By Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
(ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS / JULY 20, 2021) You think Jews cannot be Jew-haters?
Does any serious, open-minded non-Woke American still really believe that Jews are all “in it together”? How foolish!
Even as Ilhan Omar is the worst Jew-hater in Congress, with salutatorian going to Rashida Tlaib and honorable mentions for New York’s Antisemite of Color (AOC) and Betty McCollum of Minnesota, their champion in the U.S. Senate is Bernie Sanders. He endorses them when they seek election, and they endorse him. They all are as one, in it together. They are the epicenter of Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred in Congress.
But Bernie Sanders is Jewish, isn’t he? How can a Jew line up in bed with outright, unashamed, uninhibited Jew-haters? Does that make any sense?
Yes, it does.
Read my “tag line” to recognize my qualifications to write this: There is a deep, intense Jewish social sickness that afflicts perhaps one quarter of all Jews in the contemporary West. Some call it “self-hate.” Some have other names for it. A good word for it is “apostasy.” These apostates share a common psychological sickness that always backfires on them: they believe that, if they turn against “the Jews,” then others in their Left universes — whether they be liberal or “progressive” or socialist or communist or just plain Woke — will welcome them as fellow travelers.
It never works for the long term. It always comes back to bite them bad.
Do you see their dilemma? To be leftist, they need to station themselves as universalists, globalists. No national identity suits them — too jingoistic. No national language, no national anthem, no sense of deep-rooted patriotism.
These are the Jewish apostates, the self-haters of anything Jewish, who have been a blight on all other Jews these past two thousand years since Rome burned the Second Holy Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem and thereafter banished the Jewish citizens of Israel into two millennia of diaspora. They have emerged in each and every Jewish generation of Exile: the Nicholas Donins of Spain, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky and the Yevesekzia (Hebrew Section) of the Communist Party of Russia, Max Naumann and his Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (Association of German National Jews) who supported Hitler until they went up in smoke. Jews who support anything aimed at tearing down Judaism and its core values.
The phenomenon of the “Self-Hating Jew” is so sick and widespread that it merits its own separate Wikipedia entry of nearly 4,000 words. It is about winning acceptance in an environment that otherwise excludes Jews because the Left does not want them.
Are you a Jewish woman seeking to be involved in “The Women’s March”? Well, what can you do once you realize that their key internal organizational leaders are Jew-haters?
Are you an “LBGTQ” activist who wants to march at the “Dyke Parade”? What do you do when you learn that they ban the Jewish star?
You want to support “The Squad” — but they don’t want you.
You want to be engaged in Black Lives Matter, but BLM is so anti-Semitic that they endorse terrorists who shoot 4,000 rockets randomly into civilian populations of Israel merely aiming to kill any Jews they can. While Black Lives Matter rapidly has become a leading anti-Semitic organization in America, Jewish “progressives” still fall over each other trying to associate.
This is the torment of today’s Woke American Jew. The faculty members at colleges and graduate schools who must curse Israel and declare her an “apartheid” state in order to advance in their careers, qualify for tenure, and not otherwise get canceled. The Jews in Hollywood who must mouth the right words and praise the right Jew-haters in order to be considered for future roles. The Jews in the teachers’ unions who now push critical ethnic studies curricula that demote themselves into second-class citizenship.
It is a sickness. It is a deep sickness. If it did not exist, who would believe it? In their desperate pursuit to be accepted by their Woke Intersectionalist colleagues, they not only are loathed by us on the conservative side of the aisle, but are pathetic when viewed by the Left as well.
Their problem is that Joseph Stalin will kill them anyway. Leon Trotsky attacked Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Ultimately, Stalin killed all three of them. Karl Radek, too. And Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov also. Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar will hate these Jews anyway. The Woke at America’s campuses will not accept them anyway.
That is the pity for these poor Jews. In the left-wing world of Intersectionalism, where Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQs, Arabs, Muslims, and other now-favored “People of Color” stand aloft — there is no room for Jews. For the Jew-hating, America-hating 1619 Black Supremacists of Black Lives Matter, the Jews are White, and Israel is White (even though over half Israel’s population is not, and Israel is just about the only country that ever risked its military to rescue and evacuate tens of thousands of Black Africans from slavery and persecution, to integrate them into the nation’s social fabric).
The Left does not and never will trust the Jews: too White, too insular, too pushy, too . . . damn Jewish. Thus, that absolutely wonderful tweet a few weeks ago by Ilhan Omar lumping together cutthroats and murderers in Hamas and the Taliban with our United States and with the people of Israel. Even better, her fabulous eye-popper in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper:
“I think it’s really important for these [Jewish House] members to realize that they haven’t been partners in—in justice. They haven’t been equally engaging in seeking justice around the world and I think I will continue to do that. It is important for me as someone who knows what it feels like to experience injustice in ways that many of my colleagues don’t. To be a voice in finding accountability, asking for mechanisms for justice for those who are maligned, oppressed, and have had injustice done to them.”
For all their sycophancy towards this despicable and adulterous woman who deserves no respect at all, how it bemuses these Leftist Jews! “What does she want from us?” they whine. They are the first on line to wash her feet. From morning to night they talk “social justice” and “Tikun Olam” (a concept of Judaism they completely falsify and corrupt) and “Black Lives Matter” and wear their Woke credentials at every opportunity. They fire other professors who whisper a kind word about Trump and cancel those who tell the truth about Kamala Harris’s utter unsuitability for the Vice Presidency — and how she rose in politics as Willie Brown’s arm candy. Wokeism and Self-Mockery permeates and pervades their television programs and movies — their pursuit of every other people’s causes while hating their own affiliation.
It is crazy: for example, that every month on Netflix there is a new TV series aimed at mocking and denigrating Orthodox Judaism. One month’s show is called “Unorthodox.” The next month is “My Unorthodox Life.” What a clever turn of phrase! Just week-after-week Jew-bashing . . . by Jews. Can you imagine Netflix daring to run a show called “UnMuslim” and then “My UnMuslim Life”?
Meanwhile, NBC runs a medical drama TV episode that is so despicably anti-Semitic that some of its affiliates refused to air it while its “Saturday Night Live,” supposedly a comedy program from what I am told, projects outright lies and a Twenty-First Century blood libel about Israel. Amazon Prime airs a series whose first episode includes a Jewish butcher who sells pork and a Jewish “comedian” who does her stand-up on Kol Nidre night of Yom Kippur.
These Jews of the Left try so desperately to win entry into the Left’s inner circles — to gain a smile or wink from an Ocasio or Sharpton or Elizabeth Warren — by self-denigrating at every juncture.
And now Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the Woke of ice cream, announce that Ben and Jerry’s no longer will sell ice cream in two regions of Israel that now are populated by 800,000 Jews (living on state land in the biblical heartland of Israel, retaken after Jordan’s illegal occupation and which can at most be legally termed “disputed”). It is challenging to find two more perfect exemplars of Woke Jews, so immersed in their self-hating need to gain acclaim outside their own community that they will boycott Jews — not Chinese torturers, not the world’s tyrants and dictators, just Jews in Judea and Samaria.
They are despicable.
As an Orthodox Jew, I have lived a lifetime without experiencing fried calamiri, shrimp, bacon and pork and ham, and lobster. My understanding from my universe of non-Jewish friends is that I accordingly have not tasted some delightful flavors and textures. So be it. As Hebrew National used to advertise, I answer to a Higher Authority.
I have found flavors among Häagen-Dazs, McConnells of Santa Barbara, and other kosher-certified premium ice creams that can replace my cholesterol-and-sugar need. I will not purchase another Ben and Jerry’s ice cream again in the United States until they reverse their announced anti-Semitic boycott of 800,000 Jews in Israel. They can choke on their Woke.
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is adjunct professor of law at prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
This op-ed was originally published in Israel National News and can be viewed here.