On the Unbearable Lightness of Rabbi Ari Jun

He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him. His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon. - Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don’t want it. - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, "When Peace Becomes Obnoxious”

Our organization has come under fire recently from Rabbi Ari Jun, the Director of Cincinnati’s Jewish Community Relations Council and an outspoken Cincinnati Zionist. On June 17, CityBeat published an article on our informational picket outside US Representative Greg Landsman’s office in Walnut Hills. Journalist Lily Ogburn quoted Jun as calling us “tasteless” and “looking like an extremist or hate group.” Remarkably, Rabbi Jun does not deny that our organization has a democratic right to hold Rep. Landsman accountable for his actions; nor does he make any substantive criticism of any of our public claims. Days earlier, in his online journal, Rabbi Jun had already attacked us for our lack of “decorum,” again focusing on etiquette over substance, and implied that our organization is culpable for “political violence,” again without warrant or evidence. He explains to his readers that critics of Zionism don’t “expect anyone reading their message to spontaneously radicalize—that’s not why they spread their hate. Instead, they do so knowing they will make Jews (and other targeted minorities) feel less safe engaging in public life.” Of course, once again, Rabbi Jun provides no evidence for his claim. Jun’s objections to our political speech, like those of other local Zionist spokespeople, is vague and impressionistic; like them, when Jun cannot provide reasoned arguments, he offers a smokescreen of catchphrases, speculation, and buzzwords. 

Rabbi Jun often sidesteps the question of the truth of his critics’ arguments and narrowly focuses on his own feelings and impressions, as if he himself were the center of the political universe. This kind of language is unsurprising. Rabbi Jun is nothing if not a self-promoter. In all of his online promotional material, Rabbi Jun refers to himself as a “scholar,” although a quick search of several scholarly databases did not reveal a single published peer-reviewed monograph, book chapter, or journal article published under his name. Recently, Rabbi Jun repeatedly interrupted and spoke over Amina Barhumi, a Palestinian woman, in a broadcast debate on 91.7 WVXU, several times with quibbling, unsupported, and irrelevant asides and digressions. His highhanded, abrasive performance was that of a demagogue, not a scholar. Perhaps the single best example of Rabbi Jun’s narcissistic view of the world comes, again, from his own blog:

[W]e must acknowledge that the average non-Jew doesn’t have a particularly detailed understanding of Israeli (and Middle Eastern) history. Likewise, they have no reason to have a nuanced understanding of Zionism—which makes them susceptible to smear campaigns attempting to redefine and misappropriate the word. Even phrases like “from the River to the Sea”—which to Jews may seem obviously like a call for genocide of our family and friends—can seem righteous if you have only a cursory understanding of Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian culture and history.

According to Rabbi Jun, most gentiles cannot understand the “nuances” of the Zionist settler project and must therefore accept scholar Jun’s word on the matter. Again, note Rabbi Jun’s aversion to accountability, his intellectual glibness, his ad hominem style of argumentation, his habit of preaching to the choir. These examples demonstrate the real meaning behind Rabbi Jun’s concern for “decorum.” Rabbi Jun has a troubling sense of his own importance and his own rightness; he calls for democratic debate, but he wants passive—and unearned—deference from his critics.

Rabbi Jun is inconsistent in his approach to political violence and political justice. He adeptly deploys the standard social-justice slogans in his writing, but undermines the work of those who seek to defend themselves against violence from the extreme right. For example, while Rabbi Jun vigorously condemned an even-handed and even mild resolution by the UC Undergraduate Senate as “nakedly antisemitic,” he had nothing to say when the notoriously violent far-right Proud Boys rallied in Columbus last January. In fact, Rabbi Jun actively opposed efforts of the organized left to confront a 2019 Klan rally in Dayton. Rabbi Jun’s reasoning for undermining efforts to oppose the Klan are instructive. At the time, he wrote:

Courthouse Square will be a powder keg on [May] 25th. Not only will the KKK be present, but there will likely be thousands of angry counter-protestors there, many bused in from around the region. I trust our local police to ensure Dayton not become the next Charlottesville, but I still wouldn’t recommend someone I loved place themselves in such a situation.

Here, Rabbi Jun displays some of his signature rhetorical moves. For example, he has no evidence that counterprotesters will be “bused in from around the region,” but adds this flourish to represent the counterprotesters as outside agitators. This is, not incidentally, a standard rhetorical stratagem of McCarthyists in general and the Klan itself. More to the point, if Rabbi Jun’s audience had shown up, they themselves would have been, by definition, counterprotesters. They themselves would have been the very rabble Rabbi Jun seems so terrified of. This is the standard reasoning of bourgeois ideologues, for whom the state—and not the people themselves—is the main bulwark against fascism. For the ruling class, when the people respond to the provocations of the far right, they risk being just as bad, if not worse, than the fascists themselves. Rabbi Jun furthermore betrays his own paternalistic distrust of the people by, on one hand, repeatedly referring to Dayton as a “community,” and on the other, implying that directly confronting the Klan is purely a matter of personal whim. He associates passivity with community and self-defense with recklessness. Yet a mass of powerless, compliant, isolated individuals is no community at all. The only kind of “community” bourgeois ideologues like Rabbi Jun can envision is the imaginary community of bourgeois civil society, the bourgeois state, its courts, its police, its armies, and its overwhelming historical mission of defending capital and the capitalist class. 

Nonetheless, in the case of the Dayton Klan rally, the people won and both the Klan and Rabbi Jun lost. Six hundred people, some of them heavily armed—including communists, anarchists, Black Nationalists, Quakers, and members of the Church of God, along with several Cincinnati Socialists members—showed up to directly and corporeally oppose the Klan. Meanwhile, a mile away, a mere two hundred people attended the cookout touted by the Dayton police, Mayor Nan Whaley, and Rabbi Jun. Thankfully—and with no thanks to Rabbi Jun—the Klan has not returned to Dayton.

Altogether, the evidence paints Rabbi Jun as an unprincipled political opportunist. He reminds us of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”  In the case of Rabbi Jun, the “order” to be preserved is based on the illusion that the bourgeois state—the womb in which fascism itself gestates—must be the people’s sole defense against oppression, racism, antisemitism, and violence. Rabbi Jun’s online writing is laced with the paternalistic McCarthyite ideology that sees the revolutionary Left as the estate of fringe-dwellers and resentful upstarts, as dangerous as Klansmen and Nazis. Like the British statesman Edmund Burke, famously the target of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Rabbi Jun thinks the people are forfeit their right to self-defense as soon as they become fractious and impolite. The chaotic and fickle masses, in this view, need the moderating, pacifying guidance of the ruling classes and their spokespeople. They cannot speak for themselves. Yet in the end, the bourgeois order Rabbi Jun serves cannot be separated from the Zionist settler colonial project, just as the vapid cant of capitalist ideology cannot be separated from the vicious, colonialist, racist logic of Zionism itself. One is a public-relations campaign for the other; the decorous bourgeois-liberal state that Rabbi Jun embraces is the selfsame state that provides F-35s and Hellfire missiles to Israel. Rabbi Jun offers his American audience platitudes about peace and community; meanwhile, high explosives and machine-gun rounds rain down upon the people of Gaza. No one should be so naïve as to buy into this hypocrisy. Cincinnati Socialists completely rejects Rabbi Jun’s vacuous, simplistic worldview. We say there will be peace when the international working class has won the class war, when all colonies, oppressive structures, and bourgeois states have been swept from the face of the planet. We say the people of Gaza are leading the way. We say the workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains, and a world to win.