Don’t Blame Germany’s Commissioner for Jewish Life for Telling the Truth about Anti-Semitism in His Country

In an interview on Saturday, Felix Klein, Germany’s “commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against anti-Semitism,” stated that he “cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere or at all times in Germany” in light of the frequency of anti-Semitic attacks. German public figures, led by the popular newsmagazine Bild, have loudly criticized Klein and encouraged German Gentiles to wear kippot in solidarity. Defending Klein, Andrew Mark Bennett contends that he was not encouraging cowardice but simply stating the facts. Bennett has less patience for the wave of sympathizers:

“The kippah belongs to Germany,” declared Bild’s editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt. It’s a nice sentiment, but do the facts support such a claim? And what about the human being wearing the kippah? Does he belong to Germany, too? Even if he does not belong, what about the duty of the state to ensure his religious freedom and personal security? . . . Bild offered a cut-out kippah for Germans to wear in solidarity with Jews. The handful who don the cartoonish paper kippah can congratulate themselves for supporting Jewish life in Germany—without ever bothering to engage with an actual kippah-wearing Jew. This kippah-without-a-Jew is stripped of its traditional (and gendered) significance into a prop for asserting tolerant liberalism.

I do not need or want anyone to rebuke Klein. I want Germany to recognize, exactly as Klein has done, that the average kippah-wearing Jew has hidden his kippah under a hat in Germany for years. . . .

Today, various “neutrality” laws in Germany prohibit state employees in schools and in courts from wearing a kippah in the performance of their public-facing duties. The push for such provisions, buoyed by judicial approval, is only growing. The imagined need for “strengthening religious and ideological neutrality” is apparently of vastly greater importance than a Jew’s religious freedom. Furthermore, these laws tell us plainly that our kippah is not neutral, [but rather] alien to German law and education. . . .

This state intolerance of the kippah is not unconnected from the anti-kippah threats in the streets.

Read more at Verfassungsblog

More about: Anti-Semitism, Freedom of Religion, German Jewry, Germany

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