A time to speak out

The birth of Independent Jewish Voices in Britain caused some envious glances from across the Atlantic

Joel Schalit
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 18 2008

""Of course it'd happen in the UK first," said the veteran American Jewish peace activist. "They create a diverse – however temporary – coalition, and get a major newspaper to do their publicity for them. We'd never be able to pull something like that off here." For anyone involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace advocacy in the US Jewish community, such statements were all too common as word began to filter out about the emergence of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) last year......

To American Jewish eyes, IJV appeared to be a similar organisation, albeit one with a distinctly literary hue. Arriving on the heels of the Lebanon war, and months of debate about Mearsheimer and Walt's Israel lobby article in the London Review of Books, and Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, its timing couldn't have been better, particularly given that one of Independent Jewish Voices' founders (the aformentioned Rose), had made a name for herself in the US press for having been included in the Progressive Jewish Thought report (commissioned by the American Jewish Committee) in December 2006, in which a number of liberal Jewish intellectuals, like Rose, were classified as antisemites for taking critical positions on Israel.......

Published nearly two years after the February 2007 declaration announcing the formation of the organisation, the new book, A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (published by Verso) ought to put to rest any concerns that IJV was opportunistically riding a wave of post-Lebanon war disaffection with Israel. Over the course of 300-plus pages, anthology editors Jacqueline Rose, Anne Karpf, Brian Klug and Barbara Rosenbaum manage to capture every major concern about Israel voiced by diaspora Jewish progressives since the Six-Day War in 1967. From Israel's impact on Jewish religious identity to the cultural crises currently being experienced by non-Israeli Jews, A Time to Speak Out makes every effort to explain what informs contemporary diaspora anxieties about Israel.....

Considering how often diaspora Jewish liberals complain about being silenced when they raise questions about Israel's foreign policy, this alone is a remarkable achievement. To that end, the repeat descriptions, throughout the book, of the oppressive discursive environment of diaspora Jewry is absolutely invaluable, particularly in terms of how frequently Jewish anti-occupation activists contrast it to what takes place in Israeli politics and Israeli media. The Jewish diaspora is censorious, whereas Israel is ironically more free. A Time to Speak Out engineers a similarly free space for diaspora Jewry, without necessarily fetishising the Israeli example. Hence the sense among American Jews like my activist colleague that Independent Jewish Voices represented something much bigger than another group of foreign Jews wringing their hands over Israel's ill-treatment of the Palestinians – albeit with better publicity. "