Here's the Democratic side of the Obama and the Jews argument: an official Obama video about his love for my people.
The good news is that it features an Obama endorsement from David Goodman, the brother of civil rights martyr Andrew Goodman, who was murdered in Mississippi in 1964, and whom Obama cited as an inspiration at AIPAC last June. There's a stretch in the video about the Jewish commitment to justice.
The bad news is the same old bad news. The video begins with Alan Dershowitz endorsing Obama at length. Dershowitz stands for a few things in the Jewish community–Israel, media success, unapologetic Jewy power. Then the first real issue in the video is… Israel. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, my former heartthrob from Florida, is on there (I say former because I figured out who she reminds me of, in my life, and I'm trying to cathect with the actual fantasy object, not DW-S) saying Barak Obama has a 100 percent voting record on Israel. Chairman Howard Berman (who got into politics because of Israel) is
featured, also saying Obama is 100 percent on Israel; and we can trust him because the Chicago pro-Israel community trusts him. AIPAC is front and center in the video. So are Obama's threats to Iran there.
There's nothing about Iraq, nothing about Palestinian suffering, nothing about apartheid in the West Bank, nothing about dividing Jerusalem. Of course, J Street, the new alt lobby, also says as little as it can about any of that stuff. That's the sad state of American Jewish identity these days. The neocons are still at the head of the parade.
After Israel comes abortion, the issue my mom cares about. Dershowitz says something interesting here, suggesting that abortion stands for something else. "For me as an American Jew, nothing is more important than Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state. That wall of separation is what has made America unique for the Jews and the Jews unique for America. And that wall of separation is crumbling before our very eyes."
This is a majestic statement. It says that a state is only as strong as its treatment of religious minorities. It is just amazing that American Jews, as 2 percent of the population and more than 30 percent of the Supreme Court clerks, have been able to maintain this defiant and noble position in America on this issue–and completely rubbished it in Israel. Let my people go.
P.S. Speaking of Dershowitz, Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, who shares my view that Dershowitz is brilliant (but has poor judgment), recently saw Dershowitz and was stunned by his bad manners (as I was surprised by Dershowitz's meanness to questioners at Brandeis nearly 2 years ago). Velvel:
Dershowitz’s personal deportment was sometimes awful. It was sometimes
a caricature of a certain ethnic and geographical canard. One had to
see it to believe it, and anyone who doesn’t believe me can view the
approximately one hour and forty-five minute debate for himself or
herself at
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/events_archive.php#sands.
Dershowitz was totally intolerant of opposing views and assailed the
good faith of opponents. At times he vigorously interrupted his
opponent and persons who at the appropriate time were asking questions
or making statements from the audience. He seemed very defensive, often
seemed unwilling to let other people have their say, and his conduct
was such that the moderator, who was himself from Harvard Law School,
had to tell him on several occasions to calm down, to stop, or whatever
the moderator may have said to him. It was an amazing public
performance.
