Woke ‘Transgender Rabbi’ Gets Biden to Call for Pro-Hamas Pause in Gaza War

Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg
Reconstructing Judaism
Neil Munro

A Minnesota man who says he is a woman and also a rabbi prompted President Joe Biden to call for a “pause” in the Israel campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

“I think we need a pause,” Biden said when the man named Jessica Rosenberg interrupted the event to declare: “If you care about the Jewish people, as a rabbi, I need you to call for a ceasefire right now.”

A real pause would be a strategic problem for Israel, which is trying to wipe out the Hamas military in Gaza before growing protests by Arab-world Muslims can destabilize the region.

The political power of woke activists is an unexpected result of the progressives’ policy of importing many millions of migrants to divide and diversify Americans’ coherent society. Business groups also play a critical role because they fund the progressives’ profit-maximizing policy of extracting millions of extra workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries.

Biden was in Minneapolis to shore up his support among the state’s growing population of Muslims, including many from Somalia. The population’s leaders are threatening to abstain in the 2024 election.

WATCH — “Free Palestine” — Protesters March Through Minneapolis Chanting Support for Palestine as Biden Visits Minnesota:

@Bam2 via Storyful

But without the state’s Muslim vote, Biden is likely to lose the state in 2004. The state has been drifting toward the GOP since the federal government began growing its foreign population in the 1990s.

In practice, Biden’s call for a pause is likely a mere sop to the state’s Muslims, whose continued poverty keeps them in thrall to the Democrats’ tax-and-spend policies. So far, Biden and his deputies have not seriously pressured Israel to stop their Gaza offensive. In fact, he is providing military and economic support for the battle through Gaza’s streets and buildings.

Rosenberg’s role spotlights the expanding clout of post-progressive “woke” radicalism that has suddenly challenged Biden’s blend of social-policy progressivism and pro-business corporatism.

In general, woke radicals view politics as a battle of identity groups seeking freedom from a claimed hierarchy of “oppressors.” That worldview ensures that many woke Americans are primed to oppose Israel as a supposed colonial oppressor of the indigenous Palestinian people — regardless of Arab atrocities or the anti-liberal demands of Islam.

For example, as a self-claimed transgender, Rosenberg denies the biological distinctions between men and women. That rejection primes him to reject the moral distinction between Hamas’ murderous raids and Israel’s right to self-defense in a deeply antisemitic region of the world, or the border distinctions between Americans and foreigners.

The site, evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org, described Rosenberg:

Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg currently resides on Dakota land, also home to the Anishinaabe, known as South Minneapolis. She was raised on Lenape land, in the Philadelphia suburbs, by Ken z”l and Shelley, accidental organizers who taught her that Jewish communities should be life-giving and values-aligned, and that it is up to us to build them. She became a Reconstructionist rabbi in order to learn our people’s diverse and nuanced histories, and create spaces, ritual and organizing that help transform our relationships to past, present and future. She has worked as a national organizer at Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and as a collective member of the Radical Jewish Calendar project. She has served and learned from: the visionary young people at Keshet’s LGBTQIA Teen Shabbatonim, the rabbis and members of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Jewish Congregation at SCI-Phoenix Prison. She authored an Introduction to Trauma, Healing and Resilience for Rabbis, Jewish Educators and Organizers, published by Reconstructing Judaism.

The site also provides a picture of Rosenberg with a beard.

Progressives increasingly recognize that the growing clout of woke radicals is a threat to progressive goals — and also to public support for Israel.

For example, some gays have begun jeering at the woke radicals, including those who claim Islam would support “queer rights.”

Progressive intellectuals are also pushing back — but are refusing to recognize how their core demands for immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism have fueled woke support for Hamas.

“Well, certainly I have been shocked this week, by how people who’ve been claiming for 10 years that silence is violence can somehow come to the conclusion that violence is to be celebrated,” author Yascha Mounk said at an October 6 meeting, shortly after Hamas massacred more than 1,4000 Jews in Israel. He was hosted by the investor-funded American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, which has an incentive to oppose the woke ideology.

But Mounk refused to offer any political concessions to the great majority of Americans who recognize the woke left is being fuelled by immigration. The migration is powered by business groups and their funding for progressive allies in Washington D.C.

Breitbart News asked Mounk how migration has helped grow the woke ideology, but he dodged the question. He also dodged questions about the role of Wall Street in pushing for more migration and diversity.

But Mounk has just written a book to help his elite-left allies argue against the woke left, which he calls the “Identity Synthesis.” He told the AEI audience that older-style liberalism has buckled under the youth demand for wokeness:

The new set of ideas about race, gender and sexual orientation [has] become very influential on big parts of the left, but [is] also important in the political mainstream over the course of the last decade or so. I argue in this book that this is a genuinely novel ideology, that it has changed… the dominant strain of left-wing thinking.

Mounk has gotten much praise from the establishment for demanding that the United States be transformed from a nation of self-ruling American citizens into a chaotic, multicultural society.  In turn, the multicultural society would be overseen by noble progressive elites, not by the voters, according to Mounk.

That elite-backed revolutionary plan is a “Great Experiment” by progressives on 300 million Americans, he admitted in a 2022 interview:

We have no real example of democracies that managed to sustain deep ethnic and religious diversity while treating people fairly, which is the aspiration that our society now has. And we have lots of examples in history of ethnic and religious diversity going wrong, both in democracies and in nond emocratic societies leading to genocide, leading to civil war, leading to terrible forms of exploitation, domination like slavery. So, I think there is good reason to think that there is a special challenge to sustaining diverse democracy. And I think we can see some of that in our politics. We can see how fears about demographic change incite the cultural divisions that characterize the United States and many other democracies today.

The biggest obstacle to his goal of harmonious multicultural democracy, he admitted, is not politics or money but basic human psychology.

“One of the things that makes it difficult to make diverse democracies work are the fundamental elements of human psychology, are the fact that we have a very strong tendency to favor the in-group and discriminate against the outgroup,” he said.

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