RUTHFULLY YOURS

Seventy leaders, thinkers, and clergy respond: What will be the condition of the Jewish community fifty years from now?

1. Optimism

The exercise of imagining the Jewish future is, of course, more precisely an effort to understand the Jewish present by thinking through what the consequences of our actions and beliefs might be. There is no way to envision how we Jews can and will react to real-world events, calamities, and scientific advances. After all, as Dennis Prager writes, in 2065 “there may well be a Chabad House on the moon.” Prager says this not in a tone of triumphalism, by the way; he is the gloomiest of Commentary’s 69 symposiasts. And certainly the Jewish past gives us no reason to believe the Jewish future will be a sunny one.

And yet optimism, of a kind, informs most of the contributions to “The Jewish Future.” There will, practically everyone agrees, be a Jewish future. And that is a triumph. It might not seem like much of one, since the Jewish people have survived for more than three millennia—against which the next 50 years can be seen as nothing more than a blip in time. But considering the many reasons we have been given in the past few years to doubt the Jewish future, the general spirit of optimism expressed in these musings should not be taken lightly.

The 60,000 words that compose “The Jewish Future” were written under twin shadows, one hovering over each of the world’s most important communities of Jews—ours in the United States, and the one in Israel.

In 2013, the Pew survey of American Jewry painted nothing less than a portrait of a people drifting toward nonexistence. The findings documented an American Jewish community largely ignorant about the fundaments of their faith and their history, largely indifferent to their ignorance, and possibly on the verge of seeing its middle ground—the grand compromise between modernity and tradition known as the Conservative movement—vanish almost entirely. Intermarriage and out-marriage have become the norm, not the exception, and the record of the past century suggests that descendents of these couplings will not be Jews by their own reckoning in relatively short order.

Acting star receives award at Israel Film Festival, reveals impact of her work on Israeli kibbutz after Six Day War.

Academy Award, Tony Award and Emmy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren was honored at the 29th Israel Film Festival on Wednesday at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, where she revealed how her first visit to the Jewish state shaped her career.

Mirren was honored with the Career Achievement Award at the festival, and while there she said her time working at an Israeli kibbutz shortly after the 1967 Six Day War “made me the actress I am.” Video of her speech can be seen by clicking the image below.

Hearkening back to her stay in Israel, the British actress said, “I was thinking about the building blocks that lead you to becoming the person you will become. I was thinking that my visit to Israel in those days was a part, not a direct connection, but it’s absolutely a part of the building blocks that have made me the actress I am and doing the kind of work that I do.”

The Middle East is a notoriously volatile region, but you can always count on two things. One: There will be violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Two: As soon as tempers begin to flare up again, sundry Jewish commentators will set about putting pen to paper for strident anti-Israel op-eds in the world’s media.

These columns invariably follow the same dreary template, as if penned by freshmen in a Creative Writing 101 course:

A) Authors establish their Jewish credentials to lend themselves moral authority.

B) They move on to decry Israel’s settlements and express shock at Israelis’ collective inhumanity towards Palestinians, while liberally dropping the obligatory emotive clichés of anti-Israel propaganda: “occupation,” “oppression,” “apartheid,” “racism,” “disproportionate response.”

C) They explain how the conduct of the Jewish state has betrayed fundamental Zionist ideals, violated timeless “Jewish values,” and/or caused Israelis to lose their moral compass.

D) Finally, they insist that Israelis need to be saved from themselves by being boycotted, isolated and forced into further unilateral concessions.

The order of these elements might vary, but their content never does.

The European Union is being run by men and women who have displayed marked symptoms of dementia, a condition that is quite in sync with Islam’s own brand.

Again, this column is also about the epistemological epilepsy of our political elite. And the political elite’s unreal metaphysics.

As noted in an illustration tag in Part One, the sustainability of a European Islamic State, which is all the Continent’s current immigration policies can lead to and end with, will depend in large part on the ignorance of its itinerate and hapless citizens – Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Once it reaches that stage, and Shariah law becomes the legal byword, non-Muslims will be obliged to assimilate into a largely Islamic culture.

Rank-and-file Muslims will be naturally ignorant and will have no problem adjusting to the new society of diversity. Non-Muslims, however, will have great difficulty keeping their mouths and minds shut as they are relegated to second-class citizen status.

It is notable that the same week that Israel marked the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of prime minister and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas went before the UN Human Rights Commission and asked the UN to establish “a special regime of international protection” for the Palestinians against Israel.

“It is no longer useful to waste time in negotiations just for the sake of negotiations. What is required is the ending of the occupation in accordance with international legitimacy,” said the man who has never held good faith negotiations with Israel in his life and has refused to even pretend to hold them for the past seven years.

Geert Wilders has, once again, been accused, of violating hate laws in The Netherlands over a remark he made during a March 19, 2014 Freedom Party (PVV) campaign rally for the European Parliament elections that occurred in May of last year: “fewer and fewer Moroccans” . Complaints were filed by alleged aggrieved Dutch Moroccans on the grounds that his remarks were racist and violated hate laws in The Netherlands. These remarks in the US would be protected under our First Amendment to the Constitution. No such protections current exist under the laws in The Netherlands, let alone the EU. We noted this in a December 2014 Iconoclast post about a statement Wilders made before his interrogation by Dutch police in The Hague:

In 30 years, these are the people who will be running (or ruining) the United States of America…..These are the people currently in schools and in early work careers who are the subjects of training about all the microaggressions and offensive things that leap out at you. They go to safe spaces and watch videos of puppies when they get scared.These millennials may drag down the whole country, but we’re all to blame.

A new study from the world’s largest nonprofit educational testing organization says that American millennials are super stupid. In results that the Educational Testing Service managed to call “cause for concern” rather than “disastrous to the entire concept of American progress,” American millennials managed to score at or near the bottom in literacy, numeracy and computeracy ( Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments, or PS-TRE) when compared to 21 other countries. The overall results for the study called the low scores of American millennials “disappointing.”

The aftermath of a terrorist attack that took place in Ra’anana. Photo: Magen David Adom.
The current state of affairs in Israel is full of lessons and truths. The sooner we learn them, the ‎sooner we can stop the attacks.‎
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1. We can stop feeling guilty‎.
A few good things have come out of the recent wave of terror in the streets of ‎Israel. The first is that the facade that jihadis are somehow struggling for self-determination, ‎social justice, or any other noble idea has been unmasked. It is clear to us now that, unlike what ‎we’ve been urged to believe for the last 30 years, jihadis don’t want peace. They want to ‎annihilate Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel. This is great news. Because once the ‎pretense is dropped, we stop falling for it and begin unloading the guilty feeling that we are at ‎fault for everything. We drop the idea, for example, that building in Jerusalem or Judea is causing this war. Those few ‎voices who still try to blame the victims sound delusional and their ideas are being debunked. At ‎the same time, there is a realization that within Israel is a hostile minority that simply ‎does not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Clarity is forming, and it will lead to victory.

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2. The Jewish fighting spirit is back‎.
The second good thing is that the Jewish fighting spirit is back on the streets. Men and women, ‎old and young, are responding to terror with defiance. Pepper spray, rolling pins, umbrellas, ‎selfie sticks, kicks, fists, running, and especially shooting — Israelis are shooting bad guys (and ‎gals). Yes, there have been some horrific videos of Jews being gouged as though we’re back in ‎a medieval Polish countryside. But even in those videos, soon enough, a gun-toting Jew ‎vanquishes the jihadi zombie. We don’t cower and shriek as they wish we would, and it ‎demoralizes them. Our people’s healthy fighting instincts have (amazingly) not been ‎corrupted by the media, or by the ideology of weakness. Remember: Fighting back is good, so ‎stay tactical out there, folks!‎