Weiss is not just the name of a kind of beer produced in Germany. It’s also a family name. To be specific of an American rabbi, Yisroel Dovid Weiss, ancient Hungarian roots, leader of the minority Jewish group Neturei Karta (city guardians in Aramaic), which is… Anti-Zionist. Actually Zionism and Semitism have nothing in common, or well, not much, as the first is related to the State of Israel and the second to Judaism, so the first aspect is political and the second religious. But a rabbi that refuses the idea of a nation built on the ashes of the Promise Land is not an everyday thing, when also a liberal such as Woody Allen keeps balanced positions about the Palestinian conflict.
“Authentic rabbis always opposed Zionism and the State of Israel”, wrote Weiss on a cartel during a demonstration in Washington back in 2005, because “contradictory to God’s commandments. Even if this nation rose in an “inhabited and desolate land”. This speech was spoke in 2006, during the international conference to review the global vision of the holocaust, that took place – guess where? – in Teheran.
Picture an anti-mafia D.A. attending a meeting to rehabilitate mafia in Corleone. There would be critics. But Weiss, as representative of Naturei Karta, wasn’t there with a negationist purpose – he had some relatives killed by the Nazis during World War II – but just to remark the differences between Judaism and Zionism, affirming that the former president of Iran Ahmadinejad wasn’t an enemy for the Jews, but a “man who feared God which respects Jewish people and guarantees them protection”.
Some other statements sound more reasonable, whether you can agree or not. Weiss doesn’t think that the number of victims is overestimated, but that it was used to “gain sympathies and benefits. There are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people all around the world who can identify themselves with our opposition to Zionism, not feeling it as Hebrew but just a political agenda. We want a total retreat, not to the boundaries of 1967, to give the land back to the Palestinians”.
We don’t have to mention that Weiss hasn’t a lot of support in the United States, he’s not even allowed to have kosher food in restaurants, you can imagine about step foot in a Synagogue. Like he was Jake Mazursky of Alpha Dog, born Jew but with a swastika tattooed up on his chest, or Danny Balint, the Jewish/Nazi in The Believer – those are real contradictions.
In the end Weiss is a man of peace, he wishes the co-existence of Arabs and Jews in Palestine, like happened for centuries before the “criminal occupation in violation of the Torah”. To protest against one of the military actions in Gaza Weiss even burnt his Israeli passport in front of the U.N. building in New York. He’s basically ready to spend time in our radical left-wing centers. Toasting to peace with a weiss (beer).