***** Put simply, I view the Law of Return as the affirmative action program of the Jewish people. It's a legal accommodation that has been earned in the same way that preferential educational and employment policies in the United States were earned by people of color: through suffering. If four centuries of slavery and institutionalized racism can justify affirmative action programs for American blacks whether or not they themselves were brought here in chains, then surely twenty centuries of oppression and annihilation--think Crusades, Inquisition, forced conversions, pogroms, the Gulag, the Holocaust--justify similarly discrepant favoritism for Jews in Israel. *****
I'm glad that Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote such a preposterous defense of the Law of Return as above. Comparing the Law of Return -- the practice of Jewish supremacy, much like white supremacy in US and South African histories -- to affirmative action programs for American Blacks can only serve to discredit the Law of Return, especially in the eyes of American Blacks themselves.
Cf. Melani McAlister, "One Black Allah: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955-1970," American Quarterly 51.3 (1999), pp. 622-656, <http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2003w20/msg00143.htm>. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>