Increasingly Diverse Jewish Voices Are Being Heard Worldwide

Both in the U.S. and around the world, increasingly diverse Jewish voices are being heard, challenging the positions often taken by established Jewish organizations.

In the United Kingdom, a new organization has been created to provide an alternative voice to the official representative of Anglo-Jewry on issues related to Israel. Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), launched with advertisements in the Times, Guardian and Jewish Chronicle newspapers — and a week of op-ed articles on the Guardian’s blog site, “Comment Is Free” — is a grouping of academics, media personalities and peace activists opposing what they insist is British Jewry’s unquestioning support for Israel.

More than 100 signatories, including celebrities like playwright and 2006 Nobel literature laureate Harold Pinter, film director Mike Leigh and fashion designer Nicole Farhi, say in the ads that they have come together “in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole.”

One of the founding members of IJV, Oxford University philosophy professor Brian Klug, pointed to statements made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during last year’s Lebanon war, when he reportedly told an American audience: “I believe that this is a war that is being waged by all Jews.” Statements such as this, said Dr. Klug, create a dangerous “fallacy since it tars all Jews with the same brush. Yet this misconception is reinforced here by those who, claiming to speak for British Jews collectively or allowing that impression to go unchallenged, only ever reflect one position on the Middle East.”

On the IJV website, signatory Professor Susie Orbach, a prominent psychotherapist, said: “As a Jew, I feel a particular duty to oppose the injustice that is done to Palestinians. Despite what it might say, the Israeli government does not speak for me.” Progressive Rabbi David Goldberg claimed that when Jews did not speak out against “disastrous” Israeli policies, “they are betraying millennial Jewish values and acting against Israel’s own long-term interests.” Lady Ellen Dahrendorf, a former chair of the New Israel Fund, added: “I’ve long been appalled by the humiliating, brutal and brutalizing occupation of the West Bank. In our current atmosphere of growing ‘tribalism’ and the politics of identity, it is more crucial than ever that friends of Israel voice their concerns.”

The chief executive of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of Anglo-Jewry, Jon Benjamin, observed that “for a group that has been stifled, they seem to have attracted plenty of coverage to their complaint that the community does not express their views.” Others pointed out that the community boasts a wide variety of groups representing different perspectives on issues relating to human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights and the British Friends of Peace Now.

The IJV controversy, reports The Jerusalem Report (March 5, 2007), “follows another heated dispute in the Jewish community over the appointment of academic Anthony Lerman as director of the Institute for Jewish Public Policy Research (IJPPR), which conducts research into policy strategies for Jewish communities in Europe. In a public meeting before his appointment, Lerman had expressed support for the creation of a secular, binational state as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and has also repeatedly cast doubt on the accuracy of statistics reflecting the rising rate of anti-Semitism in the U.K.”

A declaration criticizing Israeli territorial policies is also stirring controversy in the German Jewish community. At issue is a declaration published in January in one of the country’s most widely read Jewish newspapers, Die Judische Zeitung (The Jewish Newspaper). The statement titled “Berlin Declaration Shalom 5767” — a reference to the current year in the Jewish calendar — and organized by a member of the presiding committee of the Central Council of German Jews, Rolf Verleger, professor of neuro-psychology at the University of Lubeck, called on Germany’s government to do more to press Israel to make concessions, and asserted that the “root of the problem is the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory since 1967.” A related advertisement was placed in two of Germany’s major daily newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Suddeutsche Zeiting.

In addition, Die Judische Zeitung published an opinion essay by Kurt Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor and honorary chairman of the International Auschwitz Committee, rebutting criticism of the declaration. “It was said that a Declaration like ‘Shalom 5767’ is grist to the mill of anti-semites in the entire world,” he wrote. “However, the reality is that there is nothing more that helps the anti-semites than what Israel did in the War in Lebanon.”

Fueling the controversy, the trustees of Die Judische Zeitung issued their own statement criticizing the publication’s publishing decisions, asking, “Does this newspaper want to go about as the mouthpiece for anti-Israel propaganda?”

In Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that a new Australian group, Independent Australian Jewish Voices, has launched an online campaign with one organizer saying that Australian Jews were “basically brainwashed” into uncritical support of Israel.