Last night the Center for Jewish History hosted a panel on Obama and postracial politics, and I dropped in. Three panelists– 2
Jewish, one black, and most of the talk was about Obama and Jews.
The oldest panelist was Samuel G. Freedman. I liked how irascible he was, how impatient with
cant.
He said that the black-Jewish coalition during the civil rights era is exaggerated. Jews
were just a very small component, it was the black Christian movement that did
it mostly, and it is just the fact that Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney were
killed in Philadelphia MS, two of the three being Jewish, that makes it seem like a Jewish
thing. Now everyone is trying to put themselves in the civil rights picture,
but it’s a lie. Huh.
two reasons. The corporate world adopted “diversity” –the new name for affirmative
action—and privatized it and now everyone is for it. And Jews are no longer in
competition for places with the blacks who are affirmative action’s
beneficiaries. Jews are “part of the overclass.” They have SAT tutoring and “legacy
admissions” to guarantee their spots in fancy schools. Wonderful.
Freedman was just as incisive when it came to Obama’s Jewish
problem. Ari Berman of the Nation was making the argument that I have often criticized
here before, that Jews are actually a progressive force, and Freedman took him on. Yes Jews vote liberal. But the Jewish republican vote could go from 20 to 40 percent, depending on
real issues. That’s the swing. And those Jews who are going to swing are going
to be hardline on: Ahmadinejad/Iran and talking to Hamas. For those people, these are
serious issues. “I’m not going to light any candles for AIPAC,” Freedman said, but if the liberal
groups can’t organize themselves they should stop “sitting in sack cloth and
ashes and whining about AIPAC.” The votes of
those 20 percent can’t be laid to “lobbying.” Hmmm.
The crazy nature of the American
political system is such that that little splinter group of Jews, the 20
percent who can swing, are being fought over. Just as farmers are being contested over the ethanol
issue, and Cubans, and ethnic Catholics.
Now to the critique. Freedman’s comments are
about ¾ true. In the civil rights case, he knows more than I do, but he is, as a matter-of-fact journalist, leaving out the soul in the connection of the Jewish community to the civil rights movement,
with lawyers and money and Freedom Riders. He’s diminishing the incredible spiritual and psychic interflow. Schwerner and Goodman are glorious martyrs in my religious tradition, and not a statistical aberration. Read
Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld’s comment on Freedom Riders here. Patricia Kovner was a red-diapered Freedom Rider, imprisoned in MS, years before her cousin Bruce Kovner started taking apart hospitals in Wisconsin and buying oil tankers and copper so as to amass the global hedge fortune that now propels the neocons and Juilliard and the NY Sun. In Pat’s girlhood, Jews felt
an identity with blacks as outsiders clamoring to get in. I know from my own
upbringing. Now that’s over. We are part of the overclass, and good for Freedman
for saying so.
voters, he is misrepresenting the “lobby” analysis of Walt and Mearsheimer. The lobby is, as Freedman says, representative of the body of
adult Jewry, for now anyway, inasmuch as Jewish identity is defined by Zionism, support for the militarized Jewish state. The lobby doesn’t work on them; it is swaying the American interest.
That’s the problem.
Freedman’s insistence that the presidential candidates are
fighting over the Jewish vote is a figment wrapped in a figleaf, one I regularly try
to lift. 20 percent of let’s be generous and call it 3 percent of the
population is .6 percent of the vote that could swing. I for one don’t believe that’s why
Hillary is threatening to obliterate
about appeasers at the Knesset. And is
even up for grabs this time? “At the risk of stereotyping,” Berman said, “Jews
are influential beyond their numbers.” As donors, as media workers,
“influential in all these different areas.” Beautiful. Berman then veered off into the
swamps of The Christians are going to the polls on the basis of
It was for a youth audience, and the Jewish writers on the stage put forward
the politically-correct view of Israel as a happy place in which yes Palestinians suffer, while the black
writer, a last-minute replacement for Ta-Nehisi Coates called Professor Gray–I am sorry I didn’t catch his name–said that blacks on campus support the
Palestinians because of narratives of “hegemony” they have from the segregated
south and from South Africa. But then they grow up and realize how complex the
situation really is.
and he wonders why the black community is glamorizing homicide and misogyny. (I
think I got that right, didn’t take notes right then; he might have actually used the word “suicide.”). The black community
should be talking about Katrina and
Freedman thereby broke the kumbaya spirit, with a legitimate–and more important, licit–critique of black culture. I wanted Professor Gray to
turn it back to Freedman, to talk about the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied
territories, and about the number of members of the “overclass,” both Jewish and gentile, who are actually serving
in
this war hatched by neocons. I think he was intimidated by the setting.
P.S. One other thing. Freedman’s overclass and “legacy admissions” opens the door nicely to a cultural analysis of Jewish wealth we never see. When I was a kid, I spent too much of my time thinking of WASP legacies and trust funds, WASPs who didn’t have to work for a living. A lot of that privilege now inheres in Jewish life. But these privileged luftmenschen aren’t working on wooden boats, they’re crafting theories of Islamofascism… Of course I generalize. I’m sure there’s an upside.
