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The Israel Wedge

The professional American Jewish world has been a bit roiled over the past few weeks as the result of a Pledge for Unity on Israel issued jointly by the American Jewish Committee and the ADL. What makes this non-innocuous is that it pointedly argues against turning Israel into a partisan political issue.

The Jewish community has had a strong interest in ensuring that American support for Israel is one of the critical strategic issues that unites rather than divides parties and officials. U.S.-Israel friendship should never be used as a political wedge issue.
This has elicited a fair amount of yelping from the right, which sees it, plausibly, as a way of protecting President Obama from GOP claims that he's bent on throwing Israel under the bus. And the AJC's David Harris and the ADL's Abe Foxman have pushed back in kind. What's clear is that the GOP has every intention of using Israel as one of the few clubs it has to beat Obama and the Democrats on foreign policy in current election cycle. What's worth pondering is who's the audience for this exercise.

The natural assumption is that it's Jewish voters, who are sufficiently numerous in swing states like Ohio and Florida to provide a theoretical margin of victory. But it is not the hunt for Jewish voters that's leading the Republican presidential aspirants to talk about Israel right now--there aren't enough of them who vote in Republican primaries to matter. And given the perpetual inability of Republicans to garner Jewish votes in the era of the religious right--and, pace the Tea Party, we're still in that era--I'd say that they're not aiming at general election Jewish votes either, albeit hope may spring eternal in the GOP breast.

More likely it's the evangelical crowd that the candidates are playing to. These days, evangelicals worry more about U.S. support for Israel than American Jews do, and they're a whole lot thicker on the ground. Telling stories about how Obama is anti-Israel will help get them to the polls--and evangelicals must turn out in force for the Republicans to regain the presidency.

But if they're false stories that are denounced as such by the AJC and the ADL, it will put a serious crimp in the anti-Israel narrative. That's the hidden threat behind the Pledge for Unity--and the reason it's raising Republican hackles.
By Mark Silk on November 9, 2011 8:20 AM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

J Street in Hartford

If all politics is local, Jewish politics is hyper-local. Well, hyper anyway.

So it happens that last week the Hartford Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) sponsored a talk by Colette Avital, former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Israeli consul in New York. These days, Avital is serving as a senior adviser to the dovish Israel lobby J Street, which co-sponsored her visit to Hartford.

This did not sit well with the Jewish Ledger, the local weekly that has been owned since 1992 by N. Richard Greenfield. To say that Greenfield cleaves to the right is to suggest that, oh, Anthony Weiner may have employed his Twitter account in a manner ill-befitting a member of Congress. (See my colleague Ron Kiener's more detailed--and less temperate--account here.) Greenfield thus took to his editorial column to denounce the JCRC, forsooth an arm of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford.

I'd link to the editorial had the entire Ledger site not for some reason disappeared yesterday. Suffice to report that it denounced J Street for a litany of sins, real and imagined, up to and including the following from the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick:

These people don't want peace. They want to wage war against Israel. They support waging economic war against Israel. They view the IDF as indistinguishable from Hamas....[their] positions are not positions that are conducive to peace.
The conclusion: "For 16 years we've been one with the Hartford Federation on its positions on Israel. This time we're not. The pity is that now is when Israel needs us the most."

In response, several Jewish faculty members at Trinity, myself included, wrote a letter to the paper (reprinted after the jump) expressing our disagreement. None of us is a particular supporter of J Street, and at least a couple would describe themselves as closer to AIPAC in their views on Israel. But all of us were appalled at the idea of pronouncing J Street beyond the bounds of legitimate American Jewish expression--such that it's an unacceptable "position on Israel" for the organized Jewish community to partner with the organization in sponsoring a talk by a respected Israeli public figure.

The Ledger's editor posted the letter briefly on its website, then at Greenfield's command took it down. In a rather heated phone conversation with me, he objected to our contention that Glick and company were as far outside the American Jewish consensus as radical Jewish leftists who denounce Israel at every turn (moral equivalence!). He allowed as how he felt personally offended. (O those delicate publisher sensibilities!) There could be no doubt that his editorial's asserted commitment to "dialogue and debate"--in the community at large as well as in his pages--was mere lip service.

In his farewell blog last week, the New York Jewish Week's longtime Washington correspondent James Besser reflected on the current state of Jewish-American politics:

The rightward shift of the pro-Israel leadership has been abetted by the drift away from involvement by centrist American Jews and a ferocious campaign of delegitimization by the pro-Israel right against those that see ending the occupation of the West Bank as an imperative.

I remember the vitriolic and ultimately unsuccessful 1993 campaign to keep Americans for Peace Now out of the Presidents Conference, but the shunning of J Street and the hyperbole about an organization with great promise but--so far--limited accomplishments has been on an entirely different plane.

To me that suggests a much narrower base for pro-Israel activism in the future.

What Hartford's Avital Affair shows is how the delegitimizing goes down. A Jewish agency gets out of line. The community's wrath is called down. Respected opposing voices are suppressed. And this is good for Israel?

By Mark Silk on June 21, 2011 8:21 AM | 4 Comments | No TrackBacks
Continue reading J Street in Hartford.

The Judeo-Catholic Tradition


By Mark Silk on June 7, 2011 7:28 PM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

Marching down J Street

What to make of J Street, the Israel Lobby of the Left that has created such heartburn in the American Jewish Establishment? Jim Besser, the Jewish Week's veteran Washington correspondent, offers a fine, well-balanced guide for the perplexed in advance of the organization's upcoming national conference.

That J-Street has sometimes been its own worst enemy can hardly be doubted. Well, OK, there are enemies--yo, Bibi!--that are probably worse. But it has got one big thing going for it: Most American Jews are closer to its take on Israel policy than they are to the Establishment's. Whence the heartburn.

If the Establishment really wanted to undermine J-Street, it would find a way to appeal to the American Jewish lumpen-liberal-laity. But that would mean distancing itself from the Netanyahu government. And that would be intolerable.
By Mark Silk on February 16, 2011 9:52 PM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

Richard Holbrooke, alav hashalom

Nice reflections (complete with shiv for Henry Kissinger) by Jim Besser, over at his Jewish Week Political Insider blog. I met Holbrooke once, when we gave him an honorary degree. One big tough Jew.
By Mark Silk on December 14, 2010 1:53 PM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

Jones' Jewish Joke

Today, National Security Adviser Jim Jones apologized for telling a Jewish joke that some in attendance at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found offensive. He allowed as how it had been "inappropriate." What was it? As originally reported by the Forward's Nathan Guttman, the joke went like this:

A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn't have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish storeowner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea: Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant; they can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he's back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: "Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant."
I think Ben Smith is right to call this "in the tradition of Jewish jokes usually told by Jews." Why? Not because it has to do with sharp dealing--with "jewing" someone down. Gentiles tell that kind of joke. This joke relies on the Jewish storekeeper knowing that his brother obliges customers to wear ties to his high-class joint. It has to do with social status, not money.

I first became aware of this delicate distinction in Jewish joke-telling in a comparable context. Back in 1987, I happened to be following the then would-be Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis on a fundraising swing through Texas--at a time when the only news such a swing could make was the response of the candidate to the events of the day. And that day in Houston, the event was President Reagan's (abortive) nomination of one Douglas Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court. At the press availability, Dukakis, asked whether he knew the nominee (who had spend time in Massachusetts), mumbled something and then said no, he didn't.

Afterwards, a staffer came up to the handful of traveling press and, with the kind of excitement one reserves for a rare event, asked whether we'd heard the governor's "joke." No, we replied. Well, he said, listen to the tape. And sure enough, there on the tape were the words, "The only Ginsburg I know runs a deli in Brookline." This was hardly a joke, but it did provoke an intense discussion among us scribblers as to whether Dukakis had made some kind of an anti-Semitic crack.

On the contrary, I argued, it was just the kind of comment that Jews make about Jews. There's Ginsburg the judge and Ginsburg the deli owner. It's was a status crack--perhaps even a touch self-deprecating. Someone, I think, did include Dukakis' remark in the story he filed, but if it made it into print, it caused not a ripple of controversy. Too obscure, and Dukakis--married to a Jew and living in heavily Jewish Brookline--was the least probable anti-Semite in Massachusetts.

So was Gen. Jones remark inappropriate? Nah.
By Mark Silk on April 26, 2010 3:54 PM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

Jewish Bankers and Obama

OK, so this story is a little long in the tooth, but given the cast of characters it's hard to resist. Last week, discussing Norman Podhoretz's book, Why Are Jews Liberals? in the wake of the Massachusetts election and Obama's pivot against Wall Street, Rush Limbaugh delivered himself of the following speculation:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's - if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there.
Leaping out of his metaphoric seat, the ADL's Abe Foxman issued a statement calling these "borderline anti-Semitic comments"  and explaining:

Limbaugh's references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate. While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans. His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
Whereupon, Norman Podhoretz sprang into action, claiming El Rushbo was just speaking about "prejudiced people" and anyway was just making Podhoretz's own point about Jewish voting, and charging Foxman with chutzpah for attacking "so loyal a friend of Israel." And Limbaugh agreed, saying he was only referring to what "the Jew-haters, the bigots" believe.

As MediaMatters pointed out, that last bit is patently untrue--unless Limbaugh wants to include himself among the Jew-haters. He begins with what "some people think" and then associates himself with the view. His speculation is that Jews--three-quarters of whom voted for Obama--may be having buyer's remorse because Obama has started attacking their co-religionists on Wall Street. Only someone a lot more familiar with traditional Gentile attitudes about Jews than with the American Jewish community could entertain the idea that the latter would have second thoughts about supporting a candidate who attacks Wall Street bankers. As usual, Limbaugh was channeling the views of the Cape Girardeau WASP elite from which he springs.

As for Foxman, it's perfectly silly to pretend that American Jews don't constitute an ethno-religious voting bloc--like Mormons, white evangelicals, Hispanic Catholics, and others. The issue at hand was posed years ago by Milton Himmelfarb, when he quipped that Jews "earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." That reality has caused Jewish conservatives like Podhoretz to gnash their teeth in rage for a generation, and his dreadful book  represents one more effort  to persuade their co-religionists to behave differently.

Foxman's own view of things harks back to the crouch that American Jews used to go into when any Gentile would start a sentence with the words "Jews are" and not conclude it with something like "public-spirited citizens who want their children to get the best education possible."  Why shouldn't Jewish voting be shaped, in some way, by Jewish values and history? In its own way, "on their interests as Americans" expresses as blinkered an account of American Jewry as Limbaugh's "some buyer's remorse there."
By Mark Silk on January 25, 2010 8:40 AM | 3 Comments | No TrackBacks

A New Michael Steinhardt Award

Steinhardt.jpegIn our day, a statement of such awe-inspiring obtuseness has been emitted by a Great Personage that it not only demands widespread notice but actually merits special recognition for all time. Therefore and herewith, I announce the b'rit milah (we Jews don't do baptisms) of the Michael H. Steinhardt Award for Macher Dopiness, the first recipient of which is, of course, Michael H. Steinhardt himself.

Steinhardt, for those of you who don't know, is the billionaire founder of the Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz & Co. hedge fund and a Jewish philanthropist of no mean donations. These days, he is perhaps best known as having funded (with Charles Bronfman) Taglit-Birthright Israel, which has sent some 200,000 young American Jews on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel. That's a lot of trips.

Now comes a good sociological study, by Brandeis University's Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, showing that the trips have markedly increased the likelihood that the young Jews who go on them will marry other Jews. Specifically, 72 percent of those who make the trip do so, as opposed to a 46 percent rate among a control group that didn't manage to make the trip. So, in the American Jewish community, this is good news. Except (as Gal Beckerman of the Forward reports):

The only voice to pierce the self-congratulatory tone of the gathering was that of Birthright co-founder Steinhardt. During a question-and-answer session, he stood up and railed against the notion of time and energy being spent on reports and what he called "dialogue."

"This study is an important study, and I think it says some very significant things," Steinhardt said. "But do you recall any Jewish study meaningfully changing the Jewish world over the last 20 or 30 years? I don't."

Now, 19 years ago, the National Jewish Population Study "changed the agenda of American Jewry." It did so by finding that less than half of American Jews--say, about 46 percent--were marrying other Jews. In short order, the agenda of the organized Jewish community became "continuity"--i.e. keeping the next generation within the fold. And a key element of that agenda has been, you got it, Taglit-Birthright Israel. And you know what? It appears to be working.

So a study created an agenda that created a program that appears to be helping to solve the problem identified by the study. Mazel tov, Mr. Steinhardt. And congratulations on your new award!

By Mark Silk on October 29, 2009 4:55 PM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

Why Jews are liberals

Bringing the hammer down on Norman Podhoretz's new book, "Why Are Jews Liberals? ("a potted history followed by a re-potted memoir") in yesterday's New York Times Book Review, Leon Wieseltier ventures his own answer to the question. Podhoretz's answer boils down to an old story: Just as the leftists of the past made Communism their God, so the liberals of today do the same with Liberalism. And as the former God failed, so should the latter have long since, in Podhoretz's view. So why hasn't it?

For Wieseltier, the point is that Judaism is not about left or right: Liberals as well as conservatives can seize on this or that part of the tradition to justify their politics--contra Podhoretz, liberalism does not make for bad Jews. But there's more to it than that. The politics of left and right have shifted markedly since the days of Jimmy Carter (for whom Jews had relatively little use). Nothing has done more to keep Jews within the liberal fold than the Republican alliance with conservative evangelicals and their distinctive concerns. Enthusiastic about Israel the latter may be, but their rejection of strong church-state separation, their injection of their religious beliefs into domestic politics and policy debates, and their alien cultural style have all been profoundly disturbing to American Jews. Over the centuries, Jews have learned to run the other way when Christians are on the march, and these Christians have been on the march.

My counter-factual hypothesis is that absent a religious right, Jewish liberalism would be, if not a shadow of its former self, a good deal less pronounced than it is today. The God who failed to bring American Jewry to Podhoretzian enlightenment was, I'm afraid, the evangelical Christian God.
By Mark Silk on September 14, 2009 10:34 AM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks

Inglourious critics

Inglour.jpeg
Back in harness after a splendid summer break, I will ease into serious business by considering the moral panic that has seized certain high-minded movie critics (e.g. the New Yorker's David Denby, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, and Slate's Dana Stevens) in their respective considerations of Inglourious Basterds. The burden of their distress lies in director Quentin Tarantino's apparent trivialization of the Holocaust. I'll spare you the quotes--you can read them yourselves. The point to note is that, as Rutgers Jewish studies prof. Jeffrey Shandler points out (in his Jews, God, and Videotape, pp. 98-103), there has never been a piece of American popular entertainment dealing with the Holocaust--including such high-minded exercises as Schindler's List--that haven't come in for such criticism. As usual, Tarentino just takes the genre to the max. He does it by incorporating the Nazi war against the Jews into a send-up of the World War II escapade genre--call it a Shoah-Dirty Dozen mash-up.

From the Jewish perspective--hey, Weinstein bros!--Inglourious Basterds is best thought of as a Purim spiel, the sole traditional theatrical undertaking of European Jewry, staged during the spring holiday that is the Jewish equivalent of Carnival, that riotous pre-Lenten enactment of the world turned upside down. Purim turns the world of the Jewish diaspora upside down by destroying, with extreme prejudice, the would-be destroyer of the Jews, the Persian king's vizier Haman. (The punishment includes Haman's family, though this section of the Book of Esther tends to be glossed over in synagogues these days.)

All in all, Inglouriouis Basterds is a revenge fantasy very much on the order of Purim. If you're looking for an Esther, there's Shosanna Dreyfus, who contrives the destruction of the entire Nazi high command at her movie palace. (The Haman figure, SS Col. Hans Landa, manages to escape the ultimate fate, but ends up marked for life as the evildoer he is.) The behind-the-lines Jewish Avengers serve up a different Jewish resistance fantasy--dating to the sicarii of the first century, who killed Romans and Roman sympathizers with concealed daggers and ended up defending the fortress of Masada after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70. The squad is, to be sure, led by a non-Jew; but Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine is part Indian, a member of one of those lost tribes, eh? He has all his men use their daggers to take Nazi scalps.

Does Inglourious Basterds pander to the primitive fantasy of doing to others what they would have done to you? Of course it does. Proper moralists are entitled to turn up their noses at such Purim-like narratives. But let us acknowledge the popular appeal--as testified by the initial box office returns in a summer of Hollywood discontent.

Update: Tarentino in an interview with the Forward: "If you're dealing with people like the Nazis ... well, you either eat the wolf or the wolf eats you. You know? And so that's where I would be coming from in a situation like that. ...."
By Mark Silk on August 24, 2009 9:01 AM | 0 Comments | No TrackBacks
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