Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: a bleg

Not exactly a full post here, but I was at the Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street and found it incredibly moving. However, I have some fears ans skepticism regarding the protests. For one, Adbusters is involved. And I'd noticed a peculiar absence of reference to the Israeli Tent City protests. According to one activist who was involved in both, the
“There is some hesitancy with proclaiming to be in solidarity with the tent protests in Tel Aviv, because there has not been a direct call from those protests to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” said Ari Cowan, 21, who said on September 26 that he had slept in the plaza all but two of the nine nights of the occupation.
The complaint, which is not uncommon, is one for which Eidelman has little patience.
“To look at a social movement only through the prism of the Palestinian struggle, that’s very limiting,” Eidelman said. “What do you expect, we’re going to change the whole system in two months?”
So the protesters in New York refuse to look at Israelis, even anti-Zionists, through any other lense. Can you imagine how I, a avowed Zionist, would be treated? Well, there are plans to build a sukkah at OWS. I have every intention of going to show support for the protest through a specifically Jewish lense. The protesters deserve support, but they can and need to do better. With that, I thought I'd bring copies for the OWS library of: the Forward article above, April Rosenblum's pamphlet, "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere," and Steve Cohen's "That's Funny, You don't look antisemitic." Any ideas on other materials? Maybe the Emma Goldman letter here?