mobius1ski

My comments to Commentary on Omri Ceren’s latest idiocy:

LOL. Who thought Commentary would one day be hawking conspiracy theories about the machinations of Jewish liberals?! You forgot to included a picture of George Soros pulling puppet strings with your post!

Just for your information: I resigned from Jewschool in 2007 when I went to work at JTA News as part of a noncompete agreement and have had no relationship to the site in the successive five years. Also, Occupy Judaism has never worked with J Street in any capacity and the letter, to my understanding, originated with Mark Green and Elliot Spitzer, not J Street. Furthermore, I did not take the Occupy Judaism site down – I was experiencing an issue with my DNS server which I was unaware of until I saw Omri’s tweets accusing me of colluding with J Street to hide said letter.

That said, your so-called “extensively documented antisemitism” is also largely a crock. I lived in a sukkah in Zuccotti Park for a week and the only people who had anything nasty to say to me about being Jewish were right-wing Jews like you. When I have encountered anti-Jewish bigotry from individual occupiers (as you would anywhere, being that 15% of Americans hold antisemitic beliefs), the movement has responded to the best of its ability in opposition to such bigotry, and satisfactorily so.

As such, I find that the frequency with which you have lied about me and OWS in the past six months beyond staggering. You’ve fabricated much of what you have printed and never bothered once to pick up a phone and verify any of your claims, nor have you done any firsthand reporting on the subject. Indeed, even Ira Stoll has testified that the reality of OWS and Occupy Judaism does not match your version of things. And yet, you persist.

Well guess what friends, I hope you have your tinfoil hats on! Because here’s the big conspiracy for you: I am a technology consultant for your online ad sales rep. Indeed, I helped setup your ad server. And while I have never received a dime of George Soros’ money (which I would unashamedly welcome), I have taken yours! Thus by Omri’s reasoning of guilt by association, that makes Occupy Judaism’s purported efforts to cover up antisemitism at Occupy Wall Street a secret plot by no less than Commentary Magazine itself!

Is it merely an attempt to generate page views by concocting a foil for Commentary’s diatribists? Is it part of a highly sophisticated effort to tar liberal Jews as being in bed with antisemites and Israel-haters in order to disenfranchise them from the Jewish community? Or is Occupy Judaism truly a nefarious ploy by neoconservative Zionist agents to infiltrate Occupy Wall Street and destroy it from within?

Only time will tell!

I have a variety of public speaking engagements re: Occupy Judaism upcoming in the next couple of months. Here’s the info. Possibly more to come.

• 12/1/11 · Thursday Night Chulent [Link]
• 12/5/11 · Kolot Chayeinu Living Room Discussion [Link]
• 12/9/11 · Rodeph Shalom Youth Program Shabbat Dinner [Link]
• 1/14/12 · Limmud NY [Link]

A lot of hay has been made of, well, me, over the last week due to my inquiry into the origins of the OWS Freedom Waves tweet and its subsequent deletion by the OWS media team. 

I would first like to reiterate that I did not request the tweet’s deletion. As Will from the OWS PR working group told Mondoweiss, “The tweet was erased because there was discussion about how it was not appropriate to address this issue on these large public social media accounts until we had agreement from the group on our exact stance on these kinds of international conflicts.” 

I was not a part of that discussion, as I am not a member of the media working group.

I would also like to say that it was not my intent nor desire to see the tweet deleted, nor to hurt Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims or anyone else who feel kinship with this movement and who felt betrayed by the tweet’s deletion.

Nonetheless, it has been written repeatedly that the tweet was deleted at my “urging,” which could not be further from the truth. It is, however, true that I have at times been frustrated with the actions of some Palestinian solidarity activists at Occupy Wall Street.

So, let’s just recap, shall we? 

Michael Letwin of Labor for Palestine tried to get the head of a major labor union thrown off the OWS labor working group because he is a Zionist, calling him a defender of apartheid (despite the fact that he is a vocal opponent of the Israeli occupation). Likewise, Andy Pollack of al-Awda threw a fit in public and on various OWS listservs after a speaker from the Israeli tent protests spoke, threatening to take his ball and go home if “Zionist racists” were allowed to be a part of the movement.

In other words, some Palestinian solidarity activists have actively tried to exclude Zionists from participating in OWS and to make anti-Zionism a litmus test for joining the movement.

Existence is Resistance, a Palestinian solidarity group, held a “Kuffeya Day” event at OWS — which is three blocks from the World Trade Center — calling for clemency for convicted armed militants (ie., “terrorists”) that they advertised using the image of the infamous airplane hijacker Leila Khaled.

In other words, some Palestinian solidarity activist held an event that could have had severe negative impacts on OWS’s public image by associating the movement with support for terrorism.

Finally, a Palestinian solidarity activist on the media working group put out a statement over Twitter of solidarity with Gaza Freedom Waves without authorization from the General Assembly or the media working group.

In other words, some Palestinian solidarity activists are making statements on behalf of the movement without authorization or ratification from the General Assembly. 

All I wanted, in inquiring about the tweet, was to know whether the GA had taken a position on the issue, because I had not been present at that evening’s assembly. After spending two weeks aggressively fighting off charges in the press that OWS was a bastion of antisemitism, and working around the clock to address and successfully defeat those claims, I was concerned that I would then have to spend the next two weeks doing the same with the charge that OWS is anti-Israel. It’s not that I personally oppose Freedom Waves — I generally support most nonviolent efforts to resist the occupation. It’s that I am concerned about the movement’s ability to attract more moderate supporters who may not share that view.

Because I dared take issue with the above actions, fearing that they could have negative consequences for the viability of the movement as whole, I have been accused of being a racist who is against Palestinian rights, who is trying to delete Palestinians from history and who wishes to exclude their voices from the protest.

Never mind talking about why any of the above actions by Palestinian solidarity activists are problematic or unfair to the OWS community. Never mind that I have repeatedly taken my lumps standing up in defense of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation over the last decade. As far as Ali Abunimah and Richard Silverstein are now concerned: Dan Sieradski doesn’t think Israel is obligated to commit demographic suicide by reabsorbing Palestinian refugees and is therefore an interminable racist and a fake progressive.

Or maybe — just maybe — some Palestinian solidarity activists behave inappropriately and then others go ballistic when anyone dares take issue with their behavior, using the specter of racism to silence any criticism of their actions. 

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I haven’t sought the exclusion of Palestinians nor Palestinian solidarity activists from the movement. Quite the contrary. I made two suggestions: Choose Palestinian solidarity actions which will not serve the propaganda aims of the movement’s opponents. And get buy-in from the community on the ground before you take action that could be interpreted as being done in the movement’s name. 

Clearly, I am a big old Abe Foxman using the bludgeon of censorship to silence legitimate resistance to the Israeli occupation. And clearly, this has everything to do with my position on Palestinian refugees.

Or maybe — just maybe — some people are behaving in genuinely problematic ways and I’m allowed to and need to speak up about it if we’re going to build a movement that is inclusive and welcoming of everyone.

Obviously, I’m a racist.

Excerpts of a blog post I wrote a number of years ago are presently being circulated by Jewish conservatives in an effort to discredit me and the work I’ve done with Occupy Judaism and more broadly in the Jewish community. Unfortunately, the decontextualized text presents me as a shrill religious anti-Zionist. As such, I have penned the following response, which provides an explanation for the post and an update on my personal relationship to Zionism.

On any given day of the week, I vacillate between between a variety of positions on Israel and Zionism. I often say that I am a religious anti-Zionist, an ideological post-Zionist, a pragmatic progressive Zionist, and (mostly kidding) a Kahanist under fire. 

To be clear: I believe in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. I believe the Jewish people have an immutable connection to the land of Israel. And I oppose boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel that are not specifically targeted at institutions directly profiting from the occupation.

On the particular day when I wrote that post, five years ago, I was living in Jerusalem as an Orthodox yeshiva student. I spent a fair deal of time learning with haredi family members who were religiously anti-Zionist. I had just endured the second Lebanon War, and during that time, watched Israeli society completely lose its mind and any semblance of tolerance or decency towards not only anyone Arab in ethnic origin, but also those who identified Arabs as human beings created in the image of God and worthy of human and civil rights. 

In response to what was an obvious collapse of morality and Jewish values happening around us, my other friends and I organized a benefit concert for Israeli and Lebanese war victims with the express intent of promoting the Torah values that you should not take pleasure in the downfall of your enemy and that you should regard all life as a manifestation of the Divine. 

As a consequence of this, I was threatened physically, receiving death threats by email and telephone. An article was written in the Jerusalem Post alleging that I was an abettor of terrorism. A group of right-wing Jewish bloggers attacked me as a self-hating Jew and an enemy of the Jewish people. People quite literally spit in my face on the streets of Jerusalem. 

And in a moment of emotional distress, I wrote a very unfortunately worded blog post lashing out at what I saw as the utter destruction and desecration of Jewish values in the name of national and ethnic supremacism. 

Many of the sentiments in the original post I still stand by today (unfortunately, you cannot see the excerpted text in context because the original post is no longer online).  But were I asked to sign my name to those words today — were I asked even a week after I had written them — I would not.

Rather I would say, I believe strongly in the need for a Jewish state and Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, but I do not — by any stretch of the imagination — support the policies of the government of Israel and I actively oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Ultimately, I believe that if we compromise and sacrifice our Jewish values in the name of military supremacy or mere physical survival then there is little purpose in having a Jewish state because the shared values that are the basis for our collective identity — and thus which justify our right to self-determination — will have been negated.

My distress and desperation at seeing the inability of Israel to progress beyond its status quo often leads me to question the sustainability of the Zionist project. But I will never negate the right of our people to express their self-determination through statehood, even while disenchanted with the form that statehood takes.

In other words: I am a reluctant Zionist, a critical Zionist, some days a borderline anti-Zionist, but a Zionist nonetheless — much to the chagrin of both the anti-Zionist Left and the Zionist ultra-Right.

I take that to mean that I’m doing something right.