Isaac Herzog is the outgoing leader of the Israeli political “left,” the Zionist Camp coalition, and the new chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which seeks to strengthen bonds between Jews worldwide. In an interview on Israeli TV (for which David Sheen provided translation), he describes intermarriage between American Jews and non-Jews as a “plague” for which he seeks to find a “solution”.
“I’ll tell you a personal story. Last summer I traveled [with my wife] to the USA for a vacation. I graduated from a Jewish school in New York. And we went to meet friends. I have a ton of friends in the U.S.A. And I encountered something that I called an actual plague. I saw my friends’ children married or coupled with non-Jewish partners! And the parents beat their breasts and ask questions, and are suffering. Listen, it’s every [Jewish] family in the U.S.A.! And we are talking about millions. And I said there must be a campaign, a solution. We have to rack our brains to figure out how to solve this great challenge.
Herzog is an expert on love. He has warned that his party must not be seen as “Arab-lovers.”
The intermarriage rate among American Jews is 58 percent, but 71 percent among the non-Orthodox.
The young are making these choices voluntarily. Herzog’s breast-beating, suffering friends are surely in the more traditional, religiously-identified Jewish community. Herzog attended the Ramaz school in New York when his father served here as an Israeli diplomat. He went on to Cornell and NYU. Among less-strongly-identified U.S. Jews, there is wide acceptance of intermarriage, because Jews are mixing freely with non-Jews at schools and jobs, and in neighborhoods.
Herzog is a regular at J Street, the liberal Zionist pro-Israel lobby group; and
His anti-intermarriage stance is shared within the Zionist community: notably by Dennis Ross, former White House negotiator who co-chairs the Jewish People Policy Institute.
H/t Jonathan Ofir.
It must be terrible to be a supremacist and to know that so many of your people willingly defile themselves with lesser beings. :-(
From the picture he looks like he’s really hurting himself to find the solution. Someone should tell him it’s only a religion. There are a lot of wonderful people in the world who aren’t jewish and are awesome. There are people who are jewish but not zionists and they are awesome. What does it mean to be a jew anyway? To hold one’s nose with one hand and tithe to the zionist state with the other or to look at it head on and say it stinks, it doesn’t represent anything I can identify with and if you can’t understand that, I’m burning my membership card but FFS quit crying about it and do the right thing for once.
“Solution”?
That terminology sounds vaguely familiar. Does it mean the same things in Hebrew as it did in German?
Herr Herzog represents a vast number of Jewish people in Israel, who thinks they are the master race, and everyone else is beneath them.
Thankfully, the vast majority of Jewish Americans, are better than that.
I personally know some Jewish folks who married Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, and even Muslims. Everyone seems to be happy.
I wonder how Isaac Herzog would re-act to his non-Jewish American friends, facing a “plague” of their children increasingly marrying Jews?
What consolation would he have brought the suffering gentile parents as they asked questions and beat their breasts.
Millions of gentile families, their children marrying Jews!
It is to shudder.
Herzog might have suggested a campaign, a solution to this great challenge –
To protect the gentiles, move ALL the Jews to their “homeland”, encircle it with a very high wall, thereby protecting young non-Jewish Americans from this terrible disease.