Social Justice
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SAPIR A JOURNAL OF JEWISH CONVERSATIONS THE ISSUE ON SOCIAL JUSTICE SHLOMO BRODY · JEREMY BURTON ETHAN FELSON · MATTI FRIEDMAN YITZ GREENBERG · MOSHE HALBERTAL FELICIA HERMAN · JAMES KIRCHICK JOSHUA MUR AVCHIK · PAMELA PARESKY BRET STEPHENS · KYLIE UNELL EINAT WILF · DAVID WOLPE Volume One Spring 2021 And they saw the God of Israel: Under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. — Exodus 24: 10 SAPIR Bret Stephens EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mark Charendoff PUBLISHER Ariella Saperstein ASSO CIATE PUBLISHER Felicia Herman MANAGING EDITOR Katherine Messenger DESIGNER & ILLUSTRATOR Sapir, a Journal of Jewish Conversations. ISSN 2767-1712. 2021, Volume 1. Published by Maimonides Fund. Copyright ©2021 by Maimonides Fund. No part of this journal may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of Maimonides Fund. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. WWW.SAPIRJOURNAL.ORG WWW.MAIMONIDESFUND.ORG CONTENTS 7 Welcome | Mark Charendoff 82 MOSHE HALBERTAL Medieval Judaism and the Roots of the Welfare State 8 BRET STEPHENS Jews and the Dilemmas of Social Justice 90 RABBI DAVID WOLPE Social Justice for Moderns 98 KYLIE UNELL The Fraught Politics of Social Justice What’s God Got to Do with It? 18 PAMELA PARESKY Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew Israel and Its Critics 28 JAMES KIRCHICK Our Duty to Be Unimpressed 108 MATTI FRIEDMAN Eight Tips for Reading About Israel 40 JOSHUA MUR AVCHIK 120 The Past and Future of Black–Jewish Relations EINAT WILF How Not to Think About the Conflict 54 JEREMY BURTON 128 ETHAN FELSON Liberalism and the Common Calling of Blacks and Jews When Progressives Meet Israel Jewish Texts, Jewish History 135 Summing Up | Felicia Herman 64 RABBI YITZ GREENBERG Judaism and the Politics of Tikkun Olam 74 RABBI SHLOMO BRODY Reclaiming Biblical Social Justice WELCOME UDAISM has long embraced and celebrated argument. The Talmud records not only con- Eight Tips for clusions but also dissenting opinions and often the full course of the discussion. Dis- Reading About Israel pute, ideally, is not resolved; it endures. It con- tinues to educate us, challenge us, and impose gray in a world that EVERY DISPUTE THAT IS FOR THE SAKE too often seeks the simplicity of black and white. OF HEAVEN, WILL IN THE END ENDURE. Coming out of a generational pandemic, the Jewish community — PIRKEI AVOT 5:17 must consider its future. This pause was deeply painful, but it has given us an opportunity to reflect, to reassess, to challenge pre- sumptions and default behaviors. While that imperative is true for everyone in the Jewish community, it is perhaps most important for leadership, one of the primary audiences for whom SAPIR is intend- ed. A community that does not struggle with larger questions of pol- icy, but instead promulgates “truths” that are accepted unchallenged, is a dull community indeed. Among American Jews, as in America as a whole, we seem to be calcifying into ideological tribes that cannot tolerate dissent. Provocative perspectives are not only not welcomed; they are vilified. Loud voices claim to speak for the whole, and those with thoughtful questions stay silent. This is not the Jewish way. Over these four issues of SAPIR, we hope to engage readers in some uncomfortable discussions. We hope to challenge your thinking. We hope to inspire you to engage with your colleagues and your commu- nities, to ask questions, examine assumptions, and embrace dissent. In Jewish thought, the blue of the sapir — the sapphire — was meant to remind us of the sky, to draw our eyes toward heaven (Exodus 24:10). We hope that SAPIR will be another chapter in a long Jewish history of arguments for the sake of heaven. We hope you will join us on this journey, and if you do, these arguments are certain to endure. — Mark Charendoff, Publisher SPRING 2021 | SAPIR 7 being an antisemite even as he delights in making common cause BRET STEPHENS with them. In 2020, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar cou- rageously denounced the shocking indifference of so many social justice warriors to antisemitic outbursts from prominent black athletes and artists. Eight Tips for Jews and the Examples such as these have persuaded Jews of the political Right and center that “social justice,” whatever it may be in theory, is profoundly hostile to Jewish interests in practice. And progressive Reading About Israel Dilemmas of Jews are themselves frequently dismayed by the degree to which movements that tout their tolerance and inclusivity are anything Social Justice but tolerant and inclusive when it comes to Jews. In the progres- sive world’s new intersectional hierarchies of race and oppression, American Jews who enjoy economic privilege and “conditional whiteness” while participating, through their support for Israel, in the oppression of Palestinians are now considered leading malefac- tors in the American system of “white supremacy.” S WITH SO MANY of the world’s big ideas, Did it really have to be this way? social justice — the term denotes the fair distribution of wealth, power, opportunity, and status within society — is a concept with deep roots in Jewish tradition and, Rabbi Shlomo Brody reminds us here that “social justice is a at times, disquieting consequences in foundational biblical value” — at least insofar as social justice Jewish life. is conceived as concern for the poor and vulnerable, fair treat- Take many of the most prominent contemporary social justice ment of workers, national solidarity in the face of common needs movements, and they are shot through with militant anti-Zionism, and challenges, and a belief in the dignity of every human being, if not unconcealed antisemitism. regardless of wealth or status. In 2016, the Movement for Black Lives published a platform These tenets of Jewish moral identity, coming down to us from the (since deleted) calling Israel “an apartheid state” that was commit- prophets, would be developed over 19 centuries of diasporic life. As ting “genocide” against Palestinians. In 2017, marchers carrying early as the 13th century, as Moshe Halbertal notes, Jewish commu- Jewish Pride flags were expelled from the Chicago Dyke March. In nities in medieval Spain were pioneering early versions of a welfare 2018, leaders of the Women’s March were revealed as proud sym- state, complete with public education, provisions for orphans, and pathizers of Louis Farrakhan’s. In 2019, the U.K.’s Labour Party alms for the poor distributed from social funds. Over time, this sense ran under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a man who, as James of concern for the communal good would be matched by an ever- Kirchick notes in our inaugural issue of SAPIR, petulantly denies expanding sense of Jewish obligation to the world at large, in what 8 SAPIR | VOLUME ONE SPRING 2021 | SAPIR 9 religious traditions but also because of our historical experience — because our struggle for individual justice as Jewish persons has Our struggle for individual justice as Jewish been predicated on a collective struggle for justice as a Jewish peo- persons has been predicated on a collective ple. Social justice, for Jews, has historically been at least as much about self-preservation as it is about altruism. struggle for justice as a Jewish people. Similarly, it should come as no surprise that Jews have been at the forefront of championing social justice for other margin- alized or oppressed communities. Justice for me but not for thee Rabbi David Wolpe calls “an ascending spiral of insularity and open- is not a Jewish value. When Jews fight for the rights of others, as ness” in terms of the locus of Jewish social concern. we did so conspicuously and courageously during the civil rights This is not accidental. Other nations, with sovereign powers era, we are also fighting to strengthen a moral and political order and normal politics, could aggressively pursue their interests with that is good for us. As Jeremy Burton argues in these pages, “it is only glancing regard for moral issues. The Jewish nation, with nei- profoundly within the Jewish self-interest to defend the American ther sovereign powers nor normal politics until the creation of the liberal project.” State of Israel, had much less latitude as far as its interests were concerned, but more scope to explore its values. For better and worse, political powerlessness went a long way to spark Jewish mor- al imagination as well as indignation — a self-reinforcing process. Yet if intellectual honesty requires that we recognize the deep Consider the Jewish names associated with major social justice connection between Jewishness and social justice, honesty also movements in the United States. Samuel Gompers (né Gumpertz) requires noting the ways in which that connection has been pro- was the founder and longest-serving leader of the American Feder- foundly problematic. The paradoxical essence of the problem is ation of Labor. Julius Rosenwald was the single greatest sponsor of this: Social justice, as it is often conceived and practiced, is both public schools for African Americans. Lillian Wald was a pioneer too worldly and not worldly enough. in community nursing. Joel Spingarn was, next to W.E.B. DuBois, Too worldly: Social justice may be a foundational biblical value, arguably the most influential early leader of the NAACP. Gloria but it is neither the only nor the central value. Tikkun olam is an Steinem and Betty Friedan all but defined the modern feminist evolving aspect of Jewish tradition, not the sum total of it, just as movement. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were, with social justice can be only one component of true justice, not a James Chaney, martyrs of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964.