Now At The Cafe • Catering They're not budging. The first major review of my book in a Jewish publica- don, the Bronfman Philanthropy-funded Jerusalem Report called me a "yoga-prac- ticing atheist Jew from New York's East Village," right in the lead paragraph! I'm an atheist because, like most think- ing adults, I don't believe in an all-power- ful creature with the white beard who rejoices in animal sacrifice. I get that. But the yoga-practicing and East Village part? Is that supposed to be evidence of how far I've strayed — in neighborhood and exercise regime — from the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Jews belong? And recently, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York — headquarters of the biKest, most central Jewish organi- zation in America — yanked an interview that one of their writers conducted with me from their Web site, along with all mention in their calendar of a benefit I'm doing in their auditorium for a Jewish social justice charity. All because, according to the editor, "a heightened sensitivity to some of the topics we discussed emerged here at UJA-Federation once it was actually posted." Gotta love the Internet: The entire interview was immediately reposted to a webzine called Jewsweek, along with an account of the whole fiasco. A week later, the excised text reappeared on the UJA site, albeit with a new title and a framing paragraph about how "Douglas Rushkoff likes to sound off." A UJA representative now says that the only problem with the original interview was the title. I'm not the only one who is facing such knee-jerk reactions from the institutions dominating public Jewish discourse. Rabbi David Wolpe, a respected and published rabbinic scholar now on the pulpit at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, made the headlines for daring to suggest to his congregation that the Exodus may not really have happened the way it was described in the Bible. Or at all. Though this question has been pon- dered out loud by rabbis ever since there were rabbis, today it is too dan- gerous a topic, and Wolpe is decried as a "silver-tongued devil." Why? Because Jews are afraid, and the institutions that should be helping them conquer their ignorance are instead stoking it to further solidify their grasp on Judaism's future. The darker picture they paint of Judaism's plight — the further synagogue mem- bership dwindles, the greater Israel's peril — the more money they raise. Every suicide attack on Israel and each negative report on intermarriage statistics lead to a surge in donations. So it's in the fundraisers' interest to foster panic instead of discussion, and to turn their agendas into inviolably sacred truths. Yet they are not entirely to blame. It is we who must challenge these holy assumptions if we're going to break free from top-down religion and start to think for ourselves again — the way Judaism demands. The first forbidden topic is race. The Jews' crucial error has been accepting our enemies' contention that we are a race. We are not. The first character in the Torah to mention an "Israeli people" was Pharaoh, and he was looking for an excuse to kill off those he feared wouldn't support him in a war. The concept of "Jewish blood" was invented during the Spanish Inquisition, so that they would still have an excuse to slaughter former Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Best yet, it was Hitler, gently reworking a bit of Jung, who claimed that Jews' "genetic memory" would keep them from ever fully accepting the natural German order. Two millennia of being treated as a despised race might convince any people that it's true. Ironically, Jews were being persecuted, at least in part, for their very refusal to accept such false boundaries. Local gods, ethnic purity and national religions meant nothing to this amalga- mation of formerly disparate tribes. Moses' wife was black, for God's sake. How much clearer can the story get about race not being the issue here? By hanging on to racehood, Jews get to hang on to an immature under- standing of chosenness. ("I like know- ing that God loves us the best," a woman told me after a recent talk.) Along with being God's chosen peo- ple, however, come the racism and elitism that undermine our ethics, but empower our central authorities. If Judaism is not a race, then who exactly are we not supposed to inter- marry with? They won't tell you that this whole matrilineal descent business isn't part of Judaism, at all, but a rem- nant of the Roman census conducted in the second century. Assimilation has always been the Jews' best strategy. Our mandate in Torah is not to protect ourselves from others, but to "share our light" with them. Part of the reason we don't know any of this is that we've relegated our Judaism to our authorities. 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