Uncategorized
You Can’t Promote Hate Against the Majority of the World’s Jews and Just Call It Politics
“Show Your Jewish Pride” rally at George Washington University G Street Park on May 2, 2024. Photo: Dion J. Pierre
The recent decision by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice v. MIT has been widely mischaracterized as a judicial declaration that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” It was not that.
The court did not issue any sweeping statement about the nature of anti-Zionism. Rather, it affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a pro-Israel group, focusing narrowly on the legal threshold for harassment under Federal civil rights law (Title VI).
The First Circuit held that campus protests and anti-Zionist rhetoric, however offensive, are generally forms of political speech protected by the First Amendment. It concluded that the plaintiffs’ allegations failed to show “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” harassment or “deliberate indifference” by MIT — emphasizing that the university had taken steps to address the situation. In doing so, the court avoided the broader debate over when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism.
That legal restraint is understandable. But the case highlights an urgent cultural and moral failure: the persistent unwillingness of elites, including some in the Jewish world, to recognize and address anti-Zionism for what it is — the latest mutation of the world’s oldest hatred.
Anti-Zionism as the Heir to Older Hatreds
As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and one of the foremost moral philosophers of our age — warned, “The greatest mutation of antisemitism in our time is the denial to the Jewish people alone the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”
Antisemitism, Sacks wrote, never disappears; it mutates — from religion to race to nation.
Anti-Zionism borrows from each earlier form. From Christian antisemitism, it inherits the charge of Jewish moral corruption — the idea that Jews act with singular malice. From racial antisemitism, it takes the belief in a people collectively tainted and unfit to belong among others. From modern Henry Ford style antisemitism, it adapts the conspiracy that Jews secretly control governments and media — projected now onto Israel instead of individuals.
The same libels that once fueled pogroms — Jews poisoning wells, murdering children, or orchestrating global cabals — now reappear in “human rights” reports and social media threads. “Jews rule the world” has become “Israel controls Washington,” a trope embraced by overt Jew-haters like David Duke as “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Government). The medieval libel that Jews “murder children for their blood” has become “Zionists murder children.”
The Globalization of an Obsession
The First Circuit’s failure to see how this ideological continuity operates in practice leaves Jewish citizens vulnerable in an environment where anti-Zionism functions as socially acceptable antisemitism.
Before 1948, antisemites were obsessed with Jews as a source of cosmic evil. Today’s anti-Zionists display the same fixation — only now it is directed at the one Jewish state. Israel, smaller than New Jersey and home to less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, faces opprobrium with an intensity no other nation faces.
China can imprison a million Uyghurs without prompting global boycotts. Russia can annex Crimea and level Mariupol without igniting campus “divestment” campaigns. Yet Israel alone — the world’s only Jewish state — becomes the singular object of global condemnation. The United Nations has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined. That is not mere “criticism.” It is pathology.
A Movement Against the Majority of Jews
This obsession also targets most Jews themselves. Surveys consistently show that over 80% of Jews worldwide identify with Zionism — the belief that the Jewish people have the right to a national home in their ancestral land. Nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel.
To be anti-Zionist, therefore, is to oppose the national aspirations of most Jews and the existence of the state that is home to roughly half of them. The claim that anti-Zionism is merely “political” collapses under this reality. Imagine a movement dedicated to dismantling Italy while insisting it is not anti-Italian, or one demanding the abolition of Armenia while professing no hatred of Armenians. No other nation’s legitimacy is contested this way. Only the Jewish State — and by extension, the Jewish people — is told its existence is conditional.
Old Tropes in New Garb
Haviv Rettig Gur, senior political analyst at The Times of Israel and a brilliant commentator on Jewish history and identity, has written that antisemitism “does not persist because it hates Jews; it persists because it needs Jews — as a canvas on which societies project their anxieties and hatreds.” Anti-Zionism performs precisely this role today. It allows movements and governments to define their virtue by condemning Israel, recasting Jews once again as the world’s moral scapegoat.
The pre-1948 demand that Jews prove their loyalty and moral purity has been transferred to the Jewish state. Every Israeli act of self-defense becomes a test of Jewish worthiness. Every imperfection becomes proof of collective evil. It is no coincidence that antisemitic incidents spike worldwide whenever Israel is forced to defend itself. The emotional and rhetorical link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is direct, measurable, and undeniable.
The Need for Legal and Moral Clarity
Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute and author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018), writes that, “Zionism is the most audacious attempt in modern times to unite faith and peoplehood, memory and sovereignty.” To deny that attempt its legitimacy is to strip the Jewish story of coherence — to say Jews may exist only as victims, never as a nation capable of defending itself.
The US Supreme Court will likely have future opportunities to address cases like StandWithUs v. MIT. When it does, it should affirm that discrimination does not always come wearing a swastika or a white hood. Sometimes it arrives cloaked in the language of “social justice” or “anti-colonialism.” But its targets are the same, and its logic — denying Jews what it grants all others — is unchanged.
This challenge is not only legal but cultural. It demands that we gain the moral and intellectual clarity to recognize anti-Zionism for what it is: the latest mutation of an ancient hatred.
If Jewish history teaches anything, it is that ideas matter — especially poisonous ones. The Supreme Court now has a chance to affirm that civil-rights protections apply to Jews too — even, and especially, when the hatred against them pretends to be virtue.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
Uncategorized
Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”