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The Biggest Victim in Today’s Election Is Jewish Unity
Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump points towards Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris, during a presidential debate hosted by ABC in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
No matter who wins today’s election, the biggest casualty for the Jewish community will be unity. We allowed ourselves to be pulled into a partisan game, where non-Jewish voices — opportunists on both sides — defined which party is “more antisemitic,” leading us to turn on each other. The only people who win from Jewish disunity are antisemites.
We must remember that we are a people apart. We might be Democrats or Republicans — but only as long as these parties allow us to remain. Both parties contain elements that don’t see Jews as “real” members of their ranks. At any moment, the fringes of each side could pull the mainstream in their direction, and we will find ourselves either shown the door or quietly made to feel unwelcome.
To be clear, the Democratic Party is not “The Squad,” and the Republican Party does not believe in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Jewish Space Lasers.” The parties are more than their loudest extremes. But we have to face the fact that these factions hold influence, and they can pull the broader party platform in directions that aren’t always comfortable — or safe — for us. We can argue over the extent to which these views are tolerated in each party, and we can vote accordingly.
By “unity,” I don’t mean that we should all vote the same way or ignore real issues on either side. I mean that we need to recognize that neither party will always represent what is good for the Jews. Both will court us, both will insist that the other side is a threat, and both will try to lock us into alliances where their interests come first. All our alliances are marriages of convenience.
Take our alliance with Evangelical Christians, for instance. Many of us are fully aware that their pro-Israel stance aligns with our interests today, but this alliance is not without strings. Evangelicals often support Israel because they see it as central to their eschatology, not always because of a genuine affinity with the Jewish people. We are allies — until the day our priorities no longer align. Going “all in” on their agenda is a risk we cannot afford.
This election cycle has exposed just how fractured we are and how much our alliances need rethinking. The old alliances — built on broad social causes, unions, and civil rights movements — are in tatters. We are finding ourselves increasingly pushed to the sidelines of causes we once led. We are not Democrats or Republicans, conservative or liberal. In the end, we are Jews, a people apart, and we must do what it takes to survive.
A few years ago, I spoke with an author who argued that the Jewish community needs to abandon “Tikkun Olam” — the notion that we should dedicate ourselves to repairing the world. His stance was that we should be concerned, first and foremost, with helping other Jews. At the time, I dismissed his viewpoint. As American Jews, we have always taken pride in our sense of justice and duty to broader society. Our pursuit of Tikkun Olam has often been the driver behind our roles in social justice, union organizing, and countless other efforts that uplifted not just ourselves, but all Americans.
Yet here we are, finding ourselves ousted from some of the very movements we helped to shape. The calls for justice are still loud, but our voices are increasingly unwelcome. Now, I am beginning to see the wisdom in that author’s argument.
In this climate, we need a different rallying point. We are not Tikkun Olam and we are not MAGA. We should be wary of both sides’ accusations of antisemitism, for neither side truly has our best interests at heart.
This isn’t to say we need to be centrists. Rather, we need to look both ways, as my mother used to tell me, before crossing the street. We need to hold onto the knowledge that we are a people with a long history, one that has outlasted empires and nations. We need each other to continue that history, no matter the political divisions that try to rip us apart.
Somehow, we allowed these divisions to harden. We forgot that we are one people. Instead, we have looked at our fellow Jews as enemies. We’ve resorted to name-calling, hurling words like “kapo” and “fascist” at each other. Friendships have been broken, families split, and fingers pointed in anger.
Yes, we’re Jews. We argue. Debate is in our DNA. But this has gone beyond debate. Our community’s infighting has provided a gift to our enemies, who look at us — splintered and vulnerable — and smile.
So, when exactly have Jews ever been united? I can think of once within my lifetime. When I was around 12 years old in 1976, my family hosted a violinist named Boris Brant. We lived in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the time, and he was a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union. Brant was one of the Soviet refusniks — Jews who had been denied the right to leave the USSR. He’d been a prominent violin professor in Odessa, but applying to emigrate had cost him his career. He left behind everything he knew to come here and start over as a free man.
His arrival in the US was part of a larger movement. By the 1970s, American Jews of all stripes were rallying around the cause of Soviet Jewry, working to free Jews who wanted to leave. This advocacy led to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which tied US-Soviet trade deals to the Soviet Union’s willingness to allow Jewish emigration. If they wanted favorable trade, they had to respect basic rights. This was one of the rare times that Jews, across all backgrounds, got behind a single cause.
Jackson-Vanik was groundbreaking. Orthodox, Reform, secular, left, right — everyone joined in. Synagogues held rallies, youth groups raised awareness, and Jewish families like mine opened their homes to tell the stories of Soviet Jews. For once, we felt like one community, and the message was simple: Jewish freedom was non-negotiable.
No matter who wins today, we have a serious antisemitism problem in this country. It is a problem that will take all our talents and efforts to address. So much emotion and time is wasted on blaming our fellow Jews for a problem that is not of our own making. We are a talented, brilliant, driven, creative, clever, stubborn people. Let’s focus all that energy on fighting antisemitism — not one another.
Howard Lovy is a Michigan-based author, book editor, and journalist who specializes in Jewish issues. He is currently working on a book, From Outrage to Action: A Practical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. His novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story, will be released in 2025. You can find him on his website or on X.
The post The Biggest Victim in Today’s Election Is Jewish Unity first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Irish School Textbooks Disparage Judaism, Defame Israel, Watchdog Finds
Demonstrators wearing masks depicting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris hold signs, in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, in Dublin, Ireland on Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: Clodagh Kilcoyne via Reuters Connect
School textbooks in Ireland foster antisemitic hatred, downplaying the horrors of the Holocaust and portraying Israel as the obstructive party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a new report.
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se), an Israeli education watchdog group, on Monday released the report, titled “European Textbooks: Ireland Review,” which revealed negative stereotypes and distortions of Israel, Judaism, and Jewish history.
The findings were unveiled amid a surge in anti-Israel animus in Ireland and even the promotion of antisemitic conspiracies by government officials. Against this backdrop, Impact-se found that Irish textbooks authors have stuffed their works with contextt likely to further fuel such an environment.
In one example cited by the report, a history textbook for eleventh graders describes Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II, as a “prisoner of war camp” rather than an “extermination,” “concentration,” or “death camp.” Such a description “minimizes the unique and horrific nature of the Holocaust and the systematic extermination carried out there,” according to Impact-se.
In other textbooks — including Inspire – Wisdom of the World, a religious studies book distributed to students as young as 12 years old — Judaism is described as a war mongering religion which “believes that violence and war are sometimes necessary to promote justice.” Christianity and Islam are more favorably judged as aiming for “peace and justice” and, in the latter, resorting to war only in “self-defense, to defend Islam but not to spread Islam and to protect people who are oppressed.”
The same book goes on to negate the charitable endeavors in which Jewish civil society organizations engage to ease the plight of the marginalized and poor, omitting them entirely from a section discussing efforts to combat homelessness.
“In this chapter, we are going to look at how some Christians and Muslims have responded to this issue by putting their faith into action. We are also going to look at how some non-religious people and organizations respond to homelessness,” Inspire says before continuing to show a series of graphics which present Christians, Muslims, and secular organizations as altruistic and conscientious.
Irish curricula is perhaps most aggressive in discussing Israel and the Palestinians, according to Impact-se. Citing Inspire again, the report revealed that the textbook’s authors chose to propagate the misleading claim that Jesus Christ lived in “Palestine,” a piece of disinformation that has been trafficked by anti-Zionist activists both to diminish Jesus’ Jewish heritage and deny the existence of a Jewish state in antiquity.
“Historical references to Jesus living in ‘Palestine’ without appropriate context can contribute to narratives that challenge Israel’s legitimacy and undermine the Jewish historical connection to the land,” wrote Impact-se, which also noted that a textbook for younger children on the story of Jesus included a comic strip with the words, “Some people did not like Jesus.” The people shown in the comic are visibly Jewish, wearing religious clothing such as a kippah.
“This portrayal aligns with antisemitic stereotypes that have wrongly blamed Jews collectively for the death of Jesus,” the report stated.
Meanwhile, Impact-se noted that Inspire uses the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan to accuse Jews of lacking concern for non-Jews and of oppressing Palestinians for believing that God favors Jews above other groups — baseless claims which the text explicitly applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Having attacked Israel with theological arguments, it moves to the realm of the secular, framing the losses of territory from what would have been a Palestinian state under United Nations Resolution 181 had not Palestinian Arabs — and their allies — launched a series of failed wars to expel Jews from the region as the “Shrinking of Palestine.”
“Similarly, the textbook oversimplifies the issue of Palestinian refugees, neglecting to clarify that the 5 million UN-recognized refugees are mainly descendants of the original refugees, rather than individuals who directly fled their homes,” Impact-se wrote in response to Inspire World‘s portrayal of the historical record. “This crucial distinction overlooks the fact that this is the only case in international law where refugee status is inherited through generations. As a result, the refugee crisis is portrayed as ongoing and substantial, while under normal international law, most of these 5 million people would not be considered refugees.”
In a press release accompanying the report, Impact-se chief executive officer Marcus Sheff called on Irish lawmakers to be an antidote to the poisons of antisemitic bias and blood libel.
“Textbooks are a window into what societies will look like in years to come. As such, Irish textbooks are deeply troubling,” Sheff said. “The Holocaust is glossed over and at times minimized, in an age where the butchering of Jews is fresh in the memory. The Irish curriculum views Jews and Judaism as a lesser part of Ireland’s social fabric, while Israel is exclusively portrayed as antagonistic. In this context, the worrying growing hostility that Jews and Israelis in Ireland are experiencing, should come as no surprise. If Ireland’s leaders wish to reverse this trend, then they must place the country’s curriculum high on their agenda.”
The report came out almost a month after an Irish official, Dublin City Councilor Punam Rane, claimed during a council meeting that Jews and Israel control the US economy, arguing that is why Washington, DC does not oppose Israel’s war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Ireland has been among the most vocal critics of Israel since Oct. 7 of last year, when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded the Jewish state from neighboring Gaza. The terrorists murdered 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and abducted over 250 hostages in their rampage, the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign in Hamas-ruled Gaza aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling the terrorist group’s military and governing capabilities.
Antisemitism in Ireland has become “blatant and obvious” in the wake of the Hamas onslaught, according to Alan Shatter, a former member of parliament who served in the Irish cabinet between 2011 and 2014 as Minister for Justice, Equality and Defense.
Shatter told The Algemeiner in an interview earlier this year that Ireland has “evolved into the most hostile state towards Israel in the entire EU.”
Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state in May, prompting outrage in Israel, which described the move as a “reward for terrorism.”
Israel’s Ambassador in Dublin Dana Erlich said at the time that Ireland was “not an honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Last week, Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris called on the European Union to “review its trade relations” with Israel, after the Israeli parliament passed a law banning the activities in the country of UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, due to its ties to Hamas.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Irish School Textbooks Disparage Judaism, Defame Israel, Watchdog Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Vandals Strike Jewish Fraternity AEPi House at Temple University in Philadelphia
One of two possible suspects who twice vandalized the off-campus house of Alpha Epsilon Pi. Photo: Screenshot/Temple University Police
Anti-Jewish hate reared its head at Temple University in Philadelphia over the weekend, with a spree of vandalisms at the off-campus dwelling of the predominantly Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity.
“Vandalism and harassment are not viable forms of protest,” university president John Fry said in a statement on Monday. “Criminal behavior will not be tolerated, and we cannot allow it to be normalized on our campuses or within our community.”
He continued, “As law enforcement pursues its criminal investigation, the university will also launch its own thorough investigation. Any student found to be involved will face strict disciplinary action under the Student Conduct Code, up to and including expulsion …While incidents like this are deeply unsettling, they will not impact the collective resolve of our community to support Jewish life at Temple University and to respond decisively to antisemitism.”
On Monday, Temple University police released a series of images of the suspected culprits, who appear to be college-age men. One of them concealed his identity, while the other did not.
The first case occurred on Friday and involved graffiti painted on the AEPi residence, although Temple’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) did not elaborate on what was spray painted. Then on Sunday, an individual wrote “antisemitic graffiti” on the residence, according to DPS.
The phrase “Israel [equals] genocide” was reportedly written on the building one of the days.
Commenting on the two incidents of vandalism, the Philadelphia office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said that anti-Zionist hate crimes do not advance the Palestinian cause.
“This is simply harassment of Jews,” the group said. “Thank you to President John Fry for condemning this criminal activity. We hope the investigation is quick and whoever responsible is held accountable.”
The AEPi fraternity has been targeted in four different acts of vandalism or trespassing since early May, The Temple News reported.
The latest vandalizing of the AEPi house was not the first of its kind on US college campuses this semester. Last month, a sukkah was vandalized at Simmons University, located in Boston, Massachusetts. The culprits graffitied “Gaza liberation sukkah” on the structure, which was built for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
“Simmons condemns this antisemitic vandalism of a Jewish religious symbol on our campus. This unacceptable act is being actively investigated as a potential hate crime,” university president Lynn Perry Wooten said in a statement following the incident. “The safety and well-being of our community is our top priority. Speech and behavior that is threatening, harassing, or intimidating are not protected forms of expression and will not be tolerated.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, anti-Israel activity on college campuses has reached crisis levels in the year since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. According to a recent report by the ADL, higher education saw a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena during the 2023-2024 academic school year.
The report added that 10 campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and the University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents — 52 and 38 respectively. Harvard University, the University of California—Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others filled out the rest of the top 10. Violence, the report said, was most common at universities in the state of California, where anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
“The antisemitic, anti-Zionist vitriol we’ve witnessed on campus is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in September, after the report’s release. “The anti-Israel movement’s relentless harassment, vandalism, intimidation, and violent physical assaults go way beyond the peaceful voicing of a political opinion. Administrators and faculty need to do much better this year to ensure a safe and truly inclusive environment for all students, regardless of religion, nationality, or political views, and they need to start now.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Israeli PM Netanyahu Fires Defense Minister Gallant: ‘Trust Has Been Broken’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv , Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: Abir Sultan/Pool via REUTERS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday, citing a lack of trust as Israel continued its military operations against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“Unfortunately, over the past months, the trust between me and the minister of defense has been broken,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “There were significant gaps regarding the management of the [military] campaign, and these gaps were accompanied by statements and actions that contradicted the decisions of the government.”
In a letter reported by Israel’s Channel 12, Netanyahu told Gallant that his dismissal would be effective 48 hours after delivery of the note. “I would like to thank you for your work as defense minister,” the premier wrote.
Netanyahu appointed Foreign Minister Israel Katz to succeed Gallant as defense minister, and Gideon Saar will become the new foreign minister.
The government shakeup came amid not only Israel’s ongoing military campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah but also the looming threat of another direct attack from the Islamist terror groups’ chief backer, Iran.
Last Sunday, Gallant said in remarks to a memorial ceremony in Jerusalem that Iran was no longer able to effectively use its proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon against Israel.
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