“Israel is bewildered; They have now become among the nations
like an unwanted vessel.” Hosea 8:8

This line from the prophet Hosea has rung hauntingly true of late. This week, Amnesty International issued a report declaring Israel to be guilty of the Crime of Apartheid and calling for action by the international community. This but a couple of weeks after the siege at Colleyville, and on the same day that Whoopi Goldberg declared that the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism because Jews are white. For me, this is also in the midst of training after training and meeting after meeting about synagogue security, live shooter training, and how we protect our Hebrew schools without scaring our kids.

Each of these recent incidents exacerbates the rising fear and anxiety in the American Jewish Community even as antisemitic violence and language are becoming ever more commonplace, acceptable, and even lauded in significant segments of society. It reveals how deeply rooted antisemitism is; so deeply rooted that it has become invisible to many people, including many Jews.

Sadly, these recent events also reveal deeper layers of meaning and in the current public discourse and imagination about Jews.  

Let me start with the least consequential: Whoopi. Whoopi took the name Goldberg simply as a stage name because she thought her actual name Caryn Johnson didn’t stand out.

Whoopi argued that the Holocaust was not about race but simply about “man’s inhumanity to man.” She said it could not be about race because is was a fight between white people. She said we should all be honest about that, implying that Jews somehow are trying to coopt racism.

Of course, Whoopi is right: the Holocaust is about “man’s inhumanity to man” but so is every evil in history. What worries me is not that Whoopi said something stupid. We all do sometimes. What bugs me is that Whoopi, perhaps unwittingly, is perpetuating a narrative that repeatedly denies that Jews have ever been systematically oppressed as a despised race, but only as an internal intra-European fight among whites. In the service of current narrative in America about race, she is part of the trend to erase and rewrite Jewish history to fit a narrative that divides the world into indigenous people of color who are good and oppressed, and colonialist white people with privilege who are evil and do the oppressing. Americans have an unfortunate tendency to see the world through the lens of American narratives, projecting American racial history onto everything. Instead of helping us understand, it actually prevents us from seeing situations honestly and in all their complexity. It is a particularly misleading way of understanding Israel. Those on the left do this while apparently missing the irony that in the service of fighting white colonialism, they are participating in it by imposing America’s past on the world’s present. Whoopi had to keep pushing the idea that the Holocaust was not about race in order to preserve the ability to see the Jews as white colonialist oppressors. She also revealed how little even socially conscious people can be about the Holocaust and antisemitism.

The Colleyville siege was scary for all of us in this community. It hit home; it could have been us. What was shocking to me was the denial by person after person that this was in any way motivated by antisemitism, even as a rabbi and congregants were still being held hostage in a synagogue on Shabbat, taken during a Bat Mitzvah. Because the terrorist only wanted a Moslem woman released from prison, it wasn’t about the Jewish community. They seemed to miss that the woman he wanted to be released was herself a violent avowed antisemite.

They also missed that his belief that Jews at this little synagogue are so powerful that we control the President with a simple phone call IS the epitome of antisemitism. So were his repeated rants about Jews, how evil we are, how we control everything, and we are the only people Americans would care about. How wrong he is! 

If that had been a white supremacist taking hostages at a mosque or a black church and demanding the release of someone in prison for racially motivated violence, I simply can’t imagine the police, the FBI, or the people being held hostage trying to convince themselves that it was not racism or Islamophobia since their goal was simply to free a racist Islamophobe. As David Baddiel, author of Jews Don’t Count, points out, Jews are consistently excluded from being counted as examples of rising racism and hate because it doesn’t fit with the ideology of the progressive left that sees Jews as privileged and white, even as they simultaneously argue that race is entirely a social construct.

It is deeply concerning that in fighting racism, a large section of the left has felt a need to minimize and marginalize antisemitism, even though it is responsible for 70% of religiously motivated hate crimes in the US.

But it was the Amnesty International report that was most upsetting. I read the report, and I read their reports on several other nations and it struck me that somehow Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds doesn’t meet their definition of apartheid; nor Thailand’s treatment of Hmong, nor China’s treatment of the Uygers, nor Bhutan’s treatment of Hindus, Georgia’s treatment of Ossetians, nor the US’s treatment of Native Americans. Only Myanmar and Israel met their inscrutable definition. In their treatment of Gaza, there is almost no mention of Hamas or rocket fire and incendiary devices sent into Israel. Indeed, the history of the conflict, of decades of Palestinian terrorism, or intransigence on both sides is simply absent. They also declare that unless all Palestinian refugees from 1948 can return to their homes and claim reparations, Israel will continue to be apartheid.

Let’s be clear: Amnesty is saying that unless Israel gives up having a Jewish majority and being a Jewish state, Israel is Apartheid. In other words, Israel doesn’t have the right to exist. Jewish self-determination is apparently racist to Amnesty.  What began as a Sanctuary for Jews fleeing racist violence is not being singled out and accused of racist violence. The nation of the Jews has become the Jew of the nations.

Germany, Britain and the US rejected the report, as did all mainstream Jewish organizations, including the Reform movement and J-street. Richie Torres the progressive congressman also rejected it. Bassem Eid, the Palestinian Human Rights Activist and Monsour Abbas, the Head of Israel’s Arab Ra’am party and member of the current coalition government there have also rejected the idea that Israel is Apartheid.   

Before we dismiss it too quickly and go into defense mode, we need to look at the report and take in some of the difficult findings there. It is a difficult but important mirror for us to look into as we, as Jews and Americans, assess whether our love and connection to Israel is keeping us from seeing the situation honestly and clearly.

 It does not help us or Israel to let ourselves off the hook without honestly looking at where Israeli policies have veered from security into dehumanization and numbness at the situation. Judaism requires we look at ourselves honestly as individuals and as a people, even if Amnesty doesn’t.

Amnesty International is steeped with a bias, conscious or unconscious, of their own. Their report is based on the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. That convention defines Apartheid as “practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern African, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them…”  The term racial group is used over and over in every section of the document.

This means that Amnesty International is defining Jews and Palestinians as different races. This is particularly confusing given that we aren’t, especially in Israel where over half the population comes from Arab nations. It reflects a growing dogmatic need on the left to see Palestinians as “brown and indigenous” and Jews as “white and colonialist” so the conflict there fits neatly into their two-dimensional frame of history. That is how dogma and ideologies work. It is also how conspiracy theories work.

Once again, a dogma and conspiracy theory emerge that blames the Jews for everything while by necessity erasing our history of suffering. This is a larger project to rewrite Jewish history to make us the very epitome of white colonialism and therefore, the symbol of all that is most wrong with the world. Sound familiar?  We should not take it lightly.

This week’s Torah portion, T’rumah, is all about the need to build a Sanctuary, to carve out a space of holiness amidst all the danger, turmoil, and wilderness surrounding the people.  After these past weeks, I deeply resonate with the need for a sanctuary, but it seems a dream for another time.

But remember that the Torah is commanding us to build this Sanctuary, this Burning Man BC in the wilderness in a time of great turmoil and schism. Remember, they had just gotten through the golden calf debacle, internal massacres and then the attack of Amalek. Yet, that is when God says, “Build a Sanctuary!” Is this just narcissism on God’s part?

No. God saw that what the Israelites needed most -after all the infighting, worry, displacement, and trauma- was to come together and become a community. God saw that the best way to achieve this was not through fear, but through art and spirit, by the community coming together, donating from their hearts, the materials, time, and skill to make this elaborate art-filled sacred space.

Perhaps this portion comes at this time to teach us something. At a time when we are so focused on security, on fighting antisemitism, defending Israel, and the world in general seems upside down, we need

to remember to be sure to create communities where art and spirit are in the center. Otherwise, we lose our reason for being, our moral compass, and our ability to sense ourselves as being b’tselem Elohim, in God’s image. We must protect ourselves and make a space where we are safe, but safety is not sanctuary. Sanctuary is found in coming together with other people to create together, to build something positive and inspiring together, something larger than the sum of its parts, to create a community where what is sacred dwells in the center. To create a Sanctuary. Then, we can take a bit of the sacred eternal flame of these Sanctuaries of community into our hearts and our homes, so that when weeks like this break upon us, we might breathe, light the Shabbat candles, and sit knowing we are good, we are loved, and we are not alone.  Ken Y’hi Ratson.