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Brown University project is digitizing 10,000 ancient Israel inscriptions

Posted on May 3, 2023 by admin

The texts inform about Jewish women philanthropists, Roman roads and the impact of the Bar Kokhba War, says professor Michael Satlow, who directs the project.

By Menachem Wecker, JNS

A 1,500 to 2,100-year-old Hebrew text from Jerusalem refers to “Shalom, mother of the synagogue.” And two burial niche inscriptions from Beit She’arim in the Galilee, both dated 250 to 350 C.E., refer in Greek to “Sara daughter of Nehemiah, mother of the priestess, the lady Maria.”

“These inscriptions tend to provide little detail, so it is hard to know what to make of some of them,” Michael Satlow, professor of Judaic studies and religious studies at Brown University, told JNS. “What on earth it meant for a woman to be a priestess of a synagogue, for instance, is very unclear.” There is no male equivalent, of which Satlow is aware, of “mother of the synagogue,” he added.

The three are among some 5,250 already digitized texts and their translations documented in the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project, which Satlow directs. The project, which began at the University of Virginia in 1996 and moved to Brown in 2002, aims to make 10,000 inscriptions from 500 BCE to 614 C.E. accessible online.

“Once deciphered, these inscriptions are then often published in specialized scholarly journals or excavation reports,” Satlow told JNS. “Only in recent decades have serious attempts been made to collect these inscriptions and make them more widely available.”

The inscriptions, written on durable materials like mosaics and stone, during the period that the project explores in Israel are largely in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Although composed by people many centuries ago, some things—like Jewish donors taking credit on synagogue walls—have remained the same.

“We have mosaics on the floors that confer blessings on a list of donors, for example, or a simple notice etched into a column that somebody ‘gave’ it, that is, donated the money for it,” Satlow said.

Despite widespread assumptions that synagogue leadership was patriarchal, an inscription from Huldah appears to name two women, Eustochion and Hesychion, as a synagogue’s “founders.” Satlow also cited several references to synagogue donations that name Jewish women. “Remembered be for good Yudan son of Isaac the Priest and Parigri his daughter. Amen. Amen,” reads an Aramaic mosaic, 400 C.E. to 500 C.E., from a synagogue in Tzipori in the Galilee.

That Aramaic mosaic is entirely preserved, but many of the inscriptions in the project are partial fragments. To make matters harder to translate, many have “irregular” spelling and syntax, according to Satlow. An element of interpretation is part of every translation of the text, he added.

One of the most striking inscriptions in the project, to Satlow, is a text found near Beit Guvrin that dates between 98 C.E. to 117 C.E. Bar-Ilan University professors Boaz Zissu and Avner Ecker have translated the five-word Aramaic inscription as: “May the memory of Lord Trajan Caesar be blessed.”

“This is all quite surprising, since the emperor Trajan violently suppressed Jewish dissidents during the Kitos War,” from 115 C.E. to 117 C.E., Satlow said. He noted that the inscription, “most oddly,” uses a formula typical of honoring synagogue patrons.

“All of this seems to suggest that, at least for some of the local Jewish population, the Roman military presence in Idumaea (Edom) may have been welcome,” Satlow said.

Some evidence suggests that Roman soldiers were regular customers at an olive oil press nearby. “No doubt this led to a great deal of ambivalence,” he said. “The Roman policing was probably not a particularly pleasant presence, but the influx of soldiers’ cash had obvious benefits.”

Rome wasn’t built in a day …

Inscriptions in the project also shed light on Roman roads and the Bar Kochba revolt, according to Satlow.

Studying the inscriptions has helped scholars come to new understandings of trade routes at the time and to reconstruct the ancient Roman road system. Evidence suggests that Rome constructed a vast paved road network for military reasons, according to Satlow. The empire wanted soldiers to be able to move quickly from one place to another, particularly if war or revolts broke out.

“Although Rome’s infrastructure appears impressive in retrospect, it wasn’t—as the saying goes—built in a day and instead took many generations to achieve this expanse,” he said. “This process seems to have begun in 69 C.E. during the Jewish War [Great Revolt], paving existing paths to facilitate the siege of Jerusalem soon after.”

After the paved roads were completed, inscriptions show how satellite military outposts, as in Emmaus, supported the larger garrison in Jerusalem, according to Satlow.

“We can trace how the road connecting Emmaus to Jerusalem facilitated a flow of goods to the latter—the milestones erected by the soldiers paving these roads indicated how far it was to the destination, along with the emperor under whom the road was paved,” he said. And along the 30-mile road from Eleutheropolis to Jerusalem, civilians would have seen 29 reminders of the emperors and military units who created the infrastructure, just as a governor’s or mayor’s name would appear on signage today crediting them for construction projects.

Roman roads also facilitated access, for tax collectors and government officials, to previously unreachable places, like the rural Galilee economy, which had a form of subsistence farming without money, according to Satlow.

“Once these roads were paved, it became easier to transport goods from urban centers to these rural areas,” he said. “On the one hand, this contributed to greater social inequality, on the other hand, this facilitated things like literacy and architectural achievements.”

A synagogue in Capernaum appears to have received “significant donations” soon after a path nearby was paved into a road under Trajan. A more ornate Jewish house of worship replaced it, “thanks in part to the economic flow through the otherwise unremarkable village,” Satlow said.

The Bar Kochba revolt, from 132 C.E. to 135 C.E., has divided scholars, some of whom take it to be a minor revolt and others who think it spread throughout Judea.

“For a long time, the debate revolved around a number of archaeological debates, but in 1999, the classicist WernerEck suggested a compelling reading of an inscription that had been known since 1978,” Satlow said. That inscription from 136 C.E. on a triumphal arch appears to celebrate the emperor Hadrian’s triumph in the Bar Kochba revolt.

“What is striking about this inscription is that it was found in the otherwise insignificant site of Tel Shalem” in the Beit She’an Valley, he said. “This inscription, combined with a bronze statue of the emperor Hadrian, suggests that it was an important military site during the revolt—that the battles were widespread to the point where there may have been panic among the Romans.”

After Bar Kochba, there is no more evidence of a military legion that appears in prior inscriptions. That silence, Satlow said, “suggests that the unit was either devastated or disbanded on account of the losses it suffered in the Bar Kokhba War.”

The post Brown University project is digitizing 10,000 ancient Israel inscriptions appeared first on World Israel News.

Rabbis slam Tlaib: ‘Lies from Nazi Germany do not belong in US Congress’

Posted on May 3, 2023 by admin

A leading American rabbinic group promoting religious liberty and human rights likened statements made by a US lawmaker to those published by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher in the virulently antisemitic ‘Der Sturmer’.

By World Israel News Staff

Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), reacting to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s friendly visit to Israel this week, posted a vicious comment on social media against the Jewish state from her official government account.

It was certainly not the first time that Tlaib, widely considered to be antisemitic, called Israel an “apartheid state,” along with other lies.

This time, on Monday, she tweeted:

“Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. 75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day.”

Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day. https://t.co/s5P35dgqv0

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) May 1, 2023

In response, Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld, President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, issued the following statement:

“The violence at Israel’s formation was the “War of Extermination” declared by the Secretary-General of the Arab League, promising to do to the Jews in the Holy Land what Hitler had done in Europe. And the ethnic cleansing was of Jews from Arab states, over 850,000 driven from their homes, the majority of whom found refuge in Israel.

“By contrast, the Arab population of Israel has grown more than tenfold since 1948,” he noted.

“It is beyond vile to falsely accuse the victims of ethnic cleansing of being its perpetrators. But it is not unprecedented: in Nazi Germany, Julius Streicher described Jews as bacteria feeding upon others. It should not need to be said, but rhetoric from Nazi Germany does not belong in Congress,” Schonfeld concluded.

The Coalition for Jewish Values represents over 2,000 traditional, Orthodox rabbis as the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America.

The Yesha Council, representing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, also condemned Tlaib’s tweet but took a different angle, blaming Twitter CEO Elon Musk for making the social media platform a place where she could bash “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Thank u @elonmusk for your new “community notes” system. @RepRashida has been spewing anti #Israel lies ever since she was elected. Instead of looking out for the residents of #Michigan’s 12th, she uses her platform to bash the only democracy in the Middle East. Thanks Elon! https://t.co/xvBvXNWSoY

— מועצת יש”ע (@YESHA_council) May 3, 2023

At a reception Monday evening in the White House’s East Room celebrating Eid al-Fitr, which concludes Ramadan, President Joe Biden made special mention of Tlaib and antisemitic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, saying they were “looking beautiful.”

The post Rabbis slam Tlaib: ‘Lies from Nazi Germany do not belong in US Congress’ appeared first on World Israel News.

How Pete Seeger Turned Green

Posted on May 3, 2023 by admin

Socialist Pete Seeger, born on this day in 1919, is widely acknowledged to be one of America’s greatest folk singers. Less appreciated is his environmentalism, which he always saw as inextricable from his left-wing politics.

Pete Seeger performs onstage at South Street, New York City, New York, August 18, 1968. The performance was designed to raise awareness and money for the cleanup of the Hudson River. (Harvey L. Silver / Corbis via Getty Images)

Styled “America’s tuning fork” by Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger (1919–2014) was known for his anthems of protest and his support for the labor struggle, civil rights, and the antiwar movement; yet arguably, his most innovative contribution to the American left was his environmental activism. Although this work spanned fifty years of his life, it has received the least amount of acknowledgment and recognition. Seeger’s environmental pivot emerged from a space of revolt in the aftermath of political persecution during the Second Red Scare. Denounced as “un-American” and pushed outside of mainstream media outlets during the 1950s and ’60s, he was forced to rethink how to enact social change from the political margins. Out of this experience of political suppression, Seeger launched a new kind of movement.

Seeger’s decision to plead the First when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955 altered the trajectory of his life and career. While other unfriendly witnesses opted for the Fifth after the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt in 1947, Seeger took a bold, principled approach — one advocated by Albert Einstein. Predictably, Seeger was also charged with contempt. After a seven-year battle over his case, which resulted in the dismissal of his charges, he remained barred from television and faced demonstrators at his concerts who branded him a subversive. Some venues simply barred him from performing. Even WQED, the public television station in Pittsburgh known for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, canceled Seeger’s gratis folk performance on a program for children called Dimple Depot because of the singer’s “Commie ties.”

During this political and personal struggle, Seeger took up sailing only to encounter industrial toxins and “toilet waste” on the Hudson River. For Seeger, the pollution evoked John Kenneth Galbraith’s notion of “private affluence amid public squalor.” Two books also prompted an environmental revolution in his thinking. The first and most obvious one was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The second, however, was a more idiosyncratic choice. In 1963, Vic Schwarz, fellow musician, artist, and history buff, loaned Seeger a copy of the book The Sloops of the Hudson, which featured images of the elegant single-masted wooden ships of a bygone era. This prompted an extraordinary, even preposterous idea: Could they resurrect one of these extinct vessels as an emblem for the nascent environmental struggle? By building a community boat for the people, Seeger hoped to reclaim the neglected river and the act of sailing itself, which had become a hobby for the rich, despite its ties to working-class labor history.

In the years that followed, Seeger attempted to raise money for the Great Hudson Sloop Restoration project through grassroots benefit concerts. Musically, this green evolution corresponded with his album God Bless the Grass, which he released in 1966. Contending with resistance from some who ridiculed his idealism and even more who perceived him as a threat to national security, Seeger performed old folk standards alongside new songs about an earth in crisis, such as “My Dirty Stream.” He also told stories about the polluted Hudson and outlined the plans for the construction of the boat. Despite the benign character of this set list, he was stymied at every level. Three hundred protesters picketed his concert in Westbury, New York, in March of 1967 — a performance that had been called off the previous year and only rescheduled after a legal battle, which determined the cancellation unconstitutional. Later that month in Granville, New York, the American Legion organized a demonstration, but when Seeger arrived, they changed their course and instead opted to monitor the standing-room-only show from the back of the auditorium.

When Seeger finally returned to television on a variety show hosted by the Smothers Brothers in September of 1967, CBS censored his performance of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” In some towns, the rumors alone were enough to prompt nervous organizers to postpone or cancel Seeger’s benefits. In January of 1969, the Nyack Board of Education voted to bar him from performing at the high school auditorium because, as one concerned member explained, “I did some research on this man. I found he did some work for the Communist Party. He was affiliated with the Daily Worker.”

Raising the money was not the only obstacle to the project. No Hudson River sloop survived the nineteenth century extant, so finding a marine architect willing to design an obsolete vessel also presented a challenge. Nevertheless, with his expertise, eye for detail, and artistic sensibility, Cyrus Hamlin took on the task using two sources: a plan from a maritime magazine and a detailed painting. Local legend Harvey Gamage of Maine directed the labor and construction of the vessel, optimistically christened the Clearwater. After they laid the keel in October of 1968, the donations increased. Seven months later, on May 17, 1969, in South Bristol, Maine, the 106-foot wooden sloop, as Hamlin recalled, “slid into the water” for its maiden voyage.

“We had a wonderful singing crew,” Seeger reminisced upon the group he rallied together for the journey. This cross-section of sailors and musicians included countercultural Captain Allan Aunapu; civil rights activists Len Chandler, Jimmy Collier, and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick; first mate Gordon Bok; sea shanty performer Lou Killen; and a young Don MacLean. While American news outlets covered the quest to clean up the river, reports did not highlight how the ecological mission extended beyond water pollution to encompass civil rights and antiwar resistance. When the sloop arrived in New York, Chandler performed his powerful protest song “Turn Around, Miss Liberty” in front of the Statue of Liberty. In a 1969 CBC interview on the deck of the Clearwater, Seeger belted out the chorus from “Bring Them Home” and then lamented the censorship in the American media landscape: “I don’t know what a song can do. But there must be something in a song or they wouldn’t try to blacklist them off TV.”

Singing and sailing along a river that Aunapu described as smelling “like diesel fuel,” the Sloop Singers stopped in the towns along the banks of the Hudson to perform concerts at every port. Collier remembered their daily life on the boat:

The hole where we slept was tiny. We were feet to head, feet to head. . . . What you got from that was being a sailor was not a fun lifestyle . . . and there was no beer down there.

Seeger recalled the resistance they faced: “They said these hippies will have this thing sunk or sold within a year.” Yet despite the difficulties of the labor for this group of musicians, who were not all used to sailing, the dedication to the cause kept them going. “We were fulfilling a mission, and whether it was popular or not or people embraced it, we didn’t care,” Collier recollected.

‘If there’s hope for the human race, there’s hope for the Hudson.’

Despite the opposition, the movement grew, albeit slowly. Five hundred welcomed the arrival of the boat in Croton-on-Hudson in July; an older man came to the river and offered Seeger a mango, which he shared with the crowd. Locals jumped on board and learned how to raise the sail. Seeger made progress in Nyack too; when he returned in August of 1969, the town that had banned him now welcomed him for a concert at Memorial Park.

However, he faced controversy close to home in Kingston that September. One of his staunchest antagonists was Democrat and local politician John P. Heitzman, who would later become mayor of the city. This was not the first time Seeger faced resistance in the Hudson Valley. The 1949 Peekskill Riots, a racist anti-communist mob attack on Paul Robeson, Seeger, and other performers left a lifelong impression on Seeger, whose car was belted with stones, shattering the windows. Twenty years later, in an editorial in the Kingston Daily Freeman, an anonymous detractor demanded to know, “Is Pete Seeger interested in cleaning up the Hudson, or is he a modern Pied Piper using this cause as a front to spread an ideology that is contrary to our American way?”

Seeger explained how he sustained the momentum in the face of such resistance:

The wind may be blowing against you, but if you use your sails right you can sail into the wind, into the wind, into the wind and you make slow progress using the very power of the wind that is against you. This is a great analogy in life. If you can use the forces against you to push ahead, you’re winning.

With its distinctive aesthetic and its singing sailors, the Clearwater became a symbol of the colossal battle against corporate greed, linking the fight for the Hudson with a national environmental movement on the rise. In 1970, the Clearwater sailed to Washington, DC, for the first Earth Day, and Seeger performed before Congress. In 1972, the Clean Water Act passed, despite Richard Nixon’s veto.

Over the years, the boat became the center of an environmental awakening that fomented campaigns and creative projects along the river, linking the local and the global. In 1978, Toshi Seeger expanded the concept of the riverside concert and created a two-day event called the Great Hudson River Revival (also known as the Clearwater Festival). The decades that followed are filled with stories of people whose lives were changed by what became a political and artistic movement, from Dan Searles, a resident of Beacon who helped transform the dump at the Beacon rail station into what is now known as the Pete and Toshi Seeger Riverside Park, to countless crew members on the Clearwater like Andra Sramek, who gave their time and energy to steer the course of the ship over the years.

Seeger’s goal was to prompt the formation of small sloop clubs in towns along the river, all with their own boats, managed by volunteers whose activism would be driven by local concerns. He had always dreamed the Clearwater would be surrounded by dozens of these sloops, and while several popped up in the early 1970s and ’80s, including the Woody Guthrie and the Sojourner Truth, the plan did not pan out as Seeger had anticipated. The Clearwater still sails and is now a nonprofit and a historical landmark with a pedagogical and social justice mission. The local Beacon Sloop Club maintains the sloop Woody Guthrie and its grassroots character, offering free sails five nights a week and sponsoring festivals throughout the year staffed entirely by volunteers. Until the end of their lives, both Toshi and Pete could be found down at the waterfront on the first Friday of every month at the Beacon Sloop Club’s Circle of Song.

The questions that Pete Seeger began to pose in the 1960s and the radical solutions he devised throughout the last fifty years of his life are particularly relevant to the present moment. Although Seeger maintained a defiant posture of resistance his entire life, he simultaneously channeled this creative energy of dissent into world-building as he and Toshi Seeger crafted and sustained a participatory, collectivist, and future-oriented eco-movement, devising imaginative arts-based environmental projects that carried forward the utopian spirit of the ’60s into the twenty-first century.

As a new ecological crisis looms, the earnestness of Seeger’s response to the destruction of the natural environment is instructive. His unflinching belief that collective human action is capable of transforming the world offers an antidote to contemporary political nihilism, and a fusion of the joy of artistic expression and political participation. As we confront industrial crises in America’s waterways once again, perhaps now is the time to consider building upon Seeger’s unrealized dream, reclaiming the rivers in our country, from the Potomac to the Ohio, the Mississippi to the Cuyahoga. As Seeger proclaimed in 1969, “If there’s hope for the human race, there’s hope for the Hudson.”

Jews don’t need a heritage month, and neither does anyone else – opinion

Posted on May 3, 2023 by admin

Pride in our history is appropriate. But wanting official recognition has more to do with the impulse to get in on the intersectional victim racket than combating antisemitism.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, Editor-in-Chief, JNS

For some community members, it’s exactly what Jews have always wanted and needed. In 2006, following up on a resolution passed by Congress, President George W. Bush was the first to declare May to be Jewish American Heritage Month. His successors have happily done the same.

President Joe Biden’s proclamation is full of the same fulsome praise for the role that Jews have played in the history of this republic, similar to Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and, like theirs, is peppered with self-referential language seeking to position himself as a true friend of the community. As has become the custom and much like the way other declarations of other months, weeks or days dedicated to various ethnic, racial and religious groups, as well as a never-ending list of philanthropic causes and efforts to combat various diseases and maladies, the states have also chimed in with their own proclamations about the commemoration of American Jewish heritage.

The fuss made over Jewish American Heritage Month may not equal that accorded celebrations such as those for Black History (February), Hispanic Heritage (September), Women’s History (March) or LGBTQ+ Pride (June), and it does have to share May with Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage. But it is gaining a lot more attention with each passing year. And a lot of serious people, including those who are advocates in the battle against antisemitism like former U.S. State Department envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism Elan Carr, think it ought to be made an even bigger deal than it is now.

This pleases a lot of people in the Jewish community who have long thought that Jewish history deserved to be singled out in the way that all those other heritages have been. To an older generation of Jews that remember a time when Jewish participation in mainstream culture was noteworthy and a source of great pride to a community largely made up of immigrants struggling for acceptance, any amount of hoopla made over Jewish Heritage Month is especially satisfying.

But there’s more to this than a group ego trip. Many in the community believe that promoting interest in Jewish life and history among the general population can also play a role in combating antisemitism.

Carr agrees with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, that May ought to be a time when schools teach their students about American Jewish history, and the ADL and other organizations post links to curricula along those lines. The general consensus among mainstream entities is that such efforts can promote awareness of antisemitism. They believe that teaching kids about the way Jews have played an important role in U.S. history and achieved distinction in just about every field imaginable can help undermine the surge of antisemitic hate.

They think that all the recognition given to Jews in this manner will, in Greenblatt’s words, “help us build understanding and allyship.”

One can only hope they’re right, though those who are committed to this idea ought to give a thought to the way that the far greater focus on Holocaust education has largely failed to achieve a similar goal.

Still, there’s nothing wrong about Jews celebrating their often-influential role in the story of America. But the impulse for Jews to get their own “month” alongside that of other minorities is part of something that goes beyond the natural desire to see our ancestors celebrated. And Greenblatt’s use of the word “allyship”—a term that is part of the new woke lexicon that must be understood to navigate the intersectional mindset that dominates our leftist-dominated culture these days—is an indication of an aspect of this effort that ought to give sensible people pause.

Seeking victim status

At the heart of all these “months” is a desire to get in on the same intersectional victim racket that is doing such damage to the country. While a laudable pride in Jewish identity is clearly something the promoters of this idea want to support, Jews don’t need congressional or presidential proclamations, or an official Google Doodle caricature about this commemoration (the absence of which has led to some complaints) to do that. Nor, I might add, do all the other communities eager to promote their special months need any of this either.

Much like the effort to include Jewish history in ethnic-studies courses, the insistence on breaking down American identity in this way is related to critical race theory and its insistence that we define ourselves solely as members of groups rather than as individuals. I understand why Jewish groups scrambled to be included in the mix of ethnic, racial and religious narratives that should be taught in California, where such studies were mandated by the state. However, the campaign to make sure Jews are in the mix alongside other minority groups is part of a mindset in which a preoccupation with group identity serves only to further racialize society and not liberate it from bias.

We are right to want to draw attention to antisemitism. But in the intersectional playing field in which “allyship” to those who are labeled as oppressed minorities (which in practice generally means to admit guilt for sins of the past even if you or your group had nothing to do with those sins), Jews are always going to be considered as not as oppressed as other groups, no matter how much we speak about past discrimination or contemporary prejudice.

In the current context, curricula about specific groups inevitably become a competition for victimhood where groups labeled as oppressed in the intersectional dialectic—a status that is denied Jews, who are labeled as “white” and therefore implicitly in the wrong—will always prevail.

Carving up American history

If we were really serious about creating an atmosphere of public discourse in which antisemitism could be marginalized and eradicated, Jews would not be joining the line of those seeking to carve out pieces of American history to be apportioned among the groups with their own months.

In fact, it is via the process by which the general narrative of this country has been changed from one that centers on the American nation and its leaders as a whole into one that instead focuses on minorities of various kinds or other demographic subsets where we have lost the thread of our history. In the name of diversity, we assume that people only feel good if they can identify with others exactly like them.

The founders of this republic may not have been as diverse as contemporary America, but men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton belong to all of us today, which is something that composer Lin Manuel Miranda made plain in his hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” when he cast them all as non-white minorities.

In that same way, later generations who were considered great in various fields of endeavor—be they jurists like Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or composers like George Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—similarly belong to all Americans, and not just their fellow Jews, without it being labeled “cultural appropriation.”

The venerated African-American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the greatest thinkers and writers in the history of Western civilization were as much his as those of European descent.

“I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not,” Du Bois wrote in his book of essays The Souls of Black Folk. “Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

Sadly, we have forgotten what Du Bois, who lived in an era of brutal discrimination against people of color, intuitively understood.

The diversity obsession

Though to say it is to fly against the fashionable yet mad desire to remake society in the image of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), in addition to the belief that all who are not “people of color” are privileged and inherently racist, what we need today is fewer special months and an emphasis on diversity.

This racialization of society has helped create an atmosphere where groups like Jews are more easily singled out for opprobrium. What we need is more unity and Americans of all colors, creeds and backgrounds joining together to embrace a shared identity in which we are all individuals and not merely members of racial and ethnic tribes whose boundaries are immutable.

Jews don’t need a presidential proclamation to have a sense of peoplehood. They can get it from their own sacred texts and history.

To move away from this tribalism that manifests itself as an obsession with diversity is not to rain on the parade of those who wish to celebrate the heritage of American Jews or any other group, large or small, that desires to be recognized. But it might do more to create an atmosphere where prejudice like antisemitism wouldn’t thrive in the way it has in this age of faux anti-racism that actually does more to promote hate than to extinguish it.

If the American Jewish community wants to throw a party and promote more knowledge of a heritage they justly take pride in, that’s fine. Yet the more Jews seek to get their share of the intersectional minority victimhood scam, they are doing far more harm than good for themselves and their country.

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