Portside

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, signed an executive order essentially creating a blacklist of entities that boycott or divest from Israel or encourage others to do so, banning those companies from receiving taxpayer funding. The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as B.D.S., is a strategy intended to combat Israel's nearly 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, a situation akin to apartheid if allowed to continue.

Executive orders are meant to avert imminent or existential crises that cannot await legislation. It's as if we are being asked to believe that BDS is some deplorable enemy endangering our very existence as a free society, and that only those who really care, take action on behalf of the rest of us, who have not yet awoken to the grim reality. For Cuomo, fighting this fight on behalf of Israel is all about "freedom, liberty and democracy".

Sanctions and boycott are the most non-violent, legitimate means there are (Israel constantly preaches to the world to use them against its enemies) and have been proven effective. We have no choice but to recognize that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the only game in town, the last hope for change. This is the only means to stop Israel from persisting in its crimes.

With a budget of nearly $50 million a year, Birthright has taken hundreds of thousands of Jewish youths over the last two decades on its whirlwind trips to Israel. Critics charge that Birthright conflates Judaism and Zionism and encourages unconditional Jewish support for Israel by offering a misleading and blatantly propagandistic narrative of Israeli history that erases Palestinians while glorifying Israeli atrocities.

The New York of Bernie Sanders's childhood was full of Yiddish socialists. Often, these were Jews of Sanders's sort, their spiritual practice less fixated on giving glory to God on high than fighting for emancipation here on earth. Although that interpretation of Judaism may seem profane, even blasphemous, at first blush, it has a firm basis in scripture.

An amazing turn for a major leader of the American Jewish mainstream - David Gordis rethinking view of Israel. He writes: Present day Israel has discarded the rational, the universal and the visionary. These values have been subordinated to a cruel and oppressive occupation, an emphatic materialism, severe inequalities...and distorted by a fanatic, obscurantist and fundamentalist religion which encourages the worst behaviors rather than the best.

The idea of Israel has long been an integral part of Jewish-American identity. But with a generational change among American Jews and increasingly stark political differences with Israel's leadership, could this be the dawn of a new era?

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1938-five years after Hitler came to power, after the beginning of the "Final Solution", Jewish refugees were denied entry into the United States. Then it was anti-Semitism and fear of European radicals and communists; today it is anti-Muslim hysteria. Then the U.S. closed its' eyes to the Holocaust; today GOP governors and congressmen are closing the borders while over 250,000 have died in Syria, there are over 3 million refugees and 6.5 million are internally displaced

The current Israeli government is unlikely to permit advances in religious freedom such as civil marriage, equal funding of non-Orthodox institutions and reducing the power of the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate...an alternative to the rigid and insular Judaism that permeates Israeli public life must remind the Israeli state about the power and wisdom of a pluralistic approach to Jewish life, said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, of the Union for Reform Judaism.