Letty Cottin Pogrebin
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN Although an ardent fan of Jewish disputation, I believe our rancor has gone too far. Intra-communal hostility is as much a threat to Jewish survival today as...
...Some Reconstructionists are angry at the perpetrators of their newly revised prayer book...
...The attackers oppose anything that "legitimates" non-Orthodox views...
...Some men threw chairs at them over the mechitzah (partition dividing the men's and women's sections) .Although religious authorities acknowledge that the women are not violating halachah, the haredim insist that custom has the force of law...
...The reason our ancestors fought for religious freedom and for the state of Israel was to keep Jews safe, not to give us new battlegrounds on which to destroy ourselves...
...Like the boy who called "Wolf...
...magazine, is the author of Among Friends (McGraw-Hill, 1986...
...Words fly, tempers rage, doors slam and am echad (one people) is torn asunder...
...We turn hair-splitting arguments into atom-splitting conflagrations...
...A 1990 survey found that 70 percent of Israelis are ready to deny the right to vote to any Jew who favors a Palestinian state...
...Although an ardent fan of Jewish disputation, I believe our rancor has gone too far—so far, in fact, that intra-communal hostility seems as urgent a threat to Jewish survival today as the external peril of antisemitism...
...Meanwhile, gay Jews complain about Jewish communal foot-dragging on the AIDS crisis...
...Intra-communal hostility is as much a threat to Jewish survival today as antisemitism...
...Some progressive Jews fault other Jews for criticizing leaders like Jesse Jackson, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who are important to the black community...
...Today, we are more likely to find an adversary, who thinks we're an enemy of the Jewish people or not a Jew at all because of what we think or believe...
...Jews can survive that—we might even argue that healthy disputation has kept us strong and smart...
...In defense, AZF says Techiya has not fulfilled the basic Zionist obligation to support the Jewish National Fund...
...The Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza will not discuss yielding sovereignty and says any Israeli government "that commits one of these crimes [is] unlawful...
...The Jewish press has censored NJA activities and NJA members have been assaulted by other Jews...
...To stay this terminal disintegration, each of us must take personal responsibility for the tenor and texture of our disputes...
...I could go on, but you get the idea...
...Some Israelis have attacked the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) for allegedly luring Soviet Jews to America solely to justify HIAS's budget and bureaucracy...
...While Rabbi Avi Weiss and others demonstrated against Mandela during his visit last June (despite pleas for harmony by the mainstream leaders, who met with Mandela in Geneva), a new group, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, sponsored a Shabbat service in Mandela's honor and collected $30,000 for the African National Congress...
...Jews have so often declared a crisis of Jewish disunity that when the death blow to our people-hood comes, we may long since have stopped paying attention...
...Others have taken sides in an acrimonious dispute involving the dismissal of Arthur Waskow from their Reconstructionist Rabbinical College faculty, ostensibly for his views on Middle East peace...
...In Auschwitz we were Jews together...
...But contemporary hostilities strike me as different not just in degree but in kind...
...We escalate the apocalyptic expletives and vilify each other in ways that would be called blood libel if said by a Gentile...
...Are we going to let Jewish unity break apart once and for all on our watch, in our generation...
...Members of the Jewish Defense League and followers of Meir Kahane's Kach movement have no use for Jews who do not support a militant, racist, theocratic Jewish state...
...Today we don't just disagree—we deplore, we condemn, we excommunicate...
...Some Conservatives still resent the Jewish Theological Seminary's decision to ordain women...
...Some would insist that internecine battles are nothing new: Think of Jacob and Esau, Hillel and Shammai, Chasidim and Mitnagdim or Litvaks and Galitzianers...
...Anger is everywhere...
...How ironic that now, in our powerful Jewish state and our comfortable United States, we are racked by strife and separatism...
...Not only are Labor and Likud at each other's throats but Jews everywhere are furious at both parties for their backroom bribery and deal-making in the recent government crisis...
...Non-Orthodox Jews are angry at the Orthodox establishment for politicizing religion and delegitimating all denominations but their own...
...Consider just a few of the schisms relating to Israel: • Jews the world over disagree about the occupied territories, where to settle Soviet Jews, whether to have Palestinian elections, trade land for pesice, negotiate with the PLO, and so on...
...for real...
...The problem is not intra-community disagreement...
...She is currently at work on a memoir about her struggle to reconcile feminism and Judaism...
...Israel's religious parties keep splintering—becoming more politically manipulative by the year...
...The Council of Jewish Federations and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry fault the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ) for raising money to aid Jews living in Moscow when, they say, the UCSJ should be "helping Israel settle Soviet Jews...
...Techiya U.S.A., which supports Israel's right-wing Techiya party, is angry at the American Zionist Federation (AZF) for excluding them from membership "for clear political reasons...
...The Zionist Organization of America alerted the American Jewish community "about the true nature of the New Jewish Agenda and similar groups who would undermine the viability of...Israel...
...An officer of the Central Conference of American Rabbis lashed out at a leading New York rabbi because he agreed to speak at an interfaith conference on Middle East peace...
...That means eschewing sinat chinam, gratuitous hatred, and lashon harah, the evil tongue...
...Next we have the feuds concerning Jewish pluralism: • Orthodox purists have condemned National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL) president Yitz Greenberg and Yeshiva University president Norman Lamm and any other rabbi or Jew who believes in intergroup dialogue, respect for differences or outreach to secular Jews...
...After the death of Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, three Satmar chasidic factions competed for leadership by committing arson, breaking windows, throwing bottles and having fist fights amongst themselves...
...The Reform Zionists of America have attacked the Chabad-Lubavitch movement for not recognizing the validity of non-Orthodox conversions and for allegedly discouraging contributions to United Jewish Appeal-Federation...
...Most of them revolve around two dreams-come-true that were supposed to bring harmony and happiness to the Jewish people: the state of Israel and the freedom to practice Judaism as we please...
...It means that when we discredit another Jew's opinions we do not discredit that person as a Jew...
...The powerful Rabbi Eleazar Schach, head of Israel's Degel HaTorah party, banned the writing of Talmud scholar Adin Steinsaltz because Steinsaltz dared to question the patriarchs' treatment of their wives...
...American Jews mounted a full-court press against Israel's Orthodox rabbis and their political collaborators, who pushed the "Who is a Jew" debate to the point where the Knesset came within one vote of amending the Law of Return to meet Orthodox criteria...
...Some Jews are angry at the New Jewish Agenda (NJA), a group that is critical of Israeli policy but is not anti-Zionist...
...The haredim (ultra-Orthodox) have defamed the women trying to pray together with a Torah at the Western Wall...
...fl> Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms...
...Given rising rates of interfaith marriage and antisemitism, the last thing the Jewish people needs is to self-destruct from within...
...In Egypt we were Jews together...
...almost 90 percent of American Jews are non-Orthodox...
...Yet if it looks like a wolf and howls like a wolf, then it's time to cry "Wolf...
...I believe we are experiencing a mortal crisis of disunity...
...Still, I must add my cry to the alarms...
...Eighty percent of Israeli Jews identify as secular...
...Others resent the breakaway group of Traditional Conservatives who have started an institute that will ordain its own rabbis, none of them women...
...B'nai B'rith Women and B'nai B'rith International have been locked in gender warfare over their possible merger...
...The problem is intra-community disintegration: permitting disagreements to calcify into permanent fragmentation, allowing millions of Jewish souls to divorce themselves from the body of our people...
...Many Jews are offended by the Reform movement's vote to ordain rabbis who are avowed homosexuals and lesbians...
...When officials of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation met earlier this year with a top PLO leader, some critics resigned from Federation, others asked those who took part to resign and still others threatened to withhold their contributions...
...Sephardim and Ethiopian Jews are angry at Soviet olim (immigrants) for getting mortgage subsidies, job training and other priority treatment from the Israeli government while they remain trapped in poor housing and low-paying jobs...
...Jews used to be able to meet a Jew and find a friend...
...No person or institution is immune to attack...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
