Open Hillel is dead. Its successor doesn't know why it exists.

Remember Open Hillel?

About ten years ago, a group of students at Harvard became incensed that their Jewish campus Hillel canceled an anti-Israel event when it was revealed that a BDS group was sponsoring it, violating Hillel's guidelines. 

Of course they could hold their event anywhere, but they decided to start a movement called Open Hillel to get other Hillels to drop their affiliation with Hillel. Like so many "progressive" organizations past and future, they are more interested in creating a split within the Jewish community than in building their own. Open Hillel had a conference at Harvard in 2014 and based on the media attention, it looked like it could rupture Hillel International.

It failed.

In the end, only four campuses nationwide defected to "Open Hillel" - Guilford College, Swarthmore College, Vassar College, and Wesleyan University. 

By 2020, none of them were still associated with Open Hillel - and two of them are now affiliated with Hillel International again. 

In short, Open Hillel made a lot of noise but in the end could not attract students who are both interested in Judaism and anti-Zionism. There is a strong negative correlation between the two positions, which pretty much dooms any attempt to fuse them, no matter how many anti-Israel Haggadahs are printed.

So Open Hillel is in a deep coma, and has been for a while, just as the American Council for Judaism - a prominent and equally tiny anti-Zionist group in the 1940s-1960s - also sunk into irrelevance. Both organizations have a couple of people still doing paperwork to maintain their tax exempt status but they have faded away after a lot of publicity early on.

But Open Hillel has one last gambit to stay alive: "Judaism On Our Own Terms," or JOOOT.

They wrote an introductory piece in Mondoweiss on Friday: "Judaism On Our Own Terms is creating a space where young Jews do not have to choose between their Judaism and their sense of justice."

JOOOT is an offshoot, and seemingly successor, of Open Hillel. Since 2020, Open Hillel's Form 990 has included a position for Rakhel Silverman as a "Judaism on our own Terms organizer." getting paid $4600 in 2020 and $2492 in 2021. Silverman describes themself as a "a proud fat trans Disabled Jew."

But JOOOT really doesn't know what to do next. On their website they say they are in the midst of a "restructuring process" where they are asking anyone and everyone to please give them some ideas of what they should be doing. To restructure means they had a structure to begin with, which is not at all clear. 

This mirrors the self-destruction of IfNotNow, but at least IfNotNow managed to grab some headlines before its inevitable collapse. 

In the end, even children know that "Judaism On Our Own Terms" is an oxymoron. People don't look at religion or community to do whatever they want - they want to be part of a whole where everyone shares basic beliefs and standards. If anyone can do whatever they want and call it Judaism, then Judaism has no meaning. The anti-Zionists only have one belief - hating Israel - and that is not enough to keep a core group of enthusiastic members nor is it enough to attract more. 

There will still be plenty of anti-Zionist Jews. But their interest in identifying as Jews is ephemeral. Which is why these groups are all doomed, but also why there will always be new ones who think they came up with the idea. 

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Nazis put an academic face on Jew-hatred. Now their heirs have "The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism."

The Nazis famously subverted academia by creating an entire new field of “Jewish research” (Judenforschung) where respected academics from various fields produced a corpus of academic papers to justify the Nazi policy of genocide of Jews. One early example of this perversion of academia is described in Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism inNazi Germany by Alan E. Steinweis:

Early in the [Nazi] regime, when the universities’ embrace of antisemitic Jewish studies still seemed tentative, Nazi supporters decided to fill the gap by creating their own free-standing Jewish studies institute. The main force behind this initiative was the historian Walter Frank. In 1935, with support from high-ranking Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess, Frank founded the Institute for History of the New Germany (Institut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands), the purpose of which was to infuse a National Socialist perspective into German historical scholarship. A short time later, this so-called Reich Institute established its special Research Department for the Jewish Question, based in Munich, and placed it under the direction of the historian Wilhelm Grau. ..Operating under the administrative protection of the Reich Education Ministry, during the second half of the 1930s the Research Department occupied a central position in the emerging field of Nazi Jewish studies. It sponsored research projects at universities, convened conferences that drew participants from a variety of academic disciplines, and published the conference proceedings in a scholarly yearbook, Forschungen zur Judenfrage (Research on the Jewish Question). 

What's old is new again. 

Modern heirs of Nazi antisemitism have just created their own pseudo-academic institution, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Don't be fooled by the phrase "critical study." It is just as intellectually dishonest as the Nazi academic studies of Jews were. 

The Mondoweiss article "Why we created the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" proves that this institute is a masquerade for making antisemitism academically acceptable in its very first paragraph:

In recent years, the Israeli flag has increasingly appeared around the world alongside racial supremacist political messaging– for instance, at the January 6th riot in Washington D.C., Hindutva rallies in India, Nazi rallies in Europe, and, most potently, in anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank. At this point, it could not be clearer that Zionism is a political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession.   

It doesn't take a graduate level logic course to understand that "racists embrace the Israeli flag" does not mean "Zionist are racist." That's like saying that KKK use of crosses prove all Christians are racists. 

But the intent of this new "Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" is not detached academic study of Zionism. It is purely political - and it is antisemitic.

The very first of the group's "Points of Unity" is an antisemitic lie: "Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism."

Zionists don't define themselves this way. Only anti-Zionists do. "Critical studies" of a topic are impossible when you pre-determine the results of the studies. These are no "studies" at all - just compiling evidence, no matter how flimsy, on one side of the scale and ignoring any counter evidence. 

Zionism is the self-determination movement of the Jewish people. It seeks the return of Jews to their ancestral lands. It is anti-colonialist. It is not racist. However, denying that Jews are a people with national rights - and labeling those Jews who assert those rights as being inherently racist -  is indeed antisemitism.

Their political agenda and disinterest in objective studies is made clear in other "points of unity:" "Academic research is not politically or morally neutral....The Institute’s project is to support research from below, produced by a community led by people who are the targets of Zionist and state repression, with a research agenda determined in collaboration with communities resisting repression."

In other words, if you believe that Jews have rights - rights to a state, rights to self-defense, rights not to be murdered by Palestinian terrorists - you are not welcome in this space.

This is not "critical studies." It is anti-Zionist propaganda. And once you get past their name, they don't even pretend to hide it. To study Zionism, they demand that you reject Zionism and Jewish peoplehood as a prerequisite.

This section of the manifesto is most enlightening:

Studying Zionism through such a comprehensive [sic!] lens means, for instance, looking at the role of Zionist institutions in arenas beyond Palestine as well as the range of Jewish communities, organizations, and institutions where it is not as readily transparent. 

These modern Jew-haters are embracing David Miller's paranoid concept of looking for, and magically finding, links between Jewish organizations and whatever they are hating today. It presupposes that Zionist Jews have a single, nefarious agenda, all controlled by a small group of Jews who secretly direct all these projects  -and always with immoral aims. 

The entire project is putting an academic face on pure hate. Its basic principles are based on bigotry and lies. 

Antisemitism is becoming mainstream, and it is people like this who are in the forefront.

(h/t  Andrew)

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Old anti-Zionist organizations don't die...they just fade away, slowly

Have you ever heard of the American Council for Judaism?

We've discussed it before. It was the IfNotNow of the 1940s and 1950s, holding an anti-Zionist position that it pretended was Jewish. The ACJ pretended to be loyal to "classical Reform Judaism," and insisted that Jews were a religion but not a people and that to be Zionist was to be anti-American. In 1957 the Union for Reform Judaism emphatically rejected the ACJ as having nothing to do with the Reform stance towards Zionism. 

Because it had the name "Judaism" in its name, the media loved to quote it even though it represented only a fringe of a fringe of American Jewry.  Just like "Jewish Voice for Peace" today, the early head of ACJ - Elmer Berger - managed to grab headlines and make it appear that ACJ was a major player in American Judaism. 

So whatever happened to the ACJ?

It is still around, and even more irrelevant.

It has a website, and apparently it still has some assets, but not much income. 

The website shows that there is a quarterly journal, "Issues of the American Council of Judaism." Nearly every article for the past twelve years is written by the same person, Allan C. Brownfeld. 

Brownfeld, in a good As-A-Jew tradition, also writes for anti-Israel outlets like Mondoweiss and the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs. 

If you want to know what JVP and IfNotNow will look like in ten years, look at the American Council of Judaism. 

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Denmark buys Israeli artillery systems, backfilling weapons sent to Ukraine - and upsetting BDSers

ATMOS truck-mounted howitzer

Defense News reported in March:

Israeli defense company Elbit Systems said it won several deals in Europe this month, including a $119 million sale of ATMOS truck-mounted howitzers and a $133 million contract for PULS artillery rocket systems.

The deals, which Elbit said are with a European NATO member country, come as several governments on the continent continue their shopping sprees to resupply their troops, having sent munitions from their own stocks to Ukraine, which is under invasion by Russia.

“We are witnessing a trajectory of an increased demand for advanced artillery solutions from militaries around the world, including European countries and NATO members, as part of their efforts to increase the effectiveness of their armed forces. Our operationally proven systems provide an advanced, cost-effective solution to meet that demand,” said Bezhalel Machlis, the CEO of Elbit.

Although the buyer was not named, it is widely believed to be Denmark, based on an earlier press release that Denmark was negotiating with Elbit for those systems.

I'm surprised that we have not yet seen conspiracy theories that Israel is behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to increase its arms sales to NATO members.

Anyway, the BDSers are livid, because they claimed to have scuttled another contract between Denmark and Elbit in 2015, a claim denied by the Danish authorities. And Mondoweiss blamed the Danish Left for this sale, saying that they were silent during the negotiations, unlike in 2015:

Few voices have raised concerns about the unusual speed this deal has gone through without due process or vigorous political scrutiny from the opposition. Is the Danish left happy to support a deal for weapons tested on the Palestinian civilians in the West Bank? Has the priority of the war in Ukraine meant all debate regarding arms procurement from Israel is frozen? Are Palestinians to remain second-class citizens in the eyes of the international community, only to be exploited for political capital as a means to express one’s ‘humanism’? 

Well, you learn something new every day. Israel has been shooting artillery at Palestinian civilians in the West Bank! Somehow the media has missed this entire story, but Mondoweiss figured it out. It is amazing what scoops you can find when you don't know what you are talking about.. 

This little episode indicates that the 2015 arms sale was not blocked by BDS, and it was just another fake victory they claimed. 

And it also shows that while Israel has not been directly supplying weapons to Ukraine, it has been supplying them indirectly, by backfilling weapons being sent from European countries. This way the EU countries get to upgrade their supplies while sending older weapons systems to Ukraine, which needs them badly. Everyone wins.

Except for BDSers and their Russian allies.  

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The haters are now demanding Trader Joe's stop selling matzoh made in Israel

This Mondoweiss article reads like a parody:

Trader Joe’s prides itself on delivering great products at fair prices. And we agree that they deliver on that promise. So, when we saw that our favorite food store is now selling Passover Matzo made in Israel we had to act. 

Trader Joe’s also has a reputation for being responsive to customers, so we started this campaign to tell them how disappointed we are in their decision to sell house branded Matzo prominently marked as a “product of Israel” or any other products labeled as “made in Israel.”

In support of the Palestinian Civil Society’s call to boycott all Israeli products, we never purchase Israeli-made products at Trader Joe’s or anywhere else, but that no longer feels like enough.  It is important that we tell stores, and the good people who work in them, why we boycott Israel and how badly it reflects on stores when they sell products made in Apartheid Israel.  

We hope that many people will join us by printing out this note to Trader Joe’s, signing it, and giving it to a manager in every Trader Joe’s that you shop in:

 

The funniest part of the Mondoweiss article was a selfie of co-author Seth Morrison smiling in front of the matzoh display with his "Palestine 1948" T-shirt. His smile makes it look like he is promoting the matzoh, not boycotting it!

This is way beyond activism and well into obsession territory. No one on Earth thinks that Palestinians are helped one iota from these ridiculous stunts, and it is obvious to all who care to think about it that this is not  animated by concern for Palestinian human rights but visceral hate for the Jewish state.

Trader Joe's sells other Israeli products, including their own branded Bamba snack and "Israeli Feta Cheese."  Horrors!

I can't wait for Sukkot when the haters start a campaign to boycott Israeli etrogim. 

(h/t Roger K)

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The boars are back in town - and @Mondoweiss and @TheIMEU have them!

Zionist pigs (according to "anti-Zionists")

The IMEU brings back one of our favorite stories of the Zionist Attack Zoo: that religious Jewish settlers raise (decidedly unkosher) wild pigs and release them to attack Palestinians and their fields.

Their Twitter thread:

Israel is using wild boars to strengthen its colonial hold on Palestinian land. Yes, you read that right. But how? 

Palestinian farmers have long documented the impact of wild boar populations, which dig up crops and destroy farmland. This has only worsened in recent years, thanks to the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority intentionally dumping large numbers of pigs onto Palestinian land. 

Aggressive wild boars have caused significant damage to Palestinian livelihoods, and have injured and killed many. This is the outcome of Israel’s colonialism, which endangers Palestinian lives by causing irreparable damage to their environment. 

Even Israeli settlers have been found to release wild boars onto Palestinian farmland as a form of abuse. These illegal settlers use the boars to pressure and intimidate Palestinians, hoping to drive them away from their lands and vacate it for illegal settlement growth. 

Thanks to Israel, Palestinians have been left with no way to protect themselves from the wild boars. Though Israel has no right to control the West Bank, it has turned large swathes of Palestinian land into nature reserves, making boar population control a crime. 

Israel not only causes environmental harm to Palestinian land, but is also weaponizing nature against Palestinians, turning the land itself into a source of destruction and violence for the indigenous population. 

Palestinians deserve to live free and to cultivate the land that their families have lived on for centuries. But under Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, their connection to their land is under attack. 

Believe it or not, IMEU stands for the Institute for Middle East Understanding,

But then for additional reading, they link to a story this past week on Mondoweiss!

That article is just as ridiculous, and perhaps more so.

In 2005, in a village north of Nablus called Sabastia, the family of Jawad Ghazal was shocked by the murder of his 84-year-old father. Jawad and his father were picking olives when a wild boar attacked them, killing Jawad’s father and severely injuring Jawad. 

It was....MURDER!

In the past, wild boars have never been a problem in Palestine. Renowned Palestinian historian Mustafa Murad Al-Dabbagh mentioned in his seminal encyclopedia, Palestine, Our Home, that in 1943 there were around 12,145 wild boars in Palestine, located in Jabal al-Tur near Nazareth, as well as in the Jordan Valley, al-Hula, and Wadi Araba.  

Um, 12,145 sounds like a problem. 

It took me about two minutes to find that wild boars were damaging vineyards in Palestine in 1862:

This 1855 account discusses the wild boars in Palestine and surrounding lands, and notes that the Muslims would call the boars "Christians" by way of insult of that faith.

Thanks, Mondoweiss, for helping us document historic Palestinian Arab intolerance!

This isn't the end of Mondoweiss' litany of lies. Not even close.

Another significant reason for the spread of wild boars in Palestine is Israeli colonial practices — recent reports have indicated that settler-owned boars are being intentionally released into Palestinian villages, even though solid documentation has lagged behind. Others claim that the Israeli military is releasing the boars with the purpose of  destroying crops, the main source of income for many rural communities.   

Yes, professional soldiers are rounding up wild boars and releasing them in Palestinian fields. They must put them in bulletproof settler buses. 

Mohammad Hassan from Salfit has indicated to the Land Research Center (LRC) that he personally saw Israeli colonists unload wild pigs in the area of al-Ashara located between the city of Salfit and the village of Iskaka. Some of those I interviewed in the village of Aboud near Ramallah said they witnessed settler trucks unloading wild boars in the village’s nearby mountains.

Palestinian eyewitnesses are amazing. They see such cool things like settlers and the army trucking wild pigs throughout the West Bank, but somehow they keep forgetting to take out their mobile phones and take photos and video. Maybe they are hypnotized by Joo-Rays. 

Notably, hunting wild boars is out of the question for Palestinians. The use of firearms by Palestinian civilians is strictly forbidden by the Israeli colonial regime. 

Yeah, it is real difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank to get weapons.

And the rare times they manage to find M16s, they use them for shooting at Jews and shooting in the air at weddings, so there is no ammunition left for the boars.

The half-measure of constructing a fence or wall has also proven ineffectual, as pigs have demolished or jumped over them. ....Israeli settlements, of course, are mountaintop fortresses, and hence shielded from the boars. 

The boars can apparently distinguish between Jewish and Arab fences.

Using wild boars is part of an older Zionist imperative to colonize nature. 

Yes! Colonizing nature has been a Zionist imperative since Herzl. Or perhaps from the time of earlier Zionists like Choni HaMe'agel.

The article then repeats the lie that JNF planted non-indigenous trees that, this article claims, turns the ground to acid to destroy all other plants. It doesn't mention the name of the trees - the Jerusalem (or Aleppo) pine, which are indeed indigenous to the region. Whoops.

There is a lot of competition, but this may be the dumbest Mondoweiss article yet. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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What's Mondoweiss afraid of?

Mondoweiss is very upset:

Last week, the Thomas Reuters Foundation announced that award-winning Palestinian journalist Shatha Hammad would be the recipient of the prestigious Kurt Schork Local Reporter Award for 2022. Not 48 hours later, Zionist watchdog group Honest Reporting unleashed a vicious smear campaign against Hammad to pressure Reuters and the Kurt Schork Fund to revoke the award. The campaign succeeded. 

Hammad is just the latest Palestinian journalist to be targeted by such groups. Earlier this month, the New York Times fired Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salem for expressing support for Palestinian resistance, after Honest Reporting dug through Salem’s facebook posts to “expose” him to the Times. Honest Reporting is one of many Zionist watchdog organizations whose mission is to rush to the defense of one of the last colonial regimes in the world, effectively functioning as an international arm of Israeli “Hasbara” and providing a smokescreen for the continuous colonization and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

As pointed out by a letter signed by hundreds of Palestinian and Arab journalists condemning these recent online attacks, these watchdog groups function similarly to Israeli intelligence agencies, digging “deep into journalists’ social media accounts, chasing after any expressions, statements, or even jokes said in childhood, taking them out of context and weaponizing them.” 

This is what Honest Reporting did to Hammad, distorting several of her old facebook posts from 2014 in an attempt to paint her as an antisemite and “Hitler fan.” Hammad emphatically denies these outrageous claims, and even contends that one of the alleged facebook posts was outright fabrication.

The Kurt Schork Memorial Fund buckled under the pressure and promptly revoked Hammad’s award. This alone is concerning, as it shows a willingness to accept the accusations of a clearly partisan organization that uses questionable methods in producing “proof” of wrongdoing.

The article goes on to say that Honest Reporting is Zionist and partisan, that there are double standards being applied, that the social media posts being quoted are false out of context or old - a litany of excuses and accusations about the unfairness of reporters being fired for being "pro-Palestinian."

Yet somehow, this fearless media outlet doesn't once mention what these reporters actually wrote that got them fired.

Seems like a curious detail to leave out of a story, doesn't it? According to the terror supporting Mondoweiss, these innocent lambs are accused of doing something they don't want to reveal, but you should  trust them - the journalists are innocent and the accusers are horrible people.

As HR reports, Salem has posted multiple times clear and unambiguous support for terror attacks, including the murder of four rabbis at prayer in Jerusalem.

In 2011, Salem took to Facebook to praise the Jerusalem bus bombing in which British Christian evangelical student Mary Jane Gardner was murdered, and 67 others were injured. Members of the Hamas cell had reportedly planned an additional attack but were stopped by Israeli security forces.

On November 18, 2014, Hosam Salem again used Facebook to express his joy over the massacre of four rabbis and an Israeli-Druze police officer in a synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof.

Citing the Quran, he encouraged his followers to “smite the necks” of unbelievers, adding: “[This is the] summary of the Jerusalem operation [sic] today.”

There’s more. In 2015, Salem applauded two acts of terror (see here and here); a shooting at the Gush Etzion Junction that killed an American teenager, an Israeli man, and a Palestinian bystander; and a Jerusalem stabbing that killed three.

Some three years later, after being hired by The New York Times, Salem called for more violence following an attack that killed two IDF recruits in the West Bank. “Shoot, kill, withdraw: three quick operational steps…to bring peace to the hearts of sad people like us,” the inciting post read.

Finally, he has repeatedly eulogized Mohammed Salem and Nabil Masoud. The two were responsible for a 2004 suicide bombing that killed ten workers at the Ashdod port, Israel’s second-busiest harbor.

What about Shatha Hammad?

 The posts that HonestReporting uncovered included dozens of violent and antisemitic clarion calls, such as one in which she eulogized the “martyrs” who killed five “settlers” during the 2014 Jerusalem synagogue massacre where two Palestinian terrorists attacked worshipers with axes, knives and a gun.

In several posts in 2014, Hammad, who currently works for Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera, signed off her comments using the nickname “Hitler” and joked that she was “in agreement” with the Nazi leader who oversaw the mass extermination of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

In another post — originally written in Arabic but translated into English by HonestReporting — she described herself as “friends” and “one” with Hitler, adding they have the “same mentality, like, for example, the extermination of the Jews” alongside a smiley face emoji.

Honest Reporting has screenshots, so Hammad's claim of "fabrication" is ridiculous.

Mondoweiss wants its readers to be angry - but it sure doesn't want them to know the posts it is defending as mere "criticism of Israel."  The article is filled with hyperlinks - but not one to Honest Reporting's articles that show the screenshots of these journalists promoting the murders of Jews.

In fact, they are so upset at these revelations that they say, with a straight face, that "Zionist watchdogs are a danger to journalism." Not journalists who support murdering Jews - but the people who expose them. 

Mondoweiss is afraid of the truth. It tries to hide the truth. Which proves that the truth is not on their side.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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