The Clare Spark Blog

This is how the social democratic TABLET website ignored Holocaust Remembrance Day: http://tinyurl.com/jw6nll8. This was the headline: “Testing Positive for Judaism: Unlocking a Family’s Genetic Secret[:] A genetic test for Tay-Sachs revealed surprising results—and helped my husband and me discover what Judaism means to us.”

I would have thought that even TABLET would have led with an essay on Holocaust Remembrance Day, surveying dangerous rifts within what gentiles and too many “assimilated” Jews call “the [presumably united] Jewish community.” As I write this, cable news and MSM are leading with the NBA scandal, targeting the racist Donald Sterling (né Tokowitz); while identity politics rules the academy and the mass media too. And who knows how deeply Louis Farrakhan’s lunatic theories have penetrated “the black community”? (See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/30/louis-farrakhan-jews-have_n_630643.html.)

Had I not a born-in-Morocco Sephardic son-in-law, I would never know about tensions in Israel between the expelled refugees from the Arab countries in North Africa and the Mid-East and the Ashkenazim in Israel (who are themselves internally divided). Nor would I be so focused on the Israeli or British Left that has taken up the Arab narrative on Israeli history with a malicious distinction between “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Zionism.” We are facing a potential second Holocaust and TABLET leads with a feel good article that escapes from the real dangers that “Jews” everywhere face?

To my non-Jewish readers: Many of you already know about how both Soviet and Nazi propaganda demeaned the American enemy, claiming that the US was controlled by Jews or “Zionists”. Here is what Dmitri Volkogonov wrote as recently as 1986 (the year I finally discovered that the Holocaust was already known about before 1945, thanks to David Wyman and Deborah Lipstadt who made a presentation at UCLA):

Dmitri Volkogonov, The Psychological War (1986): “The capitalist mass media are greatly influenced by the Zionist circles. For example, Zionist organisations in the United States control half its magazines, more than half of its radio stations, and a large number of press and radio bureaus abroad. In other capitalist countries the picture is very much the same. In addition to that, various Zionist organisations run more than a thousand publications in 67 countries. This is where the military-industrial complex draws its ideological support. The capitalist mass media spread outright lies about socialism, create a climate of fear for the future, of gloom and doom. The main idea of this vast system of disinformation is to prove that “socialism is bad” and the “free world” is good. This is how the capitalist mass media are waging the psychological war against the Soviet people, also against their own people whom the bourgeois radio centres feed with disinformation. This is how opinions in the West are shaped when people are unable to understand the true state of things, when they think and act only under the influence of the extraneous forces that manipulate them.”

This blog is not intended to plea for a return to orthodox religious observance. Rather, it is intended to remind all of us that it matters not whether “the Jews” are a religion or a race with an indelible “Jewish” identity. We are all in the same boat, and no amount of “new reads on Jewish life”: [TABLET’s motto], focused on multiculturalism, holidays and traditional foods will remedy the resentments engendered by modernization, science, and cultural pluralism. (See https://clarespark.com/2012/09/29/index-to-blogs-on-antisemitism/.)