JRV1289

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: We grassroots U.S. Jews need a website of our own, with multiple views on issues confronting us and comment threads, unaffiliated with any organization. So here’s Our Grassroots American Jewish Street. You live on it.  Come make yourself heard.

Ok, I’m herewith turning it loose, “Our Grassroots American Jewish Street” on my “book’s” website, confrontingjewishissues.com. It’s under construction, just getting started, but be a sidewalk engineer and watch us grow. Be more than that – participate in our site’s growth by commenting, blogging and more as invited below and in the PowerPoint I attached.  

Why “Our Grassroots American Jewish Street”?

I called it “Our Grassroots Street” because we need to go beyond the community leadership-improving things Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser called for us to do in Betrayed: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership. They wrote:

“Ironically, for too many American Jews, the democratically-elected leaders of the Jewish state can be pilloried time and again, but the undemocratically, donor-selected leaders here may not be questioned as this would ‘break Jewish unity.’”

Jacobs and Goldwasser concluded:

“The purpose of this book [Betrayal] is to be a wake-up call for the American Jewish community to take action and hold our failing Jewish leaders and their patron donors accountable. At a time when Jews are under siege, the need for effective leadership is more urgent than ever.”

I don’t disagree, but I’d add that the task of our grassroots goes beyond demanding better communal leaders.  We have a task of our own, to be outspoken in our pride in our people and homeland.  President Trump, light-years America’s most pro-Israel president, just vowed “Israel will not ‘annex’ the ‘West Bank.’”  As I voiced in last week’s Here & Now #1288, the fault for our President grasping neither the existential magnitude of his territorial concession, i.e., of Judea-Samaria’s security and Jewish significance, nor the Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poison in the “West Bank” and “annexation” pejoratives resides not just in our leaders but in ourselves, that we tolerate in media and public speech such Jewish homeland-delegitimizing digs.

And perhaps like me, fellow grassrootsnik, you’ve tried to communicate our grassroots concerns to our communal leaders but feel you haven’t been really heard. If you read Jacobs & Goldwasser’s Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, you’ll recognize why your frustration is real.  Our community’s defense organizations and we grassroots see defending our community through different means.

My book, Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us, a subject-ordered compilation of my “best” weekly emails over some years, strives through its five parts – Our Time, Place and Role in the World; Our Heritage: Eretz Yisrael; American Jews; Our Relations With Others; and “Middle East Peace” – to make our Jewish peoplehood case, as we American Jewish grassroots see it, in these five realms. My book is copyrighted 2024, but of course the Issues Confronting Us U.S. Jews roll on.  And your own grassroots view on these doubtless differ in some ways from my own.

So for all of these reasons we U.S. Jewish grassroots, independently of our Jewish organizations, need a public square of our own, where our discordant voices arguing our different views on these issues can wrestle with each other in public comment threads – i.e., Our Grassroots American Jewish Street.

So go to https://confrontingjewishissues.com/ and look around, but before you do click the attached PowerPoint show for a first “inside look.”

Where You Can Live on Our Grassroots Street

My Weekly Email Comment Threads: What has kept me going with my weekly emails lo these twenty-four years has been the stream of replies you’ve sent, sometimes strongly disagreeing with positions I’ve taken.  I acknowledged this in dedicating Here & Now to You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly.  But now you have three ways to agree/disagree with my email each week – click “reply” as heretofore; click “Click to Leave Comment” at the email’s foot on the web, initiating a you-me-others comment thread; or initiate your comment with the word “Private,” as comments are moderated and I won’t turn those prefixed “Private” loose.

Comment on Blogs and Debates: My deal with my publisher includes a website for my book, but what’s a website for a book?  Static pages worth maybe one curious visit.  I wanted my book’s website dynamic, hence my continuing weekly emails plus blogs by grassrootsniks like me.  And beyond bloggers who don’t recognize that others are there, specific-issue debates between bloggers who do.  Debate #1 is between my friend journalist Stu Bykofsky and me on “two-states.”  Neither of us is for “the two-state solution” right now, but Stu believes maybe someday when mutual hatreds have ebbed. So come comment on all this.

Be a Grassroots Blogger Yourself:  Plunge in, you don’t need a degree in “how to blog.”  Just send me a Word doc on a current Issue Confronting Us, and if approved (for currency, etc., not the position you take), I’ll post it in your name (or nom de plume) and you and viewers can hammer away in (moderated) comment threads.

Email Me Holiday Commemoration Photos of You and Your Gang: I want our site to show us American Jewish grassroots not just arguing over Issues Confronting Us, but how we and our families commemorate our Jewish holidays throughout the year. So email me jpgs, etc. of us grassroots gathered at Passover seders, lighting the Hanukkah lights, building a Sukkah, imbibing too much on Purim, etc. 

Ideas of Yours: Whether you do any of the above things or not, you live on Our Grassroots American Jewish Street.  But live a little.  Do these things, and also suggest what more we should put on our site. 

Btw, my publisher, beyond professionally turning my Word doc manuscript into a professionally published book, built this website for my book. So the Home page features its cover alongside an “Available At” button he wants you to click.  I have no objection of course (and neither does Amazon), but then click top menu’s middle link, “Grassroots American Jewish Street.”  I’ll value your take.  (And click on the attached PowerPoint show.)

Regards,

Jerry