Silent Majority?

There is a silent majority of Jews in the US who feel completely alienated from mainline Jewish groups because those groups are no longer in line with their central beliefs of justice and equality. Most Jews in the US are not affiliated with the institutions that purport to represent us. Never in American history have so many Jewish groups sprung up outside of the mainstream of the Jewish community, in defiance of the flawed leadership of our community.

Now there's a bold statement. Is it true I wonder? It's a passage from the transcript of a speech by Liat Weingart that I found on Electronic Intifada. about Jewish Voice for Peace supporting the Presbytarian Church of the USA in its selective divestment campaign against Israel.

Frankly, I find the speech itself quite, well, Judeocentric. Look at this, for example:

Outside of Israel, most Jews are as secure as most other human beings. However, the subjective experience of the millennia of persecution and genocide is quite another thing. Since my visit to Auschwitz last October, the constant fear that I and many other Jews live with has come to the surface of my consciousness. In some ways, my nightmares are a new phenomenon. But in reality, Auschwitz and the legacy of persecution and targeting that my family faced was always in my house as I grew up. No one talked about it, but you could feel it. A constant level of tension and anxiety that you wouldn't notice until you woke up with a stiff neck and sore muscles, not having any idea what you spent the night running from. I know this is a common experience for Jews. One of my Jewish friends wonders which neighbors will hide her children just in case there's a severe anti-Semitic outbreak. I've heard a number of Jews say that they think about having an extra suitcase packed, "just in case." My grandfather stocked our cabinets with pieces of bread wrapped in cloth, "just in case."

And this is in America. When I stayed on a kibbutz I remember the young members sneering at the "old Poles" for stashing food. Food was plentiful on the kibbutz but these people had endured concentration camps or ghettos and clearly never got over it. But for this disorder to pass on to succeeding generations requires cultivation. How can that happen in an open society like America? And why does it not happen in the UK or indeed anywhere else? And what is this about "millennia of persecution"? This is ahistorical nonsense. It links biblical mythology to what we know and it links modern racial anti-semitism to violent religious disputations and back again to social and economic rebellions.

It worries me that a Jewish woman feels that she can only approach the Jewish community by speaking of real and imagined threats to and sufferings of Jews. Why can't she just say what's wrong?