A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears no different. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish resistance fighters from a small town in the hinterlands and the Hellenized elites of the big city, between those who wished to be Jews and those who wanted to be pawns in an empire, between the tradition of the priests and the progress of a new order, between the Maccabees and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path. 

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Maccabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

General Seron of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “My fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning." 

Though the Maccabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands.

Though, worn from battle, the Maccabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Maccabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on. 

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome's Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Edomite murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Seventy-one years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light. 

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah has two major symbols: the menorah and the dreidel.

The menorah, a candelabra with eight branches, and one light above, memorializes the liberation of the Temple from the religious persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Syrian-Greek ruler who had outlawed Judaism, and the other a spinning top recollects how Jewish children learning the word of G-d in the banned ‘hedge schools’ of ancient Israel would take out tops and pretend to be playing games when Antiochus’ inspectors arrived.

American Jewish children had lit menorahs and spun their dreidels for generations without imagining that an Antiochus would arise in America. Let alone that he would arise in New York.

In 2020, Chanukah came early when another abominable tyrant, fresh from killing 11,000 nursing home residents by forcing facilities to accept infected coronavirus patients, decided to adopt the medieval habit of blaming the virus on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. A swarm of inspectors from every department were sent out to schools and then to the hidden schools.

And in 21st century America, children huddled in basements, afraid to make a noise, and then, if Cuomo’s men found them, were ready to claim that they weren’t in school, just playing games.

A month before Chanukah and Christmas, the Supreme Court's conservative justices, three of them appointed by President Trump, delivered a Christmas present in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo and a Chanukah present in Agudath Israel of America v. Cuomo. Like his Syrian-Greek predecessor, Cuomo furiously raged at the restraint imposed on his power.

Cuomo’s hatred for religion is driven by the same mad idolization that had led Antiochus to take Epiphanes, ‘the visible god’, as part of his name. Antiochus had put idols in the temple, Cuomo had placed his self-idolizing coronavirus memoir into the windows of every bookstore.

That egotistical hatred of a G-d that isn’t a culture war idol, that isn’t named Cuomo, Obama, or Ginsberg, is why the battle for religious freedom is far from over in this longest of Chanukahs.

When the pandemic lockdowns arrived, I was still completing the mourning year for my mother. In Jewish tradition, losing a parent ushers in a year of grief. I did not listen to music or attend parties, and I spent an hour each day traveling to synagogue to lead prayer services in her memory. The recital of the Kaddish, praising G-d, is said to uplift the souls of the deceased.

And then all the synagogues were forced to close.

In a dark time when the New York Post dispatches undercover investigators to do Cuomo’s work for him and spy on Jewish weddings, when the media breathlessly digs up tales of secret prayer gatherings (“Post the names and addresses, expose them,” a quote in one Los Angeles article read, “If you have information and say nothing then you could be endangering lives”), few dare to speak of the underground prayer railroad. But what more needs to be said of the state of 21st century America than that there were underground churches and synagogues.

My mother was born in the Soviet Union. As a teenager, she had terrified her parents, who had witnessed their family members being imprisoned and executed, by rejecting Communism. After being expelled from school and barred from higher education, she had joined the Jewish underground networks that had gathered together in homes to sing Jewish songs, to illegally copy Hebrew dictionaries, commemorate the Holocaust, and covertly bake Matza for Passover.

Americans tend to think of such a loss of freedom as an alien and unimaginable state. This year taught us how thin the line that divides us from the age of Antiochus or the age of Stalin really is.

For now, the synagogues are open again and many of the religious schools in Los Angeles are teaching students though some, in an echo of the dreidel, are operating officially as day camps.

The Supreme Court decision that halted some of the declarations by the modern Antiochus and his Democrat peers that religion, unlike cannabis dispensaries and film shoots, is non-essential, would not have happened if President Trump and Senate Republicans hadn’t put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. When religious freedom hangs by the fraying thread of a single justice, even as Democrats plot to seize Georgia Senate seats and pack the court, then it’s hardly there even if for the moment some of the worst Democrat depredations were halted.

The tragic truth is that if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were alive today, Chanukah would be cancelled. It would be cancelled with the connivance of her, and of Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan, much as Christmas would be cancelled with the connivance of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor. The irony of Tikkunolamists of Jewish descent lighting a menorah shaped like Ginsburg, to honor an activist who would have cancelled Chanukah escapes them, much as the problem with sacrificing pigs in the temple baffled Antiochus’ Jewish collaborators

Tikkunolamism is the modern Hellenism, a militant pagan secularism that idolizes utopian culture heroes while disdaining the intangible idea of the holy presence of an unseen G-d.

Antiochus placed idols in the temple and ordered that pigs be sacrificed because he only understood religion as power. To defile something sacred was to wield power over it. In their culture wars, leftists follow the same obsessive pattern of degradation, using elephant dung and urine on Christian symbols, draping naked women in the symbols of the Jewish faith, ridiculing Chanukah in the pages of the New York Times, and making the menorah into a mockery.

And when that doesn’t work, there’s always compulsion under the guise of a greater good.

Antiochus had taken the surname Epiphanes, meaning ‘the visible god’, to mock the invisible G-d. But the power of G-d had made a mockery of his armies, his blasphemies, and his rule.

The power of Chanukah, and of faith, is in the unseen, from the force that caused a single flask of oil to burn in the Menorah for eight days, to the covert Torah being studied by the children as they pretended to spin a top, to the hidden omnipotent might of an unseen G-d.

And this year, the suppression of public prayers made us appreciate them all the more.

Religious freedom and all that comes with it is all too often taken for granted. It can be difficult to relate to our ancestors who sacrificed so much for their faith when we don’t need to sacrifice. When the mandates, decrees, and lockdowns came down, we saw the unseen, the preciousness and precariousness of our religious freedom, that we had taken for granted.

Out of the dark times, we experienced the smallest taste of what our ancestors had endured to keep the faith, and through that renewed the meaning to be found in holidays like Chanukah.

Religious people respond to religious persecution by seeing the unseen. It is the unseen that is the source of faith in a world that places its confidence in material power above all else. And the insights and the might of the unseen make a mockery of the worst of that blasphemous power.

Another Chanukah arrives in a world in which Antiochus can be found in Albany, New York, in which the synagogues and schools open today might be forced to be shut tomorrow, and in which the ideological faction that makes a point of defiling Chanukah along with most religion, which would close most houses of worship if it could, plots to lay claim to the White House.

When George Washington visited the family of a Jewish officer, a story relates that he told them of first encountering the Menorah in the hands of a Jewish soldier at Valley Forge.

"Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees' success, though it is long past,'' Washington had supposedly said. "It pleases me to think that miracles still happen."

Even in the darkest period of a dark year, we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. Neither the trials nor the triumphs of faith are long past. And miracles still happen.

 Before the election, Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute marked Georgia, along with Florida, as one of the states where the Jewish vote could help decide the election.

Georgia has 103,000 Jewish voters and Democrats had been counting on them to flip the state.

With a Senate election and special election, two Senate seats were up for grabs, and Democrats threw money at former Al Jazeera collaborator Ossoff and activist Warnock.

Jon Ossoff raised $32 million in the Senate election, outspending incumbent Senator Perdue by almost 50%, with much of the money coming from California. Over $50 million was spent on pro-Ossoff ads alone.

In the Senate special election, Democrats raised over $21 million for radical activist Raphael Warnock.

Warnock had signed on to a statement falsely accusing Israel of being an apartheid state, falsely describing Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, as an “occupied” territory oppressed by Israel, and falsely claiming that “Jewish” people engage in “segregation”.

The letter signed by Warnock also ranted that, "Israeli fear... begets hatred" and demanded an end to weapons sales to Israel.

Warnock had defended Jeremiah Wright’s bigotry, but now said he disavowed antisemitism.

Despite Warnock’s hostility toward the Jewish State, he was backed by the Jewish Democratic Council of America over Matt Lieberman, Senator Joseph Lieberman's son.

Soros' Bend the Arc PAC aggressively supported Warnock as their man in Georgia.

“Raphael Warnock knows our Georgia Jewish community,” an ad by the anti-Israel group, founded by a former sex club dancer who had participated in anti-Israel protests, claimed.

The Jewish community of Georgia knew Warnock all right. And it spilled over to Biden.

The Associated Press exit poll showed that 48% of Georgia Jews voted for President Trump and 49% for Joe Biden: a near split. While Trump’s strong record on Israel and fighting antisemitism abroad and at home no doubt helped, it’s hard to dismiss the Warnock factor.

Georgia Democrats had backed a candidate who had ties to a notorious antisemitic figure and who had signed a letter accusing Israel of apartheid and segregation, and Trump took home half the Jewish vote. The situation isn’t likely to get any better as Warnock heads to a runoff.

In the other Senate race, Jon Ossoff tried to accuse his Republican opponent of antisemitism, claiming that an ad had given him a nose job, but Ossoff had collaborated with Al Jazeera, Qatar’s violently antisemitic propaganda network, which backs Hamas, had featured calls for another Holocaust, and which had been sued by former employees for antisemitism.

His mentor, Rep. Hank Johnson, had even compared Jews in Israel to termites.

Ossoff is unsurprisingly anti-Israel and was backed by big spending from J Street: the anti-Israel lobby group. He's also a supporter of the Iran nuclear sellout which funneled billions to the Islamic terror state and signed off on its nuclear program with no inspections on the ground.

Democrats had hoped to use Ossoff, who has Jewish ancestry, to mobilize Jewish voters, but the AP exit poll suggests that Ossoff was as helpful as Warnock.

In New York, Governor Cuomo and local Democrats had decided to use the final months before Election Day to scapegoat Orthodox Jews for their failure to manage the pandemic. These false accusations were bolstered by deeply dishonest media smears and discriminatory enforcement.

What was the response to this systemic antisemitism by the Democrat establishment?

In a number of majority Chassidic Jewish areas in Brooklyn, President Trump won between 80% to 90% of the vote. That’s not a new development. Republican presidential candidates usually walk away with the vast majority of the vote in Orthodox Jewish areas in New York.

In Rockland County, Trump won the majority of the vote even though registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1.

But no Republican can get to the White House through New York even if he’s a famous New Yorker. It’s a very different story in Florida where so many former New Yorkers ended up.

Florida has the largest Jewish population of any swing state and it has one of the largest Jewish communities of any state. And while there are plenty of Jewish conservatives in Florida, the Jewish vote out of Florida tends to favor the usual Democrat hacks. But not this time.

The Associated Press exit poll showed that 43% of Jewish voters had backed President Trump.

A J Street poll had claimed that Jews would go for Biden by 73% over Trump. Like everything the anti-Israel and pro-terrorist group founded by Soros money claims, it wasn't true.

As Jonathan Tobin at JNS notes, "Trump got about at least somewhere in the vicinity of 150,000 Jewish votes. In a competitive state where he wound up winning by only 377,000 votes.”

Before running for office, President Trump had almost as sizable a presence in New York as he did in Florida, and local Jews have stories of him opening up Mar-a-Lago to Jews and making its kitchens Kosher at a time when most private clubs on the island continued to bar Jews.

“No one called Mar-a-Lago a Jewish club, but especially in the early years, that’s what it was,” an otherwise negative Vanity Fair article noted.

And again there’s no question that President Trump’s pro-Israel policies were a game changer.

But the antisemitic incident that dominated local Jewish news in Florida this year didn't happen at a private club in Palm Beach, but in a high school.

William Latson, a high school principal, had responded to an email from a parent asking about Holocaust education by arguing, “Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.”

In its own October surprise, the Palm Beach County School Board voted to rehire the Holocaust denying principal and pay him six figures in back pay.

Racial tensions were stirred by the vote because Latson is black and of the four board members that initially voted to rehire him, two, Marcia Andrews and Debra Robinson, were black, and, more significantly, all four, had close connections to Democrat and leftist organizations.

Robinson had been endorsed by SEIU, NOW, the AFL-CIO, and the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council Voters Alliance. Marcia Andrews had been backed by SEIU, Barbara McQuinn and Chuck Shaw were backed by the Palm Beach County Human Rights Council Voters Alliance.

Shaw, a former Democrat official, had blamed the scandal on reporters who "took over this entire conversation before the superintendent had an opportunity to even begin to address this.”

After the public outcry, the board voted again, and rescinded the move, perhaps realizing that the last thing Democrats needed right before an election was an antisemitism scandal.

But by then it was too late.

There’s no way to know what impact the scandal had on the Florida Jewish vote, but the spectacle of Democrats signing off on Holocaust denial could hardly have helped.

While the media trumpets national polls that claim that the vast majority of Jews voted for Biden, the AP’s own exit polls in Florida and Georgia raise serious questions about those claims. And the state of the Jewish electorate in swing states is far more significant than national polls.

What happened in Georgia, Florida, and parts of New York shows significant fractures between the Democrat organizations trying to control the Jewish vote and Jewish voters in key areas.

President Trump’s ability to win over around 1 in 2 Jewish voters in Georgia and Florida is a warning that Democrat antisemitism carries a price, and that throwing money at astroturf groups like J Street and Bend the Arc that don’t represent Jews and never will, is not the answer.

If anything it only makes things worse.

Covering up antisemitism with Democrat candidates that have Jewish last names and a hatred for the Jewish state, with radical politicians who attack Jews and then expect astroturf lefty groups to bring in the Jewish vote, isn’t working anymore. Neither is peppering ads with, “Oy”, “Schlepp”, and “Gevalt” in a condescending minstrel show effort to relate to Jews.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida had famously replied, “abortion”, when asked why Jewish voters should cast their votes for Obama.

That’s not going to cut it anymore. Neither are videos by Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen.

Democrats expected Jewish voters to help them flip Georgia and Florida. Instead, Jewish voters flipped them off and voted for President Trump.

If Democrats can’t rein in their antisemitism, next time they may not split the Jewish vote in Florida.

They could lose it outright.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Every year, Shiite Muslims in Flushing, Queens conduct the Arbaeen, a procession in honor of Mohammed's grandson whose death at the hands of a Sunni caliph marked the pivotal break between Shiites and Sunnis, slapping their faces and chests for their beheaded Imam Hussein.

Queens now has a large Muslim population, and regular fall processions of wailing crowds.

After the synagogue had been vandalized a few days earlier, Rosen had warned that in the Austrian city, “we are dealing with a stronger left wing and anti-Israel antisemitism,”

Rosen's concern was understandable since some of the graffiti smeared on the wall around the synagogue read, “Free Palestine” and "Our language and our country is Palestine". A second attack by the same perpetrator on the Sabbath Eve had smashed the synagogue’s windows.

The wall that the Islamic attacker had vandalized was made out of bricks from the ruins of the original Graz synagogue that had been destroyed by the National Socialists. The synagogue, which had been rebuilt only two decades ago, serves Graz’s tiny surviving Jewish community.

Austrian Jews know better than to take such slogans lightly. One of the worst episodes of antisemitic violence after the National Socialist period had been an assault by two PLO Islamic terrorists on a synagogue where a Bar Mitzvah was taking place. The terrorists had opened fire with machine guns and thrown hand grenades into the synagogue. A woman who had rolled on a hand grenade to protect the children died. A number of other congregants were wounded.

When Rosen asked the bearded man what he was doing, the vandal attacked him with a chair leg, and fled on a mountain bike. When the police caught him, he expressed no remorse.

The Syrian Muslim refugee justified his actions by citing his religion: Islam, and Islamic law.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose horrifying move forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients may have killed between 6,000 and 11,000 senior citizens, has vowed to crack down.

On Jewish weddings.

“Whether it’s young people at a bar or religious people at a wedding, it’s the same thing to me. It’s ignorant, it’s disrespectful and it violates the law,” Cuomo fumed.

Religious people being ignorant, disrespectful, and violating the law by attending a wedding is awful. But when celebrities want to perform at MTV’s VMA awards, they get a special exemption from quarantine regulations because Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and Miley Cyrus gyrating on a stage is respectful, whereas the communal celebration of G-d and family life is disrespectful.

After Black Lives Matter - Los Angeles, a hate group which has partnered with the Nation of Islam and whose lead organizer praised Farrakhan, led a protest that resulted in mass attacks on Jewish schools, stores and synagogues, the leaders of 22 left-wing Jewish organizations signed letters condemning not the attacks, but the Jewish leader who spoke out against the antisemitism of the racist hate group. They made no reference to the BLM attacks on Jews.

The letters singled out Mort Klein, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, for describing Black Lives Matter as, among other things, "antisemitic," "Israel hating", and "extremist". They did not offer a rebuttal to this accurate description because none is possible.

Instead, a letter signed by 16 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, accused Klein of hate and divisiveness. The letter's signatories, including HIAS and Americans for Peace Now, included groups notorious for their hostility toward Israel.



A separate letter by a slate of militantly anti-Israel groups, including J Street, The New Israel Fund, which sponsors BDS hate groups, and T'ruah, which has led a soft BDS campaign against Israel, demanded Klein's expulsion from the Conference. That aligns with their previous calls for the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from historic parts of Israel.

The signatories to the letters by Conference members included the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, whose previous CEO had signed a letter in defense of Linda Sarsour and agreed to work with antisemitic and anti-Israel groups, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Women of Reform Judaism, and Rick Jacobs, the anti-Israel head of the Union of Reform Judaism.

Jacobs had previously welcomed Ayman Odeh who heads Hadash, a merger of the local Communist Party, and whose current Joint List coalition includes a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, and praised his, “inspiring vision”. But Jacobs doesn’t think that Klein has an inspiring vision, protesting that, “Black Lives Matter is at the center of one of the most critical fights for justice in our country”, while accusing Klein of “Islamophobia” and “racism”.

The Union of Reform Judaism has been a reliably anti-Israel voice in the Jacobs era.

Jacobs opposed moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and whined that, “Israel’s decision to bar U.S. Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering the country is wrong”.

Last year, Jacobs attacked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for stating that Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria were "not inconsistent with international law". These rants, like so many others by Jacobs, were all issued in the name of the Union of Reform Judaism.

While the Union of Reform Judaism found time to issue multiple press releases in support of Black Lives Matter, against the Jewish State, on the vital Jewish issue of withdrawing US troops from the Turkish-Syrian border, and in defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Jacobs and the URJ failed to acknowledge or offer solidarity to the victims of black nationalist terrorist attacks against a synagogue in New York and a Kosher grocery in New Jersey.

The URJ and Jacobs did manage to issue a press release over the shooting in a Texas Walmart and will respond to bomb threats and synagogue shootings, as long as they're carried out by white nationalists. If your synagogue is attacked by a Neo-Nazi gunman, Jacobs and the URJ will acknowledge it, but if a Black Hebrew Israelite swinging a machete attacks your synagogue on Chanukah, Rick and the URJ will rush out a press release blasting Israel over something.

That’s the fundamental problem that Mort Klein was getting at. Jewish lives don’t matter to the URJ. Not in Israel and not in America. The only thing that matters is its left-wing politics.

While the Jewish community of Los Angeles witnessed its synagogues and schools vandalized and stores looted over Shavuot, Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, was praising the "national rage" which saw bigots chanting "F____ Jews" and defacing the statue commemorating the Holocaust heroism of Raoul Wallenberg.

A URJ statement declaring that Black Lives Matter is a “Jewish value”, falsely accuses "white Jews" of perpetuating "the systemic racial injustices on which the nation was founded."

That’s a line that could have come from Farrakhan.

Even as Jacobs complains about divisiveness, the URJ is dividing Reform Jews by race.

The URJ's embrace of Black Lives Matter includes the worst elements of its philosophy, including mandated intersectionality for Reform congregations, dismissal of colorblindness, and black supremacist resource texts that include Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, as well as James Baldwin's 70s essay, Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White.

There's even a White-Ashkenazi Awareness Checklist.

The racist movement here isn’t the ZOA. It’s the signatories to the anti-Klein letter.

When Jacobs and 15 other Conference members sign on to a letter urging Jews to stand up "against senseless hatred and divisive bigotry" and "not to search for ways to keep us apart", they might start by looking at their own embrace of divisive bigotry meant to keep us apart.

Mort Klein and the Zionist Organization of America are willing to address the everyday antisemitism that Jews in places like New York and Los Angeles have been experiencing. And they’re willing to do it even when the bigots aren’t members of a safely discredited ideology.

There’s no great courage in taking on Third Reich supporters in 2020. The time to do it was during the Holocaust while the FDR administration and Joseph Kennedy were warning American Jewish leaders to keep quiet about the mass murder of millions of Jews. Where were URJ’s marches, protests, and sit-ins while Jews were being shot and gassed?

Reform Jewish leaders had gone to Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, asking them to issue a joint statement condemning the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

The Republican agreed and the Democrat didn’t.

Or take it from Morris Waldman, the former rabbinic leader of the prominent Temple Anshe Emeth, and the long deceased executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee.

"Some Jewish groups have some too many times protested against Hitlerism," Waldman complained.

Waldman is fondly remembered, within liberal Jewish organizational circles, as the "the first proponent of putting the human rights provisions in the United Nations Charter."

There can hardly be a better summary of the utter moral bankruptcy of the same folks now accusing Jews of racism and white supremacy for fighting against antisemitism.

The Zionist Organization of America is part of the proud tradition of Jewish groups that refused to kneel to political correctness when Jews were being attacked by politically correct mobs.

Black Lives Matter is antisemitic. Its leaders declare that they’re Marxists. Portions of the movement are openly aligned with Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Synagogues and schools have been defaced and a Holocaust memorial was vandalized. But the organized kneelers are trying to silence any members of the Jewish community who speak out against antisemitism.

As the main targets of antisemitic violence, by either black or white nationalists, Jews and their synagogues need the police. By endorsing Black Lives Matter, the Union for Reform Judaism is undermining the safety and security of synagogues and worshipers across the country.

It’s time for URJ members to speak up and ask Rick Jacobs some hard questions.

Jewish history tells us that the real threat doesn’t come from those who speak too loudly about popular antisemitism, but those who remain too silent. There are far too many memorials and attacks on targets that carry no risk within their political cohort, and too little real resistance.

By speaking out, Morton Klein and the ZOA have offered real resistance to antisemitism.

Meanwhile, the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Jewish Women International, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Women of Reform Judaism, and the Union of Reform Judaism are complicit in covering up antisemitism and silencing those Jews who dare stand up to the vandalism of synagogues, schools, and Holocaust memorials by smearing them as racists.

Organizations that claim to speak for the Jewish community have sold it out instead.

The Jewish community does not need leaders who will accuse it of racism to score points at their Manhattan cocktail parties for the Public Art Fund, but real leaders who will stand up for it.

In an article accusing the Jewish community of racism, Rick Jacobs claimed that, “fighting racism and fighting antisemitism go hand in hand”.

We’ve seen a whole lot of the former and very little of the latter.

Fighting racism and antisemitism doesn’t go hand in hand when synagogues and schools are attacked, and Jews are shot, slashed and beaten.

The ugly truth is that Jacobs and other leaders of leftist groups would much rather fight Jews, whether in Israel or in America, than get up off his knees and fight for them. Fighting Jews is safe. Rehashing the rantings of Ibram X. Kendi and other fashionable black nationalists won’t get leftist leaders in trouble. Standing up to them over black nationalist antisemitism will.

Like their counterparts in the FDR era, they’re cowards and traitors, and they know it.

That’s why they’re going after the ZOA. There’s nothing that cowards hate more than brave men who stand up for the truth. The only thing more humiliating than selling out is knowing that there was another way. Rick Jacobs and the organizations targeting the ZOA want everyone in the Jewish community to kneel before the pogromists, the bigots, and the supremacist racists.

Their message is that if you don’t kneel, they will destroy you.

Over 2,300 years ago, there was a Jewish leader named Mordechai who would not kneel. For thousands of years, on the holiday of Purim, Jewish children have sung the name of a man who would not kneel to an antisemite. Kneeling is not extraordinary, refusing to do so is.

Many other Jewish leaders no doubt knelt. Their names have been lost to history.

Those Jewish leaders with weak knees today might ponder how they will be remembered.

"It was powerful for me the way he spelled it out,” Chelsea Handler said of Louis Farrakhan. "So whatever, you know, everybody can go f___ themselves.”

Handler, a comedian pushing a new book, was responding to the backlash over her praise for the racist black supremacist leader on Instagram. The people complaining about her praise for the bigot were Jews. And the celebrity was telling critics, including Holocaust survivors, to go “f___ themselves.”

Farrakhan had called Hitler a “great man”, ranted about “Satanic Jews”, and, more recently, claimed that Florida was suffering from the coronavirus because he had asked Allah to punish Cuban Jews.

In that same speech, he thanked Chelsea Handler for posting a clip of him on Instagram.



Handler decided to promote the antisemitic hate group leader to her 4 million followers as part of her newly woke brand which included a Netflix special, Hello, Privilege. It's Me, Chelsea, and her book, Life Will Be the Death of Me, from Penguin Random House. The theme of both the special and the book was Handler’s journey from self-absorption to wokeness by ranting about how horrible white people are.

Farrakhan had been ranting about how horrible white people are since Chelsea was in kindergarten.

"I learned a lot from watching this powerful video," Handler had told her followers

The obnoxious celebrity was well aware of Farrakhan's antisemitism, and defended him, arguing that, "perhaps Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic views took form during his own oppression."

While some celebrities have been cancelled for the smallest of missteps, there was no apparent sign that Penguin Random House or HBO Max, which will be airing a new standup special by Handler, were ending their relationship with the hateful celebrity. But perhaps something was happening behind the scenes because after telling Jews to “go f__ themselves”, she finally apologized and deleted the video.

The apology was stiff and unconvincing, but it was enough for her book tour to go forward, not just at Penguin Random House, owned by Bertelsmann, the massive German media giant whose owner had donated to the SS, put out exciting fare such as, "The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth", and benefited from Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust, but at Jewish federations around America.

After Handler touted an antisemitic bigot and told Jews who didn’t like it to "go f___ themselves", the Miami Jewish Federation is touting a Zoom evening with Chelsea Handler to sell her new book.

The 39th Annual Berrin Family Jewish Book Festival features Chelsea and her book, courtesy of the Alper JCC in Miami, and the JCCs of Atlanta, Boulder, Dallas, Ft. Lauderdale, Indianapolis, Nashville, Memphis, and St. Louis, who have all taken Chelsea’s advice and are “f____” themselves and their communities.

No word on whether they’re also willing to help sell "The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth".

Why exactly does Handler, who is descended from a German mother and Jewish father, whose grandfather was a Nazi soldier, and who once had her sidekick dress up as Hitler to celebrate Germany’s World Cup victory, and then touted a bigot who admires Hitler, belong at a family Jewish book festival?

The answer is that the Jewish federations of nine major cities are telling Jews to “f___” themselves.

It’s not just that politically correct antisemitism leads to very little in the way of a response from mainstream society, or even from the organizations that claim to represent local Jewish communities, but those same organizations actually help mainstream and reward the promoters of antisemitism.

Chelsea Handler knows perfectly well that she can promote Farrakhan or mock the Holocaust, and local Jewish federations will still eagerly line up to help her sell her books and make her even richer.

The Alper JCC claims that its mission is "providing programs and services that are rooted in and promote Jewish values, ethics and traditions". The Aaron Family JCC in Dallas claims that it wants an "environment defined by Jewish values and culture". The Marcus JCC in Atlanta claims that it's dedicated to "strengthening Jewish life" and creating "Jewish moments".

Which Jewish values does Chelsea Handler represent besides a suicidal embrace of leftist politics?

The only references to Jewishness in Life Will Be the Death of Me are negative or derogatory, and revolve around her Jewish father’s response to the death of her brother. Even without the Farrakhan, Hitler, and Holocaust stuff, Handler would be the last person to be associated with Jewish values.

But so are the Jewish federations and JCCs that made the hateful decision to help her sell books.

The unwillingness of organizations with lots of J’s and little Jewishness in them to take even the most basic of stands by cancelling an event with the granddaughter of a Nazi soldier who defended antisemitism and told Jews to “go f___ themselves” isn’t cowardice: it’s disinterest and contempt.

They don’t care.

They didn’t care during the Holocaust when millions of Jews were being killed. They didn’t care when Islamic armies and terrorists spent generations trying to wipe out the Jews of Israel. They don’t care about the big stuff, let alone the little stuff, like their celeb promoting a bigot who called Jews termites.

The vast infrastructure of the Jewish federations and the JCCs, the campus Hillels and the alphabet soup of national organizations, is a rotted mass of deadwood built long ago by people who at least had some distant sense that being Jewish mattered in some way. Built by German Jews, funded by deceased Jewish philanthropists, many of whom survived the Holocaust, they’re now just a sinecure for full-time professional non-profit fundraisers with their “inspiring” clergy and their incubators for leftist activists.

They exist to cadge money from elderly Jews who think that funding a building or a book festival with their name on it at the local JCC will be a meaningful legacy, instead of a forum for a Farrakhan supporter, by filling their fundraising letters with mentions of Jewish values, ethics, meaning, and other things they can’t define and don’t believe in. What do they believe in? As little as Chelsea Handler does.

They believe that Black Lives Matter, that the planet is in danger, that whatever Israel did last week was wrong, and whatever else their intellectual cohort of social media lefties happens to believe this week.

They’re as ignorant of what the Torah says as of the contours of the Martian mountains, but like the bigot they’re eagerly hosting, they know how to jump on the bandwagon of the cultural moment. The problem with actual Jewish values is that they are as eternal as their Creator and don’t fit into trends.

The cultural moment and its politics are momentary, filled with obvious contradictions when you try to apply them beyond the hashtags and the memes of the now. Jewish ethics and values might ask why antisemitism is acceptable, when racism isn’t, but the cultural moment has no use for consistency.

To be eternally in the moment is to have neither values nor ethics, Jewish or otherwise, and no future.

The vast billion-dollar infrastructure of organizations that are Jewish in name only are as happy to put their membership lists at the disposal of Chelsea Handler and Bertelsmann, as of Black Lives Matter. They stand for nothing, except for whatever members of their cohort are standing for now, and they make no impact on the Jewish community, and have no future once the donors and the money run out.

Chelsea Handler, like many of the celebs these organizations promote, represents them all too well.

There are no children, no values, and no future, but right now the drinks are flowing and the money is coming in as long as you spew whatever garbage is in the cultural moment without thinking about it.

Chelsea Handler's book is titled, Life Will Be the Death of Me. The Jewish view of life is that of a gateway to eternity. That's why the Talmud comments on Ecclesiastes 9:5 by saying that good people are considered living even when dead, while evil people are deemed dead even while they're still alive.

Life and death don’t exist in the present moment. It’s not the now that matters, but the future eternity.

There are a great many organizations with the ‘J’ in them that are already dead because they chose to exist in the political moment without caring about the Jewish past or the Jewish future.

Featuring Chelsea Handler is their way of telling their donors and members to, “go f___ themselves”.

After the end of Shavuot, the holiday in which Jewish people joyfully commemorate the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the Jewish community of Los Angeles concluded it by the new ritual of going to clean off the hateful graffiti from their houses of worship while picking up the broken glass from the black nationalist and radical leftist night of broken glass in Los Angeles.

One small business owner described a "late Saturday night with people driving down the Fairfax district streets screaming, 'effing Jews'".

At the latest count, at least 5 synagogues in the area were vandalized, as were three Jewish schools.



One would think that the hateful vandalism of 8 Jewish institutions and a mob screaming slurs after trashing Jewish businesses would lead to some sort of meaningful response. But that would be the optimistic perspective of people who haven't experienced the unmitigated level of cowardice and appeasement that comprises Jewish institutional life at virtually every level.

In June, my inbox has been littered with missives from assorted Jewish organizations, institutions, and even, shamefully, synagogues, some good and some bad, wringing their hands over George Floyd's death, and timidly condemning violent responses, while failing to mention the racist attacks on Jewish businesses and institutions by supporters of the anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter group.

While a few national organizations condemned the "F___ Israel" and "Free Palestine" graffiti on one synagogue, that has been the extent of it. Not only the Reform and Conservative movements, but the Modern Orthodox movements have largely remained silent about the defacement of synagogues and the destruction of Jewish businesses. The OU press office put out a release which mentions racism four times and the vandalized synagogues and businesses not at all.

The Rabbinical Council of America put out a press release describing Floyd's death as a "murder" while claiming to "stand together with all who fight racism, bigotry and hatred." Perhaps the RCA could also take a minute to stand with their Jewish brethren.

Major synagogues in the Los Angeles area have piously condemned racism, but not the hatred that defaced synagogues and schools. Many of those synagogues belonged to people from outside their community, but their solidarity, which reaches to a dead ex-con in Minneapolis, can't seem to stretch far enough to touch the Moroccan and Haredi Jews who suffered in the riots.

Generic condemnations of violence are not enough. Not only have Jewish organizations failed to call out the anti-Semitism of Black Lives Matter, they've effectively jumped on to its hateful cause. And they have maintained a hushed silence about the devastation wreaked on the Jewish community.

The same folks lecturing us on the dangers of remaining silent in the face of hate are silent when the hate is directed toward Jews. That is the sad legacy of American Jewish civil rights activism which fights anti-Semitism by joining together with anti-Semites to fight racism. A mere 70 years of folly isn't all that much when you're thousands of years old. But it ought to be enough. Let it be enough.

You don't fight anti-Semitism by running away from it. And certainly not by running toward it.

The purpose of fighting anti-Semitism isn't to defeat an abstract hatred. That's the dead end of fighting racism. It's to maintain our own rights and dignity. That's not a privilege we've always had.

But we do now.

Decency and self-respect alone compel us not to remain silent. And if we do remain silent, while chanting the cause of those who vandalized our houses of worship and shops, we will have neither decency nor respect. We will have become as contemptible in our own eyes as we already are in the eyes of the Black Lives Matters pogromists who did this knowing that there would be no response.

Fighting anti-Semitism doesn't mean launching educational programs. It means, as Mordechai told Esther, "If you remain silent now, salvation will come to the Jews from some other place, and you and your father's house will perish."

All those many generations ago, the Jews faced genocide because one stubborn old sage refused to take a knee before a brutal thug and abandon the aspirations of his people.

 A Jewish organization or synagogue that takes a knee before brutal thugs and refuses to speak up when Jews are attacked is not worthy of claiming to speak for Jews. It is not worthy of Jewish support or loyalty. I, personally, will not donate to any Jewish organization or synagogue that sends me a George Floyd letter, but says nothing of the pogrom in Fairfax. I encourage you to do the same.




UPDATE: The official Young Israel statement condemns both Floyd's death and the attacks on synagogues. 

An excerpt...

We believe that peaceful demonstrations are a foundation of our democracy. Hatred and violence are abhorrent behaviors that have no place in our society, and we commend the family of George Floyd for issuing a public call for peaceful protests in the wake of his heartbreaking death. Accordingly, we also believe that violent demonstrations and wanton attacks on businesses, including African American-owned establishments, are immoral and illegal, and we were shocked to learn about the murder of retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, an African American who was killed while trying to protect a local store from violent demonstrators. 

 We are also outraged that the vandalism and violence that we have seen over the past several days included attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, some of which were defaced with anti-Semitic messages. Just like the police force needs to be restructured to eliminate hate, it is crucial that those who are demonstrating peacefully make it clear that there should be no expressions of violence and anti-Semitism by any protestor in the context of the demonstrations. Fighting hate with hate is reprehensible and counterproductive, and we therefore support the efforts by law enforcement to maintain order, prevent looting, and end the violent demonstrations.

I don't agree with everything in the YI release, but I applaud them as the first Modern Orthodox organization which, to my knowledge, has commented on the attacks on synagogues and Jewish stores. I obviously also applaud the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) for its leadership in standing up for Israel and the Jewish community.



UPDATE 2:

The Conference of Jewish Affairs and Rabbi Aryeh Spero issued a statement condemning Black Lives Matter antisemitism and the attacks on Jewish institutions and shops. Here's an excerpt.

“We at the Conference of Jewish Affairs are appalled and angered by the wanton destruction that rioters in the Los Angeles area have wrought on Jewish synagogues, institutions, and shops in the significant Jewish area along Fairfax.  Much of the destruction and defacement of these Jewish synagogues and stores is deliberate and targeted acts of anti-Semitism.

“We have known for years that Black Lives Matters is an abhorrently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish organization.  This anti-Semitism has trickled down from Black Lives Matters into large segments of those rioting. 

“We are bewildered by the lack of any condemnation from the major Jewish organizations in Los Angeles or around the country against these willful acts of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews and Israel.  It seems that for many Jewish organizations the cause of Black Lives Matters is more important than the safety and dignity of Jewish institutions and individuals.  Once again, multitudes of Jewish people are being asked to sacrifice their safety and dignity in behalf of causes the Jewish leadership deems more important." 

This is a very strong statement that condemns the root hatred of Black Lives Matter while condemning the silence around the attacks on synagogues and shops.


UPDATE: Agudah probably has the strongest statement on the subject.

We are also greatly saddened by the frightening scenes of innocent bystanders and store owners under siege, threatened by violence and mayhem, and facing the prospect of lost livelihoods and uncertain futures. We are deeply distressed, as well, by the looting and vandalism that included assaults and provocations against citizens and law enforcement officers sworn to keep the peace and ensure the safety of our citizens. 

So, it is at this very moment that we remember our Torah’s admonition that it is precisely by extending compassion, empathy, and understanding to the strangers, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens in our midst – regardless of our racial or ethnic backgrounds – that we will be shepherded safely through these troubled times, and at all times. That it is by feeling the pain of others and building a sense of community that we will merit Heaven’s healing and unifying embrace.

Let us commit ourselves to that. And, in doing so, we pray that the Merciful One will guide American society and its leaders to ensure the rights and safety of all citizens. May peace among, and respect for, all sectors of American society emerge from this national trauma.

On a bloody Sabbath in 1929, a Muslim mob massacred the Jewish community of Hebron.

The mob used knives, axes, and stones to kill men, women, and children. Many of the women were raped before being murdered. The Islamist atrocities committed against them defy comprehension.

Pierre van Paassen, the Canadian journalist, described seeing, "severed sexual organs and the cut-off women's breasts". A more recent summary notes, “Photographs from the time show a girl struck on the head by a sword with her brain spilling out, a woman with bandaged hands, people with their eyes gouged out, a man whose hand had been savagely amputated, and other grisly sights.”

Who, outside the perpetrators, could endorse and support such crimes? The Communist Party.

The Morgen Freiheit, the Communist Party's Yiddish newspaper in New York, headlined its article, “The Arab Uprising is Spreading - Zionist Fascists Have Provoked the Arab Uprising.”

"It is not innocent blood," the Communist paper insisted, of the murdered religious students, and
families, "It is the blood of people who went to war against another people on alien land."

A resolution praised the massacre of Jews as a "revolutionary uprising of the Arab masses in Palestine."

The Freiheit even held a rally in support of the mass murder, rapes and mutilations by its Muslim allies.

Jewish communities in New York and Chicago reacted by burning copies of the Communist rag, and setting fire to the newsstands that sold it. Many Jewish newspaper sellers announced a boycott of the Freiheit. No one would advertise in the paper and buying it became a badge of shame. Anyone with the least bit of decency resigned. The remaining staff were expelled, reviled, and even beaten in the streets.

Like other Communist papers, the Morgen Freiheit endorsed the Hitler-Stalin pact. In response, Jewish workers assaulted Communists who tried to defend their alliance with the Nazis, calling them, “Communazis”, and taunting them with chants of, “Heil Hitler.” Even Freiheit staffers who had defended the massacre of Jews in Hebron began to drop out of the Communist paper.

80 years after the Hitler-Stalin pact, Bernie Sanders wrote an editorial, “How to Fight Antisemitism” for the Freiheit’s latest incarnation, Jewish Currents. The magazine had not run in Yiddish for a long time. And, officially, it was no longer Communist. Instead, you could see articles like, “In Defense of Marxism”, “Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist Humanism”, and “Why I'm (Still) a Marxist”. It was perfect for Bernie.

Like his Stalinist predecessors, Bernie stuck to the party line, and pretended that there was no such thing as leftist or Islamist anti-Semitism. He didn’t mention his position on the Hitler-Stalin pact.

The former Communist magazine had gotten a major relaunch last year under Jacob Plitman, a former deputy director of the anti-Israel group J Street U, to try and appeal to millennials who hate Israel. That meant fewer historical pieces about old Communists and Marxists, and more current hatred of Israel.

The reboot was funded by the Puffin Foundation run by the Rosensteins who also work with The Nation.

Now Jewish Currents is going back to its roots by bringing in Peter Beinart, who had called the murder of Jews by Islamic terrorists, “violent resistance”.

Terrorism, he had argued, was a “response to Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights.” And he suggested that, “the Israeli government is reaping what it has sowed."

Beinart is certainly reaping what he sowed as his career tumbles down into the media sewer.

In 2012, Beinart had partnered with the Daily Beast to launch Open Zion, an anti-Israel blog. It closed a year later after failing to find an audience for its hate. Beinart moved on to Haaretz, a red rag whose racist publisher urged “international pressure” to end, “Israeli apartheid”, whose world news editor boasted that he is an anti-Zionist, and whose former editor had urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “rape” Israel. "It had always been my wet dream to see this happen," the leftist told her.

Is there anywhere lower Beinart could go?

After Haaretz, he appeared at The Forward, the Morgen Freitheit’s old rival, which runs headlines like, "3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race” and "Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather."

There, he accused Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel of being “blind to the harm Jews cause.”

Last year, The Forward dumped its editor and cut 40% of its staff. Instead of taking the advice of Haman’s wife, Beinart doubled down and joined its old even more anti-Semitic Commie rival.

"I think a tremendous need for a kind of American progressive Jewish publication," Beinart babbled, explaining that he wanted to "confront what I see as the kind of moral corruption of the American Jewish establishment and its complicity in various ways with some of the things that Trump is doing and the direction that Netanyahu is taking Israel.”

The only moral corruption is 91 years of Communists, Marxists, and Lefties justifying the murder of Jews.

The Hebron massacre had been urged on by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, later popularly known as Hitler’s Mufti for his meetings with the Nazi leader and alliance with the Third Reich. The Mufti, an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood’s arms in Israel, which include Hamas.

The Syrian Islamist terror leader, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Mufti ally, whose Black Hand group carried out attacks against Jews in Israel, became the model for Hamas, its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Beinart spent the last decade promoting ties to Hamas. In 2009, he had hailed, “Hamas” as “U.S. Diplomacy's Final Frontier”. In 2011, he had insisted, “A shift in US and Israeli policy towards Hamas is long overdue.” Last year, he compared Israel’s blockade of Hamas to Hiroshima and the Soviet gulags.

There is a sense of history coming full circle as Jewish Currents, the magazine twice renamed and spun off from the Morgen Freiheit, returns to its folly, as King Solomon wrote, a dog returns to its vomit.

The Morgen Freiheit had been the Communist rival to The Forward, a socialist paper, but one that nonetheless opposed the Islamist massacres of Jews in 1929 and the Hitler-Stalin pact. In those days, any leftist with a shred of conscience or decency had left the Freiheit and the Communist Party for more moderate publications and organizations. Some even became patriots and conservatives.

Beinart has traveled the opposite road. Back in his New Republic days, he wrote after September 11, “The left has proved remarkably creative over the years at blaming virtually any Middle Eastern malfeasance...on the Jewish State.” Then he became the hack he was describing to advance his career.

After decades of blaming everything on the Jewish State, the Crisis of Beinartism has arrived.

Once upon a time, Beinart was touted by the elderly anti-Israel donors and their organizations as the young voice of a new generation. But the voice of a new generation is pushing fifty. And scrambling in the political basement to revamp an ancient Communist magazine as the voice of a new generation.

Beinartism has taken him on the opposite route of the Jewish intellectuals who left the Communist Party for the New Republic. Instead, Beinart left the New Republic for the reds.

What’s next for the leading anti-Israel pundit in America? Al Jazeera? Jacobin? Pravda?

And yet Beinart isn’t entirely wrong about a moral crisis in the Jewish community. When the Communist newspaper that was his current platform’s predecessor defended the Islamic murder of Jews, it was boycotted, its leading figures were driven out of Jewish organizations, and its offices were besieged.

91 years later, Beinart knows that he’ll be invited to speak at conferences, organizations, and events. Nearly a century ago, Jewish workers who were just scraping by put their few pennies on the line to take a stand against the Freiheit. Now, Jewish Currents will be circulated by the Jewish establishment groups.

After the Hitler-Stalin pact, Peretz Markish, a leftist Jewish poet in the Soviet Union, met up with an old friend of his. The latter showed Peretz an editorial written by Moyshe Nadir, once a leading figure in the Morgen Freiheit, who had declared that he was leaving the Communist paper after the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

"Moyshe Nadir has revealed that he raised a snake around his neck," Markish replied. "Only he nourished this snake around his neck? Only he alone? And maybe all of us weaned the snake? And a time may come when this full-grown snake will choke all of us.... Yes, if it keeps going like it's been going, the time will come that the snake wrapped around our necks will choke us."

A few years later, he joined the Communist Party. Four years later, he received the Stalin Prize. A decade after that original conversation, he was arrested and charged with being a Jewish nationalist.

In 1952, he was secretly executed.

Two decades later, Esther Markish, his widow, wrote a courageous open letter, imploring for international pressure on the Soviet Union to allow her to leave for Israel, "Help us, our writers, the conscience of our people, help us to return to the soil of our holy homeland."

There are two sides. The side of the snake, of Beinart, of the Morgen Freiheit and Jewish Currents, and the side of those who will be choked by the snake, in Hebron, Moscow, or New York City.

When we pay dues to an organization or a synagogue that invites Beinart, when we subscribe to a magazine that publishes him, then we, like that long-dead poet, are feeding the snake.

Once upon a time, Jews were outraged when the murder of their people was excused and defended. Today they continue attending synagogues, paying dues, and funding the establishment that invites the defenders of their murderers to appear on panels, speak at podiums, and sell their books.

That is the true moral corruption of the American Jewish establishment. And it is unforgivable.