A U.S. Congressman Calls Jews Insects and (Almost) Gets Away With It

Speaking at an event on Monday organized by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Hank Johnson, a congressman from Georgia, likened Jewish residents of the West Bank to termites. After being rebuked rather tepidly by the Anti-Defamation League, he responded via Twitter with something less than an apology, as David Wolpe writes:

This was [Johnson’s] tweet: “Poor choice of words—apologies for offense. Point is settlement activity continues [to] slowly undermine [the] two-state solution.” The ADL [replied] that they “appreciate” his clarification. That would have been far more convincing had the congressman apologized, but he did not. To apologize for “offense” is to say you are sorry that someone else feels the way they do. That is not an apology. “I am sorry I said something stupid and anti-Semitic”—that would have been a fitting apology.

These are not trivial issues. We are a half-century away from millions of human beings who were designated as “vermin” and killed. . . . To call Jews “termites” is base and vile.

You don’t know a good person by the fact that they never say anything objectionable. . . . But good people will be horrified when they realize what they have said. They will not apologize for someone else’s taking offense, but for their own insensitivity and cruelty.

That is what the congressman should have done. That is what he, pointedly, did not do. Draw your own conclusion.

Postscript: Yesterday evening, Wolpe announced that “Hank Johnson reached out to me and offered a full apology for the language, the imagery, and the hurt he caused.” Johnson also sent the ADL a tweet reading “I sincerely apologize for the offensive analogy. Period.”

Read more at Time

More about: ADL, American politics, Anti-Semitism, Politics & Current Affairs, Settlements

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