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Essays and viewpoints
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Unlock Your Speech
In the morning, as part of your mad dash to work/ class/exercise, you grab your essential equipment before running out the door. A major element in what you take: keys. These are needed for the car, your office, your locker at the gym, your bicycle padlock, etc. However, the word key is often a key element in expressions we use daily.
Your key to success may often be defined by how up to date you remain in your field of expertise. Are you a key figure in your company’s operation? If so, you may be asked to be the keynote speaker at a training session.
Do not expect to be recognized for your contributions if you are always low-key. Sometimes it pays to speak up; you hold the key to your progress.
It is not uncommon these days to discover latch-key children; working parents are quite common. Do not leave sugar treats for after school, however, or the kids may get too keyed up. (All children are special and hold the keys to our hearts.)
To be an integral part of a choir you must not sing off key. Listen carefully to each piano key.
A church key (bottle opener) is not going to get you into a place of worship. Use one too often and you may find that police will lock you up and throw away the key.
Depending on your age, you may recall vividly such things as skate keys (used on roller skates) and a can key (used to open sardine cans). The latter often broke and left one with a partially opened tin; ugh!
Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State. Just as a keystone is the central support in an arch, this state
was central to the original colonies. (Let that be your lesson for the day.) Do you read the credits Sy Manello at the end of a film? Then
Editorial Assistant perhaps you have seen the term key grip. This person directs the crews of offcamera workers. I shall now stop keying in information and let you go with the reminder that you, too, can unlock — expand — your daily conversation.
guest column
Despite Canada’s recent announcement that fully vaccinated U.S. citizens and permanent residents will be able to enter for non-essential travel starting Aug. 9, the Department of Homeland Security has regrettably decided to not reciprocate and renewed its ban on non-essential travel for most foreign nationals — including Jewish Windsorites — at the U.S.-Canada land border until at least Aug. 21.
As a U.S. citizen who lives in Windsor and works on both sides of the border, I am permitted to travel relatively freely between the two countries, which I do several times a week. This puts me in a somewhat unique position, as I am one of a handful of members of the Windsor Jewish community who has experienced first-hand how two different countries have adapted to living with this rollercoaster of a pandemic.
These days, driving between Windsor and Detroit is what I imagine crossing East to West Berlin might have felt like in the 1980s. Although the situation in Ontario has improved due to Canada’s accelerated vaccination campaign and subsequent loosening of restrictions, it has not been this way for the majority of the nine months I have lived here.
Up until earlier this month, even fully vaccinated Canadians were required to enter quarantine for 14 days upon returning to the country, and non-essential travel was banned between certain Canadian provinces. For a good part of this year, Canada trailed behind the U.S. in vaccinating its population due to lack of supply. Canadians were waiting four months between
doses and encouraged to mix vaccines, whereas our American neighbors were waiting the standard three to four weeks between two doses of the same vaccine. For many months, we looked across the river with envy as our neighbors in Detroit were awash in vaccines, and our mayor even attempted to lobby Dan Brotman the federal government to allow Michigan to share some of its surplus vaccines with Windsor. Finally, the flood of vaccines arrived, and similar to the U.S., now most Canadians who want to get vaccinated have already had the opportunity to do so,
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and now only wait 28 days between receiving two doses of the same vaccine.
I experience the stark difference between our two realities as soon as I pull up to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where the guards are generally maskless; Canadian guards and travelers are required to wear masks at border control. Despite the Delta variant, I notice that most Detroit residents continue to be maskless, including employees at grocery stores and restaurants. Shops and restaurants are buzzing, although Downtown is still relatively quiet, and people are living not too differently from their pre-pandemic lives.
Just a short drive away in Windsor, it is still not uncommon to see residents wearing N-95 masks when in their car alone or walking outside on an empty street.
Despite Ontario now being significantly more vaccinated than Michigan, the Detroit Jewish community appears to have come back to life in a way that we have not. Handshakes and hugs have returned, meetings are in-person again, and on almost a weekly basis invitations are being sent out to a wide swath of in-person social and cultural events. Jewish organizations throughout the city are starting to publicize international trips for young adults this fall and winter, and Detroiters are getting on planes for their summer vacations.
MORE RESTRICTIONS
Throughout Ontario, masks are required in just about every indoor situation, with a maximum of 25 people permitted in a room, regardless of their vaccination status. Asking for someone’s vaccination status is still legally murky and culturally unacceptable, resulting in some Canadians not feeling the urge to get vaccinated, as being vaccinated does not automatically translate into new freedoms. Most meetings continue to be held via Zoom, and summer vacations are still mostly driving distance.
Whereas President Biden removed his mask on May 13 following the CDC’s revised mask guidance, many of Canada’s fully vaccinated federal and local politicians are still masked outdoors, elbow-bumping their constituents and behaving almost identically to how we all did throughout pre-vaccine 2020. Up until a couple of weeks ago, basic activities in Ontario such as getting a haircut and indoor dining were forbidden, which left small business owners no choice but to operate an underground black-market economy in order to survive.
Restricting economic activity for so long and forbidding cross-border tourism have resulted in the closure of many small businesses throughout Windsor; I was shocked to recently walk down Erie Street in Little Italy and see so many barricaded storefronts.
There are many aspects of Canada I greatly appreciate, such as its diversity, universal healthcare and the general civility of its people. I genuinely hope that the Biden administration decides to reopen the land border next month, not only to revive cross-border tourism and reunite loved ones, but especially because Canadians will greatly benefit from observing an alternative, and in my view, more sustainable way of learning to live with COVID-19.
Originally from Boston, Dan Brotman is a member of the Windsor Jewish Community. He writes in his personal capacity.
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analysis
Why Is Support for ‘Freedom of Worship for Jews’ on the Temple Mount So Controversial?
Maybe it was just the product of the ongoing civil war between the different political parties on the Israeli right. Or maybe it was just time that an Israeli prime minister said something that, in a saner world, wouldn’t be considered controversial. But whatever motivated Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to speak of Israeli security forces and police acting to maintain order on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount after Arab disturbances while also “maintaining freedom of worship for Jews” at the sacred site, it was a first and, in the eyes of many in his own country’s foreign policy and security establishment, something that could be a dangerous mistake that will lead to violence.
Bennett’s statement, made on Tisha b’Av — the day on the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples that existed on the Mount — was an eye-opener for a number of reasons. But it came in the context of what appears to be a shift in policy by the new government in that, for the first time since the city was unified in 1967, it is acknowledging that Jews are being allowed to pray at the holiest place in Judaism.
After an illegal Jordanian occupation that lasted from 1948 to 1967, Israel took control of the Temple Mount when it unified Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. Israeli rule meant that for the first time in its modern history, there was complete freedom of worship at all the holy places in Jerusalem. Prior to 1948, the British — and before them, the Turks — had maintained a status quo that established Jews as second-class citizens with respect to prayer at many holy places. During the Jordanian occupation, Jews were forbidden to pray at the Western Wall, let alone on the Temple Mount.
But the one exception to that rule after June 1967 was on the Temple Mount where Jews were, in theory, allowed to visit, but forbidden to pray. Then-Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan decided, in a gesture intended to help keep the peace, to allow the Muslim Waqf to maintain control over the Temple Mount. Those Jews who did visit were often harassed by Arabs, including police, who were vigilant against any behavior that might be construed as prayer.
That was a policy that was not challenged by any Israeli government, including those led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the coalition that has succeeded him is still to some extent claiming, as Netanyahu’s governments always did, that there has been no change in the status quo.
Dayan’s surrender of the Temple Mount has been criticized bitterly over the years, not least because it allowed the Muslim religious authorities to engage in vandalism on the site when they undertook construction projects that essen-
tially trashed the treasure trove of historical artifacts that existed underneath mosques built on the site of the two temples. The ban on prayer was maintained because Israeli governments feared that Palestinian Arab leaders would use any gesture toward acknowledging the Mount’s holiness to Jews, as well as to the Muslims who Jonathan S. worshiped at the mosques
Tobin JTA.org there, to justify violence. Since the beginning of the conflict a century ago, leaders such as Haj Amin el-Husseini, the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas have attempted to gin up violence and hate by claiming that the Jews are planning to blow up the mosques. Palestinians have consistently treated any acknowledgment of Jewish rights to the Mount as an intolerable insult to all of Islam — an unreasonable stand that has nevertheless been supported by the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. Even the supposedly “moderate” Abbas hasn’t hesitated to play that card, vowing that the “filthy feet” of Jews would not be allowed to defile Jerusalem’s holy places during the so-called “stabbing intifada” in 2015 and 2016. This appalling incitement was largely accepted by Netanyahu as a reason to maintain the status quo. He not
Israeli security forces guard as a group of religious Jews visit the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al Sharif, in Jerusalem’s Old City, during Tisha b’Av, July 18, 2021.
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guest column
Campus Antisemitism Then & Now
In 1985, I stood in the corner of a crowded meeting room at the Wayne State University Student Center, stone-faced, while people I did not know lined up at a microphone to denounce me before the Student Newspaper Publications Board.
“I don’t think Howard Lovy should be editor of the The South End because he is biased toward Israel,” said one, referring to the name of the student newspaper, where I was up for the editor’s position. The board would decide if I should take the top job. I was next in line, and the position should have been mine.
However ...
“Howard is a Zionist, so he should be disqualified from this important job as editor of The South End.”
Some of them said something about the racist rabbi, Rabbi Meir Kahane; another said something about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon three years previously. Apparently, I was responsible for all these things and people. I should not have been surprised.
A few “anti-Zionist” students had targeted me months earlier and not only peppered the Letters to the Editor column about me but would show up at The South End office specifically to
harass and threaten me. At this hearing, there were not dozens, but hundreds of people I had never met, telling the board about what a lousy journalist I was because I had written pieces on the opinion page in support of Israel. The Student Newspaper Publications Board, wary Howard Lovy of controversy because of a previous editor’s antimilitary activism, rejected me, and I did not get the job. I was 19 years old then. I’m 55 now and over the shock, but I look back on it as a key event in my development as a Jew and as a journalist. It was an important lesson for me in how isolating antisemitism could be. It was difficult for me to explain to my friends and colleagues that this even was antisemitism at all. I mean, it seemed perfectly reasonable to many that my “bias” in favor of Israel’s existence compromised my impartiality. But what was the “other side” I was supposed to take equally? Israel’s nonexistence? In 1985, at the age of 19, I lacked the words to explain to anybody that I was being targeted for harassment specifically because I was a Jew. In this way, I understand what is happening on campus today, with the rise in antisemitism masquerading as antiZionism.
SAME THING — DIFFERENT NAME
The AMCHA Initiative has been tracking antisemitic incidents and activities on college campuses all over the country since 2015. Out of curiosity, I punched Wayne State University into their database and found 16 incidents of “antisemitic expression” and “BDS activity” (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel) between March 2016 and June of this year.
The argument, of course, can be made that all these events are not antisemitic, that they simply express solidarity with Palestinians. And, if you’re not a Jew on campus and see and feel for yourself how these things manifest themselves in reality, it is difficult to explain this gray area between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitic hate speech. You just know it when you feel it.
And, ultimately, Jews are gaslighted with the phrase, “Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism,” which creates a nonexistent caricature of a Jew who takes offense at every criticism of Israel.
What got me into the whole mess, and sent me down a path I continue to this day, was a story I wrote about a pamphlet. Earlier that year, the director of the campus Hillel approached me at the Wayne State Student Center. He tossed a book near my lunch tray and asked, “Guess what I found the Muslim Students Association selling at Manoogian Hall?”
It was The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, that infamous czarist-era Russian forgery that set out the Jewish plan for world domination. The Hillel director knew I wrote about Jewish issues, so he challenged me to write a story about this.
“It doesn’t matter if the Protocols are fiction. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t,” the head of the Muslim Student Association told me in an interview at the time. “But you cannot deny that many of the prophecies in this book have come true. Jews run the financial systems.”
A NEMISIS
This student became my nemesis. Every time I’d write anything in The South End, there he was to refute it. Not only that, but it became a campaign. The student organization began tracking everything I wrote. Once, I ran into one of them while shopping at Eastern Market. I heard him say, “Zionist,” as I walked by.
OK. Yes. That was, and is, true. I am a Zionist. So, how do you describe to nonJews that, to “anti-Zionists, that is the equivalent of saying, ‘“Dirty Jew.’” How do you tell people that this was not “just criticizing Israel” when it’s part of a coordinated campaign to
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SUPPORT from page 8
unreasonably believed that the alternative was a bloody religious conflict that would undermine Israel’s efforts to normalize relations with the rest of the Arab world and provide fodder for the Jewish state’s critics in the West.
POSSIBLE RAMIFICATIONS
That decision was easy to stand by as long as the Israeli public was largely indifferent to Jewish rights on the Mount. That was backed up by the opinion of some in the Orthodox world that held that Jews should stay off the Mount since the exact location of the Temple’s Holy of Holies was unknown and thereby avoid profaning a place that only the High Priest was allowed to enter while it still existed. But in recent years, more support for the rights of Jews to pray on the Mount has been building, especially among the rightwing and religious parties.
It appears that some Jewish prayer has been going on in the last two years. In 2019, there was a report that some Jews were praying aloud there regularly in a minyan conducted openly without police interference. But the abridged informal services being held did not involve participants wearing prayer shawls or tefillin, so it somehow escaped much notice. But once Israel’s Channel 12 news reported the policy shift, it was enough to prompt violence from Arabs.
At this point, it remains to be seen what the implications of that shift and Bennett’s public expression of support for “freedom of worship for Jews” on the Mount — words that never passed the lips of Netanyahu during his 12 years in power, despite his being labeled as a hardline right-winger in the international press — will be.
It’s possible that Abbas and his Hamas rivals, whose firing of 4,000-plus rockets and missiles into Israel in May was rationalized as an expression of opposition to Israeli policies in Jerusalem, will use it to escalate the conflict again. Arab states, including those with relations with Israel, such as Jordan, will also feel obliged to make an issue of it as well, possibly endangering the normalization of relations with the Gulf States.
Nor is anyone expecting the United States — let alone, Europe — to express support for the right of Jewish worship on the Temple Mount.
That will create problems for Bennett and the incongruous coalition he leads. He will likely be pressured to walk back his statement from both Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and the Ra’am Arab party that provides the government with its slim majority.
Whatever the cost he must pay for having said those words, Bennett cannot take them back without doing incalculable damage to himself and Israel.
This dispute is dismissed by some as an unnecessary conflict that is harming Israel’s security merely to satisfy the wishes of extremists. But the Palestinian claim that Jews have no rights on the Temple Mount is inextricably linked to their unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish presence and sovereignty anywhere in the country.
That Abbas and his “moderates” claim there were no Temples on the Mount or the historical nature of the Jewish claims to this land isn’t merely rhetoric that enables them to compete with Hamas. It goes to the heart of their long war against Zionism that they still refuse to renounce. A Jewish state that would officially renounce Jewish rights on the Mount would be sending a message to the Palestinian street that the extremist belief that Israel will disappear isn’t a pipe dream that they must abandon if they want a peaceful future.
Those who are still trying to pressure Israel to accept a two-state solution that the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly made clear it has no interest in pursuing need to understand that peace can’t be built on the denial of Jewish rights, especially in Jerusalem.
Israel has no desire to interfere with the mosques on the Temple Mount or stop Muslim (or any) worship there. Those who circulate this lie, whether among the Palestinians or their American cheerleaders, like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), are opponents of peace, not people working for coexistence. That even some of those who claim to be Israel’s friends think it is reasonable to deny “freedom of worship” for Jews at their most sacred site are giving unwitting aid and comfort to the very extremist forces that make peace impossible.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. CAMPUS from page 10
attack everything you write and, ultimately, prevent me from attaining the editor’s position?
I was alone in 1985, but today, Jewish students can find solace in online communities. Julia Jassey, a student at the University of Chicago, is emerging as a leader among young people on campus fighting back against antisemitism that masquerades as antizionism. She runs a group called Jewish on Campus, and you can find them on Twitter, Instagram or you can write to them at connect@ jewishoncampus.org.
Of course, none of those things were available to me in 1985, so I did the next best thing: I interned for the Detroit Jewish News, which also ran a version of my story about the Protocols. This unexpectedly led to my career as a “Jewish journalist” and, eventually, years later, as managing editor at JTA.
Today, my college experience is wrapped into a lifetime of experiences in recognizing the various shades of antisemitism. It is difficult, I know, for college students. But I am also optimistic that, even though it looks worse than it was “in my day,” young Jewish communities are being formed to help define and fight the problem of campus antisemitism.
Howard Lovy is an editor and writer based in Traverse City. He is the former managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. You can find him at howardlovy.com or on twitter @howard_lovy.
