Excerpts from selected publications

Rabbi Speaks of Abortion ‘Holocaust’

CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Oct. 26. —As the Register commemorates the anniversary this week of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, it is important to remember that the abortion mentality has influenced people across the world. In October, Rabbi Jacob Neusner wrote about abortion and the Jewish people in an essay called, “Israel's Holocaust”:

“My heart is broken. Just now, my wife's brother called from Jerusalem. He reported that his son's estranged wife the day before had aborted the baby they conceived two months earlier, on the very eve of the couple's final separation leading to divorce. …

“The state of Israel rightly invokes the Holocaust as a primary cause in the creation of the state itself; a refuge and a hope for the victims of the Holocaust. But its liberal abortion laws, the prevalence of abortion as a medium of contraception, the routine character of decisions to abort as a perfectly ordinary medical procedure—these political facts of public policy constitute the counterpart to the race laws and the state-organized offices and institutions of mass murder that shame Germany through all eternity.

“The difference is, Germany has acknowledged its shame. But, for the annual annihilation of tens of thousands of Jewish children, the state of Israel acknowledges nothing. And, here at home, American Jewry's consensus is one-sidedly pro-choice. In desperation, I try to tell myself abortion is not a Jewish issue. But the Torah intervenes, teaching that human life comes from God.”

Out of South Africa

LONDON SUNDAY TIMES, Nov. 29.—Though it has not received the attention it once did, the situation in South Africa remains volatile. So said Anne Paton in an essay in the London Sunday Times.

Paton is the widow of Alan Paton, who wrote Cry, The Beloved Country, a book that brought world-wide attention to suffering under apartheid. Mr. Paton became an activist, campaigning for the release of Nelson Mandela and looking forward to a new South Africa after his ascendency.

Wrote Mrs. Paton, “I am glad [Alan] is not alive now. He would have been so distressed to see what has happened to his beloved country. … I love this country with a passion, but I cannot live here any more. …

“Among my friends and the friends of my friends I know of nine people who have been murdered in the past four years. … I have been hijacked, mugged, and terrorized. …

“There is now more racial tension in this country than I have ever known. But it is not just about black-on-white crime. It is about general lawlessness. Black people suffer more than the whites. …They are the victims of most of the hijackings, rapes, and murders. They cannot run away like the whites, who are streaming out of this country in the thousands.”

She concluded the essay, called “Why I'm Fleeing South Africa,” this way: “President Mandela has referred to us who leave as ‘cowards’ and says the country can do without us. So be it. … We are leaving because crime is rampaging through the land.”