To: Here & Now Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Here & Now #1254, 2/2/25
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: On the web this week is the first review of my book. Stu disagrees with some of my points, but captures my aim, here and now, to get us grassroots U.S. Jews thinking about issues confronting us by inviting blogs on the book’s site by grassroots advocates of all sides on these issues.
Stu’s Review; And Why This Site Is Different From All Other Sites
Journalist Stu Bykofsky, retired veteran of 47 years as a columnist at the Philly Daily News, did a review of my book, Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us, on his stubykofsky.com website this week: “He’s a Zealot Proud Of It.” I’d have you go read Stu’s review, along with the comments, especially Randy’s.
Early on, Stu captures what I and my book are about, noting that since 2001 I’ve sent out weekly emails to “You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly,” to which Stu appends:
“I am one, and I don’t agree with everything he has to say. He’s OK with disagreement, saying his goal is to make people, mostly Jews, ‘think about issues confronting us, from anti-Israel media bias to Zionism.’”
Stu cites as one issue on which he and I disagree my joinder in “that hopeless fight to have the West Bank called Judea and Samaria.” Stu says: “That boat has sailed and despite Jerry’s accurate arguments, the boat is not coming back.”
Sure, I would like the whole world to say “Judea & Samaria” and not “West Bank,” but that’s not the issue confronting us. That issue is which name we, grassroots American Jews, should use. In my encounter with CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Mideast Reporting in America, which I greatly respect, recounted in my book, I took exception in one of my weekly emails to its suggested correction to the media having wrongly said “Israel and Palestine” to its saying “West Bank.” CAMERA replied, asking me to publish it, which I did the next week:
“Use of the terminology Judea and Samaria is historically justified. Nevertheless, the insistence that mainstream media outlets adopt a term which is used by only a very minute fraction of the world population and which ignores the political reality for some 40 percent of the West Bank in which Palestinians rule themselves guarantees irrelevance. An emailed request for use of the nomenclature ‘Judea and Samaria’ will immediately end up in the editor’s trash box.”
I protested that “that very minute fraction of the world population that uses ‘Judea & Samaria’ is us, and the more a place name that we use differs from that which the world uses, the more important it is that we use it.”
Make no mistake: “West Bank” is not a synonym of “Judea and Samaria.” It’s an antonym, coined by invader Jordan in 1950 for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judea as “Palestine” [after the long-gone Philistine sea people, not Arafat’s ancestors] – to disassociate what was Jewish from Jews.
The media lovingly calls “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical name” for the West Bank, but that biblical name remained in world use for 3,000 years, including by the UN in its Palestine partition resolution in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
Stu subscriber Randy commented to Stu’s review that he too puts up with me weekly, but that experience “many times leaves me shaking my head.” Randy concludes:
“God bless what he does. Someone, I guess, has to do it. However, several others and I wish he would state things a little less ‘strongly and direct.’ There must be some other way to state his positions. We think he might then pull in a wider audience. But with a due respect, I know that won’t happen with Jerry.”
I responded to Randy’s comment that calmness on this is not in me. “Strong and direct” is what’s driven me 1254 weeks now. But Stu put it too mildly with “he’s OK with disagreement.” What I want to place before you, fellow grassroots U.S. Jews, in your own words and mine, is both sides of the issues confronting us. The front page of my book says what matters is not whether you and I agree on these things, but that we think about them.
If I can’t convince you that we ourselves saying “West Bank,” a term designed to delegitimize us, is self-disrespecting and counter-productive, e.g., because that boat has sailed and is not coming back, or because asking others to say “Judea and Samaria” will land in their trash box, so be it. But “to think” about issues confronting us entails weighing the arguments on both sides of them. So that is why, in my response to Randy’s comment on Stu’s site, I asked him, who I often leave shaking his head, to be one of the bloggers in my almost up website.
Here are a few key issues confronting us on which I invite You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly to blog on my site – a grassroots U.S. Jews’ forum independent of the views of any organization. Just email me now that you’ll send me a Word doc or just email text now and again, which I’ll post in your name and monitor comments for abuse. Details to follow, quite soon I hope.
*** “West Bank” is just one of what by me is a slew of poisoned pejoratives comprising a loaded lexicon delegitimizing our Jewish homeland, not just in our enemies’ mouths, but in the media, public forums and common speech. Let’s wrestle with these terms, disagreeing sometimes over what’s proper and what’s a put-down – e.g., “West Bank … Occupation.”
*** Andrea Levin, head of CAMERA, is one of my heroes. Years ago, we had a conversation in which we agreed our missions are different. CAMERA works with the media seeking balanced reporting. I work with the grassroots seeking response to imbalanced reporting. Let’s contest anti-Israel media bias, not just seek endless “clearing the record” corrections.
*** The most dangerous to our Jewish homeland worldwide campaign is, by me, “the two-state solution,” ripping from it its heart and soul – historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland. Many American Jews, some of whom put up with me weekly, favor and/or see it as inevitably happening. Be one of my bloggers and blog for it.
*** Many Americans, including too many of us Jews, misbelieve basic facts about our people’s homeland. E.g., that King David was “as real as King Arthur”; that the Romans exiled us and we were gone for close to two thousand years; that the 1949 ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be borders, are Israeli’s sovereign borders; that the Western Wall is Judaism’s holiest site and the sole surviving remnant of the Temple Mount. Let’s debunk these malevolent myths.
Grassroots Bloggers Wanted: So agree with me or not, but just don’t shake your head. Come blog now and again on “U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us.”
Regards,
Jerry
