Maggie's Farm

Our Aliyah Diary author Nathan sends us this piece from Jewish Chronicle describing how noted Marxist Bertell Ollman wishes to "resign from being a Jew" prior to surgery. A quote from the piece:

...it is lonely, on the left, when you step out of line. And the party line, when it comes to Israel and the Jews, is that one can express a proud Jewish identity only through the experience of suffering and victimisation from the past, which the Holocaust has come to embody above all. The Jew as a victim and as a witness of the quintessential, archetypal experience of suffering emerges as the positive Jewish role-model, in sharp contrast to the pro-Israel or even Zionist Jew, who is chastised for having betrayed both universal values and what is seen as the authentic Jew. Again, to borrow from Christian terminology, the Jew as the sacrificial lamb, the Agnus Dei, is what we are being asked to be.

That’s why so many Jews, spiteful of their faith and ashamed of Zionism’s accomplishments as a society which rejects the role of the victim, wish Israel away. For them, it was so much better before Zionism, when we could still say, with some self-righteousness, S’iz shver tsu zayn a Yid — it is hard to be a Jew!