My son, my teacher

When I was 9, my father’s garment business went bankrupt and we left New York City for Connecticut.

“You don’t look Jewish,” the locals would say to my blond sister whenever we told them we had moved from New York. But with dark eyes, dark curls and a “New Yawk” accent, I was never mistaken for a non-Jew.

Soon after arriving, I was chased around the perimeter of my school by kids calling me “kike,” a word I had never heard before. At dinner, I asked my parents what it was, and then I had to tell them why I wanted to know. My mother nearly choked on her flank steak and threatened to go to the school and give them a piece of her mind.

Not the “piece” a fourth-grader would want her mother going to school to share. My father shut down this idea: He was starting a new business and the family didn’t need the attention. I quickly learned that being Jewish wasn’t anything anyone needed to know.

Putting the episode behind me, I nonetheless decided to go incognito as a Jew by avoiding every stereotype. I wore no jewelry and no makeup. I played third base on a softball team. I became an assimilating superhero. The Anti-JAP! I was 100 percent committed to obliterating any ideas the anti-Semites had about Jews, specifically Jewish girls.

When I met my husband, I was still undercover. I lived in a one-room apartment, slept on a futon and mostly ate popcorn from an air popper I kept between my sleeping slab and the TV. I didn’t cook much, but on the plus side, I also didn’t “make reservations,” as the joke about Jewish women and the culinary arts goes. It’s not just the kitchen I was unfamiliar with; I also knew little about what to do with the rest of the house. (Insert bedroom joke here.)

I continued with my Anti-JAP persona through the birth of our two children. When the other moms compared notes on couches, window dressings and thread count, I kept quiet, eating the toddlers’ snacks. I also had nothing to say about hair products, skin products or handbags.

The first time I saw a friend of my son’s carrying a Chloe bag, I remembered passing one like it at Neiman Marcus on the way to the restroom, almost tripping when I doubled back to reread the price tag.

This seemingly sane young woman bought a high-end lipstick, gum and wallet carrier that cost as much as my first car.

I casually mentioned it at the next play date.

“That bag cost $2,400!” I yelled after hello.

“Oh, um, hi,” she said, nervously running a hand through her highlighted hair. “I wear it every day, so if you amortize out the cost, it only comes to, like, $5 a day, and it’s totally worth it.”

“Right,” I said, impressed. I’d never used the word amortize in a sentence in my life, and we owned a house.

“Where are you going for spring break?” she asked, eager to change the subject.

I froze. But as the kids reached school age, I was starting to see that this was something we were going to have to do. Not only did we have to do it, I found that after hours and hours of diaper changing, cleaning and never having time to read a book, I wanted an exotic vacation. I wanted to lie on a beach, swim in a warm blue ocean and sip drinks with fruit in them like everyone else on Facebook.

“Is that so wrong?” I screamed — possibly whined — to my husband.

“Of course it’s not wrong,” he said calmly, as he always does. “It’s just so unlike you.”

As the boys continued to grow, there were other material items I lusted after. Like Herschel book bags for school, well-made Italian leather shoes for their growing feet and organic milk. What was happening to me?

Now my older son is a teenager. He’s grown up in Los Angeles, where, fortunately, he never has been teased for being Jewish. He feels absolutely no need to don an Anti-JAP cape. He makes no apology about loving expensive sneakers, soft cotton T-shirts and good food. If you called him a JAP, an expression that, thank God, mostly has been retired, he would stare at me quizzically.

He’s barefaced about his passions and doesn’t even make the connection to any of them being stereotypically Jewish. Last month, he and a friend started a clothing line. I hope somewhere my father is doing a little Tevye dance for his grandson, the burgeoning garmento.

All of this has brought to mind one of the more famous quotes from the Talmud: “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.” As parents, we are expected to teach our children, but in this case, it is my sons who are teaching me to take off my Anti-JAP cape, that it’s OK to relax, put my feet up — and maybe even get a pedicure.

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Dani Klein Modisett is a comic and writer, most recently of the book “Take My Spouse, Please.”

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Letters to the Editor: Trump at the Western Wall

The Effect of Trump’s Visit to the Wall

Rob Eshman is right to note that, by visiting the Western Wall, the first incumbent president to do so, President Donald Trump linked “the sovereignty of the Western Wall to the State of Israel, despite the demurrals and hedging of his advisers and representatives” (“In Israel, Trump Reinforces the Wall,” May 23).

It is also praiseworthy that the Trump administration has started referring to “Jerusalem, Israel” –– the opposite of the Obama administration, which actually scrubbed references to “Jerusalem, Israel” from government websites.

To be sure, it would be far better if President Trump would move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem immediately. The Zionist Organization of America, which I head, has urged President Trump to do so repeatedly and has been publicly critical of the fact that he has not.

That the Palestinians and Arabs seek this and the fact the United States defers to them is a tragic mistake and injustice which needs to be put right, and we urge President Trump to do so.

Morton A. Klein, National President Zionist Organization of America, New York

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I enjoyed Rob Eshman’s column about President Trump’s visit to the Western Wall.

We might disagree about some things, but your columns continue to impress me as fair-minded and reasonable. That attitude is what we need most in America today.

Noah Palmer via email

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There, There, Rob

Well, Rob, since this particular column was the first ever of yours I’ve read, I don’t know if I disagree with you on anything or not (“Not Yelling Back,” May 12). I did want to let you know, however, I thoroughly enjoyed it. You sound like you’ve got good, tough skin, so I doubt you took anything personally. Ha ha. Anyway, I thought you could use a compliment! Keep up the good work.

Carol Brockman Castro via email

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Obama, Trump and Israel

I just read Rob Eshman’s column on our president (“Trump Blew It, Big Time,” May 19). I am not Jewish, but I absolutely recognize the value of Israel. 

The Barack Obama years displayed a disturbing disdain for Jews and Israel. President Obama did everything humanly possible to destroy Israel. His love of Iran, his nuclear deal and his disgraceful treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all should be reason for Jews to hate Obama. Israeli citizens do.   

Netanyahu would read your column and cringe. Israelis who read your material would be ashamed. You’re uneducated and wrong. You owe your readers an apology. Trump did not compromise Israeli intel. Netanyahu agrees. Are you smarter than the prime minister of Israel?

Robert Rice via email

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Reach Out for Help Regarding Substance Abuse

Regarding the May 19 story “Bringing Substance Abuse Awareness to Jewish Community,” it is important to note, that although the attendees at the event on May 8 were “mostly Orthodox,” the message is the same for all of us. Mental health and addiction issues do not discriminate based on the group one identifies with. It was an incredible honor to join with Aleph Institute to shine light on issues that affect us all.

Parents need to know that as we head into the summer and our kids will be out of school, feelings of isolation and struggles with drugs and alcohol can intensify as there are fewer adults “keeping an eye” on our kids. If you suspect your child is struggling, reach out for help. Professionals in our field work 12 months a year and can be a lifeline to you and your family. Destinations is running a summer program specifically working with teens that may be facing these challenges.

Summer can be a time of healing and healthful learning. Reach out, there is help.

 Ari Stark, VP of Operations, Destinations Premier Teen Treatment Programs for Sustainable Wellbeing

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The problem with Jerusalem

In 1967, when Israeli paratroopers stormed the Old City of Jerusalem and commander Mordechai “Motta” Gur proclaimed, “Har HaBayit BeYadeinu (the Temple Mount is in our hands!)” — the Six-Day War had reached its historic and emotional climax.

“The events of 1967 did for Judaism what 1948 did for Jewish nationalism,” B’nai David-Judea Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky said during the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Six-Day War conference.

The reunification of Jerusalem and the assertion of Jewish religious primacy there “returned Judaism to the stage of world history,” he said.

For the first time in two decades, the Jews had regained access to their holiest sites — including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall — and brought a “reunified” Jerusalem under their control for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

But a Jewish-controlled Jerusalem came with a price: East Jerusalem, the location of the holy sites, was an Arab-majority neighborhood. And the Temple Mount — where Jews believe the world began, where the first human was created, and where Abraham bound his son Isaac — also happens to be one of Islam’s holiest sites.

Known in Arabic as Haram esh-Sharif, the Temple Mount is home to the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and is the place Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven on the Night Journey. It is considered the third-holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.

While Jews have made the Western Wall the focus of their prayer life, the Temple Mount remains the most contested holy site in the world. And yet, it is only one aspect of a larger quarrel over Jerusalem, in which Christians also have a stake: Jesus Christ arrived in Jerusalem to preach his message to the masses, and, according to Christianity, was crucified, resurrected and ascended to heaven from there.

Throughout history, the “City of Peace” also has seen violent discord. Even as Jerusalem remains under Israeli control, efforts to discount one another’s claims to the city persist.

Before the anniversary of reunification, I asked Israeli tour guide Michael Bauer why Jerusalem remains a quandary. He identified several areas that explain, at least in part, the gaps separating the aspirations of each faith tradition and the reality of political Jerusalem.

Knowledge: Both within Israel and the Palestinian territories, there is a concerted effort to teach identity-building, nationalistic versions of history that do not leave room for learning about other faiths or alternative perspectives.

“I’m shocked when I see kids finishing high school and they literally don’t know anything about Christianity, which is, in a way, part of our history and part of our surroundings,” Bauer said. “I also teach the Palestinian narrative in a pre-army program, and if I don’t do that, no one does it. I’m always shocked at the lack of knowledge.”

The same is true of Palestinians: Most are not taught about Jewish religious and historical claims to the land, leaving both sides mostly ignorant of the other’s place there.

Emotion: “Jerusalem is where all the emotions are,” Bauer said. “For things to get better in Jerusalem, things need to be solved around Jerusalem.”

After 1967, Bauer pointed out, Arab Muslims were humiliated at losing control of Jerusalem, a defeat made worse by the fact that they had to pass through Israeli security checkpoints to visit their holy sites. Until their dignity is restored through political compromise, Jerusalem remains a proxy for conflict.

History versus faith: “When you walk in Jerusalem, you’re looking at stories which for one person is history and for another is faith,” Bauer said. “If I say the words ‘Jesus,’ and ‘resurrected,’ one person in front of me has heard not only a fact but maybe one of the most important facts of his life, because to believe in resurrection is a fact that defines his Christianity. But for a Jew or Muslim, they’ve heard something that they think is just not true.”

Historical and spiritual claims are equally fraught in a place that encompasses both.

Human frailty: “Religion is not the problem in Jerusalem. The problem is people,” Bauer said. “They don’t know how to get along with ‘the other’ too well. And in Jerusalem, there are a lot of ‘others’ in one small place. As long as people do not know how to live with someone different, Jerusalem will be challenged.”

This pretty much explains why we need religion in the first place.

But let’s face it: Except for periodic skirmishes and flare-ups, and the intrareligious conflicts that plague all three faiths’ holy sites, Jerusalem has been in pretty good hands since ’67.

“Most days, it works,” Bauer said. “It depends what you want to focus on. You can choose to see a reality that is very conflicted. Or you can take another look, walk the same route in a different mood, and you will see coexistence.”

A historian, Bauer prefers to look at the precedents of the past rather than predict the future.

“Through everything that has happened over 3,000 years, there were eras of stability,” he said. “Last year was terrible in Jerusalem; there were stabbings all the time and al-Aqsa was a horrible place to visit. There were kids and women yelling at every Jew that went up there, singing songs, ‘With blood we will redeem Palestine.’ But it’s not happening there now. It’s a different Jerusalem from last year. It’s like a roller coaster. Things get better and then they get worse again.”

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Danielle Berrin is a senior writer and columnist at the Jewish Journal.

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Debating the BDS movement’s immorality

If the Jewish people ever needed an icon for their sworn enemies, a litmus test that distinguishes those who oppose the core of Israel’s existence from those who have other reasons to criticize the Jewish state, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has given it to us. It has managed to galvanize the Jewish community into an unprecedented wave of unity in opposition to this threat.

A May 22 debate sponsored by the UCLA Debate Union was unique, in that the issue was not the effects of BDS actions but the morality of their aims. I took part in this debate, and I would like to share with readers a summary of my arguments. What follows is an edited version of my remarks:

Dear Friends,

I have not spoken to this debate club before, and I am glad to do so on this occasion because I see it as a historic moment.

For more than 10 years now, we have been witnessing BDS supporters roaming the campus with their megaphones and slander machines, accusing Israel of every imaginable crime, from apartheid to child molesting — accusing, accusing and accusing.

Today, for the first time in the history of UCLA, we see BDS itself on the accused bench, with its immoral tactics, immoral ideology and anti-peace stance brought to trial.

It is a historic moment.

BDS is not a new phenomenon; it is a brainchild of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who in April 1936 started the Arab Rejectionist movement (under the auspices of the Arab Higher Committee), and the first thing he did was to launch a boycott of Jewish agricultural products and a general strike against Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine from war-bound Europe.

The 1936 manifesto of the rejectionist movement was very similar to what BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti presented here at UCLA on Jan. 15, 2014. It was brutal in its simplicity: Jews are not entitled to any form of self-determination in any part of Palestine, not even the size of a postage stamp — end of discussion!

Here is where BDS earns its distinct immoral character: denying one people rights that are granted to all others. This amounts to discrimination based on national identity, which in standard English vocabulary would be labeled “bigotry,” if not “racism.”

This rejectionist ideology has dominated the Arab mindset from 1936 to this very day — BDS is only its latest symptom. It explains why Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spends so much time at UNESCO trying to erase Jewish history, why Palestinian children sing “There is no such thing as Israel,” and why their hosts and educators on official Palestinian TV applaud them with “Bravo! Bravo!” It also explains why the Israeli peace camp has such a hard time convincing the majority of Israelis that despite what they see in Palestinian schools, there still are some partners for peace among the Palestinians.

The mufti’s boycott of 1936 scored one major “victory” for the Palestinians. The British government succumbed to mass Arab unrest and prevented European Jewish refugees from entering Palestine. My grandparents were among those seeking refuge; they perished in Auschwitz in 1942.

This, ironically, was the last victory of Arab rejectionism. For eight decades, rejectionism has led the Palestinian people from one disaster to another. It led them to reject a Palestinian state in 1937 and 1947; it drove them to attack Israel in 1948, with the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) as a consequence; it led them to reject land-for-peace proposals in Khartoum in 1967, which gave rise to the settlement movement; and it prevented them from accepting any of the peace offers made since. Rejectionism negates the very notion of “end of conflict.”

Today, rejectionism is the No. 1 obstacle to Palestinian statehood. The total absence of peace education in Palestinian schools and media gives Israelis fairly good reasons to question the ability of Palestinian leadership to honor any peace agreement, however favorable. No country can come to life that openly seeks the elimination of its neighbor.

Back to the moral side of rejectionism. In 2014, BDS’ Barghouti stood here at UCLA and proclaimed, “Jews are not a people, and the U.N. principle to self-determination does not apply to them.” Barghouti made no effort to hide the racist foundations of BDS ideology, but we should keep them in mind as we consider the question before us tonight: Is BDS moral?

I would like to move now from the history of Zionophobic rejectionism to its current aims and tactics. The leaders of the BDS movement do not hide their real purpose. In every conversation with them, they admit their ultimate goal is not to end the occupation, and surely not to promote peace or coexistence, but to delegitimize Israel in the international arena, isolate her, and eventually bring about her collapse.

What most people fail to realize is that BDS is not interested in boycotting, either, because it knows a boycott cannot achieve any meaningful level of success. Show me one respectable university that would go along with this childish, anti-academic idea. Indeed, 150 university presidents came out immediately in opposition to boycott. And just last week, we saw all 50 U.S. governors deploring BDS as “incompatible with American values.” Not just “academic values” but “American values.”

So, if not boycott, what are they trying to achieve on campus? The idea is to bombard university campuses with an endless stream of proposals for anti-Israel resolutions. The charges may vary from season to season, the authors may rotate, and it matters not whether a resolution passes or fails, nor whether it is condemned or hailed. The victory lies in having a stage, a microphone and a finger pointing at Israel, saying, “On trial.” It is only a matter of time before innocent students, mostly the gullible and uninformed, start chanting, “On trial.” The effect will be felt when these students graduate and become the next generation of American policymakers. A more immediate goal, of course, is bullying pro-coexistence voices into silence.

A common hypocrisy among BDS advocates is to present themselves to new audiences as seekers of universal justice, while whitewashing or downplaying their ultimate goal of putting an end to Israel. They even coined fancy names for that end: “one-state solution” or “a state for all its citizens”— a delusional setting of wolves protecting sheep to the sound of progressive slogans, totally oblivious to Middle East realities. Noam Chomsky, a staunch critic of Israel, called this strategy of BDS “hypocrisy crying to heaven.” And Norman Finkelstein, not a warmer friend of Israel, called it “a hypocritical dishonest cult led by dishonest gurus.”

Maintaining this dishonesty, however, is crucial for BDS survival; any attempt to distance itself from the goal of eliminating Israel would cost BDS its vital support base among Palestinians.

I believe everyone would like to find out from BDS supporters how peace can emerge between two partners, one insisting on seeing the other dead and the other insisting on staying alive, no matter how glamorous the coffin.

Leaving behind this logical impossibility, I believe we should strive for a more realistic vision of peace: two states for two peoples, equally legitimate and equally indigenous.

And we must start with the latter.

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JUDEA PEARL is Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

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Trump, the voyage of the St. Louis and the haunting spirit of the damned

“What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare.

As the Trump administration works to bar the admission of individuals from Muslim-majority countries without regard to their individual backgrounds or fears of persecution in their homelands, we should remember the tragic fates of those aboard the ocean liner, the MS St. Louis, as they fled the persecution of Nazi Germany. The willful failure of the United States to offer refuge to those on the St. Louis is a lesson for us on how a great democracy, founded on the humanitarian principle that all people are created equal, but constrained by a prejudiced public and leaders without fortitude, may turn its back on frightened souls yearning to be free.

On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis departed the port of Bremen, Germany, filled with 937 persons, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. Some were German citizens from Eastern Europe, and others were categorized as stateless. All of the passengers held Cuban entry visas, and most hoped that after landing in Havana they would continue to the United States and settle there. However, unbeknownst to the passengers, the Cuban government had revoked their visas a week earlier, asserting with little evidence that their entry documents had been obtained fraudulently. (Sound familiar?)

When the ship arrived in Havana, only 29 of the passengers were allowed to disembark. The captain of the St. Louis, Gustav Schroder, a decent man sympathetic to his charges, steamed his ship toward South Florida. Meanwhile, Jewish organizations lobbied the U.S. government to admit the remaining passengers from the St. Louis as a humanitarian exception to the immigration quotas then in effect under U.S. law. Nevertheless, the U.S. State Department refused to lift the quotas, an isolationist Congress rejected the idea of special legislation and President Franklin Roosevelt declined to issue an executive order allowing the Jews to enter the United States.

Passengers on the St. Louis claimed they could see the lights of Miami as the ship turned back toward Europe, where the ship docked on June 17, 1939, at Antwerp, Belgium. In the end, 288 passengers were allowed entry to the United Kingdom, and 224, 214 and 181 were admitted to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, respectively, where they were soon caught in the Nazi invasion and occupation of those three countries. By the end of World War II, 254 of the Jewish passengers from the St. Louis had been murdered. Their blood stained the conscience of our country.

The tragedy of the St. Louis and the repressive and mean-spirited policies of the Trump administration are not identical, but they are chilling enough to give us pause. When the St. Louis was turned away from the U.S., 83 percent of Americans polled by Fortune magazine opposed the admission of Jews and others fleeing Nazi persecution. In March of 2017, the Denver Post reported that 52 percent of Americans polled supported greater restrictions on the admission of refugees into the United States.

While the recent figures appear to reflect a great improvement in public attitudes, it should be remembered that a majority of Americans today are concerned about a further mass influx of refugees that is unlikely to occur: Germany, for example — yes, Germany, the nation that murdered so many from the St. Louis — has accepted more refugees in the past year than the U.S. in the past 10 years. President Donald Trump’s Draconian efforts to stop individuals, including would-be asylum seekers, from entering the U.S. from blood-soaked, war-torn Syria, Yemen and other Muslim countries is an excessive restraint on immigration, where detailed vetting of would-be refugees and visitors already exists, and where there is no evidence that a tidal wave of foreigners is set to besiege America’s airports.

Indeed, the fear (or pretense) of the administration and many in Congress that without a travel ban — contested and found legally wanting in the courts — we are on the verge of an invasion of dangerous Middle Easterners is belied by the fact that virtually all of the Islamist terrorists who have murdered and injured Westerners were homegrown, including very recently and tragically in Manchester, England. Furthermore, the demagogic statements from many of our political leaders about the possible invasion of our country by dangerous foreigners sound eerily similar to the rhetoric of anti-Semites in and out of government who opposed the post-World War II admission of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust because of the lie that the would-be immigrants were criminals and Communists.

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. As we approach the 78th anniversary of the tragic odyssey of the St. Louis, we should be mindful that the presidential and political paranoia about today’s immigration challenges needs to be overcome by common sense and compassion, lest the ghosts of the passengers of the Voyage of the Damned haunt us forever.

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BRUCE J. EINHORN is a retired federal judge, a law professor and the founding chair of the Committee for the Persecuted and Enslaved, a nonprofit refugee assistance organization.

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Leftism’s influence on Western religion

Last week, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, the religious leader of a billion people, gave the visiting president of the United States, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, a parting gift.

It was a copy of something the pope had written. A papal encyclical, in fact.

Was it on the annihilation of Christians in the Middle East? Was it on the ongoing disappearance of Christianity in Western Europe? Was it on evil in the name of God being perpetrated by radical Muslims around the world, especially in Europe, the Middle East and the United States?

No.

It was on climate change.

It was not surprising.

Last year, five days after an 86-year-old French priest had his throat slit by two Muslims yelling “Allahu Akbar,” Pope Francis was interviewed on the papal airplane returning to Rome from Krakow, Poland. A Catholic journalist, Antoine Marie Izoard, with i.Media, a French Catholic news service, asked the pope about the French priest and Islam:

Izoard: “Catholics are a bit in shock, and not only in France, after the barbarous assassination of Father Jacques Hamel — as you know well — in his church while celebrating the Holy Mass. Four days ago, you here told us that all religions want peace. But this holy, 86-year-old priest was clearly killed in the name of Islam. So, Holy Father … Why do you, when you speak of these violent events, always speak of terrorists, but never of Islam, never use the word Islam? … Thank you, Holiness.”

As reported by the Catholic News Service, this is what Pope Francis responded:

“I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence, because every day, when I browse the newspapers, I see violence, here in Italy … this one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law … and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.”

In other words, the pope likens: 1) a person who happened to have been baptized a Catholic as a child — and who may have no Catholic identity as an adult — with an adult who affirms a religious identity; and 2) the murder of a girlfriend or a mother-in-law — most likely a crime of passion — with the ritual murder of a Catholic priest.

Pope Francis then added that “Terrorism grows when there are no other options, and when the center of the global economy is the god of money. … This is a basic terrorism against all of humanity!”

The idea that Islamic terrorism is a desperate act arising from poverty is widely held among people on the left. But it is completely untrue. Most Islamic terrorists come from the middle class or above, as did the 9/11 hijackers.

The only explanation for these statements is that Pope Francis has inherited his theology from Catholicism but, unlike his immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, he takes much of his moral outlook from leftism — in his case, the leftism that permeates Latin America, including Latin American Catholicism. This is not conjecture. In addition to the comments cited already, in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica last November, the pope equated Christianity with communism:

“It is the communists, in all cases, that think like Christians. … What we want is to fight against inequality, the greatest evil that exists in the world.”

The Western combination of Judeo-Christian morality and classical political liberalism — with their doctrines of moral accountability, moral absolutes, confronting evil, and political and social freedom — has produced the most moral societies in world history.

The pope of the Roman Catholic Church should be its greatest advocate.

But because of leftism, he isn’t.

Leftism has had an identical impact on mainstream Protestantism, non-Orthodox Judaism and, of course, secular Jews and non-Jews.

In the past 100 years, leftism has influenced Judaism and Christianity far more than Judaism or Christianity have influenced the world. If you want to understand the modern world, that may be the most important thing to understand.

And that explains why the pope gave the American president his writings on climate change and why he says almost nothing about Islamic violence generally or the decimation of Christianity in Muslim lands specifically. On the left, carbon emissions and economic inequality are the greatest problems confronting humanity. On the right, which includes traditional Jews and Christians, evil — the inhumane treatment of people by other people — is the greatest problem confronting humanity.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the great evil was Nazism; after that, it was communism. And in our time it is Islamism, the movement that seeks to impose Islam on humanity.

But the pope is more concerned with climate change than with slaughtered Christians; mainstream Protestant churches seek to economically strangle Israel; and most non-Orthodox Jews fear climate change more than they fear the Ayatollah Khamenei. Such is the state of mainstream Western religion in our time.

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BDS, back to front

The BDS phenomenon is not new.

Prior to Israel’s declaration in 1948, a boycott was initiated in 1882 against the Jews of Europe.

The sole purpose was to isolate and destroy their social, economic and intellectual lives as advocated by the Anti-Jewish Congress in Dresden 1882. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the slogan “Don’t buy from Jews” was deemed illegal, so they changed their slogan to “Buy from Christians only.”

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Nazi guards stood in front of Jewish shops and offices of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and engineers, denying entry and assaulting their clients.

The Polish government followed suit. Occasionally these boycotts ended in pogroms such as at Przytyk. The boycotts went hand in hand with the government’s encouragement of Jewish emigration. Clergy like the priest Stojalkowski publicly supported the boycotts, not unlike Bishop Tutu and some other churches that today promote the boycott of the Jewish State.

The Arab League started a boycott of “Jewish products and manufactured goods” in 1945 which was formalised in 1948 with the establishment of the Arab League’s Central Boycott Office in Damascus. The boycott was total and included blacklisting of firms that did business with other firms doing business with Israel.

Thus, companies such as British Aerospace, Shell, BP and major banks, joined Germany’s Telefunken, BASF and Siemens in complying with the boycott. Norwich Union Insurance Society dropped Lord Mancroft, a Jew, and former government minister, from its Board of Directors.

All of this prior to the occupation.

In 1977, Congress prohibited US companies from complying with the Arab boycott. Most countries however continued to comply.

In 2001, the anti-Israel BDS movement was formed to isolate and ultimately destroy Israel, since wars were unsuccessul. The boycott extended to academia and entertainment. Thus, Tutu tried to block the Cape Town Ballet from performing in Tel Aviv and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd continues to pressurise entertainers from visiting Israel.

Many BDS supporters maintain that they only boycott West Bank products. However in my conversations with such people, they admit to boycotting all Israeli products as they ”cannot be sure if these products might be linked in some way to the West Bank.” An Israeli soldier in Ma’ale Adumim eating an ice cream manufactured in Tel Aviv would be such a link.

The fact that many computer, cell phone, bio-medical technologies, pharmaceuticals, IT security, water and clean energy technologies were developed in Israel is an inconvenient fact and makes these selective BDS advocates hypocritically absurd.

BDS advocates use Israeli products each day.

Yet there is a case for BDS.

The same EU countries that uniquely insist on “Occupied West Bank” labels for Israeli products, rushed to sign huge deals with Iran that has one of the highest execution rates in the world. In 2014, Bishop Tutu, together with Kofi Annan, visited Iran, grinning in photo ops with their leaders. They praised arch terrorist and “Death to America and Israel” supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Their visit occurred during a “normal” fortnight of about 40 executions that included Iranian poet Hashem Shabaani.

If Tutu, academics, entertainers and BDS leaders like Mohamed Desai in South Africa who goose stepped in front of Jewish students and wrote that “Hitler was right in what he did,” have a need to BDS, they should focus on the Palestinian leadership.

The PA violates the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Child Soldiers Protocol.

Activists need to BDS the Palestinian leadership that ruthlessly exploits and abuses children who are rewarded to kill Jews.

They need to BDS the PA that praises suicide bombers as young as 13. Some 160-plus small children as young as 7, have been crushed to death, forced to build Hamas terror tunnels with their tiny bodies.

The criminal Palestinian leadership has trashed the aspirations and dreams of an entire generation.

They need to BDS the PA for the ongoing honor killings of women which violate the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Instead, Norway, whose trade unions support the BDS, paid for the Palestinian Women’s Centre, named after Dalal Mughrabi who murdered 38 Israelis.

Gays flee for their lives to Israel. In Gaza they are punished by being thrown off the tops of buildings. Journalists, human rights activists and critics are tortured in jail—another good reason to BDS.

Activists need to BDS President Abbas in the 12^th year of his 4-year presidency who cannot account for billions of dollars that disappeared. The Palestinians receive more aid than any other cause in history, including post-war Germany which worked hard to rebuild itself.

Abbas the multi-millionaire refugee leader cries all the way to the bank having made victimhood into a lucrative business.

Munib al Masri, worth some $5 billion, enjoyed a close bond with Arafat, and lives an opulent lifestyle outside Nablus. This “refugee,” supports the BDS against Israel.

Another BDS target could be Jibril Rajoub, jailed for terrorism, who continues to encourage the kidnapping and killing of Israelis on PA TV. He also said, that had the Palestinians obtained nuclear weapons they would use them.

Rajoub, who criticised the proposed minute’s silence for the murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, heads the Palestine Football Association and Palestine Olympic Committee.

BDS advocates need to focus on the Palestinian leaders whose terrorism led to thousands of checkpoints in airports around the world. Thanks to them, toothpaste tubes are confiscated and millions experience the humiliation of having to hold up their pants while clutching their belongings after their jackets, shoes and belts were removed.

The ruling CDU party in Germany has deemed the BDS campaign to be antisemitic, reminiscent of their Nazi past. Spain, France, and all 50 states in the USA have legislated against the BDS.

BDS activists who need a cause, should therefore rather focus on the murderous kleptocracy, the PA.

One of the Ten Commandments states,”Thou shalt not steal.” This also applies to stealing the truth.

Ron Jontof-Hutter is a Fellow of the Berlin International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism and the author of the satirical novel,”The trombone man: tales of a misogynist.”

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Haunted by the Voyage of the Damned

“What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare. As the Trump Administration works to bar the admission of individuals from Muslim-majority countries without regard to their individual backgrounds or fears of persecution in their homelands, we should remember the tragic fates of those aboard the St. Louis, as they fled the persecution of Nazi Germany. The willful failure of the United States to offer refuge to those on the St. Louis is an object lesson for us on how a great democracy, founded on the humanitarian principle that all people are created equal, but constrained by a prejudiced public and leaders without fortitude, may turn its back on frightened souls yearning to be free.

On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis departed the port of Bremen, Germany, filled with 937 persons, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. Some were German citizens from Eastern Europe, and others were categorized as stateless. All of the passengers held Cuban entry visas, and most hoped that after landing in Havana they would continue to the United States and settle there. However, unbeknownst to the passengers, the Cuban government had revoked their visas a week earlier, asserting with little evidence that their entry documents had been obtained fraudulently (sound familiar?).   When the ship arrived in Havana, only 29 of the passengers were allowed to disembark. The Captain of the St. Louis, Gustav Schroder, a decent man sympathetic to his charges, steamed his ship toward South Florida. Meanwhile, Jewish organizations lobbied the U.S. government to admit the remaining passengers from the St. Louis as a humanitarian exception to the immigration quotas then in effect under U.S. law. Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of State refused to lift the quotas, an isolationist Congress rejected the idea of any special legislation, and President Franklin Roosevelt declined to issue an Executive Order allowing the Jews to enter the United States. Passengers on the St. Louis claimed that they could see the lights from Miami as the ship turned back toward Europe, where the ship landed in June 1939. n the end, 288 passengers were allowed entry to the United Kingdom, and 224, 214, and 181 were admitted to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, respectively, where they were soon caught in the Nazi invasion and occupation of those three countries. By the end of World War II, 254 of the Jewish passengers of the St. Louis had been murdered. Their blood stained the conscience of our own country.

The tragedy of the St. Louis and the repressive and mean-spirited policies of the Trump Administration are not identical, but they are chilling enough to give us pause. When the St. Louis was turned away from the U.S., 83% of Americans polled by Fortune magazine opposed the admission of Jews and others fleeing Nazi persecution. In March of 2017, the Denver Post reported that 52% of all Americans polled supported greater restrictions on the admission of refugees into the United States. While the recent figures appear to reflect a great improvement in public attitudes, it should be remembered that a majority of Americans are today concerned about a further mass influx of refugees that is unlikely to occur: Germany, for example – yes, Germany, the nation that murdered so many on the St. Louis – has taken more refugees in the past year than we have in the past 10 years. President Trump’s Draconian efforts to stop individuals, including would-be asylum seekers, from entering the United States from blood-soaked, war-torn Syria, Yemen, and other Muslim countries, is an excessive restraint on immigration where there already exists detailed vetting of would-be refugees and visitors, and where there is no evidence that a tidal wave of foreigners is set to besiege the airports of America. Indeed, the fear (or pretense) of the Administration and many in Congress that without a travel ban we are on the verge of an invasion of dangerous Middle Easterners is belied by the fact – the real fact, not a false or alternative fact – that virtually all of the Islamist terrorists who have murdered and injured Westerners, including very recently and tragically in Manchester, England, were homegrown. Furthermore, the demagogic statements from many of our political leaders about the possible invasion of our country by dangerous foreigners sound eerily similar to the rhetoric anti-Semites in and out of government who opposed the post-World War II admission of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust because of the lie the would-be immigrants were criminals and communists.

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. As we approach the 78^th anniversary of the tragic odyssey of the St. Louis, we should be mindful that the presidential and political paranoia about today’s immigration challenges needs to be overcome by common sense and compassion, lest the ghosts of the passengers of the Voyage of the Damned haunt us forever.

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Bruce J. Einhorn is a retired federal judge, a law professor, and the Founding Chair of the Committee for the Persecuted and Enslaved, a nonprofit refugee assistance organization.

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In honor of Jewish refugees from Arab lands: Letter from a forgotten Jew

I am a forgotten Jew.

My roots are nearly 2,600 years old, my ancestors made landmark contributions to world civilization, and my presence was felt from North Africa to the Fertile Crescent — but I barely exist today. You see, I am a Jew from the Arab world. No, that’s not entirely accurate. I’ve fallen into a semantic trap. I predated the Arab conquest in just about every country in which I lived. When Arab invaders conquered North Africa, for example, I had already been present there for more than six centuries.

Today, you cannot find a trace of me in most of this vast region. 

Try seeking me out in Iraq. 

Remember the Babylonian exile from ancient Judea, after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.? Remember the vibrant Jewish community that emerged there and produced the Babylonian Talmud? 

Do you know that in the ninth century, under Muslim rule, we Jews in Iraq were forced to wear a distinctive yellow patch on our clothing — a precursor of the infamous Nazi yellow badge — and faced other discriminatory measures? Or that in the 11th and 14th centuries, we faced onerous taxes, the destruction of several synagogues, and severe repression?

And I wonder if you have ever heard of the Farhud, the breakdown of law and order, in Baghdad in June 1941. As an American Jewish Committee specialist, George Gruen, reported:

“In a spasm of uncontrolled violence, between 170 and 180 Jews were killed, more than 900 were wounded, and 14,500 Jews sustained material losses through the looting or destruction of their stores and homes. Although the government eventually restored order … Jews were squeezed out of government employment, limited in schools, and subjected to imprisonment, heavy fines, or sequestration of their property on the flimsiest of charges of being connected to either or both of the two banned movements. Indeed, Communism and Zionism were frequently equated in the statutes. In Iraq the mere receipt of a letter from a Jew in Palestine [pre-1948] was sufficient to bring about arrest and loss of property.”

At our peak, we were 135,000 Jews in 1948, and we were a vitally important factor in virtually every aspect of Iraqi society. To illustrate our role, here is what the Encyclopedia Judaica wrote about Iraqi Jewry: “During the 20th century, Jewish intellectuals, authors, and poets made an important contribution to the Arabic language and literature by writing books and numerous essays.”

By 1950, other Iraqi Jews and I were faced with the revocation of citizenship, seizure of assets and, most ominously, public hangings. A year earlier, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Sa’id had told the British ambassador in Amman, Jordan, of a plan to expel the entire Jewish community and place us at Jordan’s doorstep. The ambassador later recounted the episode in a memoir titled “From the Wings: Amman Memoirs, 1947-1951” by Alec Kirkbride.

Miraculously, in 1951, about 100,000 of us got out, thanks to the extraordinary help of Israel, but with little more than the clothes on our backs. The Israelis dubbed the rescue Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. 

Those of us who stayed lived in perpetual fear — fear of violence and more public hangings, as occurred on Jan. 27, 1969, when nine Jews were hanged in the center of Baghdad on trumped-up charges, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis wildly cheered the executions. The rest of us got out one way or another, including friends of mine who found safety in Iran when it was ruled by the shah.

Now there are no Jews left to speak of, nor are there monuments, museums or other reminders of our presence on Iraqi soil for 26 centuries. 

Do the textbooks used in Iraqi schools today refer to our one-time presence, to our positive contribution to the evolution of Iraqi society and culture? Not a chance: 2,600 years are erased, wiped out, as if they never happened. Can you put yourself in my shoes and feel the excruciating pain of loss and invisibility?

I am a forgotten Jew. 

I was first settled in what is present-day Libya by the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy Lagos (323-282 B.C.E.), according to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. My forefathers and foremothers lived continuously on this soil for more than two millennia, our numbers bolstered by Berbers who converted to Judaism, Spanish and Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition, and Italian Jews crossing the Mediterranean.

Can you put yourself in my shoes and feel the excruciating pain of loss and invisibility?

I was confronted with the anti-Jewish legislation of the occupying Italian fascists. I endured the incarceration of 2,600 fellow Jews in an Axis-run camp in 1942. I survived the deportation of 200 fellow Jews to Italy the same year. I coped with forced labor in Libya during the war. I witnessed Muslim rioting in 1945 and 1948 that left nearly 150 Libyan Jews dead, hundreds injured and thousands homeless.

I watched with uncertainty as Libya became an independent country in 1951. I wondered what would happen to those 6,000 of us still there, the remnant of the 39,000 Jews who had formed this once-proud community — that is, until the rioting sent people packing, many headed for the newly established State of Israel.

The good news was that there were constitutional protections for minority groups in the newly established Libyan nation. The bad news was that they were completely ignored.

Within 10 years of my native country’s independence, I could not vote, hold public office, serve in the military, obtain a passport, purchase new property, acquire majority ownership in any new business or participate in the supervision of our community’s affairs.

By June 1967, the die was cast. Those of us who had remained, hoping against hope that things would improve in a land to which we were deeply attached and which, at times, had been good to us, had no choice but to flee. The Six-Day War created an explosive atmosphere in the streets. Eighteen Jews were killed, and Jewish-owned homes and shops were burned to the ground.

I and 4,000 other Jews left however we could, most of us with no more than a suitcase and the equivalent of a few dollars.

I was never allowed to return. I never recovered the assets I had left behind in Libya, despite promises by the government. In effect, it was all stolen — the homes, furniture, shops, communal institutions, you name it. Still worse, I was never able to visit the grave sites of my relatives. That hurt especially deeply. In fact, I was told that, under Col. Muammar Gadhafi, who seized power in 1969, the Jewish cemeteries were bulldozed and the headstones used for road building.

I am a forgotten Jew. 

My experience — the good and the bad — lives on in my memory, and I’ll do my best to transmit it to my children and grandchildren, but how much can they absorb? How much can they identify with a culture that seems like a relic of a distant past that appears increasingly remote and intangible? True, a few books and articles on my history have been written, but — and here I’m being generous — they are far from best-sellers. 

In any case, can these books compete with the systematic attempt by Libyan leaders to expunge any trace of my presence over two millennia? Can these books compete with a world that paid virtually no attention to the end of my existence? 

Take a look at The New York Times index for 1967, and you’ll see for yourself how the newspaper of record covered the tragic demise of an ancient community. I can save you the trouble of looking — just a few paltry lines were all the story got.

I am a forgotten Jew.

I am one of hundreds of thousands of Jews who once lived in countries like Iraq and Libya. All told, we numbered close to 900,000 in 1948. Today we are fewer than 5,000, mostly concentrated in two moderate countries—Morocco and Tunisia.

We were once vibrant communities in Aden, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other nations, with roots dating back 2,000 years and more. Now we are next to none.

Why does no one speak of us and our story? Why does the world relentlessly, obsessively speak of the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars in the Middle East — who, not unimportantly, were displaced by wars launched by their own Arab brethren — but totally ignore the Jewish refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars? 

Why is the world left with the impression that there’s only one refugee population from the Arab-Israeli conflict or, more precisely, the Arab conflict with Israel, when, in fact, there are two refugee populations, and our numbers were somewhat larger than the Palestinians?

I’ve spent many sleepless nights trying to understand this injustice. 

Should I blame myself? 

Perhaps we Jews from Arab countries accepted our fate too passively. Perhaps we failed to seize the opportunity to tell our story. Look at the Jews of Europe. They turned to articles, books, poems, plays, paintings and film to recount their story. They depicted the periods of joy and the periods of tragedy, and they did it in a way that captured the imagination of many non-Jews. Perhaps I was too fatalistic, too shell-shocked, too uncertain of my artistic or literary talents.

But that can’t be the only reason for my unsought status as a forgotten Jew. It’s not that I haven’t tried to make at least some noise; I have. I’ve organized gatherings and petitions, arranged exhibitions, appealed to the United Nations, and met with officials from just about every Western government. But somehow it all seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. No, that’s still being too kind. The truth is, it has pretty much fallen on deaf ears.

You know that acronym “MEGO”? It means “My eyes glazed over.” That’s the impression I often have when I’ve tried raising the subject of the Jews from Arab lands with diplomats, elected officials and journalists — their eyes glaze over (TEGO).

No, I shouldn’t be blaming myself, though I could always be doing more for the sake of history and justice. 

There’s actually a far more important explanatory factor. 

We Jews from the Arab world picked up the pieces of our shattered lives after our hurried departures — in the wake of intimidation, violence and discrimination — and moved on. 

Most of us went to Israel, where we were welcomed. The years after our arrival weren’t always easy — we started at the bottom and had to work our way up. We came with varying levels of education and little in the way of tangible assets. But we had something more to sustain us through the difficult process of adjustment and acculturation: our immeasurable pride as Jews, our deeply rooted faith, our cherished rabbis and customs and our commitment to Israel’s survival and well-being.

Some of us — somewhere between one-fourth and one-third of the total — chose to go elsewhere. 

Jews from the French-speaking Arab countries gravitated toward France and Quebec. Jews from Libya created communities in Rome and Milan. Egyptian and Lebanese Jews were sprinkled throughout Europe and North America, and a few resettled in Brazil. Syrian Jews immigrated to the United States, especially New York, as well as to Mexico City and Panama City. And on it went.

Wherever we settled, we put our shoulder to the wheel and created new lives. We learned the local language if we didn’t already know it, found jobs, sent our children to school, and, as soon as we could, built our own congregations to preserve the rites and rituals that were distinctive to our tradition.

I would never underestimate the difficulties or overlook those who, for reasons of age or ill health or poverty, couldn’t make it, but, by and large, in a short time we have taken giant steps, whether in Israel or elsewhere. 

I may be a forgotten Jew, but my voice will not remain silent. It cannot, for if it does, it becomes an accomplice to historical denial and revisionism. 

I will speak out because I will not allow the Arab conflict with Israel to be defined unfairly through the prism of one refugee population only: the Palestinian. 

I will speak out because what happened to me is now being done, with eerie familiarity, to other minority groups in the region, the Christians and Yazidis, and once again I see the world averting its eyes, as if denial ever solved anything.

I will speak out because I refuse to be a forgotten Jew.

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David Harris is executive director of the American Jewish Committee and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and The Times of Israel.

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Why Are There Two Jerusalems?

Why is Yerushalayim plural,

One on high and one below?…

I want to live in one “Yerushal,”

Because I am just “I” and not “I”s.

—- Yehuda Amichai, “Open Closed Open”

Welcome to one of the great grammatical conundrums in the history of Jewish geography: why is the Hebrew word for Jerusalem – Yerushalayim — in the plural form?

Because, in fact, there is not one Jerusalem; there are two.

On a political level, there are two Jerusalems — the “new city” of west Jerusalem, and the Old City and eastern Jerusalem — two entities forged into one fifty years ago with the Six Day War.

On a linguistic level, there are two Jerusalems – Yerushalayim in Hebrew; al-Quds (“the holy city”) in Arabic.

On a geographical level, there are two Jerusalems. Jerusalem is on the border between the coastal plain that leads to Tel Aviv, and the wilderness that begins to its east. As soon as you leave Jerusalem, and head east, the Asian desert begins. Jerusalem, therefore, is at the nexus point of a Mediterranean climate and central Asian climate.

What is the origin of the “two Jerusalem” theory?

The first mention of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible is in Genesis 14, in the account of Abram’s war against the kings.

There Abram encounters Melchizedek, who is both the king of Salem and a priest of the Canaanite god El Elyon, God Most High. Melchizedek greets Abram with bread and wine and blesses him in the name of El Elyon. It is the first interfaith dialogue in history. There, the place is called Salem, or Shalem.

A few chapters later, in Genesis 21, Abraham returns to that place. He brings his son, Isaac, to “the land of Moriah” as a potential sacrifice.

Abraham calls the place Adonai-yireh, “God will see” — or simply, Yireh.

Abraham named the place Yireh, and Melchizedek knew it as Shalem. Yireh-Shalem becomes Yerushalayim. Those two names are soldered together: One name, given to it by a pagan king who blesses Abraham — representing the possibility of peace; and another name, given to it by Abraham himself, representing the presence of God and the sacrificial offerings that will be there at that place.

Peace between people and peace with God — wedded together in one name. A promise and a goad. A duality.

But, there is far more than this; as the late poet, Yehuda Amichai, intimates, there is a spiritual duality as well.

Jerusalem is Yerushalayim because of a subtle duality that is nevertheless omnipresent in our literature and thinking — the earthly Jerusalem (Yerushalayim shel matah) and the heavenly Jerusalem (Yerushalayim shel maalah).

Where does one begin on this quest for the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem?

The idea of a supernal Jerusalem begins in Isaiah 6. The prophet has a vision of God in a supernal temple, surrounded by angelic beings, each one chanting “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.”

The rabbis imagined that the heavenly Jerusalem served as an alternative and antidote to the real, imperfect Jerusalem. Their fantasies took on new fervor after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. They believed that the heavenly Jerusalem had its own temple with its own elite of priests and prophets.

Resh Lakish said: There are seven firmaments, and in one of those firmaments there is a place where millstones grind manna for the righteous, and in one of those firmaments there is a place where the heavenly Jerusalem, and the Temple, and the very altar are built, where the angel Michael stands and every day brings an offering.

The Rabbis idealized Jerusalem, twisting it beyond its own reality. For them, the mountains of Jerusalem pointed straight to heaven. They imagined Jerusalem as a place where no woman ever miscarried, where no one was ever stung by serpent or scorpion, where the fires of the altar were never doused with rain, where no wind blew the pillar of smoke over the worshipers.

The idea of a heavenly Jerusalem exists in Christianity as well.

For Christians, the earthly Jerusalem is Jewish and sinful; the heavenly Jerusalem, Christian and righteous. The heavenly Jerusalem is the place of the new covenant sealed through the blood of Jesus.

But you are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant. (Hebrews 12:22-24)

The ultimate vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem comes from Revelations. John sees the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband in gold and precious stones.

I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is the new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name…And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. (Revelations 3;12)

For Christians, the heavenly Jerusalem was not real. It was an ideal. In the Middle Ages, there were many fanciful descriptions, maps, and paintings of Jerusalem, each one showing Jerusalem as the center of the world, as the sages themselves imagined it – as axis mundi.

The idea of the heavenly Jerusalem finds its way into even the very architecture and design of the modern city of Jerusalem.

Anyone who has been to Jerusalem marvels at the beauty of Jerusalem stone as a building material.

The man who first figured this out was Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, and a vicar’s son. He enacted a law that permitted only Jerusalem stone to be used as a building material used in construction in Jerusalem. In his memoirs recalls the medieval hymn “Jerusalem is built in heaven/ Of living stone.” He believed that the earthly Jerusalem should be a replica of the heavenly Jerusalem.

By contrast, the Jewish view of the heavenly Jerusalem is that it is actually not entirely in heaven.

In fact, the heavenly Jerusalem is adjacent to the earthly Jerusalem.

Towards where should we pray? Rabbi Hiyya said: Toward the heavenly Holy of Holies. Rabbi Simeon ben Halafta said: Toward the earthly Holy of Holies. Rabbi Pinchas said: There is no disagreement here. The earthly holy of holies is directly opposite the heavenly Holy of Holies. (Jerusalem Talmud, Berachot 4:5).

Jerusalem represents the revealed presence of God in human history. In the liturgy, in seder kriat ha-Torah (the service for the reading of the Torah), you would expect references to the place from which Torah came – Sinai.

Not so. Instead, Jerusalem has a starring role. As we take the Torah from the ark, we echo the plaintive cry of Jews in Jerusalem during Crusader times: “Rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.” “For out of Zion Torah goes forth, and the word of God from Jerusalem.” In fact, the revelation at Sinai is absent; instead, the Torah service asks us to remember and dramatize the first time that Ezra read the Torah to the returning exiles at the newly built, makeshift second Temple.

Jerusalem represents the homecoming of the soul. At the end of Neilah, as well as at the end of Pesach seder: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

We can understand singing those words at the end of the seder; we have just imagined ourselves leaving Egypt, and about to trek into the wilderness on our way to the land of Israel/

But, why do we say those words at the end of the Day of Atonement? Because, here, Jerusalem is not “really” Jerusalem. It is a metaphor for inner wholeness, forgiveness, and redemption.

Jerusalem ultimately represents God. The Jerusalem Talmud says that in days to come, the name of the city will be “Adonai is there.” “Do not read ‘shama,’ there, but rather, shemah — her name.”

Jerusalem and God will have the same name.

Let us not read this as the deification of a city.

Rather, let us read this as the urbanization of an ideal of holiness.

Let us return to the Christian perception of the heavenly Jerusalem.

Because Jerusalem is not just Jerusalem. It is, properly, Zion – and beyond that, it is the state of Israel itself.

A theology is only as good as the implications that flow from it. Were it not for Christian (more precisely, British) philo-semitism of the nineteenth century, Zionism could never have come into existence. Sir Ronald Storrs – but not only Storrs, Balfour himself – personified that thrust. Christian Zionism is itself a child of this phenomenon – an over-idealization of the Jews and their land.

Over the last fifty years, since the Six Day War, criticism of the state of Israel – its policies, and even its very existence – has mounted. While some of the sharper, more pointed critiques verge on anti-Semitism, not all of them do.

Some, in fact, are the results of a welcome, but ultimately misplaced, philo-semitism. It is the expectation — not that Jews are devils, but that they should be angels. The same should be true of a Jewish state – that it should be angelic, perfect, beyond reproach.

Christian perceptions of the heavenly Jerusalem crowd into the public imagination. It is the problem of a misplaced philo-semitism. Like anti-semitism, philo-semitism relies on distorted, fantastical views of Jews and Judaism. Philo-semitism can become a malevolence, masked in benevolence. In fact, this love-hate relationship with Jews and Judaism is one of the most pre-dominant themes in Christian history.

Philo-semitism is the hope – even the expectation – of the moral excellence of the Jewish people. It is a moral excellence that has yet to be achieved.

The liberal Christian philo-semite does not hate the Jew because the Jew has rejected Jesus. The liberal Christian philo-semite is merely disappointed with the Jew because the Jews have not yet lived up to the advertisements of moral excellence that they have created for themselves. The liberal Christian philo-semite sees the reality of the earthly Jerusalem – an Israel that must still fight, has problematic policies, where the people are far from saintly – and is disappointed, sometimes, radically disappointed — that the heavenly Jerusalem is not yet here. They are not like the fabled Southern anti-semites who used to look for the horns on the Jews they met. They are looking for angel’s wings. And when they do not find those wings, the disappointment can become anger, can become hatred.

That disappointment with the all-too-human, realpolitik failures of the Jewish state has seeped into leftist Jewish critiques of Israel and Zionism. They are addicted to the prophetic ideal, while often forgetting that the Jews and the Jewish state have real enemies who never got that prophetic memo.

That is the paradox. In the Jewish soul, we live with the vision of a heavenly, perfect Jerusalem of our ideals. But, in real life and in real time, we live with the imperfect, morally tainted, earthly Jerusalem. The tension is built into Zionism, and Jewish historical longing – the struggle between being a “light to the nations” or “like all the nations.”

It does not seem likely that we will solve this conundrum and this tension any time soon. Jerusalem – like all of us – is a spiritual work in progress. Reb Naftali of Ropschitz, a Hasidic master, taught: “By our service to God, we build Jerusalem daily. One of us adds a row, another only a brick. When Jerusalem is completed, redemption will come.”

Let that be a new definition of Zionism, in our time – the work of making the earthly Jerusalem look more like the heavenly Jerusalem.

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Benkof: Palestinians have long commutes? Boo hoo.

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran an opinion piece by Palestinian lawyer-writer-activist Raja Shehada decrying Israeli policies on the freedom of movement by West Bank residents like him. Anyone even a little familiar with Israeli life who reads it closely will reject two complaints in particular as completely bogus.

First, in a paragraph TheTimes also used as a sub-head, he bemoaned:

I was going to London for a week, and my flight was at 5 in the afternoon. Twenty years ago, the drive took 50 minutes. Now, with so many checkpoints on the way, I left the house atnoon, five hours before the flight. (Emphasis added.)

The paragraph suggests the commute now took five hours instead of one, and the sneaky use of the numbers 5 and 50 might even lead a casual reader to conclude Israelis had made Palestinian travel to the airport ten times as long (ever since the start of the present round of anti-Jewish violence).

Clever malarkey is still malarkey. Anyone who has flown out of Ben Gurion Airport even once knows that tight security for all passengers requires arriving at least three hours before a flight. So if Shehada left the house at noon, his commute to the airport was only about two hours, not five.

Americans can spend more time commuting to JFK or O’Hare, and in fact Israelis living in Haifa and Tiberias can, too. A two-hour commute to the airport!

Boo hoo.

The 1,500-word essay (well over twice the size of a typical op-ed) bewails the travails of Shehada’s two-hour ride to the airport (soldiers signaling he can pass, children begging for money, “getting lost in your own country”) yet he fails to mention even once the reason Israelis have expanded checkpoints and road closures: Palestinian violence. For him, it’s all about Israeli discrimination.

But Israel isn’t complicating life for Palestinians because it hates Palestinians. It’s responding to the fact most terrorists who have killed Israeli Jews are Palestinian. Israel hasn’t cracked down on Mormons or dentists – or Israel’s minority Druze, ethnically related to Arabs but loyal to the State. If Palestinian violence disappeared, the checkpoints would dissolve.

Terrorism inconveniences everyone. Since the September 11 attacks, Americans have faced increasingly longer lines at airports. Heck, for eleven years we’ve been following intricate rules about liquids to avert a purely theoretical terrorist threat. And American security rules apply to people who are not terrorists, who have never been terrorists, and have completely innocent reasons for flying. Again, though, if terrorism went away, flying would be a breeze.

In his other bit of slight-of-hand, Shehada dramatically described donning his glasses to make out a West Bank border sign reading “This crossing is reserved only for Israelis.” He hastened to add the text specified that it was “including, in fine print, those entitled under the Law of Return of 1950” – i.e., Jews.

But including Jews doesn’t exclude other Israelis, like the country’s 1.6 million Arab citizens. Shehada could not mention their existence, of course, without undermining his “Israel is racist” tone.

The most shocking thing about the essay, though, is the casual, sympathetic way Shehada evokes what appears to be ethnic cleansing. He quotes a cab driver:

I’m so tired of Jerusalem. All its people are bad and don’t deserve this great city. The whole lot should all be evacuated and the city handed over to an international power. Then whoever wants to visit to pray there could use the houses of the former inhabitants, now turned into hotels.

Nowhere does the driver say Jerusalem’s Arabs as well as Jews should be expelled, nor that Jews as well as Arabs should be welcome to visit and pray. In the context of an essay without a single word of criticism for Arabs that had yet to say a single kind word about Jews, the implication is clear.

Well, it’s only an opinion piece, right? But The Times reviews thousands of opinion pieces a year, including dozens or hundreds about the Middle East. It chose one with that shocking paragraph that also obscured two key facts in a clear attempt to deceive.

Did no Israel-based staff look at the piece? Even if the “Editorial Wall” prevented participation by Times reporters and editors, anyone living in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv – indeed anyone with a basic familiarity with Israeli culture – would have known about Arab Israelis and the airport’s rules. And frankly, once the trickery was identified, the whole essay should have been scrapped.

Hopefully Israel can soon facilitate freer movement for everyone living within its borders. But the Jewish state isn’t solely responsible for the congestion. Palestinians themselves play a part – as does, sometimes, the media.

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David Benkof is a columnist for The Daily Caller, where this essay first appeared. Follow him on Twitter (@DavidBenkof) and http://ift.tt/2mGILXa, or E-mail him at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

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Rooting out extremism is an evolving battle

Less than a week before the May 22 attack at a concert in Manchester, England, I returned from a 10-day fact-finding trip to Europe on countering violent extremism.  

It is tragic that the trip, organized by the U.S. State Department, proved to be so timely. But I gained insights that helped me process and confront the all-too-frequent tragedies like Manchester. Despite countries’ differences in approaches, the core takeaways were consistent:  

1. “You can’t investigate your way out of this.” — A representative of New Scotland Yard SO15 (the London Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command)

Using only a criminal lens — surveillance, investigation, disruption, prosecution, etc. — limits the success of law enforcement in identifying threats. Our delegation heard from law enforcement and government officials across the spectrum that the most important tool in their kit is the trust of those communities most vulnerable to extremism.

Community-based organizations are essential to this strategy. The more robust the civic fabric, the greater the sense of social cohesion; the more people see themselves as having a stake and a voice in society, the less rationale there is for attacking the system. Communities most vulnerable are not blind to the problem in their midst. When engaged and supported as partners (not potential threats), they often will identify ways to address the problems with a greater cultural literacy and legitimacy than any government or law enforcement official could ever bring.

2. “Safeguarding against extremism is no different than safeguarding against drugs, gangs and sex trafficking. It’s out there and we want you to be able to protect yourselves from it.”— Prevent instructor to British students

Messaging matters. Great Britain’s Prevent program — a centralized governmental effort to safeguard against violent extremism — still suffers from a faulty launch that undermined its effectiveness. Many people perceived its focus to be solely on the Muslim community and treating the community as criminals in waiting.

By shifting to a message of safeguarding people vulnerable to recruitment by extremists and making it clear the program addresses all forms of extremism, Britain is just now starting to repair the perception and increase trust, though one nonprofit leader articulated concerns that the “horse has already left the barn” and that the program always will be tainted by the bad branding of its faulty launch.

Community leaders and parents need to know that when they have concerns about their kids or friends radicalizing, they will be given the intervention and help they need. The collaboration of mental health professionals, schools, faith communities and other community-based organizations are essential partners in identifying people who are at risk of or already on the path to radicalizing. Understanding this kind of violence as a public health issue can help engage a broader network of partners in the fight.

3. “Targeting Muslims is counterproductive. You have to identify extremist behavior.”  — Horace Frank, Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief of counterterrorism

Focusing exclusively on Muslims undermines the relationships needed in the Muslim community to identify and uproot real ISIS-inspired threats. It also ignores a rising statistical threat from extremist right-wing nationalists.

Nearly 20 percent of referrals for suspicious behavior in England are for right-wing extremism. While one might think that’s because the problem is grossly over-reported, about 10 percent of those serving time in prison for terrorism-related charges are radical right-wing nationalists.

In our American context, Muslim organizations correctly claim they are more likely to be on the receiving end of a violent hate crime than guilty of committing one. When law enforcement is present to protect minorities, it builds trust in those communities.

Like many Jewish institutions in Los Angeles, some local mosques received threats of violence in recent months. Those threats against the mosques were credible. Police arrested an Agoura Hills man with an arsenal of weapons and a plan to attack. The way that law enforcement stood with Muslim community leaders in that moment reflected the deep relationship-building that has happened for years at the local level.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric at the national level has framed violent extremism as an exclusively Muslim problem. It undermines the extraordinary work that has happened locally between Muslim leaders and law enforcement. Many Muslim organizations have built sophisticated programs to safeguard their communities from ISIS-inspired extremism.

But some are now having second thoughts about moving forward with these programs or are considering outright rejection of federal funds to support their work. This is not because they no longer think it is needed. They fear the money will come with problematic strings attached or that it may undermine their internal legitimacy for collaborating with those who amplify anti-Muslim sentiment. Local trust-building can go only so far in the midst of a toxic national conversation.

4. Despite our best efforts, governments now treat acts of violent extremism as a question of when, not whether, they will happen.  

Part of the holistic approach to this work also includes effective disaster response that can help contain the impact and lessen the casualties. In the aftermath of Manchester, there will be new lessons learned in this ever-evolving battle.

I also returned from the delegation with three lessons on how the Jewish community can be on the front lines of safeguarding against extremism.

First, our community must become more nuanced in our relationship with the Muslim community. The more integrated the Muslim community is in America, the less ISIS-inspired extremism can take hold here. We isolate and reject mainstream Muslim leaders at our own peril. Undermining these leaders empowers extremists who think ISIS is fundamentally right about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy. If you care about ISIS-inspired terrorism, then you also should care about fending off Islamophobia. We can and should disagree fiercely with our Muslim counterparts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And we should not be afraid to call out when we see rhetoric cross the line into anti-Semitism. But isolation and exclusion feed the narrative of extremists. This is not merely a progressive talking point — it is a best practice from among the most experienced law enforcement professionals and government officials in the world.

Second, language matters. We must apply consistent rhetoric when speaking about various forms of extremism. The shooter at the AME Church in Charleston, S.C., and the thwarted attacker on the Los Angeles mosques are extremists just as much as the shooters in San Bernardino.

As part of this strategy of thoughtful language, I now will refrain from using the term Islamism when referring to extremism that emerges cloaked in religious garb. While this term seeks to differentiate ISIS and al-Qaida from Islam proper, it still retains the association that violence is inherent to Islam. I take my cue from a former Department of Homeland Security employee who uses the terminology “ISIS-inspired” or “al-Qaida-inspired” to refer to this kind of extremism. It ensures both that we avoid vilifying Islam and that we make it harder for vulnerable Muslim kids to see ISIS as a legitimate expression of Islam.  

Third, the great work of Jewish organizations in mental health, social services, refugee assistance and interfaith collaboration — from Jewish Family Service to NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change to HIAS — are going to be on the front lines of safeguarding against extremism in American society. They do this by serving the vulnerable in our midst, spotting potential issues before they become credible threats, and by modeling for other minority communities with less developed infrastructures.  

The Los Angeles mayor’s office frames this work as “building healthy communities.” The Jewish community has tremendous experience and expertise to contribute on this front. This week has taught us we have no choice but to work even harder toward our goal. 

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Can soft power prevail?

Journalists and pundits are having a field day with the ironies swirling around President Donald Trump’s dialectic on ending terrorism, delivered last week to the leaders of nearly 50 Muslim nations during his visit to Saudi Arabia.

Not least was his effort to single out Iran as the primary funder and fueler of terror while ignoring Saudi support for a vast network of madrasas teaching Wahhabism, an extremist sect of Islam. Also unmentioned by Trump was a reminder that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers — plus mastermind Osama bin Laden — were from Saudi Arabia, a country one former U.S. ambassador described as the “ideological and financial epicenter” of “theofascism.”  

But there was another more significant omission in Trump’s prescription for combating terror. You can drive out terrorists from a country physically, but how do you drive hatred from their heart? What do you replace it with? 

“Starving terrorists of their territory, their funding and the false allure of their craven ideology will be the basis for defeating them,” Trump said.

The president deployed his vision for combating terrorism mostly through the prism of  “hard power”: a top-down leadership approach that ostensibly involves international diplomacy, military might, policy-making, spying and the international banking system. He’s the American president, after all, and that is his purview.   

But is there an alternative?

Perhaps Trump didn’t want to get too specific about a more grass-roots approach because that would creep too eerily into Saudi funding of madrasas and offend his “gracious hosts.”

But hard power can go only so far. The pursuit of violent conflict and economic warfare does not lay the foundation for a profound cultural shift that would offer viable alternatives to would-be terrorists. Trump himself said he does not wish to “impose our way of life” on any other nation. But in one sense, our way of life — upheld by a liberal education — is exactly what is needed.

When it comes to the world’s most intractable conflicts — and Trump’s framing of the fight against terrorism as a “battle between good and evil” certainly qualifies — hard powermust be met with partners insocial change.

So let’s pivot to another seemingly insurmountable conflict, the one between Israel and Palestine. Last week, while Trump was en route to the Middle East, a group of scholars and teachers from that region headed to Los Angeles for the conference “Learning the Other’s Past,” organized by Professor David N. Myers, chair in Jewish History at UCLA.

The focus of the conference was an Israeli-Palestinian educational partnership, PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), which produced a “dual-narrative” textbook teaching Israeli and Palestinian histories “Side by Side,” as the volume is titled.

At a certain point, the creators of the project reasoned, the only way to bridge the chasm that divides Israelis and Palestinians is to expand educational possibilities. Palestinians need to understand the Jewish imperative for statehood in their ancestral land and learn about the Holocaust. Likewise, Israelis need to recognize Palestinian claims to the land and understand how Jewish statehood triggered a Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.” 

Hard power can go only so far. The pursuit of violent conflict and economic warfare does not lay the foundation for a profound cultural shift that would offer viable alternatives to would-be terrorists.

“For me, the theory of change that really resonates most powerfully is bottom-up, people to people, community by community, school to school,” Myers told me. “That’s the kind of work that culture and education and the arts and history can promote in advance, [and which] seems to stitch together the fabric of a meaningful nonviolent coexistence.”

Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas can negotiate borders, sovereignty, holy sites and settlements. But no amount of dealmaking can undo the fear, hatred, distrust and resentment that have built up between two peoples for more than a century. Only individual contact with the other side — and The Other’s story — can do that.

It is a shame and a disgrace to “hard power” that both the Israeli Ministry of Education as well as the Palestinian Ministry have banned the dual-narrative textbook from public school curriculums. A daring few are teaching it anyway, as are several other countries. The overwhelming resistance within Israel and Palestine to teaching this broader narrative, one that encompasses multiple perspectives, is a cynical attempt to entrench future generations in a protracted conflict.

It also proves that education is just as threatening as violence: Knowledge can inculcate one-sided, nationalistic ideology or it can unlock human empathy and understanding. A madrasa can be a gateway to God — or hell.   

The process of unraveling a narrow worldview, especially if one’s identity depends upon it, is always fraught.

I asked Myers, an observant Jew and a lover of Israel, what it’s like to sit in conference rooms listening to Palestinians tell stories of Israeli-inflicted pain. How does he hold his love for Israel in the same heart that aches for the suffering on the other side?

“It’s the great challenge of my life,” Myers said. “I wake up in the morning obsessed with the question, and I go to bed at night obsessed with the question. I have a deep, searing, powerful, emotional connection to [Israel], the people, the culture, the language. And yet, it often tortures my soul.”

The only solution is reconciliation, empowering people through knowledge.

The writer Adam Thirlwell teaches that power is “always an assault on individual integrity” and thrives when there is “communal blur.”

If that’s the case, Trump’s words in Saudi Arabia were sadly out of focus.

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