Psychologists have sometimes used the Rorschach test for personality assessments. Whether or not reactions to a series of inkblots actually mean anything or not is a matter of opinion.
But when it comes to politics, some issues function more or less the way the Rorschach is supposed to. Some topics produce a reaction that speaks volumes about who we are as individuals or as groups, and how we see our place in the world.
That’s the best way to understand the controversy over whether or not Jews are supposed to care about China’s human-rights policy.
On April 30, a group of 185 rabbis and other leaders issued a statement calling on individual Jews to refrain from attending the Beijing Olympics to protest “China’s policies regarding Tibet and Darfur, and its assistance to Iran, Syria and Hamas.”
The statement made specific reference to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, used by the German Nazi regime to polish its image.
This “Yom HaShoah Declaration” was spearheaded by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the former chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, a New York City educator and author, and was assisted by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
The signatories represented a wide cross section of American Jewish life encompassing the entire religious and political spectrum, including leaders of the Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Orthodox movements. Other signers were longtime activist Rabbi Avi Weiss of New York and former New York Mayor Ed Koch.
A kosher kitchen
What was most interesting about the wording of the text was that it noted Beijing’s authorization of a kosher kitchen at the Olympics village.
The writers said this was a Chinese government ploy to “attract Jewish tourists to the games as part of its broader strategy of improving its image and deflecting attention from its complicity in severe human rights abuses at home and abroad.”
Beijing’s belief that the Olympics would help its image was a mistake. The attention given to the games and the Olympic Torch Run (a bit of baloney invented by the Nazis in 1936) has, in fact, given critics the opportunity to highlight issues the Chinese regime wanted to hide.
But rather than generating more support for a potential boycott or pressure on China, the rabbis’ statement had the opposite effect.
Within 24 hours, much of the Jewish establishment was falling over itself to dissociate themselves from the statement. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, among others, denounced the boycott.
They dismissed the initiative, and were particularly unhappy about the analogies to 1936 and the Holocaust. Their position was that any such reference was, by definition, unkosher.
Particularly remarkable was the speed and vehemence of the counterattack. For the organized Jewish world to respond so quickly and definitively to an activist project of any kind is a feat in itself.
Was it to protect the memory of the Holocaust from trivialization? Hardly.
But have we now painted ourselves into a rhetorical corner where anything less than Auschwitz is unworthy of protest?
To dismiss the clear imperative of protest by merely saying that “China is a complicated society,” as the ADL did, is no argument. It is obfuscation.
It is true that China is far less tyrannical today than it was under Chairman Mao Zedong. But what sort of standard is that?
Are events in Tibet, Darfur and China’s use of its growing power to back Iran, Syria and Hamas none of our business, as these establishment groups seem to be saying?
A matter of expediency?
Back in the early 1990s, when activists sought to make the massacres in Bosnia a matter of Jewish concern, few voices were raised then to quash the push for action.
At that time, some of the same arguments about a “complicated” situation could have been used to argue against the attempt to stop Serbian and Croatian depredations against people who had little in common with most American Jews.
What’s different today? For one, China is more powerful than Serbia.
In the Serbia case, many prominent Jewish business leaders and some organizations (who receive donations from these business people) did not see their interests jeopardized by application of human-rights principles to policy there as they do with China.
Groups could afford the luxury of conscience on Bosnia. That’s not the case with China.
Given the vast entanglement of our economy with theirs, a stand on this issue requires a degree of courage that the calls for boycotts of the Serbs or, more recently, of Sudan did not.
Indeed, some people, including some we don’t normally think of as motivated by trade, see China as a vast market rather than as the world’s largest human-rights violator.
The Orthodox Union also denounced the boycott. But unlike others that merely issued terse statements and then clammed up, the O.U. distributed a long statement from a “marketing associate” who waxed lyrical about the joys of selling kosher food in China.
The O.U. has a long and honorable history of service to the Jewish people. But it clearly now falls under the rubric of what columnist George Will once called capitalists “who love commerce more than they loathe communism.”
What good can a boycott do? Perhaps not much. Even if the few wealthy enough to think about a vacation in China don’t go, Tibet won’t be free.
But since when have Jews regarded human rights as merely a matter of expediency? If Jewish opinion weren’t important, Beijing wouldn’t bother with that kosher kitchen.
It is no accident that the Wyman Institute was a driving force behind the boycott. It has specialized in preserving the memory of those who had the chutzpah to speak out for rescue during the Holocaust when most of the Jewish establishment thought such a protest was pointless or imprudent.
Tibet and Darfur are not the Holocaust, and Chinese leader Hu Jintao isn’t Hitler. But China’s deplorable human-rights record and its effort to whitewash it are not matters of dispute except for those who have a financial or political motivation for doing so.
As in the past, activists and establishment types will look at an issue and see their own agendas reflected. Those who want an excuse to do nothing and let business as usual proceed can always find one.
It is a pity that this rule still applies to so much of the Jewish world.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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