I’ve finally read Connie Bruck’s profile of the self-proclaimed richest Jew in the world, Sheldon Adelson, in The New Yorker and I’m a little dismayed. I think it’s great the magazine ran the story, and great that it spoke so openly of Adelson’s efforts to shape Israel policy here and in Jerusalem, ideas heretofore suppressed in the U.S. press, great too that Bruck did a ton of reporting on Adelson’s dance moves. But still, I’m left a little lukewarm.
The problem with the piece is that it lacks any real social and political context. Adelson is presented as a “crazy Jewish billionaire,” as George W. Bush reportedly described him, a complete outlier. A nutjob with yes, real influence, but an independent wildman. There’s no sense of Adelson’s political context, and his broad support within the American Jewish community. For instance, Adelson has worked closely with Freedom’s Watch and AIPAC, but there is little effort to talk about Freedom’s Watch’s importance to the Republican Party. Briefly, Bruck picks up the idea that Adelson may be the rightwing answer to George Soros. Then she drops it. Where are Matt Brooks and Ari Fleischer, important figures in the Republican establishment who have worked with Adelson? Where is Charles Bronfman of birthright, which Adelson has funded? Where are Mel Sembler and Richard Fox, fellow Republican travelers to Adelson, beloved friends of neocons in high places? The brilliant Michael Steinhardt is quoted, with a smart quote, but there is no effort to put Adelson’s publishing efforts in the context of Steinhardt’s at the Sun, or Hertog’s at the New Republic, or any of the rest of the ardent pro-Israel establishment’s. Oh, Adelson is a crazy man. Well what about Hertog and Steinhardt? And what does it mean that Haim Saban, an ardent Zionist, and Martin Indyk have associations with Adelson? It means that he is part of a continuum of Zionist belief in the Establishment.
Late in the piece Bruck says by way of parenthetical disclosure that she is married to Mel Levine, the former California congressman now serving in Obama’s Middle East braintrust. Well Levine is a former board member of AIPAC, according to Janet McMahon of WRMEA. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy. I’m saying that Zionism is so deeply imbedded in American Jewish life that it is almost impossible to look to the turrets of the Jewish cultural establishment for detached examination of what Zionism is doing to our politics. Bruck makes hay of the fact that Adelson is trying to nullify the Annapolis peace process and is a big backer of One Jerusalem. I share her p-o-v on this. But she fails to say
that a former Under Secretary of Defense, Doug Feith, was a founder of One Jerusalem— let alone raise the possibility that Feith and other neocons got their jobs in the Bush Administration because of the largesse of Adelson et al. Isn’t that how it works? Bruck owes us more here.
Yes, I agree, Netanyahu is a bad guy. But he has adherents all over the American Enterprise Institute. Adelson is not an outlier on Jerusalem. 58 percent of American Jews are for an undivided Jerusalem and Bruck’s husband’s man (and mine), Obama, called for an undivided Jerusalem in his speech to AIPAC, to curry favor with powerful Jews. Adelson’s rightwing views are widely shared in the American Jewish community, especially the older members, and in the political establishment. His support for neocons has surely helped to destroy the American image in the Middle East. Bruck doesn’t go near any of this. Oh well. I’m still grateful.
