“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.” [read the story here]

I just stumbled on a Hasidic proverb in Pico Iyer’s “The Open Road” that this story brought to mind:

“You must invent your own religion or else it will mean nothing to you. You must follow the religion of your fathers, or else you will lose it.”

Distressing news as authorities in Israel arrested a woman for wearing tallit at the Western Wall for prayers on November 18th. Were this sort of religious discrimination at the hands of a government apparatus to happen to a Jew anywhere else in the world, we would be giving a collective cry of anti-Semitism, yet the religious authorities in Israel enforce a policy that goes against the longings of countless religious Jewish women, and try to marginalize the ideals of a majority of the world’s Jews.

The Kotel that I fell in love with was a where a community could come together to express its communal longings, as diverse as they are. It is one of the central sites in the Jewish religion. Using a state apparatus to close it off to all but the most Orthodox view of appropriate prayer, is, I believe, a terrible threat to pluralism and religious freedom in Israel. It is time to let go of the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on Jewish life in Israel.

I applaud Women of the Wall for continuing their struggle for religious tolerance. Surely 3,000 years of Jewish history and debate have given us the tools to adapt our holiest sites to the needs of all.

Right now, in the world there are some very apt comparisons that can be made to Hitler, those leaders in Sudan, in the eastern Congo, in Burma, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Sri Lanka who are trying to exterminate their fellow countrymen for political gain. Until recently, I would have argued vociferously against the Iran comparisons, but given the regime’s current behavior toward its own subjects (but not, I should add, the Jews specifically as Jews), even that comparison is more apt than the Obama=Hitler nonsense.

Republicans and Democrats, Jews and non-Jews, and any people of conscience have a duty to focus on the real acts that are “like Hitler,” mass-murder that is very real and ongoing, and not try to score cheap points off of survivors. Limbaugh has no shame, but the GOP leadership should at least pretend to, and distance themselves from this cruel absurdity.

In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of
Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C.
Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison
for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He
served 6.5 years in federal prison.

Is this the far-far-right reacting to Obama’s election, as a commentator on MSNBC asserted, or is this simply the innevitable result of the hateful ideology of anti-Semitism, which the Holocaust Museum attempts to memorialize?

In the discussion that will inevitable occur for days and days on the cable news networks, we cannot lose the fact that this attack had Jewish targets; that just a few weeks ago, synagogues in NY were targeted. We cannot deny the specifically anti-Jewish nature of these attacks by ascribing them to the general decay of the economy or the right reacting to our first black president. There is a specific history at work here and we cannot ignore it. In spite of our small numbers, there are a lot of people in this world who do not wish the Jews well.

“Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.”-Napolean

In Iran, it is a crime to criticize the revolution or speak out against the government. Anything that does not conform to the official, national theology is punishable by arrest, even heavy metal.

Not to be outdone by their sworn enemy, the National Religious Party of Israel has introduced a bill that would outline anything that can be interpreted as “denying the Jewish state.” Imitation is the highest form of flattery I suppose. Religious facists all draw on the same bag of tricks, it seems.

As usual, Gershom Gorenberg has thoughtful things to say on this, from a pro-Israel, pro-freedom, religious perspective:

“What could possibly be more undemocratic and more utterly, insanely un-Jewish than banning disagreement? What could cause greater disdain for the state?”

Do read his entire post.

“The Shin Bet security agency says there have been numerous recent incidents where militants have tried to lure Israelis on sites, including Facebook.”

Sadly, it might work.

This is beautitful. A group of children from Jenin refugee camp playing music for a group of elderly Holocaust survivors. The act of doing something kind and creating something beautiful for someone else can be extremely empowering for young people, and doing it for a group considered ‘the other’ in a conflict has an amazing power to heal wounds and show the best of the moral traditions of a people.

This is crap. Palestinian political organizations condemn the concert, basically because they think any act of peaceful expression related to Israelis is subversive and must be validating the Occupation. The director of the camp’s  Popular Committee, stated that the concert was an attempt to use the children to “destroy the Palestinian national spirit in the camp.”  I have no words to respond to that statment. The man’s idiocy and knee-jerk hatred speak for themselves.

These children from Jenin said a great deal about the human spirit with this concert, which I believe is a far more effective criticsm of any Occupation than the crap coming from the politicians.

I do see a glimmer of hope here. If anyone is capable of confronting these settlers and those in the government who provide them with all this material support, it is the new right-wing government of Netanyahu. If they can find the moral courage to stand up to the extremists within their own camp, they might be able to make more progress than a left/center government, which would struggle to be taken seriously by the fringe elements who build these outposts.  Perhaps there’s hope for Israel to live up to its Jewish name, rather than strive for mere survival, if they can stop supporting the ideology of warring tribes so popular in ancient times. The fate of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah is not one that should be repeated, but one that becomes more possible with every outpost built.

The web exploded with angry comments, the most astute (though no less outraged) coming from the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he noted that personal warmth and political hatred often live happily side by side in a society, even in individuals. Others simply called Cohen a fool, duped by the Iranian regime into thinking the Jews were doing perfectly fine. Some said he would have been fooled by the Nazis (a common comparison made between Ahamedinejad and Hitler came up too)

Cohen responded, noting that Iran was not Nazi Germany and that many Jews there dislike being used as a political hot button issue. As I found during my time in Iran, speaking with community leaders and youth, average Iranian Jews on the street, and pious worshipers at synagogues, they recognize that theirs is a complex community in a complex society, suffering from some real anti-Jewish discrimination, some cruelty resulting from ignorance, and some political point-scoring at their expense, but that reducing their 3,000 year history to the status of a cowed and oppressed entity, is insulting. They have just as broad a spectrum of beliefs as the American Jewish community here. Some are fiercly anti-Zionist, some quietly long to go to Israel (which they are allowed to do, unlike other Iranians), and some openly speak of admiration for Israel, as long as they also speak for justice for the Palestinians. The Jews of Iran are as free to express dissent as any Iranian, which is, not very, but no less so.

The current member of parliament and president of Dr. Sapir Hospital in Tehran explained to me that yes, indeed, they had problems, but that they were Iranians and that they were working “with the other religious minorities” to address the problems, including the limits on employment and the sometimes anti-Jewish programming on television. They did not regard outside interference as helpful. The young people I spoke with were emphatic that they had no real problems as Jews, but their problems were those faced by all young people in Islamic Iran, the limitations of a society controlled by religious fundamentalism.

Both Cohen and Goldberg are right. The Jews in Iran live safely and openly (unlike the B’hai), AND Iran provides political, financial, and ideological support to organizations that seek to destory Israel and the Jews. The Jews of Iran seek to work inside their system to change it, as Jews have done throughout their history (in America too!). The international community (rightly) seeks to pressure an extremist regime to change its behavior. But shrill accusations and comparisons to Nazi Germany won’t fix things. The only approach that can possibly work is dialogue, and the first step is to recognize that maybe, just maybe, all the Jews still in Iran are not fools or cowards, but actually believe what they say in public and in private–that their 3,000 year history of coexistence means something, that they, as someone told me, “speak English, pray in Hebrew, but dream in Persian.”

We can acknowledge that there have been some real troubles in Iran–for all Iranians, including Jews. Jews are often under suspicion because of the assumed connection with Israel, many have lost their homes and businesses and were separated from their families after the Revolution. There are a lot of bad experiences, which are just as valid as the good ones that Cohen and I encountered on our separate trips. But sometimes, it seems, only the bad experiences get pride of place in this discussion, and I applaud Cohen for voicing this other side.

Rabbi David Wolpe has extended an invitation to Cohen to meet with the Iranian exiles at his Congregation in Los Angeles, an invitation Cohen should certainly take up.  It is the Iranians themselves–those still in Iran and those living abroad–who are stakeholders in this, and all of us in the media can comment up a storm, but it is up to them to work it out. They have a lot more history at it than we do. Perhaps we should spend more time listening to them. If Cohen doesn’t show up in LA, I’d be happy to.