Tom Teicholz rebukes Dennis Prager’s appeal to conservatism and explains why Jews will always be self-appointed enemies to the Alt-Right, to conservatives, and to and the interests of America and the European nations in the Jewish Journal:
Jews will always believe Black Lives matter because Jews do not think of themselves as “White People.” You have but to walk down a street in Tel Aviv to see the multiplicity of Jewish skin colors. You have but to live as a Jew in any time in history, in any country including the United States, to recognize we are not the White People – we were not the White People allowed into certain clubs, schools, neighborhoods for most of American history. We are not the people rallying for “white people’s rights.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written more eloquently that I ever will, “Our notion of what constitutes “white” and what constitutes “black” is a product of social context.”
Dennis Prager makes much of how the Left has often betrayed Jews. He is not wrong about that. But he is wrong in thinking that means Jews should stop supporting the causes of the Left. Consider the alternative: How have Jews fared under the right? Far worse. In Egypt, or under the Greeks and Romans, in Spain and Portugal under the Inquisition, in Europe during the Reformation, in France at the time of Dreyfus, or in Hitler’s Germany or his Reichlands. Consider the fate of Jewish lives under right wing governments in Hungary or Poland – are they better off than they were under Leftist regimes? One can even ask, as members of the Israeli Knesset have, whether more Israelis have died as a result of the policies of the current right-wing Likud government than in those years when Labor was in power (they have).
Leonard Bernstein was ridiculed for hosting a party for the Black Panthers. But Bernstein’s compassion and sense of Justice led him to lead the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1947 and as it became the Israel Philharmonic in Beersheba in November 1948 and almost every year of his life. His heart was large, his passion great and he was not wrong to support the cause of Black Pride and African American self-empowerment, even if its leaders had not so great a heart as his.
Jews will always agitate for and support causes of the Left, because we are commanded to be a beacon unto others and to see social activism and seeking Justice, Tikkun Olam and Tzedaka, as part of the Jewish DNA.
The next time someone claims that the Right, whether Alt-Right or some other variety, is antisemitic and Holocaust, it should prove useful to observe that, in their own words:
- “All the non-Jews that you see all around the world, the billions, they exist just for the Jew’s benefit.”
- “Jews will always agitate for and support causes of the Left.”
Now, which of those statements do you not oppose? Are you down with both of them?
Before anyone produces the expected NAJALT argument, I should first be very interested to learn why you are intent on playing defense attorney HERE on behalf of those with whom you supposedly disagree rather than actively opposing those making such statements THERE.
And furthermore, as I pointed out to one Jewish gentleman on Twitter, one can expect the Alt-Right to stop quoting living Jews concerning their beliefs and objectives at about the same time that the opponents of the Alt-Right stop calling us Nazis, racists, and anti-semites. We are not conservatives. We do not hesitate to use the other side’s tactics. See: Point 12.
Some say that makes us SJWs. Does it make us Jews as well?
As he responded, “I can’t fault the alt-right for lumping all Jews in with our worst crazies when so many Jews do the same to Whites.”