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

Read More

The child and the bus: a tale of Israel in 15 seconds

This video of a Jewish child, no more than 6, flagging down a bus in Beit Shemesh and getting on by himself is starting to go viral:

Imagine a place where children could, without fear, go out by themselves and take the bus around town. 

It sounds utopian, doesn't it?

And parents outside Israel would naturally flinch at seeing a video like this. So many dangers to worry about - kidnapping, abuse, or worse.

But this is how the world should be. 

The reason Israelis can act this way in Jewish neighborhoods is because everyone is family. People aren't competing with each other - they are all on the same team, the same tribe, and they look out for each other. They have each others' backs. 

And this is what the anti-Israel activists want to destroy. 

They don't give a damn about Palestinian  rights - their silence about Palestinians languishing in Lebanon and Syria makes that clear. 

The modern antisemites want to take away the Jewish right to live in safety and security. Their enemy is this little kid, his tzitzit openly visible, able to freely travel around his hometown on the local bus without his parents worrying that he'll make it home safely. 

Much of Israel, today, is the utopia that everyone else wants for themselves. And for some of them, their jealousy at Jews successfully building such a utopia is what animates them to want to tear it down. 

Don't believe the lies that they care about justice or international law or, ludicrously, Palestinian "self defense." What they want is for Jews to return to being a frightened minority who are not safe, not secure, and not free. 

They hate this child because he goes against everything they want to believe about Jews. 

---

---

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!

 

Read More

We are family: the secret of Israel's success

The Economist reports that the birthrates of Israeli Jews has been rising and that of Arabs in Israel and the territories has been dropping - and the Israeli Jewish birthrate is bucking the trends around the world. 

In short, the demographic bomb that was predicted for decades to destroy Israel has nearly fizzled. 

But the article then touches on an important point that rarely makes it to the media.

Excerpts:

"If an Israeli woman has fewer than three children, she feels as if she owes everyone an explanation—or an apology.” That, at any rate, is the view of a leading Israeli demographer. When she visits London she is struck by its dearth of toy shops. Israelis have many more children than their counterparts elsewhere in the rich world. Whereas the average Israeli woman has 2.9, her British and French peers have 1.6 and 1.8 respectively.

Yasser Arafat, who led the Palestinians for three-and-a-half decades, described “the womb of the Arab woman” as his “strongest weapon”. Demographic projections used to suggest that Arabs living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean would eventually outnumber Jews.

At the time there was indeed a wide demographic gap. In Israel itself Arab women were having almost twice as many babies on average as Jewish women. But in the past few decades this gap has disappeared, as the birth rate of Israeli Arabs has fallen while that of Israeli Jews has risen.

In 1960 the fertility rate of Israeli Arabs stood at 9.3. In the next 35 years it dropped by almost half, to 4.7, before sliding to 3.0 today (see chart). The birth rate of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank also declined, from 4.6 in 2003 to 3.8 in 2019. In this Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have followed a path trodden by women elsewhere. Across the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, the average fertility rate has fallen from almost three in 1970 to 1.6, well below the rate of about 2.1 needed to keep a population from shrinking.

This makes the rising birth rate of Jewish Israelis all the more surprising. Between 1960 and 1990 their fertility declined from 3.4 to 2.6, suggesting they were in step with their sisters elsewhere. But then they began to buck the trend, driving the birth rate back up to its current level of 3.1.

Almost all this increase is caused by Israel’s growing number of ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) Jews, who have a fertility rate of 6.6, more than double the national average and three times the rate of secular Jews. ....

But it is harder to explain why secular Jewish Israelis also have more children than the norm. Most work; paid leave for Israeli parents is not especially generous. Nor is child care cheaper than in other rich places. Some argue that Jewish Israelis make more babies because they foresee a rosier future: Israel ranks among the world’s top ten countries in happiness.

Another reason may be that the state encourages baby-making by, for instance, bankrolling fertility treatment. It subsidises in-vitro fertilisation to the tune of $150m a year. Tiny Israel has about the same number of frozen embryos as America. This may have only a slight effect on Israel’s birth rate, but it signals that the government wants its citizens to procreate.

One more explanation may be that Israeli grandparents tend to help out more than their peers in many other rich countries. Since Israel is small and densely populated, grandma is never far away. In one survey 83% of secular Jewish mothers aged 25-39 said they were supported by their child’s grandparents, whereas only 30% of German mothers said the same. In Israel the traditional family structure is still strong. In France and Britain more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. In Israel it is under 10%.

That last paragraph is the most important one.

Arabs and anti-Zionists pretend that Judaism is a mere religion. But it is so much more than that. 

Jews are beyond a people, beyond a tribe.

We are family.

This is the fundamental issue that modern antisemites simply cannot grasp. It is that sense of family, of mutual responsibility, of a shared past and a shared destiny, that is the secret of Israel's success and strength. 

The entire reason for legendary Israeli rudeness and loudness is because one lets their guard down around family. Israelis will ask each other personal questions because that's how one treats family.  Walking on eggshells to make sure people won't be offended or react unpredictably is for strangers, not for relatives. 

"Jewish geography" - the invariable start of a conversation between Jews from different places to find out who they know in common - is a game that only works for cousins. 

Normal people, even the most altruistic, care more about their families than about others. It is natural. That is why Israel cares so much about the survival and future of the Jewish people.

The modern antisemites see this family dynamic and twist it into "Jewish supremacy." That is a perversion.  It is nothing of the sort. It is the way that strong, functional families act. And it is a good indicator of how strong societies remain strong. 

Strong families make better neighbors with others than disconnected individuals can, but they also circle the wagons together against threats. And this last sentence just explained Israel's policy towards its Arab citizens and neighbors better than hundreds of academic papers and articles can. 

Bethany Mandel had a great thread last week about the bonds between Jews. A slightly shortened version:

I was at the county fair today with all the kids and ran out of cash and don’t carry a bank card.   My kids were distraught and wanted more ride tickets. So I said “lemme go ask that Jewish guy if I can Venmo him for cash.” My kids were like WHAT you can’t just go up to a stranger and ask to bum cash. And I was like guys, he’s not just some guy, he’s a Jew. Watch me.    He went to the ATM, got us cash, I Venmo’d him in exchange, and they learned a valuable lesson about being Jews.

My kids don’t remember it, but I did this another time. I was on a full flight alone with three kids and had to use the bathroom. My older two were too young to hold the baby. So I got up, looked around, saw a Jewish guy four rows back in the middle seat, and handed him the baby. I came back and he was like oh, wait, I follow you on Twitter.  And everyone around him was like wait you didn’t know him…? I was like no. They asked why I trusted him.  I was like first off - where is he gonna go? Second, he’s a Jew. So he can hold my baby. They were 🤯🤯🤯.

Proud Jews get it. We viscerally understand how we are all family. We experience how visiting Israel, even for the first time, feels like returning home, both religious Jerusalem and secular Tel Aviv. 

We are family. If you don't get that, you don't understand Jews and you don't understand Israel. 

---

---

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!

 

Read More