The Anne Frank House Center says that, “Zionism is about the pursuit of an independent Jewish state.” That was accomplished in 1948, and affirmed in bloody wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and in various attacks and battles since then. On October 7 the Zionist military apparatus, for all its impressiveness, failed because of hubris. Modern Jewish history didn’t start then. The post-World War I San Remo Conference of 1920 was the genesis for current dynamics, when the artificial boundaries of the Levant were created by the victorious Western empires.  

Zionism is abused as a social and religious cudgel by the Evangelical movement, and has become another tool of divisiveness for the American far-right. Evangelicals, not Jews, comprise a greater plurality of Israeli tourism now, as more American and European Jews reject this narrative of a “false idol,” in the words of author and activist Naomi Klein. She wrote in a recent ‘Street Seder Address’ published in The Guardian, that Zionism “is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide . . . . . a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.”

Netanyahu’s virulent Likud form of Zionism, which he has now allied with the openly racist and even genocidal Religious Zionism and Jewish Power blocs, has created an image of the movement that is anathema to many progressive and leftist activists, and it fuels anti-Semitism as less informed people on the right and left conflate this ruthless ultra-nationalism with Judaism. Just as marriages can run their course, leading to a necessary divorce, the time has come for Jews to divorce Zionism. Bibi has become a literal Pharaoh to Palestinians.  Klein adds, “From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.”

Democracy Now! Video: “Naomi Klein: Jews Must Raise Voices for Palestine, Oppose “False Idol of Zionism”

It’s important to remember that “Judaism and Zionism are two distinct terms often intertwined, in reality, they represent rather distinct concepts with different historical, cultural, and most importantly, political implications,” as noted in The Business Standard.  They add, “Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that continues to support the development and protection of the State of Israel. Zionism, at its core, can be understood as a manifestation of Jewish nationalism.”  Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a political ideology.

 The original anti-Zionists were, “from fringe Orthodox sects and maintain that Israel can only be regained miraculously. They view the present state as a blasphemous human attempt to usurp God’s role, and many seek to dismantle the secular State of Israel. However, unlike many gentile anti­-Zionists, Jewish anti-Zionists usually firmly believe in the Jewish right to the Land of Israel, but only at the future time of redemption.”  Though the Neturei Karta were the most visible of observant anti-Zionists, most Haredim in Israel continue that tradition with their refusal to participate in the military or support the embattled state.

Klein asserts that the Zionist ideology, “. . .  is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children. Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child. . . . Including the love we have as a people for text and for education. . . .Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets.” She calls this “scholasticide,” which is parallel to the burning of libraries and synagogues by Nazis.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is one of many Western Jewish organizations that continues to promote the false idol narrative.  They argue that anti-Zionism means that Jews “do not have a right to self-determination — or that the Jewish people’s religious and historical connection to Israel is invalid.” The AJC also says that, “Calling for a Palestinian nation-state, while simultaneously advocating for an end to the Jewish nation-state is hypocritical at best, and potentially anti-Semitic.” The polemical problem is that the Jewish nation is a powerful “fact on the ground,” though threatened by hostile outside forces. Israel is a political reality. But Judaism and Zionism are also threatened internally by Bibi’s leadership record of self-destruction, as his primary aim is political self-preservation. Israel’s economy and security are also undermined by the refusal of the Haredim to support the state and serve in the military.

Not only can Israel remain secure without Zionism; it may become more secure, as the provocations towards Palestinians would cease. The Temple Sunday School narrative minimizes, euphemizes and marginalizes what Palestinians suffered in the Nabka, concurrent with Israeli independence. It’s time to correct that false narrative, and recognize that Zionism has run its course.

The outpouring of objection to American funding of the Israeli war machine is unprecedented in size and scope. In turn the size and scope of government efforts to quash these protests is also unprecedented, now becoming evocative of Kent State in 1970. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when anyone proposes placing National Guard troops on a US college campus. Doing so would be a provocation and incitement for escalation, and that game plan appears to be unfolding.

Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, have all been plagued by departures from their spiritual ethics into orgies of violence. We see this phenomenon in Bibi’s brand of imperial Zionism, Hamas’ and other extremist groups’ violent perversion of Islam, preferring an ideology of hate and misogyny, and the White Christian Nationalist movement in the US, fueled by Trump. The religions of Christianity and Islam have struggled to come to terms with secular modernity, and have seen powerful and violent movements during that struggle. Judaism has the spiritual Reform movement, but no corresponding social-political movement. Judaism came first and has an obligation to take the lead in creating a new paradigm, of a monotheistic, biblically-rooted tradition that nevertheless stands for tolerance and human rights for all. Jews must recognize that the shelf-life of Zionism has expired. Also important is that Judaism is a religion, not a form of ethno-nationalism, despite former President Trump’s attempts to dragoon all Jews into the effort to censor free speech over Palestinian human rights.

Madrid and State College, Pa. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In a statement from March 12, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced the suspension of Professor Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, an internationally renowned Palestinian scholar and a faculty member in the Law School and School of Social Work. The drastic and unprecedented move came after Shalhoub talked in an extended podcast interview about the October 7 horrors and the ensuing devastating war and mass killings in Gaza. Two sentences that were taken out of context dominated the public conversation. First, “And of course, they will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, they will continue with million other lies every day with another story.” Second, “Only by abolishing Zionism, we can continue. This is what I see.” The public outrage, of course, ignored her comments, conveying sympathy to the victims of October 7. In fact, she said, “My reaction to the stories on October 7th was horrified…I will never allow anybody to touch a baby, to kidnap a child, to rape a woman”, adding, “all our lives, we fought for the dignity, for life, for the wholeness of a human and not the opposite.” 

In its statement, the Hebrew University rejected “all of the distorted the statements of Professor Kevorkian”. Emphasizing that the University “is proud of being an Israeli, public, and Zionist institution. As in the past, the heads of the university repeated their call for Professor Kevorkian to find another academic home that suits her position. In this stage, and in order to maintain a safe climate on campus for the benefit of our male and female students, the university decided to suspend her from teaching.” 

But what does it mean when a central institution of higher learning defines itself as Zionist? What does it mean for the non-Zionist or anti-Zionist faculty and students? What does it mean for the Palestinian national minority of seventeen percent that has been victimized by Zionism for years that this institution is Zionist and that any attempt to criticize this ideology faces the strongest possible reaction in the university toolbox? To be clear, Jewish professors have been able to criticize Zionism openly. As a state ideology, it is fair or even necessary to question the value and substance of this ideology. Few Jewish professors–to date– faced suspension or demands to find a new academic home for their critique of Zionisim. At the same time, faculty members at the Hebrew University who have been publicly defending war crimes and cheering on genocidal acts faced no disciplinary actions.

Democracy Now! Video: “”Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism”: Palestinian Prof on Her Suspension from Hebrew University”

Just recently, the International Court of Justice ruled that the allegations that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention are plausible. Too often, the commission of international crimes is made possible through aggressive attempts to silence dissent and punish dissenters. The suspension of Professor Shalhoub by the Hebrew University is only one example of the relentless efforts on the part of Israeli institutions to silence dissent, making the university itself complicit in the atrocities that are being committed in Gaza. The witch hunt against Professor Shalhoub did not start with the decision to suspend her. In fact, it reached unprecedented levels months ago after she signed and circulated a petition accusing Israel of committing genocide. The publication of an official letter by the university accusing her of incitement and sedition not only contravened basic tenets of academic liberty, but it also put her life in real danger, given the rising violence of extreme right-wing activists against Palestinians. If this could be done to an internationally renowned scholar, we can only imagine how easy it would be to intimidate and target junior Palestinian scholars and students. 

Needless to say, the establishment of the state of Israel and the ensuing Palestinian Nakba were marked with attempts to destroy the Palestinian cultural and intellectual life to disorient Palestinians who remained in their homeland. The crackdown on Palestinian academics and Palestinian students in Israeli universities is a continuation of this policy, and it aims at thwarting any attempt on the part of the Palestinian citizens to fight for their national collective rights. Using such coercive measures against the Palestinian intellectual community could have a devastating impact on the Palestinian citizens as a whole, who are already deprived of their right to self-determination under the Nation-State Law.

These disciplining attempts are prevalent in all public spaces. About the same time as the Hebrew University issued its statement, the Israeli Football Association announced it was going to put Bnei Sakhnin (the senior Palestinian football club in the Israeli premier league) in a disciplinary process because its fans cheered loudly during the playing of the national anthem, therefore, not honoring it. This, too, joins the effort to suppress and limit Palestinian voices.   

Israel has long imposed a regime of racial supremacy on Palestinians, the last months have proved that it is willing to escalate in its resort to coercive measures to maintain this regime and to eliminate any meaningful opposition to it. When leading academic institutions become the arm of the state in enforcing such policies, the international academic community should respond promptly and loudly.   

Sonia Boulos is an Associate Professor of international human rights law at Nebrija University and the Co-editor of Palestine/Israel Review

Lior Sternfeld is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University and the Associate Editor of Palestine/Israel Review

IMDB’s laconic description of Glazer’s masterpiece, based on a novel by Martin Amis, goes this way: “Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.” The film is an indictment of what Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.”

The British national Glazer, however, clearly has a difficulty with the Zionist Right, which has appropriated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews as a primary plank in its platform of bestowing impunity on the Israeli government for whatever atrocity, whatever violation of international humanitarian law, whatever genocide its leaders wish to commit.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Glazer said,

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what we did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Here’s the clip:

ABC Video: THE ZONE OF INTEREST Accepts the Oscar for International Feature Film

Daniel Arkin at NBC writes, “Inside the Dolby Theatre, many in the audience could be seen cheering and applauding. Sandra Hüller, the German actor who portrayed Höss’ wife, Hedwig, appeared to be crying and put her hand to her chest.”

He adds, “Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore red pins on the Oscars red carpet symbolizing calls for a cease-fire.”

Glazer’s international platform (19.5 million people watched live) and his universalist sentiments posed a severe difficulty for the Zionist right wing. Glazer was saying that the Holocaust was an event in human history, not solely in Jewish history, and that its lesson is that dehumanization leads to atrocities and even genocide. In wartime Nazi Germany Jews were called “Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures.” And then they were murdered in their millions by the National Socialist government.

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals.”

Glazer is aware that the Hamas commandos who killed over 600 Israeli civilians on October 7, along with some 400 military personnel, also dehumanized those Jews, allowing them to mow down attendees at a music festival and left wing grandmothers at Kibbutz hamlets.

He was saying that this dehumanization, and its consequences in the casual murder of other human beings, clearly needs to be resisted. But how? How? is the existential question of the twenty-first century.

But for the current full-on fascist cabinet in Israel and its cheerleaders in the United States, the Holocaust and October 7 aren’t about universal values, they are about Jews and Zionism. They are antinomian in effect, justifying Israeli troops in committing any action, any crime. They are a get out of jail free card for Zionists. The Right denies that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, even though over 13,000 children have been killed in indiscriminate bombing and another 12,000 women noncombatants have been killed. How else, they ask, could you destroy Hamas? Even President Biden, however, has begun pointing out in public that there are other ways of targeting a small terrorist organization than killing tens of thousands of noncombatants.

Glazer also violated the tenets of the Zionist Right by saying that his film about the Holocaust is not about what people did in the 1940s but about what people do today. His clear implication is that the tactics the Israeli government is using in Gaza must be condemned for the same reason that the Holocaust must be condemned. These actions, while of entirely different scale, are atrocities that spring from a denial of our common humanity.

Glazer’s most controversial assertion was, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people.”

He was saying that the Zionist far right of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich had attempted to hijack the Jewish religion to which Glazer and some of his colleagues adhere, and that he rejects this appropriation.

This statement strikes at the core of Zionist nationalism, which insists that Judaism and Zionism are identical. Non-Zionist Jews from this point of view are traitors. Never mind that in opinion polling significant numbers of American Jews express discomfort with the right wing Zionism that has come to dominate Israeli politics.

Because Glazer’s brief, historic statement profoundly threatened the project of what some have called “Israelism,” a cult-like induction of people into the Zionism=Judaism and “Jews must support Bibi” complex of beliefs, some Zionists decided that he must be smeared and his reputation destroyed.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek deputy opinion editor, author of a book on how “woke” media is allegedly undermining democracy, and inveterate propagandist for the Israeli Right, presented a gross distortion of what Glazer said on X:

I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, "We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness."

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 11, 2024

Even X’s community comments eventually flagged the post as misleading, though it is actually a horrid lie, and it is hard to understand why anyone should ever again take seriously anything she says.

Her posting was widely reposted and paraphrased on the Zionist Right, in a disinformation campaign attempting to make it look as though Glazer were an apostate and had abandoned Jewish values rather than standing up for them.

An attempt was also made to push back against the red pins worn by numerous celebrities at the Oscars, symbolizing their call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (which in polling the majority of Americans of both parties desire).

Foreign policy expert Matt Duss pointed to another disinformation campaign:

pic.twitter.com/h2KG6p0SW1

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) March 12, 2024

Another poster saw a pattern:

Lol.

You can watch the roll out of the propaganda in real time…

As a bunch of geographically dispersed accounts amazingly arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. pic.twitter.com/tJk7NmfI7z

— Conor Hennessy (@typingduck) March 12, 2024

In fact, the red pins were distributed by ArtistsForCeasefire
who said, “The pin symbolises collective support for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all of the hostages and for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,”

Israeli propaganda, or Hasbara, as Duss points out, has reached the level of irrationality and of sheer crazy that characterizes QAnon conspiracies such as Pizzagate and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers.

That is why we increasingly have to consider what comes out of AIPAC, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and other Zionist organizations as QZionism, a form of information pollution.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – I grew up in the least-Jewish Jewish family around in the 1950s. We celebrated Christmas every year in a big-time fashion: tree, decorations, and all. And despite the desires of my dear grandmother, there would be no temple, no Sunday Hebrew school, no religion of any sort. I actually went to a Quaker school and I suspect that the first temple I ever entered was at 13 for a friend’s bar mitzvah. I did have one Israeli buddy for a few years, a neighbor who got a black-and-white TV before we did and so I spent as much time as I could in his apartment until his family went back to the Middle East. Yes, sometime in those early years, I was on the street with my own father when a passing stranger made an antisemitic slur and, being a tough, no-nonsense guy (“Major” Engelhardt as he liked his friends to call him from his years in World War II), my dad went right after him. And yes, one of my first roommates at Yale (which had only removed its Jewish quotas a year or two before I arrived in 1962), someone I grew to like, later told me that his dad, undoubtedly a Yale alumni, had specifically warned him to watch out for any Jew at Yale whose father was in the insurance business. (Consider that a knife through the heart!)

And none of that has ever changed. I married an ex-Catholic, brought my kids up without religion, and though there’s a temple catty-corner to the apartment building I’ve lived in for almost the last half-century, I’ve only been inside it once (for a Pete Seeger concert). And yet, explain it as you will, I take what Benjamin Netanyahu and crew, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, are doing in Gaza in a strangely personal fashion. Yes, I was horrified when Hamas committed its grim crimes on October 7th, but somehow, somewhere deep in my heart, I never thought that the Israelis would respond not just in kind but in a fashion even more horrifying and without end.

I mean, honestly, given the historic suffering of Jews, who the hell kills untold thousands of children in a 25-mile-strip of land; attacks every hospital in sight; instantly cuts off food, fuel, and water to more than two million people; causes massive deaths (a daily toll higher than any other significant twenty-first-century conflict); destroys more than half of that area’s housing; and leaves untold thousands of Gazan civilians starving to death and with untreated illnesses of all sorts — and, after all of that, still isn’t faintly done? Somehow — yes, call it the hidden Jew in me — I take offense at that. And in that context, let me turn to TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte who offers his own very personal look at what being Jewish has meant to him and means to him now in this all-too-hellish world of ours. Tom

Article by Robert Lipsyte:

Eyeless in Gaza: Being Jewish and Being Heartbroken by the War

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives. Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Sandy Koufax all made me proud, while I felt ashamed of Roy Cohn, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.

I never reached such lofty, self-righteous, or even chauvinistic heights or depths, but such figures, positive and negative, offered a comforting structure for my casual, shallow life as a Jew. I rarely observed high holy days. My children were neither bar nor bat mitzvahed. I have lived in a space somewhere between my immigrant grandmother’s anxious response to all current events — “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” — and my father’s snarky yet philosophical “Judaism would be a great religion if you got God out of it.” In my overall indifference to my Jewishness and my unsureness about what it meant to me lay, I thought, a kind of worldliness and emotional integrity. It was enough to attempt to live a decent life, be a sportswriter for the New York Times, write books for adults and children, try my best to do some good works.

Then October 7th arrived. And the response to it.

Middle East Eye Video: Footage from Unrwa shows the vast scale of destruction in Gaza

And soon, I began to wonder what I was so sure that I was unsure about now. With or without God onboard, what kind of Jew must I be right now, as Israelis valiantly defended their homeland and at the same time committed war crimes in my name, while the very words Israeli and Jew were fused in the public conversation?

What could anyone like me do in such circumstances to slow such a horrific drive toward both the destruction of others and self-destruction, while trying to continue the search for some kind of peace? How could we resolve our complicity as bystanders, whether as high-minded Spinoza-style Jews or the lox-and-bagel versions?

I’ve never thought so hard — or helplessly — about anything as I have recently about what it means to be a Jew. How did so many of us, as secular Jews, get to be where we are right now in a country that itself may be coming apart at the seams? How did we become trapped in a mindset that, whether in the Middle East or here, appears to deny a middle ground? I think of Samson in the bible story, blinded and enslaved by the Philistines in Gaza, still managing to pull the temple down around him. Do we still have the strength?

Immigrants and Refugees

Born in 1938, I grew up in New York City’s borough of Queens in an overwhelmingly Jewish community of middle-class strivers, many of whom were the children of late-nineteenth-century Eastern European immigrants. Their dreams were focused on sending their kids to college and moving to the suburbs. In their nightmares were pogroms in Poland (then fading from their collective memory) and the Holocaust, a horror kept fresh by the refugees from Europe who continued to arrive in our neighborhood throughout the late 1940s.

My neighbors hardly received all of the newcomers with open arms. Many of those Holocaust refugees came from Germany and had the stereotypical supercilious attitude of German Jews toward Eastern European ones. The refugees tended to be better educated, more cultivated, and often, despite their state, soon-to-be better off. (Many had relatives already here who would help them financially, house them, and even include them in established businesses.) In the America of that moment, the tattooed numbers on so many of their arms weren’t necessarily viewed with particular sympathy.

And their new neighbors often asked distinctly rude questions: Why hadn’t they resisted the Nazis? Why had they waited so long to leave Europe? It was as if they had decided to be willfully ignorant about how hard it must have been for the refugees to comprehend the way they had been betrayed by their former fellow citizens in Germany and how effective wartime America had been in keeping them out.

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I remember as a boy being confused by the antagonism. Weren’t we all Jews? I had enough problems with the antisemitism of the few gentiles I knew growing up. That included two Catholic cousins I happily played with in summers upstate until, when I was in sixth grade, they told me we could no longer be friends because I had killed Christ. And the slurs hardly ended there. They were usually thoughtless relics of ingrained bigotry, sometimes from the very teachers, editors, and colleagues who would help me most. I found out that, in some fashion, I could let it pass.

My Jewish education didn’t really begin until 1951, after a shotgun bar mitzvah forced by my grandparents. I ended up at a small reform Queens synagogue which was either poor enough or progressive enough to be willing to stage a quickie ceremony for me after only a few months of training in Hebrew. The rabbi, Solomon Landman, insisted that I stay on for confirmation classes. Reluctantly, I agreed and was swept away by his version of Judaism.

The classes were enthralling modern lessons in Jewish pride and accomplishment, highlighting figures ranging from Supreme Court Justices Benjamin Cardozo and Felix Frankfurter to baseball star Hank Greenberg to writers and philosophers like Spinoza to my true hero, Dr. Joseph Goldberger. He was the public health epidemiologist who discovered that pellagra, an often fatal skin disease, was caused by a niacin deficiency. I wanted to start a campaign to rename Vitamin B3, the cure he discovered, Vitamin G.

Ethics and moral decision-making were constant topics for us. We talked about the real meaning of being Jewish, about the importance of accepting responsibility for others, particularly the disadvantaged, about the need for true civil rights and a historical obligation to Black Americans. I was thrilled. The world began to make more sense to me. There was, it seemed, purpose in being a Jew beyond the “people of the book” mantra that always sounded to me like a claim to being a smarter species.

Godless Places

I came to believe that Rabbi Landman had been exiled to that backwater temple because he was so far ahead of his time. If there was a God, He had specifically dispatched the Rabbi to me. I began to look forward ever more eagerly to our weekly meetings. Then, suddenly, he died and my new world closed up. How could God have allowed that to happen? Or had God ever really been there at all?

At 14, I was done with religion. A few years later, Columbia University would prove a fairly godless place, as did the Army. I remember how, one frigid weekend, two other Jewish soldiers and I asked the sergeant in our unit for permission to skip outdoor clean-up duty and celebrate what we described as the holiday of Too Kolt. He consented, but the chaplain’s assistant, a Jew, busted us. Too Kolt was just too cute. It became a good, guilt-free story back on New York’s Upper West Side. My Jewish education, in other words, had become a joke.

That education took another complicated and fascinating turn when I married into a German-Jewish family, the first refugees I came to know well. The Glasers barely made it to America in 1938 with $5,000 in cash, four kids, and a mansion’s worth of furniture which they stuffed into a small house in Buffalo, New York. My father-in-law Willy, the patriarch, had been a factory owner but all his properties turned out to be in communist East Germany, and in that post-World War II, Cold War era there would be no reparations.

Nonetheless, over the years he managed to acquire and operate a thriving downtown photo studio and own apartments in Buffalo’s Black ghetto. He took me along once to collect rents from his “chocolates,” as he called his tenants, people he treated with a patriarchal affection that grated on the son of New York City public school teachers who had worked in Black schools.

After picking up the rents, mostly in cash, we went home for schnapps and reminiscences. Willy had been a corporal in the German Army in World War I — he showed me a depression in his thigh where he had taken a bullet for the Kaiser – and he remained regretful that he had never become an officer, despite his wealth and standing, because he was a Jew. He blamed jealous superiors. (If only the generals knew how he had been discriminated against!)

Believe it or not, he had expected better treatment by Hitler’s government. That man, Willy told me, had some good ideas for Germany. And he had expected Hitler to come to his senses on his urge to destroy Jews, but instead, of course, the Glasers had to flee with my future wife in her mother’s belly.

Willy fit easily enough into my old neighborhood’s stereotype of the German Jew. On paper, he was a white colonial and a slum landlord who found positives in Hitler. Still, I grew fond of him. The world, I realized, was more complicated than I had been led to believe. As it turned out, Willy and I stayed in touch longer than I did with his daughter.

By that time, the early 1960s, we were beginning to truly grasp the horrors of the Holocaust, not to speak of both the idealism and the political conniving that led to the creation of Israel. In some minds now, Zionism and British colonialism are simply lumped together as a pragmatic combination that solved “the Jewish problem,” while letting the Arabs pick up the bill. But that’s indicative of the ideological simple-mindedness that muddies this issue today. In the wake of World War II, the Jews needed a safe place to live, something they had never had, and Israel became a dream of survival.

At the same time, it wasn’t understood in this country that Palestinian Arabs weren’t just Indians to be subdued for the sake of the settlers (as in a John Wayne cowboy movie of the 1950s). Everyone, not just Jews, deserved the promise of “never again.” That still seems to be a hard sell with so many in this country and it doesn’t help that the most vocal advocates for Palestinian equality are often uncompromising young ideologues pitched against billionaire Israel lobbyists and Jews who are for Donald Trump because he’s supposedly on Israel’s side.

As for me, I visited Israel just once, some 20 years ago, reporting on an opera program for the New York Times. Except for airport security, I found everybody I met to be nice. I got greater insight from hearing about the trip my wife Lois Morris took there in 1973 as a travel writer. An Arab waiter followed her from the hotel restaurant and accosted her at the door to her room. A friend of hers appeared. They fought him off and reported him. After she identified the waiter, he was led away and she was told no statement would be necessary. Her word over his was sufficient. He would be in jail for at least six weeks. Almost 60 years ago, she was trapped in our same Israel conundrum — upset by the attack and appalled that the attacker had no rights in that country.

A World of Thugs and Vandals

In 1978, a quarter-century after my rabbi died, I was still raging over my deadbeat God, this time from a room at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. When a staff rabbi walked in to offer religious comfort, I threw him out, asking where this God of his had been while I was getting sick. In a fit of carcinoma bravado, I later wrote about the incident, including a gratuitous shout-out to a street gang, the Jewish Defense League: “If we’re going to have thugs and crazies who vandalize synagogues then we might as well have some who vandalize the vandals.”

Reading that in print was the start of my own experience of waking up. What, I thought, was I saying? Was I taking my cues from the thugs? Are they our teachers? Is that what happens in desperate times?

I was struggling with such thoughts when a letter arrived from Rabbi Alvin Kass, who had been a college classmate of mine, although we didn’t know each other then. Al had led a major conservative synagogue in Brooklyn and was the New York Police Department’s Jewish chaplain. (He’s head chaplain now.) In response to my piece, he gently wrote: “There is more to being Jewish than being categorized as such by a hostile world.”

I accepted his offer to meet and talk. We became friends. Over more than 40 years he’s joined Rabbi Landman as my spiritual advisor, officiating at my wedding, while offering rational possibilities in chaotic times. Of course, given the world we’re in, we’ve been talking far more urgently of late. Yes, Hamas are thugs and vandals, but how is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any different in his behavior?

The truth is we shouldn’t have to choose between them. It’s important to get rid of them both, while, at least in our thinking, separating two power-mad and murderous ruling bodies from their people, most of whom just want peace. How can we use the “ethical monotheism” of Judaism to find common ground and a country for each? We don’t have that answer and don’t even know if it’s possible, but at least we should know what the only true goal is: to end the present horror. And that would be good for the Jews, with or without God.

Copyright 2024 Robert Lipsyte

Via Tomdispatch.com .