The Iraqi Jewish Shame of Tikvah Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacist David Bernstein
David Shasha
The Iraqi Jewish Shame of Tikvah Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacist David Bernstein
It is very rare for one of the objects of my ire to respond directly to me.
On the evening of my latest attack on David Project Bernstein – and there have been many of them over the years – I received this very short e-mail from him:
Hey bro, thanks for the profile (though it’s mostly inaccurate). You should at least know about my own Sephardic heritage:
The complete article follows this note.
As I will show in this note, the Quillette article will further confirm just what a lying hypocrite he is, and how he continues to abuse the Sephardic heritage and support the Ashkenazi racists intent on erasing us.
In my defense, I have never once seen any information presented by Bernstein in his many institutional bios that included any mention of his mother and where she was born.
Please feel free to read each one with great care:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Bernstein
https://www.jewishpublicaffairs.org/david-bernstein-jewish-council-for-public-affairs-jcpa/
You can once again review his David Project Cancel Culture history – which I attacked when discussing his current CHUTZPAH-dik attacks on the current New Racial Consciousness and its own form of Cancel Culture – and his anti-Sephardic HASBARAH advocacy with the JIMENA-linked “Forgotten Refugees” documentary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Refugees
https://www.jimena.org/resources/forgotten-refugees/
Once again, I point to Yehouda Shenhav’s classic article “Spineless Bookkeeping” which shows how the Arab Refugee issue is being used to undermine the Palestinians and not for any other reason:
We are just Pawns in their Game.
It is also worthwhile to note here that JIMENA Director Sarah Levin and Tikvah Tablet Editor Alana Newhouse, like Bernstein, have Sephardic mothers.
I only know this by direct communication with all three of them, as they are reticent to “sully” their Ashkenazi surnames with any taint of the lowly Oriental:
https://www.jimena.org/staff/sarah-levin/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alana_Newhouse
Newhouse’s Tikvah Tablet bio is even less informative:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/alana-newhouse
When I spoke privately to Newhouse, she kvetched endlessly about have to attend two separate Synagogue services on Yom Kippur, one Ashkenazi, the other Sephardi, and expressed absolutely no concern or affection for her Sephardic lineage.
Without trying to make this too personal, I must say that she chose to reject all the articles I submitted to her for publication, and soon brought on Esther Levy-Chehebar to present Sephardim in a superficial and often humiliating light:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/esther-levychehebar
Again, if you still do not believe me, please compare and contrast her idiotic articles with those of “serious” Yiddishist Rokhl Kafrissen and her devoted brand of White Jewish Supremacy:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/rokhl-kafrissen
Sarah Levin has continued to try and engage with me after my attacks on her and JIMENA, but her work and public profile remain completely consistent with the HASBARAH White Jewish Supremacy that Tom Pessah presented in his seminal article on her group and its Neo-Con racist machinations:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tXd9HrTpRUm3oOkegJtKAw3MMuD-jt-mume90yyTvMg/edit
It has been repeatedly confirmed by White Jewish institutions like eJewish Philanthropy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xzRZtYI1amnNyGM47ny41p_A32xToEQJPZyUUimzrbI/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
Levin knows nothing about the Sephardic heritage, and JIMENA remains a strictly HASBARAH racist group, as we saw in their Neo-Con attacks on California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBkVBFplCWMowuOs6V_0aJ1ZDh6JQd8vtwz22A_xdvA/edit
That one was yet another brick in the endless FOX News Alt-Right Culture War, as the network once again branded the New Racial Consciousness as “Hate for America”:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/los-alamitos-ethnic-studies-program-criticized-letter
So there is that!
We can contrast this trio of Sephardic shame with the case of the great graphic novelist Joann Sfar, whose mixed Ashkenazi-Sephardi parentage has led to many interesting cultural productions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pH_hEwUcvmOEy5tdJ5brNibZYwn60hWvypYGTZFZC_o/edit
In my additional notes to the article, I mention my interview with him at The Center for Jewish History, though it has unfortunately been scrubbed from their website:
The interview directly engaged this dual identity, which can be seen in a comparative reading of his books The Rabbi’s Cat and Klezmer:
https://www.amazon.com/Rabbis-Cat-Pantheon-Graphic-Novels/dp/0375714642
https://www.amazon.com/Klezmer-Tales-Wild-Joann-2006-09-05/dp/B01FGLF5BQ
The Sephardi book is a philosophical-cultural meditation on Judaism, Post-Colonialism, and Convivencia, while the Ashkenazi book is from the very get-go a portrayal of Ashkenazi divisiveness, dysfunction, and religious violence.
Sfar himself engaged the matter in a Freudian manner when I interviewed him, and noted how other interviewers and reviewers never picked up on that part of his story.
But Sfar and other Sephardi cultural theorists and activists are simply not part of the Straussian Neo-Con world, as has become clear from the deplorable Newhouse and her Tikvah Tablet Trumpism.
I do not think it necessary to review all the Tikvah Tablet racism at this late date. If you do not get it by now, then you will never get it. Maybe you should just sign up with Ruth Wisse and Meir Soloveichik, and go visit Zalman Bernstein’s grave!
As far as David Bernstein is concerned, his e-mail did not choose to mention the shameful “Columbia Unbecoming” bloodletting, and his deep devotion to Cancel Culture of the HASBARAH kind over many materially productive decades now:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GQ1T91xG72SCnuUwl7WQwGYGZk95Dg65zRphnSZxPWg/edit
His e-mail did not choose to mention his superior Bret Stephens’ racist column on “Jewish Genius”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m94er1fxTBO2L3jClvnNgWaS2OFZcxWvRFthT0nUOkc/edit
For the record, here is the NYT cleaned-up version of the racist article, based on White Supremacy Eugenics, with their pathetic disclaimer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/jewish-culture-genius-iq.html
What is fascinating about Bernstein’s Quillette article – and of course it would have to be in Quillette! – is that it refutes many of the HASBARAH positions he and his Neo-Con allies have taken.
First, we must address the issue of the FARHUD:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/152mzNuyZzR5UWpohF6vmWWheMnoQefygNHp4-8CK-_8/edit
The article confirms that the horrible murderous event was a time of confusion when different Iraqi Muslims did different things, as Nissim Rejwan’s eyewitness testimony affirms.
In Bernstein’s own words about his mother and her memories:
It was a subject she knew something about. She was just four months old when about 200 of her fellow Iraqi Jews were slaughtered, while scores of others were beaten and raped, in a 1941 Baghdad pogrom (known as the Farhud) whose 80th anniversary was marked earlier this year. She and her family members remained safe because they’d been sheltered by Muslim neighbors, who traded houses with them during what became the most deadly anti-Semitic riot in Middle East history. As guests in a Muslim household, she explained to me, their protection became a matter of family honor for their hosts.
Rather than referring to Rejwan, Bernstein links to – naturally – a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by someone named Joseph Samuels – yet another ambiguous surname:
I googled Mr. Samuels and found that he has been adopted by the Holocaust lecture circuit, even though the FARHUD was not part of the Nazi Holocaust:
Just to make it HASBARAH official, the FARHUD has been included in the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud
Like Bernstein’s mother, Samuels was a child during the terror-filled events, so he would not be as accurate a chronicler of the time as Rejwan.
But this does not stop Bernstein from doing his best Lyn Julius impression:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/REB00Id_UXw/m/IbAHOCBf7CsJ
Julius of course is a rabid Islamophobe who denies in toto the positive cultural interchange between Jewish and Muslim culture in the Iberian and Arab world, helping to erase a Sephardic culture she knows nothing about – other than HENNA:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WXmmPlo2S1YQ7zpKkW8pbTqssJKkbEA7B78aRITmY1o/edit
Edwin Black has written a HASBARAH book on the matter that shows us how it is being used by the racist Zionist Ashkenazim:
https://www.amazon.com/Farhud-Roots-Arab-Nazi-Alliance-Holocaust/dp/0914153145
Here is my response to all the distortions:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/estFwLUHJZM/m/4fqDUN-dAQAJ
There were some Iraqi Muslims who responded to the British provocation with Anti-Jewish violence, as there were many more who chose to “save” Jews, putting their own lives in peril.
Though many Iraqi Jews abandoned the country in the wake of the Anti-British sentiment and the establishment of the State of Israel, Bernstein’s mother’s family remained.
We all know the tumultuous history of the country and its anti-democratic governments, though many might not be aware of the still-unsolved mystery of the Mas’ouda Shemtob Synagogue bombing and the other Zionist-related Anti-Jewish violence that helped push the Jews out:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1391450188d7shawaf.pdf
Indeed, the 2007 article by Rayyan Al-Shawaf published in Dissent magazine shows us just how complicated the series of terrorist actions aimed at the Iraqi Jewish community remains. And it is in the interests of Israel’s Secret Services to keep it that way.
After all, who cares about Iraqi Jews anyway!
Perhaps the best discussion of the matter, with all the possible confusion based on the conflicted sources both written and oral, is still Abbas Shiblak’s 1986 book The Lure of Zion:
https://www.amazon.com/Lure-Zion-Case-Iraqi-Jews/dp/0863560334
Even more incendiary is Iraqi-born Naiem Giladi’s Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Mossad and Haganah Eliminated Jews:
https://www.amazon.com/Ben-Gurions-Scandals-Haganah-Mossad-Eliminated/dp/1893302407
Bernstein does not refer to these sources because they do not support his HASBARAH narrative.
And this, of course, is why he is such a complete hypocrite:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/9vrg0jCRe5g
In SHU 1028 I presented the following two articles which display Bernstein’s autocratic hubris, as he duplicitously demands “Free Thought” in Jewish schools, while at the same time denying it to others:
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/341665/cancel-culture-jewish-educators-style/
https://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/an-open-letter-to-the-charles-e-smith-jewish-day-school/
He followed this SHANDA up with yet another duplicitous attack on the lack of “Debate” in America:
https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/342887/has-america-stopped-debating/
Tell it to the Columbia Middle Eastern Studies department and to those who Bernstein has sought to Cancel over the years!
In the Tikvah Straussian world that Bernstein inhabits there is only one point of view, and those who do not espouse that point of view are locked out of the discourse and ultimately demonized.
It is something we saw when Bernstein was asked to participate in what I have called the “Jazz Against Democracy” conference held by the Tikvah ASF’s Aryeh Tepper and his Straussian ways:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lHRy4s8XIPfPnDPNRLPOI2t1-YTdOc3vtMVgN90lFVY/edit
I also presented a set of articles on the matter in a special newsletter, providing more context and background to understand it, and the damage it has done to both Sephardim and the African-American Civil Rights Movement:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KcrIEAbb8bTSUFlrl2ftRMolPzxaLz5jaX7bGecAdYo/edit
David Bernstein’s entire career has been lived insight the racist Ashkenazi Neo-Con Jewish bubble that today has been gathered under The Tikvah Fund umbrella. He has until the very recent Quillette article never presented himself as an Arab Jew, and for good reason: The Neo-Con Jewish world is fully White Jewish Supremacy, and when Arab Jews are mentioned – as is the case with the ubiquitous FARHUD – it is always in terms of the “Lachrymose” version of Jewish history as presented by both Bernard Lewis and his devoted disciple Norman Stillman:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nSdrjtm-qKwYxEkewoX5ZNQpx28lJZs1no8hOmZrVKY/edit
https://rl.talis.com/3/ucl/items/5255E0D2-0862-9BD2-9B5B-29E34DB6AD25.html
Stillman’s 1991 Tikkun article “Myth, Countermyth, and Distortion” has apparently vanished from on-line viewing, but you can glean its basic thesis from Mark Cohen’s exchange with him in the same issue of the magazine:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VXSLMHVKbOp3H39xbbLEmaC7V65DGgz4/view?ths=true
Stillman and Lewis remain the basic template for the Tikvah Neo-Con understanding of Arab Jews:
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/211/reorientation/
In my article for Critical Muslim’s special issue Reclaiming Al-Andalus, I present an alternative view of the Sephardic heritage from the professional Ashkenazi Orientalists Stillman and Cohen:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KNT3cG91CHYNf6ibRwp_gSQbcaDV1Irj/view?ths=true
Here is the complete issue:
https://criticalmuslim.com/issues/06-reclaiming-al-andalus
As we have seen – and will certainly continue to see – the Tikvah Neo-Con world is certainly not a pluralistic inclusive one, where different ideas compete. It is a monolingual and monocultural universe, where only those who heed the Neo-Con dogma are allowed to speak.
Sephardim are not permitted in this world, and when we look closely at each one of these Jewish institutions, we find that there is a consistent Ashkenazi bias. When Sephardim are mentioned – and even included, though this is more of a Marrano-like deflection as we have seen in Bernstein, Newhouse, and Levin who continue to hide their maternal lineages – it is always in order to demonize the Arab-Muslim world in strict HASBARAH fashion.
Moreover, the Sephardim themselves consistently lack actual agency, as their history and culture are being demeaned and often erased by a White Jewish Supremacy, led by Cancel Culture machers like David Bernstein, who zealously do the work of the Neo-Con racists and their FOX News Trumpist allies.
Ping Pong indeed!
Zei Gezunt to all the White Jewish Supremacists and their Sephardi lackeys.
Yasher Koach.
David Shasha
Maternal Lessons in Politics from a Jewish Iraqi-American Ping Pong Champion
By: David Bernstein
Whenever I would whine about some minor inconvenience while growing up in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, my mother would say, “You should try living in Iraq for a while.” It was a subject she knew something about. She was just four months old when about 200 of her fellow Iraqi Jews were slaughtered, while scores of others were beaten and raped, in a 1941 Baghdad pogrom (known as the Farhud) whose 80th anniversary was marked earlier this year. She and her family members remained safe because they’d been sheltered by Muslim neighbors, who traded houses with them during what became the most deadly anti-Semitic riot in Middle East history. As guests in a Muslim household, she explained to me, their protection became a matter of family honor for their hosts.
With the creation of Israel seven years later, and the subsequent defeat of the Arab armies that attacked the new Jewish state, the political situation became even more precarious for Iraq’s Jews. At one point, my mother’s father and older brother were arrested and jailed on charges of torching a local oil refinery. “We did not even know where the refinery was,” my mother recalled. When her father got sick in jail, he was transported to a hospital. After a month, both he and his brother were freed after the family bribed the appropriate authorities.
A decade later, my mother lived through the anti-monarchist Iraqi coup of 1958, in which Prince ‘Abd al-Ilah was killed, and his mutilated body was dragged through the streets behind a tank. Yet monstrous though these events were, Abdul al-Karim Qasim, the new prime minister, had a soft spot for the Jews. And so he became an improbably beloved figure among the scant members of Iraq’s Jewish community who hadn’t already fled to Israel or other destinations.
During this period, my mother was filled with nationalist fervor for the new Iraq and its leader. I know this not because she told me, but because when the US military invaded Iraq in 2003, one of its units stumbled upon a treasure trove of water-logged artifacts in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters. Among the mouldy findings that were brought to the United States and restored were copies of a book on Jewish holiday liturgy written by my own grandfather, as well as the valedictorian speech my mother gave upon graduating from Frank Iny high school in 1959, just a year after Qasim had taken over the country. (Frank Iny operated until 1973, by which time it was the only Jewish school still operating in Iraq.)
The speech was essentially an ode to the Iraqi leader, whom she praised for restoring honor and freedom to the Iraqi people. “This year is different from previous years,” waxed my 18-year-old future mother, with her bouffant hairdo (yes, there are pictures) and starry-eyed idealism:
The mouths are smiling. The faces are bright. The hearts are happy. It is the first year of our blessed revolution ... Our sole leader Abdul al-Karim Qasim is the jeweled node of this nation and is the mighty thinking head who elevates us every day from one social revolution into another more glorious and more advanced. We strived and struggled to attain our freedom and our free thought. Our poet Mar’uf Al-Rusafi was right when he said: If there is an aspiration for people of a nation, free thought must be the highest aspiration.
These were heady years for Iraqi Jews, as the country appeared to be on the cusp of a more liberal order. My mother was among the first Jewish women ever allowed to enroll in the University of Baghdad, where she studied Chemistry and even played sports. As a child, I poked fun at her about the “Baghdad U” athletics program. Unamused, she proclaimed her status as the university’s one-time ladies table-tennis champion, with trophies and photos to prove it (not to mention a wicked backhand slam retained from those glory days). She freely intermingled with Muslim students at the university, and even dated one for a time (though in secret).
Iraq’s liberal moment was, of course, short-lived. Qasim, while relatively benign to the Jews, went on to rule as an autocrat. He was overthrown and killed in 1963 in the so-called “Ramadan Revolution.” And the incoming Ba’athists were decidedly less enamored with the country’s Jewish minority.
“We were devastated,” my mother recalled. “I remember my friend singing a popular song in Arabic, My eyes are smiling but my heart is crying.” After graduating from university a few months later, she left Iraq, alone, following on my grandfather’s bribe to secure a student visa. She landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her brother had settled, and enrolled in a Masters chemistry program. Just weeks after that, her friends back in Baghdad informed her that there’d been yet another coup in Iraq, this one instigated by Nasserist military officers—though they didn’t yet know if it was good or bad for the Jews. Days later, the government shut the doors to Jews wishing to leave the country.
That same month, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. My mother told me that her first thought was that tanks would soon be rolling down the streets of Cincinnati and other American cities, dragging the dead bodies of the President’s family members and advisors. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. And my mother got a lesson in how politics works in a democratic society.
Members of the Iraqi side of my family have always worshipped America. (My father, a Jew of European heritage, was born in the United States.) When I was a young child, my mother would refer to Iraq as “back home.” When she finally became a citizen in 1971, however, she announced that Iraq was no longer her home, and she vowed never to use that phrase again.
But the political attitudes that my relatives grew up with in the strongman-dominated world of Iraq proved stubborn. My grandmother, who lived in our home and didn’t speak a word of English, adored Ronald Reagan for what she described as his magnetic confidence and strength. As a teenager, I had a stereotypically sneering attitude toward the Gipper, and made my views plain during our political arguments. When Reagan won a second term, she told me, “See? I was right!” In the Arab world, victory and “strength” went together. That instinct from “back home” still held sway.
No one would accuse any of my Iraqi Jewish family members of being civil libertarians. According to the facile tropes of US political commentary, there’s often a polite fiction that presents immigrants as a unified political constituency. As anyone who grew up in an immigrant family can attest, this is nonsense. My mother once commented to me that Somali taxi drivers in Columbus, Ohio who refused to transport alcohol out of adherence to religious scruples should be deported. She also bought into conspiracy theories about Muslims trying to impose Shariah law on the United States as a whole. I told my American-born cousins that if any of our Iraqi parents found themselves heading America’s government, they might take inspiration from the methods of their late, beloved Abdul al-Karim Qasim.
In 2003, my mother and grandmother became giddy about the impending invasion of Iraq. “Let the Americans bomb my home in Baghdad!” exclaimed my grandmother, by then blind and feeble in her late 90s, along with muttered Arabic words of prayer, as if she would soon personally be storming the palace of Saddam Hussein. Every year, during the recitation of the Ten Plagues at Passover, she would wish a different plague on Bashar Assad and other notorious Arab leaders. All of this put her well at odds with the more liberal tendencies developing within late 20th-century American Jewry. (I once told my mother that in Hebrew School, I’d learned that at Seder, we take a drop of wine out of the cup when reciting each plague so as to lessen the joy we feel because of the suffering of the Egyptians who’d enslaved our forebears. “That wasn’t how we did the plagues in Iraq,” she shrugged.)
As thrilled as they were about George W. Bush’s plan to invade their former homeland, my older family members never believed the war would transform the country. “If these idiots think they’re going to install a democracy in Iraq, they’re crazy,” my mother said. By then, I was in a neo-con phase, and so the debating roles we’d played in the Reagan era were now reversed. But when it came to Iraq, she turned out to be correct.
Democratic transformation generally comes from the ground up, not from foreigners bearing guns and gifts. Perhaps she knows more about democracy than I gave her credit for.
In the end, it didn’t matter much that our Iraqi-born relatives weren’t schooled in the latest political doctrines. They were focused on making a living. Having come from a country with no real democratic tradition, they never had interest in so much as running for dog catcher. But like many of the immigrants who come to the United States from other repressive dictatorships, they still appreciate the fruits of democracy. They know that in Afghanistan, the Taliban are the bad guys and the Americans were a force for good. And they never went in for those political word games, played on both sides of the political spectrum, that serve to muddle the difference between freedom and actual oppression. It’s something I think about when I hear right-wing populists and ultra-progressive critical race theorists alike pretend that our hard-won democratic institutions are a mask for tyranny.
Not only is democracy built from the ground up—it can be undone from the ground up. Like my mother said, these people should try living in Iraq for a while.
David Bernstein is founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. You can find him on Twitter at @DavidLBernstein.
From Quillette, September 2, 2021