I work for an organization often identified as part of the American Jewish mainstream – sometimes dubbed the “Jewish establishment” – whose position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been fiercely attacked, even defamed, and I’m sick of it.
The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) of AJC partnered with the United Nations’ Holocaust Outreach Program to co-sponsor a screening and panel discussion of the film “Who Will Write Our History,” a documentary about the secret archive of first-hand accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto and the extraordinary people who created it, documenting the horrors of the Holocaust.
While none of the many Jewish bungalow colonies in the nearby Catskill Mountains have been falsely maligned as a “terrorist training camp” as Islamberg has, American Jews should be alarmed by both the false accusations and the plot to violently attack the community.
One election in Israel, or for that matter in the US, does not fundamentally alter the foundation of the Israel-Diaspora relationship. Keeping it close and strong must be a shared priority for both American Jews and Israelis.
To better understand the importance of the U.S.-Europe alliance, I recently participated in the German Marshall Fund’s Marshall Memorial Fellowship in Europe.