By Charles Jacobs, JNS
Can the “Big Tent” still hold Jewish factions together? Will the Jewish progressives who control most communal organizations be able to “cancel” their ideological foes by redefining what constitutes kosher beliefs?
A committee of Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council will meet on Feb. 5 to consider a petition by progressive members to evict the Zionist Organization of America from its coalition. Similar petitions presented to national Jewish organizations—namely, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the American Zionist Movement—have failed but these persistent efforts, coordinated by Jewish progressives, may well portend an unraveling of the Jewish community’s “Big Tent.”
For decades, umbrella coalitions kept internal differences out of the public eye as much as possible in order to present an image of Jewish unity on vital communal issues. But J Street-affiliated proponents of ZOA’S eviction contend that statements made by its national president, Mort Klein, put his organization “well outside the scope” of the JCRC’s communal discourse. Their specific focus is on Klein’s condemnation of the Black Lives Matter movement as anti-Semitic and his criticism of HIAS for taking a leading role in importing Muslim refugees to America.
Both these matters are, as they say, complex. They are also emblematic of the deepening ideological split within an American Jewish community under mounting assault.
It should be no surprise that the left-right divide in America is mirrored in the Jewish community. The biggest wedge in the Big Tent is driven by divergent views concerning the dramatic rise of anti-Semitism. Inside the community are growing complaints that progressive Jews, who control or are trying to gain control of most Jewish communal organizations, are focused almost exclusively on Jew-hatred coming from the right while ignoring or downplaying animosity from politically incorrect sources: left-wing anti-Zionists, radical Islamists and radical blacks. The response to this concern has not been sober discussion and debate, but rather, an angry labeling of those who bring it as “racist,” “Islamophobic” and “right-wing.” Indeed, it is this very fight that defines the Boston tussle. On the two specific charges against ZOA in Boston:
Black Lives Matter: Nobody wants to live in a country where black lives do not matter. Klein, who was arrested in Mississippi in the 1960s fighting for black voting rights, has repeatedly agreed with the phrase “black lives matter.” But no one can deny anti-Jewish animosity is a problem inside a movement whose leading figures are on record saying and doing hateful things against Jews. Patrice Cullors, a BLM founder, has spoken of “the ways in which, oftentimes, Ferguson felt like Palestine” and “Palestine as the new [apartheid] South Africa,” implying that the supposed murderous crimes that anti-Zionist bigots attribute to the Israel Defense Forces are systemic among American police officers. BLM leaders have been involved in physical attacks on Jewish institutions. BLM also supports the anti-Semitic BDS movement, the worldwide campaign designed to poison decent people’s perceptions of Israel and politically isolate the Jewish state. How much these views have been imbibed by BLM’s grassroots is a matter for research, but surely, no Jewish leader can be ignorant of the frightening rise of black Jew-hatred. And nowhere should it be ignored.
Even more problematic is that assenting to the BLM movement also gives a nod to its worldview—that American society is “structurally racist.” There is an ominous corollary for Jews: If black suffering results solely from what has been done to them through “white privilege,” and if white prosperity is nothing but racist theft, then the most prosperous are the most evil. Jews, we now know, are not infrequently nominated in these discussions as first and foremost among the prosperous, “the 1 percent of the 1 percent.” Jews are now (evil) “whites.” How Jewish progressives can avoid these built-in conclusions, and escape the resultant hatred, none of them say.
We have heard precious little from establishment Jewish groups about these problems, in part I imagine because they may suspect they have been trapped into this blind alley as they seek to align with and promote the progressive agenda. An exclusive focus on the dangers of white supremacist or neo-Nazi anti-Semitism is not only the easy thing for progressives to do—nobody will disagree it’s a danger—but it also happens to be the most powerful distraction from the trap they’ve put us in.
For years now, many Jews have observed their establishment leadership accepting what amounts to politically correct bigotry from the radical left, from radical Islamists and from black supremacists for partisan political reasons. The JCRC/ZOA fight reflects this broad internal conflict.
Muslim Immigration: The HIAS matter is intimately related. In the past, when HIAS was called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, it heroically helped Jewish refugees flee European anti-Semitism to resettle in the United States. Recently, HIAS dropped the “Hebrew” from its title (but not the abbreviation), and kept its machinery (and funding flows) running by simply switching the populations it serves. In recent years, HIAS launched a massive campaign throughout the Jewish community to rescue refugees from Middle Eastern wars—most notably, Syrians. The problem is that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the cultures and regions from which HIAS now brings people are the most anti-Semitic on the planet. Studies of the Syrian government-controlled school curricula reveal that each and every Syrian school child is taught that Jews, because of their “treacherous” rejection of the truth of Islam, are destined for “elimination” in this world and for “hell” in the next. While the United States asks refugees about their past deeds and statements having to do with terrorism, it does not inquire what our incoming neighbors think about Jews—or women or democracy or gays for that matter. HIAS similarly refuses even to ask. The JCRC, ADL and Jewish Federations are mum on the issue as well. How could Mort Klein’s discussion of this problem be seen as anything other than forthrightly speaking an inconvenient truth to entrenched power?
With such fundamental—some would say existential—issues dividing the community, can the “Big Tent” still hold Jewish factions together? Will the Jewish progressives who control most communal organizations be able to “cancel” their ideological foes by redefining what constitutes kosher beliefs?
If the ZOA is expelled from Boston’s JCRC, where will the Jews who agree with Klein’s views go? If they are told that their concerns about leftist, Islamist and black supremacist Jew-hatred are—to use an unfortunate but telling phrase—“deplorable,” what will they do?
Opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss quit her job at The New York Times because, she says, the once esteemed “paper of record” is no longer what it once was, citing her decision to leave after being bullied by colleagues for her focus on anti-Semitism. Many Jews already sense that their communal and defense agencies are no longer what they once were. Evicting Mort Klein’s ZOA from Boston’s JCRC might just convince them that the time has come to break away, that the time of “Two Tents” has arrived.
Charles Jacobs is president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.
Caption: Zionist Organization of America's national president Mort Klein.
Source: ZOA via Facebook.
