This Week in Dr. Mijal Bitton and Her White Jewish Privilege World (7/18)
David Shasha
Tradition Magazine Social Science: Dr. Mijal Bitton Follows Rabbi Joseph Dweck into the Deep White Jewish Supremacy
In August 2020 our dear friend Rabbi Joseph Dweck published a “Sephardic” response to Haym Solovitchik’s racist article “Rupture and Reconstruction”:
https://traditiononline.org/rupture-and-reconstruction-a-sephardic-response/
The Soloveitchik article claimed that Sephardim were not acquainted with Modernity – and Dweck agreed!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d9D5dXU_9WgFa2Chna1m_byzPUe1WaW3VbR1Qk_zQWs/edit
Now we have Dr. Mijal Bitton promoting her very accommodating view of Jewish Social Science in a BEST review of YU favorite Peter Berger’s 1969 book on Modern Society and the Supernatural:
Here is the complete review:
In his slim 1969 work, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger offers a glimpse into his personal approach to faith and theology. Born to a Viennese Jewish family which converted to Christianity when he was a child, Berger was a prominent sociologist whose early books explored religion in light of secularization. In A Rumor of Angels Berger explores the ways secular modern western society is increasingly skeptical regarding the supernatural, resulting not only in the demise of religious commitment but also how it poses a challenge to the remaining faithful few who are now a cognitive minority. Since human belief systems are usually reinforced by social structures, Berger argues that secular societies impose immense pressures on religious individuals, and in response offers an insight often quoted by faith leaders: that the person seeking to maintain their faith in a secular society “must huddle together with like-minded fellow deviants—and huddle very closely indeed.” Only by creating communities of fellow believers, what he calls social plausibility structures, can individuals strengthen their ability to believe in God.
In his analysis, Berger also provides tools for believers to push back against intellectual secular pressures. One approach is that of “relativizing the relativizers.” Secular thinkers, according to Berger, approach faith with a double standard in which they use sociological knowledge to relativize and deconstruct past religious traditions but do not subject their own beliefs to the same scrutiny. One tool in the arsenal of believers is to engage in the same exercise of relativization applied to modern critiques of religion.
Beyond taking on critics of religious belief, Berger also describes his own approach. His is not the traditional embrace of the explicitly supernatural but resembles instead the modern enterprise of seeking God by rational means. He offers an inductive orientation that looks at the world and finds traces of transcendence (hence the book’s title). Unlike Maimonides, who sought God’s imprint in the laws of the natural universe, Berger follows his sociological impulses and seeks transcendence in human behavior. He describes five major human signals of transcendence: the human belief that the world is ordered, the ability to play, the capacity to hope, the belief that some things are worthy of condemnation, and the capacity to laugh. Berger argues these aspects of human experience cannot be rationally explained and point instead to “signals of transcendence.”
Why this is The BEST? Berger’s A Rumor of Angels has several key implications for Jews in the modern world. First, Berger provides sociological language to explain the dangers of being a cognitive minority in an open society. His advice to “huddle together” with fellow believers is essentially the sociological model that’s been adopted by Orthodox Jews and other traditional communities that realized this was the most potent way to ensure group continuity in America. It is less a theological justification for “am le-vadad yishkon” (“A people which dwells apart”; Numbers 23:9) and more a sociological explanation for the necessity of building independent and socially insulated communities that can allow religious individuals to overcome the assimilatory pressures of secular society.
In this work Berger also models a different path of how to be a believer immersed in secular society—a somewhat lonely but still confident intellectual that insists on the possibility of transcendence. Tellingly, Berger is not huddled together with fellow believers; rather, his colleagues are academics and secular students. This route is hard and might not be the best for communal retention of religious commitment, but it does offer a way academics can retain their religious beliefs while immersing themselves in a secular, intellectual world.
It is a classic Washington Heights analysis that timidly mentions Maimonides, but decides in favor of Social Science instead.
As we have seen with Dr. Bitton, Sephardim are an afterthought, as she takes full advantage of her role as a token Sephardi who does not want to upset the Ashkenazim.
Indeed, it is hard to know how she could have criticized the book, given that it has already been marked as the BEST!
Not that she would ever dare to challenge her Ashkenazi masters.
Sara Labaton, Dr. Mijal Bitton and the Shalom Hartman Institute: A Study in the White Jewish Supremacy
On Friday morning we received the SHI e-mail newsletter and its sense of who counts:
https://mailchi.mp/shi.org.il/two-new-podcast-episodes-288356?e=ce188d0296
There is the podcast “A Land of Contradictions”:
How can we understand a country that one moment finds itself at war with Hamas and the next week forms a coalition government with an Arab Islamist party? On the For Heaven's Sake podcast, Donniel Hartman, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Elana Stein Hain explore what it means to live in a country of contradictions, and the role religion can play in healing deep wounds.
Here is how Donniel Hartman explains it:
"What I love most about about Zionism is the recognition that we as a people, coming home, is only the beginning of the process."
There is nothing here on Andalusian Convivencia, and the myriad ways that Ashkenazi Zionism has erased it.
Then we have another podcast, “What is Foundational Judaism, and How Do We Teach It?”:
How would you explain the foundations of Judaism? Elana Stein Hain joins host Yehuda Kurtzer on the Identity/Crisis podcast to explore that complicated question and introduce a sophisticated yet accessible new curriculum from the Shalom Hartman Institute, Foundations for a Thoughtful Judaism, including a sample podcast featuring Sara Labaton and Tomer Persico discussing the role of Jewish practice.
Here is how Elena Stein Hain explains it:
“I don't think that sophistication and simplicity must be at odds with each other; simple ideas can serve as building blocks to create more sophisticated structures."
We should note that this program includes Sara Labaton:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/DX2nwC4r6OI/m/_62mcnyLBgAJ
You can be sure that the Sephardic heritage will not be part of that discussion!
Finally, we get to Dr. Mijal Bitton:
https://mailchi.mp/shi.org.il/hartmansummer2021-288352?e=ce188d0296
Fresh off her Neo-Con triumph with David French, Dr. Bitton is involved in two SHI programs:
Mijal Bitton Dreaming of Zion: Encountering Ourselves and Others in the Promised Land
Elana Stein Hain and Mijal Bitton Jewish People or Jewish Peoples? Pew and the Future of American Jewish Life
You will notice that the word “Sephardi” never appears in either title; meaning that we have some amorphous presentation of Jewish Diversity in the wonderful Zionist project.
Ashkenazi Racism is not part of this wonderful “tapestry.”
SHI has the perfect “Sephardim” in Labaton and Bitton – they will never makes waves.
David Shasha