Younger Jews have grown up in diverse settings and are therefore less likely to be troubled by Obama's associations than their elders. "If association was the litmus test of identity, everyone would be a hopeless mishmash of confusion, or you'd have no friends," he said.Smart. Though I'd add this comment. Association is a component of identity. It is why parochial Jews separate their children from other children, and in part why Jews in Europe created Yiddish. It is why the AJC used to ask on questionnaires: How many of your friends are Jewish. It is why the Cohen/Kelman study on young American Jews valorized "ethnic cohesion." It is why Jews and Arabs have nothing to do with one another in Jerusalem. It is why my leaving a very tightknit academic family to go to an Ivy League school during the great leap forward, of Jews into the Establishment, led in time to my marrying a gentile--I felt free as a bird in the new America, and prized diversity over the demands of tribe. Obama has spoken of his own identity as fluid. I can relate; so can others.
Obviously it is possible to have a diverse social life and a Jewish religious life. I'm not religious myself, but I see many such examples around me. The real challenge though is a political one in the age of Obama (who as I have said before is already president): How can you cherish diversity and your minority rights in the U.S. and support a state that provides second-class citizenship to Israeli Arabs and has an active policy of land-gobbling and ethnic cleansing (uprooting olive trees and a traditional Arab way of life, literally pouring raw sewage on Arab villages, the ones that weren't erased). You can't. Asking young free-as-a-bird American Jews to join a church that makes that demand is like asking young Catholics to enter a church that fosters and covers up for pedophilia.
Phil: "Obviously it is possible to have a diverse social life and a Jewish religious life."
A Jew at home, a cosmopolitan in the street. Nothing new about that.
Whenever a person seeks a deeper faith, and relationship with God, it will pose certain dilemmas regarding how one conducts oneself in the non-believing world. The idea encapsulated in Mendelssohn's bromide seems wise: best to keep the faith experience unexpressed, except by actions, and God will honor your humility and sagacity.
Gilad Atzmon takes exception to such wisdom,
"Mendelssohn’s revelation for the modern Jew doesn’t leave much room for doubt. Rather than encouraging the modern Jew to genuinely assimilate into a universal ethos of equality, the Haskalah Jew is destined to live in a dual mode if not practically a state of schizophrenia. He is split between the solitary pleasure of a cozy, homey Jewish identity and the public appearance of the “cosmopolitan man.” In fact, it is this duality of tribalism and universalism that is at the very heart of the collective secular Jewish identity.
This duality has never been properly resolved. A few attempts have been made to brush it off but they have all failed. Zionism for instance, offered to abolish the ‘abnormal’ condition of the ‘Jewish Diaspora,’ in other words, it suggested that in a ‘Jewish State’ (intended as being for Jews Only) the differences between the ‘home’ and the ‘street’ would disappear. In fact, Zionism was all about transforming the ‘street’ into the cozy Jewish ‘home’. Though it managed to do this, there is no trace of universalism in either the Zionist’s ‘street’ or in his ‘home’. The state of Beit Hanoun and the carnage Israel left behind in Lebanon last summer doesn’t leave much room for doubt — Israel doesn’t really offer us any lessons in universal cosmopolitanism. Marxism, on the other hand, attempted to make people equal. In other words, it promised to make all ‘homes’ look the same. This idea was very appealing to many European Jews. Marxism was certainly successful for a while but sadly enough, nowadays, it is only consumerism that makes us all look homogenous (iPod, coca-cola, jeans). Clearly, there is not much to celebrate there either.
It is within the failure of these two competing grand ideologies that the matrix of negation marched triumphantly back. Clearly, the search for a contemporary collective secular Jewish identity is a perplexing endeavor. Just as in Mendelssohn’s time, it aims at integrating the opposing categories of tribalism with universalism. But this can never be achieved, and this is exactly where hate politics starts to play its part. If you don’t know who you are, just find yourself an enemy. In other words, ‘tell me who you hate and I will tell you who you are.’
It occurred to me a while ago that if all tribal Jewish activists see me as a threat, surely they must perceive in me some kernel of truth. I realized that there must be something about my ideas that shakes everything they believe in. Indeed, it doesn’t take a genius to understand what that thing is. I have managed to expose the Mendelssohnian clash at the very heart of contemporary Jewish secular identity in general, and in tribal Jewish left activism in particular.
Mendelssohn must have understood the intrinsic clash between the ‘cosmopolitan man’ and the ‘Jewish home.’ He must have realized that universalism and tribalism are opposing categories. Being trained as a rabbi, Mendelssohn offered a pragmatic and practical solution — but this solution led to false and deceptive behaviour. Either you pretend to be a cosmopolitan while in the ‘street’ or you lie to your God at ‘home’. This behavioral code, though being very pragmatic, happens to be non-ethical by definition. It is based on deception: both self-deception and deceiving the other. As we know, it was Mendelssohn’s insight that was the cause of many Germanic Jews eventually converting to Christianity or just departing from any connection with Jewish collectivism, Jewish life or culture. True humanists would be apt to disengage from a non-genuine lifestyle. Ethically, at least, Mendelssohn’s middle way between orthodoxy and modernity failed to provide an answer."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Atzmon12.htm
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PS. I found this snippet from the NYT interview amusing:
As for Jewish leaders, "I never really follow any of thos people anyway," she (21 yo) said from behind dark sunglasses.
"Aunt Claudie will kill you!" hissed her mother, Linda Poznak, 47, who said she would vote for Mr. McCain.
Hissed?
As for Phil's closing cutter:
"…is like asking young Catholics to enter a church that fosters and covers up for pedophilia."
This Catholic, sadly, hears an irony that was probably unintended.
"like asking young Catholics to enter a church that fosters and covers up for pedophilia."
It's not that they couldn't have known. Sexual abuse is only one part, all the illegal kids the church pays for is another. A friend a psychoanalyst once told me, how much the book had helped him to understand.
http://www.freewebs.com/drewermann-eugen/index.htm
In 1989 Drewermann published his most explosive book – Clergy: Psychology of an Ideal = Kleriker: Psychogramm eines Ideals. 3rd ed. 2001, which led to his silencing at the behest of then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). More than a dozen years before the American media exposed the church sex abuse scandal in the U.S., Kleriker revealed how the Vatican's clergy ideal was prone to produce an infantile clergy mentality that made clergy susceptible to all sorts of sexual repression, suffering, and acting out, including pedophelia. Speaking out against the suffering imposed on the clergy and the victims by the Catholic hierarchy, Drewermann shows in detail how the authoritarian form of Vatican theology produces unspeakable pain within countless clergy who have literally been forbidden to love and to be themselves, and how this, in turn, leads to harmful effects in society at large due to a poisoning of the religious sense, including pedophilia and the many hypocrisies of 'official' faith. |
Apropos of the last sentence, is it not
fascinating to contrast the media's coverage
of the many deplorable sexual scandals in the Catholic church with the relative
silence concerning the many cases of abuse
of women and boys by rabbis?
Yes, I've noticed. Further, when a lusty and/or fraudulent Evangelical preacher is found out, it's always a hot story. I was shocked when the TV series Predators actually had a segment showing a rabbi caught in the act…
Kleriker revealed how the Vatican's clergy ideal was prone to produce an infantile clergy mentality that made clergy susceptible to all sorts of sexual repression, suffering, and acting out, including pedophelia. Speaking out against the suffering imposed on the clergy and the victims by the Catholic hierarchy, Drewermann shows in detail how the authoritarian form of Vatican theology produces unspeakable pain within countless clergy who have…"
do these sorts of analyses apply worldwide or just to amurderka? maybe to a small degree in germany.
any of these sorts of sufferings in latin america? ME? canada? france? italy?
"jonathan ekman | May 22, 2008 at 08:01 AM"
in combination with many films, tv programs, novels, tv 'specials, this is a powerful, multifacited attack by jewry against the Church just as jewry attacks Islam.
I am so glad that Phil is letting is in on the Jewish psyche re these Israel issues. It has been a huge mystery to me and I don't believe Jews understand how frustrated gentiles are with the seeming silence. My Jewish friends will not talk to me. Not really. If the topic is raised the reaction is usually some canned statement like " Israel has a right to exist". There is no where to go with that in a conversation. I don't think most of us understood that voting for Bush was voting for Israel. We just had no idea that this was the great subterranean issue. The REAL issue.
The hypocrisy of supporting the Israel regime or the Lebanon war( my Jewish friends would not comment on that war when I expressed distress)has been impossible to understand. These "liberals" having these views. I just had a friendship break up over the fact that I pointed out Clinton's mideast negotiators were all Jewish therefore his peace initiative could not be in good faith. He took that as an anti-semitic statement.
I want to hear more of the conversation. I want to hear the emotions involved.
I am so glad that Phil is letting is in on the Jewish psyche re these Israel issues. It has been a huge mystery to me and I don't believe Jews understand how frustrated gentiles are with the seeming silence. My Jewish friends will not talk to me. Not really. If the topic is raised the reaction is usually some canned statement like " Israel has a right to exist". There is no where to go with that in a conversation. I don't think most of us understood that voting for Bush was voting for Israel. We just had no idea that this was the great subterranean issue. The REAL issue.
The hypocrisy of supporting the Israel regime or the Lebanon war( my Jewish friends would not comment on that war when I expressed distress)has been impossible to understand. These "liberals" having these views. I just had a friendship break up over the fact that I pointed out Clinton's mideast negotiators were all Jewish therefore his peace initiative could not be in good faith. He took that as an anti-semitic statement.
I want to hear more of the conversation. I want to hear the emotions involved.
"do these sorts of analyses apply worldwide or just to amurderka? maybe to a small degree in germany."
Slomo, these guys are supposed to love only the holy trinity; try to imagine what it would feel like to you. Any yes that is pretty universal in the Catholic Church.
And since this is the central difference between a Catholic priest and a rabbi or Protestant one, I assume the numbers may well be higher.
I don't remember a publicized abuse story in the German church, but we had ample publicity of the church's many, many illegal "children" since the lady's went public. Although I have heard that the church buys silence with these ladies, so why not in the case of abuse? There was one big scandal in Austria not too long ago.
Some people I know seem to be perfectly able to sublimate their desire. Like one member of an order who feels fine in his cloister and with all his books and doctor degrees in science and philosophy that his religious order and the church made possible.
What is "the right to exist" and why is it applied only to Israel? Do Kurdistan, Palestine, Kashubia, and Nunavut have the right to exist as well, and are only denied that?
The United States of America doesn't have the "right" to exist. Why does Israel?
Where does any nation state's right to exist come from? Or any people's for that matter? Just curious.
Phil wrote: 'Association is a component of identity. It is why parochial Jews separate their children from other children, and in part why Jews in Europe created Yiddish. It is why the AJC used to ask on questionnaires: How many of your friends are Jewish. It is why the Cohen/Kelman study on young American Jews valorized "ethnic cohesion." It is why Jews and Arabs have nothing to do with one another in Jerusalem.'
I might add, it is also why gentiles must be internally defamed, demonized and denigrated by organized Judaism — because it knows that if Jews are indoctrinated to view the gentile world with fear and loathing, their chances of leaving the Synagogue are reduced. (The more Jews within the Synagogue, the more money the Synagogue makes and the further its power extends.)
Organized Jewry's approach to the "other" is then internalized and adopted by many secular Jews in their official capacities, which, for example, is why Jewish-American Neocons approach Islamic countries–and many European ones–with nothing but contempt in terms of diplomacy, rhetoric and dialogue.
Organized Jewry's controlling, paranoid, greedy, dysfunctional and hostile personality reverberates throughout America through indoctrinated Jews, many of whom enjoy positions of power and influence in government, business, politics, media.
Think about it: How much of the generally nasty-toned rhetoric emanating from media originates in the mouths or from the typewriters of Zionist Jews? Think Michael Savage, Mark Levin, David Horowitz, Michael Medved and the plethora of other Jewish Zionist Neocons all over the media, poisoning the well of American public discourse.
Is multi-culturalism really such a great thing in a politically correct society that can't speak openly of negative ethnic characteristics as well as positive ones? For example, all anybody ever hears about organized Jewry, officially and in mainstream media, are the contributions that Jews bring and have brought to America. Yes, maybe Jews are good, but are they good when they get together and collectively pursue their own selfish interests at the expense of American interests?
And if positive generalizations about Jews can be made, why not negative ones? Isn't there validity to both halves of the argument?
And do we really want to go around the globe murdering Muslims at the behest of organized Jewry, alienating our allies and the rest of the world merely because we don't have the guts to confront the Church of Political Correctness, its acolytes, and those who use it to censor and suppress free speech and criticism of malevolence?
Fore example, is everyone who opposes the organized Jewish agenda really an “appeaser,” as Bush put it recently from the shores of the headquarters of organized Jewry, Israel?
Perhaps its just as well that with the Iraq war, Americans have learned that tightly knit, well organized groups of any religion or ethnicity pursuing a common agenda at the expense of the American collective are not to be trusted, and should actually be harangued, harassed and tormented until they desist. Or alternatively, if it comes to it, should be deported to their primary loyalty, which, in the case of Jewish Zionists, is Israel.
An Empire as powerful, influential and dangerous as America should not be run to the benefit of a narrow, selfish, parochial claque — any claque. The Zionist claque should be broken, and no narrow-minded, parochial ethnic claque should ever be allowed to attain as much power as the Zionist claque has today in America ever again. That leads to nothing but trouble and doom, as the last 5 years have incontrovertibly demonstrated.
"Where does any nation state's right to exist come from? Or any people's for that matter? Just curious."
Your Public international Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_international_law
In German is called Voelkerrecht, the right of peoples, nations.
In Israel's special case, the obsession with this right, beyond the legal frame, can't be separated from the centuries old experience of a minority that served again and again as scapegoat, someone to blame, drive out of the land, someone to kill.
Before the Nazis started their extermination enterprise, the white counter revolutionaries killed 100.000 Jews in the Ukraine. That's were the Protocols were created according to a recent study by:
Cesare de Michelis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_G._De_Michelis
"In Israel's special case, the obsession with this right, beyond the legal frame, can't be separated from the centuries old experience of a minority that served again and again as scapegoat, someone to blame, drive out of the land, someone to kill."
this is the crock we have been fed.
to repeat:
if a customer is welcomed into 50 bars and is treated beyond equality then is rudely evicted from all 50, dont blame the bar owners. look to the customer.
same with jews. they werent just innocents acted upon. they created the hostility. took part in heinous crimes. were leaders in the greatest exterminations of the 20 th century. and have a leading spot for the 21st.
"Arguably this is the most important English language work on the notorious antisemitic plagiarism, fraud, and hoax"
gosh, the protocols of the learned elders of zion has someone's self righteousness in a huff.
same heat generated when speaking nicely about palestinians or christians or muslims. or to say israel is a criminal state or that israel not oil is the cause of the iraq assault. or 6 million jews did not die in that HOLOCAUST. or that that HOLOCAUST is not unique. is not the end all be all of crimes.
tells me there is truth here.
"if a customer is welcomed into 50 bars and is treated beyond equality then is rudely evicted from all 50, dont blame the bar owners. look to the customer."
There are minorities in every country and in every corner of the earth, and always have been. Yet only organized Jewry is despised and persecuted everywhere it goes, and always has been. Haven't average Jews ever wondered about their leadership's behavior, and why it manages to piss everybody off millennia after millennia? Or does the scenario that has played itself out in America during the Iraq war and again now with Iran (where Jewish leadership and elite's ceaseless scheming digs holes for themselves, average Jews, and the country in which they dwell) just play itself over and over again through millennia, unquestioned by average Jews?
Apparently all Jewish leadership has to do to get away with murder is tell its followers the backlash they are experiencing is really nothing but “scapegoating” and "anti-Semitism."
Kind of like Bush: “They hate us for our freedom; it has nothing to do with Washington’s foreign policy.”
Thankfully, America has more critical thinkers than does Judaism.
I guess that's another reason organized Jewry seeks to keep its people under strict mind control: so they can’t see through their leaderships utter incompetence.
The media line this morning is that: Obama is reassuring Florida's Jews that he won't negotiate with Hamas, and that there would be conditions for talks with Iran.
So, if this is true, that the Fla Jewish voters reject candidates on basis of their perception of them not being hawkish enough for Israel, what other proof do we need that zionism is a big part in the push for war in the mideast??
Do we not have a world-wide pattern here?
Zionists join with right wing to bring down antiwar candidate Ken Livingston in London,
likewise in Rome with the rejection of a left
mayor for a fascist right wing cadidate.
Isn't it time for the progressive Jew to openly split from the fascist zionist Jew?
How about some sit-ins at the AIPAC and ADL offices?
.
"same with jews. they werent just innocents acted upon. they created the hostility. took part in heinous crimes. were leaders in the greatest exterminations of the 20 th century. and have a leading spot for the 21st."
I am no friend of the use of the term "new antisemitism" when Israel has publicity problems, since it opens the road to your conclusions.
But many events over history simply don't fit your example. Here in Germany Jews were killed e.g. by the Crusaders on their way to free Palestine, simply for being Jews. And you won't find such simple cause-reaction patterns in e.g. the Hep Hep riots, or the Holocaust.
Neither does the pogroms by the white counterrevolutionaries fit your example.
Concerning Russia, or the fact that Jews were prominent members in the Russian oppressive bureaucracy, true, but this may partly be caused by the fact that the Bund joined the Bolsheviks rather late, and they may well have overcompensated their status as neophytes/newly affiliated members.
Were we might agree is that the term "new antisemitism" often feels like propaganda, but I think it is wrong to simplify historical matters backwards through this lens. …
******************************************
It's no doubt striking today – as we are presented with a whole series of Hitler doubles – that already during the Eichmann trial Arabs were simply equated with the Nazis.
And: "To justify their 'preemptive' attack on Egypt in June 1967 Israeli leaders sounded alarm about 'the machinations of the new Hitler' and proclaimed that '[f]or us, Abdel Nasser is Hitler'"
Norman Finkelstein, citing Idith Zertal: Beyond Chutzpa.
Generally, Jews are not nearly as aware of or refer much less to the killings of Jews by counterrevolutionary forces during the Russian Civil War as they are of the much smaller number of deaths during the 1880s and 1890s.
I suspect that few in Jewish studies want to open up the issue of the systematic killing of "class enemies" by Bolshevik forces under the command of Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim.
Lately there has been a lot of rethinking of the historical reliability of Jewish Chronicles of the Crusades.
While the Crusaders engaged in banditry and brigandage on their march to the Holy Land, the actual level of depredations directed against Jews is currently under dispute. We do know for certain that after the Crusades there were still a lot of Jews in French and German territories, but there were no longer any Cathars.
The Hep Hep riots relate to a not necessarily incorrect perception of Jewish profiteering during the Napoleonic wars. It is not a new pattern, for there was similar criticism of such behavior during the Wars of the Reformation.
While there is doubt about the historicity of certain chronicles of Jewish suffering from the Crusades through the Doctor's Plot, it is not in fact hard to find teshuvot from Rabbinical scholars that criticize Jewish behavior from 16th century through the 20th century and that warn the Jewish community that rapacious and conspiratorial practices will lead to the sort of blowback that actually occurred.
With regard to the Pogroms in Russia, I called Professor Richard Pipes on it in a class I took from him when he neglected to mention that non-Jews suffered pogroms during the 19th and 20th century.
I recently looked over his book The Russian Revolution and noticed that he included my correction even though he lies rather like his son Daniel in rather more devious and subtle ways.
I just read this thread. The amount of anger and negativity about Jews is pretty overwhelming. The thing is , it would be pretty hard to hear. If it we were you being spoken about you might just shut it out, make you run back to the safety of your group.
A Unitarian minister friend, who has Jews in the congregation, tells me that she has been told by her Jewish friend, " I don't like what's what happening in Israel either but I don't want to speak out about it, we need a place to go if things get bad".
It seems there is a feedback loop that is pretty deep.
The thing is, I don't think there will be a pogram in America. We got through slavery and lynchings and segregation, there is certainly not that amount of hate in this case. Maybe the pattern can be broken The pattern will be broken by people like Weiss, Finkelstein, Atzmon, and others. Non-Jews will be very angry but nothing violent will happen. Those speaking up are the righteous Jews like the righteous Gentiles who saved Jews from Hitler
It's tribalism vs. univeralism again.