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In May, when Israelis were attacked by Hamas missiles from Gaza, the criticism from some voices within the American Jewish community seemed not only more intense but categorical, escalating very quickly from what Israel did to what Israel is. In many blue state cathedrals, it was no longer good enough for critics to call themselves “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace” or affirm their Zionist credentials while blasting Israel for real or supposed misdeeds. Echoing social justice talk, dozens of Jewish and Israel studies scholars defined Zionism as “a diverse set of linked ethnonationalist ideologies … shaped by settler colonial paradigms … that assumed a hierarchy of civilizations” and “contributed to unjust, enduring, and unsustainable systems of Jewish supremacy,” while the CUNY Jewish Law Students’ Association more concisely demanded “a Palestinian right to return, a free and just Palestine from the river to the sea, and an end to the ongoing Nakba.” This language effectively denied the need for a Jewish state, thereby declaring war not just on Israel’s existence but on modern Judaism as we know it.
Within American Jewry, this surge in anti-Zionism openly targets the broad Zionist consensus the Jewish world developed after the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel—as well as the post-1990s Birthright consensus embracing Israel and Israel experiences as central Jewish-identity building tools. Admittedly, anti-Zionist Jews are a small fraction of American Jewry, wildly outnumbered by polls showing 70% to 80% of the American Jewish community supports Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. But at a time when 85% of American Jews also say that it’s “important” or “very important” for them to “stand up for the marginalized or oppressed,” it is no wonder that for many American Jews, especially those in public spaces, Israel has become the ball and chain that endangers their standing as good progressives. It is also no surprise that this threat to their cherished identities as “progressives” is met by a corresponding fury that leaves no room for reasoned argument about specific Israeli policies or actions.
The anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish peoplehood, while undoing decades of identity-building. In repudiating Israel and Zionism, hundreds of Jewish Google employees rejected what they call “the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people.” The voices of inflamed Jewish opponents of Israel and Zionism are in turn amplified by a militant progressive superstructure that now has an ideological lock on the discourse in American academia, publishing, media, and the professions that formerly respected American Jewry’s Zionism-accented, peoplehood-centered constructions of Jewish identity.
We call these critics “un-Jews” because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness. They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent. Many un-Jews are active in forms of Jewish leadership, running Jewish studies departments, speaking from rabbinic pulpits, hosting Shabbat dinners. For many of these un-Jews, the public and communal staging of their anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist beliefs appears to be the badge of a superior form of Judaism, stripped of its unsavory and unethical “ethnocentric” and “colonialist” baggage.
In launching this attempt, these anti-Zionists join a long history of such un-Jews, who wormed their way deep into the tradition and tried to weaken Jewish identity ideologically from within by canceling a central pillar of contemporary Jewish identity, as part of what they imagine to be a wider commitment to world liberation. This phenomenon of the un-Jews has emerged most dramatically whenever Jews sought to join with non-Jews in advancing quintessentially Jewish ideas of brotherly love, equality, and social justice, unmoored from their Jewish context and their Jewish delivery systems (historically, the most successful of these un-Jewish movements being Christianity).
A century ago, when Zionism was still a marginal movement, and there was no Israel, Jews nevertheless had a strong sense of Jewish solidarity, of peoplehood. The base of what we remember as the shtetl was the kehilla, the rich, multidimensional, Jewish communal infrastructure.
Those Jews who wanted to join the global communist revolution to change the world felt that they had to prove themselves by denouncing their people still living in their shtetls, their small, cloistered Jewish communities. One archetypal such Jewish radical was the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg. Swept up by what we could call the critical class theory of her day, seeing the entire world through the Marxian lens of class struggle in the hope of bringing equality to all, Luxemburg, like many Jews of her day, was happy to jettison her Jewish particularism to fulfill her universal vision.
In 1917, her friend Mathilde Wurm mourned the pogroms menacing their fellow Jews. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” Luxemburg seethed. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa ... I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.” Some radicals even deemed the pogroms and other Jew-bashing outbursts necessary chapters in the “class struggle”—the violent birth of a new and better world.
These Jews were following the cues from Karl Marx himself. In his infamous 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx, the grandson of a rabbi, wrote: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money … In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”
Executed by German anti-communists in 1919, Luxemburg didn’t live to see what happened when her noble ideas about equality were spread brutally, with no balancing ideals, by dictators and police states. As Soviet communism turned more repressive after the Bolshevik Revolution, it naturally recruited un-Jews to torment their former co-religionists. The Evreyskaya Sekcia—Jewish Section of the Communist Party—took special glee in freeing the Jews from the shackles of religion, of peoplehood, of community, of tradition. Believing their traditional communities to be as burdensome to them in much the same way that woke Jews feel Israel is burdensome to them today, these Jewish communists destroyed the synagogues and cheders they had been raised in to advance the Jewish idea of social justice which they first encountered in those spaces.
MORE BY NATAN SHARANSKY
And:
The Un-Jews
The Jewish attempt to cancel Israel and Jewish peoplehood
BY NATAN SHARANSKY AND GIL TROY
One of the most pernicious long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that Americans became used to acquiescing to the most intrusive and all-encompassing government mandates, and many governors – mostly Democrats, but not just – discovered how much easier it is to rule by emergency order, without the nuisance of legislatures and citizen consent. A taste for unfettered power is not a difficult one for politicians to acquire.
As the pandemic demonstrates, widespread panic is the necessary precedent for conferring emergency powers. And in no area have our cultural institutions been so busy sowing panic over the last three decades as with regard to global warming – even as one apocalyptic prediction after another has failed to materialize. President Biden's May 20 Executive Order, in which he directs financial regulatory agencies dealing with every aspect of the American economy to draft regulations to incorporate environmental, social and governance issues into financial regulation, provides a taste of what's to come.
I personally worry much more about other threats – cyberwarfare, electromagnetic pulse attacks, and, after Wuhan, the possibility of biological warfare. The danger of rising temperatures, such as they are, are well within the human capacity to adapt – a capacity that has made mockery of every Malthusian prediction of mass starvation and the like, since the dour Englishman first propounded his theory over two centuries ago.
That is one of the central arguments of a new book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn't, and Why it Matters, by physicist Steven Koonin, who was the chief scientist in President Obama's Department of Energy. Koonin, a professor at Caltech for nearly thirty years, is skeptical of the global warming simulated models, upon which the current alarmism is based (and which increasingly diverge from one another). He recently told the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins, "I've been building models and watching others build models for 45 years, [and the current climate models] are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to."
In September 2019, five hundred scientists and professionals in climate-related fields sent the UN Secretary General a letter noting that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change global warming forecasts have consistently failed as predictive tools, and therefore are "not remotely plausible as policy tools."
I SUSPECT THAT MOST of those who most loudly announce the impending climate disaster do not believe their own claims. Former President Obama famously pronounced his nomination 'as the moment the oceans began to slow their rise and the earth began to heal." But he and his wife recently plunked down $15 million dollars for a mansion on a Martha's Vineyard, a coastal island that would be a prime candidate for submersion by rising sea levels. "Expressions of concern about climate change are performative rather than reflective of deeply considered beliefs. They are designed to signal acknowledgment of the consensus of what constitutes good taste and morally correct opinon," writes Rupert Darwall ("Has Climate Change Become a Tool of Social Control?").
One good test of seriousness about reducing carbon emissions is nuclear energy – by far the cleanest form of energy. And yet despite the Biden administration's proposals for trillions of dollars in new spending to reduce carbon emissions to zero in fourteen years, one could listen in vain for any mention of nuclear energy.
The Biden administration's efforts to stop fracking also fail the seriousness test. The fracking revolution enabled America to reduce emissions more than any other country, and to simultaneously achieve once-deemed-impossible energy independence. But such folly is par for the course for much energy policy. The European Union renewable directives forced countries to burn more wood, which releases four times as much carbon dioxide as natural gas per megawatt-hour, notes Sir John Beddington, former chief science advisor to the British government.
Instead of serious and achievable policy prescriptions we are blessed with the fanciful goal of achieving zero carbon emissions within fourteen years that would cripple the American economy, particularly manufacturing, cost trillions of dollars, and have negligible impact on global temperatures. A repeat, in short, of the experience of Germany, which in 1992 committed to reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020, and did not come close. (In that period, it closed all its nuclear power plants.) German energy rates soared to three times those of the U.S., on average. During its major shift to wind and solar power between 2006 and 2016, electricity rates increased over 50 percent.
NEITHER SOLAR NOR WIND are, or ever will be, remotely competitive sources of electricity. They suffer from an inherent and unsolvable problem – both wind and the sun are intermittent sources of energy. Proponents of a massive increase in reliance on solar and wind place their hopes in the development of batteries to store the energy produced when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. But that battery capacity is absent.
The consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that there will be 741 gigawatt hours of battery storage worldwide in 2030. That is approximately one per cent of the annual energy consumption of the medium-sized state of Minnesota. The annual output of Tesla's Gigafactory, the world's largest battery factory, could supply three minutes the annual U.S. electricity demand, and it would take 1,000 years of production to cover two days of U.S. electricity demand. Moreover, between 50 to 100 pounds of material must be mined or processed for every pound of battery produced.
In addition, almost all the current batteries rely on rare earth metals, such as cobalt and lithium, of which China controls most of the global supply. Dependence on batteries, then, would vastly increase our vulnerability vis-à-vis China.
Solar and wind power require vast acreage to generate a small amount of energy, compared to that generated by nuclear and fossil-fuels. Wind produces one watt per square meter and solar ten, compared to 1,000 for a natural gas pad and 2,000 for nuclear energy. To supply the U.S. needs via wind power would require the appropriation of 12 percent of the U.S.'s continental land area.
Solar and wind would be inevitably be placed in rural areas far from major population centers, and require the confiscation via eminent domain of a great deal of ranch and farming land. Fierce rural opposition would be result, as has already happened throughout Europe. And America would have to double its current 240,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines to bring the electricity from rural areas, much of that mileage cutting through rough terrain.
Ironically, many environmentalists also oppose wind farms for the havoc they wreak on bird and bat populations. Numerous studies establish the adverse effect of the noise generated on humans. And with a lifespan of only twenty years, disposal of the massive windmills constitutes a major undertaking.
THE ONE THING that the wind and solar fantasy would surely achieve, however, is a regime of massive government subsidies, which enrich a few out of the pockets of the many. Professor Michael Lind of the University of Texas describes how green crony capitalism "privatizes the benefits of an activity while socializing the costs." First, the government would provide investors in "green energy" with tax credits to build the wind and solar. And then it would guarantee their profits by mandating electric companies purchase ever higher percentages of their electricity from the green sources, regardless of price. According to the Congressional Research Service, investment tax credits for wind energy in 2018 were over two billion dollars for wind per EJ (exajoules) of energy produced and close to three and a half billion dollars for solar, compared to $13 million for nuclear energy.
Besides the enriched investors the only people who love such massive subsidies are the politicians who create them, as they rake in campaign contributions from their grateful and fantastically enriched beneficiaries.
THE COMPLETE REORDERING of the American economy that President Biden's professed energy goals would entail would have almost no impact on global emissions – of which only 15% are generated by the U.S. -- and even less impact of global temperatures. Large developing nations like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia will not abandon their pursuit of prosperity by abandoning far cheaper sources of energy. And the largest sources of pollution are the poorest countries, whose people still rely on wood and coal for cooking and heating, points out environmentalist Michael Shellenberger in his recent book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
John Browne, then the CEO of what was once known as British Petroleum and now goes by Beyond Petroleum, provided Mr. Koonin with half a billion dollars to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley. Koonin loved the science involved, particularly its multidisciplinary nature. But he became convinced over time that the real climate crisis was one of political and scientific candor.
He told Browne, "John, the world isn't going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference." And that difference would be long in the future. Contrary to popular belief, atmospheric CO2 levels cannot be ratcheted up and down. Forty percent of the carbon dioxide released a hundred years ago is still in the atmosphere. And its impact only emerges slowly. Similarly, any benefit of reducing emissions today would be "small and distant," according to Koonin.
Better, he suggests, to rely on the capacity of human beings to adapt to what he expects to be a one degree Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century than to trash our economy and our political system for no benefit.
And:
Fantasy Island
by Jonathan Rosenblum And Yated Neeman
One of the most pernicious long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that Americans became used to acquiescing to the most intrusive and all-encompassing government mandates, and many governors – mostly Democrats, but not just – discovered how much easier it is to rule by emergency order, without the nuisance of legislatures and citizen consent. A taste for unfettered power is not a difficult one for politicians to acquire.
As the pandemic demonstrates, widespread panic is the necessary precedent for conferring emergency powers. And in no area have our cultural institutions been so busy sowing panic over the last three decades as with regard to global warming – even as one apocalyptic prediction after another has failed to materialize. President Biden's May 20 Executive Order, in which he directs financial regulatory agencies dealing with every aspect of the American economy to draft regulations to incorporate environmental, social and governance issues into financial regulation, provides a taste of what's to come.
I personally worry much more about other threats – cyberwarfare, electromagnetic pulse attacks, and, after Wuhan, the possibility of biological warfare. The danger of rising temperatures, such as they are, are well within the human capacity to adapt – a capacity that has made mockery of every Malthusian prediction of mass starvation and the like, since the dour Englishman first propounded his theory over two centuries ago.
That is one of the central arguments of a new book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn't, and Why it Matters, by physicist Steven Koonin, who was the chief scientist in President Obama's Department of Energy. Koonin, a professor at Caltech for nearly thirty years, is skeptical of the global warming simulated models, upon which the current alarmism is based (and which increasingly diverge from one another). He recently told the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins, "I've been building models and watching others build models for 45 years, [and the current climate models] are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to."
In September 2019, five hundred scientists and professionals in climate-related fields sent the UN Secretary General a letter noting that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change global warming forecasts have consistently failed as predictive tools, and therefore are "not remotely plausible as policy tools."
I SUSPECT THAT MOST of those who most loudly announce the impending climate disaster do not believe their own claims. Former President Obama famously pronounced his nomination 'as the moment the oceans began to slow their rise and the earth began to heal." But he and his wife recently plunked down $15 million dollars for a mansion on a Martha's Vineyard, a coastal island that would be a prime candidate for submersion by rising sea levels. "Expressions of concern about climate change are performative rather than reflective of deeply considered beliefs. They are designed to signal acknowledgment of the consensus of what constitutes good taste and morally correct opinon," writes Rupert Darwall ("Has Climate Change Become a Tool of Social Control?").
One good test of seriousness about reducing carbon emissions is nuclear energy – by far the cleanest form of energy. And yet despite the Biden administration's proposals for trillions of dollars in new spending to reduce carbon emissions to zero in fourteen years, one could listen in vain for any mention of nuclear energy.
The Biden administration's efforts to stop fracking also fail the seriousness test. The fracking revolution enabled America to reduce emissions more than any other country, and to simultaneously achieve once-deemed-impossible energy independence. But such folly is par for the course for much energy policy. The European Union renewable directives forced countries to burn more wood, which releases four times as much carbon dioxide as natural gas per megawatt-hour, notes Sir John Beddington, former chief science advisor to the British government.
Instead of serious and achievable policy prescriptions we are blessed with the fanciful goal of achieving zero carbon emissions within fourteen years that would cripple the American economy, particularly manufacturing, cost trillions of dollars, and have negligible impact on global temperatures. A repeat, in short, of the experience of Germany, which in 1992 committed to reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020, and did not come close. (In that period, it closed all its nuclear power plants.) German energy rates soared to three times those of the U.S., on average. During its major shift to wind and solar power between 2006 and 2016, electricity rates increased over 50 percent.
NEITHER SOLAR NOR WIND are, or ever will be, remotely competitive sources of electricity. They suffer from an inherent and unsolvable problem – both wind and the sun are intermittent sources of energy. Proponents of a massive increase in reliance on solar and wind place their hopes in the development of batteries to store the energy produced when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. But that battery capacity is absent.
The consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that there will be 741 gigawatt hours of battery storage worldwide in 2030. That is approximately one per cent of the annual energy consumption of the medium-sized state of Minnesota. The annual output of Tesla's Gigafactory, the world's largest battery factory, could supply three minutes the annual U.S. electricity demand, and it would take 1,000 years of production to cover two days of U.S. electricity demand. Moreover, between 50 to 100 pounds of material must be mined or processed for every pound of battery produced.
In addition, almost all the current batteries rely on rare earth metals, such as cobalt and lithium, of which China controls most of the global supply. Dependence on batteries, then, would vastly increase our vulnerability vis-à-vis China.
Solar and wind power require vast acreage to generate a small amount of energy, compared to that generated by nuclear and fossil-fuels. Wind produces one watt per square meter and solar ten, compared to 1,000 for a natural gas pad and 2,000 for nuclear energy. To supply the U.S. needs via wind power would require the appropriation of 12 percent of the U.S.'s continental land area.
Solar and wind would be inevitably be placed in rural areas far from major population centers, and require the confiscation via eminent domain of a great deal of ranch and farming land. Fierce rural opposition would be result, as has already happened throughout Europe. And America would have to double its current 240,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines to bring the electricity from rural areas, much of that mileage cutting through rough terrain.
Ironically, many environmentalists also oppose wind farms for the havoc they wreak on bird and bat populations. Numerous studies establish the adverse effect of the noise generated on humans. And with a lifespan of only twenty years, disposal of the massive windmills constitutes a major undertaking.
THE ONE THING that the wind and solar fantasy would surely achieve, however, is a regime of massive government subsidies, which enrich a few out of the pockets of the many. Professor Michael Lind of the University of Texas describes how green crony capitalism "privatizes the benefits of an activity while socializing the costs." First, the government would provide investors in "green energy" with tax credits to build the wind and solar. And then it would guarantee their profits by mandating electric companies purchase ever higher percentages of their electricity from the green sources, regardless of price. According to the Congressional Research Service, investment tax credits for wind energy in 2018 were over two billion dollars for wind per EJ (exajoules) of energy produced and close to three and a half billion dollars for solar, compared to $13 million for nuclear energy.
Besides the enriched investors the only people who love such massive subsidies are the politicians who create them, as they rake in campaign contributions from their grateful and fantastically enriched beneficiaries.
THE COMPLETE REORDERING of the American economy that President Biden's professed energy goals would entail would have almost no impact on global emissions – of which only 15% are generated by the U.S. -- and even less impact of global temperatures. Large developing nations like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia will not abandon their pursuit of prosperity by abandoning far cheaper sources of energy. And the largest sources of pollution are the poorest countries, whose people still rely on wood and coal for cooking and heating, points out environmentalist Michael Shellenberger in his recent book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
John Browne, then the CEO of what was once known as British Petroleum and now goes by Beyond Petroleum, provided Mr. Koonin with half a billion dollars to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley. Koonin loved the science involved, particularly its multidisciplinary nature. But he became convinced over time that the real climate crisis was one of political and scientific candor.
He told Browne, "John, the world isn't going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference." And that difference would be long in the future. Contrary to popular belief, atmospheric CO2 levels cannot be ratcheted up and down. Forty percent of the carbon dioxide released a hundred years ago is still in the atmosphere. And its impact only emerges slowly. Similarly, any benefit of reducing emissions today would be "small and distant," according to Koonin.
Better, he suggests, to rely on the capacity of human beings to adapt to what he expects to be a one degree Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century than to trash our economy and our political system for no benefit.
Finally
https://www.jewishexponent.
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Geveryl is a friend and sometime fellow memo reader. She thought I would be interested in her article:
The critical case of race in America | Column
By Geveryl Robinson
For me, the debate surrounding what should and shouldn’t be taught has less to do with history and more to do with healing.
Whenever I go to a new doctor, one of the things I dislike most is filling out medical history paperwork. There’s row after row of one horrible illness after the other, and I must not only know if I have had any of the illnesses, but I must also know if my parents and even grandparents have had any of the illnesses as well. However, even though I dislike filling out the paperwork, I always complete it as accurately as possible, and I’m sure you do too.
The reason we are as thorough as possible with those forms is because we realize that for doctors to know how our health can be affected in the future, they need to know and understand the history of diseases in our families’ past. Even though we may not have ever had any of the illnesses, just having them in our history, no matter how distant, puts us at a higher risk of developing these diseases in the future or dying from them if they are not treated.So, it is interesting to me why there is a debate about whether our nation’s complete history should be taught, especially now when America’s racial health is in critical condition. Just as doctors need to know as much about our history as possible to treat us, we need to know as much about our nation’s history to combat and defeat the sickness of racism, bigotry, prejudice and ignorance that is permeating through America’s body. See, for me, the debate surrounding what should and shouldn’t be taught has less to do with history and more to do with healing.
Last year, people from all social classes and all races came together in solidarity to denounce racism. Many had no idea about not only the atrocities committed but also the triumphs of those who survived and even thrived through those atrocities. Out of that unified stance came a renewed, and for some a new interest in the full history of our country. People wanted to know more, but more important, people wanted to know the truth.
Those who worship at the altar of white supremacy must have been horrified because there are two things supremacists hate: unity and knowledge. So, they set the plan in motion to try to eliminate both.
They know that if people were really taught our full history, then Lewis Latimer, a Black man, would be in textbooks next to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Everyone would learn of all inventions and creations by Black people from potato chips (George Crum) to home security systems (Marie Van Brittan Brown), and the golf tee (Dr. George Franklin Grant), to tissue holders (Mary Davidson Kenner) and thousands of other things that would take days for me to list.
Geveryl Robinson is an instructor of English at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and a former columnist for the Savannah Morning News.
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