What Happened: June 8, 2021

The Back Pages

Israel’s new president and its incoming prime minister are two very different people with something surprising in common that speaks to the strengths of one uniquely American Jewish community, friend of Tablet Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz explains in this guest edition of the Back Pages.

I woke up on June 2 to the realization that my synagogue, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, had attained a unique distinction: The new president and the next prime minister of the State of Israel were both former congregants. The new president, Isaac Herzog, had been a congregant from 1975 to 1978, while his father, Chaim, was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations; Isaac attended our sister institution, the Ramaz School, of which he is a graduate. (Isaac was, fittingly enough, elected president of the Ramaz General Organization, the school’s student government, in his senior year.) As a teenager, Isaac was very involved in the synagogue and is remembered for being an exceptional reader of the Torah and Megillot. He has remained close to the community, and was honored at the 2015 Ramaz dinner.

Naftali Bennett, who is slated to be the next prime minister, was a regular attendee of the KJ Beginners’ Service from 2004 to 2006, when he and his wife, Gilat, lived on the Upper East Side. He was engaged in the lively study discussions at the service, and Rabbi Elie Weinstock, who was then the congregation’s associate rabbi, recalls the Yom Kippur when, during a break in the service, Naftali and Gilat sang the moving Kibbutz Beit Hashita melody. Bennett has also remained close to the community and spoke at last year’s KJ dinner.

Given its history, perhaps it is no coincidence that one synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan can claim both the president and the prime minister of Israel as alumni. Rabbi Moshe Zevulun Margolies was a pioneering Zionist at the turn of the century. From 1946 to 1948, the president of the KJ Men’s Club was a leading fundraiser for underground arms smuggling to the Haganah. On June 3, 1967, two days before the Six-Day War, a Shabbat morning appeal at KJ raised a staggering $3 million for a joint UJA-Israel Bonds campaign on behalf of Israel. During the second intifada, when all other tourism had dried up, KJ shopping missions to Israel helped local merchants. Several have said the congregation’s visits saved their businesses.

KJ has always sought to put Ahavat Yisrael, the love of the Jewish people, at the center of its mission, alongside an embrace of Klal Yisrael, the totality of the Jewish world. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein played a critical role in the Soviet Jewry movement and made that activism part of the community’s DNA. As Natan Sharansky put it, “Demonstrations were part of the Ramaz curriculum.” This emphasis on Klal Yisrael is all-embracing and means putting ideology aside to work together with rabbis and synagogues from other denominations.

Klal Yisrael also meant fostering an openness to people of any background. The Men’s Club president who smuggled weapons to the Haganah was not observant and would ordinarily not have joined an Orthodox synagogue. The Beginners’ Service, which reaches out to those with little or no previous knowledge of Judaism, attracted the Bennetts to KJ; they came after they saw a flyer on a neighborhood telephone pole advertising an introductory Shabbat morning service that was “better than tennis, better than shopping, better than sleeping in.” The nonjudgmental nature of the community made a profound impact on Gilat, who was raised in a secular home.

This open, embracing, and activist form of Ahavat Yisrael influenced Herzog and Bennett. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein recalls that Isaac Herzog has often said “that his years at Ramaz set him on his life’s path of Ahavat Yisrael.” George Rohr, who founded and led the KJ Beginners’ Service, recalls that Naftali Bennett often remarked that “we needed to come from Israel to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to be taught that we have to love every Jew.”

Even when it was unpopular, KJ has stood up for its vision of community. In a 1976 article, Rabbi Joseph Lookstein wrote about preserving the ever-fragile unity of the American Jewish community. He concluded the article with these words:

Rabbi Elazar Azikri wrote a ... passage from which we all can benefit.

“When all Jews live in peace with each other, Satan cannot affect them, and the Divine presence is with them even if they are not observant.”

These words are not an encouragement for nonobservance. They are a plea for tolerance and understanding. In days of dissension and upheaval, these words can be our guide and comfort.

This passion for unity and community drew in two visitors from Israel. Hopefully it will continue to inspire them as they assume some of the most profound responsibilities in the Jewish world.

The Big Story

ProPublica had an absolute blockbuster today, the rare story that could single-handedly move public policy. The publication somehow obtained what it describes as “a vast cache of IRS information” about more than 15 years’ worth of tax returns for “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, and George Soros. In the aggregate, the 25 wealthiest people in the country paid “a true tax rate of only 3.4%” between 2014 and 2018, with Buffett’s true rate for that period amounting to a miniscule one-tenth of 1% of his publicly reported gain in net worth. Musk didn’t pay any federal income tax in 2018, matching Jeff Bezos’s feat from 2007, although Soros bested them both by paying no income taxes for three consecutive years. Any one of these facts would’ve been a front-page New York Times story on its own, and the report is a bombshell for more reasons than one: It highlights how effectively the richest and most powerful people have gamed the U.S. tax system regardless of their political orientation, contributing to the case for major reform or perhaps for the imposition of a wealth tax like the one Elizabeth Warren put at the center of her presidential campaign. But one can believe the billionaire class is getting away with murder while also being troubled by the as-yet unanswered question of how ProPublica got all of this stuff. It sure seems as if someone inside the IRS leaked confidential information about several thousand people in clear violation both of their privacy and of federal law, and even an outraged reader can wonder whether such a massive collection of scoops was worth the attendant raft of moral and legal concerns.

Read about it here: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax


The Rest

Bipartisanship isn’t dead after all: An industrial policy package, in which the U.S. federal government will provide substantial investment for the domestic semiconductor, artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing industries, is expected to pass the U.S. Senate with large majorities from both parties this week. China is the reason why—the legislation is aimed at reducing dependence on foreign products and ensuring U.S. companies remain competitive against their Chinese counterparts. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/us/politics/senate-china-semiconductors.htm 

Police in London, Ontario, have said that a hit-and-run on Sunday that killed four members of the same Muslim family was a “planned, premeditated attack motivated by hate.” Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hit-run-killed-4-believed-be-planned-islamophobic-attack-canadian-n1269904 

Although the United States is getting back to something resembling pre–March 2020 “normal,” parts of the world are still under lockdowns of an intensity that Americans can scarcely relate to. In Australia, for instance, a couple quarantining in Brisbane has been prohibited from seeing their newborn son after his emergency birth, even though both the mother and father are fully vaccinated and negative for COVID-19. Read more: https://www.theage.com.au/national/qld-rejects-melbourne-couple-s-plea-for-early-quarantine-release-to-meet-newborn 

Predictions of Israel’s diplomatic isolation after last month’s flare-up have yet to materialize: Yesterday the country was elected to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council for the first time, with 153 countries supporting Israel’s candidacy.  

Benjamin Netanyahu has until a Knesset vote on June 14 to pull a still-unlikely spoiler that would prevent a Naftali Bennett–led coalition from being sworn in. From the looks of it, things aren’t going well on that front: Likud’s official Twitter account posted a completely unhinged thread in English alleging that “@naftalibennett and @yairlapid are turning Israel into a dark dictatorship with personal laws aimed at Prime Minister Netanyahu akin to the dictates of North Korea or Iran.” Read more or, better still, don’t: https://mobile.twitter.com/Likud_Party/status/1401989416537763850 

With a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan imminent, Taliban militants have started “encircling Afghan police and army positions and encroaching on government-held territory,” waiting for the moment when government forces will no longer have U.S. air support behind them, according to the Wall Street Journal. Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghan-soldiers-gird-for-taliban-to-attack-cities-after-the-u-s-leaves-11623087970

Russia has taken its beef with the United States into low-earth orbit: Moscow is threatening to pull out of the International Space Station in 2025 if Washington, D.C., doesn’t lift sanctions that greatly complicate Russian satellite launches. Critical segments of the orbital facility are of Russian construction, although the Soyuz launch system lost its monopoly on human station access when the first Crew Dragon capsule reached the ISS from Cape Canaveral last year. Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-us-lift-sanctions-space-sector-or-well-exit-space-station-2021-06-07/

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Guatemala, where she had a message for prospective northbound migrants: “Do not come to the United States.” Harris will also be visiting Mexico on her first foreign trip since assuming the nation’s second-highest office. In both countries, the new administration is emphasizing the use of foreign aid to tackle what it sees as the “root causes” of the historic numbers of unauthorized border-crossings during the first months of the Biden presidency, which critics see as an excuse for not pursuing a more security-focused response. Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57387350

As early as May of 2020, the intelligence division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concluded that the lab-leak hypothesis of the coronavirus pandemic’s origin warranted additional investigation, citing a genomic analysis of the novel pathogen. Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-report-concluded-covid-19-may-have-leaked-from-wuhan-lab-
11623106982?mod=hp_lead_pos11

Argentinian Jew Diego Schwartzman, currently the 10th-ranked men’s tennis player on earth, has advanced to the quarterfinals of the French Open, where he’ll face Rafeal Nadal, the world number three and a living legend who knocked Schwartzman out of the semis of last year’s tournament. Schwartzman has beaten Nadal before, though. Tablet took a look at their rivalry last year: https://www.timesofisrael.com/tennis-star-schwartzman-reaches-french-open-quarterfinals-could-face-nadal-next/

Ham is not kosher, per Orthodox Union clarification. Read more: https://twitter.com/OUKosher/status/1402274753394712587