Tony Judt, the outspoken, sometimes outstanding professor at NYU and controversial advocate of a one state solution for the Israeli /Palestinian conflict (see his article Israel:The Alternative), is again in the news. You may recall the hoopla several months ago when an invitation for Judt to speak had been revoked--perhaps, as Judt maintained, due to the strong arm tactics of Abe Foxman of the ADL (though this New York Times magazine piece suggests otherwise here). Judt stated that his Constitutional freedom of speech had been transgressed. 100 leading thinkers and writers signed a petition supporting Judt, though both Christopher Hitchens (read here) and Leon Wieseltier (read here) shared some choice words about Judt's claims.
Judt railed against the alleged silencing of liberals and dissenting voices within the Jewish community. And now, the parameters of conversation within the Jewish universe are again being discussed. A recent article, "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism", published by the American Jewish Committee posits that some Jews are feeding the current anti-semitism. Immediately, the controversy exploded. The New York Times' Patricia Cohen summed up the furor in an article on the matter, quoting Judt among others.
This is a conversation that is fraught and is one that many are already engaged in [given the number of congregants who have forwarded articles on this recent debate to me]. I have little taste for Tony Judt's seeming embarrassment and vitriol. I place Jewish nationhood as one of the pivots of my Judaism, so I am obviously not in Judt's company. Those Jews who feel or think otherwise are in a different place from myself--but in fairness, they are not a historical aberration in the Reform Movement.
It is important to recognize that the era of any easy assumption of consensus between Jews is over and--even more disturbing--that the fissures appearing between intellectual academia Jews and synagogue Jews are only the beginning.
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