Jeremy Corbyn Won’t Take Anti-Semitism Seriously

After meeting with Jewish leaders about the problem of anti-Semitism in the British Labor party, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, announced that he is “absolutely committed to rooting out anti-Semitism from our party and our society.” But Stephen Pollard, judging Corbyn by his deeds rather than his words, argues that the Labor leader will continue to do nothing about the problem. He explains why:

[A]nti-Semites hate Jews because they see them as clever, sly, and wily. They think Jews secretly run the world. Hence the constant references to the supposed Rothschild control of the world’s banks, Jewish control of the media, and wars fought to further Jewish interests. This is where left-wing and right-wing anti-Semitism meet. The hard left regards the world as being run by a Western elite and by powerful interest groups, which need to be broken up by revolution. See how the anti-Semitic idea of the Jews fits into this?

[Such thinking] also explains part of the visceral hatred of Israel on the hard left. As a Westernized capitalist democracy, they regard it as another arm of oppression to be smashed. This is the milieu in which Jeremy Corbyn has existed for decades. He may not hold these views himself but he still doesn’t see anti-Semitism as a real form of racism. That is why the idea that Corbyn could ever act as a “militant ally against anti-Semitism,” as he put it recently, is so much hot air. . . .

Next week, one of Corbyn’s closest allies, the parliamentarian Chris Williamson, is due to speak at a meeting alongside Jackie Walker, who is currently suspended from the Labor party for alleged anti-Semitism. . . . All [Corbyn] need do is say to Chris Williamson: “If you go [to that meeting], I will denounce you.”

When [doing] that was put to him at the meeting [with Jewish leaders], Corbyn shrugged.

Read more at The Sun

More about: Anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labor Party (UK), Politics & Current Affairs, United Kingdom

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