One of my themes on this blog is that our policymaking in the Mideast will stay broken until Jews have the courage to openly describe and, if they need to, challenge the construction of Jewish identity. The problem with the neocons is that they have by and large acted out of a strong sense of essentially religious concern with the security needs of the Jewish state, but suppressed that component of their thinking in the public square. For instance, Charles Jacobs identifies himself only as the president of a Darfur group on a neocon foundation’s website, leaving out his many Zionist activities. He offers opacity, where the state of the world demands transparency.
Tikkun of Toronto has blazed new ground in this area by posting "Israel stories," ten-minute oral narratives from Jews talking in the most personal and plain manner about what Israel meant to them growing up and what it means now. Obviously, these are progressives, but the four narratives I’ve listened to so far all get at the crisis that is enveloping Jewish identity for the next generation when at its core is support for a state that practices apartheid in the West Bank. As Tikkun says, gently, in publishing the stories: "There is a tension raised in our lives when the clothes of our ancestors, passed down to us, do not fit who we are. And there is a tension when the truths we learned in childhood no longer seem true."
And so Harvey, a religious kid and the son of Holocaust survivors, describes the impact on his worldview of being jailed in Morocco on a drug charge and finding that his Arab prison-mates treated him as an equal. Married to an Israeli, he admits that he has not been back to the Jewish state in 18 years because his and his wife’s views have the potential to divide her family. As his own family was once divided when his mother retracted an invitation to a Passover seder to a relative who had reached out to Arafat.
Or there is Joan, who grew up going to Hebrew school and Israel as part of a "classic indoctrination in ethnic nationalism" and had her ethnocentrism blown apart on a trip to India when she realized that Hindus and Muslims had also killed each other before partition, and shipped trainfuls of refugees and corpses across borders. Soon she was studying Israeli history. Joan explicitly states another theme of this blog: How can we demand a "polyethnic, polyreligious" secular culture in the U.S. (or in her case, Canada) and meanwhile lend all our support to "another kind of dream for another country." In the end, she reluctantly comes to the conclusion that Israel can’t persist as a Jewish state. "It is not a very comfortable solution, but I can’t seem to find another," she says, her voice trailing off.
These voices are agonized. And that agony is spreading. I’ve referred before to a landmark study called "Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and Their Alienation From Israel," which demonstrates that younger Jews often have little emotional attachment to Israel, that the 62 percent of Jews under 35 years old who are intermarried are three times as likely as inmarried Jews to be "alienated" from Israel. When the New Republic and the ADL wring their hands over the campaign to "delegitimize Israel," they should ask young Jews why they feel the way they do…
I believe these divides are reflected in the Democratic primary battle. Older Jews are going with Hillary partly because she does not challenge the reliable ethnic identifications of the last generation. Obama does. The world’s changing right under our feet.
Related posts:
- Nationalism as a ‘Blinding Force’ in Jewish Identity
- Obama Depends on the Old Jews, and the Old Jews ‘Just Don’t Get It’
- ‘Birthright’ Should Welcome Non-Jews (and Other Reflections on the Obama Effect on Identity)
- Memo to Bad Jews: Time to reclaim your Jewish identity and save the world
- Study: Intermarried American Jews With ‘Personalized’ Identity Are Abandoning Israel
{ 17 comments }
If Phil is correct about something I will shoot myself. Hillary won big (yes, big) because of Hispanics and poor people. Huge margins in California, Arizona, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts means bye bye Barack.
"Jewish Identity" would be a lot stronger if "Jewish-Americans" actually practiced "Judaism."
Obama won more delegates on Super Tuesday than HRC.
David: why do you think Hillary won big among Hispanics and poor people?
Could it be the diverse Anti-Osama campaigns were helpful? e.g. Obama = Osama & all the dirt along the racism and closet Muslim lines? A German documentary I saw yesterday showed me that this is often the first thing associated with Obama.
Was there anything comparable targeting HRC? I am only aware of the story below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_State_Digital
Iran: US vs Israeli Intellegence; wasn't there already a certain amount of cooperation concerning the intelligence on Iraq?
http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2008/02/mossad_vs_the_c.php
From this point of view Obama may indeed feel like an appeaser:
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20080205obamamuslim.html
Links collected by:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/political-research/messages
"Charles Jacobs identifies himself only as the president of a Darfur group on a neocon foundation's website, leaving out his many Zionist activities."
The other day I saw a 'Save Darfur' banner on a synagogue. Is it cynical to wonder whether the fairly prominent Jewish interest in Darfur is motivated solely by humanitarian concerns, or possibly by other objectives, such as using Darfur as a smokescreen to deflect attention from the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (one which they could do much more to solve)?
The neocons' attention to Darfur now is as puzzling as their push for intervention in Kosovo a decade ago. What are they up to, anyway?
Those that assimilate will not identify as Jews in two generations. Those that retain their Jewish identity will continue to.
That means continuing bar/bat mitzvahs, seders, days of awe, shabbat, study, ethics on the basis of Jewish principles. (Those principles are as broad and profound as any other tradition, and are a good vehicle for spiritual life, if practised and inquired into sincerely and commitedly.)
That split between assimilation and commitment, is as it should be, and stimulated by different needs and goals.
When growing up, I had a very strong attraction to social change, both political and personal/spiritual. I expressed it through dedication to a yoga practise, over decades, including prominently a system of ethics that did not conflict with my Jewish upbringing and identity.
I had relationships with non-Jewish women, and could have married one, and brought up children with the gradual assimilation.
But, I also had relationships with Jewish women, and eventually married one (even though we met at a yoga center in Calcutta).
She is the child of holocaust survivors, and in getting to know her mother, uncle, aunt, and the very few on her father's side that survived, my Jewish identity is MUCH more defined than if I had just proceeded as a Jewish yogi/hippie.
Its important and not dismissable by statistics. Absent a distinct religion and culture, assimilated Jews are only that temporarily. Soon their children are just assimilated.
I'd rather be a carrot in a soup, than just a soup.
A Jew/Israeli at home and an American in the street
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When I was at Vad Vashem's Holocaust museum there was a rabbi who led a group of young American Yeshiva students and explained the exhibits to them. I was listening in. At one point he said about German Jewry: "You were a Jew at home and a German in the street." I have come across this sentence in the literature also and have been wondering what it means. Is it just a description of a factual situation or is it a norm?: 'Be a Jew at home, be a German in the street!' – anyway, there is some inbuild ambiguity of identity.
When I left Yad Vashem I passed by the group that was standing outside and I overheard the rabbi telling them: "We have a mission in the world." I have also been wondering what that mission was.
BTW, these students were friendly. One of them had come up to me to ask who I am. When I told him I was German he was not taken aback (in the middle of the German horror exhibition), to the contrary. He said their rabbi had studied a couple of years in Hamburg and I should talk to him in German.
I don't know what's so awful about assimilation, unless when push comes to shove you think your genes are too special to be mixed with the masses.
Its clear the yoga was only practiced on a physical level…
I have written an entry relating to this post on one of my blogs:
The Eternal Dilemma of the Authoritarian Jew
http://www.judeofascism.com/2008/02/eternal-dilemma-of-authoritarian-jew.html
Oh joy! Get rid of ethnic identities and there will be eternal peace and brotherhood among people. Yeah, right. Albert Einstein, during World War I, lamented that if only the "nation-state" would disappear, there would be no wars. Many people like you welcomed the creation of the UN as a fledgling "world government". How has that worked out.
Let's say everyone decides to get rid of "ethnic nationalism" . Who is going to decide what the "official" culture, language, religion (if indeed you allow that) and the such is? You? Why should you? Maybe I should, instead? Or are you going to have a vote, majority rules? Then what happens to the minority that doesn't want to go along? Stalin tried this, so did Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong. After 70 years of Communism in the USSR and 40 in Eastern Europe, nationalism and ethnic identity is alive and well. For 40 Tito and Yugoslavia tried to meld differnet South Slavic groups? How did that work out?
The fact is that just as people organize themselves in family units and have a naturally closer relation with people who are in the same family, ethnic/religious ties are natural and can not and should not be suppressed. The only way you could do it is by having a totalitarian superstate, something like Stalin's USSR or Orwell's "1984". "Freedom" means allowing people to define themselves as they wish.
Yes, and some of us would like to define ourselves without the ethnic nationalism that is so important to you.
The fact that we live in families does not mean we are naturally racists… which is where your thoughts "naturally' go…
Kill the ones not related!!
Oh-good-grief: Who says someone who belongs to an enthnic or religious group is a "racist" or believes in "killing" others?
Stalin opposed nationalism, look at the millions he killed. Also Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot…all believers in an "internationlist, universalist" ideology.
"I rather be a carrot than the soup I am in"–Adolf Hitler. In the end, there are individuals and there are groups. Choose. We see.
I teach at a university in Toronto, which has a large Jewish enrollment, and I certainly agree that younger Jews are much less attached to Israel than their parents. Many have expressed disgust with Israeli policies and even a Hillel Toronto leader noted that many "pro-Palestinian" activists are Jewish (people he declared "beyond the pale"). By taking such a hardline, rightwing line on Israel they have driven away all but the minority of rightwing Jews and are such an embarrassment to many that they are probably contributing to greater assimilation. What they lack in numbers they make up for in hardcore ideological coommitment, but again they only speak for a small minority.
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David | February 06, 2008 at 12:46 AM,
Were you talking about those huge margins in Harlem, too, where Obama didn't win one single vote in the primary until the recount? Not one.
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Jim Haywood | February 06, 2008 at 11:09 AM
The answer to your Darfur question is Sudanese oil and fresh water.
The Nubian Aquifer, which is 20 times larger than the Great Lakes and the largest in the world, is under Egypt, Chad, Libya, and Sudan. Egypt and Sudan have joined together to develop these deep fossil water reserves. Libya is not going to say Come On Down, Israel. Just study the map.
That's what Israel wants.
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