Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Several readers have asked to read this original, expanded version of the article Haaretz published yesterday under the title, In Praise of the Jewish Blogosphere:

I began my blog, Tikun Olam, in February, 2003 precisely one month before the Iraq war began. But even more than my budding opposition to the upcoming war, what motivated me to begin blogging was my passion to speak out on behalf of Israeli-Palestinian peace. I spent all my adult life dedicated to this cause, but until blogging developed I had no regular, public means of expressing my views. As someone who has always loved writing but not been a professional writer, it was important to have a public means of expression since I didn’t have a regular journalistic outlet. For years, I’d written letters to the editor (i.e. Haaretz, the Irish Times or Los Angeles Times). But having something published once in a blue moon was far too frustrating. And because I was neither a professional journalist nor an academic specializing in this subject, my ability to get articles published was minimal.

So when I began reading about weblogs, as they were called then, and the technology behind them, I decided to throw myself into it with as much passion as I devoted to learning Microsoft Word in 1986, shortly after it was first developed.

It was lonely at first. The world of blogs was much smaller then. The world of Jewish blogging even smaller and the world of progressive Jewish blogging even smaller still. At times, I wondered for whom I was writing. But I kept telling myself that even if I was only writing for myself that would be dayenu. First and foremost, a blog is a personal expression of angst, passion, anger, identity—whatever are your deepest emotions. Of course, everyone wants an audience. But if you don’t have something deeply felt to say, then there’s no reason to have one.

In the beginning, I reached out with mixed success to other bloggers with like-minded views. In 2005, I created a progressive discussion forum, Israel-Palestine Forum. I thought creating a Jewish blogging community was a worthwhile goal in itself; but that this also would amplify our message in the greater blog world. Bloggers though are fiercely independent creatures. They don’t want to be organized. They don’t necessarily want to be part of a community. And they surely don’t want to do what you think they should do. So I’ve had to adjust my ambitions and set humbler goals.

After five years of blogging, 2,000 posts, and 6,000 comments, I have a modest, but substantial readership with 200 subscribers and 200,000 unique visitors annually. The Guardian’s Comment is Free and American Conservative Magazine have published my work. I have guest blogged at the “alt-Jewish” website, Jewcy. Reporters have interviewed me for stories in the New York Times, Jewish Forward, Jewish Week and Seattle Post Intelligencer.

But my impact both on the blog world and the broader debate over the I-P conflict is still less than I would like. The mainstream media doesn’t beat a path to your door and even progressive sites like Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, and The Nation already have journalists covering this issue and aren’t looking for new voices. Al achat kama v’kama, the mainstream media, who are even less interested. Bloggers, except for the best known, are generally seen as second class citizens. Their writing is viewed as less trustworthy than “real” journalism. Bloggers are seen by “serious” journalists as shouters, dilettantes and dabblers rather than serious participants in the media discourse. This of course causes bloggers like me endless heartburn. I know that many of my posts deserve wider distribution, but since I’m not a major political blogger like Juan Cole, Markos Moulitsas or Eric Alterman, I have no traction.

Despite the difficulties I outlined above, blogs have played a critical role in the American Jewish community and their importance will only continue to grow. In the age before blogs, Jewish leaders were like political bosses. They ruled their roosts. Once installed, they were rock-like presences and stayed in their positions seemingly forever. Their word was halacha l’moshe mi’sinai. Anyone who doubted it was easily frozen out of communal discourse. The leaders’ politics were conservative and generally supportive of the Israeli right. The Jewish media was a corporate entity that largely expressed the views of such leaders.

Certainly, there were dissenters regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict like Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg and others. There were also progressive Jewish peace groups over the years like Breira and New Jewish Agenda. But with few financial resources, small memberships, and young, inexperienced staff, these groups formed barely a ripple in the communal pond. Their voice was heard mostly by those who already subscribed to their ideas. They were easily sidelined.

Blogs have changed that. Now, Jewish “bosses” like Abe Foxman (ADL) or Jack Rosen (AJCongress) can be held up to immediate public scrutiny. When Foxman refused to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, the Jewish press and bloggers took him to task and he backed down. When JTA published a false ZOA claim that Desmond Tutu equated Israel with Hitler, Jewish Voice for Peace’s Muzzlewatch brought the fraud to the Jewish community’s attention forcing JTA to correct the record. When a Minneapolis Jewish community staff member advised a local college that Tutu was anti-Israel and the college rescinded a speaking invitation, Muzzlewatch was again able to lead the debate causing the college to back down. None of this would have happened before blogs.

Even more importantly, when Israeli policy goes off the rails as it did during the Lebanon war, peace bloggers published almost minute by minute coverage documenting the carnage and folly of the military-political decisions that informed conflict. Perhaps for the first time in human history bloggers on both sides of a war could not only read the words of those on the other side, they could communicate with the “enemy” almost in real time. I think this had a tremendous impact on blog readers because reading the unfiltered suffering of your enemy had the effect of breaking down the will to fight on both sides.

Within Israel and the American Jewish community, there was a consensus in favor of the war while it raged. Not so in the blogosphere where there was a furious debate pro and con. But what was most important to me was that progressive bloggers had a place to speak truth to power during those dark days. We could rail against the blindness, callousness and lies emanating from the IDF spokespeople and politicians. No one could pull the plug on us. And while it is true that we may not have been feared or even noticed by the Halutzes and Olmerts of this world, we could have our say and people listened.

I am not the first to note that blogs have democratized communication and political debate. But this is especially true in the formerly top-down structure of the Jewish communal hierarchy. Malcolm Hoenlein doesn’t give me marching orders. Neither does AIPAC. I march to my own drummer. And that is the beauty of the blog.

Not that all’s always well in the Jewish blog world. Along with this democratization of the means of communication has come a maelstrom of conflicting opinions. The breaking down of communal consensus has caused a breakdown of civility and an accompanying barrage of hate, invective, and verbal assault. Just look at the Haaretz, Jerusalem Post or Ynet talkbacks if you want to see evidence of such chaos. And the talkbacks are moderated! Imagine if they weren’t.

There has also been a steep rise in partisanship. More radical, violent and racist ideas get attention than ever did in the past. Reasoned debate has almost become a thing of the past. Instead, people go for the jugular. I have been unsuccessfully sued for libel for calling militant pro-Israel activist Rachel Neuwirth a “Kahanist.” The owner of another far-right site, Masada2000, started a mock blog in my name which included pornographic references and a stolen image of my son and me baking cookies to which a caption was added claiming we were making Palestinian suicide bombs. Masada2000’s owner also threatened me with genital mutilation. Members of the Kahanist Jewish Task Force website wished that I would get cancer of the rectum.

It would be wrong to see these merely as aberrant Jewish expressions or the actions of lone troubled individuals (though they might be that). For the internet has given wingnuts a huge megaphone with which to amplify such hate and bring it into the mainstream.

Over the past few months, an anonymous right-wing hoax e mail campaign flooded the inboxes of American Jews. It sought to portray Barack Obama as a stealth Muslim presidential candidate who would bring the views of Al Qaeda into the White House. In a close Democratic primary and general election, these types of smears don’t have to have much credibility nor do they have to. All they have to do is instill fear and doubt into the minds of a relatively small group of voters in order to have a critical effect on the elections. While Goebbels championed the “big lie” these slandermeisters work by planting small seeds of doubt in the minds of many.

Blogs can represent the highest values and ideals of Jewish tradition. And they can also represent the basest emotions lurking in the Jewish breast. Often they are somewhere in between. But there is no going back to the days of yesteryear.

I work to improve the Jewish blogosphere by encouraging more liberal voices to join the debate. We need more prominent communal figures and even journalists to understand the power of blogs and begin writing their own. Some like Leonard Fein, Bernard Avishai and Daniel Levy have already done so. But there is room for much more. And I’m hoping that the mainstream media both in Israel and America will expand their interest in blogs and incorporate what we have to say into their reporting.

tags in-praise-of-the-jewish-blogosphere, jewish-blogs, kahanist, masada2000, obama-muslim-smear, rachel-neuwirth

Seattle’s Jewish paper has written a long story about my legal battle with Rachel Neuwirth. The nice thing about the article is that it gives Neuwirth’s attorney all the rope he wants to hang himself and his client. I don’t know about you but I’m not used to hearing lawyers use four letter words in defending their clients:

“She never threw any mud at him, she was never responsible for things that he wanted to blame on her, and she so testified and he couldn’t prove to the contrary,” said Charles L. Fonarow, Neuwirth’s attorney. “The only thing she ever did was try and talk to the guy, and for that he just let loose all his shit.”

Not quite sure what he’s referring to here. Neuwirth did call the house one Sunday morning at 7:30 AM waking my wife and asking for me. I didn’t speak to her and wrote in my blog that I never wanted to hear from her again and haven’t. She used to post insulting comments at this blog using pseudonyms but doesn’t do that anymore either. So not sure what he means by “trying to talk to the guy” unless hurling insults is considering trying to talk to me.

In further remarks, Fonarow really exposes the weakness of Neuwirth’s case:

“Even though Rabbi Seidler-Feller, as a result of the settlement, admitted full responsibility and that she didn’t provoke the attack at all, Silverstein nevertheless calls her a liar and says that he doesn’t believe what Seidler-Feller has admitted,” Fonarow said. Silverstein’s original comments “may be a tad short of defaming her, but not much, and then he goes on to start committing the acts, which were clearly defamatory, for which we sued.

“A Kahanist is a terrorist, and however you slice it, it’s a defamatory remark.”

First, it should be noted that I never called Neuwirth a liar in this context. I merely said that given the facts as Seidler Feller and other witnesses stated them just after the incident; and her version of the event, I chose not to believe her version and to believe another. The problem with Fonarow and with so many right-wing ideologues is that they create huge ellipses in the arguments of their opponents in which they leap from a fact to an interpretation of the fact which has no relation to the original fact. So because I choose not to believe her I’ve called her a liar. Precision has never been a hallmark of partisan ideologues anywhere.

But the money quote here is the last line. Of course a Kahanist is not necessarily a terrorist. There are Kahanists like Baruch Goldberg, Irv Rubin and Meir Kahane himself who were terrorists. There are Kahanists who are not terrorists. Calling someone a Kahanist may mean calling them a racist, but it doesn’t mean calling them someone who personally commits acts of violence, which is what a terrorist is. This is where Neuwirth’s case collapses.

Fonarow repeats the Neuwirth-Campus Watch claim that Joel Beinin lied when claimed she made a death threat against him:

Fonarow said any allegation that Neuwirth’s message was a death threat was a lie.

“She leaves him a message that in effect, said, in the same tone, you can’t be saying [anti-Israel statements] because the Jews have to be vigilant at all times,” Fonarow said. “Look what they did to David [sic] Pearl, and look what Hitler did, and he takes that as a death threat, which is preposterous.”

Somebody oughta tell Mr. Fonarow that he was referring to Daniel Pearl, not David. But hey, what’s a little inaccuracy among friends?

About that death threat, here’s what I’ve written earlier on this:

Neuwirth DID call him a kapo and other vulgar demeaning terms. She likened him to Daniel Pearl and said that Beinin might meet the same fate as a traitor to his people. She noted that Hitler took care of those who were traitors first (not sure what this means exactly). Beinin felt so disturbed by the content of her calls that he called the police. The report quotes verbatim from her calls and documents the threat.

Again, I’ll let my readers be the judge: death threat or not? I wish I could post the police report here and quote from it verbatim. But I’ve been asked not to do so and I won’t.

Fonarow based his entire case on the claim that because Rachel Neuwirth is a private party and not a public figure, he didn’t have to show actual malice on my part to prove libel. Since the judge threw out the “private party” claim, then Fonarow would’ve actually had to prove in his filing that I DID show malice. But he didn’t even make such a claim. And in an appeal he can’t change his argument, since the appeals court only judges the evidence and arguments of the original case—though he tries to in the following passage:

Fonarow took issue with Judge Reid’s assertations and suggested that a “trier of fact” would find actual malice in Silverstein’s postings.

“She’s a private person,” he said. “She makes her money selling real estate even though she likes to write a lot of articles because she’s so pro-Jewish…. The only area you can say [falls] under the statute is that she was trying to try to talk to [Silverstein] about a matter that I guess could be considered by the courts to be a subject of public debate.

“As far as I’m concerned there was actual malice,” he added. “If you look at all the other things that he said, in blog after blog after blog, there’s evidence of actual malice even though the trial judge dismissed it as falling short.”

Astonishingly, Neuwirth chose not to talk to Joel Magalnick. That’s gotta be a first. I suppose she thought it possible that my local paper might write less than flatteringly about her. She probably made the right decision, though I would’ve enjoyed hearing more from her.

Magalnick also interviewed the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior attorney, who wrote approvingly of Judge Reid’s decision to toss the case:

But Fred von Lohman, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions free speech in the digital arena, said this case was precisely why California adopted the SLAPP statute.

“By publishing this on a blog, [Silverstein] was engaging in precisely the kind of protected speech the California SLAPP statute was written to protect,” von Lohman said. “This is really the tip of a much larger iceberg, because as more and more political speech and commentary goes online, it’s inevitable that there will be more need to clarify that the First Amendment protection applies to bloggers just like they apply to traditional pamphleteers.”

On appeal, added von Lohman, if Neuwirth’s case fails again, it will set precedent in California that other courts will need to pay attention to…

“There are lots of things about this case that are pretty standard about First Amendment law,” he said. “The thing that is different is that we don’t have the standard applied to blogs.”

We have high hopes that EFF will join in our appeal (that is, if Neuwirth is foolish enough to file which we have every reason to believe she will).

tags blogging-free-speech, charles-fonarow, first-amendment, internet-speech, jew-ish, joel-magalnick, jtnews, kahanist, neuwirth-v.-silverstein, political-blogs, rachel-neuwirth

Tonight is not a good night for Rachel Neuwirth. Like Casey at the bat, she took a mighty swing & like Casey she struck out.

She sued me for libel in Los Angeles Superior Court because I called her a “Kahanist swine.” Her claim was that this was the same as claiming she was a Jewish terrorist since Kahane Chai, Meir Kahane’s Israeli political party, is designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization.

Her attorney, Charles Fonarow, told my attorneys that her case was a “slam dunk.” Seems Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John Reid had a different idea. It’s also important to note that Judge Reid is no activist liberal judge. He teaches law at Pepperdine University law school where Kenneth Starr is the dean. He’s a law and order conservative and he understood the principles of free blog speech that were involved in this case. He understood that calling someone a Kahanist swine, while not perhaps the most refined turn of phrase in the world, is permitted in the context of public discourse on an issue of great civic importance.

We won the case with an anti-SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) motion under which the defendant must prove that his speech was made in a public arena and furthered a public good and that the plaintiff was a public figure. Rachel’s key argument was that she is a private figure (she argued that she was merely a real estate agent) and the my blog was a private forum (because I “controlled” it), all of which are patently false since she herself calls herself an “internationally respected journalist” in her online bio. That my blog is a public forum is also patently obvious as 250,000 unique visitors each year indicate. And I no more ‘control’ the 6,000 comments published on my blog than I control the entire web.

One of the beauties of the SLAPP motion is that the losing plaintiff must pay defendant’s reasonable court costs. This system was purposely designed to inhibit well-heeled individuals from bringing frivolous lawsuits against whistle blowers and other do-gooders. As the judge’s ruling states:

These lawsuits are generally brought to chill the valid exercise of constitutional rights. A SLAPP suit lacks merit and will achieve its objective if it depletes the defendant’s resources or energy because the aim is not to win but to detract the defendant from his or her objective. [An anti-SLAPP motion] is a procedural remedy to dispose of such suits expeditiously and thereby protect defendants’ free exercise of First Amendment rights on matters of public interest

So Rachel will have to dip into her savings to pay for our legal bills. I say “ours” since Rachel figured she’d kill two “kapo” birds with one stone by also including Joel Beinin in her suit. No doubt Joel is a figure who particularly irks her since he holds a distinguished academic position at Stanford University. Unfortunately, she struck out as her suit against Beinin failed as well.

The judge understood the important of protecting speech on an issue as critical and controversial as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and agreed that Neuwirth was merely trying to stifle speech she disagreed with–rather than bringing a serious charge of libel.

He also raised an importance point which even I hadn’t considered in preparing my defense. Since truth is a defense in libel suits why didn’t she argue that the portion of my statement in which I called her a “Kahanist” was false? I think we could’ve made a good case against her if she’d raised this defense since her views, like Kahane’s, are so virulently anti-Arab. But she never even made the claim.

Another good point that he raised was that just as no reasonable reader would believe I was calling her a literal “swine,” so no reasonable reader would believe I was calling her a literal Kahanist “terrorist.”

Neuwirth’s claim against Joel Beinin involved a statement he made in the Alef discussion group informing members that she had made a death threat against him. She, along with Campus Watch, have claimed that this is a lie. Well, now I have the police report in front of me from the Stanford University Department of Public Safety reported (case IR 03 265 0181) on September 22, 2003. Beinin is so weary of this matter that he expressly asked me not to publish the report details here. But suffice it to say that Neuwirth DID call him a kapo and other vulgar demeaning terms. She likened him to Daniel Pearl and said that Beinin might meet the same fate as a traitor to his people. She noted that Hitler took care of those who were traitors first (not sure what this means exactly). Beinin felt so disturbed by the content of her calls that he called the police. The report quotes verbatim from her calls and documents the threat.

Now, I want to address the hazirfleisch with the unlikely name of “Cinnamon Stillwell” at Campus Watch who called Beinin a liar. During the lawsuit I could not speak of this matter on advice of counsel. But now the world can see who lied and who told the truth.

My attorney tells me that Neuwirth appeared quite upset at the end of the hearing. Her attorney told Judge Reid that he planned to appeal his decision to the State Court of Appeals. They were apparently both upset that the ’slam’ didn’t ‘dunk.’ But the fact that the judge wrote a ten-page, intensively-researched opinion shows that the judge attached considerable importance both to the case and to his decision. It’s hard to believe that a higher court would rule against Judge Reid in this matter unless he made a serious error. And the very fact of the length of the brief and the amount of effort he lavished on it argues against that possibility.

Though I do not wish for an appeal, I would welcome one for one reason only. The higher this case goes, if affirmed, the more important a precedent it becomes in California jurisprudence. Protecting the rights of those who debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a matter worth fighting for and worthy of judicial affirmation.

Finally, I’d like to thank my pro bono legal team from Dewey & LeBoeuf. They are heroes to me. They took this on out of a commitment to protect First Amendment rights and with little prospect of financial remuneration. They believed in my right to speak out forcefully about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Unfortunately, others have threatened me with similar lawsuits in the past and perhaps some will do so in future. I think we have taken a stand that such intimidation will be met with a firm defense of my First Amendment rights and those of all bloggers.

tags death-threat-against-Joel-beinin, kahanist, libel-lawsuit, rachel-neuwirth, slapp-motion

One of my informants provides the welcome news that Masada2000 is down once again. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving hate site. Unfortunately, I can’t tell whether his web host or his domain registrar took him down.

Doing some research the other day, I discovered that the site owner actually threatened and harassed Michael Lerner according to In These Times:

In May [2001]…Masada2000 listed Lerner as one of “the five most dangerous Jewish enemies of the Jewish people,” and posted detailed driving directions to his home address. Draped in guillotines, nooses and racist language, the site repeatedly stated: “If you’re ever in the San Francisco area, drop in on him at his home.”

Predictably, the death threats and hate e-mails started pouring in–more than 60 to date. Late-night calls also drastically increased. “Both my wife and I were extremely scared,” Lerner says.

So when the same bully threatened in a comment to this blog “We are going to have fun sewing your foreskin back on, Dickie” I felt I was in good company. Like Lerner, I reported the threat to the local authorities in order to have a police record of his brutishness.

With his fake blog intended to harass me taken down by Blogger after multiple DMCA violations and now Masada2000 down, the air’s smelling a whole lot nicer.

Returning to Lerner, it’s interesting to see that no less a Jewish “eminence” than Cynthia Ozick has adopted Masada2000’s views of Lerner (though with a tad more literary elegance). At the recent CAMERA conference, whose purpose was to ferret out Jewish “defamers” of Israel, Ozick called Lerner to task (Ben Harris called it a “tour de force” denunciation though that phrase says more about Harris’ sympathetic views of Ozick than it does about the actual quality of her argument) for being defamer number 1 on the Jewish far-right’s list. In fact, her speech could’ve been titled “Michael Lerner: How Do I Hate Thee, Let Me Count the Ways:”

Ozick reserved particular vitriol for Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing journal Tikkun and a frequent critic of Israel.

After ridiculing him as a “garrulous mime,” questioning the validity of his rabbinical ordination, and slapping him with a flurry of unflattering adjectives — chaotic, disorganized, self-contradictory, puerile, and unbearably long-winded, to name but a few — Ozick accused the yarmulke-wearing rabbi of providing Jewish sanction to some of Israel’s most implacable foes.

“Only imagine Karl Marx davening and you will comprehend the dazzlement of Rabbi Lerner’s current achievement,” Ozick said.

Lerner is “one of a growing band of ambitious, self-touting Jews whose hostility to the State of Israel more and more takes on the character of the spite that kills,” she said. “The noise they make they call a silencing. The debate they attract they call a censoring.”

I rather like “garrulous mime” as I too find qualities of Lerner which are annoying or self-defeating (”defaming Israel” is certainly NOT one of them) including his propensity for pomposity, self-regard and volubility. But to mention Michael Lerner in the same breath with Karl Marx only shows how pathetically deluded Ozick is and how hysterical her political world view is. The fact that she and Masada2000 share the same view of Lerner tells us reams about Ozick and CAMERA and almost nothing about Lerner.

tags Camera, jewish-cyber-bullying, kahanist, kahanist-website-down, masada2000-harrasses-michael-lerner

It took eight days, but Masada2000 is down once more. Unfortunately, the site’s Kahanist friends at Jewish Task Force didn’t realize that Bluehost (their latest webhost) was a Mormon hosting company and might be a tad offended at the pornography, nudity and profanity at the site. Maybe next time they should try to find out who hosts sites belonging to the Aryan Nation and American Nazi Party (if there is still such a thing) and ask to be hosted there. One thing’s for certain, they need a hard core host who doesn’t flinch at the 110 proof hate spewed there.

I’d like to thank Bluehost as a company and its CEO, Matt Heaton, for recognizing the danger posed by a site like Masada2000 and the suffering it inflicts on the thousands of innocent Jews it cyber-bullies there.

Tonight, I discovered an extraordinary article, In Defense of Self-Hating Jews, about Masada2000 by Menachem Wecker in Jewish Currents (man, that’s a blast from the past isn’t it?). It provides interviews with many of those featured in the S.H.I.T. List (Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening Jews) and most importantly it thoroughly airs and debunks the poisonous term “self-hating Jew.”

My wife and some progressive friends had recently asked me whether pursuing this site was worth the time it diverted from the truly important work that I try to do here. It’s a worthwhile question and even led me to write an e mail to a JTF forum member suggesting that I’d back off my pursuit of Masada2000 if it would remove my S.H.I.T. listing and if JTF would cease publishing abusive material about me. Then I spent 15 minutes reviewing what JTF forum members had said about me in the past week. Prominent among the comments were “kapo.” “fag,” and a wish that I contract cancer. I decided a sulha with these people was impossible.

And after reading Wecker’s story, it reaffirmed the importance of combating such Jewish hate. No one likes to get their hands dirty in dealing with the slime that oozes from that site. But if it goes unanswered and unfought, then the hate there has an opportunity to slowly seep into the mainstream Jewish discourse.

tags in-defense-of-self-hating-jews, kahanist, masada2000-jewish-racism, menachem-wacker-jewish-currents

Sit back and fasten your seatbelts, readers. This could be a wild ride. As you know, I've been writing about Rachel Neuwirth's cyber-bullying behavior toward Jewish liberals here for several months. Poor Rachel doesn't like it one bit. But what really took the cake for her was one of my recent posts in which I said that in my opinion the version of the story originally told by UCLA Rabbi Chaim Seidler Feller and several witnesses (that Neuwirth first called him a "kapo" during a 2003 altercation at UCLA, after which he got into a physical argument with her) was more credible than her own version (Seidler Feller attacked her unprovoked after which ...