Why Universities Have Ignored the New Anti-Semitism

Taking as his point of departure the late Robert Wistrich’s 2013 essay “The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism,” Charles Small examines the long history of the hatred of Jews and the causes of its durability. He also elucidates the connections between old-fashioned European anti-Semitism—manifested as religious or racial prejudice—and its newer incarnations in radical Islam and in the anti-Zionism of the far left. Most troublingly, Small points to, and explains, Western academia’s unwillingness to confront these manifestations of anti-Semitism even as it produces much scholarship on its older forms, as well as on the anti-Semitism of today’s far right. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 46 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

Read more at Tikvah

More about: Academia, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, History & Ideas

 

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