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Letters
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 12:00 AM

Taking back the debate over Israel

Sick of right-wing Jews speaking in their name, progressive American Jews have launched J Street to change the way the game is played in Washington.

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  • Monday, April 28, 2008 08:37 PM

    Right-wing Jews breed anti semitism

    Thanks again Gary for publicizing this. It's about time for progressive Jews to speak out against right-wingers.

    On a separate point, Jewish exceptionalism and warmongering have bred a virulent anti-semitism in the US. From a non-Jew's perspective, it's is a self-defeating cycle that seems part of Jewish identity: you position yourselves as different and better, you exclude others, you are hated by others for that, you exclude more, you're hated more, etc. The Abe Foxman style anti-semitic paranoia actually seems to create anti-semitism.

    I'm open to discussion here. We need to open the discussion and get through these conflicts. Bottom line: the mother of all division is thinking you're inherently better than someone else. This drove the genocide of Rwanda, and the Holocaust, and other genocides. From an outisder's perspective, until Jews denounce as a community that they are inherently special or diffeent than others, they will be the targets of quite human and commonsensical disdain.

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