More on Jewish Lesbians

Just after I mentioned this 1999 study on Jewish lesbians in Toronto - Alienated Jews: What about Outreach to Jewish Lesbians? I heard about the launch of a new anthology, Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires (straight from the lips of TheWanderingJew, who reports further on the launch's success over at Jewschool). That anthology deals specifically with the stories and experiences of women who identify as Orthodox, and it looks fascinating.

There has been a gratifiyingly large amount of work done on LGBT issues and inclusion in the Jewish community (BJPA has a growing collection), but much of it does tend to treat gay and bisexual men and women's experiences together, as though they were identical (and sometimes doesn't treat the T part of the phrase at all). Sometimes it is completely appropriate to not make distinctions, other times, more problematic, such as when the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards insisted on voting teshuvot which addressed gay men's and women's ordinations at the same time, even though the halachic issues involved diverge signifcantly.

Every study is limited by all kinds of real world considerations, and generally each new study is a valuable contribution. It is still disappointing that the 2009 study, Gay, Jewish, or Both? Sexual Orientation and Jewish Engagement, made no attempt to study the differences between men's and women's Jewish experiences and choices, except to note that "Men are about twice as likely as women to report that they are gay or bisexual (9.3% versus 4.5%)."

South Africa in the Narratives of Public Debate

Today London's The Guardian alleges that Israel negotiated with the government of South Africa in 1975, offering secretly "to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime." Three weeks ago Israel's Yediot Ahronot claimed that South African judge Richard Goldstone (eponymous of the Goldstone Report) "took an active part in the racist policies of one of the cruelest regimes of the 20th century."

These stories have in common an explicit linkage of the powerful historical narrative of South African apartheid to current issues involving the State of Israel: The Guardian claims the newly revealed documents "will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week's nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East" and, furthermore, "will also undermine Israel's attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a 'responsible' power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted." Yediot Ahronot quoted Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin as saying: "'The judge who sentenced black people to death... is a man of double standards... Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists, who are not subject to the criteria of international moral norms.'"

Clearly the "news" in these articles is not news because of the historical facts being reported in and of themselves, but rather because of the rhetorical usefulness of the facts for certain opinion-holders on contemporary issues.

The South African narrative has intersected with broader themes relating to world Jewry in countless ways in years and decades past, touching a remarkable number of issues. A few examples (out of hundreds) from the BJPA:

• Eugene Korn of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs noted in 2007 that liberal Christian churches have used "the model of apartheid South Africa" in seeking to pressure Israel with a divestment campaign.
• Canadian government official Irwin Cotler, reflecting on the virulently anti-Israel activities of the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, noted with dismay the same rhetorical linkage, observing that "A conference to commemorate the dismantling of South Africa as an apartheid state called for the dismantling of Israel as an apartheid state."
• Writing in The Reconstructionist in 1999, Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan saw the end of South African apartheid as a model applicable all over the world: "It is my belief that the miracle that has occurred in South Africa over the past few years can give us all a renewed hope that we may yet live to see healing throughout the world."
• The AJC's Jennifer L. Golub, summarizing issues of antisemitism facing South African Jewry in 1993, found South African Jews in an uncomfortable corner of the black-white struggle, facing various types of hatred and resentment from both white and black gentiles.
• In 1987, Cherie Brown (also of the AJC) noted that Israel's relations with apartheid South Africa represent one sticking point (among many) for dialogue between American Black and Jewish college students.

What makes the South African narrative such a powerful recurring theme in modern issues relevant to Jewry and Israel? One might answer: moral simplicity. After all, what could be more terrible than apartheid's hateful repression, and what more heroic than the struggle against it? This clear case of right and wrong makes linkage of players in other narratives to the protagonists and antagonists of the apartheid struggle a tidy shorthand for asserting similar moral clarity in other conflicts.

One might also answer, however, that the reason this narrative is invoked by so many sides of so many conflicts lies precisely in its moral complexity. Is genuine reconciliation with former enemies possible? Is it right? Does it work? What does it require of each side? How do diplomatic engagement and diplomatic ostracization affect governments? How much oppression obligates members of a society to rebel against that society using force? Are Jews (seen as and/or perceive themselves to be) insiders or outsiders to power?

How do you think the image of apartheid South Africa functions in current public debates, and for what purposes? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Outreach

When I hear 'outreach,' I think of
1. Chabad
2. Intermarriage
Sometimes the other way around.

The issue of intermarriage and the concept 'outreach' often travel together. The majority of BJPA articles directly concerned with outreach published since 1990 explicitly focus on intermarried couples and their families.

That hasn't always been the case!

The earliest article BJPA has with 'outreach' in the title is from 1970, when we were concerned about outreach to adolescents, then schools, then the elderly, then recent Jewish immigrant groups, then the marginally affiliated, until 1990, when intermarriage/interfaith issues seem to have established a pretty firm claim on the term.

One blatant exception is the 1999 article Alienated Jews: What about Outreach to Jewish Lesbians? On the other hand, recent articles that don't focus entirely on intermarriage focus on outreach to families with young children.

What happened? It can't be that we've finished the work with adolescents, the elderly, immigrant, and marginalized Jews, but considering the question prompts reflection on the full spectrum of insider/outsider boundaries (both religious and cultural) in American Judaism, and raises a potential criticism on a newer term, 'inreach,' a concept problematized by Hayim Herring and Kerry Olitzky in their article, Outreach vs. Inreach: An Unnecessary Dichotomy.

Jewish University Students - 1937

I'm sad to say that my 1937 Jewish counterparts fell behind the general population in the college attendance gender gap - only 33% of college students were women, verse %42 of the broader population. At least someone was counting though!

The B'nai Brith Hillel Foundation (that's what it was) commissioned a study of the American and Canadian Jewish student community in 1935, and counted 105,000 "Jews and Jewesses" in college, comprising 9% of the entire student community.

The report, titled The Jewish Student in America, goes into detail on where Jews are studying (overrepresented in Massachusetts, underrepresented in New York City), what they're studying (in professional school, largely dentistry, law, and pharmacy), and what Jewish organizations serve them.

For example, it finds that students are well served by social organizations like Jewish fraternities and sororities (1/6th of students belong to a social organization), likely because at the time, "Practically all national social fraternities and sororities of non-Jewish origin [did] not admit Jews as members." on the other hand, "facilities for religious and cultural activity among Jewish students are extremely defective," and the report recommends urgent work in expanding religious and cultural resources.

Elvis Costello cancelled his concert

Elvis Costello is the latest in a line of celebrities to cancel his Israel concerts for political reasons. Israeli Culture Minister, Limor Livnat, not surprisingly, thinks this is a bad thing:

A singer who boycotts Israeli fans "is not worthy of performing in front of them."

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who traveled to Israel to receive a prize from Tel Aviv University, is another dissenter:

We don’t do cultural boycotts... Artists don’t have armies. What they do is nuanced, by which I mean it is about human beings, not about propaganda positions.

Atwood specifically takes a stance as an artist, but economic boycotts are also a perennial issue for Jewish communities. The San Francisco Jewish community recently issued a new policy to, among other things, prevent its grantees from supporting any kind of Israel boycott movement. The JCPA report - The Battle for Divestment from Israeli Securities in Somerville, analyzes another local struggle that had wider impact on the Jewish community.

Ben Cohen's 'The Ideological Foundations of the Boycott Campaign Against Israel' offers a broad analysis of this phenomenon, and Divestment from Israel, the Liberal Churches, and Jewish Responses: A Strategic Analysis, another discrete example.

Jews and the Supreme Court

Elena Kagan's recent nomination to SCOTUS has brought attention to Jews and the Supreme Court - if confirmed, she would be not only the third woman (in history) but also the third Jew (sitting now) on the American Supreme Court, making that institution one third Jewish!

(She was also, through her own struggles, the first girl to have a bat mitzvah at New York's (Orthodox) Lincoln Square synagogue.)

What else do Jews have to do with the courts?

For one:

The American Jewish Committee has been filing 'amicus curiae' briefs in the Supreme Court since 1923. AJC in the Courts:2008 reports on their briefs filed on cases relating to separation of church and state, civil rights and civil liberties (including gun control, reproductive rights, and school integration), religious liberty, and Holocaust restitution.

I don't think anybody will be shocked at the generally liberal positions taken by the AJC, though they are not entirely uncontroversial. Yossi Prager's recent article, Day School Sustainability: Ours to Achieve, disagrees with their position on government funding for religious education, for example.

For more details, the AJC's litigation reports from the last decade or so are available on BJPA. Each report summarizes the case and then the position taken in the AJC's brief.