Newsletter Special: The Tikvah Fund
David Shasha
No Hope Tikvah!
Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope that is two-thousand years old,
To be a free nation in our land,
The Land of Zion, Jerusalem.
“Hatikvah” (The Hope)
There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.
-Franz Kafka
Over the past couple of decades one of the most bold and influential Jewish institutions to emerge has been The Tikvah Fund. Its reach in and out of the Jewish community has been formidable. I have been writing about Tikvah for some time now, as the ongoing erosion and erasure of the Sephardic heritage continues unabated.
Tikvah, as I present it in my article on its founder Zalman Bernstein, is militantly dedicated to furthering the aims and ideals of the Neo-Conservative movement and its continuing alliance with the Evangelical Christian Right. Many of its public programs and the work of its vast array of writers – who have published their work in the homegrown Tablet and Mosaic magazines – reinforce and promote this benighted reactionary point of view.
And because of Tikvah’s strong financial position in the Jewish institutional world, its seminars, summer programs, and student scholarships have created an integrated network that has proven to be quite effective in establishing its supremacy in the world of Jewish educational and religious life.
With the troubling rise of the New Anti-Semitism of the Trump Alt-Right, Tikvah has positioned itself, much like Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf in Philip Roth’s classic novel The Plot Against America, to be at the very epicenter of Republican Fascist politics in the current moment.
I have often referred to Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, currently the leader of the formerly-Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel, who got on the Trump Alt-Right Bengelsdorf bandwagon early on:
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2017/12/AP17342065547859.jpg
Though of course not nearly as bad as Roth’s deplorably craven Bengelsdorfs and their public embrace of the Nazi Von Ribbentrop, Soloveichik and his many Tikvah allies have done enough damage with their very public embrace of the most Anti-Semitic American president in recent memory.
In my discussion of two Tikvah-approved articles on Kashrut, I look at Soloveichik’s atavistic, neo-Pagan version of Judaism and its connection to long-time University of Chicago Neo-Con Straussian Dr. Leon Kass. Both articles dive into the rich tradition of Ashkenazi irrationalism with its decisive rejection of Maimonidean Religious Humanism. In their analysis of the Kosher laws both Soloveichik and Kass desperately grasp at the magical and occult rather than to the rational and scientific.
In yet another Tikvah point-counterpoint, Kass is paired off with Harvard’s Jon Levenson; this time on the matter of the Exodus. The back and forth is ultimately about how to read the Hebrew Bible. In my analysis of the debate I look at the myriad ways in which Christianity plays a critical role in both men’s exegetical strategies, and how that figures into what I have called the New Convivencia.
Indeed, at the very time that a number of Philip Roth’s nightmares are coming to fruition, The Tikvah Fund and its members represent the way in which Jews have embraced their own oppression. Unlike Roth’s presentation of Anti-Semitism in an imaginary 1940s, the current crop of Jewish Neo-Conservatives truly have deep ideological ties to the Anti-Semitism.
Whether it is the academic Judaic Studies embrace of Pauline Christianity, with all its contempt for the Jewish Law, or Soloveichik’s anthropomorphic Incarnational Theology, learned from his mentor Michael Wyschogrod, the current Tikvah worldview is all about configuring Judaism to align with the regnant Christian models.
It may seem counter-intuitive from a traditional Sephardic perspective, but that point is ultimately irrelevant in the face of rampant fanaticism and religious extremism; all underwritten by a craven opportunist in the White House. What is wrong has become expedient, and what is right has become marginal. Evil continues to triumph.
As I stated earlier, a key part of the Tikvah media enterprise has been Tablet magazine, run by Alana Newhouse. One of Tablet’s best-known writers has been Bari Weiss. From her humble beginnings as a Neo-Con student agitator with the extremist Right Wing David Project to a brief stint at The Wall Street Journal and now as a major player at The New York Times, Ms. Weiss has vigorously brought Zalman Bernstein’s benighted vision to the mainstream media.
In two articles on her malign influence I track this evolution, and examine how she has become the Jewish community’s go-to person on the subject of Anti-Semitism, and how her advocacy remains tied to that essentialist Neo-Con vision as it relates to Zionist HASBARAH and racism.
Tablet has also provided an important platform for the New Age academic Shaul Magid, a public intellectual who shows us that the Tikvah spirit of reactionary White Jewish Supremacy is not at all limited to the Neo-Con Right Wing of the Jewish community. Magid’s intellectual roots are in the Jewish Renewal movement founded by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi:
https://forward.com/news/201430/reb-zalman-married-counter-culture-to-hasidic-juda/
In his apologetic article on COVID-19 and lawless Haredi Judaism, Magid shows us what this New Age Judaism looks like as we face the depredations of irrational “magical” thinking and defiance of scientific protocol during this lethal pandemic.
My discussion of that article reviews the problem with Ashkenazi Anti-Maimonideanism and the close ties between the Counterculture Jewish Hippies and the reactionary extremism of the Haredim. It is a theme that connects Tikvah ideology to all ideological sectors of the Jewish community, from Right to Left; a factor that has emerged with a vengeance as we continue to deal with the negative consequences of Trumpworld Anti-Semitism.
Tikvah means “hope” in Hebrew, and sadly, as the quote from Kafka indicates, it is eminently possible for some to have that hope, while others are just plum out of luck.
The Zionist hope has for Sephardim become our despair and desperation, as we continue to see the destruction of our cultural legacy in the Jewish community.
Indeed, Sephardim today find themselves in a Kafka-esque nightmare of enormous proportions, as the Ashkenazim, in Israel as well as the Diaspora, have reformulated Jewish Identity in a way that has so very cravenly erased our Religious Humanism and replaced it with a far more dangerous and dysfunctional Jewish self-understanding that has crushed the spirit of our classical religio-intellectual heritage and its welcoming cosmopolitanism.
As we lament what Tikvah is doing to destroy Torah Judaism, it is incumbent on us to understand the full extent of the danger it represents, and do whatever we can to stem the tide of its malignancy.
David Shasha
The Benighted Legacy of Zalman Bernstein: How The Tikvah Fund Controls the Institutional Jewish World
By: David Shasha
Why Kosher? Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Leon Kass Battle it Out to Decide Who is More Anti-Maimonidean
By: David Shasha
Whose Bible? Jon Levenson and Leon Kass Battle it Out to Decide Who is More Christian
By: David Shasha
The People-Forming Passover
By: Leon R. Kass
On Confusing One’s Own Views with the Bible’s
By: Jon D. Levenson
Bari Weiss: It Was The David Project Before it was The Tikvah Fund
By: David Shasha
Bari Weiss’ Triumphant Pittsburgh Homecoming: HASBARAH, Anti-Semitism, and the Usual Tikvah Fund Racism
By: David Shasha
Tikvah Fund Shaul Magid: Haredi Coronavirus Apologist, White Jewish Supremacist
By: David Shasha
COVID-19, Haredi Jewry, and ‘Magical’ Thinking
By: Shaul Magid