July 1, 2021
Image by getty images
In his “History of the Jews,” the historian Paul Johnson coined the phrase “Non-Jewish Jew” for any Jew who, in his words, “denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all.”
But it took Naftali Bennett and the Religious Zionist movement to trump the notion of the “Non-Jewish Jew” with that of racism posing as religion — what I dub: non-Jewish Judaism.
By historical coincidence, the year Johnson published his book was also the first full year of the Palestinian Intifada— and many of Israel’s Religious Zionists were in a violent frenzy. One of them, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, set the tone of much of what was to follow. Levinger was the “spiritual leader” of a gang of Israeli “settlers” in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In September 1988, Levinger fired at a group of Palestinians — killing one and seriously wounding another — as they stood outside a shoe store.