Jewish Quarterly » Opinion

Towards Democracy

Mike Prashker — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:08:06 +0000

As a British-born Israeli who works to overcome internal divisions within Israeli society, I watched the recent hard-fought British elections with considerable envy.
While comparisons between societies and political cultures are always problematic — and certainly those made between two as different in history and circumstances as our own — such an exercise can nevertheless provide helpful insights. The purpose in this case is not to castigate or excuse the current state of Israeli democracy, it is rather to offer some explanations into its current fragile state and propose some strategies for improvement.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Mike Prashker is the director of MERCHAVIM, The Institute for the Advancement of Shared Citizenship in Israel. He was born in London and moved to Israel in 1978. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces he studied and subsequently taught political science at Tel Aviv University. He worked for ten years at Melitz — The Center for Jewish-Zionist Education before founding MERCHAVIM in 1998.

Delegitimising the Delegitimisers

Daniella Peled — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:01:31 +0000

I first recall hearing the term ‘delegitimisation’ applied to Israel six or seven years ago at a rather turgid conference in Brussels, when Nathan Sharansky presented it as part of his 3D test for unfair criticism of Israel. The way you could detect this ‘new antisemitism’, he said, was if the critic was applying double standards to Israel, demonising the state, or delegitimising its very existence. Cute and tricksy, I thought at the time. But it seems to be a concept which has now come into its own. Delegitimisation has become the catchword of defenders of Israel, a new battle-cry in the fight to defend the Jewish state — and, if some are to be believed, one which presents an existential threat to its existence.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Daniella Peled is editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. A former Foreign Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on international affairs.

Virtual Judaism

Ruth Ellen Gruber — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:09:01 +0000

Representation is a moving target. Jewish culture is undergoing such changes that to pin it down to one representation is an illusion.
Prof. Jonathan Webber, 1999

I’m a Jewish vegetarian atheist.
Jonathan Ornstein, director, Jewish Community Center, Krakow, Poland, 2009

In the mid-1990s I began exploring a phenomenon that I described as ‘filling the Jewish space’ in Europe. Along with the efforts to revive Jewish communal life and reclaim and reassert Jewish identity in post-Holocaust, post-communist countries, I observed what I called a ‘Virtual Jewishness,’ or a ‘Virtual Jewish World,’ peopled by ‘Virtual Jews’ who create, perform, enact or engage with Jewish culture from an outsider perspective, often in the absence of local Jewish populations.
I wrote about non-Jewish klezmer bands, and Jewish museums and Jewish culture festivals organized by non-Jews for a primarily non-Jewish public. And I also described university Jewish studies programmes whose students were mostly Gentile, as well as the commercial exploitation of Jewish heritage, including the promotion of Jewish-themed tourism to synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and other sites of Jewish heritage where few if any Jews live today. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Lessons Unlearned and Learned

Konstanty Gebert — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:04:15 +0000

When will Emmanuel Olisadebe finally become a real Pole? Only when he too apologises for Jedwabne.’ This cryptic Warsaw joke becomes clear only if one knows that Mr. Olisadebe, originally from Nigeria, is the sometime star of the Polish national football team, and Jedwabne is a town in northeastern Poland where 65 years ago the ethnic Polish part of the population slaughtered their Jewish neighbours. Since April 2000, when this previously unknown fact was revealed in a book called Neighbors, written by Jan Tomasz Gross, an émigré Polish professor at New York University, the issue of Jedwabne has provoked a nationwide debate and soul-searching.
As I noted in the previous essay, which deals specifically with the Catholic Church’s reaction to Jedwabne, ironies abound in this debate, ironies that are well reflected in the joke I quoted above. Mr. Olisadebe was himself a victim of Polish intolerance, the butt of vicious racist attacks by hostile fans. Furthermore, ‘real Poles’ is a self-designation often used by Polish anti-Semites, who want to thus differentiate themselves from the rest of the nation supposedly corrupted by Jewish blood and ideas. In other words, a ‘real Pole’ is precisely what Mr. Olisadebe presumably neither would want to, nor could become, while the apology demanded of him is one he certainly neither should, nor could, deliver. In a nutshell: Jedwabne presents everybody with impossible choices and dilemmas.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Steven Pinker & Bencie Woll

Steven Pinker — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:59:39 +0000

BW: Steve Pinker – you’re an ‘academic superstar’. Your books are best-sellers; you frequently appear in the media (and are profiled in literary journals). In Europe — certainly in Britain — there’s a form of academic snobbery against academics who become media figures. Some people have called this the ‘Desmond Morris Effect’ after the zoologist who wrote The Naked Ape. Do you feel any tensions between maintaining your academic and media status and roles?

SP: In America the standard example is Carl Sagan, the astronomer who tirelessly promoted science on television and in magazines, but who was blackballed from the National Academy of Sciences. I think attitudes are changing, as scientists realize the importance of spreading scientific literacy and combating pseudoscience. I have never experienced hostility from my colleagues (many thank me for writing books that explain to their relatives what they do for a living!) It’s possible that I get it indirectly, in journal peer reviews and the like, but I try not to let my mind go there, because it would be an excuse not to take criticism seriously. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Why Anti-Semitism Matters by Denis Macshane

Denis Macshane — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:12:56 +0000

The first political pamphlet I ever wrote was in 1978. It revealed and denounced the indifference of British newspapers and television to the problems facing the black and Asian communities in the UK. It asked why there were no Afro-Caribbean or Asian broadcasters, reporters, news-readers or by-lines in our papers. I cited the anti-Semitism of the Daily Mail and Daily Express in the 1930s when they told readers that too many Jews were being allowed into Britain from Germany and that our small island could not face any more aliens arriving to disturb social harmony or compete for professional jobs. I argued that in some respects the media treatment of the then BME communities in the 1960s and 1970s had some similarities.
The pamphlet provoked outrage in the press. How dare this upstart young activist from the National Union of Journalists tell editors who they should and should not employ! How dare he insist that the racism and anti-Semitism of the National Front (1970s forerunner of today’s British National Party) should be exposed as pernicious evil! How dare he suggest that the xenophobia and attacks on Asians in the Daily Mail and Daily Express should be linked to those papers’ anti-Semitism of pre-war years! Bernard Levin devoted a whole column in The Times to trashing my pamphlet, denouncing my ‘Noddy language’ as unworthy of consideration.
Today everything has changed utterly and I feel vindicated. Some of our finest TV and press reporters and news stars are from the BME community and the appointment of community relations correspondents and investigation of the racism and discrimination that non-white British citizens face is now a norm.
And rightly so. But there is one discrimination that hardly dares spell out its name, and that is the return of anti-Semitism as a powerful political force. I leave to others to debate the rights and wrongs of Israeli government policy and I have no strong views on Jewishness as culture, history, faith or any of the many discussions of Jews and Judaism which fill the pages of this journal or can be found in books galore in many languages. However, I am passionate about politics, about the power of ideology and the strength of the words that shape ideas and meaning into political engagement, organisation, and action.
Neo-anti-Semitism is a new and pernicious twenty-first-century ideology that has steadily gained ground since the century began. Just because Jew-hatred is ancient and anti-Semitism since the nineteenth-century has produced noxious waves of political organisation it is important to recognise that twenty-first-century anti-Semitism is different. Just as there have been different forms of anti-capitalist, or anti-state ideologies so to there are different forms of anti-Semitic ideologies. An ideology provides a picture of the world that explains what is wrong and what needs to be done. It justifies harsh decisions in the search for a greater end which always justifies the means. So the ideology of twenty-first century neo-anti-Semitism seeks to provide a political rationale for attacks on Jews and on Israel. It is true that not every critic of Israel is anti-Semitic. But every anti-Semite hates Israel.

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Communal Singing

Rabbi Savage — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:48:19 +0000

These days, when only the mentally ill, the professionally hired and the irrepressibly Welsh have the nerve to do it, it’s easy to forget there was a time when public singing was as much a part of daily life as public drinking and public moaning about public transport. Students crooned the anthem of their academy, factory workers lullaby’d their shift away, pubs rattled to the rafters with cryptic lyrics involving sailors (I am basing this largely on Ken Loach films: although of the right age to remember such things, I’m also Jewish, with about as much experience of singing in pubs as I have of abseiling down the Alps). My wife’s grandfather serenaded her grandmother beneath her window through the cruel Transylvanian winter. And while not everyone could be a nightingale, even the croakiest crow knew whether he was tenor, alto or baritone. But say serenade or baritone to my teenage Zak, and he’d assume it was new medication for his attention-deficit disorder.

So what’s happened? Have we got so carried away with portable music players that we’ve lost our own voices? A clue lies, perhaps, in the only areas where it is still deemed acceptable to seek choral pleasure in public: places of worship and football matches (to be succinct, then: places of worship). Is it any surprise that song still embraces us where we are closest to collective transport, to the merging of many minds into one transpersonal being? It is significant that both Jews and football fans took to singing in response to a constraint: in the case of Jews, the prohibition against use of instruments, in the case of fans, the prohibition against physically smashing each others’ heads in.
So what can the music of synagogue and stadium learn from each other? Certainly, some football chants have felt the influence of religious hymns. Some of you may remember the awed, haunting paean to George Best that used to drift around Old Trafford like a mist: Geeooooor-giiieeeee. Anfield today resounds with a similarly dirge like: Liiiii-verpuuule. Liiiii-verpuuule. On the chirpier side, fans all over the country regale their rivals with a delightful ode to the rumoured complications in their family relationships: ‘Yer mum’s yer dad, yer dad’s yer mum, you interbred [insert regional name here] scum.’ Though the tune has been mistakenly ascribed to the Addams Family theme, the alert ear will pick up the clear influence of Adon Olam — in tune, if perhaps not lyrical content.
What, then, of influence in the other direction? Although the hymns of the siddur are replete with the yearning, the mourning, the passion and the joy familiar from the terraces, it could be argued that they are lacking the element of bile. For instance, though we rabbis are regarded merely as teachers, not holy men — eminent, perhaps, but eminently human — congregations tend to treat us with a respect out of proportion to our station. Yet some of the irreverence meted upon football referees might be healthy. We would become more assiduous in our scholarship, as well as less prone to hubris, if, for example, the incorrect pronunciation of a rare Aramaic word was met by rowdy chants of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ or ‘What a load of rabbis’.

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The Language Barrier by Gabrielle Rifkind

Gabrielle Rifkind — Mon, 11 May 2009 10:43:11 +0000

Language is the medium that allows us to understand the world. We see nature, society and human motives not as they are but as our language allows us to see.

As a psychotherapist I am keen to understand how hatred and suspicion have become so entrenched in the Palestine-Israel conflict. In my trade, I am trained to look at how individuals or families influence and react with one another. This can be equally true of the political process where history and experience accumulate over time, deeply influencing how nations behave and react to one another. Too often, stories are told – and this is particularly true of the Palestine-Israel conflict – without context and without understanding of the processes that have taken place between people and nations.

Recently I was invited to run a group within the London Jewish community. The aim of the group was to explore some of the deep tensions, scars and splits that have emerged in the community with regard to its relationship with Israel. The underlying thesis was that these splits were not only painful but were undermining effective support for the resolution of the conflict in the Middle East.

The Palestine-Israel conflict evokes such deep polarised emotions in the spirit of ‘for us or against us’ that this very emotion can become part of the problem itself. Loyalty is called on at any price and partisan alignment with one’s own side is perceived as essential. Whether it is within the state of Israel, among the Palestinians themselves or in the diaspora community, anything less than loyal runs the risk of being seen as an act of betrayal.

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There’s No Place Like Home by Joseph Finlay

Joseph Finlay — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:44:40 +0000

Surely we’re all multiculturists now. We accept the necessity of the pluralist democratic state, with multiple groups sharing a contested yet neutral public space. We know, as children of modernity, that we can never be fully ‘at home’, that communities are virtual, free flowing and in flux, and that identities are multiple. We know, from the tradition of post-colonial thought that homelands are always ‘imagined’. We know these things as a society, at least in part, because Jews have taught them to us. As the pioneers of the modern project, Jewish ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were instrumental in creating a world where the borders of nation states were transcended and internationalism became a defining value.

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The End of Diaspora and the Rise of a Global Jewish Community

David Shneer — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:44:25 +0000

Dear Gil,

As a professor of Jewish Studies and an avid reader of the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s daily news reports, I keep up on global Jewish affairs. Lately, I have been struck by the number of stories about Jewish life thriving in places that might seem surprising: a new Jewish radio station and cultural center in Madrid, Indian Jews leaving Israel to go back to India, hip underground Jewish clubs in Moscow.
At the same time, study after study comes out documenting how American Jews in particular, and some parts of global Jewry in general, are becoming less connected to Israel and are less focused on anti-Semitism as a central element of their Jewish identity. What is going on?
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Commentary

Rabbi Savage — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:16:04 +0000

Last Saturday, while watching Preston North End hammer Bristol City, I was struck not for the first time by the sight of my fellow fans sporting headphones. Now, it’s possible that some were listening to music. Perhaps the spectacle of Stephen Elliott bludgeoning the visiting defence is further enhanced by St Matthew’s Passion or Girls Aloud belting into your eardrums. But I’d wager that the majority was listening to the local radio commentary of the very game they were watching. And this got me wondering: why is commentary so important to us? Why does the thing itself, unfolding unmediated before our eyes, not quite satisfy us? Whether our temple be church, mosque, synagogue or Deepdale Stadium, can we not worship silently and without guidance? Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Exclusion

Rabbi Savage — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:28:03 +0000

Of all the wounds that rend the human heart, what aches so keenly or heals so slowly as exclusion? The childhood gang we weren’t allowed to join; the lovers entwined, oblivious to our presence; the decision of Southport’s Reform Synagogue to dispense with our rabbinical services over a matter as trivial as a single Opal Fruit on Yom Kippur; each spurning smoulders on down the years like an Everlasting Light.
And so it has been for all England the last few weeks, as we sat through Euro 2008, envious onlookers at a sumptuous multinational feast. At such times, perhaps, Jews can offer some guidance to our fellow-countrymen. For when it comes to exclusion from the Community of Nations, we have a good millennium or two of experience. As pariahs, we’re unparalleled; as rejects, unqualified successes; as outcasts, way off on our own. So what’s to be done when you’re left without a nation to root for?[hidepost]
First, there is the option of assimilation. This is the one the BBC urged during the Euros, with its strap-line ‘Who will you support?’ If you saw the TV promos, you’ll know just how much the English have to learn about this assimilation business. ‘I’ll go for Romania,’ grinned a bearded skateboarder, ‘Why not? It’ll be funny!’ ‘Italy!’ exclaimed another fan, ‘Cos it’s shaped like a boot.’ Shaped like a boot? When Napoleon asked the Jews of France to define their loyalty to La Republique, they replied as follows: ‘The love of our country is a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so in keeping with our religious views, that a French Jew feels among strangers in England even if he be among Jews.’ Had they followed the promo’s line, it would have been a very different story: ‘France? Ah oui, Empereur, we’re largely in favour. Excellent cheeses. Plus, “France”, it’s such a nice word! It rhymes with “dance” … er, and “lance”, which is coincidentally what you’re now hurling at us …”’
Indeed, when seeking the correct tone the Beeb could have done worse than glance at a Reform siddur: ‘May the Lord bless Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, and all the royal family … May He give His wisdom to the government of this country, to all who lead it and all who have responsibility for its safety and its welfare.’ You see? That’s how it’s done. Earnest, reverential, more or less entirely craven. Following this model, the skateboarder of the promo might restate his preference as follows: ‘I’m supporting Romania. Thank you so much, Romania, for not hurting me. I promise to be good.’
For those who balk at full national identification of this kind, there is a halfway house between patriotism and parochialism. That is to favour a country on the grounds that one of its players plays for your club side. When Liverpool fans support Spain for Fernando Torres’ sake, or United fans roar on Portugal for Ronaldo’s, they are following a venerable tradition of proxy glory-hunting. They remind me of my Aunt Sadie, a self-declared expert on ‘American Culture’ who knows little of Charlie Parker, Orson Welles or Herman Melville, but turns out to be mysteriously clued-up when it comes to Bob Dylan, Woody Allen and Philip Roth. She may be a bit hazy about what the Constitution is, but she’s pretty sure chicken soup is good for it.
So much for assimilation. Alternatively, you can simply exclude your excluders back — and by this alchemy transform exclusion into exclusivity. The knack lies in convincing yourself that no-one else exists: there is only the Nation — exiled, despised, but surviving. So next time England fails to qualify, its fans should ignore the distressing realities of the present and immerse themselves entirely in the past — specifically, the heady days of 1966. In tribute to the famous Russian linesman, they would dress entirely in black, and following the example of Bobby Charlton shave all their hair except for a single wrap-around strand. Changes to the Laws of the Game as they stood in 1966 would be considered abominations, with goalkeepers proudly handling back-passes as if to say, ‘I am a goalkeeper, and no heretical FIFA mandate will stop me using my hands within the area ordained for such practice by our fathers in days of old.’ Daily conversation would revolve entirely around the Third Goal, whether it crossed the line, the position of lines in general and the importance of determining what does and doesn’t cross them. The beauty of this system is that it allows you to exclude not only the supporters of other countries, but any of your fellow-fans who fail to observe the game with the same ritualistic purity as you. They in
turn can look down on you for your anachronistic literal-mindedness, and punkt! — everybody’s happy.
Of course, you could, instead, put your efforts into restoring your place in the Community of Nations. For England, the next opportunity will be the World Cup 2010 qualifiers. Experience tells us, though, that it’s not as easy as it sounds. The men in charge are inept, or corrupt, or both. The tactics are crude and outdated. The press knows no middle ground between blind adulation and fevered hostility. And every time you think you’ve finally won recognition, a couple of years later you have to fight for it all over again.
If those childhood gangs taught us anything, perhaps, it’s that the best response in the face of exclusion is just to laugh it off. After all, the one field where the Jews and the English really do stand apart from the rest of the world is that of self-ridicule. None of that for me, mind. After all, I’m an England fan, a Man City fan and an unemployed rabbi: if there’s one person I’m not accepting ridicule from, it’s me.[hidepost]

Having spent twenty-one years as a rabbi in his native Morecambe, and a brief spell as inside-right for Preston North End, Rabbi Savage is now a freelance Talmudic Scholar.