When news outlets reported that the owner of the Atlanta Jewish Times had published an opinion column seemingly suggesting that Israel might be wise to assassinate President Barack Obama, the response from prominent American Jews was fast and furious.
Here was a Jewish newspaper publisher providing fodder for something the Anti-Defamation League regularly deplores as a pernicious anti-Semitic canard: that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States.
In his Jan. 13 column, Andrew Adler outlined what he said were three possible responses by Israel to Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon: a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah; a direct strike on Iran; or “three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”
The cascade of condemnations started pouring in almost as soon as the Israeli TV report aired. Its subject was an eight-year-old girl harassed by charedi men on the way to her Modern Orthodox girls’ school in the Jerusalem suburb of Beit Shemesh.
Israel’s prime minister and president vowed that Israel would not tolerate charedi violence against women, whether directed at schoolgirls or women on public buses. Israel’s opposition leader, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni, went to a demonstration of thousands held in Beit Shemesh on the Tuesday following the broadcast.
In the United States, too, the condemnations came fast and furious: Hadassah, the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee, the Orthodox Union (OU), the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), and even the charedi Orthodox umbrella body Agudath Israel of America were among the many groups that responded.
Sessions at the five-day biennial conference of the Union of Reform Judaism covered everything from “Yoga Shalom: The Embodiment of Prayer” to “Is America Abandoning Church-State Separation? Implications for the Jewish Community.”
The conference was a mix of old and new, reflecting some of the changes made by the movement over the last generation, and some it has not made. The weekday prayer services consisted of participatory singing, guitar playing and even storytelling and meditation — part of a revolution in Reform prayer led by the late singer-songwriter Debbie Friedman. The Shabbat morning service, however, was more formal and operatic, sending some congregants — mostly young people, but also gray-haired ones — out of the room and into the hallways to chat and fiddle with their mobile phones.
At the end of this year, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), will step down after 16 years at the movement’s helm. Last week, Yoffie sat down with Uriel Heilman, the JTA managing editor, ahead of this week’s Reform biennial, which runs through Sunday just outside Washington. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview.
Q. What are you proudest about your time leading the movement?
A. My first biennial, I talked about Torah at the center. That was less of a programmatic initiative than it was a theological and cultural assertion. We had to operate with a consciousness of Torah being fundamental to all we do. It was an important cultural change.
DENVER – After a decades-long partnership that saw the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) serve as the official, exclusive Zionist arm of North America’s Jewish community federations, the federation system is getting ready to date other partners.
For Jewish Agency officials, they say, it feels more like the beginning of a divorce.
On Tuesday afternoon, at the conclusion of this year’s General Assembly in Denver, the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) board overwhelmingly approved a plan that will dramatically transform the historic commitment of the federations to fund the agency.
During the Reagan era, he was Public Enemy No. 1 in the United States. Later, after his apparent cooperation in dismantling nonconventional weapons, he became an ally to President George W. Bush’s administration in the war on terror.
He called for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation called Isratine. He traveled overseas with a coterie of fetching female bodyguards. He slept in an elaborate tent.
Now that Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi appears on the verge of being cast into the dustbin of history—he was nowhere to be seen this week when rebels stormed his compound in Tripoli—the question in the Arab world is: Who’s next?
For decades after World War II, far-right political movements in Europe stirred up for Jews images of skinheads and Nazi storm troopers marching across the continent.
But in recent years, as European xenophobia has focused on the exploding growth of Muslims on the continent, right-wing anti-Semitism has been replaced in some corners by outreach to Jews and Israel. It’s part of an effort in far-right movements to gain broader mainstream support for an anti-Muslim alliance opposed to the notion of a multicultural Europe.
WASHINGTON – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that any peace deal with the Palestinians must grant Israel a military presence along the Jordan River, exclude repatriation of Palestinian refugees to Israel and leave Jerusalem as Israel’s united capital.
However, the Israeli leader said Tuesday in his address to a joint meeting of Congress, some Jewish settlements in the West Bank would fall outside Israel’s borders in a final peace deal.
Netanyahu did not appear to offer anything new by way of substance for his vision of peace with the Palestinians, saying Israel “would be very generous” about the size of the Palestinian state but providing few details.
For years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Americans waited in fear for the next strike by al-Qaida on U.S. soil. But the ensuing decade has seen no more major terrorist attacks in the United States.
Now, with the news that Osama bin Laden has been killed in Pakistan by U.S. forces, the question many American Jews are considering is whether the liquidation of al-Qaida’s leader makes a follow-up attack more or less likely, and whether Jews could be a target.
“More likely,” said Paul Goldenberg, director of the Secure Community Network, the American Jewish community’s security organ known by the acronym SCAN.
