Uncategorized
Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.”
It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to be Jewish.
If pressed, I’d say I prefer “American Jew.” The noun “Jew” sounds, to my ear anyway, more direct and more assertive than the tentative adjective “Jewish.” It’s also consistent with the way JTA essentializes “Jew” in its coverage, as in British Jew, French Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color.
I wouldn’t have given further thought to the subject if not for a webinar last week given by Arnold Eisen, the chancellor emeritus at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In “Jewish-American, American-Jew: The Complexities and Joys of Living a Hyphenated Identity,” Eisen discussed how a debate over language is really about how Jews navigate between competing identities.
“What does the ‘American’ signify to us?” he asked. “What does the ‘Jewish’ signify and what is the nature of the relationship between the two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a tension, or a contradiction, or is it a blurring of the boundaries such that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins?”
Questions like these, it turns out, have been asked since Jews and other immigrants first began flooding Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt complained in 1915 that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” Woodrow Wilson liked to say that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” The two presidents were frankly freaked out about what we now call multiculturalism, convinced that America couldn’t survive a wave of immigrants with dual loyalties.
The two presidents lost the argument, and for much of the 20th century “hyphenated American” was shorthand for successful acculturation. While immigration hardliners continue to question the loyalty of minorities who claim more than one identity, and Donald Trump played with the politics of loyalty in remarks about Mexicans, Muslims and Jews, ethnic pride is as American as, well, St. Patrick’s Day. “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in announcing her run for the Republican presidential nomination this month.
For Jews, however, the hyphen became what philosophy professor Berel Lang called “a weighty symbol of the divided life of Diaspora Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a distant country with quaint customs, but a religion and a portable identity that lives uneasily alongside your nationality. In a 2005 essay, Lang argued that on either side of the hyphen were “vying traditions or allegiances,” with the Jew constantly confronted with a choice between the American side, or assimilation, and the Jewish side, or remaining distinct.
Eisen calls this the “question of Jewish difference.” Eisen grew up in an observant Jewish family in Philadelphia, and understood from an early age that his family was different from their Vietnamese-, Italian-, Ukrainian- and African-American neighbors. On the other hand, they were all the same — that is, American — because they were all hyphenated. “Being parallel to all these other differences, gave me my place in the city and in the country,” he said.
In college he studied the Jewish heavy hitters who were less sanguine about the integration of American and Jewish identities. Eisen calls Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the renegade theologian at JTS, “the thinker who really made this question uppermost for American Jews.” Kaplan wrote in 1934 that Jewishness could only survive as a “subordinate civilization” in the United States, and that the “Jew in America will be first and foremost an American, and only secondarily a Jew.”
Kaplan’s prescription was a maximum effort on the part of Jews to “save the otherness of Jewish life” – not just through synagogue, but through a Jewish “civilization” expressed in social relationships, leisure activities and a traditional moral and ethical code.
Of course, Kaplan also understood that there was another way to protect Jewish distinctiveness: move to Israel.
A poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement in 1917 warns that the American war effort might be harmed by a “hyphen of disloyalty,” suggesting immigrants with ties to their homelands were working to aid the enemy. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The political scientist Charles Liebman, in “The Ambivalent American Jew” (1973), argued that Jews in the United States were torn between surviving as a distinct ethnic group and integrating into the larger society.
According to Eisen, Liebman believed that “Jews who make ‘Jewish’ the adjective and ‘American’ the noun tend to fall on the integration side of the hyphen. And Jews who make ‘Jew’ the noun and ‘American’ the adjective tend to fall on the survival side of the hyphen.”
Eisen, a professor of Jewish thought at JTS, noted that the challenge of the hyphen was felt by rabbis on opposite ends of the theological spectrum. He cited Eugene Borowitz, the influential Reform rabbi, who suggested in 1973 that Jews in the United States “are actually more Jewish on the inside than they pretend to be on the outside. In other words, we’re so worried about what Liebman called integration into America that we hide our distinctiveness.” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading Modern Orthodox thinker of his generation, despaired that the United States presented its Jews with an unresolvable conflict between the person of faith and the person of secular culture.
When I read the texts Eisen shared, I see 20th-century Jewish men who doubted Jews who could be fully at home in America and at home with themselves as Jews (let alone as Jews who weren’t straight or white — which would demand a few more hyphens). They couldn’t imagine a rich Jewishness that didn’t exist as a counterculture, the way Cynthia Ozick wondered what it would be like to “think as a Jew” in a non-Jewish language like English.
They couldn’t picture the hyphen as a plus sign, which pulled the words “Jewish” and “American” together.
Recent trends support the skeptics. Look at Judaism’s Conservative movement, whose rabbis are trained at JTS, and which has long tried to reconcile Jewish literacy and observance with the American mainstream. It’s shrinking, losing market share and followers both to Reform – where the American side of the hyphen is ascendant — and to Orthodoxy, where Jewish otherness is booming in places like Brooklyn and Lakewood, New Jersey. And the Jewish “nones” — those opting out of religion, synagogue and active engagement in Jewish institutions and affairs — are among the fastest-growing segments of American Jewish life.
Eisen appears more optimistic about a hyphenated Jewish identity, although he insists that it takes work to cultivate the Jewish side. “I don’t think there’s anything at stake necessarily on which side of the hyphen you put the Jewish on,” he said. “But if you don’t go out of your way to put added weight on the Jewish in the natural course of events, as Kaplan said correctly 100 years ago, the American will win.”
—
The post Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
British PM denounces ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at upcoming Aston Villa soccer match
The British government is reviewing a decision to bar Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a major soccer match next month over what local police had said were security concerns.
The Aston Villa Football Club announced the ban on Thursday, saying in a statement that the Security Advisory Group responsible for issuing safety certificates for the matches at the team’s Birmingham stadium, Villa Park, had made the decision.
“Following a meeting this afternoon, the SAG have formally written to the club and UEFA to advise no away fans will be permitted to attend Villa Park for this fixture,” the club said, referring to the Union of European Football Associations. “West Midlands Police have advised the SAG that they have public safety concerns outside the stadium bowl and the ability to deal with any potential protests on the night.”
The Villa Park announcement swiftly drew an uproar from a wide array of voices who said the police were abdicating their responsibility.
“This is the wrong decision,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement. “We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”
The local police said their assessment reflected the sweeping violence that unfolded around a Maccabi Tel Aviv-Ajax match in Amsterdam last year, exactly one year before the Nov. 6 match planned for Villa Park. Dutch, Israeli, European and U.S. officials all denounced the Amsterdam violence, which followed rising tensions that included provocations by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, as antisemitic.
Sporting events involving Israeli teams have drawn protests and disruptions during the war in Gaza, which entered a ceasefire last week. Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated against Israel’s participation in a World Cup qualifying match in Norway this week, and earlier this month a Canadian tennis match was played in an empty stadium over concerns about disruptive protests against Israel.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a nonprofit, said it would pursue legal action against the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
“We will do whatever it takes to overturn this pernicious ban which has humiliated and angered the whole country,” it said in a statement. “Britain is increasingly waking up to the extremism in our midst but now we must all fight the instinctive appeasement within the authorities and our law enforcement.”
Now, the prime minister’s office is closely involved in conversations aimed at reversing the ban, which was announced the same day that Starmer announced new funding to protect Jewish communities, allocated in the wake of the deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur.
“We cannot have a country where we have to tell people to stay away from an event because they can’t be protected or they may be a victim of racism,” a spokesperson told the BBC.
—
The post British PM denounces ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at upcoming Aston Villa soccer match appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Trump: ‘If Hamas continues to kill people … we will have no choice but to go in and kill them’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump appeared to threaten violence against Hamas in Gaza on Thursday as he responded to reports that Hamas was executing Gazans following the ceasefire with Israel that Trump brokered last week.
“If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday, concluding with a trademark flourish: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Soon after, he clarified that he did not mean the United States would enter Gaza. “Somebody will go in … It’s not going to be us,” he told reporters, adding, “There are people very nearby that will go in, they’ll do the trick very easily, but under our auspices.”
Trump has previously said he would endorse Israeli operations in Gaza when Hamas did not meet his demands. He had said earlier in the week that he was not bothered by early reports of Hamas violence, saying that the United States had given the group a leash to “stop the problems” in Gaza for a period of time. But as clans within Gaza called out for help, he and other U.S. officials have shifted their tone.
“We strongly urge Hamas to immediately suspend violence and shooting at innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza – in both Hamas-held parts of Gaza and those secured by the IDF behind the Yellow Line,” Brad Cooper, the U.S. Navy admiral who commands operations in the Middle East, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This is an historic opportunity for peace. Hamas should seize it by fully standing down, strictly adhering to President Trump’s 20-point peace plan, and disarming without delay.”
Cooper said the United States remained optimistic that the ceasefire would hold despite the violence.
Thursday was the first day since Hamas was required under the terms of the ceasefire to free all hostages that it did not release any, after releasing all 20 living hostages on Monday and nine deceased hostages over three days. Hamas says it needs heavy machinery to be able to extricate the 19 remaining deceased hostages, but Israel, which says it has intelligence about the locations of many of the bodies, disputes the claim.
The post Trump: ‘If Hamas continues to kill people … we will have no choice but to go in and kill them’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
At debate, Cuomo and Mamdani clash over Israel in pitch to Jewish voters
Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo clashed sharply over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Thursday night, in the first televised debate for New York City mayor, their first major showdown since the young democratic socialist stunned the former governor in the Democratic primary. And a Yiddish slang term even made its way into the heated back-and-forth.
Days after the implementation of a ceasefire in Gaza, many of the two candidates’ early exchanges centered on Mamdani’s critiques of Israel, positions that have roiled New York’s Jewish community — the largest outside of Israel. Beginning with the primary, Mamdani has faced scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calling the Gaza war a “genocide,” and pledging to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the city.
Commenting Thursday on the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Mamdani clarified earlier remarks he made about having no opinion on whether or not Hamas should disarm as part of a post-war deal.
“Of course, I believe that they should lay down their arms,” Mamdani said. But he declined to welcome or credit President Donald Trump’s administration for brokering the ceasefire that ended the fighting and secured the release of the remaining living hostages.
Mamdani also appeared to draw a moral parallel between Hamas’ disarmament and Israel halting strikes on the enclave. “Calling for a ceasefire means ceasing fire,” he said. “That means all parties have to cease fire and put down their weapons.” A real peace, he continued, must address “the conditions that preceded this, conditions like occupation, the siege and apartheid.”
“That means ‘from the river to the sea,’” Cuomo countered, in an effort to suggest that Mamdani’s rhetoric mirrored the popular pro-Palestinian protest slogan that many Jews view as a call for the destruction of Israel. Cuomo also wrongly claimed that Mamdani refused to condemn Hamas. “I have denounced Hamas again and again,” Mamdani said. “It will never be enough for Andrew Cuomo, because what he is willing to say, even though not on this stage, is to call me, the first Muslim on the precipice of leading this city, a terrorist sympathizer.”
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, who took center stage without his signature red beret, was largely ignored by the two leading contenders. That didn’t stop Sliwa, who has his own history of controversial remarks about Jews, from inserting himself into the debate.
“Jews don’t trust that you are going to be there for them when they are victims of antisemitic attacks,” the Republican candidate told Mamdani.
Mamdani’s Jewish appeal
Since his surprise victory in June, Mamdani has redoubled his outreach efforts in the Jewish community, including by celebrating Sukkot with Orthodox leaders.
Still, Mamdani faces hurdles with the Jewish electorate. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Mamdani trailing Cuomo by 31 points among Jewish voters, while maintaining a double-digit lead citywide. Just 22% of Jewish voters view Mamdani favorably, while 67% hold an unfavorable opinion.
The survey found that a plurality of likely voters share Mamdani’s views on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
At the debate, Mamdani repeated past statements about his commitment to protect Jewish New Yorkers. He also reaffirmed his recognition of Israel — though not as a Jewish state. That seemed to resonate with more liberal and progressive Jews. Mamdani has been endorsed by local Jewish elected officials, including Brad Lander, the city comptroller and Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the congressional Jewish Caucus. Addressing members of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn last week, Mamdani said, “I’m going to have people in my administration who are Zionists, whether liberal Zionists, or wherever they may be on that spectrum.”
Ahead of the debate, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue said in a video statement that Mamdani’s long-standing rejection of Zionism is an example of “rigid ideological commitments that delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility towards Judaism and Jews.”
Cuomo’s Yiddish
During Thursday night’s debate, Cuomo also deployed a Yiddish slang term when debating which of the candidates would most effectively stand up to President Donald Trump.
“He can’t stand up to Donald Trump, who’d knock him right on his tuches,” Cuomo said, wagging his finger at Mamdani and using the Yiddish term for behind.
Cuomo once described himself as the “Shabbos goy” of New York’s Jewish community — the same term his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, once used, referring to a non-Jew who performs certain tasks for Jews on the Sabbath.
The former governor, who is backed by some Orthodox voting blocs, suggested that many of his Jewish supporters view Mamdani as antisemitic. “It’s not about Trump or Republicans,” he told his chief rival. “It’s about you.”
The post At debate, Cuomo and Mamdani clash over Israel in pitch to Jewish voters appeared first on The Forward.