Archive by Author: Ralph Seliger

On the evening of Sept. 16, New York’s YIVO Institute sponsored a massively attended panel discussion called “Bundism’s Influence Today.”  The panel was diverse in age, but less so in viewpoint.  The audience included an impressive number of engaged young Jews, but apparently few with sympathy for the Jewish state.  Although the panel’s moderator, Prof. Jack Jacobs […]

The following revisits debates from recent decades that still weigh upon American Jews and supporters of Israel, but leaves aside blatant antisemitic conspiracy theories.  How do we fairly assess the impact of the “Israel Lobby” and the neoconservatives on the al Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and on the US response — including its misadventure in Iraq?  […]

As explained in my post this past February on NY Times opinion editor Bari Weiss: “I don’t see her adequately confronting the fact that the ongoing injustices inflicted upon Palestinians and the deepening occupation are what’s driving support for the BDS movement and explicit anti-Zionism that sometimes spills into antisemitism from the left.”  On this publication […]

This is the second of two posts.  Click here for the first.   Late in the afternoon, I received a second shock which pulled me in the other direction, to feel protective of Israel.  I often participate in a “meetup” to discuss history, current events and political philosophies.  A session that I attended that day discussed […]

On Saturday, July 27th, my lifelong Zionist convictions were emotionally whipsawed in opposite ways.  First, a lengthy article in the Haaretz weekend magazine (“When Arabs Were Invited to Live the Zionist Dream“)  opened a hole in my heart by illuminating Israel’s historic failure to integrate its pre-1967 Arab minority as equal citizens.  Later that day, […]

Assaf Adiv, executive director of the independent Israeli labor union, WAC-MAAN (the Workers Advice Center), spoke on July 2nd at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.  WAC-MAAN is linked to the Da’am Workers Party, founded in 1995 by some veterans of the anti-Zionist socialist Matzpen group.  Da’am is characterized by Wikipedia as “a revolutionary socialist Jewish-Arab political […]

Susie Linfield (as she is known professionally as well as personally) is a professor of journalism at New York University and a leftwinger who’s on the board of Dissent magazine.  Her past writings on this subject include being the affirmative voice in a 2015 debate published in Dissent entitled “Is a Left Zionism Possible?” and […]