Is Anti-Semitism on the rise or is it Anti-Divinity? Because God does not share power with us.
Jesus came first for the Jews, or Hebrews, to identify the group by the ancient language they speak. That made sense since the Jews were the only monotheistic religious group (that we know of) at that time.
Many Jews followed Him. Others denounced Him and jeered as He was taken to be crucified (a decidedly ghastly and ignoble death in those times). A coterie of the Sanhendrin (the Jewish court) and Roman bureaucrats oversaw his execution. The Romans didn’t much care about His preaching – only that it was causing crowd control problems.
The Pharisees were a Jewish sect of rabbis who believed in the strict observance of rabbinical law. Most people think the Pharisees were responsible for Christ’s fate.
According to GotQuestions.com:
The Pharisees were an influential religious sect within Judaism in the time of Christ and the early church. They were known for their emphasis on personal piety (the word Pharisee comes from a Hebrew word meaning “separated”), their acceptance of oral tradition in addition to the written Law, and their teaching that all Jews should observe all 600-plus laws in the Torah, including the rituals concerning ceremonial purification.
The Pharisees were mostly middle-class businessmen and leaders of the synagogues. Though they were a minority in the Sanhedrin and held a minority number of positions as priests, they seemed to control the decision-making of the Sanhedrin because they had popular support among the people.
Among the Pharisees were two schools of thought, based on the teachings of two rabbis, Shammai and Hillel. Shammai called for a strict, unbending interpretation of the Law on almost every issue, but Hillel taught a looser, more liberal application. Followers of Shammai fostered a hatred for anything Roman, including taxation—Jews who served as tax collectors were persona non grata. The Shammaites wanted to outlaw all communication and commerce between Jews and Gentiles. The Hillelites took a more gracious approach and opposed such extreme exclusiveness. Eventually, the two schools within Pharisaism grew so hostile to each other that they refused to worship together.
The Pharisees accepted the written Word as inspired by God. At the time of Christ’s earthly ministry, this would have been what we now call the Old Testament. Unfortunately, the Pharisees gave equal authority to oral tradition, saying the traditions went all the way back to Moses. Evolving over the centuries, the Pharisaic traditions had the effect of adding to God’s Word, which is forbidden (Deuteronomy 4:2). The Gospels abound with examples of the Pharisees treating their traditions as equal to God’s Word (Matthew 9:14; 15:1–9; 23:5; 23:16, 23; Luke 11:42). Jesus applied the condemnation of Isaiah 29:13 to the Pharisees, saying, “Their teachings are merely human rules” (Mark 7:7).
The Pharisees taught the following doctrines:
1. God controls all things, but decisions made by individuals also affect life’s course.
2. There will be a resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:6).
3. There is an afterlife, with appropriate reward and punishment on an individual basis. The Messiah will set up His kingdom on earth.
4. The spiritual realm, including the existence of angels and demons, is real (Acts 23:8).
Many of the Pharisees’ doctrines put them at odds with the Sadducees; however, the two groups managed to set aside their differences on one occasion—the trial of Jesus Christ. To accomplish the demise of Jesus, the Sadducees and Pharisees united (Mark 14:53; 15:1; John 11:48–50).
The Pharisees were responsible for the compilation of the Mishnah, an important document with reference to the continuation of Judaism beyond the destruction of the temple. Rabbinical Judaism and modern-day synagogues owe their existence to the Pharisees’ work.
In the Gospels, the Pharisees are often presented as hypocritical and proud opponents of Jesus. The Lord stated it bluntly: “They do not practice what they preach” (Matthew 23:3). As a general rule, the Pharisees were self-righteousness and smug in their delusion that they were pleasing to God because they kept the Law—or parts of it, at least. As Jesus pointed out to them, however scrupulous they were in following the finer points of ritualism, they failed to measure up to God’s standard of holiness: “You have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness” (verse 23).
Of course, not every Pharisee was opposed to Jesus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee who rightly considered Jesus “a teacher who has come from God” and honestly sought answers from Him (John 3:1–2). Nicodemus later defended Jesus before the Sanhedrin (John 7:50–51) and was on hand at Jesus’ crucifixion to help bury the Lord’s body (John 19:39). Some of the early Christians were Pharisees, as well (Acts 15:5).
The apostle Paul was trained as a Pharisee, and his credentials in that group were sterling (Acts 26:5). Paul called himself “a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Philippians 3:5–6). But Paul found that his performance of the Law could not produce true righteousness. After he placed his trust in Christ’s finished work on the cross, he desired to “be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith” (verse 9). No one, not even the strictest Pharisee, is justified by keeping the Law (Galatians 3:11).
The Pharisees were fairly open-minded. The Sadducees, on the other hand:
During the time of Christ and the New Testament era, the Sadducees were a religiopolitical group that held a great deal of power among the Jews in Israel. The Sadducees confronted Jesus on occasion, attempting to trip Him up (Matthew 16:1; Mark 12:18), and they later opposed the preaching of the apostles (Acts 4:1–2).
The Sadducees, sometimes historically called “Zadokites” or “Tzedukim,” are thought by some to have been founded by a man named Zadok (or Tsadok) in the Second Century B.C. Another school of thought is that the word Sadducee is related to the Hebrew word sadaq (“to be righteous”). The Sadducees were an aristocratic class connected with everything going on in the temple in Jerusalem. They tended to be wealthy and held powerful positions, including that of chief priests and high priest, and they held the majority of the 70 seats of the ruling council called the Sanhedrin.
The Sadducees worked hard to keep the peace by agreeing with the decisions of Rome (Israel at the time was under Roman control), and they seemed to be more concerned with politics than religion. Because they were accommodating to Rome and were the wealthy upper class, they did not relate well to the common man, nor did the common man hold them in high opinion. The commoners related better to those who belonged to the party of the Pharisees. Though the Sadducees held the majority of seats in the Sanhedrin, history indicates that much of the time they had to go along with the ideas of the Pharisaic minority, because the Pharisees were more popular with the masses.
Not all priests were Sadducees, but many of them were. The Sadducees preserved the authority of the written Word of God, especially the books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy). While they could be commended for this, they definitely were not perfect in their doctrinal views. The following is a brief list of Sadducean beliefs that contradict Scripture:
1. The Sadducees were extremely self-sufficient to the point of denying God’s involvement in everyday life.
2. They denied any resurrection of the dead (Matthew 22:23; Mark 12:18–27; Acts 23:8). Due to this belief, the Sadducees strongly resisted the apostles’ preaching that Jesus had risen from the dead.
3. They denied the afterlife, holding that the soul perished at death and therefore denying any penalty or reward after the earthly life.
4. They denied the existence of a spiritual world, i.e., angels and demons (Acts 23:8).
Because the Sadducees were basically a political party rather than a religious sect, they were unconcerned with Jesus until they became afraid He might bring unwanted Roman attention. At that point the Sadducees joined with the Pharisees and conspired to put Christ to death (John 11:48–50; Mark 14:53; 15:1). Other mentions of the Sadducees are found in Acts 4:1 and Acts 5:17, and the Sadducees are implicated in the death of James the brother of John in Acts 12:1–2. The historian Josephus also connects the Sadducees to the death of James, the half-brother of Jesus.
Since the Sadducees left no written description of themselves, all we know about what they believed or what they did is what is found in the Bible and second-hand sources. According to most historical records, including those of Josephus, the Sadducees were rude, arrogant, power-hungry, and quick to dispute with those who disagreed with them.
The Sadducees ceased to exist as a group in A.D. 70, when Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Romans.
Their number one characteristic (1. The Sadducees were extremely self-sufficient to the point of denying God’s involvement in everyday life.) is a very telling description, one that applies to Christians and Jews alike who attain wealth. The wealthier and self-sustaining they become, the less “use” they have for God – or Jesus.
They do pride themselves on their generosity, especially at Christmas. But they seem to fall a little short when it comes to thankfulness and gratitude to God.
There was a time when they an anathematized race in the centuries after Christ’s death. However, their problems with God go way back to the beginning, with Adam and Eve and the apple (historians believe the apple was a pomegranate, noted for properties that allegedly imparted immortality to those who ate it).
The Flood of Noah’s time when God became so disgusted with Mankind’s immorality that He flooded the Earth, saving on Noah and his sons and their wives. God felt badly afterwards – but only for killing the birds and animals (also his creations) which had committed no sins. He set a rainbow in the sky, vowing never to destroy the Earth and its four-legged and winged creatures again by a flood.
That didn’t mean Mankind was off the hook. God reduced their lifespan by a considerable number of years.
Then, Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah, grew to manhood. He was angry with God for destroying Mankind. He contrived to build a great tower with which to challenge God. He built cities for humans to live in as well. This was not what God had in mind. He wanted humans to populate the planet, till its soil and so forth.
So, God scrambled their languages to thwart any cooperation on this project, this Tower of Babel (as in Babylon). Nimrod cursed God and set about the lands spreading pagan religions in his own name and his wife’s. His great-uncle caught up with him and put him on trial. After he was executed, his remains were spread wherever he had preached as a warning to pagan worshippers.
But his wife went to those same places and created temples in his name, using the language of whatever district the temple was in.
Sin was on the move once again. So, God selected Abram and gave him the land of Canaan for his children and generations beyond. Abram built an altar to God at Bethel (House of God). He and his family went down into Egypt during a famine.
Abram and his nephew Lot divided up the land in the south between them. Sodom and Gomorrah were fertile lands then. But their kings were at war with three other kingdoms. In the midst of these battles, the other kings kidnapped Lot and stole the wealth of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Abram rescued his nephew and returned the goods to Sodom and Gomorrah. Meanwhile, Abram and his wife, Sarai, weren’t getting any younger and they were still childless. Abram asked God just who he was going to bequeath the land to and Sarai laughed at the idea of bearing at child at such an old age.
Never laugh at God. Abram had one child by his wife’s maid, Ishmael, and another by his wife, Sarai. God made a covenant with Abraham, as God now called him. Ishmael, his first-born would be well cared for. But Isaac, his child by Sarah (as she was now called) would carry forth the covenant.
“A father of many nations have I made thee.”
In the midst of Abraham’s covenant with God, matters were not going so well in Sodom and Gomorrah. Evil men and women had taken hold of the cities, committing unspeakable acts of sodomy (homosexuality). God sent angels (who were set upon by a violent mob and given shelter by Lot) to warn Lot to take his family and get out of town because He was about to destroy with a rain of fire.
Lot left but his wife made the mistake of looking back (presumably on their life there) and was turned into a pillar of salt. Scientists in our time have calculated that an asteroid struck a mountain in the Alps, sending a rain of fire back down upon the Dead Sea region.
This is all within about 25 pages of the Old Testament. Abraham passed his test with God, agreeing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in the name of the Lord. It was just a test, however, and God provided a ram at the last minute, sparing Isaac.
Some centuries later, God ordered Moses to tell the Egyptian pharaoh to release His people from Egypt – or else. You know the story of course. The plagues. The beginning of Passover. The parting of the Red Sea. The Ten Commandments.
But God’s people had taken on the pagan customs of Egypt. While Moses was upon the mountain with God, the Jews had returned to worshipping golden idols and immoral conduct. When Moses returned, he smashed the tablets and had to go back for a reset. God didn’t just have Moses write everything down. He actually came down among the people so they could hear the commandments for themselves.
The Jews, however, were terrified, and begged Moses not to have Him speak to them again. So, Moses became their spokesman and from the word of God, constructed an ark for the commandments so that God’s word would be with them.
Pretty soon, the Jews began complaining to Moses. What had he done to them, leading them out into a wilderness with nothing to eat or drink. God heard them and was merciful, sending them quails and dew. Even so, the mob was still ready to stone Moses.
So God sent him to the rock of Horeb. In the presence of the elders, he hit the rock and out came the water. But for their ongoing impiety, God cursed them and said they would wander in the desert for 40 years. As for Moses, for arguing about who discovered the water, God commanded that he would come in sight of the holy land but not live to set foot in it.
Well, the Jews, being fallible humans, were constantly getting themselves into trouble with God. We’ll skip to the last books of the Old Testament where the Jewish men took pagan, Hellenized wives (remember Nimrod?) and defiled the holy temple in Jerusalem with bloody sacrifices to the pagan god Tammuz. Remember that name.
In verse 14, Ezekiel expresses his “dismay” at yet a greater abomination: “women . . . weeping for Tammuz.” This is another pagan practice, a very sexual one involving ritual prostitution. Ezekiel saw them involved in a rite in which they were mourning the death of a Mesopotamian god whose myth said he was resurrected to new life, a mockery of the redeeming death and life-giving resurrection of the true Son of God. This vision reveals that paganism had deeply affected the women in Israelite society as well.
In verse 16, the prophet sees a fourth vision in the inner court of the Temple—”about twenty-five men with their backs toward the temple and their faces toward the east, and they were worshipping the sun toward the east.” This is obviously some sort of pagan sunrise service, in which they honor the sun more highly than God, to whom they contemptuously show their backsides.
Each abomination is described as being greater in wickedness than the one before. In verse 17, God asks, “Is it a trivial thing to the house of Judah to commit abominations which they commit here [in the Temple!]? For they have filled the land with violence; then they have returned to provoke Me to anger.”
These leaders displayed no social responsibility whatsoever. They led their society to become one of rape and rapine, murder and violence in every quarter. Yet these hypocritical leaders dared to return to God’s Temple, retiring furtively to its inner rooms to practice their pagan rites “in the dark” (verse 12).
So, God sent Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, to Jerusalem to defeat and punish the Jews. In the second battle, Neb razed Jerusalem to the ground, leaving only a few survivors behind. The rest he brought back with him to Babylon as prisoners and slaves.
Eventually, they returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple again, but it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. The Jews are silent on why it was destroyed. Christianity holds that the temple will not be restored again until Jesus returns to rebuild it himself.
The Jews had long since decided to look for wisdom outside the Torah and began studying the Greek philosophers. The Talmud has served as the basis for all codes of rabbinic law. The entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in the standard print, called the Vilna Shas, there are 2,711 double-sided folios. It is written in Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis (dating from before the Common Era through to the 5th Century A.D.) on a variety of subjects, including halakha, Jewish ethics, philosophy, customs, history, and folklore, and many other topics. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law and is widely quoted in rabbinic literature.
We Christians thought that was what the Torah was for. Who knew that you could just make up your own religious laws?
For centuries afterwards, the Jews found themselves without a home, especially when the Muslims conquered the Holy Land. To this day, they hold the keys to the temple, the dome of which Osama Bin Laden’s father built.
The Renaissance was the rebirth of classical learning, literature, and art, after a long period of Christian-inspired art and music via the Roman Catholic Church. Scholars both Jewish and secular turned away from what they considered the “dogmatism” of the church and reclaimed a space for “humanism,” first inspired by Aristotle.
Universities required their students to know Greek and Latin, and Hebrew. They studied the Greek myths and subsequent literature contained references to the Greek gods, even though no less a Greek than Socrates himself warned against teaching students about these murderous, profane, and libidinous gods. For speaking against the gods, Socrates was tried and condemned to death. He accepted his fate calmly, even though the authorities were willing to allow him a chance to escape. But he replied he would not go against the law and drank the hemlock.
University and college students soon established fraternities (and later, sororities) in the fashion of the ancient Greeks, complete with Greek names for the fraternities and secret initiation rituals. The top 10 schools became known as the “Ivy League Schools,” ivy being one of the hallucinogenic drugs which ancient initiates had to ingest.
Soon, these Ivy League schools became so expensive and exclusive that only the wealthiest families could afford to send their sons to them. Graduates were assured a place in the top ranks of society in Europe and America.
But the Jews found themselves excluded from society. They were forced to convert to Christianity or live in ghettos. Christians, it seems, could not accept the fact that Jesus had forgiven the Jews and their Sanhedrin, the Romans, the pagans, the Gentiles and anyone else complicit in his trial. He forgave them from the Cross.
Only one Gospel – Luke – refers to it:
And when they were come to the place, which Is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” And they parted is raiment and cast lots [for it]. Luke 23:33-34
Biblical scholars often complain that the four accounts are not always consistent. That not all his followers were forgiving of the Romans, the Sanhedrin, the Zealots and others is hardly surprising and did not quote Jesus, in this instance, in their accounts. It’s enough that Luke did.
Some years ago, around Christmas time, the department in which I was working was getting ready for the Christmas season. She was Jewish. No one was bothered by it. She just kept repeating, “I don’t get it.” Everyone knew that you didn’t take up the Jews about Christmas. If they didn’t want to celebrate, well, that was about them.
Still, she kept repeating herself. “I don’t get it.” Something, it seemed to me, was troubling her.
“Why?” I asked her, very politely. “Do you want to “get” it.”
She said that she didn’t know. She said a woman in her apartment who was Catholic had told her that she and all the other Jews were damned for eternity for the death of Jesus Christ.
Now we were getting somewhere.
“No,” I pronounced. “That’s wrong. Jesus forgave His persecutors from the Cross itself, as he was dying.”
“He did?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s right there in the New Testament. I forget which Gospel it’s in. But he forgave the Jews and the Romans. Everyone. That neighbor of yours knows that or should know it. You tell her for me that she’s wrong and should go back and read the Bible again. You’re fine. You have nothing to worry about.”
I was busy fussing with some Christmas decorations. Still, the young lady lingered.
“Do you know want to know about Jesus?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. My family will be mad.”
“Well, Jesus did say that he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword, to divide a daughter from a mother, a son from a father.”
“Look, I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell the story. I’m a sinner, of the worst sort,” I laughed. “It’s not like in those ancient days, when most people were illiterate. That was part of Jesus’ mission – to bring word to the poor and dispossessed, since in those days, you kind of had to pay a fee in order to enter the temple to worship God.
“These days you can just pick up a Bible and read about Jesus. But I’ll try to give you the short version. He was born to a poor, peasant girl and a carpenter. Only He wasn’t the carpenter’s son – he was God’s. God was fed up with the sins of his worshippers. So, He decided to send a messenger – His own Son – to give them one last chance to get it right. When he was about 30, He decided to make it his mission in life to bring the word of God to the people.
“He taught the people that God loved them and that He was there to forgive their sins. He taught them to love another and to forgive their enemies, to do good to those who wronged them. He – and his Apostles – healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, made lame men walk, fed the masses and raised people from the dead. The last was His greatest miracle and earned the praise of the people as The Messiah and the wrath of the Sanhedrin, mainly the Sadducees, who had robbed the people of their lands, leaving them to beg in the cities, and forbade the poor to enter the temple.
“The Sanhedrin were furious. They arrested him in the middle of the night, when few priests other than the Sadducees would be there. When the chief priest, Caiaphas, asked Jesus if he was the Messiah, the Son of God, Jesus replied that He was. Caiaphas was so angry that he ripped his robes in two.
The big ham. Anyway, after the trial, they hung him on a cross with two murderers. Usually, it took a long time for the condemned to die that way. That was kind of the point. These were Romans and they were sadistic. But Jesus died after only 9 hours. The Romans were rather surprised. The Bible says Jesus died of a broken heart. One of the members of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, asked for the body and buried Jesus in a sealed tomb, guarded by Roman soldiers and Temple guards.
“Three days later, his female followers came to the tomb and found that it was empty. The guards had fainted dead away (the Romans and the Sanhedrin claimed they were drunk). A man appeared and spoke to one of the women, Mary of Magdalene. He asked why she was looking for Jesus in the tomb, that Jesus wasn’t there. Then she saw that it was Jesus.
“Eventually, He appeared to all his followers. He told them His mission was to serve as a blood sacrifice to God, to wipe out mankind’s record of sins forever and give the repentant eternal life.”
She’d listened all this time quietly. We didn’t dare tarry longer. Our supervisor was a true Roman; all she needed was the whip.
“Well, I’m not here to convert anyone. It’s up to you. You can read all about Jesus, like I said, for yourself, and make up your own mind.”
Sometime after the New Year, she approached me with news: She and her husband had converted to Christianity.
“What?!” I exclaimed. I was glad, yet horrified. Jewish families did not take such conversions away from Judaism lightly. They were known to disown their children for doing it.
“But – but – your family,” I spluttered.
“Yeah…they weren’t happy about it. They disowned me,” she said sadly.
“Oh no!” I cried. “Maybe I shouldn’t have…”
“No,” she said firmly. “I had to do it. I read about Him, like you said, and well…. It’ll be all right.”
Norman Podhoretz wrote in his 2009 book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, that the Catholic Church issued an edict around 1969 that absolved all Jews from blame in the matter of Christ’s crucifixion. They were about 1,969 years late, but better late than never. Jesus had already forgiven them.
Podhoretz details the Jews drift towards the Left and humanism in some detail, starting around the time of Christ’s death and Christianity’s subsequent reaction to it, even though God’s Chosen People had been drifting away from His commandments for some time before Christ was born.
Some sects didn’t even recognize the writings of prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, telling of the coming of the Chosen One. Isaiah was very specific, even to what he would look like and what kind of man he would be (decidedly not a warrior-king).
Not even handsome, making it difficult for normal human beings to accept Him as their Savior. He certainly wasn’t what the Jews were expecting. Others apparently predicted that God would punish the Jews with permanent wandering for flouting His laws and playing a part in his Son’s death.
That is how Christianity in general viewed them. The Jews were a hated and despised “race” throughout the Dark Ages, into the Middle Ages and right into the present up until World War II when the maniac Hitler and the chicken farmer, Hitler, decided on a “final solution” to the “Jewish question,” a question that had been asked for centuries.
Jesus gave them the answer: forgive them. But His own followers weren’t heeding His teaching, even from the Cross.
If the Jews were of the Sadducistic turn – arrogant, greedy, power-hungry – then were Christians wrong in their accusations that the Jews had become bankers capable of casting the poor off their own lands, as they had done in Jerusalem?
After the World War II Holocaust, it was unthinkable to make such a charge, as Hitler had, against them. Relatives back in Germany during the Depression, before the war, said that the Jewish women had a tendency to flaunt their jewels while peasant Germans were starving.
My parents attended a Jewish majority high school and they – and their families – had hailed the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Marxism as the path to a new more just world. The Jewish students ruled the school, being the majority. My mother was a pre-World War II student (she graduated in 1940, before the attack on Pearl Harbor). She had no reverence for the Jewish people, keeping in mind that word of the Holocaust hadn’t yet reached America.
But she had no particular hatred of them. Her dentist was Jewish. Attending a majority Jewish high school, she and my father admired – and shared – their studious love of learning. She never said so, however, whatever “annoyance” she had with them probably would have had to do with arrogance and clannishness.
No one ever speaks of it, but the Jews – some of them – do harbor resentment and even hatred of Christians. No doubt returning the “favor”. I once attended a baby-naming when a Jewish friend had a baby. I had no problem with listening to what they had to say, which is that there could be no bridge between God and Man; that the two were permanently severed, and that Man was condemned to an endless cycle of birth and death, with no hope of Heaven and no belief at all in Hell.
They didn’t believe in Satan I was told by someone else at another time. The rabbi at the baby-naming ceremony greeted me with eyes glistening with hatred. He greeted me with bitterness and said something about Christianity which I no longer remember.
Another time, I was at the local K-Mart to buy Christmas decorations. A woman was walking back and forth in front of some decorations. She was crying. I asked if she was all right.
She said that she was trying to find a Christmas decoration to give as a gift to Christian friend who’d married a Jewish man. She said the husband wouldn’t allow his wife to decorate the house for Christmas, even though when they married they had agreed they would honor both religions during the holidays. She didn’t know what ornament to buy that wouldn’t offend him.
I believe I told her to buy a non-denominational Frosty the Snowman type decoration.
I had the same question Norman Podhoretz had about why Jews leaned so far over to the Left. A woman online told me that the Jews who voted in such great numbers for Democrats were non- observant Jews. Jews In Name Only. She said they didn’t even follow the laws of Moses, but the Talmud – their own rabbinical writings – rather than the Torah.
Robert W. Iversen wrote in his 1959 book, The Communists and the Schools (The Communists and the Schools, Iversen, Robert W. Harcourt, Brace 1959 New York) that great numbers of Jews had come to New York in the late 19th Century after the czarist pogroms, when Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe were driven off their lands and into the slums. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar and the Socialist government, the Jewish residents of the Bronx and Queens were thrilled. They welcomed the new order of Marxism.
In the early 20th Century, they initially sent their children to specific Marxist schools. The workers established labor unions. They were very busy “organizing.” Only Protestant Americans wasn’t very happy about bringing down capitalist business and Irish Catholics weren’t thrilled at all about atheism.
The Marxists scrupled not to blame Protestants for the mistreatment of the Jews. That was true in Europe, Podhoretz notes, but not in America. In America, Jewish businessmen with a bent for trade quickly became successful. They went from working as traveling salesmen to opening stores and even franchises. The Protestant country clubs of Westchester County in New York were closed to them, so they opened their own.
Today, Westchester County is predominantly Jewish.
The Marxists also sought to aggravate tensions between the Irish Catholics and the German Protestants. Naturally, the Marxists took up the cause of the poorer Irish Catholics. But there was plenty of hatred for the Protestants on the part of the Irish and Italians. Non-Catholics were not even permitted to enter their churches. You had to have gone through the religious training – learned the catechisms – in order to pray in a Catholic church.
My father family was German Catholic. They called my mother some pretty awful names and when she refused to agree to raise her children Catholic, the Church would not permit the marriage ceremony to take place there. What’s more, my father was ex-communicated.
So, you know, bigotry works both ways.
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of “mental illnesses.” In fact, it was considered a deviation that could be treated. Who made up the APA in 1973? The greatest number of psychiatrists and psychologists in the United States can be found in the metro New York-New Jersey area, along with Westchester County and Long Island. Only 20 percent of its members disagreed with the change (this New Year’s Eve, the Times Square Ball will be composed of triangles – the symbol for homosexuality, or to be more specific, male homosexuality).
You would have only had to look at the Yellow Pages to determine the APA’s composition. But that would have been anti-Semitic. Yet, after World War II and the Holocaust, Americans became more sympathetic towards the Jews.
And were supportive of the state of Israel’s right to exist. The Jewish people themselves were not so supportive. In fact, they didn’t give a fig leaf about Israel. At the time, more Jewish people lived in the Metro New York area than in Israel.
Bejamin Netanyahu was just sworn in for the sixth time as prime minister of Israel. A Conservative, he’s been given a tough time of it. Still, nothing works quite like success. Under Netanyahu, Israel has been prosperous and relatively peaceful (thanks to Pres. Trump). But like the United States, Israel is a divided nation.
Newsmax interviewed Israeli citizens about Netanyahu’s election. One woman stated she was glad that a Conservative was elected and that it would reflect the fact that Israel is a religious nation.
Activists here in America have long been plotting to turn Israel into another Marxist state, eventually leading to its dissolution. Jewish high school seniors were invited to attend Kutz Camps. The purpose was to train them to run communes – as in “communism” – in Israel. Think of one of those real estate “conferences” where a real estate agent tries to sell potential buyers into purchasing homes in a select community.
The Kutz Kamp was just a three-day affair. My mother’s bus company was hired to transport the students from the airport, where they had arrived from all over the country, to the camp in Downstate New York.
Mom drove several of these charters. She allowed me to ride along on one trip. My older brother was driving the other bus. They were coming to take the students to the airport to go home.
When we arrived, the students still weren’t ready. Instead of boarding the buses quickly, as they had a flight to make, they hung upon one another’s shoulders, weeping and crying and wailing.
“Stop this!” Mom shouted. “Get on the bus! You’re going to miss your flights!!” Mom was always very punctual. Still, they continued crying – and the camp organizer encouraged them into yet another prayer circle, ending in more weeping and crying.
“What are they crying about?! Mom exclaimed in exasperation. “They don’t even know each other! They’ve only been here three days!”
“Stop crying! What are you crying for?! We’re taking you home to your families, not the ovens!”
Mom. She never pulled any punches. I clamped my hands over my mouth to stop laughing. Even in the early 1970s, you didn’t make fun of the Jews. I looked back at my older brother, standing by his bus. He was laughing, too.
She and the organizer got into the fight. He said something nasty to her and seemed to menace her. God help him if he had done anything.
“They’ve got to get on the buses or they’re going to miss their flights! We’re already late!”
Finally, the students got on the buses. After they got off the buses at the airport, Mom explained that they were being indoctrinated to give up two years of their lives before college to work on these communes in Israel.
Academia, publishing and entertainment were filled with Jewish “intellectuals” and an anti-fascist, Marxist message, even though they enjoyed greater religious freedom here in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
Jewish-Americans have a special place in American musical entertainment. They’re fantastic musicians – there’s simply no other word for it. The Jewish musicians I’ve known and played with locally have such a feeling for the music and play with such beauty and skill that it leaves you almost dumbfounded.
Irving Berlin, the Jewish composer of “White Christmas,” was born in Imperial Russia, coming to America at the age of five. He told a biographer his only memory of living in Russia was of his house being burnt down. The family was happy to be in America. He took a job hawking newspapers on the streets of the Bowery. Music was coming from the many saloons and bars in the area, and he would sing while selling the newspapers (his father had been a cantor back in Russia).
Soon he became an itinerant singer with a group of other boys, begging on the streets at the taverns. He worked his way up to becoming a singing waiter at a café in Chinatown. In his spare time, he taught himself to play the piano.
Of course, there were plenty of Christian composers, too. Something about those long ago times, before mechanical and electronic devices did all the work for it, made people better and more enthusiastic musicians.
As for the rest of the entertainment industry, there was a battle between ethnic Jewish sensibilities and Christian morals. Many of the major film producers were Jewish and directors were infamous for their casting couch proclivities. Adding to the problem of immorality was the refusal of theater owners to provide performers with any sort of privacy in which to change costumes. Often, actors and actresses had to change in drafty hallways in the middle of winter.
One thing led to another in such environments… The stars, of course, were equally sensational in their peccadillos, even in the Golden Age of film. American women gobbled up the gossip.
Then there was the Russian Jewish literature beginning in the late 19th Century. During this period, following Freud’s sexual analyses, the “psychological novel” was born. These novels made for dreadful reading, the kind that could easily send a college student into a depression.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace was an exception. People complain that it’s too long. Actually, Tolstoy was a clever novelist. The book was long – but the paragraphs were short, sending the reader galloping through the story before they knew where they were.
By the Sixties, American culture and morality was finished. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a Christian-born American socialist who supporting atheism and separation of church and state. In 1963 she founded American Atheists magazine. However, her claim to fame came when she sued the Baltimore public schools for mandating prayers and Bible readings in school on behalf of her first son. Murray-O’Hair had a degree in law, although she did not pass the bar. She managed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court which, in combination with another case,
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), was a case in which the Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for New York state officials to compose an official school prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools, due to violation of the First Amendment. Unlike the Murray-O’Hair case, three of the plaintiffs were Jewish, one was a member of the Unitarian Church (nicknamed the Un-Church) and one was a representative of a secular humanist movement, Its leader at the time, Felix Adler, was also a Jewish intellectual (that makes four).
Adler was a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. A precursor to the doctrines of the Ethical movement can be found in the South Place Ethical This group traced its roots back to The Ethical Movement which was an outgrowth of the general loss of faith among the intellectuals of the Victorian Era Society, founded in 1793 as the South Place Chapel on Finsbury Square, on the edge of the City of London.
Eventually, this movement would give rise to The Fabian Society in 1884. This movement included not just Jewish intellectuals, but Christians as well as feminists and other socialist activists.
Something about intellectualism, combined with accumulated wealth, seems to have turned the Jewish intellectuals away from their own religion. They regard religion as “oppressive” especially when it comes to sexual morality.
They blame Christians – WASPS or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – for stifling them. But Christians follow the teachings of both the Old and New Testaments. The Jews are beginning to realize that people are catching on and now Jews are also being barred from exhibiting religious displays publicly.
They identify as Ethnic Jews. But apparently that’s the only “Jewish” thing about them. They promote atheism, pornography, homosexuality, transgenderism, prostitution, abortion, freedom for criminals, the legalization of drugs and all manner of other cultural chaos. They advocate for censorship of free speech and property ownership, despite owning huge mansions on Long Island’s Gold Coast.
They have adopted Socialism, or Marxism as their new religion and vote for Democrats in impossible numbers, even when, as Norman Podhoretz notes, “it’s not in their best interests” to vote for big government. Isn’t it? If they’re lawyers in lobbying firms, the owners of newspapers, or news broadcasting stations, or magazine publishers, it is. Seventh Avenue, where fashion happens has its roots in Jewish merchandising. Once upon a time, women’s clothes were beautiful. Then there are the advertising agencies, which play a crucial role in advancing culture.
Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like a couple of gay guys toasting one another with champagne, as we’ve seen this Christmas season in an ad for tourism in New York’s Dutchess County. Dutchess County is home to the very privileged Vassar College, one of the “Seven Sisters,” all-female colleges. You have to be pretty good academically to attend Vassar. Even if you were class valedictorian, if you’re from a middle-class background, you’ll have a hard time keeping up with these upper-class society gals. Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, Jane Fonda, and Meryl Streep were some of its notable grads.
Most of all, they raise their hackles if anyone criticizes them on their Jewish background. Anyone who dares question them is accused of being anti-Semitic, or even f Dscist. They bristle at the notion that America is a “Christian” nation. Modern Christians were perfectly willing to acknowledge the Jewish rosocots of Christianity. After all, Jesus was Jewish. There used to be a group called “Jews for Jesus” which meant with hostility from mainstream Jewish leaders.
However, Jesus recognized the corruption and arrogance in the Jewish leadership, particularly the Sadducees. He was a threat to their power and they took care of him, while manipulating the Romans (who needed no urging at all) to crucify Jesus as a criminal and a threat to the Roman Empire.
Everyone talks about the Jewish question. The Jews claim they fear another holocaust. One could come from the Muslim world. They want to wipe out the Christians, too, you know. They fear a true “Christian” nation which would establish Christianity as its state religion, something the U.S. Constitution (which they strangely want to discard) clearly prevents.
Christian churches are losing membership. As more adults graduate from college, their intellectual education supplants whatever religious education they might have had. Families have been breaking up since the Sixties, although we’ve finally arrived at some sort of plateau for divorces.
No one, except for the Muslims and some hotheads on the Right AND the Left, want another holocaust. No one wants to wipe out the Jews. We’re not worried about their religion. But their political radicalization is concerning. Clearly, they’ve rejected Mosaic Law in favor of Greek
Humanism.
Being Jewish can be very useful in terms of politics and demographics. But if we were to ask them a question, it would be: “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know that Jesus came for YOU? ‘I came for my own first.’ He came to get the Jews back on track with God and His laws. Anyone else who wanted to tag along, well, that was okay by Him. But He was mainly concerned about what was happening with God’s Chosen People.
But maybe you already knew that and that’s why you hate Him and his followers so intensely.
Surely, you realize that this is not going to end well – for you or the rest of us. It’s not too late to ask for God’s mercy and forgiveness and return to His rule.
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