By John Ballard
Two weeks ago an essay appeared in the New York Book Review by Peter Beinart, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment. I printed it out at the time (it's about five thousand words) with the idea of putting together a post but abandoned the idea because it seemed like too much effort for readership here. This week Foreign Policy Magazine published That Special Relationship, comments about the essay by eight prominent Jewish commentators (yet another three thousand words) reflecting on Beinart's essay.
My observation has been that for matters Jewish most people, including Jews themselves, have preconceived opinions not easily modified. The zeitgeist runs from blind antisemitism at one end to equally blind Zionism at the other, including the curiosity of Christian Zionism with all its bizarre contradictions. Between these two extremes lies a glittering array of ideas and opinions that give life to the old saying that where there are two Jews there are three opinions. Readers who would like to pass time while the Gulf oil blowout resolves are invited to read Beinart's essay and the rejoinders in FP.
The thrust of Beinart's essay is that American Jews, particularly the younger generation, no longer sympathize with Israel as they once did.
Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States�so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel�is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz�s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel�s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.
The Luntz reference is to his opening paragraph.
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
Beinart's essay concludes with a reference to the Sheikh Jarrah protests I linked Thursday. His essay ends with these two powerful paragraphs.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America�s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz�s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
�Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,� writes Avraham Burg. �I was very comfortable there.� I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let�s hope that Luntz�s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let�s hope they care enough to try.
That said, here are snapshots of the eight reflections in FP.
American Jews will not "abandon" Israel per se, but their perceptions of Israel, the majority of which were forged after the watershed year of 1967, may very well impel them to a redefinition of relations.
If Israel is to retain the engagement of the coming (and present) generation of American Jews, organized American Jewry will need to provide a third alternative -- one that combines love of Israel with a rich and open discourse on its policies and politics...
My own impression is that the post-Iraq disaffection of some young Jews today is in fact less, rather than more, pronounced than the Vietnam distress that afflicted many when I first got involved. There's nothing new about a minority of Jews disliking Israel -- except all the attention they are getting.
...in a diverse, historically fractious and uncommonly engaged community-one that has been, above all else, eternally fluid. That divergent voices exist -- with avenues accessible for their expression and methods available for action -- is a reality that must not be oversimplified. It muddies the debating waters, yes, but it has also always been our salvation.
Who's to blame? A generation of Israeli moderates who treated American Jews as a blunt weapon, feeding them on a diet of unmitigated fear so as to keep them primed and ready to pounce. Progressive young rabbis and intellectuals who spent the last generation pursuing their inner spirit, utterly neglecting public affairs and so abandoning the field to the right. Republican zealots who have waved Israel like a bloody flag and turned it into a political football. And, not least, the Palestinian leadership that launched an appalling war of terrorism in 2000, discrediting and crippling the Israeli peace camp that was its best hope for a decent future.
Historically, American Jews have followed the rule that it was Israeli voters who should determine the policy of the Israeli state. We might doubt the wisdom of some of those decisions -- as many American Jews doubted the wisdom of the syndicalist socialism that governed the state's first 20 years -- but we recognized that the right to decide belonged to those who paid the price of decision. That was a good rule then. It remains a good rule now.
The heart and soul of the Jewish community is at stake at this very moment. If the present leadership and institutions of our community will not rise to the challenge and speak out for the very best of what we stand for as a people -- then I urge all who hear the alarm to join in the creation of the alternative voices, institutions and leadership that are needed to challenge them.
Beinart's brilliant analysis highlights the multiplicity of regrettable factors both in Israel and in the United States. However, his title, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, suggests that one must look deeper into that failure. It is a systemic failure, going well beyond those named organizations. Every synagogue, Hebrew school, Jewish Community Center, and Jewish federation shares in the failure of understanding how the power of freedom, self confidence, and education would put brain ahead of heart in the American Jewish relationship with Israel.
Putting brain ahead of heart. That disagreeable call to duty is the best way forward because that, in so many words, is what is meant -- a call to duty -- by putting brains ahead of heart. It means doing what does not come naturally. It means facing one's human shortcomings and those of others, seeking a way to bridge those deficits without mutual destruction.
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