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Why a Leading American Rabbi Picked a Fight with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister and a leading figure in the Likud, has recently been the subject of two controversies in the U.S. First, a Hillel house canceled, for political reasons, a talk she was scheduled to give. (The Hillel’s director later apologized.) Second, she gave an interview in which she commented that American Jewish teenagers, unlike their Israeli counterparts, rarely serve in the military and are not subject to rocket attacks. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union of Reform Judaism, responded with pique, calling on Benjamin Netanyahu to dismiss her from his cabinet. Leah Aharoni comments:

The real issue is not what Hotovely had to say. The real issue is who she is. When Rabbi Jacobs and his peers look at Hotovely, they see the ultimate other. She is everything they are not. Hotovely is a young, dynamic, religiously observant woman, who wears her wig with pride. She is [non-Ashkenazi] and [politically] right-wing. And since she is poised, attractive, articulate, and intelligent, they also perceive her as dangerous.

Hotovely breaks every stereotype the Reform leaders seem to want their constituents to believe about Orthodox Judaism and the status of women. No, she is not barefoot and pregnant. Yes, she is the new face of religious women in Israel, an engaged, worldly leader, who embraces the traditional values of Judaism, motherhood, and family. And with all her appeal she holds right-wing political views and serves in Netanyahu’s government.

You would think that the same leaders who are valiantly standing up to Hotovely would have had the courage to stand beside her when Hillel caved in to BDS pressure and canceled her talk. They did not. Ironically, the only American group to defend Hotovely and to offer her an alternative venue for her speech was Chabad. The supposedly misogynist “ultra-Orthodox” rabbis went out of their way to protect her right to speak, while the feminist men did not raise a finger to defend her or her right to free speech.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: BDS, Chabad, Israel & Zionism, Israel and the Diaspora, Likud, Reform Judaism

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