If I were an American Jew, I’d worry about Israel’s racist cancer

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, second from right and near Martin Luther King, in 1965. Heschel is one good role model for American Jews. Photo by AP

Daniel Blatman(Daniel Blatman is a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.)
"When sitting down to Shabbat dinner with my adult children, I would hear that Israel no longer represents the values on which they were raised: human dignity, equal rights, a pluralistic society, and the obligation to fight for the weak and the persecuted. In the eyes of America’s future economic and political leaders, Israel no longer has a place in the family of enlightened nations. It has become the South Africa of the 21st century.
If I were an American Jew, I would recall that Jews made up about 30 percent of civil rights activists in the U.S. South in the 1950s and ‘60s. Rabbis such as Julian Feibelman in New Orleans, Ira Sanders in Arkansas, Perry Nussbaum in Mississippi and Jacob Rothschild in Atlanta opened their synagogues to black activists and supported the movement openly and fearlessly."