Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism

In his Daily Telegraph article on which you report (Chief rabbi: Labour has severe problem with antisemitism, 
theguardian.com
, 4 May), Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said the antisemitism crisis engulfing Labour had “lifted the lid” on bigotry.
 
He joins in the sensationalist allegations of antisemitism in the Labour party, where the headlines’ decibel level is in inverse proportion to the evidence supporting them. Ignoring the more serious anti-Muslim racism in electoral politics, Rabbi Mirvis attacks the Labour party by launching a defence of Zionism which turns it from a political ideology (that can be supported or opposed) into a religion that is beyond question. We British Jews reject this categorically.
 
Mirvis attacks as “antisemitic” those who separate Judaism from Zionism. Yet most Jews who perished in the Holocaust were indifferent to Zionism and many opposed it. In the last municipal elections in Europe’s largest Jewish community, in Poland, just before the second world war, Poland’s Jews voted overwhelmingly for the secular, anti-Zionist, socialists of the Bund, while Zionist parties got derisory votes. Is Rabbi Mirvis recasting those victims of the Holocaust posthumously as enemies of Judaism and therefore as antisemites?
George Abendstern
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Richard Kuper
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/10/anti-zionism-does-not-equate-to-antisemitism
 

 Mirvis attacks as “antisemitic” those who separate Judaism from Zionism. Yet most Jews who perished in the Holocaust were indifferent to Zionism and many opposed it. In the last municipal elections in Europe’s largest Jewish community, in Poland, just before the second world war
 
finalmente qualcosa di attuale.

 Mirvis attacks as “antisemitic” those who separate Judaism from Zionism. Yet most Jews who perished in the Holocaust were indifferent to Zionism and many opposed it.
 
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"This is an unbelievably misguided argument. If there was a Jewish state in place only ten earlier, in 1935, then many of them would still be alive and well today ... in Israel. This is why in 1937 the Central Conference of American Rabbis changed its stance on Israel and Zionism, and stated: "We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its [Palestine's] up-building as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life."
 
Rabbi Yuval Karen