>Michael Lerner and the Workers World Party
>The Ranting Rabbi Doesn't Speak for All Anti-War Jews
>by LENNI BRENNER
>
>In 1959, I was a printer's helper in Greenwich Village with Bembo
>Typographers, which produced Labor Action, the organ of the Independent
>Socialist League. One day we got a new account. The Workers World Party
>had just set up, after Sam Marcy led a handful of followers out of the
>then Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
>
>Marcy was a platitudinous Maximum Leader, and their literature was dull
>compared to Labor Action, edited by Hal Draper, a world-class historian.
>Subsequently, WWP often pursued senseless strategies and said foolish
>things. However, by chance, on 2/14, I heard Brian Becker, New York
>organizer, on "The relationship between US foreign policy and Iraq's
>history and political development." He was well informed re deeds and
>dates as to how Washington has seen Iraq, Saddam's totalitarian
>character, oil's role, etc.
>
>There is a new maturity thruout the anti-war movement. The serious
>players want united demonstrations. In that context, I eagerly defend
>the WWP against Michael Lerner's accusation that they are "Antiwar
>Anti-Semites," using Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), one of
>the groups sponsoring SF's demonstration, "to put forward anti-Israel
>propaganda."
>
>Some years ago Lerner relocated in NY, got no audience among the apple's
>secular and largely atheist intelligentsia, and slunk back to the Bay
>Area. Indeed, if he had levied the accusation in Manhattan, everyone
>would have spit in his face.
>
>WWP is intimately involved in Al-Awda, The Return, The Palestine Right
>to Return Coalition, open to anyone who supports its principle. WWP's
>specialty is street demo logistics, and a NY Al-Awda march is a
>impressive sociological statement. I've paraded with bearded Orthodox
>Jewish Hasids, identical in black suits, wearing their traditional fur
>hats, pious Muslim women, heads covered, with secular Jews, Christians,
>some in clerical garb, Puerto Rican musicians, etc. Most onlookers cheer
>a pro-Palestine march with obvious Jews in it. The cops are friendly.
>Orthodox and Palestinians together, marching with the WWP, aren't
>terrorists.
>
>Those Orthodox are the Neturei Karta, the Guardians of the City. Jews
>make up ca. 11% of New Yorkers. Seventeen percent of the Jews are
>Orthodox, and ca. 25% of these identify with the NK. WWP's anti-Zionism
>pales to nothing compared to theirs. In 1981 they sent me to Beirut to
>report on whether the PLO would recognize Israel: "The Palestinians
>might compromise with Zionism. We can't. The Talmud forbid Jews to try
>to reconquer the land of Israel. G-d will restore us when he sees fit.
>If the PLO recognizes Israel, we must break with them." Ask NK if the
>WWP is anti-Semitic and they'll laugh in your face.
>
>The anti-Iraq war movement correctly includes Zionists who understand
>that war would generate unending suicide attacks against Israel. And at
>present, most activists, want to see Israel and a viable Palestinian
>state, side by side. But there is no room on our speakers' platforms for
>anyone making easily disproved libels against an organization playing a
>pivotal role in the growing opposition to the powers-that-be.
>
>Criticism of the WWP and everyone else? Of course!! Indeed publically
>debating what Americans should do re US military and/or financial "aid'
>to Israel, the Palestine Authority, Saudi Arabia, etc., is one of the
>best ways of educating the concerned public about the Middle East.
>
>Happily, the ranting rabbi doesn't speak for the Jews. According to the
>American Jewish Identity Survey 2001, done at City University of New
>York, only 51% of US Jews believed in any form of Judaism. By 2003, its
>followers are a minority of our Jews. American Jewry, Orthodox to
>atheist, is the world's most educated stratum. Most of the young reject
>Judaism as incompatible with science, and marry gentiles.
>
>In 1995 the American Jewish Committee reported that only 22% of all Jews
>declared themselves Zionists. The number is far lower now, mostly "the
>learned elderly of Zion.' Worldly Jews scorn Israel because of its
>medieval official religion. NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke for them in
>1995, before he turned politician: "I wont give too much money to the
>U(nited) J(ewish) A(ppeal), because of the hold the religious have on
>Israel. I have one wish: Shoot all the clerics."
>
>When movements collapse, the fanatics stay to the end, and its difficult
>to determine which is crazier, Lerner's politics or his theology: "We
>call for... the creation of a Palestinian state.... But we also call
>for... Israel's admission into NATO--or some other equally powerful
>military alliance--to give the Jewish state genuine security."
>
>Yes, NATO is about to take in Israel. Any minute now.
>
>His theology is wonderfully fanciful. In "A Jewish Renewal
>(Kabbalistic-Mystical-NeoHasidic) Approach to God," Lerner not only
>denounces prophets for not fully understanding God, he reveals himself
>to be smarter than God:
>
>"Cain seeks God's acknowledgement that his contribution, his sacrifice,
>is as valuable as that of his brother Abel, yet he does not get that
>sense of being recognized as valuable and contributing. In his pain and
>fury, he kills his brother.... If blame is to be assigned at all, it is
>to God, who failed to give Cain the recognition that he so badly needed;
>and it is perhaps out of this understanding of His own culpability that
>God does not kill Cain but instead only banishes him."
>
>Lerner is out of a Freudian text on narcissism. The kabbala was early
>medieval magic, conjuring with words. Hasidism started in the 18th
>century as a revivalist cult, combining kabbalaism with "storefront
>church' singing and dancing. "Poof' say their Rabbis, performing
>miracles, tho none so grandiose as NATO inviting Israel to join it. From
>wishful thinking to forgery is just a bounce and, indeed, Lerner has
>confessed to publishing bogus letters to the editor of Tikkun, that
>God's critic wrote himself.
>
>Such a simpleton inevitably attracted equally profound defenders. A list
>of his partisans have denounced "ANSWER's unfitness to lead mass
>mobilizations against war in Iraq." Internal evidence strongly suggests
>that the initiative for the slander campaign comes from elements in
>Democratic Socialsts of America. Among the signers is Bogdan Denitch, a
>Socialist Party leader in the early 60s. His specialty was proclaiming
>that the only way to build the anti-Vietnam War movement was to proclaim
>ourselves as "Against Washington and Moscow." We told him to go to hell,
>openly worked with Communists, and recruited hundreds of thousands to
>the cause, while the SP broke up. We called them "State Department
>Socialists' and ultimately Norman Thomas, their most famous figure, was
>exposed as a CIA collaborator by the NY Times.
>
>Today Denitch is DSA's guru as it gives out awards in Thomas' name. At
>best, DSA is divided between those who think he was a great man, who
>unfortunately secumbed to the CIA's blandishments in his old age, and
>those who think his taking secret CIA money was the highpoint of his
>brilliant career.
>
>Jack Newfield, another signer, was a star attraction at DSA conferences
>in the early 80s. In the end, Newfield went to work for the NY Post,
>which makes Mussolini's lL Popolo di Italia look timid.
>
>Nation writers and editors Marc Cooper, Katha Pollitt, Judith Long and
>Roane Carey also rushed to Lerner's side. Nation scribes write endless
>pages on how to build the peace movement. But, in 51 years of left
>politics, I remember exactly ONE Nation staffer attending exactly ONE
>planning meeting, and doing the work that goes into building a demo.
>
>Anti-war work, like charity, begins at home.
>
>Lenni Brenner, editor of 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the
>Nazis, can be reached at BrennerL21 at aol.com