Kol Rina An Independent Parashat Toldot November 10, 2018 *** 2 Kislev, 5779

Kol Rina – An Independent Minyan, is a traditional egalitarian community. We are haimish (homey/folksy), friendly, participatory, warm and welcoming. We hold weekly services in South Orange as well as holiday services and celebrations which are completely lay led. We welcome all to our services and programs from non-Hebrew readers to Jewish communal and education professionals. Today's Portions 1: 27:28-30...... p. 157 2: 27:31-33...... p. 157 3: 27:34-37...... p. 158 4: 27:38-40...... p. 158 5: 27:41-46...... p. 159 6: 28:1-4...... p. 160 7: 28:5-9...... p. 160 maf: 28:7-9...... p. 161 Haftarah: Malachi 1:1 – 2:7...... p. 163

Toldot in a Nutshell https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/3178/jewish/Toldot-in-a-Nutshell.htm Isaac and Rebecca endure twenty childless years, until their prayers are answered and Rebecca conceives. She experiences a difficult pregnancy as the “children struggleinside her”; G-d tells her that “there are two nations in your womb,” and that the younger will prevail over the elder. Esau emerges first; Jacob is born clutching Esau’s heel. Esau grows up to be “a cunning hunter, a man of the field”; Jacob is “a wholesome man,” a dweller in the tents of learning. Isaac favors Esau; Rebecca loves Jacob. Returning exhausted and hungry from the hunt one day, Esau sells his birthright (his rights as the firstborn) to Jacob for a pot of red lentil stew. In Gerar, in the land of the Philistines, Isaac presents Rebecca as his sister, out of fear that he will be killed by someone coveting her beauty. He farms the land, reopens the wells dug by his father Abraham, and digs a series of his own wells: over the first two there is strife with the Philistines, but the waters of the third well are enjoyed in tranquility. Esau marries two Hittite women. Isaac grows old and blind, and expresses his desire to bless Esau before he dies. While Esau goes off to hunt for his father’s favorite food, Rebecca dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes, covers his arms and neck with goatskins to simulate the feel of his hairier brother, prepares a similar dish, and sends Jacob to his father. Jacob receives his father’s blessings for “the dew of the heaven and the fat of the land” and mastery over his brother. When Esau returns and the deception is revealed, all Isaac can do for his weeping son is to predict that he will live by his sword, and that when Jacob falters, the younger brother will forfeit his supremacy over the elder. Jacob leaves home for Charan to flee Esau’s wrath and to find a wife in the family of his mother’s brother, Laban. Esau marries a third wife—Machalath, the daughter of Ishmael. Haftarah in a Nutshell: Malachi 1:1-2:7 https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/587261/jewish/Haftorah-in-a-Nutshell.htm This week's haftorah opens with a mention of the tremendous love G-d harbors for the children of Jacob, and the retribution He will visit upon the children of Esau who persecuted their cousins. This follows the theme of this week's reading, whose two protagonists are Jacob and Esau. The prophet Malachi then rebukes the kohanim (priests) who offer blemished and emaciated animals on G-d's altar: "Were you to offer it to your governor, would he be pleased or would he favor you? . . . O that there were even one among you that would close the doors [of the Temple] and that you would not kindle fire on My altar in vain!" The haftorah ends with a strong enjoinder to the kohanim to return to the original covenant that G-d had made with their ancestor, Aaron the High Priest. "True teaching was in his mouth, and injustice was not found on his lips. In peace and equity he went with Me, and he brought back many from iniquity." Food For Thought The Courage of Persistence: Toldot 5779 by Jonathan Sacks http://rabbisacks.org/courage-persistence-toldot-5779/ There is a strange passage in the life of Isaac, ominous in its foreshadowing of much of later . Like Abraham, Isaac finds himself forced by famine to go to Gerar, in the land of the Philistines. There, like Abraham, he senses that his life may be in danger because he is married to a beautiful woman. He fears that he will be killed so that Rebecca can be taken into the harem of king Avimelekh. The couple pass themselves off as brother and sister. The deception is discovered, Avimelekh is indignant, explanations are made, and the moment passes. Genesis 26 reads almost like a replay of Genesis 20, a generation later. In both cases Avimelekh promises the patriarchs security. To Abraham he said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like” (Gen. 20:15). About Isaac, he commands, “Anyone who molests this man or his wife shall surely be put to death” (Gen. 26:11). Yet in both cases, there is a troubled aftermath. In Genesis 21 we read about an argument that arose over a well that Abraham had dug: “Then Abraham complained to Avimelekh about a well of water that Avimelekh’s servants had seized” (Gen. 21:25). The two men make a treaty. Yet, as we now discover, this was not sufficient to prevent further difficulties in the days of Isaac: Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the Lord blessed him. The man became rich, and his wealth continued to grow until he became very wealthy. He had so many flocks and herds and servants that the Philistines envied him. So all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth. Then Avimelekh said to Isaac, “Move away from us; you have become too powerful for us.” So Isaac moved away from there and encamped in the Valley of Gerar and settled there. Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them. Isaac’s servants dug in the valley and discovered a well of fresh water there. But the herdsmen of Gerar quarrelled with Isaac’s herdsmen and said, “The water is ours!” So he named the well Esek, because they disputed with him. Then they dug another well, but they quarrelled over that one also; so he named it Sitnah. He moved on from there and dug another well, and no one quarrelled over it. He named it Reĥovot, saying, “Now the Lord has given us room and we will flourish in the land.” (26:12–22) There are three aspects of this passage worthy of careful attention. The first is the intimation it gives us of what will later be the turning point of the fate of the Israelites in Egypt. Avimelekh says, “you have become too powerful for us.” Centuries later, Pharaoh says, at the beginning of the book of Exodus, “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are greater in number and power than we are. Come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and it come to pass, when there befall any war, that they join also with our enemies and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land” (1:9–10). The same word, atzum, “power/ powerful,” appears in both cases. Our passage signals the birth of one of the deadliest of human phenomena, antisemitism. Antisemitism is in some respects unique. It is, in Robert Wistrich’s phrase, the world’s longest hatred.¹ No other prejudice has lasted so long, mutated so persistently, attracted such demonic myths, or had such devastating effects. But in other respects it is not unique, and we must try to understand it as best we can. One of the best books about antisemitism, is in fact not about antisemitism at all, but about similar phenomena in other contexts, Amy Chua’s World on Fire.² Her thesis is that any conspicuously successful minority will attract envy that may deepen into hate and provoke violence. All three conditions are essential. The hated group must be conspicuous, for otherwise it would not be singled out. It must be successful, for otherwise it would not be envied. And it must be a minority, for otherwise it would not be attacked. All three conditions were present in the case of Isaac. He was conspicuous: he was not a Philistine, he was different from the local population as an outsider, a stranger, someone with a different faith. He was successful: his crops had succeeded a hundredfold, his flocks and herds were large, and the people envied him. And he was a minority: a single family in the midst of the local population. All the ingredients were present for the distillation of hostility and hate. There is more. Another profound insight into the conditions that give rise to antisemitism was given by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (the section has been published separately as Anti-Semitism).³ Hostility to becomes dangerous, she argued, not when Jews are strong, but when they are weak. This is deeply paradoxical because, on the face of it, the opposite is true. A single thread runs from the Philistines’ reaction to Isaac and Pharaoh’s to the Israelites, to the myth concocted in the late nineteenth century, known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.4 It says that Jews are powerful, too powerful. They control resources. They are a threat. They must be removed. Yet, says Arendt, antisemitism did not become dangerous until they had lost the power they had once had: When Hitler came to power, the German banks were already almost Judenrein (and it was here that Jews had held key positions for more than a hundred years) and German Jewry as a whole, after a long steady growth in social status and numbers, was declining so rapidly that statisticians predicted its disappearance in a few decades.5 The same was true in France: The Dreyfus affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Republic when Jews had all but vanished from important positions.6 Antisemitism is a complex, protean phenomenon because antisemites must be able to hold together two beliefs that seem to contradict one another: Jews are so powerful that they should be feared, and at the same time so powerless that they can be attacked without fear. It would seem that no one could be so irrational as to believe both of these things simultaneously. But emotions are not rational, despite the fact that they are often rationalised, for there is a world of difference between rationality andrationalisation (the attempt to give rational justification for irrational beliefs). So, for example, in the twenty-first century we can find that (a) Western media are almost universally hostile to Israel, and (b) otherwise intelligent people claim that the media are controlled by Jews who support Israel: the same inner contradiction of perceived powerlessness and ascribed power. Arendt summarises her thesis in a single, telling phrase which links her analysis to that of Amy Chua. What gives rise to antisemitism is, she says, the phenomenon of “wealth without power.” That was precisely the position of Isaac among the Philistines. There is a second aspect of our passage that has had reverberations through the centuries: the self-destructive nature of hate. The Philistines did not ask Isaac to share his water with them. They did not ask him to teach them how he (and his father) had discovered a source of water that they – residents of the place – had not. They did not even simply ask him to move on. They “stopped up” the wells, “filling them with earth.” This act harmed them more than it harmed Isaac. It robbed them of a resource that would, in any case, have become theirs, once the famine had ended and Isaac had returned home. More than hate destroys the hated, it destroys the hater. In this case too, Isaac and the Philistines were a portent of what would eventually happen to the Israelites in Egypt. By the time of the plague of locusts, we read: Pharaoh’s officials said to him, “How long will this man be a snare to us? Let the people go, so that they may worship the Lord their God. Do you not yet realise that Egypt is ruined?” (Exodus 10:7) In effect they said to Pharaoh: you may think you are harming the Israelites. In fact you are harming us. Both love and hate, said Rabbi Shimon bar Yocĥai, “upset the natural order” (mekalkelet et hashurah).7 They are irrational. They make us do things we would not do otherwise. In today’s Middle East, as so often before, those intent on destroying their enemies end by doing great harm to their own interests, their own people. Third, Isaac’s response remains the correct one today. Defeated once, he tries again. He digs another well; this too yields opposition. So he moves on and tries again, and eventually finds peace. How fitting it is that the town that today carries the name Isaac gave the site of this third well, is the home of the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University, and the Kaplan hospital, allied to the Medical School of the Hebrew University. Israel Belkind, one of the founders of the settlement in 1890, called it Reĥovot precisely because of the verse in ourparsha: “He named it Reĥovot, saying, Now the Lord has given us room and we will flourish in the land.” Isaac is the least original of the three patriarchs. His life lacks the drama of Abraham or the struggles of Jacob. We see in this passage that Isaac himself did not strive to be original. The text is unusually emphatic on the point: Isaac “reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them.” Normally we strive to individuate ourselves by differentiating ourselves from our parents. We do things differently, or even if we don’t, we give them different names. Isaac was not like this. He was content to be a link in the chain of generations, faithful to what his father had started. Isaac represents the faith of persistence, the courage of continuity. He was the first Jewish child, and he represents the single greatest challenge of being a Jewish child: to continue the journey our ancestors began, rather than drifting from it, thereby bringing the journey to an end before it has reached its destination. And Isaac, because of that faith, was able to achieve the most elusive of goals, namely peace – because he never gave up. When one effort failed, he began again. So it is with all great achievements: one part originality, nine parts persistence. I find it moving that Isaac, who underwent so many trials, from the binding when he was young, to the rivalry between his sons when he was old and blind, carries a name that means, “He will laugh.” Perhaps the name – given to him by God Himself before Isaac was born – means what the Psalm means when it says, “Those who sow in tears will reap with joy” (Ps. 126:5). Faith means the courage to persist through all the setbacks, all the grief, never giving up, never accepting defeat. For at the end, despite the opposition, the envy and the hate, lie the broad spaces, Reĥovot, and the laughter, Isaac: the serenity of the destination after the storms along the way. [1] Robert Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken, 1991). [2] Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). [3] Hannah Arendt, Anti-Semitism (part one of The Origins of Totalitarianism), (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1979). [4] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a forgery, produced by a Russian journalist at the end of the nineteenth century, claiming that there was a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world The classic work on the subject is Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). See also Hadassa Ben-Itto, The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005). [5] Ibid., 4. [6] Ibid., 4-5 [7] Bereishit Rabbah 55:8. To Lift One's Eyes by Tyler Dratch http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1102506082947&ca=33bb62e1-25a4-4a44-83c2- fd956de0d73b "I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come from? My help will come from God, creator of the heavens and the earth. (Psalms 121:1-2) What does it mean to "lift one's eyes?" A number of medical studies now tell us about the damage we are collectively doing to our backs and necks by spending so much time looking down at iPhones and tablets. But there is so much more we are missing when we do not look up. When the psalmist looks up, they are looking, deeply and carefully, for God. This kind of looking enables one to see the divinity present in other people and the world in general. It brings with it the potential for redemption. This is not how the Pittsburgh shooter saw. By the time he entered the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, he was blinded by propaganda and rage, and blind to the humanity of people engaged in worship. When we fail to see the humanity of others, we power a destructive force that distances us from God, and disorders the world. As Jews, it is thus our obligation to look for God and to see others and the world, in their full complexity. In our parashah, the ability and inability to see creates the central family crisis between Yitzhak, Rivka and their children Esav and Yaakov. Esav is famished after a long day of hunting in the field. When he asks Yaakov to share some of his food with him, he can only identify it as 'red stuff', not exactly sure what he is actually asking for. Yaakov decides that he will give Esav some of his lentil stew in exchange for the family birthright blessing. Sforno, a 16th-century Italian commentator, notes that Yaakov feels justified in receiving the birthright from Esav because of this very lack of close 'seeing'. Sforno writes: "(Yaakov) saw that Esav was so totally absorbed in his futile occupation, an occupation which does not represent the task of man on earth, that he could not even identify the lentils by their name but referred to them only by their color..." Yaakov decides that a person who does not even see the world closely enough to identify a particular pot of food does not have the skills to carry on the family line. The exchange of the birthright becomes a test that will determine if Esav has the ability to see the world complexly. He fails that test and loses the birthright. Yaakov does not only understand the high risk of not seeing, but also the revelatory power of truly witnessing the other. As his mother tries to encourage him to dress up as his brother Esav to steal, or perhaps rightfully receive the birthright that is now his, Yaakov is concerned that through his father's close intimacy he will perceive the truth. Yaakov worries: "If my father touches me, I shall appear to him (lit: in his eyes) as a trickster and bring upon myself a curse, not a blessing." (Genesis 27:12). Ramban, a 13th-century commentator from Spain, explains that Yaakov could not have been literally worried about his father seeing him. After all, Yitzhak is blind! Instead, he teaches: "(What Yaakov really meant was) Maybe my father will touch me: [He wasn't worried that] the reason he would touch him would be to recognize him, but he said, "Maybe he will draw me close to him to kiss me or to put his hand on my face in the way that a father expresses love for his son, and he will find by touching that I am smooth." According to Ramban, Yaakov is concerned that his father's love for his sons will cause him to quickly discover the ruse and perhaps even curse him in place of a blessing. In the end, Yitzhak will also not fully see. The birthright will go to Yaakov, and a perceived disunity between the two brothers will cause Yaakov to flee. Yitzhak will not live to see his sons reconcile. The more we lose this ability to see, the more chaos we will encounter. May our Jewish response to the tragedy in Pittsburg include a recommitment to a deep seeing of others. May our pain slowly transform into a deep love of humanity, for this is the force that will repair the world. (Tyler Dratch is Conservative Yeshiva & Hebrew College Rabbinical Student) D'var Haftarah: A New Paradigm by Rabbi Mordechai Silverstein http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1102506082947&ca=33bb62e1-25a4-4a44-83c2- fd956de0d73b The meaning of the identifications found at the beginning of prophetic messages is often unclear to us. Was "Malachi" the name of the prophet or was he simply as the word "malachi" implies - a "divine messenger"? And when it says that God's message was delivered "b'yad Malachi", which literally means "in the hands of Malachi", does it mean that the prophecy is God's words or those of Malachi inspired by God? In rabbinic times, this curious phrase, "b'yad Malachi", prompted an even deeper and more extensive debate over the nature of prophecy itself - whether its divine source makes it timeless, or whether its human speaker makes it a product of its historical milieu. The following takes up this question: Said Rabbi Yitzhak: 'Even that which the prophets in the future will prophesy, all of them were received from Mount Sinai, as was written: 'Those who are standing here with us this day' (Deut. 29:14) - this refers to those who were already created, those who are [already] in the world; 'and those who are not with us here this day' (Ibid.) - this refers to those who will be created in the future and do not as yet exist (einenu)... And so it says: 'A pronouncement: The word of the Lord to Israel through the hands of Malachi' (1:1) - It does not say 'by Malachi' but rather 'through the hands of Malachi', to teach you, that the prophecy was already given to the prophet at Sinai." (adapted Tanhuma Yitro 11) For Rabbi Yitzhak, all prophetic messages derive from the "original" and "ultimate" prophetic event - Mount Sinai - and thus predate the later prophets. But Rabbi Yitzhak says something even more radical. Unlike the Torah given at Sinai, these "later" prophecies were not passed, as per Pirkei Avot, from Moshe to Yehoshua to the Elders, etc. No, each prophet's message was given to that prophetat Sinai. What could this mean? Maybe Rabbi Yithak's view reflects the famous midrash that all Jewish souls that would ever enter the world were present at Sinai. If so, then each prophet's soul could have received it's particular prophecy. But Rabbi Yithak's might have meant something else entirely, namely that Sinai embedded prophecy into the fabric of the universe, secret messages waiting to be revealed by particular people in the future. This conception of prophecy more closely parallels how we think about knowledge and wisdom. The genius does not bring some new truth into the world. Rather, the genius causes a paradigm shift by revealing something that was always there, but in a way others can understand. No matter how one reads Rabbi Yitzhak, the implications are staggering. Pirkei Avot sees God's message as legitimate only if it has been passed down through legitimate hands. But for Rabbi Yitzhak, a prophet's message, or a sage's wisdom, can come seemingly out of nowhere. (See Avraham Yehoshua Heschel's Torah Min Hashamayim vol. 2 pp. 259-61) The chain of transmission approach produces stability, but the second approach makes it possible for the kinds of deeper changes needed when circumstances change radically or particular lines of thinking have run their course. The late First Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Avraham Kook is a prime example of the Rabbi Yitzhak's approach. The challenge, and often the tragedy, is that we may only know after the fact whether a radical new ideal is correct. ( Rabbi Mordechai Silverstein is a member of the Conservative Yeshiva Faculty) Parshat Toldot: Educate your child according to his or her way by Rabbi Yoni Hollander https://ots.org.il/parshat-toldot-educate-your-child-according-to-his-or-her-way/ Equality in education turned Esau into a man of the fields, and turned Jacob into an innocent tent-dweller. These two youths grew up to be very different individuals. Equal education, even within the same household, can’t guarantee equal results. Εducate your child according to his or her own way. “And the youths grew up, and Esau was a man who understood hunting, a man of the field, whereas Jacob was an innocent man, dwelling in tents.” (Genesis 25:27). Parashat Toldot reintroduces an age-old educational dilemma: choosing between equal education and the desire to teach each and every child in his or her own way. This dilemma is expressed in Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch’s famous and incisive statement about Isaac and Rebecca: The principle reason for the stark contrast between Abraham’s grandchildren was not just their personality traits, but also their lacking education. When they were young, no one noted the differences in their hidden tendencies. They gave them both the same type of schooling, but in doing so, forgot a central axiom of education: “Educate the child in his own way” (Proverbs 22:6)… If one were to place Jacob and Esau in the same classroom, school them intending to impart the same life habits, and groom them for a life of study and thought, it is assured that one of them will fail. Had Isaac and Rebecca taken the time to penetrate into Esau’s soul, the future “hero” would not have become a “hero of the hunt”, but rather, a true “hero before Hashem”: “… and the youths grew up”, only after these two youths became men was everyone surprised to discover that these two boys, who had exited the same womb, grown up together, attended school and studied together, nonetheless had such different natures and were so different in the way they acted. At what age did this discovery occur? Presumably, R. Hirsch’s description is based on a Midrash that states that they were 13 years old (7th or 8th graders in modern terms). “And they youths grew up”: for all of their 13 years, they had gone and returned from school, and after thirteen years had gone by, one would go to institutions teaching Torah, while the other went to places of idle-worship (Genesis Rabbah, Ch. 63 Sec. 10). To understand the complexity of this dilemma, we ought to apply it to today’s reality. Let’s imagine that Jacob and Esau had studied together at primary school, where they received the same schooling. Even then, the two differed markedly yet reasonably. “And the youths grew up”: now, they need to choose their secondary education. In today’s terms, Jacob’s school is a direct continuation of the primary school he had attended– a prestigious Yeshiva. Where, however, was Esau sent? According to Rabbi Hirsch, it wouldn’t have been right to send him to the school Jacob was attending. Where should we send a boy who prefers spending his time in the fields, one who isn’t an innocent tent-dweller? Should we make prayer compulsory in Esau’s school? In the lessons at that school? Would there be any homework? What special programming would we run at that school? Would the students need to take matriculation exams? A year ago, at a pedagogical conference, one well-respected, long-time educator quoted R. Hirsch, and disagreed with him on how to apply those principles today. He claimed that if we follow R. Hirsch’s advice, we’d be holding back those students, and denying them the equal opportunities they need so badly in our society. A 12-year-old’s passion for being an outdoors man shouldn’t preclude him from being part of the world of the tent- dwellers. The speaker added that in his opinion, the decision-makers in the educational system erred decades ago when they separated vocational schooling and academic schooling, and in doing so, they sealed the future of these boys, who were still so young. Yet there’s even more to this complexity. R. Hirsch’s basic assumption was that our children’s education is in our hands, and if we would only give them the proper education they need, we’d succeed at our task. Yet Nachmanides commentary on Joseph reverberates here: “… to inform us that what is decreed is truth, and diligence is a falsity”. In other words, anything a person attempts to do to change a divine decree or to oppose another person’s free will is highly limited. Much of our children’s future personalities depend on themselves, on their free choice, and on their freely-felt desires. It could very well be that even the best education won’t produce the outcome the educators hope for, since the choices students make are different, “and Hashem shall perform what is goodly in His eyes”. So, what should we do? Should we send Esau to the school Jacob attends? It’s clearly unwise to make any kind of uni-dimensional decision to resolve such a complex dilemma. We can, however, glean several insights from this discussion: A. Sometimes, equal education is a recipe for a major educational disaster. B. A lot depends on giving children the best and most suitable schooling, but not everything depends on this. C. If a 13-year-old has certain preferences, that doesn’t mean he’ll have those same preferences at all stages of life. It’s important for us to maintain a certain flexibility within our educational systems that will let our youths choose the paths their hearts desire, and raise generations of “heroes before Hashem”, not just heroes of the hunt. D. The gates of prayer are still open, and we should always bolster our education with prayers, appealing to Hashem to grant us success. May we merit to raise wise, God-fearing and God-loving children and grandchildren, to become men of truth and seeds of holiness, who cling to Hashem. (Rabbi Hollander is the principal of the Ohr Torah Stone Derech Avot High School) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We remember Kristallnacht as we see anti-semitism growing all around us...... (This article was taken from Tablet magazine, November 8, 2018) Do American Jews Still Believe They're White? And how is it possible that some Jews are still shocked that they're hated in American? By Ishmael Reed Some years ago, Rabbi Michael Lerner invited me to address a gathering of his Tikkun group. I think that it was about the time that an op-ed authored by Henry Louis Gates Jr. cast the black community as the last zone for anti-Semitism in the United States. In a note to Gates, I pointed to statistics that showed a decline in anti-Semitism among blacks. He told me not to worry because there’d be a follow up in The New York Times, where his op-ed appeared, that would address the issue of racism among Jews. How did blacks express their anti-Semitism? Joe Lieberman was their first choice for president in 2004, and when Al Sharpton entered the race, Lieberman was their second choice. During the Tikkun meeting, an elderly Jewish woman said that Jews are not white. “We’re Semites.” She was ignored. I was reminded of her remark when The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin responded to the shootings at the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh. Appearing on Joy Reid’s show, the weekend of Oct. 26-28, she said of the alt-right, “And if you can believe it, they do not believe that Jews are white.” Has Rubin been so isolated from the millions of anti- Semites that she’s surprised that whites, some of whom are not considered white in Europe, do not accept Jews as members of their tribe? Now, Rubin has broken with the conservative movement, reminding one of the split between German and Jewish feminists when the German government swerved to the right under Hitler. Sam Stein also responded on air and at The Daily Beast. Stein appears to be one of those Jews who believed that anti-Semitism was a thing of the past, maybe lulled into complacency by Gates’ op-ed suggesting that minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, head of a group with dwindling membership ever since Elijah Muhammad’s late son Wallace Muhammad formed a separate group, was the last remaining anti-Semite in America. Stein said that he was naive and blamed his naivety on his being surrounded by those who did not consider him “the other.” Andrea Mitchell, appearing on Morning Joe, Nov. 6, responding to an anti-Semitic dog whistle posted by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and then taken down, said that she grew up in an observant Jewish family and when her mother mentioned she thought of it as something that happened “over there,” and attributed her mother’s concerns to “paranoia.” But now people of her generation are thinking about their status in a “different way.” Conditions that “people of color experience every day.” Appearing on CNN, Oct. 29, presidential historian Tim Naftali said that the massacre at the Tree of Life was the canary in the coal mine. That it was a warning of dire events to come. What Naftali doesn’t realize is that the canary was killed by the carbon dioxide of hatred decades ago, even though some Jews, those who have successfully assimilated into the American mainstream, hadn’t noticed. As labor leader Herbert Hill wrote: By the 1960s Jews in America had become “white,” that is, they had become assimilated and successful enough in a society sharply divided by race that they regarded themselves as “white,” and by and large they were accepted as such by the majority of the population. Perhaps this is the reason why many Jews didn’t notice an incident that happened decades ago during a weekend in Pullman, Washington. I was present as a guest of Eastern Washington University, and was quoted by Courtland Milloy of The Washington Post on Nov. 30, 1994. He cited a passage from my book Another Day at the Front. Reed suggests that blacks and Jews might be cured by a trip to Pullman, Wash., near the Idaho border, the scene of a 1984 shootout between the FBI and the American Nazi group called Order. Townsfolk were cheering for the Nazis. Jews might be forgiven the oversight, because the last 20 years have been a jumble of hope, hysteria, and misdirection, often in the wrong places. If I had written an op-ed for The New York Times about racist Jews as a follow-up to Gates’ piece about anti-Semitism among blacks, I might have included William Kristol, who appeared on the panel with Stein. Maybe Kristol is just insensitive, but I was annoyed by his argument that we should respect the Confederate dead. These are soldiers who massacred blacks at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Apr. 12,1864, after they’d surrendered. It was called “the atrocity of the war.” Kristol argued that there were “admirable” people who led the Confederacy. When asked about the Fort Pillow massacre, Robert E. Lee justified the massacre on the grounds that the blacks were members of a “servile” race revolting against their masters. When the rebel army invaded Pennsylvania they “captured” slaves whether they were free or not and, their necks tied with rope, even the children, walked them back to slavery, while the rebels rode on horseback. Admirable? When asked by his sister whether he had any regrets about the mowing down of Mexican women and children during the invasion of Mexico, whose purpose was to extend slavery to Mexico and Cuba, Stonewall Jackson said that he had none. Now suppose that I said that we should respect the SS dead? What would I be called? Kristol is part of a neoconservative movement that had its homes at the Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine, where The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein was treated with respect. Maybe those who were friendly toward that book were not aware that it was funded by the Pioneer Fund, a “race betterment” outfit that has Nazi ties. What does the book say? According to Murray, “disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior. Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action and the Department of Education, arguing that public policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that cause unequal social and educational outcomes.” Charles Murray incidentally is Scots Irish, a group that Benjamin Franklin called, “white savages.” In my reply to Gates, I would question, as I have repeatedly in the past, why David Simon, Steven Spielberg, and David Mamet offer products to the public that depict black men as sexual predators. Have they looked at the cartoons about Jewish males printed in Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer or examined Nazi movies, which the distributor Kino Lorber has explored under the title Forbidden Film. A typical image in these films is that of a Jewish male in the act of assaulting a German woman, which is consistent with the image of black men even in David Simon’s new television series, The Deuce, which is all about black pimps—who in reality are as unsuccessful in the sex-trafficking industry as they are in other forms of crimes. After The New York Review of Books compared Simon’s earlier pulp effort, The Wire, to the writings of Balzac, I wrote a letter reminding them that the portrayal of black men in The Wire was consistent with the portrayal of Jewish males in these Nazi cartoons and films. No answer. I have had a correspondence with Claudia Dreifus, the author of the article. I wrote her about this parallel. She didn’t reply either. So much for the wonders of black-Jewish dialogue. I would not have known about the Nazi depiction of Jewish males had I not attended a lecture sponsored by the San Francisco Holocaust Museum where the notorious Nazi film Jud Süss, about a Jewish sexual predator, was shown. A pamphlet accompanying the film stated that Hollywood’s treatment of black males and the treatment of Jewish males in Nazi film are similar. This same image of Jewish and black males appears in The Turner Diaries, by William L. Pierce, the white nationalists’ bible, which inspired the Nazis in that shootout with the FBI in Pullman, Washington. The same group that engaged in that shootout was responsible for the murder of a Jewish talk show host, Alan Harrison Berg. Like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), The Turner Diaries is propaganda disguised as a work of fiction. The book guided Timothy McVeigh, another Irish-American who lost his way, when he blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and very few of the media noticed the connection between the bombing and the book. What is the solution to black and Jewish males coming on to white women, as presented in this book, about a white Nationalist uprising? Extermination! When I was a young author living in New York, I was represented by the great lawyer, the late Abraham Friedman, who also represented Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. I think that Friedman had a radical past because he was once roommates with the poet Claude McKay, who, in 1919, traveled to the Kremlin to complain about white chauvinism in the American Communist Party. I used to complain to Abe about the images of blacks in novels by Jewish authors. He said that I should treat the authors as individuals. He was right. But Michael Morgan, director of the Oakland Symphony, told me that Louis Farrakhan studied with a Jewish instructor for three years to practice for a performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, “to say in music what I couldn’t say in words.” His performance is on YouTube. How many of those who want to defend something Americans called Western civilization, which was salvaged by Muslim scholars, can do that? Louis Farrakhan is an individual, but he is used by the media to indict all black Americans, which is something that the Jews, who know their history, can identify as the strategy used by their enemies since the time of the Romans. Josephus comments on this strategy of using the behavior of one individual to indict a tribe. So, when asked about the massacre at the Tree of Life, Chuck Todd, who occasionally identifies himself as a , pressed the Farrakhan button, and equated Louis Farrakhan with the anti-Semitic circle in the Trump administration, which owns Congress and the Supreme Court, and which is led by a man who said that those white men who were chanting “The Jews Will Not Replace Us” were nice fellows. A president who retweets Nazi material from white genocide internet sites. Just as the media made excuses for the Tea Party, even though the Southern Poverty Law Center, ADL, and an NAACP report described it as including every broken-down has-been anti-Semite and racist member who’ve been hitting the hate circuit for years, they make excuses for Trump voters, who, in a poll, prefer Jefferson Davis, a traitor and mass murderer, over President Barack Obama. My favorite of these excuses came from MSNBC’s Katy Tur. She said that Trump voters were upset because they couldn’t make the kind of jokes they made 10 years ago. Her father is Jewish, for whatever that’s worth. The media that elected Trump continues to provide him with millions in advertising, and some of those who speak for him are Jewish. I don’t think Steve Miller has read Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fatal Embrace which asserts that Jews provided support for anti- Semitic regimes only to be betrayed. Miller is Trump’s immigration czar. I believe that Anne Frank would have become a great writer had her family been offered refuge, but unfortunately, she was turned away from the United States. Maybe Steve Miller, who grew up in Santa Monica, a safe liberal zone, is unaware of this blot on American history. Another Trump adviser is the white nationalist Steve Bannon, who has been portrayed as an intellectual even by The New York Times. His favorite readingmaterial includes a nutty book called The Camp of Saints, all about an invasion of France by Indian untouchables. Even David Remnick, a smart guy, invited this character to The New Yorker Festival and said he’d be “honored” if he showed up, though the invite was later rescinded. The Jews that Herbert Hill wrote about are not the first ally to go white on blacks. I’ve already published an article about the circle of Irish-Americans surrounding Trump, whom a senator from Ireland called “Irish without hearts.” The Irish and blacks fought the British Redcoats at the Boston Massacre (Mar. 6, 1770) and were members of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion of 1846 that fought the future Confederate generals who invaded Mexico. Then came the Draft Riots (July 16, 1863), where the Irish ran through the streets of New York and killed every black they could lay their hands on. A colored orphan’s home was burned to the ground. It is a popular misconception that Jews and blacks began an alliance during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and ’60s. In fact, that alliance began in the early 1900s, when both groups faced brutality from the New York police, mainly comprised of Irish cops who went around punching out Jews “who looked Jewish.” The Tenderloin Riot (1900) erupted when a black man saw a white policeman treating his girlfriend like a whore, which was the attitude held by the police in those days as well as now, for many. I still remember the shouts from an Irish-American mob at black children who were integrating Boston schools: “Niggers Eat Shit.” Ethnics of whatever background and hue want to be part of the winning team. Hispanics are beginning to go white. Even though white life expectancy is on the decline and the highest suicide rate is occurring among white men, a trend that I wrote about in 1988, writing for Life magazine. Even poor people who vote against their interests are compensated with “ the psychological wages” of whiteness, an observation made by W.E.B. DuBois. White male suicide rates have gotten worse according to the CDC, but I’ve noticed that when the CDC announces suicide rates, the media don’t notice this statistic. It’s as though white men are surrounded by members of an enemy nation that is always readying to invade the white nation, and so any sign of vulnerability has to be hidden. I’m always amused when even scholars who study trends in American life are shocked that all of the pathology in our great country doesn’t take place in neighborhoods that the President calls “shitholes.” The author of one study was surprised that widespread domestic violence takes place in white middle class households. Another scholar was “shocked” by heroin use in rural areas. Reports of suburban heroin epidemics were shoved onto the back pages of the Times in the late 1990s, while television and Hollywood were enhancing their box office receipts by placing them in black neighborhoods. I recently wrote in Haaretz about the anti-Semitism in the Trump administration. I said that in the face of a president who retweets from neo-Nazi white genocide internet sites, there might be a renewed alliance between blacks and Jews. I’ve noticed that unlike some of those in the American media—Jewish pundits and opinion makers and commentators, including “white Jews”—The Postand Haaretz do not engage in whataboutism and bothsidesism They’ve been shaming the Trump Jews since the beginning of Trump’s campaign. At home, it was Abraham Foxman who said that Trump rallies reminded him of the Nazi rallies during Hitler’s regime. Yet some Jews are still shocked that they’re hated, and that a demagogue who inspires and foments hate as a political strategy has arisen in the United States. Trump was elected by haters, and he fronts for a philosophy that Richard Spencer calls “nonviolent ethnic cleansing.” When I pointed out, during a meeting of Jewish intellectuals organized by former Heyday book publisher Malcolm Margolis, that two-thirds of white college educated women voted for Trump, a woman jumped out of her chair and disputed me. But it’s true. Unlike “white” Jews, blacks can’t afford to be shocked. We do not live in safe liberal zones. We’ve developed a seventh sense to detect the hate barometer at any given time. For us, like the European Jews and the early Native Americans, extermination has always been on the table. Blacks have been massacred throughout the history of the country. Much of this history has been buried. During the election campaign of 2018, none of our progressive thought leaders mentioned the massacre of 44 black men who in 1866 had gathered to complain about the suppression of the vote in New Orleans. None mention the only coup d’état that has occurred in the United States, which happened when a white mob in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, removed black council members by force and went on a rampage of murder. Sam Stein should take a year off and tour the Southern states as a Harvard Jewish scholar did. He was skeptical of a passage in my novel, Reckless Eyeballing. Reckless Eyeballing was inspired by the lecture I attended at the San Francisco Holocaust Museum. Based on what I learned I then commented on The Today Show that The Color Purple was reminiscent of the kind of films they made in Nazi Germany about Jews. There was such a white feminist backlash that I was threatened with a boycott at the University of Louisiana at Baton Rouge. The boycott collapsed when it was discovered that none of the women who were so angered by my statement had read my books. The year after I appeared on the The Today Show, I was invited to teach in Harvard’s African-American studies department. One of the professors, a Jewish scholar, thought that one of the scenes in Reckless Eyeballing was ludicrous. In it a New York Jewish playwright is invited to present a talk about postmodernist theater at a fundamentalist college. The invitation was just a ruse to lure him into a ritual, where he is sacrificed by Christian fundamentalists. A few years later, while visiting New Orleans for an assignment where I spent most of my time writing in a hotel room and making runs to the gumbo restaurant downstairs, I ran into this same scholar, who invited me to have dinner with him. After spending two years in Louisiana, he said, he now understood the passage in my book. He had lived in an area where anti-Semitism is rife. We are now hearing the death rattle of white nationalism, the idea of a white nation that Americans have embraced from the time of the Puritans to the present day. Anybody who doubts this should check into the Holiday Inn on Delancey Street, walk a mile or so from the end of the Manhattan Bridge, then have lunch at the Burger King on Canal Street, and witness the variety of languages and colors. The United States has never been a white nation and it never will be. (Ishmael Reed’s latest works are Life Among The Aryans, a play, and Conjugating Hindi, a novel. His book of essays, Why No Confederate Statues In Mexico, will be published next year in Montreal. He teaches at The University of California at Berkeley and The California College of the Arts. )https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/274414/american- jews-white?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=169ae8aeaa- EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_11_08_03_36&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb- 169ae8aeaa-206986789 Yahrtzeits Len Grossman remembers his father Harry Grossman on Monday November 12th (Kislev 4) Perry Fine remembers his mother Rosette Fine (Reizel bat Lazar v'Sarah) on Wednesday November 14th (Kislev 6) Nancy Isaacson remembers her mother Ruth Isaacson on Wednesday November 14th (Kislev 6)