Reviewing: “Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership,” Compiled and edited by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, published by Wicked Son, an imprint of Post Hill Press, ISBN: 978-1-63758-879-6, 2023.
How did we get here, to a point where Jews wearing kippot are attacked on the streets of New York City, and the offenders are out on bail by the evening, if they’re even apprehended at all? Or worse, why are American Jews gunned down simply for being in a synagogue or a kosher supermarket in Pittsburgh, Poway and Jersey City? According to two co-authors, the answer is that American Jews started worshiping other gods.
Who are these gods? The social justice, equity and inclusion movements, belief for and against various “-isms,” like anti-racism, and the wholehearted belief in the Palestinian victim narrative and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), which runs gleefully unchecked on American college campuses.
Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, two community organizers and the co-founders of the Boston-based Jewish Leadership Project, believe that the major organizations of the secular American Jewish community have changed their priorities to align with Judaism’s most ardent enemies in the name of tikkun olam (healing the world). Unfortunately, by doing that and by adopting various causes related to social justice, the view of the Jew as a servant of God and as a light unto the nations is being snuffed out.
In their book, “Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership,” Jacobs and Goldwasser compile 22 essays that they believe show how various organizations tasked with protecting the Jewish community have actually accomplished quite the opposite. The essays’ authors, many of them well known right-wing commentators, focus their arguments almost entirely on the threat to Jewish continuity from the left wing.
Jacobs and Goldwasser lead by delivering a stinging indictment of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the North American Jewish Federations and the Networks of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs). Later, they also condemn the Reform Jewish movement for siding with social justice movements against Israel and American Jewry. The essay collection “is intended to publicly critique a failing Jewish establishment with the full understanding that many Jews view such rebukes as divisive and prefer to show unity,” they write.
“Ironically, for too many American Jews, the democratically elected leaders of the Jewish state can be pilloried time and again, but the undemocratically, donor-selected leadership here may not be questioned as this would ‘break Jewish unity.’”
Through articles by politically conservative heavy hitters like Alan Dershowitz, Morton A. Klein, Jonathan Tobin, Caroline Glick and others, the book paints a bleak picture of a Jewish world literally destroying itself, by making political choices over religious ones, justifying social justice fads and moving away from Jewish law in the name of religion.
From Jewish Link, here.