In weeks to come, I am going to insist on the importance of Shlomo Sand’s book, the Invention of the Jewish People. Caricatured in the U.S. as a tract on the Khazar theory of Jewish genetics, the book is in fact a liberal’s assault on the racial politics of identity in Israel and the diaspora, a work of brilliant synthetic scholarship about nationalism and identity construction and the roots of Zionism that will resonate in Jewish and Palestinian life for decades. (By the way, the other criticism of Sand, that he was recycling others’ discoveries about the migration of the Jewish religion through Europe, is horse feathers. Yesterday I heard Robert Wright talking religion on Krista Tippett’s great show, Speaking of Faith. The fact that he is popularizing scholars’ work is nothing against his ideas.)
I am told the following piece appeared in Yedioth Ahronoth, written by Yaron London, (and translated and circulated by the Israeli Press Review). It directly follows from everything that Shlomo Sand says:
[T]he proposed “egg donation” bill …will come before the Knesset for its second and third reading. It relates to an arrangement for donations of implantable eggs in barren women. The law, until now, had allowed using only surplus eggs, created during infertility treatments, and would now allow donations intended for this purpose. The donor would be recompensed by a small payment from the state.
The law is good in principle. It will redeem hundreds of barren families annually. The framers toiled at it for several years, but left a complex seed of ethical contention at its core. Sorrowfully, it also exposes the concealed racism in Judaism. The racism is embodied in the clause that rules that aside from exceptional cases, the donation is subject to the donor and recipient being of the same religion. It’s clear that the intention is limit pollution of “Jewish blood” with that from impure sources.
I imagine that this clause was inserted to appease the Orthodox, and without it no agreement would have been reached. Legislative acrobatics gave birth to an escape clause: under certain circumstances, the exceptions committee can permit a “mixed cocktail” donation—that is to say a donation from a non-Jewish woman for a Jewish woman. Other “mixes,” like Christian-Muslim, or Christian-Jewish are not mentioned in the bill. The bill also doesn’t cover the possibility of a woman without a religion. A person has no legal standing in Israel unless they belong to some church.
The basis of these clauses assumes that Judaism isn’t a culture but a biological breed. As a result, people are divided by ethnicity, in order to keep them pure the same way one would keep pedigree horses and dogs pure. This is racism. What is racism, if not relating to a human being according to his ethnic background?
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Wow, yeah, I can totally see how all of my comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany vis-a-vis “racial purity” were totally off base. Well, WJ, yonira, Witty… feel free to come to this thread and rest on your laurels!
Or… are you guys going to bother even reading it?
Don’t forget the best of all, Chaos “If you will it, it is no legend” from Wonderful Chew!
Yup, that’s good ol’ Israel fo’ sho’; a triumph of the will!
And yessiree Bobila! if there is anything history has taught the Jews, why it’s that reliance on the human will is the key to solving all our problems!
Well, that and a decent birthrate, and maybe less then a 50% out-marriage and walk-away rate! Well, actually organising ourselves as a religion might help, too.
Oh I see, sucess as an overbearing and intransigent coloniser proves how sucessful and willfull we are. I mean what else really matters?
Nothing else matters at all.
–H Himmler
Mooser- My assertion of “If you will it, it is no legend” referred specifically to the two state solution, by which I meant that if both the Israeli Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs truly want a two state solution they will be able to arrive at it despite the obstacles.
The original quote which was Herzl’s was meant to remove the idea of returning to Zion from the realm of “legend” to the realm of reality. It can be argued whether this idea was a good one or a bad one. But in fact the idea was moved from legend to reality and a lot of the credit (or blame) belongs to Herzl and his act of will and the will that he planted in the Zionists particularly regarding popularizing the idea and the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
This is very interesting in conjunction with another proposed bill essentially restricting citizenship to “born Jews” not converts.
Israel still hasn’t figured out “who is a Jew.” The egg-donor law specifies religion, not “nationality.” What happens when the egg donor is a convert to Judaism. Is the resulting child a Jew according to halacha?
People still try to claim that Israel is a secular state, when in fact it is increasingly a state ruled by the haredim, according to their medieval rules.
“Israel still hasn’t figured out “who is a Jew.” “
Neither has anybody else, of course. So why not just adjust the definition? Who could it hurt?
I dunno. Don’t the Nuremberg race laws of Nazi Germany and the Law of Return of the current state of Isael conform?
In the old days in the USA, anybody with a drop of black blood was a N*****.
Now, the US government and the American blacks have adopted the same standard.
That’s why Obama, actually a 50-50 mix, is de facto a black for all political purposes.
Nobody thinks that the overwhelming American black support for Obama during the presidential race was because he was half white genetically.
RE: “Israel still hasn’t figured out “who is a Jew.” Neither has anybody else, of course. So why not just adjust the definition? Who could it hurt? – Mooser
FROM IMDB: …According to [Fritz] Lang himself, on 25 March 1933, two days after Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933) had been banned, he was summoned to the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda to meet with Josef Goebbels himself. Goebbels explained the reason for the ban (the Nazi party slogans are fed into the mouth of the villain at the film’s conclusion) and apologized to Lang. He then shocked Lang by offering him the position of production supervisor at the UFA studios, where his first film would be a biography of Wilhelm Tell. Lang claims he suspected a trap and attempted to throw off Goebbels by telling him, “My mother had Jewish parents,” to which Goebbels responded, “We’ll decide who’s Jewish!” Lang then expressed interest in the position and said he needed some time to think it over. He describes how he looked at a clock and how during the entire meeting all he could think about was leaving as soon as possible so he could get to the bank and flee with all of his money. Lang says he didn’t get there in time so he sold his wife’s jewelry, boarded a train to Paris that same evening, leaving most of his money and personal possessions behind, along with his wife, Thea von Harbou, who divorced him later that year and went on to write and direct films for the Nazi propaganda machine. This story is possibly exaggerated by Lang for dramatic effect because there is evidence he left weeks after that…
SOURCE – http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000485/bio
“A person has no legal standing in Israel unless they belong to some church”
So can we drop the whole Israel/democracy pretense.
Funny, I wonder what level of affluence, influence and legal expertise is the minimum for dealing with the Israeli state as an individual denizen (Israel doesn’t really have “citizens”, does it?) as opposed to going through your local wonder-Rabbi in a dispute? What a system! How they must have missed the ghettoes of Europe!
A biological breed? Rather than a people.
Phil,
That you identify as a Jew, to whatever extent that you do, indicates that association is not ideological in origination, not religious in origination, but cultural, a community that self-identifies.
My criticism of Sand, of whom I’ve only read articles and seen youtube lectures, is that he diminishes what it means to be a people to racialist criteria.
That is skew to proving or disproving that Jews are a people.
Live with it. Accept it. If you personally wish to renounce your Jewishness and become an ex-Jew go ahead, and name it as a former identity for you.
And, if you do that, I hope that you will respect that others have different views and choices, and it would be humane of you to make room in your thinking for diversity of opinion.
Jews identity constructs BOTH the foundation of oppression and the foundation of compassion. It depends on the person and the approach.
The assault on the identity evokes either defensiveness or denial.
I didn’t think that that was your goal, to encourage denial, instead some statement of faith in human beings that in self-inquiry, change is possible.
So, Witty, you support this legislation? The tone of your statement (“Live with it. Accept it.”) indicates that you think that the notion of a “racially pure Jewish people” is something that you need to protect.
a “racially pure Jewish people”.
Like the Chinese Jews,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jews_of_Kai-Fung-Foo,_China.jpg
the swarthy Indian Jews,
the (possibly) swarthier Mizrahi Jews,
the extremely swarthy Ethiopian Jews,
and the (gasp!) Lemba!
http://haruth.com/jw/JewsLemba.html
Does Mrs. Goldstern want an egg from one of those?
Accept exactly what, Witty? What precisely is Phil to accept? What makes a Jew?
Religion? No, informed people know you can self-identify as a Jew and be agnostic or atheist. This is also acceptable by a wide range of Jewish organizations. Who, born from a biological Jewish mother is not a Jew other than one who converts to another religion such as Christianity? Is comfort food the criteria? Diaspora jewry’s comfort food is based on the standard foods of the host peoples over the generations.
If being a Jew does not rest on blood,
If being a Jew does not rest on religious belief,
If being a Jew does not rest on culture, especially comfort foods and the role of the outsider in any Gentile nation and the satirical advantage there,
then who and what is a Jew?
One answer is that the Jews are what socio-economic and chauvinistic roles they have played in human history; this answer is as negative as it is positive. In contrast, Jewish holidays of course, celebrate an opera world, a bipolar world where Jews always wear the white hats. Not a world of reality as it has ever existed. Of course attempting to talk about it is like trying to talk to born-again Christians about the Crusades and the Inquisition, and too the Salem Witch Trials.
In an April 20 1964 letter to Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism from Assistant Secretary Phillips Talbot, the State Department confirmed that it “does not recognize a legal-political relationship based upon religious identification of American citizens. It does not in any way discriminate among American citizens upon the basis of religion. Accordingly, it should be clear that the Department of State does not regard the “Jewish people” concept as a concept of international law.” See Volume 8 of the U.S. State Department Digest of International Law, M. Whiteman editor, page 35
“My criticism of Sand, of whom I’ve only read articles and seen youtube lectures, is that he diminishes what it means to be a people to racialist criteria.”
Why not try reading his book FIRST before you speak like your criticism is well thought through? Here is a link in case you forget
http://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/dp/1844674223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268115595&sr=8-1
If you read his book you will realize that he does not simply label people using ‘racialist criteria’. Now I’m curious what article(s) you read. His ultimate point of the book is very simple: Judaism is a religion that gained many converts in the past through proselytization that swelled it ranks across many places in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. This assessment of history clearly shows that the modern identity of Israel forged by Zionists is a total myth and has no basis in reality; the State of Israel should forge another, more inclusive myth (national histories are almost all myths, so why not?) to include everyone and create a real democratic state with real cultural, political, religious and social freedom for all.
Now if you read more, you’ll learn of a lot more interesting tidbits, but it depends on if you will read what he writes, or if you will rely on youtube lectures where he speaks choppy English, or articles that may not discuss his views in clear detail.
A person has no legal standing in Israel unless they belong to some church.
Yes, drop the pretense entirely. I argue this point all the time. Israel is a theocracy of sorts, and all this historical horse bleep analysis about Labor Zionists, Cultural Zionists, Religious Zionists, etc. only goes so far when you are talking about a State.
I had to laugh when I read this article.
It was the only safe thing to do. The content made me want to weep.
Israel has a lot of work to do regarding separation of synagogue and state. I favor civil marriages and no prohibitions regarding intermarriage. The egg donor laws are obviously a continuation of sorts regarding intermarriage.
Israel has a lot of work to do regarding separation of synagogue and state.
But that’s the ‘original sin’ of Israel. Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state inevitably leads to laws such as these. Israel is becoming more rigid, more religiously autocratic, and it can’t help but do so in order to defend the superior position of its Jewish citizens over non-Jews.
Does your friend mean the EJC’s Israeli Press Review? I’ve looked through their archives for the last year and I can’t find it.
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