Anyone who hurls slurs like “hate site” immediately loses the argument. Once you call your opponent a Nazi (when that is not accurate), you lose, and this is effectively what David Bernstein is doing here.
People who use the slur “anti-Semite” never use the slur “anti-Gentile” even though that orientation has as much reality as anti-Jewish attitudes.
Different groups have different interests. From the perspectives of Jews, much of Christianity is a hate religion. From the perspective of Christians, much of Judaism is a hate religion. From the perspectives of Jews and Christians, much of Islam is a hate religion. From the perspective of Muslims, much of Christianity and Judaism are hate religions.
It all depends upon your perspective. There’s plenty of hatred to be found in every major religion and in every important in-group identity.
If I were a Muslim or an Arab, I would hate the Jewish state of Israel. I would view the land it occupies as belonging to my people (Arabs and Muslims). I would rejoice when the Jewish state suffered. And as Israel is the Jewish state, I would likely have negative views of Jews in general.
I am not a Muslim and I am not an Arab. I am an Orthodox Jew. Hence, I have negative views of Islam because there has never been a country that has grown more Muslim and more in alignment with what I would want in a country (freedom).
If I were an American non-Jew, I would want America to have the same relationship with Israel as it has with Chile and New Zealand and Iceland. No more and no less.
What kind of people do I hate? Those who threaten me. My anger is a self-protection device.
I think Mondoweiss is a valuable website and in his own way and at times, he’s doing good work. Jews, like every other group, benefit from accurate criticism and appropriate applications of stigma (not that Mondoweiss is always accurate, but he has enough of a track record to merit respect for the accuracy of many of his criticisms of Jews and the Jewish state).
My own point of view on Israel in particular and on nationalism in general is the opposite of Mondoweiss but I usually find benefit from reading him. Jews and other groups should face the problems they create for others when they put their own interests first.
There are only two honorable forms of argument — to challenge someone’s facts and to challenge someone’s logic. Every other form of argument is dishonorable. David Bernstein shows himself to be dishonorable.
Regarding some points made by Bernstein:
The fact that Philip Glass told Terry Gross an anecdote about how his small-businessman father ripped off some record companies decades ago, and Terry Gross laughed, reflects the fact that Jews believe “we are justified in taking advantage of The Man.”
In my Protestant upbringing, such thievery does not engender laughter because Protestants don’t tend to make the intense in-group/out-group distinctions that Jews and Muslims do.
Weiss and his then-girlfriend, who wasn’t Jewish, exchanged letters via FedEx at Newsweek’s expense twenty-five years ago. According to Weiss, his girlfriend realized she was stealing from Weiss’s employer, while it never occurred to him. This says nothing about Gentiles’ honesty in general, or about Weiss’s perspicacity, but apparently again shows that Jews believe in taking advantage of The Man.
Groups don’t have identical virtues. Compared to white Protestants, for instance, in these sort of matters, Jews of Eastern European and Middle Eastern origin tend to be less honest.
“My friend bridled at the explanation. He had worked on Wall Street; he spoke of all the insider traders who were Jewish. They weren’t any smarter, they cheated, he said.
He might be right.
Bernstein: “The Jews never had much political power in Europe…”
Money and media ownership tend to bring political power so I suspect that Jews in Europe had a little more power than Bernstein claims. Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ around 115, a standard deviation beyond the goy’s average. That brings a lot of power in its wake.
David Bernstein writes:
Back in 2008, I wrote the following:
I find anti-Israel blogger Philip Weiss morbidly interesting, and I occasionally happen upon his blog. Weiss finds his own Jewish background alternately suffocating and infuriating, and yet can’t seem to stop talking about it, and about how he’s trying to overcome it. [Recent example: “My experience of Jewish life is that it’s elite-oriented. We cared deeply about prestige (yiches, in Yiddish) and excellence in my family, and I came to find those values suffocating…. The contempt for peasants is something I always found concerning in my own cultural background, that I seek to reform in my own Jewish experience.”] If a Woody Allen character ever became an anti-Zionist polemicist, he would be a lot like Philip Weiss.
I’ve made an occasional reference to Weiss or the blog he founded, Mondoweiss, since then. Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go.
So in a sense it’s understandable that people with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict read Mondoweiss, especially if they share the blog’s anti-Israel politics. I keep up sporadically with Mondoweiss largely because its posts sometimes find their way into my Facebook feed from some of my more left-wing friends.
I hope my Facebook friends and others recognize, however, that whatever Mondoweiss’ value as a news aggregator, it is also a hate site.
Mondoweiss tries to preserve a fine line between hostility to Jews and hostility to Israel, but every once in a while, Weiss reminds us that the blog’s entire existence owes to the fact that he can’t maintain that separation.
The most dramatic example I’ve seen arrived in my Facebook feed last week via a Jewish journalist who passed it along with the comment, “Who thinks like this?”
In the course of a typical (for Weiss) rambling, somewhat incoherent post, titled, “Forgving the Anti-Semites,” Weiss makes the following claims, all of which are either unrelated to Israel or are only tangentially related to Israel–unless you believe that whatever Israel’s sins, they are not the “normal” sins of a nation-state, but somehow inextricably tied to the shortcomings of Jews.
(1) The fact that Philip Glass told Terry Gross an anecdote about how his small-businessman father ripped off some record companies decades ago, and Terry Gross laughed, reflects the fact that Jews believe “we are justified in taking advantage of The Man.”
(2) Weiss and his then-girlfriend, who wasn’t Jewish, exchanged letters via FedEx at Newsweek’s expense twenty-five years ago. According to Weiss, his girlfriend realized she was stealing from Weiss’s employer, while it never occurred to him. This says nothing about Gentiles’ honesty in general, or about Weiss’s perspicacity, but apparently again shows that Jews believe in taking advantage of The Man.
(3) Here’s where it gets really bizarre. I can’t do justice to this part of the post without quoting it:
I remembered a conversation I’d had recently about anti-semitism with a non Jewish friend in Jerusalem. An American Protestant of the I-hate-religion variety, he asked me to explain the Israel lobby. I said that it reflected a contract the American establishment had made with Jews to drive the economy in the 1970s. We were really good at the four horses of the global economy (finance, software, education, and media), and people thought we were smarter, and maybe we were smarter; Yuri Slezkine says we are the magicians and the priests of modernity; and in exchange for that leading role, the government would support Israel. Brian Roberts runs the world’s largest media company, Chris Matthews works for him and supports Israel.
What?
Weiss apparently thinks that there is some Elders of Zion type group, which decided whether Jews are going to be willing to use their talents to drive the global economy, or let the world economy collapse, and they agreed to do the former because the American government agreed to support Israel.
Or maybe he’s saying there was no agreement, but that the American government just wanted to show its gratitude to the Jews for playing a leading role in the world economy, and did so by supporting Israel. Either way, this is completely detached from reality, and either way, it results in the Jewish Brian Roberts pulling the Gentile Chris Matthew’s strings.
(4) But Weiss gives equal time to another explanation for the success of pro-Israel forces:
“My friend bridled at the explanation. He had worked on Wall Street; he spoke of all the insider traders who were Jewish. They weren’t any smarter, they cheated, he said. I said, OK maybe we’re not smarter, but that is how I think it worked.” So either Jews cheat, or they use their economic prowess to control American politics with regard to the Middle East. Or maybe both.
(5) It actually gets worse, as Weiss comments on his friend’s theory that the Jews in Israel are acting like Nazis because they haven’t forgiven the Nazis and other Europeans for the Holocaust: “I don’t think you can forgive Hitler. But forgive Europe? Maybe that is necessary. It should not be so fresh in our minds, here in the U.S. Maybe that means telling the story differently, understanding our own role. It was never a fair fight. But we always had a kind of power.”
Allow me a digression. Here is where warmed-over Marxism meets anti-Semitism. The Jews never had much political power in Europe, but after emancipation they were often, on average, more economically successful than the local non-Jewish population. So Jews aren’t proper Marxist victims, because Marxist dogma requires the victims to be of economically lower status than the oppressors. This is a major reason why European Jews faced with violent jihadist anti-Semitism get little sympathy on the far left–they are economically better-off than the local Muslim population, so only the latter can be proper victims. Thus criticizing Islamist jihadists is “punching down.” (Of course, it doesn’t help that the Jews are perceived as “white” and the Muslims not. That seems largely irrelevant in France, where 80% of Jews migrated to France from the same North African countries as most of the Muslims, but maybe I’m attributing some rationality where there is none to be found.)
Anti-Semitism, however, doesn’t fit into Marxist dogma, and, in case one needed evidence that it has little to do with actual Jewish behavior, one need only consider how anti-Semites attack Jews for being both Communists and Capitalists, for being “rootless cosmopolitans” and ardent nationalists, for being secular atheists and religious fanatics, for being responsible for puritanical Western views of sex and for undermining traditional sexual morality, and so forth and so on.
For centuries in Europe, “Jew” simply represented whatever real or imagined foe needed to be combated. It’s not entirely a coincidence that when the European far-left decided that nationalism, racism, and imperialism were the foci of evil in the world, that it was Israel that came to be the primary target for those sins, even if the Jewish connection was unconscious among many of the targeters.
Anyway, I suppose it’s also possible that the “power” Weiss is referring to is not economic, but rather Gilad Atzmonish conspiracy theories about how the Jews set out to undermine Western civilization with Bolshevism, the Frankfurt School, and the Young Turk movement (!) But that seems a bit far out even for Weiss.
(6) Finally there is this: “I have lunch with a distant relative who tells me about spending Passover at a Ritz Carlton in Florida. $7000 per head for the week, and so much food– a breakfast of matzoh and smoked fish in the room before the hot breakfast downstairs, a lunch that never ends, a whole candy room with boxes of candy in drawers free for the taking– it was straight out of the Patimkin basement in Goodbye, Columbus, and a shonde far di goyim– nothing she would ever want the anti-Semites to see.”
I have no access to Weiss’ mind, so I can’t speak to his inner psychological motivations, but only to what he writes. There is only one audience for this sort of tripe, and it is people who dislike Jews.
If similar nonsense came from the keyboard of a right-wing Christian like Pat Buchanan, no one would have any trouble identifying the relevant website as a hate site. The fact that this comes from a leftist “as a Jew” (or a “righteous Jew” according to John Mearsheimer’s rather idiosyncratic standard) shouldn’t alter one’s conclusion.
UPDATE: Weiss replies here. This would have been a good opportunity for him to take back at least some of the more extreme idiocies in his original post, like the claim that “the American establishment” made a contract “with Jews to drive the economy in the 1970s … and in exchange for that leading role, the government would support Israel.” Instead, he purports to be proud of it.
Weiss purports to believe that my post derives from the fact that I “cannot acknowledge” “the remarkable rise of Jews inside the U.S. establishment in the last generation.” Oh yes, I can. I hereby acknowledge the remarkable rise of Jews inside the U.S. establishment in the last generation. Let’s just look in my field of law. Three Jews sit on the Supreme Court. A Bush Administration attorney general was an Orthodox Jew, and another Jew ran the Bush OLC. Jews are around 25% of all law professors, and are among the most influential professors on the far left (e.g., Brian Leiter), liberal left (e.g., Cass Sunstein), and libertarian right (e.g., Richard Epstein). Some of the most influential lower court judges, including the liberal Stephen Reinhardt, the conservative libertarian Alex Kozinski, and the eclectic Richard Posner are Jews. And of course most of the contributors to the leading law professors’ legal blog are Jews. Jews are doing very well in the United States. Yay! Good for American Jews, and good for America.
But my post wasn’t about denying that Jews have joined and thrived in the American establishment (heck, even the founder of a leading American anti-Jewish hate site is a Jew).
Rather, I pointed out that, among other things, Weiss suggested (a) that Jews are more inclined to cheat than are non-Jews, and indeed Jews don’t even recognize it as cheating; (b) that the American non-Jewish establishment made some sort of deal with the Jews back in the 70s, in which Jews provided their economic prowess to the U.S. in exchange for support for the Israel lobby (indeed, that one is so ridiculous that my fingers rebelled at typing it); (c) Jewish media company CEOs force their Gentile employees to express support for Israel and (d) that Jews need to “understand our role” in causing the Holocaust because of the “power” we had. Weiss now elaborates that he’s talking about Jewish economic power, as if the German Jew who started as a peddler and built his business into a chain of department stores wasn’t simply an individual Jewish businessman who found success, but instead part of a cabal of Jews using their “power” to undermine the Gentiles, who retaliated via the Holocaust.
These are all hateful things that we would all recognize as such if coming from the likes of David Duke. Weiss protests that he’s not anti-Semitic, but that wasn’t the point of the post. Rather, it was that he posted hateful things about Jews of the sort that one could find at the likes of the Vanguard News Network.
Is that because Weiss is anti-Semitic or is there some other motivation? Who cares. Just know that when you’re reading Mondoweiss, you’re reading a hate site.
COMMENTS ON WASHINGTONPOST.com:
* Some people wouldn’t read Mondoweiss if articles about situations in Israel would be adequately covered, from all perspectives, in the WP or the NYT. However, seeing as there is an abundance of articles that appear to favor the talking points of the Israeli government and appear to whitewash actions and policies that the Israeli government uses, some readers will undoubtably turn to other sources of information that provide the perspective that is missing.
* I hope our exchange has convinced you that the Jews who read Mondoweiss are not the monsters you seem to have imagined they were. In an Orwellian world, where Ayelit Shaked can be designated Minister of Justice, sheer horror and incredulity is driving more and more politically moderate Jews over to Mondoweiss in search of unvarnished reports and fuller coverage of events in Israel. Simply closing our eyes to what Israel has become and where it is heading won’t make the horror, indignation and bitter disappointment we feel go away.
* As David Bernstein is keenly interested in the subject of lawlessness, he has all the more reason to read the articles posted at Mondoweiss.
For example:
Leading American rabbi issues first public criticism of apartheid conditions in Jerusalem
Philip Weiss on April 21, 2015
Under cover of night, nine Jewish families take over two buildings in Silwan
Kate on October 22, 2014 –
Israel has granted refugee status to 0.07% of African asylum seekers
Ben Norton on February 24, 2015
Plans to demolish Bedouin villages and transfer 1000s to new towns in West Bank meet int’l protest
Kate on September 13, 2014 –
Israel sentences Palestinian teen Lina Khattab to 6 months in prison for protesting
Ben Norton on February 18, 2015 –
* This reminds me of the 2002 interview Amy Goodman of Democracy Now had with the former Israeli minister Shulamit Aloni entitled, “It’s a Trick, We Always Use It.” (calling people “anti-Semitic”)
Goodman: “Yours is a voice of criticism we don’t often hear in the United States. Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called anti-Semitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?
Aloni: “Well it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel then we bring up the holocaust. When in this country people are criticizing Israel then they are anti-Semitic. And the organization is strong and has a lot of money. And the ties between Israel and the American Jewish establishment are very strong and- they are strong in this country, as you know. And they have power, which is ok. They are talented people and they have power and money, and the media and other things, and their attitude is ‘Israel my country right or wrong’, identification. And they are not ready to hear criticism. And it’s very easy to blame people who criticize certain acts of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic and to bring up the holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people and that- that is justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”
* Is it hate or is it Phil‘s experiences and observations as he speak his truth which he is entitled to do, or is it a distain for hypocrisy and a conviction to human rather than special rights that calls for constructive criticism?
* Acc’to the ADL, “the number of U.S. anti-Semitic incidents in 2014 was still one of the lowest totals recorded since the ADL began keeping records of them in 1979.” In fact, ADL does not record a single instance in 2014 of a Jew being murdered in a hate crime. (As it turns out, the horrific shootings at the JCC by a lone, aging Neo-Nazi gunman happened to have killed three Christians.) In terms of homicide, anti-Semitic hate murder by a lone Neo-Nazi in a country of 300 million people, however dastardly, is hardly cause for paranoia.
Now someone might call your argument grasping at straws (and strawmen – I never said Jews were immune from the consequences of racism) but I find it telling that you connect Weiss’s comments about “Jewish cheating” and the Jewish lobby (which I don’t think rise to the level of animus) to the hate crimes in Kansas City and Seattle. Around the world, serious anti-Semitic hate crimes are much more likely to be connected to such things as Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Yet as Deborah Lipstadt and others have declared, it is strictly verboten to suggest that Israeli political aggression might trigger anti-Israeli counteraggression. I disagree and so do most ME scholars. It’s one thing to condemn these violent acts along with all vicious anti-Semitic animus as outrageous and unjustified, but quite another to deny that they are in substantial measure politically motivated. Nor is it unreasonable to point out that Israeli aggression *has* a bearing on the safety and well-being of Jews around the world.
Mild self-deprecation isn’t racism or, once again, you’d have to charge Ben-Gurion, Joan Rivers and Israelis with much worse. It’s like men making a mildly disparaging comment about men but having the grace to think twice, at least, before saying unkind things about women. The former is not taken for destructive aggression and disarms tension. The latter merely inflames between-group tensions and mistrust.
* However, in the era of the Ottoman empire, the prime source of virulent anti-Semitism came from Christians, not Muslims (who were mainly content for dhimmis to “know their place”); the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism in the 1920s and beyond clearly corresponds to milestones in the deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine. Yet Netanyahu wants us to believe in primordial hatreds that never ebb. Pam Geller insists that the Quran is to blame for everything.
The conflation of Israel and Jew (anti-Israel/anti-Semitic) works both ways: Jews add to it (i.e. politicize Jewishness) when they define Hillel as a place where *all* Jewish students can and should explore their relations with Israel and who must keep their criticism of Israel within specified bounds. This politicization of a religio-ethnic group only exacerbates anti-Semitism.
You seem to be intent on fighting a rearguard battle with a 19th-20th century Marxist phantom. But I’m no Rosa Luxembourg (if anything, I’m closer in spirit to some of the Kahal- and Yiddishkeit-affirming Bundists) and I’m opposed to all racism. I just want to know why you apply one standard to Weiss and another (apparently) to Joan Rivers and Ben-Gurion?
They’re comments about Jewish behaviors and natures (?) are all in poor taste, but I doubt that even Joan Rivers, with her far greater visibility than Weiss can ever enjoy, did all that much to stir up anti-Semitic prejudice. What do you think?
* Mondoweiss should be judged on the basis of the totality of what it contributes, not on an ill-judged remark or two or three. Same goes for the WP. But you will no doubt be delighted to learn that Weiss has been upbraided by his own followers for some of the remarks you cited. And I wholly agree with your last sentence.
But the same goes for Joan Rivers. Far from a mere comedian, she was a household name (unlike Weiss!) who made her fortune trading in Jewish stereotypes. (“I’m Jewish. I don’t work out. If God had wanted us to bend over, He would have put diamonds on the floor.”) It’s a safe bet that she did more to spread negative stereotypes than Weiss ever could in twice her lifetimes.
By stigmatizing Mondoweiss and warning people away, you discourage them from finding stories and videos that expand their moral universe. Just recently I watched:
“Badia Dwaik tries to show his city to a visitor. Then comes a settler boy on a horse…”
“Israeli soldiers attacking, throwing stones at photographers, April 24, 2015”
and I read: Is it a crime to own your own land? (about Bedouin dispossession) — Amos Gvirtz
Since as the Sages tell us, no one’s blood is redder, perhaps it’s time to acknowledge what Mondoweiss gets right and discuss why there is so little awareness and discussion of Palestinian issues in the mainstream press.
Does that matter too?
For some of us Jews, David Bernstein, Mondoweiss is a love site, not a hate site. Some of us didn’t get a more accurate picture of the history of Zionism until late in life, and it’s partly from this sense of betrayal, of impatience with our own longstanding naivete and states of denial, as well as heartbreak (lots of heartbreak) that we visit Mondoweiss now. You say you find the site morbidly fascinating? Well so do we. At Mondoweiss we find stories and videos that others deal with oh so delicately and infrequently: shocking, taboo stories about systemic abuse of Palestinians and Bedouins, The (invisible) Other, about racist intolerance and parochialism, censorship, cynicism and corruption, militarism and incipient fascism. At Mondoweiss we have a chance to disconnect from a tribal “sick society” brand (to quote Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin) and reconnect with a “Jewish brand” that has always made us proud, a brand associated with universalism, a passion for justice, integrity, love of truth, scrupulous fairness and empathy. Rabbi Heschel defined a Jew as someone whose integrity corrodes when unmoved by the sight ofwrong done to others. That’s the only reason to avoid Mondoweiss — for fear of being unmoved.
Let me assure you that we Jews of Mondoweiss are not anti-Semites simply because we have fallen out of love with Israel, or were never enamored of the Zionist project to begin with. Remember the Bundists? Remember Judah L. Magnes, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein? There are many ways to be a good Jew. One means of struggling along that path is to through humility, vulnerability and a willingness to listen to all sides. It is Israel which insists there is only one path: be loyal or suffer herem. And for that reason alone, no matter how much you wish to consign it to oblivion, Mondoweiss remains utterly indispensable and more relevant than ever.
* Bernstein defends Israel, right or wrong, despite the facts, because of the deep allegiance he feels as a Jew, for Israel, the only Jewish State. Therefore Bernstein concludes that criticism of Israel must be motivated, not by facts, but by personal animosity towards Jews, or “anti-Semitism.” Bernstein is using his own personal yardstick to measure his opponents by.
Wrong. I read Mondoweiss for the facts I can’t get anywhere else. I am a non-practicing Episcopalian, neither Jewish nor Arab. The majority of my boyfriends, friends and employers have all been Jewish, and I don’t really know any Muslims. So why do I care? Because I am a disgruntled American tax payer, and I don’t like to see my tax dollars go to subsidize civilian massacres in Gaza. And the stranglehold the Likudniks have on congress is appalling. It is not good for this country and it is not good for Israel.
A year ago I was positive/neutral on the idea of Israel, but that was only because I didn’t know anything about it. I’ve read some books now, and I found Mondoweiss, and now I know a lot more. And it’s made me unhappy, but I prefer unhappiness to ignorance.
I understand it may sound counter intuitive to some, but I think Fareed Zakaria had it right in his recent conversation with Haim Saban: Israel’s critics might just be the best friends Israel has right now. Conversely, Israel’s apologists (I’m talking to you David) might constitute its greatest threat. Israel is in slow motion self-destruct mode, and the MSM’s completely uncritical, blinkered perception of Israel isn’t doing Israel (or us, or Gazans) any favors. Thank God for Mondoweiss.
* Pamela Geller is a true human rights champion. She is mischaracterized by the leftwing haters as being anti-Muslim. She is not. She is fighting the extremist element inside Islam which is a source of much danger to us all.
Those who slander her, like the ADL and SPLC, are really carrying the torch of hate. The SPLC was always a fraudulent organization, a money-making creation of the huckster, Morris Dees. At one time the ADL was a magnificent organization, carrying out its mission wonderfully, but it has degenerated under the current leadership. The softy Abe Foxman has no business throwing stones at anyone else. Pamela Geller is doing more for Jewish security than he has in years.
* I read the argument as the following:
1) Seemingly forever Jews have been persecuted, kicked out of a lot of places, and of course the holocaust.
2) Because they feel so persecuted some Jews feel entitled to reparations to the extent that they will undertake dishonest or immoral acts towards outsiders.
3) The fact some Jews are very successful but still carry this entitlement causes them to commit their own great injustices. Examples would be the feeling that oppression justifies cheating on Wall Street, or the holocaust justifies taking over Palestine/Israel.
4) The solution he proposes is that Jewish people forgive the anti-Semitic behaviour of the past so that they no longer feel that entitlement.
Personally I have no idea if that narrative exists in some parts of Jewish culture or is just some figment of his imagination.
MONDOWEISS RESPONDS:
The thrust of the piece is that Jews have to live here now, in an America where we have considerable power. This is the issue Bernstein completely avoids: the remarkable rise of Jews inside the U.S. establishment in the last generation. How do we deal with this? How do we reconcile ourselves to this status? Do we even acknowledge it? Or do we turn a blind eye to it because it is embarrassing or goes against our image of ourselves. Bernstein cannot acknowledge it, but he surely knows that this is a signal fact of the Jewish experience, the American rise. He offers a long meditation on the Jewish experience of persecution in Europe. No doubt– but that was the point of my piece. Dwelling in that victimization narrative is a way of avoiding dealing with who we are today; and we are by and large privileged. If there is one story that captures the Jewish experience of the last 40 years it is this: that Alan Dershowitz threatened to leave Harvard Law School in 1970 or so unless they appointed a Jewish dean. There had been none. Well they did name one, and there have been a couple since, one of whom now sits on the Supreme Court, along with two other Jews appointed by Democratic presidents. In fact the doors opened all over our society in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s; and Dershowitz became a bestselling proponent of Israel. And the Israel lobby cannot be understood outside of that sociological frame. Bill Clinton was embraced by AIPAC over George H.W. Bush in 1992 because he had Jewish friends at his wedding and p.s. he supported the settlement project. Then in the 90s Bill Kristol purged the Jim Baker “Arabists” from the Republican Party; and Bush’s son ran for president as a supporter of settlements, and got Sheldon Adelson’s money. If you don’t think that this reflects the Jewish rise into the establishment, and the importance of (Zionist) Jewish money to the political process, then you should read the Forward this week, which recognizes that the American political class has a right to discuss the rightwing Zionist influence over the Republican party, stemming from wealth.
I am proud of my Passover piece because I believe this is a great spiritual challenge to Jews: to deal with our actual status in western societies. What would the American Jewish community look like today if we moved beyond viewing ourselves as the eternal victim?
Part of that process means reckoning with our history and the degree to which we were essential to industrialization and the rise of the modern nation state. This is a theme of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, it was at the heart of Benjamin Ginsburg’s Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, and of Jerry Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews. And yes, part of this acknowledgment means wrestling with our role in European societies at the turn of the century, the remarkable transformation that we helped to effect as modern professionals. Bernstein leaves out my quotation of Herzl on this theme; but before the Holocaust, Jews often talked about our economic power (and privately many Jews do so now, too). One of those professionals, Franz Kafka, often wrote in his diaries and letters about our singular presence in Prague and Berlin, and in a landmark statement of self-hatred, wrote to his non-Jewish girlfriend: “At times I’d like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say, the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I’d wait, open the drawer a little to see if they’ve suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing this to the end.” That girlfriend later died in the Holocaust trying to save Jews. So did two of Kafka’s sisters; and I quote that letter not to approve it, but to point out that questions of Jewish status in the west have been deeply perplexing to Jewish writers before me; and these issues also interest me deeply; and to try and blackguard inquiry, as Bernstein does, is a form of censorship aimed at preserving the current order, notably a disastrous Middle East policy.
The adamant refusal by powerful organs such as the Washington Post to examine the Israel lobby and its roots has hurt U.S. foreign policy and undoubtedly hurt a lot of people along the way. And we need smart people to talk about this. The Best and the Brightest helped to (nonviolently) reform the last social order, the one that produced Vietnam; and the social order that produced Iraq also deserves reform. I don’t think that accounting can be done without Jewish reflection. Bernstein mocks me for saying that Brian Roberts runs the largest media company in the world and Chris Matthews works for him and praises Israel. He says that this is evidence of Protocols of the Elders of Zion-like thinking. But that’s just namecalling, aimed at stopping people from looking at actual facts in the media age. It’s like Dana Milbank saying that Walt and Mearsheimer had Teutonic names or David Remnick cracking that if we only got rid of the Israel lobby, Osama bin Laden would have gone back into the construction business. It’s not an answer. And the answer for me is not actually an assault on elites, but their reform, including an aggressive critique of Zionism inside Jewish life. Because Zionism is a discriminatory dangerous ideology, and premised on ideas of Jewish victimization that do not reflect our experience in any way.
FROM THE ORIGINAL MONDOWEISS BLOG POST:
April 6. I was washing the dishes when Terry Gross interviewed Philip Glass about his memoir on public radio. Glass told a story about his father’s record store in Baltimore that he and she both found amusing.
GROSS: part of your job when you were young at your father’s store was breaking records because in order – he could return records to the label…
GLASS: It was called the – it was kind of the return privilege. And those were the old 78s, you know?
GROSS: Oh, the 78s, oh, OK. So the idea was if they were broken during the delivery process, they were returnable.
GLASS: Yeah. That was our first job at the store. And it was on the weekends, and we would much have preferred to be outdoors playing around. But we were down in the basement of the store, jumping – my brother and I. My brother, Barton, and I – jumping on records so that we would then put them in boxes by label – Decca, Columbia, whatever the label was – those names don’t even exist anymore. And we took out our – let’s say, we were angry, actually, that we couldn’t go outside and play. We had to break records, and we got over it by jumping on the records (laughter), demolishing them.
And one thing we had to do – we had to make sure the label stayed on it. And by the way, Ben Glass, besides that, he discovered that there were other stores all through West Virginia and Virginia that had this same return privilege, but they never returned them. So he bought up their old records. I think he paid a nickel for each record, and he got a dime back from the company. So he had another little side business going on where he had his two sons breaking the records, then he would sell them back to the company (laughter).
I had a strong reaction to the story: It angered me that Gross had laughed at it and that she had not asked Glass why he felt it was OK to steal from the company. I thought it had to do with a Jewish understanding of ourselves, as being outside mainstream society. We were excluded so we were justified in taking advantage of The Man.
I reflected that after I started dating my wife 25 years ago I was in Minnesota and I’d fedex my letters to her. This was before the internet. And she’d fedex them back, on the Newsweek account. I was living at my friend Tony’s place and he had remarked on it being wrong to rip off a company, and I’d been surprised. At least my wife knew what she was doing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was stealing.
