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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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What do Germans talk about when they talk about antisemitism?
In today’s Germany, an accusation of antisemitism can end careers, shutter institutions and put political alliances beyond consideration. That gravity is understandable in the country responsible for the Holocaust. What has become less clear, particularly since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, is what Germans mean when they use the word “antisemitism.”
Days before Berliners went to the polls on Sept. 20, Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz provided a particularly awkward illustration. At a campaign event for his party, the CDU, Merz called antisemitism “the most perfidious form of xenophobia.” German Jews were quick to point out a glaring problem; they were not foreigners. The contentious IHRA framework officially embraced by Germany stresses that antisemitism and hostility toward foreigners are separate phenomena.
The confusion has become politically consequential since Berlin voted. Die Linke, a democratic socialist party, won 25.7%, more than doubling its 2023 share and finishing nearly seven points ahead of the CDU, which came in at 18.8%. The far-right AfD came third with 16.3%, itself an extraordinary gain of 7.2 points. Yet, since the election, the question consuming German politics has been whether Die Linke is too antisemitic to govern.
Israel’s ambassador, Ron Prosor, described antisemitism within Die Linke as systemic. The Central Council of Jews warned the SPD and Greens against joining a Linke-led coalition. Bavaria’s premier, Markus Söder, called Die Linke “deeply antisemitic.”
Philipp Peyman Engel, editor in chief of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the weekly newspaper of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, distilled the case against Die Linke in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle. The party, he wrote, was “riddled with people who hate Jews and Israel” and represented “the elimination of Israel.” Even voters drawn by rents and social policy had tolerated its hatred of Israel; SPD and Green politicians would forfeit any claim to moral seriousness by governing with it. “No non-Jewish democrat should simply accept this election result either,” he wrote.
That is an extraordinary indictment of a party that just received more votes than any other in the German capital. It is also hard to reconcile with the party that actually exists.
Die Linke does carry unusual historical baggage. It was formed in 2007 from a movement of trade unionists and Social Democrats alienated by Gerhard Schröder’s welfare reforms and the PDS, successor to East Germany’s ruling communist party. The GDR pursued an anti-Zionist foreign policy, strands of which survived reunification; the modern party also absorbed a western anti-imperialist tradition in which hostility toward Israel has at times shaded into antisemitism.
A 2011 analysis published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education found serious hostility toward Israel in parts of Die Linke but rejected describing the party itself as antisemitic. A year later, Die Linke nominated Beate Klarsfeld — the Nazi hunter who spent decades pursuing German war criminals and famously slapped former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger over his Nazi past — for the German presidency. She received 126 votes in the Federal Assembly.
Die Linke’s current official position is markedly different from Engel’s characterization in the Jewish Chronicle. At its federal congress in June, Die Linke explicitly affirmed Israeli and Palestinian self-determination and the right of both Israel and Palestine to exist. It passed a separate resolution condemning antisemitism and describing its sharp rise since Oct. 7. While one may regard those positions as inadequate, contradictory or politically naïve, they do not amount to a program for eliminating Israel.
The party that won Berlin last month has changed in other ways as well. Its candidate for mayor, Elif Eralp, a trained lawyer, was born in Munich to Turkish socialist trade unionists who fled the 1980 military coup. Her campaign centered on housing, rent controls and migrant rights, and borrowed consciously from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York; Linke activists even traveled there to meet his advisers.
That helps explain why this election has rattled Germany’s political center. Die Linke is no longer easily dismissed as the residual party of eastern German communism. In Berlin, it has assembled a young, urban and increasingly diverse electorate around an issue — the cost of housing — that the governing parties have conspicuously failed to solve. Unlike the AfD, it also has potential coalition partners. A Linke-SPD-Green government could remove the CDU from power and seek to implement the result of a 2021 referendum, approved by 57.6% of voters, calling for the socialization of large housing companies.
There are nonetheless questions about parts of its Berlin organization, especially in Neukölln. A rapper at a campaign event sang “Yalla Yalla Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.” Ferat Koçak, the district’s Linke Bundestag member, was photographed on election night with Ibrahim Ibrahim, described by Democ, an anti-extremist monitoring group, as a longtime activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the EU lists as a terrorist organization. Ibrahim has also been reported to have praised Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a “steadfast leader” and “martyr hero.”
Beyond Berlin, a June investigation by Bayerischer Rundfunk into internal forums and chats of Linksjugend, the party’s youth organization, found messages by a spokesman for Die Linke’s youth organization in Rhineland-Palatinate referring to Israeli “concentration camps” and a “genocide in the name of Judaism” and telling Israel to “drop dead!”
Wolfgang Benz, who directed the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin’s Technical University for more than two decades and edited an eight-volume handbook on antisemitism, told the Tagesspiegel that the term Antisemitismus is undergoing an Ausverkauf — an inflationary depletion of its meaning.
“Die Linke is not antisemitic,” he said. Anti-Israel slogans can be crude, denunciatory, even “misanthropic,” without thereby becoming Jew-hatred. His answer when asked whether the chant “Death to the IDF” was antisemitic was no.
In the same interview, Benz also argued that Die Linke’s leadership should deal loudly and decisively with genuinely unacceptable conduct and singled out Bodo Ramelow, who became Linke’s first minister-president in 2014, and Petra Pau, a veteran Linke politician and former Bundestag vice president, as politicians with strong records against antisemitism. Benz’s successor, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, has likewise called the debate around Die Linke “overblown” and warned that antisemitism is being used to influence coalition formation.
The consequences of collapsing antisemitism and anti-Zionism have extended beyond electoral politics. In Verfassungsblog, an open-access forum on constitutional law and politics, scholars Dörthe Engelcke and Ilyas Saliba documented Palestinian-related events at German universities losing rooms or being canceled, while antisemitism commissioners intervened in debates over terms such as “genocide,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism.” Berlin’s Jews, meanwhile, are hardly unanimous. An open letter signed by 150 Jewish Berliners, including Susan Neiman, Deborah Feldman and Eva Menasse, accused parts of the media and Jewish community of instrumentalizing antisemitism against Die Linke while the far right advances.
The signatories also point out some obvious facts that, I imagine, tend to get overlooked: that Jews in Berlin pay rent, send children to schools, use hospitals and, like their neighbors, worry about economic insecurity.
Britain’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn offers a cautionary precedent. As genuine failures over antisemitism became entangled with factional warfare, parts of Corbyn’s camp focused so heavily on the political motives behind the accusations that they appeared to minimize the underlying problem. The result was to strengthen the very attacks they regarded as politically motivated. Die Linke would be unwise to repeat that mistake.
Right now, far more than Die Linke’s reputation is on the line. The far-right AfD party won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt last month, an increase of 23 percentage points. On the same day Berlin voted, it won 38.2% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, according to preliminary official results, while the CDU fell to 4.9% and disappeared from the state parliament. In Berlin, the AfD rose from 9.1 to 16.3% and finished third.
Those results should provide some perspective on the attempt to establish whether Die Linke’s 25.7% represents an antisemitic rupture in German democracy. Die Linke’s leadership will have to demonstrate that its stated opposition to antisemitism has real-world consequences. But the claim that Jew-hatred is baked into the party itself is unsupported by its program, its history or the records of many of its leading politicians.
What the controversy more clearly reveals is the alarm produced when a party long treated as marginal suddenly wins and becomes capable of leading its government. Antisemitism, the most devastating accusation available in German political language, offers Die Linke’s opponents a means of turning questions about the behavior of certain activists into a referendum on the party’s legitimacy.
Yet while Berlin argues over whether Die Linke is fit to govern, a far-right party with openly ethnonationalist positions and powerful antidemocratic currents, is winning close to 40% in parts of the former East. What’s shocking is that Germany’s political center is devoting its fiercest moral language to the left precisely when the far right is remaking the country’s electoral map.
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Jewish federations are losing my generation — and future ones — over Israel and Netanyahu
When my father Norm Gordon was six years old, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland helped rescue him. Recent immigrants from Poland, his parents were already living precariously when his mother died and his father gave him up. The Jewish Children’s Bureau, funded by the JFC, found a home for him and his brothers and kept them all together under one roof. That’s the sort of thing Jewish federations across America were founded to do, going all the way back to the “Stuyvesant Promise” of 1655: pool the resources of Jewish communities to help the helpless. My first jobs were for JFC-funded camps. My mother, a social worker, spent her career working with agencies like Bellefair Jewish Children’s Bureau, funded by JFC. After my father Norm himself died young and my mother married my adoptive father James Ratner, our family’s ties to JFC grew even stronger. My father James was deeply involved with JFC for decades, serving on their Executive Committee and as Chair of their Overseas Connections Committee.
Now all those ties have been cut. My experience isn’t unique. Federations have been alienating constituents who don’t align ideologically with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s been happening all over the country. For three decades, I’d kept a portion of my assets with JFC in a donor-advised fund. I made gifts to my preferred charities out of the fund while the principal remained with JFC as part of the “community chest” they use to finance their operations. But JFC recently told me, in so many words, I should take my money elsewhere. So I did.
Their point of contention was that I wished to give some money from my donor-advised fund to Physicians for Human Rights. After the unprecedented and barbaric terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish federations raised a lot of money for Israel. They also made lists of human rights organizations that were critical of the Israeli government. The JFC Donor-Advised Fund Committee notified me that this year, for the first time, my pledge to PHR would not be honored.
PHR is not the only cause I give to, but it’s vitally important to me. I’m an M.D., an editor of The American Psychoanalyst, and I’ve served on the PHR board for years. I am privileged to know their fine work in detail. Their physicians risk their lives in conflict zones and take on powerful autocratic regimes around the globe, using medical evidence to expose harms to civilians. In 1997, PHR shared the Nobel Peace Prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Their work is especially important to me as I watch leadership in the U.S. subjugating science, reason, and the rule of law to executive power. PHR represents a commitment to precisely those threatened values that the majority of Jews hold dear, values that hadn’t previously conflicted with JFC’s. Very little of what PHR does relates to Israel at all. I saw no reason to choose between the two organizations until JFC asked me to.
Clearly, JFC’s Donor-Advised Fund Committee sees its decision as a laudable act — that they’re standing up to antisemitic bias even if doing so means losing a constituent and his capital. But that does not describe what happened here. The DAF Committee, on the contrary, rushed to judgment against PHR and alienated a longtime backer of JFC’s community chest with false claims of antisemitism, unsupported by evidence.
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In an email sent to some of my family members, who have also sadly withdrawn their support from JFC, JFC’s DAF Committee devoted just 130 words to its judgment against PHR. Echoing Netanyahu’s incendiary talking points about the medieval “blood libel,” the DAF Committee accused PHR of falsely blaming Israel for the destruction of Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza City. Ironically, as NPR reported, PHR was a lone voice that did not rush to blame Israel before the facts were in: “By contrast, the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights put out a call on the day of the blast for the protection of civilian life and for the incident to be the subject of an independent investigation. It notably did not project blame.”
The only piece of evidence the DAF Committee email provided for their claims was exactly that innocuous PHR press release that called on “all parties to abide by international law.” The JFC DAF Committee also claimed, without providing evidence, that PHR does not acknowledge or condemn Hamas’ use of tunnels to store weapons and shield warriors under hospitals. In a joint report on the devastating impact of the war in Gaza on Palestinian mothers and infants, PHR and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School do, on the contrary, explicitly call on Hamas not to militarize hospitals. The DAF Committee provided no evidence at all of PHR’s conflicts with the JFC mission.
Some may ask, “So what?” The JFC’s priority is defending Israel when it’s under attack. It’s not as though PHR is out there helping Israel. In fact, in highlighting the suffering of Palestinian civilians in their report instead of the victims of Oct. 7, and in documenting that the Israeli military has prevented medicine and baby formula from reaching Gaza without considering the larger reasons for Israel’s blockade, PHR shows clearly enough whose side they’re on. JFC is entitled to decline support to organizations that don’t support Israel and it doesn’t owe you a reason.
I don’t question JFC’s right. I question its wisdom. I’m not trying to persuade them to value PHR’s work the way I do, though I hope I’ve made a reasonable case for why I value it. I’m trying to say JFC is making a mistake in alienating constituents like me over a difference of opinion — alienating people who have long considered themselves allies, supported JFC for years, and care about Israel. There has to be room for rational disagreement in a community organization. If not, the federations will hemorrhage constituents and support and become politicized. The majority of American Jews are highly critical of the current Israeli government and its campaign in Gaza. Younger people even more so. JFC may disagree with the rest of us, but it’s not as though we’re making stuff up out of thin air. Israel’s own ex-generals are accusing West Bank settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”
By refusing to accommodate our views, do the federations hope to change our minds? Is this how the federations want to advertise themselves to the majority of American Jews who dare to question Netanyahu? Telling us there’s no room for us, and justifying their conclusions with sloppy assumptions, naive parroting of Netanyahu, and wanton disrespect for others’ views and expertise?
I have no sympathy for Hamas. Human rights organizations like PHR do not support Hamas. Most of the 2 million people living in Gaza, however, are not terrorists. They are human beings and half of them are children. Before Oct. 7, 2023, there were 30,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, a tiny fraction of the Gaza population. I don’t see the harm in trying to insure mothers’ and infants’ access to medicine and baby formula. Nor in documenting the Israeli government’s violations of the rules of warfare when they deny medicine and baby formula to Palestinian mothers and infants who were not perpetrators of Oct. 7. Is our own government here in the U.S. always beyond reproach? No government is. Only authoritarian regimes consider themselves beyond reproach. Again, I don’t expect JFC’s DAF Committee to see it my way.
I would, however, ask them to consider the possible long-term consequences of purging people who think as I do. If protecting Palestinian mothers and infants is really such an affront to JFC’s mission, what does that say about its mission and its priorities? Quashing criticism of the Israeli government is a dramatic departure from JFC’s founding principles. The leaders of the social welfare agencies that depend on JFC’s support will be dismayed to learn that JFC worries more about defunding PHR reports on baby formula than they worry about maintaining the Bellefaire Jewish Children’s Bureau. JFC has been a national leader among the federations from the beginning in caring for their community’s most vulnerable, including children and the elderly. The founders of United Way emulated JFC when in 1913 they began organizing their own community chests. If JFC’s central aim is still the thing they were always best at — maintaining a community chest to help people, as they once helped my father and his brothers — then pushing me out for supporting PHR hardly seems like a good way to serve that aim.
What is most shocking to me is that the federations really don’t seem to care what the majority of American Jews think, or how many constituents they lose by purging those who refuse to equate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. Like Netanyahu, they seem quite comfortable without us. But they’re losing this generation and the next one.
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Israel’s supreme court says Arab parties can run in Oct. 27 election
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Israel’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the right of Arab parties to run in the Oct. 27 election could make it more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form a new coalition after the election.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Joint Arab List and Ra’am, the two Arab-led political lists competing in Israel’s elections, could run. The ruling overturned a decision by the Central Elections Committee, a largely political body in which parties in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition hold a majority of the seats, which had voted last month to bar the lists from running.
“The court found that the materials submitted to the Central Elections Committee did not meet the standards established in the case law for disqualifying a list of candidates,” the court said in its ruling, which did not include extensive reasoning.
The decision restored the parties that traditionally represent Israel’s more than 2 million Arab citizens and in doing so helped the opposition block. Now a wide constituency that rejects working with Netanyahu will have a reason to head to the polls rather than stay home.
Most polls have shown that the opposition bloc would need to include the parliamentary seats held by the Ra’am party, led by MK Mansour Abbas, in order to gain the lead over Netanyahu’s coalition. Unlike Ra’am, the Joint Arab List has never sat in an Israeli coalition and there is no expectation that it would join with Zionist Jewish-led parties to do so.
The court also took a number of other steps regarding the upcoming election. It overturned the committee’s decision to disqualify Ofer Cassif, a Jewish lawmaker running as part of the Joint List. In Cassif’s case, the decision was made by a 7-2 majority.
The Supreme Court justices said they “strongly condemn the outrageous statements and actions by Cassif that evoke revulsion.” At the same time, they ruled that “these statements or actions do not meet the stringent tests established” for disqualifying a candidate.
According to the petition seeking Cassif’s disqualification, he had legitimized Palestinian violence during the war, referred to those seeking to attack Israeli soldiers as “freedom fighters” and taken actions against Israel in international legal forums.
The most significant development, however, came in the case of Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of Balad, one of the parties that make up the Joint List.
During a Thursday hearing, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of indicating to Abu Shehadeh that a majority of the justices were inclined to disqualify him and recommended that he withdraw his candidacy.
Following internal consultations, Balad announced that Abu Shehadeh would withdraw his candidacy, rendering the court’s expected ruling on his disqualification moot.
“Sami Abu Shehadeh did not retract his positions and did not flee the struggle. Only after the court itself announced its intention to uphold the disqualification did he decide to withdraw his candidacy,” Balad said in an official statement.
A central part of the case against Abu Shehadeh focused on an article he published on Oct. 8, 2023, one day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, in which the terror organization killed 1,200 people in Israel and took another 251 hostage.
In the article, Abu Shehadeh described the Oct. 7 events as an “important historic event” and suggested that lessons could be learned from how Hamas had managed to surprise Israel and carry out its invasion. His comments were cited as evidence that he supports armed struggle against Israel, one of the grounds on which candidates can be disqualified under Israeli law.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said there was “a consensus that the things said by Mr. Abu Shehadeh are painful, outrageous and revolting.” The decision to disqualify Abu Shehadeh was also supported by the Democrats, Israel’s most left-wing Zionist party.
During the Supreme Court hearing, Abu Shehadeh acknowledged that “this paragraph was not written correctly.” He said, “I have never supported violence in my life,” and said that he knows victims of the Oct. 7 attack.
Balad said Abu Shehadeh would continue to lead the party’s political activities even without serving in the Knesset.
The Joint List sharply criticized the court’s handling of the case. In a statement, the list said that “the heart of the matter” was “preventing an Arab political leader from running in the elections and infringing on our public’s right to choose its representatives.”
The list accused the court of acting “following a campaign of incitement and political persecution led by the fascist and Kahanist right, joined by the leaders of the Zionist opposition parties.”
“The court must bear responsibility for its disgraceful decision before our public and before public opinion in Israel and around the world, for providing judicial cover for political exclusion. This ruling is another link in the chain of persecution of our public.”
Right-wing Israeli politicians also criticized the court for declining to issue a ruling formally disqualifying Abu Shehadeh rather than merely pressing him to withdraw.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist member of Netanyahu’s government, called the court’s proposal “too merciful” and said it “harms the democracy of the State of Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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