Joel K. Greenberg
Tablet, Dec. 18, 2023
“I asked him if he remembered when our rabbi believed that calling for the destruction of Israel from the synagogue pulpit was acceptable, and whether he understood that the synagogue had invited these poisonous ideas and organizations into our Jewish communal space—and in this way should be seen as, in fact, having participated in legitimizing them.”
My family and I used to be members at a Conservative synagogue. It seemed like a good match for us. We celebrated many family milestones there, and became friends with a number of families and other congregants, including a prominent judge.
But 20 years ago, something strange happened. The rabbi invited several Jewish speakers to address the congregation, from the pulpit, about the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel—namely, in favor of BDS. The rabbi argued that “the Jewish tent” was, or ought to be, large enough to accommodate all reasonable opinions, and he believed this was one.
I, on the other hand, was horrified. As a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, I came face-to-face with the foot soldiers of Nazi Germany and its “master plan” to exterminate European Jews. These men and women had been taught to think of Jews not as human, but as vermin. When I deposed them in the 1980s, four decades after they committed their heinous acts, they still clung to that view—giving me a valuable lesson in the longevity of hateful ideologies, and cautioning me against being at all tolerant of anyone whose views single out and spread lies about the Jewish people.
But one didn’t need that experience to understand what was wrong with what we were hearing from that pulpit. Regardless of the pseudo-sophisticated ideas and academic language these speakers couched their talk in, underneath it all was clearly a position that would result in the destruction of Israel—and the displacement, or worse, of its more than 7 million Jews. And that wasn’t merely another argument competing in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas; it was a call for annihilating the world’s sole Jewish state and depriving the Jews, and Jews alone, of the dignity of self-determination and the right to an indigenous homeland. This, I believed, was a dangerous idea with potentially disastrous consequences, and no Jewish space had any business tolerating, let alone promoting, it.
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