Are you watching the World Cup? It is amazing how many different "races," whatever races are, are mingled in the action, in former apartheid South Africa. There is a piece on Yahoo about the diversity of the American team, all the different backgrounds. The German chancellor has praised the diversity of her country's team, immigrants from Poland, Brazil and the astonishing midfielder Ozil, of Turkish background.
This of course is Obama's story too, one that so many can relate to.
When I was in Israel in January, a cab driver said it was the worst mistake of his life to move from Brooklyn to Israel 20 years ago. Because nothing changes, he says. The matsav, the situation, never changes. And the world moves forward. A lot of the lack of change is racial. This Tel Aviv store (at left) shows pictures of kids deported from Israel, many the children of migrant workers. [P.S. I'm told these are kids threatened with being deported, they haven't been yet.]
I like to say that Gaza is the Warsaw ghetto, but maybe that's wrong: Israel is the ghetto. The ghetto was our long condition in Europe, and it seems like we're replicating it in the Middle East. We are closed off. And even in America we have closed ourselves off to the Palestinian narrative. And Jews celebrate the birth of a nation that included many refugees and blind themselves to the 63-year tragedy of the Nakba refugees, a racial story that Israel cannot bring itself to resolve. So it can't go forward.
At times I feel it is the duty of American Jews to try and help the other Jews, by breaking the ghetto walls.
The Jews of Israel are scared. Put aside the war crimes for a second and the tyranny of the occupation, they are afraid: We have established our ghetto and the world outside the walls scares us. There was always a self-imposed aspect to the ghetto. The wall walls Israel too.
I used to have a heading on this site, The Assimilationist. Because I'm intermarried and love America and hang out with gentiles, I thought, Alright, that word must describe me, an assimilationist. But I'm not really, I'm more Jewish than I've ever been and at this moment I feel a sense of corporate loyalty, to the people I was raised belonging to. As I often say, Zionism attracted the most mistrustful-of-gentiles Jews. They compounded this mistrustful thinking when they met up in Israel. Hirsh Goodman writes that an Auschwitz witness at Eichmann's trial was one of the main reasons Goodman decided to move from South Africa to Israel in 1965-- "His message to me was that we had allowed ourselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter."
I never absorbed that lesson. Zionism was built on anti-Semitism and that is no longer the reality, there just isn't anti-Semitism in the west to speak of. The integrators of the modern democracies, us Jews who are engaged with non's, let us help our brothers out of their ghetto, the ghetto of the mind and spirit...
“I like to say that Gaza is the Warsaw ghetto, but maybe that’s wrong: Israel is the ghetto.”
I think a better description would be that Gaza is a prison camp, Israel is a fearful gated community.
Sometimes a ghetto is where people segregate themselves:
link to guardian.co.uk
Makes you wonder why he (the cabbie) didn’t move to Pitcairn Island, anywhere.
RE: “His (an Auschwitz witness at Eichmann’s trial) message to me was that we had allowed ourselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter.” – Hirsh Goodman
FROM the 2004 film Downfall: “…Be ruthless. Life doesn’t forgive weakness. This so-called humanity is religious drivel. Compassion is an eternal sin. To feel compassion for the weak is a betrayal of nature. The strong can only triumph if the weak are exterminated. Being loyal to this law, I’ve never had compassion. I’ve always been ruthless when faced with internal opposition from other races. That’s the only way to deal with it.” ~ der Führer
SOURCE – link to imdb.com
“Stupid is the person who believes in his neighbor, good and loving as the neighbor may be. Stupid is the person who relies on justice. …Justice exists only for those whose fists and stubbornness make it possible for them to realise it… Do not believe anyone, be always on guard, carry your stick always with you — that is the only way of surviving in this wolfish battle of all against all.
-Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, On Militarism,1933.
Exodus
“I’m intermarried and love America and hang out with gentiles…I’m more Jewish than I’ve ever been and at this moment I feel a sense of corporate loyalty, to the people I was raised belonging to.”
You don’t seem overly religious either. In that case, how can whatever loyalty/sense of belonging that you feel be “Jewish”? If it were specifically Ashkenaze I can understand the cultural infrastructure to that, but “Jewish”? Just impossible to understand for me and that’s why I am asking, not to create trouble. In the case of an Nth generation urban secular “biological Jew” in Western or Southern Europe, without any special-language background I see it as insane.
I keep asking the same question. The Judaic religion I understand. A strong attachment to Yiddish culture I understand. But what makes a secular American for whom baseball, pizza and jazz are far more important than the shtetl “Jewish”? Why not just give it up? Some have cited the need to oppose anti-Semitism. But I don’t get it. If you don’t need to be black in order to fight white supremacism, why do you need to be Jewish to fight anti-Semitism (which is hardly an immediate problem in the West anyhow)?
azythos and notatall, you guys are right on! I was raised in a secular, but cultural Jewish home, and we hardly ever practiced the Jewish religion. In fact the only religion I’ve ever practiced is fundamentalist Christianity, and I did that for almost 11 years, and now I’m an agnostic, so I don’t practice any religion. Although some may disagree, I am not Jewish! I am the descendants of eastern europeans! There is no way to trace my lineage back to Jewish people of biblical times. The arabs are more semitic than I am! The Christian zionists would have us believe that someone like me, with no way to trace my lineage to middle east, is entitled to the land of israel over some poor palestinian whose family has been there for generations! What bullshit! (pardon my language) Also, I get tired of people who consider Jewish as a racial category. It is not! It is a religion! Those who think it is a race are thinking like Hitler! I am a white guy, plain and simple, and my ethnicity is not Jewish, but eastern european. My homeland is America, not Israel/Palestine.
Phil,
“replicating it in the Middle East,“ and replicating the Middle Ages.
azythos,
In that case, how can whatever loyalty/sense of belonging that you feel be “Jewish”?
The same way a chain link exists in a necklace. That’s Phil’s wisdom. Israelis just want to be chain links. It’s the necklace of humanity they have a problem with.
MRW; acute metaphor–combine food & habits one grows up with, “comfort food,” and familiar habitual antics, takes on people and things, with a deeply romantic ultimate abstract view of one’s happenstance tribe, and what do you get? The necklace of humanity is so heavy it can only be worn regularly by full-blown individuals?
Citizen – There is no secular-Jewish “food & habits one grows up with, ‘comfort food,” or “familiar habitual antics”. They can be Yiddish or Sefardi and perhaps one or two more things, of course, but certainly not ” Jewish”.
Is Israel the largest ghetto in the world?
link to jewcy.com
Interesting article. The situation never changes. I’ve said this before about Israel as a ghetto. It’s a contained enclave that may replicate the historical ghetto conditions. Was their relief being Jewish and contained within the Ghetto?
Someone said it earlier on this site that Israel is so small, only a couple of hundred square miles, so it must be depressing to believe that enemies are all around you. Why don’t they aim to make a real peace with their neighbors and lift the walls of their self-imposed ghetto?
n the ghetto it was were no one wanted to be and you were free to mix with other Jews. It was secure, since no one cared to be there.
Gaza and West Bank are just an occupied ghetto in that regard.
>> Why don’t they aim to make a real peace with their neighbors and lift the walls of their self-imposed ghetto?
Lifting the walls and making real peace might entail integration and/or assimilation and there’s nothing overly-special – no (self-)righteous suffering, no ostracism, no burdens to shoulder, no profound wisdom to offer, no exile to pretend you’re on – if you’re just like everyone else.
They would have to assimilate into the world and they’re afraid to do this, as they would lose their Jewish identity. When they can drop this special mantle they believe is so precious, perhaps they will become integrated into the world that surrounds them.
But, they’re losing a battle that they can never win. As the world integrates closer and closer by easily accessible information, they seem to devolve into historical blatherings from thousands of years ago (i.e. the bible as a book/tool to use for archeological research, to further occupy East Jerusalem). It’s just not relevant to the scale of time that the world lives in.
The US is foolish for supporting their fantasies. And other countries see this fraud and hypocrisy, and are moving to make a better leadership role for the world. This is one of the albatrosses on the neck of the US (not to mention all the other failing efforts of a just leadership state). More and more irrelevant is Israel and it’s US protector, every day that goes forward.
>> As the world integrates closer and closer by easily accessible information, they seem to devolve into historical blatherings from thousands of years ago …
To be fair, Muslims and Christians do the same sort of thing, and I’ll be just as happy to see them – and any other religious group – trade in their tired dogmas and silly rituals for true, humanist-based interaction with their fellow Earthlings.
I’m with you on that point…
It seems everyone needs a sense of identity when compared to the whole, but that is where all the separations begin. Self and group identitifcation is a real killer.
In the US, Christian whack-jobs who don’t understand the critical importance of the hyphen in Judeo-Christian, are setting the US up for an Easter Island demise. We are destroying our ‘trees’ to build monuments to false gods. The gods are abstractions, they can live in perpetuity because they live on nothing but the false ideas planted in people’s heads. People, on the other hand, need very real, physical things to sustain their lives. These things the gods demand as sacrifice. Foolish people make that sacrifice to an undeserving god.
What is repugnant to me about the ancient Jewish mythos — the part of Jewish lore that is pre-prophetic — is that Abraham chose to slay an “unblemished ram, caught in the thicket,” rather than to confront a psychopathic god and refuse to sacrifice any living thing — not Isaac, his own son, not an innocent ram.
Abraham was a coward: he chose to sacrifice another living thing so that he could collect on the promise of great riches and power.
Netanyahu is a modern-day Abraham: he is willing and eager to sacrifice other people’s children — their unblemished lambs — in order to collect on his psychopathic god’s promise of a bit of real estate.
eljay, I was raised in Old School Catholicism. We were taught that “Catholic” meant “universal;” that the family of god was the entire human family, that the concept of the “mystical body of Christ” meant that “when one member suffers, the whole body suffers;” and, cycling back to EVERYBODY is part of the family, part of the body, then “each man’s joys are joy to me; each man’s fears are my own.”
I was also raised Roman Catholic. There is nothing religion can teach humans because humans invented it all – including gods and religions – anyway. All religion does is take perfectly good concepts – respect (#1, in my opinion), love, loyalty, devotion, kindness, justice, honesty – and hobble them with dogma, scripture, worship (one of the worst concepts the human race ever invented), pageantry and delusional feelings of superiority.
Keep the perfectly good concepts – apply those concepts – and ditch the rest of the baggage.
oops please disregard: n the ghetto it was were no one wanted to be and you were free to mix with other Jews. It was secure, since no one cared to be there.
Gaza and West Bank are just an occupied ghetto in that regard.
Phil- Antisemitism may no longer be an issue in the west, but it certainly is an issue in the east if one includes eastern Europe and the Muslim world. (Obviously we’re not including the comments section of Mondoweiss which includes a smattering of antisemitism as well.)
The key point that you’re making is that if American Jews especially those with an inclination to intermarry and assimilate and to accept a Christmas tree in their homes could only convince the Israeli Jews that if only they would be willing to move to America that there is nothing to fear. No, that’s not the point. Your point is that there is nothing to fear from a Palestinian majority in the place they now call Israel. And you’re going to prove that how? By pointing to the American experience? What does the American experience have to teach to people whose roots are in Morocco or the Ukraine? What does the (imperfect, but good enough) harmony of racial relations on the East Coast of the USA prove about what will happen when Hamas is the ruling party of the New Palestine? The answer is very little or nothing.
The main reason some modern Middle Easterners dislike Jews is because the only encounter with them has been through war-mongering Zionists and Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian civilians remoreselessly, without punishment or opprobrium. If heavily-armed Hindus invaded America claiming to speak for all Hindus, stole our homes, and killed our children, donchathink Americans would have just a few bad associations with and thus feelings for Hindus in general, whether justified or not?
And you still scream about anti-Semitism! I suppose if the Hindu nationalists who invaded America encountered resistance, they, too, would play the religiously-persecuted victims. Particulary if they started to lose and then claimed they couldn’t POSSIBLY allow the Americans to have political power in their own country, because of Americans’ irrational hatred of Hindus.
You people (Zionist apologists) continue to astound me. Especially when you dig your own grave by talking about “people whose roots are in Morocco or the Ukraine” vis-a-vis people whose roots are in the actual land of Palestine (including indigenous Jews, Samaritans, Christians, etc). You seem to proudly admit you’re essentially a religion-based colonialist.
Not to mention your comment misses the point — that there’s no discernible need for a Jewish-dominated outpost in the Middle East to protect Jews against anti-Semitism. In fact, nothing inflames anti-Jewish sentiment more than the state of Israel’s brutal, unjustifiable, shamelessly chauvinistic actions and attitude, and the fact that it unfairly and preposterously claims to speak for all the Jews.
Pamela Olson- Your point is totally separate from Phil’s point. Phil is saying that because his experience in America has been so positive therefore Jews in Israel should stop worrying. You’re saying that all the negativity comes from Israel and if not for Israel’s negative actions everything would be fine and harmonious.
But then again, I’m not sure that you’re saying that. For you are also playing Gotcha! and claiming because Israel has colonialist elements therefore, it should what? cease to exist? the Jews should move away?
That is unclear.
As far as the cause and effect of the hatred for Jews created by Israel’s actions I’m sure that you’re partially right. But I’m not sure that Zionism is sufficient cause for the extent of the new Islam’s hatred for Jews.
If there were no Israel in existence today in 2010 and today’s population in “Palestine” were half a million Jews and five million Muslims and Christians I would not propose that Israel should be created as of today. But the historical events that led to Israel’s founding took place and in fact there are five to six million Jews living in Israel and it will take more than your caustic tone to make them believe that the only thing they need to do to have peace is to stop acting brutal. But I do not believe that you are trying to convince them of anything. And that is different from what Phil is trying to do in this post. He is trying to convince them that the world is not against them. You are convinced that the world is against them, because they deserve to be hated, because of their actions. Phil’s tone is an attempt to calm Israel’s Jews. Your tone is an accusation.
Phil writes: “There just isn’t anti-Semitism in the west to speak of.” Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe not enough to justify the need for a state of our own, but the Rubashkin sentence where the prosecutor asked for 25 years and the judge sentenced him to 27 years seems to indicate that anti-Semitism still exists in the good old US of A.