Jonathan Gray has responded to my post that mentioned him and says I've misrepresented his views, and suggests that I made a racist comment, to boot. He writes:
As
for your desire to have me attack Sam [Freedman] about the failures of Jewish
culture vis-a-vis Black culture, or the role that Jewish neo-cons
played in starting the Iraq War, um, the panel was about the Jewish
vote and Obama. I didn't want to go down that path, tempting though it
was. That's a conversation I would love to have another time. Perhaps
you could moderate. And, "the intellectual Black community, such as it
is…" Would you care to clarify your phrase? Are you denying that an
intellectual Black community exists? Are you asserting that Black
intellectuals are somehow second class thinkers? Please enlighten me
First: thanks much to Jonathan for publishing his comment here, I didn't even have his first name. Journalism 101. As to the criticisms.
It’s not my duty to represent the thrust of someone’s statements at a forum when the comments are off my subject. This is not a newspaper, it’s a blog. If I got something wrong, of course I’m responsible. I don’t think I got anything wrong. I apologize re “the intellectual black community such as it is.” Maybe that came out wrong. What I was thinking when I wrote those words is that I would not like it if someone referred to the “intellectual Jewish community.” I think there’s a lot of diversity among Jewish intellectuals and the same holds for black intellectuals. It’s hard to speak of “community” when you refer to intellectuals unless you’re talking about schools of fish like Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier.
I do think my challenge was apropos. I wonder again whether the setting was intimidating, Jonathan. The treatment of Palestinians by Israel is disgraceful–I have witnessed it–and the benedictions that treatment regularly receives from American Jewish media workers and intellectuals reflects the meltdown in the IQ of my people that Israel has produced. I liked your statement against “hegemony” in South Africa, the segregated
south and Israel/Palestine, and I wonder if you don’t share my views on
this subject. When Sam Freedman channeled Bill Cosby and started lecturing the black community about its faults–and I tend to agree with him there–I wanted you to channel me, the Jewish nonZionist left, because we don’t ever get included in these panels. You are right, it’s my problem, but I sense we have a common cause, and our failure to speak out is only damaging our country’s position in the world. As to Jewish neocons, I say, it was a freeflowing conversation, you coulda done it. Some day at the Center for Jewish History, they will have a huge forum, maybe a whole weekend, devoted to the Jewish neoconservatives. Only when they’re safely in the dustbin of history. For now out of a tribal impulse, the Jewish center and center-left continues to provide the neocons cover, and not expose the extent to which their deluded thinking about the Middle East arose from a pro-Israel, pro-settlement outlook. Maybe Scott McClellan will help shake this conversation loose…
