Shame On You, Jewish Voice For Peace, For Targeting Pro-Israel Gays

Image by Jewish Voice for Peace

Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson June 6, 2017

I’m going “on record” condemning Jewish Voice for Peace’s tactics at the Israel Day Parade. Protesting the parade, even from inside, is something I totally respect. And I have never marched in the parade myself, since I consider it to be overly nationalistic and jingoistic, as well as needlessly confrontational.

However, JVP also endangered the safety and well-being of vulnerable queer young people by infiltrating (and, in one spokesperson’s alleged words, “targeting”) the LGBTQ contingent specifically — and that is completely unacceptable. There were at least three specific harms.

First, this action de-legitimized the queer people in the eyes of their religious and ethnic communities. These folks have fought a hard battle for acceptance, and it is dead wrong for others to undermine them. The people who lost out were the queers, not the right-wing Zionists.

Second, JVP created an unsafe space for a contingent that included many brave, first-time and Orthodox marchers. It was, at the very least, callously insensitive not to consider the emotional and physical safety of those vulnerable people. But it was in fact much more than that, and an act of violence against the most vulnerable in our queer community.

Finally, JVP is not officially a queer organization, though it is highly LGBTQ-populated, so we were treated to the spectacle of a non-queer organization targeting a queer population. That is repulsive, disgusting and contemptible under any circumstances. Unless and until JVP becomes a formally LGBTQ organization, it is a straight organization targeting queer people. That is evil.

Shame on you, Jewish Voice for Peace. I have supported you against defamation, censorship, and exclusion and have paid a price for doing so — even though I do not agree with your tactics or (often unstated) goals. But on this one, you were dead wrong and should apologize for endangering the safety of queer people and for targeting them.

Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

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