Sadly, we know who some of the signatories of that petition are, and they are highly influential and respected Jewish leaders, both religious and secular. It's unconscionable that they are using their influence to peddle such dishonest and dehumanizing crap. Shame on them.
I spend a good deal of time thinking about this. I’m certain a day will come soon when the catastrophe of self-recognition will strike the Zionist portion of am Yisrael with
Yet, just as in his day, Schechter’s words & ideals were often far removed from the world’s realities. He was speaking at a time when many good people in the western world were decrying the injustice and horrors of slavery worldwide.
Many of the loudest voices came from within Europe - where, although slavery had been abolished across the continent, the “barbaric” & “cruel” Arab slave trade around Zanzibar, Eastern Africa, & the Arabian Gulf had become the primary target of many humanitarian societies and “civilization & progress” associations determined to get rid of the scourge of humans owning other humans.
This looked and felt very good to the Christian world - to promote an end to such human cruelty & bondage. And yet, in Africa, Asia, & the Americas, slavery - in the form of forced labor - and concentration camps were springing up and thousands were dying in their captivity:
In the Belgian Congo, 10 million people had died owing to the brutal treatment of Congolese civilians by Belgian & other nationalities working for the Congo Free State of King Leopold II. The whole country had become a slave labor camp and many whites were still involved in an unofficial slave trade. When Leopold II died he bequeathed his private colony to the Belgian nation.
In what is today called Namibia, German South West Africa under the rule (ultimately) of Kaiser Wilhelm II, not only concentration camps, but a death camp & the world’s first extermination order had only recently marked the genocide of the Herero & Nama peoples - something openly called for by many.
In South Africa the British had placed Boer civilians in a concentration camp (called that) in order to separate the people from the rebels, cutting off the supply lines to the latter in an attempt to break their morale; meanwhile, the notorious pass system was underway for blacks living at the mercy of their heavily armed white masters.
In Australia the Aboriginals had been experiencing massacres, economic slavery (forced labor) and severe discrimination for over 200 years and continued to do so into the 1930s and beyond. Many were put in concentration camps. The indigenous people of Tasmania had been wiped off the face of the earth much like the Taine people in the Caribbean.
In North America, concentration camps known as reservations had swallowed up the remaining indigenous peoples of the land. A population that had reached approximately 100,000,000 in 1500 (the US & Canada) had declined to approximately 250,000 by 1900. War, hardship, superior military capabilities on the part of the white settlers, disease, & hunger carried off most of those not murdered in a 400 year long genocide.
In other words, while the nice white Christian (& Jewish) citizens of Europe & North America were singing & speaking about progress, civilization, the ills of slavery & such, their nations were involved in sadistic brutality against indigenous peoples through colonialism, settler colonialism, & economic warfare across the globe.
If we look closely at what our illustrious countries are still up to, we will find equally horrific circumstances strangling & killing those who would prefer not to be the victims of our liberal world order.
But it’s much worse than that because while many of us rightly have decried the horrors of what’s happening in Gaza, saying such things (again, rightly) as “you can’t say we didn’t know,” the same was true in the past - especially by the 19th century when newspapers and pamphlets circulated widely with stories of what was really going on there for any literate person to read.
Additionally, thousands of men were returning from their colony conquests, their trading posts, their economic hubs and shipping ports fully aware of, and directly complicit in, the abominations being carried out in their states’ names.
The point isn’t that we’re hypocrites (we are) but that we’ve always known -up to a point- what was really taking place in the colonized regions - just as returning German soldiers from the eastern front saw and knew much about what was actually taking place in the east.
The point is, we’ve always known - or been able to find out. The question is why more don’t stand up and say out loud that what is going on is wrong.
Hope you’re well. Lincoln always hated slavery, but he was willing to preserve it if it saved the union. He changed that position in the middle of the war as he realized that the war was fundamentally about slavery.
Schechter’s obsession with unity remains problematic. Who gets to decide on what basis a group is unified. What values and positions bind them? Unity in other words, almost always reflects some element of coercion of some groups at the hands of others. In his case, he viewed Jewish reformers as sectarians and as dangerous to what he called Catholic Israel, that is the tradition of the living people. Very un American in its espousal of a tradition limiting individual freedom.
Yes re Lincoln. As I did say he began as a Unionist and became an Abolitionist. Re: Schechter. Yes yet I thought it odd he doesn’t portray Lincoln in the ambiguity we now know him. He was set on portraying a “biblical” Lincoln. Hope you’re well too. Let make a time to get together.
A minor note. Lincoln was always against slavery. What he changed his mind on is whether it should be abolished. The dilemma stemmed from the fact that the constitution, which he swore to uphold, Clearly, consecrated slavery; notably in the fugitive slave clause. In due course, he decided that the declaration of independence transcended the constitution; which is to say that the constitution had to be reconstituted. He launched the Civil War in order to preserve the union. He then realized that more was required: to refound the nation on equal principles.
Anti-slavery, Free Soil and Republican politics eventually lead to freedom of the enslaved. Garrisonian Abolitionism called for a divorce with the slaveholding states which would have been a "moral victory" but would have left the enslaved in chains. T
I spend a good deal of time thinking about this. I’m certain a day will come soon when a catastrophe of shame will set psychological fire to the Zionist portion of am Yisrael like lightening striking a barn full of hay. It would not be possible to overstate just how cataclysmic the period of collective awakening to collective wrongdoing will be. Waking up, their clothing drenched in blood (no The Fixer libels here. Nobody is being accused of making matzoh with Christian babies. But, they DID kill and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian babies and youths or cleared the way so these killings could take place unconstrained) an entire generation will not have to wonder “what have I done?” They will have reams and reams of sermons, dozens of photo albums, hundreds of posts, and countless DMs and comments recording exactly how craven https://youtu.be/XAucQ0Mh_1k and self-serving their justifications had been. I am confident enough in the inevitability of this collective realization to view it as a certainty. What is not certain is when or what it will look like. A letter like this either suggests we are nowhere close or experiencing the death throes/extinction burst. Again, I spend a good deal of time thinking about this. The ‘this’ being the question that immediately follows abolition; how do we hold to account those responsible, particularly the ‘leaders’ on whom folks who were not empowered to spend all day considering the moral implications and Jewish basis of their positions? I’m sure R’ @Shaul Magid has his reasons for not naming the rabbis in The Letter, but they are a matter of record (like Rabbi Cosgrove’s differentially loyal supporters). They are proud of what they allege, or rather they are proud to be ‘the courageous truth tellers making the allegations,’ and, as we are still pre-Catastrophe, have no interest in denying their participation. When the polarity shifts, what are we going to do with these disgraced former-Zionists? What will they do with themselves when they realize what they’ve done? Will they all step down? Will they respond at all? Assuming they have capacity for self-reflection and are genuine, even as they experience spiritual macular degeneration, they will not wait for everyone else to call for their resignations, they will tender them.
I grew up with the signers and Rabbi Cosgrove officiated at my parents funerals who were longtime members of the shul. I think many of us are in the same boat and are torn between what we can see in front of us and our loyalty to leaders we still cherish but now disagree with.
Hamas has an exact analogy in US history: Nat Turner and John Brown both of whom became recognized heroes in the struggle against US Southern slavery.
What is slavery but a denial of legal personhood that turns a human being into chattel?
In Zionism we Palestinians are not people but are chattel.
Settler colonialism is not an explicit crime in international law. Settler colonialism is an implicit crime because settler colonialism is a combination of genocide with slavery. Just look at the history of settler colonialism in the Americas, in Africa, and in Australia as well as at the history of settler colonialism
1. that the Nazis undertook in occupied European territory and
2. that the Nuremberg Tribunals found criminally to comprise genocide, Germanization (demographic engineering during occupation), war crimes, and enslavement.
Zangwill proclaimed that Palestine was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
To a white racial supremacist European Jewish Zionist, Palestinians (a mostly peasant non-European population) were not fully human and thus chattel that white racial supremacist European Jewish Zionists could casually move out of Palestine. [In Yiddish and in Rabbinic/Talmudic idiom, peasantry (עם הארץ) is a derogatory term.]
To the Zionist mind, a Palestinian is a subhuman placeholder that is supposed to yield his place and vanish when the white racial supremacist Zionist appears to claim the place of the Palestinian.
We Palestinians committed the ultimate sin according to Zionist religious belief. We refused to vanish and rebelled.
By the legal analysis, which found Nazi occupiers to enslave occupied populations, Zionist colonial settler invaders enslave us Palestinians throughout stolen Palestine.
Today, the Zionist colonial settler invaders in stolen Palestine rewrite history to erase us, to exterminate us, and to cover iup the crimes of every Zionist that has ever lived.
Today, Zionism is the epitome of depravity, and every Zionist is an enemy both of the human race and also of human knowledge while the fighters of Hamas are heroes to the human race for struggling against Zionist colonial settler invaders. In international antislavery law there is no distinction between a slaver combatant and a slaver civilian.
A slave does not commit a crime when he kills a slaver because the slaver is an immanent threat to the slave and to his fellow slaves. In stolen Palestine, we Palestinians are enslaved. On October 7, Hamas committed no crimes.
But after all, there is nothing new in this moment of collapse of the moral ground of Israel...I see little difference between these times and the times of the Prophet Amos. In fact, isn't Zionism a desire to return to conquest and expansion, idealized as "glorious" and not seen as atrocious, by the settler movement? In their view, Ancient Israel/Judah is the desirable state, literally and figuratively. Genocide, in fact, was commanded by God. Don't modern religious settlers believe their mission is given them by God, justifying any and all means, including slavery and genocide? They need to remember that historically, conquering all their "pagan" neighbors was followed by being invaded and expelled from the Land. Seems to me this is all in keeping with tradition...Exile is looking better and better all the time.
This is an example of suicidal empathy which has never been a feature of Judaism until fairly recently. Perhaps the authors of the petition believe the term genocide should be reserved for senseless murder based on race, ethnicity or religion and not applied to cruel and nasty war tactics of blowing up enemy cities to take out hiding militants and/or to force a surrender. After all, in a real genocide, such as that of the Nazis against the Jews, there is no option to surrender and no approved option to flee.
The Nazi genocide of Jews started when Hitler took power in January 1933. Just as Zionist colonial settler invaders have since Dec 1947 created toxic conditions to pressure us Palestinians to leave our homeland in a specific malevolent strategy (dolus specialis) of physical group destruction (genocide), Nazis created toxic conditions to pressure the German Jewish group to leave its German homeland.
You write as "we Palestinians" but you are basically a generic Muslim Arab (less than 5% Christian) no different than the Muslim Arabs in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt. Plus some random non-Arab Muslims like Bosnians. No one is stripping you of your humanity.
"Palestine" is not your homeland. You have no homeland because you have no history of a national identity. Since the Arab invasion of the 7th century, Arabs certainly lived in the region, but they had no unique identity as Palestinians. Indeed in 1933, the person most likely to be referred to as a Palestinian were the Jews and Israel might well have been named Palestine but would have made no difference.
Your identity is itself an invention of the Muslim Arab invasion. The colonial settlers were taking back their own land, which had been passed around by empires like the Arab, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.
No matter how much leftist Jews reach out to people like you, it does no good. You are too brainwashed to deal with. More importantly, you are dooming the fate of the Palestinians. Do you really want to tell the Jews of Israel "it's us or you." You people have suffered but a mere fraction of the persecution Jews suffered at the hands of pagans, Muslims and Christians. If you make it "us or them" the Israeli's will choose "us" and decide you just have to leave.
While the peasantry of Judea province mostly considered themselves during the 1st century CE to be Judeans, Samarians, Idomeans, Galileans, Nabateans, as we abandoned Biblical Judaism or Biblical Samaritanism for Christianity, we built Palestine into the major center of Christianity, and we became the people of the Holy Land of Palestine. Later Palestinians converted substantially to Islam, which is a minor evolution of Judean Christianity in which Jesus is messiah to the peasantry, appointed by God, but not divine.
Nothing is more loathsome than a Zionist that is so ashamed of his heritage and history that he steals our Palestinian heritage and history while he gets his jollies by slaughtering us the descendants of the first Judean followers of Jesus.
Question: Did Josephus or Jesus ever call himself an Israelite?
Answer:
Short answer:
Flavius Josephus — No clear instance where he explicitly calls himself “an Israelite” (Israēlitēs).
Jesus — No recorded instance in the New Testament where he calls himself “an Israelite.”
Here is the fuller picture.
1️⃣ Josephus
Josephus frequently identifies himself as:
A Jew (Ioudaios)
A priest
Of the first priestly course
Of Hasmonean royal descent
In The Life of Flavius Josephus (Vita 1) he writes:
“I am Josephus, the son of Matthias, a Hebrew by race, a priest…”
He also regularly speaks of “the Israelites” (Israēlitai) as the ancestral people, especially in Antiquities of the Jews, but he does not clearly record saying “I am an Israelite.”
By the 1st century, “Jew” (Ioudaios) was the normal self-designation; “Israelite” was more biblical/literary.
2️⃣ Jesus
In the New Testament:
Jesus never says “I am an Israelite.”
He speaks of “the house of Israel” (e.g., Matthew 15:24).
Others call someone “an Israelite” (John 1:47), but not him.
For example, in Gospel of Matthew 15:24:
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
That implies Israelite identity, but it is not a self-designation formula like Paul’s “I am an Israelite” (Romans 11:1).
Why This Is Interesting
By the 1st century CE:
“Israelite” was often a scriptural-historical term.
“Jew” (Ioudaios) was the common ethnic identity term.
Paul explicitly revives and uses “Israelite” as a covenantal-theological identity term (Romans 9–11; 2 Corinthians 11:22).
Josephus and Jesus both operate inside Israel’s covenantal world — but neither is recorded as formally self-identifying with the statement:
“I am an Israelite.”
The people of judea, Samaria, and Galilee all converted to Christianity and remained the covenantal people of Israel. If a Jew rejected Jesus, he was no longer a member of `am Yisrael.
### Rabbinic Judaism and Judean Biblical Temple Judaism are distinct religions that have little in common--a Zionist colonial settler is an invader, interloper, thief, impostor, and genocide-perpetrator!
In Menachot sugya 29b:4, the Talmud imagines Moses transported forward in time to sit in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. The great lawgiver listens to the discussion and cannot follow it at all—until Akiva attributes one teaching to “a law given to Moses at Sinai.” Only then is Moses comforted.
> Babylonia Talmud Menuchot Sugya 29b:4
>
> אמר לפניו רבש"ע הראהו לי אמר לו חזור לאחורך הלך וישב בסוף שמונה שורות ולא היה יודע מה הן אומרים תשש כחו כיון שהגיע לדבר אחד אמרו לו תלמידיו רבי מנין לך אמר להן הלכה למשה מסיני נתיישבה דעתו
>
> Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, show him to me. God said to him: Return behind you. Moses went and sat at the end of the eighth row in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and did not understand what they were saying. Moses’ strength waned, as he thought his Torah knowledge was deficient. When Rabbi Akiva arrived at the discussion of one matter, his students said to him: My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease, as this too was part of the Torah that he was to receive.
----------------------
The scene is meant to affirm continuity. Yet, read plainly, it admits a jarring truth: Moses, the central figure of Biblical Temple Judaism, would not even recognize the content, methods, or concepts of Rabbinic Judaism, which is a Babylonian (Mesopotamian) religion that is alien to Palestine.
Rabbinic Judaism—the religion of the Talmud—emerged in the Greco-Roman world centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple. Its legal reasoning, textual focus, and layered traditions evolved in a completely different cultural and political context. Temple Judaism centered on priests, sacrifices, and the Land; Rabbinic Judaism centers on study, halakhic debate, and an oral-law canon that would have been unintelligible to the Biblical world.
If Moses himself would be bewildered by rabbinic discourse, then Rabbinic Judaism and Biblical Temple Judaism cannot be the same religion. They share an origin myth and some sacred vocabulary, but little else.
A Rabbinic Jew lies when he claims to be a member of the people of Israel,
A Zionist rots his brain with his Zionist beliefs.
Ismail (the father of Arabs) was in Palestine before Israel/Jacob.
Herod the Great, who enlarged and rebuilt the 2nd Temple was the son of an Arabized Idumean and a Nabatean Arab.
We Palestinians are proud of our great history and heritage. We are the Arabized descendants of the first Judean followers of Jesus.
A depraved Zionist, that erroneously claims Jewish heritage and history, is so ashamed of his genuine heritage and history that he tries to steal our Palestinian heritage and history.
A Zionist is an enemy of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, the American Constitutional system, the American financial system, the American social system, international law, the international financial system, human knowledge, and the human race.
A Zionist colonial settler in stolen Palestine is an invader, interloper, thief, impostor, and perpetrator of genocide.
A Zionist is only of value to the planet when he is composted.
Indeed, Ishmael is the father of the Arabs and Isaac is one of the fathers of the Jews. But Canaan was given to the Jewish/Hebrew line while vast other lands were given to the Arabs. Don't be so greedy. The covenant land was promised to Abraham's line through Isaac. God promised to make the seed of Ishmael a great nation but in what would now correspond to northern Arabia.
Herod the Great was an Edomite although his people had converted to Judaism over 100 years earlier.
You are not just Arabized but Islamized 99%.
The rest of this post is hysterical nonsense. Zionism is about conquering one tiny area of land which is the ancestral homeland of the Jews. Meanwhile Christians conquered a third of world and Islam conquered another third of the world and both killed tens of millions in the process. You people are rank hypocrites. The only forms of Christianity or Islam that should be encouraged in Israel are Zionist flavors. Why would any rational nation allow a minority to promote a jihadist flavor of religion that calls for the elimination of the majority?
Do you believe in your own lies? They will not save you or your rotten cause. But please, do not stop spreading them, in time nobody will be able to ignore them and the genocidal racism that they seek to justify. Dig deeper and faster, you need a big grave.
For over 1000 years, Muslims and Christians said the vilest things about Jews and occasionally did the vilest things. Finally, Jews learned to fight back and there's nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth over the plight of their former oppressors. One more time and slowly this time...let the Jews and Israel be. Be content with your 99.9% Arab Muslim control of the Middle East.
Zionism murdered Judaism by transforming Judaism into a program of genocide. A Zionist cannot be Jewish even if he is descendant of Jewish community.
My husband is so ashamed of the monstrous evil, which Zionism has created, that he refuses to call himself Jewish. He always claims that he is Palestinian by marriage.
No Zionist should roam freely on the planet. A Zionist is only of value to the earth when he is composted.
Your post should be flagged and banned, but in some ways I appreciate it. If I were the Israelis I would have no moral compunction doing whatever it takes to neuter your mentality. If you want to make it a fight to the death, you won't like the results. I wonder if you are even really a Palestinian.
One big problem with the intervention by those leaders is that makes it extremely hard for Jews to call out the “classic” blood libel (for lack of a better term), which is currently also seeing a resurrection right now in the context of the Epstein case.
I’m certainly not suggesting that Epstein was a victim. But there are accusations floating around that he was a baby killer, for which there’s no reliable evidence at the moment. It sounds a lot like antisemites throwing in this old accusation to make him even more of a monster.
Just curious have you ever thought about the grounds upon which Jews have been discriminated throughout history? Aside from the refusal to assimilate, primarily it was because of Jewish success, Jewish superior education & knowledge, Jewish ascent to the top levels of power in every society. There are other minorities who seem to fit this pattern. Any superiority is going to be resented. On the grounds of this phenomenal success far out of proportion to other ethnicities, I seriously doubt that the Jewish community could ever be "erased" in a multi ethnic society, America being the obvious example. Jerusalem might be the spiritual capital of the world, shared with Christian & Muslim, but New York City is the capital of the world in every other way. New York City is the Jewish homeland outside of Israel. There is much evidence to prove that life for Jews in New York City is better than anything even possible in Israel. Without constant war, the guilt of atrocity, the hypocrisy, the apartheid, the injustice, the self-annihilation. To the contrary, Jews have thrived in America since founding. There were Jews in the South who were not slaves, but who owned slaves. Yes, there is still prejudice and persecution, but there are also enclaves, communities, religious streams, political power, and cultural influence unrivaled except for relatively larger minorities. UNRIVALED. And instead of that a people want to own a tiny piece of property in the Middle East where the original dispersion took place? Where they are surrounded by enemies? Where they have become the oppressors? A very bad trade in my opinion.
I agree with you that we live in times full of propaganda, myth, and strange delusions, projections, and far too much public insanity. However, I don't agree that the demonization of Epstein is any worse because of his ethnic Jewishness. The Qanon say the exact same things about liberals, who are not, after all, entirely Jewish. Which brings up an interesting question of how did the blood libel get attached to American liberals? When I was a smoker I never noticed public smoking. When I quit, I saw it everywhere. My point being, I am one who believes current antisemitism is almost wholly due to the slaughter in Gaza. If you are looking for prejudice, you will see it in everything. How do we really know that antisemitism today is any worse relative to the persecution of other minorities worldwide? I mean, it could be, but how is that measured? I mean this as an objective statement, though you might not agree, the very small nation of Israel exhibits extreme degrees of hysteria, projection, denial, and pathology. It is TOO small and TOO homogeneous, pitfalls of seeking to form the "pure" ethnic state. Monoculture is death. There are no pure races, nor should there be. The future of humanity, if it can survive, is the recognition that our humanity transcends our particular identities and that is the only just and moral foundation of civilization. The irony of "survivalism" among minority groups is, they resort to very fascist tactics in order to achieve "security". Only justice brings peace.
Sadly, we know who some of the signatories of that petition are, and they are highly influential and respected Jewish leaders, both religious and secular. It's unconscionable that they are using their influence to peddle such dishonest and dehumanizing crap. Shame on them.
agreed
I spend a good deal of time thinking about this. I’m certain a day will come soon when the catastrophe of self-recognition will strike the Zionist portion of am Yisrael with
Yet, just as in his day, Schechter’s words & ideals were often far removed from the world’s realities. He was speaking at a time when many good people in the western world were decrying the injustice and horrors of slavery worldwide.
Many of the loudest voices came from within Europe - where, although slavery had been abolished across the continent, the “barbaric” & “cruel” Arab slave trade around Zanzibar, Eastern Africa, & the Arabian Gulf had become the primary target of many humanitarian societies and “civilization & progress” associations determined to get rid of the scourge of humans owning other humans.
This looked and felt very good to the Christian world - to promote an end to such human cruelty & bondage. And yet, in Africa, Asia, & the Americas, slavery - in the form of forced labor - and concentration camps were springing up and thousands were dying in their captivity:
In the Belgian Congo, 10 million people had died owing to the brutal treatment of Congolese civilians by Belgian & other nationalities working for the Congo Free State of King Leopold II. The whole country had become a slave labor camp and many whites were still involved in an unofficial slave trade. When Leopold II died he bequeathed his private colony to the Belgian nation.
In what is today called Namibia, German South West Africa under the rule (ultimately) of Kaiser Wilhelm II, not only concentration camps, but a death camp & the world’s first extermination order had only recently marked the genocide of the Herero & Nama peoples - something openly called for by many.
In South Africa the British had placed Boer civilians in a concentration camp (called that) in order to separate the people from the rebels, cutting off the supply lines to the latter in an attempt to break their morale; meanwhile, the notorious pass system was underway for blacks living at the mercy of their heavily armed white masters.
In Australia the Aboriginals had been experiencing massacres, economic slavery (forced labor) and severe discrimination for over 200 years and continued to do so into the 1930s and beyond. Many were put in concentration camps. The indigenous people of Tasmania had been wiped off the face of the earth much like the Taine people in the Caribbean.
In North America, concentration camps known as reservations had swallowed up the remaining indigenous peoples of the land. A population that had reached approximately 100,000,000 in 1500 (the US & Canada) had declined to approximately 250,000 by 1900. War, hardship, superior military capabilities on the part of the white settlers, disease, & hunger carried off most of those not murdered in a 400 year long genocide.
In other words, while the nice white Christian (& Jewish) citizens of Europe & North America were singing & speaking about progress, civilization, the ills of slavery & such, their nations were involved in sadistic brutality against indigenous peoples through colonialism, settler colonialism, & economic warfare across the globe.
If we look closely at what our illustrious countries are still up to, we will find equally horrific circumstances strangling & killing those who would prefer not to be the victims of our liberal world order.
Amen.
Yes, and thus liberalism has a hypocritical strain running through it on the question of universalism.
But it’s much worse than that because while many of us rightly have decried the horrors of what’s happening in Gaza, saying such things (again, rightly) as “you can’t say we didn’t know,” the same was true in the past - especially by the 19th century when newspapers and pamphlets circulated widely with stories of what was really going on there for any literate person to read.
Additionally, thousands of men were returning from their colony conquests, their trading posts, their economic hubs and shipping ports fully aware of, and directly complicit in, the abominations being carried out in their states’ names.
The point isn’t that we’re hypocrites (we are) but that we’ve always known -up to a point- what was really taking place in the colonized regions - just as returning German soldiers from the eastern front saw and knew much about what was actually taking place in the east.
The point is, we’ve always known - or been able to find out. The question is why more don’t stand up and say out loud that what is going on is wrong.
I’m still searching for the right words after reading this sermon. It carried a rare emotional force.
Shaul
Hope you’re well. Lincoln always hated slavery, but he was willing to preserve it if it saved the union. He changed that position in the middle of the war as he realized that the war was fundamentally about slavery.
Schechter’s obsession with unity remains problematic. Who gets to decide on what basis a group is unified. What values and positions bind them? Unity in other words, almost always reflects some element of coercion of some groups at the hands of others. In his case, he viewed Jewish reformers as sectarians and as dangerous to what he called Catholic Israel, that is the tradition of the living people. Very un American in its espousal of a tradition limiting individual freedom.
Yes re Lincoln. As I did say he began as a Unionist and became an Abolitionist. Re: Schechter. Yes yet I thought it odd he doesn’t portray Lincoln in the ambiguity we now know him. He was set on portraying a “biblical” Lincoln. Hope you’re well too. Let make a time to get together.
This was a cathartic read. Thank you.
A minor note. Lincoln was always against slavery. What he changed his mind on is whether it should be abolished. The dilemma stemmed from the fact that the constitution, which he swore to uphold, Clearly, consecrated slavery; notably in the fugitive slave clause. In due course, he decided that the declaration of independence transcended the constitution; which is to say that the constitution had to be reconstituted. He launched the Civil War in order to preserve the union. He then realized that more was required: to refound the nation on equal principles.
Yes, I know that. But most scholarship views him initially as a Unionist and not an Abolitionists but that did change for him.
Anti-slavery, Free Soil and Republican politics eventually lead to freedom of the enslaved. Garrisonian Abolitionism called for a divorce with the slaveholding states which would have been a "moral victory" but would have left the enslaved in chains. T
I spend a good deal of time thinking about this. I’m certain a day will come soon when a catastrophe of shame will set psychological fire to the Zionist portion of am Yisrael like lightening striking a barn full of hay. It would not be possible to overstate just how cataclysmic the period of collective awakening to collective wrongdoing will be. Waking up, their clothing drenched in blood (no The Fixer libels here. Nobody is being accused of making matzoh with Christian babies. But, they DID kill and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian babies and youths or cleared the way so these killings could take place unconstrained) an entire generation will not have to wonder “what have I done?” They will have reams and reams of sermons, dozens of photo albums, hundreds of posts, and countless DMs and comments recording exactly how craven https://youtu.be/XAucQ0Mh_1k and self-serving their justifications had been. I am confident enough in the inevitability of this collective realization to view it as a certainty. What is not certain is when or what it will look like. A letter like this either suggests we are nowhere close or experiencing the death throes/extinction burst. Again, I spend a good deal of time thinking about this. The ‘this’ being the question that immediately follows abolition; how do we hold to account those responsible, particularly the ‘leaders’ on whom folks who were not empowered to spend all day considering the moral implications and Jewish basis of their positions? I’m sure R’ @Shaul Magid has his reasons for not naming the rabbis in The Letter, but they are a matter of record (like Rabbi Cosgrove’s differentially loyal supporters). They are proud of what they allege, or rather they are proud to be ‘the courageous truth tellers making the allegations,’ and, as we are still pre-Catastrophe, have no interest in denying their participation. When the polarity shifts, what are we going to do with these disgraced former-Zionists? What will they do with themselves when they realize what they’ve done? Will they all step down? Will they respond at all? Assuming they have capacity for self-reflection and are genuine, even as they experience spiritual macular degeneration, they will not wait for everyone else to call for their resignations, they will tender them.
I grew up with the signers and Rabbi Cosgrove officiated at my parents funerals who were longtime members of the shul. I think many of us are in the same boat and are torn between what we can see in front of us and our loyalty to leaders we still cherish but now disagree with.
In re: Nat Turner
Hamas has an exact analogy in US history: Nat Turner and John Brown both of whom became recognized heroes in the struggle against US Southern slavery.
What is slavery but a denial of legal personhood that turns a human being into chattel?
In Zionism we Palestinians are not people but are chattel.
Settler colonialism is not an explicit crime in international law. Settler colonialism is an implicit crime because settler colonialism is a combination of genocide with slavery. Just look at the history of settler colonialism in the Americas, in Africa, and in Australia as well as at the history of settler colonialism
1. that the Nazis undertook in occupied European territory and
2. that the Nuremberg Tribunals found criminally to comprise genocide, Germanization (demographic engineering during occupation), war crimes, and enslavement.
Zangwill proclaimed that Palestine was “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
To a white racial supremacist European Jewish Zionist, Palestinians (a mostly peasant non-European population) were not fully human and thus chattel that white racial supremacist European Jewish Zionists could casually move out of Palestine. [In Yiddish and in Rabbinic/Talmudic idiom, peasantry (עם הארץ) is a derogatory term.]
To the Zionist mind, a Palestinian is a subhuman placeholder that is supposed to yield his place and vanish when the white racial supremacist Zionist appears to claim the place of the Palestinian.
We Palestinians committed the ultimate sin according to Zionist religious belief. We refused to vanish and rebelled.
By the legal analysis, which found Nazi occupiers to enslave occupied populations, Zionist colonial settler invaders enslave us Palestinians throughout stolen Palestine.
Today, the Zionist colonial settler invaders in stolen Palestine rewrite history to erase us, to exterminate us, and to cover iup the crimes of every Zionist that has ever lived.
Today, Zionism is the epitome of depravity, and every Zionist is an enemy both of the human race and also of human knowledge while the fighters of Hamas are heroes to the human race for struggling against Zionist colonial settler invaders. In international antislavery law there is no distinction between a slaver combatant and a slaver civilian.
A slave does not commit a crime when he kills a slaver because the slaver is an immanent threat to the slave and to his fellow slaves. In stolen Palestine, we Palestinians are enslaved. On October 7, Hamas committed no crimes.
But after all, there is nothing new in this moment of collapse of the moral ground of Israel...I see little difference between these times and the times of the Prophet Amos. In fact, isn't Zionism a desire to return to conquest and expansion, idealized as "glorious" and not seen as atrocious, by the settler movement? In their view, Ancient Israel/Judah is the desirable state, literally and figuratively. Genocide, in fact, was commanded by God. Don't modern religious settlers believe their mission is given them by God, justifying any and all means, including slavery and genocide? They need to remember that historically, conquering all their "pagan" neighbors was followed by being invaded and expelled from the Land. Seems to me this is all in keeping with tradition...Exile is looking better and better all the time.
This is an example of suicidal empathy which has never been a feature of Judaism until fairly recently. Perhaps the authors of the petition believe the term genocide should be reserved for senseless murder based on race, ethnicity or religion and not applied to cruel and nasty war tactics of blowing up enemy cities to take out hiding militants and/or to force a surrender. After all, in a real genocide, such as that of the Nazis against the Jews, there is no option to surrender and no approved option to flee.
The Nazi genocide of Jews started when Hitler took power in January 1933. Just as Zionist colonial settler invaders have since Dec 1947 created toxic conditions to pressure us Palestinians to leave our homeland in a specific malevolent strategy (dolus specialis) of physical group destruction (genocide), Nazis created toxic conditions to pressure the German Jewish group to leave its German homeland.
Zionism is an ideology of genocide and of racism.
You write as "we Palestinians" but you are basically a generic Muslim Arab (less than 5% Christian) no different than the Muslim Arabs in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt. Plus some random non-Arab Muslims like Bosnians. No one is stripping you of your humanity.
"Palestine" is not your homeland. You have no homeland because you have no history of a national identity. Since the Arab invasion of the 7th century, Arabs certainly lived in the region, but they had no unique identity as Palestinians. Indeed in 1933, the person most likely to be referred to as a Palestinian were the Jews and Israel might well have been named Palestine but would have made no difference.
Your identity is itself an invention of the Muslim Arab invasion. The colonial settlers were taking back their own land, which had been passed around by empires like the Arab, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.
No matter how much leftist Jews reach out to people like you, it does no good. You are too brainwashed to deal with. More importantly, you are dooming the fate of the Palestinians. Do you really want to tell the Jews of Israel "it's us or you." You people have suffered but a mere fraction of the persecution Jews suffered at the hands of pagans, Muslims and Christians. If you make it "us or them" the Israeli's will choose "us" and decide you just have to leave.
The Roman Expulsion was a fairy tale.
https://icarusfilms.com/if-exl
While the peasantry of Judea province mostly considered themselves during the 1st century CE to be Judeans, Samarians, Idomeans, Galileans, Nabateans, as we abandoned Biblical Judaism or Biblical Samaritanism for Christianity, we built Palestine into the major center of Christianity, and we became the people of the Holy Land of Palestine. Later Palestinians converted substantially to Islam, which is a minor evolution of Judean Christianity in which Jesus is messiah to the peasantry, appointed by God, but not divine.
Nothing is more loathsome than a Zionist that is so ashamed of his heritage and history that he steals our Palestinian heritage and history while he gets his jollies by slaughtering us the descendants of the first Judean followers of Jesus.
Sorry but Arab and Muslim are foreign to Palestine. Go back to being an Israelite if that is what you claim to be.
Question: Did Josephus or Jesus ever call himself an Israelite?
Answer:
Short answer:
Flavius Josephus — No clear instance where he explicitly calls himself “an Israelite” (Israēlitēs).
Jesus — No recorded instance in the New Testament where he calls himself “an Israelite.”
Here is the fuller picture.
1️⃣ Josephus
Josephus frequently identifies himself as:
A Jew (Ioudaios)
A priest
Of the first priestly course
Of Hasmonean royal descent
In The Life of Flavius Josephus (Vita 1) he writes:
“I am Josephus, the son of Matthias, a Hebrew by race, a priest…”
He also regularly speaks of “the Israelites” (Israēlitai) as the ancestral people, especially in Antiquities of the Jews, but he does not clearly record saying “I am an Israelite.”
By the 1st century, “Jew” (Ioudaios) was the normal self-designation; “Israelite” was more biblical/literary.
2️⃣ Jesus
In the New Testament:
Jesus never says “I am an Israelite.”
He speaks of “the house of Israel” (e.g., Matthew 15:24).
Others call someone “an Israelite” (John 1:47), but not him.
For example, in Gospel of Matthew 15:24:
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
That implies Israelite identity, but it is not a self-designation formula like Paul’s “I am an Israelite” (Romans 11:1).
Why This Is Interesting
By the 1st century CE:
“Israelite” was often a scriptural-historical term.
“Jew” (Ioudaios) was the common ethnic identity term.
Paul explicitly revives and uses “Israelite” as a covenantal-theological identity term (Romans 9–11; 2 Corinthians 11:22).
Josephus and Jesus both operate inside Israel’s covenantal world — but neither is recorded as formally self-identifying with the statement:
“I am an Israelite.”
The people of judea, Samaria, and Galilee all converted to Christianity and remained the covenantal people of Israel. If a Jew rejected Jesus, he was no longer a member of `am Yisrael.
### Rabbinic Judaism and Judean Biblical Temple Judaism are distinct religions that have little in common--a Zionist colonial settler is an invader, interloper, thief, impostor, and genocide-perpetrator!
In Menachot sugya 29b:4, the Talmud imagines Moses transported forward in time to sit in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. The great lawgiver listens to the discussion and cannot follow it at all—until Akiva attributes one teaching to “a law given to Moses at Sinai.” Only then is Moses comforted.
> Babylonia Talmud Menuchot Sugya 29b:4
>
> אמר לפניו רבש"ע הראהו לי אמר לו חזור לאחורך הלך וישב בסוף שמונה שורות ולא היה יודע מה הן אומרים תשש כחו כיון שהגיע לדבר אחד אמרו לו תלמידיו רבי מנין לך אמר להן הלכה למשה מסיני נתיישבה דעתו
>
> Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, show him to me. God said to him: Return behind you. Moses went and sat at the end of the eighth row in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and did not understand what they were saying. Moses’ strength waned, as he thought his Torah knowledge was deficient. When Rabbi Akiva arrived at the discussion of one matter, his students said to him: My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease, as this too was part of the Torah that he was to receive.
----------------------
The scene is meant to affirm continuity. Yet, read plainly, it admits a jarring truth: Moses, the central figure of Biblical Temple Judaism, would not even recognize the content, methods, or concepts of Rabbinic Judaism, which is a Babylonian (Mesopotamian) religion that is alien to Palestine.
Rabbinic Judaism—the religion of the Talmud—emerged in the Greco-Roman world centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple. Its legal reasoning, textual focus, and layered traditions evolved in a completely different cultural and political context. Temple Judaism centered on priests, sacrifices, and the Land; Rabbinic Judaism centers on study, halakhic debate, and an oral-law canon that would have been unintelligible to the Biblical world.
If Moses himself would be bewildered by rabbinic discourse, then Rabbinic Judaism and Biblical Temple Judaism cannot be the same religion. They share an origin myth and some sacred vocabulary, but little else.
A Rabbinic Jew lies when he claims to be a member of the people of Israel,
A Zionist rots his brain with his Zionist beliefs.
Ismail (the father of Arabs) was in Palestine before Israel/Jacob.
Herod the Great, who enlarged and rebuilt the 2nd Temple was the son of an Arabized Idumean and a Nabatean Arab.
We Palestinians are proud of our great history and heritage. We are the Arabized descendants of the first Judean followers of Jesus.
A depraved Zionist, that erroneously claims Jewish heritage and history, is so ashamed of his genuine heritage and history that he tries to steal our Palestinian heritage and history.
A Zionist is an enemy of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, the American Constitutional system, the American financial system, the American social system, international law, the international financial system, human knowledge, and the human race.
A Zionist colonial settler in stolen Palestine is an invader, interloper, thief, impostor, and perpetrator of genocide.
A Zionist is only of value to the planet when he is composted.
Indeed, Ishmael is the father of the Arabs and Isaac is one of the fathers of the Jews. But Canaan was given to the Jewish/Hebrew line while vast other lands were given to the Arabs. Don't be so greedy. The covenant land was promised to Abraham's line through Isaac. God promised to make the seed of Ishmael a great nation but in what would now correspond to northern Arabia.
Herod the Great was an Edomite although his people had converted to Judaism over 100 years earlier.
You are not just Arabized but Islamized 99%.
The rest of this post is hysterical nonsense. Zionism is about conquering one tiny area of land which is the ancestral homeland of the Jews. Meanwhile Christians conquered a third of world and Islam conquered another third of the world and both killed tens of millions in the process. You people are rank hypocrites. The only forms of Christianity or Islam that should be encouraged in Israel are Zionist flavors. Why would any rational nation allow a minority to promote a jihadist flavor of religion that calls for the elimination of the majority?
Do you believe in your own lies? They will not save you or your rotten cause. But please, do not stop spreading them, in time nobody will be able to ignore them and the genocidal racism that they seek to justify. Dig deeper and faster, you need a big grave.
For over 1000 years, Muslims and Christians said the vilest things about Jews and occasionally did the vilest things. Finally, Jews learned to fight back and there's nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth over the plight of their former oppressors. One more time and slowly this time...let the Jews and Israel be. Be content with your 99.9% Arab Muslim control of the Middle East.
Self-pity as an excuse for genocide. One of the least attractive aspects of contemporary Jewish culture.
Deal with it. The dhimmi Jew is gone.
Zionism murdered Judaism by transforming Judaism into a program of genocide. A Zionist cannot be Jewish even if he is descendant of Jewish community.
My husband is so ashamed of the monstrous evil, which Zionism has created, that he refuses to call himself Jewish. He always claims that he is Palestinian by marriage.
No Zionist should roam freely on the planet. A Zionist is only of value to the earth when he is composted.
Your post should be flagged and banned, but in some ways I appreciate it. If I were the Israelis I would have no moral compunction doing whatever it takes to neuter your mentality. If you want to make it a fight to the death, you won't like the results. I wonder if you are even really a Palestinian.
Lincoln did not directly emancipate slaves in Union slave states.
Of course, "genocide" is merely an obscure legal term of art that could never be weaponized.
One big problem with the intervention by those leaders is that makes it extremely hard for Jews to call out the “classic” blood libel (for lack of a better term), which is currently also seeing a resurrection right now in the context of the Epstein case.
🤔 I can't understand your comment. Are you suggesting Epstein is a victim? Or are you referring to his ties to Mossad?
I’m certainly not suggesting that Epstein was a victim. But there are accusations floating around that he was a baby killer, for which there’s no reliable evidence at the moment. It sounds a lot like antisemites throwing in this old accusation to make him even more of a monster.
Just curious have you ever thought about the grounds upon which Jews have been discriminated throughout history? Aside from the refusal to assimilate, primarily it was because of Jewish success, Jewish superior education & knowledge, Jewish ascent to the top levels of power in every society. There are other minorities who seem to fit this pattern. Any superiority is going to be resented. On the grounds of this phenomenal success far out of proportion to other ethnicities, I seriously doubt that the Jewish community could ever be "erased" in a multi ethnic society, America being the obvious example. Jerusalem might be the spiritual capital of the world, shared with Christian & Muslim, but New York City is the capital of the world in every other way. New York City is the Jewish homeland outside of Israel. There is much evidence to prove that life for Jews in New York City is better than anything even possible in Israel. Without constant war, the guilt of atrocity, the hypocrisy, the apartheid, the injustice, the self-annihilation. To the contrary, Jews have thrived in America since founding. There were Jews in the South who were not slaves, but who owned slaves. Yes, there is still prejudice and persecution, but there are also enclaves, communities, religious streams, political power, and cultural influence unrivaled except for relatively larger minorities. UNRIVALED. And instead of that a people want to own a tiny piece of property in the Middle East where the original dispersion took place? Where they are surrounded by enemies? Where they have become the oppressors? A very bad trade in my opinion.
I agree with you that we live in times full of propaganda, myth, and strange delusions, projections, and far too much public insanity. However, I don't agree that the demonization of Epstein is any worse because of his ethnic Jewishness. The Qanon say the exact same things about liberals, who are not, after all, entirely Jewish. Which brings up an interesting question of how did the blood libel get attached to American liberals? When I was a smoker I never noticed public smoking. When I quit, I saw it everywhere. My point being, I am one who believes current antisemitism is almost wholly due to the slaughter in Gaza. If you are looking for prejudice, you will see it in everything. How do we really know that antisemitism today is any worse relative to the persecution of other minorities worldwide? I mean, it could be, but how is that measured? I mean this as an objective statement, though you might not agree, the very small nation of Israel exhibits extreme degrees of hysteria, projection, denial, and pathology. It is TOO small and TOO homogeneous, pitfalls of seeking to form the "pure" ethnic state. Monoculture is death. There are no pure races, nor should there be. The future of humanity, if it can survive, is the recognition that our humanity transcends our particular identities and that is the only just and moral foundation of civilization. The irony of "survivalism" among minority groups is, they resort to very fascist tactics in order to achieve "security". Only justice brings peace.