Yitzhak zuckerman biography of martin luther king

Academics love maligning Zionism as racist, imperialist, settler-colonialist. But Oct. 7 woke up many Americans. The professoriate’s stunningly amoral response to the Hamas rampage exposed academia’s moral rot. Harvard’s Claudine Gay lost her presidency only when a plagiarism scandal undermined her academic credibility – equivocating about Jew-hatred wasn’t enough (although Jews are being blamed for her ouster, naturally). It’s time to flip the conversation. Zionism is not the problem. In fact, Zionism could be the solution to many of the academy’s ideological ills.

Although Identity Politics has loomed since the Sixties, this fall’s failures dramatized academia’s fall. Doctrinaire students, professors and administrators have transformed many campuses into Progressive dystopias. They receive billions from the government, corporations and alumni, and from struggling naïve parents, to give our best and brightest a liberal education and the credentials to build America. Nevertheless, the universities created an alternate universe, imposing many values antithetical to their sponsors and to the skills and visions America needs to progress.

Clearly, not every academic is “Woke” – one shorthand used to describe the ideology which others call “antiracism,” “DEI,” “critical race theory,” “anti-colonialism,” “intersectionality,” “social justice,” or “postmodernism.”And just because Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis declared a “War on Woke” shouldn’t stop intelligent people who detest those politicians from repudiating an ideology that is not just anti-Zionist, but anti-American.Woke’s real war is not against conservatism – most Ivy Leaguers don’t take Republicans seriously intellectually. Their war is against the traditional liberalism that long dominated academia, which is why liberals must take back the night.

It’s time for liberals to rediscover Zionism. This movement is liberal at its core. Since the 1880s, many liberals not only supported Zionism, but launched it.

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We get up every morning, God willing, and follow a general plan for the day. We think about our obligations at work. We figure out the needs of our family members. We have to pick up dinner, or bring someone to the doctor’s office or wait for the appliance guy, or whatever. It’s how life rolls, with the assumption that an errant asteroid won’t slam into Earth. Or that a volcano somewhere in the middle of nowhere that no one has ever heard of won’t erupt and cause a tsunami a thousand miles away.

If we were to consider any number of potential calamities befalling us every time we left our homes, we would end up crushed by enormous fear. This is why we live from minute to minute believing that every little thing will be alright. We have to make assumptions along the way.

So when something does happen, something so outrageous and frightening and seemingly impossible, it shakes us up, rattles us to the very core of our being. It forces us to consider the randomness of evil and its malignant power. Those “there but for the grace of God go I” experiences are sobering.

Neither the folks gathered at the Beth Israel Congregation yesterday for Shabbat services nor those who were tuned in via Facebook or Zoom had any reason to imagine a violent, deranged man would take hostages at their shul to make a political statement about a jailed terrorist named Aafia Siddiqui. But the unthinkable did indeed occur.

A small community of American Jews living between Dallas and Ft. Worth, who never even heard of Aafia Siddiqui, ended up connected to her incarceration in the twisted logic of the hostage-taker, Malik Faisal Akram. It seems preposterous that this man would target Jews in Colleyville, Texas because Beth Israel was the closest synagogue to DFW Airport. But that’s how he found them.

I had just come home from a wedding last night when I got texts from two people. My sister, Marta, who lives in Austin, Texas, and who, for years, sang at Beth Israel for High Holy Days, wante

Primary Sources

(1) Leaflet published by the Jewish Self-Defence Organization (December 1942)

Do not go willingly to your death! Fight for life to the last breath. Greet our murders with teeth and claws, with axe and knife, hydrochloric acid and iron crowbars. Make the enemy pay for blood with blood, for death with death?

Let us fall upon the enemy in time, kill and disarm him. Let us stand up against the criminals and if necessary die like heroes. If we die in this way we are not lost.

Make the enemy pay dearly for your lives! Take revenge for the Jewish centres that have been destroyed and for the Jewish lives that have been extinguished.

(2) Mordechai Anielewicz, was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising. Just before he was killed he wrote a letter to his friend Yitzhak Zuckerman.

What we have experienced cannot be described in words. We are aware of one thing only; what has happened has exceeded our dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto.

Perhaps we will meet again. But what really matters is that the dream of my life has come true. Jewish self-defence of the Warsaw ghetto has become a fact. Jewish armed resistance and retaliation have become a reality. I have been witness to the magnificent heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters.

A poignant passage in Immaculée Ilibagiza’s book Left to Tellrecounts how her father, a proud and prominent Tutsi in their village, resisted leaving Rwanda in the spring of 1994, shortly before the genocide. The signs of brewing violence were becoming increasingly obvious, but Ilibagiza’s father was determined to be a sign of hope for his Tutsi community. He remained almost incomprehensibly optimistic, refusing to believe that the worst could happen. So, his family forfeited chances at making an escape, rejecting the last getaway plan the very night before their own village was attacked.

Then suddenly, it was too late. The killing sprees began like rain out of gathered clouds, and Ilibagiza’s mother, father, and two brothers lost their lives almost immediately. Ilibagiza herself survived only by miraculous luck, spending three terror-filled months crammed into a small hidden bathroom with several other women.

When I first read Left to Tell, the attitude of Illibigaza’s father struck me as incredibly naive. Even though he paid the ultimate price for his quixotic hope in human goodness, I felt a certain anger at him for being so stubbornly blind as to throw his whole family into the path of machetes. How could he have been so foolish?

But as I continued reading about the Rwandan genocide, I discovered a rather surprising thing: The story of Ilibagiza’s father was not unusual. In the face of oncoming danger, many people seem remarkably resistant to the suggestion that very terrible things can happen.

For instance, one author writes: