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Daniel Raiskin, music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, discusses his life – from his boyhood in Soviet Russia to his coming to Winnipeg and his admiration for the Jewish community here

Daniel Raiskin

By BERNIE BELLAN Daniel Raiskin has been the music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra since 2018. This paper has been remiss not to have interviewed Raiskin until now, although to be fair to ourselves, he is an extremely busy fellow,

 so finding a time when he could sit down and talk about his career, what life was like growing up in a Jewish family in Soviet Russia, and how he feels about spending a good part of his time in Winnipeg, was not easily arranged.

But then Covid-19 suddenly took over everyone’s lives – no matter who they are or where they live and, without much planning required, we were able to arrange to speak with Raiskin from his Amsterdam home.
At the outset of our conversation, which was conducted via WhatsAapp on Friday, April 3, Raiskin explained he’s “lived in Amsterdam for 30 years.” While he travels the world serving as guest conductor for many different orchestras, he “shares his time between Winnipeg and Amsterdam. My home is both in Amsterdam and Winnipeg,” he said.
I asked him, since he’s lived in The Netherlands for so many years whether he holds Dutch citizenship? Raiskin answered that he’s been a Dutch citizen for 26 years, although he still “has a Russian passport, too.”

At the present time Raiskin is also resigned, like the rest of us, to remaining in his Amsterdam home with his wife and two children (a son, 21, and a daughter, 16) for the foreseeable future..
“I was actually caught here between two projects – both of which were in Winnipeg,” Raiskin explained. “I was supposed to return to Winnipeg to spend 10 days there, but then things began to get really cloudy and we decided it doesn’t make any sense for me to fly into Winnipeg and get stuck there without my family, so I decided to stay here.”
We discussed how The Netherlands had taken a relatively hands-off approach to the Coronavirus to begin with, but as the danger has become more apparent, the liberal attitudes that most Dutch have in being uncomfortable with seeing their liberties restricted have begun to dissipate.
“People here are used to going to parks and to the seaside, but I’m afraid that on Monday (April 6) the lockdown is going to be announced,” Raiskin observed (on April 3).

Before we began to talk about Raiskin’s musical career, I said to him that I wanted “to take him back to his childhood in St. Petersburg.” I remarked to him that when I was a student in Israel (a very long time ago – 1974-75 to be exact). I became friends with a girl from St. Petersburg, who bragged to me that people from St. Petersburg were so much more sophisticated than Israelis, also that St. Petersburg had “the best ice cream in the world.”
I asked Raiskin whether the part about the ice cream was true.
“Yes, that ‘s very true,” he responded – “at least judging from my kids’ reaction any time we go to St. Petersburg, they say ‘this is really the best tasting ice cream.’ “

I wondered whether Raiskin was a musical prodigy as a child.
“I was not a prodigy at all,” he said. “I took up the violin when I was six – and I didn’t ‘take it up’. I was given it. It’s an old joke that with the wave of Russian Jewish immigration to Israel every second Russian landing in Israel at Ben Gurion Airport had a violin in his or her hands. Those that did not were piano players.”

“I was born into a Jewish family where music played a very important role,” Raiskin explained.
“My father is one of the foremost Russian musicologists (who is also a now retired physicist, Raiskin noted). One of the first sounds I heard when I was born was my brother (who tragically died at a the age of 34) practising his cello. By the time I was six – I like to joke my mother was so tired of carrying my brother’s cello around, she opted for something smaller for me: a violin.”
By the way, both Rasikin’s parents are alive and still living in St. Petersburg, he told me. His father’s first love was always music, Raiskin noted, but as part of the generation that grew up in the Soviet Union following World War II, it was unrealistic for anyone to make a career of music, he explained.
“He was teaching physics at a university in St. Petersburg when he was 35, but he graduated from a music conservatory when he was 40. That goes to show how important music was to him,” Raiskin observed.
“My mother stopped working a year ago (when she was 82),” Raiskin said. “She was a mathematician and a software programmer.”

I asked Raiskin whether his “parents ever endured any discrimination because they were Jewish that you can speak of? ” I added that “I didn’t want to seem naive by asking the question (since anyone who was following the fight of “refuseniks” in Russia attempting to leave Russia at the time that Raiskin was growing up would have known that anti-Semitism was rampant in that country.
” We lived in a country with a great rate of anti-Semitism,’ Raiskin answered. “My parents and my brother and me and friends all around us were all subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism. At some point my family had also made the decision to leave (Russia), but it was too late. The Afghanistan war had broken out and everything was hermetically sealed. We got stuck.”

At that point I said to Raiskin that I wanted to talk about what it was like growing up as a young Jewish boy in Russia at that time – and how much love of music was inculcated into his and his peers’ lives.
“It was like – any given picture of Chagall has a violin in it,” Raiskin observed. “It’s part of the Jewish heritage and DNA; this whole ‘3,000 years of endurance’. Music was one of the things that kept us from getting alienated.”
At the same time though, Raiskin said that “music was not something that I particularly wanted to do. I wanted to play football and ice hockey with my mates outside. As a kid you don’t want to spend hours practising and doing scales for hours, looking out the window of your seventh-floor apartment while other kids are playing outside. I wanted to be more like them.”
“It’s very often a mistake to think that it’s the child who makes the decision at age six or seven to become a musician. Some kids are so incredibly gifted they show a unique talent at such a young age, there’s nothing else they want to do. I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I was one of those kids. I was pretty much normal and not very well behaved; I was pretty naughty.
“It was only later that I developed a real taste for music – and worked hard to become something.”

To that point we hadn’t discussed Raiskin’s particular musical interests. I noted that I had read in various articles and interviews that his favourite composer was Gustav Mahler (who was also Jewish, by the way). I wondered when Raiskin first became interested in Mahler’s music?
“You know, in fact, Mahler was not a composer whose music was very often played in my years in the Soviet Union,” Raiskin explained. “The performances of Mahler were always a great event,” but it was only one or two of his symphonies that were ever played, he noted.
“It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Western orchestras that started to come on European tours that we really started to hear Mahler played. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Mahler’s Seventh Symphony played by the Pittsburgh Symphony…I think this was when it really hit me hard. This is the moment that I said to myself: ‘I’m going to conduct this once’…and I did, on many occasions…I try to conduct his music as often as I can.”

We skipped ahead to Raiskin’s first time coming to Winnipeg which, he said, was in 2015, as guest conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. There were two more appearances as guest conductor of the WSO in 2017 before Raiskin was appointed as music director in 2018.
“It was a lengthy process,” he said, “but I am, in fact, already looking back on five years of being associated with Winnipeg. It’s not like it started in 2018.”
Raiskin also observed that “no matter how successful a relationship a music director has with an orchestra – it’s never a relationship for life. It’s just the nature of the profession. It’s a marriage for a time…It’s not the conductors who play the music; it’s the orchestras. It’s about 67 musicians who play. It’s very important – the mandate we get from the musicians …and at a certain point it’s time for the conductor to go.”
However, Raiskin wanted to make clear that this is not something he is thinking about now. With his second season cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said that, |“more than ever our relationship and interdependency is being tested and I am confident we’ll get out if the crisis, whenever this might be, stronger than ever.“

 

Raiskin explained that, while he is contractually obligated to conduct the WSO for 12 weeks during the year, it is hugely important for any conductor to get out on the road as much as possible. He used the following analogy to illustrate his point: “A hockey player cannot perform at the highest level of his ability if he just plays home games. It’s also important how you perform outside.”

I noted at the outset of this article that, although Daniel Raiskin has been music director of the WSO for two years now, we still hadn’t interviewed him which, given that we’re a Jewish newspaper and he’s Jewish, is something that we should have done much earlier. But, since he’s now had time to get to know Winnipeg – and its Jewish community, much better, I asked him what his impression of our community was?
“I’m sure you’ve met Gail Asper,” I said (tongue in cheek; how could the music director of the WSO not have met one of the foremost supporters of the WSO – and arts in general in this city?)
“Yes, of course,” came Raiskin’s reply, “and many other people, like Laurel Malkin, and Michel Kay and Glenna Kay. You know, Winnipeg became a place where being Jewish for me suddenly started to matter in a very personal and positive way. Growing up in the Soviet Union was definitely not. I was once expelled from a music conservatory for visiting a synagogue – for the first time, just out of curiosity.
“And when you’re in a very cosmopolitan city like Amsterdam, with a very tragic history of Dutch Jews – one needs to acknowledge that there were 150,000 Dutch Jews before the Second World War, and only 15,000 survived – so, for me, connecting to the Jewish community here…like the first Rosh Hashanah dinner I ever attended was…in Winnipeg! Because some friends just took me and my wife and said: ‘Come’. I really feel that it matters in a very positive way that I’m Jewish and I can connect to many people in Winnipeg and many in our audiences are Jewish.”
“I feel more Jewish than ever since coming to Winnipeg,” Raiskin suggested. “Jewish music is so important to me. One of the first things I recorded as a musician – as an instrumentalist, was a complete edition of music for viola and piano by Ernst Bloch, the foremost Jewish composer.”

At the end of our interview we discussed the devastating effect that the current crisis is having on people’s lives – in so many ways. Raiskin said that he was still fully involved in planning for the coming season of the WSO – and for the season after that as well.
In terms of assessing people’s hunger for music, he had this to say: “I think there will be a sense of growing hunger…our souls and our spirits are being so hollowed, there will be a growing need to fill in this gap – and this is where we can step in.”
Raiskin closed our interview with this observation: “I feel: today, more than ever, people feel how important arts and culture are to them. We suddenly realize that we use art to communicate with each other!“

 

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Famous Jewish Horse Jockeys Throughout History

Photo by Milena de Narvaez Ayllon:

When you think of horse racing, what comes to mind? The thunderous applause of the crowd, the heart-pounding thrill of the race, or perhaps the elegant hats and mint juleps of the Kentucky Derby?

Still, if I tell you to picture famous Jewish horse jockeys, does your mind draw a blank? Maybe there are some names among the contenders in the 2024 Kentucky Derby betting?

Well, prepare to be enlightened, entertained, and possibly a bit surprised as we dive into the fascinating world of Jewish horse jockeys throughout history.

Jewish Participation in Horse Racing

Contrary to what stereotypes might suggest – no, not all Jewish professionals are doctors, lawyers, or tech moguls – a number of Jewish athletes have made significant marks in the world of horse racing.

This might come as a shock to some, given the historical and cultural barriers that have often sidelined Jewish participation in various sports. But just like breaking into Hollywood or winning Nobel Prizes, Jewish jockeys have defied odds, gravity, and sometimes, even logic.

The Jewish influence in horse racing is actually quite big. If we look back on some of the most successful horse racing stories, we can see traces of Jewish people involved in the process. Just take American Pharoah for example. The horse that won the Triple Crown (first time since 1978) and the Breeders Cup in the same year.

The owner of American Pharoah was Ahmed Zayat; an Orthodox Jew from Egypt has become one of the most powerful figures in horse racing.

The Beginnings of Jewish Presence in Horse Racing

Let us start with the early days by going back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when horse racing was one of the only activities with considerable popularity.

Jewish jockeys, like as Tod Sloan, began to emerge from the crowd. Sloan was more than simply a jockey; he was a celebrity, renowned for his “monkey crouch” riding style, which transformed horse racing. But why is Sloan not a household name like other sports legends?

Perhaps it is due to the specialized character of horse racing or to the overshadowing of successes in other industries. Whatever the cause, Sloan and his contemporaries paved the way for what was to follow.

Jewish Influence on the Kentucky Derby

The Kentucky Derby is one of the biggest sporting events in the world that dates back 150 years.

Most visitors are astonished to learn that the Jewish community has had a substantial impact on the event’s history and culture.

From horse owners to riders to industry executives, Jews have left their imprint on horse racing.

One of the most well-known is the Wertheimer family, who owned the famous horse Exterminator, who won the race in 1918. The Wertheimers were well-known for their successful thoroughbred breeding and racing enterprise, which they had run for many years.

But we also have the Phipps family and the Zayat family, who also left a big mark on the Kentucky Derby.

Most Popular Jewish Jockeys Over the Years

But Jewish people are not only owners of horses. In fact, we can see many Jewish jockeys that actually made a rather successful horse racing career.

William Harmatz

William Harmatz (February 9, 1931–January 27, 2011) was an American Thoroughbred horse racing jockey who won the 1959 Preakness Stakes riding Royal Orbit.

Harmatz, a Jewish jockey, received the George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award in 1960 for demonstrating high standards of personal and professional behavior on and off the racecourse. He was elected into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1999.

Isaac Murphy

Here we have one of the most successful Jockeys, at least when it comes to win rate.

Isaac Murphy won with more than a third of his rides each year. According to his own assessment, Murphy won 44% of his races. Only 34.5% can be validated in era-specific chart books, although it’s possible that some of his races were not included. Murphy set a level that no other jockey has surpassed.

He won three Kentucky Derbys, five Latonia Derbys, and four of the first five runnings of the American Derby, which was formerly the richest 3-year-old event in America.

Murphy was recognized not just for his horseback riding abilities, but also for his honesty and commitment. He once refused to allow champion Falsetto to lose the 1879 Kenner Stakes, despite bribes from gamblers.

Walter Blum

Speaking of successful jockeys, we cannot miss Walter Blum, a Hall of Famer who had an incredible career in horse racing spanning across almost two decades. When he retired in 1975, only four jockeys actually managed to have more wins than Blum.

Despite being blind in his right eye since the age of two, when he fell from a toy horse, in 1953 he began a career as a jockey, riding his first winner on July 29 at Saratoga Race Course. Blum spent the majority of his 22-year career riding on East Coast tracks from New England to Florida, and he is one of only four riders to have won six races on a single program at Monmouth Park.

However, in the 1960s, he rode seasonally at California races, winning the 1966 Santa Anita Derby, and he also dominated Chicago’s summer racing circuit, particularly at Arlington Park.

Honorable Mentions

We’ve covered some of the most successful Jewish jockeys, but they are not the only ones in the sport. Over the year’s we’ve seen many other Jewish jockeys that might not have the same success, but definitely left a mark on the sport.

Sol Levitch competed in the Kentucky Derby six times between 1929 and 1940, placing in the top three twice. David Erb rode in the Kentucky Derby three times in the 1920s, with his best finish of third place in 1927. Herb Fisher rode in the Kentucky Derby twice during the 1940s, finishing seventh in 1941 and ninth in 1947.

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Features

The real story behind Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion to Judaism

Sammy Davis Jr. (1972 photo - source: Wikipedia)

Jewish comedians made racist jokes about him. Some Black audiences booed him. But his faith was genuine

By Beth Harpaz February 23, 2023

(This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.)

Sammy Davis Jr. was a short and skinny Black man with one eye. His wife was white, his mother was Puerto Rican and he was a convert to Judaism. In the crass and racist world of mid-20th century comedy, he was a walking punchline, even in his own routines.

“When I move into a neighborhood, I wipe it out,” was his standard self-deprecating gag. The line received knowing laughs in the 1950s and ’60s when many towns forbade property sales to Blacks and Jews, and whites often fled when Black families moved into their neighborhoods.

Jokes by his fellow entertainers were crude. In a live skit at the Sands in Las Vegas in 1963, Dean Martin physically lifted Davis up (he weighed a mere 120 pounds) and said, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this wonderful trophy.” At a Friars Club roast, comedian Pat Buttram said that if Davis showed up in Buttram’s home state of Alabama, folks “wouldn’t know what to burn on the lawn.” 

Jewish comedians got their licks in, too. Milton Berle cross-dressed as Davis’ white wife, May Britt, and sang, to the tune of “My Yiddishe Mama,” “My Yiddish Mau-Mau,” a reference to an anti-British rebellion in Kenya. 

At another roast, Joey Bishop said he’d “never been so embarrassed” in his life as when he met Davis in synagogue. When the rabbi came in, Bishop said, “Sammy jumped up and hollered, ‘Here come the judge!’”

This cringeworthy line was delivered by Davis himself in a show at the Copa: “I don’t know whether to be shiftless and lazy, or smart and stingy.”

Some of these jokes implied that it was preposterous for a Black man to convert to Judaism. But for Sammy Davis Jr., being Jewish “was the most logical thing in the world,” historian Rebecca L. Davis told me. “Over and over again, he made this analogy between being Jewish and African American. He was very admiring of the Jewish millennia-long struggle against oppressors and overcoming all kinds of obstacles.” He saw himself as “an outsider and very marginalized, and he could see in the Jewish experience a similarity that really drew him in emotionally.” 

Davis, a history professor at the University of Delaware (and no relation to Sammy), has done extensive research on the entertainer’s conversion, his career and how he was perceived. Her article, “‘These Are a Swinging Bunch of People’: Sammy Davis, Jr., Religious Conversion, and the Color of Jewish Ethnicity,” appeared in the American Jewish History journal in 2016, and she included a chapter about him in her 2021 book, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. Her take is that Davis was not only one of the most successful entertainers of the 20th century despite the many racist barriers in his way, but that his Jewish faith was utterly genuine.

The fateful accident

Davis lost his eye when he crashed his car driving home to California from Las Vegas in November 1954. One of several stories about what sparked Davis’ path to conversion originates with the aftermath of the accident. He wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can, that his friends Tony Curtis, who was Jewish, and Janet Leigh, who was not, arrived at the hospital and Leigh gave him a religious medal with St. Christopher on one side and a Star of David on the other. “Hold tight and pray and everything will be all right,” Leigh told him.

Davis later told Alex Haley in a Playboy interview that he gripped the object so tightly that the Star of David left a scar on his hand, “like a stigmata.” He took it as a sign that he should convert. 

Davis also felt that he owed his career to a Jewish man, Eddie Cantor, who ironically had been one of vaudeville’s best-known blackface performers; Cantor’s act earned him a spot with the Ziegfeld Follies. Decades later, Cantor gave Davis his first big break, a solo televised appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1952, and became a father figure to him. “He saw Cantor’s Jewishness as part of what made Cantor a good person,” said Rebecca Davis. 

In another version of how his car accident led to his conversion, Sammy Davis said that a mezuzah Cantor gave him had mistakenly been left behind in a hotel room the day of the crash. That story transformed the mezuzah “into a talisman,” Rebecca Davis observed, another signpost on the road to his conversion. 

Identifying as a Jew

In his memoir, Sammy Davis recalled Rabbi Max Nussbaum, of Temple Israel in Hollywood, telling him, “We cherish converts, but we neither seek nor rush them.” But he began to publicly identify as Jewish before formally converting. In 1959 he refused to film scenes for the movie Porgy and Bess on Yom Kippur, while Ebony ran a photo of him holding Everyman’s Talmud.

He also repeatedly compared the oppression of Jews to that of African Americans. In his 1989 book, Why Me?, he wrote that he was “attracted by the affinity between the Jew and the Negro. The Jews had been oppressed for three thousand years instead of three hundred but the rest was very much the same.” When he visited the Wailing Wall in 1969, he said Israel was his “religious home.”

The reception from Black audiences

American Jews by and large loved him, and his reception in the Jewish press, including the Forward, was also positive, Rebecca Davis said. But it was more complicated for Black media. On the one hand, she said, he was “this exemplar of Black success, very wealthy, very famous, very successful” in an era of rampant racism.

On the other hand, there was “confusion and anger” about why — as a prominent Black activist who joined marches, raised money and was the United Negro College Fund’s largest donor — Sammy Davis so often connected the civil rights cause to Judaism. While there were a “disproportionate number of Jews who were passionate about civil rights and were willing to put their personal safety on the line to stand up for civil rights,” at the same time, Jews were part of a “broader American culture that saw African Americans as inferiors. That was the prevailing cultural norm among white people in the 1950s,” Rebecca Davis said. Other critics felt that he had converted to ingratiate himself with whites as a way to get ahead.

And when he “let himself be the joke” as part of the Rat Pack — a loose ensemble of performers that included Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford — that “really angered a lot of African Americans who saw him more as performing for white audiences than for Black audiences.”

He formally converted with Britt shortly before their wedding in 1960. She was as serious about it as he was, making sure, even after they were divorced, that their children went to Hebrew school and that their son was bar mitzvahed.

Disinvited from JFK’s inauguration

But their marriage also resulted in one of the most painful episodes of his life, when he was disinvited from John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration. The Democratic coalition that elected JFK included Southern white Democrats, and they did not want a Black man married to a white woman performing at the celebration. “They forced Davis out,” Rebecca Davis said. “He was so stung by that. Here he was on stage and on film with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and the biggest stars of the day, and they all got to go to the inauguration, but he didn’t.”

That rejection helps explain Davis’ subsequent embrace of Richard Nixon. “Nixon, who was politically very devious, figured he could use Sammy Davis as a token African American supporter by overdoing it and inviting him to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom,” Rebecca Davis said. That made him the first Black man to spend the night as a guest in the White House.

Some African Americans saw Davis’ alignment with Nixon and the Republicans as a betrayal. Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier stopped returning his phone calls, Rebecca Davis wrote, and a year or two after he performed at the 1972 Republican National Convention, he was booed at an event organized by Jesse Jackson.

He responded to the boos by saying, “I get it. I understand. But I need you to know, I always did it my way. It’s the only way I’ve got,” Rebecca Davis said. “Then he sang ‘I’ve Gotta Be Me,’ and they gave him a standing ovation.”

A steadfast Jew until the end

His third wife, Altovise, was a churchgoer, but Sammy Davis remained a steadfast Jew until the day he died. Everything he said about Judaism “was said with the utmost sincerity,” Rebecca Davis said. “He never once looked back and said, ‘Oh, that was just a phase I was going through.’ And he never talked about it in terms of his career. He only talked about it as something that spoke to him on a deep level.”

Davis died of throat cancer in 1990 at age 64. Sinatra, Berle, Liza Minnelli, Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and many other celebrities were among thousands of mourners who backed up traffic for 8 miles en route to the funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in LA. Rabbi Allen Freehling presided at the service, but the eulogy was given by Jesse Jackson. 

“To love Sammy was to love Black and white, Black and Jew,” he said, “and to embrace the human family.”

The service also included one last standing ovation for Davis, when they played a recording of – what else? – “I’ve Gotta Be Me.”

Beth Harpaz is a reporter for the Forward. She previously worked for The Associated Press, first covering breaking news and politics, then as AP Travel editor. Email: harpaz@forward.com.

This article was originally published on the Forward

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Features

The Fraught Future of Jewish Studies

By Henry Srebrnik Between 1969, when the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) was founded by forty-seven scholars in Boston, and now, the field of Jewish studies has enjoyed a meteoric expansion. The association, as David Biale, Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis, has noted in the winter 2024 issue of the Jewish Review of Books (JRB), it has some 1,800 members, and programs or individual positions exist at virtually every major North American university.
Benefiting from the postwar diminishment of antisemitism and the assimilation of Jews to American society, the scholarly study of the Jews found homes in university departments such as history, religious studies, and comparative literature.
Could that golden age have come to an end on October 7, 2023? “The sudden explosion of anti-Israelism, with its close cousin, antisemitism, has rendered the position of Jewish studies precarious.” It is too soon to know for sure, he states, “but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that something fundamental shifted on that Black Sabbath and its aftermath, not only in Israel but here in America.”
Jewish Studies programs at American (and Canadian) universities, with seed money provided by Jewish philanthropists, sprang up after the 1967 Six-Day War. And at first its faculty were “pro-Israel.” But Jewish communities never had control of these programs. And as the initial cohort of academics retired, their replacements were different – because the hiring process was, of course, largely in the hands of non-Jewish faculty in the humanities. So the successful candidates were more in line with the new zeitgeist of “interrogating” the “Zionist narrative” and giving prominence to non- or anti-Zionist perspectives among American Jews.
This was inevitable. Even the AJS has moved in this direction. (I am a member and have given papers at AJS conferences.) These programs and departments are, in the final analysis, at best “neutral” and agnostic on the Middle East and Israel.
Daniel B. Schwartz is a professor of history and Judaic studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. In that same issue of the JRB, he recounted that on Oct. 9, a statement from the Executive Committee of the AJS arrived in his inbox. The heading of the email read simply, “Statement from the AJS Executive Committee.”
The statement was about the events of the previous weekend, but the email’s content-free subject line turned out to be symptomatic of what followed. “The members of the AJS Executive Committee,” it said, “express deep sorrow for the loss of life and destruction caused by the horrific violence in Israel over the weekend. We send comfort to our members there and our members with families and friends in the region who are suffering.” In a statement by the AJS, why word “Jews” was nowhere to be found.
“That we have come to the point where the AJS has to resort to such anodyne language,” he asserted, “is truly mind-boggling to me, and frankly shameful.” Why did the half-dozen distinguished scholars who form the Executive Committee of the AJS “feel obligated to obfuscate about the terrible events to which they were ostensibly responding?”
No wonder then, as Mikhal Dekel, Professor of English and the director of the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York, remarked, “For some of my Jewish colleagues, Israel and Israelis have crossed a threshold to become objects of hatred and disgust that mountains of intellectualized and reasoned essays cannot conceal. These emotions were on display on the very day of October 7, even before a single Israeli soldier entered Gaza.” Decades of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and other anti-Israel activism “around me hadn’t prepared me for that.”
Certainly the place of Jewish and Israeli-related courses in the wider world of the humanities will decline dramatically, as “anti-Zionism” takes hold across higher education. For example, Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told us in the February issue of Fathom, a British publication, that “after nearly two decades of trying, the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting finally succeeded in putting this academic group on record opposing Israel.”
The MLA represents about twenty thousand North American literature and foreign language faculty and graduate students. “This time they were riding a wave of anti-Zionist hostility that has swept the academy since Hamas wantonly slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis and foreign visitors in the largest antisemitic murder spree since the Holocaust.”
Nelson reported that at one MLA meeting, “when a member from Haifa referenced Hamas’s sexual violence there was reportedly audible hissing among the anti-Zionist members attending. Was it unacceptable to impugn the character of Hamas terrorists? Were some MLA members on board with Hamas denials?”
A recent trend has seen Jewish academics in Jewish Studies programs at universities like Berkely, Brown, Dartmouth, Emory, Harvard and elsewhere publish widely noticed books that are, at best, “non-Zionist” and in fact sympathetic to the naqba narrative of Arab-Jewish relations during and after the formation of Israel. But why should we be surprised? They are embedded in institutions where the “woke” Diversity-Equity-Inclusion ideology now prevails.
The new book by historian Geoffrey Levin, assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University in Atlanta, “Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978,” is one such work. He writes sympathetically about an early, formative era before American Jewish institutions had unequivocally embraced Zionism.
“The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto” by Daniel Boyarin, the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” and “recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.”
“The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance” by Shaul Magid, the Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, calls for “recentering” Judaism over nationalism and “challenges us to consider the price of diminishing or even erasing the exilic character of Jewish life.”
Derek Penslar, an historian at Harvard, last year published “Zionism: An Emotional State,” which described the situation in the West Bank as apartheid, even though over 90 per cent of Palestinians there are governed not by Israel but by the Palestinian Authority. The point of calling Israel an apartheid regime is to suggest that it must go the way of white-led South Africa.
They are among a spate of books dealing with the history of Jewish dissent over Israel and Zionism, including “The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism” by Marjorie N. Feld, and “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine” by Oren Kroll-Zeldin.
A cold khamsim is blowing across Jewish Studies in academia.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PEI.
 

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