I grew up middle-class in Baltimore. My parents raised 6 kids on an academic salary and my mother bought all our clothes at thrift shops. From 10 to 12, the object of all my hankering was E.J. Korvette’s. It was the one department store my parents finally agreed to take us to. They wouldn’t take us to Hecht’s or Bamberger’s or Hutzler’s. Those were fancy. But E.J. Korvette’s, lit up on a hill out past the Beltway–that was special. I got plaid pants there in 6th grade, just like the British rock bands.
Rumor had it that E.J. Korvette’s stood for Eleven Jewish Korean Veterans. I don’t know if that’s true, but that was another reason to go, to honor their service. It was the era when Jewish aspiration involved retail and medicine. Now it’s moved on, to hedge funds and media.
I thought of E.J. Korvette’s today when I read Amanda Gelender, a Stanford junior, calling for sanctions against Israel in The Stanford Daily. She begins by announcing, "I am Jewish." You go, girl. Young Jewish progressives stand on the hills outside our cities, like those 11 Jewish soldiers of my youth. They will not be silenced, they grow in number. Here’s Amanda:
We single out Israel for the same reason that others single out Darfur or Burma: because there are atrocious human rights abuses occurring in a specific socio-political context….Americans have a unique culpability for Israeli injustices, as the U.S. supports Israel’s occupation of Palestine with more than $7 million in foreign aid per day… Given this tremendous sum of U.S. aid coupled with its appalling human rights record, Israel deserves our criticism and consideration just as much as other nations; subjugation in other countries does not negate that which occurs in Israel.
In the comments, note the efforts to delegitimize Amanda as a drama major–and the mock posting saying that Jimmy Carter is a Nazi who wants to remove Jews from American public life….
Related posts:
- Jewish student mag publishes one-state argument, signaling generational battle ahead
- Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism uses ‘jewish values’ to demand sanctions on Iran
- Why single out Israel/Palestine?
- A Muslim student is denied entry to Israel and Harvard is silent. Why?
- ‘To be a Jewish artist means to avoid depicting the horrors inflicted on Palestine’
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Sarkozy once recruited by Mossad? Sounds like the stuff of tabloids but the story was broken by Le Figaro, a respectable, if right-wing, French newspaper on Oct. 12, 2007.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/france/20071012.FIG000000291_les_etranges_accusations_d_un_cybercorbeau.html
Google translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lefigaro.fr%2Ffrance%2F20071012.FIG000000291_les_etranges_accusations_d_un_cybercorbeau.html&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8
Above comment mis-posted on wrong thread. Apologies.
WRT to this post, the thread following Amanda Gelender's article stating the obvious was pretty worrying. I assume most of the hard-line Israel supporter-type contributors were Stanford students. Was it a representative sample? If so, W-M, notwithstanding, it is hard to see anything changing soon in US policy towards Israel or the Islamic nations of the world.
To borrow MJ Rosenberg's neologism, it will continue to be all (Daniel) Pipism, all the the time from the USA.
It appears that the GIYUS Megaphone Project is quite effective as the Hasbara parrots came out of the woodwork in short order to blast Ms. Gelender for her piece.
Spinoza is a sterling precedent.
Gelender should take excommunication as a badge of honour.
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