New Jersey Jewish News: "Activists plan New Jersey conference to address [engage in?] left-wing anti-Semitism"

Not a very prosiming line-up of groups:

Facing a Challenge Within: A Progressive Scholars’ and Activists’ Conference on Anti-Semitism & the Left will include presenters from the New Jersey region of the Workmen’s Circle’ Arbeter Ring, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Meretz USA.

Keynote speakers are important, right?

Joseph L. Graves, a professor of evolutionary biology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University and a Westfield native, is scheduled to give the keynote speech. Its title is “Anti-Semitism and Racism: Cut from the Same Cloth To Achieve the Same Ends?”

“I’m going to look at anti-Semitism in the present context and try to distinguish between anti-Semitism and what one might consider to be legitimate criticisms of Israel’s foreign policy. They are not the same things,” Graves said.

“There are some people who claim that if you make any criticism of Israel’s foreign policy, it immediately makes you anti-Semitic. I disagree with that. There are some scholars, including some Jewish scholars, who believe that historically maybe a Jewish state wasn’t the best thing. That is very different from the knee-jerk reaction that Israel has no right to exist.”

Nuance is very important when it comes to non-existence. Want another sample?

Esther Kaplan, a leader of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York, will lead a workshop on the convergence of left- and right-wing anti-Semitism. “When you go to an antiwar march or a march for Palestinian rights, chances are you’re going to see some signs that are inappropriate,” she said: a swastika in the center of an Israeli flag, for example. “In a gathering of more than 250 people, you’re going to see some nuts in the room.”

Going to a pro-Palestinian march and seeing some inappropriate signs--I hate it when that happens!

But, Kaplan said, she was more troubled by “an emboldened and empowered Christian Right that wants to make this into a Christian nation . . . "

And worst of all, they support the Colonialist Settler-State.

Tags: leftists, anti-Semitism, cluelessness, Judaism, Israel