The theme of Gili Getz’s work “The Forbidden Conversation” is that dialog must take place between anti-Zionists and Zionists, and between US Jews and Israeli Jews, or Jews will fragment as a community — and not deal in a more healthy way with Israel/Palestine. Abba Solomon doubts the efficacy of that program.
UN Special Rapporteur S. Michael Lynk tells an audience in New York, “annexation trends in the occupied territories, particularly with respect to the West Bank, are quickening, and annexation is in the air, and formal annexation may be occurring sooner than we are thinking.” The Israeli right has been creative, but the human rights activists give him hope.
Some American Jews are fully participatory in the Zionist tale of “building our homeland.” And their innocence about the devastation “constitutes the crime,” in the words of James Baldwin. For Jews, to recognize the system of Jewish supremacy in Palestine is absolutely necessary, but painful.
Itzhak Perlman, the beloved violinist, honored Netanyahu last year but says he would extend no honor to Trump. It’s time for Perlman to be inspired by Natalie Portman, who stood up Netanyahu, and come out for boycott of Israel.
Once the ideology of a unitary Jewish people was accepted, the cause of Zionism became a madness in Jewish life, Abba Solomon writes. And today the state of Israel is a Jewish project; and organized Jewry must confront its collective responsibility for the discriminatory regime it has created.
Open Hillel, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace, have all decentralized Zionism from Jewish political life, and the Zionist Organization of America’s gala honoring Steve Bannon is assisting that process. The drama of Zionist donors, cozying up to figures of Christian nationalism and regressive nostalgia, brings to mind Theodor Herzl’s attempt at collaboration with Russian anti-Semitic Interior Minister von Plehve.
On October 22, 2017, a party was thrown to celebrate the 120th Anniversary of the founding of the Jewish Worker’s Bund of Russia, Poland and Lithuania, sponsored by YIVO Institute in NY. The Bund in the interwar 1920-39 period provided a model of secular Jewish identity without separatism and in Poland demonstrated effective Jewish participation in a multiethnic state. The Bundists elevated the principle of Doikayt, “hereness,” working in the society in which one lives, rather than toward the religious other world, or toward a Jewish state.
Abba Solomon see the film, The Golden Age of Second Avenue, a documentary love poem for Yiddish theater in NYC, from 1890s-1930s, as part of an effort to save the Yiddish legacy of New York’s Lower East Side and observes, “The weight of memory, and the histories Jews tell of themselves, the tradition and experience we imagine we are heir to, shape the way the creation and conduct of the State of Israel is considered.”
American educator Solomon Schecter accepted Zionism as a bulwark against Jewish assimilation in the west. The twin menaces were acceptance of Jews and hostility toward them. Zionism still serves this purpose. The Israeli State ensures that its Jewish citizens are “safely hated.”
Abba Solomon notes this year is a year of big anniversaries for America’s chief Zionist organization, “As Palestinians prepared to observe Nakba day, the American Zionist Movement(AZM), the American component of the World Zionist Organization(WZO), in early May sent an announcement to its mailing list celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Biltmore Conference, launching the observance of what it calls a ‘Year of Zionist Anniversaries.'”