“This is another step along the long, sad path towards oblivion for Reform, and all Jewish movements not guided by Torah and millennia of Jewish wisdom,” observed CJV Midwestern Regional Vice President Rabbi Ze’ev Smason. “They’ve proceeded from accepting patrilineal descent to officiating at same-sex unions, to ordaining rabbis in same-sex unions, to authorizing rabbis to conduct intermarriages. So this is merely the newest way that they have placed modern Western priorities ahead of Jewish values. It is no coincidence that these same movements provide us with rabbis who uplift Hamas supporters and condemn our brethren in Israel.”

The rabbis noted, too, that media outlets like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) cover each new breach as if it were a newly-accepted standard for the Jewish community. The JTA wrote, regarding the HUC’s decision, that “within less than a decade, three of the largest Jewish seminaries in the United States will have all begun admitting students in interfaith relationships.” Several years ago, the JTA also claimed that “Orthodox” rabbis were beginning to bless same-sex unions.

“This is outright mythology. All of the 50 largest rabbinical seminaries in the United States are strictly Orthodox, meaning Torah-observant; they produce more new rabbis every week than the withering seminaries of those who abandoned Jewish standards graduate in a year,” averred CJV Rabbinic Circle Chairman Rabbi Avrohom Gordimer. “As we wrote in 2020, ‘neither media outlets nor the public should be duped by messaging designed to mislead;’ that is as relevant to claims of an institution’s size or eminence as it is to the definition of ‘Orthodoxy’ within Judaism.

Photo Credit: Ajay Suresh at Wikimedia Commons 

Part Seven: The Phenomenon of the Jewish Un-Jew

(For Ellen of blessed memory.)

The Jewish New Year 5782 began this week at sunset on Monday, September 6, 2021. Towards that occasion, this is a ten-part series of online articles that, with G-d’s help, I hope to transform into a larger book. It is prompted and inspired by questions I have been asked over the past half century by my readers and particularly these past five years by non-Jewish political conservatives of Christian background who often love Jews but cannot figure us out. Because most online opinion articles range between 600-3,000 words, this subject cannot be treated properly and completely in one single article or even in a limited series. However, this series marks an ambitious effort to address a perplexing question, one that perplexes America’s one million Orthodox Jews more than it does even non-Jewish conservative Christians.

The purpose of this series is to inform readers authentically as to what Jews believe, to demystify. For those who live by other monotheistic faiths, may you be blessed in your pursuit of justice, kindness, morality, and ethics as you serve the One True Creator according to your understanding and belief. As explained in greater detail in Part 4, Judaism does not permit Jews to proselytize others.

The other installments in this series can be found at these links:

Part One: The Basic Definitions of Jews and Non-Orthodox Jewish Denominations can be found here.

Part Two: The Orthodox can be found here. 

Part Three: The Ethnicities can be found here.

Part Four: Non-Jews can be found here. 

Part Five: What Jews Who Know Authentic Judaism Believe: The Oral Law and Written Law can be found here. 

Part Six: What Jews Who Know Authentic Judaism Believe: The Architecture of Judaism — The Talmud, the Halakhic Codes, and Authoritative Rabbinic Responsa can be found here

Part Eight: The Rise of the Absolutely Ignorant American Jew Who Knows Judaically “from Nothing” can be found here 

Part Nine: On Deep Red Conservative Dixiecrats Who Kept Liberal Democrats in Power for a Century and on Jews Just Like Them can be found here 

Part Ten: Wrapping Factors Together: Understanding the Hopeless Disorientation of Knee-Jerk Leftist Jews can be found here

The Phenomenon of the Jewish Un-Jew

In recent months, it has become rather prevalent for Orthodox and other proudly identifying Jews to start publishing major think pieces about the phenomenon of the “un-Jewish Jew.” Some call those sorts “self-hating Jews.” I call them Jewish apostates because that term is least loaded subjectively and most accurate linguistically. Think of George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and the two Jewish apostates, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who left New York City’s racially diverse metropolis to live in Vermont, which is 94 percent White, to create milky white Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. These stand-out Jewish apostates are the most evident manifestation of the much broader sickness of Knee-Jerk Jewish Liberalism, which this series explains. These apostates have prompted the growing body of commentary now appearing. Thus, in recent years, Dennis Prager has written on the subject many times, as has the conservative (small “c”) Jewish radio host Mark Levin. Conservative editor and opinion maker Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, has spoken and written on the subject often, as has one of Israel’s greatest living heroes and unifiers, former Soviet refusenik Anatoly Sharansky. Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, has written on this topic, and so have I.

We all have become increasingly frustrated that Jewish apostates control Jewish access to media, so will not let us in. They attempt unfairly to portray to the broader non-Jewish population that they reflect Judaism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Devout Catholics know this frustration — and even angst — better than do even Jews: all over the media, we Americans are told that Joe Biden is a faithful Catholic, that Nancy Pelosi adopts her positions “as a Catholic,” and so on. Andrew Cuomo is a Catholic. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, John Kerry, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia who ran with Hillary Clinton, Robert O’Rourke who sometimes skateboards to the name “Beto,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Kennedy Family of Massachusetts, Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, dozens of pro-abortion House members like Ted Lieu of California, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, TV hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, and so many other scores among American leftist celebrities, entertainers, and media personalities present “as a Catholic” as though it is their Vatican-rooted theological devotion that compels them to advance abortion on demand and even to terminate babies who have survived abortion or to endorse non-binary sexual notions, converting elementary schools’ bathrooms to accommodate transgenderism, and to advance critical race theory.

Devout Catholics — authentic Catholics whose beliefs and practices are rooted in sinceretheology and not in passing political currents — know how painful it is that their deep faith and core religious beliefs barely can break through into the general mass media. Yes, they can get into Fox News — Sean Hannity,  Laura Ingraham, Newt Gingrich, and several others. They have some voices in Congress, on talk radio, and in internet publications like this one. Nevertheless, they cannot reach the greater American mind because Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Jeff Bezos who built Amazon, Marc Zuckerberg of Facebook — these people lock out voices. So do the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the major commercial TV news networks. So it goes for deeply believing Protestants. They cannot break through or get in.  When a Jim and Tammy Bakker run into scandal, or a Jimmy Swaggart, or the Falwells, the media are on the story. Movies about religion under scandal get made for mass release, but movies that honor religion and religious values are suppressed, relegated to crowd funding and limited screenings. This is what it is for people of devout faith, whether Christian or Orthodox Jewish.

Hollywood has been more prejudiced against Judaism — yes, Judaism and authentic observers of Judaism — than the American mind can fathom. In Judaism, we are obliged to marry endogamously. Realistically, to maintain a strictly kosher kitchen (see, e.g., Part 5 of this series) everyone in the household must observe the kosher requirements. A single error causes massive inconvenience to “re-kosher” the oven, the stove, the flatware. It can be a logistical nightmare. Likewise, everyone has to be in sync with Sabbath observance. We do not watch television on Shabbat or handle money or use electronics on the Holy Day. It just does not work if one spouse is in the dining room hosting Shabbat visitors and their families as lunch guests while other household members are watching TV in the family room cheering on college football teams. And so it goes. We seek to rear our children with one belief system; we could not have survived two thousand years in Diaspora, in the face of persecution and overwhelmed demographically and culturally, if otherwise. Yet virtually any depiction of Jews on TV or in the movies has the Jew intermarried to a non-Jew. The Jews of Hollywood endeavor to undermine authentic Judaism in America by presenting something false, gods in their own images, to the majority culture who have limited other access to knowing what is what. This sabotage has intensified through the past half century. They confer upon us, what, Kyle and the Broflovski family of South Park?

Even the great symbol of Israeli Zionism, in the era long past when Hollywood celebrated Israel 60 years ago because it then was governed by socialist–leftists, was the Paul Newman character in Exodus. They deliberately paired “Ari ben Canaan” with Eva Marie Saint’s non-Jewish blonde “Kitty Fremont” from Indiana. CBS aggressively promoted Bridget Loves Bernie. ABC’s Thirtysomething had Jewish Michael Steadman married to Hope Murdoch, a non-Jew. When ABC tried a sit-com with Jackie Mason, so ethnically Jewish a comedian that he even built his reputation on Broadway by self-stereotyping, they concocted a story linematching him with a tall Christian woman played by Lynn Redgrave (the Redgrave sisterwho is not an anti-Semite). Beyond that, one runs into even more purely disgusting variations like Amazon’s Transparent, too vile to elaborate. Why did Hollywood make that family Jewish? There was no more need for its characters to have been portrayed as Jews named Pfefferman than as Dothraki or Klingons.

In the movies, Jews invariably are intermarried. None observes strict kosher or Sabbathlifestyles — ever — except for Hollywood’s outliers that prove Hollywood could do it right and respectfully … if they wanted.  The exception is when Hollywood depicts Old World Jews evoking memories of the long-disappeared Russian-Ukrainian-Polish shtetl. (See Part 2 of this series.) Accordingly, the Jews in Fiddler on the Roof  wear yarmulkas and tzitzit strings on their shirt garments’ fringes, sing about “Tradition,” and bless their daughters as the Sabbath rolls in.  An old rag-merchant Zaydie (grandfather) in Canada with a horse and buggy is depicted reverentially in Lies My Father Told Me. And Gene Wilder memorably portrayed a deeply respectable and profoundly likable pious Orthodox rabbi in mid-1800s “Gold Rush”-era San Francisco in The Frisco Kid — but the next generations, soon enough, make a mockery of all that is left. Netflix now produces one anti-Orthodox series after another. To humor ourselves, we Orthodox are left with two Israeli series: Srugim (three fabulous seasons, Modern Orthodox Jews who live a life in Israel somewhat akin to Seinfeldand Friends types, available on Amazon) and Shtisel (also three excellent seasons, Haredi Jews in Israel, available on Netflix as a sop to justify their anti-Orthodox garbage).

In great measure, the problem of the Un-Jew lies rooted in the psychoses these pathetically insecure people carry, crushed spiritually by centuries of prejudice and desperately trying to fit in where they are not wanted and never will be accepted. These un-Jews of the woke have been broken, shattered. If America had not brought in Africans to be slaves, and if America had not retained aspects of deep prejudice and bigotry against Blacks well into the 1950s, almost all of today’s sociological challenges would not be what they are — especially because honest Americans know that our societal structure is not a twinge racist, and certainly not Systemically Racist. In the same way, as will be discussed ahead, America’s genteel anti-Semitism marked the essence of what Jewish immigrants to Ellis Island encountered during the century between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. Ultimately, America’s war against Hitler changed those prejudicial attitudes at home, as pictures and data from the concentration camps filtered to the West. Until then, the genteel bigotry — “gentleman’s agreements” to keep Jews out — forced Jews to found their own industries where non-Jews had not already established themselves and thus could not yet close Jews out.

Charles Fleischman of Cincinnati had become wealthy beyond words in the yeast business, but he still could not rise fully. He was barred from major hotels, so he finally bought an entire city — which, to this day, is named Fleischmann’s, New York (replete with apostrophe-“s”) — and built a grand five-star resort hotel there for himself; soon, other Jews entered the resort-hotel industry that came to define the Catskills Mountains of the 1950s and 1960s. Jews in Vineland, New Jersey found themselves propertied alongside a Protestant fundamentalist during Prohibition; Thomas Bramwell Welch was determined to create and market a non-alcoholic alternative to wine, so Jews converted their farms to sell him the grapes for his pasteurized juice that would not ferment. Jews who had been kept out of practicing medically in hospitals and from lounging in country clubs built their own. Jews barred from major law firms, despite their Order of Coif attainments at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia law schools, started their own firms and knew that, to survive and succeed, they had no choice but to be better than the others. Jews went into aspects of alcohol distilling in Louisville under assumed non-Jewish names like I.W. Harper (for Isaac Wolfe Bernheim), Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and Old Fitzgerald. They went into ladies garment manufacturing, which required artistic skills, not linguistic charm. No woman would parade around with a “Lifshitz” label, so Lifshitz changed his name to Ralph Lauren. Soon, Jews were all around the industry from Anne Klein, Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, and Donna Karan, to Kenneth Cole, Michael Kors, and Isaac Mizrachi. Levi Strauss saw opportunity in denim during the San Francisco Gold Rush; a century later, as jeans became a designer item, the Sephardic Israeli Nakash brothers founded Jordache, the Sephardic Marciano brothers founded Guess Jeans, and Eli Kaplan became central to “Sergio Valente,” a fictional surname sexier on one’s tight jeans than “Kaplan the Kohen Temple Priest.”

Genteel anti-Semites preferred not patronizing stores of Jewish immigrants, so Jews thought “outside the box” by creating “Big Box” stores to make their wares so indispensable that even the bigoted would buy from them to get name-brand quality at a fair deal. Those Jews created department stores, crushing stereotypes with no-haggle price tags and everything under one roof. And so it began:

There were Joseph Bernard Bloomingdale and Lyman Gustave Bloomingdale, the sons of Bavarian German Jews. There were Isaac, Lehman, and Philip Sanger (The “Sanger Bros.” of Texas), later Baum & Sanger when cousin Asher Mandelbaum joined them to sell Texans dry goods and fancy merchandise like velvet ribbons, fine cutlery, perfume, jewelry, pistols, fiddles, ladies’ garters, flannel blankets, boots, shoes, saddles, and traveling bags. Then Herbert Marcus, a Jewish buyer for Sanger Bros., and his sister, Carrie Marcus, and her husband A.L. Nieman decided to turn down an offer to buy shares in Coca-Cola and instead started Nieman-Marcus for oil-rich Texans in 1907. The family slogan was “Founded on Bad Business Judgment.” Back in New York, Herman Bergdorf, a French Alsacian tailor, opened a department store with his 23-year-old Jewish apprentice, Edwin Goodman. Abraham Abraham and Joseph Wechsler started yet another department store in 1865 Brooklyn, “Wechsler & Abraham,” and then the Straus Brothers, Isidor (who later died with wife Ida on the Titanic) and brother Nathan (an early ardent Zionist for whom the modern Israeli city of Netanya is named), bought out Wechsler in 1893, changing the store name to Abraham & Straus. Meanwhile, Isidor Straus also ran a crockery shop in the basement of a larger store run by Rowland Hussey Macy, Sr., a tattooed Quaker and captain of a Nantucket whaling ship, the “Emily Morgan.” R.H. Macy died of kidney disease in 1877 and his two business partners died serially in 1878 amd 1879. Over the next two decades, as the store’s crockery sales expanded into chinaware and glass crystal stemware, eventually the Straus brothers bought the whole enterprise, retaining both the name “R.H. Macy’s” and the red star logo that had been the pride of Rowland Macy’s arm tattoos. A few blocks away, Andrew Saks created Saks Fifth Avenue and later merged with other German Jews, the Gimbels. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, Abraham Schwab, who had immigrated from France, had opened a dry goods store with the Hirsch family, but they split. Eventually, his sons Sam, Elias, and Leo operated the store. Someone in the family finally came up with their famous Beale Street slogan: “If you can’t find it at A. Schwab, you’re probably better off without it.”

Back in the Midwest, a jeweler had refused delivery on a shipment of watches. A non-Jewish guy, Richard Warren Sears, purchased and sold them low, making a profit. He thus began a mail-order business in Minneapolis, calling it the R.W. Sears Watch Company. Soon after, he met Alvah C. Roebuck, a watch repairman. Sears and Roebuck next relocated to Chicago, where they published Richard Sears’s first mail-order catalog, offering watches, diamonds and jewelry. Amid the national Panic of 1893 a deep recession caused a national cash squeeze leaving large quantities of merchandise unsold. Roebuck left, and Sears sold that half to Chicago businessman Aaron Nusbaum. Sears owed money to Nusbaum’s brother-in-law, Julius Rosenwald. Barney Pressman named his department store simply: Barney’s.  Likewise Sidney and Herb Hubschman of Harrison, NJ: Two Guys. And New York’s E.J. Korvettes was the brainchild of Eleven Jewish Korean Veterans who got back together after the war and opened a department store. Out West, there were the Gumps of San Francisco, the (Asher and sons David and Moses) Hamburgers Department Store of Los Angeles, the Auerbachs of almost everywhere in Utah, Meier & Frank in Portland, and the Goldwaters of Phoenix. Maxwell Kohl created Kohl’s of Milwaukee, and David May created The May Co. of St. Louis with his wife’s brother, Moses Shoenberg.

American consumers, even the genteel anti-Semites, learned to buy at stores owned by Jews . . . and to pay retail without haggling.

Jews are people like everyone else. Some are righteous, some despicable, most ranging between the two end points. The worst of Jewish bums have gone into crime. When the most ornery among the Jewish immigrants felt they could not trust the Italian crime syndicates, the more entrepreneurial among those Despicables organized their own crime outfits: “Big Jack” Zelig, Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Arnold Rothstein, Irving “Waxey Gordon” Wexler, Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, Benny “Bugsy” Siegel, Louie “Lepke” Buchalter, Jake “Gurrah” Shapiro, Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, Detroit’s Purple Gang, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Abner “Longie” Zwillman, Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles, and of course Meyer Lansky. Their victims overwhelmingly were Jews like Herman Rosenthal and Joe Rosen. Unlike some other contemporary American demographic groups in today’s inner cities who view the disturbingly high numbers of their own young imprisoned males, the high crime rates in their own neighborhoods, the one-parent broken homes with absent fathers, the near-exclusivity of their own group’s population as the predominant victims of the criminals — and then turn around and blame it all on the police, the laws, the economy, and the society around them — the Jewish immigrant community of that time conceded their crime problem — and spit the vermin out. The Jewish community made no excuses, dissociated from the Mob, and watched them get executed — exactly as they deserved — on New York’s “Old Sparky” . . . or by each other.

Jews welcomed and invited police and law enforcement, even though “New York’s Finest” often instigated and were at the center of several near-pogroms like the violent mass arrests during the 1902 New York Kosher Meat Riots, when Orthodox women poured kerosene on butchers’ products and set them ablaze in the streets, and the bloodbath that occurred on Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the public mourning procession of 50,000-100,000 Jews at the funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph, the only person ever invited to be “Chief Rabbi of America.” The only times the community looked the other way were in the 1940s when the Jewish Mob allied with the Italian Mob to beat up and mangle Nazi supporters at pro-Hitler rallies in Yorktown, Manhattan, and in Hudson County, New Jersey. Organized crime later worked together again on New York’s docks where Italian and Jewish longshoremen’s unions helped run guns and other armaments to Israel while Harry Truman imposed a complete ban on American support for Israel during its 1948 War of Independence.

But, amid “the gentleman’s agreement” subtle boycotts, Jews scoured for opportunities to support their families anywhere in the American economy that non-Jews had not yet occupied to close them out — even in comic books and in Hollywood. In comic books it was Stanley (“Stan Lee”) Martin Lieber whose Uncle Robert Solomon got him a job with Martin Goodman, married to cousin Jane. It was Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel at D.C. Comics. (Jerry’s father, Mikhel Sigalovich, had died of a heart attack during a Cleveland clothing store hold-up, and Jerry dreamt of a world where a “Superman” might have arrived in time to rescue his dad.) Bob Kane and Bill Finger were the two Jews who co-created “Batman” comics. The D.C. chief editor was Julius Schwartz. Over at Archie comics, there were Maurice Coyne, Louis Silberkleit, and John Goldwater with Victor Gorelick as their editor.

Amid Prohibition, other Jews saw other entrepreneurial opportunities. They helped owners of bars and taverns, stuck with costly properties they no longer could utilize profitably, convert their facilities to places where they could display films. Thus, they created the theater businesses that became chains associated with Marcus Loew’s, Carl Laemmle, Samuel “Roxy” (his nickname from his baseball days) Rothafel, and even Sidney Grauman. They became middlemen renting the new short silent films, then leasing them to those new theaters they were helping convert, creating their eponymous chains. As they received complaints that the quality of the flicks was poor, some saw opportunity in founding movie studios like Paramount (Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky), Universal (Laemmle), Warner Brothers (Hirsz, Aaron, Szmul, and Itzhak Wonskolaser), Columbia Pictures (Harry Cohn), MGM (Marcus Loew’s Metro Pictures, Szmuel Gelbfisz who changed his name to Sam Goldwyn, and Leizer “Louie B.” Mayer), and Fox (Vilmos Fuchs). The early studios soon experimented with sound, and non-Jews who could have bought them out were persuaded that “the talkies” were a passing fad, so the Jewish families held on. They hired within the families because skilled relatives also could not get employed elsewhere and likewise were shut out by anti-Semitism, so these became family businesses. In like manner, a Jewish middleman who rented a catalog of films to a theater-chain owner might get introduced to the owner’s daughter. If it was a good marriage match, the middleman might even get a studio job. Likewise in cartoons: Leon Schlesinger, a distant relative of the Warner brothers, created “Merrie Melodies” and “Looney Tunes” and brought in Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand voices. His tombstone says it all.

That is how it worked: minority immigrant victims of closed opportunities and locked doors who, instead of whining about discrimination and expecting government to help, chose to bypass the greater societal boycotts and just create new industries of their own. Moreover, initially the films were silent, so audiences had no idea that many muscular or gorgeous early actors on screen actually had whiny voices or spoke with heavy Yiddish accents. Soon, other Jews went into the dramatic acting and comedy sides. Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Jerry “Curly” Howard — and Shemp Howard and Joe Besser — all were Jewish, as were the Marx Brothers. Lauren Bacall really was Betty Persky, and Tony Curtis really was Bernie Schwartz. Edward G. Robinson really was Emanuel Goldenberg, and Jack Benny was Benny Kubelsky. Lorne Greene (Bonanza’s “Ben Cartwright”) really was Lyon Hyman “Chaim” Green, John Garfield had been Jacob Julius Garfinkle, Tony Randall had been Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg, and Kirk Douglas had been Isser Danielovich.  Those early decades of the studios saw incredible patriotism. It is striking how uniformly patriotic, pro-American, pro-clean culture those movie studios’ films were from the very beginning through the 1950s. Before an era when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway glamorized Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in 1967, or when Marlon Brando and Al Pacino induced our hearts to root for the Corleone crime family in the 1970s, Hollywood’s thugs all ended up bloodied, dead, and despised. These were the studios that made so many of the John Wayne movies. Married couples slept in separate beds. It was a different time.

Those years between 1881-1914, when the Ashkenazic forebears of 90 percent of today’s American Jews entered the United States, decidedly were not a time of the “Jewish Un-Jew,” the “Self-Hating Jew,” the Jewish Apostate. Those Jews knew something, and many of their parents and grandparents were on site to anchor them — at least a bit. One could not find deeper American patriots than an Irving Berlin (Israel Beilin, the son of an Orthodox synagogue cantor who later supported the family by working at a kosher meat market and giving children Hebrew lessons). In time he married out of the religion and composed “White Christmas.” Yet he reflected to his dying day at age 101 the deep patriotic love for this amazingly kind and wonderful Christian country that took in his family as they fled the Tsar. Even while assimilating and dissolving into the American melting pot, he composed these words in 1938:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer:

God bless America, land that I love,
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above.
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans white with foam,
God bless America, my home sweet home.

Something started changing in the 1980s and 1990s as many of all backgrounds experienced the good life, abandoning their roots now a full century and more since arriving in Ellis Island, and as their great-grandparents and then their grandparents died. What changed among Jews here has been:

1. The rise of the Abysmally and Absolutely Ignorant American Jew Who Knows Judaicallyfrom Nothing, and

2. The American Self-Asserting “Jew” Who Simply Is Not and Never Was a Jew under any classical definition of the term.

By contrast, here is a Torah-learned Orthodox Jewish Hasid singing that patriotic song for tens of thousands of spectators at Citi Field in New York on April 12, 2019.

Part Six: What Jews Who Know Authentic Judaism Believe: The Architecture of Judaism — The Talmud, the Halakhic Codes, and Authoritative Rabbinic Responsa

(For Ellen of blessed memory.)

The Jewish New Year 5782 began at sunset last Monday, September 6, 2021. Towards that occasion, this is a ten-part series of online articles that, with G-d’s help, I hope to transform into a larger book. It is prompted and inspired by questions I have been asked over the past half century by my readers and particularly these past five years by non-Jewish political conservatives of Christian background who often love Jews but cannot figure us out. Because most online opinion articles range between 600-3,000 words, this subject cannot be treated properly and completely in one single article or even in a limited series. However, this series marks an ambitious effort to address a perplexing question, one that perplexes America’s one million Orthodox Jews more than it does even non-Jewish conservative Christians.

The other installments in this series can be found at these links:

Part One: The Basic Definitions of Jews and Non-Orthodox Jewish Denominations can be found here.

Part Two: The Orthodox can be found here. 

Part Three: The Ethnicities can be found here.

Part Four: Non-Jews can be found here. 

Part Five: What Jews Who Know Authentic Judaism Believe: The Oral Law and Written Law can be found here. 

Part Seven: The Phenomenon of the Jewish Un-Jew can be found here

Part Eight: The Rise of the Absolutely Ignorant American Jew Who Knows Judaically “from Nothing” can be found here 

Part Nine: On Deep Red Conservative Dixiecrats Who Kept Liberal Democrats in Power for a Century and on Jews Just Like Them can be found here 

Part Ten: Wrapping Factors Together: Understanding the Hopeless Disorientation of Knee-Jerk Leftist Jews can be found here

8. The Architecture of Judaism — The Talmud, the Halakhic Codes, and Authoritative Rabbinic Responsa

The core of Judaism is rooted in the Oral Law that was transmitted approximately a thousand years before being integrated. Inevitably, over the centuries some of that law has been lost for the rest of time until the Messiah arrives. That is what happens with humans — because we are human. Likewise, with centuries of oral transmission among a faith community united by one Torah but divided by continents, cultures, languages, and centuries, exacerbated by living in eras when the primary objective was to survive anti-Jewish massacres so that descendants could carry the legacy, there evolved different transmissions. That is no different from how American law under the same one clearly written Constitution has evolved somewhat differently over approximately 230 years across a single continent, riven by differently nuanced cultures such as the more liberal Northeast, the more conservative Deep South, the more centrist Midwest, and the Wild West. Over time America has carved out approximately a dozen different federal legal jurisdictions — appellate districts of the United States Courts of Appeal — as well as fifty separate state jurisdictions. On the most critical defining issues, the existential issues that define a nation, there even is a Supreme Court that steps in to harmonize and create uniformity. And thus it operates in Judaism.

The Torah — the Written Law — serves as sort of a Constitution. The Oral Law, which remained unwritten for its first thousand years, finally was integrated in the form of the Mishnah two millennia ago, when Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (the Leader), the leading rabbinic authority of his time, ruled that unbridled Roman persecutions and massive executions of Jewish religious and spiritual leaders during the era when they crucified Jesus, threatened to leave the Jews without any authoritative living minds capable of continuing the transmission. He felt, therefore, that if the Oral Law were not then perpetuated in writing, all of Judaism’s core would be lost. Scholars therefore were assigned to travel to academies and record what was being taught orally, and Rabbi Yehudah gathered it all together, compiling the Mishnah. The gathered materials were too voluminous for everything to be included, and a thousand years of separate oral transmissions also had caused a certain variance of teachings. So he documented all laws, also preserving many dissenting opinions — because, even though the minority rulings were not being practiced as the dominant practice, perhaps they once had been the original teaching Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses) had learned at Mount Sinai during those 40 days and nights when G-d orally had taught him all of Judaism. Likewise, many important laws and teachings that could not be included in the Mishnah because of voluminosity were preserved elsewhere under the category of “b’righ’-ta.”

Three centuries later, as new developments and world innovations emerged, new rabbinic discussions had unfolded. It was much the same as has happened in America since 1789. The Constitution did not address whether Nazis may march in Skokie, Illinois confronting Holocaust survivors with signs reading “Hitler Was Right”; whether police need to apprise criminal suspects of their rights to obtain counsel, whether electric chairs comprise cruel and unusual punishment, and whether telephones may be wiretapped. Instead, as time and new technologies and ideas emerged, these fundamental questions came before the courts to adjudicate based on the foundational Constitutional principles set centuries earlier. Ultimately, even if a Supreme Court majority rules differently from how the original authors, the Founding Fathers, would have intended, that contemporary ruling thereupon stands as the Constitution’s principle, and dissenting opinions are preserved for another day when their alternative wisdom may enlighten. That is how any legal system necessarily works, and Judaism is not only a faith but also a legal system. Thus, as 300 years passed after the Mishnah was codified, a new even more encyclopedic work was compiled addressing new issues and experiences, and reflecting new principles of rabbinic analysis: the Gemara.  When the comparatively terse Mishnah is published along with the much more expansive Gemara, that discusses its rules at much greater length, that compendium is called the “Talmud.” Again -demystifying: that is the Talmud.

Inasmuch as the Mishnah — and its subsequent Gemara elaboration — all stemmed from what Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi could salvage amid Roman persecution, preserving as much as he could of the Oral Law that G-d had taught Moshe Rabbeinu through 40 uninterrupted days and nights on Mount Sinai, Jews today regard the Talmud as the Oral Law. Two somewhat parallel versions of the Talmud came to be compiled, one primarily in Hebrew in Palestine-Israel and now known as the “Jerusalem Talmud” (Talmud Yerushalmi) and the other predominantly in Jewish Aramaic, with substantial portions in Hebrew also, compiled in Babylonia (now mostly Iraq) and known as the “Babylonian Talmud” (Talmud Bavli).  The Babylonian Talmud today is by far the dominant authority for everyday contemporary Jewish life because it was compiled for Judaic living in a world without a Holy Temple in full force on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. While the Mishnah reads more as a dry legal code, the Gemara — which is the much deeper and lengthier dominant portion of the Talmud — sometimes reads as a legal code, sometimes contains scholarly, fascinating, and even intense  debates between and among rabbis trying to decide how best to apply the Mishnaic law of 300 years earlier to the latest realities of the day in Babylonia, and sometimes ventures way off-course into story-telling and random observations on wide ranges of topics ranging from husbands and wives whose marriages are loving versus those that miss the mark, the best medicines and medical treatments of the day, and the wisdom of traveling during daytime hours versus at night time.

Many Talmudic discussions adhere to the subject on the table, while others venture widely into segués that run for lengthy pages upon pages (folios) until somehow the discussion manages to return to the topic at hand. Contrary to the frothing hatred spawned and spewed about the Talmud for centuries by anti-Semites who cannot read Aramaic, have no sense of the context of the discussions, who live from conspiracy to conspiracy, and who would not know the difference between Baba Kamma, Baba Batra, and Baba Black Sheep, the Talmud’s 2,711 double-sided folios gathered in 63 distinct tractates focus actually on Jews living with Jews, observances of Jewish law, and directing our behavior to make it through life in This World (“Olam HaZeh”) so that we may be rewarded with eternal blessing and a place of reward in The World to Come (Olam HaBah).

(The Talmud does not discuss Christianity. There is not a single reference to any of the key Christological figures — none to Paul or Saul of Tarsus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Thomas, nor to any of the books Christians regard as sacred like Acts, Revelations, and such. Nothing about Jesus Christ. Nothing about Mary or Joseph or Three Wise Men or Lazarus. There simply is not. Christianity itself was just unfolding as a world faith within the Roman Empire at that very time, and it was not on the rabbis’ radar that such an emerging religion one day would change the face of history and would interface quite as dramatically as it would with Ashkenazic Jewish history. During the years the Mishnah and Gemara were being compiled, those in the new religion were facing their own Roman persecutions. Internal Christian theology still was settling on whether to observe Saturday as the Sabbath or to move it to Sunday, with sources like Matthew 28:1 pointing to Sunday; only Emperor Constantine’s decree centuries later helped secure the practice. Unfortunately, it was so common in those days for Romans to crucify Jews that the Mishnah in Tractate Yevamot 16:3 discusses whether we accept court testimony that a specific husband died (so that his possible widow now may remarry) if the witnesses testify they saw a corpse on a cross but could not make out the crucified deceased’s full face and nose. That discussion is purely jurisprudential — Jewish life under Roman law — with no theological overlay.

(In similar measure, the Talmud says nothing about Islam because Muhammed would not emerge yet for centuries. Thus, the rabbis of the Talmud instead were focused on idolatry of the sort that had marked Biblical times, had dominated among Canaanites and Philistines in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in the Holy Land, and that continued as central to Greek and Roman theology that their oppressive leaders imposed on Jews.)

(Likewise, as for internet postings about Kabbalah, such internet spewings and even published books predominantly are utter nonsense. Rather, Kabbalah is adjunct, way outside core Judaism, and very few of us — including highly trained and experienced Orthodox rabbis like me, a rabbi of more than 40 years who has held my share of rabbinical leadership posts — ever study any of it. It includes such ideas as “tzimtzum,” that G-d had to reduce his infinite size (so to speak) to fit into this world, that people who do good deeds help release “good holy sparks” in the world, that those who sin cause the release of “bad unholy sparks.” If you like those images, fine. Kabbalah simply is not an important or particularly relevant part of normative mainstream Judaism. A few Hasidic groups (see Part 3 of this series) take a greater interest in the subject, but 98 percent of their adherents do not know what they are talking about when they even mention “Kabbalah.” It is telling that the best known “followers of Kabbalah” are the likes of Madonna, Marla Maples, Demi Moore, and Ashton Kutcher — like other celebrities in that world of money and nonsense, some who find “The Answer to Life’s Meaning” in Scientology (e.g., Tom Cruise, Elisabeth Moss, John Travolta), in Hare Krishna (e.g., George Harrison, Russell Brand, Steve Jobs), or in whatever exotic path is next.  The “Kabbalah” sorts were attracted to a guy named Philip Berg who set up a “Kabbalah Centre” — not surprisingly in California — and they started wearing red strings on their wrists. A pouch of red strings can be purchased for $26 at the Kabbalah Centre Online Store. I personally prefer, for about the same price, the 19-piece Gold Ribbon gift box of Godiva Kosher Chocolates with ganaches, creamy pralines, rich caramels, fruits, and nuts. If you prefer a Philip Berg red string, enjoy it.)

Over the centuries that followed the Babylonian Talmud’s emergence mostly in the 5th century, new innovations came about, new questions arose, new cultural realities prevailed. In the 12th century, one of Judaism’s greatest rabbinic authorities (and very possibly the greatest) in all of history, Rabbi Moshe the son of Maimon — Maimonides or “The Rambam” (pronounced “Rahm’-bahm”) monumentally undertook to compile and codify all of Judaism — all the laws in the Torah, all the laws on all the folios of the Talmud — into one orderly code of law that omitted virtually all the rabbis’ fascinating conversations, discussions, stories, debates, and suggestions and that also reorganized certain teachings that had been scattered in random segués, compiling them together more topically, into more tightly organized subject chapters — and he did it all in a delightfully readable crisp Hebrew. This revolutionary code of law sometimes is called “The Strong Hand of the Rambam” (Yad HaChazakah) because the Hebrew word for “hand” is comprised of two letters that have a numerical equivalent of 14, the number of volumes in the code. It is known far more commonly as the “Mishneh Torah.” That code has become a primary authority guiding Jewish practice to this day, and was particularly so during its first half millennium.

By the mid-1500s, great rabbinic authorities felt the time had come to update the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah to reflect new cultural realities of the new world that had emerged over four more centuries. They scrupulously adhered to Rambam’s codified rulings but modified the organizational structure a bit, re-formatting the Jewish codes into four broad categories: laws of everyday life (Orach Chai’m), laws of men interrelating with women (Even HaEzer), civil laws of jurisprudence (Choshen Mishpat), and esoterica like the laws of building mikvehs (“mikva’ot” or ritual pools of water), laws of animal slaughter, and other esoterica and miscellany (Yoreh De’ah). This monumental opus of definitive Jewish law, customs, and practice came to be known by the fanciful name “Shulchan Arukh” (the “Prepared Table”). Inasmuch as its author, Rabbi Yosef Karo of Tz’fat (Safed, Israel), was a Sephardic Jew whose practices and traditions were Sephardic (discussed among ethnicities in Part 3 of this series), a small but distinct percentage of his authoritative rulings differed from those of Ashkenazic teachings. As a result, an encyclopedic Ashkenazic rabbinic work or two were compiled to offer an alternate compendium for Ashkenazim, but the sense emerged universally that a single monumental code for all Jews to reference would be best to maintain Jewish harmony for centuries to come. To unify the Jews in their varying nuances of religious practice, since most everything in Judaism is identical for Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Rabbi Moshe Isserles (known by the acronym “Rama”) of Krakow, Poland inserted brief “notes” and “thoughts” (hagahot) into the text of Rabbi Karo’s Shulchan Arukh wherever a ruling of his differed from how Ashkenazim practice. That way, it all is there, integrated into one definitive Code of Jewish Law. Since The Rama was augmenting Rabbi Karo’s “Prepared Table,” Rama’s efforts are known fancifully as the mapah — the “Table Cloth.”

To this day the Shulchan Arukh is the authoritative word on Judaism. George Soros and Bernie Sanders would not know they had encountered a Shulchan Arukh if it hit them in their heads. Through the ensuing 500 years since its codification, the Shulchan Arukh has been maintained as relevant and up-to-date by half a millennium of rabbinic responsa literature, in which the most authoritative rabbinic leaders of each generation publish compendia of their written answers to questions they are posed regarding Jewish practice. In the past century, for example, such authoritative compendia have included the published responsa of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Igrot Moshe), Ashkenazic Jewry’s single greatest authoritative source during the latter half of the 20th century, and by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (Y’chaveh Da’at and Yabi’a Omer), the parallel Sephardic Torah giant of the contemporary age. Both Rabbis Feinstein and Yosef of righteous blessed memory also published further works, and so have dozens — even hundreds — of other leading rabbis, many also of extraordinary authority like the 18^th century Rabbi Yechezkel Landau (the “Nodah B’yehudah”), Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (the “Vilna Gaon”), and end-of-century-into-the-next Rabbi Avraham Danzig (the “Chayei Adam”) and Rabbi Moshe Sofer (the “Chatam Sofer”); the 19^th century Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein (the “Arukh HaShulchan”), Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad (the “Ben Ish Chai”), and the transitional 20^th century Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, the Chofetz Chaim (the “Mishnah B’rurah”), Rabbi Avraham Karelitz (the “Chazon Ish”), Rabbi Yosef Dov Ber Soloveitchik, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Chabad, Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg (the “Tzitz Eliezer”), and others.

Through these continuing rabbinic responsa and through subsequently published accounts of their thoughts and rulings by their closest rabbinic disciples, Judaism’s Code of Jewish Law remains definitive and controlling for Judaic practice to this day. This is what I call the “Architecture of Judaism.” It is built on the Written Law of the Torah (alternately called “Torah,” “Chumash,” “Five Books of Moses,” or “The Pentateuch”), the Oral Law as preserved in the Talmud, the Codes of the Middle Ages, and the authoritative rabbinic responsa that have followed. Amid and intertwined throughout is the “Mesorah” — the way of Tradition by which authoritative custom and practice further takes on its own life, embedding Judaism with history and culture. Thus, Ashkenazim do not eat beans, peas, or rice on Passover but Sephardim manifestly do. Orthodox men technically can be permitted to work in the marketplace without wearing a yarmulka, but most wear it anyway and always when at prayer, when eating, and when at home. Only two candles need be lit to welcome the Shabbat into the home, but the daughters of mothers who lit as many candles as they had household members follow family tradition and light one for the husband, one for each child, and one for themselves. Many Jews descending from Syria do not eat chick peas on Passover because the way they pronounce the first and last Hebrew consonants in the word “chummus” sounds the same as the way they say “chametz” (leavened food prohibited on Passover) because their “tz” is sounded more like an “s” (which also explains the surname of the Greek Jewish singer, Neil Sedaka, a word for “charity” more commonly pronounced as “tzedakah” by Jews elsewhere). In that way, the mesorah (tradition) of Jews tracing their paternal lineage to Aleppo, Syria differs even from other North African Sephardic Jews from adjacent Arab lands.

As explained in Part One of this series, 33-40 percent of people today identifying themselves as American Jews when interviewed by Pew surveys and by other American pollsters actually are not Jewish whatsoever — and that even includes large numbers of their rabbis. However, this Part of the series reveals something much deeper. Even among the 60-67 percent of people correctly identifying as Jews — and no question at all, they are Jews — the vast, overwhelming majority of them do not have a notion in the world of what Judaism means or entails. What you now have read in this section is, after all, a somewhat truncated “Reader’s Digest version,” necessitated by the exigencies and realities of word counts and publishers’ space considerations (as well as by readers’ limits of focus in an era where typing 140-280 characters comprises an ample conversation, where commercial television cannot communicate longer than 22 minutes without breaking for marketing inducements, where children have been reared on an ADHD “Sesame Street” culture that screams and jumps from splash to splash, and where texting eliminates the need 4 any1  2 spell, 2 punctu8, or even 2 write in cursive). Yet, you now know more about actual authentic Judaism than do Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (the “BDS anti-Semites” at Ben & Jerry’s), George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and 98 percent of the Jews in Hollywood — combined.

They know nothing Judaically. They know absolutely nothing. They learn absolutely nothing of enduring Judaic substantive value. To the degree that they get enrolled for a year at age 12 in a temple’s “bar mitzvah” class, they emerge knowing more about bars than mitzvas. Given all the Judaism there is from which to draw forth some information, the ignorance they bear is beyond stunning. It is breathtaking. Most cannot open a Talmud folio correctly. Most have never even touched or seen a volume of Talmud even though it now is available in several elegant English-translated editions, in hard cover or paperback, and can arrive next-day on Amazon Prime. They not only cannot read a sentence but even a word in it. They cannot read the page header. If you tell them the header says “Tractate Sukkot, Chapter 5, HeChalil (“The Flute”), Folio 56a,” they will look at you like a deer in headlights after the headlights have been turned off and the deer realizes it is standing in a South Bronx bath tub, not in the woods of a Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoon or a Disney movie. They issue press releases to the media, in names of pseudo-“Jewish” organizations with acronyms like “ADL” and “HIAS” that belie their utter Judaism-free content and values structure. Then, other Jews exactly like them in such media as the New York Times dutifully reprint their releases as though they speak authoritatively in the name of Judaism. It is a sham, a fraud on society of indescribable proportions.

The matter transcends differences of opinion. Rather, they know absolutely nothing factual on which to base a Judaic opinion. That is why such Jews running the New York Times covered up the Holocaust, no less than they falsified and covered up Stalin’s mass murder of Ukrainians during the Holodomor, why they gave inordinate news coverage to promote Reform Judaism’s leaders in the American Council for Judaism, who fought tooth-and-nail through the 1930s and 1940s against the creation of the country of Israel — and why the New York Times still, to this day, attacks Israel and falsifies facts and photos and captions concerning Zionism so mercilessly that Ben & Jerry, two mere purveyors of ice cream, have access to their op-ed page to pillory Israel, while Bari Weiss finds herself quitting every young journalist’s dream job of a lifetime because, as a Jew, she found she no longer could walk into her office in the New York Times.

In this entire description of the “Architecture of Judaism,” there was not a single mention of “tikkun olam” (“repairing the world”). That was no oversight; the term simply is irrelevant. It all is part of the same fraud on society. It is a term that appears briefly and rarely in so little classical rabbinic literature. It appears fleetingly as a two-word infinitive barely embedded in the middle of one prayer as an affirmation that Messiah will arrive only when idolators and other atheists and pantheists on earth somehow come to recognize and bend a knee of deference to the One True G-d. When someone Jewish, who would not know Judaism if it were posted on his or her door as Martin Luther once posted his 95 theses, mouths blandishments virtue-signaling his or her “Social Justice Warrior” credentials by saying that he or she pursues “tikkun olam,” all your internal whistles, alarms, and sirens should sound off like a loud clanging bell bleating “FRAUD! FRAUD! PHONEY BALONEY! NUKH A YUTZ!”

The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) stated Tuesday more than 1,500 rabbis agree the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is “no longer competent to identify, let alone combat, antisemitism.”

The rabbis’ statement is in response to the ADL announcing a partnership with Hillel International to document antisemitism on college campuses. Hillel has a presence in more than 550 colleges globally.

The ADL and Hillel “will not always treat anti-Israel activity as antisemitism,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.

An ADL spokesperson told the JTA, “Anti-Israel activism in and of itself is not antisemitism.” This means not all Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) actions on college campuses will be documented as antisemitism.

CJV responded by criticizing the ADL and Hillel’s decision:

“Only someone with no sense of Jewish history could claim that BDS is not antisemitic,” said CJV Southern Regional Vice President Rabbi Moshe B. Parnes. “The first Nazi edict was a boycott of Jewish businesses; economic warfare directed against the Jewish people was then and has always been one of the first signs of systemic Jew-hatred. Combating antisemitism in all its forms defined the ADL’s mission throughout its long and storied history, and it is crucial that it return to its core goals.”

…

“Human rights activists opposed to tyrannical regimes don’t describe themselves as ‘anti-Cuba,’ ‘anti-Iran,’ or ‘anti-North Korea,’ or seek to destroy those nations,” noted CJV Midwestern Regional Vice President Rabbi Ze’ev Smason. “That so many BDS supporters proudly label themselves ‘anti-Israel” is revealing—and should be chilling to everyone.” He added, “any honest person can see that antisemitism runs through the core of the anti-Israel movement, from its hateful accusations to violent assaults perpetrated by ‘pro-Palestinian’ demonstrators against individual Jews.”

BDS seeks to destroy Israel, the only Jewish nation in the world and the only democracy in the Middle East. The land of Israel is central to Judaism. Jews have lived there for thousands of years, and Orthodox Jews pray for the land of Israel multiple times a day.

On college campuses, BDS often takes the form of student government resolutions calling the school to stop working with Israeli companies and even more broadly, companies that do business with Israel. Recently, Ben & Jerry’s came under fire after bending to leftist, anti-Israel ideology by boycotting Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

British megacorp Unilever’s ice cream brand is getting torched for its latest virtue signal. https://t.co/XFBMRYMxKo

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 20, 2021

Last week, Breitbart News reported the ADL is partnering with PayPal:

PayPal, the online payment processing giant, has announced it will work with the far-left Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to collect information on and cut off financial flows to so-called extremists, and that it will share the data it gathers with law enforcement, policymakers, and the rest of the financial industry.

In April, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt attempted to link Tucker Carlson with mass shootings and called for Fox News to fire the commentator.

Greenblatt has, however, been featured on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC program, despite the fact that Sharpton is associated with years of violent antisemitism, including inciting riots against religious Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the 1990s.

In September 2020, Breitbart News reported the ADL signed a statement declaring “The Black Lives Matter movement is the current day Civil Rights movement in this country,” despite the fact that BLM has a history of antisemitism. Other cosignatories include leftist anti-Israel groups such as “Anti-Zionist Shabbat” and Jewish Voice for Peace.

You’ve almost certainly heard of Bend the Arc; this “Jewish” organization is a darling of the leftist media, and also flush with cash. “Bending the Jews” is a long article, so I’ll excerpt a few key lines you truly must read:

What has made Bend the Arc such a singular and attractive investment worth tens of millions of dollars for philanthropic elites who, according to their own financial records, are otherwise unengaged with the well-being of American Jewry? A close look at Bend the Arc’s work over the years would suggest that such an investment was designed not to advance American Jewish life, but rather, to obtain and cement Jewish-branded support for progressive political causes.

So despite Bend the Arc CEO Stosh Cotler’s claims to “reflect and represent what the majority of American Jews believe,” Bend the Arc is hardly a grass-roots effort. It owes its prominence to the PR benefits of making contempt for traditional Biblical values into a “Jewish” issue.

In other words, Bend the Arc is a front group richly funded by left-wing foundations with no interest in the well-being of the Jewish community. On the contrary, their goal is to exploit Jewish ignorance to destroy America’s moral foundation.

History is replete with examples of Jews used as figureheads to harm the Jewish community, Jewish values and the national interest. One wonders if the writer who described Bend the Arc as the “Jewish section” behind the progressive platform realized that he had just translated the name of the infamous Soviet Yevsektsiya into English. Either way, he was not wrong to do so.

These are not groups that want dialogue or discussion — because in a sober discussion of common ideals and basic moral values, they lose. On the contrary, groups such as IfNotNow, Bend the Arc’s anti-Israel “Jewish” collaborator, refuse to debate in favor of deliberate disruptions and protests designed to prevent others from being heard.

Here’s a tip: a good way to avoid comparisons to some of history’s most vicious anti-Semites would be to not mimic the Sturmabteilung. You would think that was obvious, but you know what they say about those who don’t learn from history. All that is needed for darkness to fall in America is for groups like these to go from being arrested to being permitted to flourish.

And on the streets right now, we see what being permitted to flourish looks like. Who among us was not sickened by the murder of George Floyd? But who is not sickened to see his death misused to destroy our cities? Violent radicals are assaulting others, vandalizing and destroying property while minority home and business owners cry over the loss of everything they have worked for… due to a “protest” purportedly expressing concern over minority lives.

We will not bend, and we will not buckle. We will call out anti-Semitism and bigotry, and — specifically because of who we are — we have unique credibility to inform Americans that Bend the Arc and their ilk stand categorically opposed to Judaism and our fundamental values. We will stand against this well-funded mob — but we cannot be heard without your help. Your help is needed to keep us in the fight. Thank you.