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Not Jewish enough for Glenn Beck – nor Israeli enough


Glenn Beck in the Knesset, July 11, 2011
Photo by: Michal Fattal

Undeterred by being dropped from Fox, or by the fallout from having compared the victims of July’s Norway massacre to Hitler Youth, the media personality has assumed a prophet's intonation in urging his followers to stand with him in Jerusalem on August 24.

A Special Place in Hell
By Bradley Burston
Published 17:31 14.08.11
Latest update 17:31 14.08.11

This has been a summer of astonishments. So it probably should have come as no surprise that Tel Aviv's sudden tent city should have drawn the impossibility of rain in August. Or that Glenn Beck has arrived to teach us about the meaning of courage, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the likelihood of finding Islamic radicals under the protest canvas on Rothschild Boulevard.

Next week, conservative political commentator Beck plans to hold a mass rally to "Restore Courage" in Jerusalem. His goal: saving Israel and the United States from apocalyptic destruction in the form of the two-state solution.

Beck remains a curious choice, even if it is a self-choice, to save Jews from themselves. But that has done little to stop him in the past.

Twice in less than a year, the Anti-Defamation League has scathingly denounced statements by Beck. In February, ADL National Director Abraham Foxman condemned as "highly offensive and outrageous" a radio broadcast in which Beck compared Reform Judaism to "radicalized Islam," terming Reform rabbis as "generally political in nature" rather than religious. "Glenn Beck's comparison of Reform Judaism to radical Islam demonstrates his bigoted ignorance," Foxman said.

Three months earlier, Beck had already enraged Foxman, who survived the Holocaust as a young child, with remarks about the youth of billionaire George Soros, born in Hungary to Orthodox Jewish parents. Beck told a radio audience that Soros "used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps."

Foxman called Beck's account "offensive [ http://www.adl.org/PresRele/HolNa_52/5906_52.htm ]," adding that "to have the audacity to say – inaccurately – that there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that's horrific."

Hundreds of rabbis, including the heads of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, along with Orthodox rabbis, publicly urged [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/26/AR2011012607540.html ] Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to sanction Beck for the Soros remarks.

Undeterred even by being dropped from his Fox News television program in June, and by the fallout from having compared the victims of July’s Norway massacre to Hitler Youth, the media personality has assumed a prophet's intonation in urging his followers to stand with him in Jerusalem on August 24.

But Beck, true to mercurial form, could not resist taking a potshot at Israelis [ http://www.glennbeck.com/2011/08/10/radical-leftists-protest-in-israel/ ] before boarding a jet to save Israel.

In a segment titled "Radical leftists protest in Israel," Beck and two co-commentators dismissed the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators as "obviously hard left," their demands reminiscent of Soviet-style communism.

Beck also hinted that an "Islamist movement" had likely joined the protests. "I hate to even bring this up," Beck said, apparently in jest, "but the Islamists in Israel are saying that they'd like to have these riots - I'm sorry, these gatherings - every Friday now. Because they can help. They can go to the mosque, and then bring everybody out to the streets on Fridays. It's gonna be good."

Beck, with trademark sarcasm, then recalled his first visit to Israel 10 years ago. "Those Friday nights, they'd get out of the mosque, it was so great, because they were so moved by the spirit, they were so full of love and joy, and they would go right there to the Wall and drop giant stones on the heads of Jews who were praying underneath… a beautiful gesture."

Last May, buoyed by the turnout at his August 2010 "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, Beck assumed the fraught tones of a prophet to unveil a new goal.

"There are forces in this land, and forces all over the globe, that are trying to destroy us," Beck said, announcing [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV5WkVK4yjU ]

what religion scholar Joanna Brooks said Beck viewed as "a latter-day crusade to save the Holy Land from the Palestinians."

"They are going to attack the center of our faith, our common faith, and that is Jerusalem," Beck continued. "And It won't be with bullets and bombs. It will be with a two-state solution that cuts off Jerusalem, the Old City, from the rest of the world."

The irony, of course, is that the two-state solution is probably farther from reality now than it has been at any time in the last 18 years. In fact, smart money might well bet on the actual End of Days coming true sooner than two states.

But what is irony to a man for whom most Jews are not Orthodox enough and therefore not Jewish enough, for whom most Israelis are not hardline enough and therefore not Israeli enough, a man for whom some Holocaust survivors have not suffered enough, a man who knows better than the Jews what Auschwitz means, who Nazis are, what Israel needs, how Jews need to figure in the greater plan of God and His Apostle Glenn.

And lest one suspect for one moment that he's not entirely serious, Glenn Beck tells followers that he's ready to give his all for the Jewish state. On his website, standing before an Israeli flag, he declares [ http://www.glennbeck.com/israel/ ] in a promotional video clip: "I will protect. I will defend. I will stand. I will speak. And in the end, if it be His will, I will die right alongside my brother. That is the stand."

"And yet he was more them than they were," wrote Howard Jacobson of a very non-Jewish character who wishes he were Jewish, in the appropriately riotous and perplexing 2010 novel The Finkler Question [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0042JSSYA ]. He "felt more for what they stood for than they, as far as he could see, were capable of feeling for themselves. He wouldn't have gone so far as to say they needed him, but they did, didn't they? They needed him."

Copyright 2011 Haaretz.com (emphasis in original)

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/not-jewish-enough-for-glenn-beck-nor-israeli-enough-1.378585 [with comments]


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Jews in a Whisper

By ROGER COHEN
Published: August 20, 2011

London

IN his novel “Deception,” Philip Roth has the American protagonist say to his British mistress: “In England, whenever I’m in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word ‘Jew,’ I notice that the voice always drops just a little.”

She challenges him on this observation, prompting the American, a middle-aged writer, to say, yes, that’s how “you all say ‘Jew.’ Jews included.”

This prompted a memory: sitting with my mother in an Italian restaurant in the upscale London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood circa 1970 and asking her, after she had pointed to a family in the opposite corner and said they were Jewish, why her voice dropped to a whisper when she said the J word.

“I’m not whispering,” Mom said and went on cutting up her spaghetti so it would fit snugly on a fork.

But she was — in that subliminal, awkward, half-apologetic way of many English Jews. My parents were South African immigrants. Their priority was assimilation. They were not about to change their name but nor were they about to rock the boat. I never thought much about why I left the country they adopted and became an American. It happened. One thing in life leads to another. But then, a year ago, I returned.

I was at my sister’s place and a lodger of hers, seeing I had a BlackBerry, said, “Oh, you’ve got a JewBerry.” Huh? “Yeah, a JewBerry.” I asked him what he meant. “Well,” he shrugged, “BBM — BlackBerry Messenger.” I still didn’t get it. “You know, it’s free!”

Right.

None of this carried malice as far I could see. It was just flotsam carried on the tide of an old anti-Semitism. The affable, insidious English anti-Semitism that stereotypes and snubs, as in the judgment of some gent at the Athenaeum on a Jew’s promotion to the House of Lords: “Well, these people are very clever.” Or, as Jonathan Margolis noted in The Guardian, the tipsy country squire commenting on how much he likes the Jewish family who just moved into the village before adding, “Of course, everybody else hates them.”

Of course.

Jewish identity is an intricate subject and quest. In America, because I’ve criticized Israel and particularly its self-defeating expansion of settlements in the West Bank, I was, to self-styled “real Jews,” not Jewish enough, or even — join the club — a self-hating Jew. In Britain I find myself exasperated by the muted, muffled way of being a Jew. Get some pride, an inner voice says, speak up!

But it’s complicated. Britain, with its almost 300,000 Jews and more than two million Muslims, is caught in wider currents — of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and political Islam. Traditionally, England’s genteel anti-Semitism has been more of the British establishment than the British working class, whereas anti-Muslim sentiment has been more working-class than establishment.

Now a ferocious anti-Zionism of the left — the kind that has called for academic boycotts of Israel — has joined the mix, as has some Muslim anti-Semitism. Meanwhile Islamophobia has been fanned by the rightist fabrication of the “Eurabia” specter — the fantasy of a Muslim takeover that sent Anders Breivik on his Norwegian killing spree and feeds far-right European and American bigotry.

Where then should a Jew in Britain who wants to speak up stand? Not with the Knesset members who have met in Israel with European rightists like Filip Dewinter of Belgium in the grotesque belief that they are Israel’s allies because they hate Muslims. Not with the likes of the Jewish writer Melanie Phillips, whose book “Londonistan” is a reference for the Islamophobes. Nor with those who, ignoring sinister historical echoes, propose ostracizing Israeli academics and embrace an anti-Zionism that flirts with anti-Semitism.

Perhaps a good starting point is a parallel pointed out to me by Maleiha Malik, a professor of law at King’s College London. A century ago, during the Sidney Street siege of 1911, it was the Jews of London’s East End who, cast as Bolsheviks, were said to be “alien extremists.” Winston Churchill, no less, argued in 1920 that Jews were part of a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development.”

The lesson is clear: Jews, with their history, cannot become the systematic oppressors of another people. They must be vociferous in their insistence that continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank will increase Israel’s isolation and ultimately its vulnerability.

That — not fanning Islamophobia — is the task before diaspora Jews. To speak up in Britain also means confronting the lingering, voice-lowering anti-Semitism. When Roth’s hero returns to New York, he finds he’s been missing something. His lover, now distant, asks what.

“Jews.”

“We’ve got some of them in England, you know.”

“Jews with force, I’m talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame.”

I miss them, too.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/sunday/cohen-jews-in-a-whisper.html [comments at ]


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