Reviewing: “Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership,” Compiled and edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, published by Wicked Son, an imprint of Post Hill Press, ISBN: 978-1-63758-879-6, 2023.
How did we get here, to a point where Jews wearing kippot are attacked on the streets of New York City, and the offenders are out on bail by the evening, if they’re even apprehended at all? Or worse, why are American Jews gunned down simply for being in a synagogue or a kosher supermarket in Pittsburgh, Poway and Jersey City? According to two co-authors, the answer is that American Jews started worshiping other gods.
Who are these gods? The social justice, equity and inclusion movements, belief for and against various “-isms,” like anti-racism, and the wholehearted belief in the Palestinian victim narrative and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), which runs gleefully unchecked on American college campuses.
Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, two community organizers and the co-founders of the Boston-based Jewish Leadership Project, believe that the major organizations of the secular American Jewish community have changed their priorities to align with Judaism’s most ardent enemies in the name of tikkun olam (healing the world). Unfortunately, by doing that and by adopting various causes related to social justice, the view of the Jew as a servant of God and as a light unto the nations is being snuffed out.
In their book, “Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership,” Jacobs and Goldwasser compile 22 essays that they believe show how various organizations tasked with protecting the Jewish community have actually accomplished quite the opposite. The essays’ authors, many of them well known right-wing commentators, focus their arguments almost entirely on the threat to Jewish continuity from the left wing.
Jacobs and Goldwasser lead by delivering a stinging indictment of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the North American Jewish Federations and the Networks of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs). Later, they also condemn the Reform Jewish movement for siding with social justice movements against Israel and American Jewry. The essay collection “is intended to publicly critique a failing Jewish establishment with the full understanding that many Jews view such rebukes as divisive and prefer to show unity,” they write.
“Ironically, for too many American Jews, the democratically elected leaders of the Jewish state can be pilloried time and again, but the undemocratically, donor-selected leadership here may not be questioned as this would ‘break Jewish unity.’”
Through articles by politically conservative heavy hitters like Alan Dershowitz, Morton A. Klein, Jonathan Tobin, Caroline Glick and others, the book paints a bleak picture of a Jewish world literally destroying itself, by making political choices over religious ones, justifying social justice fads and moving away from Jewish law in the name of religion.
An example: No longer are Jews allowed to refer to themselves as the “chosen” people in the Reform movement, most especially to avoid offending those who are “not chosen,” who then might not be as willing to serve on the temple’s board, according to Rabbi Cary Kozberg, ordained in the Reform movement. His essay, easily the heart and soul of the book, is an outcry to those in communal leadership positions who may at some point have learned the lessons of Jewish history. “When Jews lived in the Greco-Roman diaspora around the Mediterranean Sea, there were different Judaisms practiced, many significantly influenced by the cultural Hellenism of the time. Those Judaisms ultimately disappeared on their own or became so inundated by members and influences of the outside culture so as to break with the Jewish community and its traditions, evolving into faith systems that sought to eclipse the mother faith,” writes Kozberg.
In an essay by Morton A. Klein, the longtime president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), it is posited that the reasons so many Jewish leaders fail to delegitimize those who seek to destroy Israel include “fear, ignorance of history and current facts and the psychological difficulty of facing the reality of intractable Islamist hatred and radical left-wing hatred of Jews.”
Klein explains that many of these leaders believe that Islamist hatred will end if Israelis just make a few more concessions. “But, in fact, more concessions lead to more terror. Those Jewish leaders’ failures to expose the truth end up doing grievous harm to the Jewish state and the entire Jewish people.”
Another theme of the book is that Jewish communal institutions do a great disservice by not protecting Jews but instead by aligning and building bridges with other minorities, and aligning themselves with anti-Jewish rhetoric in the form of antiracist policies. An essay by Rebecca G. Schgallis, a community organizer, provides a case study of the failure of a local Jewish Community Relations Council in Fairfax, Virginia, to protect Jewish parents and their children as they attempted to censure a Muslim school board member for hate speech. The board member used her school-linked social media account to “call Israel an apartheid, colonialist state and accused Israel of killing innocents.” The board member then delivered the commencement address at a local high school, telling the graduating class to “remember their Jihad.”
“While the JCRC met with us several times, we quickly learned that it was more interested in forging political partnerships with elected officials than forcefully addressing numerous incidents of antisemitism in the local school district,” writes Schgallis. She then spends quite a long time explaining how the school district introduced a “Woke Kindergarten” resource, which, on its website, states, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”
Later, Schgallis writes that the same JCRC sponsored “Beyond the Headlines: How History & Race Are Taught in Our Schools,” the first of two webinars about why the Jewish community should support Critical Race Theory (CRT), even though the theory incongruously casts Jews as “‘white adjacents,’ with disproportionate and ill-gotten power, and it views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of race, where ‘white’ Israel becomes an apartheid state, and therefore, like all systems of oppression, must be destroyed.”
Historian Richard A. Landes also shares how the overcorrection against Islamophobia by Jews has prevented Jewish organizations from objecting or even commenting at all when Muslims dive into Islamic radicalism and its movements. “Given the choice between public honor (virtuous progressives) and private guilt (abandoning their constituency) or public shame (stigmatized as Islamophobia) and private integrity (doing their job), Jewish leaders chose the former.”
The example Landes refers to is a massive mosque that was being built in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, funded by the Wahhabi movement, which has been linked to antisemitic and antidemocratic tendencies, and also gained the warm approval of the local Jewish community. In fact, when Charles Jacobs (the same co-author of this book) wrote against the plan in the Boston Jewish Advocate, a response signed by 83 rabbis and rabbinical students stated that they “were ‘shocked and appalled,’ and excoriated Jacobs for his ‘vicious personal attack’ and ‘destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community.’”
This mosque was built and this debate took place just three years before “two young Muslims, products of the jihadi ideology propounded at that mosque and its affiliate in Cambridge, carried out the bombing of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
“Had these rabbis heeded rather than censured these warnings—had they been as self-critical as they were ready to criticize their own people—many people, Jewish and gentile, might have been spared much suffering,” writes Landes.
While this book does not provide too many practical suggestions to reclaim the prominence and respect that the Jewish community enjoyed in earlier American generations, it does seem to identify the very root of the problem, as explained by Naya Lekht, PhD, an expert in antisemitism and Soviet influences on contemporary anti-Zionism.
That problem is communal discomfort with Jewish particularism, and the widespread embrace of Jewish universalism.“Through universalism, we have rewritten three major concepts in Judaism: tzedek tzedek tirdof, tikkun olam, and derech eretz,” she writes.
Lekht explains that most schools use the “tzedek tzedek tirdof (justice, justice, you shall pursue)” phrase from Deuteronomy 16:20, but leave out the second part of the text, which is “that you may thrive and occupy the land that Adonai your God is giving you.”
She writes: “It is an imperative from God that the Jewish people occupy and settle in Eretz Yisroel, by appointing magistrates and officials who will ‘not judge unfairly.’”
Second, while tikkun olam needs almost no introduction, “somewhere along the way Jewish educators came to believe that the goal for the Jewish people was the help to repair the world through solving world hunger, campaigns against occupations real or imagined, ending gender wage gaps and fighting climate change. However, in its original formulation tikkun olam is achieved through ethical and ritual mitzvot, such as keeping the laws of kashrut and observing the Sabbath. Similar to those who invoke tzedek tzedek tirdof piecemeal, tikkun olam, which comes from the Aleinu, appears in a passage that extends hope in ‘You, Adonai our God, to completely cut off false gods; to repair the world, our holy empire.’”
Finally, the concept of derech eretz, which literally translates to “the way of the land,” has been applied in secular Judaism as a means toward embracing kindness and common decency. Lekht writes that in the midrash from Exodus Rabbah (Shemot Rabbah 35:2), an example of derech eretz is “‘refraining from using wood from a fruit-bearing tree to build a house.’”
In this case, derech eretz is not a commentary on kindness but rather a framework to help people make choices to protect opportunities to do mitzvot, such as saying a bracha over eating fruit. “But for a cohort of Jewish senior educators at a conference, practicing derech eretz was finding a way to incorporate LGBTQ awareness into the Jewish middle school curriculum,” she writes.
This is just a sampling of the wide range of scholarship present in the pages—and while the book itself and its essays are worth reading—the lessons and bullet points for action are likely not nearly enough to heal our world and keep Judaism thriving in America. Rather, the essays read as guidelines for “what not to do” if one is advocating for Judaism’s existence. It seems an almost-impossible task, but in order to survive this particular societal moment, the combined American Jewish establishment community must remember its Jewish particularism and remember its unique role in the world in relation to God, and to again acknowledge its role as a light unto the nations. And to stop apologizing for it.
By Elizabeth Kratz
