The Judaism of Self-Congratulation—and Finger-Pointing

During the Rosh Hashanah ritual of tashlikh, Jews traditionally gather by a river or stream and symbolically cast the previous year’s sins into the water. This year, a group of students and faculty at the University of Illinois used the ritual to condemn others: namely, supporters of Israel and the university itself, which withheld tenure from Steven Salaita over his public expressions of anti-Semitism. Among the collective sins being ostentatiously enumerated, Jonathan Marks writes, were “allowing violence against Palestinians to be committed in our name as Jews and as Americans” and “not speaking out against anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.” Marks adds: