The Judenrat and Kapos are still with us.

When one asks a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps what was their most horrible experience, many will say it was the Jewish overseers: the Judenrat, and the Kapos, - Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. The evil of the Nazis is comprehensible for evil is ever present in their world, but the Jews who cooperated in the genocide of their own people is beyond imagination. The Judenrat and Kapos are still with us.

According to the great Soviet dissident Nathan Sharansky we can recognize Jew-hatred when manifested against Israel by the 3 Ds: demonization, double standards and delegitimization. By this definition J Street is loudly and proudly anti Semitic. Jewish Voices for Peace has gone so far Progressive that they honored Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, an IslamoNazi Jew killer who is about to be deported by the United States.  The Democrat Party has gone full and poisonously “Progressive anti-Israel” by aligning itself with J-Street as demonstrated by Nancy Pelosi’s speech at the most recent AIPAC policy conference when she read the manifesto for a two-state solution written by J-Street staffers. The crowd of 18,000 pro-Israel supporters was for the most part unusually quiet. No clapping, no standing ovation.

American Jewish Progressives worship at the altar of the liberal state. Their religion is not Torah Judaism but Progressive values. They identify with the power of progressive liberal government so closely that they stifle conservative dissent within their houses of worship, much like the Kapos of WW2. In the mind of Jewish progressives, they would rather do outreach to radical Islamic Imams than reach out to their conservative brothers.

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Politics and public policy has no place in modern Judaism, and I predict that this desire to worship at the alter of Progressive liberal values will continue to imprison those who only want spiritual Judaism, not a political manifesto.

The Reform Jewish Movement: "Liberalism-as-Judaism"

Why does a 3^rd generation Temple Israel Reform Jew take an associate membership at an Orthodox synagogue? To get his spirituality back.
There is a school of thought within the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ) that Reform Judaism is nothing more (or less) than the American liberal political agenda, including the advocacy - in the name of Judaism and "Prophetic Ethics" - of liberal fashionable political ideas. The beginnings of this were in the New Deal era, when American Jewish support for Franklin D. Roosevelt was nearly unanimous. It continued after World War II.
 The "Liberalism as Judaism" School argued that all of Judaism and Jewish tradition could be boiled down into a search for civil "justice" and secular "freedom". Since it was axiomatic, in the eyes of Jewish liberals, that the liberal political agenda was synonymous with justice, freedom, and righteousness and that the opponents of liberalism were evil and unjust; "Judaism" itself could be conscripted in the cause of promoting liberal partisanship.

Jewish liberalism was never based upon any serious study of social science methodologies and tools of analysis, but rather upon self-righteousness, compassionate posturing, and the appealing to smug moral high-mindedness. Jewish community leaders and liberal Rabbis have no training whatsoever in policy analysis, economics, statistics or accounting. Their liberalism is based on making themselves feel righteous and accepted, not on resolving real-world problems.

This “liberalism equals Reform Judaism” has had a profound effect on the small but growing minority of politically conservative members of at Temple Israel and across the URJ. Going to Friday night services to hear sermons FOR gun control or AGAINST President Trump’s proposed immigration policy may play well to the majority, but it alienates those who are politically conservative realists. Lord Acton said it best - “The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.” Well, the conservatives are feeling a bit abused by the tyranny of the liberal majority. Maybe instead of Temple Israel only “reaching out” to the Muslim and Christian communities it should consider reaching out to it’s conservative membership. A house of worship should be a haven for spirituality. It should not be an invasion of one’s sensibilities.

The hypocrisy of the “Liberal Reform Movement” is also a bit hard to swallow. The “Reform Left” has no problem criticizing POTUS Trump for a sexist comment he made 10 years earlier (on a bus that was secretly recorded), yet public statements in a YouTube speech by a Yale educated Muslim Professor (Yasir Qadhi) invited to speak at Memphis’s Temple Israel states that “Jews and Christians are filthy and that their lives and property can be taken in jihad by the Muslims ” – and it is overlooked as a youthful indiscretion.

I am not quitting Temple Israel. I am a 3^rd generation member, the next two generations of Fargotstein’s are members there, generations of my family are buried there, and I will be buried there. I will, however, continue to stand up for Temple to become the inclusive, spiritual political free zone that it needs to be in order to return to it’s mission of Jewish spirituality, rather than the religion of liberalism.