Jews working against Jewish interests: The theme of the Three Weeks period
The current Three Weeks period of semi-mourning for the destruction of the Holy Temples in the 1st-Century C.E. Promised Land commemorate ancient history. But their message is as contemporary as today’s headlines.
First, some background:
According to the Talmud (Tractate Gittin 55-56), at the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, a wealthy man who was hosting a party sent his servant to deliver an invitation to a friend named Kamtza. By mistake, the servant invited a man named bar Kamtza, whom the wealthy man despised. Bar Kamtza accepted the invitation.
The wealthy man, enraged, ordered bar Kamtza to leave his party. Hoping to maintain his honor, bar Kamtza refused. He offered to pay for half of the party’s expenses, then for all; the wealthy man refused, personally escorting bar Kamtza out of his home, within sight of the cowered Jewish community’s leaders. Who remained silent.
Humiliated, bar Kamtza vowed revenge. He visited the region’s Caesar, the Roman official in charge of Jerusalem, and claimed that the Jews were planning a revolt against the Roman Empire. The Caesar, in an effort to test the Jews’ loyalty, sent an animal to be sacrificed as a peace offering in the Temple.
Bar Kamtza secretly wounded the animal slightly in a way that would disqualify it as a Jewish sacrifice, but not as a Roman offering.
The Roman offering was rejected.
The Caesar was incensed.
And he struck out. “Jerusalem was destroyed on account of Kamtza and bar Kamtza.” Because of the slight, Jerusalem was besieged, and the Jewish people were exiled from the Holy Land.
A Jew turning against his people, seeking the approval of influential non-Jews, brought national catastrophe to Klal Israel.
That is the tragedy we remember during the Three Weeks, which began with the fast on the17th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, and which end on Tisha b’Av, on July 22-23 this year, when the Temple fell.
The contemporary relevance of this story?
Republican Bruce Blakeman, Nassau County executive who is running against incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in November’s election for New York State Governor, recently heavily criticized Brad Lander, the liberal Democratic (former New York City comptroller, former member of the Democratic Socialist party, former mayoral candidate) politician who won his party’s primary vote last month for the House of Representatives 10th District seat currently held by Dan Goldman.
Blakeman questioned Lander’s Jewish allegiance. “He’s anti-American, he is anti-Semitic, even though he’s Jewish,” Blakeman said on Newsmax. “This guy would be a camp guard in a concentration camp if he could.”
Strong words by Blakeman. In other words, he was calling Lander a potential kapo.
The kapos were Jewish concentration camp inmates who cooperated with the Nazi guards, beating and punishing enslaved Jews in order to get better food and clothing and save their own skin.
Blakeman’s remarks were in reaction to a pattern of actions and comments by Lander, who is Jewish, calls himself a liberal Zionist, and is closely affiliated with New York City’s newly-inaugurated, relentlessly anti-Israel mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Blakeman subsequently tempered his remarks about Lander. “Maybe camp guard was too strong, but certainly collaborator as Brad Lander turned his back on the Jewish community when he locked arms with the extremists who want to wipe Israel off the map,” he said in a written statement.
But Lander, who has consistently spoken out against the Israeli government and the country’s actions in Gaza, has left himself open to doubts about his dedication to the security of Israel. He has highlighted the suffering of Palestinians, called the Israeli Army’s behavior in Gaza “genocide,” criticized Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian land, and advocated an end to U.S. aid to Israel. He did not attend last month’s Celebrate Israel Parade in Manhattan.
Lionized in progressive circles, Lander has become anathema to many supporters of Israel, Democrats among them.
As proof of his Jewish bona fides, Lander has pointed out that he named his son after a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, opposes the anti-Israel BDS movement, has spoken out against anti-Semitism, and left the Democratic Socialists after October 7, 2023, because of the party’s praise for the Hamas terrorism.
“Standing up for Palestinian human rights doesn’t make me any less proud to be Jewish, or any less serious about fighting anti-Semitism,” he has declared.
To mainstream supporters of Israel, Lander – and other Jewish individuals and organizations who have taken similar anti-Israel stances – is beyond the pale.
Blakeman’s accusation focused attention on left-wing Jews like Lander – such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Canadian author Naomi Klein, feminist philosopher Judith Butler, and members of the Jewish Voice for Peace group – who have taken outspoken positions against Israel.
These positions have put these prominent individuals at odds with most of U.S. Jewry – a recent American Jewish Committee survey found that 80 percent of “American Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.”
And, says Dr. Jonathan Sarna, the dean of U.S. Jewish historians, at Brandeis University, the debate over the current state of anti-Semitism in this country, amplified by controversies like Lander’s attitude about Israel, has heightened many Jews’ sensitivity about their position in U.S. society.
“Outside of big Jewish communities,” Sarna says in an email interview, “Jews in American politics have long believed that they dare not be ‘too Jewish’ lest that alienates voters. Some bent over backwards to hide their Jewish ties.
“We thought the [Joseph] Lieberman nomination [as Al Gore’s Democratic Party running mate in 2000] ended that, but now it is back with a vengeance.”
Lander has put himself in the company of other Jews who, throughout Jewish history, have taken steps that many members of the Jewish community consider inimical to Jewish interests, and, in recent decades, to the State of Israel.
Notable members of this disreputable group include:
- Johannes Pfefferkorn and Nicholas Donin, born into Jewish families in Middle Age Germany and France, respectively, both converted to Catholicism and became rabidly anti-Jewish, urging the Church to burn copies of the Talmud.
- The Yevsektsiysa organization in the communist Soviet Union, led largely by atheistic Jews, coordinated the country’s anti-Jewish activities, working to eliminate Jewish religious and social life.
- Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, disclosed secrets of the nuclear program to the British press; he eventually converted to Buddhism, then to Christianity.
- Rabbi Elmer Berger was executive director of the American Council on Judaism, which during two-plus decades was the most prominent anti-Zionist organization in the United States.
- Stella Goldschlag, a beautiful blonde in Nazi Germany who, in order to protect her parents, used her feminine wiles to act as a Greifer (catcher) to entrap Jews and doom (some 2,300) those who had been successfully living an underground existence, evading capture by the Gestapo.
- Marcus Klingberg and Israel Beer, immigrants to Israel, they served as spies for the Soviet Union, passing secrets of Israel’s early biological research and military capabilities, respectively.
Bad company, all of them. Traitors or high-minded people serving a higher purpose? Should they be included in the group of minim for which chazal during the era of Rabban Gamliel added the blessing against heretics in the Shemoneh Esrei?
The answers are subjective.
All these perpetrators would justify what they did. All of them acted against the Jewish fold into which they were born, motivated by political, theological or familial reasons.
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan thinks Lander’s future as a member-in-good-standing supporter of DSA is limited. In “A 2028 letter to losing Brad Lander,” an op-ed essay in the New York Daily News a week after Lander bested Goldman in the Democratic primary, Rabbi Cosgrove wrote that Lander’s “Jewishness … may make him useful” to the Democratic Socialist party. “Until he isn’t.”
The letter is dated “the morning after the 2028 primary, when Lander discovers exactly when ‘useful’ runs out.
“I remember … how you called Israel’s war against those seeking its destruction a ‘genocide,’” Rabbi Cosgrove wrote. “We asked you to stop the hemorrhaging of Israel support inside your own party, to name the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism – you stayed quiet.
“Because then the DSA fielded one of its own against you and pronounced you a Zionist puppet … They told you it was never about being a Jew – only about being a Zionist – as if the two could be peeled apart, as if your Jewishness had nothing to do with the nation they demanded you disown.”
“Our rabbinic sages teach that the penitent stands in a place the wholly righteous cannot reach — not despite having strayed, but because of it,” the rabbi’s letter continues. “Jews don’t turn our backs on other Jews. Despite your miscalculation, despite the term you’ve spent believing the DSA’s love was stronger than your people’s — we will not turn our backs on you.”
Rabbi Cosgrove’s letter about what happens to Lander in two years is, of course, conjecture. As is bar Kamtza’s fate two millennia ago.
Significantly, the Gemara does not record what happened to bar Kamtza after he conspired against the Jews of Jerusalem. His subsequent fate is not important; his name has become a synonym for a Jew who betrays his own people.
Similarly, how many people – outside of students of Jewish history – remember Rabbi Elmer Bernstein, Marcus Klingberg or Nicholas Donin positively today? If they are remembered at all.
People like Lander – and Sanders and other Jewish fellow travelers in the disloyal-to-Israel camp – should keep this in mind.
Tisha b’Av would be a good time to start.
