Rete-Eco Ebrei contro l'Occupazione

Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity

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Category: Dissidenza ebraica

Published on Saturday, 11 May 2013 12:09

Written by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin

Critical Inquiry, Summer 1993

Critics of Zionism, both Arab and others, along with both Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Semites, have often sought to portray Jewish culture as essentially racist. This foundational racism is traced to the Hebrew Bible and is described as the transparent meaning of that document. Critics who are otherwise fully committed to constructionist and historicist accounts of meaning and practice abandon this commitment when it comes to the Hebrew Bible-assuming that the Bible is, in fact and in essence, that which it has been read to be and authorizes univocally that which it has been taken to authorize. (...)  One effect of this sudden dehistoricization of hermeneutics has been an exoneration of European Christian society that has been, after all, the religious hegemonic system for virtually all of the imperialist, racist, and even genocidal societies of the West, but not, of course, Judaism. There were no Jewish missionaries in the remote islands and jungle enclaves. It is not the Hebrew Bible that impels the "Societies for the Propagation" but rather Pauline rhetoric (...). Jews and Jewish culture will have to answer for the evil that we do (especially to the Palestinians), but it is absurd for "the Jews" to be implicated in practices in which they had no part and indeed have had no part even until now: forced conversion, deculturation, genocide. Even the primitive command to wipe out the peoples of Canaan was limited by the Bible itself to those particular people in that particular place, and thus declared no longer applicable by the Rabbis of the Talmud. It is precisely the very literalism of rabbinic/midrashic hermeneutics that prevented a typological "application" of this command to other groups. It should be clearly recognized, then, that the attempt of the integrationist Zionist Gush Emunim movement to refigure the Palestinians as Amalek and to reactivate the genocidal commandment is a radical act of religious revisionism and not in any way a continuation of historical rabbinic Judaism.

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The Jewish Hero History Forgot

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Category: Dissidenza ebraica

Published on Friday, 10 May 2013 06:55

Written by Marci Shore

April 18, 2013

the ghetto uprising was not a purely Zionist affair. The Jews who found themselves sealed within the ghetto, like the millions of other Jews living in Eastern Europe, were deeply divided — by language and religiosity and class, by national identification and political ideology. Inside the ghetto were Polish speakers and Yiddish speakers; Orthodox, Hasidic, secular Jews; assimilated Jews and nationalists. The Zionists ranged from radical right to radical left. And most politicized Jews were not Zionists; some were Polish socialists, some Communists, some members of the secular socialist Bund. A debate raged between Zionists and the Bund over the issue of “hereness” versus “thereness” — and the Bund believed firmly that the future of the Jews was here, in Poland, alongside their non-Jewish neighbors.

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British Jewish groups slam Bedouin settlement bill ahead of discussions

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Category: Dissidenza ebraica

Published on Wednesday, 08 May 2013 19:05

Written by Edna Adato and Israel Hayom Staff

Israel Hayom, May 7, 2013

Bedouin holding signs to protest the government's plan during the negotiations over the status of their communities in the Negev, in 2011. | Photo credit: Yoav Ari Dudkevitch

The UJS (Union of Jewish Students) and ProZion, the UK Zionist movement for Progressive Judaism have written a joint letter asking the government to scrap the proposed legislation.

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How the US and UK rule through contempt and humiliation

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Category: Dissidenza ebraica

Published on Tuesday, 30 April 2013 06:45

Written by Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Noam Chomsky

March 30th, 2013

Links, notes and images have been added by JfJfP postings

Noam Chomsky gives the 2013 Edward Said Lecture, (above)
Friends House, London, March 18, 2013

Swedish novelist Henning Mankell tells of an experience in Mozambique at the peak of the hideous atrocities of the apartheid era, when he saw a thin man walking towards him in ragged clothes. “In his deep misery,” Mankell relates, the wretched survivor had “painted shoes on his feet. In a way, to defend his dignity when everything was lost, he had found the colors from the earth and he had painted shoes on his feet.”

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