Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם. March 29, 2008: Make the World a Better Place » Evangelicals: ‘Killing’ Jews With Christian Kindness

A group called World Evangelical Alliance bought a full-page N.Y. Times ad (at least $120,000) this week. A bigger waste of money I’d have a hard time conceiving. Nearest I can tell, the basic message is: “Jews, we love you. But we don’t love you enough to stop proselytizing you or converting you. In fact, we really don’t care what you think of that, since it’s more important to us to keep doing this than it is to respect your wishes that we not do so.” And the real kicker was the evangelical signatories who insisted that converted Jews like Jews for Jesus and messianic Jews are still authentic Jews who despite becoming Christian have a right to call themselves Jews for the purpose of insinuating themselves into the lives of unsuspecting Jews they seek to convert.

The ad is quite a performance. Full of fake love and respect attempting to conceal presumptuousness and condescension toward Jews. The odd thing is that the ad pretends it is directed as a friendly communique to Jews. I actually took it as a declaration of war. So if it was supposed to say anything positive toward Jews it failed miserably on that score. In truth, I think it was meant more for an evangelical audience to reconfirm their certainty that they are right in their efforts to convert the Jews.

The ad begins well enough:

As evangelical Christians, we want to express our genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people. We sadly acknowledge that church history has been marred with anti-Semitic words and deeds; and that at times when the Jewish people were in great peril, the church did far less than it should have.

We pledge our commitment to be loving friends and to stand against such injustice in our generation.

But it quickly goes downhill:

• At the same time, we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and Scriptural expression of our friendship toward Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
• We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12).

FTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008

Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics - and occasionally their religious organisations - gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].

In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.

Pope Benedict XVI (AP)

ADL slams Vatican over revised prayer for conversion of Jews - Haaretz, February 7, 2008

The Vatican has come under fire from Jewish groups in recent days for changing its Good Friday service to include a prayer urging God to let Jews “recognize Jesus Christ as savior of all men.”

Earlier this week, Pope Benedict ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at traditionalist Good Friday services, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ.

But the Anti-Defamation League has called the changes “cosmetic revisions,” saying that the prayer is still “deeply troubling” because of its call to convert Jews.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer - which has retained the name Prayer for Conversion of the Jews - also excludes a former a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

Ian Fisher, Pope’s Rewrite of Latin Prayer Draws Criticism From 2 Sides - New York Times, February 6, 2008

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued a replacement for a contentious Good Friday prayer in Latin, removing language that many Jewish groups found offensive but still calling for the Jews’ conversion.

However, representatives of Jewish groups as well as traditionalist Catholics quickly condemned the new prayer, though for different reasons. Jewish groups said it was still offensive, and traditionalists said they preferred the version that was replaced.

“It’s disappointing,” said Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, who for 20 years has worked on Jewish-Catholic relations with Benedict as pope and, earlier, when he was a cardinal.

The prayer was a focus of dispute last year when Benedict allowed for greater use of a traditional version of the Latin Mass, called the Tridentine rite. That decree improved ties with Catholic traditionalists, who oppose the sweeping changes to church liturgy made from 1962 through 1965 during the Second Vatican Council.

The prayer is not part of the standard service used by most of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, who celebrate Mass in their local languages.

The new prayer, published only in Latin on Tuesday in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, deletes a reference to Jews’ “blindness” and a call that God “may lift the veil from their hearts.”

Pope nixes reference to Jews’ `blindness` over Jesus in prayer - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

Pope Benedict has ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at Good Friday services by traditionalist Catholics, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ, the Vatican said on Tuesday.The Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano published the new version of the prayer in Latin and said it should be used by the traditionalist minority starting this Good Friday, March 21.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer also removes a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

But the new prayer hopes that Jews will recognize Christ.

Le pape atténue les termes de la prière de “conversion des juifs”, Le Monde.fr, February 6, 2008

À la veille du Carême (période de quarante jours de prières et de pénitence avant Pâques), ouvert mercredi 6 février, dit “mercredi des Cendres”, le Vatican a tenté de clore une polémique qui a assombri, ces derniers mois, le climat des relations entre catholiques et juifs, devenu plus fraternel quarante ans après le concile réformateur Vatican II (1962-1965).

Cette polémique était née le 7 juillet 2007, avec la publication du motu proprio (décret) de Benoît XVI libéralisant sous conditions - à titre “extraordinaire” - le rite antérieur à Vatican II, appelé rite “tridentin” (concile de Trente au XVIe siècle). Destiné à satisfaire les fidèles traditionalistes, ce décret du pape avait choqué la communauté juive parce que l’ancien rite de l’Eglise comprend - outre la messe en latin - une prière pour la “conversion des juifs”, traditionnellement récitée dans les églises le Vendredi saint (jour de la crucifixion du Christ).

En 1959, cette prière avait été réformée par le pape Jean XXIII (1958-1963), qui avait supprimé l’emploi de l’adjectif “perfides” pour désigner les juifs. Mais le reste n’avait pas été retouché.

En date du 4 février, une note de la secrétairerie d’Etat du Vatican rectifie à nouveau - partiellement - cette prière. Les passages demandant à Dieu de “soustraire le peuple juif de ses ténèbres” et de “l’aveuglement” ont disparu. Mais la suite, qui invite à prier “afin que Dieu illumine le coeur des juifs et qu’ils connaissent Jésus-Christ, sauveur de tous les hommes”, est maintenue. Elle demande à Dieu de permettre “que tout Israël soit sauvé en faisant entrer la foule des gens dans (son) Eglise”. Cette nouvelle version devra être en usage à compter de l’année 2008 dans toutes les célébrations de la liturgie du Vendredi saint.

Tony Judt, The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe - The New York Review of Books, Feb. 14, 2008

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”[2] In one sense she was, of course, absolutely correct. After World War I Europeans were traumatized by the memory of death: above all, death on the battlefield, on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The poetry, fiction, cinema, and art of interwar Europe were suffused with images of violence and death, usually critical but sometimes nostalgic (as in the writings of Ernst Jünger or Pierre Drieu La Rochelle). And of course the armed violence of World War I leached into civilian life in interwar Europe in many forms: paramilitary squads, political murders, coups d’état, civil wars, and revolutions.

After World War II, however, the worship of violence largely disappeared from European life. During this war violence was directed not just against soldiers but above all against civilians (a large share of the deaths during World War II occurred not in battle but under the aegis of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide). And the utter exhaustion of all European nations—winners and losers alike—left few illusions about the glory of fighting or the honor of death. What did remain, of course, was a widespread familiarity with brutality and crime on an unprecedented scale. The question of how human beings could do this to each other—and above all the question of how and why one European people (Germans) could set out to exterminate another (Jews) —were, for an alert observer like Arendt, self-evidently going to be the obsessive questions facing the continent. That is what she meant by “the problem of evil.”

Adi Schwartz, A courageous journey, Haaretz, December 27, 2007

“The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History” by Katrin Himmler, translated from German into English by Michael Mitchell, Macmillan, 352 pages, 14.99 pounds sterling

The media in the United States recently reported the story of an elderly American Jew, a Holocaust survivor, the resident of a well-to-do California suburb. One day a new tenant, also elderly, moved into the house next door, beyond the small garden. Courteously, the Jewish man decided to call on the new neighbor and perhaps greet him with a warm apple pie. But the moment the door opened, the Jew recalled that he had already seen this person. It was then, back there, more than 60 years ago, on the train platform at Auschwitz - a German facing a Jew, an executioner facing a victim. More than 60 years had elapsed, but the Jew’s heart began to beat wildly….

Katrin discovers the fact that never, until their deaths in the 1970s, had any of that generation of the family expressed any sign of regret for the disaster they had brought upon their country and upon humanity.

From the author’s hands has emerged a fascinating document reminiscent of Christopher Browning’s book “Ordinary Men.” Instead of dealing with the institutional aspect of the slaughter of the Jews, Katrin Himmler tries to follow the dynamics and psychology of the ordinary German - the one who was in the party “like everyone else,” who perhaps had not been at Hitler’s side from the Beer Hall Putsch on, but ultimately impelled him to help make the terrible disaster possible….

This story has a fascinating final note: Katrin Himmler is in a relationship with an Israeli man, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the couple has a son. At the end of the book, the author writes that she is still afraid of the moment when her son discovers that one side of his family had done everything it could to kill the other side.

The Mascot - Mark Kurzem - Book Review - New York Times, November 30, 2007

To begin with, Alex now tells Mark, he is Jewish, something he has never revealed, even to his wife, a Roman Catholic. He remembers — he was probably 5, but doesn’t know his birth date — witnessing Nazi troops shooting his mother and bayoneting his baby brother and sister near their village in Belarus. To keep from screaming, he bit his hand. Believing his father dead, he fled into the forest but was caught — probably by the very soldiers who had murdered his family. They were about to shoot him, he said, when he begged for a piece of bread. One of them pitied him, and he was saved.

It is an anguished tale set in the morally gray zone between culpability and survival. The soldier discovered that the boy was Jewish — he was circumcised — and warned him to hide it. The others thought he was Russian and named him Uldis Kurzemnieks. They made him their mascot, a miniature soldier with a uniform decorated with Nazi insignia. As he traveled with them, he said, he witnessed atrocities, including hundreds of Jews being herded into a synagogue and burned alive. He became a propaganda tool, the Reich’s youngest Nazi, the subject of newspaper articles and a documentary.

Munson: The best Herzl biography remains Amos Elon’s Herzl (1975). Elon mentions that Herzl initially thought Dreyfus was guilty, but he also notes that when Herzl heard the Parisian mob’s shouts of “Down with the Jews,” he “sensed a kind of evil-smelling fog rise from the massed crowd” (p. 127). Elon states that Herzl’s editors at the Neue Freie Presse changed his account of the Parisian mob’s chant of “Death to the Jews” after Dreyfus’s conviction to “Death to the traitors” to avoid exacerbating anti-Semitism in Vienna (pp. 128-29).

Sarid, A man of action, Haaretz, November 11, 2007

We have been taught that the Dreyfus Affair, in 1894, planted the seed of Zionism in Herzl; that the humiliating public ceremony, by which the French captain was stripped of his rank in the French army, left the Austrian journalist shocked, pained and angry, and suddenly removed the scales from his eyes; that through the hatred directed at Dreyfus, Herzl came to understand the meaning of the situation of European Jews in general.

Now Avineri comes along and changes the picture: It turns out that initially, Herzl was convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt: “It is now clear that Captain Dreyfus sold his country’s defensive secrets to the Germans,” the correspondent calmly reported to his journal, without even noting his subject’s Jewish identity. In a later dispatch, he reports, without qualification, the comment of the French war minister, General Mercier, that “the guilt of Captain Dreyfus is indisputable.” Even in his piece describing the cashiering ceremony, and the breaking of his sword, there is no clear echo of the cries of “Death to the Jews” that we all read about in our textbooks.

Herzl heard the crowd, which watched the ceremony from outside the gates, shout “Death to the traitor,” and he also reported hearing Dreyfus called “Traitor Judas.” That’s what he heard, and that’s what he reported before he and others who also were there decided to rewrite history, and the cry of “Death to the Jews” took on a canonical status. On December 30, 1894, a day before the rejection of Dreyfus’ appeal of his conviction, Herzl published a long and detailed article in the Neue Freie Presse summing up the major events of the preceding year in France: The Dreyfus trial is not even mentioned in it. Herzl left Paris the following summer. When he returned to Vienna, the Dreyfus trial was still an unremarkable event, which hadn’t yet turned into an “affair” that rang of anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus affair came to its conclusion only a decade later, in 1906, two years after Herzl’s death. Emile Zola’s “J’accuse,” in January 1898, a half year after the convening of the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, by which time Herzl’s attention was fully focused on his movement.

Hence, it was not the Dreyfus Affair, as an event in and of itself, that wakened in Herzl the impulse to go along the ways of Zion that mourn, which he tried to pave the way anew after a period of two millennia of neglect, having become finally convinced that all roads must lead to the Land of Israel, and not to Argentina or El-Arish, nor to Uganda, that there’s no point looking for shortcuts. Herzl adopted that road map after trials and errors that almost succeeded in derailing him, and leaving him in the margins of history.

Tim Rutten, Coulter’s anti-Semitic comment too dangerous to ignore, Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2007

Earlier this week, Coulter went on “The Big Idea,” a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had — in our vulgar commercial argot –”branded” herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was “a Christian.” Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people’s elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews “perfected” through conversion to Christianity….

Meanwhile, Coulter was on the Kevin McCullough radio talk show, making the utterly absurd case that Deutsch somehow had ambushed her. On his blog later in the day, McCullough agreed. Deutsch, he said, “is an angry anti-Christian bigot, looking to make a name for himself by biting into Christian icons.”

Rosner, Is it okay for Ann Coulter to want all Jews to become Christian? - Haaretz, October 14, 2007

DEUTSCH: Christian - so we should be Christian? It would be better if we were all Christian?

COULTER: Yes.

DEUTSCH: We should all be Christian?

COULTER: Yes. Would you like to come to church with me, Donny?

Query for Rev. Coulter: Is the Pope Catholic?, Media Matters, June 7, 2006

In Ann Coulter’s world — as described in her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum) — Jews are Christians, but apparently Episcopalians are not.

A footnote on Page 3 of the book reads: “Throughout this book, I often refer to Christians and Christianity because I am a Christian and I have a fairly good idea of what they believe, but the term is intended to include anyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others.” [emphasis added]

Yes, you read that correctly. As far as Coulter is concerned, Jews are Christians. Mazel tov!

As for Episcopalians, they might be disheartened to learn that they will not be welcoming their newly Christian Jewish friends into the brotherhood of Christ, because they don’t quite measure up as a church. Coulter writes on Page 5, “Howard Dean left the Episcopal Church — which is barely even a church — because his church, in Montpelier, Vermont, would not cede land for a bike path.” [emphasis added]

On CNBC’s The Big Idea, Coulter said that “we” Christians “just want Jews to be perfected”, Media Matters, October 10, 2007

During the October 8 edition of CNBC’s The Big Idea, host Donny Deutsch asked right-wing pundit Ann Coulter: “If you had your way … and your dreams, which are genuine, came true … what would this country look like?” Coulter responded, “It would look like New York City during the [2004] Republican National Convention. In fact, that’s what I think heaven is going to look like.” She described the convention as follows: “People were happy. They’re Christian. They’re tolerant. They defend America.” Deutsch then asked, “It would be better if we were all Christian?” to which Coulter responded, “Yes.” Later in the discussion, Deutsch said to her: “[Y]ou said we should throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians,” and Coulter again replied, “Yes.” When pressed by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like “the head of Iran” and “wipe Israel off the Earth,” Coulter stated: “No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. … That’s what Christianity is.

Yehuda Bauer, A human being without fault, Haaretz, September 27, 2007

Over the years, a strange friendship developed between us: On the dais, we would engage in a virulent argument but afterward, we would drink coffee together and tell each other personal news, talk about new findings and mutual friends. We sought each other out, we went together to book stores in the places where we met, we wrote to each other from time to time, and he would send me his books with the most important dedication of all: “To he who, like me, seeks the truth.”

Like me, he was a total atheist, and like me, he was a warm Jew in every sense. We grew up, as he would tell me, on “the same garbage heap,” with the same mother tongue, in the same cultural milieu. We were born a few months apart and our families fled from Europe in the same month…. During the only conference that was held in his honor, when he retired from his teaching position at the University of Vermont, he insisted that I be the main speaker. There too, as always, I did not hide the differences between us, and he sat and listened. Later, we embraced. Raul Hilberg was a great man, a great researcher, irritable, furious and loving, but above all, a human being without fault. I lost a close and personal friend.