Growing Intolerance Threatens the Humane Jewish Tradition

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, there has been much discussion about the impact of the state upon the humane Jewish tradition. Some observers feared that the Jewish commitment to the prophetic tradition and to the promulgation of ethical values and standards would suffer as the needs of a sovereign political entity took their place. The confusion of religion, nationality and politics, it was argued, tends inevitably to denigrate religious faith and universalism.

In her book The Fate of the Jews, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht noted that, “In Israel, Jews have created a mutant, non-Jewish Jew. Jews have become the kind of people their mothers warned them about. Applying my mother’s measurement—‘A Jew doesn’t do this’—it appears that Israel is no place for a Jew.” It is Feuerlicht’s view that “Judaism as an ideal is infinite. Judaism as a state is finite. Judaism survived centuries of persecution without a state; it must now learn how to survive despite a state.”

In 1967, in his widely discussed book, The End of The Jewish People,the French academician Georges Friedmann wrote that Israel “constitutes a new kind of assimilation liable to produce ‘generations of Hebrew-speaking Gentiles’…The ‘Jewish people’ and the ‘Jewish spirit’ are exposed to great perils in Israel.” He added a painful witticism he had heard to the effect that if the Jewish Agency wishes to save Jews, it should help them remain in the Diaspora. Friedmann felt that the Jew who was “Israel-centered” should go there and devote his life and money to salvaging the Israel experiment, while Jews who were not Israel-centered “must be citizens of the state in which they live—having only one allegiance and one country.”

Professor Paul Breines of Boston College, in his book Tough Jews, takes a look at what he perceives as a “remarkable transformation” in Jewish moral identity in America. He notes that for two millennia Jews turned their victimization by anti-Semites into a uniquely gentle, and ethical self-imagery, but that in this century, the Nazi attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews and the creation of Israel created a new Jewish type. This new, “tough Jew...is distinctive precisely because of the Jewish history of weakness and the Jewish claim to the moral high ground of gentleness.”

Within Israel itself, religious freedom as we in the U.S. conceive the term does not exist.

The çminence grise of the tough Jew, in Breines’ view, is Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism which produced, among others, Menachem Begin, Meir Kahane and Yitzhak Shamir. One of Jabotinsky’s colleagues, Avraham Stern (leader of the Stern Gang, a group involved in many acts of terrorism in Palestine), sought political agreement with the Nazis and Italian Fascists in the years prior to 1942. Indeed, Jabotinsky’s own writing sounds much like that of the anti-Semites of his day. In a 1905 essay, for example, he reveals: “Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and imagine his diametrical opposite... Because the Yid is ugly, sickly and lacks decorum, we shall endow the real image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty…The Yid has accepted submission and therefore the Hebrew ought to learn to command…”

At the present time, both in Israel and in the U.S., intolerance seems to characterize Jewish life. While various Jewish organizations spend a great deal of time, funds, and energy combating anti-Semitism, they have tended largely to overlook the extremism which has been steadily on the rise within the Jewish community.

Manifestations of such intolerance are not difficult to discover. Describing a visit to Israel, the Canadian Jewish writer Mordecai Richler, in his book This Year in Jerusalem, reports, “…unable to sleep, I read The-Jerusalem Post in bed... The Post paid tribute to cartoonist Noah Mordechai Birzowski, who had just turned 75. A contributor since 1940 to The Palestine Post, as it then was, and other Israeli newspapers, Birzowski signed his name Noah Bee. One of the cartoons reproduced for the tribute was in two frames with the headnote, ‘FINAL SOLUTIONS.’ The first frame showed Jews in striped concentration-camp uniforms lining up to be consumed in a crematorium, smoke billowing out of its tall chimney. The second frame was a drawing of a couple being married in church, standing before a crucifix, with the footnote ‘intermarriage.’ I did not wake up Florence, my Protestant bride of 33 years, mother of our five children, to show it to her. However, it did occur to me that had Bee been a cartoonist for the Catholic Herald, and had he drawn a mixed marriage couple clasping hands before a Star of David and equated it with genocide, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League would have been on the case in a jiffy, accusing him of racism.”

Widespread Intolerance

Intolerance of this kind is widespread within the American Jewish community as well. “If you’re married to a gentile, you can forget about working as a rabbi, teacher or executive director in a synagogue or school of the Conservative movement—no matter how good a Jew you are,” reports The Forward (Oct. 3, 1998).

That is the policy handed down by the conservative movement’s rabbinical authorities and is prompting new debate about how the Jewish community should respond to the increasing numbers of Jews who marry outside the faith.

The new policy states that congregations and Solomon Schechter Day Schools “should not engage or employ any individual who is intermarried for a position in which he/she may serve as a role model.” The positions mentioned include “rabbis, cantors, educators, teachers of all age groups and subjects, youth workers and executive directors.”

When a Jew and a non-Jew marry, they should not expect a rabbi or cantor even to attend a civil ceremony, much less officiate at the wedding, a statement issued by the Leadership Council of Conservative Judaism declares. Beyond this, says the statement, intermarriages should not even be acknowledged publicly at a service or in a synagogue newsletter.

Within Israel itself, religious freedom as we in the U.S. and other Western countries conceive the term, does not exist. Christians, of course, are free to practice their faith, as are Muslims. But within Judaism, only Orthodox rabbis have any right to perform weddings, funerals or other functions. Freedom of religion for non-Orthodox Jews does not exist.

Reform and Conservative Judaism is regularly denounced by Israelis. At a convention of North American Jews in Jerusalem in November 1998, the head of the Jewish Agency, Avram Burg, declared that the American synagogue is the “symbol of destruction,” and that the new center of Jewish life should be the State of Israel.

Professor Hillel Shuval, a founder of the first non-Orthodox congregation in Israel (Har El Synagogue in Jerusalem), says that, “I went to Israel a Zionist and I still believe in the importance of Israel.” His Zionism, however, has been tempered by what he sees as a dangerous trend in Israel today. Quoting from former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, the chair of the board of advisers of HEMDAT, Shuval asserted that, “Israel is the only democratic society that prevents its Jews from living as they wish. The stranglehold of Orthodoxy deprives Jews of what they’ve been granted in all other democracies.”

It is a unique form of religious intolerance, Shuval states, because it is confined to the Jewish community. The denial of freedom and religious practice does not apply to Israeli Christians and Muslims. Shuval cited advertisements published in Israeli papers by the Chief Rabbinate on a recent Rosh Hashanah warning tourists not to attend Reform or Conservative synagogues, for their “prayers would not be heard by God and the mitzvah of hearing the shofar blown would not be fulfilled.”

Such intolerance can be seen in the U.S, as well, although here, of course, it does not have the force of law. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis in the United States and Canada recently issued a statement declaring that the Reform and Conservative movements are “not Judaism” and urging Jews not to attend synagogues affiliated with these movements.

A prominent Orthodox figure, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, said that the statement by the Union ofOrthodox Rabbis represented the beliefs of Orthodoxy’s right-wing, whose influence is growing at the expense of the more liberal ‘modern Orthodox’ wing. Rabbi Greenberg, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, said: “It does not represent the consensus of the whole community. I think it reflects the extremism that is growing.”

Freedom of Speech Attacked

Within the Jewish community, freedom of speech is under attack. At the Third International Conference of Jewish Media held in January 1990 in Jerusalem, delegations from 27 countries, including the U.S., heard Micheline Ratzersdorfer of AMIT WOMEN state that “before putting pen to paper, Jewish newspaper editors and writers must ask themselves whether what they write may harm Israel, and whether they have the ‘moral right’ to writecritical editorials.” Discussing this conference, columnist Nat Hentoff, a vigorous defender of the First Amendment, noted that, “Addressing the media conference…Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told the Jewish journalists they should exercise caution when they write about Israel....During the invasion of Lebanon, I was traveling quite a lot around the country, and in the federation papers I saw, there was not a critical word to be found about the invasion at the very same time that Abba Eban, among other members of the Knesset, was furiously pointing out the harm—to Israel—being done by that reckless adventure. And those criticisms were getting a great deal of space in the Israeli press.”

In 1998, “Jewish McCarthyites” were charged with attempting to silence those who disagree with their positions with regard to Israel and causing the cancellation of a lecture series to commemorate Israel’s 50th anniversary at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

The Smithsonian, in cooperation with the New Israel Fund, had planned to co-sponsor a series of talks marking Israel’s 50th birthday. The New Israel Fund is a group that supports religious pluralism in Israel, civil liberties and coexistence between Jews and Arabs.

A preliminary draft of the program included as speakers Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, several professors from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an Orthodox Israeli rabbi, an Arab member of the Knesset and two well-known figures in the conservative Likud Party. Among topics to be discussed were the peace process, religion in Israeli life, and the place of Arabs in Israel.

Discussing the attacks on the program, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who is Jewish, wrote: “The American Jewish community has for many decades been a force against intolerance…How surprising it is, then, to find today what can only be called Jewish McCarthyism, the use of hateful smears by a small band of American Jews who want to intimidate into silence those in the community whose political views they dislike...The major Jewish organizations need to reflect on what happened in this affair. If the planned lectures needed broadening, that could easily have been done. Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League was ready to do it, co-sponsoring the event with the New Israel Fund. But the voices of hate prevailed, suppressing the clash of ideas that is the life of America—and of Israel.”

One of those scheduled to speak at the Smithsonian, Professor Ehud Sprinzak of the Hebrew University, declared: “The most amazing aspect of the recent effort to form a Jewish thought police is its incredible provincialism, a narrow-minded conviction that if writers like myself are intimidated and silenced, the American people would only receive the ‘official’ version of the Israeli story. The problem for the new McCarthyites is that the debate they attempt to stifle is waged in Israel in full force….The true problem of the vocal conservatives involved is that they live in a global village in which the effort to police the thoughts of people simply cannot work. What makes them so pathetic, their money and congressional support notwithstanding, is that they are the only ones who do not recognize this reality.”

If intolerance among Jewish groups is growing, intolerance toward the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine is increasing as well. At the funeral in Israel of Baruch Goldstein, the American-born Jewish settler who killed at least 29 Muslims at prayer in a mosque on Feb. 23, 1994, Rabbi Yaacov Perin declared: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Samuel Hacohen, a teacher in a Jerusalem college, said that, “Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew alive, not in one way but in every way... There are no innocent Arabs here, and thank God that one Jewish hero reminded us that it had become almost legal to kill Jews in the street. He is the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect. He was no crazy...Killing isn’t nice, but sometimes it is very necessary.”

When he visited Israel in 1994, author Robert Friedman, who had frequently criticized Rabbi Meir Kahane and various extremist groups, was attacked by a group of Jewish settlers. The settlers said that the attack was a belated show of revenge for Friedman’s “vicious book of lies” about Kahane. Mr. Friedman was in the settlement of Tapuach on the West Bank conducting research on a piece for The New Yorker when he was attacked.

Binyamin Kahane, Meir Kahane’s son and successor as a leader of his right-wing group, makes clear the kind of Israel he seeks, one which is free of any Arab presence and which includes the occupied territories. He states: “The time has come for a decision about what kind of state we want here. The people have to decide whether they want a Jewish state, which means annexing the territories, evicting the Arabs, having Jewish and Zionist education instead of Western education and putting the media in Zionist hands. There is a fundamental contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic state.”

With the acquiescence of American Jewish leaders and groups, Israel has become a bastion of religious intolerance. Only in Israel, as in Nazi Germany, are Jews prevented from marrying non-Jews, or Jews who are considered insufficiently “Jewish.” Over 100,000 Russian immigrants cannot marry in Israel unless they undergo Orthodox conversions because intermarriages in their family backgrounds have left their status as Jews unclear.

Intolerance, it seems, is built into Israel’s institutionalized state-controlled religious life. An example of the mindset of Israel’s religious leadership can be seen in the declaration by Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Kolitz attacking a conference which brought together Jewish and Christian religious leaders to discuss modern challenges. He said that there is “no reason to hold discussions with non-Jewish clergy. The whole concept of inter-denominational dialogue is foreign to Judaism.”

Slowly, some within the American Jewish community are coming to the realization that the Israeli enterprise they have been supporting with their financial aid and assistance has only contempt for them and their religious beliefs and practices.

Early in 1999, a leader of the Reform movement predicted a $100 million drop-off in American Jewish philanthropy to Israel if the Knesset passes two bills that would restrict the very limited privileges of the Reform and Conservative movements. Reform and Conservative leaders have vowed to bar from their synagogues in the U.S. any Israeli lawmakers who vote for the final version of a bill restricting Reform and Conservative conversions in Israel.

If the bills pass, “This special relationship that American Jews had with the State of Israel will be tarnished. I think we’ll see an immediate decline in American philanthropic giving to Israel,” said the executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch.

The president of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, said that if the laws pass, Israel’s next prime minister will be “greeted with hostility and with demonstrations from a very, very angry American Jewish population.” He said the Orthodox chief rabbis and their political allies were trying to vilify the Reform and Conservative leaders. “Somehow, we’re the Satans of the Jewish world,” he said.

“We’re outraged,” said the president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Stephen Wolnek. “If those in power in the state of Israel wish to spit in our eye, they must expect that there will be a reaction.”

The hostility to religious pluralism, the rejection of interfaith dialogue, the contempt for those who are participants in interfaith marriage, the unwillingness to have open discussion and dialogue about religious questions as well as about the state of Israel and its policies and role in the world, is a rejection of the Jewish tradition of compassion and concern for justice.

Those who are concerned about the “continuity” of Judaism in the United States should consider the possibility that it is the Jewish establishment and its policies which may be the perpetrators of the most serious outrages against a genuine Judaism which would have so much to say to the problems faced not only by Jews but by all members of our society. The mounting intolerance that we now see has, as a result, a negative impact upon all of us and upon the search for peace in the Middle East as well.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.