The ADL is a Threat to Jews

By Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments Monday, January 28, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Jonathan Greenblatt introduced the ADL’s Never is Now 2018 conference with a full-throated defense of George Soros. It was a strange decision for an organization that had once criticized the radical anti-Israel billionaire’s defenses of anti-Semitism. But under Greenblatt, a former Obama official, the ADL had turned sharply to the left and Never is Now, the ADL’s big shindig, was a disturbing demonstration.

Greenblatt’s opening remarks at the December conference mentioned Soros twice and Israel only once.

And he did not mention Israel to defend it, but to sell out the Jewish State in defense of Soros.

“If your favorite politician is attacking George Soros,” the ADL boss warned, “you must stand up and tell them to stop. And do so even if they profess love for Israel up and down.”

Israel was less important than Soros. And that’s not surprising coming from Greenblatt, who had formerly headed the Aspen Institute, which had received funding from Soros. Instead of standing up for Israel, Greenblatt was encouraging Jews to pick fights with pro-Israel politicians if they insulted Soros.

The ADL had once condemned Soros for using Israel to justify anti-Semitism, now it was all in on Soros and out on Israel.

And it got worse.

The ADL chose to invite Senator Cory Booker to hand out an award. Booker had not only betrayed Jewish voters by backing Iran’s nuclear program, but just that summer had been caught posing with members of an anti-Israel and pro-terrorist BDS hate group while holding up an anti-Israel sign.

In September, Booker favorably quoted Stokely Carmichael at a Senate hearing. Carmichael had infamously said, "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler.”

The ADL could have chosen to invite any number of pro-Israel senators, including those who had voted against Iran. Instead it chose to invite a pro-Iran politico who palled around with BDS activists and found inspiration in the words of a black nationalist anti-Semite who praised Adolf Hitler.

So much for Never is Now.

The ADL had not only betrayed the message of Never Again, it put up on its stage a politician who had voted to protect a nuclear program meant to kill millions of Jews and who favorably quoted a racist who advocated another Holocaust.

The ADL couldn’t have betrayed the memory of the Holocaust any more thoroughly if Greenblatt had goosestepped onto the stage while singing the Horst Wessel Lied.

Never is Now 2018 sold out Jews and Israel.

The list of speakers did not include a single official from a major pro-Israel organization. Not even AIPAC. However Jill Jacobs, the head of the militantly anti-Israel T’ruah, was a featured speaker. T’ruah had rallied efforts to force Jewish charities to stop helping Jews living in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists.

While the Never is Now 2018 agenda featured an unambiguous condemnation of any efforts to combat illegal immigration, its only Israel panel asked, “When is Criticism of Israel anti-Semitism?” while suggesting that there are "some in the Jewish community who label almost all expressions that are deemed 'anti-Israel' as anti-Semitic".

While the ADL was ruthlessly unequivocal on a variety of lefty issues, such as illegal migration or the reputation of George Soros, it was willing to equivocate when it came to attacking the Jewish State.

There was no room for debate on lefty issues. But there was room for debate on hating Israel.

The panel discussing whether hatred of the Jewish State was anti-Semitic featured Jill Jacobs, a hateful opponent of Israel, and Alyza Lewin of the Brandeis Center, the token pro-Israel organization at NIN. Jacobs, along with top T’ruah leaders, had previously signed a letter urging the United States to “to take a cautious stand concerning Hamas” and called for “constructive engagement with the new Palestinian government”.

Some months after T’ruah’s leadership advocated working with Hamas, the Islamic terror group had put out its own proposal for the Jewish people, “My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews.”

Never is Now is meant to be a reference to the Holocaust. Not only wasn’t the ADL fighting a second Holocaust, it was welcoming in apologists for Islamist monsters who want to drink Jewish blood.

And apologists for anti-Semites of all sorts.

Appearing on an anti-Semitism panel was Jane Eisner, The Forward boss, whose social justice tabloid not only routinely spewed hate toward Israel, but toward Jews in general. On her watch, the formerly Jewish paper had defended the leaders of the Women’s March, Jeremy Corbyn, Farrakhan and a lefty politician who claimed that Jews control the weather.

The ADL had invited a radical bigot whose paper featured pieces with titles worthy of Stormfront such as, "3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race" and "Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather" to discuss anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism, like Israel, was also a pro and con issue at the ADL.

Also on the ADL’s list of speakers was Yehuda Webster, a black nationalist activist, the son of a pastor from Guyana, who had declared, “I am very much against state-sponsored oppression in any context in America, in Israel, or in Palestine. I must stand on the side of the people who fight for liberation.”

Webster is an activist with the radical JFREJ hate group which has fought to cover up anti-Semitism on the Left. The foster son of a JFREJ funder had even been caught setting fires in Jewish schools.

“It’s important for white Jews and Israelis to recognize, yes, the Palestinian-Israeli situation is unique, but still it does play into this global system of white supremacy,” he had argued.

Webster wasn’t the only ADL speaker with a history of accusing Jews of being white supremacists. Joining him was Yavillah McCoy who had declared, “When Jews accepted a white identity in America, they participated in sustaining white supremacy.”

McCoy is associated with Bend the Arc, a radical group headed by Stosh Cotler, an anti-Israel activist. She has also become the public face of a whitewashing effort by the anti-Semitic Women's March leadership.

Instead of inviting activists fighting anti-Semitism, the ADL had instead chosen two leftists associated with anti-Israel groups, who have a history of libeling Jews.

And yet the most obvious thing about Never is Now wasn’t its growing tolerance for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. It was how little Jewish content there was in a conference referencing the Holocaust.

There were few representatives of the Jewish community on stage. Instead the ADL brought out obscure lefty activists who, even when they weren’t openly anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, were obscure at best.

Instead of inviting activists who could discuss the rash of anti-Semitic violent attacks against Orthodox Jews in New York City or the Islamic terrorist attacks against Jewish families in Israel, the ADL invited Steph Loehr, a transgender gamer, who fights against integrating voice chat in online video games.

"In my world, the inclusivity-cost of voice chat is very real. The addition of voice chat will push many marginalized players out of the base," Loer claimed.

The ADL doesn’t have the time and the space to confront anti-Semitism, because it’s too busy with more important things. And those things are not the threats to Jews; they are the agendas of the radical Left.

That’s why Greenblatt puts George Soros ahead of Israel.

Once upon a time, the ADL was a Jewish civil rights organization. Now it’s just another generic lefty group that pretends to care about Jewish causes only long enough to fleece some of its donors.

As the Left goes anti-Semitic, the ADL is becoming a threat to Jews.


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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The New Jewish Exodus

January 3, 2021 By Adrienne Skolnik

Three months ago, with great sadness, I terminated membership with my synagogue. I am not alone.  This phenomenon is happening to thousands of religiously conservative Jews throughout our nation who are Republicans.  What would cause thousands of Jews to feel so alienated they would break from tradition and be without a “religious and spiritual home?”  How much sadness has this caused within this segment of the Jewish community?  Even more importantly, When did Judaism stop being Jewish?..............

 Progressive-left ideologies and social justice discourse monopolized conversations and email newsletters.  Even sermons contained political references.  Tikkun Olam (improving the world) by their definition, was not to be questioned.  As a Republican, I didn’t agree with their causes or agendas, so sadly the once peaceful feeling in my “religious and spiritual home” was vanishing.  Many Republican friends were experiencing similar situations and ended their memberships.

Then a series of events occurred.  When Tamika Mallory (a known anti-Semite) spoke at UNC, my Republican Jewish friends peacefully protested.  In the next synagogue newsletter, they were publicly criticized. The author apologized to the black community and hoped it didn’t hurt relations.  My friends wrote a concerned letter to the Board of Directors asking that the newsletter not have political content.  The letter was ignored, so they ended their membership.  (After black radicals killed two Jews and their employee in New Jersey, and attacked Jews with machetes in New York, I asked the author if the black community apologized to the Jewish community so it didn’t hurt relations?  When I heard that members of my synagogue protested with BLM and one got arrested, why weren’t they publicly criticized in the newsletter?) 

Some members even tried to convince me that BLM is an idea.  You can’t see an idea!  Ideas don’t destroy cities, loot and harm people. A Republican Christian friend sent me these videos and an article debunking and exposing the radical Marxist BLM doctrine because there is also a Christian exodus occurring.

Six months ago, an article appeared in the synagogue newsletter presenting, “Jews of Whiteness and Jews of Color.”  This identity politics terminology upset me, since I have an Ethiopian son.  When people ask me if he is black, I answer, “I never noticed.  He’s a Jew.”  Why is this divisive rhetoric in our community?  What is this self-imposed segregation?  It was so offensive I wrote an article called, “Whiteness, the New Evil.”     ............To Read More....

Loyal and Disloyal Jews

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 7 Comments Sunday, September 01, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

"Is there water in the spring?"

Those were the last words that Danny heard on a hot day in June. The spring of Ein Bubin bursts forth in a valley surrounded by dusty hills, flows into a glittering pool, and waters a garden of fruit trees. But every garden has its serpent. And the serpent in this spot of paradise was named Mohammed.

Mohammed Abu Shahin stopped Danny Gonen to ask him if there was water to swim in. Danny had just finished swimming in the spring and was happy to oblige. The Israeli electrical engineering student was the oldest of five brothers and sisters. He always stepped up, whether it was supporting his family after his father died, or helping out a stranger. And on that Friday afternoon, he paid for it with his life.

Mohammed shot Danny, along with his friend Netanel. Danny’s friend survived. And Danny did not.

The Muslim terrorist was a former member of Force 17, a Palestinian Authority terror group that acted as Arafat’s Presidential Guard, and was on the Palestinian Authority payroll. He had spent two years in prison for previous terror plots before being freed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a corrupt left-wing politician, along with 249 other Fatah terrorists as part of a “peace” gesture for the Islamic Eid holiday.

Palestinian Authority boss Mahmoud Abbas rejected the peace gesture, and the freed Islamic terrorists, who had promised not to carry out attacks, shockingly enough, didn’t keep their word.

"As a gesture of goodwill towards the Palestinians, I will bring before the Israeli cabinet a proposal to free 250 Fatah prisoners who do not have blood on their hands, after they sign a commitment not to return to violence," Olmert had declared at a summit, where he was photographed hugging Abbas.

It didn’t take long for blood to end up on their hands and on the hands of the “pro-peace” politicians.

At Mohammed's trial, Danny's mother condemned the process that allowed an “animal walking on two legs, who is mistakenly called a human, to keep on living and enjoying life on our bill.” The family's lawyer asked the court to ensure that this time around the terrorist would not be freed.

When Danny’s mother appeared before the Israeli Supreme Court, Supreme Court President Miriam Naor, the best friend illegal migrants invading Israel ever had, barked at her to be quiet.

“If I survived my son's murder, then no judge will ever break me,” Danny’s mother courageously replied.

Danny was murdered in 2015. A plaque went up reminding hikers that on a Sabbath Eve, the young man had been murdered not in a place that leftists call “Palestine,” but in the “Holy Land of Israel.”

Four years later, terrorists struck at the Ein Bubin spring on yet another Friday.

Rabbi Eitan Shnerb was hiking to the spring with his son Dvir and his daughter Rina when the bomb went off. For a moment, as he described it in the hospital, everything went black. Then, badly wounded, he saw that the two teenagers were bleeding. Rabbi Shnerb was a trained paramedic. He saw that Rina, his 17-year-old daughter, had absorbed most of the blast. He kissed her on the forehead.

And then he turned his Tzizit, the biblical garment that Orthodox Jewish men wear, into a tourniquet for his 19-year-old son to stop the bleeding.

Dvir told his father that he couldn’t breathe and passed out. His daughter was already dead.

Rabbi Shnerb had stopped a terrorist attack earlier this year by two armed attackers. This time there were no attackers, just a bomb, and he had not seen the explosion coming.

Medical personnel evacuated father and son by helicopter. They continued trying to treat Rina at the scene. Hoping against hope that something could still be done.

On that same Friday, while her father and bother remained in the hospital, Rina was laid to rest. Students from her high school class turned out to say goodbye to one of their classmates. Prayers from the cemetery were relayed by phone to her father. A Rabbi recited Psalm 91 and the mourners echoed.

"I will say of the LORD, who is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust," he chanted. "Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold, and see the recompense of the wicked."

The wicked are being sought once more. Israeli soldiers are hunting for the killers and their accomplices in dirty villages and sinister towns. And they are aware that the hunt may lead to more ambushes.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh praised the killers of the teenage girl as heroes.

In his sermon in Gaza, the Islamic terrorist leader called her murder a "heroic attack" and celebrated it as “proof of the vitality and bravery of the Palestinian people." He claimed that the bombing was evidence that the terrorists are "strong people" who are "faithful and steadfast."

The Shnerb family had run a charity in Lod which handed out food and clothing to the poor.

The Palestinian Authority’s Ma’an News Agency justified Rina’s murder by falsely claiming that she was an 18-year-old soldier, when she was actually a high school student who had just turned 17.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib responded to the attack by calling for an end to the “Israeli occupation.”

Trump’s Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt urged “donor countries” to “demand the PA answer for why their donor funds continue to be used to reward attacks.” Just like Danny Ganon’s killers, Rina’s murderers will receive a lifetime salary from the Palestinian Authority funded by foreign aid.

Since Trump cut off aid to the terror group, the money is mainly coming from the European Union.

“It’s time to stop burying our people,” Danny’s mother said after the latest attack.

But the only way that will happen is if money stops flowing to the terrorists. The Democrats have made it clear that if they win the presidential election, they will restore the flow of cash to the terrorists.

Joe Biden vowed to restore “security” funding to the Palestinian Authority. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand promised to restore the aid programs that “President Trump has cut.” Andrew Yang called for restoring aid to the terrorists. Senator Bernie Sanders and Peter Buttigieg went further, threatening aid to Israel.

None of them condemned Rina’s murder.

Rina’s murder and Danny’s murder, on the same day, four years apart, were funded by foreign aid.

A few days before Rina’s murder, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a speech in which the terrorist leader vowed, “Allah willing”, to destroy Jewish houses and capture Jerusalem.

"We shall enter Jerusalem – millions of fighters!" he ranted. "We will not accept their designation of our martyrs as terrorists. Our martyrs are the martyrs of the homeland. We will not allow them to deduct a single penny from their money. All the money will go back to them, because the martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners are the most sacred things we have."

Terrorists would continue receiving cash because terrorism was sacred to the Palestinian Authority.

Last week, Democrat politicians and liberal Jewish organizations fumed when President Trump accused them of disloyalty. The last time they were this outraged was when Israel barred Rep. Tlaib and Rep. Omar, overt opponents of Israel and supporters of terrorism against the Jewish State, from entering.

The murders at Ein Bubin are a harsh reminder that what is at stake here is not Twitter feeds. It’s lives.

The issue is not who said what about whom. It’s a bomb going off on a warm summer day. It’s a teenage girl dying in the dust. It’s the disloyalty of those American Jews who place their allegiance to abortion, to gay rights, and illegal migrants over the loyalty that teenage girl deserved from them.

Jewish Democrats who failed to stand up to their party to stop murders like these are not disloyal to a country; they are disloyal to Rina. And to Danny. And to thousands more like them.

While the Jewish Democrats attacked Israel over Rep. Omar, Rep. Tlaib and other anti-Semites, the Jews of Dolev, named after its sycamore trees, buried Rina and waited for her father to return home.

And Danny’s mother stands at the plaque marking her son’s death and wonders if there will be more.

We are all defined by our loyalties. Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib are loyal to their people. Many Jewish Democrats are loyal to the party even if it means accepting bigots like Omar and Tlaib.

That loyalty to leftist politics is disloyalty to the Jews being murdered by Omar and Tlaib’s people.

In the face of terror, there is only one loyalty that matters, either to terrorists or to terror victims.

At Ein Bubin, the water flows. And the residents of Dolev continue to hike into the hills, to swim in the spring and the pool, and to prepare for the next terrorist attack.

The spring is located in the land that once belonged to the tribe of Joseph.

“Blessed be the land of Joseph, before the Lord,” Moses preached in Deuteronomy 33:13, “with the blessing of the dew and the rain that comes down from the heaven above, with the blessings of the fountains of the deep which well up from the earth beneath.”

Faithfulness is like the springs that rise from the earth. Its loyalty breaks through all barriers.

Rina, her father, and her brother, were loyal not to a party, but to the G-d who gave them that land.

“Dvir said to me we will be strong, we will protect the people of Israel and the Torah of Israel, and together we will move forward,” Rabbi Eitan Shnerb said of his son.

That is a loyalty that the disloyal Democrats -- who cringe before Omar and Tlaib, who pander to terrorists, who believe in every leftist cause, but have no faith in a Jewish cause -- cannot imagine.

It is a true faith and allegiance that has endured for thousands of years. It is of an age with the land, with the hills and the springs beneath, with the truth of martyrdom and endurance, and the truth of G-d.

When Rabbi Shnerb spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu on the phone, he told him that his daughter was "a martyr of the people of Israel.” He asserted, “with God’s help we will grow stronger.”

That is what a loyal Jew sounds like. To hear what a disloyal one sounds like, listen to the media.


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Jewish Fawning of Omar Has Made Her More Aggressive

Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Most of the Jewish community has feverishly and piously supported last week’s Democrat-sponsored Resolution condemning President Trump’s remarks against Ilhan Omar. Omar, of course, is a notorious, unrepentant anti-Semite and daily demonizer of Israel. But she has become, for many Jews, a heroine, a civil rights star, a noble cause. Enjoying such support, Omar rewarded the Jewish community by immediately announcing, after the Resolution’s passage, a piece of legislation demanding that Congress vote in favor of BDS against Israel and her Jewish inhabitants..........

In one of history’s most confounding moments, too many in the American Jewish community are championing the very person who wants to destroy Israel and, no doubt, those Jews supportive of Israel.

Too many Jews see their protection, identification and fraternity with the intersectional groups, even those hostile and those calling Israel and Jews Nazis. It is a grave mistake.

They are blind to the particulars staring them in the face and view life through the generalizations they made decades ago. For example, they still fear American nationalism and conservative Christians, despite the positive sentiments and numerous acts of kindness from them toward the Jewish community throughout the last century. .............To Read More.........

6 Dem Senators Sell Out Jewish Terror Victims to Restore Cash to Islamic Terrorists

Terrorists need their guns more than their victims need surgeries.
 

April 24, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 

In 2002, Shmuel Waldman, an American from New Jersey, was shot while boarding a bus in Israel. The terrorist attack killed 2 people and left 40 injured. Among that 40 was Shmuel whose leg was blown apart, forcing him to undergo multiple surgical procedures, and leaving him suffering from PTSD.

The terrorist who shot him was Said Ramadan, a “police officer” working for the terrorists who run the Palestinian Authority. The attack had been planned by senior Palestinian Authority officials and the Palestinian Authority viewed Ramadan as a hero. Waldman joined other victims of terrorism in a lawsuit against the terrorist group, which is funded by American taxpayers, under the Antiterrorism Act.

Waldman v. PLO resulted in a record award of $655 million in damages against the Palestinian Authority terror network. But the verdict was thrown out because an American court lacked jurisdiction over the terrorist group even though the United States provides much of the cash flow that its terrorists rely on............But the real agenda revealed by their resolution shows that it’s not about humanitarian aid, but about restoring funding to the Islamic terrorists of the Palestinian Authority...........The six senators want the PA’s thugs to get paid, while their victims are left unable to sue them............To Read More.....

The Endless Ages of Purim

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 11 Comments Thursday, March 21, 2019@ Sultan Knish Blog

Tonight the celebration of the holiday of Purim begins. Purim is a Jewish holiday often neglected outside the more religious communities in America and the State of Israel because it commemorates an attempt to exterminate the Jews. And we all know that stopped being a problem long ago.

If Purim had culminated with some smart power diplomacy and a lesson on tolerance, liberal Jews might be more inclined to celebrate it. Unfortunately it ends with a genocidal madman being hung from a tree and the Jews fighting for their lives, winning and slaughtering their enemies.

And instead of feeling guilty about it, their descendants eat pastries, dress up in costumes and get drunk. At least those of their descendants who believe in survival instead of surrender.

Liberal Jews complain about the difference of values they have with Israeli Jews who insist on survival instead of surrender. They have an even bigger difference of values with the Jews of the Bible. And with Jews throughout history. Not to mention with the religion of the Jewish people.

The more liberal a Jew is, the less likely he is to celebrate the substance of his people's holidays as they conflict with his worldview and virtues. Moshe, the Maccabees and Mordechai don't seem like role models, not even if you rebrand them as community organizers and claim that they were fighting prejudice. There is something relentlessly bloody-minded about them. They care very little about a sustainable environment or LGBT rights, and instead walk through the corpses of their enemies with no regrets or apologetic winces. They stand up for their own people in a regrettable show of tribalism that perpetuates the cycle of violence instead of preaching about Tikkun Olam.

The story of the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, is the story of how Mordechai, the descendant of the first Jewish king of Israel, snubbed the Grand Vizier of a multicultural empire by refusing to bow to him. The obstinate Benjaminite so infuriated the Vizier that he plotted to kill all the Jews.

The smart thing to do would have been to bow to Haman. To invite him to AIPAC and let him give a pre-written speech and then give him a standing ovation. Then the important official might have been willing to help out the struggling Jews of the Second Commonwealth in Israel. Instead the narrow-minded fanatic offended Haman. And the angry Agagite decides to strangle the newly reborn Second Commonwealth of Israel and all the other Jews throughout the Persian Empire.

By refusing to bow to Haman, Mordechai had turned the formerly moderate Haman into an extremist. He had radicalized him. Jewish leaders hurried to reassure Haman that this fanatic was in no way representative of their values of tolerance and appeasement. Hadn't they attended the feast where the sacred vessels of their own people were used to serve wine and spirits to the mob? Rather than anticipating the return to their land at the end of the prophesied 70 year period of exile, they had cheered the brutish tyrant and made Sushan, his capital, into their new holy city.

A few tens of thousands had gone back to Israel, which the empire had repopulated with other peoples. There they struggled to survive, building half the day and keeping watch with their spears from the time the stars came out until the sun rose.  Most Jews however had remained behind in the Persian Empire. The struggling settlements of the Jews under the last of the prophets seemed like a futile proposition. The future belonged to empires, to Babylon, Persia and Rome. 

There was no room anymore for the sort of pride displayed by Mordechai. This was Haman's hour. Israel was gone and would never return. Rebuilding the Temple was a fool's dream. Why go off to some place your ancestors had come from, to slave in the hot sun, to choke on dust and sleep with a spear by your side expecting an attack from the nomads that had settled in the land?

In Sushan, the wine is plentiful, the bazaars are never closed and the empire will never fall.

There is no room for ancient dreams in the new empire. No room for old fables about slavery and freedom. Perhaps in ancient times some deity had liberated them from Egypt, but here in the modern present, it was the fall of the Babylonian Empire which had raised them up out of slavery and given them a place among the subject peoples of a new empire. They bowed to Haman and to the new order. They gave up their dreams and their religion and drank headily of the wine at the festival of the king. On their couches, they dreamed they saw a new world opening before them.

But Mordechai, narrow-minded fanatic that he was, only saw an old world. And he was determined to fight for it. He wasn't willing to let the old dreams die. To bow to Haman and to imagine, as so many Jewish leaders have done, that some accommodation with evil could be made on mutually beneficial terms. Mordechai was not a man of the Empire. He was an Ish Yehudi. A Jew.

He saw through the illusion of empires and new ages. He saw what his first ancestor had seen when he looked at the sky. He saw that the only true permanence was G-d. Nations would fall, empires would perish and even the stars would burn out. Only G-d would endure.

And so he did not bow. And Haman understood what his refusal meant.

Had Mordechai refused to bow out of personal pride, Haman might have had him and his family killed. But Mordechai refused to bow to Haman because he was a Jew. Haman sensed that the old man had seen through him. The emperor was naked. The old man in rags at the gates did not worship power. He might rule, but had no appetite for it. He worshiped only G-d.

Was it personal conviction? Haman investigated and learned that Mordechai was a member of an  obscure people. A people who do not worship the empire, but worship G-d.

And so they all had to die. The king was bribed. The letters were sealed and sent. The decree was death. It was all over.

But Mordechai had seen more than the nakedness of Haman, the crawling, insecure lackey, filled with hatred for the Persian ruler, flattering him and craving the ultimate power he could not have. He had seen the nakedness of the empire and the age. His eyes had seen past the horses and palaces, the ranks of scribes penning decrees, the harems, bureaucracies and armies.

Mordechai knew that all this would pass away. He had seen through the illusion that every age brings with it the end of history, a new age whose achievements break with the past and usher in a boundless future. The shadow crosses the sundial, the walls come crashing down and the new era of history ends up buried under the rubble of time.

Exile divides the Jewish people into Jews and New Age Jews. Jews wander on their meandering course through history concerning themselves with a past that modern people dismiss as myth and legend, more ancient than that story about Troy, and even more dubious.

The New Age Jews always see the coming of a new era of history, a bright and shining plateau that makes all those old moldy beliefs completely irrelevant. History ends and now a new age of human progress begins. The age of Alexandria, the age of Sushan, the age of Berlin. How, in such a new age, could they be expected to take a few bygone fairy tales retold by barbarians seriously? Such things weren't for enlightened people who were witnessing the peak of human civilization.

The old Jews know what the New Age Jews do not, that history has not ended, that the past is still with us and that it has sharp teeth. They know that Man has not changed, that his sophistication is still only a shell and that sooner or later the shell cracks. If it does not crack from within, then it is cracked from without. 

Those who feel time in their bones know the patterns of history, reading ages like constellations, can never lose themselves in one age or fall into the fallacy of a new era. They know that there is nothing new under the sun. Machines may come and go, but the world is a broken place because the hearts of men have not turned from their ways. And so they remember that every age carries within it the seeds of its ruin. They witness the ruin, climb out of the ashes and move on.

Liberal pieties embrace the new age, fixate on a final transformative era of history at the hands of messiahs who promise hope and change, who will uplift us and inspire us to make the world into a better place. But history never ends. That is the lesson of the Holocaust, of Purim and of countless other horrifying intrusions of the old into the new. The shining new era that begins with grand public spectacles and displays of the power and might of an empire, ends with corpses and men and women fighting and running for their lives.

Jews like Mordechai understand this. New Age Jews do not.

The confrontation between Mordechai and Haman was a collision between two different conceptions of history. It was a contest for the Jewish soul.

Mordechai defied Haman to remind the Jews, who had abandoned religion and nation for the new age of the Persian Empire, of the ugly and bloody truths under the hollow glories of that new age.

In every age, the Jewish soul is nearly lost and then redeemed. The people seem on the verge of vanishing, but then survive. Mordechai understood that the future of the Jews did not depend on the Persian Empire. It depended on their willingness to remember who they were. And so he defied Haman and brought on a Holocaust. And at the end of it, the Jews fought for their survival.

Purim, a holiday preceded by a fast kept by the men going into battle and their loved ones, is not about forgiving your enemies, progressive taxation or coming out of the closet. It is about survival. Not mere survival, but the skin of the teeth sense of how close we came, that moment of revelation which pulls back the curtains of the material world and reminds us of the impossibility of our survival under all the ordinary rules of the world that new ages are found on. It reminds us that behind the scenes of the brick and mortar, steel and steam world, is something else entirely. A force that breaks apart the towers of history, that saves us when we should have died, that has entrusted us with a mission. It reminds us of what the world is and reminds us of Itself and of what we are.

When you stand on the edge of death, life is a revelation. It is not our deaths under the Egyptian sun, the blades and bullets of a thousand empires and kingdoms, or the ovens of Dachau that we are obsessed with. It is that moment of survival. The revelation that even amid the horrors of all that we have witnessed and the terrible things that we had to do to survive, we have risen out of the ground, watched the flesh cover our bones and stood alive again upon the earth. Every time we survive, we are reminded of the fragility of the world and of our enemies who wielding every power and trick, have failed to destroy us. Each time we rise, we transcend the world, in confronting our dead, we confront our immortality.

It is not a purely joyous experience. The day of Purim is preceded by a day of fasting. Before the celebration comes a day of battle as the struggle to survive, the long decline into the abyss, the final desperate hours, suddenly give way to the upheaval of an impossible salvation. We remember the pain, the sense of the grave closing over us, the bodies lying everywhere, the certainty that we will be next. We accept the hopelessness of our situation and then we walk out of the grave and praising G-d, sit down to the feast.

This is Jewish history. It is an alien one to the New Age Jew who clings tightly to the new era and its rules, to its pieties and its mores, who scowls at the old ones for refusing to come and join the imperial festivities where the vessels of the temple are used to serve drinks and the mob toasts that the 70 years have come and gone, and still there is no chance of the Jews returning to their Jerusalem and reclaiming the lost history. "The past is the past," says the New Age Jew. "The past is the present is the future," says the Jew.

The feast of the New Age is the celebration of the end of history, a golden time when there is an unlimited bounty for all, where the wine and the free health care will never run out, where everyone will live together under one government in perfect brotherhood for all time. Many Jews are drawn to this feast, its golden vessels, its vast bounty and its glorious ideals. But then enters the Grand Vizier and some of them begin to frown for though he wears rich garments and speaks soothing words, he is a monster. They don't always know how they know it, but it is a nagging feeling that creeps into them that there is something rotten at the heart of this new age.

Most of them still bow to him, touching their heads to the floor, some even embrace him and celebrate his vision. They assure others that he is our friend, the only man who can realize the promise of this age, a wise and noble leader whose vision of change brings new hope. But one or two stay away from the feast and refuse to bow to him. Instead they look to Jerusalem, to where the battle between good and evil was once fought, and where it will be fought again. They know him for what he is.

The Grand Vizier knows that he must destroy them, must destroy them all, because they have seen through what he is, and they have seen through the shallow trappings of the golden age of fools. They know that there is more to the world than the might of men and the cornucopias of kings. They know that he is not all-powerful and when he looks at them, a scowl wrinkles his face, because he knows it too.

So he casts a lot, random chance in a random world where chance is supreme and the whim of every ruler outweighs the weight of history. The bills are signed, the laws are passed, the decrees go out, the officers from the vast imperial bureaucracy are assigned to inform every citizen that their new age will be inaugurated with blood. A people who are not a proper part of the multicultural empire of laws must be wiped out in a properly democratic fashion. Crowd-sourced genocide.

And then the Grand Vizier ends up dangling from a rope, the tanks break through to Berlin, the chariots fall into the sea, the mustachioed dictator dies in a bedroom in Moscow his clothes soaked in his own urine-- and everything has gone completely wrong.

It's an old story and a new story. We tell it over and over again because it is always happening. It is our story and the story of the world. It is the story we have accepted from our parents and it is the story that we will pass on to our children. It is the story of the blood sacrifice of the New Age that goes wrong. The sacrifice survives, bloodied and scarred, the New Age goes down to ruin.

Purim exists because Queen Esther asked the Jews of Israel to write of her for generations. The Persian Empire she had become a part of, the sacrifice she made by leaving the physical stream of Jewish history to be repaid by becoming a vital part of its spiritual history, would fall. Not in her time, but it would. The memory would be carried on by the Jews. Purim is that memory.

Jewish holidays celebrate the interconnection of Jewish survival and productivity with G-d.  The Second Commonwealth fell. Israel may fall. A thousand years from now, the world may little resemble anything we can imagine. And yet, somewhere, Jewish children will celebrate Purim as they have for thousands of years. They may even celebrate other holidays, still unimagined, other memories of salvation from horrors yet to come and remembrances of tragedies yet to be experienced. And if we look through history, as Mordechai did through Haman and the Persian Empire, we may be able to see them on the other side, the descendants of those who survived the whips of Egypt, the slave markets of Babylon, the armies of Rome, the sword and the flame, the concentration camp and the suicide bomber, celebrating a million holidays yet to come.

The ADL's #MeToo Moment

Posted by Daniel Greenfield Monday, February 18, 2019  1 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

When the Gillette ad condemning “toxic masculinity” aired, the ADL was quick to jump on board. The former Jewish civil rights group, whose priorities had sharply drifted away from Jewish issues, even put out a lesson plan for 8-year-old boys warning about “The trap of masculinity” and “aggressive” behavior.

It was an odd choice for a group whose CEO was under fire for an alleged physical assault on a woman.

In 2016, Ambassadors Against BDS brought together two ambassadors to the United Nations, America’s Nikki Haley and Israel’s Danny Danon, and many major Jewish groups for the first anti-BDS summit at the UN. It was an impressive accomplishment that used an anti-Israel forum for a pro-Israel event.

But behind the scenes a confrontation unfolded that would pit those organizations against each other.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s new left-wing CEO, was there and followed the lead of the pro-Israel speakers with a sharp denunciation of BDS. "Let me be clear: at its core BDS is an anti-Semitic movement," he declared. Like so many speakers who begin their sentences with, “let me be clear”, the former Obama official was actually disguising a hedge. Earlier that month, Greenblatt had written an essay arguing that the “vast majority of BDS supporters” were actually frustrated by the lack of peace.

At its core, he was suggesting, BDS might be anti-Semitic, but most of its supporters were good people.

Greenblatt’s ambiguity, condemning BDS while defending the “vast majority of BDS supporters”, was typical of the organization’s erratic course under his leadership. BDS supporters had appeared at ADL events and the formerly pro-Israel group had endorsed pro-BDS movements such as Black Lives Matter. The ADL had lobbied against anti-BDS legislation and condemned Jewish groups, like the Zionist Organization of America and Canary Mission, that fought unapologetically against BDS supporters.

The ADL’s double game had infuriated many in the Jewish community. And Greenblatt, a former Obama official with no experience running a Jewish organization, was equally angry. His vision of the ADL as an all-purpose social justice organization, that would act as a bridge, harnessing funds from Jewish donors for social justice causes while communicating Jewish concerns to the intersectional left, had failed.

Greenblatt couldn’t lash out at the leftist groups that had snubbed the ADL, so he directed his fury at the pro-Israel groups who saw his pandering to anti-Semites as a betrayal of the Jewish community.

And that fury allegedly reached its climax behind the scenes at the United Nations. What followed was a confrontation that has divided Jewish organizations and a scandal that took two years to reach its climax while exposing malfeasance in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization.

Ambassadors Against BDS had brought out an array of Jewish organizations and activists. The ADL was there, but so were its vocal critics at the Zionist Organization of America. The two groups didn’t just occupy different sides of the alphabet, but different sides of the political spectrum. And in the Trump era, the ZOA was every bit as relevant and pro-Israel, as the ADL had grown irrelevant and anti-Israel.

And Greenblatt allegedly decided to vent his rage on Liz Berney, the ZOA’s Director of Special Projects.

“He came up to my right side, put his arm around my back, grabbed me with his left hand on my left shoulder. He starts pushing me with the force of his arm down the hall. I was trying to get away from him, and he was restraining me,” Liz Berney related. “He’s continuing to hold my shoulder really tight, not letting me out of his grip, and basically dragging me down the hall.”

Women involved in pro-Israel activism have learned to expect not only harsh words, but physical force, from leftist advocates of peace and tolerance. But prior to Greenblatt’s alleged assault on Liz Berney, the most notorious incident had been the assault by UCLA Hillel Director Chaim Seidler-Feller on pro-Israel journalist Rachel Neuwirth and Allyson Rowen Taylor, a former vice president of StandWithUs.

“I saw my rabbi take swings to Neuwirth’s face and kicks to her legs," one eyewitness described.

"He came after me and lunged at me and started screaming and (a student) literally put his arms around him and pulled him off of me," Taylor related.

Chaim Seidler-Feller, an anti-Israel activist and a founding member of Americans for Peace Now, had attacked the two pro-Israel women at an event for Alan Dershowitz’s book, “The Case for Israel.”

Seidler-Feller later wrote a letter of apology, claiming to be, "deeply sorry that I hit, kicked and scratched you.” Despite this admission Seidler-Feller remained a respected Hillel figure. And many in the Jewish organizational world sided with him and came to his defense, rather than that of his victim.

Today, Seidler-Feller, remains affiliated with the UCLA Hillel, the Shalom Hartman Institute, the Wexner Heritage Foundation and many other Jewish groups. His name frequently appears on anti-Israel letters.

The same year that Greenblatt allegedly assaulted Liz Berney, the Jewish Journal celebrated Seidler-Feller’s “40 year legacy” at UCLA. There was a lesson here and it was a deeply troubling one.

If Liz Berney and the ZOA were to hold Greenblatt accountable, they would be swimming upstream. The celebration of Seidler-Feller and J Street’s more recent complicity in Ari Shavit’s sexual harassment showed how little accountability there was for leftist Jewish men who assaulted and harassed women.

The ADL’s #MeToo moment had arrived and the organization responded by denying everything.

“When ZOA leveled these charges privately to the ADL two years ago, we — despite their provenance — took them seriously, looked into the matter, and determined that no inappropriate conduct took place,” the ADL’s spokesman contended.

But, according to Morton Klein, the head of the ZOA, no one from the ADL had even spoken to the victim.

“ZOA has a long history of making outrageous claims against Jewish organizations they disagree with, including for many years, the ADL,” the ADL insisted. “That is why the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is currently conducting a disciplinary hearing about ZOA’s behavior."

Instead of sanctioning the ADL, the Conference of Presidents chose to go after the ZOA.

When asked for an apology for his alleged assault at a Conference meeting that July, Greenblatt allegedly shouted, “I’m never going to apologize to her.”

Nor did the Conference put any pressure on him to do so. Instead it claimed that it had no jurisdiction over an assault by a leader of one of its members, while instead focusing complaints by leftist Conference members collaborating with anti-Israel hate groups that they had been criticized by the ZOA.

The ADL, and more explicit allies of the anti-Israel left, HIAS and NCJW, often appeared more comfortable in the anti-Israel camp. The National Jewish Coalition of Women was particularly notorious for its backing of the anti-Semitic Women’s March. CEO Nancy Kaufman had earlier made it clear that her group would continue collaborating with anti-Israel activists. And yet the NCJW went unsanctioned.

“The ZOA cannot say that ADL helps anti-Semites join the anti-Israel lobby,” Jonathan Greenblatt had insisted. But, in a double standard, the ADL was allowed to accuse the ZOA of Islamophobia.

Meanwhile Greenblatt allegedly refused to show up and be questioned at the hearings. The ADL complained that the ZOA had violated confidentiality and attacked Liz Berney for going public with her story, claiming that it prevented resolution of the dispute. These tactics are typical of a cover-up.

The Conference of Presidents sided with the ADL and the anti-Israel left, allegedly violating its own due process rules by imposing sanctions on the pro-Israel group without hearing from the ZOA. Even though the ZOA had been attacked by some of these organizations, it was condemned by the Conference for the subjective metric of “the manner and tone of otherwise permissible or legitimate criticisms”.

The “manner and tone” of Greenblatt’s physical assault were left off the table.

The ZOA was accused in the Conference ruling of being “unnecessarily shrill”. It was a troublingly sexist choice of words when sanctioning the female victim of an alleged assault.

But the entire process had been troubling from beginning to end. In the #MeToo era, the Conference silenced a woman who claimed to have been assaulted while empowering an alleged abuser. It ignored the most damning issue at hand and instead engaged in tone policing in defense of the ZOA.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations had come face to face with the ADL’s #MeToo moment and had behaved as badly as the establishment had after the Seidler-Feller assault. Instead of using the incident as a teachable moment, it had enabled not only an alleged abuser, but the larger betrayal of the Jewish community by organizations collaborating with the anti-Israel Left.

And the two are inseparably interrelated.

When the umbrella group of major Jewish organizations won’t take the side of Israel against the Left, why expect it to take the side of a pro-Israel woman against the leftist leader accused of assaulting her?


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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