A few weeks back, I landed on Michael Walzer for his parochialism in a speech about Jewish identity at the Center for Jewish History. The speech was complacent: it celebrated the American Jewish religious revival and American Jews’ connection to Israel with only glancing reference to any problems, for instance when Walzer said (dismissively) that the left was alienated from Israel.
Well, Walzer subsequently spoke again at the Center; and this time gave more than lip service to the leftwing critics. And one comment of his was especially moving.
In late March, Walzer was on a panel on N.Y. intellectuals put together by a Jewish students’ journalism organization called New Voices. His co-panelists were the sociologist Nathan Glazer and the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse. The students’ questions were (surprise) mostly about Israel. Wisse is a fervent Zionist, but Walzer and Glazer expressed concern about recent history.
Glazer noted that he had been in a Zionist youth organization back when, and said, with admirable detachment, that many of the problems that Israel now faces are problems of its own making, more difficult than the problems it encountered in the ’50s and ’60s, and that people (meaning Jews) can have varying responses to those "mistakes." One can wash one’s hands of the whole thing, and say, "I’m finished." Or say (as it seems he would), "We have to live with those mistakes and work within the framework."
That captures the politics of this blog. Myself, I don’t want to work within the framework of those mistakes; they seem to me too overwhelming in character, we’ve come to an ideological dead-end; and I think Israel should go back to the drawing board.
But I am getting to Walzer. Wisse said that Jews were very bad at politics–by which she meant, they have done a lousy job of persuading the world of their position–and then Walzer said that actually Jews are very good at politics. "We sustained a national existence for 2000 years without territory, sovereignty, and without coercive power… That is an extraordinary political achievement… one that has not been studied enough, or appreciated enough."
Then he said, "It may be that the talents honed by exile don’t fit the circumstances of statehood." Jews were trained in the circumstances of "kehal," he said (as I heard it), or their own legal/religious community. "We governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves. In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people. That is something we have never had in all the years of exile, and we have not done terribly well."
I found this a beautiful statement, one that gave me a place to stand in Jewish history. It acknowledged that we critics of Zionism have a point, it acknowledged the suffering of the Palestinians. And humbly, it acknowledged the new phenomenon of Jewish power.
Related posts:
- Harvard Prof Wisse Calls on American Jews to Serve Here as Part of Israel’s ‘Army
- Responding to Realistic Dove’s Criticism of Me on Walzer
- Praise Michael Walzer, he declares that Gaza war was unjust
- Michael Walzer on Jewish Identity: Jewish Writers for Jewish Readers!
- ‘Walzer constructed an entire Just War theory with the Israeli army in mind’
{ 8 comments }
It's **Kahal** Philip,
as I remember it (Wikipedia needs experts on this term) it has to do with Russian or Polish Jewish communities, and yes it had to do with the self-government compared to "native" citizen.
Reminds me I wanted to study the Russian and Polish history more closely since I had the the impression that the self-government, or the legal realities of the kahals – e.g. that taxes had to be paid for the whole community rather than by the single Jewish citizen – gave rise to a some really peculiar anti-semitic myth. Myth that lead into the mental-protocol-universe.
This might interest you:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n09/butl02_.html
Two comments:
"In the state of Israel, we have accepted responsibility for other people."
If he is referring to the Palestinians (which I am not certain of), that is a very odd way of putting it. I think the problem is that Israel has not accepted responsibility. The Likudniks who came to power in 1977 with the old dream of a Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan accepted responsibility for the land but didn't care a wit about the people living there.
To say that Jewish survival over 2,000 years is a credit to Jewish political acumen is wacko. What about the religion? Most of us are only a few generations away from the shtetl, where our grandparents or great grandparents were orthodox Jews living in poverty and political privation that most of us could not even imagine. What sustained them was their faith.
Phil, as a self-described assimilationist, what will an assimilated Jew look like two generations from now? What will define your great grandchilden as Jews?
Can (and will) one that is assimilated assume more responsibility than one that is self-identified?
Phil, once again you have been suckered by romantic flim flam.
My repeated close observation of jews who teach, preach, etc., as experienced during my various conversion and language learning projects, suggests to me that the really unusual thing about them is that they believe their own propaganda. There is no sense of truth versus lying in jewish culture. Lying is not even a crime in jewish ethics. This, what to us would be impossible because of our logically constructed morality (you can't force yourself to believe something you know you just made up) is possible for them because the logical-moral categories I just mentioned as being true for us do not exist for them.
The question of why Jews might be so bad at politics — not in the PR sense that Wisse meant it but in the sense of responsibly wielding power — is an interesting one. It may turn out that high verbal IQ is just not particularly relevant to political reasoning. Or it may be that their burden of ethnic grievances just overwhelms the capacity for dispassionate analysis.
But Walzer is wrong: there is an historical record of Jews holding great political power — Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Germany, post-war U.S.A., Russia under the oligarchs — and it hasn't been flattering.
Jewish contribution to culture has been considerable, but in the real of politics it's been a disaster.
And of course the purest example of undisguised Jewish power, Palestine.
Imagine if the Nazis had convinced the world they were the victim!
I'd say that would take considerable political skill. The Israelis have political skill in spades.
(They need to be wiped out.)
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