New Article: The Benighted Legacy of Zalman Bernstein: How The Tikvah Fund Controls the Institutional Jewish World
David Shasha
The Benighted Legacy of Zalman Bernstein: How The Tikvah Fund Controls the Institutional Jewish World
I recently pieced together a number of media items related to the Right Wing Neo-Con Tikvah Fund and its late founder Zalman Bernstein that showed how the institution is acting as a militant and very dangerous unifying factor in the Jewish world. This article will discuss those interrelated details and set them in their proper context in order to illuminate the current dilemmas of Jewish institutional life.
Some years ago, Zachary Braiterman did an excellent job presenting the existential problem that Tikvah poses to Jews:
http://zeek.forward.com/articles/117374/
That article detailed the links between Tikvah and the larger Right Wing political movement in America and Israel.
Mr. Bernstein’s other pedagogical initiative Avi Chai has just announced that it will be contracting and closing shop:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/avi-chai-says-goodbye-but-not-mission-accomplished/
This development is significant because it leaves Tikvah, and its media outlets Tablet magazine, Mosaic magazine, and The Jewish Review of Books, free to finish the work that Avi Chai started, but in a much more polemical fashion.
Where AC was less overtly political in its aims, Tikvah has no such reserve.
As the article from The Jewish Week puts it:
From the beginning, Bernstein wanted to guard the foundation from “mission drift” before, as a forthcoming book on the foundation puts it, “future leaders could take it off course.” In addition to the sunset clause, he appointed a small board of confidantes and named his wife, Mem, as his successor. Bernstein died in 1999 at age 72.
Even at this long distance from Bernstein’s passing, Tikvah has maintained his firm ideological imprint:
https://tikvahfund.org/about/founder/
Here is my article about the Tikvah mission and its deleterious impact on Judaism as understood in the classical Sephardic tradition:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/iVBOt2E2du0/VPgR79WvBQAJ
Tikvah has unleashed on us truly obnoxious Neo-Con reactionary figures like Tablet magazine’s Liel Leibovitz and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/3LtrFnpw1TU/p2Oll1JgAAAJ
Current New York Times Op-Ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss presents us with an important Tikvah “success” story, which I have discussed in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/hGbojJTkhB4/K4kSTje6BQAJ
I have also shown the important connection between Tikvah and the Ultra-Orthodox community in the following articles on Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/APYTXhWHNbY/LWISkZp0BwAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/H3bXuIRSJwY/cZ2UsamUAQAJ
Critical to Tikvah’s ties to the current iteration of Right Wing Conservatism is its support for the infamous Hobby Lobby Bible Museum:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/x3033wR4Mqw/xsNQ_DImAQAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/Ra16uogXog8/XAmc0RlgEQAJ
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has very proudly represented the link between Trumpist “Christian” values and Orthodox Judaism, as we can see in his program at the Hoover Institute with Utah Senator Mike Lee:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/JVae6I3QlmM/rDql86i4CQAJ
It is noteworthy that Soloveichik has become a prominent figure in the spurious “Religious Liberty” movement:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/tikvah/davidshasha/SvAkVwHpJUU/y50PJbkPBAAJ
A fascinating example of how Tikvah has brought together Right Wing Jewish political radicals of different religious denominations is Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue here in New York, and a regular contributor to Mosaic magazine:
https://mosaicmagazine.com/?s=cosgrove
Rabbi Cosgrove’s “Do a Mitzvah!” sermon was posted by Mosaic and represents a very intriguing promotion of CHABAD religious radicalism:
https://pasyn.org/resources/sermons/do-mitzvah
The Yom Kippur CHABAD-loving sermon was noticed by Haredi propagandist Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein in Cross-Currents:
https://cross-currents.com/2019/10/18/a-game-changing-yom-kippur-sermo/
But it was not the first time that Cosgrove praised CHABAD in his sermons:
https://pasyn.org/resources/sermons/%5Bfield_dateline-date%5D-52
Under the bold title “Religion Beyond the Limits of Reason Alone,” Cosgrove gave a brilliant articulation of the reactionary Tikvah mindset, and how it has brought together different Jewish denominations under the Right Wing Zalman Bernstein Neo-Con Jewish umbrella.
That umbrella is being deployed at an upcoming program at the Jewish Theological Seminary on Jewish Legal and Political Thought:
The JTS program is very much in line with Tikvah’s own “Advanced Institutes” initiative, which features many of the same cast of characters:
https://tikvahfund.org/advanced-institutes/
As the YU announcement indicates, the program features a number of Tikvah Fund “stars” bringing together institutional Orthodox and Conservative Judaism:
The seminar will be run by Professors Leora Batnitzky (Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies; Professor of Religion, Princeton University), Yonatan Brafman (Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Ethics, Jewish Theological Seminary of America), and Suzanne Last Stone (University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Yeshiva University; Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law), with a guest presentation by Professor Christine Hayes (Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University).
It is all very impressive in terms of Ivy League academic bona fides, but behind it is The Tikvah Fund and its deeply Straussian political values; as can be seen in the work of Leora Batnitzky:
There is a close connection between Professor Batnitzky and Meir Soloveichik, as the latter did his doctoral dissertation at Princeton under the former’s supervision:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
A key part of the Neo-Con atavism that Batnitzky and Soloveichik represent, a logical extension of Straussianism, is the debilitating figure of Michael Wyschogrod:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/jj2Eeun1BHg/KDGl4mpIBgAJ
Batnitzky’s discussion of Wyschogrod which I included in that special newsletter was naturally published in Tikvah’s Jewish Review of Books.
It is all one incestuous ideologically-charged Tikvah world.
In the post-Reagan and post-Begin political landscape that drives a good deal of Jewish institutional activity and its Right Wing ethos, the New Jewish Primitivism acts to undermine, as I have argued, the liberal, pluralistic, and cosmopolitan values of Sephardic Religious Humanism.
It is thus crucial to note Batnitzky’s vicious attack on Emmanuel Levinas as mediated through the reactionary thinking of Leo Strauss, the inspirational leader of the Neo-Cons:
That influential book seeks to halt any progress in the role of Religious Humanism in the Jewish world.
I have consistently presented Levinas as a key figure in that tradition:
Batnitzky’s Strauss/Levinas binary is a perfect example of the Tikvah worldview and the aggressive manner in which it has sought to take control of the current Jewish institutional discourse.
It is a benighted Jewish worldview that fits into the current Trump Zeitgeist and its union of Jewish and Christian extremists who seek to roll back freedom and liberty in the name of religious absolutism, as I have recently shown in my article “Christian Fundamentalists and Post-Modernism”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/grfD1_Pchf8
The issues I raised in that article are significant not just for parochial Jewish concerns in the context of racist Ashkenazi Supremacy, but have a much more insidious role to play in the larger context of human freedom, as the New Fascism creeps in with all its xenophobia and nationalist racism.
Yoram Hazony, another Tikvah favorite, has been at the very forefront of this dangerous Nationalist vision which reinforces the toxic ideas of the Alt-Right in Europe and America:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/hazony/davidshasha/9xuFQVImBSo/UWv8QnARCwAJ
Hazony was recently awarded the Conservative Book of the Year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/isi/davidshasha/zKBuLzktVLA/usKOVtVTCwAJ
Here is how I characterized his view of the New Nationalism in that article:
Hazony’s reification of Hegelian Nationalism is not simply a rejection of Liberal Democracy, it is a vigorous promotion of ethno-cultural and ethno-religious tribalism; the very thing that the post-Reagan Conservative order sought to eliminate.
The Hazony revolution is in accord with the emergence of the New Fascism in Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia, in a way that effectively reverses many of the positive advances of Post-Communist Europe that paradoxically was at the very heart of Reagan’s Conservative vision of America and its place in the world:
Indeed, the standard Conservative rejection of tribalism and promotion of Freedom and Market Capitalism – two values that Hazony has sought to sharply curtail – has allowed Liberals and Conservatives to find some common ground. Though the two sides surely disagree on most things, they do largely agree on the necessity of Liberalism in matters of personal choice and in economics.
Hazony thus represents the dangerous new cutting edge of the Breitbart world and its manifestation in Trumpism, linking arms with his fellow Jewish radical Stephen Miller:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/as0aGuyn3AY
Not surprisingly, Liel Leibovitz has been a strong defender of former Trump official Sebastian Gorka, who has also been linked to the New Fascism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/gorka/davidshasha/gBTql59CE8U/9CC-1U9ABAAJ
Indeed, there are deep connections in this Neo-Con world that bode ominously for Jewish continuity as the White Christian Nationalists look to move us back to a more dangerous time and place in human history.
We have thus seen how The Tikvah Fund is at the very cutting edge of the New Fascism, as we track its influence inside the Jewish institutional world and how those institutions are geared up to do battle with the legacy of Liberalism as it is enshrined in the American experiment in democracy and constitutional law.
It is an attempt to reverse the gains of the Open Society, and impose on the rest of us a Right Wing Christian hegemony that is a clear and present danger to the promulgation of Torah Judaism as understood in the classic Maimonidean tradition of Religious Humanism.
David Shasha