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The nod to Orthodox political pressure enraged the organized non-Orthodox Jewish establishment. From cries of boycott Israeli leaders to claims that Israel gave U.S. Jews the finger,liberal journalistic pundits and organizational leaders alike seemingly competed to express the depth of their outrage and disgust.

(A second decision negating a provision that made conversion to Judaism somewhat easier within Israel was also made, though it's attracted much less attention outside of Israel, where conversion requirements are generally less stringent than they are in Israel.)

Consider all this the Jewish worlds internal culture war --a struggle between strict adherence to traditional religious practice versus broadening the practice to accommodate contemporary sensibilities.

Ironically, the brouhaha is of little concern to the average Israeli Jew, the majority of whom are by no means strictly Orthodox, if not outright secular (though culturally staunchly Jewish). Only the minority of ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews are deeply invested in the struggle, resistant as they are to all religious liberalization.

But it's another story for liberally religious North American and other diaspora Jews, who are overwhelmingly non-Orthodox. (In the United States, the vast majority of religiously involved Jews are connected to the Reform and Conservative movements -- the latter, despite its name, is also left of center.)

For them --and I count myself among them --the issue goes to the core of their increasingly fraught relationship with an Israel seen as religiously dominated by a myopic Orthodoxy more devoted to pushing its narrow political agenda than caring about international Jewish support for the nation that, when threatened, has looked to this same external backing for its very survival.

If you need some basic background on the dispute, click here (The New York Times)>, or here (The Times of Israel),or here (Jewish Telegraphic Agency).

Why would the Israeli coalition government led by Benyamin Netanyahu take this step?

Wily politician that he is, he knew the reaction it would generate at a time when legions of diaspora Jewish leaders have warned that Israels right wing political leadership has alienated non-Orthodox, non-Israeli, liberal Jews --the young in particular --straining their needed support for Israels national survival.

The answer is simple: Israel is more than the Historical Jewish homeland. It's also a modern nation with its own distinct political system and perceived needs. Jerusalem --and certainly not Amirim, for that matter --is not New York or Los Angeles, the bi-coastal centers of American Jewish life.

This analysis piece from The Forward, North Americas premier liberal Jewish newspaper, lays it out.So does this opinion piece distributed by Religion News Service. Note that both these pieces were written by prominent liberal Jews.

Both make the point, in much greater and important detail, of course -- which is why I'm not making it easy for you by simply pulling out a nut graph or two -- that I made above. Read one or both of them to gain a full understanding of the issues backstory.

Religion journalists: Your stories on Jewish reaction in your neck of the woods will be enhanced by accessing this background.

Also read this news release issued by the ultra-Orthodox America Jewish organization Agudath Israel to better understand the strict traditionalist argument.

To reiterate: Israel is not the Upper West Side of Manhattan or the west San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.

Additionally, Israels religiously right wing ultra-Orthodox Jews care little about the cries that international Jewish support for the State of Israel --or Zionism itself --is at stake. For them, it's more about faith, the religion of Judaism and it's survival in its most traditional form.

Lastly, Israeli politicians act as politicians do world wide. Priority number one is self-preservation.

As I said, it's a culture war. And like the parallel conflict convulsing the United States over issues of gender, sexuality and public spending, how it all ends has the potential to divide international Jewish society just as its American equivalent has the potential to further tear apart the already divided larger American society.

For the moment, though, I'm going back to staring at the view from my guest house deck.

I need the break.

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Western Wall battle: Viewing Jewish culture wars from a balcony in Israel's Galilee region - GetReligion (blog)

June 28 2017

by Rachel DiCarlo Currie

Everyone agrees that Americas political and cultural debates have become viciously polarized, and everyone has an explanation for how that happened. No explanation is complete unless it mentions the prominent role played by unelected judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular.

For decades now, the judiciary has been declaring that certain hot-button social issues fall outside the boundaries of democratic politics. Indeed, rather than allow the people and their elected representatives to reach some type of compromise on, say, abortion or same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court has chosen to make policy by judicial fiat.

As a result, the losers in Americas culture wars millions and millions of people across the country feel theyve been disenfranchised. Quite understandably, they question the legitimacy of court rulings that have no real basis in the text or history of the U.S. Constitution or American law.

Alas, the Supreme Courts current swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, has contributed to this erosion of democratic government. Whether Justice Kennedy announces his retirement this year, or next year, or four years from now, cases such as 1992s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court reaffirmed its central holding in Roe v. Wade, and 2015s Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, will be a significant part of his legacy. (Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell and co-authored the plurality opinion in Casey.)

Examining that legacy, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn explains how Kennedy has exacerbated Americas political and cultural divisions:

[start block quote]

What makes issues such as abortion and marriage so contentious is that the opposing moral positions cannot be reconciled. The beauty of democratic politics, however, is its recognition that what free people want and what they will settle for as reasonable are two different things. Justice Kennedys unfortunate legacy on these hot-button issues is to take compromise off the table and thus ensure anger and ill will.

And why not, when the sides are depicted as the enlightened versus the bigots? Though he walked it back in Obergefell, in which he conceded that many who opposed same-sex marriage were acting from honorable religious or philosophical premises, in the 2013 decision overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Kennedy asserted that the only possible motivation for such a law was a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group.

Anthony Kennedy is an educated man who writes in the smooth tones of Stanford and Harvard Law. The effect, alas, is no less noxious. Next time Americas corrosive politics comes up, its worth remembering that the justice so often hailed as a moderate or centrist has done as much as any to fan the flames of Americas raging culture war.

Read the whole thing.

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How the Supreme Court Has Inflamed America's Culture Wars - Independent Women's Forum (blog)

Angela Nagle seems fearless. Who else would dive deep into the Alt-Rights swamp of Pepe the Frog memes, conspiracy theories, and anonymous depravity unified by a hatred of PC culture, feminism, and multiculturalism, and a love for Donald Trump? Her new book, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, documented this section of the internet at a time when most on the left dared not lookwhen just mentioning 4chan or Gamergate seemed like an open invitation for a slew of misogynistic and racist hate mail.

Yet after Trumps election, every mainstream news source suddenly had to get an interview with those involved in the new edgy, nihilistic youth subculture dubbed the Alt-Right, a deviation from the right wings conventional National Review bow ties and Evangelical Christian moralizers. Whether covering former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos campus speaking tours or framing white nationalist Richard Spencer as a surprisingly dapper fascist (as if Nazi leaders werent from the suit-wearing elite), the liberal media class came off looking decidedly unprepared to combat the truly horrifying, utterly contradictory ideas this new wave of Alt-Right/Alt-Light espoused.

Kill All Normies provides much-needed context for the violent rise of a fringe internet subculture of mens rights activists and gamers into the public sphere, and it does so without undeservedly praising the liberal left. Instead, the book argues that the materially empty slacktivism and virtue signaling of liberals helped inflame these reactionary politics. She begins with the election of Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the re-emergence of cyber-utopian visions on the left. An intense fervor of optimism surrounded new technology and social medias leaderless revolutions that would make the world more democratic and better off. But what followed were cycles of momentary outrage, fizzling passions, and mockery as seen in internet campaigns like Kony 2012 and #JusticeForHarambe. The same 4chan poised to lead the anonymous hacktivist tide did wind up making cultural waves, but they came from the far right.

Nothing typifies the culture wars more than late Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbarts statement that [p]olitics is downstream from culture. Though the phrase was popularized by those on the far right, Nagle comes to attach it to the liberal Tumblr view of politics. In modern politics, liberal leaders are forgiven for drone bombing as long as theyre cool with gay marriage, while on the right, enacting policies that devastate families and stable communities was cheered on at any cost as long as it dealt a satisfying blow to the trade unions, as we saw during the Reagan and Thatcher years, she writes. Nagle counters the false dichotomy of the culture wars, and Trump has so far disproven Breitbarts thesis. Material policy comes before culture. The millions of Americans primed to lose their healthcare so some hemophiliac old-money Republican trolls can get a tax cut make Sean Spicer getting called fat by a white nationalist ghoul like Steve Bannon seem pretty trivial.

While Kill All Normies may be a critique of liberal involvement in the culture wars, it is by no means purely cynical. Rather, its a call to organizenot just to #resist Trump, but to dismantle the culture and structures that allowed him to rise in the first place. For the left to move forward in a meaningful way, it must shed the faux pragmatism of centrist-liberal narratives like America Is Already Great. Nagle posits that the only way out for the left is to refocus energy onto improving the material conditions imposed by capitalism on working people. That might take the form of granting all people access to healthcare and education, ending the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the United States, or divesting from imperial proxy-wars in the Middle East. Nagles call is a weighty oneshe asks readers to look beyond the individual actors that the culture wars assign blame to and instead toward the structures built to enable violence. Its a difficult turn, but its one we must take. After all, the Alt-Right cannot be the other option.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle (Zero Books)

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Slouching Toward the Beltway in Kill All Normies - The Portland Mercury

The United States Congress is trying hard to defund Planned Parenthood, once and for all. For a period of one year, the proposed American Health Care Act would prohibit federal funds from going to non-profit organizations that provide family-planning services, including abortions, and get more than $350 million in reimbursements under Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the poor, the elderly, children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities. When the Congressional Budget Office evaluated this clause of the bill, it identified only one organization that would be affected: Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates and clinics.

If this bill goes through, it would represent an existential threat for Planned Parenthood. The organization would be less able to serve poor women who are covered by state Medicaid programs, and it would likely have to close clinics or reduce its services because of the loss of funding. The main motivation behind this provisionand others like it that have come up at the state levelis opposition to abortion. This has lead some, including Ivanka Trump, to wonder why Planned Parenthood doesnt just spin off its abortion services into a separate organization.

Cecile Richards, the organizations president, will have no such thing. The minute we begin to edge back from that is the minute that theyve won, she said during an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday. Despite the renewed push in Washington to stop the organization from getting government funding, Richards believes Planned Parenthood can win the culture wars and make abortion widely acceptable in America. Weve got to quit apologizing or hiding, she said.

Technically, the federal government already prohibits funding for most abortion services. Under the so-called Hyde Amendment, first passed in 1976, organizations like Planned Parenthood cant get reimbursed by Medicaid for performing elective abortions. But pro-life advocates often argue that Hyde doesnt go far enough. Since Planned Parenthood can get public money for some of the other services it provides, taxpayer dollars still effectively go to fund abortions, they say.

This characterization is completely inaccurate, Richards said. Other health-care organizations, including many hospitals, provide abortions, she argued, and they, too, get reimbursed under Medicaid for their other services. Somehow, Planned Parenthood is being held to a completely different standard, she said.

Richards believes the political discourse around abortion has become toxic in recent years. There was a time when the Republican Party embraced individual liberties, she said. In fact, many of our Planned Parenthood affiliates were founded by Republicans. While more Republicans used to consider themselves pro-choice, she said, their ranks have been significantly been reducedRichards name-checked Maine Senator Susan Collins and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski as the only two left in the Senate.

Weve got to pull the curtains back and be open and honest about this procedure.

Even in the face of so much opposition, Richards isnt willing to have Planned Parenthood separate abortion from the rest of its health-care servicesquite the opposite. She believes Planned Parenthood can and will win the culture wars to end the stigma of abortion.

Its more important than ever that we stand loud and proud for the ability of any womanregardless of her income, her geography, her immigration status, her sexuality, her sexual orientationto access the full range of reproductive health care, Richards said. Weve got to pull the curtains back and be open and honest about this procedure that one in three women will have at some point in their lifetime, and their right to make that decision.

Richards cited the way pop-culture depictions of abortion have changed in recent years. Ill shout out Teen Vogue and Cosmo and Glamourwomens magazines that are putting abortion stories into their magazines. Thats never happened before, she said. Or abortion will show up on television: Shonda Rhimes, who recently joined Planned Parenthoods board, featured abortion in an episode of Scandal, dealt with not in hysterical terms, as Richards put it.

Richards repeatedly claimed that the vast majority of people in this country believe that abortion should be safe and legal, and thats even more true today than its ever been. The available polling does not necessarily back up this assertion. As of 2016, about 57 percent of American said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Centera level that has been roughly consistent over the past two decades, and slightly lower than what polls on this issue found in 1995.

Gallup found that half of Americans said abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances in 2016, and that 46 percent of Americans identify as pro-life. The numbers also dont differ radically by generation: According to Pew, between 37 and 42 percent of all age groups said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases in 2016.

Ill fight until the end of my days for every woman to make that decision themselves.

Richards sees the recent legislative efforts to end funding for abortion as the first battle in a long war. A cautionary tale: These folks arent just against Planned Parenthood, she said. Theyre against birth-control access. ... Anyone who thinks that if we didnt provide abortion services, somehow, they would quit this attack on womenIm sorry. Its just the beginning.

Her answer is to commit to abortion: to stop hiding, de-stigmatize it, and most of all, keep performing the procedure. Having been pregnant myself, my children are the joy of my life, she said. But that was my decision to make. And Ill fight until the end of my days for every woman to make that decision themselves.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the people most likely to be affected by the AHCAs one-year ban on reimbursement for family-planning services have low incomes and live in areas without a lot of health-care options. About 15 percent of this population would lose access to reproductive-health care, the CBO projected. Despite Richardss confidence, a clear majority of the House has voted to defund Planned Parenthood. If the Senate follows its lead, the organization will struggle to survive.

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Planned Parenthood Still Believes It Can Win the Culture Wars - The Atlantic

As the crusade to classify more and more points of view as hate speech marches apaceincluding the view that it is wrong to exclude individuals because of the color of their skin First Amendment supporters are resorting to a familiar rhetorical defense: The solution to bad speech is more speech.

The position appears commonsensical on both philosophical and practical grounds. John Stuart Mill, the classical defender of free speech, argued that the best way to understand your own position is to understand the intricacies of your opponents.

This mutual intellectual engagement not only benefits individuals by refining their own thinking, the process of give and take also benefits everyone by enabling the best ideas to float to the top, producing authentic moral, political, and economic progress over time.

This embrace of the fray has taken the colloquial form the marketplace of ideas. It evokes an energetic scene in which soap-box-perched defenders of diverse viewpoints compete for the loyalty of discerning listeners based on the strength of their arguments alone. It is a form of old-school inclusion: no idea is denied entry prima facie because the marketplace has faith in the virtue of civic and cultural patience, recognizing that ideas that may be considered inconceivable today may end up being celebrated tomorrowand vice versa.

Of course some of the barkers in the square are selling ideological snake oil, peddling viewpoints that should end up in the dust bin of history. But the reason the public can know when its being sold a bill of goods is because it can critically weigh the seductive, curly moustached claims against the positions of their soberer competitors. There may not be a winner every time in the exchange, but the vision assures us that, in the long arc of history, that capital-T Truth will always emerge as victor.

Whether the West has ever fully lived up to this ideal, it certainly looks quaint nowadays, if not dangerously nave. Whatever once existed of a shared space for good-faith ideological engagement has now been carved into territorial plots, each encircled with hyper-vigilant guardians of purity ready to prevent any potential heresies. The shared pursuit of a common truth, premised on an implicit social contract that recognizes the possibility that they might be right and I might be wrong from time to time, appears to have been abandoned, leaving even toleration itself as an intolerable option.

One of the epistemological and cultural transformations that has enabled this devolution takes the form of the claim that arguments cannot be evaluated independently of the person making them. The moral and political question is no longer What is being said? but rather, Who is saying it?

Ad hominem assessments of a positionthat is, either condemning or praising a viewpoint based upon the identity of the speaker rather than the soundness of the argumentused to be considered a logical fallacy. Now character deification or assassination, which becomes alarmingly less metaphorical by the day, determines both the victor and the spoils. Rallies engage in hero worship. Protesters in equally religious acts of demonization. And all of us get swept towards an ever-greater vulgar sophistry, one that has a major political party launching rhetorical attacks on the back of the F-bomb while its target gleefully troll-tweets like a teenager.

The upshot? Eighth graders14-year-oldshave been weaponized.

As the skirmishes blunder closer to total war, perhaps we can hope that a silent majority between the battle lines will rise up and demand a return to a Millian principle of free civil discourse as a way back to sanity. It is an encouraging thought. But it is also a credulous one.

The problem with the culture wars isnt that we arent talking to each other enough. Its that we are not talking to each other at all. In short, the greatest casualty of the relentless ideological tit-for-tat of the past decade has been the very grammar of moral argumentation itself, that which makes debate possible.

For a marketplace of ideas to function both as means of supplying diverse viewpoints and as a space that enables consumers to make educated decisions among them, there must be some set of shared rules and conviction that make the market itself possible. Indeed, it is these very rules that allow for the concept of comparative value at all: if we do not have a shared pricing structure, then all ideas are equally worthless and brand-loyalty can only be determined by arbitrarily grabbing whatever beliefs advance our interests.

What might some of these basic rules look like? Let me suggest a few.

A shared commitment to the search for truth as truth. Every vendor and consumer in the marketplace should recognize that what they are ultimately after is the truth; even those who come to the conclusion that there is no universal truth have, as any introductory philosophy course will highlight, embraced a belief they believe to be universally true. It is impossible to debate any point of view that refuses to acknowledge that it is a truth claim.

A shared commitment to demonstrating how your beliefs can and should be universalized. Merely asserting a position, without explaining how and why others could possibly assent to it, makes the position impossible to evaluate. For example, claiming that a belief, by definition, can only pertain to an individual or a community (e.g., only a man can understand this) is to admit, up front, that those outside the group have no reason to assent to anything you say.

A shared commitment to coherence. Saying, for example, truth is always perspectival or judging others is always wrong then proceeding to lament that someone is evil and must be resisted signals to others that the foundation of your beliefs lies in some form of emotivismi.e., I believe/feel it; therefore it is true, independent of any other logical consideration. Emotivist positions, especially those that are unapologetically incoherent, also cannot be evaluated or debated.

A shared commitment to methodological transparency and consistency. If you wear a shirt that says Dude, Do You Even Science? and cite Bill Nye as one of your intellectual heroes while also saying things like all human beings have an equal voice and should be respected or abortion is morally acceptable based on your scientific beliefs, you are engaged in methodological inconsistency, and it is likely that you are also embracing some form of emotivism. Science can certainly be a tool in moral reasoning, but it cannot, by itself, generate moral norms. This kind of methodological incoherence also prevents a position from being evaluated or debated.

A shared commitment to live according to your own beliefs and their implications. A sine qua non of any moral position is that those who espouse it both can and are willing to live according to its precepts. If, for example, you believe that all politicians who engage in sexually inappropriate behavior should be deemed unfit for office, then you should call for the ouster of everyone who engages in such behaviornot only those from opposing political parties. Debating someone who wants to profess one ideal and live according to another makes it hard to pinpoint what exactly they think and why they think it, which makes the evaluation of the position exceedingly difficult.

A shared commitment to factual accuracy and to recognizing the limitations of facts as a basis for moral reasoning. If you choose to live by fact, you should also be willing to die by the fact, no matter what narrative you want to advance. Likewise, you should recognize that facts, including polls, can certainly tell us empirically what is the case, but they can never tell us what should be the case. This means that non-empirical arguments, including religious arguments, must be part of the debate. The marketplace cannot function without them.

A shared commitment to listen carefully to each position, an openness to being wrong, and a rejection of ad hominen attacks. It pointless to enter a debate if the base starting point for all those involved in it is: There is no way you are right, and no way I am wrong. A marketplace implies that allegiances can change. Absent this possibility, the exchange of ideas is a purely academic exercise with no moral or civic value.

While these rules are not self-evident, they are necessary for any marketplace of ideas to exist and function. If we cant agree on the pursuit of truth as truth, universalization, coherence, consistency, and a commitment to abide by our own principles and listen to each other as the necessary buy ins to create and enter the market, its not clear a) how anyone could engage in debate if there are no fixed rules to what counts as an argument, and b) how anyone could possibly make a rationally defensible choice among the ideas in the marketplace.

The problem, however, is that we live during a reign of epistemological paradigms and political platforms that deliberately reject these foundational principles. Whatever other consequences that entails, it ultimately renders the claim the best solution to bad speech is more speech as completely meaningless. It doesnt matter how long or how much we talk if there is no shared basis for what constitutes rational speech. If this trend continues unchecked, it will eventually kill what remains of the marketplace. And when civil means of exchange collapse, its only natural for people to start fighting with weapons rather than words.

Matthew Petrusek is an assistant professor of theological ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and the founder of Wisefaith Ministries.

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How To Rescue The Marketplace Of Ideas From The Culture Wars Before It's Too Late - The Federalist