Where do you get yours News & Views?

Nowadays, I read my news-and-views mostly online. I still get a print newspaper delivered to my door every morning – Haaretz in Hebrew (don't read too much into that!) but like you, I get most of my news-and-views from social media, Internet viewspapers, and by visiting favorite websites.

Beyond Israel, I find myself drawn (sometimes like a moth to flame) to Facebook, Twitter, The NYT, WP, C-SPAN, PBS Newshour, Politico, Roll Call, Real Clear Politics PEW, Drudge, gosh…I could go on and on.

I'm always interested in discovering genuinely fresh sources of "content" especially since so much of what we read is regurgitated, curated, and aggregated.

In brainstorming about how I could promote my book The Pater, my publicist suggested I check out Kveller. If nothing else, I tripped upon a great site.

It is, editor Molly Tolsky tells me in an email, a website for women and parents who are raising kids through a Jewish lens and looking to share, celebrate, and commiserate with like-minded people. The site goes after readers from all different levels of observance and experience, from "first-time parents, grandparents, interfaith parents, queer parents, adoptive parents, and everything in between."

Kveller averages over 1 million unique page views a month, she says.

People turn to Kveller for its personal essays. "Our writers are relentlessly honest and unafraid to take on any topic, whether light-hearted or taboo, as it relates to parenting, relationships, careers, and so on," Tolsky says.

"We also feature an extensive Jewish Baby Name finder, how-to guides for Jewish holidays and life-cycle rituals, recipes, an advice column called 'Dear Gefilte,' and exclusive blog posts from Emmy-nominated Jewish actress and writer, Mayim Bialik, who stars on CBS' The Big Bang Theory."

Kveller is named after the Yiddish word, meaning to burst with pride (as over one's child... get it?), she prompts.

Kveller is part of 70 Faces Media, a not-for-profit group which also runs the JTA.

II

I'M FOREVER asking people where they turn for news-and-views.

When I posed this question to Shimon Fogel, chief executive officer of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Canada he wrote back:

"Elliot, there is no shortage of excellent sites from which to glean important and insightful information flowing from specifically Jewish perspectives. While my personal reading is not, of course, limited to Jewish-specific sites, the ones that I review on a regular basis include:

Commentary and Tablet magazines – both of which provide very timely insights, albeit from different perspectives (the former being more conservative and the latter more liberal). In addition, Mosaic provides an excellent daily digest that I find very useful and the Gatestone Institute has been producing some very strong and useful articles and analysis that I have found very helpful."

British scholar Colin Shindler, emeritus professor at the University of London and author of the just published The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron  tells me that he is "a great fan of Harry’s Place http://hurryupharry.org/ which focuses on the attitudes of the British and international Left towards Israel and Zionism.

"It provides factual information which is often omitted elsewhere. I also enjoy reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s website for his humour and analysis of issues concerning the Jewish world. I appreciate Roger Cohen’s insight, erudition and command of the English language in all his writings."

Sally Berkovic, chief executive at the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) in Europe is a voracious consumer of news and views particularly as it relates to her work. 

She rattled off a bunch of sites, some of which I'd never heard including of http://www.guidestar.org/ which is a repository of nearly 10,000 entries about Jewish charities in the USA and its Israeli counterpart - http://www.guidestar.org.il/

She says www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu is an excellent overview of the issues, events and challenges dealing with Jewish heritage;

http://web.nli.org.il/sites/nli/English/Pages/default.aspx is the site of one of the most important institutions in Jewish and Israeli life that holds our national memory and heritage;  http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/ has relevant updates in Jewish philanthropy and reflective articles by leading practitioners in the field; http://archives.jdc.org/?referrer=https://www.google.co.uk/ provides a treasure trove of important documents chronicling 100 years of helping Jews across the world and http://www.judaica-europeana.eu/ offers access to thousands of images and documents reflecting Jewish life in Europe.

Shimon Cohen who runs the well-regarded THE PR OFFICEin London says he makes it a point to read Tablet, Forward and Jewish Journal. "I read as much and as many as I can find and I have found these to be extensive and authoritative. Then there's Failed Messiah which is to Jews what Fox News is to the rest of the world." 

So I asked Shmarya Rosenberg of FailedMessiah to tell me about his site. 

During the "quiet summer time" he draws 200,000 visitors and about 1 million page views.

"I report on crime, corruption and bad behavior, primarily in the haredi and Modern Orthodox/Zionist Orthodox communities, but also on religion and state issues in Israel. I do it primarily to expose the internal cover-ups related to these crimes and to provide some measure of protection and support for victims by doing so. As Justice Louis Brandies said, sunshine is said to the best disinfectant."

III

OVER AT http://www.rationalistjudaism.com/ Rationalist Judaism, Natan Slifkin tells me a bit about his site: It is primarily for people with a strong yeshiva education, a strong secular education, and disturbed by much of what is taught in the Orthodox world.


The site is mostly a labor of love though sometimes he receives donations in response to offering monographs for download.
According to Slifkin: "It started primarily as an exploration of the rationalist approach to Judaism and how it differs from the mystical approach. This relates to everything from Torah/science issues to the size of a kezayis to the alleged merits of segulos to the role of Torah study. In the last few years I have also written a lot about haredi vs. non-haredi society, especially in Israel. This also relates to the non-rationalist divide, as I discuss on the site. So the site is an
unusual combination of scholarly writing and social commentary.

Sometimes these are intertwined. For example, when it comes to the issue of army service, there is a haredi claim that their Torah study protects. Many people disagree with this, but they don't actually debate its merits from a Torah perspective. On my website, I carefully analyzed this argument from several perspectives, including that of basis in traditional sources."

Slifkin used to be very much part of haredi and still lives in a generally haredi community. "This means that issues relating to haredim are very important to me, and it also means that I have an insider's perspective on their worldview, and are thus better qualified to critically evaluate it."

IV

LEAVE A COMMENT and let me know your favorite sources and sites – the more obscure or esoteric the better!

And thank you (loyal reader) for checking in on my blog over the past year.

Wishing us all a year of health, creativity and peace (with security…of course!). 

 : - )

Elliot

Pact With the Devil?

To find sanctuary and profit in the new world, Jews sometimes played a prominent role in the machinery of slavery, I learned from scholar Jonathan Schorsch

One-hundred and fifty years after the U.S. Civil War, slavery's ramifications continue to torment the American psyche. Nearly six in 10 Americans think race relations are bad, and four in 10 feel they are getting worse, according to a recent New York Times poll.

In June, a white supremacist murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. And in July, yet another African-American, Sandra Bland, wound up dead under suspicious circumstances after being arrested by a white police in Waller County, Texas.

American Jews would like to think they have only an incidental share in their country's sullied legacy of slavery and racism. But both white supremacists and black chauvinists insist Jews were central to the equation.

Jonathan Schorsch has devoted much of his academic career to understanding the relationship between Jews and blacks in the New World. Schorsch, the son of former Jewish Theological Seminary chancellor Ismar Schorsch, was drawn to the subject in the early 1990s, after learning of the accusations from Black nationalists, such as Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, that Jews were responsible not only for the slave trade but for having embedded the very idea of racism into Scripture.

Yet Schorsch was no less exasperated with the knee-jerk Jewish reaction to Farrakhan. Jewish leaders in the 1980s and 1990s turned the discussion to the vanguard role the community played in the civil rights movement.

Jonathan Schorsch

The history, it turned out, was far from black and white.

SLAVERY WAS ubiquitous in the New World starting in the 1500s until well into the mid-1800s. Schorsch set out to establish the facts— painful as they might be in contemporary eyes— about Jewish-Black relations in the age of slavery.

In 2004, he wrote Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World which concluded that Jewish attitudes toward blacks, between the 1600s and 1800s, were on the whole not much different from the European colonial norm.

In 2009, he came out with Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century . The book, aimed at an academic audience, examined the extent to which the Catholic Church in the 1600s distrusted and discriminated against both Jewish and African converts to Christianity.

His latest essay on Jews in the Caribbean appears in a just-released collection of http://www.walburgpers.nl/winkel/algemeen/joden essays— for now available only in Dutch— published in conjunction with the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam's current exhibit on Jewish life in the Caribbean.

IN JUNE, I heard Schorsch speak at the historic Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam about how Jews in the Dutch Caribbean reconciled halacha and slavery. Many in the audience were non-Jewish descendants of former slaves.

Jews from Spain and Portugal— but also from Ashkenazi lands— began to live openly in Amsterdam starting in the early 1600s after the Netherlands became Protestant. Schorsch explained that slavery in Europe during the 1600s was mostly of the domestic variety. Slaves in Jewish households were often incorporated into the family. Males were circumcised. Women went to the mikve. Otherwise, they couldn't work in the home preparing kosher food or serving wine. 

Meantime, Jews arrived in the Caribbean in the 1600s settling in Suriname, Curaçao, northeast Brazil, and New Amsterdam – all Dutch colonies dominated until 1730 by the quasi-governmental Dutch West India Company. The Dutch were happy to have white Jewish slave owners settler in the Caribbean.

But the slavery of the New World was a far cry from the domestic variety that had offered a prospect of assimilation back in Europe. Caribbean slavery was plantation-based aimed at stoking colonial economies – at a dreadful cost to African lives and dignity.

The Jewish communities of the Caribbean enjoyed sweeping religious and economic freedom not generally available in the Old World. And Jews followed the prevailing Christian and Muslim mores in their treatment of slaves – not Jewish law. The massive plantation system blocked opportunities for assimilation into the master's household previously available.

Schorsch came to conclude that the Jewish minority was no less involved in benefiting from the institution of slavery than the larger Christian society. In the 17th and 18th century, Jews owned perhaps 40,000 slaves in the Dutch Caribbean most of whom were not given the option of conversion and assimilation into the Jewish community.

I caught up with Schorsch after he returned to his academic base at Potsdam University in Germany.

What would halacha have demanded of Jewish slave owners?

That slaves be allowed to rest on Shabbat. Halacha on other matters was not monolithic. The most stringent, but until the 16th century the most widespread halachic understanding was that male slaves would be circumcised at purchase or within the first year, and that female slaves be immersed in the mikve. It was also forbidden to approach a slave sexually. 

How learned were the Dutch Jews who reached the Caribbean in the 1600s of Jewish tradition?

Scholars continue to debate the Jewishness of the Converso or New Christian population. The consensus has it that the Portuguese Conversos were far more loyal to and fervent regarding maintaining Jewish beliefs and practices than the Spanish Conversos. 

I think the best way to understand the Jewishness of Conversos is to see the population as being divided into four types: (1) those secretly loyal to Judaism – Marranos; (2) sincere converts to Catholicism and those who for pragmatic reasons dropped interest in Judaism; (3) those practicing a syncretic religion combining Judaism and Christianity; (4) those disgusted by religious coercion and violence; skeptics, free-thinkers.

Because Judaism was forbidden in Iberian territories, a prohibition enforced by the Inquisitions, secrecy and dissembling epitomize this whole phenomenon, making it simply impossible to quantify the size of each of these four types.

So even Conversos loyal to Judaism tended to know little about actual living Judaism. 

With some exceptions they had no input from contemporary Jews or Jewish texts. Hence the increasingly tenuous connection between crypto-Judaism and real Judaism.

Many Conversos who fled to lands where one could be a Jew openly did so not out of a desire to be Jewish but merely to flee the terror of the Inquisition. 

Raised as Catholics, these “New Jews,” in historian Yosef Kaplan’s phrasing, were mostly ignorant of rabbinic law and many even saw it rather negatively, as did the Church.

Jews appear to have played a comparatively minor role in importing African slaves to the New World. Right?

As slavery became industrialized by the Portuguese and Spanish in the late 15th century, some Converso or New Christian merchants played a prominent role as slave traders. This lasted perhaps into the 17th century. 

One question remains the religious loyalties of these men, but we should not preclude the likelihood that some were Marranos, i.e., loyal Jews.

In terms of open Jews, the number of slave traders, even part-time, known to scholars from the four-century history of the Atlantic slave trade probably does not exceed 30. This is an astonishingly low number and the reason for the paucity of Jewish slave traders continues to be unclear. 

Did ethics keep Jews out of this business?  Lack of connections?  The most well-known (or notorious) might be Aaron Lopez of Newport, Rhode Island.

Jews in various colonies often played a role, sometimes a prominent one, in buying up slaves at slave markets in the Americas and selling them in the interior of the colonies to planters.

Were there differences in how Jews related to the slave economy among Caribbean colonies controlled by the Netherlands versus those dominated by France or Britain?

French colonies did not generally tolerate a Jewish presence, but where they did, as in Saint Domingue (later Haiti), some Jews entered the planter elite, just as in Suriname, a Dutch colony, and Barbados and Jamaica, English colonies.

But in all of the colonies, Jewish merchants benefitted from slave labor, as did almost any family that wasn’t poor and could afford one or two slaves to help with the arduous and endless work necessary for running their domestic economy.

Were there Jews who protested the slave system?

Beginning in the 18th century, some European Jewish influenced by the enlightenment became critics of slavery. Some Jews became active in the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, which really thrived only in the English colonial orbit, but they represented a small minority of the Jewish population and their radical stance often went unappreciated by the larger community, to put it mildly.

Turning to domestic slaves. How did the Caribbean Jewish community relate to these Jews of color?

Those few slaves who were converted, either according to Halacha or by taking on Jewishness through sexual/romantic relations with Jewish masters were usually initially welcomed in the small, vulnerable communities around the Atlantic. They were treated as full Jews, as was the standard way in the so-called Old World before the rise of industrial slavery.

They married within the community, the men were given honors in synagogue. But quickly in each community a backlash ensued. In Amsterdam, Suriname and Curaçao the governing elites instituted legislation against non-whites, for example banning non-whites from burial in the regular part of the cemeteries, banning their circumcision, immersion or conversion, removing the option of calling the men to the Torah or studying in the yeshiva at Amsterdam, prohibiting non-white women from sitting in the front rows of the women’s section in synagogue. 

While Halacha is hardly always “progressive,” we see how under the Atlantic slave system race came to take precedence over Halacha in many Atlantic-world Jewish communities.

If Jews were not prominent players in the trans-Atlantic slave trade or instrumental in financing for the slave trade why have Jews been persistently singled out by Black militants for opprobrium?

I think the animosity stems from two factors. The first is the turn of early 20th-century American Black activists and radicals from their elders’ Christianity. "White” Christianity now faced harsh critique from them and so did Judaism, the source of Christianity and a partner in the alleged Judeo-Christian civilization that American thinkers loved to parade around.

The second factor is later 20th-century socio-economic tensions. In the Civil Rights era many Blacks negatively compared their own situation to that of Jews. They came to see Jews as succeeding because they could pass as white and surmised, not without reason, that some of that success was gained at their expense.

There could not have been a slave trade without Africans in Africa prepared to sell other Africans to European and Muslim buyers. Yet you seem to feel that this is besides the point.

African slavery prior to the era of European conquest and colonization— taking losing warriors in inter-tribal conflicts or raiding rival villages for slaves— was mostly domestic, an equal-opportunity matter, and lacked the intense racism that European enslavement of Africans developed and required. This is not to excuse such slavery.

Once Europeans arrived in Africa, however, they took slaves in increasingly high numbers in order to provide labor for their profit-making agricultural colonies and intentionally instigated inter-tribal wars in order to obtain more slaves.

The slaves themselves were now treated miserably, like non-humans, and since almost every slave came from Black Africa – an entire, vicious system of exclusion, ostracization, and dehumanization was erected.

And what about the Muslim/Arab slave trade?

Often inquiries into these topics have as much to do with current ideological drives than with some supposedly neutral facts. People want to know whom to blame, whom to absolve. So, frequently such questions are rhetorical as much as purely informational.

If Africans participated in slavery then whites aren’t so terrible, some whites might say. If most of the slave trade and economy was run by white Christians, the Jews who were involved were just doing what everyone else was doing. 

I find this a highly unsatisfying, even a suspect way of avoiding responsibility.

Nonetheless, can you assess the role of Arabs in the transport of African slaves to the new world.

I have never heard of Arabs involved in transferring slaves to the Americas.  They were rather busy with their own extensive slave system, which differed significantly in some respects from Atlantic-world slavery.

--------

Elliot Jager is a Jerusalem-based journalist. His book Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness will be published by The Toby Press in October.

If we adopt anti-civilian warfare in the mold of the PLO or Hamas – what does that make us?

We enter this Shabbat with heads bowed.

On Thursday night, a criminally insane ultra-Orthodox man stabbed six people at the annual gay pride parade in Jerusalem. Two of the victims sustained serious injuries. 

The perpetrator— we can dispense with "alleged" since there are pictures of him about to plunge a large hunting knife into the back of a marcher— is Yishai Schlissel. He'd been convicted of stabbing three people at a gay pride parade 10 years ago.

The police intelligence division has a lot of explaining to do.

This was also the week that we got a good look at the two smirking arsonists who torched the Church of the Loaves and Fishes near the Lake of Galilee.

Then things got even worse.

Jewish terrorists murdered a Palestinian toddler, Ali Saad Dawabsheh, and critically injured his 4-year-old brother very early this morning (Friday) by setting their home aflame. Their  mother and father were also injured in the fire.

The crime took place in the hamlet of Duma which is in gush Shilo.

In all three cases, the last thing we want is to "place them in context."

The "price tag" is fundamentally an anti-Zionist act. It discounts the fact that we have a state. It eats away at the fabric of Israeli society. It is a desecration of God.

Last summer saw the murder of a Jerusalem youth, Mohammed Abu Khdeir at the hands of Jewish terrorists.

There is no "revenge" in setting out to murder innocents. 

The killers may be driven by apocalyptic fantasies in which unleashing an all-out Muslim-Jewish war will force the hand of God and hasten the coming of the "Messiah king!"

They may well yet get a frenzy of bloodletting they so crave.

There is a need for context in understanding the Arab-Israel conflict. 

There is a need to expose Western double-standards and hypocrisy.

I have no doubt in the justice of the Zionist cause.

But now is not a time for context or excuses. 

Most every leader of the settlement community— and everyone across the Zionist political spectrum—has condemned the attack in Duma.

If we behave like Amelek, the Cossacks, the Crusaders  -- if we adopt anti-civilian warfare in the mold of the PLO or Hamas – what has become of us?

What a shameful, sad, and depressing week.

Random Stuff You Pick-Up in the Hebrew-edition of Haaretz

Israel and ISIS are kinda basically the same

- Page 12 Friday magazine  (17 July)

A make-believe Mad-magazine-like version of the weekly Hebrew Bible portion. [Ongoing series to ensure secular Israelis remain dismissive of Jewish civilization.]

-Page 16 Friday magazine

Orthodox kibbutz nearest to Gaza has trouble keeping young people from leaving. [to counter stream of reports that secular kibbutzim are abandoning area]

-  Page 32 Friday magazine

A surprise full-page ad from Shalem College aimed at Haaretz's young readers [but can they be de-programmed?]

[From Comrade Amira Haas:]

Israel will Destroy a Palestinian "village" and the US won't Like it.

-  Page 1 Sunday 19 July

{if it's Sunday, it must be the "occupation"}

Main Sunday headline: Difficult Conversation between Netanyahu and Kerry. Kerry says notion that a better Iran deal possible is pure fantasy. [Haaretz's Point: Bibi continues to poison relations with US] [Obviously, there is some truth to that, but Haaretz places exclusive blame on Netanyahu]

Accompanied by picture of Ayatollah Khamenei telling throngs at Ed il Fitr rally that US will remain the enemy. {file under for what's it's worth]

"About 200 Killed in Terror Attacks Around the World During eid al fitr"

{file under for what's it's worth]

Cartoon on page 2 Sunday paper shows Israeli leaders in cahoots with Fox News planning assault on Congress and White House

Of the four op-ed – four are by anti-Netanyahu critics or people of the left. 

Page 4 – Isaac Herzog under pressure not to speak out against the Iran deal from within his Labor Party on the grounds that it will help Netanyahu. [guess which side Haaretz favors?)

Page 4 the head of Hamas will parlay with the King of Saudi Arabia

{file under for what's it's worth]

115 Shiites murdered by Sunnis in Iraq during eid al fitr

{file under for what's it's worth]

Page 5 Netayahu calls Abbas to wish him a Happy eid al fitr

Page 1 – Chances Rise that Pollard will be released after 30 years in November

Sunday: 16 Year old Palestinian-Israeli boy killed in Family feud. It is the 8^th family feud killing among Israeli Arabs in the past month (Month of Ramadan ended on Thursday). 

Friday p 4 the infighting within Labor over its ethos (Haaretz worried party is moving too center)

Aipac Goes to War Against Obama  page 6 (Haaretz is rooting for Obama)

Page 8 Friday Kerry and Zarif May Get Nobel Peace Prize  [Haaretz is rooting they do)

p 11 another in an onslaught of Haaretz stories about the world court and Israeli "war crimes"  (Lawfare) (Haaretz's line is to play up notion that Israel is a pariah state because of the "occupation)

Sunday - Tiny piece about Gaza shooting rocket into Israel page 11

I subscribe to Haaretz for the same reason Soviet citizens used to take Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (information). 

They knew "There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda" ... but how else do you know (so early in the morning) the agenda of those who shape the news cycle.

удачной недели

Where Haim Saban and Hillary Clinton Agree

I see that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has written  to Haim Saban, the California-based Israeli-American billionaire and Clinton family friend, promising that if elected president she will work against the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanction campaign known as BDS.

The paradox is that policies Clinton implemented at the State Department from 2009 to 2013 for President Barack Obama did nothing to douse the BDS campaign. And Saban's embrace of a Palestinian state in lockstep with Clinton is yet another instance of prominent Jewish Americans in essence lobbying Jerusalem on behalf of Washington's policies. 

My guess is that if Clinton is elected, Saban will take charge at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

  

Recall, that the strategy of successive U.S. administrations has been to support security cooperation with Israel while applying ever increasing diplomatic pressure to compel an Israeli withdrawal to the approximate 1949 Armistice Lines. 

The unintended consequence of this approach is that it made comparatively moderate Palestinian leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas more intransigent and encouraged their Western supporters to batter Israel with lawfare and BDS.

Why negotiate with Israeli leaders when the Arabs know how the U.S. sees the "endgame."

The Obama administration, following through on the well-intentioned but misguided reasoning of Lyndon Johnson's White House 48 years ago, still thinks that Israel's capture of east Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Golan Heights during the 1967 Six Day War created an enduring diplomatic window. 

Johnson's secretary of state Dean Rusk reasoned that the Arabs would abandon their goal of driving the Jews into the sea and instead exchange the conquered territories for peace.

Early on U.S. policymakers realized that they could not cajole Israel back to the '49 lines (that is the boundaries from which the 1967 war commenced) if the American Jewish community stood in the way. It would just be too messy. 

The Arabs, too, would have to revise their playbook. "No to recognition, no tonegotiation, and no to peace" would have to be swapped for messages (like the 2002 Saudi peace plan) that purport to recast the Arab-Israel conflict in non-zero-sum terms.

Next, American presidents needed to dissociate American Jewish support for Israel from support for its policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

Succeeding administrations have argued that in opposing Jerusalem's security and settlement policies (the two are more often than not intertwined) they are, in fact, being "pro-Israel." 

It's a nuanced approach; the Obama administration has intensified military support to Israel (the Iron Dome project being a prime example) while diplomatically cold-shouldering the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.  The president likes to say that he has Israel's back when it comes to military and security issues.

In the same breath with which Clinton pledged to fight tooth and nail against BDS she repeated the mantra that the solution to the Arab-Israel conflict is to carve out a Palestinian state in the West Bank. This is, supposedly, in Israel's highest interest so that it could remain both Jewish and democratic.

Yet anyone who has walked the West Bank (nine miles to the Mediterranean at its narrowest) can appreciate that a Palestinian state— no less than the demographic issue— would put into question Israel's sustainability. 

Pulling out Jewish civilians and the Israeli army from the West Bank would create a vacuum nearby Ben-Gurion Airport. 

In short order, the West Bank would be engulfed in intra-Arab and intra-Muslim warfare with Fatah, ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas jockeying for power.

With Egypt's Sinai Peninsula a battlefield, Hamas controlling Gaza, Syria imploding, Hezbollah the suzerain in Lebanon, and upheaval from the Maghreb to the Arabian Gulf 

– is it really "pro-Israel" to push at this juncture for the creation of a 22^nd Arab state?

Saban is not the first Jewish leader to take exception to Israeli policies.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress called on the Diaspora to reject the policies of then-premier Levi Eshkol. 

Goldmann wanted an immediate unilateral Israeli withdrawal from captured territories. And Joachim Prinz the outgoing head of the Presidents Conference (after the 1967 war) was altogether uncomfortable with the pro-Israel sentiment sweeping the American Jewish community.  

But there was no holding back how much affiliated Jews began associating their Jewishness with Israel.

By 1969, U.S. groups like the Radical Zionist Alliance were organizing on college campuses in support of an Israeli pullback from the West Bank and Gaza. In 1973, Breira was founded as a vehicle through which intellectuals and progressives could express their Jewishness by leaning on Israel. 

Breira aimed to redefine what it meant to be pro-Israel. There was talk that Goldmann had helped finance the group.

When Breira fell apart, the New Jewish Agenda emerged in 1980. 

It had a much easier time dissociating support for Israel from backing its settlement and security policies because its nemesis was not Golda Meir or Eshkol but Likud Party prime minister Menachem Begin.

U.S. Jewish establishment machers much as the bristled when Ben-Gurion or Golda lectured  them about Zionism didn't detain the Israeli leaders.

Begin, they hated. He was altogether too ... everything they weren't. A classical liberal, tolerant, steadfast, and a student of Jabotinsky.

The notion that American Jewish criticism of Israeli policies is something new or courageous is risible.

J Street, founded in 2008, is not breaking new ground – it is treading where many Jews committed, in tandem with successive U.S. presidents, to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines have gone before.

So I see Clinton's outreach to Saban, ostensibly to express support for the Jewish state, as part and parcel of a rich tradition of political suasion, sometimes camouflaged, these days transparent, to use American Jews to pressure Israel. 

Current and former US officials use Jewish leaders to lobby Israel (no less than any "Israel Lobby" pressures U.S. officials). And Jewish personages who want to feel they are players happily allow themselves to be used.

………………

My study Leverage: How U.S. Presidents Use theAmerican Jewish Community to Pressure Israel  is available as an e-book on Amazon.