Nicole Guzik, of the Sinai Temple Israel Center in Los Angeles, on Saturday published an open letter to the co-organizers of the Women’s March, LA, Emiliana Guereca and Deena Katz (Why I Left the Women’s March L.A.), to explain why she no longer sees herself as an affiliate of their march. It had to do with broken promises and anti-Semitism.
Guzik, who created religious program at her center around her Friday Night Live prayer book, High Holy Day prayer book, Torah in the Round, and Sisterhood communities, wrote in the Jewish Journal to the two organizers: “I was assured by you, the founders of this March, countlessly in a private meeting, that this March was different. That in Los Angeles (unlike the National March) Israel would not be attacked, labeling Israel as an apartheid state would be unwelcome on the stage…”
In fact, Guzik reminded Guereca and Katz of their assurances that “if a speaker went off script, the managers of the program would raise the music.”
That last one is both pathetic and kind of sweet: if the speaker moves away from issues of concern to US women to condemn the Jewish State – the orchestra will drown them out. So Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey & Farrakhan…
Predictably, Guzik wrote, “in the very first hour of the Women’s March L.A. program at Pershing Square, all those promises were broken.”
Sister, here’s a lesson you should take home to your classes at the Sinai Center: if you cross the river with a scorpion on your shoulder, it’ll bite you, right there, in the middle of the water, causing both of you to drown. Why? Because it’s a scorpion.
According to Guzik, Marwa Rifahie from the Council on American-Islamic Relations “used her allotted time to focus on the Palestinian agenda,” which Guzik had been promised would not happen.
“When she called Israel an apartheid state…I waited. Where was the music? Where was someone asking her to remain on script? Who vetted this speaker? Why was I assured that anti-Semitic statements would not be permitted or tolerated in this anti-hate arena? Why was someone allowed to defend the organizers of the march in Washington?”
Two Jewish paratroopers are going to jump behind enemy lines, and they’re told, you jump, the parachute opens. If it doesn’t open, you pull this lever and the backup parachute opens. You hit the ground and a truck will be waiting for you to take you to your mission. So they jump, and a minutre later, Berle asks Shmerle: did your parachute open? No, Shmerle answers. When you pulled on the lever, did the backup parachute open? No, says Shmerle. You know something, Berle says, I don’t thing there’s a truck waiting for us either.
“I used my voice, opinion and reputation to defend you, the founders that assured me, a Jewish woman was welcome and needed. I know I’m needed but today, I was not welcomed,” Guzik lamented.
“I booked a hotel room from Friday to Sunday in order to observe Shabbat downtown and stand for equality and the ability for women and men to join together to give voice to those unable to speak,” she complained, sounding like the proverbial American tourist arguing about her lost luggage with the counter clerk in a sub-Saharan airfield somewhere.
The world is a tough place, sister Guzik, and in such a tough place, you are either with your family, all of it—from black capotas to tennis whites—or you’re without. If you go to great lengths to observe Shabbat in downtown LA only to mingle with the haters of your family – might as well drive over and on the way pick up a ham sandwich.
“If you want me back at next year’s March, someone like me better vet and screen your speakers,” Guzik spells out her note to be dropped in the complaint box in some resort hotel. Seriously? You really still believe it was a vetting problem? You really believe you’ll get it right next time, if only they listened to you?
Please, understand, Nicole, there’s nothing wrong with the Muslim women who hate Israel, they are normal, they hate their enemies and are not afraid to say as much. You are the wrong component in this narrative. You went and hung around with scorpions, and scorpions, as you’ve learned, know perfectly well who they are, they are the ones that bite.
But who are you?