Joe Biden’s kind of rabbis

Fresh off of falsely claiming to have visited the Tree of Life synagogue where a white supremacist gunman massacred Jews, Joe Biden invited seven rabbis to a conference to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. As Daniel Greenfield reports, Biden’s selections, taken as a whole, do not look like the American Jewry, to paraphrase that leftist cliche. Instead, they look like Joe Biden’s leftist political allies.

Greenfield writes:

Reconstructionists, a secular leftist denomination that does not believe in G-d or the Bible, and loves Israel almost as much as Hamas does [note: if you read to the end of this post, you’ll see the basis for this bit of sarcasm], make up a tiny percentage of American Jews, but 2 of the 7 clergy on the call were members of the Reconstructionist movement.

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association boasts that it has “over 300 rabbis”. That means a little under 1% of its membership were on the Zoom call with Biden.

I personally know more rabbis than that.

Reconstructionist Jews may be few in number, but they are Biden’s kind of Jews.

Greenfield continues:

One survey counted over 1,400 Orthodox synagogues.

But along with the two Reconstructionists, there were two Reform rabbis, two Conservative rabbis, and one lonely Modern Orthodox Rabbi.

He was easy to spot because he was the only one without a pronoun in his name.

There are four times as many Orthodox Jews, who do believe in G-d and the Bible, than Reconstructionists who don’t believe in anything except leftist politics. But that’s the demographic that Biden’s people were pursuing. Not Jews. Just leftists.

Some years ago, Norman Podhoretz wrote a book called Why are Jews Liberals. He argued that liberalism has replaced Judaism as the faith of modern non-Orthodox American Jews. I think Norman was right, and liberalism’s subsequent lurch to the left has not caused a diminution of that faith.

Who were the two Reconstructionist rabbis Team Biden selected for his holiday conference? Greenfield informs us:

The two Reconstructionist clergy included Sandra Lawson, an African-American woman who had been raised Christian, before coming out as a lesbian, then becoming a fitness and nutrition coach, and finally a member of the reconstructionist clergy. She’s a nice enough person, but she’s also not representative of the American Jewish community. She was there so the Biden administration could virtue signal by showing off a recent graduate who was a black lesbian.

Ridiculous, but not sinister.

The second rabbi, also female, is poisonous:

And then there was Elyse Wechterman, the executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. If you can think of an anti-Israel letter, Wechterman has signed it.

Want someone to sign a letter in defense of vicious anti-semite Linda Sarsour?

Or a letter calling for “constructive engagement” with a Hamas government?

What about a J Street letter attacking anti-BDS legislation?

And a letter calling for Israel to allow BDS activists into the country?

Or, when Jews were being beaten on the streets of New York and Los Angeles, a letter in defense of the anti-semitic movements that were assaulting them in the streets?

Elyse Wechterman signed all five. . . .

None of this is surprising from the leader of a Reconstructionist movement that hates Israel.

Wechterman sits on the Reframing Israel advisory committee whose goal is to undermine support for Israel within the Jewish educational system.

Other members include Brian Walt, a militant BDS activist, and Brant Rosen, who compared Israel to Nazi Germany and defended a terrorist who helped murder Jewish college students.

Rosen used to be the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.

Biden didn’t pick the seven rabbis who participated in the conference call. Presumably, they were picked by those on Team Biden who handle Jewish/Israeli issues.

But Biden or his most trusted advisers picked that team. And the team members they picked wouldn’t have selected a group of rabbis they had any reason to believe Biden would find objectionable.

During the conference call Biden spoke out against “hate” and those who give it “oxygen.” But, as Greenfield points out:

Biden. . .keeps giving oxygen to a tiny hateful minority that hates Israel and Jews.

Whether it’s Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, or whether it’s giving a massive platform to the Reconstructionist movement and Elyse Wechterman, Biden keeps giving them oxygen.

The problem isn’t just that Biden made up a story about visiting the Tree of Life synagogue. Biden fabulates the way that other politicians breathe. It’s that Biden continues to stand with Israel’s enemies and his administration empowers the shrillest anti-Israel voices.

Even at an event meant to reach out to the Jewish community for the High Holidays, the Biden administration amplified the voices of those who hate the Jewish State over the voices of Jews.

(Emphasis added)

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