Israel Matzav

Judith Butler and the Judenraat

I came late to the story of Judith Butler, which broke while I was returning from the US last week, so I have been leaving it to other bloggers to discuss and hope you are reading about it elsewhere. Butler is an American anti-Zionist who is receiving an award from the city of Frankfurt, Germany. But what's worse, I didn't know until today, is that the Mayor of Frankfurt is a Jew. Giulio Meotti writes that Peter Feldmann, the first Jewish Mayor of Frankfurt since the rise of Adolph Hitler, is a member of the 2012 version of the Judenraat.

The city of Jacob Hoffmann, Franz Rozenzweig, the artist Moritz Oppenheim, the world-renowned chemist Paul Ehrlich, and many other Jews who brought glory to Frankfurt before the Nazi shame, decided to honor a feminist who has been busy for a decade in the demonization of Israel.

Surprised?

Judith Butler, the professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California who promotes a cultural boycott of the Jewish State, is one of the new Jewish Marxists who have turned anti-Zionism into one of their very highest priorities.

In recent years, the most unremitting criticism of Israel has come from Jewish intellectuals. These liberal Jews are more dangerous than the Islamists. Many of Israel's worst enemies have indeed been, in William Blake's words, "those of our own house and family". Peter Beinart is another proof that Jews are just as capable of voicing anti-Semitic statements as non-Jews.

Last year, then-German president Horst Kohler issued the Federal Merit Cross, one of the country’s most important awards, to the Jewish lawyer Felicia Langer, who has equated Israel with Nazi Germany.

Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, whose father survived Auschwitz and became the first chairman of the Berlin German Jewish community following the Holocaust, has applauded parallels drawn between Israeli policies and Nazism.

Here are more: George Steiner, who questioned whether Israel should have come into being at all; Eric Hobsbawn, who supported the Intifada, endorsing “the cause of liberation"; Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who wrote letters to “Palestinian partisans” during the Intifada; the late historian Tony Judt, who had been outspoken in his rejection of Israel’s right to exist; and United Nations envoy Richard Falk, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, the linguist Noam Chomsky...

But what is most disturbing in the Butler affair is not only that the prize's recipient is an anti-Israel agitator, the version of the old Kapò; it is the role played by the new "Judenrat".

Read it all. I wonder why they're waiting to give George Soros an award.

Labels: kapos, Nazis

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:20 PM