It's Time to Leave the Sidelines on Freedom of Speech
My proposal for a "Jewish Alliance for the First Amendment"
Not all Jewish Americans grow up the same. There are those that have little or no knowledge of their religion or people, and yet there are others who are so steeped in it and visibly Jewish that they stand out in the landscape. We have a complicated mix as well when it comes to categories of class, ethnicity, political affiliation, professional life, and more. Let no one state that there is broad agreement or “consensus” among the Jewish “community”. The very use of the description “community” is also deceptive regarding our internal dynamics. A cliched joke tells of a Jew who gets shipwrecked on a desert island. When he is discovered by a passing ship he has built a flour mill, a slaughterhouse, a delicatessen, a bakery, a dry cleaning shop and three synagogues. When the ship’s captain asks why he built one of everything but three places of worship he explains reflexively: “One to go to every week, one so I can have where to sponsor fancier events, and a third one that I can make sure never to set foot in so help me G-d!”
This theme has a bittersweet connotation for us. Judaism and Jewish society has both suffered from division and thrived on dissent. During antiquity the Kingdom of Judea was split between the Sadducees, the Pharisees, Essenes, and many other factions and sub-groups one of which was the early Christian Church. Both tradition and the historical record hold that whereas idolatry ended the First Temple period hundreds of years earlier, the Second Temple was destroyed in the year 79 CE because of senseless hatred. Over the centuries of exile, as Jewish communities lived under the rule of feudal overlords and kings, our ancestors became conditioned to being scapegoated when necessary for social ills, and an underclass that could not measure up to general societies standards.
There is no full equalizer in society, but in the legal sense the United States afforded us the best possible chance at one through the Bill of Rights. All of the ten amendments of it are important and co-dependent, yet none quite as important as the First which guarantees freedoms speech, the press, assembly, and of religion (and from religion). Within these lines the Founding Fathers opened the door to a novel form of government where individual rights were protected from the state. Some of the amendments originated from grievances the colonists had with the Crown. The First Amendment however addressed a problem that transcended that - keeping the original 13 states united when they each had divergent established churches and often different economic interests. By ensuring the free exercise of minority churches and religions and prohibiting the establishment of a state church, they hoped to avoid wars between faiths as had happened in Europe during the Reformation. This was one of the ways they sought to accomplish the goal in our original national motto of E pluribus unum (“Out of many becoming one”).
Defense vs. Overprotection
But this did not protect citizens from abuses by the church and state. That is why the freedoms of the press, assembly, and speech were included. The Founders were writing the Constitution as the French Revolution was unfolding, Thomas Jefferson having returned from Paris just as the peasantry were rebelling against a system where they were third class citizens outranked by the clergy and nobility.
So what does that mean for Jews and Judaism? We get a a tradeoff that every religion gets. On the one hand we get the enjoyment of the legal protections for the practice of our religion. At the same time we are not shielded from either criticism or mockery. No religion or ethnic group has the privilege of being free from criticism, however crass or irreverent, in America. The derisive term “sacred cow” originates as a criticism of the hallowed position of cows in Hinduism, to the point where they are protected from harm.
I was asked recently by a friend visiting from Israel whether I believe Jew hatred is truly on the rise given all of the attention given to Kanye West, Kyrie Irving and others that have expressed resentment toward Jewish executives and managers within the banking and entertainment industries. I told him that really what has changed is that attitudes that have always been in the background are now out in the open. The Kanye outbursts center around the spectre of Jewish power and money being the root of corruption and degeneracy in arts and culture. No one is arguing that this is a totally new phenomenon. However, given Kanye’s notoriety and the allure of his celebrity lifestyle the search term “anti-Semitism” has peaked at its highest point since 2004 according to Google Trends.
What I also said was that the past few years have also seen unprecedented attempts to censor any type of speech that is deemed anti-Semitic, validly or not. Of the groups and individuals that have called for the most strict policing of speech on the internet and elsewhere, a major standout is Jonathan Greenblatt and the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL was specifically formed in order to be an American advocacy group against anti-Jewish violence or discrimination. Under Greenblatt’s predecessor Abraham Foxman the focus centered on documenting hate incidents and activities of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. During that era the ADL was caught multiple times overstepping its role by hiring surveillance teams to spy on Arab and black racial activists, as well as supporting a couple that illegally surveilled their neighbours.
But Greenblatt’s takeover in 2015 pointed the ADL’s ship into new uncharted waters, becoming a politicized entity obsessively engaged in policing speech and insinuating itself into every controversy that arose. An example that I always hearken back to occurred in 2018, when Greenblatt commented on the last cabinet meeting in the White House of Gary Cohn, the chairman of the National Economic Council under Donald Trump. In the meeting Trump thanked Cohn profusely for being a great resource in working on his tax plan, and joked about him being a globalist. Greenblatt then recorded a NowThis video in which he condemned Trump for using the term, asserting that it was anti-Semitic and used interchangeably with Jews.
Greenblatt also asserted that the origin of the term was as a slur against Jews hurled by right-wing bigots. This is just false. The terms globalist and globalization were actually popular pejoratives used on the political left against big corporate interests exporting jobs overseas. Leftists rioted against globalism during the 1999 Battle in Seattle, and would continue to do so for years afterward. This isn’t an isolated case, as on December 8 Greenblatt appeared on The Breakfast Club and proposed that Tucker Carlson may be the next Republican presidential nominee on an anti-globalist agenda, again associating this with anti-Semitism. Incidentally, Greenblatt never confronted the show’s host Charlamagne for hosting famous Jew hating preacher Louis Farrakhan and other senior members of his Nation of Islam movement.
Hate Usurped by Politics
In recent years the the ADL has become perhaps the most visibly powerful Jewish organization in America, perhaps even worldwide. It consults leaders, lawmakers and executives worldwide on issues of anti-Semitism and racism. But what makes the ADL such a pernicious influence is that it sees fit to be offended on behalf of millions of Jews, even ones like Gary Cohn who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. Like any other religious or ethnic group, we have major institutions that seek to be representatives of Jewish interests when interacting with political, entertainment, and corporate figures. Yet these “leaders” are not elected, nor are they accountable to the average Jewish American. No single lay or religious leader can behave as the voice of Jewish indignancy, because the beliefs of those associated with each stream vary too widely. Is a Jewish leader a . . .
Psychology professor at Brandeis?
Wall Street hedge fund manager OR Radical Occupy Wall Street activist?
Hollywood producer?
Rabbi at the Hebrew Union College?
US Senator from Connecticut?
Rebbe of a Hasidic court?
Specialized neuroscientist?
Each of these examples represent a slice out of the pie chart of prominent Jewish Americans. Add to them the multitudes of us that are not pretending to be “leaders” in the most abstract sense. The waiters, nurses, electricians, book keepers, shop clerks etc. I personally know just in my small area five auto mechanics that are Jewish., but they each have little else in common. So how does the ADL claim to have the authority to determine that certain words are hateful and also to deliver verdicts as to which speech is permitted on major networks? The short answer is that Greenblatt was an aid in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and therefore is well connected professionally and personally with federal executive officials. Recently Greenblatt appeared on CNBC and was asked about the #TwitterFiles controversy. Despite his organization having directly called for censorship on Twitter, Greenblatt sparred with hosts Joe Kernen and Aaron Ross Sorkin as to the magnitude of the story by saying it hardly qualified as the Pentagon Papers. During a previous appearance Sorkin dumped on Greenblatt for attacking anti-Semitic public figures until and unless they donate money to the ADL.
In that moment Sorkin did the job he was supposed to do — asking the tough question and making sure that the ADL chief was aware that as a Jewish person he wasn’t bowing to Greenblatt’s leadership. But this conversation has come much too late. For years the ADL chief has taken to the airwaves of CNBC, one of the most influential financial news channels in the world, to push for government regulation of speech on social media. See for instance this clip from December 2021.
Several weeks ago I came to a realization as to what was missing on the landscape of Jewish American life. There are plenty of Jewish liberal political groups like Bend the Arc and the JDCA, as well as a few conservative ones like the Coalition for Jewish Values. Jewish celebrities abound, and many of them have strong — usually liberal — opinions, like Ron Perlman and Rob Reiner.
But there is no Jewish group that advocates for the First Amendment and a robust approach to civil liberties. I think this is because part of the goal of such a group would be standing for the legality of voicing undesirable and repugnant speech, the type of sensational hate that has in the past threatened or preceded terrible events like pogroms in Eastern Europe. In previous generations, rabbinic leaders would sometimes eschew public debates with other religious thinkers out of caution that the rules would be stacked against them, or that the content of the discussion itself could be used as the pretext for new persecution. In the Middle Ages there were often instances where Jewish sages were compelled by rulers to “debate” aspects of the faith with Christian critics, often themselves recent converts from Judaism. One such episode, the Disputation of Barcelona, led to the exile of the legendary Spanish Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, best known as the Ramban.
Such cautionary tales make a compelling case for how fragile a Jewish community’s fortunes can be, but the pro-censorship “leadership” isn’t making nearly as sophisticated an argument. They have advocated for corporate technology firms and government regulators to step in out of fear that hate speech online threatens to reignite violence against Jews. So are they right? As someone who grew up reading about hate groups often from materials by groups like the ADL, I went back and found an old BBC article from 2000 in which the group was quoted saying this about the neo-Nazi website Stormfront: "They are reaching out to people. There is an electronic community of hate being created out there day by day on the internet." Back then they were fretting over simple webpages being run by hate groups. Today, the hate groups have if anything become less powerful and more divided whereas the ADL and Greenblatt has access to some of the most powerful corporate and political leaders in the world. Simultaneously the ADL is saying continuously that Jew hatred incidents are at a record high, and their answer whatever trend is in mode is more reporting, more censorship, and more legal measures against the people it considers the source of hate speech.
I think we need to offer a different answer, but I don’t know how yet. Please share this with your friends, comment below, or write me back. We’re pretty far behind in the game, so it’s time to figure out how to win it.