This comment appeared on the UJEB facebook page, and if there is any better more testimony of the moral bankruptcy being advocated though the school policy FIRIS seeks to end, I don’t know what it is.   This comment was “liked” by UJEB – which tells us a lot about UJEB.

In what other ways besides this can we come up with government sponsored techniques to help Australian Jews “confront the situation of who they are or aren’t”.  Surely if Jewish Australians benefit from having their kids segregated by SRI, by all means, we should welcome discrimination.  After all, in country where your children are not put in the hall to “concentrate” … how on earth will you know “who you are”?

I wish to point out that evidence from all over the world suggests that Jews can survive being *not* treated differently in schools, and that it does Jewish families no harm to allow them to choose the means by which they choose to segregate or not segregate their children. Making a virtue of out of segregation imposed by a public institution is obscene.

gold star

While we don’t doubt the sincerity of Elli Smith’s views on segregation being something that helped her nearly seven year old self find the space to meditate on her “Jewish Identity” – we suggest to UJEB that this is completely unacceptable to others – and we’ve made this clear.  UJEB may feel that these small acts of official systemic segregation are salutary for “Jewish Identity”, but we sincerely disagree.

We believe that Jewish parents in Australia are perfectly happy to be treated no different from everyone else and that having their children put out in the hall so that their religious identity can be emphasised is highly unwelcome.  Here is one such person if you can’t imagine a Jewish FIRIS supporter actually wanting their children treated the same as everyone else while they are in school:

http://youtu.be/e3670tJ7f40