Confessions of a Recovering Anti-Semite

Growing up in southeastern Turkey, the first book Abdullah Antepli ever read was an illustrated children’s version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, given to him by his parents; before he was fifteen he had read Henry Ford’s The International Jew and Mein Kampf, both widely available in Turkish. Few Muslims today, adds Antepli, haven’t been exposed to the sorts of ideas about Jews found in such works. In conversation with Bari Weiss, Antepli—an imam and professor at Duke University—explains the seductiveness of anti-Semitism, its grip on the Muslim world, what can be done to repair this “Muslim shande,” and the need for even those like him who are fiercely critical of Israel to recognize Zionism’s benignity. He also explains how his embrace of religion helped him, in his own words, become a “recovering anti-Semite.”

Read more at Honestly

More about: Anti-Semitism, Arab anti-Semitism, Jewish-Muslim Relations

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