Monday, August 18, 2014 2:07:09 AM
Anti-Semitism Stirs in Latin America
By Enrique Krauze
AUG. 15, 2014
MEXICO CITY — Besides its grim toll in human misery and ever more bitter divisions, the war in Gaza has awakened the sleeping monster of anti-Semitism in Europe. I would not say the same for Latin America, though there are signs that the beast is perhaps stirring.
Some Latin American governments have signaled their dissatisfaction with Israel’s actions. Chile and Brazil have recalled their ambassadors, Fidel Castro has accused the Israelis of genocide, and governments favorably disposed to Venezuela’s populist revolution have all publicly condemned Israel for the war.
While such political rejection is not anti-Semitic, something new is emerging in Spanish-language social media, mostly among young people, where condemnation of Israel is often accompanied by anti-Semitic diatribes. Latin America is not particularly anti-Semitic, but there is a danger it may become so.
In 1938, Jorge Luis Borges described Argentine anti-Semitism as “facsimile” anti-Semitism, based on European models. This had been true for decades, not only in Argentina but elsewhere in Latin America, where anti-Semitism was based on two imported hatreds: the ancient anti-Judaism of the Spanish Catholic tradition and the modern European racism of the 19th and 20th centuries. In recent years, however, such feelings have been heightened by a third influence — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and developed into a new, unexpected prejudice: an anti-Semitism of the left.
From the earliest days of the Conquest in the 16th century until the middle of the 17th century, waves of Jewish immigrants from Spain and Portugal arrived in the New World. Since Judaism and Islam were banned on the Iberian Peninsula after its reconquest by Christian armies, these immigrants were known as “conversos,” or converts, who often masked their continued practice of Judaism and thus were called “marranos,” or secret Jews.
The scholar Jonathan Israel has described this early migration to the New World and its effects. These educated exiles established an impressive financial and commercial net that spanned continents. But when they were cut down in the 17th century by the Inquisition, these generations vanished from popular memory, leaving only a few cultural traces, like the many largely Portuguese Jewish names that are scattered across Latin America. Perhaps because of their rapid disappearance into the general population, no native variety of anti-Semitism toward them ever developed.
In Spain, the story is somewhat different. There were Jews in Spain before the birth of Christ and, though they were officially expelled in 1492, their presence had been so vital to the country that it continued to impress itself on Spain right down to the present. The old anti-Judaism is still alive in daily speech, in popular legend and among influential sectors of public opinion, but its positive counterpart is no less alive in a cult of respect for the heritage of the Sephardim (the ancient Spanish Jewish community) and a liberal tradition of interest in Jewish traditions.
At the end of the 19th century, the countries of post-independence Latin America received new waves of Jewish migrants. Many fled persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, and most headed for Argentina. When anti-Semitism energized by Nazism arose in Europe, thousands of Polish Jews (among them my parents and grandparents) came to Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. There they encountered, as across most of Latin America, a general tolerance toward Jews — though Argentina was a somewhat more complicated case.
Then came World War II [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html ] and the heyday of Nazi propaganda. When the war broke out, part of the Latin American press, a segment of public opinion and a number of intellectuals, politicians and businessmen on the right sympathized with the Axis, fueled in part by anti-Americanism and the negative trait of admiration for the political strongman. Anti-Semitic literature was widely circulated (such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “Mein Kampf”), along with locally generated anti-Semitic articles, pamphlets and cartoons. Of particular importance in Mexico was the journal Timón, funded by the German Embassy and directed by José Vasconcelos, a prominent Mexican writer and philosopher.
After the war, spreading knowledge of the Holocaust and the growing prestige of Israel encouraged a rather halcyon period for Latin American Jews. But then Juan Perón welcomed Nazis fleeing a defeated Germany, allowing them to make a dark, racist mark on Argentine society.
In 1976, during a chaotic period in Argentina, the military seized power and began a savage regime of torture and murder of leftists and liberals. As depicted in Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” Argentine anti-Semitism — especially strong among the traditional land-owning and military elite, as well as the Catholic Church — created a situation where Jews who fell into the hands of the junta were treated, as was the case of Timerman, with Nazi-style anti-Semitism. Most striking is Timerman’s description of an hours-long session of electric torture where no questions were asked, only shouts of “Jew, Jew!” — and his memory of torture in a room with a picture of Hitler on the wall.
The terror ended with the fall of the regime in 1983, but in 1994 an attack by Hezbollah (apparently supported by Iran with local collusion) on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people. It was the second anti-Jewish terrorist act in Buenos Aires in two years. The ongoing unrest in the Middle East had disastrously touched Latin America’s Jewish community. And the understandable anger with the Israeli occupation of the territories suddenly mushroomed into a movement that became an anti-Semitism of the left that was especially strong in university circles.
Two other factors also influenced attitudes toward Jews in Latin America: the anti-Semitic element (strongly pro-Palestinian [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html ]) that was introduced into “Chavismo” in Venezuela, and the growth of social networks, where all the commonplaces of right-wing anti-Semitism can be found, often sanctioned by professors on the left.
The bombardment of Gaza has greatly intensified these reactions. A just solution in the Middle East could reduce anti-Semitism not only in Latin America but the entire world. The prospects are not heartening but perhaps possible. For now, each country must debate its own reactions to this problem — as must local Jewish communities, which should participate freely in such discussions in a critical as well as autocritical spirit.
Enrique Krauze is a historian, editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres [ http://www.letraslibres.com/ ], and author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America [ http://www.amazon.com/Redeemers-Ideas-Power-Latin-America/dp/0060938447 ].” This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/opinion/enrique-krauze-anti-semitism-stirs-in-latin-america.html
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Wedding Of Jew, Muslim Draws Hundreds Of Protesters
Isaeli supporters of the right-wing Organization for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land (LEHAVA) protest outside the wedding hall where Mahmoud Mansour, an Arab-Israeli, and Morel Malcha, a Jewish, got married on August 17, 2014 in the Israeli costal city of Rishon Letzion. Hebrew writting on sign reads 'Assimilation is the genocide of the Jewish people.'
(GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images)
* Police arrest four Israelis at Jewish, Muslim nuptials
* President denouces protest as an 'outrage'
By Allyn Fisher-Ilan
Posted: 08/17/2014 7:35 pm EDT Updated: 1 hour ago
RISHON LEZION, Israel, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Israeli police on Sunday blocked more than 200 far-right Israeli protesters from rushing guests at a wedding of a Jewish woman and Muslim man as they shouted "death to the Arabs" in a sign of tensions stoked by the Gaza war.
Several dozen police, including members of the force's most elite units, formed human chains to keep the protesters from the wedding hall's gates and chased after many who defied them. Four protesters were arrested, and there were no injuries.
A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 meters (yards) from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.
The protest highlighted a rise in tensions between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel in the past two months amid a monthlong Gaza war, the kidnap and slaying of three Israeli teens in June followed by a revenge choking and torching to death of a Palestinian teen in the Jerusalem area.
A group called Lehava, which organized the wedding demonstration, has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past, often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage. But they have rarely protested at the site of a wedding.
The groom told Israel's Channel 2 TV the protesters failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit. "We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favor coexistence," he said.
'DEATH TO THE ARABS' THREATS CHANTED
Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced Malka, who was born Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a "traitor against the Jewish state," and shouted epithets of hatred towards Arabs including "death to the Arabs." They sang a song that urges, "May your village burn down."
A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read: "Love conquers all."
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, sworn in last month to succeed Shimon Peres, criticized the protest as a "cause for outrage and concern" in a message on his Facebook page.
"Such expressions undermine the basis of our coexistence here, in Israel, a country that is both Jewish and democratic," Rivlin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud bloc, said.
Lehava spokesman and former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari denounced Jews intermarrying with non-Jews of any denomination as "worse than what Hitler did," alluding to the murder of 6 million Jews across Europe in World War Two.
A surprise wedding guest was Israel's health minister, Yael German, a centrist in Netanyahu's government. She told reporters as she headed inside that she saw the wedding and the protest against it as "an expression of democracy."
Arab citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel's majority Jewish population, and the overwhelming majority of Arabs are Muslims. Rabbinical authorities who oversee most Jewish nuptials in Israel object to intermarriage fearing it will diminish the ranks of the Jewish people.
Many Israeli couples who marry out of their faith do so abroad.
Malka's father, Yoram Malka, said on Israeli television he objected to the wedding, calling it "a very sad event." He said he was angry that his daughter had converted to Islam. Of his now son-in-law, he said, "My problem with him is that he is an Arab."
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan)
Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/17/wedding-jew-muslim-protesters_n_5686433.html [with comments]
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A Rabbi’s Departure Manifests a Challenge for Jews in America
Rabbi Andy Bachman developed a model for what might bring some of the nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to the fold.
Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN
AUG. 15, 2014
Leafy, affluent Park Slope, Brooklyn, embodies the challenge facing modern American Jewry: Though many Jews live there, few are observant. So it was no small feat when Rabbi Andy Bachman took the helm of Congregation Beth Elohim [ http://congregationbethelohim.org/ ] in the neighborhood eight years ago and began attracting a vibrant congregation of Jewish atheists and agnostics, as well as the more traditionally religious.
Drawn by big-name book talks, family-oriented religious classes and the rabbi’s teaching that to be Jewish is to do good in the world, membership in the Reform synagogue doubled to more than a thousand families. It drew young literati like Jonathan Safran Foer [ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1583636/ ] and catapulted to national attention as a model for what might bring some of the nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to the fold.
Recently, however, Rabbi Bachman shocked many in his congregation and in Jewish circles by announcing that he was stepping down from the pulpit and out of Jewish leadership to help New York’s poorest, regardless of their religion.
Membership at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has doubled to more than a thousand families in the last eight years, since Rabbi Bachman took over.
Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times
“I think that I deliver really good and really inspiring sermons about social justice, but is that really enough?” he said in an interview. “It’s crazy to think that’s enough. In order to maintain my sense of integrity and to keep the flame burning strongly about my commitments, I knew it was time to step away.”
His decision was deeply personal, but also touched on vexing questions at the center of Judaism’s future in this country as modern Jews — the secular, the unaffiliated, the questioning — grapple with what it means to be Jewish and what role a synagogue should play in that identity. Nationally, synagogue affiliation is falling as American Jews increasingly decide they do not need to live out their Jewishness in a religious context.
Rabbi Bachman, 51, has spent a lifetime pondering such questions. Raised in Milwaukee as a wholly secular Jew, his main links to his Jewish heritage were his paternal grandparents, who cooked sour kugel and sweet blintzes and spoke of the family’s Belarussian roots. Yet when his father died in 1983, Rabbi Bachman did not even know how to say Kaddish, the Jewish blessing over the dead. He felt compelled to take his Jewish heritage more seriously.
“I was a typical modern Jew who had an identity crisis, and rode it out, and built a whole career out of it,” he said with a smile. “What an embarrassment.”
But in the last two years, he began feeling constrained within the synagogue. He had always wanted to do good in the world, he said. Before pursuing the rabbinate, he considered becoming a journalist or working in government. Becoming a rabbi allowed him to channel his idealism in a Jewish way.
Pre-eminent among Jewish values in his mind, he said, is the call to do justice. And he had come to a point where he felt that he could do more by direct action than by giving sermons about it. “The calculus of how I wanted to spend my hours every day changed,” he said.
Rabbi Bachman spent months fretting over his decision, worried that it might cause doubt in others. Indeed, congregants peppered him with questions after he posted the news on his personal blog in March. He said one asked him: “You are leaving the pulpit, have you had a crisis of faith? Have you decided there is no God?” Another asked: “Does this mean Judaism has no value?”
“There is no crisis of faith,” he said he had responded. “In a way, it’s just a crisis of wanting to be more effective at doing good in the world.”
Rabbi Bachman at a protest on Dec. 9, 2013, nearly one year after the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He has said that serving the broader world was a way of expressing his faith in a different way.
Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Yet Rabbi Bachman admitted to grappling with the idea that he should devote his life primarily to the service of other Jews, something he called his “sense of responsibility to the broader Jewish community.” He is not alone.
Reform Judaism, which is the largest denomination in American Judaism, has a long tradition of social justice and activism, but it can be a challenge to convince many liberal, modern Jews of the need to live out those values in a Jewish context. So Beth Elohim reached beyond the denomination’s traditional boundaries to build its synagogue, hosting cultural events for secular Israelis, celebrations for young Brooklyn Jews seeking a sense of belonging, community service projects and the popular book talks featuring authors like Paul Auster [ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000808/#writer ] and Don DeLillo [ http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Don-DeLillo/1098974 ]. Simultaneously, it opened its doors to more religious Jews and began hosting egalitarian Orthodox services.
“Andy is wisely a rabbi who saw the broader landscapes of Jewish life, and built bridges to help people come in,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the Union for Reform Judaism [ http://urj.org//index.cfm ], said. “And that’s the wave of the Jewish future.”
By 2012, Rabbi Bachman was appearing on national lists of top rabbis produced by publications as diverse as The Jewish Daily Forward and Newsweek. And yet, privately, after days of teaching or officiating over funerals, he found himself nagged by a question: “Who is in greater need that I can help?”
When Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, he mobilized Beth Elohim to begin a mass feeding program. The synagogue kitchen was transformed into a center that served some 185,000 meals over a year and a half. Then budget cuts hit the temple this year, and it had to eliminate several jobs and suspend the feeding program. Some in the synagogue were worried that its finances were not keeping up with the pace of change.
Although Rabbi Bachman’s announcement that he would leave at the end of his contract in June 2015 came at the same time as the cuts, he said the timing was coincidental. Most congregants have been supportive of his decision, although there has also been sadness and unease.
“Andy has been there for us when we really needed him, so we are sad and disappointed,” said Laurie Gelles, a temple member for 20 years.
Rabbi Bachman, who is working on a book about Jewish identity, emphasized that serving the broader world was simply expressing his faith in a different way. “I will always be a rabbi,” he said. And following his example, he said, his congregants should not build a wall around their Judaism in an effort to preserve it.
After all, he added, Moses himself was worried about Jewish continuity, but according to the Jewish tradition his fears were allayed when God miraculously brought him to visit the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, a famous Jewish sage of the first century A.D. At first, Moses could not understand the lesson, because it was in Aramaic, but eventually he heard the rabbi say: “This is the law given to Moses at Sinai,” and was comforted.
“If Moses didn’t understand Akiva, my presumption is that we will probably be O.K.,” Rabbi Bachman said of the survival of Judaism. “I might not recognize it myself if I were to come back and look at it in a couple hundred years, but as long as there is Torah at the center in some form, I guess we will be O.K.”
© 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/nyregion/a-rabbis-decision-to-step-down-touches-on-questions-of-jewish-identity.html
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As online anti-Semitism grows, so do efforts to counter it
It has been 17 years since Suzette Bronkhorst, pictured here, co-founded the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet, known as MDI.
Photo courtesy of Stichting Magenta – Magenta Foundation
Luigi Serenelli | August 15, 2014
BERLIN (RNS) It’s been 17 years since Suzette Bronkhorst co-founded the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet [ http://www.meldpunt.nl/site/page.php ], but she said she doesn’t remember the level of anti-Semitic speech on social media platforms ever being this high.
“There are thousands of incidents and we’re getting so many complaints,” she said of her organization, which registers complaints of hate speech online. “There’s been a huge surge since Gaza.”
The Gaza conflict, which has led to the deaths of 1,900 Palestinians and 68 Israelis, has also sparked a wave of counter speech, with organizations like Bronkhorst’s attempting to tackle hate speech by debunking myths and stereotypes on blogs, forums and social media.
“There’s a lot of chatter on the Internet that is not based on fact and there are different ways in which you can do counter speech,” said Bronkhorst, whose organization goes by the name MDI. “For instance, if there’s a discussion on Facebook, you join in and you try to give counterpoints to people who are just ill-informed.”
Magenta Foundation hosts the conference of the International Network Against Cyber Hate at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, 2009.
Photo courtesy of Magenta Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2014.
In one instance, Bronkhorst’s volunteers asked a Twitter user writing “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” whether he really wanted to murder people by gassing them. The user removed the tweet, apologized and said he didn’t mean it.
In July, the number of Dutch-language anti-Semitic Facebook pages ran into the hundreds, according to MDI, which cannot keep up with the amount of hate-fueled posts, ranging from statements such as “Jews must die” to those praising Adolf Hitler. On Twitter, the hashtag “Hitler was right” appeared more than 10,000 times in July in connection with Gaza and became a trending topic, says MDI.
Sergey Lagodinsky, a lawyer and a member of the Jewish community’s representative assembly in Berlin, said comments by friends on Facebook shocked him.
“It’s hardly tolerable because people are being attacked,” said Lagodinsky. “You have a lot of people who you thought were friends who articulate things in a way which leaves you speechless.”
Berlin’s Technical University [ http://www.tu-berlin.de/ ] has just started a project analyzing around 100,000 Internet texts to see how anti-Semitism spreads online on social media and in comment sections, chatrooms and forums.
“The Internet plays an important role here as more drastic use of language can flourish through links between websites as well as user anonymity,” said Matthias Jakob Becker, a member of the research team.
The team has found that not only Islamist and right-wing circles have resorted to old canards, such as Jewish world-domination conspiracy theories, but so, too, has the educated middle class.
Anti-Semitism is a particularly sensitive issue in Germany. Special police protection is provided for Jewish buildings, ranging from synagogues to bakeries, and the growing anti-Jewish sentiment even prompted the country’s biggest newspaper, Bild [ http://www.bild.de/ ], to wade into the fray.
On its website, the newspaper created a button depicting a Star of David and the slogan “stimme erheben: nie wieder Judenhass” (raise your voice: never again Jew hatred) that people could share online. It has also added interviews with celebrities, politicians and ordinary people speaking out against anti-Semitism. Bild encouraged readers to tweet against anti-Semitism under the hashtag “stimme erheben.”
While the campaign ran for just one day, Tobias Froehlich, a representative for Axel Springer [ http://www.axelspringer.de/en/ ], Bild’s owner, said the publication may follow up with similar campaigns.
“You can still find it online and of course, depending on how the news develops, you could see it again in our newspaper,” said Froehlich. “The voice against anti-Semitism isn’t just for one day.”
Members of Germany’s Jewish community said the Bild campaign is a reminder that Jews in Europe are generally safe and that while anti-Semitism is a reality, it’s mainly kept in check.
American freelance writer Giulia Pines Kersthold, photographed at Falkplatz in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin on June 14, 2014.
Photo © Harald Franzen, courtesy of Giulia Pines
“The online world is a tool of propaganda for hate speech against everyone,” said 29-year-old Giulia Pines Kersthold, a Jewish New Yorker and author who has lived in Berlin for six years. But she added: “I have never really felt unsafe as a Jew in Germany and I would say that I still don’t.”
In France, where pro-Palestinian demonstrations in July culminated in attacks on eight synagogues, many Jews are fleeing to Israel.
Between January and June, 2,830 French Jews emigrated to Israel. That number is expected to exceed 5,000 by the end of 2014 — marking the first time in modern history that a full 1 percent of a western Jewish community will move to Israel in a single year, according to the Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency for Israel. In 2013, 3,288 French Jews left for Israel.
Yonathan Arfi, vice president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, called the anti-Semitic surge a new phenomenon that has intensified thanks to the Internet.
“It is a space without laws,” he said. “You have many people on the Internet who are Jewish and easily accessible to people who target them.”
Bronkhorst at MDI acknowledges the difficulties but is optimistic and hopes the project will expand to other organizations in the International Network Against Cyber Hate, of which MDI is a member.
“It’s a matter of resources right now,” said Bronkhorst. “We’re going to do it and we can only do it if we all work together to change our neighbor and let our neighbor change another one — one drop at a time to make an ocean.”
(Angela Waters and Jennifer Collins contributed to this report.)
© 2014 Religion News LLC
http://www.religionnews.com/2014/08/15/online-anti-semitism-grows-efforts-counter/ [with embedded slideshow a peaceful protest in support of Palestine on Thursday, Aug. 14, 2014 in Toulouse, France, and comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/16/anti-semitic-hate-speech-internet_n_5682031.html (with comments)]
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Evangelical leaders will travel to Israel to signal their support
Several high-profile evangelical leaders will travel to Israel next week as a part of the “Christians in Solidarity with Israel” trip put together by the National Religious Broadcasters in response to the most recent conflict in Gaza.
Photo courtesy of National Religious Broadcasters
Sarah Pulliam Bailey | August 12, 2014
(RNS) Several high-profile evangelical leaders will travel to Israel next week as a part of the “Christians in Solidarity with Israel” trip put together by the National Religious Broadcasters in response to the most recent conflict in Gaza.
The Aug. 17-22 trip will include Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham and president of AnGeL Ministries; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Matthews, N.C.
“My prayer is that God’s people in this country and around the world would intercede for heaven’s involvement in Israel, that God would defend and protect her from her enemies,” said Lotz.
The NRB is a large umbrella group for Christian communicators involved mostly in radio and television. Its annual conference attracts thousands, and it bills itself as the “world’s largest annual gathering of Christian media professionals.”
The trip will emphasize American Christians’ steadfast support for Israel, said Perkins of the Family Research Council.
Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of the Rev. Billy Graham.
Photo by Chris Stephens
“For a large number of Christians, there are two primary reasons to support Israel. We have the Jewish people to thank for our faith and we are instructed in Scripture not only to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, but are told that those who bless Israel will be blessed,” Perkins said in a statement.
“Secondly, it is in the national security interest of the United States to support Israel. To abridge our commitment to the state of Israel would be an act of hostility not just to the Jewish state but would do damage to our own vital interests.”
While Richard Land, formerly head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, will join the trip, his successor, Russell Moore, is not listed as a participant.
The trip will include popular Bible teacher Kay Arthur, Richard Bott of Bott Radio Network and Chelsen Vicari from the Institute on Religion & Democracy. It will be led by NRB President and CEO Jerry A. Johnson.
Evangelicals aren’t the only ones rising to Israel’s defense after the much-criticized Gaza incursion. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and some Democratic members of the state Legislature are headed to Israel on Tuesday (Aug. 12).
But there’s no question that Israel holds a special place for older evangelicals in ways that go beyond politics. Earlier this summer, megachurch pastor John Hagee held a summit [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/christians_united_for_israel_the_most_insanely_pro_israel_conference_of.html ] using theology to support Israel.
Still, some are worried over how younger evangelicals might be shifting on Israel. Earlier this year, David Brog from Hagee’s Christians United for Israel warned [ http://www.meforum.org/3769/israel-evangelical-support ] that young evangelicals were turning against Israel. Others say [ http://www.religionnews.com/2014/04/08/support-israel-waning-among-evangelicals/ ] evangelicals are not turning against Israel but may be more sympathetic than in the past to a Palestinian perspective.
Younger evangelicals in particular may not view Israel the way their parents did, wrote [ http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2014/08/07/how-millennial-evangelicals-see-the-israeli-palestine-conflict/33541 ] Dale Hanson Bourke, author of “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
“Most evangelicals older than 50 grew up in churches that taught some form of dispensationalism, a theology that views Jews as God’s chosen people, Israel as the land promised to them, and the second coming of Christ tied to Jews returning to Israel,” Bourke wrote. “Dispensationalism has fallen out of fashion in many evangelical circles and is no longer taught in many seminaries or from pulpits.”
It’s difficult to measure long-term support for Israel among evangelicals. Findings from the Pew Research Center, though, suggest that it has remained relatively stable in the past five years.
When asked “In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, who do you sympathize with more?” evangelicals were far more likely to say Israel — 72 percent to 4 percent in 2013, about the same as in 2009 — according to the Pew poll.
The NRB grew in the 1940s out of radio regulations disputes between mainline Protestant denominations and evangelicals, who were rapidly growing in numbers. Israel has also been a pressing issue among some in mainline churches as the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted [ http://www.religionnews.com/2014/06/20/prebyteriansdivestment/ ] earlier this summer to divest from companies that profit from the oppression of Palestinians within Israel’s occupied territories.
“Countering rising anti-Semitism in the international press and on the streets, this friendship visit will communicate to Israel and to the Palestinians who stand in opposition to Hamas that we, leaders who represent the Christian community, stand with them,” said Johnson, the NRB president, in a statement. “It will also show the world that Christians in general support the Jewish people and their right to security.”
Lotz said her famous father has been a consistent supporter of Israel. “He would also express his love for the Arabs and Palestinians,” she said. Her brother, Franklin Graham, spoke [ http://billygraham.org/story/franklin-graham-speaks-at-israeli-embassy/ ] at the Israeli Embassy earlier this year on why evangelicals love Israel.
During a recent trip to the beach, Lotz said, her daughter’s phone beeped from an app that tracked every missile strike against Israel. Lotz said it beeped so much she asked her daughter to turn it off.
“I think there’s a lot of information and spin going on about what’s taking place there,” Lotz said. “We need to support the Palestinian people. I think Hamas is using them for their evil agenda. I don’t support Israel giving up their land. ”
© 2014 Religion News LLC
http://www.religionnews.com/2014/08/12/conservative-evangelical-leaders-travel-israel-signal-support/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/17/evangelical-leaders-israel_n_5673001.html (with comments)]
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (other) following, see also (linked in):
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By Enrique Krauze
AUG. 15, 2014
MEXICO CITY — Besides its grim toll in human misery and ever more bitter divisions, the war in Gaza has awakened the sleeping monster of anti-Semitism in Europe. I would not say the same for Latin America, though there are signs that the beast is perhaps stirring.
Some Latin American governments have signaled their dissatisfaction with Israel’s actions. Chile and Brazil have recalled their ambassadors, Fidel Castro has accused the Israelis of genocide, and governments favorably disposed to Venezuela’s populist revolution have all publicly condemned Israel for the war.
While such political rejection is not anti-Semitic, something new is emerging in Spanish-language social media, mostly among young people, where condemnation of Israel is often accompanied by anti-Semitic diatribes. Latin America is not particularly anti-Semitic, but there is a danger it may become so.
In 1938, Jorge Luis Borges described Argentine anti-Semitism as “facsimile” anti-Semitism, based on European models. This had been true for decades, not only in Argentina but elsewhere in Latin America, where anti-Semitism was based on two imported hatreds: the ancient anti-Judaism of the Spanish Catholic tradition and the modern European racism of the 19th and 20th centuries. In recent years, however, such feelings have been heightened by a third influence — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and developed into a new, unexpected prejudice: an anti-Semitism of the left.
From the earliest days of the Conquest in the 16th century until the middle of the 17th century, waves of Jewish immigrants from Spain and Portugal arrived in the New World. Since Judaism and Islam were banned on the Iberian Peninsula after its reconquest by Christian armies, these immigrants were known as “conversos,” or converts, who often masked their continued practice of Judaism and thus were called “marranos,” or secret Jews.
The scholar Jonathan Israel has described this early migration to the New World and its effects. These educated exiles established an impressive financial and commercial net that spanned continents. But when they were cut down in the 17th century by the Inquisition, these generations vanished from popular memory, leaving only a few cultural traces, like the many largely Portuguese Jewish names that are scattered across Latin America. Perhaps because of their rapid disappearance into the general population, no native variety of anti-Semitism toward them ever developed.
In Spain, the story is somewhat different. There were Jews in Spain before the birth of Christ and, though they were officially expelled in 1492, their presence had been so vital to the country that it continued to impress itself on Spain right down to the present. The old anti-Judaism is still alive in daily speech, in popular legend and among influential sectors of public opinion, but its positive counterpart is no less alive in a cult of respect for the heritage of the Sephardim (the ancient Spanish Jewish community) and a liberal tradition of interest in Jewish traditions.
At the end of the 19th century, the countries of post-independence Latin America received new waves of Jewish migrants. Many fled persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, and most headed for Argentina. When anti-Semitism energized by Nazism arose in Europe, thousands of Polish Jews (among them my parents and grandparents) came to Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. There they encountered, as across most of Latin America, a general tolerance toward Jews — though Argentina was a somewhat more complicated case.
Then came World War II [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html ] and the heyday of Nazi propaganda. When the war broke out, part of the Latin American press, a segment of public opinion and a number of intellectuals, politicians and businessmen on the right sympathized with the Axis, fueled in part by anti-Americanism and the negative trait of admiration for the political strongman. Anti-Semitic literature was widely circulated (such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “Mein Kampf”), along with locally generated anti-Semitic articles, pamphlets and cartoons. Of particular importance in Mexico was the journal Timón, funded by the German Embassy and directed by José Vasconcelos, a prominent Mexican writer and philosopher.
After the war, spreading knowledge of the Holocaust and the growing prestige of Israel encouraged a rather halcyon period for Latin American Jews. But then Juan Perón welcomed Nazis fleeing a defeated Germany, allowing them to make a dark, racist mark on Argentine society.
In 1976, during a chaotic period in Argentina, the military seized power and began a savage regime of torture and murder of leftists and liberals. As depicted in Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” Argentine anti-Semitism — especially strong among the traditional land-owning and military elite, as well as the Catholic Church — created a situation where Jews who fell into the hands of the junta were treated, as was the case of Timerman, with Nazi-style anti-Semitism. Most striking is Timerman’s description of an hours-long session of electric torture where no questions were asked, only shouts of “Jew, Jew!” — and his memory of torture in a room with a picture of Hitler on the wall.
The terror ended with the fall of the regime in 1983, but in 1994 an attack by Hezbollah (apparently supported by Iran with local collusion) on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people. It was the second anti-Jewish terrorist act in Buenos Aires in two years. The ongoing unrest in the Middle East had disastrously touched Latin America’s Jewish community. And the understandable anger with the Israeli occupation of the territories suddenly mushroomed into a movement that became an anti-Semitism of the left that was especially strong in university circles.
Two other factors also influenced attitudes toward Jews in Latin America: the anti-Semitic element (strongly pro-Palestinian [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html ]) that was introduced into “Chavismo” in Venezuela, and the growth of social networks, where all the commonplaces of right-wing anti-Semitism can be found, often sanctioned by professors on the left.
The bombardment of Gaza has greatly intensified these reactions. A just solution in the Middle East could reduce anti-Semitism not only in Latin America but the entire world. The prospects are not heartening but perhaps possible. For now, each country must debate its own reactions to this problem — as must local Jewish communities, which should participate freely in such discussions in a critical as well as autocritical spirit.
Enrique Krauze is a historian, editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres [ http://www.letraslibres.com/ ], and author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America [ http://www.amazon.com/Redeemers-Ideas-Power-Latin-America/dp/0060938447 ].” This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/opinion/enrique-krauze-anti-semitism-stirs-in-latin-america.html
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Wedding Of Jew, Muslim Draws Hundreds Of Protesters
Isaeli supporters of the right-wing Organization for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land (LEHAVA) protest outside the wedding hall where Mahmoud Mansour, an Arab-Israeli, and Morel Malcha, a Jewish, got married on August 17, 2014 in the Israeli costal city of Rishon Letzion. Hebrew writting on sign reads 'Assimilation is the genocide of the Jewish people.'
(GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images)
* Police arrest four Israelis at Jewish, Muslim nuptials
* President denouces protest as an 'outrage'
By Allyn Fisher-Ilan
Posted: 08/17/2014 7:35 pm EDT Updated: 1 hour ago
RISHON LEZION, Israel, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Israeli police on Sunday blocked more than 200 far-right Israeli protesters from rushing guests at a wedding of a Jewish woman and Muslim man as they shouted "death to the Arabs" in a sign of tensions stoked by the Gaza war.
Several dozen police, including members of the force's most elite units, formed human chains to keep the protesters from the wedding hall's gates and chased after many who defied them. Four protesters were arrested, and there were no injuries.
A lawyer for the couple, Maral Malka, 23, and Mahmoud Mansour, 26, both from the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv, had unsuccessfully sought a court order to bar the protest. He obtained backing for police to keep protesters 200 meters (yards) from the wedding hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion.
The protest highlighted a rise in tensions between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel in the past two months amid a monthlong Gaza war, the kidnap and slaying of three Israeli teens in June followed by a revenge choking and torching to death of a Palestinian teen in the Jerusalem area.
A group called Lehava, which organized the wedding demonstration, has harassed Jewish-Arab couples in the past, often citing religious grounds for their objections to intermarriage. But they have rarely protested at the site of a wedding.
The groom told Israel's Channel 2 TV the protesters failed to derail the wedding or dampen its spirit. "We will dance and be merry until the sun comes up. We favor coexistence," he said.
'DEATH TO THE ARABS' THREATS CHANTED
Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced Malka, who was born Jewish and converted to Islam before the wedding, as a "traitor against the Jewish state," and shouted epithets of hatred towards Arabs including "death to the Arabs." They sang a song that urges, "May your village burn down."
A few dozen left-wing Israelis held a counter-protest nearby holding flowers, balloons and a sign that read: "Love conquers all."
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, sworn in last month to succeed Shimon Peres, criticized the protest as a "cause for outrage and concern" in a message on his Facebook page.
"Such expressions undermine the basis of our coexistence here, in Israel, a country that is both Jewish and democratic," Rivlin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud bloc, said.
Lehava spokesman and former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari denounced Jews intermarrying with non-Jews of any denomination as "worse than what Hitler did," alluding to the murder of 6 million Jews across Europe in World War Two.
A surprise wedding guest was Israel's health minister, Yael German, a centrist in Netanyahu's government. She told reporters as she headed inside that she saw the wedding and the protest against it as "an expression of democracy."
Arab citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel's majority Jewish population, and the overwhelming majority of Arabs are Muslims. Rabbinical authorities who oversee most Jewish nuptials in Israel object to intermarriage fearing it will diminish the ranks of the Jewish people.
Many Israeli couples who marry out of their faith do so abroad.
Malka's father, Yoram Malka, said on Israeli television he objected to the wedding, calling it "a very sad event." He said he was angry that his daughter had converted to Islam. Of his now son-in-law, he said, "My problem with him is that he is an Arab."
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan)
Copyright 2014 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/17/wedding-jew-muslim-protesters_n_5686433.html [with comments]
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A Rabbi’s Departure Manifests a Challenge for Jews in America
Rabbi Andy Bachman developed a model for what might bring some of the nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to the fold.
Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
By SHARON OTTERMAN
AUG. 15, 2014
Leafy, affluent Park Slope, Brooklyn, embodies the challenge facing modern American Jewry: Though many Jews live there, few are observant. So it was no small feat when Rabbi Andy Bachman took the helm of Congregation Beth Elohim [ http://congregationbethelohim.org/ ] in the neighborhood eight years ago and began attracting a vibrant congregation of Jewish atheists and agnostics, as well as the more traditionally religious.
Drawn by big-name book talks, family-oriented religious classes and the rabbi’s teaching that to be Jewish is to do good in the world, membership in the Reform synagogue doubled to more than a thousand families. It drew young literati like Jonathan Safran Foer [ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1583636/ ] and catapulted to national attention as a model for what might bring some of the nation’s millions of Jews who are unaffiliated with synagogues back to the fold.
Recently, however, Rabbi Bachman shocked many in his congregation and in Jewish circles by announcing that he was stepping down from the pulpit and out of Jewish leadership to help New York’s poorest, regardless of their religion.
Membership at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has doubled to more than a thousand families in the last eight years, since Rabbi Bachman took over.
Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times
“I think that I deliver really good and really inspiring sermons about social justice, but is that really enough?” he said in an interview. “It’s crazy to think that’s enough. In order to maintain my sense of integrity and to keep the flame burning strongly about my commitments, I knew it was time to step away.”
His decision was deeply personal, but also touched on vexing questions at the center of Judaism’s future in this country as modern Jews — the secular, the unaffiliated, the questioning — grapple with what it means to be Jewish and what role a synagogue should play in that identity. Nationally, synagogue affiliation is falling as American Jews increasingly decide they do not need to live out their Jewishness in a religious context.
Rabbi Bachman, 51, has spent a lifetime pondering such questions. Raised in Milwaukee as a wholly secular Jew, his main links to his Jewish heritage were his paternal grandparents, who cooked sour kugel and sweet blintzes and spoke of the family’s Belarussian roots. Yet when his father died in 1983, Rabbi Bachman did not even know how to say Kaddish, the Jewish blessing over the dead. He felt compelled to take his Jewish heritage more seriously.
“I was a typical modern Jew who had an identity crisis, and rode it out, and built a whole career out of it,” he said with a smile. “What an embarrassment.”
But in the last two years, he began feeling constrained within the synagogue. He had always wanted to do good in the world, he said. Before pursuing the rabbinate, he considered becoming a journalist or working in government. Becoming a rabbi allowed him to channel his idealism in a Jewish way.
Pre-eminent among Jewish values in his mind, he said, is the call to do justice. And he had come to a point where he felt that he could do more by direct action than by giving sermons about it. “The calculus of how I wanted to spend my hours every day changed,” he said.
Rabbi Bachman spent months fretting over his decision, worried that it might cause doubt in others. Indeed, congregants peppered him with questions after he posted the news on his personal blog in March. He said one asked him: “You are leaving the pulpit, have you had a crisis of faith? Have you decided there is no God?” Another asked: “Does this mean Judaism has no value?”
“There is no crisis of faith,” he said he had responded. “In a way, it’s just a crisis of wanting to be more effective at doing good in the world.”
Rabbi Bachman at a protest on Dec. 9, 2013, nearly one year after the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He has said that serving the broader world was a way of expressing his faith in a different way.
Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Yet Rabbi Bachman admitted to grappling with the idea that he should devote his life primarily to the service of other Jews, something he called his “sense of responsibility to the broader Jewish community.” He is not alone.
Reform Judaism, which is the largest denomination in American Judaism, has a long tradition of social justice and activism, but it can be a challenge to convince many liberal, modern Jews of the need to live out those values in a Jewish context. So Beth Elohim reached beyond the denomination’s traditional boundaries to build its synagogue, hosting cultural events for secular Israelis, celebrations for young Brooklyn Jews seeking a sense of belonging, community service projects and the popular book talks featuring authors like Paul Auster [ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000808/#writer ] and Don DeLillo [ http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Don-DeLillo/1098974 ]. Simultaneously, it opened its doors to more religious Jews and began hosting egalitarian Orthodox services.
“Andy is wisely a rabbi who saw the broader landscapes of Jewish life, and built bridges to help people come in,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the Union for Reform Judaism [ http://urj.org//index.cfm ], said. “And that’s the wave of the Jewish future.”
By 2012, Rabbi Bachman was appearing on national lists of top rabbis produced by publications as diverse as The Jewish Daily Forward and Newsweek. And yet, privately, after days of teaching or officiating over funerals, he found himself nagged by a question: “Who is in greater need that I can help?”
When Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, he mobilized Beth Elohim to begin a mass feeding program. The synagogue kitchen was transformed into a center that served some 185,000 meals over a year and a half. Then budget cuts hit the temple this year, and it had to eliminate several jobs and suspend the feeding program. Some in the synagogue were worried that its finances were not keeping up with the pace of change.
Although Rabbi Bachman’s announcement that he would leave at the end of his contract in June 2015 came at the same time as the cuts, he said the timing was coincidental. Most congregants have been supportive of his decision, although there has also been sadness and unease.
“Andy has been there for us when we really needed him, so we are sad and disappointed,” said Laurie Gelles, a temple member for 20 years.
Rabbi Bachman, who is working on a book about Jewish identity, emphasized that serving the broader world was simply expressing his faith in a different way. “I will always be a rabbi,” he said. And following his example, he said, his congregants should not build a wall around their Judaism in an effort to preserve it.
After all, he added, Moses himself was worried about Jewish continuity, but according to the Jewish tradition his fears were allayed when God miraculously brought him to visit the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, a famous Jewish sage of the first century A.D. At first, Moses could not understand the lesson, because it was in Aramaic, but eventually he heard the rabbi say: “This is the law given to Moses at Sinai,” and was comforted.
“If Moses didn’t understand Akiva, my presumption is that we will probably be O.K.,” Rabbi Bachman said of the survival of Judaism. “I might not recognize it myself if I were to come back and look at it in a couple hundred years, but as long as there is Torah at the center in some form, I guess we will be O.K.”
© 2014 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/nyregion/a-rabbis-decision-to-step-down-touches-on-questions-of-jewish-identity.html
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As online anti-Semitism grows, so do efforts to counter it
It has been 17 years since Suzette Bronkhorst, pictured here, co-founded the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet, known as MDI.
Photo courtesy of Stichting Magenta – Magenta Foundation
Luigi Serenelli | August 15, 2014
BERLIN (RNS) It’s been 17 years since Suzette Bronkhorst co-founded the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet [ http://www.meldpunt.nl/site/page.php ], but she said she doesn’t remember the level of anti-Semitic speech on social media platforms ever being this high.
“There are thousands of incidents and we’re getting so many complaints,” she said of her organization, which registers complaints of hate speech online. “There’s been a huge surge since Gaza.”
The Gaza conflict, which has led to the deaths of 1,900 Palestinians and 68 Israelis, has also sparked a wave of counter speech, with organizations like Bronkhorst’s attempting to tackle hate speech by debunking myths and stereotypes on blogs, forums and social media.
“There’s a lot of chatter on the Internet that is not based on fact and there are different ways in which you can do counter speech,” said Bronkhorst, whose organization goes by the name MDI. “For instance, if there’s a discussion on Facebook, you join in and you try to give counterpoints to people who are just ill-informed.”
Magenta Foundation hosts the conference of the International Network Against Cyber Hate at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, 2009.
Photo courtesy of Magenta Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2014.
In one instance, Bronkhorst’s volunteers asked a Twitter user writing “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” whether he really wanted to murder people by gassing them. The user removed the tweet, apologized and said he didn’t mean it.
In July, the number of Dutch-language anti-Semitic Facebook pages ran into the hundreds, according to MDI, which cannot keep up with the amount of hate-fueled posts, ranging from statements such as “Jews must die” to those praising Adolf Hitler. On Twitter, the hashtag “Hitler was right” appeared more than 10,000 times in July in connection with Gaza and became a trending topic, says MDI.
Sergey Lagodinsky, a lawyer and a member of the Jewish community’s representative assembly in Berlin, said comments by friends on Facebook shocked him.
“It’s hardly tolerable because people are being attacked,” said Lagodinsky. “You have a lot of people who you thought were friends who articulate things in a way which leaves you speechless.”
Berlin’s Technical University [ http://www.tu-berlin.de/ ] has just started a project analyzing around 100,000 Internet texts to see how anti-Semitism spreads online on social media and in comment sections, chatrooms and forums.
“The Internet plays an important role here as more drastic use of language can flourish through links between websites as well as user anonymity,” said Matthias Jakob Becker, a member of the research team.
The team has found that not only Islamist and right-wing circles have resorted to old canards, such as Jewish world-domination conspiracy theories, but so, too, has the educated middle class.
Anti-Semitism is a particularly sensitive issue in Germany. Special police protection is provided for Jewish buildings, ranging from synagogues to bakeries, and the growing anti-Jewish sentiment even prompted the country’s biggest newspaper, Bild [ http://www.bild.de/ ], to wade into the fray.
On its website, the newspaper created a button depicting a Star of David and the slogan “stimme erheben: nie wieder Judenhass” (raise your voice: never again Jew hatred) that people could share online. It has also added interviews with celebrities, politicians and ordinary people speaking out against anti-Semitism. Bild encouraged readers to tweet against anti-Semitism under the hashtag “stimme erheben.”
While the campaign ran for just one day, Tobias Froehlich, a representative for Axel Springer [ http://www.axelspringer.de/en/ ], Bild’s owner, said the publication may follow up with similar campaigns.
“You can still find it online and of course, depending on how the news develops, you could see it again in our newspaper,” said Froehlich. “The voice against anti-Semitism isn’t just for one day.”
Members of Germany’s Jewish community said the Bild campaign is a reminder that Jews in Europe are generally safe and that while anti-Semitism is a reality, it’s mainly kept in check.
American freelance writer Giulia Pines Kersthold, photographed at Falkplatz in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin on June 14, 2014.
Photo © Harald Franzen, courtesy of Giulia Pines
“The online world is a tool of propaganda for hate speech against everyone,” said 29-year-old Giulia Pines Kersthold, a Jewish New Yorker and author who has lived in Berlin for six years. But she added: “I have never really felt unsafe as a Jew in Germany and I would say that I still don’t.”
In France, where pro-Palestinian demonstrations in July culminated in attacks on eight synagogues, many Jews are fleeing to Israel.
Between January and June, 2,830 French Jews emigrated to Israel. That number is expected to exceed 5,000 by the end of 2014 — marking the first time in modern history that a full 1 percent of a western Jewish community will move to Israel in a single year, according to the Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency for Israel. In 2013, 3,288 French Jews left for Israel.
Yonathan Arfi, vice president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, called the anti-Semitic surge a new phenomenon that has intensified thanks to the Internet.
“It is a space without laws,” he said. “You have many people on the Internet who are Jewish and easily accessible to people who target them.”
Bronkhorst at MDI acknowledges the difficulties but is optimistic and hopes the project will expand to other organizations in the International Network Against Cyber Hate, of which MDI is a member.
“It’s a matter of resources right now,” said Bronkhorst. “We’re going to do it and we can only do it if we all work together to change our neighbor and let our neighbor change another one — one drop at a time to make an ocean.”
(Angela Waters and Jennifer Collins contributed to this report.)
© 2014 Religion News LLC
http://www.religionnews.com/2014/08/15/online-anti-semitism-grows-efforts-counter/ [with embedded slideshow a peaceful protest in support of Palestine on Thursday, Aug. 14, 2014 in Toulouse, France, and comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/16/anti-semitic-hate-speech-internet_n_5682031.html (with comments)]
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Evangelical leaders will travel to Israel to signal their support
Several high-profile evangelical leaders will travel to Israel next week as a part of the “Christians in Solidarity with Israel” trip put together by the National Religious Broadcasters in response to the most recent conflict in Gaza.
Photo courtesy of National Religious Broadcasters
Sarah Pulliam Bailey | August 12, 2014
(RNS) Several high-profile evangelical leaders will travel to Israel next week as a part of the “Christians in Solidarity with Israel” trip put together by the National Religious Broadcasters in response to the most recent conflict in Gaza.
The Aug. 17-22 trip will include Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham and president of AnGeL Ministries; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Matthews, N.C.
“My prayer is that God’s people in this country and around the world would intercede for heaven’s involvement in Israel, that God would defend and protect her from her enemies,” said Lotz.
The NRB is a large umbrella group for Christian communicators involved mostly in radio and television. Its annual conference attracts thousands, and it bills itself as the “world’s largest annual gathering of Christian media professionals.”
The trip will emphasize American Christians’ steadfast support for Israel, said Perkins of the Family Research Council.
Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of the Rev. Billy Graham.
Photo by Chris Stephens
“For a large number of Christians, there are two primary reasons to support Israel. We have the Jewish people to thank for our faith and we are instructed in Scripture not only to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, but are told that those who bless Israel will be blessed,” Perkins said in a statement.
“Secondly, it is in the national security interest of the United States to support Israel. To abridge our commitment to the state of Israel would be an act of hostility not just to the Jewish state but would do damage to our own vital interests.”
While Richard Land, formerly head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, will join the trip, his successor, Russell Moore, is not listed as a participant.
The trip will include popular Bible teacher Kay Arthur, Richard Bott of Bott Radio Network and Chelsen Vicari from the Institute on Religion & Democracy. It will be led by NRB President and CEO Jerry A. Johnson.
Evangelicals aren’t the only ones rising to Israel’s defense after the much-criticized Gaza incursion. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and some Democratic members of the state Legislature are headed to Israel on Tuesday (Aug. 12).
But there’s no question that Israel holds a special place for older evangelicals in ways that go beyond politics. Earlier this summer, megachurch pastor John Hagee held a summit [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/christians_united_for_israel_the_most_insanely_pro_israel_conference_of.html ] using theology to support Israel.
Still, some are worried over how younger evangelicals might be shifting on Israel. Earlier this year, David Brog from Hagee’s Christians United for Israel warned [ http://www.meforum.org/3769/israel-evangelical-support ] that young evangelicals were turning against Israel. Others say [ http://www.religionnews.com/2014/04/08/support-israel-waning-among-evangelicals/ ] evangelicals are not turning against Israel but may be more sympathetic than in the past to a Palestinian perspective.
Younger evangelicals in particular may not view Israel the way their parents did, wrote [ http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2014/08/07/how-millennial-evangelicals-see-the-israeli-palestine-conflict/33541 ] Dale Hanson Bourke, author of “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
“Most evangelicals older than 50 grew up in churches that taught some form of dispensationalism, a theology that views Jews as God’s chosen people, Israel as the land promised to them, and the second coming of Christ tied to Jews returning to Israel,” Bourke wrote. “Dispensationalism has fallen out of fashion in many evangelical circles and is no longer taught in many seminaries or from pulpits.”
It’s difficult to measure long-term support for Israel among evangelicals. Findings from the Pew Research Center, though, suggest that it has remained relatively stable in the past five years.
When asked “In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, who do you sympathize with more?” evangelicals were far more likely to say Israel — 72 percent to 4 percent in 2013, about the same as in 2009 — according to the Pew poll.
The NRB grew in the 1940s out of radio regulations disputes between mainline Protestant denominations and evangelicals, who were rapidly growing in numbers. Israel has also been a pressing issue among some in mainline churches as the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted [ http://www.religionnews.com/2014/06/20/prebyteriansdivestment/ ] earlier this summer to divest from companies that profit from the oppression of Palestinians within Israel’s occupied territories.
“Countering rising anti-Semitism in the international press and on the streets, this friendship visit will communicate to Israel and to the Palestinians who stand in opposition to Hamas that we, leaders who represent the Christian community, stand with them,” said Johnson, the NRB president, in a statement. “It will also show the world that Christians in general support the Jewish people and their right to security.”
Lotz said her famous father has been a consistent supporter of Israel. “He would also express his love for the Arabs and Palestinians,” she said. Her brother, Franklin Graham, spoke [ http://billygraham.org/story/franklin-graham-speaks-at-israeli-embassy/ ] at the Israeli Embassy earlier this year on why evangelicals love Israel.
During a recent trip to the beach, Lotz said, her daughter’s phone beeped from an app that tracked every missile strike against Israel. Lotz said it beeped so much she asked her daughter to turn it off.
“I think there’s a lot of information and spin going on about what’s taking place there,” Lotz said. “We need to support the Palestinian people. I think Hamas is using them for their evil agenda. I don’t support Israel giving up their land. ”
© 2014 Religion News LLC
http://www.religionnews.com/2014/08/12/conservative-evangelical-leaders-travel-israel-signal-support/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/17/evangelical-leaders-israel_n_5673001.html (with comments)]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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