In This Moment: A Rabbi's Notebook
Louis Farrakhan is 93 years old and is still head of the Nation of Islam, which he has led since 1981. The man who famously called the Jewish faith a “gutter religion” is still going strong. The ADL, which has chronicled his speeches and writings, has put together a selection of some of his greatest hits, including fairly recent ones. All I can say is, read them and weep.
His most famous slur took place in a speech in June of 1984. He denied the “gutter religion” reference, which was roundly condemned, but a recording emerged and that slur took its place among the most famous slanders of the Jewish people to take place on American soil.
Until now.
Notably, this attack on Judaism grew out of an attack on - you guessed it - Israel. Here’s the full quote, as recorded:
Now that nation called Israel never has had any peace in 40 years and she will never have any peace because there can be no peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your gutter religion under His holy and righteous name.
Here’s the full article, from the NYT, June 28, 1984:
Sometimes even an antisemite gets it right - and Farrakhan did in recognizing the intrinsic and inseparable bond between the Jewish people, the Jewish homeland and the Jewish religion.
Notice that his road to “gutter religion” is paved with slaps at the Jewish state. The homeland of the Jewish people...
The place that my grandmother, who escaped Russian pogroms, fled to America and dreamed of visiting once in her life but never got there.
The place that I went to as a teen and from where I brought back a small container of dirt and when I gave it to my grandmother she cried tears of joy because she know why I had brought it back.
The place from where I got the little container of dirt that I placed into my grandmother’s grave when she was buried a few years later in Boston.
Now Farrakhan, who cursed Judaism and Israel in the same breath, protested that he actually called Judaism a “dirty religion” instead of “gutter.” That makes me feel much better. It would be as if Jesse Jackson denied calling New York “Hymietown,” which he notoriously did that same year1, and instead said he called it “Pickled herring town, with a shot of Slivovitz.” The intent is to degrade, and that’s all that matters. But “Gutter Religion” is the epithet that has survived.
We can’t seem to shake it, and it’s the opposite of true. And now we have another “G” word to deal with.
That is what is at play in the genocide-a-rama currently taking place in far-left circles among candidates trying to establish anti-Israel bona fides and get accepted into the “Global Intifada” club. “Genocidal, apartheid Israel” has become the Trump-like Homerian epithet that rolls off the tongue like “Swift-footed Achilles,” “Crooked Hillary” and “Lil Marco.” I’ll bet there are lots of people around who still word-associate “Hillary” with “crooked” and call Biden “Sleepy Joe” (ironic, given Trump frequent forays into dreamland during public events). As Homer intended, epithets are useful in oral traditions as memory aids. They get burned into the brain like TV screen paused on a single image for too long.
Bigoted epithets are nothing new, but we should never accept shameful labeling of Islamic candidates as “jihadists” and Somali immigrants as “not smart.” Trump did both this week.
But for barely-alive refugees from Auschwitz to survive the Holocaust and struggle to find their way to back to the Jewish homeland - to then be labeled genocidal colonizers, in a land that their ancestors cultivated, that’s just to much to bear.
At a mayoral debate last October, Mamdani accused Israel of genocide three times in just a few minutes. It seemed like an intentional tactic from the propagandist’s playbook. Either he was going for the Homerian effect or he was trying to summon Beetlejuice from the beyond.
We have seen how shameful labeling sticks, and thanks to Farrakhan, Judaism is forever associate with the gutter. And now, thanks to the DSA, with genocide.
Louis Farrakhan must be giggling at all this. The guy who demonized not just Jews but LGBTQ and white liberals everywhere has now been emulated, his methods celebrated, and his antisemitic diatribes imitated.
For current far left Democratic candidates, “Genocide” has become the password-du-jour for entry into the anti-Israel speakeasy. And…
It doesn’t matter if it is accompanied by exceedingly patronizing promises to “keep my Jews safe,” or disingenuous claims like, “but I love Jews and Judaism.”
It doesn’t matter that the genocide accusation has not yet been proven in any international court.
It doesn’t matter that Israel has yet to establish an independent commission to investigate its own actions before, during and following October 7, which is something that will happen if the opposition parties can form a government after this fall’s Israeli elections.
It doesn’t matter that inflammatory accusations against Israel only strengthen Bibi-ist forces of extremism and isolationism in the current campaign.
It doesn’t matter that the use of that term, which was invented to chronicle the unspeakable crimes perpetrated against Jews during the Holocaust, is supremely offensive to Jews - worse, I contend, than Farrakhan’s “gutter religion” and Jackson’s “Hymietown” combined.
And it doesn’t matter that the obsession with this name-calling distracts everyone from taking a closer look at what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank and addressing it. It’s a needless distraction.
And to repeat, it is an attack not just on Israelis, but all Jews, and not just on Jews, but on Judaism itself. You would think that if the purpose is not to troll but to actually do some good, the schoolyard name-calling would stop.
Mayor Mamdani, Dr. El-Sayed and others just think they are playing rhetorical chess when they claim not to be attacking Judaism, just Israel. Farrakhan gave away that game long ago. Read his famous quote again (above). Farrakhan understood that what makes Judaism a “Gutter Religion” is, at least in part, Israel, which is “structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit.” All of these are antisemitic tropes.
And the very “structure” of Israel - that means the religious values at its foundation, was characterized by Farrakhan as Satanic.
Farrakhan said in that same “gutter” speech that his task was to “expose the wickedness and lay it bare” so that “the people of this earth will come to see that those who come in the name of God, cloaking themselves in the robe of God, but in fact members of the synagogue of Satan2.”
There’s a short hop from genocidal to Satanic, or the other way around. I’m not sure which epithet is worse. But I don’t believe I’ve ever been to the Synagogue of Satan. I hear their dues are too high and the rebbetzin wears Prada.
Farrakhan built on that ancient demonization of Jews and Judaism (originating in Revelation 2:9) and, whether they realize it or not, current Democratic Socialists are channeling those same ancient and medieval Christian tropes, as filtered by Goebbels and refined by Hamas. The Jew is the Devil.
Here’s how Joshua Trachtenberg describes this phenomenon it in his popular study, The Devil and the Jews:
Farrakhan, for all his despicable hate, got that one equation right. The Jewish people = Israel = Judaism. Rinse and repeat.
While some Jews may insist that their religion is not connected to the Jewish state, I ask, if your ancestors were Jewish, in what direction did your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents pray? What words did they utter at the end of the Passover Seder? “Next year in Gracie Mansion?” While Zionism has had distinctly political objectives that might seem to stray from forms of Judaism that evolved in the Diaspora when Jews had no political power, the two are intrinsically and forever linked.
My grandmother could tell you that.
I can say all of this even though I disdain Netanyahu’s government and hope for its speedy demise and acknowledge that criticism of this government’s actions is not inherently antisemitic.
I can say this also acknowledging the great suffering of Gazans and Lebanese and the crimes against innocent Palestinians on the West Bank. The war crimes committed might eventually be determined to have risen to something greater. And yes, the ethnic cleaning going on in the West Bank must be stopped - and yes, Netanyahu’s opposition parties know that and, if they win, will have to address it.
And I can say this even though, as I wrote last week, I still see Abdul El-Sayed as the preferable candidate in a general election where democracy is at stake. And I also have seen some positive outreach being attempted on his part. But until he stops using the “G” trope, all his protestations of loving Jews and Judaism will be hollow. You can’t use the “N” word and claim to “love the Blacks,” (like Trump has reportedly done).
Another simple equation: G-word = N-word. Or at the very least, G ≈ N.
My message here is that the cheap slurs being flung at Israel are daggers in the heart of the Jew because they are attacks on our people and our religion.
Why should I be forced to justify to college students, again and again, that Judaism is not genocidal (“I am not a schnook!”) and actually is a religion of peace. The word “Shalom” (peace) appears in the Hebrew Bible 350 times. On a given Shabbat, between prayers and greetings, the average semi-observant Jew might say the word “Shalom” more than fifty times . We’re big on peace.
Despite centuries of antisemitic propaganda, the God of the Hebrew Bible is not characterized by vengeance, violence and Jewish victimhood. Our Judaism is a tradition of kindness and love and we do not revel in conquest and cling to a vision of blood and soil. Ours is the vision of the prophet Zechariah:
Jews have long championed that moral message adapted from Zechariah 4:6 by way of Darwin: Not brute force, not blood and soil; but adaptation; that is the true survival of the fittest. Returning to our ancient land did not abrogate that principle. It strengthened it. Zionism was all about Jews and Judaism evolving and adapting to meet a particular moment of peril on the world stage.
That verse is featured in the prophetic reading for the Sabbath of Hanukkah, in part as a reminder that the rabbis of the Talmud abhorred the militarism of the Maccabees and reimagined the holiday as one celebrating a victory of faith and light, rather than blood and soil. They quasi-cancelled the militaristic Hanukkah they way DSA candidate Francesca Hong wanted to cancel the colonialist Thanksgiving. Ironic.
Speaking of Hanukkah, with all the tragedies that have afflicted Jews and Palestinians, we know that at the heart of the current darkness burns a special light. We see it in countless acts of courage and love.
But with one word and a casual flick of the hand, these politicians on the far left and right are branding my Judaism as Satanic and delegitimizing the refuge that we forged with great sacrifice because every country on earth refused to let us in.
This is personal, Abdul and Zoran, much more personal than you seem to understand. You are taking hundreds of generations of kind and righteous people, who died for the sake of a loving God, and you are throwing them into the - what’s the word - gutter.
You are calling my grandmother a Gutter Jew.
Do you really want to call my dead grandmother, who was buried with the dirt of Israel under her head, a Colonialist, Genocidal, Gutter Jew?
You might have thought it was a cute chance to troll all those people who fundraised against you, or who had all those lavish, over-the-top Bar Mitzvahs. Here was your chance for revenge. You thought it was a clever gotcha, a neat trick to win some street cred at the next rally. That was before you spat on my grandmother.
I hope you can now see how personal this is. I know I’ve written about this alot and I wouldn’t keep doing it if I didn’t care. Trumpism needs to be stamped out this fall like an old-fashioned Smokey-the-Bear forest fire (which we now call wildfire). And for that happen, you have to change your ways and meet us half way, arms outstretched. And please stop spitting.
Abdul, I’m glad you now recognize at least the possibility for a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian state. Hopefully you can continue to distance yourself from the DSA policies that call Israel genocidal and that call for a full return of Palestinians to their ancestral homes, which would eliminate any possibility of a democratic Jewish state. Distancing yourself from DSA is progress. Envisioning a future Palestinian state alongside a future Jewish state is progress. I support that vision of two future states.
But I also ask you to cease slandering the one we already have.
Do it for my Bubbe.
And he apologized for it. 'It was not done in the spirit of meanness,'' he told an overflow crowd in the synagogue, Temple Adath Yershurun. ''However innocent and unintended, it was wrong.''
Synagogue of Satan is an actual term from the New Testament (Revelation 2:9 and 3:9), though the context is debated.
