Scaremongering for dollars? 'Tis the season...

Just to remind me the end of the tax year is nigh, my Facebook feed just produced a new report titled, "Europe Turns Blind Eye to Anti-Semitism". The content doesn't even back up that outrageous claim.

In the waning weeks of summer, before the Jewish High Holidays, numerous Jewish organizations send out "the sky is falling" alerts, with a donation card so we can avert yet another second Holocaust.

Now, we're just days away from the end of 2013, so this is our last chance to save the Jewish people and the State of Israel from imminent destruction and claim a juicy tax deduction. 

A win-win? No.

In this particular case, there may be no fundraising tie-in, just a byproduct of the general climate of sensationalism left behind.

These appeals and alerts not only trivialize and undermine the very real challenges and real successes of real people, including Jews. They not only eliminate all sense of proportion by crying wolf on cue. They insult our intelligence at best, and help turn otherwise well-meaning Jews into human echo chambers of fear and resentment at worst. 

Non-profits that need to resort to such outrageous and reckless messaging, just to fulfill their budget benchmarks, should consider whether their actual mission is worthy to begin with. 

ASA vote dooms a generation of Jewish students

The latest decision by the American Studies Association to "boycott" Israel and its institutions unleashes much negative energy, and my personal experience leads me to regret its long-term impact on a generation of students.

Many of my pro-Israel friends regularly bemoan the amount of attention the mainstream media devotes to Israel's foibles, and to sympathetic portrayals of Israel's adversaries and detractors. This complaint has some basis in fact, though it's also true that Israelis and American Jews invite coverage, and that much of the coverage is positive. As well, many of the problem stories originate in Israel's own mainstream media.

Meanwhile, many thousands of Jewish students have been deployed as "shock troops" against a "sophisticated campaign to discredit Israel on the college campus." That was in the 1980s, and one of many slogans drilled into my head at the time. I took my mission seriously, and devoted untold hours -- often working through the night -- to assure that the evil anti-Israel students were held off at the ramparts. 

No doubt, thousands of impressionable minds were spared as a result of my brave sacrifice. 

After the Cold War ended and while Oslo still held promise, I asked one big-name Hillel colleague how the less contentious atmosphere was affecting turnout to his programs. He told me numbers were up, and for the first time in years most students were coming in just because they wanted to be Jewish, and they were learning about... being Jewish.

Fast-forward to today, when another defiant Prime Minister of Israel is making waves, dovetailing with the legacy of another arrogant U.S. former President, and the Jewish (sorry, "pro-Israel") community is again issuing general calls for mobilizing brigades of students for early warning and propaganda response.

With various studies like the recent Pew report reporting the obvious decline in American Jewish affinity, giving Jewish college students a compelling sense of duty is a good way to keep them engaged (and, maybe, to get engaged to fellow Jews). But it's a little like the mismatched couple who stay together "for our children's sake". 

Only later, I realized how many educational and social opportunities I missed, in order to be a tuition-paying activist for Israel, along with a few other nice Jewish causes. Only later, I realized I might have learned something from all those disagreeable anti-Israel speeches, had I listened to their substance rather than red-flagging them for the Q&A and long reports back to HQ.

Yes, the American Studies Association has disgraced itself, and so many American studies scholars who have better things to do than wasting their time on ideological conferences and sloganeering. And yes, some Israeli academics will be unjustly inconvenienced and be denied proper recognition.

What I will lose sleep over is how this decision will generate ever more momentum for young Jews to forgo the campus experience, to shut their perceptive faculties, as they hunker down for full-fledged pitched battles in lecture halls, campus media, and student senates. Along the way, they may strengthen their identity as defensive, combative and doubt-free supporters of Israel. They will be encouraged and funded by our major organizations and lauded back home in their parents' congregations. 

Many will outgrow that phase, and many will not. Still more will only watch all this from the sidelines, later recalling Judaism as a pro-Israel answer to a potent but marginal group of academics. And then, 25 years from now, the Pew Center will call them up and ask whether they feel attached to the Jewish people. Spoiler alert...

Netanyahu's new rogue state is Israel

Hours after the five Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (the "P-5") announced an interim deal that pulls Iran back from the threshold of nuclear weapons capacity, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done more than denounce the agreement. By reasserting Israel's right to attack Iran at its own discretion, even following this international accord, Netanyahu has effectively set Israel as the Middle East's new rogue state - even without actually attacking Iran.

With Iran formally committed to the agreement, Israel is now the nation standing defiantly against world opinion and the international community. None of those countries party to the agreement - including France and the United States - can now abide an Israeli attack. 

Israel is routinely criticized and condemned, with or without justification, for all manner of violations of international law. Yet it enjoys positive relations with dozens of countries and is seamlessly integrated into the global economy, and it has never directly defied the Security Council. Though the Council as an entity has not formalized the agreement, the P-5 and the European Union are all officially signed on. Agree or disagree (as I did elsewhere) with Netanyahu's assessment of the negotiations and the deal, he is now declaring Israel to be above the Security Council.

The inconvenient Beilis centennial

One hundred years ago this week, a jury in Kiev acquitted Mendel Beilis of ritual murder in the death of a Christian child. Half the jurors were literally card-carrying anti-Semites, members of the infamous Black Hundreds, and still they could find no plausible evidence to convict this Jewish man. The trial was followed around the world, and 20 years later, 4,000 people attended Beilis' funeral in New York.

Jay Beilis addressing diplomats and Ukrainian officials

Last month in Kyiv (note the Ukrainian spelling), we commemorated the Beilis centennial within the context of fighting anti-Semitism, with full participation by the Government of Ukraine and many other countries. As a consultant to the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, I had the opportunity to help facilitate. As Jay Beilis pointed out to us, countless thousands of Jews are alive today because his grandfather refused to confess to a crime he didn't commit, and the highly publicized trial inspired a new mass emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe years before the Holocaust, and before the mass-murder at Babi Yar, which occurred just the other side of town from our conference.

I believe the fact that neither Israel nor the United States is hosting any major event for this centennial reflects our own politics and mythology. In Israel, they already have the earlier Dreyfus Affair and Theodor Herzl narrative. In the States, the Jewish community is largely defined (and self-identified) as a post-Holocaust community -- even though most of us are descended from pre-War arrivals. And if there's a centennial to mark here, it will be the Leo Frank trial, which ended in the lynching of an Atlanta Jewish community leader and is popularly linked to the founding of the legendary Anti-Defamation League (which was also among the cosponsors of the Kyiv conference).

Ironically, U.S. officials were precluded from participating in the Kyiv conference due to the federal government shutdown. Even The Forward, whose Yiddish-language forerunner The Forverts at the time promoted Beilis as the trial of the century, was unavailable to participate in or report on the Kyiv commemoration. 

As a culture, we choose our heroes or they are chosen for us, and then we choose or invent new heroes when it's convenient. This may be something America and Israel have in common, as new (or renewed) societies.

At least the record has been honored where it was set. 

Netanyahu's fantasy date with destiny

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently acted as though Israel has a veto on any negotiations with Iran, as though reminding world powers - and Tehran - that Iran's nuclear program is only a concern for Israel and not for the entire region and the international community. Every step forward in the process has been derided, every sanction discounted, even as he says it's better than nothing. Even as he acts like the judge for all nations.

Netanyahu speaks as though only he and only Israel are concerned or actively fighting Iran's ambitions. He has already ridiculed the discussions underway in Geneva as "The Deal of the Century," even though limiting - and not completely dismantling - Iran's nuclear program was always the stated goal. He warns us all not to trust Iran, as though anyone outside Tehran trusts that regime. Anyone. This isn't about world leaders being naive, it's about working within political and strategic realities.

What Netanyahu won't acknowledge, is that neither Israel nor America has a way to decisively stop Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. The best option is some deal for verifiable controls on further enrichment and weaponization. While dismissing the use of sanctions or negotiations, the Prime Minister has offered no realistic alternative. None. 

Despite his tough talk, there is no surefire way to deny Iran a nuclear capability. Sanctions, blockade and assassinations have pushed Iran to the point of considering measures to verify and limit its program going forward. There has never been a point at which any U.S. President or Israeli Prime Minister could have permanently neutralized Iran's program, either successfully and effectively or without Israelis paying a catastrophic political and economic cost. Israel's own military experts have routinely warned against attacking Iran.

Can Jewish leaders take 'yes' for an answer?

It's happening again... The Obama administration is inviting American Jewish leaders into the White House for substantive, high-level consultations on matters integral to U.S. and Israeli national interest, and (some of) these American Jewish leaders are publicly trash-talking the Administration within the same news cycle. 

During President Obama's first term, this happened a few times, when organizational leaders leveled complaints and demands to the President's face and to reporters. Last year, Jewish leaders were so critical of the President's nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, they gave journalists 'anonymous' negative quotes during the President's own Hanukkah party -- and trust me, that's no easy invite to snag.

This week, the President's National Security and other senior advisers met with Jewish leaders to discuss the Administration's approach to nuclear negotiations with Iran. Even as the White House guests described the meeting as "constructive", one of those same leaders was blasting Secretary of State John Kerry for publicly refusing to "succumb to fear tactics" by critics of the U.S.-Iran talks.

If the Secretary of State states something on Monday, and you're meeting the National Security Adviser on Tuesday, why not use that meeting to raise your concerns? Especially if your bone with the Secretary is that -- if he had any implied criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (the perennial Cassandra on Iran) -- he "should have made them privately." 

Substantively, there seems to be no alternative to talks with Iran, since a military solution is at best costly, and unlikely to achieve a decisive outcome. It's Obama, and not Bush or Netanyahu, who succeeded in instituting "crippling" multilateral sanctions against Iran, all for the purpose of securing a realistic halt to Iran's weapons-oriented nuclear projects. If Netanyahu and Obama (and Kerry) have a difference of opinion, do they really need an American Jewish arbitrator?

In this case, the particular Jewish leader's concern was that friends don't need to air their disagreements in public. By this measure, various Jewish leaders don't appear to be "friends" of the President or his administration, or his Secretary of State. But as loyal Americans and Israel advocates, they might consider which is the best path to securing our shared future, one based on trust and humility, not grandstanding and paranoia.

What I saw, and didn't, at the #SocialGoodSummit

I was lucky enough to get to this year's Social Good Summit, sponsored by -- and also featuring -- some of the world's leading change agents. Overall, this was an incredible opportunity to hear and cross-tweet vision, goals and implementation strategies for moving our planet to where it needs to be. One cannot help but walk away feeling inspired and hopeful that there are thousands of social entrepreneurs creatively seizing opportunities and addressing problems in ways that can be shared and applied by others -- if we can do a better job of connecting. 

Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Fast Company Editor
Robert Safian, and Hope North founder Okello Sam

Malala Yousefzai, Al Gore, Melinda Gates, Richard Branson, Anthony Lake, David Miliband and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt were among the well-known VIPs, but every speaker was on the mark and worthy of a million Facebook "likes". On the sidelines, I was also able to engage around a table with a top corporate leader and his partner on the ground, who are using mobile technology to bring stability and education to victims of a generation of conflict in Uganda. The lessons were numerous, and the incredible wealth of knowledge and spirit will take weeks to fully absorb.

My caveats lay in a few areas, mostly not the fault of the organizers. I list them here and now in the hope they might benefit next year's planning.