New Article: Just Call Me “Schvartze Hayye”: Zionism as McCarthyite Racism
David Shasha
Just Call Me “Schvartze Hayye”: Zionism as McCarthyite Racism
The Jewish community is all abuzz over the story of a Jewish history teacher named JB Brager who was fired from the elite New York City prep school Fieldston for Anti-Zionist tweets:
The newspaper of record got right on it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/nyregion/fieldston-anti-semitism.html
“Ethical Culture” is not what it used to be!
Mondoweiss provided more particulars on the teacher:
https://mondoweiss.net/2020/01/ny-private-school-fires-jewish-teacher-for-anti-zionist-statements/
The article provides evidence of a letter signed by Fieldston alumni, Jewish Voice for Peace members, Queer activists, and a plethora of supporters to have the firing reversed.
As I began to process the story, echoes of Joe McCarthy reverberated in my head:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/B9jIsA-FH4U
The Anti-Communist hysteria was not racist per se; it targeted anyone with Left Wing views, though it did have an Anti-Semitic undertone to it given that many Jews in that period were Liberals.
Zionist repression of free thought has been far more successful over the years, as there is a veritable thought-police industry that has sought to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy on Israel.
Everyone must tow the HASBARAH line – or else.
Today we have Canary Mission:
And Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch:
https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/
But the daddy of them all was Masada 2000’s infamous S.H.I.T. list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada2000
That vicious website has left no actual trace, but there are many others who have taken up the radical HASBARAH baton.
The Brager/Fieldston case was reported out by the Washington Free Beacon, a rabid Right Wing media outlet:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-free-beacon/
But even more importantly, it was The Tikvah Fund’s Tablet magazine that sought to ratchet up the scandal:
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/295595/pride-and-prejudice-at-fieldston
The whole story is very much a Tikvah Fund thing.
I was struck by the following portion of the Mondoweiss article:
Brager commented again after the principal of the Fieldston upper school announced a school assembly featuring two Zionist rabbis, Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and Joshua Davidson from Temple Emanu-El. JTA says that Brager tweeted,
“for a school assembly on anti-Semitism, SURE GO AHEAD and invite two white men who run Reform congregations, both of whom are Zionists, one [Davidson] that wrote that the ‘most insidious strain [of American anti-Semitism] is that of anti-Zionist intersectionality [on the far-left].’”
Hirsch is also a firebreather, who has likened the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace to Osama bin Laden.
We will recall that JVP also played a central role in the firing of Center for Jewish History head David Myers, which was led by members of the American Sephardi Federation:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-curious-case-of-david-myers-and-the-center-for-jewish-history/
We have long passed the point where Anti-Zionism has been de-coupled from Anti-Semitism; indeed, the two things are now firmly seen as one:
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Anti-Zionism-is-antisemitism-593635
What is fascinating in the Fieldston case is that the school chose to invite two Reform rabbis to present Zionism as a “corrective” to Brager’s “offensive” views.
It actually begs us to look at what Reform Judaism is, and whether its dismissal of the Jewish ceremonial law is a salutary thing, while Anti-Zionism is considered Jewish violation.
In January 2018 I posted the following item on Tikvah Fund macher and Sephardi-hater Jonathan Sarna on the notorious 1883 “Trefa Banquet” led by Isaac Mayer Wise, the central figure in the history of American Reform Judaism:
In my comments to Sarna’s pusillanimous defense of Wise I make note of his disparaging attitude towards the American Sephardic Jewish tradition and refer to Sabato Morais and his heroic battle against Wise and Reform Judaism:
http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/morais/introduction.cfm
Fieldston sought to “correct” Brager’s attacks on Israel and Zionism by inviting the heirs of Isaac Mayer Wise to the school!
Well played.
It makes us think of just what Zionism is in relation to the actual Jewish heritage of the Talmud.
I have discussed the complexities of the matter in my article “The Three Weeks and Religious Zionism”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/sbaKDOtTgjU
The Fieldston case should force us to re-assess the relationship between Zionism and Judaism, as it should force us, as Sephardim, to consider what Israel has done to our cultural-religious heritage.
I recently posted a special newsletter on Maimonides which discussed the myriad ways in which the Ashkenazim have continued to attack him and the tradition of Religious Humanism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/pcddAeJ4Qw8
Included in the Anti-Maimonidean litany was my pushback against the Messianic Settlers and their Neo-Hasidic atavism, which has become central to the new Zionist alliance.
Sephardic cosmopolitanism has become anathema to the Ashkenazi Zionists because it does not conform to the Shtetl alienation and Jewish chauvinism that have long been the hallmarks of the Spartan Jewish State.
We can see how this works in the following New York Times article by Matti Friedman which closes with a disparaging assessment of that cosmopolitanism as it relates to the Ottoman Sephardim:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/books/review/family-papers-sarah-abrevaya-stein.html
Friedman, yet another Tikvah Fund staple, has arrogated for himself the role of Sephardi spokesman. Sadly, he is not only not Sephardic, but harbors a deep resentment towards our culture.
As he puts it in the book review:
It’s hard to imagine a place like Salonica today, but its closest approximation in the present is not far away to the east in Israel, a Mediterranean enclave that feels a lot like Greece and has a lively and fractious Jewish culture in constant contact with Islam. But unlike the working-class Salonica Jews who played a key role in the birth of Israeli ports and shipping, few members of this educated family seem to have had much to do with the new state. They were creatures of a polyglot empire, and nationalism wasn’t their style. Their faith was in Western progress and good will. After World War I, Sam, the journalist, had in fact written to the Versailles peace conference to propose that Salonica become “a free and neutral city administered by Jews” with a vote in the League of Nations: “a Jewish city-state that was neither Zionist nor Greek.” It was a great idea, and of course it was doomed along with the world he knew.
Friedman the HASBARAH master is not keen on the Ottoman Jews and does not do much to hide that resentment.
For a more salutary view of the matter, there is Michelle Campos’ excellent 2010 book Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine:
For those who have yet to read that book, I urge you to do so:
https://www.amazon.com/Ottoman-Brothers-Christians-Twentieth-Century-Palestine/dp/0804770689
And here we must reckon with the clash between Tikvah Fund HASBARAH and the actual reality of the Arab Jewish immigrants to Israel, who were called “Schvartze Hayyes” (Black Animals) in the common Israeli vernacular.
I addressed many of the critical issues in Ashkenazi Zionist racism against the Arab Jews in my essay on Yehouda Shenhav’s seminal 2006 book The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LQGPldAVbze_Fjb78pZ57LwQ0pC-Pt0eetskBVQ8aq4/edit
And for those who have yet to read that book, I once again urge you to do so:
https://www.amazon.com/Arab-Jews-Postcolonial-Nationalism-Ethnicity/dp/0804752966
The history of Arab Jews in Israel has been marked by persecution, erasure, and self-loathing.
In my essay on the Shenhav book I cited a deeply disturbing passage from G.N. Giladi’s classic 1990 work Discord in Zion: Conflict Between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel on the notorious Ma’abarot, transit camps:
Sephardi Jews suffered from harsh health conditions in the camps with each family, usually with many children, living in one tent whose area was smaller than a normal room. In 1950/1 the winter was unusually harsh, with snow falls everywhere. The tents and the huts had no heat, and since there were only a few standpipes in every camp people had to stand in long queues for their water ration. In rural areas, priority was given to the Ashkenazi farmers and the camps had their water cut off. Often the water was muddy and unfit for drinking which led to an increase in complaints and violent demonstrations against the authorities which were put down with a steel hand. There was one shower, with cold water naturally, for every 16 people, but it was rare to find a shower which worked regularly. The toilets consisted of a small pit measuring one metre square, and there was one for every four families. The queues to use them were long and sometimes there was only one per hundred people. After heavy rainfall, the contents of the pits would overflow and in summer they gave off a foul stink and nourished armies of stinging insects. The government did not bother about rubbish removal, and, since the camps had no gutters, mounds of rubbish piled up. Since some of the camps lay on the Lod-Tel Aviv highway, Ashkenazi journalists wrote that these camps were jeopardizing Israel’s image since they could be seen by foreign tourists and it would be better to move them away from the highway. The establishment thus started building cement huts a few kilometers away and demanded that the camp inhabitants buy them and move into them. The Sephardim, however, spurned the offer because there was no asphalt road from the new location to the highway, but the Ashkenazi newspapers picked this up and reported ‘these Sephardim refuse to live in buildings because they are used to living in tents like the Bedouin.’
We have recently seen similar White Jewish Supremacist rhetoric coming from New York Times columnist and yet another Tikvah Fund favorite Bret Stephens, in his odious article “The Secrets of Jewish Genius”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/vCcR0JR62JA
In the original version of the article, before the Times was forced to print a retraction, Stephens cites an academic paper on Ashkenazi IQ written by a bunch of racist professors from the University of Utah which marks the Arab Jews, pace Bernard Lewis, as “dirty”:
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
Sadly, over time, the Mizrahi Jews in Israel have discarded their historical culture and adopted the Ashkenazi critique.
Rachel Shabi’s 2009 book We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands reminds us that the Ashkenazi Anti-Sephardi Kulturkampf has taken hold and created an utterly spineless and compliant Middle Eastern Jewish population that have become the most vociferous Arab-haters and supporters of Right Wing Zionist essentialism:
Today we see not only Ashkenazim like Matti Friedman in control of the Mizrahi narrative, but Naftali Bennett with his Biton Committee initiative:
The Algerian-born Israeli poet Erez Biton has become a hero the Zionist Right Wing radicals:
He has been lionized in The Lehrhaus:
https://thelehrhaus.com/culture/words-winged-with-light/
Indeed, the Ashkenazi HASBARAH crowd are probably more familiar with Biton than young Sephardic students are.
But in Israel the Mizrahim are a necessary voting demographic, so it is best to leave the “thinking” to the Ashkenazim and the “serving” to the lowly Arab Jews.
It is something that we have seen in The Tikvah Fund’s Tablet magazine, whose editor Alana Newhouse knows quite well how to demean Sephardim:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/O5fLIPuIBLE/0Kw-snaNBgAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/mLsCGetrhwc/ZRDVSjWFBgAJ
Newhouse has slighted Sephardic culture, relegating it to the “Bourekas and Haminados” kitchen:
Tablet is proudly representative of a racist Ashkenazi institutional world that refuses Sephardim a place at the Adult Jewish Table.
The most outstanding example of this came when Newhouse published the following love letter to the vile Israeli racist Ephraim Kishon, which was written by her prized writer Liel Leibovitz:
For those who are not familiar with Kishon’s “Sallah Shabati” get ready:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/sallah/davidshasha/t4IyE96qZd4/mTc9Bbv3yrkJ
“Sallah” is one of the most offensive portrayals of Arab Jews in the long history of Zionist culture!
Newhouse has also given us the insultingly ephemeral and deeply anti-intellectual “colorful” articles of Esther Levy-Chehebar which clearly display a debased Sephardic illiteracy replete with an Orientalist exoticism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/6tcvzDjOf5Q/n3WgsEYFFgAJ
So, as Tablet goes after Anti-Zionism with gusto, it has sought to enfeeble the Sephardim, thus squaring the circle when it comes to White Jewish Supremacy.
Sephardim remain “Schvartze Hayyes,” even as that heinous term has been effectively retired. Indeed, it is far more useful to manipulate the Sephardim by institutional means.
Who gets in and who is excluded is a far less dangerous way to keep us out of the Jewish discussion, as money and influence are doled out to those Sephardim who are “approved” by the racist Ashkenazim.
The net effect, however, is the same: Whether we are being called the Jewish equivalent of the N-word, or whether our voices are being silenced in more subtle institutional ways, we are still out of the running when it comes to being represented in the Jewish discussion.
Indeed, currently both the American Sephardi Federation and Congregation Shearith Israel are being run by racist Ashkenazi Jews:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/k8q8iQon_zU/uLejOcMWBgAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/uFHOK4_Zass/ZNTICrtPAQAJ
I have no idea whether JB Brager cares anything about Sephardim. But the Fieldston firing demands that we look at the nature and meaning of Zionist advocacy today and how it affects not only traditional Judaism, but what it augurs for the Sephardic heritage.
Many Sephardim have simply adapted to the White Jewish Supremacy and the racist tenets of Zionism. Sadly, this racism, as we saw so clearly in the Bret Stephens case, is aimed directly at us.
It is for this reason that I continue to identify the members of my community as “Idiot Sephardim”; lacking the most basic understanding of their historic culture and having not a shred of self-dignity.
It is what I have called the “New Convivencia.”
David Shasha