American Latinos rally in support of Israel

T. Belman. If only liberal Jews would feel this way about Israel.

Ben Shapiro was asked how were we going to get Liberal Jews to connect to Israel, he said teach them about Judaism. Of course the closer you are to Judaism the more pro-Israel you are. That applies to Christians as well.

Hundreds of Latino Evangelicals gather in LA for bilingual ‘Night to Honor Israel’, one in a series of events for Hispanic community.

By David Rosenberg, INN

Hundreds of Latino Evangelicals from Southern California gathered at the Igelsia Evangelica Latina church in Los Angeles Thursday night for a special event honoring the State of Israel.

The event, which was advertised as a “Night to Honor Israel”, was organized by Pastor Peter De Jesus, a Latino Evangelical clergyman from Texas and the National Hispanic Outreach Coordinator for Christians United For Israel (CUFI).

Participants waved Israeli, American flags while singing Hebrew songs, as girls from the congregation danced in blue-and-white outfits, based on the colors of the Israeli flag.

In addition to members of the Los Angeles Latino Evangelical community, the event – which was held in both Spanish and English – was also attended by local Jewish community leaders and a representative of the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles.

Pastor De Jesus, who helped organize a series of events across the country, including Thursday night’s ‘Night to Honor Israel’, told journalist Karmel Melamed that the State of Israel is doubly important to Hispanic Evangelicals.

“Why is this so important for us as Hispanic Evangelicals? First and foremost, we are Evangelicals. We understand that as Christians, the root system of our faith comes from Judaism. The Bible that we consider to be sacred and infallible and without error…was written by… all Jews.”

“When it comes from Hispanics, we are descendants…[of people from] Spain. We know the history, especially when we consider the 1400s and the Spanish Inquisition and the real reasons for the Inquisition being done, that was, unfortunately, persecution against Jews to the point of not only forcibly trying to convert them to the Catholic Christian religion, but also mistreat them to the point of murder.”

“We as Hispanics, our roots go all the way back to that era, and even beyond that, indirectly or directly connecting to the Jewish people, to Sephardic Jews.”

Last Thursday’s event is part of a series of pro-Israel gatherings within the American Latino Evangelical community across the country.

Similar events, including ‘Nights to Honor Israel’ and ‘Standing With Israel’ gatherings of Spanish-speakers were held in San Antonio, Las Vegas, Arizona, and even Pawtucket and Providence Rhode Island in October.

In November, events directed towards Spanish speakers were held in Connecticut, Oklahoma, and Washington State.

December 3, 2018 | 2 Comments »

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2 Comments / 2 Comments

  1. @ adamdalgliesh:

    The experts he consulted-the liar- seem to have access to information about the Maccabean Wars that nobody else has. As far as I know, having extensively read all about that period by genuine experts, we’d have known virtually nothing about them if it were not for the Books of the Maccabees……There has never been other information found. And that this assimilated, half or quarter Jew admits that the Wars were against the Selucid Empire, not the Roman Empire, could only have been acquired from a history book, certainly not from a Rabbis drasha.. It’ requires no genius to know that amongst the Graeco-Syrian armies would have been some former Jews. But the enemy was the Selucid Greek Empire and it was a massive, miraculous victory.

    The 8 day tiny oil cruse is only an incidental accretion to cement the event in Jewish minds of THOSE days and their descendants forever. It sounds more like a miracle than winning a (20 year) war. And the Prophets and Sages always used miracles to show G-d’s unending love for His People.

    What we do know, without the Books of the Maccbees, is the history of the last 100 or more years of the Jewish State, because from other sources, we know how it all led up to Herod and the later Roman Wars. Herod murdered the last 2 direct descendants of the Mokkoviim one being his wife the other her young 18 year old brother

    So I suppose that we’d have been able to backtrack from them to the Maccabees anyway. This “Humanist” guy with a 3 year old top advisor, is lost to us, as his -“poor me”- article amply shows……… Good bye

  2. Meanwhile, the New York Times prints overtly antisemitic article denouncing Hannukah. Author claims to speak for liberal American Jews. Obviously, people who hate Judaism don’t love Israel. Evangelicals have more respect for Judaism than liberal , assimilated American Jews.

    The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah
    It’s a holiday that commemorates an ancient battle against assimilation. And it’s the one holiday that most assimilated Jews celebrate.

    Dec. 1, 2018
    A menorah on Independence Mall in Philadelphia in 2017.Matt Rourke/Associated Press

    A menorah on Independence Mall in Philadelphia in 2017.Matt Rourke/Associated Press
    It’s the question that Jewish parents instinctively dread.

    A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch with my 3-year-old daughter, watching YouTube videos about animals in space, when out of nowhere she looked up at me and asked:

    “Dada, can we celebrate Christmas?”

    “We don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told her, putting on my serious voice. “We celebrate Hanukkah.”

    Like generations of Jewish parents before me, I did my best to sell her on the relative merits of Hanukkah. True, Christmas might have those sparkly trees, ornaments and fruitcake. But we have latkes, jelly doughnuts and eight nights of presents.

    “Do we have Santa?” she asked, hopefully.

    “No,” I said, and her face dropped. “They do.”

    I tried to reiterate the part about the jelly doughnuts and the eight nights of presents. But she wasn’t having any of it. I can’t say I blame her. During the rest of the year, the Jewish holidays we celebrate are like special, bonus celebrations we get to have on top of everything else going on in the calendar.

    With Hanukkah and Christmas, however, it’s a zero-sum game.

    [Discover the most compelling features, reporting and humor writing from The New York Times Opinion section, selected by our editors. Sign up for the Sunday Best newsletter.]

    Most of the year, it isn’t hard for our family to feel both American and Jewish. But in December — when there are wreaths and Peppa Pig Christmas specials and inflatable Santas everywhere you look — that dual identity becomes more of a question. Which is why Hanukkah is a big deal for mostly assimilated Jews like myself.

    The only trouble is the actual holiday. Not the latkes and the dreidels, but the story of Hanukkah, which at its heart is an eight-night-long celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.

    For most of the past 2000 years, Hanukkah was an afterthought on the Jewish calendar, a wintertime festival of lights during which people spun tops and ate greasy food to commemorate what has to be one of God’s least impressive miracles — a small container of oil lasted for eight nights! More recently, as Jews have become assimilated into American society, the holiday has evolved into a kind of Semitic sidekick for Christmas, a minor festival pumped up into something it was never meant to be so that Jewish kids won’t feel bad about not having a tree.

    This is the version of Hanukkah that I grew up with: presents and chocolate gelt; latkes with sour cream and applesauce; a few somber, off-key songs that no one fully remembered, about Judah Maccabee. This is the version of Hanukkah I had in mind when my daughter and I walked down to our local branch of the Oakland Public Library to check out a stack of books about the holiday.

    Most of the books we found presented a familiar narrative — dreidels and menorahs and pious Maccabees doing battle against their enemies — but between the lines, there were some hints at a darker story, enough to send me to Wikipedia and the Books of Maccabees on the (definitely not Jewish but very helpful) Bible Gateway website, which led me back to the library for another stack of books, this one for myself.

    According to most modern scholars — and a few rabbis I called on to help me out — the story of Hanukkah is based on a historical conflict between the Maccabees and the Hellenized Jews, the former being religious zealots who lived in the hills of Judea and practiced an ancient form of guerrilla warfare, the latter being mostly city-dwelling assimilationists who ate pork, didn’t circumcise their male children and made the occasional sacrificial offering to pagan gods.

    Some of the details are up for debate, depending on which texts you consult. But everyone agrees that the Maccabees won out in the end and imposed their version of Judaism on the formerly Hellenized Jews. So Hanukkah, in essence, commemorates the triumph of fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism. Our assimilationist answer to Christmas is really a holiday about subjugating assimilated Jews.

    The more I thought about all this, the more it disturbed me. For what am I if not a Hellenized Jew? (O.K., an Americanized Jew, but what’s the difference, really?) I eat pork every so often. Before having children, my wife and I agonized over the question of circumcision. And while I’ve never offered burned sacrifices to Zeus, I do go to yoga occasionally. When it comes down to it, it’s pretty clear that the Maccabees would have hated me. They would have hated me because I’m assimilated and because I’m the product of intermarriage. And while I can’t say for certain what the Maccabees would have thought about my fondness for Bernie Sanders or my practice of Reconstructionist Judaism, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have liked those things either.

    Given all this, there’s a part of me that wants to skip out on Hanukkah altogether. Why should I light candles and sing songs to celebrate a group of violent fundamentalists?

    The answer, frankly, is that it’s not my choice. With my daughter ready to sign up for Team Santa, we have to celebrate something, and I’m not quite Hellenized enough to get a Christmas tree.

    So this year, for lack of a better alternative, I’m going to try to embrace Hanukkah in all its contradictions. When I light the candles, I’m going to celebrate the possibility of light in dark times, the importance of even the smallest miracles. And when everyone else is singing about the Maccabees, I’ll be saying a prayer for the Hellenized Jews and for the “renegade Jews” of our day.

    Then I’m going to sneak my daughter an extra piece of chocolate gelt and break out the presents. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about beating Santa.

    Michael David Lukas is the author of the novel “The Last Watchman of Old Cairo.”

    Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

    Correction: December 2, 2018
    An earlier version of this article misstated the historic enemy of the Maccabees, as commemorated in the Hanukkah story. The Maccabees fought the Seleucid Empire, not the Romans.