This report by Cecilie Surasky of Muzzlewatch (Jewish Voice for Peace) bears on the untoward and disagreeable actions of the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern in the manner in which he defined anti-Semitism for the European Union. Under his expanded definition, criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism are considered anti-Semitic, thus bringing under its umbrella a host of outspoken progressive Israeli and diaspora Jews. Likewise, statements comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa as in Jimmy Carter’s book or implicating racism in general are subject to criticism as being anti-Semitic. The question mark at the end of the title appeared in the original report.
As we (Muzzlewatch) previously reported….
The infamous American Jewish Committee (AJC) Rosenfeld report
…..the AJC’s embarrassing essay, “Progressive Jewish Thought”…..takes progressive Jews out of context of their critiques of all human rights violations and inequality, and makes them out to be simply Israel-haters, and by extension, Jew-haters.
Richard Cohen strikes back in his Washington Post column. Leonard Fein defends left Zionists. Phil Weiss of the New York Observer (mentions Muzzlewatch) and says progressive Jewish criticism of Israel is now a movement. And Rabbi Tzvee gives it the award for worst article about anti-Semitism ever written.
The report is a kind of black listing by a major Jewish organizations of other Jews, including Jewish Voice for Peace and JVP advisory board members Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Adrienne Rich and Tony Kushner, all of whom have made extraordinary contributions to the Jewish world.
….a spirited debate in the UK ended in the passage of a controversial definition of anti-Semitism by the National Union of Students. Arthur Neslen, in the UK Guardian’s Comment is Free, says that the definition, which in essence declares that many forms of criticism of Israel are anti-Semitic, was in large part written by the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern. AJC caused an uproar in the Jewish community for their infamous pamphlet charging some of America’s best known progressive Jewish artists, like Adrienne Rich and Tony Kushner, with fomenting anti-Semitism.
Neslen writes:
What do Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi, Ehud Olmert and myself all have in common? We could each be censured for racism according to the European Union Monitoring Centre’s “working definition of anti-Semitism” which was last week adopted by the National Union of Students as official policy.
(the full definition can be found here: http://eumc.europa.eu/eumc/material/pub/AS/AS-WorkingDefinition-draft.pdf)
This definition has lately been sweeping all before it, taking endorsements everywhere from the all-party parliamentary Report on anti-Semitism to the US state department’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism. The British government has pledged to re-examine its own definition of anti-Semitism if the EUMC’s successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency, ratifies the new lingua franca.
So it’s actually a bit shocking to discover that the new definition was largely drafted by a pro-Israel advocate who gives talks on how to elide the distinction between anti-Zionism and hatred of Jews. Kenneth Stern is the American Jewish Committee’s expert on anti-Semitism and in Defining Anti-Semitism, a paper published by Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute, he explained how he developed the working definition “along with other experts” in the second half of 2004.
Significantly, it involved crunching religious and racial hatred of Jews with what he labeled “political” anti-Semitism. This latter, he claimed, has been “otherwise known in recent years as anti-Zionism, which treats Israel as the classic Jew”. Political anti-Semites could thus include, for example, those who “seek to disqualify Israel from equal membership in the community of nations”, presumably by means of boycott initiatives. Naturally, comparing Israel to apartheid-era South Africa is also, within Kenneth Stern’s framework, “an expression of anti-Semitism”.
His organization, the AJC, boasts that during the consultation period, the EUMC accepted its invitation to convene a consultation over the working definition. Unlike some of the other Jewish contributors to the consultation process, the AJC’s mission statement lists building support for “Israel’s quest for peace and security” and countering “the treatment of Israel at the United Nations” among its most pressing concerns. But Stern seems to be particularly interested in discrediting anti-Zionism. The flyer for a meeting on “anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism”, which he is giving next month, says he will be addressing the question: “What are the essential ingredients of strategies to combat anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism both here and abroad?”
At the risk of sounding flip, I’d say that persuading policy makers to blur the difference between the two in their working definition might be a good start. The EUMC ended up doing precisely this. “Anti-Semitism,” its report began, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred.” Such a perception could include stereotypical or dehumanizing libels about, for example:
…Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel
Jewish peace activists have always balked at this last point, dissociating themselves from war crimes committed in their names. Sadly, Ehud Olmert was not so circumspect when, on July 7, he told the United Jewish Communities that the invasion of Lebanon was “a war fought by all the Jews”.
Read the whole piece here,
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/arthur_neslen/2007/04/when_an_antisemite_is_not_an_a.html
Kenneth Stern is clearly out of sync with the progressive Jewish community and the progressive community in general.