This week Ben & Jerry’s announced they are boycotting 800,000 Jews. Those Jews live in 140 communities up and down Judea and Samaria (the misnomered “West Bank”) in Israel. The area includes cities you learned about in the Bible, where Jews have lived since the time of Joshua, the Judges, the Prophets and Kings, cities where Jesus lived among the Jews to whom he preached: cities like Hevron (Hebron), Shechem (Nablus), Beit Lechem (Bethlehem), Beit El (Bethel), and Shiloh. And, oh yes, Yerushalayim (Jerusalem).
There were no Arabs then, no Muslims then. When King Solomon built the First Beit HaMikdash (Holy Temple) on Mount Zion (also called Mount Moriah) and when Ezra and Nehemiah led the Jewish return from Babylonian Exile to build the Second Beit HaMikdash on the Temple Mount under the aggregated sponsorships over time of Cyrus the Great, Darius I, and Zerubavel, they arrived a thousand years and more before Muhammad emerged in the 600’s to create Islam by beheading opponents in his centers of Mecca and Medina.
The story that has emerged more fully behind Ben & Jerry’s anti-Semitism is that, when Ben & Jerry’s sold its enterprise to Unilever, a multi-national conglomerate based in the United Kingdom, B&J maintained the right to dictate corporate policy on “social justice” matters. B&J was empowered to maintain its own “independent board” to decide its politics. For Unilever it was a welcome opportunity to make more millions by buying into a profitable capitalist enterprise. Ben and Jerry’s, for all its socialism banter, is a cut-throat capitalist business that has made its eponymous owners multi-millionaires.
As with Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, the multi-millionaire socialist Bernie Sanders who owns three houses, and others of that sort who preach the beauties of socialism and extol its advocates, so also Ben and Jerry’s is a thriving capitalist bastion for the rich to get richer.
When they sold to Unilever, Ben Cohen received $41 million, and Jerry Greenfield got $9.5 million. If that is how socialism works, baby, sign me up for the Internationale. They purchase milk from non-GMO cows, while they shovel plenty of dung themselves, actually squeezing out competitors in the marketplace. And how do all those cows blend in with the Green New Deal?
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are the extreme-left (“progressive”) sorts of Woke hypocrites we despise. Like Woke Bernie Sanders, they live in lily-White Vermont, as apartheid a polity as exists in America, where Blacks comprise only three percent of the population and only two percent of annual births. They barely would know what a Black person is if they did not have a few token “Persons of Color” on their board. Their state likewise has the second fewest Hispanics of the Nifty Fifty. Like Bernie, both Ben and Jerry grew up in New York and then fled the racially diverse region to live in an apartheid 97 percent White Vermont. From there they pronounce on racial justice.
They are — like Nicholas Donin of France, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Genrikh Yagoda, and even Bernie Sanders, George Soros, and Sarah Silverman — part of a millennia-old line of people born Jewish who turn apostate. What drives them? The act of Jewish self-hate has absorbed psychiatrists and mental-health professionals for centuries. Unless you personally have grown up in a household with parents relating a narrative of how the Other has murdered your ancestors throughout two thousand years of Crusades, Inquisitions, Blood Libels, Desecration of the Host slanders, pogroms, Holocausts, and other Genocides directed uniquely at Jews, it is hard to understand the psychoses that permeate some Jews who simply are desperate to find acceptance — no matter the cost. So they seek to shed their identities or to denigrate them, hoping for entrée into the world of globalists and universalists where identity will not keep them out.
But it ultimately will anyway. As summarized briefly in the Wikipedia entry on “Self-hating Jews”:
The issue has periodically been covered in the academic social psychology literature on social identity. Such studies “frequently cite [Kurt] Lewin as evidence that people may attempt to distance themselves from membership in devalued groups because they accept, to some degree, the negative evaluations of their group held by the majority and because these social identities are an obstacle to the pursuit of social status.” Modern social psychology literature uses terms such as “self-stigmatization,” “internalized oppression,” and “false consciousness” to describe this type of phenomenon. Phyllis Chesler, the professor of psychology and women’s studies, in referring to female Jewish self-hatred, points to progressive Jewish women who “seem obsessed with the Palestinian point of view.” She believes their rage against oppression, frustration and patriarchy “is being unconsciously transferred onto Israel.”
Kenneth Levin, a Harvard psychiatrist, says that Jewish self-hatred has two causes: Stockholm syndrome, where “population segments under chronic siege commonly embrace the indictments of their besiegers however bigoted and outrageous,” as well as “the psychodynamics of abused children, who almost invariably blame themselves for their predicament, ascribe it to their being “bad,” and nurture fantasies that by becoming “good” they can mollify their abusers and end their torment.” According to Howard W. Polsky, the social scientist, “feelings about Jewish marginality are often a step away from self-hatred.” He then says, “Jewish self-hatred denotes that a person has adopted gentiles’ definition of Jew as bad in one way or another and that being Jewish will hinder their success or identity.”
So they change their names. Bernie Schwartz becomes Tony Curtis. Betty Perske becomes Lauren Bacall. Emanuel Goldenberg becomes Edward G. Robinson. Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg becomes Tony Randall. Now they can kiss and maybe even marry a Janet Leigh or Humphrey Bogart on the big screen. Some change their affiliations. They stand in front of audiences and mock their identity group and religious roots — not just funny Jewish Catskills self-directed humor but outright self-denigration and self-abasement. The audience can feel their disgust with their roots. That is why so many Jews cannot watch Sarah Silverman. She is despicable.
For many of these fools, raised and reared on a diet of historically accurate narratives about how Jew-haters on the Right persecuted us for centuries and even millennia, they emerge with the ignorance that Jew-haters on the Left did so, too. Jew-hatred is the ultimate equal opportunity employer.
However, their own personal direct ancestors fled East European pogroms between 1881-1914, the murderous paths of Tsars and Kaisers and muzhiks associated correctly with right-wing butchery, so they heard tales of extreme-right anti-Semitism while missing the other half of the history class. Those Jews got out of Russia mostly by 1914, and a few into the early 1920’s, before the Stalinist Holodomor murders in Ukraine, the Stalinist show trials, and the Yevesekzia persecutions of the Stalinist anti-Semitic Left.
Those immigrants came here ignorant of what communism is, its own evil and its own penchant for mass murder in the same millions that Hitler and Eichmann perpetrated. They do not know that heroes of the Left — Voltaire, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, today’s Squad of House Democrat Jew-haters — hate and despise and tolerate mass murder of Jews. For all their supposed education, they are fools and are ignorant, to boot.
That, in the briefest of terms, is what accounts for so much Jewish liberalism. They do not know better. They do not know their own history, and they do not observe their religious heritage. There is a reason that more than 90 percent of Orthodox Jews are social and political conservatives. That comes with believing in G-d, living G-d’s laws, observing kashrut (kosher rules), the Shabbat (Sabbath ordinances), and preserving the mitzvot (the 613 commandments in the Torah). Ruth Bader was not such a Jew, neither before nor after becoming Ginsburg. Bernie Sanders and George Soros are apostates. That simply is what it is.
And the same for Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who fled New York to live in apartheid Vermont. Greenfield applied to medical schools twice — and was rejected twice. So he exchanged his mother’s dream of a stethoscope for a scoop. The two of them together do not know a thing about actual Judaism. They mumble phrases that sound as silly as when Sid Caesar faked speaking a foreign language by mumbling some words and mixing in nonsensensical sounds. For Ben and Jerry and their half-baked Jewishness, their goal of life is to be accepted by the globalists and universalists whose love and acceptance they crave.
So they end up with a Board of Directors headed by an outright Jew-hater who wants the only Jewish country on earth to disappear, preferably not of its own demise but to be wiped out.
The head of the B&J Board is Anuradha Mittal. As the slogan goes amid the anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter movement: Say Her Name. This Jew-hater has been pressing for years for an international anti-Israel boycott to bring Israel to an end. She likewise pressed the Ben & Jerry’s board to vote for a complete and total boycott of all of the only only Jewish country on earth. Not for a boycott of repressive and torturous dictatorial China, where Ben & Jerry’s sells profitably — only a boycott against the Jews. Her twitter account reflects at least 107 anti-Israel tweets. In one, she describes the very creation of Israel as a “catastrophe.” She tweets congratulations to Woke performers who boycott any part of Israel. When AirBnB first announced they would boycott Jews in Judea and Samaria but thereafter reversed their boycott of those 800,000 Jews, Mittal tweeted that she deactivated her AirBnB account.
She is a Jew-hater. Yes, like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, she has her niche of Jews — the apostates. Loves Jewish apostates. But when someone applies rules to the only Jewish country on earth that she does not apply to any other polity, then “the Goebbels” in her shows.
If apartheid is concerning, then what about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the other Muslim Arab countries where Christianity is persecuted even as much as is Judaism? How many Jews do they allow to live in those tyrannies of bigotry? How many synagogues? How many Christians may worship there? How many churches? How many churches in such apartheid Arab Muslim countries have been forcibly converted into mosques? And, yet, does Anuradha Mittal associate the word “apartheid” with any of those truly racist countries?
Yes, Israel has a Jewish population majority, and Passover and Yom Kippur are national holidays there. So? What about Catholic France or, for that matter, Christian Europe? Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with European countries like Denmark and Switzerland that have a cross on their national flags.
After all, Arab and other Muslim countries have their symbols — crescents and deathly swords — on theirs. But, unlike Christian Europe and Jewish Israel, the Arab Muslim countries truly are apartheid. In Israel, by contrast, an all-Arab political party is part of the governing coalition. Arabs vote there, sit on the Supreme Court, even receive government stipends to procreate equally as do Jews. No Arab country pays Jews child stipends to have more babies.
This Jew-hater’s position on vaginal circumcision under sharia law? Black slavery by Muslims in Mauritania? Don’t hold your breath.
So Mittal, the B&J Board president, mourns the catastrophe of Israel’s existence, alongside CEO Matthew McCarthy who also presses for a boycott of the entirety of Israel, not just Judea and Samaria’s 800,000 Jews.
So the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, Egypt, and Jordan trade with Israel — but not these Jew-haters of BDS. But now we know: it is not about a “West Bank.” Rather, to them all of Israel is a “Jewish settlement” in “Occupied Palestine.” And they aspire to see Israel disappear.
The thing is, while some three dozen former flavors now reside in the Ben and Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard, Israel’s population continues growing, and there soon will be one million Jews in Judea and Samaria. And one day Anuradha Mittal will be one more forgotten flavor of Jew-hatred in a row with others, gone and melted.
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. Other writings are collected at
