This Week in The Tikvah Fund (12/6)
David Shasha
More “Red Hot Catholic Love”: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik Gives the Annual First Things Erasmus Lecture
The New Convivencia is a wonderful thing:
Meir Soloveichik’s relationship with the radical Right Wing Catholic journal First Things goes back many years:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/70C64c4J5Bk/m/1lKw3FwTBQAJ
And his obsession with Jewish Election blossomed into his doctoral dissertation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
When you bring those two things together, you get the topic of his lecture:
Lincoln's Almost Chosen People: Hebraism, Nationalism, and the American Future
Indeed, given his close ties to Senator Mike Lee and Amy Coney Barrett, Soloveichik is far more at home with the radical Christians than he is with the Sephardic Jews.
Bari Weiss is Still On Top!
We received word this week that the unemployed Weiss will be the featured speaker at UJA-Federation’s Wall Street Dinner:
https://www.ujafedny.org/event/view/wall-street-dinner
She will also be speaking at the Z3 HASBARAH conference:
https://z3project.virtualjcc.com/speakers
The latter is an eight-day event taking place under the auspices of the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, home to Stanford University and Silicon Valley:
https://www.paloaltojcc.org/History
It is a city unto itself!
Just to give you a sense of what the well-funded White Jewish Supremacy world looks like:
https://z3project.virtualjcc.com/partners-and-sponsors
You will notice that the speakers list is a who’s who of the Neo-Con Jews, with Bret Stephens appearing as well.
And, of course, there will be newly-crowned Tikvah Token Sephardi Mijal Bitton:
https://z3project.virtualjcc.com/speakers/Mijal-Bitton
Moving up the Tikvah ladder is indeed the way to get places!
Liel Leibovitz Has COVID Company
For those who might have missed Liel Leibovitz’s epic show of support for the Catholic Court of Death, here it is again:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/3I3aEzqgadA
His attack on Governor Cuomo was affirmed by the New York Young Republicans, who decided that his Jewish aide is a “Court Jew” and that he is the most Anti-Semitic governor in the country!
https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/new-york-young-republicans-call-andrew-cuomo-aide-a-court-jew
This is the same Republican Party that is now led by a group of Neo-Nazi lovers.
Shortly after posting the Leibovitz article we received Bret Stephens’ column affirming the official Tikvah position:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/opinion/cuomo-gorsuch-coronavirus.html
“Liberals will one say cite and celebrate this defense of religious liberty.”
Unless COVID kills them!
Later in the day the paper published yet another debased Op-Ed defense of the Court of Death position:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/opinion/supreme-court-Covid-19-religion.html
And, wouldn’t you just know it, there is a Tikvah connection there too:
Both Michael McConnell and Max Raskin are members-in-good-standing of The Federalist Society:
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/michael-mcconnell
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/max-raskin
McConnell is a Christian radical:
https://www.deseret.com/2011/1/9/20165856/scholar-michael-w-mcconnell-mixes-law-religion
He puts faith above country:
Faith dominates the intellectual landscape of McConnell's life. A devout Christian belonging to a Presbyterian congregation, he chooses from among five different translations of the Bible depending on the purpose of his study. He co-edited "Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought," published by Yale University Press.
And he has an illustrious Right Wing CV:
McConnell has held jobs in which he reported directly to superiors such as Rex Lee, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and for two years he even held top-secret military clearance. In 2001 George W. Bush nominated McConnell to the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals (one of a handful of appellate courts just below the U.S. Supreme Court), and after seven years on the bench he stepped away from the 10th Circuit to assume the prestigious directorship of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, a key position at one of the best law schools in the country. On two separate occasions in 2005 he was on the short list of candidates for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and throughout his career he has argued a dozen cases before the Supreme Court about issues like freedoms of religion and speech.
Raskin on the other hand just got his law degree in 2016:
https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=39847
But he is well on his way to Neo-Con extremist immortality.
Yiddish is Booming
I do not often refer to the regular Tikvah Tablet columns on Yiddish culture by Rokhl Kafrissen, but this one caught my eye:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/new-kind-of-yiddish-textbook
Reading through the article I was truly taken aback by just how much is going on in Yiddish culture and pedagogy, while the Sephardic tradition is limited to Bourekas and Haminados ephemera.
I would include in that all the attention being paid to Ladino; a belated language that does not enter into the classical Andalusian Jewish heritage, which is rooted in Arabic.
Kafrissen discusses a new way of teaching Yiddish, even as Yiddish is an ongoing academic Jewish concern and has ample exposure.
And while there is certainly a hint of jealousy in my feelings towards her article, I still have admiration for those Ashkenazim, unlike the Sephardim, who actually care about their cultural heritage.
Even though we have learned that Kafrissen is a White Jewish Supremacist who denies her privilege, it remains clear that she is on the winning side, while Sephardim are on the losing side.
Perhaps Esther Levy-Chehebar should read her articles – it might help!
A Yiddish Note: As Seen Outside Prospect Park Tuesday Morning
I wanted to supplement the previous note with an interesting thing that I learned by keeping my eyes open:
https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2017/the-holocaust-history-of-nycs-yiddish-trump-protest-banner
I was walking into Prospect Park on the Parkside entrance by the Parade Ground, and saw a young man walking his dog with a curious patch on the sleeve of his jacket. From afar I was thinking it might be an IDF emblem – you see them from time to time.
But it was this Yiddish phrase:
Mir veln zey iberlebn, iberlebn, iberlebn
Translated into English:
We will outlive them
Indeed, I took great pride as a Jew in such a wonderful statement of defiance in the face of tragedy.
The JTA article notes that the statement was seen on a banner at the 2017 Women’s March:
The song quoted on the (slightly misspelled) banner has a dark history. In 1939, a group of Hasidic Jews from the Polish city of Lublin were backed up against barbed wire and ordered to sing to their own execution. One of the men began: “Lomir zich iberbetn, iberbetn, iberbetn” – “Let us reconcile…” But nobody joined him.
It made me think fondly of those Ashkenazi Jews who represented the polar opposite of Tikvah Tablet, and stand up proudly for Liberal Humanistic values in a way that seems impossible looking at racists like Alana Newhouse and Rokhl Kafrissen.
The Very Strange World of Alana Newhouse: Arabian Horses in Gush Katif
I was not exactly sure what to make of this week’s Tikvah Tablet podcast, “The Princess”:
https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/israel-story/the-princess-israel-story
I was curious because Azulay is a Sephardic name, though Hodaya’s Facebook profile did not much help me to learn about her:
Both her first and last names indicate something Arab, but I am not sure what!
We do learn that she grew up in an atheistic family in East Germany, and that she moved to Gush Katif and made a zoo of sorts.
It is truly bizarre, and speaks to a very strange Settler Zionist mentality that exists in the Tikvah Tablet world.
David Shasha