When I was a kid in Baltimore we respected the Gordis’s. The father was a scientist named Leon, just like my dad, but he was a serious Jew. His father was a big rabbi. We went to their seder once or twice, and couldn’t keep up with the formality of the ritual (compared to my family’s slopjob seders). I remember a lot of Judaica. Daniel Gordis is my generation and moved to Israel– his father lately followed— and writes books denouncing assimilation.
He’s a big deal at the Shalem Center, a neocon thinktank, and like so much of Israeli society, seems to be going off the rails. At least according to this account in a Connecticut Jewish newspaper of Gordis’s talk at a Conservative synagogue the other night. If the account is accurate, it just proves that intermarrying, universalist me is on the right side of Jewish history, and Gordis has gone down a messianic, ethnocentric rabbit-hole that is completely dependent on imperialist power.
Notice the incredibly frank talk about the lobby. It’s the usual hypocrisy. Deny it exists to the goyim, work it in the minyan. From the Ledger:
Here are some of Gordis’ key points:
1. Israel has survived all conventional military attacks and… reduced terrorism to a minor threat.
2. There is one potent attack by the Arabs against Israel that is capable of succeeding and against which Israel has no defense:. That is the direct assault that Israel is now under by the Arabs via appeals to the world community. This coordinated effort aims to delegitimize the Jewish state and cause it to be treated as an international pariah, whose products and scholars will be boycotted and ostracized from the international community.
3. In order to survive this new attack American Jews must fight it in the halls of Congress and on the American campuses. This means getting involved with organizations willing to present Jewish arguments, e.g. the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).
4. If Israel were to be destroyed, American Jewry would be reduced to the bleak existence they experienced years ago in Poland or Russia….
6. We are at war with Islam and any denials to the contrary may be politically correct, but are wholly inaccurate. Of course, there are Muslims who are not Jihadists, but they represent a small percentage and are irrelevant. Militant Islam is succeeding in Europe, the Middle East and is coming to America.
