A group Bill Kristol co-founded – the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) – has been engaged in a full-court press to smear #ows as anti-Semitic. This disingenuous charge – based on a few rogue signs and planted stooges – has predictably gained the corporate media's attention.
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A man holds up an anti-Semitic sign in Zuccotti park as protesters surround him with signs that read, "Who's paying this guy?" and "This guy doesn't speak for me or OWS."
Photo by Mario Burger.
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ECI – which produced this vile video last week casting Occupy Wall Street as virulently anti-Semitic – is just one conservative institution which has recently attempted to smear the movement as Jew-hating. (Rush Limbaugh and Commentary magazine are just a few examples of the folks who have taken up this mantle.)
But as Michelle Goldberg, a senior writer for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, correctly noted in a Tablet Magazine column from today (emphasis mine):
The charge that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism is dishonest and deceptive. But it’s built around a kernel of truth. There are a few Jew-baiters at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, though they are marginal, particularly compared to the large numbers of Jewish activists taking part.
That last point is an important one: Occupy Wall Street has given birth to a massive Jewish activist movement – #OccupyJudaism – which has brought large numbers of young, progressive Jews into #ows across the country who are being fully embraced by Occupy Wall Street.
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This Jewish activist renaissance at #ows began just over a week ago when Daniel Sieradski, a new media activist, sparked a 1,000-strong Yom Kippur service at #ows that set many in the American Jewish community aflutter.
Since then, this Jewish movement hasn't just been lovingly embraced by #ows. It has moved, literally, to the forefront of several battle lines where building structures are forbidden by #ows activists, and is being viewed heroically by activists in both New York and Seattle.
Allow me to explain, with visual (and emotional) testimony over the fold...
See, it is right now the holiday of Sukkot, a holiday in which Jews build temporary huts, called a Sukkah, to symbolically represent the fragile structures built by the Israelites after escaping their enslavement in Egypt. So, of course, Sieradski created #OccupySukkot.
And the result? Progressive, activist Jews have built Sukkahs in occupations across the country, from New York to Boston, from Atlanta to L.A., from London to Seattle (and beyond).
In Seattle recently, after #ows protesters took Westlake Park, a group of Jews built a Sukkah. When the police moved in to evict everyone, these progressive Jews, a part of #OccupySukkot, linked arms and refused to budge.
Pic by zoltan, who write a fantastic diary on the Seattle protests.
As the police encircled the Sukkah, the hundreds of protesters encircled the police and witnessed, screaming, as ten of them were arrested and the Sukkah was taken down, which you can see in this video:
And then, something amazing happened. Five young Jews, arms linked and huddled on the ground, remained. The police surrounded them, determined to arrest the remaining youth who where just sitting, arms linked. Not doing anything.
The protesters surrounded the police and shouted them down, demanding they leave the remaining be. Amazingly, after a few moments, the police dispersed, at which point the scene erupted into this:
Anti-Semitic, right?
Hardly. In fact, the Sukkah has become one of the primary symbols of resistance in Seattle, and over the weekend, Jewish activists went back to Westlake Park and built another Sukkah, to the wild cheers of everyone.
And Seattle isn't the only place this has happened. It also happened, dramatically, in Zuccotti Park, where Sieradski and his companions built a Sukkah, hoping for a confrontation with NYPD.
They got one. But when the cops came to remove the Sukkah, this is what occurred:
The video speaks for itself. It is not only inspiring, but demonstrates in much more powerful anecdotal terms that #ows is anything but anti-Semitic.
As Sieradski Tweeted today:
Everyone who keeps hurling accusations of antisemitism at #OWS has never spent a day or night in a sukkah at their local occupation.
Amen.