These two rabbis walked into a newspaper with an op-ed about Gaza, and–

by on February 23, 2011 8
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I just remembered this this morning-- a story that Felice Gelman told last week at Alwan for the Arts when we were flogging our book on the Goldstone report (buy it here; then write a scalding or fulsome review at Amazon).

Last December or the December before (my notes don't say), Gelman helped two rabbis who had written an op-ed called "Light a ninth candle for Gaza" place that piece in a "major major newspaper." One of the top 5, she said. Near the end of the process, the rabbis were told that the piece would go online within an hour. "It didn't appear within an hour." Instead, the op-ed's authors received a "dramatically-revised version" of the piece that included a number of questions, assailing their facts re Gaza. Some of these questions were not in grammatical English, and Gelman said that she can't prove it, but she believes an Israeli was consulted. The Op-Ed, Gelman said, never was published. "That's the conspiracy of silence."

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Israel/Palestine

{ 8 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. pineywoodslim says:
    February 23, 2011 at 1:19 pm

    Any chance of disclosing the name of that particular newspaper?

  2. Pamela Olson says:
    February 23, 2011 at 1:42 pm

    I ghostwrote an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune one time. They eviscerated it. There was nothing we could do. Either agree to the edits or it wouldn’t be printed. It was still pretty good, but it had the usual blandification of shockingly horrible things so that the paper could maintain its “even” tone of “balance.” This happens everywhere you look. A friend from the BBC said his article was once edited for being “too balanced.” These editors know what’s going on — some of them do anyway. But they also know it’s not worth the headache to print the truth.

    • Lydda Four Eight says:
      February 24, 2011 at 3:04 am

      we were told by American diplomats serving in the MidEast that calls to be “even handed” were looked down upon as taking a pro-Palestinian position. that speaks in 2 ways to me 1) the obvious bias/ zionist favor and 2) that justice is really on the side of Palestine/ Palestinians.

  3. Les says:
    February 23, 2011 at 2:30 pm

    It is no secret that the upper echelons of the US media are disproportionately Jewish. (The reason for that is part of US history, not Israel’s.) While there are Jews in our media who oppose Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, these do not include publishers, editors, and owners of major print and broadcast media. Instead of the “Two Jews, three opinions,” this media group is in lockstep with the Israel Lobby. I don’t think their uniformity of opinion is due to intimidation, knowing they make it their business to intimidate those who fail to fall in line. If it is fear that keeps them united, just what is it that they have a shared fear of? What will it take to get just one of them to break away and become the reminder that not all Jews support occupation? A break in this bloc will be hugely beneficial, but what will it take to accomplish that?

  4. Psychopathic god says:
    February 23, 2011 at 3:06 pm

    After watching Edwin Black discuss his earthquake book, “The Transfer Agreement,” and jotting down the very important facts and attitudes that Black FAILED to discuss or reveal, I re-read David Sasha’s explanation of pilpul and subsequent application of that concept to Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2010 AIPAC speech.

    It’s helpful to re-read David Sasha and recognize that Jewry is broader than Likud and anti-Likud, zionist and anti-zionist. Sasha digs up the roots, does the taxonomy, compares crab grass to Kentucky Blue and restores one’s center and grounding in the knowledge that sustained the prior 3/4 of one’s life.

    the Ashkenazi rabbis were less concerned with promulgating the Law transmitted in the Talmud than they were with molding it to suit their own needs. Pilpul was a means to justify practices already fixed in the behaviors of the community by re-reading the Talmud to justify those practices.

    There were two ways in which the Ashkenazi rabbis effected this radical reinterpretation of the Talmud:

    In Rashi’s Talmud commentary — a required text in every Jewish school in the world — he uses the Aramaic term Hakhi Garsinan, meaning, “This is how the text is to be read.” Whenever this term is used, it indicates that Rashi has amended the text. His emendations were necessitated by the need to bring actual practice in line with the text.

    Rashi’s emendations are not a theoretical proposition; the actual editions of the Talmud that we use today reflect the changes. The text of the Talmud was forever remade according to the dictates of Rashi and his school.

    As if this was not enough, the Tosafists instituted one more pilpul principle into Talmudic discourse. This was called the Lav Davqa method. In English we might call it the “Not Quite” way of reading a text. When a text appeared to be saying one thing, the Tosafot — in order to conform to the already-existing custom — would re-interpret it by saying that what it seemed to mean is not what it really meant!

    In absolute contrast to the Ashkenazi method, the Sephardic tradition, grounded in textual reality and scientific principles, carefully parsed every term in the Talmud; a concern that often led the most prominent scholars to look for the most accurate version of the Talmudic text.

    Rashi’s method of emendation and the Tosafist reading based on the Lav Davqa method completely transformed Judaism; the Ashkenazi tradition was the one that ultimately triumphed.

    What this means for contemporary Jewish discourse is critical: Even though many contemporary Jews are not observant, pilpul continues to be deployed. Pilpul occurs any time the speaker is committed to “prove” his point regardless of the evidence in front of him. The casuistic aspect of this hair-splitting leads to a labyrinthine form of argument where the speaker blows enough rhetorical smoke to make his interlocutor submit. Reason is not an issue when pilpul takes over: what counts is the establishment of a fixed, immutable point that can never truly be disputed.

    In this context, the Law is not primary; it is the status of the jurist. Justice is extra-legal, thus denying social equality under the rubric of a horizontal system. Law is in the hands of the privileged rather than the mass.

    What is thought to be the Jewish “genius” is often a mark of how pilpul is deployed. The rhetorical tricks of pilpul make true rational discussion impossible; any “discussion” is about trying to “prove” a point that has already been established. There is little use trying to argue in this context, because any points being made will be twisted and turned to validate the already-fixed position.

    Pilpul is the rhetorical means to mark as “true” that which cannot ever be disputed by rational means.

    Thus, Black’s dissertation on the Transfer Agreement, with all its omissions and distortions, can be understood as pilpul, and while it can make me angry and demand that I take some action to counter it, all of Jewry is not implicated in Black’s mendacity.

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