Fall 2007

Review

Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition

Edited by Stefan Merken and Murray Polner

Bunim & Bannigan, 2007, 232 pages (cloth), $25.00

Reviewed by Richard Deats

Murray Polner and Stefan Merken, past co-chairs of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, co-edited Wrestling with Your Conscience: A Guide for Jewish Draft Registrants and Conscientious Objectors and expanded and updated Allan Solomonow's Roots of Jewish Nonviolence. They continue this significant collaboration in Peace, Justice, and Jews. The book is dedicated to Michael Robinson, rabbi, and Naomi Goodman, feminist writer, two important Jewish peace leaders, both recently deceased.

This remarkable book contains essays, poetry, photos, and prayer by activists and scholars, journalists and refuseniks, conscientious objectors and soldiers, Israelis and Americans. Hearing their stories and pondering their writings touch both one’s heart and mind. It is a salutary and powerful testimony to the great Jewish tradition of peace and justice.

A number of the authors examine the biblical tradition of peace and justice. Phillip Bentley, rabbi, lifts up the importance of the fact that the Torah – the five books of Moses – says 36 times: “You shall not oppress the stranger for you know the heart of the stranger having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” Richard Schwartz, professor and author, stresses the centrality of compassion in Judaism – not only for people but also animals, for “God’s tender mercies are over all his creatures” (Psalm 145:9). Writer-activists like rabbis Al Axelrod and Arthur Waskow struggle with the issue of violence and “accept the possibility of certain limited forms of violence in extreme necessity,” yet recognizing, as did Buber, that “the more violence in the means, the more violence will remain in the goal achieved.”

Waskow has a fascinating examination of what he labels “the Jewish path of assertive nonviolence.” He says the most successful single use of nonviolent civil disobedience by the Jewish people since the midwives Shifra and Puah hid the baby Moses from the Pharoah was the Soviet Jewry movement. Almost wholly nonviolent, they won the freedom of Soviet Jews. “Dancing in the streets of Moscow on the night of Simchat Torah. Marches, demonstrations, boycotts. Sit-ins in the Supreme Soviet. I can remember when people thought, ‘Hey, a sit-in in the Supreme Soviet? All those folks will be dead next week!’ But they lived and won allies all over the world.”

In their excellent introduction, Polner and Merken recall Henry Schwarzschild, refugee from Nazi Germany and staunch witness against war and the death penalty; he celebrated the fact that Jews “are defined by neither doctrine nor credo” but by task: “to redeem the world through justice.” This volume explores many dimensions of this enormous task. Rabbi Sheila Pelz Weinberg calls this “an alternative vision” and maintains that “Judaism and feminism share a radical alternative vision of the world as well as a basic optimism that change is possible – not easy and not fast, but possible.”

A recurring theme is the universality of human rights and how Israeli and Palestinian rights are interconnected. As teacher/author David Howard says, “Let’s reclaim our most sacred prayer – a prayer held hostage by armed men. Shema Yisrael, Listen, Jewish people. Our God is one God. If we listen, we will hear the voice of our Palestinian twin. Her God, our God. His Land, our Land. One God. One Land?” And Helen Fein, director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, says that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a case of “right against right rather than the stark ‘either/or’ so often taken in discussing the conflict.” Ed Feder, businessman/writer, in his essay “Will There Ever Be Another Holocaust?” says “In truth, we can only eliminate future holocausts for the Jews by eliminating them for all people.”

Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose eldest son was abducted and murdered by Hamas, speaks of the occupation as the worst form of terror. He says that the Zionism of the Hebron settlers has become “a destructive force alien to Judaism.” He is working for an Israel “free of occupation, free of evil and callousness.” Ada Aharoni shares her alternative vision in a poem:

My Arab sister, daughter of Ishmael,
Let us build a sturdy bridge
From your olive world to mine,
From my orange world to yours.
Above the boiling plain
Of acid rain prejudice—
And hold human hands high
Full of free stars
Of twinkling peace.

This review touches on only a few of the works found in this superb reader. For those who would understand and work for Middle East peace with justice, this book is indispensable.

Richard Deats is editor emeritus of Fellowship.