By Rabbi Aryeh Spero, AMERICAN THINKER (First published in Sept 2019)
The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and Manhattan began almost a year ago. We have cellphone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing “Allahu Akbar” and from younger black and Hispanic men often yelling “dirty Jew.” They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks and stones, breaking bones and smashing eyes. There was no mainstream media discussion about this until a few weeks ago, and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.
You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society.
My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most Americans have no clue about what is happening in Boro Park, Williamsburg, or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the list of many officeholders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain — something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders. Beyond doubt, the establishment Jewish organizations would themselves be knocking down doors right alongside them. They, as they always do, would be proclaiming “how the most important Jewish value is the protection of minorities and fighting racism.” Actually, it is President Trump who has made more of an issue over anti-Jewish remarks coming from the mouths of high-profile members of minority communities than our own Jewish establishment “leadership.”
Many of those running Jewish organizations and non-Orthodox synagogue and temples have for decades made helping other minorities the centerpiece of their ideological life and, thus, will never spotlight the anti-Semitism coming from members of the minority community, since it would shatter all they believe in. It might get in the way of “dialogue,” which is their most precious template, though it usually is a dialogue of what we Jews can do for you and not what you can also do for us. Years after the 1992 Crown Heights pogroms, the ADL finally acknowledged that its unwillingness to defend the Lubavitch community was a fear of jeopardizing their loyalty to the Black civil rights movement.
Preoccupation with black civil rights is for most Jewish groups “their spiritual life and the continuum of their days.” We can also add sexual lifestyle rights, abortion-on-demand, open borders, and promotion of Muslim immigration. Jewish groups are in the forefront of demanding even higher levels of Islamic immigration, knowing full well that it’s precisely the recent influx of Muslims into Europe that accounts for the last fifteen years of beatings and murder of Jews in France, Belgium, and Germany. These Jewish organizations call their support of Islamic immigration a “Jewish value,” ignoring that a cardinal Jewish value is protecting Jewish life and safeguarding Jews.
Many American Jewish leaders, including rabbis, consider these issues more important than mere tribal Jewish concerns, while others have convinced themselves that it constitutes Judaism itself, universalism taking precedence over those matters of Jewishness that are labeled “parochial” and “tribal.” For them, more important than Jewish survival is the survival of progressivism and left-liberalism, their guiding light. They have redefined Judaism as leftwing progressivism. This is their “religion” and they are zealots for it. Even the few Jewish holidays observed have been stripped of the uniquely Jewish component and replaced by universalist themes that abhor the Jewish particular.
A people in constant need to display to others or affirm their own moral superiority will eventually not defend itself and puts its survival at risk. Virtue signaling is but another form of social climbing.
II
This devaluing of things specifically Jewish explains how Jewish organizations have allowed Jewish children on college campuses to be bullied, spat upon, harassed, and forced to renounce support of Israel. The ADL and big-city federations have the funds to counteract the BDS movement on campuses, the know-how in doing so, and the clout and savvy to demonize the movement and the Muslim students behind it as full-fledged racists not acceptable on campus. But they haven’t. In fact, the ADL has assertively come out against those states proposing legislation against BDS.
Some Jewish organizations have jelly-like offered programs speaking of the downside of general “hate and intolerance,” unwilling to call it by its real name: anti-Semitism. These Jewish leaders would invoke the specific term Islamaphobia if the victims were Muslim, likewise with anti-Black or anti-Hispanic activity.
Nor does it help that many of the college deans and professors are themselves Jewish and have chosen to protect their jobs rather than stand up for Jewish students; something Black or Muslim professors/administrators would never do to their people. (Ron Lauder is refreshingly singular in announcing that he is no longer donating to Columbia University, which this week is sponsoring Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, a proud and vocal anti-Semite.)
This obsession to universalize everything Jewish sends a message that the Jewish people and their needs are insignificant and must take a back seat. Even the Holocaust has been universalized by many Jewish organizations and rabbis so that now detention centers at our southern borders are labelled “concentration camps,” and ICE and Homeland security as Nazis, and Trump, the lover of Zion and Brooklyn’s Jews, as Hitler. By universalizing Judaism they belittle its need for existence as something in and of itself.
Worse, many have fashioned an avant-garde Judaism that consists of belittling Jewishness and being over-the-top critical of Israel while adoring its enemies — Peter Beinart/Thomas Friedman Judaism. They sit around in their Upper West Side salons and bash Jewish Jews and Israel. No Irishmen or Frenchmen in America want to dismantle Ireland or France. In contrast, an awfully high percentage of American Jews invest enormous time, energy, and money into trying to bring down and defame the country of their origin, Israel. This form of self-hate is pathological and unique among mankind. Something craven, suicidal, and unnatural is happening within much of American Jewry.
III
It is true that establishment Jewish organizations and liberal rabbis vociferously condemned the attacks on synagogues during this past year. But those attackers were characterized as “right-wingers.” Jewish organizations are always eager to attack anything considered right-wing. But their silence in the face of dangerous, loud, and undeniable anti-Semitism coming from a wide variety of liberal/progressive sources, including the social justice warriors, leads to one inevitable conclusion. Major Jewish organizations will not imperil the Left or the “social justice” causes; they have chosen liberalism and the Democratic party over particular Jewish needs. Jewish politicians such as Chuck Schumer, Eliot Engel, Nita Lowey, Steve Cohen, Jan Schakowsky, and Adam Schiff, for example, have been silent about the Omar/Tlaib/Ocasio-Cortez anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.
Furthermore, many Jewish groups will insidiously parlay anti-Semitism in the hopes of tarnishing Trump and his supporters and to further their decades-old efforts to characterize conservatives as anti-Semites and racists. A previous editor of the Forward once said: “Our greatest enemy is ‘majority-ism,’” in other words, the American white, Christian majority. Most Jews still feel that “minorities” are their allies and that white, Christian Americans are the ones to fear. Ari Gordon of the AJC said so recently when he announced: “Jews and Muslims are natural allies in fighting off the bigotry out there and protecting our shared democratic freedoms.” As a pulpit rabbi, especially during my Manhattan years, I was upset to hear the nonchalant bigotry of many brethren against southerners, whites, and Christians, especially patriotic whites who displayed their love of America. In the end, liberal Jews generally feel more comfortable around minorities and want to belong to the political and social Left, no matter what.
This past Sunday we held a rally in front of the NYC City Hall on lower Broadway regarding attacks against Jews in Brooklyn. I ended my speech by saying it’s obvious we can’t depend on the leaders of major Jewish organizations. They are not really leaders, rather big-shot bureaucrats. It seems we are witnessing once again the Rabbi Stephen Wise phenomenon of the 30s and 40s: leadership replaced by self-glorifying photo ops, fancy dinners, bland statements, meetings, and dialogue. We, the grassroots, will have to defend the Jewish people, defend ourselves in our neighborhoods. Self-defense is a biblical mandate, a mitzvah.
At the rally, we chanted: “Jews Fight Back.” It’s time Jews carried an aura of self-respect, an aura of self-value, so that would-be perpetrators know their attacks come with a downside for them.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero is president of Conference of Jewish Affairs, author of Push Back, and of Why Israel Matters to You.
I learned about the Federations years ago when I told them about Jewish American History was not being celebrated in Broward County schools. I worked at a Reform Synagogue during the Second Intifada. They wouldn’t MENTION it. No new contract for me. Jews are their own worst enemies.
Poor stupid Jews who should have moved on after thousands of years of not being to be as numerous as Christians or Muslims and not stopping the Shoa from happening by killing Hitler in 1920 or before.
I wish every Jew would wake up GREEN so they couldn’t hide until they disappeared forever.
Today, in NY a Jewish family was attacked by Muslims and injured. Any Jew organization go after those animals who attacked them or kill them?
The American Jewish community today and their putative leaders remind me of the Jewish Hellenists, the “progressives” of antiquity, who followed what was fashionable at the time rather than following the laws and traditions of their Jewish ancestors — resulting in the takeover of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria by the Greek Hellenist king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. As we know, Israel was saved only because a small group of devoted Jewish Maccabees exhibited the strength and courage necessary to overthrow its Hellenistic rulers.
Where will we find modern Maccabees ready, willing, and able to overcome the paralysis of the American Jewish community in the face of “progressive” antisemitism?
The Shondacrats are actively leading the Jews to another Holocaust. They aren’t even protesting, or saying it will be wrong or a crime. This time the Left could get all the Jews.
If Jews aren’t protesting their disaffirmation and suborning genocide for Israeli Jews it stands to reason that their enemies will take them up on their offer.
Based on what I’ve seen, heard, read, and experienced liberal Jewish leaders like Schiff, Schumer, and Nadler are leading the Jewish people off a cliff. The Republican Jews have their head in the sand. It doesn’t matter why. There is little chance that change can occur from inside the system.
The 2024 Democratically controlled spectacle, euphemistically called an election by the current culture, will strengthen the Left’s hand. Trump can make a difference but, as in any third-world culture, the Left will prevent him, or anyone like him, from running.
It’s hard to avoid being fatalistic about the future? For Jews, America is becoming a good place to be from.
We have the same problem in the UK. The Board of Deputies is packed with Labour apologists, likewise the now taxpayer greased CST its top echelons infested with the self-hating Left. Both are more concerned with “phobias” and appeasing the religion of fluffy kittens than protecting Jews and defending Israel. They are all happy to throw fellow Jews to the wolves if the latter don’t parrot their garbage. The only thing “liberal” about these people, is that they are infinitely liberal in selling us out so that they can enjoy their titles and social kudos. As always, le the ghetto councils, they will find that it’s temporary. I won’t mourn them.
@ Iamceebee2:
Judaism is dying in the United States. Statistics tell us that the Intermarriage rate among Jews is better than 50%, and 75% of those Jews will not bring up their children as Jews or even convert to Judaism. The same thing happened in Germany once the Jews were Emancipated back in the early 1800’s. Once the Jews realized that they could have any occupation on par with the Christians, many Jews converted to Christianity, knowing that one day that so called Emancipation could disappear. The Mendelssohn family in Germany was a good example of this situation. Today in the United States we are two generations away from the Holocaust and maybe 5 or 6 generations away from the pogroms that took place in Russia in the later part of the 19th century. Jewish People immediately changed or shortened their names, and over time became less and less Jewish. This is one of the main reasons why when anti semitism is prevalent or overt, there really is no outcry by these Jews. They see other Jews especially those Jewish People who live in Crown Heights and Boro Park as being their enemy, rather than the people who are actually inflicting harm to their fellow congregants. When a Negro is attacked, these Jews will march and protest forever, but when a Jew is attacked, there is total silence. Once can see now just how easy it was for the Brown Shirts during the Nazi era to beat up the Jews, especially when other Jews preferred to remain silent.
@ Ted Belman:
Bravo a million times for these provocative comments…kvelled at the entire article.I,too, have had similar conflicting thoughts regarding my support of the “”alphabet” ersatz Jewish organizations that purport to support Jewry and Israel, but almost wind up as enemies of their purported values. Mr. Lauder, in refusing to support Columbia U for its blatant negativity towards Israel and Jewry , hopefully will awaken Jewry to the threats looming over us, and will STOP future donations given blindly to these groups. Perhaps the time has finally arrived that Tiikuloam will be second in our philosophy and Israel and Jewish welfare will be FIRST, just where it should be.
The physical attacks on Jews in the NYC area,, many of them by black Americans, have continued and increased since Rabbi Spiro wrote this article. From Yeshiva World News:
There was also a break-in at a students dormitory on the Yeshive College campus in NYC a few days ago, at about 4am in which the invader started three fires in different parts of the building. Had the fire department not arrived promptly, hundreds of students could have been killed (this attacker was white). The police announced that they found “no evidence” that the attack was motivated by antisemitism.
At around the same time, a synagogue in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, was invaded in the wee hours of the morning and thoroughly “trashed.” Numerous prayer books, prayer shawls, hummashim and ritual objects were desecrated. Here too, the police decared that they could find “no evidence” of any antisemitic motivation. They are still looking for the perpetrator. The video cameras at the Shul show him to be a white man.
The URL where you can find this article is http://researchantisemitism.ca/sold-out-by-liberal-jews-and-their-establishment/. It is on a website named CRRNS–(Center for Research on Radicalism and National Security). Presumably, Ted has reproduced this article from that site, rather than directly from American Thinker.
I agree with everything that Rabbi Spiro says. But I wish to point out that this column is not posted on the American Thinker site, although many other articles by Rabbi Spiro are posted there, including even in today’s issue. Obviously, it was once posted on American Thinker, but has been removed. It is posted, however, on another site that monitors antisemitism (I don’t have the URL at the moment–will post it later).
The webmaster of American Thinker demands that he be given the copyright of all articles published on the site, and that no article published there can be published elsewhere without his permission. Presumably, Rabbi Spiro decided not to agree to this condition with respect to this particular article, and so the webmaster removed the article of the American Thinker site. Also pr4esumably, Rabbi Spiro agreed to this condition with respect to many other articles his that are available at American Thinker.
@ J:
The progressives are the most antisemitic and they progressively fuel the flames of antisemitism but the liberal JINOs will never learn just as the JINOs in Germany who didn’t learn even as they were pushed into the gas chambers. The DemocRats are behaving like the Nazi Party with their Jew hatred and tyrannical socialist aspirations.
@ Linda Goudsmit:
Thank you for “enshrining,”: if you will, the word “regressivism” as the TRUE identity of the liberal Jews and their allegiance to the Demonrat Party!! I have been saying this for at least the past couple of years and insist that we need to “rescue” the word “progressive” and return it to its original meaning! The Demwits and the liberal Jews have taken that word and turned it into something it is NOT!!
Support the Lawfare Project, they actively fight anti semetism, especially on campus, go to their website and see their lawsuits. The Rabbi should get in touch with them to see what can be done regarding effective lawsuits to fight the antisemites by enforcing Jewish civil rights. Trying to work with progressive Jews is and has always been a difficult and almost impossible task. They are reverting back as the Rabbi notes to their tactics of the 1940’s. They did not learn much from the greatest tradegy to befall our people, and can be accused of aiding and abetting those that want to repeat it with the destruction of Israel. Is there anything in the Torah to explain this and what can be done to help correct this behaviour?
https://www.intellectualjudaismforalljewsandchristians.com/2019/09/defining-anti-semitism-and-what-to-do.html
You may find an answer in this post and the entire blog on how to handle the anti-Semitism and modern paganism.
So true I have for about ten years corrected EVERY person who refers to “progressives.” I have re-branded them “regressives” and then I explain why.
All who agree with Rabbi Spero should also pursue this truthful description. I have opened some eyes. L’shana tovah.
@ Ted Belman:
You are quite right, and I agree with one essential edit – the Reform Religion, its establishment, and its Rabbis all worship Regressivism. There is nothing progressive or Jewish about “Progressivism.” Ordered liberty and a sane society demand emotional adulthood from its citizens. Freedom, tolerance, and individual rights are an adult enterprise. The Democrat party is promising its voters eternal childhood and regressive cradle-to-grave dependence on the government because children are so easy to control. The foolish, regressive, anti-Trump Jewish Democrats are too arrogant to realize they are no different than their Jewish predecessors in Germany in the 30s who believed it could never happen to them – they ignored the antisemitism until it was too late and perished. The Jews in America had better grow up and say NEVER AGAIN because if they ignore and make excuses for today’s antisemitism of course it will happen again!
Linda Goudsmit Said:
They have been duped even moreso by the Reform Religion, its establishment and it Rabbis, all of whom worship progressivism and not Judaism and universalism and not Jewish particularism. They consider the Democratic Party as their political arm.
In the United States, if a mother ignored the abuse of her child the way the liberal Jewish community ignores the abuse of Jews in New York neighborhoods, social services would be called and that mother would be held accountable for her neglect of the safety and welfare of her child. So it is with the liberal Jewish community in America that has been duped by their manipulative radical leftist Democrat party to believe that Tikkun Olam means they are obligated to commit cultural suicide to heal the world. It is time for a reality check – ignoring the violence done to your Jewish family makes you complicit in the crime. You are not healing the world – you are not a hero – you are a useful idiot aiding the virulent antisemites in America. Shame on you.