Words of the Week

“So, my dear friends with flowers in your hands, yes let’s convene another peace gathering and I will be there with bells on. But before that let us be discerning and draw clear lines. All is not a wash of oneness, equivalencies, equalities. There are cancers that can not be cured by chanting. Conflicts that can not be quashed through diplomacy. Aggressive medicine can sometimes be the most compassionate treatment for the disease.”
Source: Chaya Lester, “Feeling ‘Peaced Off'” (Hevria)

“If you’ve decided to turn the American campus into a war front, well, à la guerre comme à la guerre. Expect to take casualties.”
Source: Martin Kramer, “Hero’s Welcome for Hater of Israel at MESA” (The Sandbox)

Words of the Week

“There’s something else that bothers me about the binary formulation that Zionism = particularism and Diaspora = universalism. It doesn’t take into account the attachment Jews feel for one another and the need for community — even, dare I say it, that squishy word ‘peoplehood’ — that undergirds a Jew’s sense of being in the world.

Such attachment doesn’t have to take the form of Adelson’s crass particularism and unthinking solidarity. But it does require liberals to do something that many of us obviously find difficult: To privilege our own. To be able to say that Jewish tradition is special, that Jews should feel a responsibility to one another that does not negate our responsibility to the wider world but sometimes preempts it.”

Source: Jane Eisner, “Is Exile Good for the Jews” (The Forward)

Words of the Week

“Missing from these earnest and well-intentioned pieces, however, was any acknowledgment of the role the media themselves have played in creating the conditions under which anti-Semitism flourishes. The media do not grasp, the media refuse to see, the relation between the biased and hostile coverage of Israel they produce every day and the anti-Semitism on which they report.”
–Matthew Continetti, “Anti-Semitism: Now They Notice” (Commentary)

“Support for equal pay, or health care reform, or union rights, or abortion rights, or anti-discrimination laws, or protecting the environment, or the idea that corporations should pay their fair share of taxes—none of these are enough of a basis anymore for your liberalism. What now defines American Jews—and only American Jews—as liberals is whether they back the administration on Israel. If you don’t think Netanyahu is not just an opportunistic politician but also the devil; if you don’t see Mahmoud Abbas as a man singlemindedly committed to peace; if you don’t agree that John Kerry is doing God’s work bringing Israelis and Palestinians together; if you don’t think the leaders of Hamas are people who can be reasoned with—and even if you agree with all of the above but are perhaps a little unsure about the wisdom or the necessity of ever-closer U.S. ties with the Mullahs in Tehran—then you should accept that you aren’t a liberal anymore.”
–Tablet Staff, “American Jews Don’t Have to Choose Between Liberalism and Israel”

“Indeed, as Cary Nelson correctly points out in his introduction, boycotting Israel as a solid manifestation of detesting its very existence has become arguably the single most potent marker of being of the left today. He quotes one of the global left’s most cherished gurus, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who states the obvious that, ‘by now, anti-Zionism is synonymous with leftist world politics.’ Even if one is explicitly and actively anti-racist and anti-sexist, opposed to oppression, favours economic equality, fights for workers rights, actively supports the LGBT community, advocates strict gun control, stands for ecological reforms; one will be at best a very suspect, indeed even an unwelcome, member of what constitutes today’s left and being progressive without having decidedly and explicitly anti-Zionist views.”
–Andrei S. Markovits, “Book Review: The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel” (Fathom)

Words of the Week

“That cartoon was irresponsible and has great potential to ultimately do far more damage to Israel and [to the] Jewish people in general than it does to the policies Netanyahu or Likud.”
–Derek Kwait, “Collapsing Towers: Liveblogging My Quarrel with Haaretz” (New Voices)

“It is tough to say what is the most stomach-turning aspect of this. Is it that Hamas managed to bully and intimidate foreign journalists en masse for almost two months and get away with it? Is it the fact that this bullying and intimidation successfully prevented the world from receiving an objective picture of what this awful war was really all about? Or is it the fact that the principal correspondent of the New York Times either had no clue about what was happening, or instinctively desired to deny it, or both?”
–Jeff Robbins, “A Willful Ignorance on Israel” (The Times of Israel) (more…)

Words of the Week

“But what has become even more stunningly clear in recent years is that even if the United States could fix the Palestinian issue and produce a two-state solution, that accomplishment alone would not stabilize the angry, broken, and dysfunctional Middle East. The region is already in the process of melting down for a tsunami of reasons that have nothing to do with the Palestinians. But talking about the consequences of not fixing the Palestinian issue, particularly in Chicken Little the “sky is falling” terms, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been wont to do, doesn’t help matters — it makes them worse.”
–Aaron David Miller, “It’s Not Washington’s Fault” (Foreign Policy)

“You can take for granted the way a grandfather feels for a granddaughter that has just been murdered,” he said. “You can see it.”
–Shimshon Halperin, grandfather to Chaya Zissel Braun, quoted broadly, including by JTA.

“The Met has the First Amendment right to present this opera, and people certainly have a similar right to attend. It is their choice.
Equally, all of us have as strong a First Amendment right to make our position clear and warn people that this work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt terrorist organization, and the state of Israel, a democracy ruled by law.”

–Rudy Giuliani, “Why I Protested ‘The Death of Klinghoffer'” (The Daily Beast)