As some of you know, a settler recently assaulted the head of Rabbis for Human Rights, Arik Ascherman, as he pursued his usual activism in the West Bank helping Palestinian farmers protect their fields and harvest their crops. But none of this has earned him anything but scorn from the anti-Israel website, Mondoweiss, in the form of a piece by Marc Ellis.
It’s amazing how Ellis, davka as a retired professor of Jewish studies, would denigrate a courageous human rights activist and rabbi for finding inspiration in Talmudic texts (which Ellis derides somehow as “Biblical”). Nor does he know anything of the politics of Ascherman, who almost certainly votes for Meretz — but of course, this in itself would be nothing but a manifestation of this terrible thing he caustically calls “progressive Zionism.” And as always with Mondoweiss, the online comments are even worse.
Marc Ellis, the public record shows, did not “retire.” He was fired. And whether he was actually qualified as a scholar of Jewish studies is also open to interpretation. Let the interested reader do his own googling on that one.
Your’s is a point of view where real inegeliltnce shines through.