Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause - NY Times
On 6/26/10, Ralph Dumain (Remember the theme song to the film Exodus? I was accustomed to hearing only Ferrante and Teicher's piano rendition. When I got hold of the sheet music, I learned that the theme had lyrics, and when I saw the verse This land is mine, God gave this land to me, I was appalled: I had never heard such a thing before, and had accepted the legitimacy of Israel as a product of the Holocaust without any crap about God in the mix. I don't recall any American Jews ever saying anything about God, though they were nominally religious.) ^^^ CB: With respect, Ralph, you didn't think a movie titled Exodus had any notion of God somewhere in it ? ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause - NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/26religion.html American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN One day nearly 20 years ago, Stephen Naman was preparing to help the rabbi of his Reform Jewish temple in South Carolina move the congregation into a new building. Mr. Naman had just one request: Could the rabbi stop placing the flag of Israel on the altar? We dont go to synagogue to pray to a flag, Mr. Naman, 63, recalled having said in a recent telephone interview. That rabbi acceded to the request. So, after being transferred to North Carolina and joining a temple there six or seven years later, Mr. Naman asked its rabbi to remove the Israeli flag. This time, the reaction was more predictable. The rabbi said that would be terrible, recounted Mr. Naman, a retired paper company executive who now lives outside Jacksonville, Fla., and that hed be embarrassed to be rabbi of such a congregation. As shocking as Mr. Namans insistence on taking Israel out of Judaism may seem, it actually adheres to a consistent strain within Jewish debate. Whether one calls it anti-Zionism or non-Zionism and all these terms are contested and loaded the effort to separate the Jewish state from Jewish identity has centuries-old roots. For the past 68 years, that stance has been the official platform of the group Mr. Naman serves as president of, the American Council for Judaism. And while the establishment of Israel and its centrality to American Jews consigned the council to irrelevancy for decades, the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made Mr. Namans group look significant, or even prophetic. It is not that members are flocking to the council. The groups mailing list is only in the low thousands, and its Web site received a modest 10,000 unique visitors in the last year. Its budget is a mere $55,000. As Mr. Naman acknowledges, the councils history of opposition to Zionism renders it radioactive for even liberal American Jewish groups, like J Street and Peace Now. Yet the arguments that the council has consistently levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence over the last decade, with the collapse of the Oslo peace process, Israels wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and most recently the fatal attack on a flotilla seeking to breach the naval blockade of the Hamas regime. One need not agree with any of the councils positions to admit that, for a certain faction of American Jews, they have come back into style. My sense is that they believe that events are proving they were right all along, Jonathan D. Sarna, a historian at Brandeis University and author of the seminal book American Judaism, said in a telephone interview. Everything they prophesied dual loyalty, nationalism being evil has come to pass. I would be surprised if vast numbers of people moved over to the A.C.J. as an organization because of its reputation, he continued. But its certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the diaspora, recent years have highlighted the point that Zionism is no panacea. Mr. Naman grew up in a Texas family deeply involved in the council, and as a result he has lived through the swings of the political pendulum. We were ostracized and maligned, he said. But we felt back then, and we feel now, that our positions are credible. Theyve been justified and substantiated by what has occurred. On that matter, to put it mildly, there is disagreement. If American Zionists who oppose the West Bank occupation face withering criticism from the conservative part of American Jewry, which has tended to dominate the major communal and lobbying groups, then the unapologetic foes of Zionism in the council are met with apoplexy and indignation. The rejection of Zion, though, goes back to the Torah itself, with its accounts of the Hebrews rebelling against Moses on the journey toward the Promised Land and pleading to return to Egypt. Until Theodore Herzl created the modern Zionist movement early in the 20th century, the biblical injunction to return to Israel was widely understood as a theological construct rather than a pragmatic instruction. Most Orthodox Jewish leaders before the Holocaust rejected Zionism, saying the exile was a divine punishment and Israel could be restored only in the messianic age. The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality. This country is our Palestine, a Reform rabbi in Charleston, S.C., put it in 1841, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple. The Reform movements 1885 platform dismissed a return to Palestine as a relic akin to animal sacrifice. Only when the Reform leadership, on the eve of World War II, reversed course did its anti-Zionist faction break away, ultimately forming the council in 1942. Its discourse was simultaneously idealistic and contemptuous a proposed curriculum
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause - NY Times
An interesting factual account, but one is loathe to draw definitive conclusions from it. Coincidentally, a Pakistani Facebook friend recently posted a video called Judaism vs Zionism, featuring someone with an English accent contrasting Jewish ethics with the Zionist state. Such simple-minded reasoning clarifies little, and in fact promotes irrationalism rather than dispels it. There's a three-way conflation here between ethnicity, religion, and nationalism, and four-way when one adds biology to the mix. There is also the argument of Shlomo Sand, that the concept of Jewry is a modern concept, that the Exile never happened, that there were mass conversions involved in the formation of the Jews in Europe (and elsewhere), and therefore that the actual ties of European Jews to ancient Judaea are spurious. Thus the founding Zionist myth is . . . a myth. To argue for anything on any of these bases, against Zionism as well as for, defies logic. Additionally, there is an assumption that religious justifications and myths of origin played the decisive role in the formation of Zionism in the 19th century and a constant, unvarying role throughout its history, which, as the Stalinists and partisans of /other/ nationalisms would have it, was always and unvaryingly fueled by racialism and a master plan to drive out the Arab inhabitants of the region. Counter-myths are not necessarily more illuminating than myths. There is not a single point that was not already debated by Zionists themselves in the pre-Herzl period, not to mention anti-Zionists, more often on a secular than on a religious basis. And the rational and irrational components of pro-Zionist arguments have to be calibrated along a sliding scale, which can be done when we see what those arguments were, especially as Palestine was by no means a target of universal consensus in the early period. We will learn more if we examine the conditions of 19th century Europe, esp. Eastern Europe, but also Central Europe, and look at what nation-building meant across the board among nationalities under the yoke of empires, in a world almost completely subject to empires and that by the end of the century would be completely subjugated, with nothing but empire in sight. We could also compare fantasies and schemes of colonization and resettlement among various peoples. One could, for example, examine 19th century black nationalism and compare it to Zionism before Zionism got anywhere so that it could be imitated or opposed. Taking all this as a base, we can better understand the variations on the theme, and to what extent nationalist projects actually were underwritten by irrationalist ideologies like religion, racial theories, metaphysical idealism (German Romanticism), Social Darwinism, etc., and how much weight these ideologies had, among secular and religious components of the population. What it takes to convince people of anything depends heavily on circumstances and options as well as ideologies, and sometimes it doesn't take much of a push to convince people of something. Which is why secularists and even people with little taste for nationalism (like Einstein) would turn to Zionism. Another factor is that those far removed from a concrete situation may not even have the facts with which to justify the policies they are being sold. Religion, shmeligion, ancient homeland, shlomeland, between 1945 and 1967 the Holocaust was the only argument anyone needed to hear, and for American Jews at least the other elements played rationalizing supporting roles at best, at least as I remember the atmosphere of the early '60s. (Remember the theme song to the film Exodus? I was accustomed to hearing only Ferrante and Teicher's piano rendition. When I got hold of the sheet music, I learned that the theme had lyrics, and when I saw the verse This land is mine, God gave this land to me, I was appalled: I had never heard such a thing before, and had accepted the legitimacy of Israel as a product of the Holocaust without any crap about God in the mix. I don't recall any American Jews ever saying anything about God, though they were nominally religious.) On 6/26/2010 8:44 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/26religion.html American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN One day nearly 20 years ago, Stephen Naman was preparing to help the rabbi of his Reform Jewish temple in South Carolina move the congregation into a new building. Mr. Naman had just one request: Could the rabbi stop placing the flag of Israel on the altar? We don't go to synagogue to pray to a flag, Mr. Naman, 63, recalled having said in a recent telephone interview. That rabbi acceded to the request. So, after being transferred to North Carolina and joining a temple there six or seven years later, Mr. Naman asked its rabbi to remove the Israeli flag. This time, the reaction was more
