Uncategorized
If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster
I’ve gone to work on an oyster farm on Block Island, a tiny dot of land midway between Long Island and Rhode Island, every May for the past few years.
If you are, like most people, unfamiliar with the mechanics of oyster farming, here’s what it looks like, at least on this farm. First, you toot around a saltwater pond in a glorified bathtub with a motor hanging off the back. From the boat, wearing chest waders, you hop in the water to unmoor dozens of giant floating mesh bags full of oysters from lines anchored in the pond. The bags are usually also bogged down with a mess of extraneous sea dwellers like kelp, mussels, green crabs and goopy creatures called sea squirts, so they’re heavy. You pile as many bags as you can into the boat, clamber back in — which is harder than it sounds, because your wader boots are probably stuck in the mud at the bottom of the pond — and bring those bags to a floating barge.
Finally, you dump the bag onto a muddy wooden table, pick out everything that isn’t an oyster, since all of those aforementioned sea critters will kill the prize bivalve, and chuck the extra stuff back into the pond. Then you hand-sort the oysters by size. You harvest ones that are big enough to eat — oysters take a few years to reach full size, and grow unevenly, so each bag always has a range of oysters — shovel the rest back in the bags, get back in the boat and tie them back onto the lines. Then you do it again. On a good day, you get through around 100 bags of oysters in a shift.
Bigger farms might have machinery to help sort the oysters; this farm does everything by hand. This may sound backbreaking, and it is, but it’s also a great break from desk work. A day spent out on the water doing repetitive physical labor is a kind of a reset. You can’t look at your phone with the wet, muddy oyster gloves on, and there’s barely service anyway. Plus you’d probably drop it in the pond, so it’s best not to try.
You may, at this point, notice that you’re reading a Jewish newspaper, that I’m a Jewish journalist, and that oysters are not kosher.
But what if I told you oysters were, in fact, kosher? That a rabbi once argued they are actually vegetables, by virtue of the fact that they “root” on rocks in the ocean? And that their shells are a form of scales, thus making them part of the kosher category of scaled and finned fish?
These are real arguments that were made around the turn of the 20th century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the first American institution for Reform Jewish ordination.
The impetus for this Talmudic bit of logic was in large part a now-infamous feast that has come to be known as the “Trefa Banquet,” due to the amount of non-kosher food that was served. The menu included littleneck clams, shrimp salad, soft-shell crabs, a lobster bisque and frog legs in a cream sauce. Bordeaux wine and Champagne, also not kosher, were served alongside each course, and ice cream — real ice cream, made with dairy — followed with dessert, despite previous meat courses that included beef tenderloins and squab.
The occasion was a triple-header of religious Jewish events: HUC’s first ordination, a meeting of the Rabbinical Literary Association and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the previous name of today’s Union for Reform Judaism. And the discourse this meal set off about the place — or lack thereof — for kashrut in American Jewish life went on for years.
Despite the fact that oysters had not even been on the menu, in Jewish newspapers across the country, rabbis and laypeople wrote warring op-eds on the kosherness of oysters. Somehow, oysters became the symbol of what American Judaism would be. And, of course, what American Jews would eat.
The symbol of an oyster
I had never eaten an oyster until I lived in Seattle after college; for my first anniversary with a long-ago ex-boyfriend, we went to what was then the hottest restaurant in the city, an oyster bar. We were broke, but playing at a kind of sophisticated adulthood we hadn’t quite reached, and oysters seemed like the way to act out that sophistication.
Presented with a menu of oysters from across the country and not knowing where to begin, we got an array on the half shell, two each of a dozen types presented on a beautiful bed of ice with lemon and mignonette. Unsure how to slurp them out of the shell, I had to ask the waiter whether one chews oysters or just swallows. (You chew.)
The first one tasted like a stormy ocean, another buttery and mild, a third one sweet and meaty. They were evocative, like eating the memory of a day at the beach.
Oysters, if you haven’t had them, have terroir in the same way as wine does. Just as grapes take on the characteristics of the soil they grew in, oysters taste different depending on the water they came from; even though there are only a few different species of the bivalve, there are countless variations. East Coast oysters tend to be sharp and briny and refreshing, while West Coast oysters are usually creamy and sweet. But past that, each one is completely unlike the next.
One oyster I had from Maine tasted like pennies. (Maybe that doesn’t sound appetizing, but neither does petrol, yet aged rieslings are prized for their petrol notes.) I’ve had oysters that tasted delicately vegetal, like a cucumber, or deeply umami like a mushroom.
When the Trefa Banquet occurred, oysters were in vogue across the U.S. And the occasion was a lavish and sophisticated one, almost a coming-out party for American Jewry. It was, after all, the celebration of the first class of rabbis ordained in the U.S., proof to the country that Jews were here to stay, and a statement to the rabbis and Jews of Europe that these American Jews were just as good, just as learned, as their European counterparts. In fact, perhaps more so — they were creating a new model of Reform Judaism, leaving the Old Country’s ways behind for a modern, American image of what it meant to be a Jew. The menu had to be the pinnacle of refinement.
Plus, these Cincinnati Jews had a bunch of New Yorkers in from the big city to impress. In a 2005 paper published in The American Jewish Archives Journal, rabbi and historian Lance J. Sussman argued that the menu, which included numerous French misspellings, may have been the caterer’s attempt to appeal to what he imagined were the more elevated tastes of the event’s East Coast guests.
Of course they served shellfish.
In 1883, the year of the banquet, America’s Jews were largely German immigrants. (Though newer waves of immigration had begun to bring in more traditionally observant Russian Jews fleeing pogroms.) Some of them had been associated with the Haskalah in Europe, a progressive Jewish education movement that advocated for secular education, modern dress and assimilation into wider society. By and large, these Jews were urban, educated and middle-class, having left the shtetl Judaism of their elders behind when they left the village.
These Jews began to develop a modernized form of Judaism, largely based in Germany. They changed the liturgy, axing concepts they found backwards, such as the idea that, in a coming Messianic era, Jews would return to Zion and resume sacrificing animals in a restored temple. They recited prayers in German instead of Hebrew and lightened many of the restrictions involved in observing Shabbat, kashrut and festivals. They took on a Christian aesthetic, exchanging synagogue chanting for an organ and choir. Sermons emphasized universal ethical themes instead of Jewish rituals. Some rabbis even argued for allowing both intermarriage and eating pork, though these topics remained hotly debated.
Once imported to the U.S., this newfangled Judaism got more popular.
“Part of the Reform ideology is to get away from all of the laws, all the do’s and don’ts of Judaism, which are considered primitive and superstitions almost,” said Jane Ziegelman, a Jewish food historian and curator of food talks at the Tenement Museum.
Instead, these Reformers wanted to turn Judaism into a more introspective, morally and socially focused religion. And thanks to its roots in the Haskalah, science was core to this new, modern Judaism. Oysters made for a perfect example. At the time, bivalves were considered an aphrodisiac and a health food, and they were both plentiful and popular. (So popular, in fact, that they got over-harvested, which is one of the reasons they’re so expensive today; the mountains of shells from the oysters eaten by New Yorkers were so large they posed a sanitation challenge.) These modernizing Jews understood kashrut to be, fundamentally, about health and ethics, which meant that anything healthy should be kosher.
“The idea was that the unhealthy categorization of the oyster had been proven wrong by modern science,” said Ziegelman.
American Reform Jews saw kosher rules, which they dismissively referred to as “kitchen Judaism,” as a contrast to their more noble pursuit of an intellectual, moral and scientific Judaism. Embracing the oyster was a way to live out their ideals about assimilation, modernization and religious ethics.
“It was the oyster because of its prevalence in American food culture,” Ziegelman told me. “To adopt the oyster was seen as both acculturation — that you really were American — but also you really were a modern person. You weren’t relying on these old kashrut superstitions.”
The shellfish scandal
Not everyone waxes poetic about oysters’ subtle marine nuances so much as their textural similarities to mucus. Personally, I don’t get that — I find them silky, or buttery, or meaty — but I get that oysters can seem a bit gross, and not just because of their texture.
Though on the farm, the oysters float on the surface of the water in bags, they are, at least naturally, bottom dwellers. They’re also “filter feeders,” which means they filter water for their food. This makes them an excellent resource in cleaning up polluted waterways — the Billion Oyster Project in New York City works restoring oyster reefs to the rivers around the city to help clean them and encourage biodiversity. But that also means that oysters aren’t always safe to eat because they’re consuming whatever bad stuff there is in the water. They can purify themselves given enough time in clean water, but they get polluted easily by their environment, perhaps one of the reasons they were originally forbidden under the laws of kashrut.
And even when they’re from clean water, there’s a lot to manage to make them safe. My partner and I run an oyster shucking side hustle with some friends, popping up at bars and events and turning out trays of raw oysters on the half shell. Preparing for each event takes many hours. You have to scrub the mud off each shell with a stiff-bristled brush. Then, since you want your oysters alive until you eat them lest they spoil, you pack them in coolers on ice — but you can’t bury them in too much ice lest they freeze to death. And since they’re salt-water dwellers, you have to drain the coolers regularly to prevent them from drowning in the freshwater ice melt.
On top of that, as a saying goes, oysters are best in the months that contain the letter R — September through April. Some of that is because they are plumpest during colder months when they build up their fat stores. But some of it is because colder waters reduce the risk that a raw oyster will carry a virus or bacteria like Vibrio or norovirus.
Today, farms take the temperature of their water daily and regularly test it for bacteria, so raw oysters aren’t particularly dangerous, but you can still easily get food poisoning from a mishandled oyster. As much as I love them, they’re work. I understand that, to some people, they’re not worth the risk — spiritually or physically.
Perhaps the subversive and literal danger of the oyster is what led to the legend that rabbis at the banquet threw down their napkins and stormed out. The public flouting of kashrut, at a religious event, could symbolize the end of Judaism. The Highland House Affair, as the feast is also known, has become infamous among Jewish historians and rabbis in the century since it occurred as a moment of schism. But in fact, most contemporaneous descriptions of the event make no note of any drama around the menu.
An account of the feast in The New York Herald briefly mentions the non-kosher menu, but does not say that any of the attendees were upset — in fact, to the author’s palpable distaste, quite the contrary. “Instead of rising in a body and leaving the hall, they sat down and participated,” they wrote of the rabbis in attendance.
Only one account at the time, written in New York’s Jewish Messenger by Henrietta Szold (who would go on to found the Jewish women’s society Hadassah) observed that some attendees hadn’t partaken of the food, though, she noted, it was only “a surprisingly small minority.”
“There was no regard paid to our dietary laws,” she wrote of the catering, “and consequently two rabbis left the table without having touched the dishes, and I am happy to state that I know of at least three more who ate nothing and were indignant but signified their disapproval in a less demonstrative manner.”
Wise, the Hebrew Union College founder who had organized the meal, at first defended it, saying he had hired a Jewish caterer who regularly served a Jewish association and had no idea the meal served would not be kosher. Eventually, however, Wise and his supporters changed their strategy and began to defend the non-kosher components. They railed against the idea of kashrut; one rabbi argued that it was the perfect occasion to put “kitchen Judaism to the antique cabinet where it belongs.”
When the 500 members of the Free Sons of Israel, a Jewish fraternal order that Wise belonged to, gathered and supped on oysters, the rabbi reprinted the menu in the newspaper he ran, The American Israelite. He repeated the tactic when another Jewish fraternal order put oysters on a meeting menu. Jews were not accidentally consuming oysters, he pointed out. This was how Jews were eating, and why should they pretend otherwise?
Yet ironically, given his vociferous rejection of tradition, Wise also provided Talmudic arguments as to why the meal may have in fact been kosher; even as he chose assimilation he used Jewish wisdom to justify his choice. In the pages of The American Israelite, he argued “that the oyster shell is the same to all intents and purposes as the scales to the clean fish” and referenced both Moses’ and Maimonides’ statements on the topic. Elsewhere, he called the oyster an “ocean vegetable” to explain why it might be kosher. (Today many vegans take a similar stance; oysters have no nervous system and some vegans are more willing to consume the bivalves than they are honey.)
Others wrote back, citing their own raft of Jewish sages. One B. Younker wrote in to The Jewish Voice to reference Talmudic debates over what constitutes a scale, concluding that the oyster’s shell does not count.
But amid the debate, everyone else kept eating oysters. Sussman’s article in The American Jewish Archives Journal notes oyster-filled menus from the double wedding of two rabbis, a synagogue dedication and a banquet for a Jewish fraternal order; the last even used the same caterer as the Trefa Banquet. Apparently, there was something to that luxurious menu they planned — it was impressive enough to earn them repeat customers.
Today, many Jewish historians look to the Trefa Banquet as the beginnings of the Conservative movement in Judaism, as some of those horrified Jews rejected the idea of kosher oysters and decided they needed to develop a middle ground between the Reform and Orthodox movements. The debate the banquet set off over kashrut, as well as Wise’s liberal interpretations of Jewish law, concerned some Jews who wanted to protect tradition. Soon after the great oyster debate began, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship institution of the Conservative movement, opened its doors as a place to retain some amount of tradition in text and theology.
Fishy Jewish cooking
In my time manning the pop-up, I’ve come to believe that shucking an oyster is an art form. First, there’s the basic problem of opening the oyster. Usually that means inserting an oyster knife at the narrow hinge of the shell — though some people shuck from the side — and wiggling until you feel the point of the knife settle in deeper. Then you lever the knife down to pop the shell, slice along the flat top shell to separate the oyster, and then scoop the knife underneath the oyster to sever the adductor muscle. Personally, I prefer a Duxbury-style knife, which comes to a sharper point, but many people prefer the more classic New Haven-style knife, which curves slightly at the tip, providing a bit more leverage and a bit less likelihood of stabbing yourself in the palm.
Every oyster is different, not only in taste, but in shape, so finding the right spot to pop open the oyster is difficult; it takes practice. And that’s just the first challenge. A well-shucked oyster must be clean, free of shattered shell or sand. Just as importantly, it cannot be pierced by the knife (“scrambled”) and should retain all the liquor inside the shell. Ideally, it’s served on pebble ice, not just cubes, so that it doesn’t tip over and spill.
There’s something meditative to running the oyster pop-ups, trying for the perfect shuck with every oyster. They’re rushed and busy and stressful — there’s always a line and shucking a dozen without scrambling or shattering is hard to do when you’re working fast. You have to reach a sort of zen state to fly through them, finding the right point on each shell to insert the knife, cleanly severing them from the shell and cleaning out any sand inside. No one wants that grinding sensation you get when you have a snack at the beach and feel the grit between your teeth. And you can’t appreciate the unique texture and taste of each varietal if they’re a scrambled mess inside.
The oyster should be a plump, pearly arc in the shell, with lacy frilled edges. It should be beautiful.
Apparently everyday Jews saw the beauty in the bivalve. They largely left the debates over kashrut to the pages of The American Israelite and continued to eat oysters by the bushel.
A 1911 blurb in the J. Jewish News of Northern California excitedly announced the beginning of oyster season, listing several of the area’s best “oyster houses,” as did Jewish newspapers across the country over the next few decades.
Jews even ran their own oyster stands. An 1892 article in the B’nai Brith Messenger wrote a brief piece marveling at the success of one Al Levy, whose Southern California oyster cart did so well he was able to open cafes and “cocktail rooms.” Despite Levy’s obvious disregard for kashrut, the piece notes that he “has been one of the most progressive, honored and beloved Jews in this community, popular alike among Jews and gentiles.”
Some of the most popular Jewish cookbooks from the era are full of oyster recipes, literally writing the bivalves into Jewish food history alongside kugel and latkes.
Aunt Babbette’s Cookbook, a Jewish cookbook that remained in print for 25 years, featured 11 oyster recipes in its fish section; the rest of the fish, all kosher, are given one preparation apiece. A dish that sounds an awful lot like kugel — though the cookbook doesn’t use that term — includes an option to add oysters. (Notably, other seafood like clams and shrimp are omitted from most Jewish cookbooks of the era.)
For all the enthusiastic embrace of oysters, though, there was still one line that wasn’t crossed: pork, which even the Trefa Banquet did not serve.
“The debate over selective kashrut centered on two issues: pork and oysters,” wrote Sussman, the rabbi and historian, and the line was drawn, for the most part, between the two. Pigs have long been a metonym for kashrut and Judaism, and centuries of antisemitic caricatures pictured Jews riding pigs. Eating pork, apparently, was instinctively understood by most American Jews as a step too far, a symbolic denial of identity.
The power of ‘kitchen Judaism’
The oyster has always been the perfect metaphor for American Jewish life.
There’s a Judaism of purity, hewing to the safety found in tradition: keeping kashrut, retaining a degree of separation from the rest of society. But most American Jews opted for a Judaism of experimentation, in which the rules get bent, reinterpreted and altered to adapt to the ways of a new culture and new country. It’s more dangerous; one might eat a bad oyster. But in the meantime one also gets to enjoy the good ones. Yet even as Jews debated how far Judaism could stretch and remain Jewish, they did so Jewishly. Even the Jews who, over a century ago, rejected Jewish tradition and embraced shellfish justified their choices with Talmudic citations and biblical exegesis. They used Jewish law to justify why Jewish law was wrong about the oyster. What debate could be more Jewish?
Food, since then, has become both more and less central to Jewish identity. Plenty of Jews now will eat bacon or ham, and a celebration of the Trefa Banquet’s centennial in 2018 served a menu of mostly pork, connecting to Judaism specifically through a rejection of its strictures. Kitchen Judaism has become aspirational instead of pejorative as food traditions have become a rich and beloved way to connect with Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the Reform tradition has actually tipped back toward kashrut observance; in 2001, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform movement added in a recommendation that Jews follow “some element of Jewish dietary discipline.”
Through it all, the oyster has remained the perfect symbol of the decision confronting American Jews: How much should they assimilate to their new country, and how much tradition must they retain to stay Jewish?
This summer, I think I might have to miss the oyster farm; life has gotten in the way and I just don’t have the time. Still, I’m sure I’ll be shucking up trays for friends and customers somewhere (including at my Jewish wedding).
And most importantly, I’ll be carrying on the proud tradition of the oyster debate. I’ll admit that I don’t really buy the idea that shells are the same as scales, though I’m sympathetic to the idea that they should be categorized as vegetables. But the discussion I’m more interested in is how to eat them. The right answer is raw and plain. Maybe a drop of lemon. Maybe.
Cocktail sauce or horseradish or hot sauce, though? That’s heresy.
The post If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “fomenting” hate and making Jews less safe through his fierce criticism of Israel. Netanyahu suggested the mayor’s rhetoric on the Gaza war contributed to the climate that led to Thursday’s stabbing of an Orthodox man outside a Manhattan synagogue.
“I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue,” Netanyahu said Sunday morning on Fox News.
Authorities said the suspect, Jose Morales, 51, allegedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife and an Orthodox man in the torso with a screwdriver before being subdued and arrested. Morales was arraigned Friday on several hate crime charges and was held without bail. Both victims were hospitalized and are expected to recover.
Investigators have not publicly linked the suspect’s motives to the mayor’s comments in a video address last week conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The controversy has also been fueled by reports that members of Mamdani’s inner circle believed long before the legal review was completed that the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu. Despite that, Mamdani proceeded with the review and used a mayoral address to announce the legal conclusion while renewing his criticism of the war in Gaza. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him. The speech drew more than 200 million views across social media.
Speaking outside the Manhattan synagogue on Friday, Jewish leaders and some prominent rabbis expressed concern that the comments risked endangering Jewish New Yorkers, the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
Netanyahu escalated his feud with Mamdani by directly linking the mayor’s embrace of the International Criminal Court’s case against him to the rise in antisemitism. “I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now,” Netanyahu said. “I speak to quite a lot of my friends, and they say, ‘Look, it’s like a different world. We’re afraid to go into the streets. We certainly do not want to wear yarmulkes or any clothing that would give away that we’re Jews.’”
The Israeli leader further accused Mamdani of “basically supporting” Hamas, despite the mayor describing the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a “horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.” Asked on Thursday whether he considers the Hamas massacre a genocide, Mamdani stopped short of using that term.
“The genocide charge belongs to our enemies,” Netanyahu said in the Sunday interview. “What we are doing is try to fight this genocidal terrorist organization that embeds itself among civilians.”
Netanyahu (6 minutes ⬇️) accuses Mamdani of fueling antisemitism by embracing ICC case:
“He’s fomenting hate… I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now. And I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against… pic.twitter.com/qjb5uj4xNM
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) July 26, 2026
The latest clash shows how the war in Gaza has become one of the biggest political issues of Mamdani’s administration. His outspoken criticism of Israel has won support from progressives but has also deepened tensions with many Jewish leaders, who say his rhetoric has made an already difficult climate even worse. In an interview on Thursday, Mamdani suggested that New Yorkers “have been aghast at this genocide over the last few years, and not only the continued denial of that genocide but also the fact that it continues itself.”
A recent Associated Press survey conducted before Mamdani’s recent comments found that Mamdani, who won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Netanyahu, who is facing a tough reelection in October.
Netanyahu is expected to visit Washington, D.C., on Monday for a meeting with President Donald Trump and attend the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close political ally.
Despite acknowledging he cannot arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani has vowed to continue speaking out against the Israeli leader ahead of his expected appearance at the United Nations this fall. Netanyahu said Sunday that he still intends to travel to New York “to speak the truth” and defend Israel before the international body.
The post After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel’s shameful West Bank front
Two mosques burned in the West Bank on Sunday.
One, in the village of Qusra south of Nablus, was torched and defaced with graffiti reading “Revenge for Benayahu,” referring to Benayahu Mellet, who was killed in the deadly clashes near the village of Tel two days earlier. Another mosque, in the village of Kur, was also set ablaze. Cars were burned. Fields were set on fire. Elsewhere, according to witnesses, extremist settlers blocked a major road, attacked Palestinian motorists, and allegedly did so in full view of Israeli security forces. No arrests were reported.
In the incident on Friday, villagers had confronted armed settlers who had entered the village in a provocation, triggering a gun battle that left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead. The clash was the latest in an escalating wave of settler-Palestinian violence that has killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded hundreds this year, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority — and not denied by Israel.
The images should horrify every Israeli and Jew. Not because they will generate another round of hostile headlines abroad, though they certainly will. Not because Hamas or Iran will exploit them for propaganda, though they will. They should horrify Israelis because they reveal a sickness that has been growing inside the Jewish state for years — one that the Netanyahu government has failed to confront, and some would say abetted.
For all the disasters that have befallen Israel in recent years, few have been as shameful as the tolerance of violent Jewish extremism in the West Bank. This is no longer a matter of isolated “price tag” attacks or a handful of hooligans. It has become a persistent phenomenon that includes the burning of places of worship, attacks on civilians, destruction of homes and farmland, vigilante raids into Palestinian villages, and organized acts of intimidation designed to terrorize entire communities. Sometimes it results in deaths, almost always in material damage, and without exception in reputational damage. Whatever political cause its perpetrators imagine they are serving, they are inflicting immense damage on Israel itself.
Two arrests were reported by Israeli police for the latest widespread mayhem – far from a crackdown; if past is prologue, those detained will soon be released. There have been no known convictions for the murder of Palestinians by radical settlers; a security apparatus that knew the exact location of Iranian leaders could not, apparently, find the perpetrators.
This is a moral failure and a national security disaster. At the very moment Israel is preparing for the possibility of renewed confrontation with Iran, remains engaged against Hamas, and continues to try to deter Hezbollah, it is simultaneously forced to contend with Jewish extremists opening yet another front. Every burned mosque, every unauthorized raid into a Palestinian village, every revenge attack requires soldiers, commanders, intelligence assets, and police resources. Every incident inflames the West Bank precisely when Israel can least afford another arena of instability.
The latest violence illustrates the pattern. And every burned mosque and vigilante actions helps Hamas and strengthens Iranian propaganda. Every assault on innocent Palestinians makes Israel’s diplomatic task immeasurably harder. Israel’s enemies could scarcely invent a more effective narrative than the one Jewish extremists hand them themselves.
Israel’s security establishment understands this better than anyone.
Reserve Major General Gadi Shamni, who commanded the IDF’s Central Command and served as the army’s top officer in the West Bank, warned on Israel Radio that the military has too often looked the other way while influential members of the government have effectively encouraged the radical fringe.
Shamni also described what he sees as the strategic vision animating the most extreme elements of the settler movement: gradually forcing Palestinians into disconnected islands of “Area A” autonomous zones while emptying much of the rest of the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation.
If that assessment is correct, it represents one of the most cynical political projects imaginable.
Apart from its profound moral implications, it would guarantee perpetual conflict. It would invite international isolation, deepen Israel’s demographic and diplomatic dilemmas, and condemn another generation of Israelis to policing an endless insurgency. It is a blueprint for permanent instability.
Defenders of the government cry foul when settlers are criticized, claiming that the vast majority of them reject violence and are not responsible for the crimes committed by a handful of extremists. This is a misleading presentation.
Sure, most of the half million “settlers” are living in communities close to the pre-1967 border which Israel expects to receive in border swaps as part of any future two-state deal. But the 20% or so living well beyond the “security fence” line, deep inside the West Bank, are another matter.
Many of them are deeply committed ideologues who, in the best-case scenario, envision a future of permanent subjugation of the Palestinians. Moreover, those who dream of the Palestinians leaving altogether, one way or another, are not a handful, as I know very well from countless off-the-record conversations. And the radicals who commit actual crimes are quietly backed by a massive infrastructure that is run by radical Cabinet ministers with real political power. So the violent fringe has acquired influence wildly disproportionate to its numbers — and is serving a vile cause with real support.
That influence is visible not only in the attacks themselves but also in the willingness of prominent politicians to minimize them, excuse them, or rally publicly behind individuals accused of serious violence against Palestinians. Such gestures send a devastating message: that political loyalty may matter more than the rule of law.
It is a tragic indication of the foresight of the late Israeli philosopher Yishayahu Leibowitz, who warned over a half century ago that the occupation will eat away at Israel’s decency and democratic character.
The ideological ancestry of much of this movement leads back to Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach movement was eventually banned from the Knesset because of its openly racist platform. Even former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir — a career Likud politician, former underground fighter, and hardly a man of the political left — refused to remain in the Knesset chamber while Kahane spoke.
How far Israel has fallen that ideas once considered beyond the pale increasingly receive sympathy, protection or political indulgence.
The irony is, of course, that those who proclaim themselves the fiercest defenders of Israel are among those inflicting some of its deepest wounds. They weaken Israel’s international standing, strengthen its enemies, undermine society’s resolve, force young Israeli soldiers into impossible situations and stain Judaism itself.
The burned mosques of Qusra and Kur are another indication of what is at stake in the Oct. 27 election. If the opposition comes to power, this will not be tolerated any more.
The post Israel’s shameful West Bank front appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Troy Jackson wins Maine Democratic Senate nomination, keeps mum on Israel, AIPAC
(JTA) — BANGOR, Maine – Troy Jackson accepted the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate race on Saturday with no mention of Israel, sidestepping an issue that has become a focal point for many Maine Jews as they assess the party’s new standard-bearer.
Jackson secured the nomination in a landslide 566 to 5 vote by delegates at the nominating convention. Saundra Pelletier, the only remaining challenger after the rest of the field dropped out in the days leading up to the gathering, picked up the handful of votes that didn’t go to the winner.
While Jackson took several shots during his acceptance address at Sen. Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican he will now face in the general election, it was Pelletier who used her remarks to specifically malign Collins’ voting record on Israel.
“She voted to increase federal funding in defensive arms for Iran, and did not vote to take moderate measures to hold Netanyahu accountable,” Pelletier said, receiving a chorus from the crowd.
The victory for Jackson came after the state’s former Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic, left the race earlier this month amid a sexual assault allegation, which he has denied. The resulting scramble to replace him upended the Democratic primary and prompted fresh scrutiny from Jewish Mainers of Jackson’s recent evolution on Israel.
Jackson, a former state lawmaker and union advocate, had previously said little publicly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his two-decade career in state legislature. However, during the race to replace Platner, he has embraced the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel on his campaign website, both positions championed by Platner before his exit. Jackson also has said he wouldn’t accept any funding from AIPAC.
But on Saturday, as a sea of supporters sporting his campaign’s blue and yellow “Troy Jackson” t-shirts cheered their new nominee, Jackson omitted any mention of Israel from his remarks. Instead, Jackson reaffirmed his commitments to passing Medicare for all, supporting union rights and restoring abortion rights nationwide, among other issues.
During his address following the decisive victory, Jackson also offered a message to Maine voters who remain on the fence:
“Whether you supported me from the beginning, supported another candidate, or are still deciding what you think of this fifth-generation logger from Allagash,” Jackson said. “I’ve always known this, that your trust has to be earned, and so I want you to hear this directly from me. There is a place in this campaign for all of you. There is work for you in this movement, and I will spend every day, now through November, earning that trust because today we turn the page.”
Amy Fried, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Maine who attended Saturday’s conference as an alternate delegate but did not cast a ballot, said that while she believed Jackson had addressed Israel in the lead-up to Saturday because “a lot of people are interested in the topic,” his speech reflected the issues he had been “concerned about his whole political career.”
“Obviously, he’d have to take votes on foreign policy and funding when he’s in the Senate,” Fried said. “But I think that his main interest is always in issues that have to do with housing and healthcare, you know, all of the matters that are sort of more day-to-day kitchen table issues.”
While Jackson avoided revisiting his recent stances on Israel, which have raised concern among some Jewish voters in Maine, about a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the convention hall in support of his candidacy.
“It’s a really positive step that you have nominated Troy Jackson,” one protester shouted through a megaphone. “I think he’s going to be a strong voice for the kind of values that I believe in and the people of Palestine, the children of Iran, and all the other places the U.S. bombed.”
Ronna Lugosch, a 71-year-old Jewish grandmother and delegate from Round Pond, Maine, said that she was “more excited now than I was before” about Jackson’s candidacy.
Lugosch, who supports Jackson’s stances on Israel, said she hadn’t noticed he had left the topic out of his remarks. “Unfortunately, it’s a sensitive topic, so that’s my guess that maybe he didn’t bring that up because it was just too much,” Lugosch said. “You know, he was being careful.”
Still, Lugosch said that she was “really impressed with all his comments about working people and organizing.”
“I’m going to campaign for him because we need to get rid of Susan Collins,” Lugosch said. “Before it was more of a sort of a defensive stance, but now I’m supportive, and so I feel better about going out into the community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Troy Jackson wins Maine Democratic Senate nomination, keeps mum on Israel, AIPAC appeared first on The Forward.
