How would you, the average white American, feel about Mexican pundits urging Mexican-Americans to prioritize Mexico when they vote in America?
If Jews in the diaspora want to prioritize Israel, they should move to Israel. By staying in the diaspora and prioritizing Israel as Shmuel Rosner suggests, they are making the case that Jews don’t care as much about their host countries as they do about their own group. In other words, that they have, at best, dual loyalties.
In 90035, there is an Orthodox home that flies a huge Israeli flag on its roof, topped by a tiny American flag. This is not good symbolism for Jews who want to be popular with their fellow American citizens.
As Stephen Steinlight wrote in 2001: “That America has largely tolerated this dual loyalty — we get a free pass, I suspect, largely over Christian guilt about the Holocaust — makes it no less a reality.”
Dr Joseph Dulbeeg, a Manchester Jew, wrote: “Judaism is not a religion merely, like Catholicism or Protestantism; it is a brotherhood, a race if you like; and that it will remain as long as there are two Jews left in the world. Say what you will, no matter how an English Jew or a German Jew may love and feel for his English or German neighbours, he will have a greater love, a greater sympathy for another Jew, even if that Jew may come from the other end of the world.”
American interests and Israeli interests are not identical. Every group has different interests and they compete. Israeli spy Jonathan “Pollard was a cokehead who stole some of the crown jewels of our national security secrets — information relating to the our nuclear missile submarine deterrent — in return for money from the Israelis. (The Israeli government is widely believed to have then bartered the American secrets to the Soviets.”
Rabbi Mayer Schiller said in 1999: “The State of Israel poses a problem for Jews living in the diaspora. A Jew living in America, France or England but yet somehow says I am an Israeli or a Zionist, that creates a tremendous amount of tension. Herzl envisioned Zionism as Jews leaving Gentile nations and going to live in Israel, not staying in France and England and saying I am a Zionist. Jews living in America, England, France, etc, have three moral possibilities: They can be loyal citizens, they can be Zionists which means to leave [for Israel] or they can adopt the Neterui Karta position of non-involvement in the affairs of the nations.”
There is no shame in taking policy toward Israel into account as you vote for your congressman, senator, and, in the future, president. In recent years many studies and polls have proved time and again that Jews in America don’t place the issue of “Israel” high on their agenda as they go to the polls. In most cases these numbers have served to advance the argument that insisting on a “pro Israel” message when speaking to Jewish voters was not as necessary and as beneficial as some observers might think.
Point taken – Israel doesn’t much matter in American elections. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the discussion. It is reasonable to ask if this reluctance to prioritize Israel is healthy for the American Jewish community. It is, no doubt, not healthy for Israel. But when it comes to American elections, Israel is a bystander, not a real player.
American voters are the ones who have to set their agenda straight and decide what’s important to them and what isn’t. And while I know this will ignite the ire of some readers, I’d still urge American Jews to prioritize Israel. Of course, “prioritize” does not mean that they should put Israel at the top of their agenda, and surely not as the only item on their agenda. It also does not necessarily mean a certain vote for a certain party. I advocate for prioritization not to serve a political cause but rather to serve a communal cause.
For Jews to prioritize Israel is a way of saying that they are a community of people with an agenda that has components unique to them. Having an agenda that is unique to them is what makes Jews a community. It is as simple as that.
Steve Sailer writes Sept. 25, 2014:
Leaving aside the specifics of the Brooks family (which are pretty interesting: Brooks’ wife not only converted but changed her first name from Jane to Sarah) …
This is a good example of a general theme of mine: in 21st Century America, you can roughly divide white men up into conservatives and liberals based on their predilections toward loyalty. Everybody feels loyalties, but conservatives tend to be more motivated than liberals by loyalty or team spirit. And conservatives tend to experience their feelings of loyalty in a fairly natural concentric fashion, with their feelings of loyalty diminishing as they go outward to people less like themselves.
Of course, there is a sizable degree of social construction involved in defining natural-seeming loyalties, similar to the inevitable splitter and lumper questions in any field. For example, George Washington was involved in first splitting the British Empire, then in lumping the 13 colonies. But, as Plato might have said, Washington turned out to have been more or less “carving nature at the joints,” so his social constructions have endured better than, say, the British Commonwealth or the United Arab Republic.
White male liberals, in contrast, pride themselves on a certain degree of disloyalty, possessing a set of loyalties that leapfrog in disdain over some set of people not all that far off from themselves. (Of course, all other kinds of liberals besides straight white males are encouraged by the media to subscribe to crude forms of ethnocentrism, such as demanding amnesty for their co-ethnics.)
As an American, I want other Americans, especially other Americans of power, influence, wealth, and talent to see themselves as on my side, the American side. That doesn’t seem too much to ask. I particularly want Americans of influence who are by nature conservatives to train their innate urges toward loyalty to overlap with my loyalties toward my fellow American citizens.
In contrast, if, say, Noam Chomsky doesn’t feel terribly loyal toward American citizens, well, I don’t mind all that much because he’s not by nature all that conservative. Loyalty is not a big part of Chomsky’s personality, nor are his loyalties naturally concentric. There are good things you can say about Professor Chomsky, but “you’d want him in your foxhole” is not the first one that comes to mind. Expecting loyalty from Chomsky is like expecting loyalty from your cat. People don’t give their cats names like “Fido” or expect them to defend their homes from intruders.
In contrast, there are a lot of more naturally conservative Jewish-Americans whom you would definitely want on your side, not on somebody else’s side. They like being loyal. But these days, nobody expects them to be loyal to their fellow citizens.
I would like to see our society engage in more social construction to get naturally conservative Jews like the Brookses to be more loyal to their fellow American citizens and less loyal to their foreign co-ethnics.
In particular, I favor criticism. Being criticized rationally for your poor behavior tends to encourage you to improve your behavior. But criticism of Jews for Jewish-typical failings such as excessive ethnocentrism is a career-killer today.
It’s like calling an angry black woman an angry black woman, except that angry black women tend to be more angry than powerful. In contrast, when Gregg Easterbrook wrote one sentence of criticism of Jewish movie moguls in 2003 in, of all places, Marty Peretz’s The New Republic, Easterbrook was immediately fired from his sportswriting job at Michael Eisner-controlled ESPN that accounted for half of his income. This is even though Easterbrook’s older brother Frank Easterbrook is a heavyweight federal judge. But nobody fears nepotistic vengeance by people named Easterbrook, while Eisner’s actions certainly served pour encourager les autres.
It didn’t always used to be this way. For example, as a child of the 1970s, I’ve often thought about Henry Kissinger. His career and personality have always been controversial, but I think it’s safe to say he is a man of parts. Further, I’m very glad in retrospect that Henry Kissinger was on our side, the United States of America, rather than on the side of the Soviet Union or of Israel.
My impression from reading between the lines in Kissinger’s immense memoir of 1973-74, Years of Upheaval, is that Kissinger had always been very concerned during his younger days about the possibility of accusations of dual loyalties, and that he resolved to overcome them by … not having dual loyalties, by just being loyal to the United States. And to his own fabulous career, of course, but back in the post-WWII era, loyalty to Americans in general tended to help you in your career.
Kissinger’s single loyalty drove the nascent neoconservatives wild with rage, but the neocons weren’t quite as organized and influential back then. Overall, back in the 1960s-1970s, the fact that the only thing simple about Kissinger was his single loyalty greatly benefited his career domestically by allowing him to become the right hand man of the experienced and cynical Richard Nixon.
And, more strikingly, it allowed him to play the role of honest broker in his shuttle diplomacy negotiating the disengagement of Israel’s army from the armies of Egypt and Syria after the 1973 war. That Anwar Sadat (and even Hafez Assad) came to see to see this Jewish-American as representing the interests of the United States rather than of some complicated mixture of American and Israeli interests proved highly useful to the United States (and even to Israel).
In today’s atmosphere, however, the idea that Henry Kissinger had to carefully police his own loyalties to prove, not unreasonably, to gentiles his loyalty to the United States sounds shockingly retrograde and anti-Semitic.
