Reena Failure

Hmm. Two things:

It is part of a larger campaign to centralize Judaism, as both a religion and a culture, for particular, narrow political purposes.

Whatever else one may argue, this clearly has nothing to do with religion. It's very simple ethnic politics, of the kind that takes places in most ethnic communities.

These groups are advocating the de-facto excommunication of someone whose opinions do not align perfectly with their own. Jews should be monolithic, you know.... local organizations claiming to represent all Jews.

First, when these organizations claim to "represent" a group, all they can mean is that they are advocating according to their sense of the best interests of that group. That's how advocacy groups work. (Heck, it's how governments work: last I checked, our Canadian representatives don't even have a consensus of opinion within the House of Commons, never mind having the agreement of every single Canadian.) It would be nonsensical to think they could only do or say what all self-identified Jews agreed with -- that would mean they could never do or say anything at all.

If other self-identified Jews disagree, they are free to not support that advocacy group, not work with organizations that do, and to start their own advocacy groups. Which is exactly why B'nai Brith and CJC are separate from one another, and each distinct from other advocacy groups like Not In Our Name, Independent Jewish Voices, Israeli Apartheid Fascist Land-Grabbing Non-Semitic Not-a-People European Colonialist Carnival Crew, and any other group that folks want to start up.

That's democracy. It's what enables Jewish ethnic politics to be spectacularly non-monolithic compared with, well, many other ethnic communities' politics in this country. As it happens, the advocacy groups that fund Baycrest and the Koffler Centre have been tremendously more successful than any other Jewish advocacy group by nearly any measure, particularly longevity. Perhaps those groups will change to maintain their success. Perhaps they don't need to change to maintain their success. Perhaps they do, they won't, and other groups will therefore rise up to become more successful. We shall see.

Montauk: I agree that fierce criticism can be painful, although I'm not sure "snapping down jaws" is the right way to describe criticism. I disagree that there is anything surprising in advocacy organizations advocating, although you are probably right that soft-pedalling their message would often make for more effective PR. As to Judaism "bringing the state into the church", this is incorrect -- the Jewish tradition has no position on statecraft, while the State of Israel is constituted under international law with respect to the self-determination of peoples and without reference to religion.

1. If by "dismissal" you mean not interested in talking about something then, sure -- some will not find their interests met in one spot, and will therefore look to another. Again, I think that's healthy. If by dismissal you mean the power to dismiss a matter altogether, of course, then I think you'd Jewish organizations do not control the public sphere. Dissent within an organization can and should be rechannelled into a whole new organization -- that's the nature of democracy.

2. If you mean that the Jewish tradition, and Judaism as a religion, are deeply tied to the Land of Israel then, again, sure. Even Reform Judaism, a recent West European invention trying desperately to erase Jewish ethnicity and revamp Judaism as a religion compatible with post-Enlightenment Europe, was unsuccessful in rooting it out. Lord knows it tried.

The extra step going from there to being Zionist is not exactly surprising, I agree, but it's an extra step -- one rooted in the (secular) system of international law that governs statecraft. That, really, is why, much more than being fierce Zionists, most such Jewish organizations are better described as anti-anti-Zionist. What they are really reacting to is the implied criticism that Jewish self-determination (as that term is understood under international law) is illegitimate because Jews do not constitute a people. To the extent most anti-Zionism is based on that last claim, which is of course antithetical to most Jewish traditions (save, possibly, the Reform one, at least in its earliest versions), it is unsurprising that Jewish organizations react strongly to it. Noone likes to be told they don't exist.

I suspect Jewish organizations would react much less strongly to forms of anti-Zionism based, not in explicit or implicit denial of Jewish peoplehood (hence the "apartheid" slur which seeks to link with South Africa), but which instead refused to affiliate with such denials. For instance, by explicitly recognizing the existence of the Jewish people, but arguing against the legitimacy of the international legal system of nation-states and self-determination -- say, a simultaneous call, not just to dismantle the borders between Israel and Palestine, but also between Germany and France, Turkey and Greece, China and the Koreas, India and Pakistan, Sweden and Finland, and so forth.