Now they want to #OccupyJudaism

Posted by William A. Jacobson Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 1:52pm

There have been some highly publicized anti-Semitic outbursts at the Occupy Wall Street protests, as well as claims of anti-Semitism lodged against the organizing group, AdBusters.

So now some progressive Jews have formed an Occupy Judaism movement presumably to deflect from the criticism and to mainstream Jewish progressives into the various Occupy groups:

As protest movements under the banner of Occupy Wall Street grow in cities across the United States, a parallel movement calling itself ‘Occupy Judaism’ has sprung up as well.

Occupy Judaism is a movement of those who are unhappy with not only the state of American society, but perhaps with Jewish life in America as well. Like the succot built at several protest sites, Occupy Judaism indicates the Jewish presense among protesters claiming to represent the “99 percent” of the country disenfranchised and dissatisfied with inequalities in American society….

“There are a lot of Jews who have been really affected by the economy,” Rabbi Alana Suskin, a participant in Occupy DC, said. “There may be one synagogue in the country where no one has lost their jobs. Jews also have their poor. It’s the unspoken elephant in the room. Not everybody’s well off. Probably most Jews are part of the 99 percent.”

OccupyJudaism now has a Facebook page and numerous local offshoot pages.