Outrage that a poet who married a non-Jew might be featured on Israeli currency– from a rightwing Israeli news site:
Dr. Hagai Ben-Artzi, a Bar Ilan University lecturer and brother in-law of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, slammed the government’s plan to issue currency with the likeness of Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky. Turning Tchernichovsky into a “national icon” was a terrible idea and would set a bad example – because of his longtime marriage to a Christian woman, he explained.
“We cannot turn him into a national symbol, since he disdained such an important component of Jewish identity and intermarried, increasing assimilation,” Ben-Artzi said.
This story is a reminder of Israel’s importance to many Jews and Jewish organizations, preserving Jewish “continuity,” by keeping Jews from marrying out. Dennis Ross is engaged in this enterprise, heading the Jewish People Policy Institute, which opposes intermarriage.
But where are the shared values? I first got engaged on religious-political issues 15 years ago when Protestant Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial dating was drawing national political opprobrium; and I pointed out that the American Jewish community’s policies to stop people from doing what I’d done– falling in love with and marrying a non-Jew– were just as bad.
By the way, others are complaining that the new Israeli banknotes will only bear images of Ashkenazi Jews. Gershom Gorenberg’s report.
Update: This post originally stated that Bob Jones is a Catholic University. It is Protestant.
Bob Jones University is not Catholic. I don’t think Catholic institutions have ever been open to segregation in the US. Georgetown University was founded by a partly black Bishop of the Church. Catholics, in fact, have founded many black schools, e.g. Saint Elizabeth Drexel founded scores of schools for blacks in the South, and the Jesuits founded the black Jesuit college Xavier in New Orleans.
The Catholic Church has much to be defensive about, but Bob Jones University is not one of them–thank god!
Reminds me of the first scripted racial kiss on television in the science fiction series Star Trek between Kirk and Uhuru in 1968, the Israelis are fighting a losing battle. Earlier NBC had expressed concern when Petula Clark in her musical special, had touched Harry Belafonte’s arm, a moment cited as the first occasion of direct physical contact on US television between a man and woman of different races.
This reminds me of a recent brouhaha that emerged in the wake of new bank notes for the Canadian dollar. The Bank of Canada had a polling group that they tested various images on and tried to measure their response in intelligent ways.
One such image, an Asian woman at a microscope, was reacted to strongly because it “played into ethnic stereotypes”. The solution, according to the panel, was a more ‘neutral’ image.
They settled for a white woman – doing the same exact thing. And the new bank notes themselves also ended up with nothing but white people on them.
It should be noted that 11% of Canada’s population is Asian, twice that of ours. So they’re not a minor group; they’re by far and away the largest minority group in Canada. Oh, and that’s based on numbers from the 2006 Census, and Canada has a net-migration rate per capita which is two to three times higher than America and is much more dominated by Asians.
So the actual numbers today are probably quite a bit higher.
“Neutral” in the minds of many Canadians, obviously, is the white default. Many the same for many Ashkenazi Jews in Israel for what a typical(or ‘neutral’) Israeli looks like?
Remarkably, Ross’ Jewish mother married a Catholic, and they together raised Dennis (in a non-religious household).
Does he now criticize his mother for harming the Jewish people and promoting assimilation?
Catholic Bob Jones University’s
catholic? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s the case.