Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

One of the nation’s most insightful voices on immigration, Dr. Stephen Steinlight is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in Washington, DC. He focuses on ascending trends in immigration and immigration policy, America’s changing demography and culture, the politics of immigration, the impact of immigration on the nation’s social cohesion, and the consequences of massive low-skill immigration on America’s most vulnerable groups. He is also concerned with the nexus between immigration and national security in an age of Jihadist terrorism and significant Muslim migration to Western Europe and the United States.
Dr. Steinlight has testified before the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives and the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. He has also provided expert testimony before state legislatures and State Freedom of Information Commissions. He has shared podiums with members of the House and presidential candidates. He has also addressed hundreds of state legislator and civic and religious groups across the country, been a panelist at conferences and public forums, and is frequently interviewed on radio and TV. He has written extensively on many of the central issues in the immigration debate.
Prior to joining CIS, he was Executive Director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, the Boston-based abolitionist organization. For eight years he was National Affairs Director at the American Jewish Committee (AJC) where he oversaw its public policy agenda centered on First Amendment issues, civil rights, immigration, and social policy. While at AJC, Dr. Steinlight was a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and founded and served as Senior Advisor to the critically-acclaimed commonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations.
He also served as Vice President of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) for three years. He convened the first global interreligious dialogues involving dissident Muslim scholars; played a lead role in propagating community-oriented policing; worked on issues affecting Native Americans; and directed the largest survey of intergroup attitudes ever undertaken in America: Taking America’s Pulse: A Survey of Intergroup Attitudes in the United States.
Prior to joining NCCJ, he was Director of Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the body responsible for developing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Steinlight was co-creator of the Museum’s “Remember the Children Exhibition.”
A magna cum laude graduate of Columbia College, Columbia University, upon graduation he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and received the Columbia College Alumni Merit Award. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Kellett Fellow, and a Marshall Scholar at the University of Sussex, England, where he received his M.Phil and PhD. He was a professor of English and Victorian Studies for 20 years, teaching at the University of Sussex, the State University of New York; the Institút Britannique de Paris; and the School of Graduate Studies, New York University. The recipient of numerous academic honors and visiting professorship, he has been a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently an Associate Fellow at Timothy Dwight College, Yale University.
Dr. Steinlight is author of two books: Fractious Nation? Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life (UC-Berkeley Press, 2003); and Children of Abraham (K’TAV 2002): An Introduction to Islam and Islamism co-authored with one of the foremost scholar/opponents of Islamism, the late Khalid Durán. Both authors received fatwas for having written the book. Dr. Steinlight was also selected by the United States Council for Peace to join a team of conflict-resolution and civil society experts sent to Macedonia in 2003 to maintain the ceasefire in that nation’s civil war and create a process for President Trajkovski and his cabinet to work with leading jurists and former rebels to amend its constitution.

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Oldest white supremacist site shut down after complaint

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

First they came for the white supremacists, and I said nothing because I was not a white supremacist…

I have mixed feelings about these matters, though ultimately I fall more on the side of free speech and allowing these sites to operate. I am ambivalent, however, because sites like The Daily Stormer talk frequently about throwing people into ovens, which on the face of it is a call to violence and therefore it is hard for me to defend that right. When you are inciting criminal activity, you may well have lost your rights to free speech.

I’ve spent time on Stormfront. It is filled with ugly material, as well as thoughtful postings. Overall, from what I have seen, it is not a site that generally promoted criminal activity (though some of its posts did).

On the other hand, the Torah contains calls for Israel to commit genocides against the original inhabitants of Canaan. Also, there are other statements in the mesora (Jewish tradition) as well as in Christianity that are as ugly as things you can find on Stormfront or The Daily Stormer. I do not want my tradition or Christianity censored or shut down. So I need to allow others the same latitude.

I just read a biography of George Lincoln Rockwell and saw that the ACLU repeatedly went to bat for his right to speak, and much of what he said was horrifying, including his desire to eliminate parts of America’s population.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — The founder of the internet’s oldest white supremacist site said he was trying to get back online Monday after a company revoked its domain name following complaints that it promotes hatred and is linked to dozens of murders.
Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has operated stormfront.org since 1995, said he didn’t receive any warning before Network Solutions blocked the use of the stormfront.org name on Friday.
Stormfront.org had more than 300,000 registered users, Black said, with traffic increasing since a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Popular with the KKK and neo-Nazi groups, the site included forums where users sometimes promoted white power events.
“I’m talking to my lawyers, and that’s about all I can do right now,” Black, of West Palm Beach, Florida, said in a telephone interview. “I can switch to another domain, but it might wind up the same way.”
Another major white supremacist website, The Daily Stormer, was previously been shut down by the web-hosting company Go Daddy and then Google after the violence in Charlottesville.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the stormfront.org shutdown followed complaints it filed with Network Solutions alleging the site promotes not only hate speech, but deadly violence.
A spokesman for Network Solutions didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment.
Users of Black’s website have been implicated in more than 100 murders, according to the complaint, including 77 people slain by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik at a camp in Norway in 2011.
“Especially in the wake of tragic events in Charlottesville and the spike in hate crimes across the country, Stormfront crossed the line of permissible speech and incited and promoted violence,” said a statement by Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Black, speaking about the shutdown during an online radio show Monday, said his site had rules against promoting violence or any crime.
Black was a state KKK leader under former Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, who appeared on the radio show following Black and expressed his “full support” for Black and the website.
“He was the first major site defending the rights of white people,” said Duke.
Black has been involved in the white supremacy movement since the 1970s and was convicted in 1981 for his role in a right-wing plot to overthrow the overthrow the government of Caribbean island nation of Dominica.

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When Orthodox Jews Are A Tourist Attraction

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

Baruch writes: Walking to shul on Shabbos afternoon for Mincha, through the 3rd and Highland intersection of Hancock Park, BCC spots a tour bus, with the tour guide pointing at BCC and other Orthodox Jews walking, and the tourists are taking pictures. BCC could swear he could read their redneck mouths saying:. “Look, Martha, there’s those Jeeeewwwssss we be readin’ ’bout.” These tourists are gawking pointing and taking pictures as if they never saw Jews before. Paranoid, or are we Orthodox Jews viewed by tourists on our Sabbath dressed in our suits and hats on show as a tourist attraction?

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The liberal Zionist crisis — white nationalists are villains, but settlers are ‘complex’

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

I think the healthy attitude for all people is to put your own people first. They should be one’s primary political concern. Interests over principles. I do not care if Israel is a liberal democracy. My first concern is that the Jewish state is Jewish, run by Jews, and operated in the interests of Jews. I expect everyone to take this attitude toward their own kind. Surely you want your people to live, right? To live under their own sovereignty?

Philip Weiss is an honest leftist. He puts left-wing universal principles ahead of the interests of his own people.

Philip Weiss writes:

Last week I wrote about the liberal Zionists’ contradiction. They are eloquent critics of the racism that Trump is fostering in the US; but they can’t find that voice when it comes to Jim Crow and apartheid fostered by Jewish nationalism in Israel. And the contradiction is plain for all to see.
Here’s another example. I make it a point to hear Rabbi Yehuda Kurtzer speak at J Street and other Jewish spaces. He is a very smart guy and very positive. While he’s too Jewish-communitarian for my taste (the touchstones of his judgments are Jewish referents rather than universalist ones), he’s an idealist who addresses Israel’s crisis.
So I was disturbed to discover on his Facebook page from June a promotion of a visit to rightwing “hilltop” settlements in the Occupied West Bank to get to know those folks better, sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute, of which Kurtzer is an executive. Kurtzer wrote then that the tour was available to 200 visiting North American Jewish lay leaders as a way of “engaging with the complexities of modern Israel:”
Around a quarter of [Shalom Hartman participants today] are on the trip to Shiloh and its environs, trying to understand the roots and legacies of the Gush Emunim movement. They are doing this not because the settler movement accords with their politics and values, though for some that is probably the case; they are out doing this because they understand that to be in relationship, in serious and committed relationship, with the State of Israel requires a real reckoning with its complexities, its history and its values even when – especially when – those values conflict with their own. They do this because they know, as does much of American Jewish leadership, that sustaining a relationship with the State of Israel in spite of geographical difference, diverging ideological trends, and a growing chasm of world views, requires of them a deep commitment to understanding Israeli society and the humility involved in trying to stay in relationship to it.
As the Times of Israel noted last week: these are segregationist communities [my emphasis]:
Bat Ayin is home to a staunchly nationalistic community that, as a policy, does not allow Arabs through its gates. Residents have been involved in a number of attacks on Palestinians and their property in the past.
I am not convinced that “humility” and a “deep commitment” to Israeli society and “sustaining a relationship” to Israel entails lunching with these people and getting to know them and recognizing the “complexities” of their lives.
Now compare Kurtzer’s laissez-faire attitude about Israeli settlers to his sense of the emergency represented by Charlottesville. He wrote this on August 13, about the “sick morning” following the neo-Nazi rally:
“Never Forget” may be periodically trivialized by its overuse, but it is absolutely and scandalously undermined by its *underuse* – specifically, when we fail to map its warnings against the real and present dangers of its being rendered into a lie….
[W]hether it comes to devaluing our own victimhood, or denying the parts we play in allowing our societies to be villainous towards others, this central slogan sourced violently from the modern Jewish experience is now tested by our willingness to take it seriously in our politics, our activism, and our moral and political vigilance. Let’s hope it is a real thing.
Wouldn’t speaking out against against the role “we play in allowing our societies to be villainous towards others” mean condemning and exposing the settler movement, not seeking to understand it? Peter Beinart has been a leader on this score, inside the Jewish community.
Compare Kurtzer’s reaching out to the settlers to what longtime peace activist Bob Loeb said on first visiting Israel in the late 60’s (in an interview with Aliza Becker of the American Jewish Peace Archive):
I found the attitudes toward Palestinians in direct contradiction to everything that I had been struggling for in the States in terms of civil rights. It just didn’t make any sense.
That’s not hard to understand. And it’s more true than ever 50 years later.

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Identity Politics

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Luke Ford

Stephen Steinlight posts on FB: “One of the gods of my youth [Jim Brown] unsurprisingly gets is exactly right. All of us should be unhyphenated Americans first, last and always, and we should honor our national symbols. Then — yes — let us act on our consciences and political judgments, which will inevitably differ from time to time and sometimes passionately — but not to the insane Identity Politics extent of deconstructing America.”

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Rabbi claims he was vilified for welcoming non-white members

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

A lot of Jews do not want non-whites in their synagogues, schools and neighborhoods. Jews tend to lead white flight though some Hasidic Jews stay (such as Chabad in Crown Heights).

New York Post: A Westchester rabbi who sought to diversify his synagogue was panned by its “racist” board members for turning the congregation “Spanish and Black,” according to a federal discrimination complaint.

Rabbi Rigoberto Emmanuel Viñas, a Sephardic Jew who trained as an Orthodox rabbi, claims the board at Lincoln Park Jewish Center in Yonkers has a “long history” of discriminatory practices against “non-Whites.”

Viñas’ explosive allegations are laid out in a complaint recently filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“Racist members employed subterfuge and sabotage against not only Rabbi Viñas but new Latino and African American members,” the complaint said. “They have attacked any bi-racial or non-white member as ‘not really Jewish.’”

Viñas, who joined the synagogue in 2003, claims one board member, Helen Schwartz, commented, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if the darkies took over the synagogue?” without realizing the rabbi’s Cuban background.

In 2011, Schwartz also allegedly complained to a director that Viñas wasn’t actually Jewish because of his “Sephardic/Hispanic background.”

Board members allegedly spread rumors that the rabbi was out to turn the congregation “Spanish” – and even accused him in 2008 of stealing from the rabbi’s discretionary fund to change the congregation to Spanish members.

“An investigation revealed that the funds were properly distributed,” the complaint said. “However, the very same false allegations arose again several months later, again with no finding of wrongdoing.”

Viñas accuses the board of doing nothing when a White congregation member with a Dominican spouse and biracial kids complained of racist treatment in 2010.

“Specifically, board members raised her biracial background, claimed she ‘didn’t look Jewish’ and said the family was ‘creating the wrong impression at the congregation,’” the complaint said.

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May Gentiles Play Music For Jews On Shabbat?

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

This no longer happens in Orthodox life (it has generally been forbidden since the destruction of the temple in 70).

In his first lecture for Torah in Motion on the Ben Ish Chai (Baghdadi rabbi in the 19th Century, handled business for the Sassoon family), Marc B. Shapiro says:

“There was a custom in Baghdad on the Shabbos after someone’s wedding, he was accompanied to the synagogue singing and dancing accompanied by non-Jews playing musical instruments.”

“The Shulchan Aruch is explicit that you can have non-Jews play music at wedding celebrations on Shabbos. If any of us tried that, we’d be [called] Reformers.”

“Let me give an example from my town with my family four weeks ago. This is an uncontested halacha. There aren’t many halachot that aren’t contested. This is in the Shulchan Aruch. All the commentaries agree. A boy under bar mitzvah can get maftir (except for parasha Zachor and Paroah) — he can get the aliyah, read the Torah and read the haftorah.”

“My son, who is 11 years old, and wanted to learn his parasha early, and we asked the rabbi and he said ok, but we don’t want to do it in the main shul, people won’t understand, do it in the side minyan… For Sephardim, a five year old can lein (recite) the Torah.)”

“It was the practice in Europe that on bar mitzvah, the boy would get an aliyah. He wouldn’t lein… Then people got the idea that he should do more… This led the average person to think that you need to be bar mitzvah to do the haftorah, which is not true.”

“In America, you have a lot of people who dress haredi who are really religious Zionists.”

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We Need To Start Befriending Neo-Nazis

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

Bethany Mandel (who has blocked me on Twitter because I criticized her) writes:

The subject of our third remarkable story is Derek Black, the scion of famous white supremacists. His father, Don Black, was the brains behind Stormfront, the Internet’s first and biggest white nationalist site with 300,000 users. His mother, Chloe, had been married to David Duke, who was Derek’s godfather. “They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him ‘the heir’,” the Washington Post reports ,
Black was outed on his college campus as an anti-Semite. But one of his classmates, Matthew Stevenson, the only Orthodox Jew on campus, decided to invite Black to a Shabbat meal.
“It was the only social invitation Derek had received since returning to campus, so he agreed to go,” writes the Washington Post. Stevenson told the other guests, “Let’s try to treat him like anyone else.”
Pretty soon, Black became a regular at these Shabbat meals. And eventually, Black, like Phelps-Roper and the two hundred men (and women) Davis befriended, renounced the ideas that had once filled him with such hatred.
I am not made of the same fiber of Davis, Abitbol or Stevenson. I spent the entire Republican primary being attacked by white nationalists and landed myself on a top ten list compiled by the ADL of Jewish journalists targeted by them. Unlike these three remarkable human beings, I did not engage with any of these individuals as human beings once. But maybe I should have, and maybe I should in the future. Because hating people for being hateful obviously isn’t getting us anywhere.
Someone once tweeted, “There is not a single good person who voted for Trump. Not one.” To which Federalist writer Tom Nichols responded, “This is a recipe for a second Trump term.”
…It’s time to admit that even in the wake of Charlottesville – especially in the wake of Charlottesville – the only way we’re going to get our country back is to change minds. This might mean we need to start befriending nazis.

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When Is A Pardon Shameful?

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

US Jewish groups say Arpaio pardon “shameful” and “inexcusable”; but they fought tooth & nail for Marc Rich's pardon https://t.co/GaSR9WX5RR
— Kevin MacDonald (@TOOEdit) August 27, 2017

Stephen Steinlight: Do you have any idea what percentage of Americans who are Jews the Jewish Establishment speaks for? As in most other subjects you address — but especially when you discuss the Jews on whom you obsess — you show bloody ignorance. The leadership cadres are tiny and most Jews are unaffiliated to secular Jewish orgs or to religious institutions. As usual, you are shooting at the wrong target.

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Parasha Ki Teitzei

Posted on August 27, 2017 by Luke Ford

This week’s Torah portion consists of Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19. Listen here and here.

* You can take a woman captive and make her your wife, but first you have to let her shave her head and mourn her family for 30 days. This seems like a realistic way of dealing with human nature. According to Talmudic law, a Jew after a battle may rape a woman captive once, but after that, if he still wants to marry her, he has to follow the above.

* Deut. 22:5: A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.”

* 13 If a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes her 14 and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” 15 then the young woman’s father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin. 16 Her father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. 17 Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18 and the elders shall take the man and punish him. 19 They shall fine him a hundred shekels[b] of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.

20 If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, 21 she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.

22 If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.

23 If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, 24 you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.

25 But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. 26 Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor, 27 for the man found the young woman out in the country, and though the betrothed woman screamed, there was no one to rescue her.

28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels[c] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.

* Exclusion From the Assembly
23 [a]No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.

2 No one born of a forbidden marriage[b] nor any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation.

3 No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. 4 For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim[c] to pronounce a curse on you. 5 However, the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam but turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loves you. 6 Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them as long as you live.

7 Do not despise an Edomite, for the Edomites are related to you. Do not despise an Egyptian, because you resided as foreigners in their country. 8 The third generation of children born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord.

[In the Jewish tradition, Edom equals the West, it equals whites.]

Uncleanness in the Camp
9 When you are encamped against your enemies, keep away from everything impure. 10 If one of your men is unclean because of a nocturnal emission, he is to go outside the camp and stay there. 11 But as evening approaches he is to wash himself, and at sunset he may return to the camp.

12 Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. 13 As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. 14 For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.

* Dealing with excrement is related to God walking among you. Judaism is realistic. It is focused on the nitty gritty realities of life.

* Deut. 23:15: ” If a slave has taken refuge with you, do not hand them over to their master.”

If a slave can run away and can’t be forcefully returned, you can’t really have slavery.

* 17 No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute. 18 You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute[d] into the house of the Lord your God to pay any vow, because the Lord your God detests them both.

19 Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. 20 You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the Lord your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.

* 24 If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, 2 and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, 3 and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, 4 then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.

5 If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.

* 17 Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. 18 When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. 19 When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!

Every people is going to have enemies. You can think of your enemy as evil, or you can think of your enemy as an adversary with whom you have conflicting interests. The Bible vs the Carl Schmitt approach.

* What is a Nazi? A neo-Nazi? A National Socialist? We’ll use the relevant Wikipedia entries as our shared text.

* A goy messaged me: “Jewish New Testament scholar rethinks homosexuality. Hello fellow whites, let’s reform your religion together. I don’t like it. The reasoning in that last paragraph is such a girlish attempt at Socratic thinking. Fake dialectic. I’m sure I’d like her as a person, but Jewish women should stay out of Christian theological concerns… I mean, who is the best-known female gentile Talmud scholar?”

Luke: “Perhaps Christine Hayes at Yale, you hater. #LoveWins”

Hayes published 2003’s award-winning Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud.

In the 19th Century, we got the first important gentile scholars of Talmud.

* Amy-Jill Levine writes:

Not Good to be Alone: Rethinking the Bible and Homosexuality
Conservative readers regard Scripture as having authority over their lives, and they attempt to be faithful to texts they see as divinely revealed. They are not reading erroneously when it comes to same-sex relations: the Bible does not condone such relationships.
Further, many of these same conservative readers would also forbid women’s ordination, but they are by no means bigoted against mothers, wives, or daughters. Indeed, they may struggle to follow the divine word over their personal preference regarding women’s ecclesial roles.
Similarly, they may believe that individuals who are not baptized are bound for hell, but that view does not necessarily make them haters of individual Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or Muslims. Rather, they are deeply concerned for their neighbours’ souls. They do not hate gay people, any more than they hate women, or non-Christians. Liberals should at least recognize these individuals as acting according to their convictions in granting certain Scriptures precedence over secular culture.

* Amy-Jill Levine writes:

Holy Week and the Hatred of the Jews: How to Avoid Anti-Judaism this Easter
Jesus of Nazareth, charged by the Roman authorities with the sedition, dies on a Roman cross. But Jews – the collective, all Jews – become known as “Christ-killers.”
Still haunting, the legacy of that charge becomes acute during Holy Week, when pastors and priests who speak about the death of Jesus have to talk about “the Jews.”
Every year, the same difficulty surfaces: how can a gospel of love be proclaimed, if that same gospel is heard to promote hatred of Jesus’s own people?
The charge against “the Jews” permeates the pages of the New Testament.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate literally washes his hands while “all the people” – all the Jewish people – clamour for Jesus’s death: “Let him be crucified … His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:23, 27).
John’s Gospel identifies the Jews as “from your father the devil” (John 8:44) and blames them for backing Pilate into a corner and forcing him to kill an innocent man.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter charges “the entire house of Israel” (Acts 2:36) with crucifying Jesus and so having “killed the Author of life” (Acts 3:14-15). Paul then bluntly refers to “the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:14-15).
Perhaps this vilification was inevitable. Jesus’s followers could not understand how the vast majority of Jews could not accept their belief in him as the Messiah. The majority of Jews, in turn, saw no sign of the Messianic age having dawned: no general resurrection of the dead; no ingathering of the exiles to Zion; no end to death, war, disease, or poverty. What was self-evident to one group was incomprehensible to the other. Incomprehension turned to mistrust, and mistrust, on both sides, turned to vilification…
We come finally to our sixth option: admit to the problem and deal with it. There are many ways congregations can address the difficult texts. Put a note in service bulletins to explain the harm the texts have caused. Read the problematic texts silently, or in a whisper. Have Jews today give testimony about how they have been hurt by the texts.
Those who proclaim the problematic verses from the pulpit might imagine a Jewish child sitting in the front pew and take heed: don’t say anything that would hurt this child, and don’t say anything that would cause a member of the congregation to hurt this child. Better still: educate the next generation, so that when they hear the problematic words proclaimed, they have multiple contexts – theological, historical, ethical – by which to understand them.
Christians, hearing the Gospels during Holy Week, should no more hear a message of hatred of Jews than Jews, reading the Book of Esther on Purim, should hate Persians, or celebrating the seder and reliving the time when “we were slaves in Egypt,” should hate Egyptians.
We choose how to read. After two thousand years of enmity, Jews and Christians today can recover and even celebrate our common past, locate Jesus and his earliest followers within rather than over and against Judaism, and live into the time when, as both synagogue and church proclaim, we can love G-d and our neighbour.

* When a goy gets his FICO score, does he feel that the Jews are ranking him?

* I like much of Southern California’s non-native vegetation. When I see a beautiful flower or tree, I rarely ask, is this native? I am not bothered if the vegetation is not native. Yet, there are non-native forms of vegetation that are pernicious. The same principles apply to people. Just as I want a country to select non-native vegetation carefully, I want them to select their immigrants carefully.

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