Friday, June 18, 2021
From Ian:
Christine Rosen: How the Media Ignore Jew-Haters
Seth Mandel: The Jews Who Are Complicit in Jew-Hatred
Christine Rosen: How the Media Ignore Jew-Haters
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, Google issued a lengthy statement outlining its commitments to racial equity in hiring and promotion as well as the money and support it had promised to the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet Google has said nothing about the recent spike in anti-Semitic violence, including brutal beatings of Jews on the streets of American cities, despite the fact that Jews are the targets of hate crimes in the U.S. far more frequently than other racial or religious groups.
Part of that has to do with the fact that Google’s workforce is progressive, particularly on matters related to Israel: According to The Verge, some members of the Jewish group at Google to whom Bobb privately apologized claim that the group itself “was not a safe space to express anti-Zionist beliefs,” and they formed their own anti-Israel splinter group. That group demanded that Pichai make a public statement condemning Israel’s response to the recent Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel that would include “direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence.” Not surprisingly, no pressure was placed on Pichai to condemn Hamas’s terrorism, which directly targeted Israeli civilians. The letter further demanded funding for Palestinian causes and “termination of contracts with institutions that support Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”
Google’s inconsistent application of its own supposed principles of diversity and inclusion should be more widely known, but the mainstream media long ago accepted uncritically the notion that anything labeled an effort at fostering diversity cannot and should not be questioned—unless the diversity is ideological. Thus James Damore, a white man, is fair game for dismissal by Google for criticizing diversity dogma, and his story is widely discussed; Kamau Bobb, a black man, remains protected by his institution for his anti-Semitism, and his behavior is barely mentioned in the press. Which is why, as of this writing, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and most other mainstream-media outlets that avidly covered the Damore case have completely ignored the Kamau Bobb story. They employ their own Kamau Bobbs, and that is sufficient for them to cast a blind eye on the matter.
Although appeals to “diversity” are ubiquitous in corporate America, there is little consensus among Americans about what, exactly, diversity means—and little incentive on the part of woke executives or the mainstream media to find out. As the internal contradictions of intersectionality continue to reveal themselves, perhaps the media could spend less time on self-congratulatory reporting of its own “moral clarity” on race and more actual reporting on the hypocrisies embedded in our culture’s pursuit of those things that Kamau Bobb’s former title claimed he represented: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Seth Mandel: The Jews Who Are Complicit in Jew-Hatred
It was an astonishingly vile and aggressive coordinated attack against the Jewish group. The ADL was silent. JDCA was silent. The Democratic Party sided with the Squad. The Jewish community had been abandoned to the rise of the dominant left-of-center ideology according to which Jews are part of a white power structure of which Israel is a prime example.Liel Leibovitz: No, Jews Aren’t White
Corbyn’s attempt to separate the Jews from the Jewish state in the UK failed miserably. But the Squad’s efforts to do the same here are not failing. And it’s not just in the halls of Congress. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner suggested it would be a good tactic not to beat up Jews, as part of an overall strategy to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. (This after the New Yorker’s union put out a statement of solidarity with the Palestinians that included the phrase “from the river to the sea.”) Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote a column with a headline so instantly infamous that the Times eventually and quietly changed it: “Attacks on Jews Over Israel Are a Gift to the Right.”
Meanwhile, the comedian Sarah Silverman objected to attacks on Jews in Los Angeles not on the grounds that they were evil acts of anti-Semitic violence but rather because “WE ARE NOT ISRAEL.” For his part, Kenneth Roth, the obsessively anti-Israel executive director of Human Rights Watch, declared, “It is WRONG to equate the Jewish people with the apartheid and deadly bombardment of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government.”
Throwing fellow Jews to the wolves is abominable moral behavior. Delicately excising the name and words of a chic Democratic politician from a list of anti-Semitic statements to protect her—or to protect the organization you run from her wrath—constitutes an act of complicity in the violence that ensued in whatever small measure from her remarks. And the man who was thus complicit—Jonathan Greenblatt—had the nerve to act surprised. The anti-Semitic street violence in America is “literally happening from coast to coast, and spreading like wildfire,” Greenblatt told the Times. “The sheer audacity of these attacks feels very different.”
It feels different because it feels so familiar. And if the American Jewish community is to survive, it must start acting like it. And we must start by cleaning our own corrupted house.
A modicum of immersion in Jewish life would save these Jews from the maws of their own obliviousness. But herein lies their second misfortune: Religion, to them, has become not the communal pursuit of study and practice, as it had been for Jews since at least Moses, but one more lifestyle decision among many. For the most part, the modern progressive Jew is Jewish the same way she’s vegan, say, or a socialist, or a fan of matcha lattes. Like nearly a third of American adults, she likely defines herself as spiritual but not religious, ignoring the fact that religion emerged in precisely the same way across cultures and continents precisely because humans realized that spiritual stirrings alone were meaningless unless tethered to the ground by rituals that had to be performed together with other people.
The young secular Jews who identify as white have none of that. As they are not likely to belong to a synagogue or a faith community, they practice their Judaism as they do their aversion to gluten, privately and sporadically, as the mood suits them. It’s much easier than accepting the yoke of obligations—from holding space with other Jews you may not like to performing practices, like keeping kosher, you may not fully understand—but it also offers far less protection against being swallowed by the tide of a hostile culture.
Which brings us to misfortune number three: Being all too human, progressive Jews are eager to belong to something. And because their own parents spent decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars telling them that the greatest good is to be found in the quad of an Ivy League school or the sparkling boardroom of a Fortune 100 company or any of the other temples of the all-American meritocracy, they are happy to pay any price to fit in among the swells.
If you grew up in a household where Shabbat candles were rarely if ever lit and no one bothered reading a page of Talmud, but where SAT scores were obsessed over and Penn and Princeton stickers, coffee mugs, and sweatshirts ordered as soon as those thick admission envelopes arrived in the mail, you would understandably pay any price to stay in the good graces of the priestly class that maintains these hallowed institutions. So if the priests demand that you identify as white and say a little prayer of repentance for your sins, well, isn’t that a small price to pay for the American dream?
That nothing good ever came to the Jews from groveling, that we survived—indeed, thrived—precisely because we refused to compromise our beliefs, is lost on these lost souls. In their airless world, nothing is true and nothing is permitted except for parroting the articles of faith passed down by those who hold power. Thankfully, as some Jews continue to torment themselves by trying to fit in with a milieu that will never accept them for who they are, most young Jews are traveling in the exact opposite direction. According to the latest Pew Survey, released earlier this year, only 3 percent of Jews 65 and older define themselves as observant, while among adults under 30, the number skyrockets to 17 percent. This means that many among the coming generation of American Jews have no use for obscene formulations like “Jews are white.” They have only one identity marker, the only one they ever had, the only one that matters: Jews are Jews.
