Yesterday Mike Desch, author of the new book, Power and Military Effectiveness, the Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism, knowing of my fascination with issues of dual loyalty, passed along this exchange from Haaretz. In it the writer David Samuels speaks of the claims of Jewish identity in the age of Israel. It's a high-minded conversation. I felt I had stepped into it halfway, and asked Desch to interpret. He said, "I think that Samuels is arguing that Jews and other minorities face a 'creative tension' living in America because the Jewish and American master narratives are out of sync in important respects. Here are the money grafs from Samuels:"
“As a writer, I believe that people live through stories that are
handed down through the ages by parents and grandparents and that we pass
on in turn to our children.
Americans believe, very deeply, in the value and necessity of
abolishing the past and living in the future. Americans believe that each
individual has the capacity for finding God’s grace within him or herself,
and can only find it by being born again — independent of family
history and ties. While you don’t have to be a Christian to accept
historically peculiar American ideas about the individual, the past and the
future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in
their history and, I would argue, in their essence.
The stories Jews tell ourselves are different. We tell ourselves
stories about our unbroken connection to a common set of tribal ancestors to
whom all Jews are connected by blood. We tell ourselves about the
unbroken chain of interpretation that connects today’s Torah sages to the
medieval commentators to the sages of the Gemarra and Mishna to the
revelation given to Moses on Har Sinai. We tell ourselves stories about our
survival as a people through thousands of years of exile and
persecution in which we still claim to be able to see the hand of God.
I don’t believe that American Jews are likely to spy for Israel, or
that being Shomer Shabbat is un-American. I don’t believe that the way
Jews understand ourselves and our relation to society is a superficial
question of customs and manners (although manners too can be important).
I am talking about something deeper. The ways that Jews see the
individual and his or her place in the world contradicts core American
beliefs about abolishing the past, living in the future, and making yourself
up from scratch. Sometimes we acknowledge this contradiction to
ourselves, and sometimes we pretend that we think and see the world the same
way as everyone else. Sometimes we acknowledge our difference to
ourselves and to our friends but not to our Christian neighbors. We are double
agents. That’s what it means to be a Jew in America.
As an American Jew, you can chose to make sense of the inherent
contradictions of our existence in a creative way, which is what I try to do
in my own life. Or you can simply live your live as a Jew who randomly
happens to reside in America as opposed to Israel or France, like the
ultra-orthodox do. Or you can embrace mainstream American notions of
personal identity and cease being Jewish in any meaningful way. Finally,
one can gratefully acknowledge the contributions of one’s long-ago
Jewish ancestors (see: John Kerry, William Cohen, Madeleine Albright,
etc.).”
To which Desch adds, “I think that this is the most profound discussion of the issue of
‘dual loyalty’ I’ve ever seen. Of course the big lacuna in the last
paragraph was the pre-Holocaust reform Judaism project, which is part and
parcel of America’s Liberal approach to religion based on a separation
of church and state. Still and all, very thought provoking.”
My own response to this is to free associate: I feel guilty because I’m assimilating, I feel that when people invoke a definition of Jewish identity that is so ethnocentric, I get scared. I ran away from that stuff as a kid, it was claustrophobic. Still find it claustrophobic. I think people tell themselves stories all the time, not just historical biblical mythologies, and American Jews can tell American Jewish stories too. Intermarriage is a very American story. Jews and WASPs being at the same powerful Washington/NY law firms and having the grace and common sense to let their children socialize and even go to bed together is such a story. Clinton’s philosemitic administration is such a story. German-Jewish antizionism is such a story. If those stories make me assimilating I say Well dammit I will go to hell then. Like Huck who broke the law to save Jim, I broke the law to marry my wife. No I am not telling everyone to do that. Still it will continue to seem attractive to Jewish kids, especially when the alternative seems to be dual loyalty to a militarized state that has completely erased the humanity of Palestinians. Samuels is a real smart guy. I note that his entry about this dialogue on Jewcy is titled: American Jews Are Double Agents: Deal With It. No thank you.
Thanks Phil, It is interesting that in the USA white people don't seem to have a strong racial memory. Obviously this is not the case with native and black Americans. I suspect it reflects a lack of communal suffering among the ruling clique. I am a member of the brotherhood of man and have no use for flags and borders. But then I haven't felt the suffering of a race. I have resided outside of the US sporadicly for almost 14 years. I communicate with a cousin who is conservative and often responds to my historical perspectives vis the middle east "Can't they just get over it" when "it" is usually something that happened within our lifetime. My parents house was never destroyed or my family killed by an invading army etc.
Samuels' message is essentially the same "anomalous nature" that Walzer spoke of at Yivo.
link to philipweiss.org
I continue to be worried for Phil. If "too claustrophobic" is the strongest condemnation he can come up with for this sort of tribalism, then I can easily imagine a late-life return to the fold. It will be done in a spirit of heroic self-abnegation, just like Walzer's and just like so many other Jews confronting the solitariness of death.
Samuels is right to emphasize the profound difference between the Christian and Jewish outlooks. (Notice that only politicians and academics ever speak of something called the "Judeo-Christian tradition." Christians don't, and Jews among themselves most definitely don't.) But he is wrong to just single out the "rebirth" theme in Christianity. Far more important is the moral theme of responsibility for your neighbor. When EVERYONE is your neighbor, not just blood relations, then "loving your neighbor" takes on a different significance.
It's some recognition of this moral dimension that is lacking from Phil's discussion of his personal tribulations.
I think the existence of Phil's blog shows, and what he writes for it shows, his recognition of the total moral dimension. However I do agree there is a profound difference between the Christian and Jewish outlooks. I only wish to add that Christ was a Jew. He spoke to Jews. It was Saul, to my knowldege, who brought the message to the Gentiles. Anyway, the bottom line divides the individual, treating others as individuals, and tribes–I understand the attraction of tribes. It is lonely to be an individual, but looking at others as individuals is the only way to
reverse the terrible course of history.
Thank you David the First, you hit the nail on the head. This guy Samuels strikes me as coming up with another rationalization for what Atzmon calls "racialist" thinking, that there is some 'fundamental' difference between American core beliefs and Jewishness is crap. I am American and my family's history was endlessly mythologized around the dinner table. Ethnic identification can add a charming dimensionality to a personality or be a big bore, or worse.
I think what Samuels is referring to is moving on with your life vs clinging desparately to a tribal identity to provide… what? A sense of comfort? security?
phil, i know of no other ethnicity in america other than jews at their synagogues, that sings the national anthem of another nation while worshiping in america.
the jews in their synagogues sing the israeli national anthem, catholics dont sing the italian national anthem in their churches neither do other catholics from other nations sing theirs..plus i have never seen the anglican churches promoting nationalism under the roof of their churches…
that jewish leaders promote israeli nationalism and by association zionism at their schools and synagogues is evidenced by a visit to a service at a synagogues or to the preschools for the little zionist in the making.
zionism promotes dual allegience and expects dual allegience from its flock.
belonging is very important to the jews, and you belong if you behave as expected.
its probably very easy for the israeli secret services to recruit the putzes who serve israel while living in other countries.
i love it when i hear jewish ameiricans complain about other ethnicities who are here illegally and the way they question their status as americans but cannot see past their own duality of national identification.
you know what i love…i love america, and i dont really care who wants to be an american as long as they are americans and love our constitution.
Thank you David the First, you hit the nail on the head. This guy Samuels strikes me as coming up with another rationalization for what Atzmon calls "racialist" thinking, that there is some 'fundamental' difference between American core beliefs and Jewishness is crap. I am American and my family's history was endlessly mythologized around the dinner table. Ethnic identification can add a charming dimensionality to a personality or be a big bore, or worse.
I think what Samuels is referring to is moving on with your life vs clinging desparately to a tribal identity to provide… what? A sense of comfort? security?
"his recognition of the total moral dimension."
I didn't mean that Phil does not address moral issues. I meant that in his personal tribulations over assimilation/apartness, he treats it as if it were an aesthetic issue.
Missing in Walzer, Samuels, and Weiss is any discussion of the question of how "a people apart" are supposed to relate to the people they're apart from.
if jesus was a jew, jews werent. if jews were jews, jesus wasnt.
"David the First | May 25, 2008 at 01:32 PM" is worth a reread.
fairly simple:
love thy neighbor as thyself.
"Americans believe that each individual has the capacity for finding God's grace within him or herself, and can only find it by being born again — independent of family history and ties. While you don't have to be a Christian to accept historically peculiar American ideas about the individual, the past and the future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in their history and, I would argue, in their essence."
This is just wrong. "Born again" is a particular subset of Christianity, until recently not even a very large subset. I concede the Pilgrims were often religious fanatics, but the founders were not particularly church-going. Where does this guy get these ideas?
It is interesting however to find out these Jewish secrets, praying for the IDF and apparently getting the creeps around a tree. (About as Xtian a symbol as an bunny on Easter)
More rationalizations to feel separate, special, victimized, and therefore justified in stealing a country.
I do agree with him about no pograms though. Nope, no pograms.
Regarding Jim Byers comments – I agree that a lack of shared suffering has made white Americans less likely to find a common narrative; yet the story is not quite that simple.
A generation or two ago, whites did have something approaching a common and cohesive culture – often (perhaps always, as seems to always be the case) defined against other races and cultures.
What has been at least as important as a lack of suffering in changing or breaking whites apart as a cohesive group is the veritable tidal wave of anti-wasp, anti-gentile academic, legal, entertainment, journalistic messages that have washed over our country in the last 50 years. I hold up as a good example of the base lie at the bottom of much of that kind of propaganda the example of my father and my grandfather.
It is a long story, and I have to caveat it by saying that I am proud of my dad for leaving the room whenever his dad said the n-word. But my father's only reply when I ask him about why white america seems to be so passive is "whites have done a lot of harm to other people." No nuance, just a the belief that seems so common among whites of a certain age – we did bad things.
I contrast this with my grandfather, a man who never went to high school and was much more in the scrum than my dad, a physician, ever was. He looked at jews, blacks, hispanics, as his competition – which they were. The irony is that the family was chased out of Long Beach as it descended into a post WWII slum, with my dad and uncles being chased home from school by blacks and hispanics. Long post, sorry about that. White Guilt – a huge hoax that will be redressed.
I agree with Peter – which Americans is this guy Samuels claiming to define? My mother is a Southern (white) American and I heard about nothing but family and history when I was growing up. My grandmother used to speak of Sherman's march through Georgia with trembling rage. It happened 40 years before she was born. I heard about my great-great-grandparents from her, and later when I had occasion to research her stories on the internet, they all checked out.
Read William Faulkner. He wrote about the heavy weight of family and history, and the attempt to get away from it, and the pull of the past. So that's Southern white people.
Somebody else upthread mentions black people. They have histories that they tell to their children. Collecting Afro-American memorabilia, collecting family portraits, passing on stories. Native Americans also keep their stories and tribal histories alive.
Ever read the novels of John Cheever? He goes into great detail about the history of a New England Yankee family. Those people cared about who they were, cared about their histories. Yankees are out of fashion but they still exist. I knew a young woman in NY 25 years ago who was in the Social Register, and she knew all about the old families and newer ones, and who was who.
Occasionally I meet Californians whose families go back six or seven generations. They will announce the fact "I'm a seventh generation native Californian." "I'm a fourth generation San Franciscan" and so forth. The numbers matter to them, and if you want to know more about their families and their connection to California history, they'll be happy to tell you.
I went to the SF Presidio for a ceremony honoring Junipero Serra, and found about 100 descendants of the original Spanish settlers gathered to view the proceedings. The MC called out the names of the original settlers, and each descendant got up when his ancestor was announced to put a carnation in a wreath set up by the cannons. And pundits say Californians don't care about their past. Such pundits just make shit up based on hanging around a cafe for a week, talking to the baristas.
Don't essentialize Americans, buster.
"Such pundits just make #### up" – Leila Abu-Saba
yep. make it up then endlessly repeat until it becomes "fact".
Leila is right, almost everyone has some pride in their own history, including whites – but why is it that everyone but whites can translate that history into political will and action that favors their group? That is the part of what they call at vdare "the national question". Why Americans passively watch their country slip away due to immigration, messianic war/foreign policy, support for an apartheid state.
In honor of all those americans who have given their lives in the defense of their nation, peace.
for what better symbol to honor them with, than an enduring peace.
peace to honor them.
Great gospel lyrics I heard today:
"If there is light in the soul, there is peace in the person."
"If there is peace in the person, there is harmony in the home."
"If there is harmony in the home, there is honor in the nation."
"If there is honor in the nation, there is peace in the world."
Happy Memorial Day.
read somewhere 1800 vets dying each day or at least 1800 getting buried. read somewhere else 1000 ww2 vets dying/getting buried each day.
say 3-4 from civil war. est 300 from other conflicts. leaves about 500/day from iraq as close to actual.
approx: 365x 5= 1825=approx 1900 x 500 = 95000 closer to reality usa soldiers killed in iraq. doesnt include scummy contractor thugs.
The first Jew to reject his Jewishness of course was Christ. He was the first Jewish Heretic and it wasn't easy and He/he suffered for it mightily. Phil is right to be concerned about his "assimilation". It's very tough to leave that fold. I did in h.s., but maybe the fact that my grandparents were English Jews helped a lot. Polite, modest, unassuming, never talk with their hands, hard-working Brits. The family lived in a very anti-Semitic town that had Nazi Bund meetings in the 30's And, one day a Gentile schoolgirl friend of my 10 year-old mother confided: "Marilyn, my parents really like your parents. They say they are White Jews."
"Love thy neighbor as thyself." Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, this is from the Old Testament, or the Hebrew bible. It was picked up later by Jesus who was a Jew, who did not reject his Jewishness. The first Christians were a sect of Judaism. It was Paul who decided that gentiles could actually join the community without converting to Judaism. There was no inherent conflict between the two belief systems at least for the first century or two. Excuse the pedanticness.
I wanted to make sure "love thy neighbor" was not written off as some toxic Christian belief.
"The first Christians were a sect of Judaism."
Where do you get this stuff? From Richard Witty?
I was struck by the reference to Huck. The exact same reference which struck me as a child and remains with me always.
Huck was doing far worse than merely breaking the law, Huck was convinced he was going to Hell for doing something against both laws of man and God. But he did because he loved Jim.
"I'll just go to Hell then."
Mark Twain was every bit the prophet or seer that Moses was.
I wrote: "which Americans is this guy Samuels claiming to define?"
Subject verb agreement. I'm just not sure. "is" is the verb for "this guy Samuels"
This guy Samuels is claiming to define which Americans?
Which Americans does this guy Samuels claim to define?
That last is more like it. I'm not the best editor on the planet but I know about subject/verb agreement; I do have a masters in English from a decent college.
Samuels claims to define Americans: which ones?
(is that better?)
Thank you for letting me muse in public. I just couldn't let that previous version stand. Messy.
truthpatrol,
the first xtians were jews . you could say that jesus was a rabbi that they followed. the movement got bigger and bigger and they didn't want gentiles to join up. paul, who had originally been a jewish official hunting down christians, decided they should be included and wrote letters to the different communities promoting that idea. there were actually different sects of judaism , just like now.
This is very interesting, but reaching for it a bit.
I agree that Americans believe in new beginnings and reinventing themselves, but so do American Jews… How many Isaacs became Irvings? How many Bernsteins became Bernsteeens? How many of those Irvings name their sons Yitzak? How many Yitzaks marry shiksas? America is open and stuff happens.
And being "born again" is strictly evangelical Christianity, mainstream Protestants and Catholics are not "born again".
The Israel/Palestine issue is political: about land, about water, about citizenship.
So, I take it the Hebrew mandate "Love thy neighbor as thyself" was first applied to non-Jews by Saul (St. Paul)? And everybody in the parable of The Good Samaritan was some type of Hebrew sect member?
do unto others…is known to many peoples. does not originate with the hebrews – very little did. they took/stole(like current israelis) from all, esp egypt.
if jesus was a jew, jews werent. if jews were jews, jesus wasnt.
egypt is great, ancient, glorious. we are nothing but beggers, thieves, liars, and plague bearers. we are envious of our betters – all others. we will hate them. we will vilify them. we will write another history for ourselves. others, equally repugnant, will assume our garb. we will be believed because words written, even stolen words, are believed. we learn this early about the media. we elaborated the dreyfus "affair" to our benefit. our scheme continues.
egypt is great, ancient, glorious. we are nothing but beggers, thieves, liars, and plague bearers. we are envious of our betters – all others. we will hate them. we will vilify them. we will write another history for ourselves. others, equally repugnant, will assume our garb. we will be believed because words written, even stolen words, are believed. we learn this early about the media. we elaborated the dreyfus "affair" to our benefit. our scheme continues.
where do comments go? is there a hole/disposal here?
Did Philip Weiss notice that the NYT published a response to Goldberg's op-ed by Stephen Walt?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/opinion/l20israel.html?ref=opinion
"You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Leviticus 19:18)
Context is everything.
It always amazes me to see how the insular nature of Jewish self-obsession is matched if not exceeded by the near-total ignorance among Christians about the basic tenets and historical origins of their own faith.
What I mean by "born again" is not the shorthand phrase used by political pundits when discussing lower class American protestant voters (i.e. "evangelicals") but the ancient and time-honored Christian definition of the idea of being born again in Christ. Christians are defined by the Church as individuals who were called out from the pagan tribes to leave their personal and tribal histories behind to form a "New Israel" — a covenant that either augments or supplants (depending on whose theology you read) God's Biblical covenant with the Children of Israel.
Thus, while both Jews and Christians enjoy a special relationship with God, the two covenants bring with them a very different relationship to history. Christians are Christians by virtue of their personal choice to become Christians, an identity that is self-chosen and replaces that of family and tribe. On a theological level, no one is a Christian because their family is Christian, or their tribe is Christian: Every Christian is born again in Christ outside of historical space and time.
The Jewish covenant is founded on a historical relationship with God. Instead of a rupture with history, family, and tribe, Judaism leaves those relationships intact and celebrates them as proof of God's favor. The historical record is important because it tells the story of the romance between the Jewish people and God, and offers proofs of God's favor and disfavor.
While this fundamental difference between Christians and Jews can be more or less reconciled on a theological level (according to the ancient religious principle of different strokes for different folks), the difference in the ways that Christians and Jews relate to family, tribe and history are fundamentally irreconcilable and are regularly taken as evidence of moral idiocy and bad faith by both sides.
As for Jewish origins of Christianity, it is only deep-seated Christian ignorance and prejudice that makes this a subject of any dispute. The Gospels make it quite clear that Jesus was a believing Jew who stressed the importance of following Jewish ritual to his followers before his death. After Jesus's cruxifiction by the Romans, his original followers fractured into two camps — one led by Jesus's older brother and appointed heir James, and the other by Jesus's disciple Paul (Most Christians I know are astounded to learn that Jesus had siblings, believing against the evidence of their own texts that Joseph and Mary never had sex with each other or with anyone else. Of course some Christians do argue that the repeated references to James being the "brother" of Jesus made in Matthew, Mark and Galatians should not be taken literally. Yet references in the gospels to Jesus's siblings, who also include Jude, Simon and Joseph, seem more believable and are more common than the idea that God is Jesus's actual "father," on which the Roman Catholic church is founded).
In any event, the record of the arguments between James and Paul is preserved for us in Paul's letters – which are hardly an unbiased source, but confirm the terms of the debates, and which can hardly be denied by Christians to be valid texts.
We know from Paul that James and his followers lived in Jerusalem and held that all non-Jews who wanted to become followers of Christ would have to follow Jewish dietary and ritual law when interacting with Christ's Jewish disciples. When Jewish "Christians" met with non-Jews, the food would have to be kosher. Gentile men would have to be circumcised.
Paul, who lived in Syria (and was also Jewish), argued that when Jews and non-Jews met to discuss Christ's teachings, the food should be the food of the non-Jews, and everyone should eat it. From arguing that non-Jews should not have to obey Jewish laws in order to hear Christ's teachings, Paul soon began to argue that Jewish-born followers of Christ should also be free from Jewish ritual requirements even when not interacting with non-Jews.
Paul's argument with James about whether Jewish followers of Jesus needed to obey Jewish law when interacting with non-Jews was in fact an argument about whether "Christianity" was a Jewish sect or a new faith. The evidence of Jesus's teachings alone would clearly seem to favor James's view that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, that the Jewish followers of Jesus were still Jews, and that non-Jewish followers of Jesus should obey some form of Jewish law if they wanted to live by his teachings. Jesus himself regarded the commandments as binding on himself and on his disciples — every last one of whom was born Jewish.
Yet, at the same time, it is also clear that insisting that non-Jews living in Antioch give up pork and get circumcised to hear the message of a dead Jewish teacher from the rural Galilee was unlikely to excite much enthusiasm among the gentiles-to-be that Paul was trying to recruit. Nor was it particularly in harmony with the universal themes of Jesus's message — themes that were part of the common Jewish prophetic and rabbinical heritage that Jesus and other 1rst century Jewish teachers drew on, but which are given a more insistently universal and non-sectarian emphasis in Jesus's teachings.
The debate between the followers of James (who was killed in 62 AD) and the followers of Paul came to a abrupt end in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, killed an estimated 1.1 million rebellious Jews, and wiped out the existing Jewish state — and with it, all of James's followers. It may be overstating the case to say that Paul won the great historical argument within the early Church over the Jewishness of Christianity simply because all of his opponents were wiped out by the Romans. Yet it is clearly true that the Roman victory made the idea of a Jewish Christianity impossible and seemingly pointless. All of James's followers were dead, and there was no reason for semi-ex-Jews like Paul to imagine that "Judaism" would continue to exist in any meaningful form. It must have seemed equally unlikely that anyone would want to join the wiped-out religion of a defeated anti-Roman rebel colony whose temple had been leveled and whose fields had been sown with salt. Nor would the Romans be likely to view efforts to spread a "Jewish" sect throughout the empire with much favor. The less Jewish "Christianity" seemed, the better.
Paul's decision to firmly separate "Christianity" from Judaism while incorporating the entirety of the Jewish Biblical and prophetic texts into the faith of the "New Israel" was both one of the greatest examples of cultural pillaging and one of the greatest examples of cultural preservation in the history of mankind. From a Roman perspective, at least, there was little reason to think that Jews would continue to survive or that anyone would care about the ancient books of the Israelites. For all we know the Edomites and the Moabites had equally great books, or at least a few entertaining poems.
Yet from a Christian perspective, it was important that the Jews continue to exist as proof of the historical truth of the Bible and of God's second covenant with the New Israel, which is why the Church kept the Jews alive in ghettos while murdering the Druids, stone-worshippers, and other pre-Christian believers.
Whatever the realities of current Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians — and I have seen it all first-hand — it is impossible to separate contemporary arguments about the reborn Jewish state from the ambivalent place of the Jews in Christian theology. In some ways, the creation of the State of Israel is as momentous an event for Christians within the terms of their faith as it is for Jews, opening up deep questions that have been quietly vibrating for millennia. My own belief is that the State of Israel is a problematic historical oddity whose existence was made both feasible and necessary by the deep Christian denial of history and the accompanying inability to accept Jews as full members of society.
I don't see this argument at all. American Jews are as American as mom's apple pie.
American Jews have "reinvented" themselves endlessly, Israel Isidore Beilin became Irving Berlin, Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis, Allan Stewart Konigsberg became Woody Allen and Robert Allen Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. How is that for reinventing?
If American Jews didn't reinvent themselves how did English surnames like "Brooks" and "Harris" become "Jewish" and how did the surname of an ancient American writer, Washington Irving, become a more Jewish name then "Moses"?
David Samuels, you write as if the battle over "the Jewishness of Christianity" boiled down to dietary laws and ritual practice. Surely the collision between a universal religion and one with membership conferred by bloodlines also has some relevance?
When was this second, some would say more important, battle fought? Did it have any bearing on Jesus' death?
To the Editor,
Re “Israel’s ‘American Problem’ ” (Op-Ed, May 18):
Jeffrey Goldberg attacks our book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” while openly embracing one of our main arguments.
He writes that we “argue, unpersuasively, that American support for Israel hurts America. It doesn’t. But unthinking American support does hurt Israel.”
Our book contains detailed case studies showing that unconditional support for Israel is not in America’s national interest. Readers can judge for themselves whether we are “persuasive.”
But we also emphasized that “the lobby’s impact has been unintentionally harmful to Israel,” that its actions “may even be jeopardizing the long-term prospects of the Jewish state” and that its “influence has been bad for both countries.”
The lobby’s harmful impact on Israel was also a central theme of an op-ed article, “Israel’s False Friends,” we wrote in The Los Angeles Times on Jan. 6. Mr. Goldberg clearly agrees with this part of our argument. John J. Mearsheimer
Stephen M. Walt
Chicago, May 18, 2008
•
To the Editor:
Jeffrey Goldberg argues that “the dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.”
That strategy has failed. In the summer of 2005, Israel dismantled every settlement in Gaza, expelled all the Jews, destroyed every military base and removed every soldier.
Rather than build a functioning peaceful society, the Palestinians rewarded Israel by electing Hamas.
There is no reason to believe that dismantling West Bank settlements would produce a different result.
Until the Palestinians desire peace more than the destruction of Israel, there will never be peace.
Jacob Sasson
New York, May 18, 2008
Re: Jesus and love thy neighbor -
I heard a sermon entirely by chance one Sunday in 1991 at a Methodist church in Brooklyn (that lefty one in Park Slope). I was just walking by and happened to put my head in the door.
The Methodist minister was preaching on the Canaanite woman – a woman Jesus encountered when he was visiting the region of my ancestors, the hills east of Sidon. The Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter; he said "do you expect me to take the bread from my children's mouths and feed it to dogs?" (i.e. Canaanite children are dogs) and she said "but master, even the dogs eat crumbs from the master's table." He relented and said – you have faith, go, your daughter is healed.
The minister said that Jesus had a paradigm shift in that moment (trendy word of the time, he defined it). Jesus was still a tribalist, only concerned with preaching to and saving Jews. On his trip to Sidon, where Jews lived among many other Semitic peoples, a Canaanite woman made him see that his message applied to all people. Supposedly, according to this minister, Jesus' multi-cultural awakening happened with this story.
It's an interpretation. Since my grandmother was a Canaanite woman of great faith, I was staggered by the story. Seemed a synchronistic moment that I should happen by and choose to stick my head in the church door and hear this. I never went to church, and rarely walked by that one on a Sunday morning.
So no, according to the mainline Protestant theology of the Methodist church, it was not Paul who opened the message of Christ to the Gentiles, it was Christ himself.