There’s a lot to like about Purim. Normal middle class decorum is suspended; dressing up encouraged (providing a one day a year outlet for closet transvestites); drinking mandated; satire traditional; God relegated and mindless fun is order of the day. It serves as the Jewish Mardi Gras, an outpouring of emotion and play before the preparations for Pesach begin, but also a Jewish All Fools Day, where everything is turned on its head, one in which Purim shpiels offer an explicit opportunity to satirise rabbis and others in positions of power. What’s not to like? There are always those, usually of a Yekkishe bent, who find the whole thing an embarrassment that violates their deeply held notion of decorum. People like these insist that Purim should be ‘just for the kids’, they frown upon excessive (or any) drinking, and they’re damned if they’ll wear more than a token costume. For them, the point of Purim (if they deign to mark it at all) is to read the Megillah and remember the story of Jewish survival – all the customs that have grown up around the festival are barbarous relics of our folk culture.

Bullshit. The customs of Purim represent the only (safe) way to read the Megillah.

The book of Esther is a thumping, juicy tale – a Arabian nights fantasy of banquets, sex (Ahasuerus ‘tries out’ each of the applicants for queen for one night each) intrigue, confused identity and murder. It’s a dystopian vision – to read it straight is a monstrosity. While the immorality of the Persian characters was emphasised and embellished by Rabbinic commentaries, the behaviour of the Jewish characters is harder to justify. The heroic couple have Persian names ( The name Hadassah for Esther is only used once at the start) and are evidently based on the Babylonian Gods, Ishtar and Marduk. Mordechai has few doubts about pimping his niece/daughter out to a gentile king, and no Jews seem to have any qualms about the resulting intermarriage. As if to hammer the point home, unlike all the other books of the Hebrew Bible, Megillat Esther does not mention God once. Its a fun world, but a dark one.

So far, so petty. Who needs a Biblical text to be morally upstanding? The notion that the heroes of the Bible are flawed is familiar from countless (and usually mind-numbing) drashot and sermons.

But it gets a lot nastier. While most Jewish readers remember the main story of Esther they conveniently gloss over the end. Haman has been killed, Esther is safe, but there is the small matter of Haman’s decree that the Jews should killed on the 12th of Adar to deal with. As revoking royal edicts is not the done thing, the king gives Esther and Mordechai the chance to write a new decree. They take the opportunity with gusto, and write a decree giving them the right to ‘destroy, massacre and exterminate’ (8:11 JPS translation). This they do and after two days of violence (they get another day of killing in Shushan, you know, just for luck) the text tells us that they’d killed 75,000 of their enemies.

Contemporary Jewish readers, when pushed to deal with this, make a number of apologetic point:

a) It was a more violent time, everyone did that kind of thing. Yes, ok, but why read it now?

b) It’s all fictional, don’t take it so seriously etc. Yes, true, but we still read it don’t we?

c) It’s ok – they were really bad people. I wouldn’t have included this given it’s obvious stupidity, if it wasn’t for the fact that this does get said “Since the Jews were given a unique chance to attack their enemies, it was appropriate to take the opportunity to kill those people who would undoubtedly take the opportunity to kill them if such an opportunity would ever arise”

d) Cut the last bit out altogether. This approach was practiced by Chief Rabbi Marcus Adler, who produced a Bowdlerized version of the story in 1877. It’s bold, but also unsatisfactory, if the remainder of the text is being read – it’s a case of ignoring the problem rather than dealing with it

d) The behaviour in the story was self-defence. This is seemingly the best case, and the most common apologetic. Let’s examine why it’s wrong

There is little textual evidence that, by the time of the violence, the Jews of the story are under any threat whatsoever. Haman’s plot is discovered a full 11 months before his decree is due to be carried out; from then on the Jews have all resources of the Persian state at their disposal, with the King giving Esther the right to ‘write with regard to the Jews whatever you see fit….and sign it with the King’s signet’ (8.8). There is no description of gentiles planning their attack or of fear on the part of the Jews, on the contrary: “There was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many of the people of the land professed to be Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them (8:17). During the violence, the text describes the Jewish side as in total control: “The Jews got their enemies in their power” (9:1), No one could withstand them [the Jews], for the fear of them had fallen upon all the peoples” [9.2], “So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies

From this, it should be obvious that, according to the text, the Jews are not acting self defensively, they kill at best pre-emptively, and at worst, in an unprovoked massacre. The only point of counter textual evidence is the use of the term ‘enemies’ – which some take as a clue that the gentiles deserved to be massacred, along with all their women and children (8:11). This is clutching at straws – the text is clearly written from the perspective of the Jewish side – the fact that it calls these people enemies simply reflects on the perception of the Jewish characters. If we all had the right the slaughter all those we deem our enemies……..

Isn’t what you’ve written rather dangerous?

Yes. So to be very clear. This story is MADE UP. There’s no evidence that it ever happened. I think that if Persian Jews had actually done what the story says there might be some records of it in Persian sources. But there’s always a danger, when writing about the Hebrew Bible, that naive readers (and believers) will think that this is how JEWS REALLY ARE. In this mindset, one simply looks at the text of the ‘Old Testament’ and one understands ‘the Jew.’ This is nonsense, but has a long ignoble history.  Some Christian thinkers saw their own antisemitic outlook reflected in the pages of Esther. Martin Luther fell in to this trap: “I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much” (In Elliot Horowitz’ translation of Luther it reads “too Jewish”). German bible scholar Carl Heinrich Cornill wrote in 1891 that in Esther “all the worst and most unpleasing features of Judaism here are displayed without disguise”, and this trend reached a hideous nadir in Nazi Germany, when, for example De Sturmer connected the case of a Jewish chemist alleged with torturing a cat to “the slaughter of 75,000 Persians in the Book of Esther” (Saul Friedlander Nazi Germany and the Jews).  Just before his execution following the Nuremberg trials, Julius Streicher cried out ‘Purimfest 1946′. This was a chilling to claim that the book of Esther was being reenacted , a vile absurdity given that no Jews died in the book of Esther and the Nazis had just murdered 6 million. Of course the idea that something said by a prominent Nazi is automatically invalid is about as convincing as the ‘Hitler was a vegetarian’  line of argument, but this does give us cause to tread more carefullly. Let us say categorically: to assume that one can learn about Jews from the pages of the bible is an insane piece of essentialism; large parts of the bible are fictional, Judaism has never been solely defined by the Bible, and crucially, Jews are as different from one another as any other group. Jews are not intrinsically violent because Jews are not intrinsically anything. Those who practice Judaism choose to read and interpret the biblical texts – they are not the subjects of them, and cannot be defined by them.

So it’s all ok then?

Not quite. The trouble is that many contemporary Jewish readers practice an essentialism of their own, viewing the passivity of the Jews in the first half of the story as representative of Jewish experience in the diaspora and the gentile characters typical of antisemites through history. This is, though few seem to realise it, simply the reverse of the antisemitic essentialism outlined above. The belief often has the discursive result that Jews (especially in the diaspora) are seen to be always and everywhere victims of violence and never aggressors. The relatively small amounts of political power held be Jews historically render this attitude understandable – but Jews, like gentiles are individual agents; there can be no textual predictor of how they will behave. Sometimes, the urge to argue that the Jews in the Esther story are acting in self defence rather than in attack stems from the underlying (and often unconscious) that Jewish violence is, and always will be purely in self defence. This is a theological essentialisation posing as textual or historical analysis. It might have been reasonable when Jews had relatively little political power, and the book of Esther could be enjoyed as a revenge fantasy that would and could never be enacted, especially in periods of intense persecution. In a position where a state calls itself a Jewish state, with a army that draws on Jewish texts for its code of ethics this is just not good enough. This was made especially clear in 1994 when religious settler Baruch Goldstein walked in to The Cave of Machpelah in Hebron and shot 29 Muslims at prayer. On Purim. The date is unlikely to have been a coincidence. While most of the instances of Purim violence by Jews through history, as documented by Elliot Horowitz, are highly petty (such as tipping urine out of windows on to gentile heads), the text is transformed into something much more dangerous when Jews hold political power within a highly militarised society. In too many ultraorthodox circles, comparisons between Palestinians (and liberal Jews) and Amalekites are commonplace. Most recently, the extremist religious work ‘Torat Hamelech’ (condemned by most of mainstream Orthodoxy), which justifies violence against Palestinians, draws upon the book of Esther and its commentaries.

So what do we do, drop the whole thing?

That was the approach of many enlightened and reformist inclined Jews in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, including the British Liberal Judaism movement, who explicitly hoped that Purim would die out. They were concerned primarily by the festival’s lack of decorum, but some, like Liberal Judaism co-founder Claude Montefiore articulated moral concerns, describing the end of Esther as ‘a massacre of unresisting gentiles’ and arguing that “if the Bible had not included the book of Esther it would have gained rather than lost in religious value and moral worth”.  In a recent and amusing post on the blog Micha’s Paradigm Shift, the author, through the voice of Vashti, reborn as a psychoanalyst, advocates:

“Complete abstinence from the festival of Purim. Start the detoxification regime now and start to sober up”

It’s a tempting suggestion. But it’s flawed. Instead of sobering up we need to drink more.

There are many reasons why we shouldn’t dump Purim – it provides a bacchanalian moment which the Jewish year otherwise lacks, as well as offering an annual opportunity to undermine the unthinking decorum that stifles middle class Jewish society. To drop it would stink of the Yekkish/pseudo-Protestant attempt to rob jewishness of all its weird, transgressive and subversive elements in order to recast it as a religion of reflection and bourgoise morality. A rich, thick, inebriated, dirty jewishness has a chance of remaining a compelling way of life,  a souped up liberalism with watered down ritual does not. Our call is for radical rather than liberal Judaism, the whole-life Jewishness of the east end rather than the narrow, worship-led Judaism of the west.  To be true to this we have to reread rather than abandon, to subvert from within rather than walk away.

More specifically, weird, and perhaps unjustifiable rituals can play important psychological roles – the practice of Tish Ba Av (largely abandoned by Liberal and Reform Judaism) provide a ritualised, collective outlet for loss – the idea of mourning for the temple becomes merely a hook for bringing out, and being permitted to dwell on, our darkest psychological baggage. Similarly, Purim provides an outlet for our besest instincts toward violence and revenge. The fact that these instincts are not pleasant does not mean that most of us don’t have them. If we deny them an outlet at Purim we run the risk of them surfacing elsewhere.

The trick, of course, is to provide a safe outlet. And this, strangely enough, is what the rabbinic customs of Purim create. They prioritise gift giving, both to the poor and to friends. The reading of the Megillah, word for word is commanded – because through reading we get to express our violent instincts without engaging in any violence. It is, in Jeremy Schonfield’s description “ the classic rabbinic posture of transforming actions….words into speech-acts which take the place of perfomance”. Similarly, the commandment to wipe out Amalek is transformed in an injunction to simply read the passage expressing this, and Pesikta Rabbati 12.9 has God say: “ My children, you need only read every year the passage concerning Amalek, and I shall reckon it for you as though you were blotting his name out from the world”. Do not kill: only read – we could do a lot worse for a summation of Jewish ethics.

Further more, there is a crucial Talmudic injunction to drink on Purim – until one cannot tell the difference between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordechai’ (Megillah 7b). This is not talking about becoming a little tipsy – to get to such a point of confusion one needs to be absolutely paralytic. We should be so wasted that we can barely remember the experience of reading the megillah the next morning, it is just a nasty, violent dream. This is an appropriate ritual for reading such a bloody, godless text – this is the only way to read Esther. In Schonfield’s bold suggestion, the commandment hints at the fact that there is little moral difference between the behaviour of Haman and Mordechai – a thought that would be too scary to contemplate if we weren’t too drunk to dwell upon it. We recreate a dark world, god is absent, we boo, we cheer, and we express (textually) our bloody fantasies: all drenched in leveling, blurring and salvational alcohol.

This seems to me a plausible defence of continuing to celebrate Purim and continuing to read the Megillah – in this and no other way. But, given the horrific ways the text has been, and continues to be read, a few further steps are necessary. Non-orthodox Jews should be quite explicit about the fictional nature of the text. Orthodox Jews who cannot bring themselves to make this step should follow the approach of Rav Kalonimus Kalmish Shapiro, (1889-1943) who argued that ‘the violence at the end of the text is specific to the story and should not be expected or desired at any other point in history’. The convention of expanding the definition of Amalek to ‘enemies’, be they Palestinians or Iranians (Netanyahu hilariously gave Obama a copy of Esther as ‘background reading on Iran’) has to be stopped.  Finally we must firmly take on the prevailing ‘settler Judaism; (which extends far beyond settlers) which attempts to make literal what rabbinic Judaism deferred, metaphorised or turned into a speech-acts, be it reading the promised land as an actual destination, Jerusalem as real estate, the messiah as a man set to arrive imminently or the practice of reading of violent texts as mandating actual acts of violence.

There is one further, subtle, but significant step – a way to read a critique of the text directly into our public reading of the text. It’s a technique that relies on a high level of cultural literacy, but this has never been a problem in Judaism, where all the best stuff is reserved for those who are prepared to dig beneath the surface. There is a tradition of using cantillation as commentary, creating a new meta-text in performance in which the music may convey a meaning different to the text itself. This tradition is essentially an oral one and is utiised in the reading of the Megillah, when certain verses are traditionally sung to the trope for Eicha, (Lamentations), a tragic text describing the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. This has the effect of giving certain verses a tragic overtone; we read them but they are transformed in the process. I suggest we could adopt this practice for the end of the Megilah, reading 9:1-19 in Eicha trop, using the music associated with violence against Jews to portray the violence the Jews in the story perpetrate against others. To demonstrate distaste in a way which doesn’t condemn us to a watered down ritual life without bacchanalian excess. We continue to read the text but we subvert it from the inside. It’s a small step, but, in an era of Jewish political power, it’s the least we can do.

N.B. No gentiles were harmed in the writing of this article

Elliot Horowitz            Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence

Jeremy Schonfield       Esther: Beyond Murder

Jill Hammer                 A Violent Ending

Apologies for being a Jewish person who is anally retentive about Israel/Palestine, and writes into the Guardian about it. I’ve heard you get a lot of those.

However, in the article http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/18/mitt-romney-fresh-blow-leaked-video?intcmp=239

Ewen MacAskill says that “He [Romney] described Tel Aviv as being only seven miles from the West Bank, though in fact it is over 40 miles away”

But actually the distance between Tel Aviv and the West Bank is 7-10 miles (pretty much what Mitt Romney said(unfortunately))

Eg, if you look at this map, http://www.distancefromto.net/between/West+Bank/Tel+Aviv you will see the distance between the points is 31.84 miles, with the West Bank point being deep inside the West Bank. If you look at the actual border of the West Bank (the dotted line), the distance is much shorter (and also bear in mind that Tel Aviv extends to about highway 4 on the map probably further.)

Perhaps, Ewen was getting mixed up between the distance from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and therefore the West Bank, which is about 40 miles.

I don’t know if you are able to publish a correction at the bottom of the article – it might be difficult to change the actual text.

Thanks,

Anonymous, 16 Oldhill Street, N16, London

Ps. STOP hating Israel.

Forget the Egypt elections, forget the American presidency, this is the one that counts, the chance to choose the next Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth! (Naturally, the Commonwealth gets no say in the matter)

Now, this is not the most democratic of elections. Vladimir Putin has given it his seal of approval. A bunch of men (with a few token women, labelled ‘women’s representative’) sit in a darkened room, knocking back the slivovitz until white smoke is seen above Hendon, and not just coming out of the volvos. The key requirement is for someone who will change absolutely nothing. Someone, who, when asked by the beth din to jump off a cliff, replies ‘how far, and how many bagels would you like me to bring’?

So Jewdas wishes to give the search committee a helping hand, and help find those hard-to-reach candidates who are learned and pious but too modest to put themselves forward. So we present:

Various rounds will test the REAL qualities needed by Chief Rabbis including Beard Growing, Yiddish Karaoke, Banqueting, Propagandising, Chair Dancing, Volte-Facing and Platitudinating.

Candidates need not be male, though obviously they should be circumcised (a back room will provided for this purpose). Candidates need not be Jewish but those who are excessively sporty, attractive or neat at eating risk immediate disqualification. Candidates need not be human. Pigs are especially encouraged to apply. All candidates should display fluency in Talmud and/or The Book of Mormon. Particularly the pigs.

The winner gets the right to issue pronouncements, laws and excommunications from jewdas.org. It is expected that the Jewish community will take as much notice of them as they do the current chief rabbi.

As this is clearly going to be hugely competitive its best to get a head start with the campaigning. Send us your manifestos – in video, text, image form, to jewdas (at) gmail.com or post to geoffrey’s facebook page or twitter feed.

To set the ball rolling, and to demonstrate the high standard expected, we enclose Rabbi Geoffrey Cohen’s application:

Name: Lord Viscount Colonel Sir Rabbi Geoffrey Cohen of Wherever-the-Simchah is

Rabbinic Training: Yeshivah Shel Malah, Yoreh Yoreh, Yadin Yadin, Beigel Beigel

Spouse: Yentl Timtum, ‘married’ for 35 years, with a 3 year break from 1984-7 for ‘fun with Lady Jakobovits’

The Sacks era is over. Enough of the smooth talking, philosophising and hobnobbing with the goyim. Enough of substandard beards.

Geoffrey Cohen promises a back to basics approach. Rabbi Sacks has often been seen in synagogue on Shavuot, Tish Ba Av and other obscure Jewish festivals. Rabbi Geoffrey, a man of the people, will instead restrict himself to weddings, barmitzvahs and ‘doing security’. Rabbi Cohen will be the chief Rabbi of austerity. In this difficult time, Rabbi Cohen will shun a high salary. He will instead be paid in unlimited quantities of doughnuts, borscht, cream cheese, gherkins, latkes, strudel, fishballs, hamentashen, egg salad, kneidalach and almond pudding. In a further cost-cutting move he will move the seat of the Chief Rabbinate from St John’s Wood to Upper Clapton, where ‘its cheap, more people speak Yiddish, and you’ve got less chance of running into a Sephardi’.

- Rabbi Geoffrey promises to move beyond denominational squabbles and implement ‘fishball and whisky’ Judaism, where less emphasis is less on where Jews go to pray and more on where they go for Kiddush.

- Rabbi Cohen will work to reverse British Jews ‘excessive’ interest in Israel, and pledges to reinvigorate our connection with Bournemouth and its many excellent kosher hotels

- In recent years, The United Synagogue has made great use of new technology such as websites, apps, and social media. Rabbi Geoffrey will reverse all of this. His more heimishe approach will see a return to photocopies, preferably illegible ones. Rabbi Geoffry says ‘If the kids don’t like it, they can fuck off”.

And if not now, perhaps some other time?

As a young, inexperienced, geeky, undomesticated and lacking-in-social skills Jew living in the shtel that is North West London, I chose to come to Limmud on the same assumption that most young adults in my situation choose to do so: this being the guarantee to get laid. The implicit Jew-screw promise percolating the Jewdar communications network every chrisunakkah time.

However, I was extremely disappointed to discover that this assumption – of which I invested not only financially (forcing me to cancel my costly J-Date subscription), but also emotionally in my anticipation of the certainty to finally find that special someone who would be as awkward and desperate as I was, was not fulfilled and well….I want my money back.

Perhaps I am being unfair and a total refund would be extreme since the quickie in the corner with the Polish cleaner fulfilled some of the expectation, but not enough to write home about. In this respect, a 50% refund would be acceptable bearing in mind the emotional trauma of false expectations and damage to self-confidence (although granted, the Polish cleaner was a bit helpful in that department).

Even so, the accepted implicit assumption of a Jew-screw I failed to encounter and thus want to be compensated (a posted-dated Jew-screw guarantee for limmud 2013 may be acceptable if I have failed to accomplish it at limmudfest, gefitlefest – or all the other Jew-fests with such implied promises).

It’s all very well spending thousands of pounds importing big American academics to talk about the plight of the Jewish woman in Orthodox Judaism, or the need for serious dialogue over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but these rabble-rousing subjects all pale into insignificance in comparison to what really gets to the heart of what affects the Jewish young adult of today: to get laid with a nice Jewish boy/girl in a nice Jewish environment with decent showering facilities under the auspices of the Jewish establishment.

I feel it is totally unreasonable to expect us to “go out into the world” and “work things out for ourselves”.  As with our politics, education, shopping habits, brand of pickled cucumbers etc, we are delicately pushed into line with the rest of the Jewish community in order to keep the Jewish community in its established order. Since  Limmud is central in conditioning guiding us in these well-trodden paths, surely it should provide the same manipulation assistance in helping us manage with whom we have our first love encounter, unplanned pregnancy and STD – you know, those important milestones in life that we just need the security and “safe place” of the community to aid us in, rather than having to, god forbid, encounter those experiences amongst the gentile world.

The continuation of Jewish survival rests in your disorganised, recycled, over-priced hands. For next year, I suggest a dedicated room (to be booked for 10 minute slots, shouldn’t need more than that) that promises a Limmud meal of “Marks and Spencer” quality rather than the usual “Tesco value” standard on the condition that certain acts are fulfilled. We need that push, that motivation, to release our inhibitions – go on limmud, you’re our only hope!

Yours flaccidly,

Anonymous Jewish Events Service User

Now that The JC and wider Jewish Broiguserati has cleaned itself up after its collective trouser-soiling over Ken Livingstone’s remarks on whether London Jewry was likely to vote for him, have a think about what factors play into who you vote for as London Mayor. Especially to what extent whether a candidate liking Jews more than another one is of any significance compared to actually making London a better place.

Let’s recap in case you sensibly avoided the outbreak of political loshon hora. Ken Livingstone upset some Labour supporters recently by making it seem like he thought there was no point courting the Jewish vote because Jews were too rich to vote for him. We say “Making it seem like” because as the Guardian report testifies, plus Ken’s own measured mea culpa also demonstrates, the remarks have been taken substantially out of context. He said lots of lovely nauseous things about Jews as well as this off-the-cuff remark to the gathered cabal of Jewish Labour luvvies, but in a mysterious act of selective hearing, they chose not to focus on that when they went running in tears to the press.

Having strangely ignored Boris’ track-record of dodgy views on non-Jewish minorities, not to mention the poor, protestors, social justice, fairness, the health of children, Inner London generally, and Earth’s condition as a whole, The JC leapt into action – accusing him in an editorial that had clearly been waiting in a treasured vault since the early 80s of having let his mask slip. Where he’d mentioned Israel before, he meant Jews. Where he’d smiled at Jews before, he’d been mouthing anti-semitism secretly under his breath. When he told us he loved us before, he’d meant “Muslim” not “Jew”. When he’d said he wanted to lower fares and reduce inequality, he’d really meant he wanted to cleanse London of all filthy Jews. “The Mask was off” and we’d seen him for what he really was. An interesting deployment of anti-Semitic rhetoric techniques in the name of calling out anti-Semitism – the ridiculous tool for which The JC has become renowned.

Another JC correspondent went further, making the hilarious further claim that she could never vote for Labour again in any election EVER – because as well as Ken’s comments, she’d noted that Jeremy Corbyn defended the rights of Palestinians sometimes. So, as one commentator under her article noted, if you’re Jewish, you have to vote for Boris and the Tories because “at least you know where you are with them” – even if that place is one where cuts hitting the poorest reigns, and the rights of the global wealthy and powerful are pandered to. Hey, if it’s good for the Jews, we have to go to that place. We’ll know where we are there with the Tories, even if it’s in hell.

Ken apologised – though arguably the other people at the meeting should probably have been the ones apologising for misrepresenting him. – and Brian Paddick did the ignoble thing of penning a spineless “I love Jews, me” piece for The JC, the digested read of which is “I met some Jews once, I spoke to some Jews once, I have never had any views either way on Jews, So Vote For Me”. The JC didn’t really like Ken’s apology, with Martin Bright writing that the decision to “eat humble pie” was “noted” (careful, nearly praised the mask-wearing anti-Semite there, Martin) elaborating in classic ‘what we say goes for all’ style that “Though the Jewish community will never take him to their heart, some may at least give him credit for admitting he was wrong.” However would we in this singular COMMUNITY think for ourselves without you telling us what we truly know in our heart of hearts, Mr. Bright

Meanwhile, Jonathan Freedland disappointingly peddled the same line, and it’s this that’s really got our goat. Jonathan F wrote that

“The meeting that night was packed with people who desperately wanted Livingstone to reassure them they could vote Labour. One explicitly said he sought no recantation of past remarks nor a change of position on Israel, just reassurance that “you won’t put us through another four years of this”. Even that Livingstone could not provide. Afterwards, one activist told me he felt as if he had grown up in two tribes, both intertwined in his DNA: one was the Jewish community, the other the Labour party. Yet now he was being forced to choose – because Livingstone had made it impossible to remain true to both. People will wrestle with their own dilemmas. Some will conclude that only Livingstone’s policy positions on transport or housing matter. I’m afraid I’ve reached a different conclusion. I don’t want to see Boris Johnson re-elected, but I can’t vote for Ken Livingstone.”

So, Freedland and those in the meeting are telling us that it is totally impossible to reconcile being Jewish with voting for Ken. Or voting for, or supporting, any candidate, party, personality, or activist that doesn’t tell us how much they love Jews. Nothing else matters – as long as they kowtow to the Jewish vote, that’s it, vote secured. If they won’t do so, they’re anti-Semitic, and dead to us. Ken has opinions that could seen as Jews dangerously not being his most favourite London minority, so he’s clearly anti-Semitic, so we must clearly reject him. “Four more years of this” refers to not being treated as a special group amongst other Londoners, not being giving preferential influence over policy out of proportion to numbers, not making Ken censor his actual views for fear of offending us. What they’re saying is that though you might not like that posh man Boris, he does good Goy-in-a kippah PAs in Golders Green, so you should probably vote for him.

We disagree. Here’s some other things to think about – a city where the Super-Rich can run around in their own private playground without paying tax, with the most expensive urban transport system in Europe, with a chronic shortage of housing, with a Police Force who treat anyone with a black, brown or masked face as an almost-certain public threat, where a corporate locked-down sports day built on greenbelt land is being paid for by us for no local benefit, where an unacceptable number of young people have no jobs and nowhere to go, where air pollution regularly exceeds binding EU levels but where the car is king over all other methods of transport, where violent crime is rising month on month, and where any dissent is greeted with the hard end of a truncheon or shield. Compared to these things, do you actually care whether the Mayor is willing to prioritise the feelings of a section of Londoners who, let’s be honest now, are generally way above the capital’s average income levels as a group? Boris has made all these things worse, and however you judge Ken’s personality, his record on all these issues is vastly better than Boris’

Want to vote as a Jew? Then vote with what we’ve been taught about justice, equality and tolerance. Vote with what’s going to reduce the appalling gulf between living standards of rich and poor in London, vote with what’s going to give houses, jobs and justice in the city. Vote for what will benefit all Londoners in need, not who panders to the sensitivities of those not in need. The most Jewish thing to do would be to vote for the most socially radical candidate – which is why, in the only bit we agree on with Freedland, we’re also saying you shouldn’t vote for Ken. Rather we say vote for Jenny Jones of the Greens – and she really doesn’t pander to the Jewish vote. Vote Jenny first, and Ken second. But whatever you do, please don’t vote Boris. He might say nice things about Jews, but he’s a disaster for all Londoners, and it’s for the benefit of all Londoners that this mythical “Jewish vote” should be directed.

Our Jewish heritage includes a long tradition of reshaping society to help the least fortunate, from the teaching of prophets like Amos and Jeremiah, to Rabbi Hillel, to modern figures such as Abraham Joshua Heschel and Naomi Klein. It also includes a long history of secular Jewish activism, in the struggles for fair treatment for workers, human rights and environmental justice. It is in this tradition that we add our voices to the movement demanding accountability, honest and ethical practices from banks and global corporations, and a restructuring of financial regulation to ensure transparency and strict legality.

We wish Occupy London success in furthering and deepening the debate in the country, and hope it will be a catalyst towards a more sustainable, just and equal society.

Signed by

Occupy Judaism London

Rabbi Judith Rosen-Berry
Rabbi Howard Cooper
Rabbi Sheila Shulman
Rabbi Mark Solomon
Rabbi Margaret Jacobi
Rabbi Judith Levitt
Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah
Rabbi Richard Jacobi
Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu
Rabbi Jeffrey Newman
Rabbi Francis Berry

If you’d like to add your name to this statement, please email jewdas@gmail.com

Below is a superb piece of Radical Torah, a sermon by Rabbi Howard Cooper in support of the Occupy movement, given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on 30th October 2011.

So: are you part of the 1%? Or are you part of the 99%? Are you someone who has a major responsibility in business, or for the country’s economic well- being, or some other social or political responsibility for the lives of citizens in the UK, someone with real power – and probably with an income to match, an income and savings and investments where you don’t have to worry what happens in the euro zone, because – well because you are part of the 1%? If you are, then I wish you well, but you probably won’t be interested in what I have to say. You can have a snooze now – or go and stretch your legs.

But if you are part of the 99%, and you feel the everyday anxieties about your income, or your savings, or your job, if you feel worried for your future or that of your children, or grandchildren, economically, environmentally, if you worry about how you will manage if you get sick and your local hospital is shut; or how you will get an education; or be able to get a mortgage; or pay off your credit cards; or you worry about who will take care of you when you are old – if you have these everyday familiar worries, then you might just want to stay awake a little longer.

Because we are living through a crisis – it’s happening in a sort of slow-motion car-crash way – but it is a crisis. I was down at St.Paul’s this week, in the City, I spent some time there, mostly in the rain, trying to absorb what is going on, what this Occupy London movement is about, trying not to let my mind be filled with how the media are representing it, but seeing for myself, talking to people, wandering round the site into the educational centre and the multi- faith centre and the media centre and the volunteer-run kitchens and the legal aid centre and the entertainment centre and the first-aid centre – I use the word centre but actually I should say tent, because all of these centres of activity are under canvas, (well, polyurethane, to be accurate), but anyway, tents large and small, spread out higgledy-piggledy and yet in a curiously tidy way, around the Cathedral, with clear and safe access to and from the building for those who want to use it. And a lot of good-natured conversations going on, between camera-wielding visitors and those living there or just giving up time to be there – academics and lawyers, teachers and the unemployed, young and old, sober suits in earnest conversation with dreadlocks and grunge – discussions serious and jovial , with the great religious building providing a backdrop – and a silent commentary (apart from the bells) – on the social and political issues at stake for all of us, but being given specific attention by the inhabitants of these makeshift booths plastered with posters and quotations and lists of daily events, discussions and lectures and films on worthy issues like the dangers of deep-sea oil drilling or political oppression in South America or the implications of the savage cuts to legal aid in the UK. It’s a new hybrid, a cross between politics and street theatre, an on-going act of performance art that, like all art, wants to change the world – or perhaps, less grandiosely, just help us see the world differently.

Trying to see the world differently, trying to live out certain ethical values, is of course a Jewish preoccupation, a Jewish meshuggas, a stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is, a stubborn belief that we could live in better and more life-enhancing ways. During Sukkot there was a Jewish tent, a sukkah, offering hospitality; and on Simchat Torah dancing and song; and a Shabbat service is planned. Jews have been bringing their values into the mix – and they bring their humour.

‘Now is the Winter of our Discount Tents’ reads one banner – humour being one of the hallmarks of this gathering in the centre of London, along with civility and co-operation and a principled spirit of commitment not to inconvenience those who live in the area or work in the area or who have businesses in the area. It was all curiously tidy – not a scrap of litter and large recycling bins at the very centre of the encampment. And the talk was of a range of issues – political and environmental and economic – and the commitment to try and create a particular form of community. And to my surprise there seemed a lot of respect, praise, for the church officials and workers who have been involved with them this last fortnight – this was before Giles Fraser’s principled resignation on Thursday – and, again surprisingly, what seemed a mutual respect (muted but apparent) between the police and the protesters. Though they say they are not protesters, but resisters.

And what they are resistant to is encapsulated in one of the largest banners on the site: ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ it reads; which as a slogan is pretty naff, and simplistic, just as this rhetoric of the 1% and 99% is also naff and simplistic – though that began in San Francisco, so say no more… But although we might be sceptical about these as slogans, as propaganda for a cause they are pretty effective: maybe they do provoke us to think more deeply, more rigorously, about what is going on in relation to the values we live by; and how we organise ourselves in societies; and the systemic failures we have to endure.

You see I don’t agree that Capitalism is Crisis: it might be in crisis but Judaism traditionally didn’t disparage wealth creation – it just insisted (regularly and rather boringly) that when wealth had been generated it needed to be distributed fairly, equitably, that spreading justice was a higher value than accumulating wealth, that charity was an obligation, that with wealth comes responsibility; that a society that neglected the poor, the widow, the orphan, the outsider, that deprived them of the means to live with dignity, that refused to listen to their cries for help, their needs, their well-being – that such a society where wealth was generated but not used for the good of all, that kind of society was – to use a traditional word – sinful. And, as both the Torah and the prophets intuited, such societies were doomed, would in the end be destroyed (from the outside), or destroy themselves.

I was very impressed by what I saw this week, more than impressed, I would say I was rather inspired. It is easy to poke fun at this gathering, it’s easy to be a bit scared (as I felt for moments) by the otherness of people, the way they look, the way they sound – you inevitably get people at these kind of open gatherings with a variety of mental health problems – but what was inspirational was the tolerance I saw, the kindness, the commitment to a laborious form of collective decision-making: meetings open to everyone at 1 pm and 7 pm each day with a slow process of listening and speaking and respecting different views until some coherent consensus was achieved – that’s a commitment to a particular kind of inter-personal respect; it’s a commitment that unites a secular belief in the dignity of the individual with a religious belief in the holiness of each human being.

And percolating through it all, what is inspirational is the passion on display for a different model of living together in community. And yes it is easy to be sceptical and dismissive of this as naive – or to condemn it as some of the tabloids and Tory MPs have done, as hypocritical because some of these people have a coffee at Starbucks, or charge their mobile phones there, but this smug moral point-scoring quite misses the point. And the point is that all around the world this year, there have been groups coming together, for one- off events or day after day – 400,000 in Tel Aviv in August on the streets demanding of the Israeli government a fairer ordering of society, prioritising jobs and homes and education and care of the elderly – people gathering in 900 cities world-wide this month, and they are not all saying ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ but they are all responding to global capitalism being in crisis.

The Tower of Babel story that Barbara read to us is a mythic story, but a myth can contain powerful truth if you know how to read it right, if you listen in to its message, to what is hidden inside its fairytale-like exterior. And the Tower of Babel is a story that speaks about what is happening now, it tells us about a society that ‘had the same language and the same words’ and the people said:

‘Come on, let’s all build a city with a tower that reaches to heaven’ – literally a skyscraper – ‘and let’s make a name for ourselves…’

And this is what we have done, more powerfully than ever before in the history of this planet – the same language, the same words, whether you in London or Berlin, New York or Brussels or Beijing: ‘globalisation, economic growth, free-market turbo-capitalism, deregulation, consumerism based on the manufacture of desire’ – this is what we have built over the last fifty years (and more). This is the name of the game – and what a name we have made for ourselves.

You go up to Hampstead Heath and look out over the city, this wonderful, awesome, awful city of ours, London, and you survey the thrusting Canary Wharf-Gherkin-Shardification of our skyline, all that glitter and glass and phallic cold steel – and you don’t have to be the God of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, to think: no good will come of all this, the omnipotent building and the idolisation of growth; and you don’t have to be the Holy One of Israel to think: who do these people think they are, playing god with people’s lives? There is an extraordinary story in the Jewish tradition, a midrash about the Tower of Babel, where the rabbis said that the Tower had seven levels on its east side and seven on its west side: builders brought the bricks up one side and then came down the other. And if a person slipped and fell down and died, nobody paid any attention and the work went on. But if a brick fell down, everyone stopped working and wept: ‘OMG, they said – Woe is us! How, when, are we going to get another brick to replace it!’
So you don’t have to be a Marxist critic of capitalism to see what is going on in this story. Two thousand years ago the rabbis were aware that people were quite ready to put the projects of empire-building before care for people, for individuals. Building the brand becomes more important than the conditions of the workers. Profit margins take precedence over alleviating poverty. It’s a universal story and it has led us in our own times into a profound crisis.
But this time no God is going to look down and destroy the project and scatter the people and confound their language. We are the gods now – or think we are – Anya read about the sun and the moon and the stars in another part of our mythic narrative from the Book of Genesis, a story wrestling with the mystery of how did they come to be here, these celestial bodies, how did they come into existence, how is it that we live just the right distance from the sun – 93,000,000 miles – not too hot, not too cold, that we can live at all on the fragile surface of this tiny planet in the middle of nowhere; how can that be, how can that possibly be?

And we , who have become the gods now – or think we are – we have a universal language now, just like in the story of the Tower of Babel, and with this language of science and technology – on which of course the global markets now depend – we can measure the heat of the sun, and we can land a man on the moon, and we can see pictures in wonderful colour and awesome detail of stars being born and stars dying: we can do all this miraculous stuff, we have build a civilisation brick by brick, with information added to information, a world solid and towering and magnificent – and I don’t decry it, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without penicillin or be operated on with a carving knife – so we have build this world with towers of knowledge and expertise; but we can’t yet care, we still don’t care, for those who fall off the edge, who depend for their homes and their well-being, and their very lives sometimes, who depend on the politicians and wealth-creators to devise ways of sharing it – more equally, more justly, more compassionately. If we can put men on the moon and capture the birth of stars, surely we can use our ingenuity to prevent one fifth of the children in this country living in poverty.

And those protestors, resisters, are saying: We can do this, if there is the will to do it, we can do things better, we can pay attention to those who fall off the project. And around the world there are many, many who fall off, who slip out of sight, who are exploited and abused and used for the sake of the Babel projects of profit and consumption. We can do it differently, we need to do it differently, and the challenge for Anya’s generation growing up in this world – and the majority of those I saw at St Paul’s were young (but then most people look young to me these days) – the challenge is to do it differently, to do it better. They are not going to have any choice – because the Tower is tottering, and when it falls, who will have the energy, the experience, the wisdom, to re- build on more secure foundations, on more deep-rooted human values?

Those people in those tents may be gone by Christmas, by choice or by eviction, this may be an ephemeral, a transient occupation of the space around St.Paul’s. But they will be back, in one form or another, here and abroad, they will be back because they represent something eternal, something very Jewish actually, a belief, a hopefulness – what use to be called messianic hopefulness – that we can do better than this. We can build a society, brick by brick: dignity, justice, generosity, compassion, care, companionship, these are the building blocks of real community and a good, a godly, society where people are more valued than profit margins, where sharing what we have is more important than share options.    We can do it better.

In a time of austerity, riots, and a rise in the price of beigels, Jewdas returns to Cable Street……….

Live Bands, Film, Talks, Cabaret, Fascist Baiting and Revolutionary Borscht.

Live Music from:

Daniel Kahn & Merlin Shepherd – a mixture of Klezmer, radical Yiddish song, political cabaret and punk folk, accompanied by top UK Klezmer clarinettist
Klezmer Klub feat. David Rosenberg – songs of Yiddish London telling the story of the Jewish east end from 1900 to the 1930s
The Ruby Kid – Hip-hop and spoken-word poetry, influenced by the cinema of Woody Allen, the politics of Hal Draper and the music of Aesop Rock.
The Electric Swing Circus – electro swing sensation.Big band swing. Gypsy jazz. Thundering drum beats. Phat bass lines. A dazzling stage performance.

+ Stephen Watts reciting poetry of the East End.

+ Full film programme of riots, resistance and rabbles

+ Talks on Gandhian resistance, Spanish Civil War, Anti-fascist activism today as well as performance poetry.

+ Communist-Fascist Arm Wrestling, The Three Yentas, Live Guernica tribute painting, Cantorial Drag

+ DJ Notorious spinning speeches, 30s swing and hard beats

+…more

Dress Code: 1930s chic. Fascist, Communist. Yiddish Musical Hall

Free entry for all who were there in 1936! For the rest of you its £7 on the door and £5 if you book in advance HERE

Saturday October 1st
from 8.30pm

Jamboree
Cable Street Studios
566 Cable Street,
London E1W 3HB

£5 advance, £7 on the door.

Buy advance tickets here.

supported by Bet Klal Yisrael

There was a quote from Reform movement chairman Stephen Moss saying that, the appointment of the chief rabbi had been discussed with Mr Pack’s predecessor, and “all agreed that this was a matter for the United Synagogue” Considering no offer had actually been made, hardly therefore a rejection of the offer. The closest anyone got to a ‘rejection’ of such an idea was a quote by Danny Rich, the chief executive of Liberal Judaism who stated that, “I cannot imagine any circumstances in which a Liberal Jewish representative would be authorised to sit on a panel to select the United Synagogue chief rabbi,”

The anomaly of course is that the chief rabbi is the chief rabbi of the United Synagogue and not actually formally the representative or leader of all Jews in the United Kingdom.

So well done to the JC for upholding enviable journalistic standards. Well done for featuring an article about Reform Jews rejecting an offer that hadn’t actually been made, and given the history of splits between the Reform and Orthodox communities, well done for putting such a divisive and inaccurate headline on your front page.

Our dating agency, “Desperate Jews For Lapsed Catholics” (DJLC), is specially designed to provide the perfect Catholic boy/girl for you and there is every reason to use us, too! It really is a match made in Shiksa and Shaygetz heaven. Just think of all the values , traditions, and complexes, we have in common, all which make for healthy loving relationships (and great debates on Seder night!)

Our communities both worship dead men, endure guilt and shame over sex and masturbation, partake in obsessive repetitive chanting of phrases in ancient tongue, hold irrational beliefs about the transformative nature of food (wine into blood, bread into flesh, the laws of chemistry and calories not applying to food eaten on the Sabbath), and of course that wondrous head gear, dress and general strange adornments which are defining features of both our communities. These are all just some amongst the  many reasons why our members find their Bashert through us….and of course don’t forget the bonus of  decreasing the risk of spreading those nasty genetic diseases,  avoiding broiguses over a “get”, and  to top it all off….. treif sex is just better when you don’t have to worry about ritual purity laws!

We even have an elite membership option, “ Catholics with Cash”. Sign up to this and you will have special access to our single, sexy Catholic doctors, lawyers and accountants. This will be certain to placate those super fussy parents with at least one of their necessary criteria!

If you are interested and would like to join DJLC please email Mrs Fleischig-Milkeg at:  welovethevatican@jewmail.co.uk