The Sensible Jew

The Sensible Jew is very happy that Ittay has joined the fray. His is a refreshing perspective indeed.

We wrote in the comments of the last Reader Response post of our concerns regarding the damage our current leadership is doing to our community’s standing in broader society. We condemned the paucity of good PR and outreach and the short-sightedness of preferring confrontation to establishing prophylactic structures that might head off future deterioration between the Jewish and Muslim communities. We invoked the Parisian example of intercommunal strife, and then hedged somewhat because the Australian situation is far less combustible. We wanted to emphasise, however, that Muslim disadvantage and perceptions of Jewish wealth and influence are present here as well and might very well result in something unpleasant if the leaders on both sides continue their stellar work.

That said, let’s move onto responses from Yoram and Ittay.

Yoram seems to be concentrating on this blog’s opinions on legitimacy and Australia’s Jewish leadership. While this is indeed a concern for The Sensible Jew, it is not our only concern. We believe that the massive PR incompetence of our spokespeople – our interface with not just the media, but with all of Australia – is damaging us. This is not an ideological position, but a statement of fact that can be easily verified through perusal of any letters to the editor pages of all the country’s major news papers, the nature of reportage in these newspapers, the prevalence of anti-Jewish, or anti-Israel online content, and in the atmosphere at the country’s universities, both amongst academic and students. The incessant whinging about anti-Semites everywhere is a terrible substitute for intelligent action.

Yoram also doubts this blog’s ability to effect substantive change in our leadership. We would agree with him. Setting up any sort of rival institution or mounting coups is not at all what the Sensible Jew is about. We are about providing a forum for Australian Jews to discuss these matters, because we are unaware of the existence of any other such public forum. One needn’t be planning the overthrow of ECAJ. Or the abolition of AIJAC as self appointed spokespeople for our community. We only seek to make public what has traditionally been private: disquiet with the direction our community’s leadership, and our interaction with the wider public. If this should inspire concrete change for the better, that would be wonderful, but that is not our job, nor has it ever been the brief of this site.

Now to Yoram vs. Ittay: we respectfully disagree with Yoram’s assessment that Ittay’s plan for good leadership is ideological. Indeed, if anything, it is post-ideological. And dissent about institutions and structures in a liberal democracy – how they’re run, what their purview is – is absolutely rife everywhere. These disagreements can be ideologically based (US Supreme Court, activist judges, abortion), or they can be technocratic. There is never total assent in any institution of governance anywhere in the world. And as for the idea of legitimacy existing wherever a government is not actually being overthrown (the idea of implied consent – and the extension of that to the Australian Jewish community and our current leadership), stretches the definition of, “legitimacy” to breaking point. Indeed, where apathy or intimidation remove active participation, the term, “legitimacy” is stripped entirely of its lexical value. Indeed, what we are really talking about is, “assent” and even that word is problematic in this context.

We believe that Ittay’s points are post-ideological because rather than seek to press an agenda based on a prefabricated theoretical foundations, he approaches each issue from a practical standpoint.

For example, he objects to leadership’s “obfuscating” language; he wishes that rather than parrot lines from The Israeli PM’s office, our leaders would engage more in the complexities of the situation; that dialogue with other groups should be the first port of call rather than confrontation; that we should promote shared resources in our institutions, rather than forcing them to compete with each other for funding; our leaders should avoid loaded political language which creates further confrontation; perhaps most interestingly, Ittay encourages a move to verifiable historicity as a counterpoint to the emotive use  of “memory”.

Ittay’s is advocating neither a leftist nor rightist agenda – merely setting forth a list of behaviours and tactics that would aid good governance of our community. Kol hakavod!