Ellison Call Comes Up Short
The JCRC requesting Keith Ellison to step aside from his Democratic Party leadership post is an empty gesture (“JCRC Calls on Ellison to Resign from DNC,” Feb. 22).
Most of the Democrat leadership feels the same way as Ellison. They revealed this when very few stood and applauded during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech mentioning the upcoming move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. My daughter and niece nodded in approval when I yelled at the TV, “Stand for Israel you … Jew haters.” Her fiance, who’s a big J Street supporter, sat there silently.
Ted W. Borowsky | Lafayette Hill
Finding Home in the RJC
I am a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, and I joined it because I got tired of the growth of the anti-American and anti-Israel bias in the Democratic Party (“Don’t Overlook Republicans’ Role,” Feb. 8). Christianity had nothing to do with my joining the RJC.
It bears reminding that the Christian community supports Israel more strongly than the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, George Soros and J Street. After all, it was Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, who sat on her hands the last time an anti-Israel vote came up in the Security Council.
We know where the anti-Semites and BDS supporters call home — it is today’s Democratic Party.
Richard Tems | Doylestown
Letter Adds a Word to ‘Jewish’ Lexicon
A recent letter, griping about coverage of the Women’s March in Philadelphia, submits “that Planned Parenthood’s dehumanizing of the unborn is all too similar to Nazi Germany’s dehumanizing of the Jews” (“Marches Not Equal, it Seems,” Feb. 8). The term “unborn” reflects a standard Christian, not Jewish, usage.
As Rabbi Charles Feinberg summarizes the consensus Jewish position on the fraught subject of abortion, “Jewish rabbinic authorities, starting with the Middle Ages, say that a fetus is not a person. Judaism has always said abortion is never murder. It may not be permitted, depending on the circumstances — how far along the pregnancy is, how seriously ill the mother-to-be is — but it is never murder. It only becomes that once the baby is born.”
Only actual, fully formed persons can be “dehumanized.”
Judaism allows abortion, as does current U.S. law. For abortion to become prohibited — as the letter writer and his Catholic and evangelical Protestant confrères at the March for Life would prefer — would constitute an abridgement of constitutionally protected rights.
I’ll leave the blasphemous and despicable Holocaust analogy for others to rebut.
Jesse H. Wohlberg | Philadelphia
Jonathan Pollard could not agree with Richard Tems more.
Mr. Tems: if your concern for Israel is all that important to you, more so than America’s domestic well-being, that is your choice. But in that case, do the honest thing and make aliyah.
Right on, Mr. Tems.
In the words of Nato Green (The Forward, March 2): “(President) Trump has done something unprecedented by uniting Jews and Nazis. He deserves more credit for that. He can bring together Sheldon Adelson, [Benjamin] Netanyahu and Jared Kushner with all his Nazi supporters around a shared vision of killing everyone else. It’s almost inspiring.”