NPR did an OK story on Madoff's effect on Jewish charities yesterday, ably reported by the able Tovia Smith, but it included a line that irritated me no end. See if you can spot my button-pusher in this excerpt:
Jeffrey Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies â one of the foundations not invested with Madoff â says every phone call and meeting these days starts with a conversation about who got hit.
...A few organizations have already shut down, including the Massachusetts-based Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, an organization that ran Israel trips for teens. It lost $8 million and closed up, as did the California-based Chase Foundation, which gave more than $12 million to at-risk youth in Israel.
The trips to Israel aren't for simply "teens." They are for Jewish teens. This is a form of discrimination that people find perfectly acceptable, which bugs some young non-Jews I've run into, still it is a fact: it's for Jewish teens, so that they will fall in love with Israel and meet other Jewish kids and marry them. The Lappin Foundation wasn't just about frikkin trips. It was--there it is in the first sentence--about intermarriage and assimilation, the two horns of my Jewish dilemma. Journalists who try to shade this truth are doing their listeners a great disservice. Imagine hiding a Catholics-only or evangelical Christians-only policy from the sophisticated ears of NPRia.
plus, I really hate to think what their concept of 'at-risk youth in Israel' and its needs is.
Phil has a problem with JEWS giving money to JEWS so that they can do JEWISH things such as going on a trip to the JEWISH state where they can interact with other JEWS in a JEWISH environment.
There is one common denominator in all of this. I wonder what it is?
@Rowan,
In Israel, they have places where kids from "troubled homes"(homes where the parents are either poor, abusive, or drug addicted) go live with a family. It's like a foster care system. My class went to Ashkelon a few years ago and we volunteered at this foster center. They have about 8 kids of different ages with a solid loving parents. It's not just for Jews. They have several of these family units in each center. It's creates a nice family environment and makes it easier for volunteers to help. There are also boarding schools which are better suited for kids from "troubled homes." I have a friend in the IDF who takes care of these kids at a boarding school west of Jerusalem. She's like a counselor and she helps them get ready for school and with homework. She also plans evening activities for them.
rrrrrrrrrrrrrright………
@Rowan,
What are you trying to say?
Nothing :-)
Michael W, you poor thing. Come here and have a bowl of truth.
One of the good things about Israeli society is its bastard child of Weimar Socialism, the treatment sector, which (however spottily) provides the near-universal healthcare which is directly responsible for the rise of the Bedouin, Israeli-Arab and Haredi demographics to their current prominence and future battle for supremacy.
@ MM,
What does the Israel Lobby have anything to do with what I said?
My feelings about Jewish youth culture in Israel are more or less identical to those of the subjects of Liz Nord's movie, "Jericho's Echo : Punk Rock in the Holy Land", except that she has included a few mad russian right wing hardcore outfits, just for balance. I keep telling people I have a lot of Israeli music on my blog, but I don't always tell them it's mostly punk rock:
link to niqnaq.wordpress.com
one problem with charities: the donations, contributions are tax deductible meaning the general population of taxpayers has to make up for these contributions to "charities". anything going to israel is terrorist to support terrorist enterprises in a terrorist entity. guantanamo should be kept open as a way station to the boiling pots of uzbekistan for these "charities" founders and supporters.
"…it's for Jewish teens, so that they will fall in love with Israel…" and someday either make aliyah or betray America on Israel's behalf. Either one works, as far as organized Jewry is concerned. And the statist/socialist media? Why should they have a problem with Hitler Yout…er…Zionist Youth? Doesn't Obama have a similar program on tap? It's all about anti-Christian indoctrination, either from the Zionist end or the Socialist end, or both.
"The trips to Israel aren't for simply "teens." They are for Jewish teens. This is a form of discrimination…"
I wouldnt go that far; it certainly doesnt "bug" me. This is a free country. There are similar opportunities open only to members of other groups.
The Jewish kids in my liberal film/tv L.A. neighborhood belonged to Jewish Youth Groups. As goyim, albeit with Jewish stepmom and cousins, we were excluded and patronized in a very highhanded way. These Jewish kids were atheists like everyone else but completely bonded, to this day 20 years later, by an all-consuming tribalism. If it had been a white youth group with similar aims it would have been considered abhorrent and rightly so. Now that they're all entombed in the West LA neo-con ghetto with the likes of Eurosabra, I really value my hippy arty glamorous fuckup parents.
I don't have the slightest problem with minorities having an anti-assimilationist and anti-inter-marriage culture. I use the term minority in the sense of local demographic proportion, e.g. Jews are a minority in America, but not in Israel. Cultural 'diffusion' is an obvious reality, and folks who want to ensure that their cultural heritage is passed down have every right to raise their children as they see fit. My hackles only get raised when the issue crosses the line from culture to politics. Hindering diffusion of one's culture by hostility to others, exercised through the machinery of the state, is not acceptable. It's ok to spend money to fund trips and play matchmaker, but it is not ok to spend money to create a climate of fear in the machinery of our state with the object of browbeating cooperation to political and financial subsidization of murder, torture, and theft abroad.
I think it important to note Jewish culture is in no danger of vanishing from America. I suspect that what older Jews fear is not that it will vanish, but that it will change. Life is a contact sport, cultures change. Aspects that are not incongruous with a new generation's reality will be passed down. Those that are, won't. It's foolish to try, and wrong to impose on others to try. I view Zionism in exactly that light. It is a relict late 19th century form of European imperialism only given new life in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Relative to contemporaneous versions from other European cultures, which were horridly violent in ways that most Westerners don't understand, it is mild and humane befitting the long tradition of Jewish morality born of two millennia of antisemitism. However, the world has moved on. What was mild then is an abomination now. Colonization, with its attendant murder, torture, and oppression, is no longer viewed by most people as acceptable behavior, and those who practice it are very correctly labeled as uncivilized.
"Imagine hiding a Catholics-only or evangelical Christians-only policy from the sophisticated ears of NPRia."
I don't know how many people share my view, but I don't see Judaism as just a religion in the same sense that Catholicism or Methodism are. There is a more distinct and enduring cultural component, and in my opinion that was what Adolph Hitler and fellow travelers were trying to exterminate. Phil, while I agree with you that it is, strictly speaking, dishonest not to make explicit the fact that the free trips to Israel are only for Jews, I view it as obvious within the context of cultural preservation, and don't object to the lack of emphasis.
Is your objection to the wording in this case representative of a more general objection to language used in discussions of Jewish issues? That I would strongly agree with. In my opinion, there is a conscious attempt by members of 'establishment Judaism' (not in any organized conspiratorial sense, but rather in the sense of auftragstaktik) to constrain the set of vocabulary and hence conceptualizations acceptable for discussing the I/P conflict. I think they see this as necessary to preserve the viability of the traditional Zionist narrative, which in their 'heart of hearts' they know is deeply flawed. I have no doubt you agree that words matter a great deal, and that it behooves us to choose them for ourselves.
Extraordinary efforts to preserve traditional Jewish culture are an understandable reaction to the Holocaust. However, in some ways I think it is self-defeating. Perhaps the very act of trying so hard distorts the culture in ways that many of its adherents find unpalatable, requiring greater degrees of obsession from the 'guardians' in order not to lose ground. I submit that the excessive degree of this obsession causes a 'positive feedback' that, left to operate in isolation from other social 'forces' that could dampen its deleterious effects, can only end in failure.
Though I know there are instances where the charitable assistance is not exclusively limited to Jews, I always get the feeling that it is for the benefit of Jewish interests, both in the status of the institution as well as pool from which to do their fundraising (as with the Chabad telethons).
Granted their are Catholic charities and others focused on bringing good PR through their charitable works, but quite often the Jewish charities are clearly to be seen as for Jews and Jewish interests alone.
The way these funds can be moved around (laundered even) troubles me, as I'm convinced that much foreign aid to Israel comes back to the US as money from lobbyists such as AIPAC. We're virtually funding our own corruption.
Anon,
You mistake me for someone whose parents "made it big" in America. I'm more one of the appalled tie-dyed onlookers of the Waxman/Berman/Sherman/Weiss machine, amused at the snark of their letters-to-the-editor regarding a Jerusalemite scion like Saree Makdisi. Organized Zionism doesn't serve me a whit, but it's the only game in town for an Israeli-American who cares about friends and family left behind. I don't see why I'm not allowed to care as much as the Irish with my dollars as long as it's a bit less than the Croats or the Albanians, who made WAR from Diaspora with the imprimatur and support of the US.
Colin Murray, your last two paragraphs provide an excellent summary of what, in a nutshell, is wrong with organized Judaism and its world view. But the overly-controlling, lineage obsessiveness you describe isn't merely a "post Holocaust" phenomenon. Organized Judaism has always been that way. And sure, those values may work to assure the continued existence of the tribe, but when the tribe has as much power as organized Judaism does in America, it completely and utterly distorts and destroys America's traditional operating principles, and deranges the entire country. It's akin to throwing a Tasmanian Devil amongst a group of kindergarteners and saying, "come up with a way to all get along, and then we'll use Empire to project whatever the outcome is abroad." Itâs quite literally insane.
Marlene Dietrich decided as a point of honor that she could no longer be German if German Nazis defined what German meant.
Likewise an honorable Jew would have to take the position that as long as Zionists (ethnic Ashkenazi Nazis) are in control of Stolen and Occupied Palestine, he would work with all his might for the dismantlement of the Zionist state and for the remove of the criminal murderous genocidal population of Zionist invaders, interlopers and thieves.
From the standpoint of America, Zionism is a fraud that will cost the USA approximately 10 trillion dollars within the near term and nearly ruin the economy.
Patriotic Jews must start demanding the arrest of Zionist fraudsters as the first step in a claw-back of the money that Zionists have conned out of the US government or otherwise cost America.
BTW, please note that contributions to the racist Lappin Foundation were tax deductible despite clear IRS rules and regulations that forbid treating donations to racist charities as tax-deductible.
From http://www.rilcf.org/contact.htm.
Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation
Robert I. Lappin, Trustee
29 Congress St.
P.O. Box 986
Salem, Massachusetts 01970
Phone: 978-740-4410
Fax: 978-744-1411
Should you wish to make a tax-deductible donation, please send a check to
the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, 29 Congress St., PO Box 986,
Salem, MA 01970.
Not only was the Lappin Foundation a victim of Madoff, but it was itself part of a conspiracy with wealthy Jewish racists to commit tax fraud.
Eurosabra – I understand all of that but most of your previous posts have been very contemptuous of Arabs. Kind of off topic but I just returned from Seville and Granada blown away by the brilliance of Islamic Spain. In school I only heard about the Jews who were expelled, a minute fraction compared to the Muslims who were killed and their magnificent architecture debased. But, then we got Velazquez, Murillo, Cervantes and Zurburán so that helps… Do you think Likud will produce an El Greco any time soon? I like Waxman, he's my rep, but the Waxman/Berman/Sherman/Weiss cabal is really creepy.
I like that Jewish kids are invited to visit Israel and are sponsored.
And yes, the Madoff idiocy, will hinder those efforts, as well as a hundred thousand social service efforts towards Jewish and non-Jewish families and individuals.
The intellectual and moral self indulgence of these people will be their undoing. Take this example from above:
"I don't see Judaism as just a religion in the same sense that Catholicism or Methodism are. There is a more distinct and enduring cultural component, and in my opinion that was what Adolph Hitler and fellow travelers were trying to exterminate."
Now some might say that for a completely untrained writer, paragraphs like that are signs of effort, and possible future development. I would say however that they are worse than useless and in fact an insult to the serious reader, and to illustrate, I shall simply reverse the terms – not because either is 'correct', but to show that both are utterly meaningless:
"I don't see Aryanism as just a religion in the same sense that Catholicism or Methodism are. There is a more distinct and enduring cultural component, and in my opinion that was what the Jews and fellow travelers were trying to exterminate."
It's not just the trips that are directed towards Jews, but the at-risk kids are likely only Jewish, not Arab citizens of Israel (they're Israeli too). But to be honest I wouldn't be happy either way–there's been an Israeli Jewish doctor coming around raising money for a hospital in Israel, sponsored here by a Christian fundamentalist church, who bases his appeal on providing care to both Arabs and Jews–just so compassionate with everybody. It's part of a propaganda effort to pretend that Israel is democratic, and that Arab citizens of Israel are treated better than they are by their own leaders, etc. Nothing that the mainstream American Jews do in relation to Israel is without its fundamental propaganda aspect. That's the nature of the beast.
Quite so, David, although for me, taking a sort of subterranean punk attitude as I tend to do, the difference between Israel and other capitalist countries is more a difference of obviousness and immediacy than a difference of essence. The nature of the beast is exactly the same, but in Israel it's right in your face all the time. In the USA or Britain, it's always somewhere else – the chickens never quite get home to roost on your own doorstep the way they do in Israel, it being hardly larger than a pocket handkerchief in the first place.
@David Green
You are wrong. The biggest single Jewish organization is Hadasa (Jewish women organization) which is famous for its hospitals that treat all Israelis and even Palestinians, even those responsible for violent acts against the State of Israel.
@Anon,
Contempt for a corrupt political class and supra-nationalist (because Islamist) armed militia, sure. Arabs as a whole, not in the slightest. Palestinian Arabs, my once and future neighbors, here in the Diaspora and in Eretz Israel, a fortiori. Sorry if I gave you that impression. The Spanish, FWIW, were retaking land they had lost to Jihad in the 600s-700s, and it is worth remembering that even today al-Andalus is claimed by al-Qaeda as Muslim land. One can argue that Jews should have consented to live in an Arab-Islamic Palestine governed solely by the Arab Higher Committee but that hasn't been a political possibility since 1937-8, when it foundered with the Peel Partition Proposal and the AHC decided to implement it by force. Oh, and Ismail Shammout's style is very similar to that of El Greco, who was himself a Cretan
whose homeland fell to the Ottoman Turks approximately 50 years after his death.
It occurs to me that the meaning I was trying to convey didn't come across in the way that I had hoped. When I say that Judaism has a more distinct and enduring cultural component than Catholicism or Methodism, I don't mean that as a criticism at all. It's different, but that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it.
For example, my folks came over in 1713 and by dating gravestones and researching archives my family has determined that they worked their way south and then gradually westwards over the mountains west of the Carolinas trying to stay on the frontier ahead of the encroaching organizing influence of government. They changed denominations of Christianity several times, and their experience was far from unique. They, and others, did it to conform to the dominant local denomination, to ensure that they were very much considered 'part of the community', which was very important for security at the edge of an expansionist (Western colonial) civilization. My point is that if they had chosen otherwise, and instead decided to band together with a smaller minority within the frontier communities and maintain the cultural and doctrinal differences, relative to the local majority, of their original denomination, there would have been absolutely nothing wrong with that. In exactly the same way, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Jews choosing to maintain the unique cultural identity associated with their religion.
'Assimilation' is a continuous rather than a discrete process; it is done by 'degrees', and isn't an either/or proposition. I'm certainly not asking for complete assimilation. My problem with the current American Jewish establishment is my involuntary involvement in wars that have nothing to do with me, and the consequent staggering damage to our country. I want to see just enough assimilation that the rest of us are viewed with the basic level of respect requisite to the Jewish establishment ceasing to involve our country in foreign wars. My resentment will continue until, and only until, that happens. If our roles were reversed, I suspect that Zionists would not find it too much to ask. And make no mistake, I am NOT asking, I am demanding, and will work against them in every way I can until they stop.
Obviously El Greco was "The Greek" but he flourished in Toledo. There are a lot of interpretations of the very complex Spanish Reconquista and al-Quaida is absurd. I'll check out Ismail Shammout but I'll go out on a limb and guess that the Spanish Golden Age isn't about to be eclipsed by the Tel Aviv art scene any time soon.
You're hung up on the idea that expulsions "mean" something, that something is gained or needs to be gained to "justify" them in some way. The Spanish Golden Age was a pale shadow of what a multicultural society might have produced, likewise even ur-Israeli authors like S. Yizhar and A. Yeshurun recognized that 1949 destroyed the landscape of their homeland in favor of a State. Any Middle Easterner can tell you that history doesn't just happen, it is generally DONE TO someone, but not in hopes of a payoff. At least, not a cultural one.
Eurosabra,
When has there been an Irish-American NGO with a mission mandate to reverse assimilation in the USA, seduce Irish American kids to immigrate to Ireland and/or fund, support, propagandize in behalf the Irish State?
Rav Kook,
Ancient Order of Hibernians. Duh. Also, remember that the Prince of Orange and the Scottish Church were patrons of Princeton University, giving us a major establishment fixture with links to the Orange Order, and now the Uni has a Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney fetish trying to mix in some green to make up for it. Other people's wars and lobbying and actual conspiracies are all over–there was a Croat foreign minister during the 1990s war who was from Silicon Valley, as in dual-national, and you can bet THAT helped the SAM shipments–but all anyone ever hears about is the Joos, Joos, Joos.
But hey, according to your pseud, aren't secular Zionists "workers of the divine light" despite themselves?
And yes, the AOH calls for the Irish Republic to be sovereign over the entire Irish isles, which even the Republic (officially) no longer claims, tries to protect, defend, and extend the Catholic faith, preserve and promote Irish culture, and carry out works of charity. I imagine the Irish equivalent of the Law of Return–one grandparent gets you citizenship–along with EU benefits attracts a certain amount of American Diaspora resettlement, possibly numerically on a par with Israel's since there are 10m Irish-Americans eligible for Irish citizenship under Irish law.
But they are not Jews, so only Orangemen and the UK froth about their "conjurations."
As a person with mixed Irish/Jewish background I had to laugh at Eurosabra's post. There is absolutely no comparison between Jewish and Irish-American ethnic identification. He's really grasping at straws here. I mean, really…
A key distinction:
The Irish are indigenous.
irishholocaust.org
You don't get to decide whether Jews are indigenous to Judea.
"Some day this war's gonna end."
link to philipweiss.org
Israel deliberately forgets its history
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
By Schlomo Sand
…But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture.
and Wexler and Koestler…
Shlomo Sand is a historian of modern Europe and not of Jewish history. Like everyone else, he's published a book, oooh, expecting the Jewish people to vanish in a puff of ink.
His ahistorical crap will gather dust like Akiva Orr's. Shoot, I don't think you can find _The UnJewish State_ outside research libraries. Yup, the Jewish people deconstructed in 1972, secular Jewish identity as a historical fraud, yadda yadda. Sand has more modern theory, that's all.