Diaspora

Jews have won 23 percent of all Nobel prizes, 51 percent of the Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction and 54 percent of the world chess championships. They represent 38 percent of our most philanthropic donors, 21 percent of Ivy League enrollment and 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees.

I just read Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's piece on Huffington Post about Helen Thomas the Jew Hater, and I felt compelled to write something in response.

I just read Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's piece on Huffington Post about Helen Thomas the Jew Hater, and I felt compelled to write something in response.

There are two profound psychological blocks that do not allow Israel's leadership to get off its disastrous course, once again proven by the Flotilla Disaster: one is sheer fear, the other is self-righteousness.

Israel has real enemies like Iran and Hezbollah. Human psychology is such that fear often leads to freezing and hanging on to the same course of action, even if it proves disastrous time and again. As a result Israel doesn't listen to criticism - either from inside or from outside.

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen.

We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.

Zionism didn't begin as a unitary ideology. There was Herzl's liberal Zionism; Ahad Ha'am's and Yehuda Magnes' cultural Zionism. Socialist Zionism first carried the day and dominated Israeli politics for the first three decades. In the last decades Revisionist Zionism took over, and fused with the Messianic Zionism that gave religious significance to Land and none to human rights. But discussion among Zionist ideals was possible until a few decades ago.

This story in the Forward today reminds me of something my older son wrote to us in a letter from Jewish summer camp when he was 14.

He told us the kids were terrific but that some of them were so paranoid about Israel that he thought they were "crazy." After all, these were all pretty well-off Jewish kids at a beautiful spot in Massachusetts and yet they acted like they were under assault by the world . Some of them were even Republicans (because of Israel).

By Michele Chabin
Religion News Service

JERUSALEM (RNS) Following recent face-to-face meetings with Israeli officials in New York, leaders of North America's non-Orthodox Jewish movements said a bill aimed at easing Israeli conversion laws would marginalize non-Orthodox Jews who struggle for equality.

Representatives of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements said the bill will strengthen the ultra-Orthodox establishment's authority over Jewish matters at the expense of non-Orthodox Jews.

The failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000 and the onset of the second Intifada has in stages swung the pendulum of Israeli politics to the right to the current government that includes Avigdor Lieberman, one of the most anti-democratic ministers Israel has ever had, who is moving Israel ever closer to the brink of total international isolation and the Shas Party whose main impact is to push construction in East Jerusalem and the settlements.