Israel Bars Book From Schools Due To Its Discussion Of “Intimate Relations Between Jews and non-Jews”

RNS-BOOK-ISRAELWe recently discussed the concern over the criminalization of speech in Israel. Now there is an added concern after Israel’s Education Ministry disqualified Dorit Rabinyan’s award winning “Gader Haya” (literally “Hedgegrow,” but known in English as “Borderline”)from being used in high schools. The reason? The novel describes a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man. The Education Ministry decided that the novel threatened “the identity and the heritage of students in every sector,” and the belief that “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity.”

It is a truly disappointing decision from a nation founded by people who survived book burning and censorship laws. The Education Ministry insisted that “young people of adolescent age don’t have the systemic view that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation.” Wow. Miscegenation?

Recently published in Hebrew by Am Oved about a year and a half ago, the novel tells the story of Liat, an Israeli translator, and Hilmi, a Palestinian artist, who fall in love in New York. The couple eventually moves back to Tel Aviv and the West Bank city of Ramallah. It is now the romance that the Education Ministry dares not speak its name.

The decision reverses the view of a professional committee headed by Prof. Rafi Weichert from the University of Haifa and including academics, Education Ministry representatives and career teachers. The panel recommended the use of the book. The panel’s role is to advise the ministry on various educational issues, including approval of curriculum.

I have long admired Israeli educational standards and its remarkable educational system. It is therefore particularly disappointing to see such anti-intellectual and intolerant views emerge over the assignment of such books. It is ignorance and intolerance that threatens Israel not concepts considered by some to be offensive like miscegenation.

Ironically, the effort to block the book has led to a surge in sales in Israel.

Source: New York Times

70 thoughts on “Israel Bars Book From Schools Due To Its Discussion Of “Intimate Relations Between Jews and non-Jews””

  1. john said:
    As for miscegenation, all tribes discourage it. If they did not they would not be tribes for long. Say what you will of laws and such, but I don’t consider it wrong in itself,. not for jews nor anybody else. Even when the Apostle said, “not jew nor greek but one in Christ,” he was contextually referring to spiritual brotherhood, not physical. We are either physical brothers or not. There is nothing in Christianity that requires an end to family nor tribe nor nation. The great Commission calls for conversion of the nations in fact, not their dissolution through miscegenation. So we may remain ethnically diverse and yet spiritual brothers.
    As far as I understand it, the same is true of other universal religions such as Zoroastrianism, or Buddhism, or Islam. None of these necessarily entails an end to tribe or family or race.
    ————————
    I suspect that the tribal discouragement of miscegenation is a cultural trait rather than a religious one.
    Then again I am speaking through the Islamic prism, which puts a strong emphasis on brotherhood of humanity and of faith, of righteousness.
    Islam actually came down to reframe the structure of relationship between master/slave, man/women/, Arab/foreigner into one of equality where even the righteous slave is greater than his less righteous master in the eyes of God.
    The quran also specifically downplays tribalism, referring to it only as differences God created in His mercy in order for people to know one another as brothers.
    Therefore, in Islam, the only worthy criteria is a moral one.
    now if we delve into that and how Moses and Jesus AS were sent to the tribes of Israel, the tendency towards tribalism makes sense. But if we allow the islamic premise that Mohamad AS was sent to all of humanity until the end of times, tribalism could not be a worthy criteria…especially since we know that sooner of later everyone will be a shade of brown, even bambam’s grandchildren.

  2. If John Smith is Catholic, my suggestion is an exorcism to rid him of his obvious demons. STAT. St. Louis has a verifiable history with regard to the successful execution of a very famous exorcism. Yes, as in the famous case upon which the film, The Exorcist, was based. Too Jewish for you, johnny boy? You know, Hollywood, and all. I happen to have more than a few contacts within the Church’s hierarchy to make that happen. Can’t wait. Flying pea soup time. Just ask Linda Blair.

  3. Tom Nash, Great comment. Growing up in CT. I did not know any Norwegians. I’m sure there are a few, but none I knew. The Nordic folk in central Ct. where I grew up were Swedes. My old man worked w/ a Swede and we would go to his Lutheran Church’s annual smorgasbord. Not to any pagan Lutheran service, just the meal in the church hall. LOL! Now I live in Norwegian Central in south central Wisconsin. Italians are a distinct minority in Wisconsin. Many made their names Anglo which was a HUGE taboo back where I grew up. Now, you may have heard me blast to horrible Norwegian food culture. I mean, there are a few good items, but it is bland as hell. When my old man visited and heard about lutefisk he almost had a stroke. Italians understand the need to dry fish. Bacala is dried cod, but it’s dried in salt, NOT LYE. How did your family reconcile the 2 food cultures? The Irish are akin to the Norwegians in having a poor food culture. My mom would make boiled dinners[ham,potatoes, onion, carrots] which we hated. But, the Irish soda bread was good. My dad was a great cook and taught my mom how to cook Italian. They shared the duties, each making their own specialties.

    The northern/southern Italian is a conflict that still, to a certain extent, lives on in this country. The story I tell that explains it best is the life of Joe Dimaggio. He was the child of Sicilian immigrant fishermen. Most of the Italians in SF where Joe was born and raised were from northern Italy. They made him feel inferior. So, when Joe made it big he always carried himself, dressed impeccably, like Northern Italians. Having visited both northern and southern Italy, there are 2 very different cultures. Both my grandparents were born in the south[Naples and Bari]. Most of the Italians in my town were southern. If that church you attended was built by Italians, it must be beautiful and almost certainly brick or stone. In the northeast US, you can still pick out old Italian neighborhoods as the houses are all stone or brick mortar.

  4. As for miscegenation, all tribes discourage it. If they did not they would not be tribes for long. Say what you will of laws and such, but I don’t consider it wrong in itself,. not for jews nor anybody else. Even when the Apostle said, “not jew nor greek but one in Christ,” he was contextually referring to spiritual brotherhood, not physical. We are either physical brothers or not. There is nothing in Christianity that requires an end to family nor tribe nor nation. The great Commission calls for conversion of the nations in fact, not their dissolution through miscegenation. So we may remain ethnically diverse and yet spiritual brothers.

    As far as I understand it, the same is true of other universal religions such as Zoroastrianism, or Buddhism, or Islam. None of these necessarily entails an end to tribe or family or race.

    Even though you will hear a lot of preachers say otherwise. I suspect those are also the ones who were sucking up to George Soros types, kind of like the leftist version of the fundamentalist Bible thumping Israel firsters.

    I trust that I have offended all here today, but don’t take it personally. Happy New Year.

  5. Po is right of course that Islam and Christianity are both religions of conversion.

    The Pharisees said to Jesus, Are we not the seed of Abraham? (sperma, in Greek)
    Jesus said, if you be the CHILDREN of Abraham, do his works of faith.

    Children includes, as all lawyers know, issue of the body and also those adopted by law.
    Conversion, voluntary acceptance of Christ and baptism, and living the life of faith and works, makes one a child of Abraham, ie, one of the New Covenant, not just a literal descendant of his blood, who in a narrow minded and selfish way believes himself superior to all men by virtue of the old covenant.

  6. anyhow bam bam, both for Catholics, for Orthodox Christians, and nearly all Protestant churches, Christ is the fulfillment of the law, and brings a new law. That is indeed a “transvaluation” of the OT Yahweh, to some degree, I will give you that. But in short, there is a lot of stuff in the OT that needs to be taken in light of the New Testament, and not just accepted at literal face value. However, fundamentalists do that, which is why the Jews are always sending the simplistic Bible thumpers and televangelists on junkets to occupied Palestine.

    Finally, the Church itself considers itself the New Israel, which supercedes the literal Israel, in case you did not ever get that concept– many Christians do not, especially in America which fears the Jewish masters– but by reference then, the blessing of the Church brings good to those who bless her, etc.

  7. I’m a Catholic. We don’t chain ourselves to a literal interpretation the way fools do.

    As for evolution, it is part of God’s plan, just like gravity.

    It does account to some degree for Jewish success, but also for their troubles, but in a naturalistic way.

    I can’t apologize for operating on both a natural and a theological level, although usually only Jews believe they can do that, we goys are verboten from it. I will think and speak as I please and not always be asking for permission from Jews and their lackeys.

  8. Interesting, John, I have said before that Judaism is the perfect proof for the holy books, and therefore, for God.
    Evolution does not account for Judaism, its success, its resilience and its burden.
    What accounts for it is divine preference for Jews, which echoes across history, and divine ire against Jews, and its aftershocks
    All of history is marker of Jewish experience, between election & destruction, between empire & exodus
    All of history is Jewish!

  9. Hahahahaha…my point exactly, bam.
    You make my original case, quite well too, thank you!
    Judaism is ethnic, while Islam and Christianity is of conversion.
    You further state my point about the role ethnicity plays in judaism, and thereby, the role racism plays into the interplay of Jews and other non-Jews.

    And I must ask you, if my children, born of a Muslim father, are atheists, or become christian or Buddhists, are they Muslims?

    Additionally, if Judaism transfers from the mother, and prophet Moses ‘(As) children were from a Madean mother, and Madean people were Arabs, are Moses’ children Arabs?

  10. Nature favors adaptation, and nature works through DNA and ancestry. You can call it racist, I call it biology. And Humans in their complexity, form all kinds of different groups, and compete for resources just like animals. Liberals call it bad, I call it survival.

    You can admire the Jews for survival and flourishing. If they didn’t hate us for trying to do the same.

    Of course, survival and flourishing doesn’t always require exploitation and deception and hypocrisy. The Jews should be working on the beams in their eyes before they worry about the specks in our own. Live and let live is ok, for those who will abide by it. For those who will not?

    1 Thess. 2:15: “Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men”

  11. Oh, and john john smith. You are a Christian? Laughable. Take a gander at Genesis, Christian soldier.

    AND I WILL BLESS THOSE THAT BLESS YOU AND CURSE THOSE THAT CURSE YOU.

    Take up your curse with God, not with me. And, while you’re at it, ask about all the Jewish characters in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Maybe God can explain the storyline to you. You seem quite confused.

  12. Poor, poor, po. Thought you done nabbed yourself a real, live Jew there, huh? Adjust your prayer rug for this one–you haven’t. Not even close. Your purported wife’s father’s religion is not determinative in assessing one’s religious identity in Judaism. Unlike Islam, which passes through one’s paternal lineage, one’s Jewish affiliation passes maternally, through the mother. Since your wife’s mother was Catholic, you done nabbed you a Catholic. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I thought that I should let you know. Maybe now you can stop beating her.

  13. Karen also said: “Every population has its own pressures. Asian cultures heavily emphasize education and success, for example. So much so that universities now penalize Asian applicants who are over achievers.”

    The Jews are to be admired for their skill at letters and the learned professions. As East-Asians are to be admired for their STEM successes and their social orderliness.

    Every population (tribe, race, group, whatever) may have a composite of characteristics. Anybody with sense learns to understand the average characteristics of groups. Only fools believe “we are all created equal.” It is closer to the truth to say that none are the same, hence none are equal.

  14. Nick…….you posted interesting comments about Italian culture, traditions, etc.
    My Italian mother married my English/Norwegian father in 1939……those “intermarriages” were indeed rare back then.
    The Italians built “their” church in 1915…..my immigrant grandfather was a key member of the Italian immigrant community.
    I attended a funeral in that church a week ago for a 93 year old Italian relative. From generation of habit and tradition, the Southern Italians (Calabrese) always sit on the right side of the church, the Northen Italians on the left side.
    That tradition is humerous today, but there was real conflict at times between the immgrant Milanese and Calabrese Italians.
    I jokingly said to a friend (not from that parish) that “You realize, of course, that you were sitting on the Northern Italian side”.
    Of the c. 45 people at the service, about 40 were on the right side in church, just a few on the left.😊

  15. Here’s a more interesting question than the softballs tossed back by Bam Bam. Why do Jews both in Israel and the American neocons, explicitly, tacitly, and materially support the insane Wahabist and Salafist creeds in the Middle east? Why is Israel cooperating with Saudis and their fellow camel jockey lordships who promote ISIS/ ISIL?

    Ideologies are one of many tools in the hands of the powerful, idea-weapons, doctrinal warfare. The Jews promoted the Reformation, they promoted one revolution after another, and they still do. Divide and conquer the goyim is the plan, many are the weapons.

  16. read stuff by Norman Finkelstein, another Jew of conscience,

    http://www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/finkelstein/interview2.html

    “Interview: “Jews Are Immune From Any Kind of Criticism” [Excerpts]
    Norman Finkelstein – American, Jew, polemicist – on the exclusive claim of suffering.
    American Jews have exploited and manipulated the suffering in the Second World War for their own benefit. Politics professor Norman Finkelstein has written an indictment of the “Holocaust industry” and provoked a stream of reactions, especially in Europe. “Everyone can say that my analysis is too limited. But don’t say that my method is no good.”
    Bas Blokker,
    NRC Handelsblad,
    August 5, 2000
    Don’t rush yourself, says the man in the doorway, keep calm. It is ten o’clock, already a suffocating day in New York. Norman Finkelstein is wearing short sleeves and has bare feet in slippers. He speaks cautiously and softly. From the kitchen comes the whistle of two caged parakeets. Everything suggests the calm that Finkelstein desires for his visitor.
    Oh well.
    Within a couple of hours he’ll be screaming and saying: sorry I’m raising my voice. He’ll jump up from his chair to the bookcase to get one book after another and read excerpts from it with a breaking voice. He’ll point to paragraphs where there are mostly large areas of scribbling: “Now look, now look,” he then shouts, “that’s the level they’re lowering themselves to.”
    “They” – that is what the politics professor Finkelstein (47) calls the “Holocaust industry”: American Jews, who have appropriated, twisted and exploited the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War for their own benefit – and the American government that uses this fabricated version of history for its own Middle East policies. According to Finkelstein, this thesis is set out in his controversial book The Holocaust Industry, whose Dutch translation appears in September.
    “They” – that is people such as Edgar Bronfman, President of the World Jewish Congress – according to Finkelstein, a “blackmailing gangster.” People such as Daniel J. Goldhagen, author of the successful book Hitler’s Willing Executioners – “Holo-porno,” according to Finkelstein. People such as the historian Martin Gilbert, whose book Never Again Finkelstein calls “Harry Potter, Part IV.” People such as Nobel prize winner Elie Wiesel, who Finkelstein says “fabricates – that’s a nice word for lie.”
    … Until 1967 there was nothing available, writes Finkelstein. A few serious studies about the Jews’ destruction and isolated authentic diaries and memoirs from survivors appeared. In that year the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors changed the attitude of the American government to the Jewish state. The Americans saw in victorious Israel a strategic bulwark in the Middle East. To justify massive American military support to Israel, history was revived. The US as protector of the people that had already suffered so much. And so that the past would leave absolutely no space for misunderstandings, it was polished into virtually the new orthodoxy.
    The Nazis were the incarnation of age-old Jew-hatred. The hatred of non-Jews for Jews is a form of envy; Jews had to be destroyed because they were better. And that destruction is the most terrible that has ever happened in the whole of history. The destruction of the Jews is a unique crime.
    So schoolchildren are taught in compulsory Holocaust lesons. So students are instructed in courses in Holocaust Studies. So it is presented to visitors at the dozens of Holocaust museums across the whole of America. So it is instilled in all Americans on Holocaust Memorial Day. To keep this version intact, shelves full of Holocaust literature have appeared, not to be confused with Holocaust scholarship, says Finkelstein. But the distinction has become blurred, he thinks. Certainly after Goldhagen’s Holocaust literature in 1996 became Holocaust scholarship. That was the moment when Finkelstein decided that something had to be done. And that he must do it.
    “As a Jew I have an inborn immunity. And the moral responsibility to use that.” That responsibility earlier brought him to write about the Palestinians. “The suffering of the Jews was invoked as an excuse for what Israel did to the Palestinians.” He goes to look at a photograph of himself from 1982. He is standing in front of the Israeli consulate in Washington with the placard:
    This son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising & Auschwitz & Majdanek will NOT be silent. Israeli-Nazis – stop the Holocaust in Lebanon!!!

    Goldhagen, also the son of a survivor, does the opposite, according to Finkelstein. “He gave the Jews and Israel a permit for their actions.” As victims of the ultimate Evil they are the ultimate Good. “It is unhealthy that Jews are immune from any kind of criticism. Any form of criticism of Jews is dismissed as antisemitism or Holocaust denial. That has a devastating effect on their morality. My mother always made many merciless criticisms of me. Painful, but in the end a good thing. I never had a superiority complex because of my success at school, because she always pointed out my mistakes.
    “By hammering on the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the exclusive link between Holocaust and Jews, the Holocaust industry has become the main promoter of antisemitism. I teach at a public university and there you notice the irritation over Jewish self-worship because of the Holocaust. The moment that a Jewish student starts on the Holocaust, you feel the tension in the hall rise. That is suffocating.”
    … Finkelstein takes from the shelf a book by Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies – issued by Oxford University Press, footnotes and everything…
    “For the Holocaust industry the Gypsies must be forgotten. The thought that lies behind the uniqueness argument is: they killed us because we were better. And that thought is untenable if the Gypsies accompany it. For looking at their current status, who could seriously maintain that Gypsies were murdered because they are better? Let me say that the real reason for a book like Lewy’s is Jewish racism – or no: chauvinism…
    “Why is Goldhagen’s thesis so attractive? Because it’s politically convenient.”
    Did the American public really crowd into Schindler’s List because it generated support for policies in the Middle East?
    “Then give me a better reason. If we encounter a large body of material which, taken together, constitutes an ideology, then the first question is really: who is profiting from this? In my opinion, there are two beneficiaries of these ideas: American Jews, and the American government, which uses the destruction of the Jews for its political goals.
    “In 1978, NBC made the TV series Holocaust. Do you think that it was a coincidence, 1978? Just in time for the negotiations between Israel and Egypt at Camp David?”
    In 1978, the ABC series Roots came out, a history of American blacks over two centuries. Whose interests did that serve at the time?
    “Roots was something quite different. That series came out of the victory of the massive civil rights movement.

    “Everyone can say that my analysis is too limited. But don’t say that my method is no good. Or that it comes from a conspiracy-theorist’s mindset. That’s absurd.”
    At the end of your book you no longer have individuals, but only “the Holocaust industry,” which does this or says that. That sounds really rather like conspiracy-mongering.

    “The silence around my book in the US – if that isn’t a conspiracy, what is it then?”
    Lack of interest?
    “You don’t believe that! Lack of interest for something to do with the Shoah? This is America. Here we make Holocaust cookbooks. Really, the cookbook of the women of Terezin, In Memory’s Kitchen.”
    Perhaps people did not consider the book sufficiently important.
    “Then would it really get so much attention in England? The mechanism of ideological control is subtle. People know automatically whom you must and must not name. And anyone who doesn’t know that yet, and then goes to look me up for a comment, gets a telephone call from his boss: ‘You know who that Finkelstein is? You know what he’s said about Israel? About Goldhagen?’ And then: silence.”
    It is scarcely believable that a small group of people, which also represents only a small part of the American population, is succeeding in foisting its ideology on such a large number. Certainly in light of the fact that so many other interest groups are competing for the same attention.
    “Jews are influential. They occupy an important position in the media. All opinion journals in the US, from left to right, are Jewish.”
    So it’s only a matter of time before black viewpoints start to count.
    “Ha ha ha, that will take about as long as the advent of world communism. Power structures are strong.

    “It would be interesting to see what would happen if Israel or American Jews taxed the patience of the American government. I think that the Holocaust would then simply be one of many relatively obscure chapters of history. As it also was until 1967. In 1966 nothing ever appeared in the papers about the Holocaust. It was scarcely written about.”
    … I’m no martyr, says Finkelstein, fearing that the impression is arising that he is. “Every five-year-old Palestinian boy who threw a stone at Israeli soldiers has more courage than me. But if you want to know how you’re treated in the American academic milieu, if you have criticisms of Israel such as I’ve made in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, then this is it: I can never get a job. I’m at Hunter College as an adjunct teacher, which is roughly equivalent to a lift boy. My income is between $15,000 and $18,000 dollars, far below the poverty line…
    “Only once have I been invited for a job interview, at the University of San Francisco, a small Jesuit college. Not one article by me has ever been published in a scholarly journal. In Hunter I can never give a class on the extermination of the Jews, only on the history of political theory. I also rarely give a class by day, mostly in the evenings. I’ve paid my price.
    “The truth is a bitter pill. My parents did not teach me to soften the pill. My parents and my intellectual teacher Noam Chomsky have that outspoken style. I love moral indignation.”

  17. Worthy comments, john.
    had I read them sooner, I would have saved my trump card till another time 🙂

  18. There are Jews of conscience and goodwill. I believe that. Many of them convert, like Saul became Paul. The key to their cohesion, as Alan Derschowitz explained in “the Vanishing Jew,” is their religion. OF course he was not the first to so observe. The rabbis knew and know it well, and Frederich Nietzsche wrote all about it in “The Genealogy of Morals.”

    I DO have a big problem with the obsolete and hateful Talmudic Judaism religion. Not with Jewish persons as individuals, but yes, I have a big problem with their religion. It reeks. Yes I am a Christian, call me a bigot I don’t care.

  19. As Americans, we are truly idiots for believing that our government does not meddle in the press.
    We are also fools for believing that the press doesn’t serve other interests too, like their capitalist owners.
    Jews and capitalism? Just as Jewish Karl Marx about that topic. I am not making this stuff up folks. Don’t take it from me, take it from them, since people seem to think they are “a light unto the peoples” etc etc LOL

  20. It’s why the CIA had operation Mockingbird, to place collaborators inside mass media. Mass media is hugely important.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

    I am not sure the Jews invented mass subversion by mass media and culture, goys can play at it too. The “Founding Fathers” were no strangers to propaganda and the manipulation of the press. Franklin was a trained printer for gosh sakes.

    And Henry Luce was a protestant manipulator of mass culture by his TIME magazine and worked closely with the CIA too. The Jews are probably just better at it than goys. But for the topic I alluded to, promotion of miscegenation in America, my assertion is firmly supported by facts.

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