September 27, 2023

While much of the Jewish world is focused on and absorbed in Israel’s internal political turmoil, the pernicious campaigns of demonization and antisemitism continue to expand without facing significant or sufficient counter force. On many university campuses, anyone still brave enough to be associated with Israel and Zionism is ostracized, intimidated, and increasingly targeted in physical attacks. Jewish students and faculty are afraid to openly express their affinity with Israel as a central part of their identities. 

In parallel, powerful groups claiming to promote moral principles, including officials of the UN Human Rights Council, accelerate their assaults on Israel and Zionism. They twist the lessons that should have been learned from the Holocaust to promote hatred of the Jewish people in an audacious employment of moral inversion. The network of obsessive anti-Israel and anti-Zionist radicals and their donor-enablers are facing far too little counterforce while the Jewish leadership in Israel and the diaspora are otherwise engaged. 

Reflecting the lack of pushback, these attacks no longer attempt to disguise their hatred as merely “opposition to the post-1967 occupation” or legitimate criticism of Israeli policies – their goal of eliminating Israel is directly stated, including through labels like “apartheid.” Classical antisemitic themes of nefarious Jewish power which had been taboo since the Holocaust are openly disseminated. 

These developments are reflected in a number of campus events, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” – a propaganda celebration under a very thin academic facade. Sponsored by official university departments, including Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. and Cinema and Media Studies, the invited “experts” included Roger Waters – a notorious antisemite and clearly not a Palestinian writer – who wore a Nazi-style uniform during a recent appearance in Germany. (At the last minute, and following protests, Waters was uninvited.) A number of speakers label Zionists as Nazis, refer to Israel as “one big tumor,” post “Death to Israel” slogans on social media, and call Israel a “demonic, sick project” – declaring we “can’t wait for the day we commemorate its end.” And at least one speaker is openly identified as a member of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), which is officially designated as a terror organization by the US, Israel and other governments. 

University officials have turned a blind eye to all of this, hiding, as usual, behind academic freedom and other slogans. The comparison of Israel to the Nazis and denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination are examples of antisemitism in the consensus working definition published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Of course, similar expressions of hate directed at other minority groups would not be tolerated for an instant. Demonstrating the link between hate speech and antisemitic violence, the campus Hillel at Penn was vandalized and the perpetrator shouted antisemitic slurs. 

Another example is the founding conference of the self-declared Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, whose objective is to delink “the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.” The event, focused on attacking the IHRA definition of antisemitism is scheduled to take place “in the intellectual space” (sic) of UC Santa Cruz and NYU. 

This combination of delegitimization and antisemitism is fueled by the blatant campaigns led by powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working closely with allies in the United Nations. The two most influential political NGOs operating under the false flag of human rights – Amnesty International ($350 million annual budget) and Human Rights Watch ($100 million) – continue to pump out “apartheid” agitprop, presented as research reports and analysis. Both organizations have long histories of singling out Israel and double standards (another example of antisemitism listed in the IHRA Working Definition.) 

Amnesty also began trolling the Israeli protestors in a campaign attacking the Israeli courts, which they accuse of upholding “laws, policies and practices which help to maintain and enforce Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians – the Supreme Court has signed off on many of the violations that underpin the apartheid system.” (To gain the support of reserve officers and former security officials, protest leaders claim that the Netanyahu government’s reform would compromise judicial independence and expose IDF personnel to lawfare attacks led by NGOs, including prosecution by the International Criminal Court. As Amnesty demonstrates, the manipulation of legal arguments is political, and Israel’s actual judicial processes are largely ignored.)

Instead of concentrating on exposing and fighting back against these and many other virulent forms of demonization and antisemitism, Israel and the Jewish communities worldwide are distracted and divided. The attention and energies of Israel’s dysfunctional government and opposition, as well as writers, academics, high-tech leaders and even doctors are devoted mainly to the internal political struggle. Jews, particularly on university campuses, are exposed and forced to fend for themselves against the tidal wave of hate.

The NGO-led efforts to weaken and replace the IHRA working definition – the most effective means of countering modern antisemitism – need to be countered effectively before they become dominant. 

We cannot afford to wait until Israel’s internal crisis is resolved (or papered over) before fighting back. The NGO-led efforts to weaken and replace the IHRA working definition – the most effective means of countering modern antisemitism – need to be countered effectively before they become dominant. The bogus efforts to twist free speech principles in order to make antisemitism acceptable must be systematically rejected. Jewish students need to know that they are not being abandoned to the forces of hate.

Gerald M Steinberg is professor emeritus of politics at Bar-Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor in Israel.

It should be a hashtag during Sukkot, shouldn’t it? We are all wandering Jews: #WeAreAllWanderingJews. The 40-year stint in the desert may be little more than a flickering, fading image in our collective rear view mirror at this point, but we haven’t forgotten how to wander. Maybe we aren’t literally walking through an empty desert, waiting for manna to fall from heaven, and building golden calves, but it’s hard not to see some of the social and political upheavals of the past few years as a new kind of wandering. And then there’s our often mindless Internet scrolling. We click and scroll from one page or topic to the next: a digital wandering, and we’re all stuck in that rut.

Perhaps we wander the web in order to distract ourselves from a larger and more urgent kind of wandering. Some feel that we’ve lost our way when it comes to collective American values and ideals. Around the world it’s a similar story. Look no further than the political unrest and potential threats to democracy in Israel if you want a current example of what it might look like to wander in the 21st century.

And Jews aren’t the only ones wandering in this way. This time, we’re all in it together.

It hardly bears mentioning that in the United States we have our own social and political unrest, our own threats to democracy coming from both ends of the spectrum, all of which has been exacerbated over the past four years. Our rhetoric is perpetually inflammatory, with arguments about politics, racism, pronouns, education, Russia/Ukraine and free speech never finding resolution. And then there’s the pandemic—talk about wandering. Let’s just hope we don’t have 40 years of this.

Sometimes, returning to that fixed point, that place where we had stability and dignity and hope, is the only way through. Sometimes we have to go backward to move forward.

To wander is to move slowly away from a fixed point; it’s never methodical or purposeful. Sometimes we aren’t fully aware that we’re doing it. In many cases, we wander so long that we find we no longer how to get back to that fixed point. For the Israelites in the desert, this was a good thing. Returning to Egypt was never part of the plan. But I’m not sure that the kind of wandering we’re doing these days has a prosperous ending. Sometimes, returning to that fixed point, that place where we had stability and dignity and hope, is the only way through. Sometimes we have to go backward to move forward.

The holiday of Sukkot is the perfect time for this. I remember driving through Los Angeles years ago while listening to a CD that someone had given me. It was a local rabbi talking about how Passover is not the time to be welcoming to non-Jews. In his opinion, the seder is a time when Jews gather with other Jews to remember when we were slaves in Egypt and to contemplate what it means to be brought out of that slavery. It’s not a time to welcome outsiders; it’s a time to focus on being Jewish.

But Sukkot is the opposite. The sukkah is a place of openness and welcoming. We build it during a time that coincides with the harvest: a moment of plenty and abundance. It’s a place where we invite our guests to remember, with us, a time of wandering without meaning or structure, without any perceptible purpose. There are only three walls to a sukkah, after all, and that means no closed doors. It’s meant for people to move and flow easily in and out. And this year, perhaps more than many other years, whether we’re Jewish or not we can all commiserate about how tired we are from so much wandering. We can all hope, together, that we can move on to a better place that offers purpose and structure and a clear path forward: a place that offers community and meaningful dialogue. That’s what most of us want.

When we’re truly wandering, we are lost: aimless. Sukkot gives us a chance to be found, over and over again, and to find others. We sit, we eat and we drink in a sukkah that is temporary and permeable. But we gaze above through the branches of its roof at the sun or the moon peeking through: a reminder to look up, as we sit and eat together, and to see the same sun or moon and stars that have been there all along. The sukkah is the convergence of the permanent and the impermanent.

Last year, here in Florence, Italy, we built a sukkah in our backyard and invited all of our friends here to celebrate Sukkot with us. Given that it’s not Los Angeles, our group of friends is no longer dominated by Jews. Instead, it’s a mix of Italians, Germans and Canadians as well as a few Americans and people from the UK and Poland and other places. The point is that while a very small handful of our friends here are Jewish, most aren’t. But that doesn’t mean we can’t welcome everyone into the sukkah.

We are all wandering. All of us across the world live in a moment that feels tenuous. Will Israel lose its spirit of democracy? Will the war in Ukraine continue to rage? Will the effects of a changing climate make certain places unlivable in the next few years? These are only a few of the towering questions that have taken up residence in our minds.

Wandering is not something that remains in the past. It’s something we enter into time and time again. 

Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig said of Sukkot that it serves “to remind the people that no matter how solid the house of today may seem, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in the long wanderings through the wilderness of centuries.” Wandering is not something that remains in the past. It’s something we enter into time and time again. And Sukkot is a brief moment where, together, we get to acknowledge this and to rest, if only for a moment, so that we can find the next Promised Land.

Monica Osborne is a former professor of literature, critical theory, and Jewish studies. She is Editor at Large at The Jewish Journal and is author of “The Midrashic Impulse.” X @DrMonicaOsborne