I write in response to the recent McGill Daily feature, “Judaism in a Pickle”, penned by three students who proudly flaunted their anti-Zionism yet lacked the courage to do so using their real names, instead hiding under pseudonyms.
The facts and anecdotes in the article range from the mendacious to the absurd. Thus, the commentary itself commits historical error by marginalizing the leadership and contribution of Eastern-European-Jews to the Zionist project, despite the fact that Israel’s first four Prime Ministers (one a woman) came from the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, a story of rejecting Israeli pickles is offered as some courageous sign of moral development and gusty rebellion.
IJV complains that its views are ignored and marginalized. The organized Jewish community has every legal and moral right to reject views that directly conflict with, indeed threaten, its members and values. As Rabbi Reuven Poupko succinctly put it, “You don’t invite butchers to a vegetarian’s convention.”
An entity that affirms everything ultimately affirms nothing.
IJV is entitled to its views, repugnant as I and many others find them. It is not entitled to impose them on the many others, myself included, who utterly reject them and for whom their Jewish heritage and identity and love for the land, people, and State of Israel are indivisible.
I wish to highlight the fact that in its approximately four-thousand word discourse, IJV did not see it necessary or even warranted to deploy any words to condemn the nakedly inciteful and violent tweet that Sadikov published.
Sometimes it is the words that aren’t stated that speak the loudest.