Uncategorized
A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
—
The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israel presses on with settler-fueled archaeology expansion, crippling Palestinian communities
JERICHO, WEST BANK — Israel’s ultranationalist government and its backers are undertaking a major drive to develop and expand archeological sites in the occupied West Bank, with leaders stressing that it is incumbent upon Jewish citizens to connect to their history and heritage.
“He who doesn’t understand the importance of an archeological site for the preservation of the nation doesn’t understand where his future is going,” Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council representing more than 500,000 settlers, told the Forward in an interview on Sunday.
Funding to accelerate the push emerged in May, when the cabinet allocated 250 million shekels (approximately $86 million) to preserve, upgrade and make accessible heritage sites that show ancestral Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria — lands the settler movement contends Jews are entitled to claim.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, linking the drive to Israel entering the 60th year since its victory in the Six Day War, told the cabinet that the funds are an investment “in preserving our past in order to secure our future, strengthen our hold on the Land of Israel and pass on to future generations the heritage, identity and historical truth of our people.”
But Palestinians and left-wing Israeli groups see this as not an innocent educational drive, but rather an intensification of efforts to displace Palestinians and annex the territory.
The archeology drive, reflected in robust budgeting and ambitious planning, including of new roads and wide expropriations of Palestinian land around sites, is moving ahead despite Netanyahu’s decision early this month not to advance a bill creating a separate antiquities authority for the West Bank, both supporters and opponents of the push say. That decision, reportedly to avert international diplomatic fallout, does not affect the allocation of funds. And Ganz notes the Judea and Samaria authority can still be created in the future.
“For sure now we are seeing the largest-scale effort ever to use archeology for annexation,” said Alon Arad, director of the organization Emek Shaveh, a left-wing group watchdogging the use of archeology by settlers as a tool for expansion. The momentum stems from plans made when the coalition took power in 2022 now coming to fruition, and a sense among right-wing parties that promoting Jewish heritage is a way to impress voters for upcoming elections, he added.
Whether this is in Israel’s interest or not is in the eye of the beholder. The flagship site of the archeology drive, the Hasmonean Palaces near Jericho, reflects all that is wrong with Israel’s harsh rule over Palestinians, critics say: settler violence, violation of international law, dispossession of helpless people and a hierarchy in which Israelis have all the rights and Palestinians none.
Digging as a tool
When the Forward visited the site recently, its most striking ruins were those of Palestinian Bedouin homes, 13 of which were destroyed by a settler bulldozer driver during a day-long raid on Feb. 10 by an estimated 50 settlers according to witnesses. Haaretz reported that at least 15 homes were destroyed.
Only 200 meters from the excavations, families are living inside the ruins of their homes. Among them is Ali Kaabnah, his wife Najiba and six children, staying in a house missing one side and with a large hole in the bedroom.
It is half a house, looking as if the driver had been interrupted in the middle of his task. Somehow a refrigerator survived, still plugged in.
“The house doesn’t have supports, it is without pillars. If there is a tremor it will collapse,” Kaabnah said. His and other families have no other place to go and remained even though settlers struck again in late April and last week warned him to leave, he said. “I do not sleep because we do shifts to see if settlers are coming,” he said.
Kaabnah said that he had repeatedly called Israeli police during the bulldozing raid but they did not come. The Israel police did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward about the incident.
Ali’s brother, Yusuf, said he had to be taken to hospital with head injuries during the first attack. and that settlers severely beat his wife, Shikha, 46, during the second attack, resulting in her being treated at a hospital in Nablus. His son Aliyan, 20, was “beaten with clubs without mercy” and his youngest son, 11-year-old Ali, was also attacked, he said: “Until now he screams at night in terror that ‘they are coming.’”
Arad views the settler violence as a state-backed method, along with demolition of homes on the grounds they were built without permits, to drive Palestinians away from the area of the site. The IDF denies siding with settlers and says troops are expected to detain Israeli citizens perpetrating violent acts.
Violence is not the only threatening aspect of the archeology uptick for Palestinians. Land expropriations around sites, which include swaths well beyond the antiquities themselves, are pulling the territory from underneath the Palestinians’ feet, critics say. In the last half year, there have been three land expropriations around sites, the largest at Sebastia in the northern West Bank; plans for roads on land seized from Palestinians to enable easier access, and forays by settlers to establish a presence or control of sites on Palestinian property.
Dror Etkes, a veteran monitor of Israeli policies in the West Bank, says the Sebastia expropriation — said by the government as intended to develop the site for visits by the public — includes the vast majority of the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Sebastia. Emek Shaveh says the expropriation separates the village from antiquities, breaking an ancient attachment central to the identity of locals and harming them economically.
“The goal of Israel’s colonial project is to dispossess and settle,” said Etkes, who heads the West Bank land monitoring group Kerem Navot. “Archeology provides an effective way of doing this.”
Ganz and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu — who famously raised the idea in November 2023 of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza — are particularly enthusiastic about developing the Hasmonean palaces site. Harkening back to the days of Joshua, Eliyahu terms the Jericho vicinity “the gateway to the land of Israel.”
He does not appear to view the settler violence at the site as a problem. In a social media post released the day of the bulldozer raid, he declared that “in every place where there is building on Jewish heritage, we will destroy it.” Speaking from the site, he promised a mass infusion of funds to achieve the perceived revival of its past glory.
Claims of vandalism
At present the Hasmonean Palaces site looks unimpressive, lacking signage, explanations or a path. Only some of the antiquities are roped off. But Ganz describes the site as being on a par with Israel’s most important ones. “I can’t say what the breadth of the site is but it certainly doesn’t fall short of Masada,” Ganz said.
According to the IDF body dealing with civilian affairs in the West Bank, called the civil administration, the site is “of great importance to Jewish heritage as well as to the architecture of the early Roman period.”
“It was built as a winter palace for the Hasmoneans in the first century BCE and served the Hasmonean dynasty for approximately 200 years,” the civil administration wrote in a statement. Subsequently during the reign of Herod there was also significant construction including a fortified palace, a bridge and a sunken garden, it added.
Ganz says the site needs to be safeguarded from what he claims is deliberate and systematic destruction by the Palestinian Authority, which he alleges has targeted it and other sites in a bid to erase evidence of Jewish ties to the land. The Civil Administration statement also cited vandalism as a major problem, though it did not specify involvement of the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian Authority assistant deputy minister of tourism and antiquities Jehad Yasin said in remarks to the Forward that allegations of PA culpability aim to enable Israel to take over West Bank sites. “We haven’t done that. We do our best to keep our sites and if someone does something it doesn’t mean you have the right to take this site,” he said.
Yasin stressed that for an occupying power to expand sites and carry out anything other than salvage excavations violates international law. Referring to the Israeli plans at the site near Jericho, he said: “They don’t have the right to make an archeological park or an excavation. It’s a Palestinian site.”
Arad agrees Hasmonean Palaces is an important site but stresses that this in no way justifies harming Palestinians.
Ganz’s vision for the site includes new excavations, touching up finds to preserve them and steps to “absorb the public.” A new access road is seen as essential for tourism, and he wants to see a convenience store along with state-of-the-art scanning capability enabling visitors to explore information about the site.
The land for the road has already been seized by military order from Palestinians, Etkes said, adding that when it is paved it will take less than a half hour to drive from Jerusalem to the site. What’s more, according to Etkes an illegal outpost overlooking the site and situated next to an army intelligence base is on the way to becoming a full-fledged settlement.
Arad says all of this amounts to Israel turning the site into a “touristic settlement,” something he stresses has been done previously on a large scale at the popular City of David site in occupied East Jerusalem.
“You change the identity so that from a village on the outskirts of Jericho it becomes a palace of a dynasty. You don’t need actual settlers there, it’s enough to build an access road, put up a fence and whatever comes with tourist development-a kiosk, a parking lot, someone to guard it.” Arad said.
The goal, in his view, is to woo the public to the settler view that the West Bank is part of Israel. “You start bringing in tourists and it’s a normalizing process for people to go inside the West Bank and return to Haifa or wherever they are from,” he said. “They go in and out and it was fun for them and you create the idea that this is part of Israel.”
As for the possibility of there being an Arab presence at the Hasmonean Palaces site, Ganz said: “If they don’t harm the site they will be allowed gladly. But if, God forbid, there are security incidents or harm to the site, then they can’t be there.”
Ganz stressed that the homes at the site needed to be destroyed for being illegally built, but that the demolition should have been done by the state and not what he depicted as a lone deviant. “No one is permitted to take the law into their own hands,” he said.
Etkes predicts that based on the experience of other sites, local Palestinians face an extremely bleak future. He termed the sight of Palestinians living in what is left of their houses “one of the worst things I have ever seen in the West Bank.”
But that is by no means the end of the harm Israel will cause to Palestinian civilians in the vicinity of the archeological site, he said. “We will see an area completely disconnected from its surroundings,” said Etkes. “Palestinians won’t be able to enter the area. Two roads [for Israelis] will lead to this area. Settlers will be very violent, it will be very restricted for the Palestinians, construction in the area [by Palestinians] will be completely banned, the construction that already exists is without a permit and a large part of it will be demolished by Israeli authorities.”
He declared: “It will be another national park that will tell one story — the story the Israeli radical right wants you to hear.”
The post Israel presses on with settler-fueled archaeology expansion, crippling Palestinian communities appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The eternal summer question that no rabbi can answer: Will I finally hit a home run this year?
I was six or seven years old when I first dared to dream of hitting a home run. Nixon was president. Kissinger was National Security Adviser. Le Duc Tho chain-smoked at the Paris Peace Conferences where they argued for three months over the shape of the negotiating table.
I was one of the dusty dumpy boys of summer; short and overweight, I occasionally tapped or blooped the ball into the shallow outfield for a single. In my life I remember only two doubles over five decades. Nothing like the moonshots the big boys slapped into the upper atmosphere.
Sometimes I played second base, but more often I was deposited and abandoned into the Siberia of right field. Once, when I was a young adult in the UJA softball game at Heckscher Diamond in Central Park, a high-pop sailed into the outfield, nothing fancy. The orb floated daintily into my glove at the warning track. Somehow, I threw a strike to third base and nabbed the runner trying to advance on the fly. It was a rare moment of triumph.
All was right with heaven and earth at that moment, in fact with the entire solar system. It was as though I had mastered the entire Mishna in the morning and had a date with Ann-Margret later in the evening.
But most of the games were a grind. Long afternoons in the dust bowls of Queens, the sandlots of the Rockaways. Forgotten stretches of overgrown weeds between concrete and cobblestone. Chainlink backstops with holes a wild boar could poke through. Beyond the overpass of the Van Wyck and the Whitestone Expressways, a dagger dug through central Queens conceived by the community-defiler, Robert Moses in the form of Flushing Meadows Park.
Sunburnt and with solemn resolve, I muttered pleas and hopes to the baseball gods with no real hope of improvement. Thus years would pass. How I loved the game, but it would not love me back — at least not in the way I wanted it to.
I would go up to take the bat. Which should I use? Wooden, aluminum? The shorter one with the bigger snout and barrel? The longer but skinnier one? “You want to use a lighter bat,” someone would invariably say. It made no difference. I would take a weak hack and hope for the best.
My father bought me am $8 pitcher’s glove with Fritz Peterson’s signature on it. Then, I got a bat with Roy White’s signature from a giveaway on Bat Day at Yankee Stadium — June 4, 1972. It was white and wooden with a long heavy barrel. This would do it — my own bat.
Yet I held it limply at the baseball diamond. “You’re not doing it right,” someone would invariably tell me.
I came to the baseball field for absolution, for redemption, but there was none to be had. I felt hollow, even desperate. I appealed to the only man who I knew would not reject me: my late father.
Yet, my father, though I was the apple of his eye, considered baseball to be something childish. He thought I should immerse myself in the sacred texts — the only thing that would ever really pay off. Why would anyone want to play ball?
My father saw childhood itself as an illness. If he could not cure it with his strict and clear instruction and imprecations from the rabbis, it would surely pass on its own by the time I was 13.
My mother and sisters were indifferent to my baseball agony; it was something they consigned to “the mens’ world.” They couldn’t tell a baseball from a candled egg or a guinea hen.
I knew the problem was far deeper than just strength or technique. I could see the ball (I almost never struck out) so why couldn’t I hit it with force? I would go up to the batter’s box full of doubt, but excitement too. Maybe this time it would be different.
More years of weak swings and fading dreams. I was not strong. And when I reached my full height, I was 5’3”. One needed strength, but one l also needed technique. I studied the swings of the great baseball players. They seemed to take a cut from their upper shoulders and wrap a swing with even more strength coming from their glutes and hips. Perhaps only gentiles had these kinds of shoulders and hips. Oh, the mysteries of the universe…
A Freudian dilemma
When I first started playing, I was younger than everyone. Decades later on the baseball diamonds of Passaic, I am older than everyone by decades. But with age comes wisdom.
I practiced swinging hard, but I always held back, as though a full swing was un-Jewish, a sin. A full swing takes a certain, shall we say aggression? Forgive me for sounding a bit basic, but what did this swing really mean? Was this all about my father? I was afraid to take a swing; did that mean I was afraid to take a swing at dad? Only fathers can swing, but even though I was now a father and grandfather, I did not feel I could swing. I held something back.
Maybe this seems too Freudian, but in order to hold on to my father, even after he went on to the next world, I had to do poorly.
If I wanted to hit a home run, I had to let him go.
A new father
About ten years back, when I was 50, I hired a trainer, Moshe Klyman, a Jewish Greek god from Underground Gym in Tenafly. He is an anachronism from the time of the Maccabees. He can lift 630 lbs five times in a row. This modern day Samson, two decades and some younger than me, said, “you can do it.”
I believed him, at least a little. The man knows everything there is to know about the human body (and I know everything there is to know about the mind — hey, I thought, this partnership could work. ) I am convinced that on the day of creation six thousand years ago and then some, God Himself consulted with him on how to construct the first human.
A few months ago, he had me deadlift 405 lbs, almost three times my weight. If that weren’t enough he had me do 200 pull-ups 50 at a time.
“Age is irrelevant,” he said. “You and I are going places.”
As I kept working with Moshe, I got better at the game. Not a home run, though, never even close. A base hit or two, once in a while a satisfying crack at the bat.
Until now.
After years of jumping, lifting, pressing, pulling (and puking) my body began to take on a different identity, separate from my history. I may have been 62 but now I was ready for the Marines.
This past Sunday, I took a full cut, a real swing at the ball. No pulling back. I waited for my pitch and uncoiled. To my great surprise, the ball was corked, launched. It was high, it was far; it landed at the left field fence, missing a home run by just a few feet.
The left fielder, a terrific athlete, was caught flat-footed. I watched the ball fly over his head. The team was dismayed. Was this Yisrael at bat? What kind of juice was he on?
As the ball sailed farther than I ever believed, 47 years of humiliation seemed to melt away. I headed for a triple.
Maybe this summer, I will finally hit my first home run.
The post The eternal summer question that no rabbi can answer: Will I finally hit a home run this year? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on.
Tens of thousands of queer women are expected to take to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to celebrate the women who fought for their right to celebrate safely and to declare equal rights for all. Some will also be there to condemn the state of Israel, as organizers of the renowned Dyke March insist for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism has become a core value of the event.
But the bitter internal fight that shift sparked last year has vanished, along with many of the march’s longtime Jewish participants. Many will attend a separate event on Saturday hosted by Shalom, Dykes, a group created in 2024 by former Dyke March participants who have been shut out of the celebration.
“There has been an exodus,” said Nate Shalev, who spent a decade on the march’s organizing committee. Shalev stepped down when the organizers turned on them and other Jewish supporters of Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks. “Anyone who has dissented, anyone who has any sort of connection to Israel, anyone who is quote unquote not a good Jew.”
Dyke March organizers reject the notion that the march’s anti-Zionist stance disproportionately excludes Jews.
“We have Jews on the NYC Dyke March committee, and we do not believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic,” organizers told the Forward in a statement.
The split reflects broader fractures in queer spaces nationwide, as Pride Marches from Vermont to San Francisco have also splintered over positions on Israel and Gaza in recent years.
In New York, that divide now feels permanent. After getting doxxed and ousted from their roles, activists who once pushed back on the march’s anti-Zionist stance say they have given up on making change from the inside, instead directing their energy toward queer Jewish spaces.
“There’s this feeling of, where do we want to put our energy?” Shalev said. “Fighting against these folks who clearly don’t care about me or my communities, and don’t have the desire to be able to see multiple perspectives or truths, that’s not worthwhile.”
‘Settled in for the long haul’
Shalev, whose wife is Israeli, said the organizing committee debated for years whether the march would ban national flags — and by extension, the Jewish pride flag with a Star of David. But the committee allowed for open discussion, Shalev said, and they never ended up banning the flags.
That culture changed after Oct. 7, 2023, when Shalev said fellow organizers showed little understanding of the personal toll the attacks had taken.
“Here I was, post-October 7 with my Israeli wife, navigating all of this in our home, trying to understand if her friends and family were OK,” Shalev said. “And then having to navigate this with the Dyke March committee.”
A year later, an attempt at reconciliation was short-lived. In June 2024, the Dyke March Instagram account put up a post acknowledging that the committee’s delay in condemning the attack of Oct. 7 had caused harm and insisting that “unequivocal solidarity and empathy for Jewish safety can coexist alongside unwavering commitment to Palestinian safety and freedom” — then removed it after a half hour.
Organizers’ reason for deleting the post, they wrote in a subsequent post, was that “any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperial agenda is harmful to all.”
The 2024 march — dubbed “Dykes Against Genocide” — raised funds for five groups including Within Our Lifetime, a group that voiced support for Hamas after Oct. 7 and defends “the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”
That same year, Shalev co-founded Shalom, Dykes, a group that describes itself as a place where “Jewish dykes can exist fully and freely as themselves, no questions asked.”
What began as a one-off alternative to the Dyke March quickly became something larger. Roughly 300 people attended the group’s first celebration with dancing and a performance by drag queen Matzah Belle Soup at an East Village bar, scheduled at the same time as the Dyke March.
“I definitely thought it was going to be a one-time event,” Shalev said. “Immediately during and after that event, I understood that this was actually much, much larger than I thought.”
Even after the split, Shalom, Dykes encouraged members who wanted to attend the Dyke March to do so together. But two years on, Shalev said, fewer people are interested in reengaging with the Dyke March, while Shalom, Dykes has continued to grow.
One of those attendees was Amy Vernon, who came out as bisexual at age 50 and said she was still finding her footing in queer communities when she attended her first Dyke March in 2023. Marching proudly through the streets surrounded by thousands of queer women was an “electric feeling,” she said.
But the following year, the march’s statements about Zionism made Vernon feel like she couldn’t attend. Shalom, Dykes gave her an alternative.
“It really just felt like this lifeline,” Vernon said. “Because I was still trying to figure out where I even belonged anymore.”
Last year’s Shalom, Dykes dance party drew about 600 attendees — double the turnout of its first event — and the group has expanded into a year-round community, hosting holiday celebrations and happy hours.
“We’ve reached the point where we’re settled in for the long haul,” Vernon said. “I don’t know what future there is for American Jewry if we can’t eventually build bridges back, but to my knowledge, there is no interest from the Dyke March or other queer organizations to welcome us back.”
Dissenters depart
Founded in 1993 by a group of activists called the Lesbian Avengers, the Dyke March — which unlike New York’s Gay Pride parade the following day takes place without corporate sponsorship, permits, or police presence — originally had a strategically narrow focus: lesbian visibility. By separating themselves from male-dominated parades, the Avengers sought to specifically highlight women’s issues.
Today, organizers frame the Dyke March through a broader, intersectional lens. Its “statement of values” includes not only “anti-Zionism” but also “anti-militarism,” and standing “in solidarity with all oppressed peoples and occupied lands, including Palestine” among its many priorities.
According to Shalev, the change in approach reflected the exodus of dissenting voices in recent years, which left the committee without the intergenerational perspective that had long characterized the march.
By 2025, committee member Jodi Kreines found herself as the lone voice opposing a proposal to reaffirm the march’s anti-Zionist commitments.
“The only qualification was you had to identify as a dyke, and that was really what I was holding to,” said Kreines, who has been marching for two decades. “The idea that creating an explicitly anti-Zionist message would be really exclusionary of a large swath of dykes, especially within New York City.”
After Kreines voiced her concerns about the group’s anti-Zionist stance in the Forward last year, the committee voted to remove her in a 15-2 vote.
Kreines said she never shared her personal opinions about Israel with the committee. Her argument, rather, was that the march should remain open to all dykes regardless of their beliefs.
“You don’t get to determine who is a good dyke or a bad dyke, just as you don’t get to determine who is a good Jewish person or who is a bad Jewish person,” Kreines said. “There is no one way to exist.”
Other Jewish activists who challenged the committee’s anti-Zionist stance last year faced similar treatment, including Judith Kasen-Windsor, the widow of legendary gay rights activist Edie Windsor — the lead plaintiff in the landmark marriage equality case at the Supreme Court. Kasen-Windsor was also told she was no longer welcome at any Dyke March planning or organizational meetings.
“It was our community, and now it’s not our community anymore,” Kasen-Windsor told Gay City News after she was ousted from her role.
Dyke March organizers did not address questions about the committee’s process for removing members or their tolerance for dissent, instead directing the Forward to their “value statement” on Zionism.
“We oppose the nationalist political ideology of Zionism, particularly as it is promoted within U.S. institutions, which continues to be used to subjugate, displace, and marginalize Palestinian people,” the document reads. “We stand against antisemitism in all its forms and recognize that Jewish people have faced historical and ongoing oppression. Our critique is directed at a political system and ideology, not at Jewish people or Judaism.”
Kreines decided not to fight the committee’s decision.
“I needed to choose to protect my peace,” Kreines said. “I was not in any place that I had the capacity to fight anymore.”
The post For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on. appeared first on The Forward.
