A Blood Libel at Vassar

Vassar College has been distinguishing itself lately by the frequency and ferocity of anti-Israel outbursts on its campus. Most recently, Jasbir Puar, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Rutgers University, appeared there to give a talk on “How Palestine Matters” that was by turns absurd and horrifying. Jonathan Marks writes:

In such a jargon-laden talk, one needs every now and again to jolt one’s audience awake. Complaining of a delay [by Israel] in returning the bodies of some of the Palestinians killed in the course of recent [terror attacks], . . . she reports without comment that some “speculate that the bodies were mined for organs for scientific research.” Because when you merely report unfounded rumors of Israelis harvesting the organs of young people, it’s technically not a blood libel, right? About this disgusting and irresponsible charge, the professors and activists [present] said not a mumbling word. Did I mention that the Jewish Studies program co-sponsored Puar’s appearance?

Puar also renews a charge she has made elsewhere, that the Jews are hogging the privilege of being victims of genocidal violence. “The Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population. They need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.” This is a remarkable move. Evidently realizing that it is hard to sustain the charge of genocide against the Israelis in light of the increasing Palestinian population, Puar adds the failure to commit genocide to the list of Israel’s crimes.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Academia, Anti-Semitism, Holocaust inversion, Idiocy, Israel on campus, Postcolonialism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society