Caroline Glick makes good suggestions for Jewish student groups contending with campus anti-Semites:
Educational efforts are of little value in contending with thugs. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done. Groups like Block the Boat for Gaza, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and Direct Action for Palestine need to be investigated.
Where does their money come from? Who are their leaders? What are their ties to terrorist groups? What are their ties to organized labor? What are their ties to politicians? What is their tax status and what do their tax returns say? If members of various groups are intimidating Jewish students then there should be restraining orders against them. Criminal complaints should be filed against them. Their tax-exempt status should be challenged.
Jewish students should be demanding that Students for Justice in Palestine be expelled from their campuses along with other hate groups, like Jewish Voices for Peace. Jewish alumni should be organizing to withhold all donations from universities that permit anti-Semitic groups to operate on campus. And Jewish lawyers should be filing lawsuits against universities and other institutions that enable the operation of anti-Semitic groups on their premises.
She makes similar points regarding how Jewish organizations should respond to anti-Semitic incitement in the larger society.
A problem is that, with notable exceptions (e.g., the Zionist Organization of America, responding to the Met’s production of Klinghoffer), Jewish organizations and individual Jews have handicapped themselves by throwing in their political lot with the Democratic Party. Most of the anti-Semites are leftists and members of Democratic Party constituencies. The Democrats resolve the conflict by catering to the anti-Semites since the Jews, like the blacks, have needlessly limited their own options so that the Democrats have little fear of paying a political price if they go against Jewish interests.
The major Jewish organizations should become functionally nonpartisan, should support candidates from both parties who support Jewish interests, and should work against those candidates, regardless of party affiliation, who fail do do so. This is how the National Rifle Association operates and is why the NRA is politically successful. The Jewish organizations should also go full Alinsky against Jew haters. The ZOA is doing this in a mild way by naming and shaming Jewish contributors to the Met. These tactics work.
“Jewish organizations and individual Jews have handicapped themselves by throwing in their political lot with the Democratic Party”
This is a huge problem. UC, Irvine has a Muslim Brotherhood student group and the faculty advisor was a goofy professor named Mark LeVine. What would you say his ethnic background is ? He was chair of Middle Eastern Studies for years.
“Jewish organizations and individual Jews have handicapped themselves by throwing in their political lot with the Democratic Party”
Jewish friends that I’ve asked tell me they’ve voted Democratic in the past because they were concerned about the religious right. Actually I don’t think any of them are very observant, so they may just be opposed to the practice of religion in general. Some of them have been joining a “Humanistic” congregation because they still want the cultural rituals for their children like the bar and bat mitzvahs.
I may be wrong, but I think I’m starting to detect a bit of a revival. I think the unanimous support for Israel helps, which will in turn hurt left wing support. The big thing is that I think those rituals and ethnic identity are wearing off on the kids.
“…because they were concerned about the religious right.” I was raised a Baptist (I guess that is part of the religious right) and maintain family and friend connections with that group and I have never heard one bit of hate against Jews. In fact, Jews were revered, and I was taught as a kid that Jews were God’s “chosen people” and that anyone that went against them would meet damnation. This is anecdotal, I understand, but I don’t get where Jewish people would fear the religious right, unless they were indoctrinated by some leftist Rabbi that there was an issue there. Which could be the case, but I don’t really know the ins and outs of the synagogues, to say the least.
Specifically, I believe it was a concern with prayer in schools. That was one topic that always seemed to came up. I’m not sure if it was really thought out very well, but I assume that the fear was, first it would be Christian prayers mandated, then that would lead to discrimination against non-Christians society-wide.
I tried to tell them that with Democrats in charge, the only thing left to do was to pray. It fell on deaf ears.
Living in Chicago for so long, I have a lot of liberal friends and colleagues. You learn not to ask too many questions or press them too hard on logical grounds.
“Living in Chicago for so long, I have a lot of liberal friends and colleagues. You learn not to ask too many questions or press them too hard on logical grounds.” Try living in Madison.
Another thing I just remembered was when Bush campaigned at Bob Jones University in 2000. I honestly don’t know much about it other than what I watched on the news at the time, but that seemed to be a point of contention also. There must have been some anti-Semitic undertones in the events surrounding it?
“Jewish organizations and individual Jews have handicapped themselves by throwing in their political lot with the Democratic Party”
Wow. Everyone jumped on that one. It was the first thing I thought of when I read this.
Also, consider how Hollywood Leftists, many Jewish, have treated conservatives and Christians for 50 years. They’re lucky anyone on the right gives a damn about them at all. Now the Left has decided that Israelis are expendable and is willing to throw them to the Islamists because they see domestic muslim votes in that direction, plus it excuses them from having to commit resources to a fight and they see those resources as better spent on social engineering and vote buying. Finally, Islamists and Leftists both hate America and western civilization, so they’re natural allies.
On the other hand, I’ve heard American Jews defending their positions by claiming that Isrealis are acting like Nazis by defending themselves from Hamas. Try to reason that out if you can.
Grurray – very highly doubtful on anti Semitism at BJU. When I was in Baptist school, we were basically being groomed to go to college there and that school was talked about a lot and I spoke with many of their alums and advisors. Jews weren’t mentioned, hated, or anything else.
Jews, as well as many Christian denominations, agree with social progressivism because they see the state as a compassionate surrogate for their own desire to aid the indigent and needy.
This was a faustian bargain, to say the least, as the religious groups allowed the state to co-opt their traditional roles as charitable entities, thinking that the task could be done better by the resources and wider scope of the state.
As we have seen, instead, the result has been the enslavement of several generations of welfare recipients, a culture of dependency, the destruction of the family structure within the welfare-dependent community, and the rise of criminal gangs and their enablers as the most powerful elements in a devastated culture which worships money and violence, and disdains education, family stability, and religiously-based moral principles.
In it’s own twisted way, the support of the religious communities for socially progressive statism has demonstrated, perhaps more clearly than any other aspect of that ideology, the utterly corrosive and destructive results of the belief that the state should undertake basic social functions previously the domain of voluntary, private and/or community, organizations.
As has been demonstrated in several studies, the rise of state responsibility for common social goods that were previously considered the province of personal or community efforts ends up destroying the civic groups who cede such responsibility to the state, while simultaneously enervating and undermining the culture of the recipients of the state’s largesse.
The two groups which have been “adopted” by social progressivism as wards of the state, as it were, are Native Americans and African Americans. Both are normally found, still, at the bottom of many significant social measures, such as wealth, education, and health, etc., and have found what salvation they can through activities outside the channels of mainstream commerce, such as gambling and the drug trade.
These are broadly brushed sketches of the situation, of course, but the primary fact remains that the very spiritual communities, Jewish and Christian, which plunged headlong into supporting the progressive social welfare state are now the very ones who find themselves under attack by the various PC elements of that state, and are also experiencing crumbling internal support from declining congregations, as they struggle to find political justifications for their existence, having surrendered their social-spiritual roles to the state.
I have met many people over the decades who could not comprehend the idea of a society without the massive interventions of an activist, progressive state. They could not imagine how anything worthwhile could ever get done on a large scale with only voluntary social and religious groups in charge of the effort. This is a very common frame of mind in our culture at large.
What has gone unreported, or widely disseminated, is the many substantial ills that have accompanied the rise of the state as the repository of social compassion. This situation is not some weird anomaly, but the inevitable outcome any ideology which claims for the state a position of primacy in social and civil affairs.
Whether the Jewish community can come to some understanding of how their trust has been betrayed, as they are now being discarded by the progressive forces they have supported for so long, is part of the larger question as to whether or not several of the major progressive-supporting communities, such as African Americans, women, and other “victim” groups, can step back and grasp the enormously destructive results that their embrace of the progressive vision and ideology has brought about for themselves, and society at large.
There is much work to be done.
I grew up in New England, and what Jews I knew, were as staunchly liberal as the rest of us. But at that point in history, I don’t think that any of us, Jew or Gentile would dream that the Farrakhan/Sharpton/Jackson faction of the party would ascend to the position it has. Later on, I lived in NYC, where I met and worked with Jews who had survived the Holocaust, who had spent time in Israel and who lived in very close proximity to some of the nastiness that can be found there. I knew some who were not so liberal. Still, they seemed to be Democrats, I can remember my observant boss, speaking ill of the prospect of another Bush presidency. I can’t imagine that would be the same know with things as blatant as they are, but you never know. It’s a weird place, where you have concentration camp survivors sharing the sidewalk with henna-bearded tribesman from Kablamistan.
Many Jews, particularly left-wingers and the nonreligious, believe that fundamentalist Christians want to 1) force Jewish kids to go along with Christian religious rituals in school, 2) impose Christian rituals on the public, and 3) convert Jews to Christianity. These Jews also tend to see Judaism as synonymous with taxpayer-funded social activism, and Democratic northern machine pols as their political allies. American Jews who are religious and/or politically conservative, as well as Jews outside of the USA, tend to have a more realistic understanding of who their friends are and where their political interests lie.
” The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. ”
That is a line from a New Yorker essay by Jonathan Haidt who seems to be recognizing there the hazards of leftist bias in academia. Especially jun social psychology.
Interesting essay in spite of the somewhat off-putting title.
I think it also applies to blacks and Jews.
I grew up in a neighborhood in Chicago that was about evenly divided between Catholics and Jews. My friends and I always made it a point to have a Jewish girlfriend because their fathers would give us baseball tickets. I think the girls thought of us as “forbidden fruit.” I got a little too close to the daughter of a Jewish state senator when I was about 17 and she was told she could not see me anymore. It was an interesting dynamic for kids our age.
Of course, we were all Democrats in those days.
” very highly doubtful on anti Semitism at BJU”
I’m sure you’re right. I think what it was is that his visit prompted anti-Semitic fear mongering by his opponent. I believe it was during the primary, so that was McCain’s campaign engaging in some mud-slinging.
This is an interesting and informative thread. I guess my question to Jonathan (and anyone else) is why do Jews feel that they will be imposed upon or attempted to be converted? Afaik, at least with my experiences with the religious “right”, nothing could be further from the truth.
at least with my experiences with the religious “right”, nothing could be further from the truth.
If you don’t mind me jumping in here, it only takes evangelist who wants to convert the Jews or one incident of someone demanding Christian prayer for everyone in a public school. It can be a complete outlier, a one-off incident, but it will be portrayed as the norm. All these people – everyone on the right – want to do this to all of you, the Jews. It’s probably an easier sell than we might think, especially with media megaphone the left has available to them.
> It can be a complete outlier, a one-off incident, but it will be portrayed as the norm<
some norms are more equal than other norms see: 9/11/2001.
Our first target should be the Jew Hater in the White House.
A very good post on a very nuanced and touchy, dangerous subject. As were the comments to a degree.
Now. W/regard to Education my nicest recommendation and policy I support is complete separation of school and state on 1st Amendment grounds – for it’s always been religion. It’s simply that the religion has turned toxic that drives the general urgency to separate.
Not O/T as that’s the main bone of contention in the post.
Now Sirs and Madams. Known that I don’t hide intentions or motives, or recoil at stating animosity or hostility to point of being censored. So if I had it I’d say so. If I was or am Anti-this or that, or racist I’d admit it. I might trumpet it. I’m not.
Having said so all wishing to be flattered, fluttered and stroked stop reading now.
This is said from my POV of worry for my friends and Dunbar Dears of which there must be several [Dunbar – limit of people is 150 friend or foe].
The first thing is to examine the defensibility of what’s defended, and decide what to defend. Your right to exist and Israel’s right to exist – of course. That you can give as good as you get and in kind yes.
In this narrow sense, yes: “The ZOA is doing this in a mild way by naming and shaming Jewish contributors to the Met.” Well yes, do start with internal housekeeping. A through one.
For having listed in part what can be defended, the following cannot: Finance insofar as it’s associated with a particular ethnicity. [It’s actually the ghost of the Bank of England being channeled through Radical Poltergeists, for Finance is the most Radical element in our society].
Pornography. Wail as ye will, whose burden that is cannot be denied.
Anti-Christian/anti-european ethnic and religious hatred, ancient animus carried into words and policy by certain persons. When you’re busy defecating on people it’s ridiculous to complain that they punch back.
For the truth is what’s being now coyly termed Anti-Zionism or against this or that occupation is really Anti-Semitism.
The problem being for those of us who have dear ones, the problem being for those of us who don’t believe in lumping vast numbers of innocents in with tiny numbers of guilty – Tiny but Dominant -the problem being they can and do invoke tragically misplaced Tribal Loyalty to common ruin. Or at least can count on not being expelled, excommunicated, shunned, cast out. There seems to be no actual mechanism internally for dealing with the bad element that exists in all groups.
Groups that don’t police their own internally over time suffer, or indeed disappear. Another problem is the bad element becomes dominant. That seems to have happened in the United States.
Don’t defend the Indefensible. Reject them and cast them out. As you know they’ll quite betray you, and indeed profit from same. To name one: Soros.
This is all said from a standpoint of benevolence. It needs to be said, even though it’s probably hopeless.
Do consider before you respond, in particular the urge to lash out or refute point by point. What I put in bold above can’t be refuted, it happened and is happening now.
“It has nothing to do with me, or us.” Yes it does or I wouldn’t mention it.
For it is coming in the middle and the right as well, or I wouldn’t mention it.
For White racial consciousness returned immediately after the 2012 elections, and all calculations are so reset. It doesn’t have to be terrible for all, but it will be for some.
The actual racial conflict in America is white vs white, and actually 2 groups of Protestants that hate each other. That’s truth, not to be confused with safety.
And the malice that drives evil among this group is indeed tribal, racial hatred of Others. That they also apparently loathe themselves is part of this post.
This still wouldn’t be worth the grief of mentioning except for this: our Finances and ruling elites having gone mad a crisis is certain, and we know who will get blamed, the justice of this isn’t relevant.
[no, it’s the ghosts of the Puritans channeled through Radical poltergeists, but it won’t matter. People will look at the names and it is done].
The way out of the Finance/Debt&Derivatives bomb BTW is utter and comprehensive wiping out of all debt, that is Jubilee across the board.
For the truth of our politics as it stands now – although we don’t feel the horror of it yet – is this: There are only 2 fatally intertwined factions. Debtors and Debt Collectors, and that’s most of us. That will drive the madness of 1840’s Ireland across the entire span of Western Civ and certainly America, unless headed off.
But meanwhile all will search for scapegoats. Dump the guilty now, they’ll certainly do the same to you.
I hope you have good luck. Be very careful of the earnest flatterers. They will say anything until you need them to speak, and then they’ll stand there mute and not lift a finger.
In all benevolence, good day.
Kindly read and think on above before you react.
Now if you want more flattery and stroking worry not, it will come.
For the blows however they’ll not share lots with ye.
Cheers.