Beware of "Tikkunistas" Who Use "Tikkun Olam" As an Excuse for Zionhass

Gerald Steinberg writes:

Tikkun olam, Hebrew for making the world a better place, is an important component of Jewish religion and culture. But when removed from the wider Jewish context and artificially transformed into a radical “social justice” campaign, it can become a destructive cult. In its most immoral manifestation, this “tikkunism” is used by marginal individuals whose tenuous links to the Jewish people are appropriated in the war against Zionism and Israel.

The example of Judith Butler is a case in point. Butler, a post-modernist academic icon and anti-Israel activist from the University of California (Berkeley), was recently awarded the Theodor Adorno Prize by the city of Frankfurt.

As documented by journalist Benjamin Weinthal, the offensive move triggered many protests – Adorno achieved recognition without renouncing his Jewish identity, declaring: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

The decision to honour Butler is also a betrayal of Adorno’s principled support for Israel following the 1967 war, when many European “intellectuals” turned their backs on the Jewish nation after we refused to play the role of victims seeking their pity. Similarly, the officials of the Berlin Jewish Museum, who gave Butler a platform from which to attack Israel and the Jewish people, have transformed this edifice into an anti-Jewish museum.

In contrast to her façade of “social values,” Butler promotes the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks the destruction of Israel. As justification, she claims to believe in a “different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak,” invoking what she refers to as traditions that “represent diasporic values, struggles for social justice, etc.”...

Steinberg notes that Butler and her ilk have

created the term “diasporic values” to remove themselves from the collective Jewish embrace of Israel, Zionism and Jewish national self-determination, preferring, even after the Holocaust, the status of helpless victim living in exile.

His killer conclusion:

Indeed, the values of tikkun olam are meaningless without Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. When these are separated, and tikkunism is used as a weapon against the Jewish nation-state, it loses its moral foundation.

It does indeed. But the Butlers are so convinced that they and they alone occupy the moral high ground that they cannot see how low they have actually sunk.