betrayal – Jewish Relationships Initiative

Being Canceled

In response to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute’s decision to cancel the showing of the film The Child Within Me, I make the following statement:

To the Board of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute

You squandered an essential moment of leadership.

Until this decision, you were a cultural icon and an important voice in our community. But instead of devotion to keeping culture accessible through film, its thoughtful curation, and presentation, you cowed in the face of political pressure. You canceled a film thoroughly unrelated to the war. The only controversy about this film is your decision to condemn it because the Israeli Film Festival sponsors it. Shame on you.

People protesting against the showing of a film is an act of free speech. It does not automatically devolve into violence, and using that as a pretense for canceling is a sign of it is either fecklessness or outright bias against Jews (also known as Antisemitism) and Israel.

Protesters are loud and obnoxious, but they are not violent. Those who attend the festival would find them uncomfortable, but they are not a physical threat. Further, the police of Lower Merion would have done an excellent job of keeping the peace even in this potentially testy situation.

BMFI was an important institution, one I enjoyed participating in and supporting. However, I am deeply disappointed that you have focused on other aspects, neglecting the crucial role of bringing influential films into our community. This decision has undermined the basis for our relationship. I resign from my membership and call on everyone in our community to do the same.

Sincerely

Rabbi David Levin

Our lives are changed

All of our lives have been irrevocably changed as a result of October 7. The lives we thought we enjoyed before have had the veneer ripped away, and we are in a new and strangely familiar place as a people of history.

As many of you know, I am planning a trip to Israel with a few of my colleagues from the Philadelphia region through the generous support of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Our purpose is to learn, bear witness, and bring home the stories of what is happening to the people of Israel. We will start in Tel Aviv, and we will move South, meeting with families of the kidnapped, hostages, and others whose lives around the envelope have been changed forever.

I do not know what I will encounter. And I say that as someone who is struggling here in the Diaspora and as someone committed to the Jewish state. We have complex and conflicting moral issues to try and understand. It is like threading the eye of a tiny needle. Our tradition is well-versed in parsing, probing, and understanding how we maintain our values even when those values are challenged in the most extraordinary ways. But we have enjoyed the opportunity to study those texts, not live them in real-time, and here in lies the real challenge of what it means to understand what is going on Jewishly.

I will share the lessons I will learn and some wisdom that I hope will come from these experiences. But I will at least bear witness.

I have been asked repeatedly if I am nervous or scared about my trip to Israel, and I do have trepidation, but it’s not the trepidation of being physically hurt. It is the trepidation of everything that I have held dear, of everything that I have worked for, of everything that I believe in, being tested in a way that I never thought would be imaginable today.

The virulent Jew-hatred we believed was part of our history is now being expressed publicly and shamelessly; that is frightening.

I am privileged to know many people of Goodwill, and so many of them have reached out in this fraught time to offer their support and love. But there are so many others who have remained silent and too many others who have let their antisemitism erupt into the public space. We can no longer pretend that Jew-hatred does not affect us. It does, and we must now decide whether we stand for what we claim to believe and fight for those values and ideals.

I pray for the people of Israel, I pray for my Jewish brothers and sisters both there and here, and I pray for peace. Perhaps these things may come more quickly than the all-too-elusive Messiah. It is up to us to hasten their coming.

The American dilemma of Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter. Most of us agreed a while ago that this statement means that all lives matter, everyone should receive justice in our system and the institutional barriers to equality must be broken down. The criminal justice system, the education system, and the economic system must provide opportunities to all.

And then, a political platform emerged from BLM. It lost focus on the ideas that brought us all together. In addition to talking about the issues that brought BLM into being, pronouncements about the US military and pronouncements about the Israel-Palestinian conflict inserted themselves, blurring our focus and obscuring our original mission.

The tragedies that spawned the BLM movement were about righting the wrongs that exist here. Reaching internationally under the banner of “intersectionality” does nothing to galvanize us to action here in the United States. As a point of fact, such stands become dividers as many of us that were supporting BLM are put off by the singling out of Israel as a villain in the sadly reductionist narrative of Palestinian as the victim, occupation bad. The naming of Israel as an Apartheid state, support of BDS, and the deliberate misuse of the word genocide to describe the Palestinian situation is loaded and hurtful, directed at the people who were victims of real villains who perpetrated a real genocide. This is not to negate the real issues of the Palestinians, but rather to state this is the wrong place for this conversation to occur, let alone one-sided judgmental statements.

BLM is not about the world’s oppressed. It is about our oppressed. BLM is not an opportunity to indict the United States military, its mission or its budget. It is about correcting the institutions that do not serve the people properly. Rectifying systemic domestic issues should be the priority and with laser focus, we need to understand what has gone wrong and what we need to do to fix our nation before another generation is deprived of a full and hopeful future.

Unless and until the BLM “movement” can focus on the complicated issues, it will be stalled. There will be loud voices for a while, but systemic change will prove elusive and ultimately unsuccessful as the focused collective will of the people becomes nothing more than the diffuse broad brush protest against the establishment, by those with an agenda very different from identifying and making the necessary changes required to create a just society here in the United States.

I will continue to work for the society we aspire to be, but sadly I have been shut out from the “movement” many had wanted to create. I hope that the BLM movement sees the alienation it has created by its irresponsible platform and seeks to include all citizens of goodwill to join the important work that is needed here at home.