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A book by a Rabbi who blames all the ills of the world on Zionism
Imagine it is 1941 and Hitler gives the remaining Jews an ultimatum: emigrate en masse to Israel immediately. If not, they will be sent to their deaths in the concentration camps.
For this reviewer and I think most people, the choice is eminently clear: go to Israel. However, if one takes the approach detailed in The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s journey from identity crisis to identity theft by Rabbi Yakov Shapiro, the choice would be for the remaining millions of Jews to die in the gas chambers, rather than violate the oath of exile, which forbids mass emigration to Israel.
Shapiro is related through marriage to the Satmar Rebbe, Rav Yoel Teitelbaum. In Va’yoel Moshe, the Rebbe laid out the Satmar doctrine on Zionism. While Va’yoel Moshe is strictly a scholarly rabbinic text, Empty Wagon takes a very altered approach and is a disingenuous religious and political polemic that blames nearly all of the failings in the Jewish world of the past 150 years, including the Holocaust, on Zionism. While Shapiro quotes extensively from Va’yoel Moshe, there is no connection between these two works.
The Empty Wagon is a seriously flawed work, and Shapiro’s approach is histrionic, rather than logical. A full disputation would take more space and time than I have so that I will focus on a few of the…
