JEWISH THEMES, ISSUES: “19TH CENTURY” PUTIN BRINGS ONCE “JEWISH” CRIMEA BACK TO RUSSIA; TIKKUN OLAM CRITIQUED, AS ISRAEL PRIZE GOES TO TALMUDIST

The Wages of Weakness: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Mar. 6, 2014— Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come.

Before Crimea Was an Ethnic Russian Stronghold, It Was a Potential Jewish Homeland: Jeffrey Veidlinger, Tablet, Mar. 4, 2014 — “On the way to Sevastopol, not too far from Simferopol,” begins what is probably the most famous Yiddish song from the Soviet Union, “Hey Dzhankoye.”  

On the Tikkun Olam Fetish: Steven Plaut, Arutz Sheva, Dec. 22, 2014— What are we to make of Tikkun Olam proclamations?

How Shamma Friedman, Winner of This Year’s Israel Prize, Revolutionized Talmud Study: Shai Secunda, Tablet, Jan. 21, 2014 — Zionism, a polemical issue, still causes fiery debate amid Israeli and international politics and is seen by some as a movement, culture and mentality that is no longer viable in the current Israel.

On Topic Links

Ukrainian Jews Adjusting to Life in Uncertain Times: Sam Sokol, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 27, 2014

For the Kremlin, Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Is a Tool for Scaring Russians in Crimea: Hannah Thoburn, Tablet, Mar. 7, 2014

Putin Can’t Stop: David Brooks, New York Times, Mar. 3, 2014
How Two Montrealers Made an Oscar Favourite About Alice Herz-Sommer: Matthew Hays, Globe & Mail, Feb. 28, 2014

THE WAGES OF WEAKNESS                                                      

Charles Krauthammer                                                    

Washington Post, Mar. 6, 2014

Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come. He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it’s not in Russia’s interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it’s a sign of weakness. Really? Crimea belonged to Moscow for 200 years. Russia annexed it 20 years before Jefferson acquired Louisiana. Lost it in the humiliation of the 1990s. Putin got it back in about three days without firing a shot. Now Russia looms over the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin can take that anytime he wants — if he wants. He has already destabilized the nationalist government in Kiev. Ukraine is now truncated and on the life support of U.S. and European money (much of which — cash for gas — will end up in Putin’s treasury anyway).

Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history, and Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin’s is “really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century.” This must mean that seeking national power, territory, dominion — the driving impulse of nations since Thucydides — is obsolete. As if a calendar change caused a revolution in human nature that transformed the international arena from a Hobbesian struggle for power into a gentleman’s club where violations of territorial integrity just don’t happen. “That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior,” says Kerry. Makes invasion sound like a breach of etiquette — like using the wrong fork at a Beacon Hill dinner party.

How to figure out Obama’s foreign policy? In his first U.N. speech, he says: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” On what planet? Followed by the assertion that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” — like NATO? — “make no sense in an interconnected world.” Putin’s more cynical advisers might have thought such adolescent universalism to be a ruse. But Obama coupled these amazing words with even more amazing actions.

(1) Upon coming into office, he initiated the famous “reset” to undo the “drift” in relations that had occurred during the George W. Bush years. But that drift was largely due to the freezing of relations Bush imposed after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Obama undid that pushback and wiped the slate clean — demanding nothing in return. (2) Canceled missile-defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic. Without even consulting them. A huge concession to Putin’s threats — while again asking nothing in return. And sending a message that, while Eastern Europe may think it achieved post-Cold War independence, in reality it remains in play, subject to Russian influence and interests. (3) In 2012, Obama assured Dmitry Medvedevthat he would be even more flexible with Putin on missile defense as soon as he got past the election. (4) The Syria debacle. Obama painted himself into a corner on chemical weapons — threatening to bomb and then backing down — and allowed Putin to rescue him with a promise to get rid of Syria’s stockpiles. Obama hailed this as a great win-win, when both knew — or did Obama really not know? — that he had just conferred priceless legitimacy on Bashar al-Assad and made Russia the major regional arbiter for the first time in 40 years. (5) Obama keeps cutting defense spending. His latest budget will reduce it to 3 percent of GDP by 2016 and cut the army to pre-Pearl Harbor size — just as Russia is rebuilding, as Iran is going nuclear and as China announces yet another 12-plus percent increase in military spending.

Puzzling. There is no U.S. financial emergency, no budgetary collapse. Obama declares an end to austerity — for every government department except the military. Can Putin be faulted for believing that if he bites off Crimea and threatens Kiev, Obama’s response will be minimal and his ability to lead the Europeans even less so? Would Putin have lunged for Ukraine if he didn’t have such a clueless adversary? No one can say for sure. But it certainly made Putin’s decision easier. Russia will get kicked out of the G-8 — if Obama can get Angela Merkel to go along. Big deal. Putin does care about financial sanctions, but the Europeans are already divided and squabbling among themselves. Next weekend’s Crimean referendum will ask if it should be returned to Mother Russia. Can Putin refuse? He can already see the history textbooks: Catherine the Great took Crimea, Vlad (the Great?) won it back. Not bad for a 19th-century man.

Contents
                                        

BEFORE CRIMEA WAS AN ETHNIC RUSSIAN STRONGHOLD,

IT WAS A POTENTIAL JEWISH HOMELAND                                  

Jeffrey Veidlinger

Tablet, Mar. 4, 2014

“On the way to Sevastopol, not too far from Simferopol,” begins what is probably the most famous Yiddish song from the Soviet Union, “Hey Dzhankoye.” The song, named after a collective farm near the Crimean town of Dzhankoy, celebrates the alleged victories of the Soviet collectivization drive of the 1920s and 1930s, which, according to the song, magically transformed Jewish merchants into farmers. “Who says that Jews can only trade?” asks the final verse of the song, “Just take a look at Dzhan.” Now, as the new government in Kiev struggles to find its footing after the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russian troops are occupying the Crimea in the name of protecting ethnic Russians and, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested at the United Nations, combating anti-Semitic ultra-nationalists—an ironic twist, less than a century after the Kremlin contemplated the peninsula as the site of a potential Jewish homeland.

Jews have been living in the peninsula since ancient times, largely divided into two communities: the Krymchaks, who followed rabbinical Judaism, and the Karaites, who rejected the Oral Torah. Soon after Catherine the Great conquered the region from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, she opened it up to Jewish settlement, hoping that the Jews would serve as a bulwark against the Turks. Although Jews were later barred from living in the major cities, the peninsula promised open spaces and freedom to adventurous Jews seeking new frontiers and willing to take up a spade. Tens of thousands of mostly young Jews settled in this part of “New Russia” over the next century. The Crimea became so identified with Russia’s Jewish history, in fact, that Jewish activists in St. Petersburg pointed to the long legacy of Crimean Jews as an argument for Jewish emancipation in the empire—after all, they claimed, Jews had been living there longer than Russians. (The 19th-century Karaite historian Avraam Firkovich even tried to argue that Karaites were living in the Crimea before the time of Jesus Christ, and he fabricated tombstone inscriptions to prove it.)

Jewish residents of the Crimea were also deeply engaged in the critical Jewish question of the time—Zionism—and by the late 19th century the area had become a training ground for future Zionist pioneers, who practiced agricultural techniques there before relocating to Palestine. Joseph Trumpeldor—who famously gave his life defending the northern Galilee settlement of Tel Hai with the motto “It is good to die for our country”—once trained potential migrants in the Crimea. (One Crimean settlement was named Tel Hai in his honor.)

In the early 1920s, the new Soviet government once again turned its attention to the peninsula. Concerned that the Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Germans who mostly populated the region were anti-Communist, officials in Moscow were eager to buy the loyalty of new recruits with land grants and promises of autonomy in the agriculturally rich peninsula. When the American agronomist and communal activist Joseph A. Rosen suggested providing financial support through the Joint Distribution Committee to resettle Jewish victims of the pogroms in the region, the Kremlin jumped at the opportunity. In 1923, the Politburo accepted a proposal for establishing a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Crimea, before reversing itself a few months later.

Nevertheless, from 1924 until 1938, the Joint Distribution Committee, through its subsidiary American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation and with the financial support of American Jewish philanthropists like Julius Rosenwald, supported Jewish agricultural settlements in Soviet Crimea. Numerous Jewish collective farms and even whole Jewish districts sprouted over the next few years. The dream of building a Jewish republic in the Crimea remained alive until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Most of the Jewish colonists in the Crimea fled east to seek safety far from the front; entire collective farms fled together, traveling in convoys eastward, just ahead of the German troops, all the way to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. There they reestablished their collective farms, and many joined the Red Army to fight the Nazis. As the war dragged on, Stalin dispatched two representatives of the newly established Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee—Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels and Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer—to the United States and other Allied countries to raise support among Western Jews for the Soviet war effort. In New York, Mikhoels and Fefer met with representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee, who spoke of renewing their support for Jewish colonies in the Crimea once the peninsula was liberated from Nazi control.

In 1944, the Red Army routed the Germans out of the Crimea. Stalin ordered the deportation of about 180,000 Crimean Tatars in retaliation for their alleged collaboration with the enemy. Soviet troops ordered Tatar families to pack up their allotted 80 kilograms of belongings and board trains out of the region; soon thereafter, tens of thousands of Jews returned to the Crimea from the east to resettle the colonies they had been forced to abandon. It was in the context of this chaos that Mikhoels and Fefer met with the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and discussed the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in the Crimea. Molotov seemed like a sympathetic ally. Stalin had appointed him in May 1939 to replace Maxim Litvinov, whose Jewish roots made him an awkward choice to lead the coming negotiations with Nazi Germany; three months later, Molotov signed the nonaggression pact that would allow Germany to invade Poland, beginning WWII. Yet Molotov was not unfriendly toward Jews; his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, was from a Jewish family in southern Ukraine and had a sister who had emigrated to Palestine. Mikhoels and Fefer left the meeting convinced that Molotov would support the plan and followed through by sending a memorandum outlining the proposal to Stalin. But instead, Stalin used the Crimean proposal as a pretext for a major assault on Soviet Jewry.

The United Nations vote in support of the establishment of the State of Israel in November 1947 had rendered a Jewish homeland in the Crimea superfluous and reinforced Stalin’s suspicions of Jewish national aspirations. On the night of Jan. 12, 1948, Stalin had Mikhoels murdered, signifying the beginning of Stalin’s campaign against the Jews. Over the next 13 months, Fefer, Zhemchuzhina, and numerous other members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee were arrested. Zhemchuzhina was exiled to Kazakhstan. Fifteen others were tried in secret on the charge of conspiring with the United States to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea. On Aug. 12, 1952, in what came to be known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, 13 of the defendants, including Fefer and well-known Yiddish writers Dovid Bergelson, Dovid Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, Peretz Markish, and Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, were executed in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. Two years later, the Kremlin settled the fate of the Crimea when it transferred the peninsula to the administrative authority of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]

Contents
                                  

ON THE TIKKUN OLAM FETISH                                                         

Steven Plaut                                                                                  

Arutz Sheva, Dec. 22, 2013

"The central mitzvah or commandment for our era is the mitzvah of Tikkun Olam.   It is the defining mission of Jews to strive for the repair of the world by making society more just, fair, egalitarian, and sensitive. Judaism demands that we repair the world by striving for social justice.  It is the mission of Jews in the Divine Plan for the universe to repair the world by repairing man, by improving and advancing mankind."

The above paragraph is a fair representation of what has become the defining raison d'etre of Judaism as conveyed by non-Orthodox liberal Jewish organizations and synagogues in America.  It is not a direct citation from any of them, but is an accurate paraphrase of what has become the canon of non-Orthodox Jewish liberalism in our time. It is the "modernized" and contemporary "reinterpretation" of "Jewish ethics" as defined and inculcated by much of the Reform and Conservative movements.  It is also the "theology" of Jewish radical leftist groups operating at the fringes of the Jewish community, including the "Renewal/ALEPH" movement, the "Eco-Judaism" groups, the "Tikkun community" of people and groups that are satellites to the magazine by that same name published by tikkun-activist Michael Lerner, and what remains of the "Reconstructionists."  Lerner, it should be added, discovers "repair of the world" even in LSD consumption.

What are we to make of Tikkun Olam proclamations? The most important thing that must be understood about the Tikkun Olam catechism in the United States is that each and every sentence in the above proclamation is false. First of all, there is no such thing as a mitzvah or commandment of Tikkun Olam.   Jews are nowhere commanded to "repair the world."  In all the authoritative or traditional compilations of the commandments of Judaism, none list Tikkun Olam.  The expression itself does not appear anywhere in the Torah or in the entire Bible. 

Those assimilationist liberals who insist that the entire "ethics of the Prophets" can be reduced to the pursuit of Tikkun Olam have to explain why none of the Books of the Prophets use the term. Tikkun Olam is used sporadically in the Talmud, but as a technical term for resolution of certain judicial problems that arise before rabbinic courts. The only place the expression appears in Jewish prayer is in the "Aleinu" and there it clearly has nothing at all to do with social justice.  In the "Aleinu," Tikkun Olam is explicitly explained in the prayer text itself as the quest to eliminate pagan superstition and to see God's rule of the universe implemented. It is a theological concept, not a social, political or environmental one. In Judaism, the world does not get repaired by redistribution of income and wealth nor by cutting carbon emissions, but by humans subordinating themselves to God's will.  

Secondly, Tikkun Olam does not mean that Jews are obligated to strive to make the earth a more just, clean, fair and equal place.  Nowhere in Judaism are Jews commanded to restructure or re-engineer the societies of nations.  Jews have a certain obligation to participate in the Jewish community and to assist other Jews, especially Jews living in hardship, including through charity.  Even within the Jewish community, there is no religious imperative or justification for coerced schemes of income or wealth redistribution, aside from payments to the Levites and priests.  And while there is no prohibition against Jews using their resources to assist the downtrodden among the non-Jewish nations, there is also no Judaic imperative to do so. The Torah and the Prophets do speak out about the plight of Jewish widows, orphans, and converts, but in every single case where the matter is brought up, the concern is for protecting the rights of these weaker groups in the courts, assuring they do not face judicial discrimination.  There is no official obligation to transfer resources to these disadvantaged groups except for the "tithe for the poor" collected out of agricultural produce in two years out of seven.  (If you do the math, it averages out to about 3% of farm resources per year.) 

The idea that it is somehow the religious duty of Jews to "repair mankind" is not only unfounded  it is a manifestation of the ignorance of assimilationist Jewish liberals.  The simple fact of the matter is that in actual Judaism, it is none of the business of Jews to fix or repair humanity.  More generally, in Judaism it is the job of Jews to repair the Jews – a not inconsiderable task – not to repair the world… Indeed, the very notion that Jews are so ethically superior that they are entitled to instruct non-Jews in ethics is completely foreign to Judaism.  The self-image of Jews in the Torah is that of a group of people awash in their own moral failures and foibles, from the Golden Calf to the paganism of the era of the kings of Judah and Israel.  The moral imperative of the Torah is for the Jews to improve and reevaluate their own behavior, not to pretend to have the moral superiority to preach to the entire non-Jewish world. 

"Man" may very well be in need of redemption and improvement and repair, but it is not the business or job of the Jews to carry these things out.   And it would be hubris to think that Jews are morally equipped to do so.  Jews have more than their hands full in attempting to repair Jews…It is… wrong to attempt to recruit the Torah and Tikkun Olam as artillery support for ideological positions regarding other fashionable questions of the day.   Probably one of the most common misuses of Tikkun Olam by liberals involves environmentalist trendiness.  But the only real environmentalist statement by the Torah is that God will never allow planetary destruction to take place, and that every time one sees a rainbow in the sky one should remember that the doomsday warnings by the radical environmentalists about man destroying the planet are negated by the Torah…                                                                      

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]                                                                                              

Contents
                                  

HOW SHAMMA FRIEDMAN, WINNER OF THIS YEAR’S

ISRAEL PRIZE, REVOLUTIONIZED TALMUD STUDY                   

Shai Secunda                                           

Tablet, Jan. 21, 2014

This past Sunday, sitting amidst the curated clutter of his peaceful study near Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, the accomplished Talmud scholar Shamma Friedman wrapped up a typical afternoon of work. Suddenly, the phone rang. Friedman picked up the receiver to hear a secretary announce that the Israeli Education Minister, Shai Piron, would be on the line shortly. Then, the pensive silence of hopeful expectation. After the conversation was through, the professor eased himself into his chair and disbelievingly gazed out the window at the fading January light. Within minutes, the internet lit up with the news that Friedman would be awarded the seventh Israel Prize in Talmud at a special Independence Day ceremony. He phoned his wife Rachel, closed the door to his study, and made the short trip home to celebrate the good tidings.

Shamma Friedman, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Schechter Institute, is the most important Talmudist of his generation. That may sound like a desperately arcane perch, but marginality is of course a relative concept. Friedman’s accomplishments would appear inconsequential only to those not privy to the longest and most absorbing conversation the Jewish people have ever held—the study of the Talmud.

The Talmud itself might paradoxically be described as a marginal bedrock. It is the foundational work of normative Judaism, yet it often seems hopelessly consumed by language games and conceptual digressions. Ostensibly, the Talmud is structured as a commentary on an early third-century rabbinic legal compilation known as the Mishna; in practice, it ranges far beyond that. Everything that comes into view is ripe for analysis, and anything is fair game for extensive discussion—from weighty questions of theology to locker-room banter between obese rabbis.

Within the confines of that narrow vastness, Friedman made multiple breakthroughs—and still remains an impressively productive scholar. He wrote extensively on Rabbinic Hebrew, published studies on talmudic manuscripts, explored the composition of talmudic narratives, examined the relationship between the Mishna and related works, and produced important scholarship on towering medieval Talmudists like Maimonides. But arguably, Friedman’s greatest legacy has been to untangle the Talmud’s complicated textual web, and show how it was actually put together.

Most of the rabbis named in the Talmud lived in Mesopotamia during a time in history now known as late antiquity. Their primary activity was to learn and discuss the Mishna and other rabbinic texts which, incredibly, were at that time not yet written down. For a thousand years, early Talmud commentators and modern scholars alike had assumed that the Talmud was essentially a transcript of those original rabbinic discussions. Yet, over the course of the twentieth century, scholars began to question this view. In the 1970s, two Talmudists—David Weiss-Halivni (the recipient of the last Israel Prize) and Friedman—published groundbreaking research that focused on the question of the Talmud’s composition. By independently demonstrating that unnamed editors who lived significantly after the Talmud’s rabbis played a central role in the corpus’ creation, these Talmudists drastically changed the way scholars understood the composition of the talmudic text, and more importantly, the way it is to be studied…                                        

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]                 

CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!

Ukrainian Jews Adjusting to Life in Uncertain Times: Sam Sokol, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 27, 2014 —The turmoil in Ukraine has left one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities on edge.

For the Kremlin, Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Is a Tool for Scaring Russians in Crimea: Hannah Thoburn

, Tablet, Mar. 7, 2014 —You know the joke: Ask two Jews a question, get three opinions.

Putin Can’t Stop: David Brooks, New York Times, Mar. 3, 2014 —Even cynics like to feel moral. Even hard-eyed men who play power politics need to feel that their efforts are part of a great historic mission.
How Two Montrealers Made an Oscar Favourite About Alice Herz-Sommer: Matthew Hays, Globe & Mail, Feb. 28, 2014