After listening to Fresh Air’s interview with Deborah Feldman this week (aired March 15, 2021), the author of the acclaimed memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (Simon & Shuster, 2012) that became the basis of the film by that name starring the award-winning Israeli actress Shira Haas, I was so intrigued by Feldman’s story that I found a longer interview she conducted with the Dutch-born writer Arnon Grunberg in 2017. I was captivated by both conversations, especially as we approach Pesach, our season celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, the redemption of the Jewish people, and our renewal as a community and as individuals.

Deborah (age 36) grew up in the extremist and reactionary Satmar Hasidic sect in Williamsburg, New York. The Satmar community was founded by Holocaust survivors raised to believe that Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was God’s punishment for European Jewish assimilation.

Deborah is bright and articulate, fluent in Yiddish (her first language), English (which she learned by reading English literature on her own and in college after leaving the Satmar community) and German (close to Yiddish that she learned in Berlin). She speaks the three languages without a discernible accent in any of them.

She discusses without restraint her disturbed childhood, her beloved Grandmother “Bubbie,” a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen who raised her and saved her from a mentally ill father and a mother who abandoned her, her failed arranged-marriage, the long process to escape with her son from the toxic reach of the Satmars that sought to destroy her and corrupt her son’s innocence, and her search for her identity as a German national living in her adopted city of Berlin.

Ironically, in Berlin she found the city welcoming to refugees, respectful of human rights, open about Germany’s culpability for the Shoah, and filled with bookstores. She loved books early on in her life and sneaked into libraries to read. Literature became the font of her inspiration towards self-determination.  

Deborah met her ex-husband when she was 17 years old through a match-maker, saw him twice before her wedding, and married him seven months later. He was such a stranger that she didn’t remember his face until they met again at the hupah on her wedding night. During the seven interim months, she was trained to be a dutiful wife, learned the traditions required of Satmar women, and was taught that sex was a necessary religious duty to produce children and rebuild a devastated community. Her grandmother, quoting their rabbi, explained that women cut their hair the day after their weddings to demonstrate to God that they are stringently observant enough so the Almighty won’t punish the Jews again with another Holocaust.

When she escaped with her son to Berlin, the Satmar community prayed for her death and hoped to dance on her grave. They charged that she moved to Germany and became a Nazi to destroy what was left of the Jews.

Deborah now doesn’t want to be identified as a Jew, though she freely speaks about her origins, and considers herself a humanist. She explained that in order to live in a free society she needed to liberate herself from past trauma, “from the inner and outer limits of the program” with which she was raised, to identify as a human being and to empathize with every person regardless of background. A political and social leftist, she has little patience for identity politics that she believes damages society. She argued that people ought to emphasize our universal human identity first; everything else is second. Germany, she says, is the opposite of the melting pot – where everyone can be free to be uniquely themselves without social pressure, obligation, or restraints.

Deborah’s career as a young writer was meteoric. A literary agent read her blog after she left the Satmar community and approached her to publish her book Unorthodox. At the age of 23 she was a complete unknown but ended up in an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC’s The View.

Her second book is called Exodus: A Memoir which she published two years later. It focuses on her life after Satmar as a single mother, an independent woman, and a religious refugee.  

It took courage to break from everyone and everything she knew in the Satmar community. She missed especially her grandmother, but senility was taking her Bubbie’s mind away so Deborah began mourning before her grandmother’s actual death.

Deborah’s story, similar she says to women who escape from other restricted oppressive and abusive religious communities, isn’t unique. She may be right, but hers is an extraordinary story nevertheless.

For the discussion with Arnon Grunberg see – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbKvcTZqNA0

My favorite season of the year is now upon us – Springtime, nature’s way of reminding us that rebirth and renewal are ever within and around us, that there’s a continuum between the physical and the metaphysical, the world and the implicate order of things, the immanent and transcendent.

In Judaism, there’s a blessing for every occasion, and here are a few for this season:

Upon seeing the large-scale wonders of nature: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, osei ma-asei v’reishit – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, Maker of the works of creation.

Upon seeing the small-scale wonders of nature: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, she-kacha lo b’olamo – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, that such as these are in God’s world.

Upon seeing trees blossoming for the first time in the year: Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu, Melech ha-olam, she-lo chised b’olamo davar, u-vara vo b’riyot tovot v’ilanot tovim l’hanot vahem b’nai adam – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, Who has withheld nothing from God’s world and has created beautiful creatures and trees for humankind to enjoy.

Upon seeing flowers and herbs: Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, borei is’vei v’samim – Praised are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, Who creates fragrant flowers and herbs.

I offer you a few poems that may enhance your Seders in the celebration of springtime and renewal: 

“Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away / for, lo, the winter’s past, and the rain is gone; / the flowers appear on earth; / the time of singing is come, / and the voice of the turtle dove is heard; / the fig tree brings forth her green figs, / and the vines in blossom bring forth their fragrance. / Arise, my love, my fair one, come away.” Song of Songs 2:10-13

“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. / The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. / The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. / That it can be good again.” ―Suzanne Collins

“Spring nights I’ll stand in the yard under the stars / Something good will come out of all things yet / And it will be golden and eternal just like that / There’s no need to say another word.” ―Jack Kerouac

“The sun just touched the morning; / The morning, happy thing, / Supposed that he had come to dwell, / And life would be all spring.” ―Emily Dickinson

“’Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What’s it like?’ / It is the sun shining on the rain / and the rain falling on the sunshine, / and things pushing up and working under the earth.”―Frances Hodgson Burnett

“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” ―Mark Twain

“The snow has not yet left the earth, but spring is already asking to enter your heart. If you have ever recovered from a serious illness, you will be familiar with the blessed state when you are in a delicious state of anticipation, and are liable to smile without any obvious reason. Evidently that is what nature is experiencing just now. The ground is cold, mud and snow squelches under foot, but how cheerful, gentle and inviting everything is! The air is so clear and transparent that if you were to climb to the top of the pigeon loft or the bell tower, you feel you might actually see the whole universe from end to end. The sun is shining brightly, and its playful, beaming rays are bathing in the puddles along with the sparrows. The river is swelling and darkening; it has already woken up and very soon will begin to roar. The trees are bare, but they are already living and breathing.” ―Anton Chekhov

Happy Springtime!

Hag Pesach Sameach!

A two-state solution continues to command the support of a majority of Israelis, the equivalent of 65 or 66 seats in the 120-seat Knesset,  but only 20.5 percent of Israeli voters consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict an important electoral issue, according to a new poll commissioned by the Geneva Initiative one week before the 4^th election in 2 years.

For details, see – https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-poll-israeli-leftists-backing-right-wing-parties-to-oust-netanyahu-1.9622279

My friend, Rabbi Ammi Hirsch, Senior Rabbi of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan, has written a powerful and eloquent op-ed challenge in The Jerusalem Post to Israel’s political leadership and American Jewish mainstream organizational leadership to take a public stand against the Haredi political parties and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate that are corrupting Jewish values, Israeli democracy, religious pluralism in the State of Israel, and the unity of the Jewish people worldwide.

Rabbi Hirsch mentions a pivotal trip he led to Israel when he served as the Director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA) in the late 1990s. I was one of about 15 North American Reform rabbis who accompanied him on that journey.

He is right – we met late into the night with Prime Minister Netanyahu to urge him not to change the Law of Return that was being challenged the next day in a bill to be introduced into the Knesset by the Haredi ultra-Orthodox parties and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. The bill would have excluded Jews converted by Reform and Conservative Rabbis abroad from the Law of Return. Netanyahu wouldn’t let us go from that meeting because he understood then how important was the bond between the vast majority of the American Jewish community with the State of Israel. He used persuasion and intimidation to get us to stand down and remain quiet the next day. We and the international leadership of the Reform and Conservative movements held our position of opposition to the change in the Law of Return, and in the end we won that battle.

The decision last week by Israel’s High Court to accept the conversions performed in Israel by Reform and Conservative Rabbis for the purpose of the Law of Return and Israeli citizenship is another important victory in this relentless battle against the corrupting influence of Jewish values, Israeli democracy, and religious pluralism by the Haredi parties and Israel’s Chief Rabbinate.

Rabbi Hirsch wonders where is much of the American Jewish organizational leadership on this issue who have remained silent since the court’s decision. Except for the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructing Judaism movements, J Street and a few other progressive Jewish organizations, we have heard nothing, especially from established American Jewish organizational leadership.

See Rabbi Hirsch’s op-ed here for a more complete discussion: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/we-must-stop-enabling-haredi-domination-of-religion-and-state-opinion-661729

I try and have always tried to understand the thinking of people with whom I disagree, not only because I learn something when I do, but because I don’t claim nor have I ever claimed to be the sole possessor of truth and moral goodness.

But, in the last few years I’ve utterly failed to understand the thinking and morality of the vast majority of Republican leaders (with a few exceptions) and their supporters relative to the immoral, autocratic, and destructive leadership of their party and standard bearer.

My inability to understand continues. I don’t get why not a single Republican lawmaker in the House or Senate voted ‘yes’ on the historic and necessary relief package signed today by President Biden.

Given the historic health crisis caused by the pandemic, the tragic death of more than a half a million of our fellow citizens, the sickening of millions more, the consequential economic hardship, small business failures, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness, the greater economic pressure on states and cities, on schools and hospitals – I don’t get it. How can these Republicans justify failing to act on behalf of their fellow citizens?

They say the bill is way too big – but they had no problem giving a $2 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest 1% in 2017 or in supporting the first $2 trillion relief package when they held the Senate and presidency.

Is their renewed concern really about growing the national debt? Or is it sour grapes that in the last 4 years because of the moral turpitude and political incompetence of their leadership they lost the House, Senate, and presidency? Or is it because they are suddenly opposed to big government now that the Democrats are in control? Or is it that they’re terrified of their extremist and bigoted base and being primaried in the coming elections?

I don’t know the reasons.

Thank goodness the Democrats are now in control. I’m grateful that by passing this relief bill they have done the right thing, and I look forward to their continuing to do the right thing on such important issues as infrastructure, climate, racial justice, immigration, and voting rights.

May they have the wisdom and fortitude to carry on.

The Forverts has released a Yiddish rendition of folksinger Woody Guthrie’s classic song, “This Land is Your Land.”

The music video, which features an international group of Yiddish singers and klezmer musicians, was produced by punk-klezmer musician Daniel Kahn.

While a Yiddish version of “This Land is Your Land” may at first seem far afield from the “dust-bowl troubadour’s” life and work, Guthrie, who was not Jewish, actually had deep personal and artistic connections to Yiddish and Jewish culture. His mother-in-law was the acclaimed Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt and the two often performed their works for each other.

Thanks to Letty Cottin Pogrebin who posted it in her frequent newsletters.

https://forward.com/yiddish/464504/watch-the-forverts-premieres-yiddish-version-of-woody-guthries-classic/

Full disclosure: Rabbi Gilad Kariv is a friend. I like him. I admire him. I have watched him for years skillfully fight the good fight on behalf of Israel’s Reform movement and the causes of religious pluralism and freedom, women’s rights, racial tolerance, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, human rights, and democracy in the Jewish state.

After having run for the Knesset three times over the past ten years, Rabbi Kariv will become in his fourth run a Knesset Member in the center-left Labor Party in the up-coming election. Current national polls show that Labor will earn at least six mandates. Gilad (#4 on the list) will become the first non-Orthodox rabbi ever to serve in the Knesset.

After Gilad secured his spot, the ultra-Orthodox political parties went ballistic against him. Shalom Yerushalmi, political analyst for Z’man Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew current affairs website, wrote that representatives from the right-wing religious parties Shas, United Torah Judaism, and the Religious Zionist Party threatened to boycott Gilad and the Labor Party, refuse to include him in a Knesset minyan, and called the Reform movement a “dangerous cult” that seeks to destroy the foundations of Judaism. They charged that Israeli Reform “represents distorted religion,” that “to come near him [i.e. Gilad] is a danger,” that he is “an idol in the sanctuary.” Israeli social media writers called Reform Jews “scum of the earth, scoundrels,” and that we “should all go to hell.”

Gilad’s candidacy has struck a raw nerve among the ultra-Orthodox because Israeli Reform Judaism increasingly represents the liberal values and inclusive attitudes of an ever-growing number of Israelis who want to celebrate egalitarian non-Orthodox Judaism. Recent surveys show that 13% of all Israeli Jews (800,000) identify as Reform whether or not they are formally members of synagogue communities. This is roughly the same percentage of Israeli Jews who identify as ultra-Orthodox.

Gilad provokes the ultra-Orthodox community’s wrath, hatred, and fear because they do not accept the voice of the “other.” Though we are of the same people, the ultra-Orthodox regard Reform Jews as “strangers.” We are outsiders even as we live enriched Jewish lives. Theirs is a hatred of difference, of dislike of the unlike, and that hatred drives them to autocratically suppress all other Jewish religious streams in Israel outside the ultra-Orthodox world.

Gilad has worn many hats in his public life, career, and devotion to Israel’s security, democracy, religious pluralism, and Jewish character (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Kariv). He was in the IDF Intelligence Corps. He is an attorney with expertise in constitutional law who appeared many times before Israel’s High Court of Justice as Director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the Israeli Reform movement’s social justice arm. He is an Israeli ordained Reform rabbi who for more than a decade served as the Executive Director of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ) and helped grow the Israeli Reform movement. He helped lead the effort to establish an egalitarian prayer platform at the Kotel (Western Wall) culminating with the government officially recognizing egalitarian prayer there.

For the past decade, Gilad has overseen the development of the Israeli Reform synagogue movement of more than 50 congregations, a Young Adult Leadership Forum, a pre-military young adult study and leadership training program, a youth movement and summer camps, early childhood education centers, teacher training programs, progressive Jewish curricula in public schools, and an active social justice movement.

Gilad’s election to the Knesset shines a light on the cultural, religious, and political battle for the heart and soul of the State of Israel between the ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox. That battle is emblematic of contrasting visions within Israeli society as a whole, between religious oligarchy and religious freedom, totalitarian religious extremism and religious liberalism and diversity, the political right and political left, tyranny and democracy, an exclusive society and an inclusive one, the rigid pull of the past and an unfurled thrust into the future, ghettoized isolation and expansive hope. Gilad has been at the center of that struggle for years.

I hope that more Israelis will decide to vote for the Labor Party ticket on March 23 not only because Gilad is a prominent member of the ticket, but to restore the center-left to its historic place in Israeli politics and to be in a position to advocate for and legislate on behalf of liberal Jewish and democratic values.

I am thrilled that Rabbi Gilad Kariv will be a Member of the next Knesset, and I wish him every success.

[Note: This latest column by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President Emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism and a regular columnist in the Israeli daily Haaretz, is an important read in advance of the Israeli elections on March 23. I’m posting it because only those who have a subscription to Haaretz can read it, and it ought to be read by every American Jewish leader, especially in the organizations he mentions. If you know such leaders, please forward this to them.]

Just as Trump normalized the Proud Boys, Bibi is normalizing the neo-fascist Kahanists and their anti-Arab hate. But instead of outrage from AIPAC and U.S. Jewish groups, there’s apologetics, or silence

No more excuses, please.  

Not for the vicious racism and neo-fascism of Itamar Ben Gvir and the band of thugs that he has gathered around him.

Not for Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in a despicable display of political narcissism, stage-managed a merger of right-wing parties that will bring Ben Gvir and his racist cronies into the Knesset.  

Not for AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee, which were critical of Ben Gvir in the past, but, in this Israeli election campaign, have chosen to remain silent.

And not for other American Jewish groups and leaders, who are too often detached and indifferent as an Israeli party promotes extremism, mob rule, and anti-Arab hatred, with the blessing and support of Israel’s Prime Minister.   I am tired of the excuses, the explanations, and the thoughtful “analysis,” all of which fall far short of what is required at this moment: explicit, unequivocal, full-throated condemnation of Ben Gvir and everything that he stands for.

This is a fateful moment for the Jewish world. In 1975, when the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that Zionism is racism, Jews everywhere came together to assert, in outraged protest, that no, it is not. Now, almost half a century later, Ben Gvir, a candidate for the 24th Knesset, spouts racist slogans and justifies them as the natural extension of Zionist and Jewish values.

And thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and his colleagues in the “Religious Zionism” party — which is neither religious nor Zionist — seem assured of at least five seats in Israel’s parliament.  

It may be too late to prevent their election. But it is not too late for American Jews to join with the great majority of Jews in Israel in denying these quasi-criminals the legitimacy that Netanyahu has shamefully bestowed on them. They are distorters and corrupters of all that is sacred and holy in Jewish tradition, and they must be branded as such.   

For those unfamiliar with the background, this is a story that begins with Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American immigrant to Israel who was elected to the Knesset in 1984. In that year, Kahane spoke at an election rally in the Arab-Jewish city of Akko. As reported by Ben Caspit in Ma’ariv, Kahane began the rally with these words: “Shalom Jews, shalom dogs.”

Everyone understood who Meir Kahane was. He celebrated terror and embraced anti-Arab violence. He made no attempt to hide his views or his intentions. Michael Eitan, then a Likud Knesset member, drew up a chart demonstrating that the legislation proposed by Kahane was similar to the Nuremberg laws. Kahane sought, for example, to establish separate beaches for Jews and Arabs and to prohibit Arabs from having sexual relations with Jews.   Kahane’s disciple, Itamar Ben Gvir, mentions his mentor at every opportunity. Ben Gvir lacks Kahane’s flamboyance and charisma, and, as a matter of practicality, has slightly toned down his rhetoric; Kahane was ultimately banned from politics by the courts, and Ben Gvir hopes to avoid that fate. But his racist message is the same.  

Ben Gvir is infamous in Israel for hanging in his living room a photograph of Jewish mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein, who carried out the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron. Ben Gvir eventually took the picture down last year, not because it was wrong but for the sake of “a right-wing victory in the elections.”

In 2019, when Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party was running for the Knesset as part of a coalition with other far-right parties, AIPAC tweeted that it viewed Otzma Yehudit as “racist and reprehensible,” and noted AIPAC’s longstanding policy of refusing to meet with the group. It associated itself with a similar statement by the American Jewish Committee.

This time around, however, both groups have refrained from critical comments, as have most other American Jewish organizations and leaders.  

But this is a serious mistake. In 2019, Ben Gvir’s election to the Knesset was a long shot. This year, he is considered a sure thing, thanks to the intervention of the prime minister. Netanyahu has attempted on previous occasions to create mergers between the Kahanists and other extremist parties, but his efforts in this round of elections have been far more successful. 

Motivated by his desire to win votes for a Likud-led coalition that will make him Prime Minister again and grant him immunity from prosecution for the criminal charges that he faces, Netanyahu did not hold back; he twisted arms, pressured allies, and made promises of power and money to bring together Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. Ben Gvir is number three on the Religious Zionism list, and as noted, is virtually certain to win a Knesset seat.  

But not only will Ben Gvir follow Meir Kahane into the Knesset. Netanyahu has officially announced that if he forms the next government, Ben Gvir and the Religious Zionism party will be part of his coalition.

Netanyahu apologists, both in Israel and America, say: Politics as usual. No big deal, they claim. Bibi is just doing what everyone would do.  

But it is not politics as usual. It is a political earthquake, an indication of the moral degradation that has transformed Benjamin Netanyahu into a Trump-like figure and a caricature of a Zionist leader.

And it is most assuredly not what everyone would do. When Meir Kahane was in the Knesset, he was a pariah, shunned by every major party across the political spectrum. When he would rise to speak in the Knesset, Yitzhak Shamir, the hardline Likud prime minister, would walk out in protest, followed by most members of his party. Legitimacy for Jewish racism? Never. Acceptance on any level? Absolutely not. 

Kahanism was an embarrassment, an impure growth on the outer fringes of Zionism. And Israel’s political establishment – right and left, Likud and Labor – was intent on keeping it there.

But not Netanyahu.  

Bibi, as American Jews are observing with horror, is turning into Donald Trump before our very eyes.

Just as Trump aligned himself with the most violent, reprehensible elements of the American far-right, Bibi has embraced the most violent, reprehensible elements of the settler community. Just as Trump legitimized the militias and the white nationalists, Bibi has legitimized the Arab-haters and the racists on the margins. Just as Trump excused and normalized the Proud Boys, Bibi is excusing and normalizing the Kahanists and the criminal cohorts that champion them. And just as Trumpism radicalized the Republican Party and destabilized American society, leading ultimately to violence and insurrection, Kahanism, if it enters the inner sanctum of Israeli political power, will pose a similar threat to Israeli society. 

Am I overreacting? I do not think so.  

Consider the following: In order for Netanyahu to form a government, he will need a coalition of 61 Knesset members, drawn from the Likud, the Haredi parties, the Religious Zionism party, and Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party. (Bennett has not ruled out joining a Netanyahu government, and in my view will ultimately do so.) According to current polls, Netanyahu is within a seat or two of the 61 he needs. 

If he gets those seats, and he might, he will be prepared to pay a very high price to Bennett, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir to assure their loyalty. And this means he will be completely dependent on them, every minute of every day, for the existence of his government.  

How does Netanyahu justify a coalition that includes Ben Gvir? He says that Ben Gvir will be in the coalition but not in the cabinet. Take note: Benjamin Netanyahu is expecting the citizens of Israel to be grateful to him for taking an unrepentant Kahanist into his coalition but not giving him a government ministry. And, by the way, Netanyahu’s assurances mean nothing. If Smotrich demands a cabinet position for Ben-Gvir as his party’s price for entering the coalition, Netanyahu will agree.

And that is why American Jews must find their voice and condemn Ben Gvir in the clearest terms. And an interesting question, of course, is why they haven’t already done so.  

Responding to questions from Haaretz, UCLA professor of Israel Studies Dov Waxman offers a number of interesting thoughts, including this theory: American Jews have not expressed outrage over Netanyahu’s ties to Ben-Gvir because they have simply given up on the prime minister. He long ago stopped caring about American Jews, and they in turn have stopped being shocked by anything that he does.

Waxman is an astute observer of the American Jewish scene, but he is wrong about that.  

It is a mistake for any Jewish group to suppose that American Jews have lost the ability to be shocked or outraged by the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, the majority dislike him. But most remain closely tied to Israel, and as jaded as they are by Netanyahu’s antics, they still see an embrace of neo-Kahanism as a big step too far.  

Two factors are at play here. First, Israel’s extremist settlers are little known in America, but Meir Kahane is the exception, even 30 years after his death. For American Jews, Kahane is one of their own — a homegrown phenomenon who travelled the path from activist to fanatic on American soil before bringing his racist medicine show to Israel. American Jews remember Kahane, understand him, and despise him, just as they despise those who embrace his teachings and traffic in his anti-Arab vitriol.   Second, American society has been consumed in recent years with a struggle against racism, and American Jews have played a leading role in that struggle. Ben Gvir represents racism run wild, and American Jews will refuse to disregard or whitewash in Israel what they struggle against every day at home.

Let us be clear: An insignificant percentage of Israelis support Ben Gvir and his neo-Kahanist philosophy. As Israel’s political establishment has always proclaimed, Kahane, Ben Gvir, and their supporters do not represent Israel and do not represent the Zionist enterprise. They are, in fact, the antithesis of everything that Jews hold dear.

But there is no denying the danger that now exists. Benjamin Netanyahu, putting his personal interests before the interests of the state that he leads, appears to be creating a space for the Kahanists to emerge from the muck. If he succeeds in activating Ben-Gvir’s movement of degenerate Jewish radicalism, it will not be easy to deactivate it and return it to the depths from which it came.

And this means that American Jews must pound on the table, supporting the anti-Bibi forces that want Ben Gvir to remain the outcast he has always been.

Yes, American Jewish religious and communal organizations usually refrain from involving themselves in Israeli elections. Nonetheless, there are times when Zionist principles, Jewish values, and common decency require Jews of all persuasions to speak up. And this is one of those times.  

Eric H. Yoffie, a rabbi, writer and teacher in Westfield, New Jersey, is a former president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Twitter: @EricYoffie

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-i-m-tired-of-u-s-jews-excusing-netanyahu-and-his-proud-boy-allies-1.9558667

I often think about my heroes, especially in tough times, about the moral compass that guided them and the courage that sustained and fortified them. I have a long list. Many, though not all, were religious figures who challenged prevailing public sentiment and entrenched political power that were obstacles in the way of justice and human rights.

I have just published a blog at the Times of Israel that considers two kinds of politics as encapsulated in the title above. To read the blog go to https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/covenantal-politics-vs-the-politics-of-power/

Following the death of the last of my mother’s generation this past year, my cousins came across two letters from Israel that my mother wrote to our family in late 1970 when she lived for a few months in the heart of West Jerusalem at the now permanently closed Eden Hotel only steps from Zion Square. My cousins scanned and sent these letters to my brother and me.

Our mother died five years ago at the very old age of 98 years, so reading her correspondence from more than 50 years ago was a sudden throw-back to a much earlier time in my life and in the life of the State of Israel.

My mother jumped off the page in her characteristic way as a keen and engaged observer of people and an enthusiastic visitor in the Jewish state in that period of national euphoria following Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. This was her second visit to the State of Israel. During the first, in 1965, Jerusalem was divided, East Jerusalem, the Old City, and the West Bank were part of Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was controlled by Egypt from which the Fedayeen never ceased crossing the border to attack Israelis.

My mother described Israeli life as she encountered it then, the economic deprivations most Israelis felt, the steely Israeli acceptance of the ever-present threat from hostile neighbors, the Israeli personality characterized by the sabra fruit of the cactus, prickly on the outside and sweet within, and her amazement of all that Israel, still a young nation of only 22 years, had accomplished since the pre-statehood period and the establishment of the State in 1948.

In reading my mother’s letters I missed her and felt again her energy, passion, and love for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and our family there and in the Diaspora. I also miss the Israel she encountered in that time.

I spent my first year of rabbinic school in Jerusalem three years later (1973-74). I landed at Lod Airport on June 29, 1973 while Nixon attorney John Dean was testifying in the Watergate trial. I studied there until May 13, 1974. On the flight home, the Maalot massacre grabbed the headlines and shook the Jewish people. I learned of that horrific attack when I landed at LAX the next day. It involved two-days of Palestinian terrorist hostage-taking of 115 Israelis in that northern Israeli town, and ended in the murder of 25 Israeli children.

That event continued a traumatic turning-point year in Israel’s history. In the early days of the war that began on the afternoon of October 6, 1973, Israel was almost overtaken by Egypt and Syria in a coordinated surprise attack on the Jewish people’s holiest day in a war Israel might well have lost had the United States not sent massive re-armaments on the tenth day of the war. Israel’s fortunes then turned and the near disaster became a battlefield triumph ending in an American imposed ceasefire to save Egypt’s surrounded army from total  humiliation and prevent the IDF from occupying Damascus.

To gain a sense of the trauma that the war inflicted upon Israelis, who lost 2,656 soldiers and suffered overall causalities of 11,656, I recommend viewing the recently produced Israeli 10-episode season of “Valley of Tears” (עֵמֶק הַבָּכָא – originally named שְׁעַת נְעִילָה – “Ne’ila time” – HBO Max; dubbed over in English) that tells the story of the fighting on the Golan Heights in graphic detail. A second season is planned to focus on the war in the south.

I was then a 23 year-old student in Jerusalem. Classes were canceled until after the war, and like most of my classmates who volunteered at a wide variety of vital businesses and charitable causes filling in for Israelis defending the state, I spent every night from 10 pm to 6 am helping the skeletal staff of the Berman Bakery in Jerusalem bake nightly 60,000 loaves of bread, much of it sent to soldiers at the Egyptian front.

I’ve often imagined how Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East would be different had PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership been willing to accept Israel’s existence in those years and agree to negotiate an end-of-conflict peace deal for a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and had Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and her government been willing to accept a Palestinian State on its borders. Few were imagining such a possibility then.  

Fifty years is a long time and much has transpired since my mother wrote her letters from Jerusalem. She was in her early 50s then, vital, engaged, enthusiastic, optimistic, and loving. I miss her, and I miss too the Israel of those years, a less polarized nation despite the trauma of war, terrorism, political and cultural division that would eventually challenge the state and the Jewish people.