Israel=Israel

I just read a horrifying article summarized on the RJC News page, which explicitly details the latest U.N. Conference Against Israel & the Jews. (Officially it had another title, something about learning about racism and hatred of ethnic groups, but it really all boiled down to how the Jews are at fault for anti-Semitism, oh, and for everyone else's low self-esteem, too.)

In my thesis, this little ditty on the history of the Jew in American sitcom television that turned out to be a historical analysis of the Jewish image in 20th century American popular culture, I write that the majority of American Jews are at an identity crossroads now. Having effectively removed the majority of the elements of Jewish religion out of their lives, what do the American Jews have left to identify themselves with? Is there really a specifically Jewish-American culture? I don't believe so; unless you think my gentile neighbors are the only ones who say "schmooze" and people in Texas have never heard of a bagel, you realize that what came from Europe between 1880 and 1920 has either become assimilated into the American fold over this 100 year period, or its disappeared completely. So what can the majority of American Jews, secularized and assimilated, use as the foundation for their cultural identity? There is only one answer, and it is obvious: Israel.

Isn't it disgustingly clear, then, that when the U.N. holds summits where intellectuals declare that Zionism is the modern-day equivalent of Nazism, they are performing a gross action of anti-Semitism meant to destroy the spirit of the Jewish people? They can argue that anti-Zionism isn't anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism is an individual act against one individual Jew purely for the fact that they are a Jew, but this argumentation supports Hitler's death camps under their anti-Zionist stance!

The Jewish American population must realize that Israel isn't simply an ancestral homeland, or a sister country half-way across the world. WE are Israel. Jacob, the last of the three patriarchs, wasn't just given the land-- he was given the name. He and his descendants, we by right, are marked with the name "Israel." With all of their academic elocution, the U.N. isn't just condemning a strip of land in the Middle East penninsula, the U.N. is tearing at our very identity as Jews. We must understand that Israel the land=Israel the people, and we must understand this, our true identity, if we are to survive.