Thread by @SethAMandel

1. This Tablet piece should have been earthshaking, but like so much these days, it wasn't The Story of the Day--and it's a bit inside baseball. But it illuminates a crucial trend: what I term the divide between Political Judaism and Theological Judaism. tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

2. The piece, by Sean Cooper, is about an umbrella org you've probably heard about and read quotes from: Bend the Arc. It counts as major donors Warren Buffett's son Peter and the Rockefeller Brothers. So the piece wonders: why are non-Jews propping up *only* this Jewish org?

3. Stosh Cotler, the head of Bend the Arc, provides the answer in the form of two statements that explain Political Judaism.

Here's the first: “Let’s discontinue this framework of Jewish continuity because it is actually the symptom, not the problem.”

4. Stosh Cotler's second key statement: "The organization’s overt and aggressive political actions were quite intentional, however, and grew out of what Cotler described to me as the 'very deliberate shift in building Bend the Arc as a political organization.'"

5. That is, Bend the Arc wants explicitly to turn Judaism into something it isn't--ending Jewish continuity and replacing it with instrumentalizing Jewish Americans into non-Jewish political battle.

6. Why? Same reason ppl rob banks, as the joke has it: “the vast majority of American Jews considered economic justice issues, racial justice issues, and immigration issues as the core factors in who they vote for, who they make their donations to,” Cotler said.

7. So it is, by admission, a mercenary organization that realized the money was not in Judaism, it was in left-wing politics. So the Buffetts and Rockefeller Fund understood immediately that this was a way to pretend to fund Jewish causes while actually undermining the Jews.

8. I don't want to get into it now, but the article at length establishes how much of this revolved around Obama administration figures and ideologies. Consider that a sequel thread to be done at another time--Obamaworld's role in undermining Jewish continuity.

9. An earlier iteration of BtA brought synagogues into th fold: "For congregations that had been organizing local coat drives and food pantry collections, Ross oversaw the evolution of their traditional community self-care to an approach that was more overtly political in nature"

10. That official, Benjamin Ross, told Tablet “It was a big shift for synagogues from just doing direct service work to thinking about systemic change.”

Indeed it was. And as is clear from this, it was intentional. Over a hundred synagogues were in the network.

11. “It’s a new thing for my congregation,” Rabbi Janet Liss, who took part in BtA's political organizing in her area, told Cooper. “But that’s what Bend the Arc is about.”

12. There's a lot more in the Tablet piece about the history, and I highly recommend reading it all. But essentially what happened was: a couple of activists took the reins of liberal Jewish organizing and excised the Judaism by flexing their hold on funding.

13. That funding, meanwhile, was coming from non-Jews. So you have non-Jewish political funders propping up a group that has admittedly and operationally taken liberal Judaism in America away from Judaism and consciously into a certain stream of political action.

14. Warren Buffett's son and a small circle of Obama vets determining what happens at your synagogue? Welcome to Political Judaism, explicitly opposed to Jewish continuity and communal support.

15. It matters for another reason. If you pick up mainstream newspapers you will see folks from these networks quoted representing the Jewish community. The picture of Judaism you get is *completely* false. The American Jewish community walking off a cliff for Peter Buffett.

16. In all my research--which is thorough--nothing like this appears elsewhere in the modern world. Only American Judaism has given up on Judaism, outside of its observant minority of course. This is an existential threat, and media and business leaders are complicit.

/fin