By Dan Siegel / Original to ScheerPost
Hi, my name is Dan.
My pronouns are he and him.
I went to Hebrew school for a year when I was 10 and was bored out of my mind.
I am REALLY outraged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and want to see the hostages freed.
May I proceed?
***
The student protests happening across the U.S. are the best thing that has happened in America in years. What’s even better is that they are happening at USC, the University of Texas, and Arizona State. Special thanks are due to the university presidents and politicians for their efforts to suppress the protests. Their failure to learn the lessons of the 1960s and ‘70s guarantees that the protests will continue and grow. Maybe Biden, Blinken, et al. will be faster learners than JFK, LBJ, and Nixon and will force Israel to end the genocide in Gaza before the death toll doubles again.
The complaints of antisemitism from my Brethren in the Jewish community and their new friends on the right are growing more hollow by the day. Fewer and fewer people remain confused by the blatant sophistry of those who try to equate antisemitism with opposition to Netanyahu, the Israeli government, or Zionism, either as a political movement or as manifested by the State of Israel. I have heard fewer antisemitic statements in the scores of pro-Palestine events I have attended than during a typical week at my Long Island junior high school.
If anyone wonders whether much of America’s Jewish community has been overcome by a mass psychogenic illness, events at a dinner for graduating Berkeley Law students a few weeks ago should answer the question definitively. A group of students associated with the school’s chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine politely disrupted the celebration as one of them, Malak Afaneh, attempted to speak about their outrage with conducting business as usual while the death toll in Palestine was creeping up to 35,000.
Within seconds, one of the dinner’s hosts, law professor Catherine Fisk, had an arm around Ms. Afaneh’s neck while trying to take her phone, from which she was reading, with her other hand. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Fisk’s husband, quickly joined the fray, insisting that Ms. Afaneh leave their home. Professor Fisk pointed out that she paid the mortgage on the property.
Ms. Afaneh and a group of supporters soon departed. The uproar that followed was at once predictable, disappointing, and yet even a little surprising. The chairman of the University’s Board of Regents and Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ denounced the protest, describing it as an inexcusable disruption of a private event at a private space. Much of the public debate over the incident has focused on the arcana of free speech, specifically whether the dinner, paid for by the university, should be considered a public forum, a limited public forum, or no forum at all. Litigation is likely.
More interesting is what this event says about the Jewish community. Edwin Chemerinsky is not the average law school dean. He is deservedly respected for his scholarship and advocacy for the Constitution, especially on free speech issues. So it was especially disappointing that his response to the dinner disruption quickly devolved into assertions of private property rights.
But Dean Chemerinsky is not alone. Events in Palestine and Israel since Oct. 7 have heightened the longstanding conflicts among American Jews who have otherwise consistently fought for the humanitarian and democratic values at the heart of Jewish tradition. One could easily make the argument that Judaism would not have survived in a hostile world for over 3,000 years if it had not united its followers around the progressive principles that explain why, even today, such a large proportion of those supporting Palestinian rights and condemning Israel are Jewish.
I have never been uncomfortable as a Jew supporting Palestinian rights. My grandfather Max grew up in Belarus in the late 1880s in a Jewish community split over whether Zionism or socialism offered a path to Jewish liberation. Max was sent from his small town to Minsk to study to become a rabbi. Instead, he joined the Jewish Workers Bund and supported the 1905 Revolution before emigrating to New York during the repression that followed.
My father became a cadre in the Communist Party, U.S.A, although he developed a soft spot for Israel late in his life. As a small child growing up in the Bronx in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I have no memory of my parents, who discussed politics constantly, ever talking about Israel. Much later, our family’s Passover seders emphasized Jewish solidarity with the oppressed and exploited people of the world and recognized the similarities between the Hebrews’ struggle to escape slavery in Egypt and modern liberation struggles.
The anger of many in America’s Jewish community towards protesting students and critics of Israel is both understandable and confounding. The Holocaust was the 20th century’s effort to eradicate the Jewish people and the continuation of European efforts since at least the Crusades. The attraction of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is easy to understand for refugees unwelcome elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, it became easy to ignore the fact that those pesky Palestinians already lived there and unsurprisingly reacted to the arrival of the Jews similarly to the reaction of the indigenous people of the Americas to the arrival of the Europeans 450 years earlier.
Splits in the Jewish community are not new. As far back as the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel condemned the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and materialism of the Jewish establishment and predicted its defeat.
Small wonder at the psychological crisis this history has created for American Jewry. The “never again” faction loudly worries that Palestinian liberation is incompatible with Israeli survival and sees growing American antisemitism behind every picket sign. But support for Netanyahu and his government contradicts everything valuable in Jewish tradition and divides Jews from their historic allies in this country and worldwide. People who have spent decades supporting the civil rights movement and efforts for peace and justice throughout the world are now alienated from their traditional values and beliefs.
Does anyone wonder where Einstein and Freud would stand in this debate?
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Dan Siegel
Dan Siegel is a civil rights attorney in Oakland.