I’m still caught up in Ambassador Gillerman’s statement that Israel is a "far better" country than most others because it produces scientific and artistic talent. My friend Richard Witty acknowledges that this attitude is unfortunate when he hears it from guys in his shul, and he prefers people simply expressing pride in their accomplishments. True enough, but Witty is someone who actually possesses humility. This guy’s an ambassador who is paid to be diplomatic and he makes these offensive comments. It causes me to reflect that I grew up with feelings of Jewish superiority, that we are better because we are smarter, and that it is an attitude whose time has passed.
The other night I was at a dinner party typical of the new
establishment, half Jews, half non-Jews, and heard a gentile down the
table talking excitedly about Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, explaining how Jewish gifts for learning and the law had specially
outfitted them for modernity. "But what is the Jewish century?" his
Jewish dinner partner asked. He and I said in unison, "The last one."
I truly think it’s over. Jewish superiority is being undermined on many fronts, perhaps chiefly by the fact that intermarriage is blunting the notion of Jewish difference in the next generation and meanwhile everyone else is on to the importance of education. Yes we have cherished books and the law for millennia (and may have genetic advantages mentally in this age). But China and India are making the hedge funds less important, and the internet is making reading and analysis a great democratic value, in every hamlet of this great country, let alone the world.
And what about that image we so prided ourselves on? Iraq has shown that our thinkers are as debased as any other imperialist thinkers, while Israel/Palestine is showing daily that we are morally the same as any other colonizer.
The presidential race is also hurting, as it proves that a conservative Jewish old-guard is as involved with Hillary as Rockefeller Republicans were in a previous ancien regime. On election night (my wife tells me) Chris Matthews said that Hillary is in trouble financially because she paid those many millions to Mark Penn for bad advice. Penn is the ceo of Burson, Marsteller and should have worked for nothing, Matthews said, as Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger did for Kennedy. Then Matthews added re Penn, "He’s one of those Iraq guys isn’t he?" or words to that effect.
It struck me as close to antisemitic, but revealing of the new if somewhat subterranean Jewish image in American life: piggy and belligerent. Sheldon Adelson, U.S.’s third richest man, promoter of the Iraq war and free trips to Israel for Jewish kids only (in stout contrast to #1, Bill Gates, philanthropist and #2, Warren Buffett, genial genius).
Mark Penn is actually a nice guy (I knew him in college). He wrote a smart book last year called Microtrends:
The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, that openly described Jews as principals in American society, something few other Jewish writers like to acknowledge. "Jews are in demand everywhere" in the U.S., he wrote. Non-Jews want to marry
Jews, on a scale that they never did before. Jews have been at the "forefront of the
professional revolution of the last several decades." And Jewish
"money" plays a big part in our new image (more important than "values").
And he notes that philo-Semitism "represents the tumbling of thousands
of years of barriers."
Whatever
in the past seemed to trigger envy or rejection of Jews now seems to be
triggering admiration and attraction. In the 1940s, several national
surveys found that Jews were considered a greater threat to the welfare
of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial
group. Compare that to a Gallup poll taken in August 2006. When
Americans were asked how they feel about people of different religious
or spiritual groups inthe United States, Jews rated the highest of any
group in America, with a net positive of 54 percent.
(Well that was two years ago, before Jimmy Carter and the flameout of the neocons.)
As Penn said, this transformation of the Jewish place in society is utterly new in Jewish history. It is time to stop looking at the ghetto and the Holocaust and Tel Aviv in order to frame our response to events, it is time for humility.