“Trans-Tolerance,” Israeli-Style?

In the 1950s in the volume, “The Radical Right,” Peter Viereck coined the concept of “trans-tolerance” not to praise but to put down American Christians and Jews who crossed sectarian lines and abstained from religious prejudice in order to raise a common banner for—not against—Senator Joe McCarthy. In other words, you did not have to be an anti-Semite, or even a Christian, to be a right-wing bigot.

Perhaps the concept has unique application in contemporary Israel regarding Benzi Gopstein’s Lehava movement, which attracts right-wing soccer hooligans. Gopstein has been arrested, and his movement may be outlawed, for inciting racism—but racism of a special kind. Lehava makes a point that it has no objections to Israeli Jews marrying across “racial” lines—i.e., Ashkenazi with Sephardi or even Beta Israel. It’s religious intermarriage between Jews and Muslims that Lehava virulently and maybe sometimes violently objects to.

This is “trans-tolerance” that abstains from racial rabble rousing, but raises its banner against interreligious unions. Left-wing “Haaretz” columnist Anshel Pfeffer opposes outlawing Lehava yet tweaks the political right by claiming that Gopstein has a legitimate claim to “Judah Maccabee’s mantle.”

Pfeffer is peddling nonsense in that religious intermarriage today may represent challenges to Judaism, but these are not nearly of the order of the putsch to Hellenize Judaism sponsored by ancient Syrian monarch, Antochius IV Epiphanes.

Even so, it has to be admitted that Jews and Israelis are not immune to bigotry.