Showing posts with label anti-Zionist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-Zionist. Show all posts

Monday, September 04, 2023

The New York Times has an op-ed by Ilan Stavans about the resilience of Yiddish, supposedly by an expert in the field. It includes some antisemitic tropes, oversimplifications, self-contradictions, outright falsehoods and ultimately reflects anti-Zionist politics more than it represents the state of Yiddish today.

For a language without a physical address that has come frighteningly close to extinction, Yiddish’s will to live seems inexhaustible. The lesson is simple and straightforward: Survival is an act of stubbornness.

Yiddish has been experiencing something of a revival. Online courses mean that anyone from Buenos Aires to Melbourne might learn to speak it. There are new translations of long-forgotten works and literary classics. A Broadway staging of “Fiddler on the Roof” was performed in Yiddish. And streaming platforms like Netflix have released series, including “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and “Rough Diamonds,” fully or partially in Yiddish.

Before World War II, approximately 13 million Jews, both secular and religious, spoke Yiddish. Today it is estimated that there are about a quarter of a million speakers in the United States, about the same number in Israel and roughly another 100,000 in the rest of the world. Nowadays the vast majority of those who speak the language are ultra-Orthodox. They aren’t multilingual, as secular Yiddish speakers always were.
Here is the problem with this article in a nutshell: it is written from the perspective of the relatively tiny number of secular Yiddish speakers today, and it all but ignores the real use of the language among religious Jews, which is the core of how the language is used - and more importantly, how it is evolving.

The Yiddish of the secular Jew today is an adaptation of the Yiddish of the heyday of socialist secular Yiddish newspapers in America in the early 20th century. But the vast majority of Yiddish speakers today use it in their everyday speech and as such the language continues to evolve as needed to accommodate modern life. The religious Jews speaking Yiddish are the ones who are not only keeping it alive but they are the ones who are the ones who change it. As a result, Yiddish speakers who learn the language in university courses in the US have a difficult time understanding the many dialects of Yiddish spoken in Boro Park, Mea Shearim or Bnei Brak, which includes healthy amounts of modern English or Hebrew just as local Yiddish dialects have always assimilated elements of the majority population's language. 

To the secular Jew studying Yiddish, the language is a romantic throwback to the good old days of unionization of sweatshops in the Lower East Side. To the actual speakers of the language today, it is what is used in everyday life. That is where the dynamism of the language comes from - but the current class of secular Yiddishists tend to be anti-religious, and it shows.

Here are two religious Yiddish magazines published today. This is where the "interesant" things are happening to the language, not in academia or with today's secular Yiddish speakers. 


The writer dismisses the "ultra-Orthodox" (itself a demeaning term) as not being multilingual as the secular Yiddish speakers were. Where does he get that from? How many American haredi or chassidic Jews do not speak English? How many Israeli chassidim cannot speak Hebrew? They might not be as fluent in their national languages as they are in Yiddish, but the vast majority can speak and understand more than one language; they couldn't survive in society otherwise. This is just one example of how Stavans subtly disparages the people who are the ones that really keep the language alive - not as a museum piece but as a living language.

It’s worth noting that Yiddish has been maligned by gentiles and Jews alike. Antisemites considered it the parlance of vermin, while the rabbinical elite deemed it unworthy of serious Talmudic discussion. 
Really? The "rabbinical elite" were anti-Yiddish? What planet does he live on?  Yiddish was the lingua franca of all the major European yeshivas, even after they were transplanted to America or Israel after the Holocaust. The roshei Yeshiva (yeshiva heads) from Europe gave their lessons in Yiddish as long as their students understood it, well into the 1960s and 1970s. Today's American "yeshivish" language includes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic and plenty of Yiddish along with English. And some of the "yeshivish" Yiddish has become part of modern Israeli Hebrew - such as "shkoyach" meaning "good job, itself a Yiddishization of a Hebrew term. 

But the article really descends into modern antisemitism/anti-Zionism here:
Another enemy of Yiddish was Zionism. In the late 19th century, as the hope for a Jewish state found its ground, it was portrayed as jargon spoken by the diaspora — the language of homelessness, without a true national voice. To combat this deficit, Hebrew needed to be revived. Soon the myth sprung of the Hebrew pioneer, in sharp contrast with the large-nosed, hunchbacked Jew that Zionists themselves vilified.
Hebrew, which officially became the national language of the state of Israel in 1948, is spoken by about nine million people around the world. For some, the language symbolizes far-right Israeli militarism.
So according to Stavans, Zionists are antisemites who regard diaspora Jews the same way that neo-Nazis do, while modern Hebrew is the language of oppression. 

This is a sick slander.

In fact, the people who initially embraced Hebrew as a modern language outside the religious context, and who rejected Yiddish, were the exact type of people that have embraced Yiddish today: the anti-religious, supposedly enlightened Jews. 

Before Eliezer Ben Yehuda revived Hebrew as a modern language in Israel, there were lots of Hebrew language secular newspapers in eastern Europe. They were created by the Maskilim, the self-described "enlightened" ones, who considered Yiddish vulgar and common and tried to make Hebrew a secular language. Here's a list from the National Library of Israel of the Hebrew periodicals in their collection that existed before 1885, nearly all of them from Eastern Europe and nearly all of them secular:


And the first cover of one famous Haskalah newspaper from 1860, trying to attract the Yiddish speaking public to Hebrew:


These secular European Jews abandoned Hebrew for Yiddish at the same time that Zionists embraced and modernized Hebrew, around the 1890s. As described by the American Israelite in a requiem for Hebrew secular literature in 1906:


And while the current secular Yiddishists are often anti-Israel, the Israeli government is doing more to preserve Yiddish than they are, having created a National Authority on Yiddish Culture in 1996.

Another point about at least some of the secular Jews in Israel at the turn of the 20th century. Many of them opposed the idea of Hebrew being the official language of a Jewish state, and instead lobbied for the official language to be - German
In contrast, Yiddish represents exile — a longing for home. 

This is the problem of the modern, anti-Zionist Yiddishists in a nutshell. Stavans cannot even understand how this sentence is self-contradictory. Exile is by definition being away from home.  To people like Stavans, Yiddish is Jewishness - but it is as transient as symbol of Jewishness as cuisine or dance. Yiddish is something that should be studied and remembered. but it is a tiny slice of the richness of Judaism throughout the millennia and throughout the world. 

In Israel, the choice to standardize Hebrew as the language of the state was partially prompted, and later vindicated, by the Mizrahi Jews in the land who did not know Yiddish and who eventually became the majority. The only thing that Jews throughout the world have in common is Hebrew, not Yiddish. 

The history of Yiddish among secular Jews is much more complex and ambivalent than is described here. This article promotes a myth of secular Jews having always used Yiddish as their preferred language when in fact they used it for political purposes - as they continue to do today. It is the despised religious Jews who keep the language relevant, alive and vibrant today, while the author of this article keeps Yiddish in a romanticized amber of a century ago. 





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!

 

 

Friday, June 23, 2023


 A variant of two previous posters.





This really happened.

















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!

 

 



Sunday, March 26, 2023

From Times of Israel:

An Israeli woman was released from prison in the United Arab Emirates on Saturday night and was flown back to Israel early Sunday, after UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan granted her amnesty as a personal gesture to President Isaac Herzog.

Fidaa Kiwan was serving life in prison for drug smuggling. She was originally sentenced to death in April 2022, but the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeal Court canceled the punishment and sentenced her to life behind bars in July.

Kiwan, a 44-year-old Haifa resident who owns a photography studio, reportedly came to Dubai for work at the invitation of a Palestinian acquaintance. She was arrested a short while later, on March 17, 2021, after a search of her apartment turned up the drugs. She claimed that the cocaine was not hers.
World Israel News fills in some details:
Kiwan, a staunch anti-Zionist, previously made headlines in 2010 for refusing to serve a uniformed IDF soldier in a café she once owned. The café eventually closed.

According to Hebrew language media reports, her brother, a one-time employee of public broadcasting station Kan, trashed a room at his workplace in which Israeli flags were displayed.

After her Kiwan’s arrest in Dubai, she initially resisted help from Israeli officials because of her political views. However, she eventually reached out to Israeli authorities for assistance.

Her family vocally accused the Israeli government of racism, claiming in a press conference that officials weren’t doing enough to help her case because of her Arab ethnicity.

President Isaac Herzog personally asked UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan to pardon Kiwan and he agreed, according to a statement from Herzog’s office.

Kiwan’s release came on the first day of Ramadan.
The president of the Jewish state put a great deal of his own political capital on the line to save the life of an anti-Zionist Arab - because she is a citizen of Israel and that is the government's job. 

(h/t iTiIL972)






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!

 

 

Friday, December 23, 2022



 More than 330 American rabbis, including some who occupy prominent roles in major cities, are pledging to block members of the Religious Zionist bloc in Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government from speaking at their synagogues and will lobby to keep them from speaking in their communities.

An open letter now circulating says they will not invite members of the bloc “to speak at our congregations and organizations. We will speak out against their participation in other fora across our communities. We will encourage the boards of our congregations and organizations to join us in this protest as a demonstration of our commitment to our Jewish and democratic values.”

Its signatories come from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. There were no Orthodox signatories.
This is prominent US Jewish leaders embracing BDS.

Every synagogue is free to invite whomever they want to speak, and not to invite people they don't want. But when they say that they will protest other synagogues' choice of speakers, and encourage their congregations to protest those other congregations, that is not a commitment to "Jewish and democratic values." 

That is shutting down free speech.

That is identical to BDS.

Imagine these same rabbis' reaction if Orthodox synagogues encouraged their members to picket their choice to allow Arab or Leftist MKs to speak at their synagogues. Yet they are encouraging the same kind of activities from their own members - in the name of democracy!

I have not dug deeply into the new Israeli government, mostly because every article about it is speculation. Likud is still by far the majority of the government, not the far right, and they will be the ones setting the agenda, just as they have for most of the past decade.  

The cabinet members have not even been finalized.  

With every political party, including in the US, there is a huge gap between what they say when campaigning and what they actually do when governing. Often, their party platforms include things to make the extremists of their parties happy while the leaders have no desire to actually implement them.

Moreover, the hysterical headlines coming out of Haaretz, US media other outlets are rarely correct. For example, reporting about the proposed change to the Law of Return is riddled with major errors.  

In short, the reporting so far about Israel's future government has been high on hysteria and nearly nonexistent on what the government will actually do.

Israeli's policies can and should be criticized when appropriate. But the criticism should be based on actions, on real legislation, not rumors or even falsehoods written by partisan reporters and columnists. 

The thought of of Reform Jews coming out to protest and disrupt a member of Israel's cabinet speaking at an Orthodox synagogue in the US is far worse than anything that Ben Gvir has done - and is likely to do. That is not "Jewish and democratic values." That is hate. 

And it shows that, ideologically, these rabbis are more on the side of BDS - spreading false rumors, looking for publicity rather than waiting for the truth to come out, trying to shut down free speech  - than on Israel's side.




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!

 

 

Thursday, September 15, 2022






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!

 

 


Friday, July 15, 2022

Israel is a leader in lab-grown cultured meat. But according to at least one academic, this is symbolic of Israeli colonialism.

Yes, really.

Efrat Gilad is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Bern. She wrote "A Colonial Legacy of Cultured Meat" describing how Israel's meat industry, including its recent leadership in lab-grown cultured meat, is really all just a history of Jewish colonialism.

Without the politics, the article would be a pretty good overview of the history of the meat industry in Palestine since Ottoman times. But instead, it is a screed about how evil Jews have upset the wonderful balance of nature in Palestine by introducing a meat-based diet into the region.

You see, native Palestinians didn't consume much meat. But the evil Ashkenazi Jews who selfishly returned to Palestine to save their lives from pogroms brought with them a love of meat, and that transformed the country into something it was never meant to be.

In Europe, Jews had been associated with the cattle trade since the Middle Ages. But in Palestine, consuming meat depended on Palestinian peasants and regional Arab breeders. Jewish actors (importers, butchers, religious authorities, urban officials) tried to gain more ground in the country’s meat trade. In the 1930s, Jewish cattle dealers began to import cattle from Europe, relying on their old continental networks. By shipping in animals from overseas, Jewish dealers expanded Palestine’s regional trade into a transcontinental trade. This ...allowed Jewish dealers to penetrate the country’s meat trade by importing to Palestine European bovines three times the size of local species.

...Tel Aviv, for example, was the settlement’s most important city financially, demographically, and also in terms of meat consumption. Its emerging meat infrastructures – especially its slaughterhouse built in 1931 – facilitated the expansion of the city, and by proxy, the entire Jewish settlement.

Rather than a land of milk and honey, settlers hankered for meat as the material manifestation of arriving at a utopia of prosperity and plenty. Increasing Jews’ access to meat in Palestine under British rule may have been against economic ideals, but still served the Zionist goal: the expansion of the settlement and the colonization of Palestine.
I suppose that their draining the malaria-infested swamps was also a colonialist interference to destroy the natural beauty of Palestine.

Gilad goes on to describe the austerity period after the War of Independence when there was very little meat, and Israeli attempts to create vegetable-based substitutes, as a precursor to today's cultured meat industry. She includes this marvelous cartoon from Maariv in 1949:

“We have been informed of the invention of “artificial meat” in our country, and it was produced from mushrooms and eggplant..” - “What kind of animal is this?” - "It's an artificial cow!"

But she absurdly interprets a brief history of the Israeli meat market by the Tnuva conglomerate as evidence of how Israelis hate Palestinians:

On its website, the company recalls how it entered the meat business: Until 1948 meat supplies depended on “Arab agriculture and nomadic Bedouins. But with the creation of the state, this main source of meat disappeared”. Echoing the hegemonic Israeli stance, Tnuva’s website reduces Palestinians to a “source of meat” and their forced exodus to a “disappearance”.
If you write a history of meat that doesn't center Palestinian suffering, you must be a racist colonialist pig.

In short, when Zionists import beef, it is colonialist. When they try to create ersatz substitutes, it is colonialist. When they lead the world in cultured meat, it is colonialist.

Anti-Zionist glasses are a requirement for academia


Her very thesis that meat is an alien part of the Middle East diet brought in by colonialist European Jews is another manifestation of viewing the world through anti-Zionist glasses. The consumption of meat in Arab countries today roughly corresponds with wealth, not historic diet habits. The per capita consumption of meat in Gulf states - almost all of it imported - is not much different than that of Israel. 

And guess who consumes the most meat in the Arab world?  Palestinians, by far

No doubt, Gilad would blame Israel for irrevocably ruining the diet of the natives.

As countries become richer, they buy more meat. It has nothing to do with colonialism. It has everything to do with the crazy idea that people like meat. 

Ascribing Jewish colonialist and racist motives for what is a consumer preference and economic issue is just a more sophisticated  - and academically approved - version of antisemitism. 




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!

 

 

Thursday, July 07, 2022

In April 1921, British High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel met with Amin al-Husseini who assured him that he was supportive of British rule and would work hard to keep things peaceful. Samuel said:

I saw Haj Amin Husseini on Friday [April 8] and discussed with him at considerable length the political situation and the question of his appointment to the office of grand Mufti. Mr. Storrs was also present, and in the course of conversation, he declared his earnest desire to cooperate with the government and his belief in the good intentions of the British Government towards the Arabs. He (e.g. Haj Amin al-Husseini) gave assurance that the influence of his family and himself would be devoted to maintaining tranquility in Jerusalem and he felt sure that no disturbances need be feared this year. He said that the riots of last year were spontaneous and unpremeditated. If the government took reasonable precautions, he felt sure they would not be repeated.

He was referring to the 1920 Nebi Musa riots which killed 5 Jews - and which Husseini had himself provoked.

Nevertheless, Samuel accepted Husseini's assurances and supported his appointment to the position of Mufti of Jerusalem.

Here is an account of the new Mufti's appearance at the Nebi Musa festival procession only two days later, on Easter Sunday, April 10:
Although we were less than a mile away from the place where the procession first came into sight several hours elapsed before they passed the place where we stood. The procession of which the mufti of Jerusalem, who had but recently been inducted into office, and other Moslem dignitaries made up the rear, moved so slowly because dozens of circles composed of dervishes moved forward ahead of the mufti only as the dancing circle advanced. Terrible fanaticism was discernible in their distorted faces as they danced. In the characteristically Oriental rhythmic song, or call, repeated in chorus after their leader, they called out sentences that they were interpreted to me as follows: "This place has been conquered by the sword. Jerusalem is the city of Allah. Our banner enters into it. Get out, you dogs, you Jews, you Zionists. Our banner enters Medina. We will draw the sword against any one that opposes us.

While they spoke these threatening words a dervish who as lifted on the shoulders of others frantically brandished two swords over his head. Last year a number of Jews were killed at this festival. (The Evening Kansan-Republican, July 5, 1921)

Samuel's quote above was made on the following day. It is unclear if he was aware of the blatant incitement that the Mufti was provoking.

What is clear is that this appointment resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jews at the hands of the Mufti's own people as well as his followers during the 101 years since. The Jew-hating Mufti is still considered an "icon" of Palestinian history and is universally venerated by all Palestinians. 




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!

 

 

Tuesday, July 05, 2022



Amnesty USA maintains a Twitter account with the name IOTPA and the Amnesty logo. It describes itself as an unofficial account: "Amnesty International USA member leader team for Israel/OPT/Palestine. Views our own. Re-tweets should not be construed as a position of Amnesty International."

It might not be official, but it sure shows how anti-Israel Amnesty USA is. Beyond that, it uses Amnesty's name and logo, without any apparent pushback from Amnesty International, so its tweets are tacitly approved by the larger organization. 

Over the past several months, Israel has experienced a terror wave where innocent civilians have been slaughtered in the streets. The victims are the sort of people that Amnesty claims to want to protect.

IOTPA has not said a word about any of these attacks.

In fact, one would need to look very hard to find any condemnations of any attacks on Israelis. The few attacks on Israelis I found were couched in terms of "but Israel is far worse." I found one condemnation of a Hamas bus bombing - in 2016.

Not only that, but when these "human rights professionals" deign to mention any criticisms by Zionists, they usually dismiss them as "hasbara smear language." 






The folks at Amnesty USA are not shy about admitting that they are anti-Zionist. They just redefine it to mean "critical of Israel." But in reality it means that they oppose self-determination for the Jewish people. Which is pretty antisemitic.

The account consistently dismisses any pro-Israel viewpoint as a lie by definition - and accuse anyone who supports Israel of being trolls paid by the Israeli government.  In one exchange, they wrote to a critic, "R u one of the paid trolls by #Israel?  Wonder what a person's soul sells for nowadays." And "R u a paid troll perhaps?" And "Do you get paid to troll?  How much do you make?"

They actually said that no one should believe a word that the Israeli government or pro-Israel people says: "Don't believe the 'hasbara' (propaganda) being spread by Israeli military and supporters.  They always try to control the narrative so their statements should never be taken at face value." 

They've never said this about the Palestinian Authority. Or Hamas. Only supporters of Israel are accused of being liars by definition. 

Yet they insist that they aren't biased.

Judge for yourself.




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!

 

 

Wednesday, June 29, 2022


Anna Rajagopal may be confused about when she converted to Judaism (was she 10, 11, or 12?), but about one thing she is certain: Rajagopal hates Israel. She also hates any Jew who believes in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in the Jewish homeland. Which is funny for someone who converted through a Temple that has always been Zionist.

But let’s back up.

Of her conversion, Rajagopal wrote in a blog entry:

I converted to Judaism as a child, when I was around ten years old, but my conversion journey began at age nine, when I felt an inexplicable tug at my very being that I attribute to my Neshama (soul) being present at Har Sinai (Mount Sinai) when G-d revealed Themself to the Jewish people. For me, conversion was G-d calling me home, after thousands of years in exile. Where's the shame in that? (Spoiler alert: There is none). 

Converting as a child was by no means easy, so I understand how difficult, overwhelming, confusing and even upsetting this process, and subsequent life can be. 

One month later, writing for Hey Alma, Rajagopal had moved up the age of her conversion from “around ten years old” to “around age 11.”

I converted to Judaism around age 11, coming from a multicultural household with both Christian and Hindu influences. 

Not a huge difference, for certain. Except that neither version of the Anna Rajagopal conversion story is true. From these two accounts, dated one month apart, the reader might have inferred that Anna converted alone, on her own, as a young child. According to a 2013 temple newsletter, however, we learn that the entire Rajagopal family converted when Anna was 12.



Anna Rajagopal did not convert as a lone brave child because of something tugging on her soul, but alongside her parents and brother, a decision made and taken as a single family unit. At the time, Rajagopal was not around 10 or 11, but age 12, the age of Jewish womanhood, when a girl becomes fully responsible for her choices and actions.

Is this stress on the small difference of a year or two or three in a personal narrative important in the scheme of things? Yes. Because conversion would have been something momentous, something Rajagopal would have remembered with all the details, including her age, intact.

Of course, if Anna Rajagopal were otherwise a person of integrity, we might have looked the other way. We might have shrugged and said, “Big flip, so she got the age wrong by a year or two (or three).”

Rajagopal however, is not a person of integrity. How do we know this? Because of her visceral dislike of certain Jews—really all Jews—expressed as remarks about, for example, their physical appearance. In March 2022, for example, Rajagopal tweeted:

"sometimes I sit here and just wonder why zionists are so physically unattractive. it's very interesting to me how every zionist is just extremely ugly. like actually very unpleasant looking. it’s like you have to be horrifically grotesque to be part of the genocide club.”


This is not Rajagopal’s sole antisemitic tweet, but in a nutshell, it is certainly one that should disgust all humanity, no matter what they think about Jews and Israel. Let’s flip it for a moment and rephrase her tweet in terms that might make this blatant example of bigotry easier for the world at large to comprehend and digest:

"sometimes I sit here and just wonder why BIPOCs are so physically unattractive. it's very interesting to me how every BIPOC is just extremely ugly. like actually very unpleasant looking. it’s like you have to be horrifically grotesque to be part of the genocide club.”

If reading the above shocked you, it should. Good people do not generalize about the appearance of another people, no matter their identity. We learn this at our parents’ knees. But then again, when someone raves like this, it has nothing to do with looks, Zionist or otherwise. It’s just a bigot ranting on Twitter. If Rajagopal had something substantive to say, she’d say it, instead of resorting to baseless insults that generalize about the physical characteristics of a people.

Instead she says Zionists are ugly. And she didn’t say it only the one time. In an earlier tweet, for example, Rajagopal wrote, “Zionists are genocidal freaks. If there’s ever a circus show for ugly, sunburnt, violent outcasts, that’s where you’ll see them.”


Where does this hatred for Zionists, really Jews, come from? Not from the temple that converted Anna Rajagopal, her father, mother, and brother. Billed as the first Reform Jewish congregation in North Texas, and the largest synagogue in the South, Temple Emanu-El of Dallas is a member of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ). Under Israel Engagement, the URJ website states that: “Reform Zionism accepts and supports the foundational aim of Zionism: the establishment of a Jewish State in Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people.” 

Foremost among the goals of URJ’s Reform Zionism work is “To increase each Reform Jew’s relationship with Israel and make Israel a core component of every Reform Jew’s identity.” To that end, the URJ website links to its affiliate branch, ARZA (Association for Reform Zionists). The acronym “ARZA” is a Hebrew imperative: “To the Land.”

It is no coincidence that Temple Emanu-El of Dallas, under whose auspices Anna and her family embraced Judaism, is affiliated with URJ/ARZA. The temple is nothing if not Zionist. In fact, the synagogue just completed not one but two group trips to Israel.



It’s not just the trips to Israel that mark Temple Emanu-El of Dallas as Zionist. The Reform congregation also provides adult education classes in Zionist philosophy. As recently as 2019, for example, Temple Emanu-El offered a course called The Zionist Ideas

Here’s the course description:

"The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow” will be the textbook for the class exploring the vision of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Author Gil Troy profiles more than 170 Jewish visionaries from the 1800s to today in this book, which builds on Arthur Hertzberg’s “The Zionist Ideas."

Temple Emanu-El is Zionist both by nature and by deed. How does Rajagopal feel about this? How did she feel during services as a “child convert,” seeing the “horrifically grotesque” congregants sitting all around her?

And why would Rajagopal convert if the people are so ugly, er Zionist? 

While attempting to join the Nation of Israel, did Rajagopal somehow miss the fact that there’s an actual, physical location associated with that nation? And if she thinks the idea of Jews having land or wanting to live in it and govern themselves is so bad, then why did she sign on?

Like all antisemites, Rajagopal has tried hard to cut the indivisible ties that bind the Nation of Israel to Israel the nation. She does this “as a Jew,” using the fact of her Reform conversion to lend legitimacy to her rejectionist views on the Jewish State. She assumes her Jewish persona at will when convenient to the ultimate purpose of eradicating Israel.

When Rajagopal talks about her Neshama being at Har Sinai and how for her, "conversion was G-d calling me home, after thousands of years in exile," we wonder: of what nation were we to imagine her becoming a part? To where was she being called home? Was her soul’s presence at Sinai, her being called home from exile, meant as some sort of metaphor for something else?  

Perhaps so, since her actions since that time have been directed toward the purpose of ethnically cleansing the Land of Israel of its entire Jewish population, as per her tweet: “Free Palestine by any means necessary: Decolonization is not a metaphor but a call to immediate action in which any form of resistance or rebellion is deemed moral under any immoral circumstances.”

We need not wonder about the borders of Rajagopal’s would-be Jew-free Palestine. The borders would be the borders of Israel. Zionists, according to this “child convert” are not to be allowed to live in any part of their ancient, biblical homeland, or in fact to live. Rajagopal’s “call to immediate action” is a call to murder Jews.

What is it about Zionism that so disturbs Rajagopal? Is it the aspiration to have a Jewish state, or is it the actual fact of Jews living in Israel? Is it Jewish self-determination on Jewish soil that bothers her? What is the real Zionism in her Rajagopal's eyes? Which aspect of Zionism is it that makes us Jews so ugly to her?

Who knows? But the Avodah Institute for Social Change must agree with Rajagopal’s antisemitic* views because they hired her for their social media team. That can only mean that her prospective employers monitored her Twitter and liked what they saw. Else they would not have hired her to assist in the running of their own Twitter account.

The Avodah website describes itself as “[providing] Jewish leaders the tools, experience, and networks they need to create change.” If Avodah likes what Rajagopal is tweeting out, this mission statement must be some kind of code. Based on the hiring of Rajagopal, “creating change” is likely code for getting Jewish leaders to stop being Zionist, to stop standing up for Israel and the welfare of the Jewish people

A truer Avodah mission statement, one not couched in code, might have said, “We agitate for and support the murder of Israeli Jews by Arab terrorists and the annihilation of the Jewish State by any means.”



Note that there is nothing about Israel in the Avodah values statement, because Israel is not a value for them.



The kind of people who found groups like Avodah, and those who work for them, all use coded language. They can’t come right out and say they hate Israel and want to annihilate its Jewish presence. Not yet. Not as an organization. 

Instead, they encourage people like Rajagopal to say it for them until it becomes a natural part of the conversation. Lucky for us, this time Avodah was stymied in its efforts to amplify views that would appear to mirror those of Rajagopal. The Avodah tweet announcing her hire is gone. So is the page devoted to Rajagopal on the Avodah website. This is because Rajagopal was caught out for her tweets and the buzz went out until Avodah likely had to fire her in order to save face for what will probably be its next salvo against the Jewish State

As a people, we need to learn how to see and interpret anti-Israel, antisemitic code. There’s the code of Avodah regarding Jewish leadership and the unsaid need to change the way the leadership feels about Israel. There is the code of Rajagopal excusing murder, as long as the Jewish victims love and/or want to live in Israel. All of this is in code. The code is necessary because the aims are wrong and immoral, so they dare not voice them aloud.

At least not yet.

It is inevitable that some readers of this column will assert that Rajagopal is not really Jewish. They will say that Reform conversion is not the same as Halachic conversion performed according to Jewish Law. I will go a step further.

Could Anna Rajagopal and perhaps even her family, have duped the people of Temple Emanu-El regarding their sincerity in wanting to be Jews? Did she/they trick the rabbis who performed the Reform conversion into thinking that some or all the members the Rajagopal family shared the Jewish dreams and aspirations of this so-Zionist congregation? As a “child convert” could 12-year-old Anna have already been poisoned about Israel and the Jewish people? Could she have absorbed this lesson at home?

We might also ask: what was the group conversion about? What is the real reason the Rajagopal family sought conversion? Was the conversion genuine for some, not so much for other members of this family? Could the conversion have represented a bid to be upwardly mobile, to angle for a portion of what they might have seen as outsized Jewish power? Or was there some other dark, nefarious political purpose to the family conversion, an infiltration, perhaps, of enemy lines?

At this point, we cannot know. There is no backstory to hint at the answers. There is only the backstory supplied us by Anna Rajagopal, in which her age at conversion changes on a whim and the conversion of her family is entirely omitted. Rajagopal's Twitter rants reveal more, showing signs of a highly disturbed personality filled with antisemitic loathing.

Without a backstory all we have is what we know of Rajagopal, and what we know of Rajagopal tells us all we need to know about Avodah, the organization that hired and subsequently fired her.

Despite the Jewish-sounding name of this organization, Avodah is clearly a hornet’s nest--one filled with hate-filled hornets like Rajagopal, brimming with hate for one specific people:

The Nation of Israel.

The Jews.


*From the IHRA examples of antisemitism: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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