The Phantom Establishment of the Jewish Anti-Israel Left
February 20, 2014 by Daniel Greenfi
Alan AldaÂ’s wife signed a letter denouncing the newly elected left-wing mayor of New York for doing AIPACÂ’s bidding. The Sandinista supporter had been accused of many things, but being an Israeli stooge wasnÂ’t one of them. Signing the letter, along with the spouse of that guy from MASH, were Martha Weinman Lear, the wife of the cousin of liberal producer Norman Lear, Eve Ensler of the Vagina Monologues and diet guru Jane Hirschmann author of Overcoming Overeating who took a break from obsessing over food to sail on a Jihad cruise to Gaza.
Signing on to the attack on Bill de Blasio for being a dirty Zionist were such faded celebrities of the literary left as Erica Jong, who hasnÂ’t written a single book that anyone can name in the forty years since Fear of Flying first came out and Gloria Steinem, who peaked around that same time.
These familiar names of the Manhattan cocktail party circuit who grind their teeth every time they hear NetanyahuÂ’s name, give way to the professional activists, the board members of the toxic American Jewish World Service, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Dorot, the Rabbis for Gaza and Rabbis for Obama and the men and women like Peter Beinart of Open Zion and Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace who have built their lives around the war on Israel as much as any Islamic Jihadist tinkering with a Kassam rocket in Gaza.
The radical clergy sign on; Rachel Brown Cowan, a Unitarian who married a Jewish writer for the Village Voice, added “Rabbi” to her name and began attacking the Jewish State after her husband’s death, Rolando Matalon, who has yet to find a Latin American Marxist group he wouldn’t embrace and Sharon Kleinbaum, a lesbian supporter of the Fast for Gaza that aids and abets the not particularly pro-lesbian Hamas.
Reading these names feels like reviewing the membership of a small familiar club. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone in the club hates Israel.
Between Erica Jong and Alice Kessler-Harris (the biographer of Anti-Israel Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Kessler described as having a “streak of Jewish anti-Semitism”) is Peter A. Joseph who pays for this whole dance, funding everything from Peter Beinart’s Open Zion to the Manhattan JCC whose anti-Israel turn has led to a pitched battle among members.
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These fading Feminist writers, Wall Street millionaires trying to buy social relevance, hippie social scientists who hit it big with books about food, sex or childrearing, radical rabbis holding forth to congregations who believe in religion as little as their preachers, are a phantom establishment; community leaders without a community except their own mutual approbation.
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A year after British comedian Stephen Fry appeared on a genealogy show to trace his mother’s Jewish roots, he signed on to a letter by British Jews, a group that he had never considered himself a member of, declaring its “independence” from the British Jewish establishment. The list included the expected collection of fading feminist authors, Marxist playwrights, historians and philosophers, as well as radical sociologists, pop psychologists and professional activists.
The “coming out party” of Independent Jewish Voices consisted of Marxist Jews who were notorious for hating Israel, the UK, industry, facts, mirrors and human civilization announcing that loudly in a letter that was covered by their media friends.
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When its anger is spent and its letters are signed, the children will play on in the hills and fields of Israel, neither knowing nor caring that there was once a Jane Hirschmann, a Mrs. Noel A. Buckner, a Rachel Brown Cowan or a Rebecca Vilkomerson that sought to do them harm.
The Phantom Establishment of the Jewish Anti-Israel Left | FrontPage Magazine
