Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: antisemitism

Showing posts with label antisemitism. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

NPR's Peniel Joseph: Farrakhan’s Antisemitism is “Just a Blip” (Judean Rose)

Peniel Joseph, Wikipedia will have you know, is as a “leading voice on race issues.” The professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas, weighing in on Farrakhan’s influence in an NPR podcast, described Farrakhan’s antisemitic remarks as “a blip,” as though such remarks are of no significance.

"And so I think that this is a blip. This is not the main story."

And despite stories like this, or perhaps even *because* of stories like this, the media will generally keep it a blip. pic.twitter.com/AoSL2vS3oF
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) July 20, 2020

The purpose of the NPR interview, we are meant to understand, is a thorough exploration and reassessment of Farrakhan’s influence in light of recent horrific antisemitic remarks emanating from such celebrity Farrakhan followers as DeSean Jackson and Nick Cannon. Going forward, should celebrities like Chelsea Handler and Madonna continue to share Farrakhan’s videos on race? Is it okay for people like Jennifer Anniston and Jessica Chastain to like those posts? And are we allowed to have an affinity for some of Farrakhan’s views while overlooking the rest—the horrid antisemitism and the crazy conspiracy theories?

Framed more boldly, if Farrakhan’s message about race is right on, may we, as a society, ignore the man’s antisemitism? Can we gloss over his epithets, the things he has said, calling Jews termites and sexual deviants?

Peniel Joseph was brought onboard by the liberal folk at NPR for the express purpose of answering these questions with a resounding yes. Yes we can ignore the antisemitism. Yes we can embrace Farrakhan in spite of the fact that the Nation of Islam leader is neither reticent nor shy about his insane hatred for the Jewish people. Because Farrakhan, says Joseph, comes in two different flavors.

"And on the other hand, you have a version that is preaching at times anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, numerology, just different theories that some Black leaders feel unbelievably uncomfortable with..."

"unbelievably uncomfortable with"?!https://t.co/1JvbKhP6KE pic.twitter.com/gQyGoopPcA
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) July 20, 2020

That means we get to choose which Farrakhan to embrace. We don’t have to choose the “bad” Farrakhan who blames all the world’s ills on the “satanic Jews.” There’s also the “good” Farrakhan—the one who is fighting for “Black political self-determination.”

The NPR interview is of note because it employs a race expert to put its liberal imprimatur on an ugly antisemite. And this is done in a twisted and perverted manner. We are told to think a certain way: that Farrakhan’s antisemitism is okay because it is offset by other factors, as if such a thing were possible: as if antisemitism could be offset or trumped by other matters.

Joseph paints two distinct versions of Farrakhan to make him “kosher.” The NPR interview is the liberal stamp of approval on Farrakhan, an “out” for society at large to overlook Farrakhan’s monstrous antisemitism, because it’s black lives that matter—black lives that are liberal flavor of the month.

It is sad and tragic to see the way people fall in. The way they accept, without questioning, what they are told to think. And it is also frightening to see how easy it is to get people to turn a blind eye to the kind of antisemitism that gets Jews killed in the millions.

Antisemitism is a hatred based on the idea that Jews are subhuman. If Jews are vermin, why then, it is okay to murder them or sacrifice them on the altar of BLM. But first you have to get people to see them as nothing, as unimportant as stepping on a cockroach. Something to get out of the way, to get to what’s really important. The MAIN message.

Black lives matter. And Jewish ones do not.

Which is how we come to have Peniel Joseph, really NPR, telling liberals that they don’t have to be concerned about Farrakhan’s despicable Jew-hatred. That it’s just not important. And because the people want to believe Joseph, they will. Just as the Germans wanted to believe Hitler. And the liberal left will look the other way as antisemitism grows, just as the Germans looked away from the atrocities and continued to believe that it was all for a good cause. And the cancel culture that applies elsewhere, to other forms of xenophobia, won’t apply when it comes to hating Jews. Nick Cannon may be delayed in getting his show on Fox, but after a proper amount of reflection, he’s still going to get that show.

Because Jew hatred is somehow different. And in fact, it IS different. Because the important thing is Black Lives Matter. And if we step on some Jews to get there, so be it.

Thus we have Farrakhan made kosher for the masses with race expert Peniel as the “hechsher,” the stamp of rabbinic approval. Peniel’s ruling is clear: it’s okay to look the other way on the antisemitism, it’s okay for celebrities to embrace Farrakhan, for society to embrace Farrakhan, and overlook his appalling out-sized hatred for the Jewish people.

NPR, using Peniel as its mouthpiece, would like you to understand that Farrakhan’s main message s what’s important. Because it’s for black people. And when Farrakhan describes the Jewish people as sexual deviants or portrays them as Satan, this is only incidental to the real message of Farrakhan. That those no-good awful things he says about the Jews can be considered and rejected, but the man himself, and the things he says on race, should be embraced. And because Farrakhan’s antisemitism—his outright hatred for the Jewish people—is not Farrakhan’s main message, it should not be our takeaway.

Which does a great job of reinforcing the idea that it’s okay for Chelsea Handler, for instance, to post a Farrakhan video on race, that it’s equally okay for Jennifer Aniston and Jessica Chastain and a whole bunch of other celebrities to follow suit. Which is why we’re going to have to document it all as it happens. To be the voice of logic in a field of hate, and to say, “This is wrong.”

It’s the one thing we can do. The one thing we have to do. And we have to do it often and at length.

It’s just the way it is. The way it always has been when it comes to hating the Jews.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Marc Lamont Hill is against conspiracy theories–unless they are Zionist conspiracies

In an exchange on Twitter, Marc Lamont Hill sadly admitted that rapper Ice Cube had posted some antisemitism, gently denouncing them as conspiracy theories that he, of course, never engages in:

Hill’s record indicates otherwise.

In 2018, Hill said that Israel “poisons the water” of Palestinians, echoing the antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning water that has been hurled since the Black Death of 1348.

Last year he said that the entire State of Israel created a category of Mizrahi Jew out of thin air for as part of a “racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.”

While one can argue that Mizrahi Jews from Morocco, Jerusalem, Syria and Yemen have different customs, they have far more in common with each other, and accept the same interpretations of Jewish law as each other compared to Jews who lived in Europe. For all of Israel’s failures in integrating the Mizrahi Jews properly in the 1950s, putting them in the same category had zero to do with any “Palestinian identity” that they wanted to “detach” them from.

That is a conspiracy theory, and worse, it is an attempt to erase the identity of Jews who identify as Mizrahi.

Hill’s love of conspiracy theories about “Zionists” doesn’t end there.

Last year Hill participated in a conference with other prominent anti-Israel activists, whose criticisms of Israel are published as op-eds in the most influential media outlets, claiming that they are being “silenced” by Zionists. Being fired from CNN has not slowed down Hill’s anti-Israel activism – in fact, it probably accelerated it – and there is no “silencing” going on.

That is a conspiracy theory.

An example of how Hill has not been “silenced” is his bizarre comments at the Netroots Summit also last year, where he said that news outlets like CNN, ABC and NBC are “Zionist organizations.” He described a Zionist conspiracy behind the news that he then quickly denied was a conspiracy:

“They’re like, I want to work for Fox, or I want to work for ABC or NBC or whoever. I want to tell these stories. You have to make choices about where you want to work. And if you work for a Zionist organization, you’re going to get Zionist content. And no matter how vigorous you are in the newsroom, there are going to be two, three, four, 17, or maybe one powerful person — not going to suggest a conspiracy — all news outlets have a point of a view. And if your point of view competes with the point of view of the institution, you’re going to have challenges.”

When you say that Jews control the media, you are peddling an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But when you say Zionists control the media, you are celebrated as an anti-racist fighter.

At that same summit, fellow panelist Noura Erekat invented a new conspiracy theory about an “explicit project” led by Ashkenazi Jews in Israel to avoid “sully[ing] the blood line with becoming dark and oriental” by marrying Mizrahi Jews. Hill didn’t say a word against that. (Her theory is complete fiction – today, some 20% of children in Israel are born to parents of marriages between Ashkenaz and Mizrahi Jews.)

Finally, Marc Lamont Hill still proudly associates with Louis Farrakhan, and while he has expressed discomfort with Farrakhan’s anti-LGBTQ preachings, he has never said a word against his antisemitism – including his rabid antisemitic conspiracy theories such as that Jews were behind the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

There is no difference between saying Jews poison the wells or Israelis poison the wells, between saying Jews control the media or Zionists control the media, between claiming Jews have supernatural powers to silence critics or that Zionist have that power. The fact is that in order to believe in an Israel of unparalleled evil, one must believe in the same kinds of conspiracy theories that traditional antisemites have believed about Jews over the centuries. And Marc Lamont Hill is an enthusiastic purveyor of these conspiracy theories.

Antisemitism: Spell it Without the Hyphen, Please (Judean Rose)

Wilhelm Marr 1819-1904

Antisemitism should be spelled without the hyphen. It’s something I’ve known for years, even if auto-correct just won’t get the message. Neither will the media, of course, or even most dictionaries.

“What’s the difference?” you might well ask. “It’s just a little mark on the page. Meaningless.”

Ah, but it’s not.

The concept of “antisemitism” (without the dash, thank you) and the term, were introduced by Wilhelm Marr when he founded the Die Antisemitenliga, the League of Antisemites, in 1879. Materials put out by the league often employed the word “antisemitism.” The league, in fact, was the first popular political movement based solely on anti-Jewish sentiment. Marr’s famous and oft-reprinted tract, The Victory of Judaism Over Germandom, made the claim that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.”

Statutes of the Antisemitism League flanked by two of Marr's antisemitic tracts

Marr wore the title “antisemite” as a badge of honor. From the perspective of Marr and his colleagues, to be an antisemite was to be “woke.” But then, politics with a specifically anti-Jewish flavor and focus were big all over Europe in the years leading up to the 20^th century.

The word “antisemitism” had its roots in an 18^th-century treatise on languages which analyzed the differences between Aryan and Semitic languages. The terminology that was used led to the false assumption that there were racial groups corresponding to these two groups of languages. The minds of the time made a leap so that “Jew” became synonymous with “semite” in the lexicon of the day.

The interesting thing here is that there was already the perfectly good expression Judenhass, or “Jew hate,” in the popular lexicon. But Marr wanted to make his hatred about race, rather than religion. The new term he coined avoided altogether the question of religion. “Antisemitism” also sounded more scientific, more intellectual, therefore more credible and more acceptable. Also, people just liked it. So the word “antisemitismus” spread like wildfire as a new way to speak about hating the Jews.

But the thing is, there’s no such thing as a “semite” or even a “semitic” people. The terms were invented by some historians in the 1770s to refer to people who speak Semitic languages But in truth, there are only Semitic languages. There is no race or people that are “semites.”

In other words, when you spell the word with a hyphen, the word makes no sense. Because you can’t be against something that doesn’t exist. And there’s no such thing as a semite.

The other problem is that people say that Arabs are semites, too, therefore Arabs can’t be antisemites, because they can’t be against themselves.

Except there’s no such thing as a semite.

The term antisemite, you see, is standalone. It only means “someone who hates Jews.” And that is all it was ever intended to mean.

Antisemitism, as a term, is based on racist claptrap. The word was lifted from the field of linguistics to give weight to the idea of hating the Jews (and only the Jews) as a race (which they aren’t). The pseudoscientific sound of the term gave it loft and validity. Which is stupid.

To be clear: Jews aren’t semites. Neither are Arabs.

Antisemites hate Jews, not Arabs.

So when you use the hyphen you’re unwittingly espousing turn of the century European racism. You’re also ignorant of history. If Marr had meant to include Arabs he would have spelled the word he invented with a hyphen to include them.

Historians, at least those who care about academic rigor, are careful to spell the word without the hyphen. But the media continues to hyphenate the word. And spell-check and the auto-correct function of Word just won’t get the message. Historian Shmuel Almog, in fact, wrote about the problem with the hyphen all the way back in 1989:

“So the hyphen, or rather its omission, conveys a message; if you hyphenate your 'anti-Semitism', you attach some credence to the very foundation on which the whole thing rests. Strike out the hyphen and you will treat antisemitism for what it really is—a generic name for modern Jew-hatred which now embraces this phenomenon as a whole, past, present and—I am afraid—future as well.”

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism could solve this entire mess

J-Street tweeted this:

No to anti-Semitism. No to efforts to silence legitimate debate about #Israel. Strong statements from 2020 contenders @BernieSanders @KamalaHarris @ewarren

__
statements via @aterkel & @danielmarans pic.twitter.com/u56GKDtjW1
— J Street (@jstreetdotorg) March 7, 2019

Here's what the candidates said:

Elizabeth Warren:We have a moral duty to combat hateful ideologies in our own country and around the wortd--and that includes both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. In a democracy, we can and should have an open, respectful debate about the Middle East that focuses on policy. Branding criticism of Israel as automatically anti-Semitic has a chilling effect on our public discourse and makes it harder to achieve a peaceful solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Threats of violence -- like those made against Rep. Omar -- are never acceptable.

Bernie Sanders:“Anti-Semitism is a hateful and dangerous ideology which must be vigorously opposed in the United States and around the world. We must not, however, equate anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government in Israel. Rather, we must develop an even-handed Middle East policy which brings Israelis and Palestinians together for a lasting peace. What I fear is going on in the House now is an effort to target Congresswoman Omar as a way of stifling that debate. That's wrong.”

Kamala Harris:We all have a responsibility to speak out against anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and all forms of hatred and bigotry, especially as we see a spike in hate crimes in America. But like some of my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, | am concerned that the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk. We should be having a sound, respectful discussion about policy. You can both support Israel and be loyal to our country. I also believe there is a difference between criticism of policy or political leaders, and anti-Semitism. At the end of the day, we need a two-state solution and a commitment to peace, human rights, and democracy by all leaders in the region -- and a commitment by our country to help achieve that.

As far as I can tell, there is no Jew or Zionist that suggests that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, the way that J-Street and these candidates are saying or implying.

Even the most right-wing Zionists accept the IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism. from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It was adopted by the US State Department. It says this about criticism of Israel:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

...Contemporary examples of antisemitism could include:

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

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.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

The IHRA defines legitimate criticism of Israel as the type that would be leveled at any other country. This is quite fair.

The question is, who would oppose this definition?

Who wants to say that singling out Israel for special criticism when other countries are worse is not a form of antisemitism? Who wants to defend an Electronic Intifada/Mondoweiss worldview where obsessive focus on Israel out of proportion to its actions is considered legitimate debate? Who wants to claim that boycotting Israel, and only Israel, is not antisemitic in practice?

Who wants to say that accusations of dual loyalty is not antisemitism?

Who wants to say that equating Jewish self-determination with racism is not antisemitism?

Either these candidates accept the definition set here, or they don't. If they don't, they should explain the exact problematic part of the definition that they believe is not true - and be prepared to defend that.

No one, and I mean no one, is shutting down debate over Israel when the criticism is legitimate according to this definition. Which means that these candidates, and J-Street, have a completely different definition of what "legitimate criticism" than the IHRA.

What is it?

When politicians talk about how much they are against antisemitism, they aren't saying what that means to them. If the IHRA definition is not to their liking, they must explain what specifically they disagree with.

The Democratic Party can make all this mess go away by adopting the eminently reasonable standard that the IHRA created. And if they did, it is obvious that Ilhan Omar really did spout Jew-hatred and must be censured.

If they don't want to do that, then it is their responsibility to come up with their own definition - and to defend it.

The IHRA should be the baseline for the discussion. It would add clarity to everyone's positions. And that is exactly why the Democratic Party will stay away from it - because it would expose a small but vocal minority of their members as engaging in antisemitic speech, and the party is too frightened to do anything to rein them in.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Alice Walker responds to antisemitism charges with yet MORE antisemitism

On Alice Walker's blog, the author and poet publishes a letter from anti-Zionist Israeli Nurit Peled-Elhanan that pretends to defend the Talmud from Walker's antisemitic essay:

Dear Alice
I read your poem and the criticism of it and I must react.
The people who torture and kill Palestinian have never studied the Talmud. It is not studied in Israeli state schools. And no one can read it on their own. The ones who study it are the ultra-orthodox Jews such as the pro-Palestinian Neturei Karta in NY.

Really? Professor Peled-Elhanan, who has previously published lies about Israeli textbooks supposedly being "racist," is another academic fraud if she thinks that Talmud is only taught among the haredim.

In order to buttress her arguments she says that the disgusting Neturei Karta, rejected by every Orthodox Jewish group, study Talmud!

The quotes (whether true or false) are surely partial and do not characterize this 12 volume work (thousand pages in every volume) whose writing ended thousands of years ago.

Peled-Elhanan, as an academic, should have researched the Talmud a bit herself before giving Walker an out by saying her quotes might be true. She could have done a great service by informing Walker that she was repeating lies in her poem.

She chose not to, and allowed Walker to believe the lies she was hearing.

(And there are far more than 12 volumes of Talmud, none of which have a thousand pages.)

The rest of Nurit's letter is not too inaccurate, although there are errors.

The Talmud is not a prescriptive book. It is an endless interpretation of the Torah, always adapting the Torah to present times so that people can live by it. Ethiopian Jews never studied it and lived by the Torah as is.

In these volumes you read discussion and polemics between different sages about every tiny aspect of human life. And the discussions are brought as they happened, more or less because it was all discussed orally.

But the main thing is that each such discussion ends with: “and so they disagreed” and people would choose the interpretation they wanted. Every argument that is brought is immediately countered by an opposite argument and the discussion that ensued. It is always open ended.

In my time we learned a bit of it and I loved it, because it is Logic, like reading Plato. Today schools don’t teach it anymore.
So in order to know what is in the Talmud – which none of the non-orthodox Israelis or Jews know – you have to read at least a whole chapter, pros and cons etc.

One of the most discussed subjects in the Talmud as in the Torah is the treatment of foreigners, workers, slaves etc. Extremely human and enlightening.

I don’t want you to be trapped in superficial propaganda of ignorant people. And again: the reason for the ruthlessness and violence towards Palestinians is not to be found in ancient writings but in Modern ones. It is Modernity and European Enlightenment that brought slavery, colonialism, Fascism and Totalitarianism, national movements such as Zionism and the way to treat people as superfluous. Auschwitz was not prescribed in any ancient scripture, neither is Israeli colonialism.

Much love
Nurit

–
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Walker responds with a newer poem where she repeatedly refers to "Zionist Nazis" as not representing all Jews, but those "Zionist Nazis" are pretty evil. An excerpt:

Zionist Nazis are not the Jews I know; terrorists who would and do kill anyone and anything to get what they want: Control over everyone.

(When you take out the random line breaks that make this drivel "poetry" the hate is much clearer.)

Walker is saying that "Zionists" want to control the world and everyone in it, and are willing to do any immoral act to achieve their aims.

Which is exactly what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion says!

Since over 90% of Jews support the existence of a Jewish state, Walker is saying that nearly all Jewish people are terrorist killers hellbent on world domination. But, no, she's not antisemitic, because she loves the other Jews.

Even after this explicit antisemitism, Walker pretends to be righteous:

I will never be divided from my friends, no matter how bad Zionist Nazis are making Jews look.

She can distinguish between good and evil Nazi Jews, but sadly, many others (on her side!) cannot. Which means that when Jews are shot dead for being Jews, from Pittsburgh to Paris to "Palestine," you can give the murderers the benefit of the doubt because they really hate Zionism and Zionists are to blame for making all Jews look bad.

A rough analogy would be for a white person to say "I will never abandon my black friends, no matter how bad the welfare queens and gangbangers and muggers make all black people look."

Then Walker addresses the Talmud specifically to Nurit:

As someone ignorant (yes, this is true) of what is in the ancient texts in their totality, I am, millions of us are, still wounded by the parts that have been inherited by word of mouth, over generations, and millennia, and are recognized as active in human behavior today. I don’t see how we will ever have peace without examining the deep past, and letting go of those parts that mean endless contention and war and suffering.

Walker's response is that the evil Talmud is in the DNA of all Jews and her extensive exposure of it using neo-Nazi YouTube videos helps excise the poison from the Jewish DNA.

THIS IS ANTISEMITISM.

Her letter talks about love but one doesn't have to scratch very much beneath the surface to see the hate and ignorance that fuels Walker.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Anti-Zionists justify Alice Walker's antisemitism, saying she's "wrong" - but her heart is in the right place

Mondoweiss publishes Sarah Schulman, the academic fraud who popularized the term "pinkwashing," to explain to their audience how Alice Walker's blatant antisemitism is sort of okay once you contextualize it.

Like many of us, Walker has tried to understand the source of Israeli cruelty, violence, self-righteous racism, and supremacy ideology. She has risked her life for Palestinian liberation on the Flotilla, and has been in deep confrontation with the Israeli state for years. Being in that place is shocking, it reveals behaviors and beliefs of the Israeli state that are almost impossible to comprehend.

According to Schulman, Walker claiming that rabbis have taught generations of Jews to enslave "goyim" and to kill the best of them isn't antisemitic - it is a reflection of her deep pain at the plight of the Palestinians and her honest attempt to understand how Jews can be so cruel.

At no point does Schulman admit that Walker's hate for Jews is antisemitic.

Schulman admits that Walker is wrong. Not offensive, mind you - just mistaken. Not because Walker is trading in Nazi-style Jew-hatred, but because she falls for conspiracy theories and doesn't understand that Judaism isn't the issue, but religion altogether.

By looking to the Jewish religion as the source of Israeli cruelty, Walker is making two significant errors. 1. Pathologizing Judaism itself, instead of the larger problem of religions in general and how they are used to justify supremacy ideology. and 2. Ascribing religion as the central motive for apartheid when many Jews who support the Zionist state are not religious, and many Jews who stand with Palestine are religious.

Notice that purported scholar Schulman does not say that Walker's description of the Talmud and Judaism is completely wrong. No, Schulman sort of agrees that Walker is correct in saying that the Talmud teaches Jewish dominance over "goyim," but by singling out Judaism and not generalizing it to all religions, Walker fell into the trap of allowing people being able to call her antisemitic - which detracts from the wonderful work she does.

That Alice Walker has chosen conspiracy theory tools to address important questions discredits some of her thinking. But it does not discredit all of her thinking. Sometimes people who do good things also do bad things. And that can be disappointing, or devastating, but that is life and here we are.

When a supposed scholar like Walker freely admits and even brags that her method of researching the Talmud is by watching YouTube videos made by neo-Nazis, and when she then takes that information and publishes poetry that could have been published in Der Sturmer, and when she refuses to apologize but doubles down on her hate for Jews, it doesn't discredit her at all, according to Schulman.

She's just misunderstood and human.

Really.

This is very funny coming from someone whose bogus "pinkwashing" charge is meant to tell the world that Israel does only bad things, and never does good things. When Israel treats women, minorities, LGBTQ, the disabled in ways that are more liberal than many other Western democracies, Schulman doesn't say that "sometimes people who do good things also do bad things" - she says that when Israel does good things it is by definition a bad thing.

The hypocrisy of Schulman is astounding. But not surprising.

(h/t Andrew)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Academic fraud of the day defends Alice Walker: "Some of her best friends are Jewish" @myHNN

At History News Network, professor of social studies and history at NYU Robert Cohen states flatly that Alice Walker is not an antisemite:

Whatever the merits of Walker’s reading of Icke, her life history has been one in which she has consistently and eloquently battled bigotry since her teenage college years at Spelman College where she was active in the Atlanta movement against racial discrimination and the Jim Crow system. As one who has studied Walker’s history of political activism, I find no trace of anti-Semitism, but instead find a humane identification with the oppressed, including Palestinians, and a dedication to battling war, poverty, and hatred.

... I know this because this year I published a book on Howard Zinn, Spelman, and the Atlanta student movement, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism, and Walker wrote a foreword to it that described in moving terms how her and her family’s love of education and reverence for teachers, along with her passion for freedom, and justice, motivated her to stand up for her beloved [Jewish] teacher.

Wow. Just wow.

A supposed scholar who has spent a great deal of time studying Walker not only brushes off her defense of David Icke, chooses not to mention Walker's antisemitic poem, on her website today, about Jews and the Talmud, based on her meticulous research of watching YouTube videos.

Walker says that for centuries Jews have been taught by their rabbis that they should enslave "goyim." Walker says that Jewish rabbis have taught generations of students that Jesus is burning in hell because he stood up for the poor. Walker claims that Jews are taught from birth to kill "goyim" (which she helpfully defines as "us," since Jews are clearly The Other.)

This isn't "support for Palestinian rights." This is Nazi-level Jew-hatred, Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level filth, far worse than what I see in the worst of Arabic media.

To excuse this hate and these lies is to be complicit in them.

Walker's poem should exclude her from any respectable circles. Full stop. Anyone who disagrees because of the good work she has done is enabling antisemitism in academia and intellectual circles. It is beyond immoral - it is dangerous.

The most charitable thing one can say about Cohen is that he is unaware of Walker's antisemitism in her poem and her earlier books (where she says that Israeli Jews have used the dictum, that "might even be enshrined in the Torah," that possession is nine tenths of the law.) If that is so, he is not a scholar - he is a hack and a fraud.

The least charitable thing you can say is that Cohen is aware of Walker's antisemitism (as he is clearly aware of her full throated support for Icke's Jew-hatred) and that he consciously decided to defend her anyway.

Either way, if he doesn't pull this article, he has been proven to have no intellectual honesty.

This is twice in one week that History News Network has published ridiculous defenses of antisemites. In the previous article, Jews who felt that someone who accuses Jews of poisoning Palestinian wells of antisemitism are the real racists.

HNN needs to employ some fact checkers, because what used to be a good and useful site is in danger of being subverted by "academics" whose goals are anything but the truth.

(h/t Phil)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

11 in Pittsburgh and the Baby from Ofra (Judean Rose)

The Arab gunman raised his gun to the car window as the vehicle neared the bus stop and taking aim, shot that pregnant Jewess in the stomach first. “Good,” he thought, spraying the woman’s young husband, a couple of teenage girls, and then anyone else in range.

Targeting the Jewish woman was smart, aiming at her abdomen, even smarter. He’d killed two birds with one stone, or so he hoped. There was a good chance he’d hit a major organ, and hopefully, the baby in his Jew-Mama’s womb. Why let that baby Jew live when you can squash it like the cockroach it is, before it gets born to spurn the word of Allah and get in the way of building the Khalifa, the worldwide Muslim caliphate?

Robert Bowers raised his gun to spray the elderly Jewish woman first, then anyone else in shooting distance. A Jew is a Jew is a kike, and it doesn’t matter if that Jew is old or infirm. That’s all a mirage to make you have mercy on them, when what they are is no less than a “kike infestation.” No mercy, no how. These Jews can’t be allowed to continue flooding our country with immigrants who steal our jobs, steal our resources.

Killing that old woman was smart, a test of his bravery. He was no wuss. He was leading the way for others, no matter what would happen now when he got caught.

Killing that old woman was genius.

***

Two terror attacks. Two men. One Arab. One not.

Do we know the thoughts in their minds?

Can we state unequivocally that both attacks were antisemitic by nature?

Do we know that the Arab terrorist who shot Shira Ish Ran in her pregnant stomach (and killed her child) thought “Jew” and not “Zionist,” “Jew” and not “Occupier,” “Jew” and not “settler?”

Media pundits would claim there is a distinction. That you can be against Zionism without being against Jews. That you can be against occupation and not Jews. That you can hate the settlers, without hating all Jews.

But we know the truth, because of statements made by Arab leaders (government, military, and religious) on official PA TV. These endless antisemitic statements set a precedent which no measure of etymological chicanery can obscure. Listen, for instance, to Palestinian National Council member Najib Al-Qaddumi, who had this to say on the official PA TV program Palestine This Morning, regarding the Balfour Declaration:

“There is no choice but to return to the background behind the publication of this promise by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. We will return to the situation of the Jews in Europe and Russia, when they lived in a closed society and knew only to make money, trade, weave plots, corruption, and such. Even the European nations and Russia were sick of them and longed for when they would leave their country."

Or listen to the words of Masoud Rayyaan, lecturer on Islamic Shari'a at Al-Quds Open University, in this Friday sermon broadcast on official PA TV:

(Quran) “’Proceed throughout the earth and observe how was the end of those who denied’ ... The occupation government hasn't learned from history, from the corruption of the Children of Israel the first and second time.

“It hasn't learned. They [The Jews] didn’t learn from what Nebuchadnezzar did to them.

“They didn’t learn from what Titus, the great Roman leader, did to them.

“They didn't learn from what Hitler did to them, and the kings of Europe, and Spain – they didn't learn. They have continued to behave the same way: The mentality of arrogance toward other people. The mentality of superiority over other people. The mentality of seclusion, the mentality of settlement. This mentality, an ideology of planning and systematically working to incite wars and strife in the entire world. Those [Jews] have not learned from the events of history."

Hear the words of Hamas Commander Read Sa'ad:

"We won't abandon the way of Jihad and Shahada [Martyrdom] as long as one inch of our holy land is in the hands of the Jews. A day will come when our flag will fly above all of the regions of our land. Our flag will fly on the minarets of Jerusalem, and the walls of Acre, and the quarters of Haifa."

Or listen to PA Shari’ah Judge Muhannad Abu Rumi:

"[Khan Al-Ahmar is] holy land. We know its value, and not them [Jews], the foreigners, the fabricators of history, who dance and live on the body parts of others, and on the blood of others. Read their history: There is no global corruption that they are not behind. There is no global corruption that their rabbis did not allow... People could be deluded or think... that we have no way out with the Jews... The liberation of this land is a matter of faith, which will happen despite everyone. The Jews leaving this land is a divine decree... The war is not only over this strip of land, as you all know the Jews want everything and not just a part [of it]. They want to subjugate us, and that we be slaves to their command... There have always been two camps in history: the camp of truth and the camp of falsehood. The people of falsehood see themselves as those who rule over everything... Among the Jews we find nothing but corruption and depravity."

Lest you think these men represent the unwashed or uneducated, here are the words of an academic, one Imad Hamato, Professor of Quranic Studies at the University of Palestine in Gaza who hosts a weekly official PA TV program on Islam:‎

“Humanity will never live in comfort ‎as long as the Jews are causing devastating corruption throughout the land. Humanity ‎will never live in peace or fortune or tranquility as long as they are corrupting the land. ‎An old man told me: If a fish in the sea fights with another fish, I am sure the Jews are ‎behind it. As Allah says: ‘Every time they kindled the fire of war [against you], Allah ‎extinguished it. They strive throughout the land [causing] corruption, and Allah does ‎not like corrupters.’” (Sura 5:64)

Then there's the recent Hamas radio chatter picked up by Israel only last month, describing the operation that took the life of Officer “M”:

“Four fighter jets are above me. There was a strike near us. The jets are coming from the north. They attacked one of the (Hamas) cars. Hide. Close in on the Jews. Don’t let them leave Gaza," yelled one Hamas commando into his radio during the firefight.

He said "Close in on the Jews." Not "settlers," "Zionists," or "Occupiers." Not even "Israelis," but "Jews."

What are Arab children taught? On November 29, a young girl recited a poem at the Gaza Conference for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People that referred to the Jews as wild apes, miserable pigs, and evil creatures destined for humiliation. She said that Jews are like herds of stupid cattle, and that Jerusalem "spits out [their] filth" because it is a pure virgin.

I did not have to scour the internet to find these examples. They are numerous. Antisemitism is not just the domain of a few oddballs or iconoclasts. Jew-hatred pervades the culture of the Arab terrorist who shot Shira Ish Ran in the abdomen, an act that led to the death of an infant she never got to hold.

To the terrorist who shot her, Shira was not a hands-off target, someone vulnerable, carrying life in her womb. She was less than human. A pest to be sprayed dead, along with the baby in her womb.

To think of her as a pregnant woman, like any other pregnant woman, or her baby like any other baby would have betrayed weakness, a fault in his basic foundational beliefs, a softness that must never be given quarter if the ultimate goal were to be achieved.

If he'd dared think of Shira Ish Ran as a pregnant woman, he would have had to try all the harder to prove his mettle by shooting to kill her and her unborn infant. Once he did so, of course, the terrorist was free to tell the world anything he liked, that he did not, for instance, think of Shira Ish Ran or the baby she carried as Jews, but as Zionists, settlers, occupiers, and oppressors.

They would want to believe these things, the world, for the West is short on understanding how things really work and they prefer not to see the bigger picture.

Those who live in Europe or America, prefer you to couch such actions, the elimination of Jews, in the language of colonialism and oppression. That speaks to them, while antisemitism seems so, well, gauche. If you use language that is politically correct, they can excuse the targeted murder of a pregnant woman, the successful attempt at infanticide, or if you like, the long, drawn-out third-trimester abortion of a Jew-Pig.

After all, that baby would have grown up to be a soldier. Had he lived. That made him fair game. Right? Just another occupier, a thief, an oppressor in waiting.

As long as the world has an excuse to think of it in another, politically correct way, an Arab is safe to shoot whatever Jews he likes, whether it be a pregnant woman and the baby in her womb, or a couple of teenage girls. Europe looks the other way. The UN looks the other way. The New York Times looks the other way.

It’s all good.

The question is why Jews look the other way. Even the Arab terrorist, now dead thank God, couldn’t puzzle that one out. To him, in his short evil lifetime, Jews were Jews. No matter who shed their blood. No matter that their condition marked them among the most vulnerable sectors of society.

An old woman in Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in this respect, is exactly the same as a young pregnant woman standing at a bus stop in Ofra holding life inside her womb--a life soon extinguished.

The dead Arab terrorist knew there was no essential difference between him and Robert Bowers. He actually felt a lot of sympathy for Bowers, when he thought about him. After all, he hated Jews and Bowers hated Jews. Hates them still. The Arab terrorist saw Jews as less than human. So did and does Bowers.

When he thought about it, the Arab terrorist who shot Shira Ish Ran and killed her baby, knew that the only difference between him and Robert Bowers was that there was no possibility that Bowers would ever be set free in a prisoner exchange or receive a large government pension for killing Jews. Had the Arab terrorist not struggled during his capture, he would have ended up on easy street in a comfortable Israeli jail.

Of course, the 72 dark-eyed virgins are a nice compensation.

If only Bowers had been Muslim.

A pity.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Are Settlements an Obstacle to Peace? (Judean Rose)

Are Israeli settlements an obstacle to peace? Lots of people say so. Bulgaria’s Mladenov said it. The EU’s Mogherini said it. And the UN has said it again and again.

By why would anyone think that Jews building homes stands in the way of a peace settlement?

The homes of the 10,000 Jews the Israeli government expelled from Gaza in 2005 did not stand in the way of the unilateral gesture of peace that was Disengagement. We just knocked those homes down. We left behind the greenhouses, the infrastructure for making a living, and the Arabs knocked those down without Israel’s help, rejecting the Jew-stench that apparently still clung to these structures, in favor of poverty.

Demolition of Ganei Tal, Gush Katif

The homes of the 7,000 Israelis expelled from Sinai in 1982, similarly did not stand in the way of Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt.

This being not one, but two instances in which homes did not stand in the way of peace, what is the rationale for calling Jewish homes “obstacles to peace?”

Some say the problem is that building homes expands existing settlements. But this is not so. Settlement boundaries are already defined. Building more homes within those boundaries doesn’t expand them. The boundaries remain the same. And the settlements that are within the consensus as belonging to Israel in any peace agreement, retain their dimensions whether or not Jews build homes therein.

The real issue is that when Jews build homes in Judea and Samaria, their numbers increase in the land. The issue isn’t limiting homes, but limiting Jews. Which is antisemitism.

But can the building of Jewish homes be construed as a provocation? Is it as if the Jews are saying, “All of this is ours and this also is ours?”

Well, yes. But so what?

In what sense does this prevent the parties from sitting down at the negotiating table?

The fact is, it doesn’t.

Jews building homes on land Arabs want, doesn’t stop Arabs from demanding more land. And Jews building homes on land Arabs want, doesn’t stop Jews from being willing to sit down and discuss land giveaways.

None of this stops anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart from pulling a stern face when referring to the building of homes for Jews in Judea and Samaria. Because he wants what the Arabs want and not what the Jews want. He wants the land Judenfrei.

JINOs like Beinart want what Arabs want because Arabs are brown people they see as victims. People like Beinart feel better when they do nice things for the downtrodden.

Beinart and his ilk like to identify victims and feel bad about them. They like to see themselves as self-sacrificing heroes. So they demand that Jews living where they themselves don’t live, give up their homes for the people they see as victims.

As for Jews like Naomi Chazan or Amira Hass, the Israeli versions of Peter Beinart, settlers are a breed apart from “normal” Israeli Jews like them. Settlers are vermin, while they sit in their high tower, as Beinart sits in America, pointing a finger at the nasty settlers.

From their perspective, settlers are like Nazis seeking Lebensraum in Czechoslovakia, a land not their own. These high and mighty Jews see the settlements as a colonialist project. But Judea and Samaria are the indigenous lands of the Jewish people and always have been. The idea that the land is not Jewish land betrays a preference to ignore ancient history in favor of modern revisionist history that shuts Jews out and lets Arabs in.

The truth is, building homes for Jews is not a crime, never was, and never will be.

Building homes is just creating shelter. It’s part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which ironically, is a psychological theory proposed by a Jew, which recognizes that people have basic needs. Like shelter.

Shelter doesn’t hurt anyone. And a Jew deserves a home as much as the next person.

Homes don’t get in the way of peace negotiations.

And Jews don’t contaminate territory. They’re human beings like all other human beings. The only difference is that God gave them the Torah and the Land of Israel.

Which hasn’t stopped them from sitting down with the Arabs in peace negotiations.

And it appears it never will.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

“Hath Not a Jew Eyes?”: The Dehumanization of the Jews

All of us know, deep down, that hatred, for instance Jew-hatred, is bad. It’s part of our moral fiber. So when we want to indulge in a little xenophobia, we have to find an excuse that gives us permission to act in a way we know is wrong.

Hating Jews, for example, requires the antisemite to build a moral foundation for hate, a tautology that makes Jew-hatred not only acceptable, but a virtue. Antisemites build the moral foundation for their hate through the dehumanization of the Jews. Because if Jews aren’t human, it’s okay to hate them.

If Jews are not human, hating them becomes exactly like hating Brussels sprouts. A choice completely divorced from morality. It’s not immoral to hate Brussels sprouts, therefore it’s not immoral to hate the Jews, who, after all, are not human, much as Brussels sprouts are not human.

Of course, Jews are clearly living beings, even if not human. Killing them, therefore, would still be deemed as cruel and inhumane as killing animals, according to societal norms and the bylaws of PETA. For this reason, building a moral foundation or tautology for Jew-hatred necessitates a foundational belief that Jews are not just not human, but subhuman: untermenschen.

Hating Jews, the haters tell themselves—tell you—is not like hating other creatures, because the Jews are an invasive and dangerous species that steals jobs from regular humans as part of their wider mission of taking over the world. And if Jews are subhuman, say the haters, killing them is therefore not only not murder, but a moral imperative, performed by decent, upright people for the good of society.

The proof of the subhuman nature of the Jews, the haters will tell you, is that they regularly attempt to pass as actual human beings in order to evade capture and death. Jews know, they say, that if you think they’re only human, you won’t kill them. It’s how they’ve managed to survive throughout the centuries: shape-shifters who multiply and spread, a metastasizing societal malignancy, goes the narrative of hate.

Antisemitic blogger targets me for filing a DMCA notice after he plagiarized my piece, Should We Carpet Bomb Gaza.

Comment referring to "jew-dogs" and "jew-rule" on the content that was disabled as a result of my DMCA notice.

It is the dehumanization of Jewish people, and the conscience-driven necessity to spread the narrative of this dehumanization, that made the Holocaust possible. Der Untermensch, a 50-page brochure edited by Himmler and distributed by the Race and Settlement Head Office at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the 1942 German invasion of the Soviet Union, expanded at length on the subhuman nature of the Jews and other minorities; the Jews being the subhuman supreme. Here is a quote from the pamphlet of which 3,860,995 German language copies were printed (the pamphlet was also translated into 14 other languages):

Just as the night rises against the day, the light and dark are in eternal conflict. So too, is the subhuman the greatest enemy of the dominant species on earth, mankind. The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.

Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.

A subhuman and nothing more!

Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it!

Mulattoes and Finn-Asian barbarians, Gipsies and black skin savages all make up this modern underworld of subhumans that is always headed by the appearance of the eternal Jew. (emphasis added)

In the contemporary aftermath of the Holocaust, the dehumanization of the Jews as untermenschen continues, because some people will always look for a reason and an excuse to hate. “In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”*

Which tends to render the mantra of “Never Again,” completely meaningless.

And of course, the dehumanization of the Jews begins long before Hitler, may his name and memory be erased, was a glimmer in his mother’s eyes. Critics have, for example, long debated the meaning of the eloquent, but usurious Shylock’s famous speech in The Merchant of Venice:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Some say Shakespeare, with this speech, far from intending to make the Jews seem human, meant only to depict Shylock as running true to the species. That is to say that Shylock does what Jews do: poses as human to survive. The Nazis, in fact, took full advantage of Shylock as an oft-employed device in their anti-Jewish propaganda.

We could certainly go much further back in time to find examples of the dehumanization of Jews as an excuse to hate them as a breed. The Jews as a nation were, in fact, born in the wake of Egyptian enmity. Way before Christ, Mohammed, or even the Romans.

And going forward, the dehumanization of the Jews continues.

The dehumanization of the Jews is today illustrated by the lack of space given to Israeli victims of Arab terror in the media, while Arab suffering is amplified. Turn on the television and you will not hear about the two Daniels, Daniel Tragerman and Daniel Viflic. Tragerman was a four-year-old boy who was killed by shrapnel when a mortar exploded next to his home along the Gaza border. With only three seconds between siren and explosion, the little boy couldn't make it to the family safe room in time. But you wouldn't have heard about that.

Nor would your television tell you about Daniel Viflic, a 16-year-old kid murdered in a school bus on the way to his grandma's house. Arab terrorists deliberately targeted the school bus with an anti-tank missile, assuming the bus would be filled with Jewish children. The shrapnel peppered Daniel's brain. He was declared dead ten days later.

Daniel Viflic, HY"D

The media hides these stories from the public in order to dehumanize the Jewish population of Israel. To them, Jewish children aren't children like other children. Photos of the dead Arab infant Leila, on the other hand, were splashed across your screen for days, her death blamed on the Israeli army. You probably never heard her uncle's admission that Leila was already dead of a blood disease when he grabbed her still cold body to bring her to the border riots. Leila's uncle was paid by Hamas to bring the dead baby's body to the border and to claim the IDF killed her with tear gas.

🇵🇸#Palestine : The funeral of 8 months Palestinian baby Leila Ghandour who was died after the inhalation of tear gas shot by Israeli occupation forces at Palestinians to the east of #Gaza yesterday .#Nakba70 #GreatReturnMarch #JerusalemIstheCapitalofPalestine pic.twitter.com/8mCScQcY81
— Shehab News (@ShehabAgencyEn) May 15, 2018

But you only saw the photo of the "grieving" uncle holding the tiny, dead body. You only heard the lie. Because in humanizing Leila with a faked photo opp, Israeli soldiers are dehumanized. The photos of Leila in her uncle's arms produce outrage against Jewish soldiers, making them seem like monsters. There is not a little irony in that Jewish IDF soldiers are dehumanized through the vehicle of an infant's humanity when the humanity of Daniel Tragerman is hidden from your sight.

In its cherry-picking stories about Israel and Gaza, and through the process of selective omission, the media proves that it works hard to never, ever humanize the Jews. We can see what they choose to present us, and what they choose to hide from view. We can see that the media has learned its lesson well: that a narrative of dehumanization might be countered by humanizing the object of hate.

It's elementary. And some of us learned about it in school, as seventh graders, when we were assigned the book Black Like Me, to learn about prejudice and racism. That book worked magic because it served to humanize black people. It was pedagogical theory in action: when you get to know and like someone, it’s hard to hate them. Which is exactly as the dehumanizers have always warned.

Take the case of Liel Levitan, the 7-year-old Jewish Israeli chess prodigy. There was talk of Tunisia banning the Israeli delegation from competing in the World Chess Championship to be hosted by that country. Only when the World Chess Federation hinted that Tunisia would be ousted from its ranks, did Tunisia relent and agree that Levitan could compete.

During the campaign to get Tunisia to allow for Israeli participation in this event, i24 News issued a most affecting video of the youngster. One couldn’t help but think: What on earth is the danger of this tiny little cherub with her masses of blonde curls? Of what are the Tunisians so frightened??

But that’s exactly the point. If you believe that Jews can masquerade as adorable humans, you have no compunction in treating them as undesirables, or perhaps more to the point, like rats or cockroaches. That is why Nazis had no trouble shooting Jewish infants in their mothers’ arms or bashing their heads against a wall until they were dead. To the Nazis, these infants were Jewish cockroaches in need of extermination. No need to show them any mercy.

Note the veiled irony in the voiceover accompanying the i24 clip of Levitan, which taken in the wrong light by the wrong people, might suggest the child prodigy’s angelic appearance is just cover for her subhuman nature:

“Don’t be fooled by her childish face and long, frizzy blond hair.”

Humanizing the little girl in the eyes of the public worked. The campaign brought pressure to bear on Tunisia. But it is doubtful that the effort made Liel any more human in the eyes of the Tunisians. More probably, they wished only to avoid being ousted from the World Chess Federation. They wanted to rid themselves of a public relations nightmare.

Efforts at humanizing an object of hate, if truth be told, are not always successful. Sometimes the efforts serve only to make the hate an abstract thing, one which allows the person to hate a group in general, but love a person, in particular, as an exception. This may be a meaningless distinction.

In Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, author Leonard S. Marcus relates an anecdote about this most famous author of children’s books such as Good Night Moon, and one of her illustrators, Esphyr Slobodkina. Brown invited the illustrator to visit her at her summer cottage in Maine. The two were out rowing when Slobodkina “made some remark that caused Margaret to realize, apparently for the first time, that her companion was a Jew.

“To the artist’s shock and dismay, this realization seemed to irritate Margaret. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ she replied as though her guest had somehow failed her in an obligation that might have spared her some trouble. Margaret went on to insist that she disliked herself for harboring what she called a ‘Jewish prejudice,’ yet she had the prejudice all the same. Slobodkina soon left the island.”

photo of Esphyr Slobodkina seated in front of "Irish Elegy", c.1948-50

Margaret Wise Brown wrestled with the unpleasant knowledge of her own prejudice, acknowledging it as such. And eventually, author and illustrator reconciled. Troubled by their fall-out, however, Brown wrote a never-published short story entitled, Oh Gentle Jew, in which a character presumably patterned after Slobodkina, says to another woman (presumably Brown), “Love the Jew and hate the Jews. I wonder if it is possible.”

Perhaps it was Brown’s milieu growing up that informed her views about the Jews in general. Once confronted with the Jewishness of someone she liked and admired, a colleague, Brown was forced to see that her prejudice had no logical basis in fact. That knowledge didn’t make her prejudice go away, but it made her mighty uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable enough to grapple with the subject, and to write about it, too.

Margaret Wise Brown (photo: Consuela Kanaga)

It is perhaps the knowledge of how the haters see the Jews, that, through the ages, has kept the Jews on their best behavior. It’s not so much fear of being killed, though this is certainly part of the equation, but the desire to be seen as human beings, kind and good, that has helped shape and refine the Jewish people. This is the desire that drives every Jewish mother’s instructions to not create a shanda fur die goyim: to not embarrass one’s own people in the eyes of the world.

Perhaps the effort to dehumanize the Jews is the secret fuel that powers Jewish excellence. If so, we must nonetheless continue to bear witness against antisemitism when we see it in God’s world. Because it will always be a mitzvah to fight against hate; a thing that has no sensible reason for being.

*V’hi She’amda prayer from the Passover Hagaddah.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.