New York, October 3 – Seasonal custom calls for Jews to conduct a reckoning of their behavior, and one organization that assumes the mantle of progressive Jewish values has demonstrated it excels in the important but overlooked arena of publicizing all the faults it sees in the Jews and Jewish institutions that do not share its anti-Israeli politics.The NGO, which specializes in calling attention to the perceived moral failings of Israel, pro-Israel organizations, and Zionist Jews, and which presumes to tell American Jews how they must feel and act about Israel’s policies, has seized the Jewish penitential season with relish, identifying exactly where and with what level of intention other Jews have strayed from its enlightened, forward-looking attitude that can be the only correct set of positions on serious questions of moral judgment, such as whether Jews should ever be anything other than passive victims. Its messages in advance of the Day of Atonement this coming Wednesday contained no fewer than ten specific sins it demanded that other Jews redress, among them support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, condoning Israel’s occupation of Palestine, refusing to acknowledge the evil that is Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The epithet “Apartheid” also featured prominently in several such messages.
In a series of tweets, the organization called on Jews to introduce the subject of the Occupation at festive family meals related to the High Holidays, with some indication that the deeply Jewish authors of the messages remain ignorant that Yom Kippur does not feature any such meals, given its status as a Biblically-mandated day of fasting. The same lack of knowledge, observers note, appears to account for the organization’s assumption that anyone is unaware of Israel’s control over territories captured from Jordan in 1967 and the Jewish state’s measures to protect its citizens from attacks by Arabs residing in said territories.
The gusto with which the organization has embarked on this seasonal project has drawn notice from prominent figures and groups in the Jewish community. “Given the non-Jewish funding sources that underwrite their activities, and the centrality of certain Christians in the organization’s activities, we should not be surprised their message is… unorthodox,” remarked Nodrek Sherlock of the New York Board of Rabbis. “Unorthodox? In fact I’d hesitate to associate even militant Reconstructionist with that level of proudly not-Jewish sensibilities. I will grant, however, that bickering and fault-finding among organizations remains a venerable tradition in the Jewish community.”
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