We’ve met the enemy and he’s us

Members of Jewish Voice for Peace – Chicago (JVP-Chicago) disrupt a Jewish United Fund Stand with Israel fundraiser at the Chicago Hilton on 21 August 2014. Among the speakers are Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

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THE FORWARD
by Menachem Wecker
November 2, 2013

Brant Rosen, Suburban Chicago Rabbi, Doubles as Firebrand Critic of Israel, Evanston Congregation Stands by Jewish Voice for Peace Leader

It was on December 28, 2008, soon after Israel launched its punishing military campaign in Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, that Rabbi Brant Rosen hit the “send” key for a blog post that he believed could well pitch him out of his pulpit. “We good liberal Jews are ready to protest oppression and human-rights abuse anywhere in the world, but are all too willing to give Israel a pass,” Rosen had typed out as Israel’s bombs were falling on Gaza — part of a massive response, with numerous civilian casualties, to rockets fired into Southern Israel by the Palestinian faction Hamas, which controls the territory. “What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza,” Rosen wrote on his blog, Shalom Rav, “is an outrage.”

Rosen, then a decade into his tenure as spiritual leader of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, a 520-household synagogue in Evanston, Ill., concluded his 221-word post with these sentences: “There, I’ve said it. Now what do I do?” That rhetorical question came from a writer whom Newsweek had named earlier that year to its list of the top 50 pulpit rabbis in the United States.

Today, Rosen, 50, heads the rabbinical council of a group called Jewish Voice for Peace, which makes him a high-profile official with an organization on a much different kind of list: the Anti-Defamation League’s “Top Ten Anti-Israel Groups in the U.S.” for 2013.

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http://m.forward.com/articles/187958/brant-rosen-suburban-chicago-rabbi-doubles-as-fire/?p=all