holiday:rosh hashanah

  • America’s Jews are watching Israel in horror
    The Washington Post - By Dana Milbank - September 21 at 7:25 PM

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/israel-is-driving-jewish-america-farther-and-farther-away/2018/09/21/de2716f8-bdbb-11e8-8792-78719177250f_story.html

    My rabbi, Danny Zemel, comes from Zionist royalty: His grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, led the Zionist Organization of America in the late 1930s, and presided over the World Zionist Convention in Zurich in 1939. So Zemel’s words carried weight when he told his flock this week on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the Jewish year, that “the current government of Israel has turned its back on Zionism.”

    “My love for Israel has not diminished one iota,” he said, but “this is, to my way of thinking, Israel’s first anti-Zionist government.”

    He recounted Israel’s transformation under Benjamin Netanyahu: the rise of ultranationalism tied to religious extremism, the upsurge in settler violence, the overriding of Supreme Court rulings upholding democracy and human rights, a crackdown on dissent, harassment of critics and nonprofits, confiscation of Arab villages and alliances with regimes — in Poland, Hungary and the Philippines — that foment anti-Semitism. The prime minister’s joint declaration in June absolving Poland of Holocaust culpability, which amounted to trading Holocaust denial for good relations, earned a rebuke from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

    “The current government in Israel has, like Esau, sold its birthright,” Zemel preached.

    Similarly anguished sentiments can be heard in synagogues and in Jewish homes throughout America. For 70 years, Israel survived in no small part because of American Jews’ support. Now we watch in horror as Netanyahu, with President Trump’s encouragement, leads Israel on a path to estrangement and destruction.

    Both men have gravely miscalculated. Trump seems to think support for Netanyahu will appeal to American Jews otherwise appalled by his treatment of immigrants and minorities. (Trump observed Rosh Hashanah last week by ordering the Palestinian office in Washington closed, another gratuitous blow to the moribund two-state solution that a majority of American Jews favor.) But his green light to extremism does the opposite.

    Netanyahu, for his part, is dissolving America’s bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in favor of an unstable alliance of end-times Christians, orthodox Jews and wealthy conservatives such as Sheldon Adelson.

    The two have achieved Trump’s usual result: division. They have split American Jews from Israelis, and America’s minority of politically conservative Jews from the rest of American Jews.

    A poll for the American Jewish Committee in June found that while 77 percent of Israeli Jews approve of Trump’s handling of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, only 34 percent of American Jews approve. Although Trump is popular in Israel, only 26 percent of American Jews approve of him. Most Jews feel less secure in the United States than they did a year ago. (No wonder, given the sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents and high-level winks at anti-Semitism, from Charlottesville to Eric Trump’s recent claim that Trump critics are trying to “make three extra shekels.”) The AJC poll was done a month before Israel passed a law to give Jews more rights than other citizens, betraying the country’s 70-year democratic tradition.

    “We are the stunned witnesses of new alliances between Israel, Orthodox factions of Judaism throughout the world, and the new global populism in which ethnocentrism and even racism hold an undeniable place,” Hebrew University of Jerusalem sociologist Eva Illouz wrote in an article appearing this week on Yom Kippur in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper titled “The State of Israel vs. the Jewish people.” (...)

  • For Rosh Hashanah, a picture of Israel’s muddled Jewish soul
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-for-rosh-hashanah-a-picture-of-israel-s-muddled-jewish-soul-1.6462

    Most Israeli Jews believe in God. Among Western democratic countries, Israel’s only competitor for the heavyweight God-fearing title is the United States, hitherto recognized as the most puritan of democracies.

    The figures for the two countries are identical enough to be spooky. They put Israel and the United States squarely in the lead in terms of belief in God, with Western European countries far behind. At a time when Jewish settlers and evangelical Christians seem to be running foreign policies in both Jerusalem and Washington, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that religion has assumed a more pivotal role than ever in the special relationship between the two countries.

    […]

    But perhaps the most startling gaps are generational. In Israel 2018, the younger the Jew, the more likely he or she is to be more religious, observant, conservative and willing to impose his or her beliefs on others. Sixty-five percent of the population would let supermarkets and groceries operate on Shabbat, but that position is supported by only 51 percent of people between 18 and 24, compared with 84 percent of those 65 and older.

    […]

    The phenomenon of a younger generation that’s more devout than its elders is of particular interest, in part, because notwithstanding the near-identical overall results, it stands in stark contrast to current trends in the United States and Western Europe, where millennials are ditching religion in droves. Take participation in religious services. Only 17 percent of Israeli Jews visit a synagogue at least once a week, compared with 36 percent in the United States. In Israel, however, younger Jews go to shul at twice the rate of their parents and grandparents, while in the United States and Western Europe the opposite is true.

    […]

    It’s far more realistic, however, to see the poll as a warning that if you think Israel is religious, conservative and hawkish enough as it is, wait for the fundamentalist theocracy that’s lurking around the corner.

    Younger Jews, amazingly, also lead the pack in adhering to supernatural beliefs that are seen as primitive superstitions by the secular majority.

    […]

    This meshes well with the fact that only 44 percent of the public believes in the theory of evolution, but if Israeli schools continue to avoid teaching it, as recently reported, people soon won’t know about Darwin or his theories anyway.

  • To Peter Beinart: We pro-BDS Jews Are Just as Much Part of the Jewish People as You Are -
    http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.718665


    The arguments for BDS attract ever more Jewish students, triggering the Jewish establishment’s frenzied counterattack, clinging to the status quo, while a seismic shift is underway in the U.S. Jewish community.
    Ben Lorber May 09, 2016 5:43 PM

    The stories of Jewish students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of Israel until it ends its violations of Palestinian rights are often painful stories of exclusion from the Jewish community.

    They tell me, in my capacity as Campus Coordinator with the pro-BDS organization Jewish Voice for Peace, that they can no longer attend Shabbat at Hillel without facing steely stares and cold shoulders from staff; that the rabbi of their synagogue back home devoted his entire Rosh Hashanah sermon to the “evils of the BDS movement”; that they can’t attend a family gathering without someone calling them a self-hating Jew.

    But there’s another kind of story they tell me as well. A wave of anti-occupation freshmen and sophomores just joined their JVP chapter; the president of their Hillel board just publicly criticized the occupation, and called for JVP to be given a seat at the table; their old friend from Hebrew school confessed in a private message that she, too, supports BDS as a tool to achieve justice for Palestinians, but is afraid to say so publicly.

    With this growing engagement, and the Jewish establishment’s frenzied counterattack, a seismic shift is occurring in the American Jewish community. The old consensus is crumbling, and a new Jewish world is emerging.

    So when liberal columnist Peter Beinart told me recently in Haaretz that Jews like me have broken ‘the bonds of peoplehood’ by embracing BDS, I heard an assertion that reflects the consensus of the old Jewish world, not the contours of the new. In Beinart’s view, while pro-BDS Jews like me do indeed hold strong Jewish identities and build robust Jewish communities, the fact remains that we have broken sharply with the mainstream Jewish communal consensus.

    For embracing a call for solidarity from Palestinians who experience daily violence from the Israeli state, we are denounced from the local synagogue bimah, denied jobs at the local JCRC, and ridiculed around the local mah-jongg table. We have prioritized our ethical values over the commandment, in Beinart’s words, to ‘protect other Jews’. And for making this choice, we have excommunicated ourselves from klal Yisrael (the Jewish collective).

    But whose ‘peoplehood’ have we broken, exactly? Who determines the boundaries of what Beinart calls the collective ‘family’? Mainstream synagogues, with their ‘We Stand With Israel’ banners facing the street and Israeli flags adorning the bimah, are struggling to find members under the age of 50. In many places, a growing majority of Jews don’t pass through the doors of their community JCRC or their campus Hillel. For a variety of reasons, institutions like these have for decades been inaccessible not only to pro-BDS Jews, but to queer Jews, Jews of color, Jews from interfaith families, working-class Jews, disabled Jews, and many others.

    More and more Jews today are leaving establishment Jewish institutions: they are flocking to independent minyanim, alternative havurahs and DIY ritual spaces across the country. In these heterogenous alternative spaces, they find not only many Jews who are against the occupation, but also many Jews who support BDS. Spaces like these, and organizations like JVP, are striving to create exactly what yesterday’s withering institutions cannot- a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, intergenerational, interfaith community centered around Jewish values of justice.

    What we see today is a phenomenon that has repeated itself throughout Jewish history- a movement of Jewish dissidents, who started agitating at the margins, have begun to transform the center of Jewish life. This should not surprise us. Jewish history, after all, is a tapestry woven through vibrant dissent, marked by passionate disagreement, shaped by outsiders and outcasts.

    To name but one example among many: the Zionist movement, for the first decades of its existence, was viewed as dangerous and marginal by most Jewish communities where it attempted to take root. Religious Jews warned that it uprooted Jews from Torah; liberal Jews warned that it uprooted Jews from the nations in which they strove to become full citizens; leftist Jews warned that it uprooted Jews from the movements for workers’ rights, social equality and national autonomy then sweeping the globe. Like pro-BDS Jews today, Zionists were seen by most, in the early decades of their emergence, as challenging Jewish unity, and even as encouraging physical and existential threats to the Jewish people.

    The truth is that we, the Jewish people, have not moved through history as a compact and homogenous entity, bound by stable borders. Rather, we are marked ‘from time immemorial’ by passionate, often foundation-shattering internal struggle. The boundaries and contours of our peoplehood are always in dynamic flux, and we are often propelled forward by outsider ideologies that, at first, are profoundly threatening to the majority. Things change. Ideas that, in one era, appear antithetical to our continuity as a community, later emerge as celebrated norms.

    Today, the American Jewish community is at a tipping point. There are growing numbers of Jews like me who support BDS as a strategic, accountable, nonviolent way to participate in the movement for justice for Palestinians, and a growing community of anti-occupation Jews who respect the use of those tactics even when their activism takes different forms.

    Those who are trying to expel us beyond the bonds of peoplehood are clinging to a status quo that is shifting under their feet. We know these bonds to be more elastic, this peoplehood more expansive, and this community more capable of transformation than they believe. Just as yesterday’s Jews would be shocked to see that it is considered more heretical for Jews today to question the State of Israel than to question belief in God, tomorrow’s Jews will inhabit a community that, to today’s mainstream, appears equally unrecognizable.

    Those of us Jews who support the tactics of BDS are not simply choosing to prioritize our ethical values over Jewish unity. Rather, we are working to transform our Jewish communities into ones that reflect our values. Pro-BDS Jews like me are not here to free Palestinians, or tell them how to free themselves. As we see it, our work is to align our community with a call for justice from Palestinians, and to contribute to the growing, diverse movement for equality and freedom.

    Ben Lorber works as Campus Coordinator with Jewish Voice for Peace. He has written articles for a variety of progressive publications, and has previously worked with immigrant justice and workers’ rights organizations throughout the United States. He lives in Chicago, IL.

    #BDS

  • Iran doesn’t deny the Holocaust, Iranian foreign minister tweets -
    By Haaretz and Barak Ravid
    Haaretz | Sep. 6, 2013
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-and-defense/1.545546

    Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif took to Twitter on Thursday to say that his country does not deny the Holocaust.

    The message came on the heels of Jewish holiday greetings released both from his Twitter account and an account believed to be operated by Iranian President Hassan Rohani. 

    “As the sun is about to set here in #Tehran I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah,” wrote Rohani, attaching a photo of an Iranian Jew praying at a synagogue in Tehran.

    A few hours later, the president was joined in his well-wishing by Zarif. “Happy Rosh Hashanah,” he tweeted.

    The new foreign minister’s tweet drew a flurry of responses, including that of Christine Pelosi, an author, activist and the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who wrote: “The New Year would be even sweeter if you would end Iran’s Holocaust denial, sir.”

    Zarif soon replied: “Iran never denied it. The man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone. Happy New Year.” He was presumably referring to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a “fairy tale.”

    Zarif’s account was confirmed by CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour in yet another tweet.

    Rohani’s twitter account is semi-official; it was set up during his election campaign and was operated by his campaign staff, which consisted mainly of young people. Since he took office, the account remained open, but it’s not clear who is actually running it.

    Raz Zimmt, a research fellow at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University, has said that the Iranian officials’ Rosh Hashanah greetings are extraordinary.

    “Iran has always maintained it differentiates between Judaism and Zionism, and that its policy is anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. However, this is a definite expression of a change in terminology and atmosphere that defines the new Rohani era, after years of an Ahmadinejad-led discourse that was dominated by Holocaust denial," Zimmt said.

  • Iran’s Rouhani wishes Jews blessed Rosh Hashanah |
    The Back Channel

    http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index.php/2013/09/6125/irans-rouhani-wishes-jews-blessed-rosh-hashanah

    “Not even under the monarchy do we remember such a message,” Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-born scholar who heads the Middle East program at the Woodrow Willson International Center, said of the message.

    Rouhani’s well wishes to the Jewish people come as the Iranian mission at the United Nations confirmed to Al-Monitor that he will travel to New York later this month to address the United Nations General Assembly and participate in a disarmament meeting.

    Rouhani is scheduled to address the General Assembly on the afternoon of September 24th, the same day that US President Obama will address the body in the morning.

    It also comes as Rouhani and Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif have sent multiple messages condemning the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Iran’s ally, while not saying explicitly they believe it was done by the Assad regime, and while urging against U.S.-led action. Foreign Iranian President Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, however, is reported to have accused the Syrian government of gassing its own people at a lecture last week, allegedly recorded on video, even as other reports say his office had denied the comment.

  • Qu’est-ce qu’on pourrait bien faire pour fêter le nouvel an de manière originale ? Tiens, et si on invitait une criminelle de guerre ! (Ah mais quelle bonne idée dis donc !)

    Livni to travel to London - Israel News, Ynetnews
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4130070,00.html

    Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni announced that she will travel to London next week, her first trip to the United Kingdom since it issued a warrant for her arrest in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead.
     
    British Foreign Secretary William Hague called Livni last week, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and invited her to visit the UK. On Sunday, she said that she has accepted the invitation.
     
    The news came two weeks after British legislators amended the law that allowed arrest warrants to be issued against Israeli officials, making Livni’s trip possible.