Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/rseliger/page/5/)
… most of the systematic and onerous forms of discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel have their origins in the fact that these Israelis have kinship, narrative, cultural and ideological ties to the other side in a conflict.
On the evenings of May 9th and 10th, I attended two stimulating events honoring Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day). The first was a discussion between Arnold M. Eisen, the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS, the seat of Conservative Judaism) and John S. Ruskay, the executive vice president and CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, held at JTS. It was not actually a debate because they are both liberal Zionists. Dr. Eisen’s recent op-ed in the NY Jewish Week, “Appreciating, And Learning To Talk About, Israel,” is a passionate plea for civility and honesty regarding Israel’s flaws as well as its merits, from an unabashed supporter of Israel and a self-described political, religious and cultural Zionist. Dr. Ruskay has a Ph.D. in political science and served as vice chancellor of JTS for eight years.
It turns out that Art Spiegelman’s factually-based graphic novel, Maus, was not the first use of a comic book format relating to the Holocaust. Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music by Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish refugee who perished in Auschwitz at the age of 25, consisted of a remarkable series of 1300 vividly colorful frames (known technically as “gouaches”). These were based on her life and that of her family, and completed in the year prior to her being arrested by the Gestapo in the south of France in September 1943.
The New York Jewish community largely rallied against the City University of New York’s initial decision last week not to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner over his alleged views on Israel. My journalist friend, Doug Chandler, broke this blockbuster story in an online news article in The NY Jewish Week newspaper. In a followup, he reported that the CUNY board would reverse this ill-considered action [which it did] and that Ed Koch, New York’s outspoken and very pro-Israel former mayor, called for the “resignation or removal” of the CUNY trustee who attacked Kushner. Also on the Kushner affair, in his Political Insider blog, James Besser (The Jewish Week’s Washington correspondent) sensibly asked, “what kind of pro-Israel movement do we want?” He warned against a narrow ideological view regarding Israel.
I’m not a Canadian, but I’ve lived in Canada and was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Democratic Party, the perennial third (sometimes fourth) party in that country until a few days ago. I don’t wish to steal Peter Marmorek’s thunder as an actual Canadian and I look forward to his post-election analysis, but I would like to share some reflections of my own. When I was a student at McGill in the early ’70s, I campaigned for an NDP candidate in Montreal. Naturally, he finished a distant third (if not fourth). Now I’ve learned that dramatic NDP gains in Quebec (where it nearly wiped out the separatist Bloc Québécois, down from 47 seats to four) have catapulted it into a respectable and unprecedented second place finish nationally–up from 37 to 103 seats, with the Liberals crashing from 77 to 34.
Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, falls this year on the evening of May 1, until nightfall, May 2nd. (There are slight overlaps in this post with the online essay I wrote for Tikkun’s 25th anniversary and what I’ve posted earlier today at the Meretz USA Blog.)
Last year, within the space of a few days, I saw two very different films related to the Holocaust: A Film Unfinished is a documentary about a Nazi faux-documentary; the other is the 2009 Quentin Tarantino sensation, Inglourious Basterds, which I saw on the Showtime cable network. The former makes the Nazi cameramen into honest documentarians despite their intentions; the latter fictionalizes World War II in an outlandish way, to make Jewish characters into uber-avengers who shorten the war by wiping out most of the Nazi leadership, trapped in a burning cinema. If Inglourious Basterds were simply a spoof, it would be in exceptionally poor taste and not worth commenting upon. Instead, it is surprisingly serious and even riveting.
A reader of a draft of my article, “Hannah Arendt: From Iconoclast to Icon” (published recently in Tikkun’s new online edition), asked me something that triggered my elaborate response, which evolved into another article. It begins with Arendt, but it’s really not about her. “Finding Refuge: Why Palestine?” was published in the March/April 2011 issue of Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine. I am making it available on Tikkun Daily because Outlook did not choose to publish it on its website.
What are we to make of Richard Goldstone’s partial retraction of the UN report on the Gaza war of 2008-09? There are some very thoughtful reactions that preclude any need for me to comment in my own words. This first one is by Bernard Avishai (the Canadian-American-Israeli political economist, author and blogger–see Tikkun Daily’s Blogroll). Avishai is both insightful and pithy:
Goldstone’s Reconsideration
Richard Goldstone is a good man in need of a good editor. His report would never have attracted so much lightning had it not started off the way it did, trying to chronicle the terrible events of the Gaza operation, along with all the preliminary allegations of war crimes, before getting to context, testimony, caveats, and definitions (see especially pp.
Rather than exclusively blaming Arabs or Israelis, I pride myself in explaining how both sides, for a variety of complex reasons, have kept their conflict going. There’s plenty of blame to go around, as I contend to the distaste of some fervent pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices alike (as illustrated here and there). I’m engaged in an ongoing email debate on the Meretz USA Blog with Prof. Werner Cohn, a retired professor of sociology who expresses himself energetically and acerbically in opposition to my dovish brand of Zionism. He has asserted that I’m committing the “Tu Quoque” logical fallacy by deflecting the problem of widespread Arab antisemitism with Israeli transgressions against the Palestinians. The following is an online definition of this concept:
Tu Quoque is a very common fallacy in which one attempts to defend oneself or another from criticism by turning the critique back against the accuser.
A little-noted outgrowth of the current wave of popular upheaval sweeping the Arab world is that Algeria’s nearly 20 year rein of martial law has been lifted. Most of the 1990s were marked by a savage civil war that pitted a variety of Islamist insurgent groups against Algeria’s military regime and against each other. By the time it petered out early in the 2000’s, the massacre of whole villages, urban bombings, shootouts and assassinations had claimed 150,000 to 200,000 lives. Eventually, this conflict engulfed the French Cistercian Trappist monastery situated in a remote village, where its monks were much loved by their Muslim-Arab neighbors. They incorporated them into their everyday lives, even inviting them to family weddings and other life-cycle events.