11/02 Links Pt2: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor; The Balfour bogeyman; AOC’s ‘obsession’ with Israel is ‘shameful’; LA Council Passes IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

From Ian:

The Stories She Never Told

My mother loved to talk politics, real estate, and cooking. She’d happily offer intelligent insights on nearly any subject except one: her own life. With stops in prewar Hungary, Auschwitz, the Sorbonne, Mexico, and finally Manhattan, my mother’s life was extraordinary, but she kept it to herself. I hated that, but I knew why. So tender-hearted that news of terrorist attacks or natural disasters brought her to tears, she needed to distance herself from the pain of her own past. Still, as her child, I needed to understand her and the world that created her.

As a teenager and young adult, I plied her with questions, but I was only partly successful. I uncovered the scaffolding of her past but not its interiority. My mother is gone now, but my curiosity remains. I still search for her by immersing myself in stories of prewar Hungarian Jewry. Surprisingly, a new book about a Sephardic Holocaust survivor has opened a window into my mother’s inner life.

One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, a Natan Award winner, is a Tuesdays with Morrie-style recollection of journalist Michael Frank’s conversations with nonagenarian Stella Levi, who grew up on the island of Rhodes. My mother was born thousands of miles and a universe away in the Romanian city of Satu Mare, the small Romanian city better known by its Yiddish name Satmar—the birthplace of the Satmar Hasidic sect—yet their lives seem to mirror each other.

They were born within two years of each other in the mid-1920s; both grew up in religiously observant but non-Hasidic families (prewar Satmar was home to many non-Hasidic Jews), and both belonged to the last generation of Jews to feel deeply rooted in their European birthplaces. My mother’s forebears had lived in or around Satmar for more than two centuries. Levi’s family had been part of the Juderia, Rhodes’ Jewish district, since the Spanish Inquisition. Both grew up in the embrace of aunts, uncles, and cousins in a world that moved to the eternal rhythms of the Jewish calendar.

Living within a 5-mile radius in Manhattan, both Levi and my mother viewed themselves as consummately modern women, yet both were intensely nostalgic for their childhood homes. Levi spoke of “a place where old women sat outside and told stories … took dishes to be baked in the communal oven … and where a granddaughter learned to prepare her grandmother’s sweet and savory dishes.” Unable to access the right words, my mother expressed her longing to recreate the flavors of her childhood and by carrying a crumpled photograph of her doomed aunts and cousins inside of her wallet.

Daniel Greenfield: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor

"A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers"

This is what happens when the Holocaust becomes universalized, a free-floating metaphor and finally woke kitsch.

Yes, that’s the problem there.

This production, which has now been canceled, comes on the heels of things like the various Anne Frank revisions, including the Latino/ICE one. The underlying problem though is the use of the Holocaust and Hitler as a metaphor for everything bad.

The Holocaust is not a lens. It’s certainly not a lens for whatever woke nonsense is trying to appropriate Jewish history to make claims about the “rise of fascism” today.

There, is to a much lesser degree, similar objections to Netfix’s Dahmer movie which distorted and rewrote the history of the murders to score political points.

Treating real events, especially the murder of people, as a metaphor reduces the dead to the means of a political end while robbing them of their voice, their history and their identity.

The Holocaust is not slavery, slavery is not the Holocaust, whatever some sexual minority is upset by is not either one, and real events are not interchangeable. Neither are real people.

The Balfour bogeyman

In the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, one historical act is attributed with all future Palestinian suffering. That act is the Balfour Declaration, issued today, Nov. 2, in 1917. The declaration was the first contemporary, internationally recognized expression of the right of the Jewish people to establish a national homeland in the geographical area known as “Palestine”.

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

As exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, the PA Ministry of Information called the Balfour declaration: “The greatest crime in the history of mankind,” and the official PA daily called it “The crime of the century.”

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who also serves as the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge recently claimed that the Balfour declaration violated international law:
“Israel’s very existence contradicts international law. On what right do you bring people who have no connection to this land and plant them here and tell them: This is your national home? Who gave Britain a right to give a national home? Was Palestine the land of [former British Foreign Secretary Arthur] Balfour’s father?”

[Facebook page of the Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Oct. 10, 2022]

So how then, can one answer the PA’s claim?

While the Balfour Declaration was an important statement of policy on the part of the UK government, it certainly did not have the ability to bring about the creation of the Jewish state without wide international consensus.

Historically, the declaration was issued as part of a new regional order that was born out of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which, inter alia, had controlled most of the Middle East for centuries. As part of the new order, new borders were drawn and countries were, for the first time, carved out.

In the Ottoman Empire, “Palestine” as the separate national country and identity, as the PA claims, never existed. Rather, the region was merely just another region of the empire with no specific definition.

Abbas’ advisor: Israel’s existence contradicts international law

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Is There Anyone From J-Street Who ISN'T A Co-Founder of If Not Now? (Daled Amos)

Just asking.

It seems there are various former members of J Street, some who served in leadership positions, who are now involved in If Not Now -- and some of them are apparently founding members.

For example:

Max Berger

o  He is identified as a co-founder of If Not Now in his 'bio' on Haaretz
o  A JTA article notes that before If Not Now, Max Berger worked for J Street as a new media assistant

Yonah Lieberman

o  Yonah Lieberman has a twitter account that identifies him as a co-founder of If Not Now
o  Lieberman was very heavily involved in J Street. According to his LinkedIn page, from January 2010 on he was a member of the National Student Board, the Midwest Regional Co-Chair, and Campus Chapter Chair.

Carinne Luck

o  Times of Israel identifies Carinne Luck as a co-founder of If Not Now.
o  Luck's website notes she was a founding staff member and Vice President for Field and Campaigns at J Street.

Simone Zimmerman

o  Simone Zimmerman identifies herself as a co-founder of If Not Now on her Twitter page.
o  In an article for The Forward, Josh Nathan-Kazis writes that Simone Zimmerman was the national president of J Street U’s student board in the 2012-2013 school year

Kara Segal

o  Kara Segal's LinkedIn account lists her as an If Not Now co-founder.
o  She appears in this YouTube video at a 2009 J Street conference.

Emily Mayer

o  Emily Mayer identifies herself as an If Not Now organizer on her Twitter page
o  Daniel Greenfield notes that Emily Mayer was with J Street U at Haverford

Sarah Beth Alcabes

Canary Mission lists Sarah Beth Alcabes as leading an INN disruption, in partnership with Taher Herzallah of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and also being an activist with J Street U at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley) from 2012-2014.

Times of Israel mentions Elianna Fishman, who was "heavily involved with J Street U Dartmouth" and who confirms "I interned for J Street, and helped set up a chapter on campus” before graduating and joining IfNotNow -- to which the article adds

In fact, many of IfNotNow’s leaders are alumni of J Street U.

An article in Haaretz echoes this when it says:

[If Not Now] remains small, attracting several dozen participants, some of whom are leaders of J Street U, the group’s student-organizing arm.

But the question remains: why have these, and other members of J Street, made the switch?

It sure appears as if J-Street is a gateway drug for Jewish students to learn to hate Israel and to be comfortable to criticize Israel "as a Jew." But it might be more than that.

According to a Haaretz article from 2014, Gaza War Pushes Some to the Left of J Street. The logic, according to Haaretz, is that over time, J Street, even back in 2014, was becoming larger and more moderate, with the result that there were the beginnings of a limited exodus that benefited smaller more radical groups. One of those groups was If Not Now, described in the article as "an ad hoc group."

Of course, what the Haaretz article claims is a sign of J Street's moderation can also be seen as the failure in the eyes of some of its members, to become increasingly radical.

A similar theme to Haaretz is taken by Nathan-Kazis in the Forward also in an article from 2014, that in contrast to the more "moderate" tone taken by J Street, some members felt J Street was not doing enough:

Former high-ranking J Street staff members were among the organizers of a July 28 protest in New York City against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. They acted under the name #ifnotnow and made no mention of their former J Street affiliations.

He writes about another protest just a few days earlier, launched by 4 activists that included high-ranking members Carinne Luck who had left J Street in 2012 and Daniel May, director of J Street U from 2010 to 2013 as well as Max Berger.

Other participants in one or both of those #ifnotnow protests included Isaac Luria, J Street’s vice president of communications and new media from 2008 until 2011 and Tamara Shapiro.

Some of that former J Street staff said they were not opposed to J Street’s long-term strategy -- but felt limited by its tactics. Others, like Luck, said they did not share J Street's "patience" with the "Jewish institutional community."

That is the narrative. Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag.org isn't buying it.

He is cynical of claims that If Not Now was simply born of a break with J Street. In If Not Now, J Street's Latest Anti-Israel Front Group, he writes:

The official narrative is that If Not Now parted ways with J Street because the group was insufficiently opposed to the Jewish State and insufficiently supportive of Hamas. As a practical matter though this is how radical groups have always operated, with a front group that makes efforts to appear moderate while incubating radical organizations within itself that "split off" but still pursue the same agenda.

Despite claims of a split, If Not Now is just pursuing the exact same agenda as J Street U, protesting Jewish charities for supporting Israel, while claiming to be the voice of a new generation.

It's the same scam with a new brand and slightly less of a paper trail.

If Not Now is J Street...

...New organizations are constantly being created and destroyed. But they all share one agenda. The destruction of the Jewish State.

If there is indeed an element of dramatic effect at work here, then this alleged break would be no more authentic than the recent break of Jesse Steshenko, who claimed to have been "a very ardent Zionist" who as a result of his recent J Street trip to Israel became "disgusted" with Israel.

Elder of Ziyon revealed that in fact as recently as 2016 as a member of Junior States of America, a mock Congress, he introduced a resolution calling Israel an apartheid state and demanding the recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as defined by the 1949 Armistice -- effectively depriving Israel of the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.

Actually, J Street itself has a history of being less than straightforward.

o  It is a group that claims that it is pro-Israel, yet only supports Democrats, going so far as to support candidates it claims support Israel such as Representative Mark Pocan, who anonymously reserved official Capitol Hill space for an anti-Israel forum organized by organizations that support boycotts

o  J Street was perfectly willing to support Rashida Tlaib, until it withdrew it only because she backed out of support of a 2-state solution

o  Despite denials, J Street not only supported the Goldstone Report - it actively facilitated Goldstone's attempt to defend it

o  Despite their repeated denials to the contrary, in 2008 and 2009 J Street received funding from George Soros.

o  J Street's co-founder Daniel Levy called the creation of Israel ‘an act that was wrong’

Carinne Luck's involvement in If Not Now is another reason for apprehension.

Here is a 2012 video of Luck explaining J Street's job:




The main takeaway from what Luck says:

o  A sizable percentage of J Street is not Jewish
o  J Street responds to  the wishes "the Hill, the (Obama) Administration" which wants J Street to "move Jews"
o  The bulk of J Street resources are dedicated to this
o  There is an uneasiness about those in J Street leadership who are not Jewish who may present themselves as Jews 

This idea of misrepresentation that Carinne Luck shares with the group -- without condemning -- is an issue that arises again with If Not Now, both in terms of questions about its connections with J Street but also in terms of its own claims to represent today's young American Jews.

We have seen there is a failure of J Street to live up to what it claims it does.
Should we be surprised that there are doubts about what If Not Now claims as well?

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