This Week in the WOKE Bari Weiss Intersectionality (2/6)
David Shasha
Let’s Do the Tikvah SAPIR White Jewish Supremacy Interfaith WOKE Intersectionality Connect-the-Dots
It has indeed been a very busy time for Bari Weiss.
There was the COVID denialism on Bill Maher:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/fCaS8nDBPBM
Ignoring the Tennessee ban on Maus, and then having her partner Nellie Bowles blame it on the Libs:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/XujVIovjuRI
Aggressively defending Trumpscum racist Ilya Shapiro:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/ww2uc8ttdtk
And just being part of the Joe Rogan-Jordan Peterson Alt-Right conspiracy:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/K7Zs4QMWhck
On Tuesday Tikvah Mosaic gave us one more gem from Weissworld:
As I do not follow Weiss’ “Honestly” podcast – and I am not sure there is any more “honesty” in it than there is “common sense” in her Substack – I was not surprised to learn that she was all with the SAPIR Intersectionality:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/honestly-with-bari-weiss/id1570872415?i=1000549160493
Indeed, I made reference to the racist Shalom Hartman Institute’s Yossi Klein Halevi and his new SAPIR article promoting SHI’s Muslim Leadership Initiative:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/N0qvRS58W28
Here is the article:
https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration/2022/01/muslim-jewish-reconciliation/
MLI is another White Jewish Supremacy institution that ignores Arab Jews and the historical relationship of native Jews to native Muslims in the Middle East, as is indicated by its faculty and course content:
https://www.hartman.org.il/mli-faculty-and-lecturers/
https://www.hartman.org.il/mli-sample-courses/
From all indications, as was made clear in Klein Halevi’s SAPIR article, it is not interested in Sephardim – other than to deploy Bernard Lewis’ lachrymose fatalistic history with its Neo-Con Chickenhawk “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.
Just for precise accuracy, I will point out that one of the MLI guest lecturers is someone named Fleur Hassan Nahoum, an Arab Jew in name only, who is a true HASBARAH giant:
https://shi-webfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/Fleur_Hassan_Nahoum.pdf
Here is her bio from their website:
Fleur Hassan-Nahoum grew up in Gibraltar and studied law at Kings College, London University. She qualified as a barrister in 1997 and practiced in London before becoming the Campaign Director of World Jewish Relief. In 2001, along with her husband, Fleur made aliyah and was recruited by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, where she served as a senior associate in resource development for six years. In 2007, Fleur became the Executive Director of Tikvah Children's Home, an organization rescuing abandoned and abused children from the FSU. In 2011, Fleur founded Message Experts, a boutique strategic communications firm that works with local and international executives and organizations. Fleur is bilingual in English and Spanish and is fluent in Hebrew. In May 2016, Fleur became a City Councilor in Jerusalem and in February 2017 the leader of the Opposition. Fleur is involved in the advancement of women and immigrant groups in the city. She is also involved in the development of Jerusalem as a hi-tech ecosystem and in the fight for a pluralistic Jerusalem. Fleur frequently represents Jerusalem in global forums and hosts missions of foreign dignitaries and journalists.
The giveaway term here is “Pluralistic Judaism,” which makes her part of the Ashkenazi denominational system; apparently totally ignorant of the Sephardic heritage:
https://www.hartman.org.il/program/beeri-program-for-pluralistic-jewish-israeli-identity/
With all that out of the way, we can again turn to Imam Abdullah Antepli, who I engaged in conversation with some years back – to no Sephardic avail.
As I previously said, the Imam – pace SHI and Weiss – has become a big favorite of the Ashkenazi racists. Which is a dead giveaway when it comes to actual Interfaith Dialogue.
His refusal to deal constructively with the history and culture of the Middle East, and the place of Jews in it, is truly despicable, and allows him to be used as a complaisant Muslim who will stand with The Tikvah Fund bullies against what I have called the Levantine Option:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586
Maybe the Imam can write a piece defending Ilya Shapiro!
I expect to see him on Bill Maher and Joe Rogan soon!
He can speak with Jordan Peterson about how inferior Muslims are.
Joe Rogan is the Greatest Trumpscum!
It has indeed been a very busy time for Bari Weiss BFF and Trumpscum macher Joe Rogan.
I just collected a bunch of articles which elucidate the danger:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/K7Zs4QMWhck
Right on cue, Thursday gave us one more piece of the Alt-Right puzzle:
I am not much on Mumford and Sons, but apparently one of its members is full-on Brexit reactionary:
Take Brexit. It was an issue about which the British people were fairly evenly split. But among musicians, there was only one socially acceptable view. In October 2018, an open letter to then-Prime Minister Theresa May urging her to rethink withdrawal was backed by Ed Sheeran, Bob Geldof and Brian Eno, among many other powerful musicians. Those who were pro-Brexit—Morrissey, Sir Ringo Starr, Roger Daltry—were in a small minority, but, and this is an important but, there were very few without that level of global fame willing to speak out against the EU.
For Zionist racism:
With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if you are a musician, you are expected to stand against Israel. Musicians For Palestine, launched in 2021, is an anti-Israel collective of over 600 musicians. Also last year, 1,524 artists signed the Artists’ Pledge for Palestine, vowing to boycott Israel. There have been some artists siding with Israel—notably, Gene Simmons of KISS, who is Jewish and was, in fact, born in the Jewish state—but the overwhelming majority have fallen into line. I’ve heard privately from Jews in the industry, even Jews critical of Israel, that it’s a topic too dangerous to discuss. So they self-censor. British actress Tracy-Ann Oberman described this phenomenon in a piece for The Jewish Chronicle last year.
And Lysol YEEZUS and J.K. Rowling:
Outliers on hot-button topics are notable by their scarcity. Those brave enough to peep over the parapet—think of Kanye on Trump or J.K. Rowling on the trans debate—are attacked viciously. Not so much by the powers that be, but by their contemporaries. Criticism is, of course, fine, but attempts to deplatform have gone too far.
The hysterical article by Winston Marshall forced me to look into him:
Which then forced me to look into Proud Boys ally Andy Ngo:
Ngo is a top Trumpscum:
Ngo, who is originally from Portland, has earned a huge social media following, a book deal, and regular appearances on Fox News and at congressional hearings by wildly exaggerating the supposed threat posed to American democracy by the antifascist movement he first encountered in his hometown. (Some of Ngo’s reporting on antifascists in other cities has recently been proven flat wrong. Earlier this month, after the FBI concluded that the gunman who carried out a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, in 2019 was not motivated by antifascism, as Ngo had claimed, he responded to my own discovery of factual errors in his reporting on that incident by blocking me and making more false claims.)
The ever-reliable Zack Beauchamp gives us a more general view of the Ngo-ANTIFA problematic:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/3/20677645/antifa-portland-andy-ngo-proud-boys
Anything having to do with the Proud Boys and ANTIFA is a mess, and the Common Sense article lacks common sense, as it attacks Neil Young for attacking Joe Rogan and using his Spotify platform to do it.
Weiss continues to promote the New McCarthyism by using the Lysol Projection; acting as if those fighting the New Fascism are themselves Stalinist.
In the end, the very unfortunate emergence of groups like ANTIFA who do indeed deploy violence, is directly related to the Trump Alt-Right movement, which is a shield for Nazism and the Klan:
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-695348
Tikvah Weiss should be focused on her Trump allies and the Neo-Nazi movement than she is on defending them.
Roxanne Gay Leaves Spotify
A few moments after reading Bari Weiss’ defense of Rogan, I read this in The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/opinion/culture/joe-rogan-spotify-roxane-gay.html
Roxanne Gay eloquently lowers the volume on all the hysteria, providing more common sense on the Rogan matter than Free Speech Grifter Weiss does.
Canceling Anti-Zionists is Fine!
I have already noted the deafening silence of Weiss and her Tikvah McCarthyite allies when it comes to issues dealing with Right Wing Cancel Culture.
Here is one more that they remain silent on:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/nyregion/synagogues-israel-opinion.html
The complete article also follows this note.
It is yet another master class on how to make sure that all American Jews are on the same page when it comes to Zionism.
The usual White Jewish Supremacy Leftists have signed an open letter on behalf of the fired Jessie Sander:
https://sandervswrt.weebly.com/
It is the usual Ashkenazi dysfunction, but in the case of Bari Weiss it is a reminder that she is very selective when it comes to Cancel Culture and who she defends.
Bari Weiss for The View!
To be honest, I was hoping to avoid any mention of the Whoopi Goldberg matter; given the way it has consumed the Jewish world. I am sure it is known to all of you by now.
Goldberg’s ignorant and offensive Holocaust comments point to the continuing tensions between the Ashkenazi Jewish Geniuses and their own racism and the larger African-American community and Black Lives Matter concerns:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15413718/bret-stephens-new-york-times
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-real-story-of-the-central-park
And that is just Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss.
Weiss, of course, has become a fierce defender of White Snowflake Privilege, devoted the bulk of her not-so Common Sense Substack to Allan Bakke Reverse Racism rantings. It is often hard to distinguish her work from that of Tucker Carlson. There is indeed a FOX through-line between them and the subjects and people they support.
On Friday the Jewish Insider weighed into the Whoopi scandal by demanding Jewish Representation on The View:
https://jewishinsider.com/2022/02/a-jew-on-the-view-some-say-its-long-overdue/
Even though the show was created by a Jew:
Out of 22 co-hosts who have worked for “The View” since 1997, when the show was created, only two have been Jewish, the last of whom, the comedian Michelle Collins, departed in 2016 after just a year in the role. The broadcast journalist Barbara Walters, who helped launch the show 25 years ago, retired from her seat in 2014.
Indeed, for those who think that my obsession with numbers and Sephardic representation is abnormal, we get the full View Ashkenazi body-count!
And who does JI want for the currently non-existent position?
It is to be expected:
Another commonly cited pick was Bari Weiss, who has already appeared on “The View” as a guest host. The former New York Times editor who publishes a popular Substack newsletter, “Common Sense,” has previously expressed concern over instances in which, as she wrote for Tablet two years ago, “Jews are flattened into ‘white people,’ our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely ‘white on white crime.’”
In social media comments on Monday, Weiss reiterated that view in describing Goldberg’s remarks as a “whitewashing of the Jewish people and Jewish history.”
Bethany Mandel, the conservative columnist who is outspoken on Jewish issues, said that Weiss could help bring a renewed focus to addressing antisemitism in a manner that, she believes, has been lacking since McCain left the show.
But she was equally enthusiastic in recommending a somewhat lesser-known journalist who would be a “provocative” addition to the cast: Batya Ungar-Sargon, the former opinion editor of The Forward who now serves as a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.
“She talks about the class issues that are happening, especially with regard to COVID, and that’s not a conversation that anyone is having,” Mandel told JI, adding that Ungar-Sargon is “powerfully equipped to handle” the subject of antisemitism as well.
John Podhoretz, the Commentary editor and New York Post columnist, said that Mandel herself was his choice for the job, but he declined to elaborate beyond that.
It doesn’t really matter who hosts The View, it is still more “provocative” daytime talk show blather promoting corporate bank coffers.
But it is interesting how the White Jewish Supremacists, the ones who knowingly exclude Sephardim from representing themselves at the Adult Jewish Table, are frothing at the mouth when it comes to demanding that representation for themselves.
But I think that even more than that is the way in which Weiss herself did not take to defending Whoopi in the way she has defended so many Right Wing White Snowflakes.
And that tells us all we need to know about Jewish Genius Hypocrisy.
David Shasha
Why I’ve Decided to Take My Podcast Off Spotify
By: Roxane Gay
Sometimes, I watch a reality TV show called “Building Off the Grid,” about people who decide to make homes for themselves in remote places where they can live sustainable lives. Over the course of an hour, I’ll watch someone build a yurt or a mud hut with cob walls or a house on a mountain outside of Denver, powered by solar panels. It’s clear that what these modern-day hermits want is to exist in a vacuum, where they are not affected by nor do they affect anything beyond the boundaries of their home. That is, certainly, an illusion, but I can see the appeal.
I’m a writer. I often write about my opinions, and I know I can’t do that in a vacuum, as tempting as that sometimes seems. I believe we should be exposed to a multitude of interesting ideas and perspectives, including those that challenge our most fiercely held beliefs.
But engaging with the world with intellectual honesty and integrity is rarely simple. Several years ago, I pulled out of a book deal with Simon & Schuster because the publishing company had bought a book by a white supremacist provocateur. (Eventually, it dropped Milo Yiannopoulos’s book.) He had every right to air his political beliefs, but he didn’t have a right to a lucrative book contract. Nor did I, for that matter. The right I did have was to decide who I wanted to do business with.
I made a stand because I could. I had the means to do so. But it was symbolic, as most such stands are: Most of my books have been published at HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corp, the company started by Rupert Murdoch, whose manipulation of the media has done great harm to public discourse over the last several decades. HarperCollins has published all kinds of people I find odious, dangerous and amoral. Would I walk away from my body of work because I find those people loathsome? No. I don’t live in a vacuum. And the most toxic voices should not be the only ones that are heard.
Every day, I try to make the best decisions possible about what I create, what I consume, and who I collaborate with — but living in the world, participating in capitalism, requires moral compromise. I am not looking for purity; it doesn’t exist. Instead, I’m trying to do the best I can, and take a stand when I think I can have an impact.
I would never support censorship. And because I am a writer, I know that language matters. There’s a difference between censorship and curation. When we are not free to express ourselves, when we can be thrown in jail or even lose our lives for speaking freely, that is censorship. When we say, as a society, that bigotry and misinformation are unacceptable, and that people who espouse those ideas don’t deserve access to significant platforms, that’s curation. We are expressing our taste and moral discernment, and saying what we find acceptable and what we do not.
Too many people believe that the right to free speech means the right to say whatever they want, wherever, whenever, on whatever platform they choose, without consequence. They want free speech to exist in a vacuum, free from context, free from criticism. That, like the idea that living in an off-the-grid yurt frees one from the demands, responsibilities and complicities of human society, is an illusion.
Joe Rogan is a curious fellow. I remember him from another reality TV show, “Fear Factor,” which he hosted in the early part of this century. Contestants on the show ate bugs, lay down in beds of snakes or jumped from a helicopter into a lake. It was a garish but entertaining spectacle, the kind of show where you could spend the entire episode with your shoulders hunched up to your ears, cringing as people humiliated and degraded themselves for a chance at $50,000 and 15 minutes of microfame. Around the same time, Mr. Rogan became a mixed martial arts color commentator. He eventually ventured into podcasting, as one does.
Today, Mr. Rogan hosts a wildly popular podcast on Spotify, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” for which he claims he often does little preparation. Episodes are long and meandering, as Mr. Rogan muses on whatever is on his mind — including false claims that Covid vaccines are “essentially a gene therapy,” for example. His guests are often people hovering on the intellectual fringes, purveying dangerous misinformation about Covid and other topics. Sometimes, racism is sprinkled in his conversations, just to keep things interesting. Mr. Rogan says he is curious, merely interested in asking questions. It’s a convenient way of shirking accountability for misleading people about their life-or-death health decisions.
Mr. Rogan has been handsomely rewarded for these efforts, to the tune of a reported $100 million deal when he moved his podcast to Spotify. The company clearly believes that’s a worthy investment. He has a large, enthusiastic audience of an estimated 11 million willing listeners, none of whom are forced to listen to the podcast. Clearly, something about his feigned curiosity and ignorance and his embrace of conspiracy theorists and quacks resonates with a lot of people. That, too, is disturbing.
In the face of the outcry and boycotts begun by the musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, both the company and Mr. Rogan have made conciliatory gestures. On an earnings call this week, Spotify’s chief executive and co-founder, Daniel Ek, defended the company’s efforts to combat misinformation, which include working to create content warnings for shows that discuss Covid-19 — but not removing Mr. Rogan’s podcast from the platform. He added, “I think the important part here is that we don’t change our policies based on one creator nor do we change it based on any media cycle, or calls from anyone else.”
Spotify does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions it makes about what content it hosts have consequences. To say that maybe Mr. Rogan should not be given unfettered access to Spotify’s more than 400 million users is not censorship, as some have suggested. It is curation.
Misinformation has contributed to tens of millions of people believing the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. It contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection. And misinformation has helped prolong the Covid-19 pandemic and encouraged people to do dangerous things such as injecting bleach or taking Ivermectin, a horse deworming paste.
The platforms allowing this misinformation to flourish and intensify consistently abdicate their responsibility to curate effectively. Instead, they offer tepid, ambiguous, and ineffective policies. They frame doing nothing as a principled stand to protect free speech, but really, they’re protecting their bottom line.
I have a podcast where I talk to interesting people. Until Tuesday, it was available on Spotify, but I have decided to make another stand. A small one. Joining Mr. Young, Ms. Mitchell and a growing group of creators, I took “The Roxane Gay Agenda” and its archives off Spotify, though it will be available on other platforms. It was a difficult decision — there are a lot of listeners on the platform, and I may never recoup that audience elsewhere.
I am not trying to impede anyone’s freedom to speak. Joe Rogan and others like him can continue to proudly encourage misinformation and bigotry to vast audiences. They will be well rewarded for their efforts. The platforms sharing these rewards can continue to look the other way.
But today at least, I won’t.
A Jewish Teacher Criticized Israel. She Was Fired.
By: Liam Stack
Last summer, Jessie Sander had been on the job at a Jewish school in Westchester County for less than a month when a meeting with her boss took an unexpected turn. Was she comfortable working at a Zionist institution? he asked.
Her boss, Rabbi David E. Levy of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., had come across a recent blog post she had written that renounced Zionism and sharply criticized Israel, Ms. Sander, 26, said in a lawsuit filed on Jan. 25. The rabbi had questions: Did she support Hamas? When she called herself “anti-Zionist,” what did that mean?
Ms. Sander, who is Jewish, explained her beliefs to the rabbi and said she would not discuss politics in her classes. The rabbi said he agreed with much of what she said and later praised her as a good role model for their students, Ms. Sander said.
Then, one week later, Rabbi Levy and Eli Kornreich, the temple’s executive director, fired her.
When she asked why, Mr. Kornreich said “it’s just not a good fit,” she recalled. “In the earlier meeting, I was like, ‘Wow, here’s a manager who gets it and says, ‘No one should fire you for your political beliefs,’ then at the next meeting it was, ‘Oh, except for me.’”
Rabbi Levy and Mr. Kornreich declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement to the community, Warren Haber, the synagogue president, said it “made this termination decision after much consideration and in accordance with WRT’s religious mission.”
Mr. Haber said the synagogue’s work was based on the religious principle of Clal Yisrael, which calls for “strengthening our commitment to Israel and the Jewish people of all lands and working to establish understanding and commonality among the various expressions of Judaism.”
The firing of Ms. Sander drew rebukes from left-wing Jewish groups and highlighted a generational divide over Israel among American Jews that is driving some of Judaism’s most delicate internal debates: What is the relationship between Zionism and Jewish identity? When it comes to Israel, should there be limits to what employees or members of Jewish institutions can believe or say?
Ms. Sander began her job at the school last July and was fired 15 days later. Since then, she said, she has worked four part-time jobs to support herself, none of which provide health insurance or other benefits.
Her lawsuit, which was filed before New York State Supreme Court in Westchester, accuses the school of violating labor law by firing her “because of her uncompensated lawful recreational activity, outside of work hours, off the employer’s premises and without use of the employer’s equipment or other property.” It seeks her reinstatement to her old job, plus compensatory damages.
Debate over Israel, including sometimes strong criticism of its policies, is not unusual at synagogues in the United States, especially those that follow the Reform movement. The Union of Reform Judaism, an umbrella group of Reform congregations, describes itself as a movement that “accepts and supports the foundational aim of Zionism: the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people.”
At Westchester Reform Temple, rabbis have criticized Israel in the past. In his Rosh Hashana sermon in September, Rabbi Jonathan Blake criticized “extremists, cynical political officials and wealthy patrons” in Israel for promoting “a grandiose vision of Jewish totalitarianism in the biblical Holy Land.”
But their critiques never challenge the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, as opposed to a state whose structure favors no ethnic or religious group.
In the blog post, published on May 20 during last year’s conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, Ms. Sander and a co-author, Elana Lipkin, wrote that they embraced a position that “rejects the Zionist claim to the land of Palestine.”
The post continued, “Zionism is not equivalent to, or a necessary component of, Jewish identity.”
They also described Israeli actions against the Palestinians as genocide and accused Jewish institutions in the United States of spreading “one-sided narratives and propaganda” about the conflict.
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Marc Stern, the chief legal officer of the American Jewish Committee, said Ms. Sander’s lawsuit may have little chance of success because the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that religious institutions have broad leeway in employment matters.
“It seems to me a complete nonstarter that any court would say that some doctrine — whether Zionism or any other doctrine — is or is not part of the faith that a school wants to pass on to students,” Mr. Stern said.
“The plaintiff in this case is saying, ‘My individual right to speak is being infringed upon,’ and that may be true,” he said. “But that comes up against other peoples’ right to say, ‘We want to form a community of people that share one set of beliefs, so you’re not welcome here.’”
“You can go and find another synagogue, or form a new synagogue, but you can’t force other people to accept your views,” he said.
Ms. Sander said she grew up in a Reform congregation in upstate New York, where she was elected president of the youth group and her mother taught Hebrew school, she said.
She described her family as Zionist but said she began to question those beliefs as a teenager in Hebrew school, when her class read a short story that included a debate between an Israeli and a Palestinian character.
“The Jewish tradition involves questioning and wrestling with complex ideas, which is one of the things I love about Judaism and especially Reform Judaism,” she said. “We are constantly in dialogue with these ideas that are way older than we are.”
Ms. Sander’s views on Zionism reflect a growing shift among younger Jewish Americans. According to a major survey published last year by the Pew Research Center, slightly less than half of American Jews under the age of 29 described themselves as feeling an emotional attachment to Israel, compared with more than two-thirds of Jews over 65.
The survey also found that 27 percent of young American Jews said caring about Israel was not an important part of what being Jewish meant to them, a belief shared by only 8 percent of those over 65.
That dynamic has begun to assert itself in the city’s politics as well. During Israel’s conflict with Hamas last year, the mayoral candidate Andrew Yang walked back a statement of support for Israel that might have once seemed like political boilerplate after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, called it “utterly shameful.”
Rabbi Blake, in his Rosh Hashana sermon, identified that trend as a source of concern.
He cited a 2021 survey of 800 Jewish voters from the Jewish Electorate Institute that found 25 percent of respondents believed Israel was an “apartheid state” and 22 percent said it was “committing genocide against the Palestinians.”
“In such an emotionally charged milieu, with such hysterical rhetoric framing the public conversation around Israel, is it any wonder that our students feel worried and confused?” he said. “We should all feel worried and confused. I know I do.”
Peter Beinart, a Jewish writer who argues in favor of creating a single democratic state in Israel and the Palestinian territories, said younger American Jews have seen “a different snippet of history,” resulting in different attitudes than their parents and grandparents when it comes to Israel.
“For older American Jews it was easier to see Israel as a David versus an Arab Goliath,” he said. But younger people “are more likely to see Israel as a regional superpower that is fundamentally confronting the Palestinians, who are a stateless population that lack in various ways basic rights.”
Mr. Beinart is one of 78 Jewish writers, academics and activists who signed a public letter in support of Ms. Sander. He said he thought Jewish institutions should welcome people who hold a wide range of views about Israel.
“What I think synagogues need to do is host these conversations,” he said in an interview. “They need to be places for people who have strong views and for people who, frankly, don’t know what they really think, which is also a lot of people.”
Ms. Sander, previously a public school special-education teacher in New York City, was hired to teach the Hebrew language and a leadership class at the Jewish Learning Lab, the educational arm of Westchester Reform Temple. She said she believed the conversation with Rabbi Levy about her political beliefs, held within the first few days of working at the school, was the reason she was fired.
At one point in the discussion, Rabbi Levy asked her if she was “calling for a second Holocaust,” Ms. Sander said. “I physically remember the feeling I got in my chest,” she continued. “That is when I realized the conversation took a more serious turn and was a conversation about my career and future employment.”