Death of the Sephardim High Holiday Essay (5): Fear and Cowardice in the Sephardic Community: A Legacy of Human Failure
David Shasha
Fear and Cowardice in the Sephardic Community: A Legacy of Human Failure
It is said that he who dares, wins:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Dares_Wins
But it is not always clear that this is the case when it comes to fighting racism and ethno-cultural hate, with its residual cruelty.
I just learned that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has marked the day after the MLK federal holiday as a Day of National Healing:
https://thegrio.com/2023/01/16/natonal-day-racial-healing-equity/
That we continue to need such a day is evidence of our racial problems, as I have discussed the self-perceived failure of MLK himself in my article on the documentary “King in the Wilderness”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VM84tY-8f6nujFtZ4lk7HDhIdy-x5Cwp/edit
King not only had a premonition of his impending death from a White Supremacist’s hail of bullets in Memphis, Tennessee, but he was painfully aware that his support from the American people, Black and White, had dissipated, as he took a principled stand against the Vietnam War and began what he called the “Poor People’s Campaign” attacking economic disparities.
As I wrote in the article:
“King in the Wilderness” shows us a man in the throes of a painful realization that the work he began a decade earlier was taking a dangerous new turn and that he would have great difficulty keeping the movement together in the face of the gargantuan problems that were now being confronted. He decided to enter the volatile fray of labor issues, fair housing practices, and the cause of global peace.
I recently posted MLK heir Rev. William Barber’s Pastoral Letters to the Democratic and Republican Parties, both of which speak to this failed legacy and the intensification of the problems that King tried so heroically to resolve:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/VaU1fpZAs0I/m/--i7gxmRAQAJ
Central to the problems we continue to face is the matter of the Law, and the perversion of justice by those in charge of its dispensation.
Indeed, as the MLK holiday weekend began, the courageous Nation legal analyst Elie Mystal appeared on Ari Melber’s MSNBC program and excoriated the man who is arguably the most cowardly and inept member of the current Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/msnbc-guest-scorches-garland-over-004159981.html
Garland’s pathological fear of Trump has reached a fever pitch.
Mystal continued to appear on the network through the rest of the weekend, calling out Garland as a weakling who refuses to do his job.
I have written about the man I call the New Banana Republic AG many times:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/iQlufMPSLNk/m/fwAxJgEaBQAJ
Mystal made the point of his cowardice crystal clear in his April 2022 article “Donald Trump’s Continued Liberty Is an Affront to the Rule of Law”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/I7B9jQfzS5g/m/5puv5R-lCgAJ
Mystal correctly sees Garland’s excessive use of Special Counsels as a clear dereliction of duty, an admission that he is unable – or unprepared – to do his job.
Former Federal Prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg, another frequent MSNBC legal analyst, concurs, and explains the problem in stark terms:
We can continue to ask, “Where are the Indictments?” but it appears to be increasingly useless as Trump keeps working to run out the clock.
It is a strategy that has so far been extremely successful:
DO NOT COMPLY!
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/us/politics/trump-subpoenas.html
EVER!
What is most interesting about the latest DOJ Special Counsel appointment is that it continues Garland’s idiotic practice to choose Trump-appointed prosecutors to do the job he refuses to do:
https://time.com/6247018/biden-classified-documents-special-counsel/
As if this will change the minds of the Seditionists and their fearless leader:
Garland is joined under the proverbial coward’s desk by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg who, after all the work done by his predecessor Cy Vance, chose not to indict Trump and his family over their obvious criminal malfeasance:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/kZrZN2zLRlU/m/uJw5bSn1BQAJ
The “WOKE” Bragg continues to be afraid of the WOKE Jews, who continue to attack him:
Looking back at history, we can contrast this lamentable Trumpstate of affairs with the aggressiveness of President Ulysses Grant and his AG Amos Akerman, as they fearlessly took on the Ku Klux Klan and its 19th century White Supremacist terrorism, forerunner of the MAGA:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/president-grant-takes-on-the-ku-klux-klan.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_T._Akerman#Prosecuted_Klan
To these American stalwarts, we can add the name of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenting vote in the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which effectively began what historian C. Vann Woodward called The Strange Career of Jim Crow:
Woodward’s classic book had its own MLK connection:
https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/king-woodward-and-strange-career-jim-crow
From the heights of the Civil War victory by Union troops to the Republican-led Reconstruction legislation, America eventually fell to the Confederate forces, under the banner of The Lost Cause, as brilliantly presented by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his excellent documentary “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sPfI7cErS-77CXOxoMyHT5d_AvuGAdjvvXodl5lp0hQ/edit
The documentary highlights the seminal studies of scholars W.E.B. Du Bois and Eric Foner, essential reading in these trying times:
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Reconstruction-America-1860-1880-Burghardt/dp/0684856573
https://www.amazon.com/Reconstruction-Updated-Unfinished-Revolution-1863-1877/dp/0062354515
Confidence and heroism led to fear and cowardice in a way that permanently changed this country, handing it back to the traitors and rebels who sought to break our Union.
Fear and cowardice are extremely powerful motivators when it comes to perverting justice, as we have seen in the Sephardic Jewish community.
I just read Eric Alterman’s recent book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, which puts a fine point on the Sephardic failure:
https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Not-One-Americas/dp/046509631X
Another writer from the Left Wing Nation magazine, Alterman not only displays a deficient understanding of Jewish culture and history in the very clumsily-written tome, his White Jewish Supremacy completely ignores Sephardic Jews and our place in American Jewish history, as his discussions are exclusively devoted to Ashkenazi Jews and the internal contentiousness that divides those Jews on the matter of Israel and Zionism.
And while the book does an excellent job addressing its subject within those exclusionary racist parameters, its overall argument about Israel is seriously compromised by a lack of understanding of the meaning of Zionism in religious terms, as well as a deficient appreciation of the role of Andalusian Convivencia and the erasure of Sephardic culture from the contemporary scene. This erasure has done immense damage of the Mizrahi Jews, whose self-loathing has led to fierce Arab hatred and Islamophobia.
Alterman’s book led me to Benjamin Balint’s disturbing 2010 book Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right, an important contribution to our understanding of The Tikvah Fund, as Commentary and its dictatorial editor Norman Podhoretz cleared the ground for Tikvah and its Right Wing Fascist values:
https://www.amazon.com/Running-Commentary-Contentious-Transformed-Neoconservative/dp/B0058M7LZM
Balint is pure Tikvah reactionary, as can be seen from his published articles:
https://benjaminbalint.com/review-essays/
His book, as with Alterman, is a deeply racist piece of White Jewish Supremacy, but more than this seeks to act as an apologia for the Commentary “Family,” better MISHPOCHEH, and its bizarre evolution from Trotskyite Marxism, to HUAC-style Anti-Communism in a purportedly “Liberal” manner, to Podhoretz’s 1960s embrace of fashionable New Left ideas, to his eventual commitment to elitist Straussian Fascism with its Chickenhawk militarism and embrace of Right Wing racism, in its alliance with William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, the Falwell Christian Evangelical Right, and Richard John Neuhaus’ Catholic Fascist First Things.
Though Balint wrote the book prior to Trump’s election, Jonathan Chait fills in the details on Podhoretz and his organic support for the MAGA insanity:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-revealed-norman-podhoretz-for-what-he-always-was.html
Podhoretz’s repugnant ideology presents an important through-line from the Reagan era to the present.
Balint does not seem to be aware of just how bizarre the ideological transformation has been. And while The Tikvah Fund has been heir to this long-settled ideology, the way the proverbial Neo-Con sausage has been made is rather ugly and shameful.
It is curious to note that in the book’s conclusion Balint deploys two metaphorical analogues to characterize the Commentary process, one from V.I. Lenin, the other from Paul of Tarsus in his “old wine in new bottles” formulation.
Balint’s identification presents Commentary as both Marxist in conceptual inspiration and Christian in religious orientation, as his painstaking analysis of the magazine’s tortuous history ignores Neo-Con racism, the corruption of the modern Republican Party in the wake of Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair, and the deep well of hatred the reactionaries have for the classical Jewish tradition and its Religious Humanist values.
He is also tellingly silent on MISHPOCHEH adultery and sexual malfeasance.
By its smooth assimilation into the WASP power structure, Podhoretz’s Commentary set a reactionary standard that brooks no dissent, and which still exerts its dominance in an American Jewish community, where a minority of Right Wing zealots control a majority of its institutions.
It is a sad truth that was confirmed in the 2021 Pew Research report on Jewish Americans, and by the continued centrality of The Tikvah Fund and the CHABAD messianists in the Jewish institutional world:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aumJU1VzaWupahVJvRlpp6iICo48MiETuFDFw0qtUfQ/edit
On the Sunday preceding MLK Day I posted SHU 1086, which I introduced with a binary opposition between the great historian of religion Karen Armstrong, and the pathetic case of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/RP4050Fmakg
Rabbi Sacks was once a strong proponent of Jewish Humanism, in the grand tradition of the Sephardic heritage, who could not finally stick to his principles, as he cowered under the pressure of the Orthodox reactionaries, and for which he has been amply rewarded:
https://www.rabbisacks.org/news/bar-ilan-launches-its-international-conference/
Once again, we see, contrary to my pluralistic reading of Sacks’ classic book The Dignity of Difference, the re-emergence of White Jewish Supremacy and the Modern Orthodox Shtetl.
For those who may still have not read it, here is my EDAH Journal article:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10PB65T0j5KCtYVuRDffdThuTUWdKksCt/view?ths=true
Sacks’ weakness translated into a fear and cowardice that has maintained the Right Wing Fascism of The Tikvah Fund, as we have seen in the work of its most prominent members, like Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1inwIdB46odydf4p-7ahzdzqmiBcJz4KT9wNMiY-TJWw/edit
I have discussed The Tikvah Fund and its role in the Ashkenazi takeover of the Sephardic community in the following article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BgKyS9jl1IVHbpCEAHLsnVpuZBjudvDW/edit
Soloveichik has articulated ideas and values which forcefully reject Maimonides and Sephardic Jewish Humanism, as he continues the work of Fascist reactionary Michael Wyschogrod, a Commentary magazine favorite:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkNZusv09KazmHUp3BNcBGIe9TEZEMcKsZXfbBFMm4Q/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
As with Podhoretz and Commentary, Soloveichik has maintained strong links with First Things and its debased Catholic Fascism:
https://www.firstthings.com/author/meir-y-soloveichik
Soloveichik has his own Tikvah Washington Heights connection to Sacks, and with the latter’s contrition tour in the Modern Orthodox community which had once excoriated him for his enlightened statements in Dignity:
https://blogs.yu.edu/news/straus-center-hosts-rabbi-sacks/
We can thus begin to discuss the problem of fear and cowardice in the Sephardic community, as Soloveichik took the pulpit of the oldest American congregation, after it was ruined by Rabbi Marc Angel and his very incestuous self-hating brand of Washington Heights Modern Orthodoxy:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/meir-soloveichik-tapped-by-oldest-us-synagogue/
The appointment reflects a spate of Ashkenazi hires by putatively Sephardic institutions, as has been the case with the American Sephardi Federation, another Tikvah Fund-related institution:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14cKispiXs6t14GfQlUw764iNnX6XZTdc9YzMU8LhwHc/edit
Led by Jason Guberman and Aryeh Tepper, the Tikvah ASF has promoted HASBARAH racist values, rooted in an occult concern for Dead Sephardim:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jkws0yY4GqDLXTeGt04TGOjB2GFlpuFlO7kkwpRlmNE/edit
The Tikvah ASF has participated in the “Jewish Nakba” Grift:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/W6EkyfHJMfw/m/sDYZKRy6AQAJ
Guberman and Brooklyn SY self-hater Eddie Ashkenazie were both namechecked by Tikvah heroine Dara Horn, whose White Jewish Supremacy led to an attack on documentarian Ken Burns:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SMERk-ASM6s_8cidnXXBli7ECsNo8Baw/edit
Horn is another proud Tikvah White Jewish Supremacist, whose racism against the classical Sephardic heritage can be seen in her attack on Burns, whose documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is rooted in the same values of Religious Humanism that animate our tradition, but which are anathema to the Ashkenazim.
Where Burns’ work is a true Kiddush Hashem, reflecting the commonality between all religions and ethnic groups, Horn is a committed devotee of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his benighted love of Benito Mussolini:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41857736
Horn’s connection with Eddie Ashkenazie and the Tikvah ASF led her to an appearance with Rabbi Richard Hidary in Deal, New Jersey, under the auspices of the Sephardic Community Alliance, a YU-affiliated institution of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k1NebkmJYheC9WnK5HeEfDSQbDQ4fSZK/view?ths=true
The SCA has also added its name to the many institutions promoting the legacy of Rabbi Sacks:
https://www.rabbisacks.org/app/uploads/2021/10/CinC-programs.pdf
Sadly, the group has never once made mention of the late Rabbi Jose Faur, whose Sephardic legacy has been banished from the Sephardic community, as it has been erased from the Ashkenazi community:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T5hwSK5C4N8Vd50UYMptCy1jmk5LSyJbIUEh-Lq6_s8/edit
The idea is to block any form of Sephardic representation against the ubiquitous Ashkenazi racism.
Hidary has been a loyal foot soldier in The Tikvah Fund’s assault on Torah Judaism, most recently writing an article on Dreidels (!) for Alana Newhouse, the Whore of Trump:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/FWRQg_Z59r8/m/Quk5mvtlBgAJ
Given his official enforcement of the SY legal ruling against accepting any converts to Judaism, his Tikvah Tablet article “The Rules of Conversion” is an astounding piece of duplicity:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/BhOVgZS64J0/m/fp9jT-E2BAAJ
For those not familiar with the notorious Edict, this will get you up to speed:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nbcwNrH1Am1bgJYw_FqiJ7yhiLN34WKI9oRQnVxFShQ/edit
Hidary is also involved with the White Jewish Supremacists of The Lehrhaus, where he just reviewed a book by Settler Messianist Rabbi Yakov Nagen, yet another Anti-Maimonidean Ashkenazi radical:
Which, of course, was noted by Tikvah Mosaic:
Nagen has become a very important figure in Religious Zionist circles, as he promotes worship at the Temple Mount:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-house-of-prayer-for-all-humanity/
Even more important than that deplorable fact, Hidary notes in his Lehrhaus article how Nagen de-emphasizes the legal form of the Mishnah, instead creating a “philosophy” that conceptualizes Halakhah, in the manner of New Talmud pioneers Jacob Neusner and Daniel Boyarin, who deny the traditional dating of the rabbinic canon, averring that the Sages made it all up.
I have discussed the Anti-Rabbinic and Anti-Maimonideanism of the New Talmudists in the following articles:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qihywNGjZbuPEY4-cbQ1g02-nOoaCL2Ug0G2qZ12t64/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LPbxxP_kkV536tPTvMpsUE9feBgoBSa7QEP8iXXDHIk/edit
Hidary has proudly – and defiantly – rejected the classical Sephardic heritage as taught by Faur. His fear and cowardice have been transformed into a deep and abiding devotion to the White Jewish Supremacy of The Tikvah Fund and its insulting rejection of our intellectual-religious heritage.
His Lehrhaus article’s single footnote is a fawning citation from Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews, which allows us to see how this Tikvah SY Intersectionality works.
As an example of this process, I have pointed out the outpouring of honors for Isadore Twersky in relation to the Ashkenazi silencing of Faur; both men were students of Harvard’s Harry Wolfson, one of the most consequential Judaic Studies scholars in America, a pioneering voice in the field:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ye7X9yLWRJbJWR7SIknhuO8dqWBtp_EC/edit
While the Ashkenazim promote the legacies of Sacks and Twersky as leading figures in Jewish Thought and religion, the Sephardim neglect their own scholars and rabbis, as we have recently seen in the case of London’s Rabbi Abraham Levy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rl7pnYtDLnb2RFVOlYrE_WVX4aW01yxU/edit
Looking again at Congregation Shearith Israel, I have commented on the lost legacy of Rabbi David De Sola Pool and his essential studies of the Synagogue and the early history of Sephardim in America:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4sgyA6BOz14/m/HQC26sLCAQAJ
Once again, we can see the central role of Rabbi Marc Angel in the loss of this legacy, as I discussed it in my article “Entering ‘Pottersville’: Modalities of Destruction and Self-Hatred in Sephardic Jewish History”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V-uAEYS_aBAnDNMDPwvzIUFn9hbTy6n5jVknqrDTUN8/edit
In that article I imagined a different ending to the classic Frank Capra movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where the Sephardim become a failed George Bailey who lost his battle to the vile banker Henry Potter, allowing for the destruction of the beloved Bedford Falls.
Angel infamously sought to counter the views of historian Malcolm Stern, by defending Ashkenazi racism against Sephardi pride.
Indeed, it was a tactic that was proudly repeated by Angel’s SY community ally, the late Rabbi Ezra Labaton:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IcdFEia2TvNUoa3OhzSisj1XdjZru3wamrrysvJ9Cxw/edit
In a recent SHU post, I presented the lamentable case of Transgender teacher Talia Avrahami in her struggles with the Brooklyn SYs and the Washington Heights cabal:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/hSP9MPUusEU
In my article I recalled the privileged Orthodox standing of child molester Baruch Lanner, and his close connection to Labaton and the Deal, New Jersey SY community:
https://www.jta.org/2002/06/21/ny/women-detail-abuse-by-lanner
And this is where fear and cowardice intersect with moral degeneracy, as the Syrian Jewish community has elevated the Trump wannabe Jeff Sutton, whose crooked billionaire career was summed up in the following letter, anonymously sent out to members of the community by yet another coward who would not sign their name to it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bs4oAzqOyAn-boa_HTPUst9JEfYSx84cgRtg2eGJNVw/edit
Let us never forget the fierce SY attachment to the Zombie Orange Pig:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15k9tT2xLwjKbj3K-LqqI8LxFBJ1vwsBVT564WB94wyI/edit
It is thus highly ironic that Sutton, naturally committed to the Washington Heights White Jewish Supremacy, has found his leadership impeded by the elevation of Lakewood Rabbi Eli Mansour to leadership in the Magen David Yeshivah:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/eqFgpyw05qE/m/uYiHuoLGAAAJ
More generally, I have written about the SY malfeasance, including Sutton, in my article “The ‘Idiot Sephardim’ in Their Native Element: Money, Power, Ignorance, Immorality”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wZLZSZ-TP8aUVjs351YThh74WHzCBorf37U0HqY2brY/edit
Where Marc Angel has sought to suppress the books of David De Sola Pool, Labaton, Hidary, and their fellow SCA travelers have eliminated the legacy of Hakham Matloub Abadi:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fO_WyLY2gnqUOvbpDQ7KzsS82UOwW35j-ACCPi7sBDQ/edit
Given his abject silence on Abadi, it is ironic that Hidary posted my program on the late sage which was held at the Magen David Synagogue in Bensonhurst, now being run by Eddie Ashkenazie in the name of Tikvah Fund values:
Some years ago, I helped Ashkenazie prepare a plaque in honor of Rabbi Abadi that continues to be displayed in the Synagogue, and which preserves his Jewish Humanism for a community that despises him and his teachings.
Abadi was defeated by Isaac Shalom, through the installation of Rabbi Jacob Kassin as the leader of the Brooklyn SYs.
The matter was discussed in the following article by Daniel Harari:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sa4YGX4v5w3BRWFS6WfGVwICemodsyPVfmu2gt6_IJA/edit
In order to tie all these threads together, I would like to recount a very contentious meeting I held in my home, which I hoped would help resolve both my family and Sephardic professional issues; all of which are connected to money.
It did not go the way I hoped it would.
In preparing the agenda for the meeting, I sought to anchor things in the lost legacy of Hakham Matloub, as well as in the tragic deaths of my grandfather Saul Mishaan, Harari’s father Felix, and Sam Toussie.
Sadly, these three men were pulverized by the heartless SY community; persecuted until they saw their lives teetering on edge, and ultimately extinguished by a fatal heart attack.
My grandfather was done in by Isaac Shalom, as he altruistically put his own livelihood in danger in order to aid his brothers in Latin America, who had experienced business reversals. He signed over his own successful business to them, leading him to financial desperation while they became millionaires off his work.
At the very moment when he sought help from his friends and students in the SY community, Shalom tightened the screws, and he found himself left abandoned and unwanted.
The story of Felix Harari is somewhat different, but has intersected with my own personal misery in a very strange way. Deviating from the usual ways of the ignorant and malevolent SYs, whose hate for book-learning is legendary, Harari demanded that all his children go to college, including his daughter.
This led to residual resentment from his brother Salomon, who eventually blamed this “permissiveness” for the daughter’s intermarriage – which then led to a very hostile estrangement – and ultimately to Felix’s untimely death.
One of Salomon Harari’s sons, Eli, married to my cousin Joy, abided his father’s wish, and cut off all communication with his uncle’s family – including not attending his funeral.
The cancellation is ironic given that I too have experienced intermarriage in my immediate family, as my mother committed adultery with a married Catholic man, who she eventually married after his divorce.
I would eventually experience this tragedy in my own marriage as well.
And while Eli Harari rejected his uncle for accepting his daughter, he and his wife rejected me for rejecting my mother!
Indeed, you can cut the hypocrisy with a knife.
For those not familiar with the SYs, it all makes sense because both Felix Harari and I share a love of knowledge, but more importantly were seen in a community demanding conformity as persecuted and weakened targets.
The vulnerability is the common denominator, not our different responses to intermarriage.
As Adam Serwer has said of Trump, the cruelty is indeed the point.
Which leads us to Sam Toussie, whose story is recounted in Zev Chafets’ seminal New York Times article “The SY Empire”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t4z5IL7aLzfmN5hgLNUhhY3rqY_7kD0J/view?ths=true
As he wrote there:
My first trip to the enclave was conducted by a guide who insisted on being granted anonymity. He emphasized the need for discretion by recounting the cautionary tale of a man I later learned was named Sam Toussie. Some years ago, a reporter had come from some unremembered publication to write an “inside” story on the enclave. At the time, Toussie was a member of the community in good standing, but he made the colossal error of talking about SY affairs, on the record, to the journalist. When this was discovered, he was ostracized. But that did not go far enough for some of the hardliners, who, I was told, actually prayed for his death. When he did die, at a relatively young age, his passing was taken as a sign. “Somebody put the evil eye on him,” my guide told me darkly.
At the meeting, which took months to arrange, I had requested that my now permanently-estranged son invite Toussie’s daughter Marie, related to him by marriage, in order to have members of each of the three men’s families present to affirm the details of their deaths and the persecution they suffered.
She obstinately refused to attend to speak on behalf of her father.
And though it took some time until I fully learned of my own son’s infamy and malfeasance in loyalty to the SY evil creed, I finally came to completely accept the deep well of cruelty that undergirds every aspect of SY life.
While Martin Luther King, Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet, the victims of White Jewish Supremacy in the Sephardic community have been destroyed in a much more prosaic, and less dramatic, manner. They are brutally cut off and ostracized, left to wither on the vine, alone and unwanted, as their community and families watch them suffer and ultimately die off.
All the time doing nothing to help them.
It is for them a mark of pride.
Sadly, I have found that my own life matches the existential issues faced by those three men.
As punishment for speaking out in defiance of community rules, rules rooted in ignorance and malevolence, the persecutions reflect a frightening revolt against the classical Sephardic heritage and its deep and abiding concern for human dignity and integrity.
I often consider my own misery in terms of Frank Borzage’s classic Anti-Nazi movie “The Mortal Storm”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rZIMHvmdqzG4i4gB5wITIMtQExQbP2mb/edit
In that MGM production, one of the first direct Hollywood assaults on Hitlerism, we see a Jewish university professor, played by Frank “Wizard of Oz” Morgan, whose wife is an Aryan, be deported to a Concentration Camp with the involvement of his step-sons, who have both embraced the Nazi movement and its Anti-Semitism.
It is indeed possible to lose your children to the regnant cruelty, when they place loyalty to community over loyalty to morality.
There must be no compromise with such cruelty.
In the case of the SYs, I have seen how community rabbis have supported adultery and intermarriage over Torah generally and the Sephardic heritage more specifically.
And that is why I have called such people “Pious Degenerates,” as they hypocritically make a big show of their ritual punctiliousness, while committing theft and other heinous violations of the Torah moral code:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uAdFmpN-JAbEEPNTUeTs8N-mMaI_KiEc/edit
Never cross them, or you will face the ultimate penalty.
And never worry about God, as your bank account is the only theology to believe in.
It is in this way that fear and cowardice function as a control mechanism, when weak people acquiesce to the evil manifest in those who have militantly elevated crass material values over humility and the Fear of God.
We have thus seen in this article an endless array of individuals who have allowed their fear and cowardice to trump common human decency and Torah ethics.
So much so, that I have been told that my surname has long become a verb, which signifies what happens to people who refuse a corrupt status quo.
It is why there is, pace “Pottersville,” little if any hope for a real Jewish future, as the deranged White Jewish Supremacy has sought to eliminate Sephardic Jewish Humanism with all its wisdom, nobility, and grandeur.
David Shasha
From SHU 1092, March 1, 2023