Kahn-Harris said when he told Tenenbom he was dropping him from the JNEB session, “he was fine about it, but then he saw that as a snub, he thought it was coming from on high and although I did talk to others about it, ultimately it was my decision.”
While Kahn-Harris agreed that he “could have done it [disinviting Tenenbom] better,” and he “could understand why it wasn’t taken well,” still, he refused to “give a public apology to Tuvia.”
Kahn-Harris insisted that disinviting Tenenbom was “not that significant” and that conference sessions shape shift all the time. Still, he could not remember a single other instance, in all the many dozens of events he has participated in and organized, including all the Limmud conferences, when anyone was disinvited from a session during the course of the conference.
Nidra Poller was also a presenter at the 2015 Limmud Conference. Poller, an American-born Parisian journalist and author, sat in on Tenenbom’s session on his latest book about America. She told the JewishPress.com that “some in the audience obviously appreciated what Tenenbom said,” but once the Q and A began “he was barraged with objections.”
According to Poller, “some of the objections were ridiculous: ‘How could he say such things about American Jews? How could he say they don’t defend Israel?'” She said that some assaulted him as if he were an “academic sociologist or claimed to be a professional pollster.”
“The animosity became increasingly personal as the session went on,” Poller continued.
Poller’s sessions were on topics one might imagine would incite the same level of hostility as Tenenbom’s. One session was on her recent book, “The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks La République” and another on the Muhammed al-Dura “lethal narrative,” but Poller said she did not incite the same fury as did Tenenbom. She said she was “quite surprised by the hostile reception” Tenenbom received.
Blum said that, from her perspective, although “there were some hard-core leftists in attendance at Limmud, for the most part, the place was filled with committed, liberal Jews. In some ways this is worse, because the far-Left is out-and-out anti-Israel, while liberals are conflicted about Israel: They visit regularly; they follow the news about events going on in the Jewish state; and they care about it.
“But,” Blum said, “these liberal Jews “are so fraught with Jewish self-doubt and guilt that they wish Israel would just ‘behave itself,’ so that maybe, just maybe, all the terrorism would cease and two peoples would live side-by-side in harmony. It is such nonsense that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Furthermore, they see everything through a prism of ‘peace,’ to the extent that they expect Israel to remedy the war-mongering in its direction. ‘What can Israel do?’ they kept asking about the ‘stabbing intifada,’ as though it was Israel’s place to ‘do’ something, other than kill as many terrorists as possible.”
And maybe what Blum observed is not that different from what Tenenbom was saying. Tenenbom explained to the JewishPress.com that once the abuse started he decided “it was important to talk back, to not take the abuse, to not keep quiet.” He said, “these English manners won’t save you, only fighting back will.”
Tenenbom’s point is that when the pro-Israel team just calmly points out there is a problem with a certain overarching and illiberal position, it gets washed away, but calling out anti-Semites and those who cast unfair and dangerous aspersions on Israel requires calling them out emphatically, sometimes even harshly.
It is interesting to note that so many self-described liberals or progressives would never verbally attack a Palestinian Arab for claiming Israel is racist, but when a Jewish man claims Americans or Germans or other Jews are anti-Israel, those same people are prepared to attack.