[This piece is intended as a sidebar to this article]
THE BOOK OF PSALMS: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy
In each of the first two parts of my 44th Councilmanic Moby Dickstein, I’ve promised an anecdote which illustrates the lengths to which City Council candidate Joe Lazar will fetch, heal, rollover and play dead for Dov Hikind. As I stated in part two, the issue involved is not really important to the work of a City Councilman, but it says everything one needs to know about Joe Lazar’s independence.
Everyone knows Israel is Dov Hikind’s passion.
The Jewish Star once said the following while reporting from an interview with Simcha Felder:
“Let me tell you [said Felder], before I got elected, I consulted with a rebbe I had in Israel and he told me if I run for office and succeed, I should make sure to focus on two things: one is make sure that I spend my energy and time serving my constituents with local problems, and [the other is to] not try to be the prime minister of Israel.” The latter [said the Jewish Star] was clearly a reference to Hikind’s penchant for public statements regarding events in Israel, far from his elected district.
In fact, as I once noted, Hikind took out ads in Jewish newspapers calling for the resignation of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The ads denounced Olmert as “ARROGANT,” (being called arrogant Dov Hikind is like being called promiscuous by Tiger Woods) “IRRESPONSIBLE,” “DELUSIONAL,” “INEPT,” “CONFUSED,” “INDECISIVE,” “OVER WHELMED,” AND “INCOMPETENT."
As I later learned, Hikind funded the ads with the cooperation of Igud’s Gershon Tannenbaum, with the money being laundered through Tannenbaum’s tax exempt “charity,” Yad Moshe, even though donations on behalf of political causes are not even tax deductible if the campaigns take place in America.
I bring this up only as context. In actuality, even though my views about Olmert’s policies are as different from Hikind’s as Purim is from Tish A’Bav, I could not be more pleased. Such distractions keep Hikind from spending time defending the rights of local Jewish youth to beat up Pakistanis and also serve the laudable function of making sure he does not have as much time to contribute his public policy input in places like Albany, where it might actually have an impact.
Most importantly, speaking as a proud member of Brooklyn’s Zionist community, I believe that such ads represent a marked improvement in the manner Gershon Tannenbaum and his friends at Igud have past expressed its opinion concerning the best methods for removal of Israeli Prime Ministers: by murder.
I bring it up because Joe Lazar shares Dov Hikind’s fervent Zionism, but at Dov Hikind’s request was willing to suppress it on behalf of a candidate.
Last year, probably dubious that a social conservative could win the seat in the 39th Councilmanic, Hikind endorsed Brad Lander, some of whose allies had delivered large for Hikind. As always, Joe Lazar followed like a Siamese twin.
It is likely that Hikind’s pre-endorsement conversations with Lander avoided social issues and concentrated on questions of access and programmatic funding. Given what transpired, it seems unlikely that Hikind and Lander discussed Israel before the endorsement. Hikind probably assumed that all the race’s Jewish liberals favored the wishy washy left-Zionist, Rabinish territorial compromises and two-state solutions that both Hikind and Lazar disdained as ungodly and naïve.
But while Hikind’s assumptions concerning the views on Israel of the race’s other Jewish candidates were correct (at least after Craig Hammerman left the race), if Hikind also attributed such beliefs to Brad Lander, he was to be proven wrong. Lander had a paper trail and that trail included an article published in a largely anti-Zionist anthology which recounted a speech Lander and his wife gave at their son’s circumcision, which was astonishing both for its pomposity and its manifest repugnance for the idea that the Jews, like all of the world’s other peoples, had the right to an national entity of their own:
“Marek, we inscribe you today into the Jewish covenant. We are imposing upon you a set of overlapping identities, inscribing you with a name of our choosing and with the ritual violence of circumcision
…We hope that you will learn to embrace this gift without thinking that you are better than others, or that your identity ought to endow you with special privileges. In particular, we are thrilled to pronounce you a Jew without the Right of Return. Your name contains our deep hope that you will explore and celebrate your Jewish identity without confusing it with nationalism.
Your last name is your mother’s — a non-Jewish one — by the fact of which you are ineligible for the nationalist privilege of automatic Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. We believe that law confuses the wonderful and painful inheritance of identity with unearned advantages — legal, political, and financial — granted by a militarized state over other people, including so many it oppresses daily….
…We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history. But even then, we hope you will appreciate this absence of nationalist privilege in your inscribed identity. We hope you will work for a world where identity is explored, nurtured, critiqued, celebrated, and protected — but not the basis for privilege, for discrimination, for money, for power.”
TRANSLATION: “even if war ended and all the awful things attendant to war also ceased, so that no one could object to any of Israel’s actions (no matter how justified) –we think it would be great if you repudiated the idea that Jews should have their own nation.”
Four years later, Lander and his wife agreed to publish the damned thing in an anthology of mostly anti-Israel writings by noted anti-Zionist Tony Kushner. Lander’s speech was discovered and became an issue. When Lander realized the matter would not just fade away, his solution was to obfuscate. He could have said that his views had changed, but did not. Instead, Lander claimed that he had always been pro-Israel, and the speech was merely the regrettable product of a mistaken impression that his son’s non-Jewish mother made his child ineligible to become an Israeli.
Hogwash.
Lander’s article did not even imply any objection to Israel’s definition of whom it considers to be Jewish. Lander practically jumped for joy at the thought that his son was ineligible to be a return Jew. His use of terms like “militaristic” and “oppressive” indicated that he took an extreme view of the Israeli enterprise, and his disdain for the “special privilege” afforded to Jews is clear.
But, while Lander was surely lying that the article was a plea for a more liberal definition of who is a Jew, the Ultra-Orthodox community actually believed him, even though they’ve largely disdained everything else he said on the topic as prevarications. Instead of killing the issue, Lander‘s remarks had the opposite effect among the ultra-Orthodox, some of whom were themselves non or anti-Zionist (although even most of them regard anti-Zionist politicians as probable anti-Semites, and have security concerns about their relatives who reside in the Zionist entity whose authority they do not themselves recognize).
Lander had not only repudiated Jewish nationalism, he had also publicly questioned the Orthodox Jewish definition of what constituted a Jew; which meant he was questioning their religious doctrines, which they considered the moral equivalent of saying “yo momma.” Lander’s mea culpa (perhaps not the best choice of words) had only thrown gasoline on the fire.
Hikind was clearly appalled: “He said some things that were really beyond the pale…It was enough to really say I cannot support someone like that.”
Though Hikind stayed put, support for Lander in Borough Park, even among Rabbis close to Hikind, including some who had earlier proffered endorsements, began to hemorrhage, especially as the sparking of their curiosity caused some to explore Mr. Lander’s stances on other issues, which did not help.
The Jewish Press ran a series of editorials attacking not only Lander, but Hikind, which remarkably persisted after Lander would the primary which was tantamount to election. Even Letters to the Editor defending Hikind managed to compare Lander to Hamas. And Lander began losing support to John Heyer, a social conservative. Lander and Hikind became desperate. In a paid advertisement on Dov Hikind’s radio show, Hikind vouched for Lander’s pro-Israel credentials.
On the same broadcast, Hikind and Lazar then joined Lander in vouching that Lander was merely misunderstood. Hikind, who’s made a career of endorsing Republican presidential candidates over any Democrats’ slightest little variance from far right wing Zionist orthodoxy, and has even endorsed judicial candidates on that basis, was now vouching for a candidate whose statements on Israel put him at the furthest extreme of not merely American Jewish politics, but all American politics.
And Lazar was helping him to do it.
Speaking on Hikind‘s show about rumors that he was anti-Israel, Lander said, “it’s painful, it’s preposterous, it’s a campaign.” Meanwhile, Hikind emphasized again and again that Lander’s piece was written over a decade before, as if Lander were then a small child not responsible for his own actions. In actuality, Lander, was thirty years old at the time, and actually chose to publish it years after that.
Joe Lazar then joined the amen corner and said “what you wrote was probably in a different context altogether.”
This is most assuredly true; rather than being an issue in an election, Lander made his comments totally out of left field while his son’s foreskin was being removed. But that does not change the meaning of the words.
As to the words themselves, Lazar and Hikind never mentioned them, however Lander said, “as it was sort of published, it doesn’t well represent what I think, what I feel, it’s very one-sided, it doesn’t represent who I am or what I am. “
Well, who put the gun to Lander’s head to make him put those words inside a hardcover? If it didn’t represent what he thought, why did he let it go into print? “One sided”? Well, who wrote it that way?
Yes, if I wrote a criticism of a particular Israeli action, it might appear one-sided outside the context of my generally pro-Israel perspective. But, Lander’s words cannot be defended as a one-off dissent on a particular aspect of Israeli policy. Though some Israeli policies are mentioned in passing in Lander‘s article, the article did not merely object to Israel’s actions; it objected to Israel’s existence.
As such, Lander’s appearance on the Hikind show continued to amplify a lie of almost mountainous proportions even more than I thought possible. In amplifying that lie, Hikind served as the microphone and Lazar as Hikind’s echo chamber.
Though a proud Zionist, I come from a far, far more left and dovish (not Dovish) perspective on Israel than either Hikind or Lazar, but I would hang my head in shame if I ever vouched for the pro-Israel credential of a man who, even after a brush with the consequences of disdaining the Jewish people’s right to normalcy, still betrays his true beliefs by making a speech after the primary, at a ceremony honoring Holocaust survivors, about the heroism of a recently deceased man who had compared the Palestinian intafada to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (Lander also spoke of Lazar’s recently deceased mom).
And yes, I know that Marek Edelman, the man Lander chose over all others (except Joe Lazar’s mother) to memorialize, was a hero of both the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Solidarity Movement. I also know that after Edelman’s death, hawkish former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens wrote of Edelman’s heroism. But, Arens had no need to prove his credentials as a supporter of Israel’s right to exist, and Lander still does.]
So I ask, one more time, if Joe Lazar is willing to prostitute even his deeply held right wing Zionism at the behest of Dov Hikind, is there any shred of independence in the man whatsoever?