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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: Western culture

Still time to save earth

Indigenous activist, scholar and farmer Dr. Randy Woodley was the keynote speaker on May 24 for the Vancouver School of Theology conference Religious Responses to Climate Change. Based in Yamhill, Ore., Woodley addressed the assembled Zoom audience on the topic Indigenous Spirit: Weaving Justice and Peace in a Wounded Land.

“The West has largely failed in its mandate to till and keep the soil; that is, to serve the community of creation, the whole community of creation,” Woodley began, introducing the concept of humankind’s responsibility to assure the well-being of those in its care, namely, the land and all the creatures that reside on it and in it.

Humans are co-sustainers of the earth, he stressed, showing a slide that highlighted the billions of bacteria, millions of protozoa, metres of fungi and thousands of nematodes in just one cup of soil.

Woodley gave examples of the unflattering views Western scholars have often had of Indigenous cultures and how such scholars (and others) have overlooked “many things that ‘primitives’ still know.” While North American curricula contain lessons on Greek, Egyptian and Chinese civilizations, for example, education on ancient American civilizations is lacking.

Indigenous American societies brought about such things as micro-agriculture and macro-environmental management, including botany, agronomy, forestry, raised beds and naturally self-sustaining fertilized gardens, said Woodley. Further, there was sustainable architecture that incorporated passive solar design, solar heating, water capture systems and mass water transport.

“I would argue that the Western worldview has been a failed experiment,” he said. “We need to dump it and we need to adopt a more Indigenous approach.”

He said the “faster, bigger, cheaper” method of food production in the Western world is depleting soils and leading to the loss of crop varieties. At the same time, forests are shrinking, species are going extinct and droughts are increasing. Blame for water waste could be placed on big agriculture, he asserted.

Meanwhile, Indigenous people have lived in North America for more than 20,000 years without permanently endangering the land. He said, “The earth has had enough and is not going to let humans get away with knocking things out of balance forever.

“Nature’s chaos, which we’re understanding now, is actually stable because it continues to adapt. If there’s one thing true about all of creation … it will adapt. Human beings are the only ones who resist that. Adaptation is stability.”

The nature of a closed system is to collapse in on itself or be consumed by other more adaptive systems, he argued. Therefore, he said, the religious response to climate change should be to adapt as well. Within adaptation, there is an order that builds open systems of unity and diversity. The West, on the other hand, introduced chaos and continues to maintain it.

“Lots of different diseases we have are because we have not lived in the way we should with the animal kingdom. We only have a short time to come back from our own unsustainable chaos and back to the Creator’s sustainable order,” Woodley said.

A handful of human generations has accelerated consumption exponentially. Mother Earth is now trying to rebalance the overuse through “random acts of nature,” he said. The planet is reclaiming its territory and “spitting out the inhabitants in order to restore harmony, the top of the food chain temporarily is now Mother Earth herself.”

It was a particular kind of human being, Woodley reiterated – the Europeans and Americans, and not the species itself – that brought us to this perilous stage. Woodley sees a connection between the way Europeans and Americans treat both creation and people, especially women, immigrants, the poor and other marginalized groups – with respect to nature and fellow humans, they have a need to control, exploit, expect production from and objectify, he said.

Practical steps forward, in Woodley’s view, include a critical examination of the Western world approach, the shedding of unhealthy paradigms, and the adoption of a more Indigenous perspective, such as sustainable ecosystems, a respect for the wisdom found in nature and an acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of all living things.

Woodley quoted environmentalist and economist Winona LaDuke as saying, “Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food, food has a culture, it has a history, it has a story, it has relationships.”

And he cited a Shoshone elder: “Do not begrudge the white man his presence on this land. Though he doesn’t know it yet, he has come here to learn from us.”

Together with his wife Edith, Woodley runs Eloheh Indigenous Centre for Earth Justice, an organization that focuses on developing, implementing and teaching sustainable and regenerative earth practices. Eloheh is a Cherokee word meaning harmony, wholeness, abundance and peace.

Woodley has written several books, including Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine, and Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision.

Director of the VST conference was Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan-Kaplan.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Posted on June 24, 2022June 22, 2022Author Sam MargolisCategories LocalTags climate crisis, education, environment, Indigenous culture, Randy Woodley, Vancouver School of Theology, VST, Western culture

Tackling the hatred head on

When white supremacists converged on Charlottesville, Va., four years ago chanting “Jews will not replace us,” it was the first encounter most of us had had with the conspiracy theory known as “the Great Replacement.”

In the pretzel logic of racists, immigration and multiculturalism are products of the Jewish imagination, with Jews perpetrating, through behind-the-curtains jiggery-pokery, what the tiny number of actual Jews in the world cannot do demographically: replace Aryan culture with alien races and cultures. The absurdity of the “theory” makes a lot more sense as one delves deeper into the trends and characteristics of antisemitism. Three wildly different but related books show that the projection of all that is wrong in society onto an empty vessel that happens to be Jewish recurs repeatedly. As ludicrous as the Great Replacement is, it dovetails magnificently with thousands of years of anti-Jewish prejudice and propaganda.

In Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity (TLS Books, 2021), author David Baddiel explores how the treatment of Jews is the exception to effectively everything today’s progressives espouse.

“It is a progressive article of faith – much heightened during the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 – that those who do not experience racism need to listen, to learn, to accept and not challenge when others speak about their experiences,” he writes. “Except, it seems, when Jews do. Non-Jews, including progressive non-Jews, are still very happy to tell Jews whether or not the utterance about them was in fact racist.”

image - Jews Don’t Count book coverBaddiel discusses how racism and antisemitism are disentwined to disadvantage Jews, placing antisemitism lower on a “hierarchy of racisms” than other forms.

“Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways as the other minorities are – as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking – but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world,” he says. “And, if you believe, even a little bit, that Jews are moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world … well, you can’t put them into the sacred circle of the oppressed. Some might even say they belong in the damned circle of the oppressors.”

Baddiel confronts the canard that Jews can’t be victims of racism because they represent a religion, not a race – an audacious defining of an entire people by others who do not belong to the group, itself an example of something progressives would deign to do with no group other than Jews. By pushing antisemitism down the victimization scale, perpetrators can then accuse people who call out antisemitism as diminishing the experiences of minorities with legitimate claims to oppression.

When Baddiel called out one prominent antisemite, saying he had rarely heard so blatant a statement from someone with so large an audience, the perpetrator replied: “’Cos everyone was scared, that’s why.”

By alleging that a cabal of powerful Jews is policing the language of critics, the perpetrator, Baddiel writes, “isn’t a racist, he’s a hero, finally standing up and saying the things that need to be said even though it will bring down the wrath of this all-powerful Jewstablishment on his head.”

Similarly, when an article in the New York Times seemed like an attempt to rehabilitate the notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan, the author replied to a critic who mooted the negative impact this could have on Jews: “Somehow, among the million concerns, you believe that yours are supposed to rise to the top.… That is called privilege.”

A recurring theme is that, unlike other minorities, Jews are not “innocent victims.” Baddiel (and the other authors mentioned here) do not explicitly say it, but it is understood that, for antisemites, Jews are not victims because, whatever the calamity, they bring it on themselves.

Another recent book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby (Free Press, 2021), picks up on some of Baddiel’s themes.

Tishby is an Israeli-American actor with a strong Zionist lineage. Her grandmother was a founder of the first kibbutz in Israel. Her grandfather was Israel’s first ambassador to West African countries and served on the Israeli delegation to the United Nations. Her great-grandfather was the founder of Israel’s ministry of industry and trade. Tishby served in the Israel Defence Forces entertainment troops, which she describes as, basically, “a nightly USO [United Service Organizations] tour.” She starred in an Israeli prime time soap opera – Ramat Aviv Gimmel, a sort of Israeli Melrose Place – then made the move to Hollywood.

image - Israel book coverHer book is aimed at people of her demographic – young, hip, leftist (though presumably non-Jewish) readers – and she presents, through biography and history, a tidy Zionist narrative that hits the bases. She does what pro-Israel writers rarely do: she uses emotion and personal stories, rather than dogged reliance on facts, chronology and empiricism. This is not to diminish the fact-based foundation of the book, but her first-person narrative connects the reader to the land and people of Israel in a way that cold facts do not.

Tishby provides a simple but thorough overview of regional history and the development of Israel, as well as the parallel history of the Palestinian and Arab peoples in the area. She dissects the claims of the BDS movement one by one, debunking the prevailing leftist narrative in the West. She pillories the obsession of the United Nations with anything Israeli and rebuts allegations of colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, unequal warfare and occupation quite effectively.

She recounts how, in the years after the Second World War, there were roughly 11 million refugees worldwide, 700,000 of whom were Palestinian.

“The 10,300,000 non-Palestinian refugees were funneled into UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, created in 1951), the UN agency dedicated to resettling and integrating refugees and/or stateless peoples,” she writes. The Palestinians got their own unique refugee agency: the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

“While UNHCR is constantly working on getting the global number of refugees down, with UNRWA the numbers go up, up, up,” Tishby writes. “After the 1948 war, there were approximately 700,000 displaced people. Now UNRWA has 5.6 million ‘refugees’ registered in their books. How is that possible?”

Even Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank are counted as refugees by UNRWA, she notes, asking: “Can you be a refugee from Palestine when you currently live in … Palestine?”

Near the end of the book, Tishby throws some questions at the reader: “How would you handle a wannabe Sharia state 30 miles from your house? How should Israel retaliate when Hamas fires thousands of rockets into southern Israeli towns? Why haven’t the Palestinians agreed to make a final peace deal? Will the PA unite with Hamas and, if so, will Hamas denounce violence, like, ever? Why is Israel singled out? What about other countries that actually do systematically abuse human rights? Why aren’t activists focused on their freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly, which Israel grants all her citizens? Where are the boycott movements of neighbouring countries that literally kill people for their beliefs, desire for freedoms and democracy, or sexual orientation?”

Tishby’s Israel is an engaging, entertaining read and an ideal primer for newbies to the subject. For those more immersed academically or through lived experience with this topic, there is little new information, but it is largely an enjoyable read although, in an effort to be hip and approachable, she routinely employs gratuitous profanities, which might grate on some readers.

Far from these two volumes on the scale of page-turning readability is the monumental tome Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013). Published eight years ago, it had somehow escaped my eye and, when I did get my hands on it, it sat for some time on my pile. Cracking the spine was daunting because the thesis is dark and unnerving.

Nirenberg undermines the received wisdom that antisemitism is characteristic of ideological extremes in Western civilization. Instead, he depicts “anti-Judaism” as absolutely central and foundational to the very identity of Western civilization. (He differentiates “antisemitism,” which is discrimination against Jews, and “anti-Judaism,” which is perhaps a more pernicious, guileful thing, attributing “Judaism” and “Jewishness” to anything undesirable, whether the object is Jewish or not.) Applying Nirenberg’s thesis to Charlottesville is a simple way of understanding it. In the eye of the racists, immigration and multiculturalism are bad, ergo, by definition, they are “Jewish,” whether actual Jews have any hand in them or not.

image - Anti-Judaism book coverNirenberg provides a sadly compendious recital of civilizations for whom “Jews,” “Jewishness” and “Judaism” were used as a prism through (and against) which non-Jews defined their own identities.

“Why did so many diverse cultures – even many cultures with no Jews living among them – think so much about Judaism? What work did thinking about Judaism do for them in their efforts to make sense of their world?” he asks.

In Christianity, Jews are viewed as “materialist” and earthly, which is juxtaposed with Christians’ self-image as being concerned with the spiritual and the divine. In a theology where things terrestrial are equated with all things evil, the corollary is predictable.

Nirenberg quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, who said: “if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” The subtext of Nirenberg’s book, one could say, is that both things are true: the Jew does exist and the antisemite invented him. There are, in effect, two different “Jews”: real Jews and the image antisemites have created and refined for millennia.

It is this latter imaginary “Jew” that has been used not only to torment generations of actual Jews, but also to contrive the self-identities of civilizations. Nirenberg includes both Christianity and Islam under the rubric of Western civilization when he writes: “anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”

Since Christianity and Islam were both founded as supercessionary religions to Judaism, juxtaposing that theological parentage with an antipathy to the descendants of the parent religion creates a cognitive dissonance that Nirenberg describes as the “truth of Jewish scripture and the falsity of the Jews.”

Somehow, adherents of both religions have intrepidly managed to accommodate the dissonance.

“The simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of Judaism became for Islam – as it had been for Christianity – a structuring principle of the world, one through which Islamic truth was explored, discovered and articulated,” he writes. Jews were “both necessary and noxious, prophetic and pernicious.”

The religious bigotry permeates Western civilization, not just its religion, he argues. Nirenberg discusses how Marx employed typical Christian perceptions of Jews as materialistic to fit his atheistic ideology. He also analyzes how it influenced the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. For example, while the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the great document of the French Revolution, does not mention Jews or Judaism, “it was famously presented and represented to the people – in a painting and in print – as two new tablets of law, replacing those handed Moses on Mount Sinai.” Never mind Christianity and Islam, when it came time for what was probably the most progressive, liberal society yet in modern history to define itself, the revolutionaries took Jewish imagery and firmly demarcated themselves as “not that.”

What is striking when immersing oneself in volumes about antisemitism is the stark certainty of today’s “critics of Israel” that they are untainted with antisemitic bias. They apparently have given little, if any, thought or effort to learn the history of antisemitism and its myriad permutations.

While Nirenberg speaks very little about Israel, he packs a powerful punch when, after hundreds of dense pages excruciatingly dissecting how civilizations for thousands of years have understood their identities and their most significant beliefs in direct opposition to Judaism, he declares: “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel.’”

Coincidence? It doesn’t seem so to those have studied the history and malleability of anti-Jewish ideas.

Posted on August 27, 2021August 25, 2021Author Pat JohnsonCategories BooksTags anti-Jewish, anti-Judaism, anti-Muslim, antisemitism, David Baddiel, David Nirenberg, history, identity, Jewish history, Noa Tishby, politics, racism, religion, Western culture
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