Sephardic Heritage Update

A collection of current Essays, Articles, Events and Information

Impacting our community and our culture
A Publication of the Center for Sephardic Heritage

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Education is improving the lives of others and leaving your community and world better than you found it.” -Marian
Wright Edelman

Contents 29 June 2011

Sephardi, an Exile Within
Sephardi, an Exile Within By: David Ramírez
By: David Ramirez
In the life of every individual a person is faced with an array
Chaim Amsellem: Toward a Sephardic Spiritual of choices, which determine his or her decisions.
Revival in Israel? Sometimes some of these choices are forced on the
By: Misha Uzan individual because of the circumstances, other times these
options are freely elected according to the goals one sets
Israel and the ‘M’ Word in life. As many Jews of our era, I was not raised in a
By: Philologos religious milieu. I became religious by my own choices,
which gave me an advantage from the Jews who had been
Activist Jews Use Mimouna Festival to Protest raised religiously, who are trained from a young age to
Ultra-Orthodox Conversion Stance believe and behave a certain way. The advantage was the
By: Yair Ettinger freedom to look at things critically from the outside in, and
rationalize every step of the way.
Killing Jews in the Balkans, Saving Jews in the
Balkans Being already a Jew of Sephardi stock, the decision as to
By: Edward Serotta the tradition I was to follow was an intuitive and natural
option. However, I – as many other Sephardim of my
Arab Spring? Not Quite generation – really did not know what it meant being a
By: Yoram Ettinger Sephardi. Most of the books available in print gave a partial
and disjointed understanding of the subject, not to mention
The Seder Night Question these were hardly authored by a Sephardi, both in ethnic
By: Amalia Rosenblum and cultural terms. The situation was very confusing
because nothing was coherent; nothing actually made
Israel Unveils First ‘Sin-Free Yiddish sense.
Smartphone’
By: Bangkok Post Staff My Sephardic Rodhesli synagogue, which I had been
attending since I became religious, had gone through a
Meet Bart Ehrman: A One-Man God Fraud process of abandonment of tradition long before I was
Squad born. It did not take a rocket scientist to realize that much
By: Anneli Rufus of the Ottoman Sephardic tradition had not been carried
over by the subsequent generations, which I had to
Why Being a ‘Foodie’ isn’t Elitist understand it in the context of cultural adaptation to Anglo
By: Eric Schlosser American culture and issues of acceptance within the
larger American Ashkenazi community and Israeli Zionism,
A Budget for the 21st Century as well as certain cultural particularities the synagogue’s
By: Paul Ryan founders already came with, a baggage of its own already
developing during the 19th c. which included the
Ultimate Spoiler Alert denouement of rabbinic norms. Though newer generations
By: David Brooks of the community’s Rhodesli-Turkish Sephardim had fled
the community through intermarriage with Ashkenazim,

1
migration to Israel, or conversions to ultra-Orthodoxy, the
older congregants maintained the traditional Sephardic
marks of dignified abnegation, humility, happy
contentment, hospitality and kindness very much
reminiscent of my own grandparents and family back in
Mexico – one contrasting picture to the aggressiveness,
intrusiveness, smugness and inhospitable environment of
the neighboring Ashkenazi religious community.
At one point, as many other Sephardim of my generation
wanting to “uplift” their spiritual experience, I migrated to a
“more observant Sephardic” community. At the suggestion
of a fellow community member who was doing the same, I
did so, but such community was precisely located at the
heart of the Ashkenazi religious community. The rabbi
there was of Persian Jewish stock, trained in a Lubavitch
environment since his youth. The members of this new
community, some of whom had migrated from the older
Sephardic community for the same reasons I had, were
very much at the mercy of what the rabbi said. Its
environment had little to do with my older synagogue. In
the course of time, they had adopted the same smugness
and inhospitality characteristic of their Ashkenazi religious
neighbors, with the added bonus of a sense of righteous
superiority at the idea they were doing something
“right,” unlike the city’s mother Sephardic “slipshod”
community three miles away.
The worst part of that experience came during services and
the third appointed meal of Shabbat, where it was
commonplace – and perhaps still is – for small altercations
to break out and discuss money and business matters at
the table, something I hardly – if ever – experienced in my
older community. Historically, traditional Sephardic
communities and families have been particularly attentive
to dérekh eress, a Hebrew term for “good manners,” so
experiencing the uncouth attitudes in the new place,
especially during the Sabbath when such things should not
happen at all, was particularly shocking to me. Had it not
being for an angel, a young fellow Jew of Persian stock
and his extended family with whom I shared many holidays
and Sabbaths, who took seriously the lessons of kindness
and hospitality from Abraham our ancient Patriarch, that
interim of my life would have been a complete waste. Were
it not for the countless times we spent together at his
family’s table, with an array of Persian and Middle-Eastern
dishes and desserts complimented with the lively and ease
of conversations, the period of my life would had remained
very disconcerting; a true Lot in the midst of Sodom.
The breaking point for me came at hearing the
community’s rabbi say in one of his regular lessons that
one should recite the blessings over fruit and vegetables
because it “liberated” the human souls trapped in them.
Such thing not only stroke me of superstitious and naïve,
but also completely against the purpose of the
berakhót (Jewish blessings).
Not soon after this I migrated back to my older community.
By this time, my older community had seen some changes.
2
Having hired new rabbis to replace the retiring one, my
community was able to see renewed commitment to
Jewish observance.
All the while through these phases, I had discovered by
chance the writings of Hahám José Faúr, a Syrian rabbi of
Sephardic extraction who had been working all his life to
explain Rabbinic Tradition to the modern mind. This
discovery was watershed, momentous. For the first time in
my reading experience Jewish tradition made all the sense,
where all its intellectual infrastructure was neatly
organized, a seedbed of ideas and legal principles
explained with documented accuracy, working as loci (a
collection of departing points) upon which the entire
civilizing-organism of Judaism is based. Even though such
Judaism as transmitted by Faur was no longer part of our
contemporary lives, it was nonetheless a burning flame that
kept me from falling into the skepticism, cynicism, cul-de-
sac perplexity, convenient hypocrisy, awkward
complacency or outright abandonment of tradition as
experienced by so many Jews of our age.
The time of my life when it all came together to maturity
was when I was invited to be part of a start-up Spanish &
Portuguese synagogue, where I was able to get in direct
touch with a rabbi who carried this Western Sephardic
tradition. Myself being coming from this traditional stock, it
was a very meaningful part of my life, where I was able to
reaffirm many family traditions that had been lost through
assimilation. This experience made me realize the
importance of Sephardic tradition first hand, their meanings
and objectives, as well as having found a new respect to
community leaders and communal rabbis everywhere.
Managing a community is not an easy task, beset with the
brutal realities of human existence. And despite the
heartache, it was for the first time in my life where I was
able to experience a true freedom and the vision that things
can be changed for the better, starting from a humble
seedling, away from the baggage current world Jewry is
suffering from literary decades of accommodation to
secular-Zionists prerogatives and recent cliquey religious
awakenings, which have created an untold unprecedented
confusion in the minds of our young generations.
Though often criticized for being an idealist, seeking and
longing for a Sephardic Judaism no longer in existence or
one impossible to “resurrect,” my peers often do not seem
to understand that my enthusiasm should not be confused
with the lessons ancient Sephardic Judaism carries for our
contemporary lives. It seems especially uncomfortable to
them that one can show a viable alternative, which often is
in opposition to what they were raised to believe and hold
dear in their hearts.
One thing I often heard was that there was very little
difference between the two dominant modes of Jewish
tradition, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Perhaps – but only
when mediated by secondary sources and readings by our
contemporary scholars. But when one gets to read first
hand the works and lives of Sephardic rabbis and
community leaders, one cannot help but to realize that
Sephardic Judaism, heir to the Geonic-Babylonian
academies, is a very different parallel universe from what
we are now accustomed to see and hear – even in the
post-Kabbalist debacle. The slight-of-hand attempt to
collapse differences, though at heart noble, it only achieves
to dampen inquiry.
Now, when I hear that again, I think who would ever say
that the English and Italians have little difference among
each other, despite both being Europeans? Anyone with
the slightest understanding of both cultures would look at
you as if you were crazy, besides the English and Italians
being personally insulted. But somehow the current
discourse has gotten away with that seemingly benign lie,
purposefully ignoring that both of our traditions developed
contingent on our historical experience, and how each
decided to deal differently with the realities thrown at us.
What is so threatening about a Judaism that demands both
secular and religious erudition from its rabbis? What is so
threatening about a Judaism that allows each individual his
or her personal space for growth and development? What
is so threatening about a Judaism that does not appreciate
populism and banal superstitions? What is so threatening
about a Judaism that dares to speak its mind, and though
disagreeing, always holding a civility of respect and mutual
freedom of expression? What is so threatening about a
Judaism that views our legal texts through the lenses of the
contingent realities, and not through some high-pedestal a-
priory idealism? What is so threatening about a Judaism
where the community is in charge of its own affairs through
the highly regulated medium of its communal Constitution
(Ascamot), independent from the personal interest and
ideologies of the community’s rabbi? What is so
threatening about a Judaism that maintains ethical principle
over personal ideology?
What is so threatening about all that, and whole lot more
that Sephardic Judaism represents, is the issue of giving
up control. Most of our people do not realize how much our
lives are being controlled by forces which we cannot truly
understand, yet we all have a latent discomfort deep within
ourselves which we cannot exorcise.
Choosing to live by the example of our ancestors, who very
much imitate the Biblical personalities such as Abraham,
Jacob and Moses, is a freedom who sets us in exile once
more, from the confusion brought in by the controlling
idolatry and tyranny of Pharaoh.
Being true to Sephardic Judaism today means to be in
Exile, and exile within another Exile of the historical Galut.
Yet one, despite its desert daunting loneliness, where we
as individuals can experience a peace of mind, freedom of
expression, and finally a liberation from perplexity.
3
Chaim Amsellem: Toward a Sephardic Spiritual
Revival in Israel?
By: Misha Uzan
A year ago he was nearly unknown, but within a few
months he made headlines, defied his own Shas party, and
was exposed to criticism from the orthodox Haredi world.
They are talking about him for a possible new party, and
whether we like it or not, we can only emphasize his
audacity and more, in fact, use his position to appreciate
and reflect on the relationship between Judaism and Israeli
Zionism.
Chaim Amsellem is a rav (rabbi) and Israeli MP elected
under the banner of the Shas Party for the first time in
2006. He was born on October 12, 1959 in Oran, Algeria,
of a family recently having emigrated from Morocco (recall
that Morocco became formally independent in 1956). At the
age of six months as Algeria was in full blown war his
family moved to Lyon. He lived there until age 11, then his
family moved to Israel. Chaim Amsellem is francophone.
The journey of a rabbi
Amsellem is foremost a rabbi: he graduated in 1990 and
was ordained a rabbi in 1993. He became the rabbi of
Moshav Sharsheret in the northwestern Negev, then the
neighborhood rabbi in Netivot proper, a small town north of
Moshav. He was also director of a yeshiva (religious study
center) and Kolel Baba Sali (named after the famous
Sephardic rabbi) in the same city. Then he moved to
Jerusalem in the Har Nof neighborhood and founded
another Kolel. He still lives with his wife and eight children.
He also officiated at the Sephardic community of Geneva in
Switzerland. Amsellem is primarily an intellectual rabbi, he
is the author of several books (including one on Zera Israel,
the seed of Israel , meaning the Jewish origin). His work
follows, he said in an interview with Jerusalem Post, in the
tradition of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’ mentor, who has
read, agreed and often cited in his own works.
Rabbi Amsellem says, to whoever still wants to hear it, that
he has always been loyal to Rabbi Yosef, former Sephardi
chief rabbi of Israel, who ordained him, and who he always
perceived as a great scholar and the great inspirer of the
"Sephardic spiritual renaissance" in Israel.
Along with Nissim Ze'ev he is the only ordained rabbi to
serve in the Shas group in the Knesset. That said, since
2009, although elected to the eleventh seat on the Shas list
in 2006 and tenth in 2009, Chaim Amsellem expressed his
differences with the party leadership on several sensitive
levels.
The comings and goings of Shas
To understand the emergence of Amsellem’s criticism, we
must retrace the history of Shas. The political party was
born in 1984 just before national elections. It was created
on the initiative of the late Rabbi Eliezer Menachem
Schach, a leader of the current Lithuanian Ashkenazi
Haredim, not Sephardic, excluded from the Ashkenazi
ultra-Orthodox party after a power struggle, which found
itself without a label thereafter. At the outset therefore, the
Sephardic Shas is a party created by Ashkenazim. Its
officers are from the ultra-Orthodox world and were
schooled in traditional Ashkenazi yeshivot, called
Lithuanian. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was named official leader
but it was Schach who made the major decisions.
As an orthodox party, it has religion at the source of its
decisions which are then applied to society, that is to say
that religion takes precedence over politics. As such
Ovadia Yosef is what might be called the spiritual leader
while others are responsible for representing the party
politically in the Knesset.
In the case of Chaim Amsellem, he served as Rabbi Meni
Mazuz's representative. At the time, from 1984 to 1988, it is
therefore Itzhak Perez (born in Morocco, raised in Israel
and became Orthodox in the Lithuanian sense) who takes
the reins of the party, that is to say its political wing. Its
original goal, and that of Yosef, is to bring together the
moderately religious Sephardic with the traditionalist
lifestyle practiced by the ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian school.
Therefore, the goal is to create a Sephardi Haredi world.
Everything changes with the arrival of Arieh Deri at the
head of the party and what some have called the ‘Deri
revolution’(1).
In 1988 a break occurs between Yosef and Schach.
Schach decides to create Degel Hatorah, an Orthodox
party without Sephardic Jews. Seen as an affront, Ovadia
Yosef gets rid of Peretz, supported by Schach, and
appoints Arieh Deri as the head of Shas. Deri then leads
the Shas as a party with an ethnic rather than religious
claim, and in fact as the great Sephardic party of the
country. Taking votes from secular voters or from the
traditional Likud party, Shas managed to get 17 seats in
the Knesset in 1999. Deri distanced himself from Ovadia
Yosef’s original idea of creating a Sephardic orthodoxy,
and sees himself more generally as a defender of Oriental
Jews.
The success is such that Ovadia cannot honestly oppose it.
That being said, every revolution comes to an end. And it
occurs in 1999 when Eli Yishai heads the party in place of
Deri, highly disturbed by problems of corruption that landed
Deri to prison. Yishai puts an end to Deri’s ethnic
orientation to return to the original design, and devotes
himself more fully in the defense of the ultra-Orthodox body
in its entirety. The June 2010 Emmanuel School episode
was the point of no return for Shas. Faced with a case of
conflict between the Israeli Supreme Court, seen as
secular, and the Ashkenazi Haredi world, even though the
charge was ethnic discrimination against Sephardic
students within an ultra-Orthodox school, Shas chose the
Haredi camp. In their defense, Shas, like the Lithuanians,
4
denies ethnic discrimination but justifies the exclusion of
pupils in question for reasons of insufficiently orthodox
religious practice. If there had been real discrimination is
irrelevant. By its approach Shas approves of the ultra-
Orthodox Lithuanian lifestyle and believes that the
Sephardim must comply. Shas has returned to the
principles that have established it
Amsellem’s Criticisms
This is where Chaim Amsellem enters the story. Since
spring of 2009 he showed his disagreement with this form
of ultra-Orthodox thinking. In many places Amsellem’s
views are shocking. First, there is the military. Although he
did not serve himself (the army would not have needed
him) most of his children did serve. Within the leadership of
Shas it is often the contrary. Because the party has aligned
itself with the hard-line, ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists who
refuse military service and even consider the army as the
most concentrated place of secular heresy. Amsellem
believes instead that it is the duty of every Jew to serve his
country and he is willing to use the Torah to prove it.
Similarly he calls on the Orthodox world to go to work. He
categorically rejects the idea that Torah study is the only
thing that matters. “If this is how the Lithuanians see
things”, he said, “it was never part of the Sephardic
tradition, and it is even a "deviation" which does not
conform to Judaism, which recommends that Jews feed
their families by their own means. The Orthodox world has
instead created a "vicious circle of poverty”, he says.
With another of his criticisms Chaim Amsellem becomes
the defender of conversions in the army, criticized and
rejected by the Orthodox rabbinate. The intransigence of
the Israeli ultra-orthodox position is such that it intends to
reject Orthodox conversions performed abroad and
therefore refuse converts to make aliya (despite the fact
that the Supreme Court recognizes conversions of the
liberal movement as well as the Masorti movement to
immigrate to Israel). Again, Amsellem takes a sympathetic
stance towards those who serve the people of Israel, that
fight for it, and sometimes die for it, who are of Jewish
descent but whose mother is not Jewish.
The former rabbi of Sharsheret also evokes the failure of
orthodox teaching. In Israel there are four totally different
formats of teaching, depending on whether the school
follows secular, Arab, Haredi or national religious
instruction. Amsellem denounces Haredi education in Shas
schools, which neglects general subjects of instruction.
According to him, in order to understand the Torah, the
Talmud and Jewish texts one needs to obtain a well
rounded education. Very sharp in his understanding of the
texts he invokes traditional works such as Massekhet
Shabbat, Masseket Sukkah , Masseket Erouvim or
Masseket Kil'ayim, which according to him are not within
reach without a comprehensive understanding of general
knowledge.

Also in general, Chaim Amsellem severely criticizes the
ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian line, which is, according to him,
that followed by Shas. By showing it as too harsh, too
severe, too narrow and, after all, contrary to Jewish
tradition, he appeals to humanistic values derived directly
from the Hebrew Bible. We owe him this sentence: "The
Jewish people must be an example, for themselves, of
tolerance, of acceptance of the other, and of non-
persecution of others for their beliefs" (2).
All of Amsellem’s statements about military service,
conversions, teaching or work for the ultra-Orthodox have
not appealed to Shas. In an interview with Israeli
newspaper Maariv in August 2009, Amsellem described
the Shas party as "Sephardi-Ashkenazi" for submission to
the Lithuanian spiritual leadership. Since then, things have
just gotten worse and worse. By the end of 2010, the break
was sealed; Amsellem was excluded from Shas, insulted,
and threatened with total exclusion from all ultra-Orthodox
synagogues.
Amsellem, and then what?
Chaim Amsellem's speech, by contrast, was rather well
received by the secular establishment, religious Zionists, or
simply the non-orthodox. Amsellem himself is said to be
supported by thousands of people, having received letters
from all over the world, from Israel and from some parts of
the Orthodox public. Still, in order to be elected, he needs a
list, a label, a party capable of putting together members
and a program. Mere sympathy to his criticism of the
Orthodox way of life vis-à-vis the state of Israel that was
able to inspire secular or the religious-Zionist public is not
enough to make him a viable candidate. Amsellem said
himself that he went into politics because he was
convinced that the religious sphere was not sufficient to
change Israeli society. By cutting himself off from the
support of Shas, did Chaim Amsellem shut the only door
open to a Sephardic Haredi like him or have other doors
already opened?
What will happen to Chaim Amsellem? The future will tell.
Several options have been discussed in the Israeli media
and the rabbi said himself that he had had several
proposals. There has been talk of an alliance between
Aryeh Deri (who is trying to re-establish himself after two
years in prison) and Chaim Amsellem. We saw that the
revolution led by Sephardic Deri had what it takes to bring
him somewhat closer to the speech by the former member
of Shas, which defends the Sephardic religious tradition as
less radical and attacks the Lithuanian Ashkenazi lifestyle.
One point however that cannot not be ignored and is major:
the Rabbi’s Zionism.
A Haredi Zionist?
Without any hesitation, Chaim Amsellem has repeatedly
said that he is a Jew, a Haredi and a Zionist. In his
5
interview with the Jerusalem Post he said: "I am someone
who believes that the rebirth of Israel is one of the biggest
and most obvious miracles that the Holy One, blessed be
He, has done for us. This is our state. We must contribute.
"These few sentences are enough to understand the nature
of the gap that separates Amsellem from the Lithuanian
leadership. Seeing the state of Israel as a divine gift, a
miracle, a state registered not only in history but in the
miracles of God, Amsellem holds the discourse of a
religious Zionist, those known as Dati-Leumi, the national
religious. Their Zionism and Judaism go together. This is
why a religious Zionist party as Ha-bayit Ha-yehudi has
been in contact with him. Without going into details of the
religious Zionist ideology, one can see however, that
Amsellem is distancing himself from the ideology of
Ashkenazi Jews of Lithuanian inspiration. We need to
recall that this type of Judaism is not Zionist. This anti-
Zionism is the cumulative radical rejection of secular Israeli
society, which largely explains the ultra-orthodox positions
on labor, education or military service. Conversely, it is a
concept that explains Amsellem’s Zionist positions on
conversions or things relating to the State of Israel.
In the case in point, that of Amsellem is characteristic of
the complex relationships that govern Judaism, its different
religious traditions, and Zionism. In the Ashkenazi world,
the Orthodox group which has a history rooted in Zionism
is embodied in the political world by Agudat Israel (apart
from this religious Zionism which has its own ideology and
its construction, led by Rabbi Kook), but this trend is less
straightforward in the Sephardic world. In the same way as
Sephardic orthodoxy is less rigorous in its foundation on
the societal level that the Lithuanian Haredi, its Zionism is
more natural. In his book, Jews and Arabs (Paris,
Gallimard, 1974), the Franco-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi
illustrates this fact by stressing that the Sephardic Jews
believed in the Jewish state and the recovery of Jewish
sovereignty well before the Zionists and the European
Zionist political movement in itself (3).
Having later immigrated to Israel (except mainly for
Yemenis), the Zionist ideological conception of Agudat
Israel was almost totally inconceivable to Sephardic Jews.
Although more attached to religion and tradition that
secular Ashkenazim, this population was not ultra-
Orthodox as in the Lithuanian manner. By wanting to bring
the lifestyle of Sephardic Jews closer to the Ashkenazi-
inspired ultra-Orthodox, Shas also brought them closer to a
form of anti-Zionism that was unknown to them.
However, even today, these religious and ideological
differences (in their relationship to Zionism) can still be
found in everyday life. The strength of Zionism and the
reality of helping Israel, few have poured into the radical
anti-Zionism, at most a form of abstention to Zionism, a-
Zionism (4). In this sense, Shas has failed and Amsellem is
a symptomatic component. Irreproachable in terms of
religious orthodoxy, he has not embraced anti-Zionism nor
the lifestyle, that is to say the refusal to work within the
State of Israel, the rejection of any secular education, or
the systematic opposition to the defense of the country.
In a 2006 essay, David Andre Belhassen and Gerard
Nissim Amzallag, two researchers in Canaanite archeology
and history, consider the loss of reference of religious
Zionism after disengagement from Gaza. If a two-state
solution were accomplished even temporarily the religious
Zionist movement would be challenged in its very
foundation - that is to say the perception of the state Israel
as part of an integral Messianic process that would return
the whole land of Israel to the people of Israel - could die
or, at any rate, diminish. Chaim Amsellem’s positions,
which derive from the Haredi world, show that Zionism in
the religious world still has something with which to revive
itself.
For more by Misha Uzan see his blog
http://mishauzan.over-blog.com
Notes
(1) An expression used in a particular section of Aryeh
Dayan for the Jerusalem Report in June 2010
(2) Quoted in the Jerusalem Post, January 2011
(3) On this point see my university thesis, page 81,
available at the IEP of Paris: Misha Uzan, Images of Israel
and understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict by French
intellectuals, 1967-1982, Paris: IEP, 2007. This thesis has
been summarized and extended in my article published in
Controversies, No. 7, Israel and French intellectuals, from
1967 to 1982
(4) On this term see even my university thesis and my
article Israel and French intellectuals, from 1967 to 1982.
(5) David Andre Belhassen, Gérard Nissim Amzallag, La
Haine now? Zionism and Palestine. The seven traps of
conflict, Paris: Editions de la Difference, 2006.
Translated from the French by Aimee Dassa Kligman
From Un Echo d’Israel, February 24, 2011
Israel and the ‘M’ Word
By: Philologos
For those who do not recall Philologos and his anti-
Sephardi racism, please see the special newsletter we did
that was occasioned by his articles on the term “Arab Jew”:
http://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_threa
d/thread/b4d6d3a2672ee62f#
6
In this article there are no surprises. We have, yet again,
more anti-Sephardi bias cloaked in a pseudo-scientific
garb. The Moroccans are responsible for their own
ignorance and Israeli Ashkenazim are all well-meaning
liberals. I am particularly taken with the blatantly racist
characterization of the Hebrew pronunciation of the Mizrahi
Jews. The Ashkenazim, who pronounce Hebrew as if it
was a variant of German or French, are seen as the
standard here. The Sephardic pronunciation is identified
as “guttural” and as “Arab” – the veritable kiss of death
from a Zionist-Israeli point of view.
The Ashkenazim have even tried to discriminate against
Sephardim based on their incorrect pronunciation of the
Hebrew language!
It is all you need to know about how Ashkenazi Jews close
ranks when they are accused of being racists. They
proclaim that they are innocent of the charge and that,
anyway, the Arab Jews are primitives anyway.
Poor Mr. Herzog! How terrible these attacks against him
are.
And, for good measure, those who raise the issue of
Ashkenazi racism are agitators who are not speaking in
good faith.
This is how the Ashkenazi discourse works. Deny the
truth, obfuscate, and then blame your victim.
DS
On the face of it, there was no need for anyone to be
embarrassed by the much publicized WikiLeaks disclosure
that Israel’s former minister of housing, Labor Party
member Yitzhak Herzog, told an American diplomat in
2006 that ex-defense minister and then Labor Party head
Amir Peretz was perceived by the Israeli public as being
“inexperienced, aggressive, and a Moroccan.” Herzog was
commenting, after all, not on his own opinion of Peretz, but
on how the latter, so he thought, was perceived by many
Israelis who did not intend to vote for him in the upcoming
national elections. There was nothing wrong with this,
which can’t be said for Herzog’s hasty and politically
correct disclaimer that he couldn’t possibly have said such
a thing. He would have looked better had he simply
declared: “Of course I said it. Why shouldn’t I have?”
Inasmuch as there is nothing reprehensible in calling
someone inexperienced (Peretz, though a seasoned
politician, had had no administrative experience in military
matters when appointed minister of defense), and
aggressiveness isn’t necessarily a bad quality in politicians,
the problematic word attributed to Herzog was obviously
“Moroccan” — which, it so happens, Peretz is in his origins.
Born in Morocco in 1952, he came to Israel with his family
when he was 6, and lived as a young person through the
worst period of the discrimination once practiced by the
country’s Ashkenazi elite against immigrants from Arab
lands. Although these immigrants, known as mizraḥim or
“Easterners,” came from different places, such as North
Africa, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Iraq, and although they all
encountered some degree of prejudice, the North Africans,
who are generally known to Israelis as “the Moroccans,”
the largest group among them, suffered from particularly
negative ethnic stereotypes that labeled them as ignorant,
primitive, shiftless, hot-tempered and violent.
There was a reason for this. Unlike Jews from other Arab
countries, who immigrated to Israel as entire communities,
the Jews of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, all of whom had
been granted the right to French citizenship by French
colonial regimes, split into two groups: The better-off urban
class, nearly all of it French speaking, largely immigrated to
France, while the rural poor left mostly for Israel. The result
was a North African population in Israel more heavily
weighted to the latter than other “Easterners,” with all the
inevitable problems caused by low social and educational
levels. In the 1950s and ’60s, therefore, the
word marokai, “Moroccan,” took on for Ashkenazi Israelis a
more disparaging connotation than did “Egyptian,”
“Yemenite” or “Iraqi.”
But marokai was never a taboo word, and its primary
meaning in Israeli Hebrew continued to be simply
“Moroccan” rather than “a primitive, shiftless, hot-tempered
immigrant from North Africa.” The Hebrew slang word for
that was tshakh-tshakh, which probably originated
as tsakh-tsakh, one of the features of a heavy Moroccan
accent in Hebrew being the tendency, influenced by the
Berbers in rural Morocco, to sibilate the “t”-sound into a
“ts.” This was a word that became a cause célèbre in the
1981 Israeli elections, when the entertainer Dudu Topaz,
speaking at a political rally, called the supporters of
Menahem Begin’s Likud tshakh-tshakhim. Begin, who was
heavily backed by mizraḥi Israelis, made the most of this
and finished his campaign strongly because of it.
Although Amir Peretz does not sibilate his “t’s,” he does
speak Hebrew with a discernible mizraḥi accent, evidenced
mostly by his pronunciation of the letter ḥet in the Arabic
fashion, as a guttural fricative produced by a contraction of
the larynx, rather than as the velar fricative, made by
scraping the back of the tongue against the hard palate,
characteristic of most Israelis. Yet the word tshakh-
tshakh itself, ever since Topaz’s gaffe, has been taboo and
is rarely heard anymore, while the only remaining
pejorative Hebrew slang word associated with North
African Jews, freykh or (for a woman) freykha, would never
be applied by anyone to Peretz. A freykh in Israeli slang —
the word derives from the once common Moroccan-Jewish
female name Freyḥa — is a cheap, flashy dresser with
vulgar taste and loud behavior. These are traits that, while
once identified in the minds of many Israelis with lower-
class Moroccan Jews, are certainly not Peretz’s.
7
In any event, there is something anachronistic about the
whole attack on Herzog, who actively supported Peretz in
the 2006 elections and is far from being prejudiced himself.
Despite the attempts of some ideologists to keep the
Ashkenazi-mizraḥi issue on the front burner, it has little
meaning to most young Israelis, who often don’t know and
rarely care where anyone’s parents or grandparents came
from. If Yitzhak Herzog said anything foolish to the
American diplomat, this lay in his mistaken assumption that
being Moroccan would hurt Amir Peretz’s electoral
chances. Peretz did far better at the head of the Labor
Party than did super-Ashkenazi Ehud Barak three years
later, and there is no evidence that his Moroccan ancestry
was a stigma for Labor voters. In Israel today, the M-word
is nothing to be scared of.
From The Forward, April 29, 2011
Activist Jews Use Mimouna Festival to Protest
Ultra-Orthodox Conversion Stance
By: Yair Ettinger
It is interesting to see the way the word “activist” is used in
this article about Moroccan Jews whose views are closer to
Ashkenazi Zionism than to the Sephardic tradition. It is a
troubling sign of the transformation of Israeli Sephardim
and the way that they have ignored their mistreatment by
the Ashkenazi leaders of Israel over the course of many
decades.
DS
Sam Ben-Sheetrit is one of the people who turned the
Mimouna Festival into a national holiday, without any
mention of discrimination. He's chairman of the World
Federation of Moroccan Jews, which chooses a "positive"
subject for the Mimouna every year, such as "Every person
is a world" and "Bridges."
This year, for the first time, the federation is coming out
against injustices to converted Jews and people in the
process of conversion to Judaism. This Mimouna (which
began last night and is taking place today ) will be held as
a protest and a way of supporting the converts, in the
shadow of the political and halakhic controversy
surrounding it.
Paradoxically, the topic has little bearing on Jews of
Moroccan descent but impacts on immigrants from the
former Soviet Union. The protest is also directed against
Shas, which unofficially represents Israelis of Moroccan
origin.
Sam Ben-Sheetrit, what does the Mimouna have to do with
the conversion controversy?
"Is there any better occasion to show our support for the
converts than the Mimouna? This is a celebration of
hospitality, love of man, bringing people together. Every
year the Mimouna celebrations are marked by some value
or another. This year they are marked by protest. We will
raise a cry against the ultra-Orthodox laws pushing away
all those who want to join our people. Regrettably, the
ultra-Orthodox groups have taken over our lives. Not only
the money, the public coffer, but everyday life. They're
simply closing doors in the face of all those who want to
join our people."
What has been planned for the celebrations?
"We've invited hundreds of converts from all over the
country to the main celebration in Ashkelon's Beit Yad
Lebanim. My good friend [former Ashkenazi Chief] Rabbi
Yisrael Meir Lau will be there. The event will be hosted by
Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, who converts people to Judaism. Six
converts from different countries will tell their story of how
they ended up as Jews and mainly how society treats them
and what they feel now. We must treat converts leniently
and tolerantly. They will be guests of honor in Mimouna
celebrations worldwide, we will put them in the front rows
and embrace them."
Why are Jews of Moroccan origin getting involved with a
problem relating to FSU immigrants?
"How do you think we improved Moroccan Jewry's image?
We used the Mimouna to bring people together. We will
demand of the ultra-Orthodox to stop bullying us, to get out
of our life, to allow this country to work. I hope our bitter
cry, and especially the government, are able to stop them."
Are you also speaking out against Shas? It is a member of
the government that is responsible for the conversion
policy and a party that recently ejected MK Chaim
Amsellem because of his lenient views regarding
conversion.
"If Shas is keen on the ultra-Orthodox laws and acts in their
spirit, then [our] protest is certainly against it. This is one of
the tragedies that befell us Moroccan Jews. Moroccan
Jewry advanced in huge steps and became integrated in
every field, but when it comes to tolerance, for which our
sages were famous, Shas' leaders have learned and done
nothing. They are lagging behind."
But Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled in favor of the IDF
conversions.
"A halakhic ruling is a halakhic ruling but I heard he backed
down a little afterward. That's why legislation is required."
Many Jews, including yourself, are received by Morocco's
king, King Mohammed VI. How is the wave of Arab protest
reflected in the Palace? The monarch's stability is upheld
but there have been shock waves and people have been
killed there. Is it possible that in the next Mimouna there
will be another regime in Morocco?
8
"I don't believe it. The Moroccan people love the king. He
runs all over the place, creating work opportunities. He isn't
even interested in international politics. Note how in
Operation Cast Lead he didn't utter a word. He is
concentrating on helping his people. I certainly don't expect
a revolution. It's an almost democratic monarchy."
How do you respond to WikiLeaks reports of Isaac
Herzog's statement in 2006, that "Amir Peretz is seen as
inexperienced, aggressive and Moroccan?"
"He denied having said those things. I denounce those who
attacked him. Herzog and his family represent the
integration in Israel. His mother, of Egyptian descent,
married an Ashkenazi. Apart from that, he is a member of
the federation's presidium and takes part in its activities. He
will be a guest of honor in this Mimouna as well. There is
nothing farther from him than ethnic discrimination. I said in
an interview to Israel Radio that if [Eitan] Cabel and Peretz
continue attacking him they will have us to deal with, and
we haven't heard them since. We won't let ethnic
discrimination become an issue again. It's flogging a dead
horse."
From Haaretz, April 26, 2011
Killing Jews in the Balkans, Saving Jews in the
Balkans
By: Edward Serotta
Seventy years ago this month, Hana Montijo had not quite
reached her first birthday. Her parents, Menahem and
Flora, lived in a mostly Muslim neighborhood on a steep hill
overlooking Sarajevo. They were a poor family; Menahem
worked as a tailor.
Matilda and Breda Kalef were 10 and nine-year-old sisters,
and lived in a large house in Belgrade’s Jewish quarter,
Dorcol. Their family owned a textile store, and everyone –
uncles, grandparents, parents – worked there.
And in the southern Yugoslav Macedonian town of Bitola,
Roza Kamhi and Beno Ruso were a pair of 21-year-olds,
deeply in love, and planning for their future. All of them
were Jewish.
Then came Nazi Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia in April
1941, and immediately after, its invasion of Greece. The
Wehrmacht was accompanied, or followed by, the SS and
foreign ministry diplomats. After the Royal Yugoslav Army
collapsed in two weeks, regular soldiers, committed Nazis
and professional diplomats all began planning how to
murder every living Jew in Yugoslavia, and then in Greece.
Who were these Jews? Albahari, Arditi, Farhi, Kanhi, Alvo,
Amouli, Kalef, Saltiel, Molho, Behar, Montijo, Kabilo, Finci –
these were Sephardic family names, descendents of those
who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Unwanted by
most of Europe, they had sailed east and found a home in
Balkan lands, then ruled by the Ottomans.
For the 450 years they had lived in the Balkans, the
Sephardim kept their traditions, their recipes, their
customs, even their Spanish dialect, Ladino, or Judeo-
Español, all while becoming part and parcel of Balkan city
life.
In the north, their great city was Sarajevo, with a Jewish
population of 10,000. But the greatest of all Sephardic
communities was Salonika, or Thessaloniki as it was
known after it became part of Greece in 1912. More than
53,000 Jews lived in this bustling port city on the Aegean.
Through the centuries of the Ottoman empire’s expansion,
Balkan Jewish communities flourished. During the empire’s
long decline, as industrialized northern Europe sped past
the Ottoman economies in the south, most Jews in the
region became impoverished. But in these lands, there had
never been a pogrom against them. They had never been
forced to live in a ghetto.
What makes the story of Hana in Sarajevo, Breda and
Matilda in Belgrade, and Roza and Beno in Bitola so
different is that they survived the Holocaust, whereas more
than 96 percent of their fellow Balkan Sephardic Jews did
not.
The four women – all alive today and still living in the
Balkans – owe their survival to Muslim and Christian
neighbors who risked their own lives to protect them.Each
of these women has a story to tell.
Breda and Matilda, for instance, will never forget that day in
March, 1942. Their mother had gotten them false papers
so they could pass as Catholics, and that morning was
taking them to the Jewish hospital, where the girls’ crippled
father and his mother were imprisoned. Breda and Matilda
had hoped to visit them, but something was happening.
German soldiers had blocked off the street, and the girls
and their mother hid behind a curtain in a nearby house.
They watched as soldiers loaded the patients and doctors
into a windowless van, and the girls saw it drive off. This
was the first use of the carbon monoxide gas vans in
Serbia, and this would be the preferred method for
murdering around 6,200 Serbian Jewish women, their
children and the handicapped.
Beno Ruso, Roza’s boyfriend, didn’t thank anyone for
hiding him during the war. That’s because he picked up a
rifle, joined Tito’s communist partisans and fought back.
By the time the war ended in May, 1945, Beno, all of 24
years old, had reached the rank of general. Then he raced
home to Macedonia to look for Roza.
Where approximately 150,000 Jews lived between
Sarajevo and Thessaloniki in 1940, today there are less
9
than 7,000. Yet these remnant communities are a
remarkable lot. One reason is they were re-established by
former partisans. That meant they were – and still are – a
feisty bunch. When war came to Sarajevo in the 1990s, for
instance, a handful of Holocaust survivors sent most of
their family members to safety, then opened a nonsectarian
humanitarian aid agency to help everyone – Muslims,
Serbs and Croats. In fact, all ethnic groups staffed their aid
agency, La Benevolencija, and they doled out food,
medicine and jokes in equal measure.
No sooner had the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia
become an independent country in 1991 than a small band
of Jews – some of them aging partisans – made their way
to the new government and asked for support to build a
Holocaust museum so they could honor all those who had
perished. It took a few years to write all the legislation to
return heirless property to the Jewish community, but the
answer was yes.
Although General Beno Ruso did not live to see the new
museum open its doors last month, his girlfriend, who had
become his wife, Roza, did attend. Although she is 89
years old and blind, her grandchildren and children
escorted her through the museum, and read to her the
panels that told tales of Sephardic Balkan life, which had
blossomed for 450 years. Until this month, 70 years ago.
The writer is director of www.centropa.org, a Vienna-based
Jewish historical institute. He acted as co-curator of the
Macedonian Holocaust Museum.
From The Jerusalem Post, April 30, 2011
Arab Spring? Not Quite
By: Yoram Ettinger
This shameless and deeply offensive article might not
seem like much without some contextual historical
understanding. But after looking at the matter more
closely, we can see a number of disturbing things emerge.
The shamelessness of the article rests in its blind
allegiance to a philo-European attitude that forgets two
World Wars and the tragedy of the Holocaust.
As I write these comments on Holocaust Memorial Day, I
am struck by the knee-jerk and idiotic Zionist allegiance to
the very European values that caused so much destruction
to humanity in general and to the Jews more specifically.
In addition, we should note how the author extols the
European Imperial system and demonizes the Arabs for
not democratizing their societies.
Now there are a few ways to see this:
We can see the Arabs as barbaric thugs who cannot rise to
the elite level of Europe; a Europe which was expert in
settling political conflict in a series of wars that shed much
blood over the course of many centuries. Wars of religion
are – of course – not limited to the Arab-Muslim world in
spite of how Europe wishes to see itself.
We can also see it as a justification of European civilization
in light of the Zionist pantomime as a reflexive imitation of
these racially-charged nationalist values.
The tradition of 19th century Nationalism is championed in
the article as if that Nationalism was not the cause of many
of the political problems that continue to plague us.
Ignored in all this is the desperate attempt by many Arabs
– and others in the so-called Third World – to modernize
their countries through electoral and legal reforms while
having to bear the brunt of Colonial domination which
effectively sought to curtail independence movements,
leaving many generations of reformers dead or imprisoned.
The European hammer is completely ignored here and for
good reason. The racism and ethnocentrism of the
European nationalism has become a vital part of the Zionist
enterprise and has caused Israel to deal with Arabs and
Arab culture in a dismissive manner.
So the article is suffused with the ethnocentric chauvinism
that marked 19th century European Nationalism as it
promotes a political ideology that served to decimate the
Jews of Europe and infect the world with a xenophobic
mentality that continues to inform Western politics.
How any Jew can square this adoption of European racial
values in the wake of the Holocaust is beyond me. But, as
we have learned, in the Zionist mind anything is possible.
DS
The 19th Century violence on the European street signaled
the arrival of the Spring of Nations: National cohesion,
liberty and rebellion against tyranny.
In contrast, the 2011 Middle East upheaval exposes the
Arab Street: No “spring” and no “nations,” but the
exacerbation of tribal-ethnic-religious-geographic loyalties,
splits and power struggles, the intensification of domestic
and intra-Arab fragmentation, the escalation of intolerance,
violence and hate-culture, the absence of stability, the
deepening of uncertainty, exposing the tenuous nature of
Arab regimes, the ruthless submission of democracy-
seeking elements and the perpetuation of ruthless
tyrannies.
The 19th Century Spring of Nations was energized by
waves of enthusiastic optimism. On the other hand, the
2011 delusion of the Spring of Nations is exposed by the
impotence, despair and frustration of pro-democracy Arab
10
activists, who are forced to emigrate as not to be
persecuted.
The expectation for a near-term Arab Spring of Nations is
detached from Middle East reality, could produce another
victory of wishful-thinking over experience, already leads to
a delusion-based policy and risks a lethal boomerang
caused by delusional yearning.
In February, 2010 President Obama appointed a new
ambassador to Damascus – following four years of
diplomatic absence – "because Assad could play a
constructive role in the Middle East." In July 2000, Western
policy-makers and public opinion molders cheered the
prospect of Spring in Damascus upon the succession of
Hafez Assad by his son, Bashar.
They were not alarmed by his 97% victory in two elections.
They assumed that as an eye doctor, who interned in
London, who is fluent in English and French, who was the
chairman of the Syria Internet Association, and married to
a London-educated wife who advocates women rights, he
must be a moderate. They sacrificed documented facts –
about the Assad family, the ruling Alawite minority, the
Damascus vision and the centrality of the strategic
cooperation between Syria and Iran – on the altar of the
yearning of peace with Syria. The current turmoil in Syria
exposes Western oversimplification and the authentic
merciless nature of this Syrian despot.
In February 2011, President Obama and Secretary Clinton
hastily proclaimed the ushering of democracy into Arab
lands and the reincarnation of the spirit of MLK and Gandhi
in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. However, their
expectations are thwarted by the thousands of moderate
Tunisians who are escaping to the Italian Mediterranean
island of Lampedusa and by the horrific campaign of
killings, murder, torture, hate and corruption, which has
accompanied recent volcanic eruptions in Arab countries.
In 1993, upon signing the Oslo Accord, the New Middle
East visionaries announced Spring in Ramallah, the
supremacy of standard-of-living over ideological and
military considerations, the age of no-wars and the
irrelevance of borders and military forces.
However, the conduct of the Palestinian Authority
(epitomized by hate-education), the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the intensification of Islamic terrorism, the
Iranian threat, the proliferation of advanced missiles, the
murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, the wars in
Lebanon and Gaza and the current Middle East upheaval
crashed the superficial New Middle East and Spring in
Ramallah visions. Yet in order to sustain the “peace
process,” Israeli and Western “elites” have ignored the
unprecedented Arafat and Abbas-initiated hate-education
and terrorism.
In January 2005, they were further encouraged by Abbas'
rise to the chairmanship of the Palestinian Authority. They
would not be diverted from the pursuit of their visions by his
track record: Introducing hate-education into Palestinian
schools, mosques and media, subversion against Arab
regimes, Holocaust denial, enrollment in KGB and Muslim
Brotherhood schooling, the embracing of ruthless Soviet
Bloc Communist regimes and centrality in the 1972 Munich
Massacre.
The 1989 dismantling of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin
Wall triggered a Spring of Nations hope and a New World
Order concept, which was swiftly transformed into a New
World Disorder. While the Spring of Nations introduced
democracy into Eastern Europe, it could not advance the
cause of liberty in Arab lands. Some 1,400 years of
Muslim-Arab tyranny, guided by an imperialistic, intolerant
and violent religion, which embraces terrorism and
tolerates “female circumcision” (genital mutilation),
constitutes too high a hurdle for the Spring of Nations.
The British Empire attempted to democratize Arab
countries - but failed, due to the lack of essential
infrastructure of democratic values and education in Arab
lands.
The turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain,
Oman and Syria (and you ain’t seen nothing yet…),
coupled with the expected US evacuation from Iraq and
Afghanistan, the Iranian threat and the inherent non-
reliability of international or Western guarantees and forces
do not usher in Spring; they do usher in lethal geo-political
twisters and floods, which require the retaining – and not
the giveaway - of critical Israeli security assets.
From Ynet News, April 29, 2011
The Seder Night Question
By: Amalia Rosenblum
In discussing the thorny question of Judaism and the state
of Israel, I am often told by Zionist partisans that Israel is a
Jewish country because the vast majority of Israelis have a
Seder and fast on Yom Kippur.
This article looks more closely at what the Seder in Israel is
and what it means in inner-Jewish terms.
Israel’s Eastern European socialist founders were largely
antagonistic to Judaism and religion in general. They did
not believe in God and felt that their great success in the
transformation of the Jewish people gave them license to
promote an amorphous secularism that was paradoxically
based some sense of Jewish religious identity.
This paradox hits a wall when secular Israelis are set face
to face with the Seder which is in its deepest sense an
affirmation of the rabbinic system of education and its
11
unique way of parsing Scripture. The Sages set out a
scholastic form of Judaism that was developed in the wake
of a profound and earth-shattering political defeat at the
hands of the Romans. In addition, a schismatic form of
Judaism – Christianity – grew alongside the emergence of
the Talmudic civilization, only serving to make matters
even more complicated.
Most Israelis have little facility with the intimate aspects of
Jewish tradition; its language, rituals, and its strange way
of seeing the world are somewhat alien to them. Israelis
pride themselves as Zionists who have transcended what
they see as the lachrymose history of the Diaspora and
have created a place where Jews can now be free of the
shackles of tradition and Jewish heritage. They do not
know much about the Jewish past and are largely unaware
of the vast literary heritage that is, of course, closely
connected to a rabbinical tradition that is seen as suspect.
Israelis do not pronounce Hebrew correctly and have
Westernized Hebrew grammar. The Haggadah is,
naturally, an alien text to them because their short history
as an independent nation has taught them to reject this
past as an organic totality. The Haggadah is spoken, as is
much of the Hebrew liturgy, from the perspective of
Diaspora.
For secular Israelis, Judaism is what the Haredim do, and
what we, the real Israelis, do not do. That both secular
Israelis and the Haredim are alienated from Jewish
tradition is itself a complex matter that speaks to the nature
of religious modernity and the profound transformations
that have taken place in most religious traditions.
It is at times like Passover that secular Israelis are forced
to face the Jewish tradition; a tradition that they know
precious little about. Thus this article recounts the
confusion many Israelis face when they sit down to conduct
a Seder which is a mark of their vaunted Jewishness that
they have largely abandoned.
DS
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli households held a
Passover seder last week. According to the findings of a
national survey, 30 percent conduct a seder out of religious
beliefs, and as such, take pains to adhere to halakha
during the ceremony. Most of the other 70 percent said
they hold a seder for "reasons that have to do with family,
Jewish culture and tradition."
Despite the desire to use this ceremony to connect with
Jewish culture and tradition, in many secular homes,
reading the Haggadah and conducting a seder arouses
much confusion. How much of the Haggadah should be
read (just the part before the meal or after as well)? How
are certain words pronounced? Which instructions written
in the Haggadah actually need to be followed?
The confusion is often resolved in some strange
compromise, like singing only some of the songs or putting
the most devout person in the family in charge.
How does one explain the gap between the importance of
this holiday in many secular Jewish homes and the inability
to extract much significance out of it? Some of the
confusion indicates a lack of confidence that is
characteristic of secular Jews interested in defining
themselves as Jewish in a cultural, rather than religious,
sense. A paradigm has taken root in Israel, according to
which authentic Judaism is associated with pagan rituals
and with traditionalism in the folklorist sense of the word.
The ceremonies and traditions serve to preserve Judaism
in its ethnological sense but leave little for the secular.
Indeed, apart from institutions like Alma College, there are
few places in this country where secular Jews can explore
questions of Jewish-Israeli identity and Hebrew culture.
This paradigm was able to take root not only because of a
hostile takeover by a small group who sought to impose
their own definition of Judaism on the uneducated masses,
but also because the first generations of secular Jews in
Israel surrendered, without any fight whatsoever, anything
that smacked to them of exile and the Diaspora. They did
this because they believed it was a necessary price to pay
in their struggle to create a new Jew.
But that historical context is no longer relevant. Secular
Jews who give up their right to Jewish identity, as part of a
political battle against what they perceive as the ultra-
Orthodox or right-wing radicalization of society, are
forfeiting an important asset, both in personal terms and in
terms of the battle over Israeli culture. The seder provides
an excellent opportunity to learn how the historical memory
of a people is shaped, to explore the historical
transformations of the Jewish holidays, and to discuss how
Jewish tradition was influenced by the struggle to
distinguish itself initially from neighboring pagan traditions,
and subsequently, from Muslim and Christian rites.
It also provides an opportunity to spark a discussion among
friends and family on the following key questions: Why do
we seek signs of divinity in the supernatural rather than the
natural? Is it possible to talk about prophecy without
revelation, in terms relevant for modern leaders and
thinkers? Is it legitimate to promote fantasies like divine
supervision and the existence of an afterworld to preserve
Judaism? And do we need a detailed list of rewards and
punishments in order to encourage moral behavior? These
questions are relevant to any Jew, and whoever suffices
with singing Had Gadya alone, whether out of a sense of
inferiority or confusion, has forfeited his right to understand
his history and culture, Passover after Passover.
From Haaretz, April 28, 2011
Israel Unveils First ‘Sin-Free Yiddish Smartphone’
By: Bangkok Post Staff
12
This short announcement – from a Bangkok newspaper! –
speaks volumes about the Orthodox Jewish world.
It is a world that exists in a Yiddish-only environment and
where its religious fanaticism extends to every aspect of an
outside world which it loathes and mistrusts but tries
desperately to emulate. After all, these Orthodox Jews can
theoretically live without the new technology altogether, but
instead seek to make the technology “Kosher.” This
means that their extreme view of Jewish ritual law must be
accommodated and nestled within their Eastern European
comfort zone.
For those of us who live in the Orthodox community, this is
an old story which typifies the alienation and fanaticism of
the Haredim and the insular world that they have created
for themselves; a world which seems to be authentically
Jewish, but which in point of fact is more a product of a set
of social norms that are only marginally related to the
Jewish law. It is a form of cloistered monasticism that is
much closer to Christianity than it is to Jewish tradition.
Those Sephardim who have entered into this Haredi world
understand very well that they are making a mental and
social move to Eastern Europe which leaves them as far
away from their Middle Eastern roots as possible. It is
therefore deeply ironic that Arab Jews who lived in their
traditional culture for centuries have now – after the advent
of Jewish independence in Israel – have relinquished that
noble heritage for that of the Eastern European shtetl and
its religious psychosis.
DS
Israel - While other firms have tapped into the religious
market by offering phones free of Internet access, with no
email or access to Facebook which could lead users into
temptation, none has so far offered its services in Yiddish,
Yediot Aharonot said.
"This phone has no text messages, Internet access,
Facebook or email. It doesn?t even have a camera," said
the paper.
"And if you call from it on the Sabbath, you will pay an
exorbitant price of 10 shekels ($2 euros) per minute."
And all the menus are in Yiddish -- the traditional German-
derived language still widely used by ultra-Orthodox Jews,
with the local market estimated at between 350,000 to
400,000 people, the paper said.
Local importer Accel Telecom said it took four months for a
pair of ultra-Orthodox translators to come up with the
interface which is written in Hebrew characters and uses
words such as "Klingen" (ringtone) and "Schirm
Verteidikung" (screensaver).
But to win rabbinical approval for the device, which is
based on an Alcatel T-701 handset, Accel had to first prove
that tech-savvy users would not be able to work their magic
to circumvent the safeguards and succumb to sin.
"It is not simple to make the phones kosher and bring them
to a level in which you prove that the phone cannot be
breached or changed in such a way that it will be possible
to send text messages or surf the Internet with it," Accel
CEO Mark Seelenfreund told the paper.
From The Bangkok Post, April 27, 2011, Reprinted in Vos
iz Neias with the title “First ‘Kosher’ Cellphone with Hasidic
Folk Music Ringtones”
Meet Bart Ehrman: A One-Man God Fraud Squad
By: Anneli Rufus
This is an interesting article in a number of ways:
What we see here is the imposition of modern standards of
knowledge on ancient texts like the Bible. The idea is that
by setting a contemporary metric for interpreting the texts,
the texts will falter and lose their status as truth documents.
Next, we should make careful note of the way in which
Professor Ehrman is presented. His story as written in the
article is that of a convert. When he began his academic
study he was a zealous believer who over time became
convinced that what he believed was wrong.
The idea here is that there are competing truth claims – as
if reading texts was akin to scientific investigation – and
that one claim must be correct while the other is incorrect.
It is a “Road to Damascus” moment – in reverse. The truth
seeker begins with Christ but ends with atheism.
The matter is important because of the way in which
Orthodoxy and atheistic non-belief now function in our
culture. The truth claims of Orthodoxy are marked by non-
believers as the “correct” way of parsing Scripture. This
lends total credence to the fundamentalist viewpoint which
sees the Bible as a document that emerged fully formed
out of the mind of God.
The historical record has correctly shown that this
contention of the Bible being a supernatural document is
not empirically true, so the non-believers think they have
won the argument. Game, set, match!
This then leads the historicists to make the larger claim that
the Bible is a tissue of lies meant to brainwash believers.
And while in the case of fundamentalism this might well be
true, it does not undermine the rhetorical and philosophical
power of the Biblical texts within their cultural contexts.
To wit, communities of faith and practice grew up around
these texts and were formed around a tradition of Biblical
exegesis. These communities are an empirical reality and
13
continued to grapple with the texts as time evolved.
Marking them as delusional does not free to investigator
from the necessity of understanding what such people
thought and said about these texts and how the texts were
made into a central part of our civilization.
By marking the Biblical texts as abstractions that are to be
read solely in terms of who wrote them and when they
were written – details that cannot be identified with exact
precision in spite of the widely-held “beliefs” of the
academics – the epistemological heritage of Biblical
interpretation and the place that these texts have in the
organic lives of people and religious institutions is blunted.
What is being missed by the Bible critics is that their
animus towards the Bible precedes their investigations.
The great epiphany of discovering that the Bible is a sham
is simply a replacement of one set of absolutist beliefs with
another. The academics have created a myth of
authorship and set out a heuristic historiography based on
a dangerous combination of archaeology and speculation
that is often presented as definitive science.
And that is the ultimate point here: It is highly unlikely that
any one group has the “truth.” It is highly unlikely that such
a “truth” even exists. Historicism has its place in the study
of religion and the Bible, just as the Biblical interpretation of
the Sages and the Church has its rightful place in our study
of the texts.
One does not simply strike down texts and traditions as
“false” as if they were conducting a scientific experiment on
a Bunsen burner or as if they were looking at the texts
through some magical microscope. “Truth” is not a
singular thing and we must be careful to study all aspects
of a subject before thinking that we have definitively
understood it.
DS
Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to
a world-renowned Bible scholar whose new book fingering
the forgers is making evangelical Christians as mad as —
well, hell.
"Bart Ehrman has waged war on Christianity for years. This
is just his latest salvo," snaps a FreeRepublic commenter.
"Bart himself is a forgery. More of his usual tragic,
groundless, infantile, bigoted narcissism enslaved to the
father of lies, mammon ... a willful subtle prevaricator ... a
disgusting, arrogant hack. God have mercy on his
benighted soul," rages another at the Rightly Dividing the
Word of Truth blog.
Ehrman is used to it. The University of North Carolina
religious studies professor stoked evangelical ire with his
previous bestsellers The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A
New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed and Misquoting Jesus:
The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. He's
doing it again with Forged: Writing in the Name of God —
Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They
Are (HarperOne, 2011).
"When Bart D. Ehrman and all his so called 'scholar' friends
are long gone, Jesus Christ will still be the King of Kings
and Lord of Lords to whom EVERY KNEE will one day
bow. Friends — repent," pleads a Daily Mail commenter.
Ehrman knows where they're coming from. He used to be
one of them.
As an undergrad at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute in the
mid-1970s, Ehrman was "an extremely zealous, rigorous,
pious (self-righteous)" evangelical who followed the
school's draconian rules — no smoking, drinking, card-
playing, dancing, movies, or beards — because Bible
verses seemed to support them. Unlike most college
students, unlike nearly all young Americans, Moody
students didn't question authority.
When you take the Bible literally, you don't subvert
dominant paradigms.
Such bullet-proof belief "was comforting," Ehrman says
now, "because we thought we had a corner on the truth
and that we were right and everybody else was wrong. And
these were eternal truths, so they were going to bring us
eternal life and everybody else was going to hell. It's very
comforting to think you're always right."
Studying for his PhD a few years later at Princeton
Theological Seminary, poring over each part of the New
Testament in its original Koine Greek, the born-again
young scholar remained "passionate about my studies and
the truth that I could find." But what he found instead were
errors. Contradictions. Self-defeating arguments. Historical
inaccuracies. And worse.
"The New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament,
where the problems are even more severe) was chock full
of discrepancies. ... I wrestled with these problems, I
prayed about them. ... Eventually I came to realize that the
Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It
also contains what almost anyone today would call lies."
Lies. Not just fact-twisting fabrications but the composition
of entire books by obscure authors who claimed to be the
Apostles Peter and Paul and other spiritual celebrities but
weren't.
According to Ehrman, individuals falsely claiming to be
Paul wrote Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Epistles to
Timothy and Titus. Equally bogus, Ehrman charges, is the
premise that the Apostle Peter wrote the Epistles of Peter
or anything else in the Bible — or anywhere, ever, because
as a poor hick fisherman raised in rural Palestine, Peter
was almost certainly illiterate.
14
Researchers estimate the literacy rate of Roman-era
Palestine at only 3 percent. Ehrman surmises that in rural
areas, where most residents "would scarcely ever even see
a written text," it might have been as low as 1 percent.
"Peter probably didn't write anything. Paul, on the other
hand, was educated. Unlike Peter, he didn't come from
some one-horse town in Galilee." Thus, Ehrman says,
seven of the 13 epistles attributed to Paul "were probably
written by Paul."
Who wrote the rest? And who's behind the Bible's other
forgeries, which Ehrman estimates at a whopping 12 of the
New Testament's 27 books? And that doesn't even include
oodles of counterfeit apocrypha. Ehrman says these
materials were not merely discovered unsigned way back
when and then mistakenly, well-meaningly, attributed to
saints:
"The books we are talking about are by authors who lied
about their identity in order to deceive their readers into
thinking that they were someone they were not. The
technical term for this kind of activity is forgery."
Writing painstakingly with reed pens on papyrus scrolls,
ancient sneaks signed the fruits of their labor with other
men's names, leading Christendom to base its beliefs and
behaviors on these fibs for the next two thousand years.
But why?
Not, as motivates modern forgers, for money or fame.
Ancient "books" weren't mass-produced, thus couldn't
become bestsellers. While forgery wasn't illegal then, it was
frowned upon. Forgers, if exposed, faced public shame.
Yet some braved that risk as a means of hawking their
agendas: doctrine that the devout would devour if declared
by Matthew or Luke but dismiss if propounded by a random
guy named Flavius.
It's relatively easy to fool illiterate hordes.
"If people are literate, they can recognize writing styles. But
if you can't read or write and you can only listen to writings
read aloud" — which was mainly how Christianity was
practiced in its first few centuries — "it's hard to do the kind
of stylistic analysis" that scholars employ when comparing
suspected forgeries with their alleged authors' known
works, searching for inconsistencies in grammar, diction
and dogma.
While some ancient impostures are deft, in other cases "it's
like you're reading Mark Twain and then all of a sudden
you're reading T.S. Eliot," Ehrman says.
Forging holy books in an effort to save souls "is in one
sense a noble cause, because it's not for self-
aggrandizement, it's not for advancement, and it's not for
money. It's because these people had something they
thought was worth hearing. It's just sad that they had to lie
about it. And some of these forgeries are really dangerous,
which is a good reason to point out that they're probably
forged. Their ramifications are devastating."
For example, the First Epistle to Timothy — attributed to
Paul, although Ehrman insists it's forged — forbids females
from becoming pastors or even speaking aloud in church.
"Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden, First
Timothy says women are easily deceived, so they should
stay silent and submissive and pregnant."
This dictate is still followed today by conservative
evangelical congregations who believe that Paul wrote it,
"when in fact it was a forger writing under Paul's name
twenty or thirty years later — someone who was tired of
hearing women speak up in church."
When Ehrman attended Moody Bible Institute, female
students weren't permitted to take classes in preaching.
Those classes were male-only, thanks to First Timothy.
Ehrman's no longer a born-again. He's now an agnostic.
"My evangelical faith couldn't hold up to rational inquiry. I
stayed a Christian for many years, but a liberal Christian.
The story of Christ was something I wanted to live by.
When I became an agnostic fifteen years ago, it wasn't
because of all the scholarship. It was because of the
problem of suffering, and the question of how a powerful
God could exist in a world like this."
Faked scriptures warning us to speak the truth: Some liars
lie for what they say is our own good. Parents assure their
children that people are kind. Spouses never confess those
one-night stands. Is it sometimes okay to lie? In Forged,
Ehrman argues that hearing the truth might be a human
right.
"Maybe children have the right to know what parents
honestly believe. ... Maybe it is better for our elected
officials to come clean and tell us the truth, rather than
mislead us so as to be authorized to do what they
desperately want," he wrote in a passage that he says was
inspired by "George Bush and this whole business of the
war in Iraq with Colin Powell telling one lie after another."
He wasn't the first and won't be the last.
"From the first century to the twenty-first century, people
who have called themselves Christians have seen fit to
fabricate, falsify, and forge documents, in most instances in
order to authorize views they wanted others to accept,"
Ehrman writes.
If both the Old and New Testaments are full of fibs and
forgeries, then what of other so-called holy books?
"People always ask me that question about the Koran,"
15
Ehrman says. "Out of concern for my personal safety, I
don't say a thing."
However, he doesn't hesitate to say: "The Book of Mormon
is completely made up."
By whom?
"Joseph Smith, I assume. Whether he was completely self-
deceived or crazy or just a lying bastard, I don't know. It's
one of those three, probably."
Maybe someday he'll take that up with Glenn Beck.
From Alternet, April 29, 2011
Why Being a ‘Foodie’ isn’t Elitist
By: Eric Schlosser
Social activism is sometimes a tricky matter given the
socio-economic disparities between activists and those
they are advocating for.
We have dealt harshly in the SHU with the many Limousine
Liberals who live lavish lifestyles while speaking out on
behalf of the less fortunate. I can think of the late musician
John Denver who in the 1970s was both a mega-star and
an insufferable environmentalist. Denver notoriously built a
massive gasoline tank on his Colorado estate during the
famous Gas crisis of the 1970s so he could fuel his stable
of cars and airplanes (he was also a licensed pilot) while
the less fortunate were waiting on endless lines at gas
stations.
I also think of the Obamas and their transformation from
social activists in Chicago into political bigwigs who have
long forgotten the poor who are disproportionately affected
by the malignant policies of the current administration and
its inability to toe the line for the less fortunate.
When attending a Neil Young concert some years ago, I
was struck by his shrill advocacy on behalf of the family
farmer and his demand that we all eat organic produce.
This to me was quite rich given the fact that the tickets for
his concert – like the food products he was promoting –
were quite expensive. I was sitting in an elite society that
demanded a level of economic status that most people
cannot afford.
And that is the main problem with Mr. Schlosser’s
argument here: I do not think that people go to McDonalds
because they want to be obese and unhealthy. They go
there to get cheap food. So too do we go to our
supermarkets to look to save money in order to feed our
families.
When one goes to the PC supermarkets like Whole Foods
and Trader Joe’s – places with the best and most healthy
food – one sees members of the economic elite. Poor
people cannot afford to buy the products at such places
because they often cost double the products at the
corporatized supermarkets.
I agree with all the arguments about this corporatization
and yet I cannot help but think that in a practical sense the
whole thing is about who has money and who does not.
On a larger plane, the Limousine Liberal elites who shop at
Whole Foods and who demand ecologically sustainable
food more often than not hypocritically earn their money
from the very same corrupt system that they are decrying.
They go to their corporate jobs where many of them rape
and plunder the poorer citizens of the planet, and then they
go home – or better, send their poor nannies and
housekeepers – to shop for food that is not tainted by
corporate interests they protect while working at their day
jobs.
After all, the Limousine Liberal does not want to be
poisoned by the corporate food that they support in their
professions!
It is similar to a Viacom employee who spews mindless filth
through MTV and then goes to Lincoln Center to watch
opera and ballet in their leisure time. It is similar to Noam
Chomsky and other radical academics who preach
socialism from the perch of elite colleges like MIT which
are a central part of the corporatization of America. I do
not see any of them refusing their corporate paychecks
There is no question that the food system we have in
America has been corrupted and must be addressed for
the health of our fellow citizens. It is not a negligible issue.
But it is truly an affront for the economic elites to sit in
judgment of the poor and the difficult situation they are in. I
do not question the assertion that our food is killing us. But
it must be understood that the food that does not kill us is
very expensive, and for those on the lower end of the
economic ladder this price is one that they cannot bear. It
is wrong to maintain distinctions based on wealth and then
snidely sit in judgment of the poor. It is not just about what
au courant restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper West Side
serve to their patrons – who are also part of this Limousine
Liberal elite.
Rather than attacking the poor and the weak, the
Limousine Liberals should start looking at themselves and
their place in the corporate hierarchy; that same corporate
hierarchy that they decry – after they leave their corporate
jobs and come home to a meal of organic food purchased
at Whole Foods for a princely sum that only the rich can
afford.
DS
16
At the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting
this year, Bob Stallman, the group’s president, lashed out
at “self-appointed food elitists” who are “hell-bent on
misleading consumers.” His target was the growing
movement that calls for sustainable farming practices and
questions the basic tenets of large-scale industrial
agriculture in America.
The “elitist” epithet is a familiar line of attack. In the decade
since my book “Fast Food Nation” was published, I’ve been
called not only an elitist, but also a socialist, a communist
and un-American. In 2009, the documentary “Food,
Inc.,” directed by Robby Kenner, was described as “elitist
foodie propaganda” by a prominent corporate lobbyist.
Nutritionist Marion Nestle has been called a “food fascist,”
while an attempt was recently made to cancel a university
appearance by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s
Dilemma,” who was accused of being an “anti-agricultural”
elitist by a wealthy donor.
This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to
evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies.
And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward.
America’s current system of food production — overly
centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a
handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures,
pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives,
genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government
subsidies and fossil fuels — is profoundly undemocratic. It
is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And
it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers,
workers and consumers.
During the past 40 years, our food system has changed
more than in the previous 40,000 years. Genetically
modified corn and soybeans, cloned animals, McNuggets
— none of these technological marvels existed in 1970.
The concentrated economic power now prevalent in U.S.
agriculture didn’t exist, either. For example, in 1970 the
four largest meatpacking companies slaughtered about 21
percent of America’s cattle; today the four largest
companies slaughter about 85 percent. The beef industry is
more concentrated now than it was in 1906, when Upton
Sinclair published “The Jungle” and criticized the
unchecked power of the “Beef Trust.” The markets for pork,
poultry, grain, farm chemicals and seeds have also
become highly concentrated.
America’s ranchers and farmers are suffering from this lack
of competition for their goods. In 1970, farmers received
about 32 cents for every consumer dollar spent on food;
today they get about 16 cents. The average farm
household now earns about 87 percent of its income from
non-farm sources.
While small farmers and their families have been forced to
take second jobs just to stay on their land, wealthy farmers
have received substantial help from the federal
government. Between 1995 and 2009, about $250 billion in
federal subsidies was given directly to American farmers —
and about three-quarters of that money was given to the
wealthiest 10 percent. Those are the farmers whom the
Farm Bureau represents, the ones attacking “big
government” and calling the sustainability movement elitist.
Food industry workers are also bearing the brunt of the
system’s recent changes. During the 1970s, meatpackers
were among America’s highest-paid industrial workers;
today they are among the lowest paid. Thanks to the
growth of fast-food chains, the wages of restaurant workers
have fallen, too. The restaurant industry has long been the
largest employer of minimum-wage workers. Since 1968,
thanks in part to the industry’s lobbying efforts, the real
value of the minimum wage has dropped by 29 percent.
Migrant farmworkers have been hit especially hard. They
pick the fresh fruits and vegetables considered the
foundation of a healthy diet, but they are hardly well-
rewarded for their back-breaking labor. The wages of some
migrants, adjusted for inflation, have dropped by more than
50 percent since the late 1970s. Many grape-pickers in
California now earn less than their counterparts did a
generation ago, when misery in the fields inspired Cesar
Chavez to start the United Farm Workers Union.
While workers are earning less, consumers are paying for
this industrial food system with their health. Young children,
the poor and people of color are being harmed the most.
During the past 40 years, the obesity rate among American
preschoolers has doubled. Among children ages 6 to 11, it
has tripled. Obesity has been linked to asthma, cancer,
heart disease and diabetes, among other ailments. Two-
thirds of American adults are obese or overweight, and
economists from Cornell and Lehigh universities have
estimated that obesity is now responsible for 17 percent of
the nation’s annual medical costs, or roughly $168 billion.
African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be
obese than non-Hispanic whites, and more likely to be
poor. As upper-middle-class consumers increasingly seek
out healthier foods, fast-food chains are targeting low-
income minority communities — much like tobacco
companies did when wealthy and well-educated people
began to quit smoking.
Some aspects of today’s food movement do smack of
elitism, and if left unchecked they could sideline the
movement or make it irrelevant. Consider the expensive
meals and obscure ingredients favored by a number of
celebrity chefs, the snobbery that often oozes from
restaurant connoisseurs, and the obsessive interest in
exotic cooking techniques among a certain type of
gourmand.
Those things may be irritating. But they generally don’t
sicken or kill people. And our current industrial food system
does.
Just last month, a study published in the journal Clinical
Infectious Diseases found that nearly half of the beef,
17
chicken, pork and turkey at supermarkets nationwidemay
be contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. About 80
percent of the antibiotics in the United States are currently
given to livestock, simply to make the animals grow faster
or to prevent them from becoming sick amid the terribly
overcrowded conditions at factory farms. In addition to
antibiotic-resistant germs, a wide variety of other
pathogens are being spread by this centralized and
industrialized system for producing meat.
Children under age 4 are the most vulnerable to food-borne
pathogens and to pesticide residues in food. According to a
report by Georgetown University and the Pew Charitable
Trusts, the annual cost of food-borne illness in the United
States is about $152 billion. That figure does not include
the cost of the roughly 20,000 annual deaths from
antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
One of the goals of the Farm Bureau Federation is to
influence public opinion. In addition to denying the threat of
global warming and attacking the legitimacy of federal
environmental laws, the Farm Bureau recently created an
entity called the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance to
“enhance public trust in our food supply.” Backed by a long
list of powerful trade groups, the alliance also plans to
“serve as a resource to food companies” seeking to defend
current agricultural practices.
But despite their talk of openness and trust, the giants of
the food industry rarely engage in public debate with their
critics. Instead they rely on well-paid surrogates — or they
file lawsuits. In 1990, McDonald’s sued a small group
called London Greenpeace for criticizing the chain’s food,
starting a legal battle that lasted 15 years. In 1996, Texas
cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey for her assertion that mad
cow disease might have come to the United States, and
kept her in court for six years. Thirteen states passed
“veggie libel laws” during the 1990s to facilitate similar
lawsuits. Although the laws are unconstitutional, they
remain on the books and serve their real purpose: to
intimidate critics of industrial food.
In the same spirit of limiting public awareness, companies
such as Monsanto and Dow Chemical have blocked the
labeling of genetically modified foods, while the
meatpacking industry has prevented the labeling of milk
and meat from cloned animals. If genetic modification and
cloning are such wonderful things, why aren’t companies
eager to advertise the use of these revolutionary
techniques?
The answer is that they don’t want people to think about
what they’re eating. The survival of the current food system
depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really
operates. A Florida state senator recently introduced a bill
making it a first-degree felony to take a photograph of any
farm or processing plant — even from a public road —
without the owner’s permission. Similar bills have been
introduced in Minnesota and Iowa, with support from
Monsanto.
The cheapness of today’s industrial food is an illusion, and
the real cost is too high to pay. While the Farm Bureau
Federation clings to an outdated mind-set, companies such
as Wal-Mart, Danone, Kellogg’s, General Mills and
Compass have invested in organic, sustainable production.
Insurance companies such as Kaiser Permanente are
opening farmers markets in low-income communities.
Whole Foods is demanding fair labor practices, while
Chipotle promotes the humane treatment of farm animals.
Urban farms are being planted by visionaries such as
Milwaukee’s Will Allen; the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
is defending the rights of poor migrants; Restaurant
Opportunities Centers United is fighting to improve the lives
of food-service workers; and Alice Waters, Jamie Oliver
and first lady Michelle Obama are pushing for healthier
food in schools.
Calling these efforts elitist renders the word meaningless.
The wealthy will always eat well. It is the poor and working
people who need a new, sustainable food system more
than anyone else. They live in the most polluted
neighborhoods. They are exposed to the worst toxic
chemicals on the job. They are sold the unhealthiest foods
and can least afford the medical problems that result.
A food system based on poverty and exploitation will never
be sustainable.
From The Washington Post, April 29, 2011
A Budget for the 21st Century
By: Paul Ryan
Using the same benign language as many Right Wing
extremists who would prefer to be seen as high-minded
statesmen, Paul Ryan confirms my analysis in the
comments on David Brooks’ article.
He completely ignores the profound structural problems
with the current economic system and picks away at taxes
and social programs. By reframing the debate Ryan wins.
What he has effectively done is to provide even more
support to those who have destroyed the economy. Under
his plan the poor will have to pay for the sins of the rich.
And the rich – the “Job Creators” – will make out like
bandits.
Never mind that since the age of the execrable Ronald
Reagan that these economic ideas have not worked; the
idea is not to make things better for the majority of
Americans. No, the idea is to maintain the imbalance of
financial power and provide the wealthy with all they desire.
Taxes must always be lowered and government should be
starved. Not starved for the rich though – their
corporations should continue to receive the welfare that is
now a critical part of the system. It is for the less well off to
figure out how to deal with the new realities.
18
The problem is that the system can only extend itself so
much to the wishes of the rich. The continued pillage of
the US economy by Wall Street and corporate interests –
which the Ryan plan is designed to enhance and expand to
historic levels – would have the potential effect of creating
a perpetual debt for America; a matter that Ryan seems to
be aware of given the fact that he has invented economic
numbers out of thin air and in the end does not seriously
eliminating that debt and balancing the budget.
As has been the recent Republican strategy, the idea is to
make the wealthy more wealthy by draining the
marketplace through tax cuts and the hoarding of capital;
effectively destroying the production base of the country
and creating an elite that now effectively controls the vast
resources of the economy.
Ryan is having his “Let them eat cake” moment – we are
waiting for someone to call him out on it. The Democrats
and the president do not seem to have the guts to do it.
DS
This week the House of Representatives will take the first
real step in addressing our looming fiscal crisis by bringing
“The Path to Prosperity,” a budget resolution for next year
and beyond, to the House floor. This budget offers a clear
contrast to the president’s speech on Wednesday.
It offers a contrast in credibility. Unlike the president’s
speech, which was rhetorically heated but substantively
hollow, our budget contains specific solutions for
confronting the debt and averting the most predictable
crisis in our nation’s history. It also offers a contrast in
visions. Unlike the speech, our budget advances a vision of
America in which government both keeps its promises to
seniors and lives within its means.
Two months ago, President Obama submitted a budget for
fiscal 2012 that did not deal with the major sources of
government spending while calling for much higher taxes
on American businesses and families. This budget was
widely panned as lacking seriousness.
Now comes a deficit speech that doesn’t even rise to the
level of a plan. Missing was a credible way to curb out-of-
control spending. Instead, the president called for greater
reliance on government price controls, which would strictly
limit the health-care options of current seniors while failing
to control costs. The president would couple this approach
with $1 trillion in tax increases, which would destroy jobs
and hurt the economy.
We cannot accept an approach that starts from the premise
that ever-higher levels of spending and taxes represent
America’s new normal. We have an obligation to fulfill the
mission of health and retirement security for current
retirees and future generations. We have a historic
commitment to limited government and free enterprise. And
we have a duty to leave the next generation with a more
prosperous nation than the one we inherited.
The House Republican budget keeps America’s promises
to seniors and those near retirement by making no
changes to their current arrangements. It keeps America’s
promises of health and retirement security for future
generations by saving and strengthening our most
important programs. And it keeps a promise that is implicit
in our form of government: that a government instituted to
secure our rights must be a limited government.
That is why “The Path to Prosperity” prevents spending
and taxes from rising steadily to unprecedented levels, as
they are currently projected to do. Doing otherwise would
leave our children a nation that is less prosperous, less
free and much deeper in debt.
If you are someone who agrees with the president that we
cannot avoid this outcome without resorting to large tax
increases, know this: No amount of taxes can keep pace
with the amount of money government is projected to
spend on health care in the coming years. Medicare and
Medicaid are growing twice as fast as the economy — and
taxes cannot rise that fast without a devastating impact on
jobs and growth.
If you believe that spending on these programs can be
controlled by restricting what doctors and hospitals are
paid, know this: Medicare is on track to pay doctors less
than Medicaid pays, and Medicaid already pays so little
that many doctors refuse to see Medicaid patients. These
arbitrary cuts not only fail to control costs, they also leave
our most vulnerable citizens with fewer health-care choices
and reduced access to care.
And if you believe that we must eliminate waste, fraud and
abuse in these programs, know this: Eliminating inefficient
spending is critical, but the only way to do so is to reward
providers who deliver high-quality, low-cost health care,
while punishing those who don’t. Time and again, the
federal government has proved incapable of doing that.
Medicare is projected to go bankrupt in just nine years
unless we act to curb the relentlessly rising cost of health
care. This cannot be done with across-the-board cuts in
Washington. It has to be done by giving seniors the tools to
fight back against skyrocketing costs. That’s why our
budget saves Medicare by using competition to weed out
inefficient providers, improve the quality of health care for
seniors and drive costs down.
The president’s proposals are aimed more at empowering
government than strengthening the free market. He
continues to prove he’s not up to the challenging work of
reforming government to meet 21st-century needs. If he
gets his way, the nation will endure huge tax hikes, seniors’
access to health care will be reduced — and we will
experience an epic collapse of our health and retirement
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programs that would devastate our nation’s most
vulnerable citizens.
House Republicans are fighting to prevent this. Our budget
offers a compassionate and optimistic contrast to a future
of health-care rationing and unbearably high taxes. We lift
the crushing burden of debt, repair the safety net, make
America’s tax system fair and competitive, and ensure that
our health and retirement programs have a strong and
lasting future. These issues are too important to leave to
the politics of the past. If President Obama won’t lead, we
will.
From The Washington Post, April 15, 2011
Ultimate Spoiler Alert
By: David Brooks
Here is another excellent example of the subversiveness of
the David Brooks stealth approach.
He lists a number of items that characterize the current
debate, a debate initiated and controlled by the Right Wing
extremist approach, as if the list is a comprehensive recap
of all the issues involved.
It is most certainly true that this partial list of the relevant
items is the one deployed by both the media and by the
president himself. It has sadly become the conventional
wisdom of the punditocracy and the political class. If
Brooks were as smart as he makes himself out to be, he
would not be following the party line on the issues as he
does constantly.
What is missing from this pseudo-scientific analysis of our
economic situation in America is the larger financial
framework that underlies the trouble with are in.
In essence, it is not all that hard to identify the problems if
one thinks a bit deeper:
It is all about the massive financial drain on the system that
was created by Wall Street malfeasance. The national
economy was drained by the swindles with Wall Street
firms both pocketing huge chunks of cash – taking that
money from pensions and other public sources – while
tanking their companies and imperiling the nation’s
economy. The government then rewarded the most
egregious of the Wall Street firms and bailed them out with
money taken from the US Treasury. These firms now have
a direct “free credit” line with the Fed.
It should be noted that the government officials involved in
these financial schemes are more often than not
employees or former employees of the same Wall Street
firms who have drained our economy and made boatloads
of money for themselves.
Wall Street – the firms who made it through the collapse –
was thus able to “double-dip” and receive profits from both
their swindles and the bailouts that came in their wake.
This is why they continue to pop the corks on their
champagne bottles in celebration of the obscene amounts
of money that they have absconded with.
This money is a transfer of American wealth – corporate
socialism – that has blown a huge hole in the economy and
because of the way the Fed and the TARP system has
worked, it is money that will remain in the hands of the
thieves and not in the hands of the American people.
Nothing less than a complete overhaul of the Wall Street
system will solve this problem – and the president has
shown a complete lack of interest in doing such a thing.
Second – the inability of President Obama to create a
workable alternative to the private healthcare industry – as
he promised in his election campaign speeches – has led
to a complete dominance of greedy financial interests
which have since the presidency of Richard Nixon
continued to eat up our healthcare dollar.
The idea of a Single-Payer system would solve the
problems of Medicare and Medicaid, but because the
president refused to propose such a system, we are still at
the tender mercies of a healthcare industry that – like Wall
Street – is in the driver’s seat. Making record profits at the
expense of the American taxpayers these companies have
gamed the system and are making out like bandits.
I will leave discussion of the Defense budget out of my
analysis for the purposes of brevity – but there too we have
another huge drain on our economy. And as far as taxes
go – the Ryan lie – which Obama seems to be buying – is
that any movement from the Bush cuts which are not a
permanent part of the tax code is considered an “increase.”
But by law, the tax rates have not changed since the time
of Bill Clinton – the Bush cuts are temporary and should
not be renewed; restoring those rates – as even Jon
Stewart showed – would significantly lower the national
debt. That Obama and the Democrats agreed to renew
them is yet another nail in their coffin.
To sum up: Until Wall Street firms and the healthcare
industry can be reined in, the discussion will remain as
Brooks outlines it. The basic debate will revolve around
tangential issues – never really getting to the inherent
structural problems that have led to the collapse of our
economy. Before taxes are discussed we need to know
what happened – and what is still happening – with the
massive amounts of dollars that have been transferred to
corporate and financial interests by means of various
schemes that have been made legal or have been left
unchecked by a government that is now in the pay of these
vested interests.
The money is all there – the question is who has it and
what are they doing with it.
20
DS
If they [President Obama and Paul Ryan] met, would they
resolve their differences? No, but they would understand
them better. Paul Ryan believes five things Barack Obama
does not. First, he believes that aging populations,
expensive new health care technologies and the
extravagant political promises have made the current
welfare state model unsustainable. Fundamental reform is
necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in
Europe.
Second, he believes that seniors and the middle class
cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be
imposed to rebalance these systems. Third, he believes
that health care costs will not be brought under control until
consumers take responsibility for their decisions and
providers have market-based incentives to reduce prices.
Fourth, he believes that tax increases should not be part of
these reforms because the economic costs outweigh the
gains. Fifth, he does not believe government can nurture
growth and reduce wage stagnation with targeted
investments.
Obama, meanwhile, does not believe the current welfare
arrangements are structurally unsustainable. They have to
be adjusted, but not fundamentally altered. He does not
believe the seniors and members of the middle class have
to suffer significantly in the course of these adjustments.
The approach he outlined Wednesday mostly shields these
groups from cuts, even if Congress can’t reach a deal on
deficit-cutting and a fiscal trigger kicks in.
Obama does not believe in relying on market mechanisms
to reduce health care costs. Instead, he would rely mostly
on a board of technical experts, who would be given power
to force their recommendations upon Congress.
Obama believes that tax increases on the rich have to be
part of a fiscal package. His approach claims to contain $3
in cuts for every $1 in taxes, but if you count these things
the way a normal person would, it’s closer to 1 to 1. Finally,
Obama believes that government investments in research
and infrastructure nurture broad-based prosperity.
Personally, I agree with Ryan on items 1-3 and with
Obama on items 4 and 5, and I think an acceptable
package could be put together to reconcile these views.
But I do not believe there is any chance this will happen in
the current climate. What’s going to happen is this: We’re
going to raise the debt ceiling in a way that fudges the
issues. Then we’re going to have an election featuring
these rival viewpoints, and Obama will win easily.

From The New York Times, April 15, 2011

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