“‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism”

http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7b42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7d/PROGRESSIVE_JEWISH_THOUGHT.PDF ^ | Alvin H. Rosenfeld

[ventanax5]

How can there be something “new” about something as old as anti- Semitism? Hostility to Jews—because of their religious beliefs, their social or ethnic distinctiveness, or their imputed “racial” differences— has been around for a long time. But, as this erudite essay by Professor Alvin Rosenfeld of Indiana University demonstrates, hostility to Jews has morphed into hostility toward a Jewish state, and that hatred has acquired the ability to leap across national, linguistic, and religious boundaries. Old tropes, such as Jews as well-poisoners or as conspiratorial power brokers, have been transformed into Jews as inoculators of AIDS in the Arab world or contaminators of Palestinian water sources or manipulators of American foreign policy. The spread of these calumnies has been especially rapid in the Muslim world, but Europeans, not only those within Muslim communities, have been susceptible to the virus. As Prof. Rosenfeld points out, “those who denounce it [Israel] as an outlaw … are found on both the left and the right, among the educated elites as well as the uneducated classes, and among Christians as well as Muslims.” A “conflation of interests” among these divergent groups has led to a well-documented spike in violence against Jews on streets of European cities as well as a parallel rise in verbal aggression—whether it be tarring Israel as a Nazi state or its prime minister as a “terrorist” and a “war criminal.”

[llevrok]

As said by me before, it is nuts that the American Jewish community votes largely for democrats when there is no better friend to to the Jewish faith nor to Israel than GOP.

[BW2221]

Some of the hostility to the state of Israel actually comes from secular progressive Jews (ACLU types).

[yochanan]

There a few more hostile to the Jewish faith than secular JINO's