The alleged Pittsburgh shooter saw Jews as warriors for a liberal democracy. This is a role the brothers Rosenthal may not have known they were playing, but we should honor them and the nine other victims by championing refugees and migrants and civil rights for minorities.
“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism,” Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group, informs the president ahead of his Tuesday visit. J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace also hold the president responsible for inciting anti-Semitic violence in statements on Saturday’s massacre of 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, who has been everywhere in the media explaining Pittsburgh, has a history of accusing leftwing critics of Zionism of anti-semitism as “damaging” as white nationalism. Last January he accused IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace of taking extreme views on Israel in reaction to Trump, and he said his former boss President Obama had made a “series of missteps” on Middle East policy.
Lesley Williams has seen the despair and terror in the Jewish community since the attack in Pittsburgh and wonders as a Jew of Color where this response was following other recent racist attacks. “I have a message for all of you, my white Jewish friends,” Williams writes, “I feel no more fear, no more rage, no more terror than I did two days ago. No more than I have felt every day as a black person in this country.”
Robert Herbst writes, “Now the poisons circulating in our politics, with a heavy dose injected by Donald Trump and his discourse of hatred, have killed 11 members of Tree of Life Congregation in the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, and left their mark on the whole American Jewish community. My fear is that this incident will increase our communal sense of victimhood. In the wake of Pittsburgh, there is no Jewish future in turning inward, either physically, spiritually, or politically, here in the United States, or in the Middle East.”
Many moral voices are blaming Donald Trump and the spirit of xenophobia he has licensed for the hate-crime in a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday that killed 11. But some advocates for Israel, including Josh Block and Shmuley Boteach, are blaming anti-Zionists.
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.
Clyde Haberman of the New York Times accuses Democratic congressional candidates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar of being “hostile toward Israel and maybe … toward Jews in general” in a discussion at the Center for Jewish History. Neither Rabbi Jill Jacobs or Halie Sofier of the Democratic Jewish council pushed back against the smear.
Israels nation state of the Jewish people has been denounced for making Palestinians less than second-class citizens. But Sara Greenberg, Netanyahus adviser told American Jews the law shows the “strength” of Israeli democracy because worse clauses were removed from the bill before it passed.
David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, seems to think of himself as an ambassador for Zionist Jews only. In a speech today in Tel Aviv, he described Israel as the “land of our national history,” and distinguished between the “country of our citizenship,” the U.S., and the country “we love so much,” Israel. He never mentioned Palestinians, nor the Christians and Muslims who feel a connection to Jerusalem.