New Article: Rachel Fish and the Mainstreaming of Right Wing Zionist Radicalism in American Jewish Institutions
David Shasha
Rachel Fish and the Mainstreaming of Right Wing Zionist Radicalism in American Jewish Institutions
I was particularly struck when I saw the following article by Rachel Fish in eJewish Philanthropy:
We will recall that Ms. Fish was a critical player in the McCarthyite HASBARAH group The David Project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_David_Project
The David Project was on the extreme Right Wing margin of HASBARAH advocacy. It produced two documentaries of note. There was 2005’s “The Forgotten Refugees,” which deals with the Arab Jews and their role in pro-Israel and anti-Arab discourse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Refugees
The film presents the usual Zionist demonization of the Arabs as it manipulates Arab Jewish history to suit Israel’s perceived needs.
The “Forgotten Refugees” section on the group’s current website has been removed. It has been replaced with a section on Arab Jews in the Resources section under the more innocuous rubric “Jews of Arab Lands” which makes passing mention of the film:
http://www.davidproject.org/educators/teacherlogin/modular-units/
Here is the website’s description of the unit:
This modular unit focuses on the history of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, and the eventual hardships that resulted in many of the Jews leaving their homes and becoming refugees. It explores the various countries in this region that once had thriving Jewish communities. In exploring the nature of the various communities that developed in these countries, this unit allows students to develop a better understanding of the relationships between the Jewish communities and the ruling powers, and a deeper understanding of Jewish history in light of these Jewish communities.
Along with the Student Edition, this unit includes a Teacher Edition equipped with more detailed information about the communities, as well as classroom activities. Upon completion of the unit, the students should have an awareness of the history of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa and an understanding of the complexities of this history.
Optional assignments in this unit are
intended to be utilized in conjunction with the documentary The Forgotten
Refugees, available through JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa).
To order a copy of The Forgotten Refugees documentary for your
classroom, call JIMENA at
415-626-5062 or email sarah...@jimena.org.
We will note the group’s continuing connection to JIMENA, which co-produced the documentary. An e-mail contact is provided for Sarah Levin, the Ashkenazi leader of the purportedly Arab Jewish group.
We recently cited Richard Silverstein’s excellent exposé of JIMENA as an Ashkenazi Zionist front group:
Here is his complete article:
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/05/17/san-francisco-jcrc-steals-nakba/
As we have learned from experience, Arab Jewish history is ignored unless it has some value to the Zionist cause.
The David Project’s other documentary was 2004’s “Columbia Unbecoming”; a McCarthyite attack on that university’s Middle Eastern Studies department:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_David_Project#Columbia_Unbecoming
The controversy over the film was presented in a 2005 New York magazine article by Jennifer Senior:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/urban/education/features/10868/
A conference on the film was held at Columbia University in March of that year. I wrote a very lengthy review article that was published in SHU 149 which provides a basic introduction to this form of radical Right Wing HASBARAH advocacy, and a review of the truly repugnant things that took place at the conference:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GQ1T91xG72SCnuUwl7WQwGYGZk95Dg65zRphnSZxPWg/edit
The group’s website seems to have scrubbed clean any references to the documentary:
http://www.davidproject.org/?s=columbia+unbecoming
In just over a decade we have seen the dangerous ways in which this radical discourse has been “mainstreamed” into the American Jewish institutional world.
In her eJewish Philanthropy article Fish shows us how the current usages have transformed, or better sanitized, the older, more brazenly McCarthyite discourse by focusing on the current situation on American campuses:
These examples illustrate one of the major challenges occurring on campus: the fact that Jewish students – who identify as Jews, engage in Jewish organizations and participate in Jewish life – may encounter the growing phenomenon of anti-Jewish politics at North American college campuses and universities. In these cases, the emphasis was on Jewish not Israel since Israel was not the main point of identification nor were these scenarios about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or how that conflict is represented or debated on campus. Of course, the anti-Jewish politics is also framed as anti-Israelism, including the BDS movement, which today’s students confront. The degree of anti-Jewish politics varies among campuses, and the stories of the many Jewish organizations supporting students on campus is often told. I want to ask another question: How has – and how should – the Jewish community, and Jewish educators specifically, prepared their communities of high school learners for this anticipated reality on campus?
In this citation from the article we see the continuing HASBARAH attempt to blur the distinctions between Zionism and Judaism, and to turn the BDS movement into a form of Anti-Semitism; Fish insisting that what is happening on college campuses today is about Anti-Jewish sentiment and not Anti-Israel criticism.
The blurring of the distinctions between Zionism and Judaism is thus a product of HASBARAH advocacy which can be seen in the following articles, one from Natan Sharansky, the other by Ibrahim Alloush:
http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48918442.html
https://www.radioislam.org/islam/english/jracism/judzion-insep.htm
Fish, who now works at Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, will be leading a conference for Jewish Day School Educators dealing with the current situation for Israel supporters on American college campuses:
In collaboration with The AVI CHAI Foundation, the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University and a steering committee of religiously and geographically diverse Jewish day school heads are convening a two-day conference, November 14-15, 2016, to explore the trends playing out in the academy and the campus quad: “From Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism: An Educators Conference.”
With the dominance of the Likud Party model in Israeli politics over a significant period of time, the American Jewish community in its HASBARAH advocacy has normalized radical figures like Rachel Fish.
The radicals appear to have softened their approach and tried to expunge some of their more blatantly repugnant history as they use the same basic ideological template to inform their ongoing advocacy.
This reframing of HASBARAH rhetoric has taken us from “Columbia Unbecoming” and its pathological Right Wing censoring impulses, to what appears to be a far more benign and acceptable engagement with the current problems for Jewish students on American college campuses.
But let us not be fooled by the rhetoric.
What we are currently seeing is the end-result of a lengthy institutional process that has attempted to sanitize figures like Fish, and in the process make their radicalism palatable to a mainstream American Jewish community.
And with the ongoing extremism that is turning Israel more and more to the Fascist Right, the current situation in America is worrying as it seeks to recalibrate the radical wing of the pro-Israel faction in order to make it appear to be more moderate and reasonable.
David Shasha