Abe Foxman may be sawing off the treelimb he’s standing on. People are passing around the JTA’s wonderful/bizarre interview with the ADL director of a week or so back, in which Foxman defends his campaign against recognizing the Armenian genocide, so as not to alienate the Turks.
The most interesting moment in the interview came when Foxman said he had misjudged the Boston Jewish community, which is more progressive than the N.Y. Jewish community (and was all for recognizing the Armenian genocide). Foxman took a shot at the Bostonians’ inclinations for intermarriage and assimilation:
When Foxman says the assimilating Boston Jews are reversing Hillel, he is referring to the famous statement by Rabbi Hillel, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" "Hillel" is a standard warning in Jewish life: Jews must look out for themselves, because no one else will. A.M. Rosenthal used to invoke Hillel all the time. (The Hillel-quoters tend to leave off the next part of Hillel’s statement: "If I am only for myself, who am I?")
The revelation here is that Foxman is saying that assimilated and intermarried Jews tend to look out for others. He’s right. I think this is one of the reasons I intermarried. I found myself seeking out modes of consciousness that weren’t as Jewish-oriented as the tribal one that I grew up with, in which it was O.K. to ask routinely, Is it good for the Jews? I wanted to open the windows a little… It bugged me when people invoked Hillel all the time…
I note that in Ruth Wisse’s jeremiad on Jewish powerlessness in the Wash. Post the other day, she also took a shot at assimilationists like myself, in the context of U.N. criticisms of Israel:
I understand why some Jews and Israelis try to escape [the U.N.'s] assault through assimilation or denial, or even by joining their assailants. It’s seductive to hope that by accommodating our enemies, we will be allowed to live in peace. But the strategy of accommodation that historically turned Jews into a no-fail target is the course least likely to… etc.
I don’t know that it is tactically wise to attack assimilators. 62 percent of American Jews under 35 are intermarrying. They are bound to take a more enlightened view than Wisse and Foxman of Palestinian suffering…
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Adam Keller, editor of the Tel Aviv-based The Other Israel, spoke at length on the issue during a lecture tour of the US in September 2004, especially in the course of an intense and highly emotive debate with right-wing Jewish hecklers on the university campus at Fullerton, California. Among other things he said on that occasion:
"I find this term, 'Silent Holocaust', more obscene than all the pornography in the world put together. The Holocaust, from which my mother and my father barely escaped and in which many of their relatives perished, was the systematic genocide and mass murder of millions of people, solely because of their ethnic and religious identity. The so-called "silent holocaust" is the freely chosen exercise by human beings of the right to choose a spouse and live a happy and satisfying life with him or her, a right specifically guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which the State of Israel is one of the first signatories. Only a monstrously perverted mind can possibly conceive of making such a comparison. This comes from a mindset in which an individual counts for nothing, his or her wishes count for nothing, and the individual's only worth is as being a component of an overwhelming, all-supreme Nation or Ethnos. This is a racist way of thinking, a fascist way of thinking. It is, I must say, Hitler's way of thinking, and I am deeply ashamed that some Jews have taken it for their own."
Endogamy is a reactionary culture, suitable for the ghetto.
Time to join the 21st century.
the title of Wisse's latest screed is actually "If I Am Not For Me". end of sentence. the fact that Harvard is harboring race-baiters annoys me
Because Ruth Wisse is an orthodox Jew, she is not going to take a position favorable to intermarriage, but she is teaching at Harvard and not at Touro.
In http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/09/jews-and-power-versus-israel-lobby-and.html , I discuss whether Harvard should fire her for moral turpitude.
In general the Wicked Witch of Harvard NELC poisons the University environment. See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/poisoning-atmosphere-at-harvard.html .
I do agree that Wisse is a fanatic ethnic Ashkenazi Nazi in the sense that her political ideology combines politicized ethnic fundamentalism, social Darwinism, biological determinism, essentialism, primordialism, eugenics, national revival through racial purity and opposition to race mixing as a source of decadence.
[BTW, Wisse's husband Leonard Wisse is Chairman of the Board of Directors of CAMERA.]
This particular combination of political beliefs was not unique to German Nazis. The ideology of the Polish Endeks combined similar ideas, and parties with similar creeds existed in Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia.
In their formulation of ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism, which I associate with Jabotinskian Zionism, Nordau and Jabotinsky anticipated intellectual developments of German Nazis and similar (non-German) Nazi groups throughout Eastern Europe.
The various parties associated with Labor Zionism are in the mainstream of Eastern European fascism. Sternhell is quite dishonest in "The Founding Myths of Israel" when he claims that Labor/Left Zionism is nationalist socialist and not fascist because he never addresses Eastern European fascism, which is never formally anti-democratic in the manner of Western European fascism.
In any case the boundaries between fascism and Nazism are not hard and fast. The Strasser faction of the German Nazi party in many regards was very close to Italian fascism in ideology.
Likewise there are clear boundaries between Zionist fascists and Zionist Nazis.
The Labor Zionist leader Arlosoroff described Labor Zionist ideology in "Der juedische Volkssozialismus." At the time period Volkssozialismus is the normal German term for fascism, but Sharon, who started in the Zionist fascist parties in the 50s came to head a Zionist Jabotinskian (i.e., Nazi) party in the 2000s.
I'm surprised these yokels (yankels?) don't advocate that in order to remain pure Diaspora Jews should return to the coldwater flats of the urban ghettoes and return to work in the sweatshops for peanuts. But that's crazy, since they wouldn't be able to keep the Prince of Foxes in the lifestyle he's become accustomed to.
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