New Article: Who Speaks for the Arab Jews?
David Shasha
Who Speaks for the Arab Jews?
Once again, we present a post from our anonymous, self-hating friends at the Point of No Return blog that deals with their very favorite issue: Pitting the Palestinian Refugees against the Arab Jews:
We have consistently seen that object of derision Uri Avnery – unlike the self-haters at the Point of No Return – actually does deal with Arab Jewish issues in a serious way without all the Zionist racism and psychotic angst:
The Ashkenazi Avnery truly understands the contentious Ashkenazi-Sephardi dynamic in Israel, and more than this appreciates the desperate concerns of Sephardim within the fuller context of Jewish and Zionist history.
This is how the Point of No Return presents their concern with Avnery:
Haaretz has been carrying an interesting exchange on the Palestinian 'right of return' for refugees. The radical leftist Uri Avnery breezily ignores the rights of Jewish refugees in the discussion. While a rebuttal letter in response mentions Jewish refugees, the author makes the mistake of demanding an equal right of return for Jewish refugees to Arab lands.
In addition to attacking Avnery, the post includes a rebuttal by someone named Joseph Grinblat.
Without any sense of irony, we see just how Ashkenazim get to speak for Arab Jews and how the Arab Jews then follow those Ashkenazim just like lapdogs following their master as they are dragged along by the leash.
Another example of how Ashkenazim control Arab Jewish representation comes from the American Sephardi Federation.
Here is the complete text of a formal statement sent out by the do-nothing, Ashkenazi-controlled ASF; an institution which dutifully serves Ashkenazi interests and not Sephardic ones:
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I have looked at the ASF many times. Here is one of my articles on the ways that Ashkenazim have sought to control us through our very own institutions that tells us a good deal about what is happening at the present time:
The ASF has been known for decades for its ephemeral approach to the Sephardic heritage and has done nothing serious to help promote our culture in what has become a very hostile environment suffused by White Jewish Supremacy. It has done nothing to address the pressing problem of Ashkenazi racism against our culture.
We have seen how the partner institutions in the Center for Jewish History present substantive and robust programs in their areas of interest, the ASF is widely seen a laughing stock in its anemic approach to the Sephardic intellectual heritage:
The ASF presents a constant barrage of “Bourekas and Haminados” and “The Last Jews” of whatever Sephardic place you want to mention. It presents nothing of serious cultural and academic import. It explains why Sephardim have no knowledge of their own history and culture, and why so many Sephardic students have abandoned their heritage and adopted Ashkenazi ways; whether that is the Yeshiva University way or the Lakewood way, as I have presented it in my article “The New Sephardic Jewish Binary: Between Meir Kahane and Moshe Fainstein”:
Sephardim have become a dead letter and there is no real active role for us in the larger Ashkenazi-controlled Jewish discourse. We are told to stay in our place as second-class citizens and shut our mouths.
We do not even control our own institutions.
The ASF previously “partnered” with a group heavily promoted by Ronald Lauder’s World Jewish Congress called Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) that was founded by Irwin Cotler as part of Malcolm Hoenlein’s Canadian Zionist circle:
The ASF “integrated” the JJAC into its institutional framework under Stanley Urman, who effectively became the ASF Executive Director for a time:
Since Urman left the ASF they have done a similar thing by “integrating” the Diarna Project which is run by yet another Ashkenazi, Jason Guberman.
The ASF, unlike most other active Jewish organizations, does not have a fully-functioning website with resources and other pertinent information, preferring instead to announce its programs via e-mail and on its Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/americansephardifederation/?fref=mentions&rf=133120746726474
The ASF weekly newsletters are thus not archived to a website. Indeed, the editor of the newsletter is another Ashkenazi named Aryeh Tepper who is very much a part of the Right Wing Ashkenazi Zionist world as we can see from his connection to The Tikvah Fund:
https://tikvahfund.org/faculty/aryeh-tepper/
I recently posted the following article showing just how hardline Neo-Conservative The Tikvah Fund really is:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/H3bXuIRSJwY
We have the Tikvah-aligned Mosaic magazine, Tablet magazine, The Jewish Review of Books – and the American Sephardi Federation!
Not surprisingly, Tepper’s claim to fame is a 2014 study of the Conservative icon Leo Strauss, and nothing to do with Sephardim:
https://www.amazon.com/Progressive-Minds-Conservative-Politics-Maimonides/dp/1438448449
Guberman and Tepper present a united front of Ashkenazi reactionaries that goes a long way in explaining the lack of substantive Sephardic intellectual content at the ASF.
Looking at the FB page will provide you with a sense of the ephemeral nature of the institution and its lack of serious heft.
Prominent in the institution’s agenda is the “Forgotten Refugees” issue which is central to self-hating groups like JIMENA, HARIF, and the larger umbrella of the anonymous Point of No Return blog:
http://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
The documentary film was actually produced by The David Project, a Right Wing Zionist HASBARAH group that works to promote Israel on college campuses:
An article by Tom Pessah exposes JIMENA as an Ashkenazi organization pretending to be Sephardic:
The following passage from the article ties all of these issues together in a big, bright White Jewish bow:
It turns out, the organization is heavily dependent on Ashkenazim for their funding and this shifts the focus of the organization from being about an old and precious Jewish culture to being an Israel advocacy organization almost totally beholden to a Hasbara agenda. The different donors came up every day in conversations with my boss, the Director – Sarah Levin. JIMENA was founded in partnership with the JCRC, and they get funding from JCRC, the Jewish Federations, and the same main donors of the Jewish community in the Bay Area. If you look at the board of the Jewish Federations, those who make the decisions on grants JIMENA applies for, or the people who run the JCRC, they’re mostly Ashkenazi. Promoting the diversity of Jewish communities is not the first priority of these organizations: they mainly want to create a new angle for Hasbara and promote Israel. My job as communications director was to write materials that would make people donate money to JIMENA. So I would write something and it would get changed completely, to fit what Sarah thought that the mostly Ashkenazi donors would want to see.
That just about says it all.
It is a situation that is reflected in the abysmal – and quite dangerous – decision-making processes of Sephardic laypeople, who for decades now have deferred to the Ashkenazi radicals. We can clearly see from the ASF statement that such corrupted Sephardim have clearly internalized the Ashkenazi weltanschauung in its most debased reactionary iteration.
They have very unwisely let the Ashkenazi roosters into the Sephardic henhouse.
The ASF statement is directly connected to the current controversy over new Center for Jewish History head David Myers, who has gotten into hot water with the Right Wing extremists:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-oppenheimer-myers-jewish-history-20170908-story.html
The BDS issue has taken on a prominent role in the controversy:
https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/09/05/new-ceo-of-center-for-jewish-history-holds-radical-viewpoints/
The anti-BDS campaign is an attempt to cower and bully Jewish Liberals from speaking their minds freely, and yet is being characterized in precisely the opposite way by the HASBARAH crowd.
In any case, Myers himself has presented his views on the matter in a straightforward manner:
http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/178552/
But this does not seem to have put an end to the witch-hunt.
The McCarthyite conspiracy against Myers reflects the bullying tactics of the Zionists, and the ASF statement does nothing to defuse the controversy, or to provide unequivocal support for Myers who is effectively the leader of the building in which they are housed. In fact, it might likely do the opposite and give aid those who want Myers ousted.
The problem of Ashkenazim representing putatively Sephardic institutions can also be seen at the historic New York City Congregation Shearith Israel, which is led by the extremist Right Wing reactionary Rabbi Meir Soloveichik; a man who misses no opportunity to ignore and belittle the Sephardic tradition:
Soloveichik recently published a loving paean to Settler Messianic Zionism in a Commentary magazine piece on the Temple Mount:
Indeed, the Ashkenazim who currently run institutions like the ASF and SI are the bullies who close off authentic representation in the Sephardic community by making it all about Right Wing Zionism; as is the case with Diarna which seeks to document the lost homes of the Arab Jews in what is a cleverly novel variation on the work of the JJAC. It is a project that does nothing to promote classical Sephardic Religious Humanism and its literary-intellectual values, but does seek to aggressively promote Israeli-Zionist interests.
And so it is that we have Sephardic groups giving over their institutions to racist Ashkenazim who have little interest in preserving our culture and history in its full richness and complexity.
This is the New Convivencia!
David Shasha