this neocon yutz has a collection of tzipi livni photos mixed among, um, artful nudes in his wank slideshow on flickr.
be sure to flip around and check out his profile. it features such choice cuts as “My political hero is Independent [de-selected veteran Democrat] Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.”
My friend, Dr. Uri Gordon, and I started writing a lengthy rebuttal to Yehezkiel Dror’s anger-inducing op-ed in The Forward calling for the shuttling of morality out the window in the face of threats real and imagined against the Jewish people. And perhaps we will finish it soon. In the meantime, Eli Valley has done a bang-up job with his response in Jewcy, which touches upon many of the points Uri and I raise in our piece, and which echoes several of the points made in my post on the Jewish identity panel at the President’s Conference last week. Check it out.
I joked for days about what I’d do, given the opportunity. I joked seriously, half-seriously, “I’d be willing to martyr myself for this cause.” I’d throw tomatoes, a pie, drop a banner, talk trash to his face, strangle him with my bare hands. Something, anything.
I considered the pie my best option. Key lime, perhaps. Something messy, with a lot of cream and custard. Something he’d have to eat like the seven years of fecal waste we’ve been made to eat by his administration.
You can view more photos from this panel, as well as from the rest of the President’s Conference, here.
I just sat through an hour and a half of infuriating dialogue on Jewish identity that has only further concretized my belief that Jewish leadership is completely out of touch with the greater Jewish public.
Jews and Judaism are moving forward, but many of the panelists in this discussion seem obsessed with keeping us still, or worse yet, moving us backwards.
With rare exception, few of the statements expressed by the panelist seemed to convey an understanding of where we, as the next generation, stand in relationship to our Jewish identities.
They are certainly capable of parsing the data. They have no trouble spotting the trends. But the conclusions they have drawn from this data border on lunacy.
Many of them spoke as if Jewish identity is a monolith and that you’re either with them or against them. With few exceptions, they spoke about fluid identity like it’s a disease. They spoke about individuals expressing their Jewishness in their own way as ignorance and self-aggrandizement. They spoke about Western Liberal values as if they’re anti-Jewish (as opposed to a new paradigm in which to be Jewish). Worse yet, they exposed their contempt for those outside their purview, by claiming that if you are not a Jewish nationalist and if you are not committed to traditional Jewish institutions, then you are uneducated, you are naive, and you have been corrupted by the goyishe world.
In every generation we receive higher revelations of Torah, vis-a-vis the higher revelations of morality that unfold in each new age. And yet, it seems that, in the eyes of these individuals, progress threatens the continuity of the Jewish tradition. There is no acknowledgement that progress — responding and adapting to new paradigms in thought — is itself a Jewish tradition.
They cry that we are disappearing, that Jews aren’t interested in Judaism. Yet they project the impression that the Jewish tradition itself contradicts the values of modern Jewish people. Worse so, they suggest that to feel affection for and solidarity with the non-Jewish world is to abandon our commitment to our own people.
In that regard, they view Jewish social justice ventures that address non-Jewish problems (one of the fastest growing sectors in Jewish communal life) as only a means of moving Jews back towards particularism and tribalism. They do not recognize the value of that service work in-and-of-itself or the concept of service as a Jewish value itself, other than as a means to this end. They do not acknowledge our obligation to love all of G-d’s creation nor our tradition’s imperative to care for the downtrodden whether Jew or non-Jew. They do not see our commitment to the greater world as the logical extension of our tradition, but rather a recipe for our self-destruction.
They pat themselves on the back for their purported forward-thinkingness in bringing young Jewish leadership into the fold, in creating a space for these purportedly “new” forms of Jewish expression, yet they appear only to be co-opting these initiatives with the goal of advancing their unchanging agenda. Indeed, for every dollar they spend on new Jewish initiatives, they spend 10 to fortify the old guard.
I stepped to the microphone and asked (paraphrasing), “Rather than repackaging and rebranding the same old Judaism, what are Jewish institutions doing to make themselves relevant to future generations? If we have new moral revelations in every generation, why are we tolerating the panelists’ characterization of Western Liberalism being as anti-Jewish?”
What I have concluded from this panel — and from the utter isolation I felt in response to my challenge to the panelists, as embodied by their avoidance of these questions and the contemptuous looks I drew from the audience members — is that it is not we who have abandoned the organized Jewish community. Rather, it is the organized Jewish community which has abandoned us.
[Update] The full audio of the panel (1 hr 8 m), which featured Leon Wieseltier, Chaim Waxman, Joseph Kanfer, Sergio DellaPergola, Rachel Fish, Eliette Abecassis, and Rabbi Yehuda Amital, is available (missing only minor introductions), below.
I’m heading back to Israel motzei shabbat, for the first time since I left exactly one year ago. I am in flux between endemic nervousness and dizzying exhilaration.
On the one hand there’s Uganda! Noc! Sira! Alex! Davide! Uri! Amy! Harry! Barya! The Rebbe! Minyan Shelanu! Humus and falafel that don’t taste like ass! Uch, I am so excited!
And yet on the other hand, I can think of a few faces — three in particular — which I absolutely dread running into, and who now maintain a home field advantage that does not bode well for my physical safety. In other words, I’m bringing pepper spray, yo.
Apart from ducking alleyways and visiting my beloved friends, I will be attending Facing Tomorrow: The Israeli Presidential Conference, which will focus on the future of Israel and the Jewish people. I hope to do some live blogging of the event either here or over at the Telegraph, so do be on the lookout.
Perhaps the most provocative and challenging conversation at the Righteous Indignation conference was the Israel panel discussion which took place last night. The participants included Dr. Dianne Balser, Joseph Gindi, Dr. Leonard Fein, Rabbi Melissa Weintraub and Rabbi Brian Walt.
After two days with the American Jewish Committee down in Washington, D.C., I am now in Newton, Mass., at the Righteous Indignation conference.
The train up from D.C. took seven hours(!) and I arrived rather late in the day. Thus, the only content I have to share with you at the moment are the following photos and audio of the keynote session.
Sadly, I didn’t notice that the batteries had died on my MP3 recorder until we were three-quarters through the panelists’ presentations, but luckily I had it back up and running by the time things started getting interesting. The following is a roughly hour long discussion between the panelists and the audience.
My father had dual knee replacement surgery on Friday and is having trouble regaining his blood pressure. He has been slipping in-and-out of consciousness.
Also, my grandmother, Thursday, fell and smashed her face up pretty badly.
So if you’d be so kind, please pray for the swift and full recovery of Pinchas ben Rivka and Peska bas Yuta.
My friend, Dr. Eva Fogelman, has written a piece for Jewcy about third generation Holocaust survivors for which I was an interview subject. It’s an interesting piece and worth a read, though I regretfully disagree with her assessment of “intergenerational transmission of trauma” and her assertion that “Trauma cannot be transmitted to others.”
As Eva identifies, “3Gs are not experiencing Nazi racism or genocide. What is transmitted to 3Gs are values, worldview, family interaction and love—not trauma.”
Indeed, my generation has not been traumatized by having directly experienced persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Rather, it is our stated family interactions and the values we have inherited from our progenitors that account for our traumatization.
Our historical and religious narratives perpetuate a legacy of persecution: One should view himself as though he had been a slave in Egypt; the Amalekites shall rise up in every generation; 6 million perished in Europe; Israel is the most vilified nation on Earth; “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” Even our national symbol, the Menorah, recalls surviving our near-total destruction. In fact, I may go so far as to argue that the primary characteristic of Jewishness in itself is the affectation of surviving traumatic historical episodes.
Add to this our generation’s coming of age in a time of outright hostility towards Israel and Jewish national identity, which has brought along with it resurging levels of antisemitism.
And finally, consider the all-too common experience of domestic violence shared by 2nd and 3rd generation survivors, who embody and perpetuate the effects of physical and psychological abuse initiated by 1st generation survivors. I find it telling that the defining act which earned Abraham the inheritance of Israel was that of traumatizing his son Isaac by binding him to a sacrificial altar. This is where our story begins.
In that, while we may not have inherited the very trauma that afflicted our grandparents directly, I believe it self-evident that we have inherited trauma itself.
