Bursting the Blue State Fantasy that Gay Enclaves Are ‘Safe’ to Be Out

Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend has written an important article - Bursting the Blue State Fantasy that Gay Enclaves Are ‘Safe’ to Be Out.

In the past week NYC has been rocked by a few incidents of hideous violent attacks against gays and transgender residents. There have been shootings assaults outside gay bars and a brutal killing of Mark Carson in another shooting in the Village.
Michelangelo Signorile, who also points out the unending violence against transgender residents that goes under-reported in the media: 

It’s sickening and enraging. And perhaps the shock I’m seeing expressed about it, particularly among younger LGBT people, underscores that many of us have been living with a false sense of security, intoxicated by the wins on marriage equality in the states and in the federal courts. It’s way too easy to grow complacent, fed by the desire to have the fight done with as well as by the seductive message of some in the media who’ve simplistically declared victory for the LGBT rights movement.

Victory is very far off, however, if we can’t walk the streets of even the most LGBT-friendly cities holding hands or expressing ourselves without fear of being taunted and violently assaulted. And for hundreds of thousands living in less tolerant places all across the country, openness has never been a reality. Until it is, we’re nowhere near victory.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that in New York City, in a state that passed marriage equality in 2011, hate crimes against LGBT people so far in 2013 are almost double what were at this point in 2012. And 2012 itself was a notable year nationally, with outbreak of anti-LGBT violence in some of the country’s most gay-friendly cities, like New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta. 2011 saw the highest number of anti-LGBT murders ever reported, with transgender people the hardest-hit victims. At least 13 transgender Americans were reported to have been murdered in 2012 alone. 

Putting LGBT equality on the books does not equal universal cultural acceptance. That anger from our ignorant opponents has to be channeled somewhere, and if they have no legal recourse, then look out. After all, it’s been decades since the desegregation in the schools, the Voting Rights Act and other means to bring full legal equality for minorities to the fore, and it’s pretty clear that racism has not been extinguished. In fact, the election of Barack Obama has so unhinged some Americans that they easily succumb to grotesque racist rants and behaviors that I think would otherwise have remained under the surface.

So much for the claim by the Pinkwashing and Homonationalism crowd that LGBT people in the US have it so good that we should be spending our time boycotting Israel, instead of continuing to work for equality and against violence in this country.

Gay Pride in Tel Aviv, June 7, 2013

In Tel Aviv, the Gay Pride Parade for 2013 is scheduled for Friday, June 7. For more information, see: Tel Aviv Gay Pride Parade 2013.

Moscow's Gay-Bashing Ritual

When will the "Pinkwashing and Homonationalism" crowd get around to condemning the beatings and arrests of gay activists in Russia simply for trying to have a demonstration? 

Moscow's Gay-Bashing Ritual (New York Times)

A concerted effort by Moscow activists to secure a legal permit for an L.G.B.T. pride parade resulted, after several years, in a 2010 European Court on Human Rights ruling that directed the city authorities to allow the event to be held. Though Russia usually complies with E.C.H.R. decisions, this time the Moscow City Court responded by banning gay pride events for the next 100 years. That, and the pending legislation against so-called propaganda of homosexuality — passed in a number of Russian municipalities and likely to face a final vote in the national Parliament as soon as this week — have pushed L.G.B.T. issues to the foreground of Russian politics and L.G.B.T. organizing deep underground.  

Earlier in the day, a young woman stood up in front of Parliament with a poster and was attacked by a self-identified Orthodox believer before she had a chance to turn the poster to face the onlookers; she was then detained by the police. Then another woman unfurled a poster with the words “Love Is Stronger Than Hate” and had barely had time to say, “This is a legal one-person picket to protest the homophobic laws” before two policemen grabbed her and dragged her away. In all, at least 25 people were detained by the police in the early afternoon. Because what they had been doing was legal, they were eventually released without charge — but not before the 5 p.m. rally was over.

The Jewish Identity Administration

The Israeli government is establishing a new unit in the Religious Services Ministry with a positively Orwellian name - the "Jewish Identity Administration." Apparently the goal of this new administration is to strengthen the Jewish identity of (presumably only Jewish) Israelis. It sounds more like the Jewish Indoctrination Administration - and into a very particular kind of Judaism. The person who will head this administration is Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, who used to be the chief rabbi of the IDF and who is currently the rabbi of the yeshiva in the Jewish settlement of Itamar. Rontzki said, “The goal is not hahzara betshuvah [bringing Jews back to religion], but strengthening the Jewish identity in the State of Israel." He says that the goal is not to make people more religious, but to "strengthen Jewish identity, " which he seems, however, to think of as exclusively religious. And who will be working in this new "administration"? Yeshiva students!

He also said: “This is not folklore, it is not Jewish knowledge, that they should know more Judaism and win trivia games,” he stressed. “This is to strengthen the connection of the people not to the land, but to itself, its heritage. This is in my eyes a matter of survival. A person who does not know the Bible will, in moments of crisis, not last here. Today Jewish identity is very weak.”

Since he is a settler rabbi, and since he thinks the ideal teachers are yeshiva students, I would assume that he will employ yeshiva students who are thoroughly indoctrinated into "settler Judaism," which sees holding onto the whole land of Israel as the supreme Jewish value. He won't want Israeli Jews to learn about the spectrum of Jewish belief and practice, the different Jewish movements, differing opinions on the roles of women in Judaism, much less the commandments to "seek peace and pursue it" and "do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

This is a new low for Judaism in the state of Israel.

Joseph Massad's article on Al-Jazeera dropped from the site

As Petra Marquardt-Bigman reports on her Jerusalem Post blog, From Al Jazeera to Columbia University: Joseph Massad’s obsession with Israel, Al-Jazeera English pulled Massad's article. I wonder why Al-Jazeera decided to do this, given all the other anti-Israel articles they publish.

Why is Joseph Massad linking to Kevin MacDonald, White Nationalist and Jew-hater?

While reading Elder of Ziyon's accurate analysis of Joseph Massad's recent article in Al Jazeera English, I came across this sentence. He writes: "Massad helpfully links to the hard-to-find pamphlet written by the apparent coiner of the word "anti-semite." This is a reference to Wilhelm Marr's notorious antisemitic book, "The Victory of Judaism over Germanism," published in 1879. Massad provides the link to this book in this sentence in his article: "Their call would be espoused by many 'anti-Semites', a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism." The link in Massad's article, The last of the Semites, is to a PDF of the English translation of Marr's book, translated by Gerhard Rohringer, copyright 2009. 

What website does Massad's link take us to? To an academic site that discusses antisemitism? No, not at all. The link is to Kevin MacDonald's website: http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Marr-Text-English.pdf. To those who do not know Kevin MacDonald, he is a Professor of Psychology employed by California State University–Long Beach. He is also an academic antisemite who has written several books and many articles on what he considers to be the iniquities of the Jews.

He writes for the Occidental Observer, an online journal with the tagline "White Identity, Interests, and Culture." The Southern Poverty Law Center has a profile of him on their website that catalogs his white nationalism, racism, and antisemitism.

Kevin MacDonald is the neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic. A psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, MacDonald, who also is a board member of the white supremacist Charles Martel Society, published a trilogy that supposedly "proves" that Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies. MacDonald also argues that anti-Semitism, far from being an irrational hatred for Jews, is a logical reaction to Jewish success in societies controlled by other ethnic or racial groups. After the publication of a 2007 Intelligence Report exposé detailing MacDonald's anti-Semitism, his teaching duties were reduced and many of his colleagues publicly condemned his racist research....

In the 1980s, MacDonald started reading up on Jews, trying to determine the reasons behind what he saw as their lockstep liberalism and hatred of all things Western. His inaugural effort, the first book in his trilogy on the Jews, was the 1994 publication of A People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, which was published by Praeger Press and came out just after MacDonald was awarded his full professorship. Today, most of MacDonald's publishing is about Jews and the evils of the liberal immigration policies that he says they support. 

Through the late 1990s, MacDonald dedicated himself to his anti-Semitic intellectual odyssey. He produced two more volumes on the Jews, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998). Taken together, the trilogy provides a whole new justification for anti-Semitism that has little to do with Nazi race theories, which blamed Jews for introducing evil social vices and other perversions into Nordic society and portrayed them as degenerates preying on unsuspecting, wholesome Aryans. MacDonald's basic premise is that Jews engage in a "group evolutionary strategy" that serves to enhance their ability to out-compete non-Jews for resources. Although normally a tiny minority in their host countries, Jews, like viruses, destabilize their host societies to their own benefit, MacDonald argues. Because this Jewish "group behavior" is said to have produced much financial and intellectual success over the years, McDonald claims it also has produced understandable hatred for Jews by gentiles. That means that anti-Semitism, rather than being an irrational hatred for Jews, is actually a logical reaction to Jewish success. In other words, the Nazis, like many other anti-Semites, were only anti-Semitic because they were countering a genuine Jewish threat to their wellbeing. To restore "parity" between Jews and other ethnic groups MacDonald has even called for systematic discrimination against Jews in college admissions and employment and special taxes "to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth." 

If Joseph Massad wants anyone to take his opinions about Jews, Zionism, and antisemitism seriously, I suggest that the very least he can do is not to link to websites run by blatant racists and antisemites like Kevin MacDonald.

It does make me wonder how Massad found this translation of Marr's article. Did he simply Google the title, find it on MacDonald's website, and put the link into his Al Jazeera article without paying attention to the source? I just did a Google search, and the PDF of Marr's book on MacDonald's website is the first result. The second one is the Wikipedia article on Marr, and the third and fourth are links to an article that MacDonald wrote for the Occidental Observer on Marr's book. Subsequent results on the first results page include links to MacDonald's website from Stormfront and Vanguard News Network, two neo-Nazi websites. The book can also be found on ebookbrowse.com and slashdocs.com. I think it would be pretty hard for someone linking to MacDonald's site to be unaware of the nature of the site. If Massad had wanted to link to the book without linking himself to a notorious antisemite, he could simply have gone to the two PDF aggregators.

Joseph Massad - homophobia and antisemitism

I missed this article when it was first published in the New Republic, about Joseph Massad, the tenured Columbia professor who attacks oppressed gay and lesbian people in Arab and other "non-western" countries for accepting the "colonial" Western view that they should not be oppressed for their sexual orientation.

James Kirchick wrote, in 2007:

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.....

State repression against gay people happens on a frequent basis across the Middle East. Massad, however, who claims to be a supporter of sexual freedom per se, is oddly impassive when confronted with the vast catalogue of anti-gay state violence in the Muslim world. Massad, unlike Ahmadinejad, does acknowledge that "gay-identified" people exist in the Middle East, but he views them with derision. Take, for instance, his description of the Queen Boat victims as "westernized, Egyptian, gay-identified men" who consort with European and American tourists. A simple "gay" would have sufficed. He smears efforts to free the men by writing of the "openly gay and anti-Palestinian Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank" and the "anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian [Congressman] Tom Lantos" who circulated a petition amongst their colleagues to cut off U.S. funding to Egypt unless the men were released. He then goes onto belittle not just gay activists (one of whom, a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society, referred to the Queen Boat affair as "our own Stonewall," in reference to the 1969 Stonewall riot when a group of patrons at a New York City gay bar resisted arrest, a moment credited with sparking the American gay rights movement) but the persecuted men themselves. The Queen Boat cannot be Stonewall, Massad insists, because the "drag Queens at the Stonewall bar" embraced their homosexual identity, whereas the Egyptian men "not only" did "not seek publicity for their alleged homosexuality, they resisted the very publicity of the events by the media by covering their faces in order to hide from the cameras and from hysterical public scrutiny." Massad does not pause to consider that perhaps the reason why these men covered their faces was because of the brutal consequences they would endure if their identities became public, repercussions far worse than anything the rioters at Stonewall experienced. "These are hardly manifestations of gay pride or gay liberation," Massad sneers.

Massad's point of view reminds me of those academics who have invented "Homonationalism" to identify those gays and lesbians whom they despise for their supposedly atavistic attachment to the United States which they demonstrate by enlisting in the US military and getting married.

This is the same Massad who has just published an anti-semitic screed on Al-Jazeera English - http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/201351275829430527.html.

Tell me again, why did Columbia give tenure to Massad?

Liam Hoare wrote a good take-down of Massad's antisemitic screed: http://youngcontrarian.tumblr.com/post/50430800882/joseph-massads-problem-with-rooted-cosmopolitans

Once again, calling Jews by their name: genteelism, not gentilic

Oliver Kamm, in his column The Pedant in the Times of London, also just wrote about the curious reluctance of some people to use the word "Jews" when they are, in fact, writing or speaking about Jews. In his case, he discovered this usage in the recent document published by the Church of Scotland denying any connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. The church's argument is based on the ancient Christian doctrine of supersessionism - the belief that the people of Israel has been abandoned by God and that the promises made to Jews have been transferred to Christians.

This document rarely uses the words "Jew" or "Jews." It predominantly uses the term "Jewish people" to mean "Jews," but without the article (above I used the phrase with the article in order to indicate Jews as a collectivity, or as a gentilic - look it up).

Kamm quotes a sentence from the report to give a feel for how it uses the term "Jewish people": “There has been a widespread assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel.”

In this sentence the word "Jews" would have been perfectly natural in the place where "Jewish people" occurs.

He comments:

The phrase “the Jewish people” is, of course, not only legitimate but an exact description. To be Jewish is not necessarily to be religious; it is to be part of a people. But the report’s authors didn’t mean the Jewish people collectively, otherwise they’d have used the definite article. By “Jewish people” they meant, simply, Jews. 

The Church has belatedly removed the document from its website, so I can’t check this, but I recall from it not a single use of the noun “Jew”. I can only guess why this should be and offer my opinion that the authors’ use of language should not be emulated. [RL - actually, the nouns "Jew" and "Jews" do occasionally appear].

The term “Jewish people”, with no preceding article, is a genteelism. A genteelism (the word is a nice coinage by H. W. Fowler, the lexicographer) is a word or expression thought by its utterer to be more refined than a common synonym. There is a widespread if unexpressed premise that the word “Jew” is blunt and that politeness requires that it be softened. 

It’s a bizarre and misconceived notion. I’m confident, however, that it explains the linguistic diffidence of the authors of the Church of Scotland report. It’s a modest irony that they’ve couched their argument in unnecessary euphemism while failing to anticipate the inflammatory nature of their conclusions. 

My advice on language is to embrace the noun “Jew”. Writers who avoid it are typically just averse to plain speech, but it has a less benign connotation too. The Church report provoked outrage because, among other things, it contrasted Jewish particularism with Christian universalism. This used to be a common theme of Christian theology but is now little heard. The implication is that Christianity supersedes its Jewish origins, and thus that the survival of the Jews into modern times is in some sense historically aberrant. That notion has come to be seen by most Christian churches as outmoded and insensitive since the Holocaust. 

This isn’t the place for an assessment of the ideas behind the Church of Scotland report, but its critics’ allegation that it is anti-Semitic is on my reading correct. That conclusion is reinforced by the authors’ fastidious aversion to using the term “Jew”. In attempting to avoid the taint of insensitivity, let alone prejudice, they have haplessly conveyed a highly traditional anti-Jewish stance.

If you would like to read the original document (it has been removed from the Church of Scotland's website because of the objections raised to it), you can go to Scribd - The Inheritance of Abraham and judge for yourself its use of the terms "Jew," "Jews," and "Jewish people."

Calling Jews by their name

It's the end of the semester so I'm grading papers and projects for my courses. I'm coming across an odd phenomenon that I've encountered before. Some students simply will not use the word "Jew" or "Jews" in their papers. They come up with all different kinds of circumlocutions - "Jewish people," "Jewish followers," "followers of the Old Testament," "followers of Judaism." There's even the occasional "Hebrew"! I've asked students about their reaction to the words "Jew" or "Jews" before, in my Judaism course, and some of them say that they feel uncomfortable using the word "Jew," as if there is something derogatory about it. I've heard this reaction from non-Jewish students who don't wish to say something offensive. I explain to them that this is not the case, that the word "Jew" is not offensive. Still this strange phenomenon continues.....

On "Islamophobia" and hatred of Muslims

Martin Robbins in the Guardian has an interesting article about Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and whether they cross the fine line between criticism or mockery of Islam and Islamophobia.

On one hand, critics of the term "Islamophobia", like Oliver Kamm, rightly point out that it's ludicrous and censorious to conflate hostile coverage of areligion to xenophobia, as Mehdi Hasan appears to do. On the other, it's clear that there's a very real phenomenon of bigotry directed against Muslims, recklessly inflamed by elements of the press, that blurs at the edges into something barely distinguishable from racism, the last acceptable form of racial prejudice. Kamm described it neatly last year:

"There is something disturbing in public discourse about Islam. A segment of opinion cannot distinguish between Muslims and the theocratic fanatics of al-Qaeda. It holds to a conspiracy theory that genuinely does recall the ancient prejudice, given modern garb in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, against the Jews. This is not only a problem but a pathology and an evil."

Whatever you choose to call this phenomenon, it's clear that there's a line between criticism (or ridicule) of Islam, and bigotry against Muslims. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have blundered into that line with an alarming degree of recklessness.

Bob Cargill on "The Biblical Dilemma of Denouncing Slavery, Yet Opposing Homosexuality"

On his blog, Bob Cargill has been arguing with conservative Christians about same sex marriage and homosexuality - in particular, against those who claim that to follow the Bible faithfully requires one to oppose homosexuality and same sex marriage, while at the same time not agreeing with the biblical permission to own slaves (found in Exodus, Leviticus, and in the household codes of the New Testament).

I wrote a comment on the blog which I'm also posting here:

I’d like to speak as a scholar and also as one of the gay people whom the religious right demonizes. Yes, demonizes. Organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family accuse gay and lesbian people of doing things that we do not – they spread lies about us. Some Christian right groups are opposed to anti-bullying laws for students in public schools out of the fear that it would mean allowing gay and lesbian schoolchildren to live in peace. They use the pretext that this is limiting their religious freedom – freedom to harass and ostracize teenagers. People are still attacked and murdered for being gay. Children are thrown out of their homes for being gay by their bigoted parents. We have fought very hard to gain the rights that we have in American society, but we are still not equal in rights to heterosexual people. In many states, without anti-discrimination laws that include gay people, it is still legal to fire someone or evict someone if they are gay. 

If you read the Bible with care, you will see that Leviticus 18:22 does not speak of “homosexuality” as an identity – there was no such concept when the Bible was written. A certain act is forbidden – men having sex with other men in the manner that a man would have sex with a woman. There is no mention of lesbians at all in the Hebrew Bible. 

In Genesis 19, the sin of Sodom is not homosexuality – it is lack of hospitality and attempted gang rape. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah says nothing about a consensual relationship between two men. 

In 1 Samuel and the book of Ruth, close emotional relationships between people of the same sex are presented as praiseworthy – the close friendship between David and Jonathan and between Ruth and Naomi. It’s unknown to us whether sex would have been part of these relationships, but close emotional relationships are assumed.
In the New Testament, Jesus never says anything about homosexuality. Since he consorted with people considered the dregs of society – prostitutes and tax collectors – one might think that were he alive today he would also be consorting with the gay children thrown out of their homes who subsist on the streets of our big cities by selling their bodies. 

I’m not a Christian – I’m Jewish, so I would not follow the New Testament as inspired scripture, but there are certainly beautiful prophetic lessons presented in the New Testament. 

I do believe that the Bible should be read as a product of its historical period, which means that parts of it are not relevant to our lives today, including the two examples that Bob has been writing about, slavery and same sex relationships. 

And I also see no evidence whatsoever that biblical slavery was any more pleasant than American slavery. Slaves were at the mercy of their masters – a master could kill a slave with impunity, as long as he or she did not die immediately from a beating. Leviticus says that it’s permitted to treat foreign slaves בפרך – with harshness. Even Hebrew girls sold into slavery by their fathers had no choice about whom they had sex with – their masters or their masters’ sons. I do not think that biblical slavery is something that anyone living today should defend with the weak argument that somehow it was “better” than American slavery. Slavery is indefensible, period, regardless of the time period in which it was practiced.

God as therapist and the Holocaust

I was just reading an article in the New York Times about evangelical Christians’ relationship with God – that they treat God like a therapist, someone that you can bring your problems to and share them, that God is close and supportive. Evangelicals have closer, more personal relationship to God than other Protestants or Catholics. I think this is certainly true also for Jews – I have never had a conversation with anyone who has said that they have that kind of personal relationship with God. The people I know don’t talk about talking with God. The article says:

More strikingly, I saw that the church implicitly invited people to treat God like an actual therapist. In many evangelical churches, prayer is understood as a back-and-forth conversation with God — a daydream in which you talk with a wise, good, fatherly friend. Indeed, when congregants talk about their relationship with God, they often sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist who will listen to their concerns and help them to handle them.

“It’s just like talking to a therapist,” one woman told me, “especially in the beginning, when you’re revealing things that are deep in your heart and deep in your soul, the things that have been pushed down and denied.” The church encourages people to bring those conversations with God into their prayer group and to share their struggles with others, who are expected to respond with love, respect and compassion.

I find it striking that prayer is described as a conversation – which suggests that they receive answers, that there is someone replying to them. How do they envision this? What does God say to them? How would they describe the conversation? How do they imagine God? I have prayed to God and even felt that I was answered – but it wasn’t a back and forth conversation, because for me God is so strange and other than we humans. How can I have a conversation with God like I would have a conversation with a human being? Other humans are on the same level as I am – frail, flawed, limited in time and space. God is not. Communion with God is with the Wholly Other, as Rudolph Otto put it. But yet somehow it is possible to have a relationship with God – but I think much of it is nonverbal, intuitive – not put in words. Can loving God be put into words? Or apprehending God in feeling God’s presence all around – and pointing to something beyond our ordinary human perceptions?

You can see this therapeutic dimension most clearly when evangelicals respond to the body blows of life. The churches I studied resisted turning to God for an explanation of tragedy. They asked only that people turn to God for help in dealing with the pain. “God doesn’t want to be analyzed,” one woman explained to me. “He wants your love.”

I don’t agree with her, because I don’t think that turning to God for explanation is analyzing God. I think it’s a very important part of a relationship with God – at least it has been for me. I wouldn’t even call it asking God for an explanation – sometimes it’s getting angry or despairing with God. The emotion is a bridge to God – even if it’s anger.

A young man — a kind man with two adorable children and a loving wife — died unexpectedly in one of the churches where I spent time. When the pastor spoke in church the following Sunday, he did not try to explain the death. Instead, he told the church to experience God as present. “This is a difficult philosophical issue for Christians,” he said. “We who believe in a loving, personal God who created the earth and can intervene at any time — we have this problem.” His answer? “Creation is beautiful but it is not safe.” He called our everyday reality “broken.” What should you do? Get to know God. “Learn to hang out with him now.”

I like this – “Creation is beautiful but it is not safe.” Read the book of Job – the descriptions of the beauty of the creation are stunning, but it’s clear that creation is not safe. God says to Job, “Where were you when I founded the earth?” Job is overawed and ceases to speak. The world is not safe – we’re in danger from natural and human-made dangers, and we all die in the end. I don’t feel a need to have God explain to me why the natural dangers exist - they’re the conditions of our existence. What I need is an explanation for human evil.

I saw the same thing at another church, where a young couple lost a child in a late miscarriage. Some months later I spent several hours with them. Clearly numbed, they told me they did not understand why God had allowed the child to die. But they never gave a theological explanation for what happened. They blamed neither their own wickedness nor demons. Instead, they talked about how important it was to know that God had stood by their side. The husband quoted from memory a passage in the Gospel of John, where many followers abandon Jesus because his teachings don’t make sense to them. Jesus says sadly to his disciples, “You do not want to leave, too, do you?” and Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”

The question about the source of evil is universal, and can be raised by anything, but as a Jew it is always raised for me by the Holocaust and the other disasters of Jewish history. I can’t imagine not asking God why these things happened, especially within the framework of Jewish theology, where the Jewish people and God have made a covenant. We might have transgressed against the covenant, but God has torn it asunder. I don’t feel satisfied with the assertion that God stood by our side. It’s comforting to think that God stands by us when we are in distress – but did people feel that at Auschwitz? Or when they were about to be shot in front of an open pit? I can’t answer that question, only somebody who was there could answer that question for themselves. I visited Terezin in the Czech Republic when visiting there in the summer of 2005. There were one place there that I could only walk through with the thought that God was present even here in this place – inside the Small Fortress where people were taken to be executed. But at one place I was so horrified that I could scarcely even think – at the crematorium.

So how would evangelical Christians deal with experiences like that? What about when it’s impossible to feel sure that God is with you, because the horror is too great? I’m not talking about unbelief – going to Terezin didn’t make me doubt God’s existence. It made me question reality, in a way – the incommensurability of normal middle-class American existence and life and death in Terezin.

I'm sure that evangelical Christians have seen the sites of the concentration camps in Europe - what are their theological responses?

The latter history of Kathy Boudin

Despite my leftist tendencies, I do have an online subscription to the Wall Street Journal, and I read the tweets of one of their writers, Sohrab Ahmari. He just tweeted today that Columbia University has hired Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground terrorist who spent many years in prison, as an adjunct professor in the School of Social Work. As the New York Post reports, she is also the Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. Sohrab is interviewed by Mary Kissel on the "Opinion Journal" part of the Journal website - Opinion Journal: Columbia Hires Ex-Con Professor.

Who is Kathy Boudin? She was a member of the Weather Underground, a leftwing terrorist group active in the early 1970s. She was one of the members of the group who survived the destruction of the house where they were living in 1970. It was destroyed by a bomb in the basement of the house - one of the bombs that they were constructing for a terrorist campaign. Three people were killed. She escaped before being questioned by the police, and was on the FBI's most-wanted list until 1981 when she was captured by police. See this New York Times article for more on the destruction of the house.

She spent 22 years in prison for her role in an armored-car robbery that killed two policeman and a Brinks guard. Her role was as the getaway driver for the robbery conducted by the Black Liberation Army on October 20, 1981. She was paroled in 2003.

It is actually not news that she is employed by Columbia. The Post has apparently just learned of her employment at Columbia - she has been teaching there since 2008. I can't figure out why they published the article today, perhaps because they just learned that she is a scholar-in-residence at NYU as well. In March, 2013, she delivered the annual Rose Sheinberg Lecture on the "politics of parole and reentry." According to the NYU article that reports on her speech, she spoke on the politics of parole for violent offenders, and I have to say, reading the summary, that she what she says is quite self-serving. She argues that the recidivism rate for people who have been convicted of homicide is the lowest of all crimes (I'd like to see the evidence for this). She also argues that long-term prisoners are the ones who undergo the greatest transformation during their time in prison. She also says that more punishment does not lead to more accountability. All three arguments certainly would support her release from prison in 2003.

If you go to the School of Social Work web site, her biography mentions nothing about her involvement in a terrorist group or her 22-year imprisonment for her part in an armored car robbery that killed 3 people.

Why would Columbia have hired her? According to the Wikipedia article about her, she was active in starting five programs while imprisoned at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York. The programs were intended for teens whose mothers were incarcerated, the parent education program for incarcerated mothers, the adult literacy program, the AIDS and Women's Health Program, and the College Program, for incarcerated women to take college courses and gain degrees.

When she was released she went to work for the HIV/AIDS clinic at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. She earned an Ed. D. from Columbia's Teachers College.

Based on the work she did in prison, and her subsequent employment at the HIV/AIDS clinic, and her Ed. D from Teachers College, I can see that she would be qualified to teach at Columbia. But why would they decide to employ her in particular? And why would they leave out the very salient facts in her faculty biography about her history as a terrorist, accomplice to murder, and long prison sentence? It's not like these facts are a secret. If you just Google her name, you get many links to articles about her. If you go to the New York Times website there are hundreds of articles about her.

I feel the same way about her that I do about Bill Ayers (whom I wrote about earlier, in 2008). These people should not be lionized or honored. They committed horrible crimes. In Boudin's case, she spent a long time in prison. In Ayers' case, he avoided any punishment because the FBI case against him was tainted by improper surveillance. While they certainly should be able to get any kind of work that they are qualified for, I do not see why it has to be in the most prestigious universities in the United States.

Sohrab Ahmari and Mary Kissel raise a good point in their discussion - would a university in the United States ever hire someone with their same records if they had been involved in a right-wing terrorist cell that had committed bombings and had killed people? If, for example, Timothy McVeigh had not been executed, and had been paroled (admittedly unlikely), I don't believe that any college or university would have hired him regardless of how much he had "rehabilitated" himself in prison. Why do Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn, and now Boudin, get a free pass?

Nabi Saleh - Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?

A good article from the New York Times about the struggle between Palestinians and settlers in Nabi Saleh, on the West Bank - Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?

Protesters fleeing from tear gas launched by the Israel Defense Forces. In the background, the Israeli settlement of Halamish. Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

From most south-facing windows in Nabi Saleh, you can see the red roofs of Halamish, the Israeli settlement on the hilltop across the valley. It has been there since 1977, founded by members of the messianic nationalist group Gush Emunim, and growing steadily since on land that once belonged to residents of Nabi Saleh and another Palestinian village. Next to Halamish is an Israeli military base, and in the valley between Nabi Saleh and the settlement, across the highway and up a dirt path, a small freshwater spring, which Palestinians had long called Ein al-Kos, bubbles out of a low stone cliff. In the summer of 2008, although the land surrounding the spring has for generations belonged to the family of Bashir Tamimi, who is 57, the youth of Halamish began building the first of a series of low pools that collect its waters. Later they added a bench and an arbor for shade. (Years after, the settlers retroactively applied for a building permit, which Israeli authorities refused to issue, ruling that “the applicants did not prove their rights to the relevant land.” Recently, several of the structures have been removed.) When Palestinians came to tend to their crops in the fields beside it, the settlers, villagers said, threatened and threw stones at them.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Pope Francis and the Argentinian dictatorship

UPDATE AND CORRECTION

The story recounted below in Hugh O'Shaughnessy's article names Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) as the one who hid political prisoners from a human rights commission when they came to investigate during the time of the Argentinian military junta. Actually, it was the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires at the time, Aramburu, who is accused of doing this. Bergoglio is accused of an entirely different act of complicity with the Argentinian junta - withdrawing his support from two Jesuit priests and allowing them to be arrested and tortured by the junta. See transcript of interview with Horacio Verbitsky on Democracy Now after the incorrect blog entry.

Three years ago, Hugh O'Shaughnessy wrote in the Guardian about the Sins of the Argentine Church during the period of military rule in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the people he discussed was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who has just been chosen as the pope to succeed Benedict. He cites Horacio Verbitsky, author of the book El Silencio, who wrote about Bergoglio's complicity with the junta in his book.

The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.

I would like to know more about Bergoglio's actions during the junta - is Verbitsky the only person to accuse him of collusion with the regime? Has Verbitsky's account been confirmed by other authors? If his accusations are true, it is indeed very troubling that Bergoglio has just been chosen to be the next pope.

Interview on Democracy Now of Horacio Verbitsky, March 14, 2013:

Introduction:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: For more on the new pope, we turn now to one of Argentina’s leading investigative journalists, Horacio Verbitsky, who has written extensively about the career of Cardinal Bergoglio and his actions during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. During that time, up to 30,000 people were kidnapped and killed. A 2005 lawsuit accused Jorge Bergoglio of being connected to the 1976 kidnappings of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. The lawsuit was filed after the publication of Verbitsky’s book, The Silence: From Paul VI to Bergoglio: The Secret Relations Between the Church and the ESMA. ESMA refers to the former navy school that was turned into a detention center where people were tortured by the military dictatorship. The new pope has denied the charges. He twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court to testify about the allegations. When he eventually did testify in 2010, human rights activists characterized his answers as evasive.

The arrest and torture of the two Jesuit priests.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about that and some of the things that—because you’ve been a leading investigative reporter uncovering the relations between the church and the government in terms of the dirty wars? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Of course. He was accused by two Jesuit priests of having surrendered them to the military. They were a group of Jesuits that were under Bergoglio’s direction. He was the provincial superior of the order in Argentina, being very, very young. He was the younger provincial Jesuit in history; at 36 years, he was provincial. During a period of great political activity in the Jesuits’ company, he stimulated the social work of the Jesuits. But when the military coup overthrow the Isabel Perón government, he was in touch with the military that ousted this government and asked the Jesuits to stop their social work. And when they refused to do it, he stopped protecting them, and he let the military know that they were not more inside the protection of the Jesuits’ company, and they were kidnapped. And they accuse him for this deed. He denies this. He said to me that he tried to get them free, that he talked with the former dictator, Videla, and with former dictator Massera to have them freed. 

And during a long period, I heard two versions: the version of the two kidnapped priests that were released after six months of torture and captivity, and the version of Bergoglio. This was an issue divisive in the human rights movement to which I belong, because the president founding of CELS, Center for Legal and Social Studies, Emilio Mignone, said that Bergoglio was a accomplice of the military, and a lawyer of the CELS, Alicia Oliveira, that was a friend of Bergoglio, tell the other part of the story, that Bergoglio helped them. This was the two—the two versions. 

But during the research for one of my books, I found documents in the archive of the foreign relations minister in Argentina, which, from my understanding, gave an end to the debate and show the double standard that Bergoglio used. The first document is a note in which Bergoglio asked the ministry to—the renewal of the passport of one of these two Jesuits that, after his releasing, was living in Germany, asking that the passport was renewed without necessity of this priest coming back to Argentina. The second document is a note from the officer that received the petition recommending to his superior, the minister, the refusal of the renewal of the passport. And the third document is a note from the same officer telling that these priests have links with subversion—that was the name that the military gave to all the people involved in opposition to the government, political or armed opposition to the military—and that he was jailed in the mechanics school of the navy, and saying that this information was provided to the officer by Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, provincial superior of the Jesuit company. This means, to my understanding, a double standard. He asked the passport given to the priest in a formal note with his signature, but under the table he said the opposite and repeated the accusations that produced the kidnapping of these priests. 

AMY GOODMAN: And these priests—can you explain, Horacio, what happened to these two priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes. Orlando, after his releasing, went to Rome. 

AMY GOODMAN: How were they found? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Sorry? 

AMY GOODMAN: How were they found? In what condition were they? What had happened to them? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Well, he was released—both of them were released, drugged, confused, transported by helicopter to—in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, were abandoned, asleep by drugs, in very bad condition. They were tortured. They were interrogated. One of the interrogators had externally knowings about theological questions, that induced one of them, Orlando Yorio, to think that their own provincial, Bergoglio, had been involved in this interrogatory. 

AMY GOODMAN: He said that—he said that Bergoglio himself had been part of the—his own interrogation, this Jesuit priest? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: He told me that he had the impression their own provincial, Bergoglio, was present during the interrogatory, which one of the interrogators had externally knowledge of theological questions. And when released, he went to Rome. He lived seven years in Rome, then come back to Argentina. And when coming back to Argentina, he was incardinated in the Quilmes diocesis in Great Buenos Aires, where the bishop was one of the leaders of the progressive branch of the Argentine church opposite to that of Bergoglio. And Orlando Yorio denounced Bergoglio. I received his testimony when Bergoglio was elected to the archbishop of Buenos Aires. And Bergoglio—I interviewed Bergoglio also, and he denied the charges, and he told me that he had defended them. 

And Orlando Yorio got me in touch with Francisco Jalics, that was living in Germany. I talked with him, and he confirmed the story, but he didn’t want to be mentioned in my piece, because he told me that he preferred to not remember this sad part of his life and to pardon. And he was for oblivion and pardon. That he was, during a lot of years, very resented against Bergoglio, but that he had decided to forgot and forget. And when I released the book with the story, one Argentine journalist working for a national agency, [inaudible], who has been a disciple of Jalics, talked with him and asked him for the story. And Jalics told him that he would not affirm, not deny the story.

The second subject is who was responsible for hiding the political prisoners when the human rights commission came to Argentina. It was not Bergoglio, but the then Cardinal Archbishop Aramburu.

AMY GOODMAN: Ah, let me ask you a question. We thought we lost you for a minute. We’re talking to Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine investigative journalist, well known for his human rights investigations. I wanted to ask you about this issue of hiding political prisoners when a human rights delegation came to Argentina. Can you tell us when this was, what are the allegations, and what was the role, if any, of Bergoglio, now Pope Francis? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: No, in this episode, Bergoglio has no intervention. The intervention was from the cardinal that in that time was the chief of the church in Buenos Aires. That is the position that Bergoglio has in the present. But in that time, he was not archbishop of Buenos Aires. When the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights came into Argentina to investigate allegations of human rights violations, the navy took 60 prisoners out of ESMA and got them to a village that was used by the Cardinal Aramburu to his weekends. And in this weekend property were also the celebration each year of the new seminarians that ended their studies. In this villa in the outskirts of Buenos Aires were the prisoners during the visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And when the commission visited ESMA, they did not find the prisoners that were supposed to be there, because they were— 

AMY GOODMAN: ESMA being—ESMA being the naval barracks were so many thousands of Argentines were held. So where were they? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes, but Bergoglio has no intervention in this—in this fact. Indeed, he helped me to investigate a case. He gave me the precise information about in which tribunal was the document demonstrating that this villa was owned by the church. 

AMY GOODMAN: He said that they were hidden in a villa that was owned by the Catholic Church? 

HORACIO VERBITSKY: Yes. And the prisoners were held in a weekend house that was the weekend house of the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires in that time. And Bergoglio gave me the precise information about the tribunal in which were the documents affirming this relationship between this property and the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

Young soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

There's a really interesting article in the Guardian (of all papers!) about life as a young female soldier in the IDF: Young gun: life in the Israel Defense Forces. It's written by Shani Boianjiu, who is the author of the novel, The People of Forever are not Afraid. It's not a political article, but rather it's about her own personal experiences as a weaponry instructor in the IDF.

Marc Goldberg, who writes a blog for the Times of Israel, is chronicling his experiences training in the IDF on his own personal blog, Marc's Words. He's not as polished a writer as Boianjiu, but he's pretty good and is hoping to publish a book about his experiences.

Meir Javedanfar on "Is Israel An Apartheid State?"

Good discussion by Meir Javedanfar which expresses my views, for the most part: Is Israel An Apartheid State?

Anti-Israel agitation at Harvard University

The anti-Israel campaign reached my alma mater some time ago, but this manifestation of it really angers me.

The ostensibly "pro-Palestinian" Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee has celebrated "Israel Apartheid Week" by putting mock eviction flyers (Mock Eviction Flyers Incite Debate) on the doors of some Harvard suites in order, supposedly, to make Harvard students feel like Palestinians who are being evicted from their homes in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. Palestine Solidarity Committees like Harvard's are, in actuality, anti-Israel groups that want to see the destruction of the state of Israel in favor of a "one state solution" that will make Jews once again a minority in every country of the world.

For a good student response, see this article by Ariella Rotenberg and Ariel Rubin, "The Wrong Type of Engagement."

As two seniors writing theses on aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have actively sought out views that oppose our own and continue to work in an effort to understand contradicting narratives. Through our research and combined eight months of living experience in Israel over the past year, we found barriers to peace attributable to both Israel and the Palestinians. We realize the importance of employing a framework that engages with multiple perspectives. There are limits to this framework, however, when words are based in hatred rather than facts. The Palestinian Solidarity Committee has reached this limit in its portrayals of the conflict as one-sided, revealing either a lack of understanding of history or rejection of an honest, albeit challenging, conversation about the complicated reality. 

The PSC’s use of the word “apartheid” is ahistorical, polarizing, and preventative of informed, fact-based dialogue. The implication of the comparison to “apartheid” is that the Israelis are racist totalitarians ruling over blameless Palestinians, with no consideration for the nuances and details of the conflict. Israel’s Declaration of Independence guarantees equal rights to all citizens irrespective of religion, race, or sex. It is a country where a Palestinian citizen of Israel serves as a Supreme Court Justice; where political discourse includes Arab elected officials who are hyper-critical of Israel; and where all citizens are guaranteed the same right to education. It is a country committed to peaceful coexistence, not a country with a systematic policy of racism. By using the misnomer of “apartheid,” the PSC explicitly demonizes Israel by squeezing the complicated Arab-Israeli conflict into the same racially driven mold that existed in South Africa. We take issue with certain Israeli policies and recognize that the state is not perfect, but we base our criticism in historically accurate facts. It takes only a very rudimentary understanding of the situation to appreciate the PSC’s gross misuse of the word “apartheid.” 

The PSC as an organization consistently projects a dishonest voice that distorts the reality of the conflict. Last November, the group staged a “die-in” to show solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza under what the PSC deemed a so-called “unprovoked assault” from Israel. It is one thing to show solidarity with the people of Gaza, but labeling the operation as “unprovoked” is a deliberate neglect for the more than 10,000 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel over the previous decade. The PSC bases its activism in the Veritas Handbook, a 347-page “guide to understanding the struggle for Palestinian human rights.” Crimson columnist Daniel Solomon described it last week as “glib dismissals of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism...indulg[ing] in conspiracy theories, that Mossad agents, not government-sanctioned campaigns of violence and terror, were responsible for the exodus of Jews from Arab lands.” The PSC’s mission statement states that it “does not prescribe a solution to the struggle; rather...believe[s] in supporting and amplifying the voices of those working against injustice.” If an organization is devoted to a struggle, that struggle should at least aim for a peaceful resolution built on mutual respect and understanding. Instead, the PSC polarizes the campus discourse through misinformation and inflammatory tactics.

"Hekhalot Literature in Context" to be published by Mohr Siebeck

The papers from the "Hekhalot Literature in Context" conference, which was held at Princeton a couple of years ago, are going to be published this spring by Mohr Siebeck. I have a paper in this volume, "Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature."

Hekhalot Literature in Context: Between Byzantium and Babylonia 

Edited by Ra'anan Boustan, Martha Himmelfarb and Peter Schäfer 

Over the past 30 years, scholars of early Jewish mysticism have, with increasing confidence, located the initial formation of Hekhalot literature in Byzantine Palestine and Sasanian or early Islamic Babylonia (ca. 500–900 C.E.), rather than at the time of the Mishnah, Tosefta, early Midrashim, or Palestinian Talmud (ca. 100–400 C.E.). This advance has primarily been achieved through major gains in our understanding of the dynamic and highly flexible processes of composition, redaction, and transmission that produced the Hekhalot texts as we know them today. These gains have been coupled with greater appreciation of the complex relationships between Hekhalot writings and the variegated Jewish literary culture of late antiquity, both within and beyond the boundaries of the rabbinic movement. Yet important questions remain regarding the specific cultural contexts and institutional settings out of which the various strands of Hekhalot literature emerged as well as the multiple trajectories of use and appropriation they subsequently travelled. In the present volume, an international team of experts explores—from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (e.g. linguistics, ritual and gender studies, intellectual history)—the literary formation, cultural meanings, religious functions, and textual transmission of Hekhalot literature.

Survey of contents:

Ra‘anan Boustan: Introduction 

I. The Formation of Hekhalot Literature: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Contexts 

Noam Mizrahi: The Language of Hekhalot Literature: Preliminary Observations. Peter Schäfer: Metatron in Babylonia. Michael D. Swartz: Hekhalot and Piyyut: From Byzantium to Babylonia and Back. Alexei Sivertsev: The Emperor’s Many Bodies: The Demise of Emperor Lupinus Revisited. Klaus Herrmann: Jewish Mysticism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Merkavah Mysticism in 3 Enoch. David M. Grossberg: Between 3 Enoch and Bavli Hagigah: Heresiology and Orthopraxy in the Ascent of Elisha ben Abuyah. Moulie Vidas: Hekhalot Literature, the Babylonian Academies and the tanna’im.

II. The Transmission and Reception of Hekhalot Literature: Toward the Middle Ages

Peter Schäfer: The Hekhalot Genizah. Gideon Bohak: Observations on the Transmission of Hekhalot Literature in the Cairo Genizah. Ophir Münz-Manor: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Hekhalot Traditions in European Piyyut.

III. Early Jewish Mysticism in Comparative Perspective: Themes and Patterns 

Reimund Leicht: Major Trends in Rabbinic Cosmology. Rebecca Lesses: Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature. Andrei A. Orlov: “What is Below?” Mysteries of Leviathan in the Early Jewish Accounts and Mishnah Hagigah 2:1. Michael Meerson: Rites of Passage in Magic and Mysticism. Annette Yoshiko Reed: Rethinking (Jewish) Christian Evidence for Jewish Mysticism.

Where and when was this photograph taken?