Corey Balsam of Canada’s Independent Jewish Voices, filmmaker and Jewish Voice for Peace activist Rebecca Pierce, Wake (or perhaps Woke?) Forest University Prof Dr. Barry Trachtenberg, and Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) President Lara Friedman recently got together on Zoom to attack the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
I watched the entire thing so you won’t have to – but also to pick out the inevitable examples of the panelists’ lies, hypocrisy, and – wait for it – antisemitic talk.
There is actually so much to highlight, I couldn’t confine it to just the one post.
Back to Trachtenberg, where he attacks Jewish organizations that have opposed California’s ethnic studies curriculum and even accuses them of reinforcing antisemitic tropes:
Besides the vile insinuation that Jewish organizations’ opposition to the ethnic studies curriculum are somehow helping increase antisemitism, Trachetenberg is again being dishonest. The opposition is entirely legitimate and not based on Jewish notions of exceptionalism at all.
Following this, Trachtenberg completely revises history and Jewish belief, redefining what a Jew is, and rejecting the idea of Jewish self-determination as an integral part of Judaism, but rather just a modern phenomenon.
Note the matter-of-fact way he describes how it sprang as a way for Jews to escape antisemitism in Europe, yet is still rejecting it. Clearly, this is not someone who really takes antisemitism seriously to begin with.
He does not disabuse us of this notion when he later on speaks out against the need for a universal definition of antisemitism, yet again referring to Jewish exceptionalism:
He then goes on to allege that the early Zionists like Herzl were trying to push out the Arabs because they brought with them the “racist and colonial ideas” of European society.
This is yet another outright lie. In Herzl’s utopian novel The Old New Land (Altneuland), Arabs have full equal rights with Jews, with an Arab engineer among the New Society’s leaders, and most merchants in the country are Armenians, Greeks, and members of other ethnic groups.
Trachtenberg springboards off this false history to accuse Zionists of once again reinforcing the notion of Jewish exceptionalism. Including bonus “as a Jew” qualifier!
Remember, this is a professor presumably teaching his students this revisionist garbage.