This Week in Dr. Mijal Bitton, Enthusiastic Tool of the White Jewish Supremacy (3/28)
David Shasha
Mijal Bitton and White Jewish Feminism
On Monday we received an announcement of a new publication from the White Jewish Supremacists at the Shalom Hartman Institute:
https://mailchi.mp/shi.org.il/sources-journal-287912?e=ce188d0296
Front and center is of course our dear friend Mijal Bitton, whose contribution “Is Jewish Continuity Sexist?” provides an excellent example to see her process close up:
https://www.sourcesjournal.org/articles/is-jewish-continuity-sexist
For those of you who might still think that I have been exaggerating on just how Ashkenazi she is, I strongly advise you to read the article in full. It is a masterpiece of White Jewish indoctrination which bears not a trace of the Sephardic heritage in either its conceptual process or in its deeply troubling “Jewish Future” genetic content.
The footnotes provide the usual Social Science claptrap, while the article itself is rooted exclusively in Ashkenazi Jewish academic and institutional voices – with one exception:
My convictions have also been shaped by studying the choices of traditional Sephardic women. The work of the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood has proven particularly influential. Mahmood challenged the scholarly discourse on feminism by arguing that it centers a western and liberal view of the autonomous self—one that could not properly recognize the choices of women when those choices did not align with emancipatory progressive politics. In her book Politics of Piety, Mahmood studied the religious subjectivities of women in Egypt who were part of pietist revival movements.14 She showed that those women’s choices, however non-feminist they may appear to western eyes, must be understood in light of their agency in shaping their own lives—the seemingly paradoxical ability to make choices despite those choices being non-egalitarian.
After slavishly following Ashkenazim in her understanding of both Judaism and the Social Sciences, she cites Saba Mahmood’s work on Muslim fundamentalism:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/us/saba-mahmood-dead.html
Here is how the NYT obituary characterized her work:
It is often argued, she said at the 2016 conference, that the solution to religious extremism is more secularism, and that nations like Pakistan suffer from fundamentalism because the state and its people are not adequately secular. But the idea that secularism means the separation of church and state “is an old idea” that has been challenged by scholars for about the last 20 years, she said.
These scholars now argue that the condition of secularism is in fact one in which the state has become “more and more involved in the regulation of religious life and religious institutions,” she said.
Thus, when Islamic movements struggle to make the state their means to Islamicize society, they’re in line with this modern conception of secularism, Professor Mahmood maintained.
It is nice to see Sephardim being presented as religious fanatics, when in point of fact it is the Sephardic assimilation into Ashkenazi Judaism – whether YU Modern Orthodoxy or Lakewood Haredism – that has caused the general malaise.
I have written about the matter in two articles on Rabbi Eli Mansour:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/Kmi5UgxrL9I/m/ZakBPZDhDRYJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/rkEMy3MVtQQ/m/cduocbDFAgAJ
You can see how Mansour distorts the classical Sephardic heritage in order to have his views line up with the Lakewood view.
Bitton’s article is ultimately about children and “natality” in the larger context of whether Judaism will have “continuity”:
An open and honest grappling would result in changes in the discourse around fertility and Jewish continuity. It would center women’s voices and seek to be truly representative of the diversity of our communities. It would acknowledge that the liberal Jewish community is invested in two values that sometimes stand in tension: promoting Jewish fertility and advancing gender equality. To aid in this goal, the communal discourse related to fertility should strive to distinguish between describing population trends and proposing communal interventions.
While there are certainly many valid points to be made about Feminist agency in the Jewish community, Bitton is mired in the discourse of White Jewish Supremacy, as we can see from her citations of racists Rokhl Kafrissen and Batya Unger-Sargon:
Finally, many critics make a broader and particularly erroneous set of assumptions: that there is some sort of coherent linkage between the bad actions of specific men and their advocacy for Jewish continuity; that the continuity agenda reflects an obsession with "other people having sex, with other people having babies,” as Forward editor at the time Batya Ungar-Sargon put it; and that this obsession is “sexist and homophobic.” Kafrissen describes Cohen as the architect of the Jewish continuity discourse in which "it becomes very hard to disentangle the sexism of the alleged abuse from the patriarchal agenda Cohen spent decades pushing.”
We will recall that Ms. Kafrissen has stood against the idea that there is even such a thing as White Jewish Supremacy and Ashkenazi racism:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/q84ktULGijo/m/aF9iwD4BBu4J
She has been one of the most egregious figures representing that Ashkenazi racism in the Tikvah world:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/djrhFHPqpRw/m/MyWX64EdBQAJ
In her prominent role in the racist Forward and its renewed ethnocentrism under Jodi Rudoren, Ms. Unger-Sargon has become a key Haredi apologist:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/the-forward.php
She just attacked The New York Times article on the corrupt Trump pardons as they relate to the Orthodox Jewish institutional world, calling the paper worse than the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer:
These are the Ashkenazi racists that Bitton has very warmly embraced in order to climb the Jewish institutional ladder and make a name for herself.
The main idea we can glean from the article, as I have repeatedly stated, is that Bitton has no knowledge of or allegiance to the Sephardic heritage; instead, she has been trained in the manner of White Jewish Supremacy and its Teutonic 19th century sense of Social Science.
Mijal Bitton and Yehuda Kurtzer
We have already seen how the SHI North American director has erased Sephardim from the Jewish discourse:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ytx5ztODWRA/m/MiqL6_6fBQAJ
And we have seen in his book The New Jewish Canon that Mijal Bitton has gone along with the White Jewish Supremacy.
Indeed, it always pays to have Uncle Tom Sephardim along for the ride!
In another article from the new SHI publication, we see the White Jewish Supremacist Kurtzer double-down on his abysmal racism:
https://www.sourcesjournal.org/articles/what-happened-tojewish-pluralism
You see, when the racist Ashkenazim use the term “Jewish Pluralism” they are talking about Ashkenazi Jewish Denominationalism.
I have written about that Jewish dysfunction in my article “A Broken Frame”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjFku-0Z8bD2BD4QuDxv6OWK5Lubd8Uj/view?ths=true
Kurtzer sees the dysfunction as a good thing; though he does not see his own racism and the erasure of Sephardim.
Bitton is a perfect self-hater.
Not only does she provide no Sephardic content or ideological perspective in her cookie-cutter Social Science work, she is keen to act the part of a token Sephardi who will do anything – anything – to appease her Ashkenazi masters.
David Shasha