Miriam,
Of course you are right. I just get frustrated at times over the
focus being misdirected. Of course we can learn, even from
"alternative" history. But debating our differences will never save a
single victim of this monstrous Israeli/American assault.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/30/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, I guess the article is for people who either identify as being Jewish
and are involved with the religion, or who have bought the biblical
justification presented for the existence of Israel. But the point is that
now there is a real split within the American Jewish community regarding
what it means to be Jewish and what Israel means and when an Israeli Jew
threatened the lives of American Jews, which is what happened recently, this
split became much more apparent. The other day AIPAC had a conference, and
there were more than a thousand young Jews demonstrating against AIPAC. They
were new to this anti Israel movement. Max Blumenthal said that he didn't
know who most of them were. So just like American history is relevant to
what Trump is doing today, what people claim to be Jewish history and what
is actual Jewish history, is relevant to what Israel and America are doing
today.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2017 12:42 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] ‘Negation of the diaspora’
as Zionist antisemitism: The JCC bomb threats came from an Israeli Jew
I'll blame it on the lateness of the hour, but this article leaves me colder
than cold. Jewish history has been so distorted that it is virtually
useless, as is our own American history, and most all other histories. I am
reminded of the great religious philosophers debating as to how many Angels
can dance on the head of a pin. As if Angels are permitted to dance!
It's all pointless gobble dee gook in the face of our own destruction.
As much as I am devoted to seeking honest history, I full well understand
that our perverted histories will not save Mankind. A truce is needed. A
coming together. An understanding that if we, the People of Planet Earth do
not join as One People and work to learn to live *With our Planet and all
Life on Earth, if we can't do that, all history will be of no import.
Perhaps one day in the distant future Earth will be visited by Beings who
managed to work together, and who have come to see if this planet could
support their life, and they wonder together just what happened to what
appears to have been an advanced society.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/29/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mondoweiss
News & Opinion About Palestine, Israel & the United States
‘Negation of the diaspora’ as Zionist antisemitism: The JCC bomb
threats came from an Israeli Jew David Shasha on March 28, 2017 25
Comments
The JCC bomb threat suspect, identified as Michael Kaydar by The
Daily Beast, leaving court in Rishon Lezion, Israel, March 23, 2017.
(Photo: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)
After many months of speculation, we have now learned the name and
identity of the perpetrator of the JCC bomb threats. Michael Kaydar, a
Jewish teenage resident of Ashkelon in Southern Israel, has been charged
with the crimes.
The announcement of the arrest caused immediate panic in American
Jewish circles and, not unexpectedly, the American Alt-Right Nazis
were thrilled to hear that the suspect is a Jew.
Also not unexpectedly, The Forward, with its intense Ashkenazi Jewish
ethnocentrism, published a spate of opinion pieces which expressed
great worry about the fact that the Anti-Semite was an Israeli Jew.
There was even a “gradation” of Anti-Semites presented by Peter
Beinart in the face of all the Trumpworld malfeasance. Forward
editor-in-chief Jane Eisner gave herself the final word on the matter
in a discussion that provides absolutely no insight into the matter and
only adds to the moral confusion.
To be fair, it has been a really long time since America has
experienced such a mass outbreak of Anti-Semitism, and the Liberal
Jewish community has been deeply shaken by its re-emergence under
Trumpworld domination. We should however note that the ditto-head
Trumpjews were quick to say “I told you so” and demand an apology from
the Liberals. It is interesting to note that Trump made extraordinary
efforts to catch the perpetrator in Israel. It would seem that Trump
is not completely unaware of his toxic role in the resurgence of
Anti-Semitism in this country.
With all that we still do not know, it is clear that Kaydar’s
antisemitic threats exposed the raw emotions on all sides of the
American political spectrum over the explosion of racism in the wake
of the Trump election and the ongoing White Christian Supremacist
advances in many Western democracies under the banner of Populist
Nationalism.
But one aspect of the JCC bomb threat story and its connection to an
Israeli teen has not been discussed: the intense loathing of the
Jewish Diaspora in classical Zionist thought.
Some years ago I wrote a lengthy review of the right-wing Zionist
scholar and political pundit Yoram Hazony’s apologetic book The Jewish
State entitled “The Nightmare of Diaspora.” The title referred to the
important Zionist concept called in Hebrew Shelilat ha-Galut, Negation
of the Diaspora. In the article I quoted from noted Israeli academic
and educational leader Ben-Zion Dinur, designer of Israel’s 1953 State
Education Law, who states the deeply distorted Zionist view of Jewish
history succinctly and accurately:
… Jewish history was, in the main, the history of the Jewish people
living in its own land. This is so in spite of three facts of cardinal
importance:
(1) the antiquity of the Jewish Dispersion, the origins of which may
be presumed to go back to before the destruction of the Northern
Kingdom; (2) the large number of Diaspora Jewish settlements and
communities already existing in the time of the Roman and Byzantine
empires (three hundred of them are known to us by name); and (3), the
fact that, in this same period, the majority of the Jewish nation was
living outside the borders of its own land.
Dinur’s view of Jewish History is predicated on land and settlement
rather than religious values and knowledge. Jews were only really
Jews when they lived in the Land of Israel and not when they lived in the
Diaspora.
The Israeli scholar Uri Ram unpacks the assertion in the following way:
In the invention of the Zionist national tradition the Bible played
two pivotal and complementary functions. On the one hand, it attached
Zionism very convincingly to Jewish history and culture while, on the
other, it enabled Zionism to skip almost two millennia of Jewish Exile
and reach back in time to the period of the alleged source of the
nation. This was accomplished, first, by singling out the Bible,
rather than exilic Jewish literature (the Talmud and other
commentaries) from the corpus of Jewish traditional literature, and,
second, by the pertinent selection of sections, and the biased
interpretations of themes, from the Bible itself.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi also provided a perceptive conceptual analysis
of modern Judaism and its relation to the Jewish past:
The modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins at a time that
witnesses a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living and hence
also an ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory. In this sense, if
for no other, history becomes what it had never been before – the faith of
fallen Jews.
For the first time history, not a sacred text, becomes the arbiter of
Judaism.
In the penultimate chapter of his classic book Zakhor, Yerushalmi
wisely cites Haim Hazaz’s Hebrew short story Ha-Derasha, The Sermon,
which provides a precise articulation of Shelilat ha-Galut:
Those Jews who are still within the enchanted circle of tradition, or
those who have returned to it, find the work of the historian
irrelevant. They seek, not the historicity of the past, but its eternal
contemporary nature.
Addressed directly by the text, the question of how it evolved must
seem to them subsidiary, if not meaningless.
An anti-historical attitude of a very different kind is expressed by
those who have experienced modern Jewish existence as something so
totally new that it demands the past be either forgotten or
demolished. The deep ambivalence of modern Jews to the past is perhaps
best discerned in modern Hebrew literature, which, even more than
Yiddish or Anglo-Jewish letters, reflects the widest spectrum of
modern Jewish sensibility. Here we find, on the one hand, the fiercest
antagonism to the Jewish past, not as a personal idiosyncrasy, but a major
theme that runs from the Haskalah to the present.
One of the purest instances will suffice:
In the explosive short story by the Hebrew writer Haim Hazaz entitled
Ha-Derashah (The Sermon), a meeting of a kibbutz is held at which
Yudka, who never speaks on such occasions, startles everyone by rising
to unburden himself of thoughts he can no longer contain. Haltingly,
at first he declares what has been gnawing at him:
“I want to state,” Yudka spoke with an effort in low, tense tones,
“that I am opposed to Jewish history.”
And then, when his stammering gives way to an articulate fury: “I
would simply forbid teaching our children Jewish history. Why the
devil teach them about our ancestors’ shame? I would just say to them:
Boys, from the day we were exile from our land we’ve been a people
without a history. Class dismissed. Go out and play football.”
The figure of Yudka, with his primal antipathy to Diaspora Judaism and
its cultural legacy, is echoed in the offensive pronouncements of the
iconic Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua.
Yehoshua believes that only Israelis are “real” Jews. Diaspora Jews
are just “partially” Jewish. In comments made in a 2013 Jerusalem
lecture Yeshoshua could not be clearer:
A Jew is an “empty definition.” To fill that definition with substance
one must live a Jewish life, and the only way to do that fully, he
argued, is to be Israeli. “Israelis are the total Jews,” Yehoshua
proclaimed. “The empty definition of Judaism fills up simply by being
here… Everything around me is Jewish! Just like everything in America
is American.” Every ethical question confronted by an Israeli—say, by
an IDF soldier at a West Bank checkpoint—is a dilemma as inherently
Jewish as a sugya in the Talmud. “Our values are Jewish values,
because we live here. It’s not what the rabbis say that defines
Jewishness, but what we Israelis do every day—our actions and our
values.” With this he reached his now infamous conclusion: “This is
the reason I say to American Jews: you are partial and we are total…
If you really want to be Jewish, come here. It’s not easy, full of
questions, your nice warm Jewish identity in your community will be over.
But this is real and not imaginary.”
Israel as a state is seen in the strictest Zionist terms as the “True
Judaism” as it negates the lengthy and complex process of Jewish
history in its myriad iterations.
This means that to be Jewish is not to be “adulterated” in any way by
the Gentile world.
The “Negation of the Diaspora” is connected to what Zionism sees as
Jewish weakness; a defect that is rooted in Diaspora adaptation to the
non-Jewish world.
Diaspora Judaism from the Babylonian and Hellenistic periods to
Medieval Spain and Modern Europe has been seen by Zionism as an
adulteration of the “pure” Jewish identity which is militaristic and
xenophobic.
Michael Kaydar was raised in an Israel which holds to the dogmas
expressed by Yehoshua and his predecessors like Dinur. It is taken
for granted that the State of Israel is a superior country that represents
“authentic”
Judaism.
In contrast to the weak and pusillanimous Diaspora Jews, the Israelis,
calling themselves Sabras, after the fruit with a prickly exterior and
sweet center, are Macho Jews who fearlessly call the shots.
It is certain that Kaydar saw the images of cowering JCC students and
their teachers which were broadcast on news reports all over the
world. His Zionist sadism is a product of an internal Israeli Jewish
hatred and contempt for those who are viewed as weak and unable to defend
themselves.
We can note here the fact that Kaydar, who suffers from a brain tumor,
was rejected for his compulsory military service. This rejection
appears to be a critical factor in his decision to threaten American
Jewish institutions.
And while it has been reported that he also threatened Israeli
institutions in more recent months, the preponderance of his crimes
remain tied to the American Jewish Diaspora; that place which has been
vilified and demonized by Zionists for so many years.
American Jews are loath to raise the issue of Shelilat ha-Galut; an
idea which presents the ways in which Zionism has sought to usurp
Jewish identity by creating a rift between those Jews who live in
Israel and those who do not.
What is in question here is what Judaism really is and who gets to
represent it.
Going back to Haim Hazaz and his provocative short story, the Hebrew
word used as its title, Derasha, is very much connected to this
question. It is ironic that Hazaz uses the word at the very same time
that he seeks to erase the very rabbinical tradition which created it.
The Jewish Sages of the early Diaspora period, after the Jerusalem
Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, conducted a massive
organizational effort which transformed Judaism from its Priestly
Temple-based nationalist caste into a scholarly-academic religion,
increasingly marked by universal values and concerns, which promoted
the quietist practice of rituals and the intense study of sacred texts.
It marked the beginning of Jewish Humanism as the defining Judaic ethos.
The rabbis, those castigated in the most debased and ignorant terms by
the anti-Jewish bigot A.B. Yehoshua, produced a canonical collection
of texts which became the Hebrew Bible. It was this act that
inaugurated the People of the Book as opposed to the People of the Land.
It is not that the rabbis eliminated national identity or the
restoration of the Jewish people to their homeland, but shows their
pragmatic acceptance of the new reality created by the Roman conquest
and their reliance on God for the future Redemption.
The loss of national-territorial autonomy did not kill off Judaism as
the Zionists contend.
On the contrary, Judaism was reinvigorated and strengthened by a new
openness to the world and to its own literary-religious traditions by
the practice of Derasha, or canonical exegesis.
Zionism has sought to literalize ancient Jewish tradition by
valorizing an atavistic reading of the Hebrew Bible which was shorn of
these rabbinical interpretive accretions.
The process of Derasha has been a means to make the Biblical text
relevant to contemporary values and to changes in culture, science,
and history. The Hebrew Bible became a dynamic work rather than a
static record of what happened in the past.
I have provided a brief overview of the Midrashic process in the
following Huffington Post article and in a subsequent article I
examined the problem of Monolingualism and the static nature of Western
Civilization.
Zionism was an outgrowth of Western nationalism rather than a product
of the classical Jewish tradition.
The very mechanisms inherent in the Zionist project were adopted from
19th century European philosophy, particularly the ideas of Hegel.
Jonathan Boyarin has brilliantly discussed the matter in his seminal
essay “Hegel’s Zionism?”. Zionism has indeed rejected the classical
rabbinical tradition, and put in its place a barely-modified Spartan
identity that it has identified with the age of the Israelite
commonwealth, as I have written in my article “Sparta and Jerusalem:
The Zionist Transformation of Jewish Identity.”
The issue of violence looms large in this discussion.
In Michael Kaydar we have a troubling example of the Israeli Spartan
ethos gone haywire. He apparently embraced the military ethos of the
Zionist protocol and was comfortable making threats against Diaspora
Jewish targets which then cowered in fear at the possible danger to their
security.
Kaydar thus fits into the larger Trumpworld pattern that has shown us
how the Alt-Right finds a commonality with the Zionists:
In a “debate” conducted last December at Texas A&M University between
its Hillel rabbi and Alt-Right Nazi leader Richard Spencer, the
Zionist issue took on a very troubling cast:
During a question-and-answer session, Texas A&M Hillel’s Rabbi Matt
Rosenberg stood and invited the white nationalist to join him in Torah
study. Rosenberg’s invitation, and Spencer’s response, were captured
on video by The Eagle, the Texas A&M student paper, and viewed widely
on Twitter.
“My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,”
Rosenberg said. “Will you sit town and learn Torah with me, and learn
love?”
Spencer declined the invitation, but used it as an opportunity to
suggest that the objectives of Zionism and Jewish continuity were
close to his own goals for white people.
“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?”
Spencer said. “And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the
Middle East could go move in to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really
want that?”
Rosenberg, who later admitted he is not a good debater, stood silent.
“You’re not answering,” Spencer said.
“I’m not answering,” Rosenberg said.
Spencer’s positive spin on Zionist Jewish supremacy sought to link his
own racist movement to that of Israel.
The rabbi, as we see, was unable to respond to the point.
And, indeed, the figure of Michael Kaydar has served to trouble many
American Jews as it puts into serious question the way that Israelis
see Jewish identity and the relation of their country to the Diaspora.
They are finding it difficult to explain why he would do such heinous
things.
A.B. Yehoshua has not called for threats to Diaspora Jewish
institutions, but his hurtful words represent a dominant strain of
Israeli culture which holds the Diaspora in utter contempt.
It is not really that far a leap from Yehoshua to Kaydar as we might
think.
Words and ideas have real life consequences and the founding of the
State of Israel in 1948 has forced a major transformation in Jewish
identity and its relationship to traditional Judaism and its
rabbinical heritage as embodied in the Talmud and the Midrashic literary
texts.
The Zionist idea has sought to “move” Jewish identity away from the
pluralism of the Talmudic tradition and its acceptance of the larger
reality of Gentile civilization, and replace it with a militant
Monolingualism that is, paradoxically, a reflection of those very Gentile
values.
Michael Kaydar has opened a chasm in the relationship between Israelis
and the Jewish Diaspora and reignited the most elementary questions
about Jewish identity in the supercharged atmosphere of Trumpworld
Fascism and its intense racism; a racism which is not limited to White
Christians, but is also present in their Israeli Jewish counterparts.
