The Battle for the Jewish Voice and the Jewish Soul Heats Up

There have been two great articles by NION members in Culture Magazine recently. In Waking Up Jewish, Lia Tarachansky recounts how she and other Jewish Canadians have had their eyes opened to the realities of Israeli Apartheid.

"Ben, Corey and I have woken up and learned to separate Judaism from Zionism, history from propaganda, and defence from offence ... Much effort is expended to ensure that Jewish people around the world are oblivious to the resolvable issues of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict ... But a growing number of us are awakening
to the nightmare endured by the Palestinians."

In Heating Up: The Battle for the Jewish voice and the Jewish soul, David Mandelzys writes a moving open letter to his parents:

"Remember last Passover? Remember when we sat around the Seder table and listened to you rant about Israel`s victimhood? About how ethnic cleansing really isn’t that bad? And about how if they try to kill the Jews this time, we will at least take them all with us? ... You see, our generation is different. We are not blind Zionist ideologues. We did not take the lesson of kill or be killed from the stories our
grandparents told us about the Holocaust or the anti-Semitism they faced.
Alongside our lessons about Zionism and about why the Holocaust meant that Jews
need a Jewish state for themselves, we couldn't help but absorb the need to
oppose racism, to fight oppression and to not justify the subjugation of one
‘people’ for the benefit of another."

Both articles highlight the rapidly growing resistance to Israeli Apartheid from within the Jewish community, and shed light on some of the discussions happening around the kitchen tables of the worldwide Jewish diaspora. Despite the triumphalism leading up to the worldwide Israel at 60 "celebrations" last month, such celebrations were challenged by Jewish dissent around the world, including newspaper ads saying that Israel's 60th anniversary is nothing to celebrate, vigils, protests, political theatre, and civil disobedience. All of these initiatives and more are being led by Jewish activists and organizations like Not In Our Name alongside Palestinian allies. The times, they are a changin', indeed.