Shaul Magid is an esteemed professor of Jewish studies at Indiana University. The latest Forward contains his review of David Myers’s book, Between Arab and Jew: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz, which ends with the paragraph below. Magid is active in Brit Tzedek.
When we have in our affluent and tolerant Diaspora (where Jews are arguably treated better than at any time in historical memory) an
eminent scholar from Harvard like Ruth Wisse, who writes in her book
“Jews and Power” that the problem with Israel and the Jews today is
that they are not militant enough, and when Martin Peretz,
editor of The New Republic, proclaims that the message of Israel’s 2009
attacks in Gaza is “Don’t f–k with the Jews!” we need to seriously
rethink where we have come as a people. And when Avigdor Lieberman and
his quasi-fascist Yisrael Beiteinu party wins 15 seats in the Knesset
and the centrist parties reject even symbolic repatriation and ignore
the issue of civil rights in Israel, we should wonder if Rawidowicz’s
fears in 1951 have come to pass. Survival is a wonderful thing, but
selling one’s soul is a tragedy. We owe David Myers a debt of gratitude
for giving us Simon Rawidowicz’s lost voice: a voice of reason, of
tradition, of morality, especially at a time when we need to be brought
back to our collective senses.
Jack Ross writers: That last paragraph is all very well and good, but the full article reveals the larger context. It states that Rawidowicz was a “religious Zionist” critic of the binationalists Buber and Magnes and argued for a “role” for the diaspora but for a Zionist revolution within it. In other words, it seems that Rawidowicz was the earliest forebear of the Breira/contemporary Reform ideology.
