Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—Just Not for Jews

Earlier this month, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Kamau Bobb, Google’s head of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” had written in a 2007 blog post that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war,” and other things in that vein. In response, Bobb issued a feeble apology, and Google moved him to some other department where he will deal with promoting science education. Christine Rosen puts the episode in context:

Perhaps, like the Catholic Church and its pedophile priests, Google deems itself a powerful enough institution that it too can protect its archbishops by reassigning rather than removing them, so long as they are acolytes of the new woke religion. Heretics, on the other hand, will face the fire.

This is consistent with the progressive left’s general approach to diversity and justice questions, and its willingness to treat anti-Semites with benign neglect because Jews are seen as “white-adjacent” or not as high on the victimization totem pole as other groups. It’s not as if companies like Google haven’t been enthusiastic supporters of other diversity initiatives.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, Google issued a lengthy statement outlining its commitments to racial equity in hiring and promotion as well as the money and support it had promised to the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet Google has said nothing about the recent spike in anti-Semitic violence, including brutal beatings of Jews on the streets of American cities, despite the fact that Jews are the targets of hate crimes in the U.S. far more frequently than other racial or religious groups.

[For the same reason], as of this writing, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and most other mainstream-media outlets . . . have completely ignored the Kamau Bobb story. They employ their own Kamau Bobbs, and that is sufficient for them to cast a blind eye on the matter.

Read more at Commentary

More about: American society, Anti-Semitism, Political correctness

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