that,' he said. 'It's hard for me to see why Christians would want to be sympathetic to Judaism, when it's being described as a religion that esteems hate and doesn't seem to have much of a role for repentance.' But Soloveichik gives a boost to the interfaith relationship by taking a swipe at Jewish institutions and individuals who refuse to abandon their centuries-old gripe with the Christian community. "[A] danger inherent in hate is that we may misdirect our odium at institutions in the present because of their past misdeeds," he writes. "[A]fter centuries of suffering, many Jews have, in my own experience, continued to despise religious Christians, even though it is secularists and Islamists who threaten them today, and Christians should really be seen as their natural allies.... Modern anti-Christianity is no more excusable than ancient anti-Semitism' ... For at least one Jewish leader, this point was pitch-perfect, and a message for our time. 'This is an amazing article, and he makes a compelling case,' said Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, director of the Pennsylvania Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. When editing the Reform movement's first new Haggada in three decades, Elwell reinserted significant portions that had previously been edited out, including a passage from Psalms and Lamentations in which those at the table call on God to 'Pour out your fury on the nations that do not know you.... Pursue them in wrath and destroy them from God's heavens." According to Elwell, it is important, especially in the context of religious practice, to acknowledge feelings of anger and the desire for vengeance."

Should Jews Be Parochial?,
American Prospect, Undated, Vol. 11, Issue 23
"Since 1995, when he retired from Wall Street with a fortune in excess of $300 million, [Michael Steinhardt] has poured tens of millions of dollars into Jewish causes. His Jewish Life Network, run by a small rabbi-rich staff working out of an office building near Times Square, has become a hothouse of ideas for promoting Jewish identity and awareness. In just the past three years, Steinhardt has created a cultural center in New York for Jewish singles, called Makor; helped launch Birthright Israel, a program to send young Jews to Israel free of charge; helped form Synagogue Transformation and Renewal (STAR), a campaign to revitalize America's synagogues; funded a network of Jewish outreach workers on college campuses; and, in his most impassioned undertaking, formed a partnership to build a network of Jewish day schools across the country--an enterprise that, with its echoes of the Catholic parochial schools, has caused much controversy. In the process, Steinhardt is helping to transform Jewish philanthropy. For most of the past century, Jews have given money through the monolithic Federation system. Each community had its own Federation, which carried out an annual appeal. These campaigns--legendary in their ability to hit up every Jewish household in an area--raised as much as $1 billion a year. Part of that money went overseas to defend Israel and to help Jews in places like the Soviet Union. The rest was spent at home--on 'defense' organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, which fought discrimination, as well as on hospitals, community centers, homes for the aged, and other service institutions. While set up to help Jews, these institutions came to serve needy populations in general. But the old rallying cries--Israeli security abroad, anti-Semitism at home--no longer serve. Jews today tend to be wealthier and more secure than ever, and, as the nomination of Joe Lieberman for vice president shows, no quarter of American society is off limits to them. Moreover, Jewish donors want more say over how their money is spent. Today, there are more than 4,000 foundations that give to Jewish causes. Of these, 20 or so 'megadonors' stand out. In addition to Michael Steinhardt, they include Charles and Edgar Bronfman, co-chairs of the Seagram Company; film maker Steven Spielberg, head of the Shoah and Righteous Persons foundations; Leslie Wexner, owner of the Limited and Victoria's Secret; Laurence Tisch, chairman of the Loews Corporation; Charles Schusterman, head of a lucrative oil-and-gas business in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Mort Mandel of Cleveland, a retired distributor of electronics parts. Every year, these men (and they are all men) give as much as $300 million of the more than $1 billion given by Jewish foundations. And their influence is magnified by their tendency to collaborate. Twice a year or so, the megadonors meet for a night and a day to discuss their faith and their money. They listen to guest speakers, study Jewish texts, and, most importantly, exchange ideas on how they might work to save Judaism. And Judaism, they believe, desperately needs saving. With American Jews no longer facing annihilation or suffering serious discrimination, they are now thought to face a more insidious threat: assimilation. And so these philanthropists have launched a movement to expand and revitalize old institutions like schools and synagogues, and to set up new ones like singles centers and Israel tours--all part of a gathering movement to kindle a Jewish renaissance... [Steinhardt] was drawn to Israel, though, and after the Six Day War, he began visiting it on an annual basis. In the mid-1980s, Steinhardt became active politically. A centrist Democrat, he gave large sums to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and in 1985 became its chairman. He also helped found the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC's think tank ... ... Seeking as always to put his own stamp on things, Steinhardt has financed the Jewish Campus Service Corps to reach out to unaffiliated Jews. The outreach workers--students who receive $25,000 to remain on campus for a year after graduating--give talks, organize a cappella singing groups, and hold kosher sushi-rolling parties. There are 83 'Steinhardt fellows' around the country, constituting what Richard Joel calls 'a Jewish peace corps.' Far larger in scope, and visibility, is Birthright Israel, a program that sends young Jews to Israel ... Prior to the lunch (brisket and couscous), Steinhardt, standing before a billowing white tent, told the group that "we are committed to making day schools the bedrock of Jewish education for klal Yisrael, the people of Israel."

Ancient Indian Jewish Community Faces Unclear Future,
Reuters, March 1, 2003
"India's Bene Israelis, or Children of Israel, have dwindled to barely 4,000 from a peak of about 80,000 a few decades ago as thousands moved to Israel for a better life. 'India is our motherland, but Israel is our fatherland,' says Abraham Jacob Awaskar, treasurer of Alibag's whitewashed Magen Aboth synagogue, which is nearly a century old. Extensive DNA testing has found the Bene Israelis, clustered in and around the western city of Bombay, are direct descendants of a hereditary Israelite priesthood that can be traced back 3,000 years to Moses' brother, Aaron. On Alibag's Israel Lane around the corner from the synagogue, the Wakrulkars, one of the last three families in the alley, is preparing to sell out and join their sons in Israel. 'We are Jews. The biggest thing for us is our faith,' explains 68-year-old Mozel Moses Wakrulkar. 'In these last days of my life, I want to be in Israel with my kids. Over the years, everybody has gone. In my mind, I have this longing to be there.' Around 175 B.C., a boatload of Jews fleeing persecution was shipwrecked on India's west coast a few miles from Alibag. Legend says only a few men and women survived to found a community that stayed genetically pure through the centuries ... Now only a handful of families remain in Alibag and many of them plan to follow their friends and family to Israel, where they can draw a pension worth a fortune in India ... Some of the Alibag Bene Israelis do occasionally go to Hindu temples with their neighbors. 'We do have friends, we do mix, but we don't get close,' says Mozel. For the local Hindus, the Bene Israelis have always been something of an oddity, often mistaken for an obscure kind of Muslim. Even the synagogue is known locally as a masjid, or mosque. 'I miss them. I feel bad they have gone,' says Prakash Ranade, a 58-year-old quarry owner. 'But they have gone to their own country. Although they lived in India, they always thought of Israel as their own country.'"

[The Baltimore Jewish News gives public forum -- with no condemnation -- to an unrepentant Jewish Charles Manson. Why? Unless this world view is of interest in some Jewish quarters. Go to the original and read it in full.]
Catching up with the man who almost started World War III,
by Alan Feiler, Baltimore Jewish News, March 6, 2003
"Twenty-one years ago next month, Alan Harry Goodman, a 37-year-old Jew born and raised in Baltimore, made world headlines by storming Jerusalem's Temple Mount compound — the holiest site in Judaism and third holiest site in Islam — and beginning a shooting spree that killed a 65-year-old Muslim guard and wounded four others. In the 20-minute attack, Mr. Goodman ran into the Dome of the Rock mosque, where he eventually was overpowered by Israeli police. During a riot in the compound immediately following the attack, an 18-year-old Arab female passer-by was killed by Israeli police and seven others were wounded. Riots also immediately broke out in other parts of the city and in the West Bank, wounding scores of people. Mr. Goodman, who during the attack was wearing his Israeli army uniform and carrying an M-16 automatic rifle issued weeks earlier during basic training, said he intended to 'liberate' the Temple Mount from Muslim control. After serving 15 1/2 years in the Israeli prison system, Mr. Goodman was released and sent back to the United States in October 1997. He was freed early by the Israeli parole board on condition that he would spend the following eight years outside of Israel ... An articulate, gregarious man ('Call Me Alan') fond of quality cigars and Chinese buffets, Mr. Goodman was unabashedly candid throughout the three-hour interview about his hatred of Arabs, the media and left-leaning American Jews while fiercely proud of his actions on the Temple Mount.
[QUESTION]: Are you frustrated with your lack of recognition in the Jewish community?
[Goodman]: No, it's better this way. What do I want to be recognized for? They don't care. But outside of these cheap little pseudo-liberal Jewish groups that control the Israeli media, almost every Israeli I encountered showed me support and solidarity. The hundreds and hundreds of prisoners, they all showed me support and solidarity, except for four or five and they were really crazy. All the police in Jerusalem, the prison guards, they couldn't be nicer ...
[QUESTION]: Do you have any regrets? The only thing I regret now, in the light of these endless Arab atrocities, is not shooting more Arabs in the mosque. There were about seven or eight workers in the mosque. These guys were a higher-value target. These were grown males. But at that moment, I just couldn't shoot them. They seemed so frightened. It was a moment of Jewish weakness.
[QUESTION]: No other regrets? I have no regrets about what I did. The only regret is that I didn't execute every Arab Nazi in Jerusalem, which is every boy Arab from 15 to 55. My only regret is the Arabs that the Israelis have not killed. The Israelis have a lot of weapons and arguably the second most powerful air force in the world, and the most accurate. They have 250,000 napalm bombs, or maybe twice that many by now. They've got 250,000 cluster bombs, and maybe twice that many. And probably a minimum of 1,000 atomic and hydrogen and neutron bombs. I regret they have not dropped their nuclear weapons on every one of these Arab Nazi entities from Algiers to Baghdad ...
[QUESTION]: Was your intention to start World War III?
[GOODMAN]: I sincerely hoped to. Absolutely. I thought I had done my life's work. But now with these atrocities every day, yakety-yak, I've got to go back. I sincerely hope to go back [to the Temple Mount] in nearly three years. [In a lower voice] What I want to do is attack the Arabs again with whatever is available — a rifle, a pistol, a napalm bomb, a neutron bomb, whatever they've got ...
[QUESTION]: Why do you repeatedly call Arabs 'Nazi pigs'?
[GOODMAN]: That's exactly what they are, a bunch of Nazi pigs. These atrocities against these innocent Israeli civilians and these Americans on 9/11 have nothing to do with war or politics. This is genocide. These are not suicide bombers but homicide bombers.
[QUESTION]: But what about the Druze and other Arabs who support Israel?
[GOODMAN]: Arabs are a schizophrenic people. On the outside, they rape and murder and steal and complain about everything when they have the best life of any group of people anywhere in the world. If there is a good Arab, what does that mean? In war, you kill off the enemy as sufficiently as you can. There is no murder in war, it does not matter if someone on the other side is good or not good. The question is to hit the enemy and his most valuable targets. That's what I tried to do. The Israelis should have laid waste to the [Arabs] within a week or two after these atrocities started a couple of years ago. They should have laid waste to Bethlehem and Hebron and Jericho within weeks of when these atrocities began. These precision attacks, it's not going to do it.
[QUESTION]: The media has portrayed you as mentally deranged.
[GOODMAN]: That's what reporters do. They print whatever agrees with their prejudices. The entire Israeli news media is ultra- liberal. And these Jew bastards who control the American media are ultra-liberal. And they are not going to paint a good picture of any Jew who acts and speaks for Jewish rights."

One man's vituperation is another man's culture,
Haaretz (Israel), March 10, 2003
"On February 26, a 'Back to Religion' extravaganza was held at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, featuring a keynote - and controversial - speaker, Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak. In spite of the objections of the director-general of the Cameri itself, and of the company that owns the theater building, neither of which is keen to host these sort of rallies at the Cameri, the theater signed a contract with Yitzhak's representatives. Subsequently, when the theater tried to repudiate the agreement, the court ruled that the contract was valid and that the rally would indeed be held ... What secular Jews can expect Amnon Yitzhak is well-known for his extreme statements and apocalyptic prophesies about secular Jews. The Haredim, meanwhile, are portrayed as pure and saintly. For instance, Yitzhak predicts, 'The day will come when it will be 1,500 degrees on Planet Earth, and then the secular will be burned like mosquitoes in electrical traps, and will give off the same kind of sounds - tzz, tzz, tzz. And their saintly Haredi neighbors will not understand what these sounds are or to where their secular neighbors have vanished.' Yitzhak once created an uproar when he compared Herzl to Hitler. 'There were two great criminals in the history of the Jewish people - Hitler and Herzl. Hitler wanted to destroy the body of the Jewish people. Herzl wanted to destroy the soul, which is much more important than the body.' Guests at one of Yitzhak's lectures were shocked to hear his commentary on the Holocaust: 'It was a scheme of God's, meant to reprove us for all of the generations of the Enlightenment,' referring to the movement that aimed to bring Orthodox Judaism into the modern world. Another show of public insensitivity dates to July 1997, when Ramat Gan residents were invited to an evening 'filled with humor and attractions' that was dedicated to "praying for the souls of the 73 victims of the helicopters tragedy,' with Yitzhak's participation. Yitzhak has also made his share of unusual statements in regard to Arabs. 'If an Arab gets on the bus, everyone runs to the back. Out of fear. Who's willing to sit with his back to an Arab?' asked the rabbi."

[God bless Israeli "democracy." Level the playing field: starting tomorrow, any Jew who wants to get married in America and can't prove they're Christian must get married in some other country.]
Rabbinical panel determining `proof of Judaism' is dissolved,
Haaretz (Israel), March 12, 2003
"Immigrants who arrived here after 1990 and were sent to a special rabbinical committee to be 'approved' as Jews in order to marry will no longer be required to appear before the panel. The decision came following the state's dissolving the committee in response to a High Court petition by New Family, a non-profit organization devoted to helping couples interested in getting married but facing bureaucratic problems. The panel was established in 1990 due to a Chief Rabbinate decision requiring new immigrants to present 'proof of Judaism' as a condition for getting married in a religious ceremony. At first, the couples were sent to "regular" rabbinical courts, but following complaints over delays that included long lines, a special committee was established in Jerusalem to handle immigrant couples from throughout the country. Although the institution was called a committee, all the trappings of a rabbinical court, including a fee, were evident. The 'judges' were ordinary rabbis, not rabbinical judges, who were selected for their command of Yiddish and Russian. Their job was to test the new immigrants' knowledge of Jewish tradition. The head of New Family, Dr. Irit Rosenbloom, said many of the immigrants failed to pass the committee's tests. As a result, they could not get married in Israel but had to get married in civil courts overseas. 'Their favorite test, was `the Yiddish test',' said Rosenbloom. She said that in one case, an immigrant was requested to bring his elderly mother to the committee: when she was unable to communicate with the rabbis in Yiddish, the man and his fiance were told they were not Jewish and could not get married ... She added the demand to present 'proof of Judaism' was immoral and violated international law. Despite the decision to dissolve the panel, there is still no possibility of civil marriage: the marriage registrar - a rabbinical court officer - will decide whether the couple is Jewish."

[Disgusting Jewish hypocrisy: case #12,387. The Jews' own "Protocols of the Elders of Russia." Since the U.S. is following the Israeli model in pre-emptive assassinations, torture, alienating the world, turning into a Police State, and so forth (thanks to the Jewish Lobby), let us follow their lovely model below from the Middle East's "only democracy": American Jews shall henceforth not be allowed to organize as an ethnic minority. Synagogues are hereby banned, anything Jewish is institutionally ignored, etc.]
Nixing the ethnics. Israel's ethnic Russians want autonomy, an NPO of their own and eventually, a Russian village, complete with a church. But the state perceives them as a threat to the country's Jewish character,
Haaretz, (Israel) March 14, 2003
"In the midst of a long conversation, Maxim Mushkalev [a non-Jew who moved to Israel with his Jewish wife, since divorced] began to weep. He was describing how all kinds of people he knows here beg him in tears: 'Take me to church. I haven't been there for so long,' but he cannot always help them. It seemed, though, that Mushkelev was not only weeping for others' distress, but rather for himself and his fate as a member of the minority of 'ethnic' - that is, non-Jewish - Russians who are living in the Jewish state ... When he talks about his life and the life of the non-Jewish Russian community in Israel, he uses terms that Jews use when talking about life in the Diaspora. He is worried about assimilation and a life here that could erode the heritage and culture that the exiles have brought with them. He also feels hostility and suspicion from his Jewish surroundings when someone notices the cross he wears around his neck ... Mushkelev has been active in an attempt to organize the ethnic Russians in Israel. This effort is headed by Anatoly Gresimov ... Gresimov has been investing all his energy in setting up a registered association of ethnic Russians. There are now 50 people active in the group, the potential of which Gresimov estimates at about a quarter of a million in Israel, most of them secular and a minority of them observant Christians. In a long letter he sent a few days ago to President Moshe Katsav, as well as in negotiations with other officials, Gresimov refers to international conventions on the rights of national minorities, without specifically demanding that the state recognize the ethnic minority he represents. 'Our main aims are preserving Russian culture and creating mechanisms of integration between it and Israeli culture,' wrote Gresimov. 'It is important to us, the Russian Israelis, that the State of Israel accept us as we are.' He has not yet had a reply from the president. The ethnic Russians are posing a new challenge to the state. During all the years of its existence, Israel has defined itself as a state of aliyah - Jewish immigration. In recent years Israel has become a state of immigration in the more general sense of the word, and it seems as though no one has any idea how to deal with this fundamental change. The existence here of approximately 250,000 non-Jewish Russians, and their attempts to organize themselves on a national basis, is perceived as a threat to the Jewish character of the state. 'We have a lot in common with the Russian Jews," says Gresimov. "We grew up on the same language, we went to the same schools. But nevertheless, we are two distinct peoples - Jews and Russians. There is Jewish culture and there is Russian culture. Therefore we want to organize. Every Jewish community maintains ties with the mother state - so why shouldn't we maintain connections with Russia? The desire of minorities to organize on the basis of nationality and culture is a natural process in every normal state.' This opinion is not shared in Israel in general, and especially not at the office of the Registrar of Non-Profit Associations. Last year 'The Russian Ethnic Group' repeatedly applied to be registered as a non-profit association. In the form they filled out, they defined their aims:'"Help in the complete integration of Russian Israelis into Israeli society. Legal and social support for Russians who live in the State of Israel.' For a year, their application has been refused. 'They are a body that wants autonomy within Israel and to damage the Jewish character of the state,' the registrar of NPOs, Amiram Bogatt, told Haaretz. 'The right to organize cannot be exploited to hurt the state. We have received additional material that clarifies their real intentions' ... Arkady Mazin, a journalist who serves as an advisor to MK Roman Bronfman (Meretz), relates that Gresimov contacted his non-Jewish mother, a successful painter, in aneffort to recruit artists to his organization ...'The new regime in Russia is trying to create a network of influence around the world, built on people from Russia in various diasporas, among them Israel. If we aren't careful, there is a danger that these people will become a foreign country's agents of influence, even if unwittingly. Even though I immigrated to Israel as a child, I'm still afraid of the remnants of the Soviet regime, and President Putin among them. He is now making a concentrated effort to unite all the Russian emigres around the world, and not just out of altruism' ... Among the immediate aims, alongside social and cultural activities, is the establishment of a legal aid center to help the ethnic Russians with the special problems they encounter - like people who get fired because they wear a cross. Mushkelev also wants to set up a center for the dissemination of information about injuries to Russian Christians in Israel on the model of Jewish organizations that disseminate information to the media about injuries to Jews anywhere in the world. Thus, for example, he wants to bring to the world's attention the Russian schoolgirl in Netanya who was beaten up by a gang of Jewish girls and left crippled. The big dream includes the establishment of a 'Russian village' in central Israel."

Why Study Ashkenazim? How Jewish Participants Are Especially Able to Help Researchers Understand Mental Illness Genetics,
John Hopkins Medicine,
"Jewish individuals are in a unique position to assist scientists in the understanding of genetic disorders. Due to a long history of marriage within the faith, which extends back thousands of years, the Jewish community has emerged from a limited number of ancestors and has a similar genetic makeup. This allows researchers to more easily perform genetic studies and locate disease-causing genes. The following slides provide a graphic representation of variation. Due to the history of marriage within the faith, individuals of Jewish descent have less variety in their genetic makeup. This reduction in variability makes it easier for us to locate disease-causing genes ... Is our community still especially useful? Yes. Even though the Jewish genetic lineage is not as "pure" as it used to be, the long history of marriage within the culture still results in a more similar genetic background. This is why our Johns Hopkins study is able to accept participants with only one Jewish parent. There is already a potential for discrimination against Jewish individuals, as well as those with mental illness. With this in mind, why focus on the Jewish community? The concern for discrimination is valid, and we understand that participation is not an easy decision for many participants. As described previously, the Jewish community offers great potential to facilitate genetics studies. The more quickly we are able to locate risk genes for these disorders, the more quickly we can expect to offer improved treatments and medications for severe mental illnesses. In addition, we hope that a gene discovery will lead to a better public understanding of mental illness and a reduction in stigma. Potential volunteers must weigh the pros and cons of the study before deciding to participate."

Better a Jew,
by Nicky Blackburn, Haaretz (Israel) April 24, 2003
"For the growing minority of non-Jews living in Israel, a sense of belonging can be impossible to achieve. Just recently, former MK Michael Kleiner described non-Jewish immigrants to Israel as 'dirty water.' He applied the metaphor to Russian immigrants, but his racist statement was also aimed at me. The only difference is that I'm the dirty water that slopped in from England, not Russia. Kleiner's comments are not unusual in Israel. For years now I've been listening to politicians, public officials, even ordinary people spilling out bile toward the non-Jewish citizens of the country. Living in Israel as a gentile is not an easy experience. There is always someone out there to remind you that not only do you not belong, but that in some way you are polluting the purity of the country. During my early years in Israel, the first question people asked me was whether or not I was Jewish. It was like an obsession. In taxicabs, at bus stops, at interviews, at work, even in the supermarket, the question followed me everywhere and anywhere. 'Are you Jewish?' I lied about it twice. The first time to a taxi driver. He eyed me suspiciously and then launched into a tirade about his brother who had married a goy and gone to live in America. 'It's people like him who are destroying the Jewish race,' he told me angrily, his eyes locked on mine in the mirror.'"I cannot forgive him' ... I met my Israeli husband in India in 1990. We lived in England for a few years and then decided to move to Israel and get married. Before we left, my husband asked if I would convert to Judaism. He told me it was important for both him and his family. I agreed. I'm not a practicing Christian. I only went to church on special occasions. My faith went so far as the morning assembly at my Church of England school and the Lord's Prayer. I was open to Judaism. I thought that becoming Jewish would be an intellectual and emotional challenge. I thought it would bring me closer to my husband's family and my new way of life. I expected it to give me great insight into the Jewish people. In retrospect it did, but certainly not in the positive way I was anticipating ... After talking with the [Orthodox] rabbi [to convert to Judaism], my husband and I realized that it would be impossible to convert this way. We were already married and our lifestyle in Tel Aviv was far from that required by the Orthodox. We started looking for alternatives, and found a rabbi who would be willing to help me convert for NIS 600 a week. The rabbi lived in an Orthodox suburb in the hills surrounding Jerusalem. Twice a week we sat in his tiny, dark apartment studying at the dining room table. Whenever I asked a question he would snap at me angrily. 'Don't ask questions. It's a matter of faith. You're not supposed to understand. You're just supposed to believe.' Sometimes he would ask a question and as I made to reply, he would bark out 'wrong!' Whenever possible, he criticized the Christian religion. He told me it had been set up for people who were too lazy to live by Jewish rules, by people looking for an easy life. On one occasion he told me that Baruch Goldstein should be praised for killing 29 Arabs in an attack in Hebron in 1994. Throughout those awful weekly meetings I kept quiet. I gritted my teeth, studied the books, paid him the money and did not say a word. Inside, however, I began to seethe. I was sickened by his hypocrisy. He set himself up as a man of faith, then took our money without a moment's hesitation. The more I learned about the Jewish religion in Israel, the more I realized how rife it was with corruption. The media was full of stories about Orthodox figures taking bribes, about scams and dodges carried out in the name of religion. And worse than that, it was like an open secret. Everyone knew about it, they even laughed about it, but no one was prepared to do anything to stop it. Instead they insisted that it was vital that I become Jewish. After a while I began to question this insistence. No one actually cared whether I believed in Judaism or not, not even the rabbi. No one cared whether I'd continue to celebrate Christmas or any other Christian holidays. When I told Israeli friends that I felt this was morally wrong, many sympathized, but others dismissed my fears. "It's just a game," they'd say. "Don't even think about it." All anyone seemed to care about was that it would say Jewish on my ID card, and that somehow, therefore, I would fit in. As time went by, I became increasingly distressed. I was shocked by the discrimination I saw around me toward anyone who was not Jewish. In my office, colleagues called me 'shiksa' and 'goy' as if it were a joke. They made comments about my non-Jewish appearance. Readers wrote letters of complaint if newspapers dared run adverts for Christmas festivities. The media was constantly running stories about how the Jewish race was being destroyed by assimilation. A cartoon published in 1996 showed a man sitting at a table. 'The two major threats to Jewish continuity today are - terrorism and assimilation!' he said. 'Or, in other words, the non-Jews who want to kill us - and the non-Jews who want to marry us.' Facing facts I continued visiting the rabbi, but he began to grow uneasy as stories about corruption in the conversion process began to leak to the press. Finally he told me that he could no longer help. 'You're not prepared to suffer enough to become Jewish,' he said. We next tried a rabbinical court lawyer in Jerusalem, a man with good connections to Shas. He offered to convert me for a large sum of money. We met him in a hotel on the outskirts of Jerusalem. He asked me about Jewish friends, about any connections I had with Judaism as a child. After some coaxing, I realized he was not after the truth, just some fabricated story about how, even as a child, I had always wanted to be a Jew. He told my husband to gather certificates and documents showing that I bought my meat only from Kosher butchers, that I attended synagogue, and was following the rules of the Orthodox way. By the time we left the hotel I knew that I did not want to be Jewish. I bitterly regretted my decision. I was antagonistic and hostile. I did not want to lie or cheat anymore. Not long afterward we were given details of a rabbi in Paris who would convert me for $5,000 in a simple, one-day process. By then, however, it was too late. I was so ashamed of the whole process that I could not go through with it. I felt that by converting I would actually be committing a sin. I decided, however hard it would be, that Israel would have to accept me as I was. My husband's family took the decision badly. They felt I had cheated and manipulated them, and for a long time afterward their frustration spilled over into our relationship. Very few people here understood me. Some Israeli friends felt I was making an unwarranted fuss about something very minor, while at the same time admitting that they would never dream of changing their own religion. For years after this experience, my bitterness and resentment continued to seethe. I felt let down by the country. Before arriving here, I believed that the terrible suffering the Jews have experienced over the centuries would have created a nation where tolerance and understanding was prized. Instead, I found a society full of prejudice and bigotry ... Today there is a growing minority of non-Jews who live within the Israeli community. We are full members of this society and yet we are still denied some very basic human rights. My two sons, for instance, can serve in the army, they can pay taxes, but they cannot marry here, nor can they be buried alongside Jewish friends or partners. Like me, they will spend their lives listening to constant sniping remarks by politicians and officials who feel they are second class citizens, the dirty water that slipped in on a wave of immigration. They too may have to listen to jokes about goys, sarcastic comments about their parental heritage, and have doubts raised about their Israeli identity. This, however, is a mistake. Today there are 50,000 Russian immigrants living in Israel who identify themselves as Christian, and another 270,000 who are not Jewish according to halakha. While some of them have given up and left Israel, in a few cases even seeking asylum in England on the grounds of religious persecution, the rest are here to stay. Israel must make a decision. Does it want yet another alienated minority, or does it want full citizens who feel a real bond to their country? In the wake of all this, it is hard to understand why the Orthodox community is so determined to make conversion such an unpleasant process. Every year thousands apply to convert, but only a small number make it through. Assimilation today is a major problem for diaspora Jews. Experts are beginning to realize that it is also a growing problem within Israel. At a recent conference, Dr. Asher Cohen, of Bar-Ilan University's Institute for the Study of Assimilation, reported that the present rate of intermarriage in Israel stands at 10 percent, and is rising. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, head of the Kibbutz Hadati Yeshiva, also told participants that rabbis who ease the conversion process and promote mass conversion, are actually preserving Judaism. Instead of welcoming new converts, however, Judaism shows them its worst face. Potential converts are too often met with narrow-mindedness, corruption, and distrust. While some people undertake conversion with a full heart, many others view it as a game in which you cheat and lie to win. Had I been met with understanding, then perhaps I would be Jewish now, and so would my two children. For Israel, it was a missed opportunity. Instead of teaching me to respect the religion, I learned instead to despise its protagonists ... I now have a warm relationship with my parents-in-law, whom I love dearly, and people rarely ask if I'm Jewish. Despite that, however, I still feel like an outsider. At Christmas I bring out my tree and decorate the house, but inside I feel it's almost an act of defiance. A few years ago, a co-worker arrived in the office fuming because hotels in Jerusalem had put up Christmas trees. I told her that I put up a tree every year. 'Well I hope you shut your curtains,' she said bitterly. 'It's not right that people in your neighborhood should have to see it. When you live here you should respect our beliefs.' I was deeply distressed by her prejudice, but the awful truth is that I really have begun to feel that my religion should be hidden away behind curtains. Just a few weeks ago I had another reminder. I was writing an article on Tekes, a new alternative Israeli organization set up to provide secular ceremonies for Jews who cannot, or do not want to, undergo an Orthodox ceremony. I suggested to the founder that I might also write up the article for a newspaper here. He hesitated for a few moments, and then said: 'No offense, but I think it would be better if a Jew wrote the story.'"

Jewish Attitudes Toward Immigration,
by Edward Levy, The Social Contract (Spring 1995)
"Thus, like the Biblical prophets, today's committed Jews fear assimilation as the most crucial attack on continued Jewish survival. This sense of unity leads Jews, like other ethnic groups, to care for their own, pressing for them to be accepted as immigrants. The preference is for migrants, especially Russian Jews, to go to Israel, where assimilation would be, not a loss of Jewish identity, but a way to rekindle their Jewishness, and thus their oneness with themselves and their people. But if Israel is not chosen, the next best choice is the United States, with its lack of systematic, government-sanctioned anti-semitism, its protection of individuals' rights, its laws against ethnic bias, and its tolerance for individual religious choices. The Talmudic concept of being for yourself but not for yourself alone would be interpreted as if I want something, I must support the right of others to have it, too. Jewish advocacy groups might, then, like to ignore other ethnic lobbies; but if the way to get Jews in is to get others in too, then so be it."

The Crack of the Whip,
by Emanuel A. Winston, Gamla, September 16, 1998
"It would appear that the European nations have once again surfaced as operational anti-Semites with the whip in hand. Since 1944, when World War II ended and with the exposure of their participation of anti-Jewish horrors, the Europeans have kept their profile low but no longer. Although they worked in secret concert with the Arabs against the new born Jewish State, they could not (until now) attack the Jews boldly, as they wished to. In recent years all of the European nations were exposed to having criminally conspired to financially benefit from their theft of Jewish possessions during Hitler's war years ... Yes, they (the Europeans) were all involved in massive theft and they hate the Jews even more now as their venality is exposed to the world. Now the Europeans are openly attacking the Jewish State both in the mode of Jews hatred and the approval (read: contracts) they hope to receive from the Arabs through the abortive Oslo Accords. They hide behind that high level of approval for Arafat and his Palestinian terrorists. Suddenly, a terrible murderer and a violent people are the darlings of the Europeans as their present instrument of hatred. I think, if oil was not underfoot and money to be made in selling weapons, those sensitive, noble Europeans would view Arabs as the English do...wogs or ragheads. As any prostitute can tell you, for a fee they will agree to do anything you want. The Europeans are really a low, immoral people who would sell their mother...and then deliver. At the moment, regardless of which agreement they break with Israel, the Europeans are firmly behind Arafat and the radical Arab nations. While it could be enough to get the lucrative contracts to sell weapons, including conventional and non-conventional weapons of mass destruction, the deep dark reason is they simply hate Jews. How easily any sense of humanity of civilization slips away from their face, leaving only the beast. This beast has many faces and names. Sometimes they are called Germans, Poles, Croatians, Ukrainians... While at other times they became the Church, the Red Cross, or Prime Ministers, Kings, Fuhrer. Then, in a quick change, we see some Americans, French, English and, finally, there is the contaminated Jew called the Leftist. It doesn't really matter, this name or that. Underneath there is strand, a bond that society teaches children to hate the "other" - the different ones. These are people of ultimate evil as the beast stays just below the surface, ready to savage, ready to kill the Jew. The planet would be well rid of the European predator. Perhaps we will be fortunate to live in such interesting times (an old Chinese curse), to see the decline and disappearance of the graveyard called Europe. Never mind, that Jes-s was a Jew, as good "Christians", they only regret that Hitler didn't finish the job. Even without their Jews, there is anti-Semitism in Europe. At least the Muslims are honest when they openly express this vile thought. Europeans are really an ugly bunch who have, through the centuries, killed each other with certain glee when they were not killing the Jews. Perhaps, having failed the test of humanity and decency, retribution will come in the form of incurable plagues, vast storms followed by crop-killing drought."