Censoring British Rabbis Who Don’t Toe the Line on Israel

Some articles I’ve been reading recently:

On Jewish Revenge: An overview of themes of revenge in postwar modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature

A piece on bizarre forms of philosemitism in contemporary Germany: How German Isn’t It: The Ceremonial Performance of Jewishness in Germany

A piece on a very influential Bialik poem: The 120-Year Old Zionist Poem Still Being Used to Smear the Diaspora and Justify Atrocity

A tremendous D’var Torah on the concept of Ahavat Yisrael (Love of the Jewish People_ by Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein

Excellent podcast episode from Jewish Currents on the implications and efficacy of competing terms: Anti-Zionism/Non-Zionism/Cultural Zionism/Diasporism

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In the early 1960s the British Jewish community was rocked by what would come to be called ‘The Jacobs affair’. It concerned Louis Jacobs, a brilliant Manchester-born Rabbi who had trained at the Ultra-Orthodox Gateshead yeshiva and was often seen as a future Chief Rabbi. Jacobs held a several prestigious posts, as Rabbi Manchester Central Synagogue, Munks in Golders Green and the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater. He became a tutor at Jews College, the British Orthodox Rabbinical training school, with the expectation that he would eventually become its principal. The trouble was that Jacobs was an independent thinker. While he loved the trapping of United Synagogue Orthodoxy, its top hats and rabbinical vestments, he also venerated academic scholarship, and particularly the academic study of religion. From his studies, Jacobs came to accept that ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible, or the ‘Documentary hypothesis’ was essentially correct; that the Hebrew Bible was written by a range of authors writing in different periods, and later collated and framed by a group of scribal editors. Jacobs argued that it was necessary for modern-thinking Jews to accept the truth of such arguments; he believed that Judaism could continue to be practiced, albeit with a new understanding, that revelation had come from human hands. Jacobs suggested that the phrase ‘Torah Min Hashamayim’ still stood, it just depended on how one understood the ‘min’ (from).

If there was ever a credible case for Israel’s war on Gaza, the arguments have now evaporated

It’s time to stop the war. I admit I thought it was time to stop the war almost as soon as it began, but at that point I never thought it would still be raging, 6 months on. The time to end it is now.

I write here to those who have supported the war, if with caveats, and are to some degree continuing to do so. I’m assuming that the Israeli political and military leadership have some kind of rational arguments behind their actions. I appreciate that many believe that Israel is simply trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible, and the vast and terrible destruction we have seen in Gaza gives support to that view, but I think there is more going on than that. I still think that persuasion is important, even if forms of economic pressure are also needed, and that Jewish and Israeli supporters of the war are worth engaging with. If we want the war to end, and fast, we need to engage with them.