O pinion
After 9/11, I Wrote a Headline Comparing US, Israel. I Regret It
BY GARY ROSENBLATT
ONE OF THE MOST contro-
versial — and tone-deaf
— front-page headlines to
appear in The New York Jewish
Week during the 26 years I
served as editor was published
the morning after 9/11 — 20
years ago.

Across the top of the page,
in moon landing-size bold
type, it read: “America: The
New Israel.”
And underneath, in italics:
“As fear and vulnerability
grip U.S., will empathy with
Jerusalem increase?”
How did Israel somehow
take center stage in this
American tragedy?
I can criticize the headline
and those words because I
wrote them.

Looking back now, I realize
just how misplaced my anger,
sadness and fear were in my
immediate response to the
deadliest terror attack in U.S.

history — one that claimed
3,000 innocent lives at the
World Trade Center, the
Pentagon and in a lonely field
in rural Pennsylvania.

Not in my defense but in
the interest of establishing the
context of my initial reaction
— and of many supporters of
Israel — allow me to recall the
mood of much of the Jewish
world, here and in Israel, in
early September 2001. It was, to
be blunt, one of deep despair.

In Durban, South Africa,
international anti-Semitism
reached a new high — or low
— when the United Nations
World Conference Against
14 SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
Racism adopted a resolution
labeling Israel an “apartheid,
racist” state and accused its
government of “genocide and
ethnic cleansing.”
The U.S. and Israel withdrew
their delegations on deter-
mining that they could not
remove anti-Israel language
from the final declaration of
the conference.

But Durban is hardly
remembered now, its miserable
outcome overtaken by the leap
from rhetorical terror to the
real thing.

In early September, Israel
was one year into the Second
Intifada, a uniquely brutal and
frightening period when it
seemed that Palestinian terror-
ists were killing Israelis on an
almost daily basis.

It’s difficult to convey the
sense of fear and outrage that
hung over the country like a
bombings, drive-by shoot-
ings, stabbings and stonings
across the country. Sixteen
teenagers and five other
young people were blown up
at the Dolphinarium disco in
Tel Aviv; 13-year-old Koby
Mandell and his 14-year-old
friend Yosef Ishran were stoned
to death in a cave in Tekoa on
Lag B’Omer; a five-month-old
baby was stoned in an attack in
Shiloh; a 40-year-old woman,
five months pregnant, was shot
in her car near Karne Shomron;
and 15 people were blown away
by a suicide bomber one August
afternoon in a Sbarro restau-
rant in downtown Jerusalem.

According to
the International Institute for
Counter-Terrorism, 1,137
Israelis were killed during the
Second Intifada, which lasted
five years. Its most common
weapon: suicide bombers
tragedy, I already mourned
for my fellow Americans. But
as we learned more details, I
was overly focused on what
I saw as the striking paral-
lels between two democracies
whose citizens were viciously
and unfairly attacked by Arab
terrorists. To the perpetrators,
the U.S. and Israel were Big
Satan and Little Satan.

Particularly galling to me,
American officials for months
had been calling on Israel to
show restraint in its response
to the many Palestinian terror
attacks, and the media too often
made moral equivalence of the
attackers and the attacked.

As my colleagues and I tore
up the articles planned for
that week’s edition and threw
ourselves into reporting on
the attacks and their profound
impact, I wrote an editorial
titled “Terror Hits Home,”
Looking back now, I realize just how misplaced my anger, sadness and
fear were in my immediate response to the deadliest terror attack in
U.S. history — one that claimed 3,000 innocent lives at the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon and in a lonely field in rural Pennsylvania.

dark cloud. I returned from
a five-day trip to Israel on
Sunday, Sept. 9, relieved to
have avoided terrorism first-
hand. That same day, three
Israeli men (one was 19 years
old) were killed by a Hamas
suicide bomber on a train in
Naharia. Every day, parents feared
that when they sent their
children off to school in the
morning, they might never
see them again. The battle was
waged not on distant fields but
on the streets of Israeli cities,
in cafes, hotels, on buses and
trains. During that first year,
110 Israeli men, women and
children were killed — almost
all of them civilians — in 51
separate incidents of suicide
targeting innocents. Its most
lasting impact: convincing a
majority of Israelis that making
peace with the Palestinians was
a dream-turned-nightmare.

The intifada’s impact on
Israeli politics is evident two
decades later in a country
whose citizens have moved
increasingly right on the
Palestinian issue.

I was back at work on that
beautiful Tuesday morning,
Sept. 11. After seeing on TV
the non-stop clips of a plane
smashing into one of the
Twin Towers, I looked out the
window of my Times Square
office and saw and smelled the
black clouds in the distance.

And then the second plane hit.

I felt sickened and stunned.

Not knowing the extent of the
JEWISH EXPONENT
which stated: “Friends and
supporters of Israel could not
help but think that this week
the United States became
Israel,” with American citizens
suddenly “learning what it is
like to experience fear and
vulnerability, to bear the
brunt of blind hatred, to have
innocent civilians targeted as
victims of suicide bombers.

“Will the U.S. government,
which pledged to strike back
against those who committed
these dastardly deeds, now see
the folly in its calls on Israel
to use restraint in the face of
murderous terrorist acts?
“Surely we don’t expect
Washington to seek peace
talks with the perpetrators, or
offer up several states to pacify
them, or condemn the cycle
of violence” as if there is no
difference between the arsonist
and the victim of fire.

In a letter to the editor
responding to the headline,
published a week later, a reader
wrote she was appalled that
rather than focus on the plight
of the victims, “you harangue
and berate the United Sates for
its sins of omission. How cruel.

How arrogant.”
The letter noted that “there is
nothing wrong with your front-
page articles except for their
placement. Horror and outrage
should have been your lead.”
Her point was well taken,
and still is.

My timing was woefully
premature in calling out what
I saw as Washington’s hypoc-
risy — pressuring Israel to
ease up in its defense against
deadly attacks on civilians as
the U.S. was about to launch a
“war on terror.” I should have
been mourning the victims,
damning the perpetrators
and praising the heroes — the
firefighters who rushed into
the chaos rather than escape
it, and those brave souls on
American Airlines Flight 77,
whose struggle with the plane’s
hijackers likely saved the U.S.

Capitol from a direct hit.

The fact is that the 9/11
attacks did change U.S. policy
toward Israel in its own, and
ongoing, war on terrorists.

It started at the top. “The
personal relationship between
[President George W.] Bush
and [Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel] Sharon grew much
tighter,” Gideon Sa’ar, then
Cabinet Secretary in Sharon’s
government, later recalled.

“Following the September 11
attacks, Bush finally under-
stood Sharon’s situation as
leader of a nation fighting mass
terror attacks. He began to
identify with him.”
Israel is still condemned by
many for using “dispropor-
tionate force” in its insistence
See Rosenblatt, Page 26
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



O pinion
What ‘The Wire’ Actor Michael K.

WiIlliams Taught My Jewish Students
BY RABBI JOE WOLFSON
BETWEEN 2008 and 2011,
one of the ways I survived
in yeshiva was “The Wire,”
HBO’s groundbreaking police
drama. Tosafot and Rambam
throughout the day, Brother
Mouzone, Avon Barksdale and
McNulty late at night.

Our beit midrash had a
main lower part and an upper
part up some steps. These were
the low rises and the high rises.

The fish pond in the garden
was the docks. When one of
my rabbis asked me about
my dating life, the scene of
imprisoned Avon asking young
Marlo how things on the street
were going came to my mind.

I responded as Marlo did: “It’s
all in the game.”
I can own my weirdness,
but I wasn’t alone. A friend
who had attended elite private
schools and universities in the
U.K. before moving to Israel
to work in tech — his life was
about as far removed from the
Baltimore ghettos as possible
— told me he loved “The Wire”
so much because “I can just
relate so well to the characters.”
Ridiculous and outrageous
as this may be, it’s a testament
to the unique brilliance of “The
Wire.” I can only assume that
if Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews
responded this way to “The
Wire,” then other cultural
subgroups were similarly
riveted. Yet even amid all this
brilliance, one character
especially stood out. Omar
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Little, a frightening stick-up
artist who nevertheless lived
by a code of honor, stole
nearly every scene in which
he appeared. As The Guardian
once put it, “if ‘The Wire’ is a
cult, then Omar is a cult within
a cult.”
The actor who played Omar
Little, Michael K. Williams,
died on the eve of Rosh
Hashanah at the age of 54.

Years after the show aired, I
had the privilege of getting to
know Williams. His passing
and the memories it brought
back suggested what society
in general and the Jewish
community in particular can
learn from his life.

In 2015, I began working as a
rabbi at New York University’s
Bronfman Center for Jewish
Life. Downtown Manhattan
boasts more than its fair share
of famous folk, and one day
the man I could only think
of as Omar literally bumped
into me. Any desire to respect
his privacy was overwhelmed
by my excitement. Far from
showed him the brilliant Omar
Omer counter.

I told him about my work
with students at NYU, and he
told me about his nephew who
had recently left jail after 20
years and the HBO documen-
tary “Raised in the System” they
had made together focusing on
the school-to-prison pipeline.

He wanted to find audiences
for the documentary’s message.

I wanted to find a way for our
community to think seriously
about criminal justice. We
decided to work together.

Few of the tributes in recent
days have focused on Williams’
work as an activist, but I am
reasonably confident that if he
could choose one of his works
that people would watch in
the aftermath of his passing,
it would be “Raised In The
System.” Shortly before Passover,
in the spring of 2019, the
Bronfman Center and the
Orthodox Union’s Jewish
Learning Initiative on Campus
at NYU hosted Williams for a
[Michael K.] Williams wished to tell the story of
his own community, but simultaneously
expressed a genuine curiosity about the
Jewish community.

being annoyed at my intrusion,
he was exceedingly gracious
and even agreed to record a
Shanah Tovah greeting for our
community. We arranged to
get coffee a couple of weeks
later. Humble, gracious, curious
is how I would describe that
coffee. I asked a few questions
about “The Wire.” Was the
Sunday truce — when warring
gangs would put down their
arms — actually a thing? I
told him how many Jews were
obsessed with the show and
completely baffled him when I
viewing of the documentary
and a panel discussion.

It’s impossible to watch
the documentary and not feel
broken-hearted over the lives
of beautiful young people
who get sucked up within the
prison industrial complex. The
documentary takes a viewer
from being an outsider to the
issue to a passionate believer
that incarceration rates are a
national priority issue which
must and can be fixed.

Yet the stars of the evening
were not Williams and the
KVETCH ’N’ KVELL
An Incongruous Opinion
MOSHE PHILLIPS’ DIVISIVE RANT about Israel and rabbi
bashing (“The Real Danger of That Atheist Harvard Chaplain,”
Sept. 9) seemed incongruous on the Exponent’s opinion pages.

Phillips poo-poohed a rabbi’s credentials even though he
hides his own in public profiles. Phillips attacked Harvard hiring
a secular humanist chaplain, even though that happened in 2005.

All recent demographic studies report Jews as the least religious
group in America, thus Harvard chose someone relatable to its
students. Rabbi Epstein’s promotion to chief chaplain illustrates
his success.

I’m happy these young, bright Jews who don’t identify with
religion found an alternative role model for staying in our
community. Not my brand of Judaism either, but if it works,
great. Then Phillips attacked Epstein’s Zionism due to a tweet
labeling as “supremacists” some Jewish Israelis who provoca-
tively marched, chanting “We’re here — so suffer!” and “Death
to Arabs!”
The centrist Israeli foreign minister also commented that day,
saying “The fact that there are extremists for whom the Israeli
flag represents hate and racism is abominable and intolerable.

It is incomprehensible how one can hold an Israeli flag in one’s
hand and shout ‘death to Arabs’ at the same time ... this is not
Judaism and not Israeli and it certainly is not what our flag
symbolizes. These people shame the people of Israel.”
If Phillips’ Zionist test requires siding with those “national-
ists,” then the foreign minister’s out. Epstein’s tweet demonstrated
calling out bigotry, Jewish or not.

Finally, Phillips bemoaned Epstein’s association with J Street,
a left-wing organization espousing a two-state solution. Phillips
omitted his leadership at Herut, a right-wing group.

Such vitriol is decimating American Zionism. Publishing it
before Yom Kippur is especially discordant. As the other op-eds
noted, especially now, we need to be kinder and remember we are
one people who need each other.

No exceptions. l
F. Penina Hoffnung | Philadelphia
STATEMENT FROM THE PUBLISHER
We are a diverse community. The views expressed in the signed opinion columns and let-
ters to the editor published in the Jewish Exponent are those of the authors. They do
not necessarily reflect the views of the officers and boards of the Jewish Publishing
Group, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia or the Jewish Exponent. Send
letters to letters@jewishexponent.com or fax to 215-569-3389. Letters should be a
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at jewishexponent.com
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See Wolfson, Page 26
JEWISH EXPONENT
SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
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