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.
