Among its enemies, Israel must count America’s liberal Jews.
IS THE JEWISH STATE DIVIDING AMERICAN JEWRY”?
By Jonathan Rosenblum
Jewish World Review
May 10, 2011
The creation last October of the Jewish American Affairs Committee of Indiana (JAACI) flew under the media radar screen, at least outside of Indiana. But the new group may prove to be a harbinger of a growing split in the American Jewish community.
Once, Israel served to unify the bickering factions of US Jewry; today, it is more often a source of heightened tensions.
JAACI came into existence as an alternative to the local Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), the advocacy wing of the local Jewish Federation.
The local JCRC pointedly left out of its mission statement the second goal of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the national umbrella organization of local JCRCs: "To dedicate ourselves to the safety and security of the state of Israel." Like many other JCRCs across America, it focused its advocacy efforts primarily on "social justice issues," such as opposing the school voucher initiative of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels — which holds the promise of substantially boosting Jewish parochial education.
JCRC-sponsored programs devoted to Israel typically included "pro-Palestinian" voices to maintain balance.
JAACI's first scheduled event was addressed by the current speaker of the Indiana House, Brian Bosma, who expressed appreciation for new views being heard for the first time from the organized Jewish community. JAACI, for instance, actively supported school vouchers, and it crafted a pro-Israel resolution that unanimously passed both houses of the Indiana legislature, reaffirming the right of Israel, America's "greatest friend and ally," to defend itself.
The breakaway from the JCRC in Indiana will likely prove the first of many such reactions to the perceived passivity of the traditional communal organizations on Israel. Plans are well advanced to create an alternative to the local JCRC in one of America's largest Jewish communities. An organization called JCC Watch has accused the New York Federationfunded Jewish Community Center of the Upper West Side of partnering with numerous organizations that support, directly or indirectly, organizations actively promoting the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel.
The discontent among rank-and-file Jews has much to do with the federations' politicization and seeming indifference to Israel's image. The New York Federation has recently come under attack for providing over $1 million to the George Soros-funded Jewish Funds for Justice, which coordinated the January ad in The Wall Street Journal, signed by 400 heterodox rabbis calling for Fox News to sanction Glenn Beck for inappropriate Holocaust analogies. Beck, as anyone who watched his broadcasts after the recent Itamar slaughter knows, is one of Israel's staunchest defenders in the media.
The Washington, DC Federation funds an anti- Israel Jewish theater troupe called Theater J. Among the recent offerings was Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, a short play based on the metaphor of Israeli Jews as today's Nazis. The theater company also sponsored a bus trip to a showing of the anti- Israel agitprop My Name is Rachel Corrie. The Orange County Federation and the Hillel at University of California, Irvine participate in the Olive Tree Initiative — two-week trips to Israel on which students are exposed to both Palestinian and Israeli speakers who share an animus for Israel. One of those early speakers was a prominent Hamas leader (whose participation the Federation subsequently protested).
Philadelphia's JCRC recently sponsored a night on the theme of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. Unnoted by any of the presenters was that Israeli Arabs enjoy political freedoms unknown to any other Arabs in the Middle East, as well as higher levels of prosperity, and are represented in Israeli universities in proportion to their percentage of the overall population.
At the recent General Assembly of Jewish Federations, $6m. was allocated to the creation of the Israel Action Network (IAN) to combat the BDS movement. Martin Raffel, vice president of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, was chosen to head the new initiative. He argues that Jewish groups calling only for the boycott of goods produced beyond the 1949 armistice lines should not be treated as outside the communal tent. Thus the head of the mainstream community's anti-boycott efforts legitimates this tactic.
Perhaps most ominous is the recent appointment of Richard Jacobs to head the Union of Reform Judaism, which claims to represent the largest group of synagogue-affiliated Jews in America. Jacobs sits on the boards of both J Street and the New Israel Fund. The former actively opposed sanctions against Iran, is currently working against a congressional resolution urging the administration to take a tougher stand on Palestinian incitement, enthusiastically endorsed the Goldstone Report and escorted its author around Capitol Hill, and urged the Obama administration not to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning the illegality of the settlements.
(To be continued)
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