Jackie Digs Books’s Reviews > Who Are the Jews―And Who Can We Become? > Status Update

“They also need to understand that for Israelis, fifty plus years of occupying another people has come at a profound moral cost. It is difficult to sustain a sense of moral obligation toward a people who you believe has rejected your right to exist and who has eliminated peace and coexistence as an option.”

“If Israel and North American Jewry were to disengage from each other, my principal concern would not be about Israel’s political well being but whether my Jewish story is in danger of coming to an end - a Genesis emergency. I have no Judaism without my people.”

“I am left with one major problem with regard to the entire question of our relationship to the State of Israel. I think the worst thing that Zionism and the State of Israel have done for us is to give us another topic in America which cannot be debated. We now have a subject on which no arguments are allowed, no criticism. A new sacred cow is introduced.”

“His (Maimonides) own life’s work centered around the same mission: to try to save his own commitment to Judaism by reinterpreting that which he found alienating within the tradition he’d inherited.”

“In practice, “intolerable deviants” may not be kicked out of the Jewish community. Instead, they may be stigmatized as a member in lesser standing unworthy of communal compassion or concern of hatred in humiliating and alienating ways from fully participating (in religious and communal life).” Is this the premise for alienating get refusers and sexual abusers?