JERUSALEM POST
By Daniel Gordis
April 24, 2014
[Eric Yoffie], our self-appointed Socrates (formerly president of the Union for Reform Judaism) now spends his time with the conscience-afflicted masses, convincing an American generation of Jews, wholly uncomfortable with Jewish particularism of any sort, that their Jewishness can be comfortably rooted in a universalism that refuses to critique anyone, in a universalism that demands inspirational leadership from Israel, but from no one else.
….Rabbi Yoffie tells us that the students he meets “desperately want an Israel that appeals to their values and their highest ideals.” So when he speaks to these aching students, does he ask them how many Arab countries would set up field hospitals on Israel’s border to treat wounded Israelis were the situation reversed? “They want an Israel that will stand up to its own extremists,” he says. Israel should absolutely do more to rein in extremists, both in certain radicalized settlements as well as in the rabbinate (and I’ve written about that extensively in this column, however inconveniently for Rabbi Yoffie’s “focus solely” claim).
Let us then, for just a brief uncomfortable moment, be honest. Where is religious extremism a more serious problem? Among Jews on the West Bank (a small number of whom are unquestionably revolting), or in Gaza, Egypt and Syria? Is the approximately $50 billion a year that the United States is spending on Homeland Security necessary because of radicalized Jewish settlers, or because of Muslim fanatics who daily threaten every single one of us, regardless of our politics or where we live? Did Rabbi Yoffie ask his student interlocutors anything like that?
ArchitectGuy on Israel 