What Is Judaism?

by | Sep 18, 2019 |

From Rabbi Elmer Berger's A Partisan History of Judaism: The Jewish Case against Zionism (1951): Judaism evolved from a primitive tribalism to as noble a spiritual and universal vision as man has ever attained. This fact attests, even without detailed proof, to the truth that "unity" and segregation may have had their partisans but that there must also have been undiscourageable partisans of another kind through the long history of Jews and Judaism. For change and evolution rarely, if ever, are born from uniformity. Uniformity is imposed, as our modern world knows, in order to suffocate...

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Is the Bible a Title Deed?

by | Sep 18, 2019 |

I was asked on Facebook, "What is your response to many Jews and Christians who believe the Bible makes it clear that the land belongs to the Jews?" Here's is my (slightly edited) response: The Bible isn't a history book, and archaeology has not been kind to it. See Spinoza's and Paine's critiques, and more recent work by Rabbi Elmer Berger and Shlomo Sand. If it is, Joshua committed genocide, which can't be grounds for legitimate title. If it is, God threw the Jews out. Where's the Messiah? Most Jews are the descendants of converts who never set foot there. Judaism, which proselytized...

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Judaism, Zionism, and the Dual-Loyalty Charge

by | Sep 4, 2019 | ,

Zionists, that is, Jewish nationalists, who hold that Jews qua Jews constitute something more than a religious community, open themselves up to the dual-loyalty charge. And that is exactly what the majority non-Zionist Jews warned against from the start. As Joseph Levine writes: It’s particularly ironic that Zionists should be making this charge [that dual-loyalty is an anti-Semitic trope]. When [Howard] Lovy (along with many others...) refers to the “ancient specter of Jewish disloyalty”, I take it he means in particular the standard anti-Semitic charge during the 18th and 19th centuries in...

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The FDA’s Continuing Assault on the Principles of Justice

by | May 21, 2019 | , ,

Eddie Gray, the owner of the online pipe-smokers’ boutique The Pipe Nook, reports in his latest YouTube video that the FDA has accused him of selling to a minor but refuses to provide the evidence. This is nothing less than a direct assault on a basic principle of Anglo-American justice: innocence until guilt is proved, which means that the government — exclusively — has the burden of proof and the accused has no burden whatever to provide evidence of his innocence. One obvious aspect of this principle is that the state has an obligation to present the evidence to the accused, who may then...

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FCC Commissioner Wants to Ban E-cigarette Commercials

by | Feb 15, 2019 | , , ,

If a member of the Federal Communications Commission gets her way, commercials for e-cigarettes (vaping products) would be banned from radio and television. A ban would not only violate freedom, specifically the freedom speech that is supposedly protected by the First Amendment, it would also harm cigarette smokers by reducing information about a substantially safer alternative to cigarettes. (E-cigs may contain nicotine but not tobacco. Rather than burning leaves for inhalation, e-cigs a vaporize a flavored liquid.) What grounds does Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel cite? Public health, of...

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