Jewish Coalition for Literacy’s demise
The end of the Jewish Coalition for Literacy, an outstanding program, is a great loss for the Bay Area community. Over 15,000 children in Bay Area public schools were impacted by the work of the talented professionals who guided the organization, along with the hundreds of volunteer tutors. The article (“Jewish Coalition for Literacy shuts down after 25 years of teaching kids to read,” July 1) states that this was part of the “JCRC shift to respond to antisemitism that has swept the region.” What is difficult to comprehend is how teaching underserved children to read is not also understood as an effective way to combat antisemitism.
Reading is core to a healthy democracy, and connection with the tutors from the Jewish community is often the only contact that students, teachers, administrators and families from the most vulnerable communities have with Jews. It is hard to believe that with billions of dollars in the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund and many other Bay Area Jewish foundations, we lack the vision to see the benefits of this outreach in helping to address the plague of antisemitism and shaping an equitable and just society that uplifts all people.
Rabbi Lee Bycel
Visiting professor, USF Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice
Umm al-Khair demolitions
Thank you for publishing Benjamin Linder’s moving opinion piece about home demolitions in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair (“I am an Israeli American Jew. Bulldozing Palestinian homes is personal for me,” July 10). In early June, I spent two weeks in Umm al-Khair as part of a protective presence shift coordinated by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.
I saw first-hand the violence that Palestinians in the West Bank experience from Israeli settlers, often under the approving eyes of the Israeli military. Since the demolitions on June 26, my friends in Umm al-Khair have experienced near-constant harassment. Settlers have entered their village and attacked women and children, fired live rounds between the houses and tear-gassed villagers. Twice since June 26, settlers have cut the water pipes that supply Umm al-Khair — a devastating attack on the basics of human life, especially in the summer heat of a desert climate. During many of these attacks, Israeli troops have stood by and made no attempt to end the destruction.
Before my shift in Umm al-Khair, I had never before experienced the lawlessness that reigns in the West Bank, where no authority can be relied upon to enforce the law and protect basic rights. As one example, while accompanying a family of farmers attempting to harvest their grain, we were accosted by seven armed, masked settlers, some of whom terrorized myself and another female American visitor by driving their ATV directly at us at high speed before driving us from the land with the harvest unfinished. I later learned that one of these men had been sanctioned by the U.S., yet was still actively attacking Palestinians.
I echo Linder’s call for the U.S. to stop enabling Israel’s human rights abuses in the West Bank. Further, I call for the U.S. to stop funding the Israeli military, which is destroying life in Palestine.
Alice Robinson
Redwood City
Criticism of settlement activity
Benjamin Linder’s criticism of Jewish settlement activity in Judea and Samaria has no basis in Judaism itself. He explicitly rejects a central tenet of Judaism — that Jews are first and foremost obliged to follow the laws of God and are sternly warned not to cast those laws aside in order to conform to the laws of the nations.
His description of the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, as an illegal occupation of land that rightfully belongs to some other nation, is equivalent to renouncing a central tenet of Judaism.
Linder is a board member of J Street. If J Street’s policies were implemented, they would surely prove catastrophic. In its myopic view, the way for Israel to attain peace with its neighbors is not by displaying strength, but by displaying weakness; not by advancing, but by retreating; not by expanding, but by shrinking; and not by embracing its religious heritage, but by denying it.
Linder said he is “deeply ashamed” of those who claim to represent his religion and his nationality. But he’s the one who has abandoned Judaism and replaced it with a foreign ideology, one that continues to weaken and undermine both the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
Martin Wasserman
Palo Alto
Anti-Zionist Jews make no sense
Oren Kroll-Zeldin makes it very clear in Sue Fishkoff’s interview (“‘Unsettled’: Meet the young activist Jews standing up for Palestine in USF professor’s new book,” June 27) that young American Jews most certainly suffer from an entitled and protected state of cluelessness regarding the conflict in Israel and the Middle East. How any Jew can call himself anti-Zionist is a mystery to me, considering Jews have prayed to return to their homeland for over 2,000 years, and the existence of Israel today is the only thing that will protect Jews from a new Holocaust.
Kroll-Zeldin says young American Jews are too young and “far removed” from the Holocaust to understand its significance. I would counter that they simply don’t understand from their position of privilege and safety, as well as their poor understanding of history, that the cultural divide between Jews and Arabs is vast, and that when the Arabs say they want to kill the Jews, they really mean it. Alas, this declaration of hatred now occurs with great regularity in Berkeley as well as Tel Aviv.
A naive and false pursuit of social justice for Palestinians will be the downfall for Jews like Kroll-Zeldin. “From the river to the sea” doesn’t mean Palestine will be free. It means the eradication of the Jewish state along with misguided Jews like Kroll-Zeldin.
Jeff Morgan
Berkeley
Attacks on Chabad of Oakland
Jew hatred raised its head again June 21 and July 6 in acts of vandalism against Chabad of Oakland (“Attacker hurls chunk of concrete at Oakland Chabad center — again,” July 8). Chunks of concrete were thrown at the center’s windows, damaging them. In December, Chabad’s large menorah at Lake Merritt was torn apart and tossed into the lake during Hanukkah. No one has been charged for these attacks.
The Socialist Workers Party calls on working people and trade unions to oppose these acts, to speak out against them and to organize to defend Jews against attack. SWP campaign supporters joined the protest against the vandalism at Lake Merritt, and we stand with the Chabad of Oakland today.
These attacks are not one-off acts. The Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom — the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — was a warning that the rise in Jew hatred and anti-Jewish violence that has marked the opening of the 21st century is a world question. The fight against it is decisive to every working-class battle today.
Eric Simpson
Socialist Workers Party Candidate for U.S. Congress, District 12, Alameda County
Israel’s generals want a cease-fire
Jeff Saperstein’s July 9 letter states that the Israeli government has called for a cease-fire. This is only partially true. According to the New York Times, Israel’s top generals want to begin a cease-fire in Gaza, even if it keeps Hamas in power for the time being. The generals think that a truce will be the best way of freeing the 120 hostages still held, both dead and alive in Gaza.
The Israeli generals also believe their forces need time to recuperate in case a land war breaks out with Hezbollah. The generals fear a “forever war” in which the military’s energies and ammunition are gradually eroded even as the hostages remain captive, and this has widened a rift between the military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has opposed a truce.
George Z. Banks
San Leandro