Anti-Semite Takes Aim at Jews; Other Jews Take Aim at Israel

Unbelievable the reactions.

An anti-Semite shoots and kills Jews and, in addition to blaming President Trump (here and here and here), some Jews seek, by intimating or a direct accusation, to blame Israel and its Prime Minister.

Here's one list up at EOZ. It includes posts, tweets, etc. by

Julia Joffe

Rabbi Mivasair

Aaron David Miller

Franklin Foer

Rabbi Jill Jacobs

Rebecca Vilkomerson

Here's another:

David Simon, and my response.

A New York group will mourn and then - resist (anti-Semitism or Trump?) And Linda Sarsour will be there.

Ronald Linden declares cowardly, unprincipled political leaders are cozying up to the anti-Semites.

Joseph Dana.

Chemi Shalev bemoans Netanyahu's "hypocrisy".

And Tel Aviv University's Ishai Rosen-Zvi writes (in Hebrew so far):

שר החינוך יוצא לנחם את משפחות הרוגי הטבח בבית הכנסת אך שייך לעולם ערכים הפוך משלהם. היד רועדת כשכותבים זאת, אך במובנים רבים עולמו קרוב יותר לזה של הרוצח מזה של הנרצחים

or

The Minister of Education is off to console the families of those killed in the synagogue but belongs to a counter-world of their values and while the hand shakes while writing this, [nevertheless] in many ways, his world is close to that of the murderer than that of the murdered.

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UPDATE


The caricaturist released from the Jerusalem Report

Jonathan Weissman.

ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt is left-side blinded.

Bend the Arc. Caroline Glick's tweet. (Members of BTA's board include Alexander Soros, the son of Jewish billionaire George Soros, a frequent target of the alt-Right as well as Peter Beinart, a prominent left-wing columnist.)

Baroness Jenny Tonge backtracked.

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Finally, some sense, from a non-Jew:

This rush to blame Trump for a massacre of Jews is not only profoundly cynical, where the militarisation of anti-Semitism is pounced upon to the cheap, low end of scoring points against a politician people don’t like.It also has the effect of whitewashing the true horror of anti-Semitism in the 21st-century West. It is in itself a form of apologism for the new anti-Semitism to the extent that it dehistoricises and depoliticises it by presenting it as little more than a function of the new right-wing populism.It presents violent anti-Semitism as yet another thing unleashed, or at least intensified, by Trump and by the political turn of the past two years. And this dangerously distracts public attention – purposefully, I suspect – from the fact that anti-Semitism has been growing and becoming increasingly militarised for more than a decade now, among the left as well as the right and within Muslim communities, too.Post-Pittsburgh, it is hard to escape the conclusion that many observers are more interested in shaming and weakening Trump than they are in truly getting to grips with the new anti-Semitism. After all, where was their rage, their concern about rhetoric, their existential handwringing over hateful ideas and hateful language, back when anti-Semitism was deepening and militarising pre-2016, pre-Trump, most notably in Europe?

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UPDATE

Abe Foxman cleans up after ADL and Co.

Then backtracks.


IfNotNow goes bonkers

עודFrom tonight’s vigil organized by @IfNotNowOrg Toronto. We mourn Pittsburgh, and Louisville, and Gaza. And fight like hell for the living

A reaction to that.

And here is an associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern:

One striking feature about critiques of Zionism is that Zionists are the very first to treat the Zionist project as central to Jewish identity.  The more sophisticated ones - like below - treat it as a contingent requirement on the existence of a safe Jewish community.Matthew Smith added,

@ProfDBernstein

Yes, the fact that Jewish communities have been thriving in Europe and the Middle East, since the Enlightenment with nary a blood libel, pogrom, expulsion, and certainly not a Holocaust, in sight, shows how little the Jews have needed a nation-state. Idiot. https://twitter.com/elsenorrocket/status/1057249327305895937 …

But often the “evidence” for the existence of a nation of Jews is biblical.  The irony, of course, is that in this era, the Jews had a political unit ‘all their own’ and yet were constantly at war, and eventually were overwhelmed, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans.

The biblical evidence, such as it is, stands as a warning against the territorial centralization of Jews under a single political order.

And fighting for such a goal often ends in mass death. 

Bar Kokhba lost, yo.

And so if we appeal to the Bible and Roman history as grounds for accepting the anachronistic interpretation of ancient Jews as a modern nation, then we ought also to be alive to the dangers of territorial agglomeration of a people.

Giving in to modernity’s interpretation of Jewishness is dangerous. Part of Judaism’s power is that it is a robustly adaptable spiritual and communal practice. Resisting an imposition of identity, refusing to calcify the hermeneutics of the religion... this is a strength.

The rush to a highly militarized modernist colonial nation-state was sensible in the face of the Holocaust, but at 70 yrs remove we should have the confidence to ask if it is the best route to safety. I think that it’s not the best route and that it comes at great spiritual cost.

^