Three acts of censorship in New York demonstrate the desperate pass to which Zionism has brought the American Jewish community: we are walking away from our greatest treasure, literacy.
Two days ago I reported that the Museum of Jewish Heritage had spiked a panel featuring John Judis’s book on Truman and Israel because that book, which says that Truman was for the separation of church and state and took a dim view of Zionism but the lobby compelled him to act against his principles, is just too scary and controversial.
Yesterday we reported that Ramaz School in New York had barred Rashid Khalidi from speaking and that students had risen up demanding that the prohibition be lifted. Jerry Haber says:
No doubt the school is fearful of alienating its donor base. No explanation has been given so far.
(I’ve called and emailed Paul Shaviv, the head of school, but he’s offered no explanation of the decision.)
Then there’s the news that Judith Butler was supposed to give a talk about Kafka at the Jewish Museum of NY on March 6 and withdrew after people began flipping out over her endorsement of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel). Again, donor pressure is cited.
Despite the event being non-political, critics contended that hosting someone who advocates against Israel at a museum that receives charitable contributions from the Jewish community crossed the line.
“The hosting of [BDS] advocate Judith Butler by The Jewish Museum is a slap in the face to every Jew,” Richard Allen, head of JCC Watch, told JNS.org.
The museum said in a statement, “[Butler] was chosen on the basis of her expertise on the subject matter to be discussed. While her political views were not a factor in her participation, the debates about her politics have become a distraction making it impossible to present the conversation about Kafka as intended.”
This is truly disgraceful. The Jewish community is in IQ freefall, and it’s happening before our eyes. The crazy uncles in our community are putting their feet down about who can come into the house, and other forbears are accepting the prohibitions out of some tribal impulse that recalls the self-destruction of the Shabbatai Tzvi collective delusion of the 1600s.
Young Jews are rising up against the censorship but it’s going to take a long time to turn this trend around. In the last year or so there have been stark acts of censorship by the 92d Street Y and Washington DC Jewish Community Center and Hillel International; and so many other Jewish institutions have red lines about who can’t speak that it boggles the mind. I’ve waited so long to see a production of David Zellnik’s magnificent play on Sharon and Herzl that he’s had to change the title once and surely will have to do so again because of the death of a main character.
It’s tragic, and embarrassing. The Jewish community is rebranding Jewish culture, from the brave civilization that gave us the greatest minds of the last 100 years, Einstein, Marx and Freud, as my mother used to brag to me, to a community that’s scared of Israel’s shadow. And p.s., it’s a very long shadow.
Great article, Phil.
It’s tragic, indeed.
It has been happening since the early 1960s, when the success of liberalism and the prospect of assimilation led to the “first Jewish continuity crisis” and measures to head off intermarriage and other liberal horrors from the American Jewish Committee. See Marianne Sanua’s history of the American Jewish Committee post-1945, for this and later episodes.
This tendency was fatally supercharged by Israel’s dramatic victory in 1967. Read Jacob Neusner’s collection Stranger at Home, from the 1970s and 1980s, the telling passages about the insularity and chauvinism of American Jews–from a Conservative Judaic scholar, not some peacenik. See ditto in Peter Novick’s book on the Holocaust in American life. See Peter Beinart’s kid glove treatment of same in “The American Cocoon” in the NY Review late last year.
As I argued in my recent “Theses on Zionism” the modern period of Jewish history has ended. The social and political outlook of the Enlightenment, of emancipation and integration, has been replaced by “the Jewish people” in the form of the Jewish state and the organized Jewish communities abroad, as the Jewish social principle. This outlook has also deeply informed the left.
Here are my “Theses” http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/17/theses-on-zionism/
responding to a piece of the same name by Joseph Massad http://electronicintifada.net/content/theses-zionism/12982
Phil, you,Adam and the rest of your team are the heroes of your generation.
You are instrumental in the evolving change, and rest assured that nothing can change the thrust .
Agree w/ just and bintbiba.
There’s more than a tinge of sad irony in a bunch of faceless, nameless people interfering with a literary discussion of Kafka. That alone must surely make people aware that they are living/participating in the tragedy, not just observing it from some “safe” distance.
“This is truly disgraceful. The Jewish community is in IQ freefall, and it’s happening before our eyes. ”
Zionism is just not worth it.
Second collapse of Jewish community leadership in less than 80 years.
The first collapse involved leaders collaborating in the destruction of their own people. The second involves denying them intellectual nourishment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwxga8udIio