I had a big weekend. My father-in-law turned 80 and we celebrated in Philadelphia. I married into a Protestant clan and a lot of the festivities took place in Chestnut Hill, which is the sort of privileged old neighborhood in Philly I would have called a "bastion" when I was young.
At one point we were sitting around in an old house where Digby Baltzell had grown up–Baltzell a hero of mine, for his sociological clarity back when he wrote the Protestant Establishment 40 years ago and went after the WASPs, his own group, as a calcified caste. A beautiful old house, though Digby’s branch of the family had been impoverished for a while. We also had a family tennis tournament at the Philadelphia Cricket Club–an endless English greensward of grass courts, surrounded by low brick formal clubhouses. My father-in-law had ordered me to brush up my tennis beforehand, and he and I played together, and we won, and I was awarded a silver cup for the best player (which I’m not; just managed to get the ball over the net regularly, while others were hitting trick shots). My mother in law brought the cup to me yesterday afternoon before she left town. My wife and I were staying at my parents’ place, in the Main Line. So my mother-in-law and my parents and my wife and various nieces were standing around in the driveway when she produced the tarnished heirloomish cup, and my father said, “What synagogue did that come from?” My mother and mother-in-law glided right over that one, bonding about Obama and their children. They were cool. My father’s hot, like me. He thinks a lot about antisemitism. Just like I think a lot about neocons. And I have to admit, the cup looked a little like the silver Judaica you see in Judaica stores.
When my wife and I had our first date I said Hey look, we are from very different tribes, this stuff is real, and she said, wisely, Yes, it’s real, the issue is whether it gets bigger or smaller over time. It’s gotten a lot smaller. It doesn’t bother me so much. Even my dad’s comment; I didn’t yell at him after, as I might have in days gone by. Intermarriage is against Jewish law, of course, partly out of the understanding that when you marry someone, they become “flesh of my flesh.” You intermingle. My wife and I are intermingled.
I used to blog alot about being an assimilationist, because that seemed an honest description of the personal process I’m engaged in, though I’m not prescriptive about it. Then I left off because I felt it undermined the political points that are so central to this blog. I didn’t want to be both attacking the Iraq war and pointing out the Jewish role in the establishment, and also be personally responsible for the end of the Jewish people in America, which is the great fear of Jewish organizations re intermarriage. The vanishing American Jew, as Dersh says. Still, it’s a real part of my condition– and of 62 percent of Jews under 35. And I think about it a lot, want to get past it, past the guilt and difference, and walk under the Obama rainbow into the future. I used to freak out when I went into a place like the Philadelphia Cricket Club, with its Indian logo and cricket bats and 1854 everywhere. Now it feels inoffensive to me. Just another clan. Yes a privileged one. But I gather there are a good number of Jews in the club. Jews are just too important now to be left out of such bast—
On the drive back my wife and I talked about my dad and I told her about Douglas Feith’s Iraq-war book, and his disclosure that both his father Dalck Feith’s parents, and four of his father’s sisters and three of his father’s brothers were murdered in the Holocaust. I find it stunning. My wife and I both knew the late Eric Breindel, another wild neocon, also the son of Holocaust survivors, and we had a sense of how central that family experience was to his worldview. Feith tries to suppress all emotion and ideology in his book, but his family experience is obviously central to his worldview. As it was to his former boss’s Paul Wolfowitz, who has also said that he lost family in the Holocaust. Wolfowitz looks a lot like my father, facially and in his manner too.
Feith and Wolfowitz extracted the wrong lesson from that history, Feith in particular since he’s been such an unrelenting enemy of Palestinian statehood. The neocons projected the Holocaust horrors on to Arabs, made them the new Nazis, did not understand that the Israel situation wasn’t about antisemitism, but about anticolonialism. As Mike Desch has argued persuasively, Never-again-ism, the duty not to allow the Holocaust to happen again, has distorted our Middle East policy for a long time. It’s the wrong lens, and it excuses anything Israel does to oppress the Palestinians because the Jews must never be genocided again. So we overlook hecatombs in the Arab world….
One of the ideas I’m trying to get to in this blog is something Desch also deals with in his paper on the Holocaust in American life: the American establishment’s alleged failure to save the Jews during the Holocaust. I grew up with this belief, which Desch, a realist, challenges–saying the bombers could barely have gotten to the Hungarian railroads and if they did, the tracks would quickly have been repaired. I don’t know enough to disagree with Desch or agree with him (and I keep promising to post a dialogue between Desch and Laurence Zuckerman, who studies this stuff). But that belief was central to my received worldview as a kid. “The bastards!” my mom used to say of the Roosevelt White House. Jeffrey Goldberg says it in his book Prisoners: he imbibed it and fully believed it. I think Dersh says it in Chutzpah. I bet Feith believes that, too.
My discussion of the Israel lobby will be pointless if I fail to reckon with this belief at the heart of the lobby: You gentiles helped to destroy us in World War, we will never allow that to happen again, we will not trust you again. That’s why we have accumulated this power. Because it’s necessary to protect ourselves. Someone in Tel Aviv asked this question of Walt and Mearsheimer the other day: Where was the Israel lobby between ’39 and ’45, when we could have used ’em? Well that’s the point. It wasn’t there. Jews relied more on court petitioners at that time in history, eschewing mass action; and look what happened.
That mistrust is at the heart of the Israel lobby, at the heart of the older Jewish generation’s relationship to American power. It’s why there was so much Holocaust rhetoric against Walt and Mearsheimer. And I say that all these people are fighting the last war, one that ended 60 years ago. I’ve made a different bet on history.
P.S. Jack Ross says I’m wrong re Dersh and FDR: “Dershowitz, for what its worth, has a praise on the
cover of Robert Rosen’s “Saving The Jews”, a defense of FDR‘s record.” To be continued…
