December 6, 2011 | 4:46 pm

Was Howard Gutman Right?: Israel and Antisemitism, What Do We Know

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

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We are hearing an awful lot of nonsense about the remarks of Howard Gutman, the United States ambassador to Belgium, regarding whether Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is to “blame” for the increase in anti-Semitism.

A summary of Gutman’s remarks, not a direct quote, appeared in an Israeli newspaper. American bloggers took it as gospel, and Republican political candidates called for Gutman’s ouster. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, himself condemned the remarks as an excuse for inaction on anti-Semitism, and the headlines blared “American Ambassador Blamed Israel for Anti-Semitism.”

For the record, we should follow the trail of remarks:

The Israeli newspaper quoted Gutman, who is Jewish and whose father survived the Holocaust in Poland, as saying: “A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned, and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”

What he actually said is quite different and a bit more nuanced:

“There is and has long been some amount of anti-Semitism, of hatred and violence against Jews, from a small sector of the population who hate others who may be different or perceived to be different, largely for the sake of hating. … What I do see as growing, as gaining much more attention in the newspapers and among politicians and communities, is a different phenomenon.

“It is a tension, and perhaps hatred, largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem. … An Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism.”

Foxman wrote in response: “This assessment of Muslim anti-Semitism, and your attempt to distinguish it from traditional or classical anti-Semitism, is not only wrongheaded but could undermine the important effort to combat the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe.

“When one tries to attribute this anti-Semitism to outside forces — in this case, the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict — one not only misunderstands the role of anti-Semitism in that conflict, but provides an unacceptable rationale for inaction.”

I respect and admire Foxman and regard him as a cherished friend, but every scholar I know distinguishes between classical anti-Semitism and its politicalization.

The evidence of history would suggest that Jews fared far better under Moslem domination and dhimmi than they did under Christian domination. All would also agree that Jews fared and fare best when they were treated as equal citizens and not under any religious domination.

But instead of engaging in charges and countercharges, perhaps it is wisest for us to consider what we know for certain about anti-Semitism, what all responsible scholars would agree with even if the news is unpleasant.

1. Israel can quench the thirst of anti-Semitism; it can also fuel the flames.

Theodore Herzl’s “The Jewish State” had two premises: Jews were a non-European element within Europe, and anti-Semitism would only diminish by a process of normalization of the Jewish condition. The Jewish state — it was not yet termed Israel — would be a state like any other, with an army and a flag, and the Jewish situation would be normalized. It stood to reason, the founder of political Zionism believed, that anti-Semitism would then disappear.

Throughout the past 63 years, despite its considerable accomplishments and the marvels of its achievement, we have seen that Israel has not achieved normalization, the Jewish state is not a state like any other state, and the Jewish people not a people like any other people. Only a people desperate for normalization would have given up the oil fields and the depth of the Sinai for the promise of normalization some 30 years ago.

Almost two decades ago, in what seems a distant memory, after the Oslo Accords, it seemed as if anti-Semitism would be a minor phenomenon, confined to the fringes of society. Americans of my postwar generation know no barriers to advancement because we are Jews — none in higher education, none in the professions or in industry. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of communism, a major pillar of worldwide anti-Semitism fell. When some Arab countries sought normalization with Israel, a muting of anti-Semitic rhetoric, if not of anti-Semitic feeling, was required; it seemed as if more might follow. In Eastern Europe, the Jewish communities were small, and in some places there were advantages to being Jewish. Roman Catholicism and a significant segment of Protestant Christianity were changing their views on the Jews and knocking down another pillar of anti-Semitism. One could be optimistic that a generation after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was quarantined.

The last decade has now shattered those hopes. While one can argue how severe a problem anti-Semitism is in the second decade of the 21st century, no one can dispute that there has been a resurgence in Europe, both on the left and the right and within the immigrant populations of major European countries. This is most particularly true in the Muslim world, where major themes of anti-Semitism that were endemic to Christianity, and rejected by it in the post-Holocaust world — such as the blood libel and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — have re-emerged with great ferocity.

Holocaust denial, originally a European phenomenon — after all, Germany and its allies killed the Jews — has migrated to the Arab and Iranian world, where, in some sort of distorted logic, Holocaust denial is used as a means of eliminating Israel. Deniers reason that if Israel is an outgrowth of the Holocaust, then if there was no Holocaust, Israel would cease to exist.

2. Let us say it loudly and clearly: Israel is not to blame for anti-Semitism; anti-Semites are to blame for anti-Semitism.

Now that we have gotten that rhetoric out of our system, let us consider the other reality.

3. There is a direct correlation between actions in the Middle East and an increase in manifestations of anti-Semitism.

I could cite many examples, but let me confine myself to France over the past decade. Increased anti-Semitism came in waves, which occurred with greatest intensity in five periods: October 2000, just after the start of the Second Intifada; post-Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center; in April 2002, following the bombings of Passover and the massive Israeli response to the intolerable bombings of its civilians; the war in Lebanon; and the war in Gaza. There can be no doubt about the correlation.

4. When Israel is negotiating with the Palestinians or with other Arab countries, there is a decrease in the expressions of Muslim anti-Semitism.

I am not naïve enough to believe that it is because Muslims suddenly come to like Israel or love Jews, but because such expressions are counterproductive to the process and only stiffen the terms of the negotiations. Can anyone dispute the last part of the ambassador’s statement: “An Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism”?

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta reiterated the point, restating the obvious when he said that Israel-Palestinian negotiations would deprive Muslim extremists of one of the sources of oxygen to fuel the fires of their militant agenda.

Let me leave it to others to determine who is to blame for the absence of negotiations, but there can be no denying that the absence of negotiations fuels the extremists’ fires. I spoke to several people who attended the meeting at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, a high-level conference of Americans and Israelis — the room was full of people who support Israel, Panetta has long been regarded as a friend, and no one disagreed with what Panetta had said.

Panetta also said that Israel’s security would be enhanced if it would “reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional stability — countries like Turkey and Egypt, as well as Jordan. This is an important time to be able to develop and restore those key relationships in this crucial area.”

No one can dispute this statement. Some do argue that it is difficult to reach out to Egypt under current circumstances with the Muslim Brotherhood on the political ascent and the military in retreat. President Shimon Peres’ publicized visit to Jordan was indeed the reaching out that Panetta called for, and though a newly empowered Turkey is not easy to deal with, no one can dispute that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s public humiliation of the Turkish ambassador was not a way to win friends and influence people.

5. Political problems can be solved by compromise. Religious fundamentalism is antithetical to compromise.

Contrary to Foxman, I and most scholars of anti-Semitism believe there is a difference between classical anti-Semitism and the current politicalization of anti-Semitism in the Middle East, and it does the Jewish community no good to deny it. For centuries Jews held limited power, had no state and no army. Israel is a political entity, and opposition to Israel may be anti-Semitic, but it is also political, perhaps primarily political. Acknowledging the differences between the two forms of anti-Semitism does not undermine efforts to combat anti-Semitism but may actually enhance them.

But we must also be equally mindful that while the current conflict exacerbates Muslim anti-Semitism, the problem would be solved for some — but not for all — were peace to be. For many Muslims, the very existence of a Jewish state in historically Muslim territory is a religious insult to Islam, a point that would not sound so strange to those religious Jews who see territorial conquest as a manifestation of the triumph of the God of Israel.

If the divide is religious, there may well be no compromise. If the divide can be seen in political terms, it will be far easier to reach some sort of agreement.

But the conversation in the Jewish community is not helped when serious issues cannot be confronted by serious people publicly and directly among friends, among lovers of Israel and Zion.

Michael Berenbaum is professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University.

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October 24, 2011 | 3:49 pm

The unseen body of Bin Laden, the all too seen body of Gadhafi

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Last May when the US government captured and executed Osama Bin Laden, President Barack Obama took significant criticism for its decision not to show the body of the slain Al Quaeda leaders. Seeing what we have seen over the past several days with the pictures of slain Libyan leader Col..Muammar Gadhafi, I wonder if any of the critics would like to reexamine their views. Sometimes the unseen is more potent than the seen.

For those who us who have labored in the post Nuremberg trials world for international accountability of leaders who trample on human rights and destroy their own population, the appearance of a decision, however spontaneous and however local, to execute the Libyan leader rather than hold him for trial is disappointing. It does not bode well for the new Libyan ruling coalition. I would much prefer to see Gadhafi face justice in the Hague or in Tripoli and even if his defenders had employed the insanity defense, which might well have succeeded, at least we would have had a full accounting for the magnitude of his crimes.

Recall that what was far more important at Nuremberg was the detailing of the scope and scale of Nazi crimes, the very notion of accountability and not the verdicts for the individual Nazi War Criminals. Justice Robert Jackson, who took an unprecedented leave from the Supreme Court to prosecute the Nuremberg defendants said in his opening statement:

“In the prisoners’ dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever. It is hard to perceive in these miserable men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals, their fate is of little consequence…

“What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners…are the living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power….Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.

The Libyan people deserved an accounting. Gadhafi’s victims also deserved an accounting. The world is better off with the Libyan dictator dead, but justice would have better been served had he been killed by a Court of law than by his captors.

And once dead, no matter how heinous his crimes – and they were heinous – his body should have been treated with dignity, not because he deserved it but because we did.

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September 4, 2011 | 12:14 pm

September 11, 2011: Memorializing and Remembrance

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

As we reach the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11th, there is a fundamental problem in the task of its Memorialization and Remembrance.

On September 11, 2011, a decade after the attacks, there is no closure. The legacy of 9/11 remains unclear.

Permit me to explain why: there is a difference between tragedy and atrocity. In tragedy what is learned roughly or even remotely balances the price that is paid for such knowledge. Atrocity offers no such, no such possibility and thus no inner space to bury the event. At most, it leaves those of us left behind searching amidst the rubble to find some meaning to an event of such magnitude that it violates our very sense of meaning.

The bombing of the World Trade Center was not a tragedy; it was an atrocity. The reason that Americans could find only incomplete closure to their suffering after the execution Osama Bin Laden is because of the imbalance between the magnitude of the crime and the limited justice that could be achieved.

Why is the legacy unclear? We are still at war in two countries as a result of the attacks—if not technically in Iraq as least psychologically—the war in Iraq was completely unrelated to 9/11 and it was started for reasons now proven as invalid. There were no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was many things awful, but he was not involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The struggle against terrorism is ongoing; not yet won; at best some progress has been made. So the legacy can not be described in terms of attack and response, defeat and victory. Al Qaida has now morphed and in the post-Bin Laden era will continue to take diverse shapes and forms in different countries.

New York, and the Nation with it, will have to deal with the paradoxical Legacy of Absence: The Absence of Presence and the Presence of Absence.

New York is in the process of rebuilding from the ashes. A moving memorial has been erected on the actual footprint the Twin Towers, flowing pools of water with the names of all who were killed whether in the bombing of the building or the rescue efforts. The one surviving tree, now rehabilitated and renewed will bear witness, truly a remnant plucked from the fire.

The pool demarcates the void where once there had been massive buildings. New York’s Skyline is marked by the absence of presence and when one visits the site one is haunted by the presence of absence; the buildings that were once there are absent, but their absence is ever present, at least for those of us who know the site, who remember the skyline, who are haunted by the flames, the ashes and the collapse.

The families of those who were lost during the attack of 9/11, the workers and visitors to the Twin Towers and their would-be rescuers who became it victims are also haunted by the presence of absence. At first it was the father whose place at the table is suddenly empty or the wife who no longer ruffles one side of the bed. Over time, one must get used to that absence and must move on, but on important occasions,  a orphans’s graduation or the wedding of a child, the birth of a first grandchild, a second or a third, one senses that absence. Its presence is haunting, making even the most wonderful moment bittersweet, every joy incomplete.

New York has decided to build not only a Memorial, which stands mute, and to which the visitors can impart meaning, but a Museum to tell the story of what happened. It too will have to deal with the unformed nature of the legacy of 9/11. It will tell the story of the perpetrators and their victims. It will memorialize the dead by giving them a name, a face and a voice and a story. It will speak of the courage of the rescuers who struggled to save them and paid for their gallant efforts with their lives. It will exhibit the remnants that also remained from the flames. I had the chance to see these haunting and shattering artifacts when they were still in an old Tower Airline Terminal at JFK. It will offer solace by telling the story of a city that was united, a country that was joined together as one, by speaking of rescue, courage and dignity in the face of atrocity. But it will also have to tell the story of the unity that fractured, the opportunities that were lost, of the sacrifices that were unrequited.

When I first contemplated the loss a decade ago, I wrote:

The survivors of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Bombings will not be defined by the lives they have led until now, but the life that will lead from now on. For the experience of near death to have ultimate meaning, it must take shape in how one rebuilds from the ashes. Such for the individual; so too, for the nation.

The question remains how have we rebuilt from the ashes?

 

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July 24, 2011 | 10:03 am

Bookie: An Appreciation

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Hyman Bookbinder (1916-2011), the legendary long-time Washington Representative of the American Jewish Committee died yesterday at the age of 95. Known to everyone as Bookie he was the most passionate moderate I have ever known.  Fair and intense, he was fierce in his convictions, but equally committed to civility and decency.

I first met Bookie when I came to work on the President’s Commission on the Holocaust during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Elie Wiesel had been appointed chairman, Irving “Yitz” Greenberg was the Commission’s Director and I served in Washington as Deputy Director. At that time, none of us had had any Washington experience and Bookie served as a masterful tutor, schooling us in the ways of the nation’s capital and in the protocols of both public life and Jewish life in Washington. He rolled his eyes as we made rookie mistakes, but never embarrassed us and never lost faith that we could learn.

During his era under the leadership of Bert Gold, AJC had assembled the most impressive staff of Jewish professionals. They were pioneers in their fields and each excelled and extended the reach of the organization and its effectiveness. Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum headed its Interreligious Affairs Department, Irving Levine worked on ethnic relations and Milton Himmelfarb was in charge of research. Each worked in their own fiefdom – only Bert Gold could see how they worked together—and made the most of their independence and their talent.

Bookie was the AJ Committee’s face in Washington. His contacts were legendary. Senators and Congressmen were his personal friends; he appeared routinely on television and talk radio, writing for the Washington Post and the New York Times. The walls of his office were filled with pictures of National and International leaders warmly inscribed to “My friend Bookie.” His autobiography was entitled Off the Wall as these photographs had to be taken down when he retired to make way for his successor.

He was the “go to” guy on Jewish affairs, more influential behind the scenes and in solving problems that in his significant public contributions.  He solved so many problems that the nature of his considerable success was not always manifest. He did not like to brag and he took pride in other’s achievements. He also pressed his organization to make sure that Jews were using their influence creatively and compassionately tilting toward the liberal side of the debate.

He worked with all sorts of coalitions on the issues that were of primary concerns. The issue of Civil Rights was central in those days and he was instrumental in sustaining the Black-Jewish Alliance in Washington, which remained strong, even as it was fracturing on the Streets of New York or Detroit and Los Angeles. He juggled another coalition for the cause of Soviet Jewry and yet another in support of Israel. He used his government experience wisely. Drawn to Jewish communal service in the aftermath of the 1967 War, he had previously been in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and played an important role in the War of Poverty and the creation of the Great Society. Earlier he had worked for the AFL-CIO and for Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, once the most Jewish of all unions. His ties to Labor were deep and personal. He had an important back channel to the Carter Administration as Vice President Mondale was both an admirer and a personal friend.

Bookie played a central role in the President’s Commission on the Holocaust seeking to bridge a divide between Survivors of the Holocaust who wanted the Museum to be exclusively Jewish and those who wanted to maintain the singularity of the Jewish experience while including other ethnic groups that perceived themselves as victims of Nazism even if their record with regard to the Jews was quite questionable. He pressed that their respectful and truthful inclusion in the Museum as essential if the Museum was to be located in Washington and not New York. He intuitively understood how to mediate and negotiate and how to compromise without sacrificing principle, words that sound quite strange in today’s polarized Washington. He could disagree without being disagreeable and his disagreements were issue oriented and never personal.

His singular contribution to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was the insistence that the Museum create a Committee on Conscience, comprised of moral leaders of the nation “who would warn of impending genocide.” Having lost 80 relatives in Poland during the Shoah, he felt that remembrance of the past entailed responsibility for the future.

His proposal might seem quaint today. But remember back 32 years before the Internet and faxes, before Facebook and Twitter, before email and You Tube, when Cable Television was but in its infancy. It was assumed that if only the world knew what was happening then men and women of conscience would have insisted that something be done. Little could he imagine then that information was be instantaneous and that what was lacking even among people of conscience was the political will to do something about genocide. Little could he fathom that the President of the United States or the Secretary of State would deliberately call a series of attacks genocide and then say: “but this will not change American policy.”

Bookie was persistent. When the Museum was reticent to engage in such social action or when there were fears that it would become a “second State Department” and put itself in a situation at odds with the Administration, Bookie kept pushing and when leadership changed, he engaged the new chairman and get off pushing for the Committee on Conscience, now a vital part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and indeed its voice of conscience.

Bookie was not without his critics. One nasty comment heard from a rival leader of the young and uncompromising, more militant generation was that he had “perpetual knee pads,” which roughly translates as he sought compromise rather than confrontation. He was someone who could find a middle ground so that both sides could come away with something. In our era, such voices of moderation are few and far between and more often than not because of that both sides come away with nothing.

Bookie married twice, both times happily. After his first wife died after a long marriage, their longtime friend Ida Levick, who herself had been widowed became his companion and later his loving and ever so caring wife. They shared political passions and a love of Yiddish. Bookie read many papers each day and watched all the Sunday morning shows. He was a political junkie did what he loved and loved what he did. He had a special passion for Yiddish, the language of his parents, the immigrant generation. It was a tie that linked him to survivors

He was not a religious man in the conventional sense of the term; only in old age did he join a synagogue out of concern for his funeral and burial – he will be buried out of Washington Hebrew Congregation, the Capital’s largest. His Jewishness was all encompassing and the content of his Judaism was Tikkun Olam, to repair the world, fragment-by-fragment.

He was an original. I grew to respect and revere the man, to cherish him as a mentor and a friend, a source of wisdom and sanguine advice. I am not alone. Throughout the corridors of government and in the inner reaches of many Jewish organizations, there are men and women of my generation who are proud to claim Bookie as a mentor, a friend, a model and a conscience.

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May 31, 2011 | 12:46 am

The God who Hates Lies: David Hartman’s Confrontation with a Rethinking of Jewish Tradition

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

David Hartman with Charlie Buckholtz, The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2011)

Two adolescent encounters with two important teachers shaped the person I have become and formed the core of my scholarly and personal values. One was with David Hartman, then a young rabbi. I had just given what I thought was an imaginative d’var Torah at a Yeshiva University Young Leadership Seminar. Self-impressed with my seeming erudition, I quoted original sources, Biblical and Rabbinic—even Maimonides commentary on the prohibitions of an Israelite King acquiring too many horses or marrying too many wives. Hartman approached me and asked: “Do you believe what you said and did you say what you believed? Or did you merely want to appear impressive and not rile up your audience?” I internalized his question and have asked it again and again whenever I speak and whenever I write.

I kept thinking of this encounter as I read his newest book, The God Who Hates Lies: Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition.

A bit of biography: Hartman is best known for founding the Shalom Hartman Institute, a meeting ground for secular and religious Israelis of many stripes and a place where rabbis of all denominations from the Diaspora (many from the United States) study classic texts together—where the sacred text becomes the bond that bridges great denominational divides. The Hartman Institute is the Red Heifer of the modern Jewish world, a mediating institution where the sacred and secular enrich each other intellectually and Jewishly. Its offerings are wide and its institutional writings significant.

The pure, those who prefer the shelters of their intellectual ghettos, are contaminated, albeit but for a while, while the impure encounter the sacred and are touched by it, sometimes for a lifetime.

Hartman was a product of the Haredi community. He studied in Lakewood and came to Yeshiva University where he met his mentor, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who combined unquestioned Talmudic brilliance with Western philosophical mastery. He created a system that insulated his religious life and observance from his encounter with Western civilization and its values. He wrote:

“When Halakhic man approaches reality, he comes with his Torah, given to him from Sinai, in hand. He orientates himself to the world by means of fixed statutes and firm principles… His approach begins with an ideal world and concludes with a real one.”

Hartman became the Rav’s protégée and, until now, his fierce defender.

Ordained by Yeshiva University, he was advised by the Rav to go to the Jesuits, to New York’s Fordham University for his doctoral training in Philosophy. For 18 years he was a successful, charismatic and influential rabbi in Montreal.  He went to Israel in the post-1967 exuberance, hoping to bring the insights of his Judaism to bear on the great questions facing Israeli society, which could no longer operate within the four cubits of Halakha but had to confront all the issues facing a modern state.  Today, his Shalom Hartman Institute may be one of the last and most creative bastions of a religious Zionism that is not Messianic.

Ironically, Hartman preferred to be seen as a religious thinker, not as an institution builder. Yet like Martin Buber before him, he was best appreciated abroad, not in Israel. His scholarship was too relevant, too engaged with the here and now (and perhaps too popular for the academics) and his concerns too religious for the bulk of secular Israelis. Yiddish is his favorite, his warmest and most expressive tongue. His English is tinged with Yiddish and his Hebrew is infused with English.

Now fourscore years of age, Hartman has written a powerful and painful book. It marks an important break with his great teacher and mentor on a point central to both student and disciple—the history and Halakha. Soloveitchik could encounter history because his philosophy of Halakha insulated him from history and Hartman wants Halakha, especially in Israel, to engage every aspect of history from welfare to warfare, from economics to ecology.

This work may also be an even deeper severing of ties with the Orthodoxy that has emerged in this generation. A generation ago, Hartman’s attempt at synthesis and dialogue, his confrontation with the modern world and Orthodox sensibilities would have made him a hero of modern Orthodoxy. A generation ago, he also could have shifted to Conservative Judaism, whose central motif then was the struggle between tradition and change, creating a Halakha responsive to history, but the distance is too great today. After this latest work, he will find himself in no man’s land, confined to a community of fellow seekers who dwell in two worlds, the world of Torah and Halakha and the modern world with all its challenges. His institutional role should allow him to create Jews who are fervent, but not fanatical, proud and pious, and also pluralistic. For both “types,” the study of sacred text is absolutely central.

For Hartman, three issues force the confrontation with the Orthodoxy of his youth and, painfully, with the person who had been his model of coexistence between the Halakhic and the modern.

The first issue is the treatment of women within Halakha, including the inability (inability is too soft a word, more accurately we should describe it as ‘the adamant refusal’) of the Orthodox Rabbinate, especially in Israel, to solve the problem of Agunah, the woman whose recalcitrant husband’s refusal to give her a divorce leaves her unable to initiate a divorce and chains her to a future without marriage. This is but one manifestation of his discomfort with the entire treatment of women in Halakha.

Another is that Jewish women can be Supreme Court Justices in the United States, other countries and in Israel; they can serve as Prime Ministers, but their signatures cannot validate a religious document. Their status is often reduced to that of a minor; women are even compared to possessions.

One more manifestation of this treatment is that women do not participate as equals in the religious life of the community. To change that, Hartman’s daughter, Tova, founded Shirah Hadashah [A New Song], the Jerusalem congregation that provides women with as many opportunities to participate in the service as a creative understanding of Halakha permits. This might seem whimsical to those who come from equalitarian communities and observe the Mechitzah being drawn closed or opened at various points in the service and those non-binding segments of the service that women can lead. The “moving” Mechitzah makes the congregation unacceptable to many Orthodox Jews. Conversely, not removing the Mechitzah makes it unacceptable and/or strange to egalitarian Jews for whom this debate was settled a long time ago.

In one sense, the Mechitzah compromise seems artificial rather than organic, timid rather than bold. And yet, it may provide Hartman and the Jews who feel as he does with a place to daven with the people they speak with, and a place to speak with the people with whom they can daven.

The second issue is the question of the non-Jew. As a rabbi, Hartman once faced the question of whether a Cohen could marry a woman who converted for love of Judaism and was an active and religious Jew. Did her previous status as a non-Jew make her a zona and Biblically prohibited to a descendant of the priestly line?  Hartman studied with the Jesuits and recognized non-Jews who are intellectually sophisticated and devoutly religious. You cannot simply categorize them as “goyim.”

This is the merely tip of the iceberg that Halakhic Judaism must confront when dealing with issues of democracy and a society that aspires to justice. Up until now, accommodation to the state was based on utilitarian purposes—avoiding what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of all against all.” There is no theology or Halakha to guide Halakhic Judaism in the acceptance of democracy. They understand the rule of law. They do not understand the state is a mediator of justice.

The third issue is the self-inflicted incapacity of the Orthodox Rabbinate to come to terms with the modern state of Israel—in the prayers recited and in the treatment of new generations. On Tisha B’av, we still speak of Jerusalem as abandoned and uninhabited, lying in ruins. The lack of sensitivity in the all-important category of membership in the nation is illustrated most profoundly by a soldier who dies for his country and is not eligible to be buried with his comrades because his maternal Jewish origins were doubtful.

The agony of this book is how Hartman wrestles with the tension between the God he believes in, the tradition that nourished him and to which he has profound loyalty and love, and the encounters with reality that force him to challenge that tradition—and even break from his mentor and master.

The details are important, but his struggle is all the more significant. He is looking for a way of living with integrity and confronting the reality of the world he encounters.

At his age, he has fulfilled the challenge he posed to me. He now may be liberated by age, stature and status to say what he believes and believe what he says. The results are most impressive. The seal of the Holy One is truth and those who worship must worship the Holy One in truth. Perhaps that is why the deepest of all lies are those we tell ourselves.

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May 22, 2011 | 4:39 pm

[UPDATED] Invoking the Borders of Auschwitz Trivializes the Holocaust and Misrepresents Our Time

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

[UPDATE No. 2 5/22/2011]:
That was Friday. President Obama addressed AIPAC on Sunday morning, The reception he received was far from frigid, it fact it seemed enthusiastic, not quite the way you would receive a political leaders who had proposed “Auschwitz borders.”

Here is what the President said:

“It was my reference to the 1967 lines—with mutually agreed swaps—that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now.  And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” means.

By definition, it means that the parties themselves -– Israelis and Palestinians -– will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.  (Applause.)  That’s what mutually agreed-upon swaps means.  It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation.  It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years.  (Applause.)  It allows the parties themselves to take account of those changes, including the new demographic realities on the ground, and the needs of both sides.  The ultimate goal is two states for two people:  Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people—(applause)—and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people—each state in joined self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.  (Applause.)”

As the President said there was nothing new or original in these propsoals. They have been American policy essentially since 1967, nothing different from the Clinton Administration and as President George W. Bush’s Chief of the National Security Council Stephen Hadley said on CNN nothing different that the Bush Administration.

So we Jews must ask ourselves: how irresponsible is it to invoke the image of Auschwitz? What are we going to say if ever there is an emergency?

As of this morning, it seems as if the Israeli Prime Minister is backtracking. Stay tuned, let us see what he has to say to AIPAC tomorrow evening and what he has to say when he addresses a Joint Session of Congress. [End UPDATE]

 

UPDATE: In the hours since I wrote this entry, it seems that other Jews also cannot help but invoking the Auschwitz comparison. Alan Dershowitz at least had the good sense to qualify his invocation of Auschwitz, but the ZOA left all caution to the wind: Its headline, “We Won’t Return to Auschwitz.”

I wonder, was the State of Israel between 1948-1967 Auschwitz? The ZOA, once the proud heirs of the great Zionist movement and which once supported partition as a means to obtain a Jewish State, might as well proclaim Israel is a failure. The IDF cannot protect the security of the Jewish State. Israel, even in 1967 borders, is not Auschwitz—- far from it.

So in its fury – remember, under its current leadership the ZOA opposed Israel’s efforts at peace – the ZOA in one press release has managed to trivialize the Holocaust and debase the accomplishments of the State of Israel while also seemingly comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

What an achievement! [end update]

Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper are my friends. I admire their work, their drive and their service to the Jewish people so this criticism is historical and certainly not personal. Still I disagree with a statement of Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Just after President Obama finished his speech on the Middle East today, the Wiesenthal Center sent out a statement condemning the speech with the title: “SIMON WISENTHAL CENTER ISRAEL SHOULD REJECT A RETURN TO 1967 ‘AUSCHWITZ’ BORDERS”

The use of the term “Auschwitz borders” is offensive and anti-historical. It demeans the Holocaust and diminishes the genuine achievement of Jewish empowerment in the post-Holocaust era of Jewish history. Despite the fact that Abba Eban and Benjamin Netanyahu—and now the distinguished leaders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center—have used it, does not make it any more credible or any less ahistorical. It makes it only all the more problematic

Permit me to tell you why.

Simply put, it misrepresents the situation of Jews in Auschwitz and the power of the contemporary Israel state. Jews had no troops, no armies, no tanks and no planes within the vicinity of Auschwitz; they had precious little to defend themselves, except perhaps their willingness to die.

Not all dangers facing the Jewish people are the dangers of Auschwitz.

I do not quarrel that the Jewish people face dangers but not all enemies are capable of – even if they were to desire to—systematic state-sponsored murder while dominating the fate of 9 million Jews.

Even the situation with Iran is not comparable to the Holocaust for one very basic reason. If you had to bet your life on whether Israel is more likely to attack Iran to prevent its nuclearization or Iran is likely to attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which way would you bet? 

I can tell you how my Israeli family answers that question.

Israel’s first response to Iran’s nuclear threat was to obtain submarines capable of carrying nuclear weapons so that any leader of Iran who decided to attack Israel would have to consider that his country would face retaliation – the very basic calculus of Mutual Assured Destruction. They may be mad – or denying of this world—enough to attempt it, but they well know that such an attack would not go unanswered.

Auschwitz was Auschwitz. The borders of Israel are the borders of a sovereign state, which has the power to defend them.  Let us not confuse the two.

Israel’s army is, to quote its current Defense Minister, the most powerful army within 1,000 miles. Israel is a regional military superpower and it is also enormously and disproportionately powerful economically in a global universe because of the talent of its people and their creativity in high tech and medicine and so many other fields.

As I have written before: “Comparing the contemporary situation to the Holocaust is to cede to our enemies a power they do not have, an intent they may not share, and to disparage to great achievement of the Zionist revolution that the Jews become actors in history rather than its passive victims.

“It is to invite upon ourselves not only nightmare of our own times, but the absolute darkness of another time and another place that is not our own and bears no resemblance to our own. Those who do so manifest considerable ignorance of those times and misinterpret our own.

Finally, it should not go unmentioned that President Obama did not suggest a withdrawal to the borders of 1967. Here is what he said:

“So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states…”

This has been American policy since 1967. The President has restated the obvious. “Mutually agreed swaps” is not a return to the borders of 1967, actually the 1949 Armistice Line. “Secure and recognized borders” is also not a return to the borders of 1967.

Negotiation is the means: Would that the parties could negotiate.

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May 8, 2011 | 5:25 pm

Fragmentary Justice in the Aftermath of Atrocity: Reflections on Osama Bin Laden’s Death

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

The American people are united in paying tribute to the U.S. military and to American intelligence operatives for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Almost all Americans — including many Republicans — are also willing to give President Barack Obama considerable credit for his courageous and considered judgment to order the attack on the compound and the capture of bin Laden.

Yet, there seems to be considerable division regarding whether pictures of bin Laden’s body should be released to the public. Some two-thirds approve of not releasing the photographs, and one-third — including many in the political and journalistic world — are in favor of releasing Osama’s photos. Their arguments vary: Some are arguing the public’s right to know, others believe that it will convince the world that bin Laden is dead, and still others merely want the satisfaction of seeing this murderer of Americans, of Westerners and of many more Muslims dead of gunshot wounds to the head.

I applaud the president for not releasing the photographs.

I do not believe that the photographs will convince the doubters, and I do believe that it could incite some in the world of radical Islam to ever greater violence and could, therefore, endanger American soldiers and/or other Americans.

Sometimes the imagination is more powerful than the actual photograph. Let people imagine what he looks like dead, shattered.

From the perspective of Jewish religious values, the decision not to release the photos is the right call; in fact, the only call.

Jewish tradition would easily sanction the attack on bin Laden: “If one comes to kill you, arise earlier and kill him,” the Talmud teaches. Self-defense is a sufficient justification.

But once the murderer is dead, his body must be treated with respect. After all, the murderer, even the mass murderer, is also a child of God — and, believe me, I do not envy God such children.

On Passover, Jews powerfully give expression to the desire for justice but also recognize that the perpetrators of injustice were also human.

Recall that we recite the Ten Plagues. Through the marvels of rabbinic commentary, we learn that because the Ten Plagues of Egypt were but the “finger of God”; at the sea, we experienced “the hand of God;” thus, there were 50 plagues. Because each plague had multiple dimensions to it, some rabbis say 200 and others say 250 plagues were inflicted on the Egyptians at the sea.

And yet, before we recite the Ten Plagues, we fill our wine cup, and as we recite them, we remove one drop of wine from the glass plague by plague, symbolically teaching that while the plagues were necessary, our cup is not full because there were human victims — even our oppressors.

According to the Bible, the Children of Israel began to sing of their victory at the sea. “God, the Warrior” [literally God is a man of war], “Who is like unto thee among those worshipped, Oh Lord?”

According to the midrash, when the angels sought to join this song in heaven, God silenced them: “My creatures are drowning in the Sea, and you sing songs?”

Bin Laden’s execution was so very well deserved that we can wholeheartedly celebrate his demise. The world is a slightly better place, but then we must remind ourselves — however difficult that reminder may be — that he was human and his body must be treated as it was, with respect.

We should not parade around with heads on swords. As the president said: “That’s not us” — at least, that should not be us.

Bin Laden’s death occurred on Yom HaShoah, the paradigmatic atrocity of the 20th century. It also coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Adolf Eichmann trial. Israel never showed a picture of the execution. Eichmann was cremated — as were his victims — his ashes scattered at sea so that there would be no grave to become a shrine. It was wise of the United States to bury bin Laden’s body at sea. His burial place will remain unknown, unmarked. No shrine will arise for his followers.

The media kept asking whether bin Laden’s death brought closure for those who had lost a loved one on 9/11, or even to the American people, as if there was a simple equation. They failed to grasp the difference between a tragedy and an atrocity.

The bombing of the World Trade Center — like the Oklahoma City bombing before it, and, without comparing the events, like the Holocaust 66 years ago — was not a tragedy but an atrocity. The reason the people of Oklahoma City could find no closure to their suffering after the execution of Timothy McVeigh was because of the imbalance between the magnitude of the crime and the limited justice that could be achieved.

Even the killing of bin Laden will offer no closure to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings because the justice achieved can never balance the injustice of the deed. It is fragmented justice — at best.

Even as we rebuild, even as the 9/11 Memorial is opened, even as the site of the World Trade Center is repopulated with buildings and people, even as widows have remarried and orphans have given birth to their own offspring, the void will remain — absence where presence had been. So it must be in the aftermath of atrocity.

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April 24, 2011 | 5:24 pm

Why Jew Should Celebrate the Beatification of Pope John Paul II

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

There have been few times in the two thousand years of Christian Jewish relations when Jews have shed genuine tears at the death of a Pope;when Pope Jon Paul II died, I – and many other Jews – cried. Building on the work of Pope John XXIII has done more to improve on Catholic Jewish relations than any Pope in history. And Jew should react with joy at the beautification of Pope John Paul II on Sunday May 1st.

It is a paradox of the Holocaust that the innocent feel guilty and the guilty innocent.

Nowhere is this paradox more pronounced that in the post-Holocaust behavior of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II made confronting the Shoah and the fight against antisemitism a centerpiece of his papacy. He brought Roman Catholic-Jewish relations to a new level of respect. Like his predecessor Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II was directly touched by the Holocaust and has assumed responsibility for its memory. Both men were changed by the history they experienced and as leaders changed the institution they headed, even an institution so conservative and seemingly so reticent to change as the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope John XXIII accepted the ongoing life of the Jewish people after the arrival of Jesus rejecting supercessionism, the doctrine that Christianity had come to replace Judaism and thus that there was no reason for the people of Israel to remain Jews; he eliminated the charge of deicide and removed it from Catholic teaching and liturgy, he stopped to greet Jews leaving a Rome Synagogue on Sabbath, yet neither he nor his two immediate successors accepted the renascent State of Israel, the very form of Jewish life since 1948. He had come to terms with 1878 years of Jewish life – the years of Jewish exile from 70 C.E. to 1948

Enter Pope John Paul II who as a young man in Poland witnessed the Shoah. Three million Jews of Poland were killed in the Holocaust. After the war, Polish cities, which were once the home of large and thriving Jewish communities, were bereft of Jews and the Pope’s hometown was the site of a large ghetto whose Jewish population was deported to death camps. As a young university student, and when he worked in the theater Karol Wojtyla had Jewish friends. Some remained his friends throughout his long and distinguished life. As a recently ordained young priest, he was asked to baptize children born of Jewish parents who had been raised by Polish Catholics, who had sheltered them during the Shoah, thereby saving their lives. When their Jewish parents did not return after the war, the Polish family that had raised them lived them as their own children and wanted to raise them in their faith. On these occasions, the future Pope insisted that Jewish children first be informed of their Jewish origins and only then could they be baptized. It was an act of courage – political, religious and pastoral in post-war Poland, a deed of profound respect for memory. It was not an act popular with his congregants who were unable to tell young Jewish children of their origins during the war for such information could be lethal of both the child and his adoptive family, and who were reluctant to do so after the war for fear of reprisal from the local population and for complicating their relationship.

As Pope John Paul II, he recognized the State of Israel. He visited a synagogue for prayer and treated the Rabbi and the Congregation of Rome with every religious courtesy. Instead of dividing the world between Christians and Jews, he spoke of the commonality of religious traditions/ He spoke with reverence of the Torah. He spoke out against antisemitism again and again. He visited the sites of Jewish death and acknowledged on numerous occasions the centrality of the Shoah.

His visit to Poland in 1979 was perhaps the moment for which he was elected Pope. He delegitimated Communism in Poland and played a pivotal role in its demise. And Communism was the strongest enemy of Jewish nationalism and of Judaism.

In March 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Israel – the State and not just the Holy Land. From the moment he arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv to the moment he departed, it was clear to Roman Catholics and Jews, and to the international media, that this was an extraordinary gesture of reconciliation in the shadow not only of two millennia of Christian antisemitism but in the massive shadow of the Holocaust. Even if Pope John Paul II did not say everything that could be said – he apologized for the antisemitism of Christians not of Christianity—his bowed head at Yad Vashem and his note of apology inserted into the Western Wall said more than could be said by words alone. In the Third Millennia, The Pontiff was determined that Roman Catholics act differently, behave differently and believe differently. An eyewitness to the Holocaust, he had come to make amends. He took all-important steps to make certain that the full authority of the papacy was brought to bear against antisemitism. His theology was quite simple: antisemitism is a sin against God. It is anti-Christian. These are welcome words to every Jew and one could sense their power by the manner in which the Israelis received Pope John Paul II. Even ultra-Orthodox Rabbis, opposed by conviction to anything ecumenical and raised on the stories transmitted through the generations of confrontations between Priests and Rabbis, were deeply impressed by the Papal visit to the offices of the Israel’s Chief Rabbis.

Pope John Paul II’s record was not perfect. He attempted to canonize Pope Pius XII, the war-time Pontiff, he did not open the Vatican Archives from World War II for researchers on the Holocaust to let the true record of he Vatican be known, he canonized Pope Leo IX who had forbidden he return of a forcibly baptized Jewish child, he welcome Yasir Arafat and President Kurt Waldheim to the Vatican, the former before he recognized Israel and the later after his Nazi past was exposed and he had flamed Austrian antisemitism during his presidential campaign.. The most charitable thing that can be said of his handling of the pedophile scandal in the Church was that it was inadequate. Jewish tradition teaches that “there is no righteous person without sin.”

Yet none of this can obscure the overriding substance of his papacy. He demonstrated that true religiosity – devout, orthodox and pious as it may be—need not demonizes another religion and disparager other faiths and the right of another religion to worship their God as they believe. The innocent ones who felt guilty have led contemporary Roman Catholicism to renounce antisemitism and to accept the integrity of the ongoing religious life of the Jews. This behavior should serve as a model for Jews and Muslims as well as for other religious leaders as to the ethical requirements of religious doctrine.

 

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