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What Jewish Extremists Get Wrong—and Right

March 19 2018

Growing up as the son of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, Yossi Klein Halevi was deeply shaped by a sense of Jewish identity, his father’s wartime experiences, and his father’s anger at what he perceived as American Jews’ passivity regarding the fate of European brethren. Halevi himself migrated from the right-wing Zionist Beitar youth movement, to the movement to aid Soviet Jewry that emerged in the 1960s, to Rabbi Meir Kahane’s militant, sometimes violent, and often racist Jewish Defense League (JDL). Sometime after breaking with JDL in the 1970s, Halevi wrote of his experiences in Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, a work whose themes he revisits in conversation with Jonathan Silver. (Audio, 73 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

Read more at Tikvah

More about: American Jewish History, History & Ideas, Holocaust survivors, Jewish Defense League, Soviet Jewry

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic