New Article: The Rabbis Who Hate Us: Eli Mansour, Jeremy Rosen, Meir Soloveichik, and Ashkenazi Jewish Supremacy
David Shasha
The Rabbis Who Hate Us: Eli Mansour, Jeremy Rosen, Meir Soloveichik, and Ashkenazi Jewish Supremacy
Rabbi Eli Mansour, one of the primary leaders of the Lakewood Haredi faction in the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, re-sent one of his greatest hits just in time for Rosh Hashanah:
http://www.dailyhalacha.com/displayRead.asp?readID=2209
I have already responded to his praying-in-the-cemetery antics, a heinous violation of the Maimonidean strictures, and how they mark him as strictly Ashkenazi in his love of the occult and the magical:
We can not only blame Rabbi Mansour and his many allies for this Ashkenazi Haredi revolution in the Sephardic community, but must also look to the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University faction who are not only impotent in the face of the Black Hat onslaught, but who themselves have brought Ashkenazi Judaism to our community in a way that has served to obliterate our classical Sephardic heritage and the precious values of Jewish Humanism.
We recently encountered Rabbi Jeremy Rosen, a member of that Modern Orthodox contingent, attacking the novelist Toni Morrison for being “permitted” to write the introduction to a collection of the writings of Primo Levi:
In that case we saw how Zionist Jews determined who is allowed to speak and what they are permitted to say.
Rosen determined that Morrison – a fierce critic of Israel and a supporter of BDS – should not be allowed to write an introduction to Levi’s work.
It is important to note that in Rosen’s review of the Levi anthology that was introduced by Ms. Morrison he completely ignored the Sephardic identity of the author and the values of Jewish Humanism that he represented as a Holocaust witness:
Rosen was very careful in the review to highlight Elie Wiesel’s Eastern European Jewish heritage, but characterized Levi as an “assimilated Italian Jew” without discussing his Sephardic heritage, as can be clearly seen in his masterpiece The Periodic Table. Once again, we see the suppression of the Sephardic heritage and the privileging of the Ashkenazi as more “authentically” Jewish.
In response to the ongoing campaign against Levi’s Sephardic identity and his Jewishness, I wrote the following article in which I contrast his views with that of the Ashkenazi “mystic” Wiesel; who was a blatant apologist for Zionist violence and Jewish ethnocentrism:
It is important to understand how Ashkenazim continue to view themselves as the only truly “authentic” Jews, an issue that I have dealt with before:
In Rosen’s latest column we have a full-throated attack on what has become known as “Intersectionality”:
http://jeremyrosen.com/2017/09/intersectionality-the-new-false-god.html
The article was immediately reposted by the Far Right website Algemeiner – for very good reason:
https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/09/15/intersectionality-the-new-false-god/
The argument of the article fits like a glove with the Trumpworld moral equivalence between Left and Right.
Trump has continued to double-down on his repugnant assertion about the Charlottesville violence:
In Rosen’s article it is the Left Wing PC police that is deemed the biggest danger we now face; something that has become common in the Orthodox Jewish community which remains committed to the New Duce and the Fascists.
It is indeed very difficult to be lectured on free speech by Ashkenazi Jewish censors like Rosen and his preferred ally Alan Dershowitz.
The continuing evolution of college campus speech codes is something that should be addressed, but the HASBARAH polemicists and Ashkenazi ethnocentrists should not be the ones throwing the stones.
The latest flashpoint in this battle is the Berkeley speech by Right Wing firebrand Ben Shapiro:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/us/berkeley-ben-shapiro-speech/index.html
I recently discussed the Berkeley campus and its curious views of Jews and Judaism seen out of the eyes of three of its professors, from the Left as well as the Right:
It is interesting that when Ashkenazim are involved, suppression of speech seems destined to follow. Most importantly, we should notice how the various political factions demand free speech for their views, while denying it to their opponents, as we saw with Rosen’s attack on Toni Morrison.
An excellent example of these repressive Zionist speech codes can be found in the David Myers controversy:
This article from Settler media organ Arutz Sheva was written by a staff member of Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch, a neo-McCarthyite organization that tracks any critical speech on Israel.
Those who us who live in the Orthodox community, or suffer under the Zionist hammer – both are combined in a very lethal manner under the banner of Religious Zionism – know all too well what can and cannot be said.
It is interesting to note that Rosen subscribes to the Religious Zionism, and yet does not examine the suppression of speech in his own ideological faction.
It should be carefully noted in this context that Sephardim have continually seen the erasure of our historical culture as Ashkenazim arrogate for themselves the sole representation of Jewish values in the larger world. Sephardim do not exist in the ongoing discussion at the Adult Jewish Table. Our voices have been silenced by the callous Ashkenazim.
When recently watching “Planet of the Apes” I could not help note that Charlton Heston’s character Taylor is initially unable to speak because he his vocal chords have been damaged by the filthy apes. It made me think of how as Sephardim we have been silenced by the Ashkenazim, and how it has served to mark us as boors and primitives.
And it should also be quite clear by now that the college speech codes are not by far the most important issue that Jews face today.
When we see miscreant figures like Dershowitz going out of their way to defend Trump and his racist agenda, we must speak out in defiance of the New Jewish Fascism:
Ashkenazi outrage is often deployed in the language of PILPUL which is grounded in moral hypocrisy.
And so it is that we see how the most pressing issue of the day is being overlooked by HASBARAH advocates like Dershowitz and Rosen, as Trumpworld fanaticism continues to permeate the Orthodox Jewish community and as Right Wing dogma places a stranglehold on the freedom to speak in what has become a Whites-only Jewish discourse.
This Ashkenazi hegemony is embodied in our very own Sephardic institutions that are currently being led by Ashkenazim. A case in point is New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel whose pulpit is now owned by Right Wing Orthodox extremist Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.
We have encountered his brand of Ashkenazi fanaticism many times before:
In addition to his monthly column for Commentary magazine, Soloveichik now has a series of occasional essays on Judaism and Art for The Tikvah Fund publication Mosaic magazine.
His first piece is one Rembrandt and it is a doozy:
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/09/rembrandts-jewish-vision/
Soloveichik relies exclusively on modern Ashkenazi Jewish voices throughout the article.
Here is a list of those luminaries:
Avraham Melnikoff
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook
Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Menachem Mendel of Kotsk
Rabbi Norman Lamm
The essay itself deals with the standard Ashkenazi concerns of anti-Jewish persecution and apostasy.
In his discussion of the Biblical text on the Binding of Isaac, he gives us an indication of this viewpoint:
Is Isaac, then, the uncelebrated hero of the saga? The question is one that medieval Jews often contemplated. Earlier rabbinic tradition tended to focus on the faith and heroism of Abraham. But in an age that witnessed wholesale persecutions of Jews—in the lands of Ashkenaz by Christian Crusaders, in the lands of Sepharad first by Islamic extremists and later by Christian rulers—they, too, like Isaac, were called upon to give their lives for their faith, and in circumstances where the countervailing divine assurance of success to Abraham and his progeny seemed nowhere in evidence.
Of course the focus is on Anti-Semitism and prominent mention is made of Islamic extremists.
But I was struck by the way he characterizes the Sephardic liturgical poem ‘Et Sha’arei Rason:
Throughout the centuries, the haunting lyrics of Eyt Shaarey Ratson became the Sephardi version of the Un’taneh Tokef—the poetic prayer on the theme of divine judgment without which, for Ashkenazim, the marking of the new year is impossible to imagine. It is tempting to speculate whether Rembrandt himself might have learned about the poem from the ex-Portuguese Jews among whom he lived in Amsterdam and for whom it represented the acme of their High Holy Day experience—and whether he might also have learned that the poet’s own son Samuel had become one of the most notorious apostates of the age, having converted to Islam and embarked on a career as a polemicist against Judaism. How much more wrenching does this render Eyt Shaarey Ratson, the work of a Jewish father whose own son has been spiritually lost about a father on the brink of losing everything whose son will be miraculously restored to him.
The Sephardic poem is a “version” of the Ashkenazi Unetana Tokef!
It is good to know that Ashkenazim always take priority over Sephardim in historical terms.
Sephardim must know their place!
But more than this, we see how Sephardim and Sephardic culture, central to the figure of Rembrandt, are not made an active part of the analysis of his Art.
While Amsterdam embodied the culture of the Sephardi exiles, today’s American Judaism, even in a putatively Sephardic Synagogue like Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, is culturally Ashkenazi, as only Ashkenazi culture and religious thought is valid in our assessment of Judaism and of Jewish history.
And so it is that even when a figure like Rembrandt is being discussed, all we get is more Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and no Sephardic Jewish Humanism.
We continue to see Ashkenazim and their Sephardi lackeys suppress our heritage and promote ideas and values that are antithetical to our historical identity. This deleterious process has served to undermine the ideals of Convivencia and Sephardic cosmopolitanism as the ever-shrinking Jewish community is in the grip of authoritarianism which has silenced dissent and free speech.
David Shasha