Tikkun is an American Jewish magazine on the left which takes its name from the theological concept of tikkun olam - repairing and improving the world through the promotion of social justice.
I’ve found the magazine to be an odd and occasionally spooky fusion of New Age hokum and far left politics. It’s not just the content. The underlying idea, with its emphasis on spirituality and community, is a tad cultish: reverential of those who lead, back-slappingly agreeable to those who buy in, disdaining of those who don’t.
Still, I never thought I’d see the day when an antisemite found his way into its pages. But that is exactly what has happened. The man in the picture above may look like a Borat impersonator - he is, in fact, a shadowy individual who goes by the name of Israel Shamir. He believes in blood libels and Jewish conspiracies and all manner of antisemitic garbage. Not even Electronic Intifada will publish him.
How Shamir ended up in the pages of Tikkun is briskly detailed over at Engage and at Harry’s Place. On the Harry’s Place entry, you can also read the sneering, puerile email sent by a Tikkunista called Dimitri Zagoroff to Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist campaigner who objected to Shamir’s article. (Zagoroff makes fun of Pfeifer’s English, which is not his first language. I will wager that Pfeifer’s English is streets ahead of Zagoroff’s German.)
I have just one nugget to add to this shameful episode. A colleague recently received some promotional literature for a book by one E. Michael Jones entitled “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History.” If the title isn’t a giveaway, the publisher - a far-right catholic magazine called “Culture Wars” which publishes articles with headlines like “Israel, Oil and Death: The War for Ossetia” - certainly is.
I haven’t got a copy of the book and I won’t be buying one - $48 (plus $8 shipping and handling) is a ridiculous price to pay for a screed which claims that when “the Church acquiesced to the Jewish interpretation of Nostra Aetate, she opened the door to the rise of a neoconservative foreign policy which has led to the disastrous war in Iraq.”
Among the assorted endorsements for the book from various obscurantists is this one, which describes it as a “monumental book which scoops two thousand years of troublesome relations between Christendom and the Jews, and endeavors to connect Jewish strategies of permanent revolution with the permanent Jewish rebellion against Christ (= Logos). This timely book may help to regain the lost balance between Judaic and Christian tendencies in the Western mind.”
The author of this soaring praise? None other than professional antisemite - and occasional Tikkun contributor - Israel Shamir.
Postscript - Karl Pfeifer posted his reply to Zagoroff in the comments at Engage:
Mr. Dimitri Zagoroff,
thank you for your observation. It was late in the evening in Vienna when I wrote to you and I was very tired. I am 80 years old, a survivor of Holocaust and I am fighting in my country against Racism and Antisemitism. I have recently won a case at the European Court of Human Rights against Austria, which is connected with my work as a journalist, who confronts people with philonazi views.
However you published the article of Adam Ermash, formerly Jöran Jermas (Israel Shamir) a man who writes about ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), who is a friend of Horst Mahler, David Duke and Mark Weber and who is claiming, that Jews commit ritual murders.
Karl Pfeifer
never, ever trust a hippy or a new ager. I’d rather have a cup of tea with a member of Hamas
why do you write “not even Electronic Intifada will
publish him”? It’s the “not even” part I’m curious
about. I’ve read Abunimah’s stuff for years, and
as far as I know he has always been 100% scrupulous
in avoiding any hint of anti-semitism. His reaction
to Shamir was not surprising (although of course
very welcome).
Seth
Because I don’t hold EI in particularly high regard, as you can no doubt imagine. Theirs is a shrill, fundamentalist anti-Zionism. They promote boycotts - of Israel but of no other state. They promote what is euphemistically called a “one state” solution - something which can only be implemented at the cost of the expulsion or murder of the majority of Israelis.
I’m not going to give Abunimah any credit for rejecting Shamir’s antisemitism. I expect people to oppose racism and I also expect it to be unremarkable when they do, whether the subject is Shamir or his pal David Duke or anyone else similar.
Frankly, I’d be a lot more impressed if I saw Abunimah reject - without any equivocation - the antisemitism of Hamas.
Excellent reply to Seth, Ben.
Michael Lerner the editor of “Tikkun” is a crazy radical who during the Viet Nam war wanted to start a bloody civil war in America. David Horowitz’ memoir ‘Radical Son” describes Lerner’s behavior during the 60’s.
http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221838847&sr=8-1
Horowitz was the former editor of Ramparts, a new left publication, and had published some articles by Lerner. He has some interesting things to say about Lerner’s inability to write complex prose and also didn’t seem to care about style.
The Rampart editors had to severely edit his articles.
I am not surprised therefore that his web site would post comments by the “Israel Shamir” (which is a pseudonym for a non Jewish antisemite). To Lerner the creation of an antisemitic environment would be like the view on the left that “the worse the better.”
Of course he doesn’t seem to understand that intensification of antisemitism would drive Jews to Israel rather than to his crazy patchwork quilt of self declared radicals. Nor does “Shamir” understand that without the Catholic Church’s move away from antisemitism Zionism would have become stronger and not weaker and the reconciliation between different Christian sects would have been impossible.
While Tikkun was clearly wrong to print Shamir, the assault on Lerner and the magazine is unwarranted, and the broad brush attack on the left offensive. Both Lerner and Tikkun are a mixed bag. Many Jews and others who are concerned about social justice find value in some of the things they have printed and done. Lerner, for instance, was one of the few who tried to take on International ANSWER particularly as it coupled antisemitism in its anti-war program.
Tikkun should be criticized when it is wrong, as it was in this instance. But to demonize it is to do to it what we complain about others doing to Israel.
“…the assault on Lerner and the magazine is unwarranted, and the broad brush attack on the left offensive.”
Ken, over the years many antisemites have used articles published in Tikkun as an excuse to claim that they could not be antisemitic because a national “Jewish” magazine have also voiced similar opinions on Jews and Israel.
See: “Joel Kovel’s “On Left anti-Semitism and the Special Status of Israel” (May/June 2003)
Kovel’s views are not that disimilar to that of “Shamir.”
I was a subscriber in the 80’s when the magazine was first established and before I realized its true agenda.
I also don’t like the way Lerner has monopolized the term Tikkun which has more than one meaning in Jewish thought and not the sappy universal socialist one given it by the magazine:
On Tikkun Olam: see: “How Not to Repair the World,” by
Hillel Halkin
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/how-not-to-repair-the-world-11461?search=1
Had Commentary or The Weekly Standard published an article by a vicious antisemite, I doubt either of them would have been given a pass.
Ultimately, this debate is not about Lerner - let’s not give him yet another ego boost. It’s about the failure to recognize antisemitism even when it smacks you in the face.
“It’s about the failure to recognize antisemitism even when it smacks you in the face.”
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard left-leaning rabbis say that expelling over 300,000 Jews from the West Bank is a “pragmatic” solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. My cheeks are bleeding from being smacked so often.
Ben, how do you explain, that Rabbi Lerner did not care to answer my simple questions?
Do you mean it was wrong of me to ask those questions?
Is it on the part of Tikkun and Rabbi Lerner really “failure to regognize antisemitism” or could it be, that he is so full of hatred against Zionism/Israel and the majority of Jews who are for the existence of the Jewish state, that he is ready to publish even a swedish-russian antisemite and friend of neonazis in order to stick to his sectarian agenda?
Hello Karl
As I hope I made clear, you were absolutely, one hundred per cent right to ask those questions. And Tikkun is obliged to answer them all. Our attention, and the attention of many of our friends, will be focused on this matter until they do so.
I cannot really speculate about what motivates Lerner or anybody else. But I think what has happened is that questioning Israel’s right to exist has become more acceptable in the mainstream, with the result that parts of the left can longer distinguish legitimate criticism (of the settlement policy, for example) from outright demonization. When that point is reached, the Israel Shamirs of this world can reach audiences they could only previously dream about.
Karl Pfeifer, if you want to find out what motivates Lerner’s hatred read the book by David Horowitz I mentioned above.
His hatred isn’t confined to Israel it’s a typical far left hatred against what he considers “bourgeois and capitalist cultures.”
In the late 60’s he was calling for a shooting war against the US “ruling class.”
He chided Horowitz for not having guns at his disposal.
He calls himself a Rabbi and he got some Rabbinic institute to give him a certificate, but to my eyes and the eyes of many other Conservative and Reform Jews he is anything but. He uses his title in order to enhance his radical agenda. His is a case of trying to infiltrate the “enemy camp” in order to subvert it from within.
The whole “Tikkun community” he built is a sham.
“I have lost count of the number of times I have heard left-leaning rabbis say that expelling over 300,000 Jews from the West Bank is a “pragmatic” solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. My cheeks are bleeding from being smacked so often.” Roddy Frankel
You don’t have to be a leftist Rabbi to say that a two State solution will require the evacuation of many but not necessarily all of the settlers from the West Bank.
Only someone unacquainted with the situation on the West Bank would make the kind of comment you quote.
Many of the settlers are a drag not just on the peace process but on the economy of the Jewish State. There many places in Israel proper they can move to. The Galil and other areas within the Green line need developing.
There is talk within Israel to set up a multi million dollar fund to compensate settlers who want to move to Israel.
A two State solution is essential for the survival of Israel.
To Roddy Frankel: I cannot agree with you. Some settlers in the Westbank (or Judea and Samaria) do not care about Human Rights of their neighbours. Some uproot olivetrees of Arab neighbours others overturn stalls in the market of Hebron. And as Shriber has correctly stated, many of them do not contribute to the welfare of Israel but on the contrary cost money, which would be better invested in education and social affairs.
I also do not like your sweeping condemnation of the left. There is part of the left in Europe which is Antiamerican and antisemitic, which I critizise. But on the other hand there are also many in the left, who fight antiamericanism and antisemitism. So probably we should not generalize.
And then who is left? In Austria many people qualify me a leftwinger. Antiimperialist leftwingers call me a Palmachmurderer and in some discussions I was also qualified as a “fascist”. I do not care about such “qualifications”.
Since Rabbi Lerner (and the title of a Rabbi is not protected by law, so anyone can call himself or herself a Rabbi)did not care to reply to my questions I wonder, why.
As a journalist it seldom happened before to me, that simple questions I’ve asked were left unanswered. At the beginning of 2000 I’ve asked Joerg Haider the then leader of the extreme right Austrian Freedom party at an international pressconference broadcasted live on 3 TV chains with 2.5 million spectators if he could stop his contacts with Holocaust deniers and Neonazi. Haider instead of answering my question, started to preach tolerance. A very strange experience.
But not getting an answer to simple questions from a Rabbi, this did never before happen to me. I am still looking forward to his answer.
And I am in agreement with Shriber: “A two State solution is essential for the survival of Israel”. Of course such a solution can be only realised, if the Palestinians really want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbours. Now with all the antisemitic incitement in their media I doubt if they wish that.
shriber: “Only someone unacquainted with the situation on the West Bank would make the kind of comment you quote.”
my reply: Pardon my ignorance, but your condescending tone distracts from the substance of this discussion. Also, I am not quoting, I am stating my own opinion. You are qoting me.
shriber: “You don’t have to be a leftist Rabbi to say that a two State solution will require the evacuation of many but not necessarily all of the settlers from the West Bank.”
my reply: True enough, but I contend that this is an insidious form of anti-semitism. Anti-semitism, I am sure you agree, is not limited to Left-leaning rabbis.
shriber: “Many of the settlers are a drag not just on the peace process but on the economy of the Jewish State.”
my reply: Does this mean that all unemployed Jews must be deported from the West Bank. Are they less worthy in your eyes? Do you apply the same tough standards to Arabs living in the West Bank?
Karl Pfeifer: “Some settlers in the Westbank (or Judea and Samaria) do not care about Human Rights of their neighbours. Some uproot olivetrees of Arab neighbours others overturn stalls in the market of Hebron. And as Shriber has correctly stated, many of them do not contribute to the welfare of Israel but on the contrary cost money…”
my reply: This sounds a lot like shriber. So you think that some bad attitudes and occasional vandalism justifies expelling 300,000 people? If some West Bank Arabs vandalized Jewish settlements (and they have), does that mean all Arabs must leave as well? Will anyone be left in the West Bank? I won’t even start talking about Arab attitudes toward human rights.
Karl Pfeifer: “I also do not like your sweeping condemnation of the left.”
my reply: My condemnation is not of the left, per se, only of this perverse form of justice I have heard them repeat so widely.
So I ask you both, shriber and Karl:
What is your litmus test for allowing a person to live in the West Bank, or in Yemen, or Morocco, or Iraq, or Lybia (my aunt’s birthplace), or Tel Aviv (my birthplace), or anywhere else on this planet? Will you apply this same litmus test to all residents, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or religion? Justice is not just if it is based on double standards.