Lefty Jew Jeffrey Blankfort offers the same diagnosis as I have for the tepidness of the antiwar movement, the absence of Jews from the vanguard this time round.
Historically, [Jews] have funded the Left… They were the major funders of the Civil Rights Movement. They were the funders of the anti-war movement during the Viet Nam War. If people were arrested, and they needed bail, progressive Jews provided the bail, and the lawyers were mostly Jewish… Going back into the thirties, you have Jews active in the unions, active in every radical movement. That’s the tradition I grew up in. It no longer exists. As a matter of fact, it’s been erased from Jewish history. Young Jews growing up in America today have no idea of the Jewish radical past in this country.
Blankfort points to the same problem I have pointed to, the Israel lobby, which saw crushing Iraq as in Israel’s interest. But I’d like to throw in another factor: class. Since Vietnam, Jews have risen dramatically in American society. My people are now implicated in the power structure in ways we never imagined in the ’60s. Back then Jews who joined the antiwar movement thought of themselves as outsiders in American life. Most of the white Columbia U. radicals, for instance Mark Rudd, the late Ted Gold, the imprisoned David Gilbert, Bob Feldman—were Jewish kids from middle class backgrounds who felt alienated from a warmaking establishment.
Rudd, born Rudnitsky (his dad changed the name to advance in the military), writes in an essay on the Jewishness of the radicals:
What outraged me and my comrades so much about Columbia, along with its hypocrisy, was the air of genteel civility. Or should I say gentile? Despite the presence of so many Jews in the faculty and among the students.. the place was dripping with goyishness… We were peasant children right out of the shtetls of New Jersey and Queens screaming, “You want to know the truth about Columbia University, they’re a bunch of liberal imperialists! ” Morally and emotionally we could not fit into the civilized world of the racist, defense-oriented modern university. Such was our ordeal of civility.
Today’s Jewish world is not the shtetl. We have assimilated, we are the American success story. Morally and emotionally, Jewish kids tend to identify with blue-state powers-that-be. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule: as a body we have little class interest in challenging the assumptions of the (corrupt!) ruling class that got us into this disastrous war.
haha, this Mark Rudd is great:
As a kid in Maplewood I never heard of tikkun olam, the now well-known commandment to repair the world. For all I know, Michael Lerner whose parents, incidentally sat near my parents in shul at Beth El made the whole thing up.
I liked this comment of his:
Israel is America?s future: militarized, racist, religio-nationalist, corporate, riven with so many internal splits and hatreds that only the existence of a perpetual enemy keeps the nation from exploding.
Of course it's not only the Jews of Israel who need a perpetual enemy.
Just FYI, the MidHudson Progressive Alliance of Beacon is sending a bus to the Washington Justice for Peace March on Jan 27 2006.
At least 20 % of the members plus their leader are Jews.
The Beacon scenario is so assimilated that nobody pays attention to the Jews or Israel.
Wow, me and my people- my mother in law and my wife really got down last night.
I did the mother-in-law until she bled out her ass. The wife was really into it.
I'll be getting back to little Deb Gardner's skull later. I wish I could have offed her myself, instead I had to dig up her corpse to play with.
I'm glad that I can really "open up" to my readers- you're good people.
PW
Apparently, Philip Weiss seems himself as some of a sage of the Jewish left. Yet his comments reveal a breathtaking ignorance about the actual views of the great majority of Jewish progressives. Phil, wake up and smell the coffee. The reason most left-wing Jews have kept their distance from "the anti-war mvt" is not because of the influence of the "Israel lobby." Instead it is because most Jews on the left are sensible enough to avoid a close association with a movement that typically blames Israel and Jewish neocons for most of the problems in the world today. One need not be a right-winger to have simply noticed all this. The fact is that of the two main umbrella organizations that have organized almost all of the large anti-war protests -one is led by a lunatic fringe group that supported Saddam Hussein's "anti-imperialist" leadership and makes the demonization of "Zionists" and Israel a cornerstone of their ideology. And the milder of the two coalitions(UFPJ) identifies with "the resistance in Iraq" and cannot even bring itself two support a two -state solution in the Middle East!
The fact that most Jewish leftists have not been deeply involved in this sort of bullshit speaks well of us. We have nothing to be ashamed of at all. And it should also be noted that our disgust with these developments on the left has NOT led us to support the war. It does mean we have an appreciation for nuances and complexities as opposed to just swallowing dogma.
Two last points: has Weiss bothered to even notice that a number of moderate formations on the Left – such as the extremely influential Moveon.org- does have a number of Jews in its leadership?!
And lastly, for Weiss to point to Jeffrey Blankfort as some sort of insightful… anything, reveals his own ignorance. Blankfort and his pal Alexander Cockburn are widely seen on the left as two of the most mean spirited, sectarian dogmatists around.
Dear Phil. Please find yourself another "beat" to report on. Or ..if you insist on continuing to write about these matters, please have the decency, honesty, and accuracy to call "your" left what it is -the sectarian far left.
That Jews are not as active in this wacko wing of the left as they were in the movements of the sixties says many GOOD, things about Jewish progressives. …despite what you, Blanfort,and Cockburn may believe.
"Blankfort and his pal Alexander Cockburn … "
I like the way he puts that. It reminds me of Catch 22 :
"We got your pal, buddy, we got your pal."
Right on, Ken. You've articulated a different aspect of the problem "Tough Dove" has been talking about on this blog for the last few days. But he and Philip Weiss appear to have calmed down a bit and there is a possibility (maybe a slim one) that a constructive conversation will take place. (See "I'm Too Harsh on my Own People" and the responses). So stop being angry and tell us if you think there is any way to fix the problem you've identified. We've got to stop this obscene War instead of screeching at other! That's all Cockburn and Blankfort know how to do.
Ken Brociner: "American leftist Jews didn't support the movement to end America's war in Iraq because it would not be in Israel's interest." [paraphrased]
I am not sure if it makes a huge difference whether there are a lot of Jewish individuals leading the recent anti-War movement.
If one goes back to the Vietnam era, the anti-War movement wasn't very effective considering how much energy was put into it. That war lasted a very long time, and there was repeated escalation into both Cambodia and Laos. At the time there was even more American deaths and they showed the returning bodies on television and there wasn't "embedded" reporters. My experience with the recent anti-War movement (and from my studies of the Vietnam-era movement) is that they are completely ineffective at stopping or prematurely ending wars. These movements though are fun for the participants, including lots of excuses for getting laid. Wars are managed by the political elite who are mostly insulated from such "proletariat" movements. The end to the Vietnam era war occurred because of broadly unhappy voting publics and disillusioned elites, although even with Vietnam it took a while if one remembers Nixon's false promises.
I am of the strong opinion that student and dissident led anti-War movements pretty much useless. Change happens via access to the political elites and via creating structures (think tanks, media watch dogs, fund books, etc.) which reinforce such efforts. And thus I do agree with Philip that smart funding is important to success, but funding of elite-directed efforts, no so much mass public directed efforts (although political television ads and editorials are useful) and especially not simplistic anti-war protest movements.
A jew who claims to be assimilated into normal mankind and uses phrases such as "my people" when
refering to jews is simply lying to himself. Judaism is racist in its seminal idea, that jews are the "choosen people" of god. The tribal and knee jerk reaction of american jews to support the racist regime of Israel underlines the reason they aren't supporting an antiwar movement. They support "der goyim" waging war against islam in the Mid East. Bob K
Part of the broad "Left" has traditionally been the churches. Back in 2002 when the war drums were beating, all the major organized religions of the world took very public stances against the onrushing war. Pope John Paul was probably the most vocal, but all the mainstream churches joined him — the Anglicans, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Lutherans, etc. etc. All except two: Judaism (all main branches) and the Southern Baptists were alone in backing the neocon project.
This is particularly interesting when you consider the liberal tradition of, for example, the Union for Reform Judaism. Representing the largest bloc of American Jews, Reform brags on its site of its "long history of opposition to war," and how it was "the first religious organization to oppose the War in Vietnam."
But when it came to an unprovoked preemptive war on a third-world country by the planet's only superpower, this time they chose to remain silent.
I think Ken showed why Jared Kushner should strip little ignorant Phil of his blog and hand it over to sensible Ken.
David writes that all major religions were against the invasion of Iraq in 2002 "except two –Judaism and the Southern Baptists" which were "alone in backing" the neo cons' war Then he notes that even the Reform Movement was silent…
I am a Reform Jews and I wanted the Union of Reform Judaism to protest the invasion and pass a resolution against it in 2002. There was a furious fight within our movement. My side lost. I was very angry that, in the end, no such resolution was adapted.
Instead, as described below, there was a statement approved by the leaders of the movement that was, essentially identical to the position of centrist Democrats in Congress.
Like Hillary Clinton and Kerry and many Dems, our movement should have spoken out against the invasion before it happend. But, like them, the movement did not exactly "back" the neo cons war.
More importantly, the position taken and conversations that led up to it had little to do with the threats Saddam posed to Israel. Sure, Israel's plight came up, but we discussed the issue of Iraq like all other American citizens in that harrowing, confusing time. On this blog, there is somehow the assumption that loyalty to Israel caused Jews to be silent. That is just ridiculous, at least among the liberal (but too passive) Jews I know.
Like other Americans, as the lies and the deceit and bad planning became clear, the vast majority of Jews turned against the war. The URJ has since passed a number of resolutiouns against it.
Here is an exerpt from the Resolution on Iraq adapted by the Union of Reform Judaism in 2005. It describes what Reform leaders were thinking about before they adopted what turned out to be a mistaken, tragically mistaken position. But if you read through it, I defy you to find evidence of "dual loyalty" or of a particular concern for Israel as the expense of concern for America.
We made mistakes for the same reasons other Americans made mistakes: