Alvin Rosenfeld, an Indiana University professor of English and Jewish Studies, engaged in dialogue at the NY Museum of Jewish Heritage, Dec. 14, with David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee, on his new book, The End of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2011). Prof. Rosenfeld had achieved a measure of notoriety with an essay published by the AJC in 2006, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Antisemitism.” The controversy that followed is admirably summarized in this Wikipedia article.

You also might wish to read “Shotgun Blast,” an analysis of this essay in The American Prospect magazine by Gershom Gorenberg. He praised Rosenfeld’s idea, but criticized his “sloppiness”:

…. While attacking vituperative opponents of Israel who call themselves “progressive,” he identifies their views with all who call themselves progressives – rather like letting James Dobson define what “Christian” means. He fires the shotgun of his criticism at such a wide flock of writers that his reader can wonder where he is aiming. Does The Washington Post’s pro-Israel columnist Richard Cohen really belong to the same ideological species as those who accuse Israel of genocide? [Cohen apparently went overboard in one column, cited by Rosenfeld, when he characterized Israel's creation as a "mistake"; in another column published not long after Rosenfeld's essay came out, Cohen complains (in much the same way that Rosenfeld would) about the left's outsized focus upon Israel, while often giving far worse human rights offenders (like China, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran) a bye.--R.S.]
The blurriness is a shame, because Rosenfeld has a legitimate argument. … his intended target is those Jews who reject the very existence of a Jewish state, and who express their opposition in shrieks that rise to equating Israel with the Nazis.

Another excellent critique was written by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, in an editorial that I reproduced on the Meretz USA Blog. Since I share Rosenfeld’s concern for the more outlandish and unfair arguments against Israel that characterize too much of the left, and occasionally seep into mainstream liberal discourse, my response was rather mild.

Judging from this public appearance, Rosenfeld (as in the AJC essay) engages in overkill in his new book. He’s

Chanukah was the first recorded national liberation struggle against Greek imperialism, and Christmas celebrates the birth of a hoped-for messiah to free the Jewish people from Roman imperialism.

What would a non-consumeristic Christmas look like? Here's one vision: a "Christmas Peace Tree" made from post-consumer recycled plastic installed by artists in Washington, DC, as part of Occupy DC's gathering in Freedom Plaza. Credit: Creative Commons/Elvert Barnes.

The symbolism of a homeless couple giving birth in a manger surrounded by animals because the more comfortable people have not been able to make room for them inside a roofed home is akin to the symbolism of the candles lit on Chanukah to celebrate the victory of the powerless over the powerful: both offer a powerful reminder that both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless were in their times the “Occupy” movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.

All the more tragic to witness how both religions have been twisted in our own time to serve the powerful. Major forces in the Christian world have sided with the war-makers, ultra-nationalists, and the blame-poverty-on-the-poor cheerleaders for vast inequalities and protection of the rich against the needs of the rest. Jews, while retaining their commitment to domestic liberalism, have become tone-deaf to the cries of the oppressed in Palestine, to the huge inequalities of wealth in Israel, and have allowed their American institutions to be governed not by “one person, one vote” but “one dollar, one vote.”

Christopher Hitchens has died.

I pause to take note of his passing because I loved him, and I love him still.  I love him in the same way that I love thinkers and writers, artists and ordinary people who live their lives and who do their work with skill, integrity, determination and courage.  He wrote with an authenticity of cool.

I loved him because he gave me words.  Whenever I sat down to read his work, I made certain that I had my dictionary within reach so that I could look up the words I knew he would introduce to my mind. I loved his contrarianism, and I agreed with much of it.  He was right to indict Henry Kissinger and by extension the approach to foreign policy that he represented.  He was right to defend justice for the Palestinians.  He was wrong about the Iraq War, but I understood his arguments,

I am a believer who believes that God Is.  I thought his anti-theistic challenge was a good thing for those of us who believe in God.  It made me ask:  How deep is my Love?  I believe that God is LOVE, emphasis on the LOVE.  This is my confession of faith because most people who do not, who cannot believe in God or religion or this or that religious or spiritual tradition can believe in love.  They themselves have loved, and they have been loved.  This capacity to love and to be loved is the spiritual aspect of humanity and of creation that is not only rational but is also transrational and indestructible.

How has it come to this? How is it possible that President Obama will be the one to codify, for the first time since the McCarthy era, the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens?

I will get to the answer. However, first, let me defend the title of this post by making clear that the revised National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) set to be signed by Obama – called “an astonishing attack on our civil liberties” by Sam Seder – indeed legislatively grants the U.S. military the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on American soil without a trial or charge.

While this codified detention authority is intended to be used on terror suspects, the categories of those who can be detained are so slippery and amorphous that they could, in the future, be potentially applied to anyone.

Donny Shaw at OpenCongress offers an analysis I wholly support:

The language of the bill authorizes indefinite military detention without trial for anyone who has “substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The key phrases there – “substantial support,” “associated forces,” “hostilities” – lay the groundwork for the military’s detention power to be extended beyond al-Qaeda and the Taliban to anyone providing support for potentially any group that is hostile towards the U.S., domestic or abroad. For example, if a lone-wolf domestic terrorist claimed allegiance to an activist group or cause, nothing in this prevents the military from labeling the entire group “hostile” and using this power to detain them without trial. And the consistent over reactions to social uprisings of the increasingly militarized police forces across the U.S. does not help assuage concerns that this language could be used to justify cracking down on legitimate, constitutionally protected political action.

On Monday morning I awoke before dawn and somehow managed to crawl out of bed, fumble my jeans and boots on, and sling my drum and backpack – the one that has become the indefinite home for my first aid kit, a patchwork bag of herbal tinctures, a squirt bottle half-full of milk of magnesia, a bottle of bubbles, and some lavender essential oil – over my shoulder.

As I checked my back pocket one more time for my ID and locked the back door, the clock on the microwave read 5:08 AM. By 5:39 AM, I was snaking through the dark streets of West Oakland in what seemed to me to be a much-too-small crowd, mostly quiet except the occasional heartbeat of a lone drum or the sleepy but hopeful cheer that rose up as we passed under the overpass of Mandela Parkway. It was somehow comforting to hear our own voices echoing off the walls – it helped us remember our power.

You better believe I was asking myself the same questions that CNN, the Huffington Post, the BBC, and Mayor Quan had that morning: Why on earth are we doing this? Are you absolutely out of your gourd, trying to shut down all of the major ports on the West Coast?

Mustafa Tamimi's funeral, Nabi Saleh (Photo by Sam Kestenbaum)

On the day of Mustafa Tamimi’s funeral, the sky is blue and clear. It’s the first week of December and the air is cool. Families cry and hold each other. Old men stand around in leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and shaking hands, their faces drawn. Tamimi’s body is covered in a sheet, laid on a board and hoisted on shoulders. He’s then paraded around the village’s narrow streets. The crowd gathered here – friends, family and supporters – is in the hundreds.

Mustafa Tamimi was from Nabi Saleh, a small village of 550, north of Ramallah. One week ago, he was shot in the head with a teargas canister. An Israeli soldier fired the shot at Tamimi, who was among a group of other Palestinian and international protestors. The shot was fired from inside an armored military jeep and at close range. Tamimi immediately crumpled to the ground.

Lowe’s recently pulled its advertising from the popular television show “All-American Muslim,” bowing to the pressure of Isalmophobes. It is unworthy of our business as Americans who care about the stories of all American religious communities.

We now need a new place to shop, as we approach the new year. Help us draft Home Depot to be the tolerant alternative!

We are asking Home Depot to buy the spots on “All-American Muslim” that Lowe’s used to purchase. If they do so, those who sign this petition commit to turning first to Home Depot as our home, appliance, and hardware store in 2012. We shop tolerantly — and want Home Depot to be our go-to store for religious freedom.

By signing this petition, you are showing that you want all religious communities in
American to have a free voice. You are exercising your freedom to shop at stores that further religious tolerance.

SIGN ON NOW! DRAFT HOME DEPOT AS THE STORE OF TOLERANCE IN 2012!

The Jewish cemetery in my parents’ village of Lututow, Poland had disappeared; I walked through the thick forest, vividly green, pushing aside branches that had overgrown what once had been pathways, running my hands through the earth seeking anything – a stone, some mark from a gravesite; but only some fragments of human bones strewn on the forest floor suggested that this had been a burial site for hundreds of years. Somewhere beneath the earth was my family, my kin. How I ached for them. I had come here because of a restlessness I could not understand; somehow I think I needed to bring my parents back to what had been their home. I had, in fact, brought a photograph of them – their marriage picture taken in Germany in a DP camp just after their liberation from concentration camps that had become a kind of demonic home. Here, in this place of absence, I left their picture among some leaves, in the dirt. I said Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as I stood in this emptied, lost space, and wept.

Like so many children of Holocaust survivors, I had flown to Poland to experience my parents’ village. But unlike others who had made such pilgrimages, one trip had not been enough for me. I’ve made three altogether, each a step in a process of healing I could never have envisioned, and each in response to that restlessness that I could not understand.

Santa Claus in Japan. Credit: Creative Commons/Kodomo No Tomo.

I found myself talking about Santa Claus with Sara the other day. She is a charming little girl, 8 years old, and now at a wonderfully delicate developmental stage of her life.

Sara is at that age where the emerging presence of doubt and inquiry are grappling for predominance with the evocative fantasies which have largely colored her young mind for much of her blessed childhood. She was inspecting holiday decorations in my office when I asked her if she thought Santa would visit her this year. The conversation so enchanted me that I hastened to write it down at once to the best of my recollection.

Great texts are about more than simply telling tales, there is an understanding that there are lessons to be learned, responses to emulate or avoid, and leadership roles to strive towards. In this week’s reading we are presented with two lives developing in parallel, one wise and righteous, the other errant and potentially destructive. Yet, the text does not make the obvious choice of whom to celebrate or who to condemn.

Ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (Reason.com)

With characteristic boldness, the G.O.P. front-runner du jour, Newt Gingrich, asserts that the Palestinians are “an invented people.” This was a telling moment at the pander fest that was the Republican Jewish Coalition’s candidates’ forum. Having carefully not invited Rep. Ron Paul, the RJC insured that it would be no less. From the little that I saw of it, only Jon Huntsman (albeit warm toward his audience) seems not to have gone overboard in this mode.

Although Gingrich’s comment, according to the JTA account, drew “rebukes” from some of his rivals, these were not anything like the points I’ll raise here. First off, all nations are “invented” in their formative stage. Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people and generally press their claim in some organized way. As the well-known Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi indicated in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), “National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given….”

Arab-Palestinian identity was largely a reaction to the Zionist movement reestablishing Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible and remembered reverentially in the Jewish religion for two millennia. Just as Palestinian nationalism was born of the Arab struggle against the Jews in the early to mid 20th century, the Jewish national rebirth occurred in Palestine, with Jewish identity made over from what was primarily (but not only) a religious heritage — because of the tragic experience of Jews as a frequently reviled and downtrodden minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East.

Protesters in Chicago abjam77/Creative Commons

I’ve noticed a meme beginning to fester among liberal insiders who are positing that the Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to “distract” the citizenry from the wicked machinations of Republicans of the legislative class. Nonsense.

The OWS movement is not a distraction from – but serves as an alternative to – the disingenuous theatrics staged by the political hacks of this faux republic. Conversely, movement members have grasped that it is the hollow grandstanding – the modus operandi of the present U.S. political system itself – that serves as distraction from the realities of the day.

Those drawn to the OWS movement realize this: Vast sums of money are required to get the attention of, and gain influence over the entrenched class of self-serving political insiders who hustle their wares in Washington, D.C.

Year after year, election cycle after election cycle, Washington’s political class has revealed whose interests it serves. Accordingly, let the one percent and their political operatives continue on their present myopic, society-decimating course. By doing so, they will just bring more outraged people into the streets and hasten their own undoing.

Bergson in 1940s & '70s (VarianFry.org)

Over this past weekend, the NY Jewish Week posted my article on a film and filmmaker dealing with the Holocaust-era controversy of the “Bergson Group” and whether American Jews were too passive. My article begins with a discussion of filmmaker Pierre Sauvage’s background as a child survivor in France and how pre-State Zionist divisions and the politics of that time (and ours) enter into the controversy, including a word from J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami. In a meeting with Sauvage, he told me that he is not right-wing and doesn’t understand why his sympathetic treatment of Bergson’s work would lead people to think this.

Yet this confusion surely arises because Peter Bergson (the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook), and his comrades from Palestine, were members of the right-wing Zionist underground, the Irgun. Together they worked tirelessly and ingeniously to rally a mass movement of American Jews to pressure the Roosevelt Administration to engage in meaningful rescue efforts for the trapped Jews of Europe. Jeremy Ben-Ami’s father, also an Irgunist, was one of Bergson’s core associates; his son writes of this in an afterword of the recent posthumously published memoir by another of Bergson’s close colleagues, Samuel Merlin (Millions of Jews to Rescue, published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies). Paradoxically, Ben-Ami points out that most Americans recruited into the Bergson Group– such as Ben Hecht, Stella Adler and Max Lerner– were liberals, whose efforts were augmented by varying degrees of support from such leftists as Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson.

When so many citizens and governments of so many countries regularly bathe in an anti-Israel bias, why would Israel ever reject a loving embrace?

Christians United For Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, is now the largest pro-Israel (see Israel’s pro-Israel definition) group anywhere in the known universe and afterlife — over 500,000 strong and bountifully multiplying. All committed and loyally engaged in their Biblical struggle to defend the home team by enlisting, along with AIPAC, Israel’s much smaller Jewish quarterback, as Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s American blocking back and unofficial coalition party member.

Just as Netanyahu feels he speaks for generations of Jews, as he proclaimed before Congress in May, Pastor John Hagee, CUFI’s leader, has proclaimed to speak for all right-thinking evangelical Christians — evangelical Christians who know that Jews are God’s chosen title holders to all of pre-1947 Palestine: In July, while speaking at the sixth annual CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., he said, “The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people….they own the land of Israel!  The boundaries…are given exactly in the Bible.”

It’s God as The Supreme Cartographer.

This sermon by Rev. Stephen Phelps, the interim Senior Minister at the Riverside Church in New York, is the first in an ongoing series of sermons by the Reverend.

Romans 12: 1-13; Matthew 22: 16-22

Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it this way:

a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass
of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society
formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself . . . Such folk owe
no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of
thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine their whole destiny is in their hands.
(Democracy in America, p. 508)

You could say that something of today’s Tea Party has been part of America from the beginning. Its creed is hardly clear but it contains the belief that What’s mine is mine and I got it with nobody’s help. The extreme expression of this mantra once belonged to libertarians only, with Ayn Rand their evangelist. But since Ronald Reagan taught the catechism that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” hundreds of politicians have been bornagain to the religion of self and wealth.

This post was originally published on the +972 blog.

From Al-Khalayleh, a Palestinian village near the settlement of Giva’at Ze’ev, outside of Jerusalem – A group of young men are swinging shovels and hammers at the walls of a house – their own house.

They had watched as the bulldozers tore down their neighbors’ homes and buildings early the same morning, and decided to destroy part of their house themselves. They were doing this, on one hand, to “not let the Israelis have the pleasure of doing it,” they told me.

But more than that, they were doing so with the hope that the authorities would decide that enough of the house was gone, and allow them to keep one room. Also, this way they perhaps could avoid the fine Palestinians are commonly forced to pay- for the cost of the demolition of their house.

(I am back from a three-week hiatus. For the time being, I am not writing about the Occupy Movement, though I imagine I will return to this theme.)

In April, 2004, in the last week of her life, my former colleague Julie Greene participated, with my sister Inbal and with me, at one of our intensive residential retreats. We all listened for those few moments when she would wake up and speak to us from wherever she was. More than once, she repeated this one sentence which I still carry: “There is no reason to wait even one minute longer.”

I know very well about waiting, because it’s one of my coping mechanisms I acquired as a child. I learned to endure hardships by knowing they will end, and counting the minutes, or days, or even years at times. I learned to survive having no capacity to change circumstances, and in the process lost some of my sense of power to create change. I still, to this day, continue to wait, though less and less, in all aspects of my life. For a less stressful time in which I can finally shift an inner pattern, or the compatible people with whom I can connect, or the circumstances that will bring more ease into my life, or the perfect opportunity for making a difference. What would it mean to shift that habit completely and bring the future into the present?

When I remember Julie’s words and leave behind my habit of waiting, I sometimes experience a kind of glee, like a child that just discovered a new way to climb on the counter and get the goodies that were previously out of reach. This is a subversive act, because it means embracing my power, releasing the shackles of helplessness, becoming an agent in my life and beyond. It’s a way to move to another story, of living as if the future, previously a dream, is truly here, now.

This week’s perasha gives us the first picture of the newly settled Yaakov homestead. He buys a plot of land, the text tells us, all rather matter of factly, and then builds an altar. There is nothing to prepare us for the horror episode that follows, and I suspect that the text means to shock us with its rather abrupt narration, which begins innocently enough with Dinah going out to see what the local girls are doing. We will see how some of the commonly cited readings of this text may shock us even more, and present alternatives from within the tradition that will be more palatable and sensible.

It might be easiest to break this analysis into two parts. First, there is the depiction of the crime against Dinah, and then upon the commentators’ response to the action taken in response by Shimon and Levi and their father Jacob’s response (I refrain from the term revenge or retribution, since that too is already a position).

A word on methodology. I am not trying to recreate a literal historical event, to present some kind of naïve version of “what actually happened” in the biblical story, I’m not sure that is desirable if it is even possible. My concern in the following analysis is what Benveniste would label the “place of enunciation” of the commentators; a recognition that reading any text involves not merely some kind of empirical textual explication but a worldview which underlies them (Gadamer’s “pre-understanding”). We can’t read and understand without involving who we are, we are always reading through a lens made up of our own viewpoint. Thus, in a sense, we want to attempt a meta-parshanut, if you will, by looking at the views of the commentators on this episode and examining what this reading might reveal about the minds of the commentators themselves with regards to women and crimes against women.

photo by Jakub Fulin

A gale force wind always seems to precede dub poet d’bi.young when she enters a room. Her fierce presence and her unstoppable energy are perhaps the most noticeable things about her, but what lingers after the first impression is her overwhelming determination in her mission to spread the word about love, equality and social action.

The first time I met d’bi.young, I had taken a group of students in a college course entitled “Dangerous Acts: Dramatic Literature as a Tool of Social Change” to a production that she had written, performed, and produced with fellow artist Naila Keleta Mae. Both women are Jamaican-Canadians, and their work handled a range of issues including abuse, poverty, racism and social inequity. I had arranged for the artists to have a talk back session after the show with my students, a number of whom were Caribbean – Canadians themselves – and this turned out to be one of the most moving moments I can think of during my teaching career. My students, some of whom were prone to feeling indifferent and powerless in the face of some of the challenges they faced, became animated, engaged and passionate. The performance had managed to reflect back to my students something about their own lives, and this alone was enough for them to elevate their view of who they were and what they could accomplish in their lives. This was, in no small part, thanks to the warmth, the honesty and the strength of the drama, but also of the artists. A pair of students who saw the show that night went on to do their oral presentation on d’bi.young and her work, and they reported feeling that her work touched them in a special way, and made them realize their own power. When an artist manages to bring this passion to the classroom, the effect is tremendous. Since this experience, I have taught d’bi.young’s work in a number of different contexts, and I can say that my students always find that her voice speaks to them in a way that compels not just their intellect, but their hearts.

d’bi.young’s work is fiery. She stares down issues like racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, slavery, and the inequities visited upon the world by capitalism, but perhaps her most enduring theme is love. In the video below, d’bi.young elaborates upon her vision of a love that is honest, compassionate, and forgiving.