We're in IQ freefall.
None of us can doubt that Jewish genius transformed the 20th century. Finance, science, psychiatry, media--do I really need to go through all that part?
Now we are in IQ freefall, for two reasons related to Zionism. 1, Israeli culture is altogether mediocre. 2, Diaspora culture is now reduced to arguing that black is white, i.e., that Israel is blameless. This exercise is not only a great insult to Jewish tradition, it is pointless.
1. I know literature. This weekend at my parents' house I was reading Kafka's letters to his first mistress, Felice Bauer. It goes without saying that Kafka transformed literature in the 20th century, and yes, Kafka was a cultural Zionist. He was caught up in the central-European movement in the 19-teens, even as he observed that the Zionists had small heads.
My point. Kafka was against political Zionism because he understood it would transform the Jewish presence in society. It would make Jews the administrators of a nation rather than inhabitants of one. I think he anticipated that Jewish nationalism would call on the worst aspects of Jewish society.
Kafka's sense was correct. None of Israel's cultural achievements is much to write home about. Everyone talks about David Grossman and Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua. I don't know about Yehoshua and Grossman has always seemed pretty-darn-good, what I've read of him, but Oz (I've read his memoir) is just not that impressive. If he were writing in the States, he would have less of a reputation.
The sad truth is that Israeli culture is remarkable for the very quality that Kafka despised in administrative culture in Central Europe--its toughness, thuggery. Consider that Israel's most famous contribution to world culture is Dana International, a transsexual singer who was launched to international stardom by the Eurovision song contest in 1998. Kafka he/she ain't.
I don't mean to be making jokes here. This problem is actually inherent. Chas Freeman recently noted at a discussion of the two-state solution that all the smart Israelis are coming to New Jersey and all the messianic militaristic Jews are moving from Brooklyn to the West Bank. Jews like Diaspora life. The brain drain is a real problem for Israel.
(And the best work out of Israel, the incredible journalism of Haaretz, and the new historians from Kimmerling to Pappe to Shahak, is all of it oppositional in character.)
2. That brain drain is matched by a more significant brain drain: the tremendous burden placed on American Jewish intellectuals, journalists, writers, you name it, to stand up for Israel here. Dershowitz says that supporting Israel is our "secular religion." I don't need to go down the list here, but a lot of smart Jews are recruited in this belief, just about any smart Jew who makes it, including regrettably the likes of Steven Pinker and Michael Chabon and his wife, and it's not good for Jewish genius. It's the opposite of genius: it's orthodoxy. It elevates second-rate racemen thinkers like Michael Oren and Marty Peretz and grants rabbinical status to a very smart and often-nasty propagandist, Alan Dershowitz, who has repeatedly tried to destroy people's reputations.
Proving that the Israel lobby is marketing black as white is the everyday business of this website, so I don't want to reprove that here. Just look at the video Adam posted yesterday from the landgrab in that West Bank village on Sunday. It is disgusting. Purely disgusting. These are thuggish Jews ethnically cleansing land in my name. This is all that any Jew needs to know about Israel right now.
Arguing that this sort of behavior is justified is deeply intellectually destructive. It is an insult to Jewish tradition. In fact, it has closed the door on our great 20th century tradition. One of the lessons of the last 10 years is that Jewish gifts are not genetic, or not strictly genetic. They are cultural, and exist in time. Spinoza said similar things when he challenged the idea of the chosen people 300 years ago and was excommunicated for it; he saw greater promise in European liberalism than in Mosaic laws. Well now we have imparted our great cultural gifts to this great country that accepted us, and others are learning to be as textually analytical as our traditions made us. When I meet the young Iranian-Canadian scholar Nader Hashemi, who has studied Chomsky, or young Palestinian students who have studied the talmudical Norman Finkelstein to sharpen their wits, and they quote him and expand on him, they remind me of my Jewish gang in the Ivy League 30 years ago-- outsiders with big brains, and a lot to prove. Meanwhile Jewish intellectual life is largely dominated by neoconservatives, who in addition to being wrong about the ability to spread democracy at the point of a gun, are not sincere about their motivation.
I said at the beginning that the hasbara exercise is not only stupefying, it is pointless. The world is on to Israel's chopping-down of olive trees and slaughter of Palestinian children. It's over. The exercise is over. The U.S. is waking up, witness the fabulous Ellison-Baird-Holt teach-in at the U.S. Capitol, led by Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, with congressional staffers crammed in the doors.
I'm a hopeful person. So the question is, What should Jews do now about our fabulous disgraced tradition of honest intellectual inquiry? How do we recover?
The answer is pretty obvious. At that teach-in in the Rayburn Building, a Jew took a prominent place, Dan Levy. I haven't been able to listen to his remarks in the first video (they were inaudible), but I'm sure he wasn't arguing with one thing that Brian Baird and Keith Ellison and Rush Holt observed (and let me note, Holt and Baird are scientists by training, men shaped by the Jewish century). Levy is an honest man.
That's the answer: turn to the smart young Jews who see what is happening in Palestine, and embrace them and encourage them. Embrace J Street, with which Dan Levy is involved; they are doing good work, along with Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek and Israel Policy Forum. Embrace any organization that was appalled by Gaza's "awfulness," as Michael Walzer, who understands the perils of nationhood, has put it.
Embrace young Jews like Lisa Adler, who was featured in that amazing anti-AIPAC event in LA, and the anti-Zionist scholar Jack Ross, and the activist Hannah Mermelstein. Or my partner Adam Horowitz, who, responding to hecklers at a Temple U. event last week who shouted, "Mr. Horowitz, what do you think of the two-state solution?" responded calmly and thoughtfully in a way that brought tears to my eyes. Adam's going to post that answer soon here.
I am not a spokesman for Jewish communal life. I'm an intermarried, assimilating Jew with a strong sense of Jewish intellectual tradition, which I will always try and honor here, but if I could impart a message to the communal types it is: wake up to what is happening in world opinion and then turn the great Jewish tradition of compassion on the Palestinian people. The American Jewish community here has been the chief obstacle to Palestinian statehood and self-determination; that's an American Jewish achievement. Jewish organizations have the power to end that disgraceful legacy tomorrow. And then they could recognize and embrace the common humanity of Palestinians, and start bringing young Palestinian intellectuals to this country to study, and to learn from our example, once again.
I have certainly noticed the quantity and quality of Jews entering college dropping to the level one finds in the percentage of Jews attending higher education in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lybia, Sudan, Niger, Chad, Haiti, Greenland, Mongolia, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and such.
Could it just be that Phil has noticed too many people looking at him as if he were a pinhead?
Phil, this is a breathtaking piece of writing.
I know that you have been somewhat adamant in your position that non-Jews are involved in this awakening as well, but I have always thought that ultimately it's going to come about because enough Jewish people will see where Zionism and unbridled support for Israel in their name is heading, not only for themselves as Jews, but for the world at large.
I hope that this piece is distributed as far and wide as possible, for Jews and non-Jews alike to read and ponder – and ACT!
Thank you.
First rank stuff, Phil.
I think this passage in particular will really resonate with many:
That brain drain is matched by a more significant brain drain: the tremendous burden placed on American Jewish intellectuals, journalists, writers, you name it, to stand up for Israel here. Dershowitz says that supporting Israel is our "secular religion." I don't need to go down the list here, but a lot of smart Jews are recruited in this belief, just about any smart Jew who makes it, including regrettably the likes of Steven Pinker and Michael Chabon and his wife, and it's not good for Jewish genius. It's the opposite of genius: it's orthodoxy. It elevates second-rate racemen thinkers like Michael Oren and Marty Peretz and grants rabbinical status to a very smart and often-nasty propagandist, Alan Dershowitz, who has repeatedly tried to destroy people's reputations.
Yes, the opposite of genius is indeed orthodoxy; the opposite of creativity is ideology.
More info please on the Temple University event where Adam Horowitz spoke: the topic, the other speakers (?), the crowd, the hecklers. Is there YouTube; is there an event link?
Phil’s post is important and insightful, and offers an interesting narrative. Please allow me to offer a counter-narrative.
—
“Kafka was against political Zionism because he understood it would transform the Jewish presence in society. It would make Jews the administrators of a nation rather than inhabitants of one.”
Jews being forced to administer a nation instead of relentlessly critiquing and ridiculing the administration of others from the peanut gallery is healthy. It forces them to grow up, which much of diaspora Jewry never has, to this day. The reason guys like Schumer and Frank are such poor administrators is because they still haven’t grown up.
“I think [Kafka] anticipated that Jewish nationalism would call on the worst aspects of Jewish society…The sad truth is that Israeli culture is remarkable for the very quality that Kafka despised in administrative culture in Central Europe–its toughness, thuggery…Arguing that this sort of behavior is justified is deeply intellectually destructive. It is an insult to Jewish tradition. In fact, it has closed the door on our great 20th century tradition.”
Let’s face it, from Jewish Bolshevism to Zionism to Neoconservatism, toughness and thuggery are not at odds with Jewish tradition, but a manifestation of a certain interpretation of Judaism, PARTICULARLY in the 20th century. The “good Jew/bad Jew” formulation (the “bad” Jew being the thuggish, gangster Jew) is really quite accurate, and I suspect Phil understands this (he documents the “bad Jew” here every day, after all) even if he can’t accept it.
“That brain drain is matched by a more significant brain drain: the tremendous burden placed on American Jewish intellectuals, journalists, writers, you name it, to stand up for Israel here. Dershowitz says that supporting Israel is our "secular religion."
Many Jews, like Muslims, have always had a difficult time separating religion from politics (even as they gnash their teeth about public crèches in the US, for example). Dershowitz has simply turned a phrase that accurately describes their mixing of the two.
“Meanwhile Jewish intellectual life is largely dominated by neoconservatives, who in addition to being wrong about the ability to spread democracy at the point of a gun, are not sincere about their motivation.”
Again, this goes to certain thuggish Jews’ inability and unwillingness to separate synagogue and state.
“smart Israelis are coming to New Jersey and all the messianic militaristic Jews are moving from Brooklyn to the West Bank.”
This tells me that Israel is working as designed. Those thuggish Jews that can’t or won’t separate synagogue from state belong in the Middle East fighting it out with Muslims who don’t separate politics from religion either. It is only America’s failure to cut them lose (mostly as the consequence of the Israel lobby and Christian Zionism and the successful selling of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” as a Zionist P.R. campaign) that Israel is the problem that it is. Once Israel is cut lose, it will be forced to sink or swim on it’s own merit without implicating Americans.
I personally hope Israel survives, because the world has no interest in starting from square one with these people. But I’m unwilling to implicate myself in its behavior by supporting it with my tax dollars, even as Zionists are willing to implicate me by turning my tax dollars over to Synagogue Headquarters for the Israelis to do with them what they please.
Phil, don't lose all the goyim in one fell swoop with the 'Jews are smarter' bit.
Jews are prominent at most prestigious levels of society and you yourself have articulted the reasons for this pretty succinctly before.
This is just divisive and sort of, well, masturbatory – if that's a word.
This ain't Phil, you dummies – it's Adam. And he's cookin.
This ain't Phil, you dummies – it's Adam. And he's cookin.
Well, it says:
Posted by Philip Weiss at 11:09 AM in Adam Horowitz
What does that mean?
"This is all that any Jew needs to know about Israel right now."
When you make one-dimensional statements like that, you are suggesting that our generation is the first of the IQ free-fall.
Is it fortuitous that you speak of "the tremendous burden on American Jewish intellectuals" as this essay appears on The American Conservative:
Burdening Israel
The weight of being the bulwark of civilization
By Brendan O’Neill
It is a “beleaguered, courageous little democratic upholder of freedom and enlightenment.” It is defending “the modern world and its achievements” and “the very future of our species.” It stands on “the side of morality, justice, and civilization,” and anyone who criticizes it is a “fellow-traveller of barbarism.” It is possessed of the “values that underscore the Judeo-Christian culture that fostered the Enlightenment” and is a beacon of “political liberty and freedom.”
What could these commentators possibly be gushing about? A plucky new political movement that fights for democracy, liberty, and Truth with a capital T? A humanist journal that faces down the tidal wave of relativism and makes the case for Enlightenment values?
In fact, they’re writing about Israel, that small, militaristic state in the Middle East, which has just executed a bloody war in Gaza and is increasingly seen by culture warriors in the West as the final defense against barbarism; against the unenlightened hordes; against a one-eyed, militant, global conspiracy that would destroy the Western way of life forever.
There are major differences in the way Americans view Israel—most are generally favorable—and the way Europeans view Israel—many are increasingly hostile to the Jewish state. Yet what unites pro-Israel thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic is a view of Israel as a representative of everything progressive and decent. Across the West, more and more anti-relativist, pro-reason writers are projecting their fears for the future of civilization onto the Middle East, imagining that Israel, that last defender of old-fashioned national sovereignty, is fighting not only for its right to exist but for the continued existence of the ideals of the Enlightenment itself.
This is a mad, bad, ill-informed fantasy. A hundred years ago, the German Socialist August Bebel coined the phrase “socialism of fools” to describe those left-wingers who blamed Jews for the ills of modern society. Today, in the elevation of Israel to the position of protector of “the very future of the human species,” we have an “Enlightenment of Fools”—a political posture that both obscures the true origins of anti-Enlightenment sentiments today and places an intolerable burden on the shoulders of the tiny Jewish state.
A new band of writers is continually infusing the squalid wars in the Middle East with a historic, end-of-days momentum. Where many of us recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian clash is a hangover from the national conflicts of the Cold War era, and one that has been exacerbated by the partitionist, divisive politics of the “peace process” instituted by Washington, the Israel-as-Enlightenment lobby sees it as a civilizational war in which Western values might be crushed by the enemies of progress.
During Israel’s attacks on Gaza, writer Ruth Dudley Edwards said Israel had “every right to bomb Hamas” because it is fundamentally fighting to “uphold freedom and enlightenment.” British journalist and author Julie Burchill, who describes herself as a “philosemite,” described Israel as “our Jews,” in the sense that if Israel were to be “wiped out,” then “we will be wiped out, too, all of the modern world and its achievements—swept back into the Dark Ages mulch from whence we came.” Burchill says Israel represents “mankind” and “the very future of our species.” Here, rather than seeing the conflict in the Middle East for what it is—a messy, complex clash over territory, sovereignty, and identity—pro-Israel writers reduce it to a simplistic, cartoon war between progress and darkness, in which the fate of Israel gets dangerously tangled up with the fate of the entire modern world.
Earl Tilford writes in Frontpage magazine about the contrast between Israel, a product of the “Judeo-Christian culture that fostered the Enlightenment” and its neighboring states, which are possessed of a “medieval cultural ethos … more reminiscent of tribalism than civilized society as the West knows it.” In his book The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz moves beyond making the case for a specifically Jewish homeland and instead transforms Israel into a civilization symbol. Israel “deserves to exist,” he says, “as a beacon of liberty and democracy in a sea of tyranny and hatred.” Mark Steyn argues that Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis came horribly to life in Israel’s fight against Gaza.
Where once Israel was seen by Republicans and some conservatives as a useful political ally of America, it is increasingly discussed as a cultural ally, even an existential one. In The Objective Standard, John David Lewis says Israel stands at “the front-line of the war between civilization and barbarism.” Echoing Eric Hoffer’s famous Los Angeles Times article of 1968, in which Hoffer argued that “should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us all,” another British “philosemite” claimed this year that Israel is at the “defensive frontline against a tyranny that wants to envelop us all. If Israel were to fall, the rest of us would not be far behind.”
Here we can glimpse the fantasy politics, even the conspiracy theory, that underpins the promotion of Israel as the urgent defender of “morality, justice and civilization.” Of course, Israel has local enemies, but Hamas and Hezbollah, two increasingly weak and isolated movements, are hardly a “tyranny” that will “envelop” the world and cause Western civilization itself to “fall.” Yet again and again, Israel’s “enlightened” backers talk up the threat in the Middle East and present themselves and their own ways of life—their values—as also being under attack from the forces of “irrational hatred and genocidal hysteria” lined up against Israel. Indeed, they spread global conspiracy theories that sound similar to those spouted by antiSemites, only this time it’s a cabal of anti-Jews that threatens the world.
Melanie Phillips, one of Europe’s most zealous supporters of Israel, who is now widely published in conservative, pro-Israel publications in the U.S., says, “The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilization. Those who want to destroy Western civilization need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones.” From this mythic perspective, the ragtag militant groups that launch attacks against Israel are not motivated by local or political grievances but by a deep, hidden desire to kill off the Jews in order ultimately to finish off Western civilization. Phillips warns, “Unless people in the West understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the West but civilization in general.”
What is going on here? How can a conflict that looks to many reasonable people like a long-running national and political clash be described as a grand battle for mankind? In effect, Israel is cynically, and lazily, being turned into a proxy army for a faction in the Western Culture Wars that has lost its ability to defend Enlightenment values on their own terms or even to define and face up to the central problem of anti-Enlightenment tendencies today.
It is striking that many of the newfound, passionate defenders of Israel in the Western public debate are the same people who have raised legitimate concerns about the rise of relativism and the denigration of truth over the past ten to 15 years. Frontpage magazine, Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips, Ruth Dudley Edwards, and numerous other right-leaning thinkers and writers have, in different ways and with varying degrees of success, tried to counter backward intellectual trends and made the case for rationalism, science, and excellence in the academy and the arts.
In debates about education, for example, they critiqued the trend toward “dumbing down” and “relevance” and defended a Plato-style communication of knowledge and rigorous training of the next generation’s minds. In the discussion about multiculturalism in Europe, or what one pro-Enlightenment, pro-Israel writer describes as “state-sanctioned sectarianism,” they attacked the move toward community separatism and the worship of all cultures as “equally valid.” They criticized the transformation of national museums, products of the Enlightenment, into community outreach centers and for the most part stood up for free speech against the patronizing idea that certain words should be censored to protect the sensitivities of small communities or ethnic minorities.
All of this was—and is—an uphill struggle. It is hard work, in our Age of Relativism, to argue for the values of liberty, equality, and excellence. As the cliché goes, where the Right won the economic war, the cultural Left—with its innate hostility toward apparently oppressive and discriminatory “Western values” (always said with a sneer)—won the Culture War. Faced with the relentless denigration of intellectualism, the defenders of Enlightenment values became increasingly discombobulated and allowed their arguments to become shrill caricatures.
Over the past few years, since 9/11 in particular, they have opportunistically hitched their pro-civilization stance to the war against al-Qaeda, against myopic Islamic radicalism, against small groups of religious militants whom they depict as the greatest threat to the Western way of life. Their flagging, battered 1990s struggle to defend the Enlightenment was re-energized by the brutally simplistic war on terror. Eventually they came to see Islamic militancy as the great enemy of the Enlightenment and thus Israel—Public Enemy No.1 of all Islamic militants—as its supreme defender.
This is a worrying development. It distorts the truth about the conflict in the Middle East. The Israel-as-Enlightenment lobby vastly exaggerates the threat posed by Israel’s enemies, which are not capable of destroying Israel, much less the “foundation stones” of Western civilization. It also exaggerates the coherence and vision of the Israeli state. Far from being an outpost for civilizational values, Israel is, in the words of one Israeli commentator, a collection of “frightened people, wishing for someone strong and forceful, who will miraculously fend off the people’s enemies, real and imaginary.”
Worst of all, the “enlightened” pro-Israel lobby now presents the threat to Western values as a purely external one, emanating from the slums of Gaza or the towns of southern Lebanon or the radical mosques of Iran when, in truth, the Enlightenment is being corroded from within the West itself. In describing Israel’s wars with Palestine as a fight to defend “not just the West but civilization in general,” pro-Israel groupies are partaking in a political and theoretical displacement activity of historic proportion.
It is of course true that Jews have contributed enormously to history, literature, and culture. Yet as Richard S. Levy argues in his book Anti-Semitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice and Persecution, simple philosemitism, like anti-Semitism, also treats the Jews as “radically different or exceptional.” Only in this instance, they are looked upon as the saviors of mankind, the lone defenders of civilization rather than as society’s destroyers. Where anti-Semites project their frustrations with the world and their naked prejudices onto the Jews, and frequently onto Israel, too, the new philosemites project their desperation for political answers, for some clarity, for a return to Enlightenment values onto Israel and the Jews. Neither is a burden that the Jewish people can, or should, be expected to bear.
Anyone interested in breathing life back into the enlightened way of life and thinking should be prepared to have some hard arguments, alongside Jews, Muslims, and anyone else who wants to get involved, rather than pushing Israel forward as a kind of canary in the mine of collapsing Western civilization.
__________________________________________
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked in London (www.spiked-online.com).
it means it's adam. i mean, you know, phil just doesn't talk like that. c'mon.
"but if I could impart a message to the communal types it is: wake up to what is happening in world opinion and then turn the great Jewish tradition of compassion on the Palestinian people. The American Jewish community here has been the chief obstacle to Palestinian statehood and self-determination;"
Hear hear.
But, in your chosen style, you DISCOURAGE the self-inquiry that encourages that.
The single community that you've most flagrantly alienated IS the pro-peace community that is more than willing to reconcile, to respect the other's narrative AND to value their own.
What good is knowing half of the symptoms of a disease that are shared by another one, while applying the remedy applicable to the first disease harms severely someone with the second (with the same shared symptoms).
The message is, that believing ONLY the condemners provides you with insufficient information to make the cure.
hey, adam, check out this little essay of mine on sexy sabras from beyond the stars:
link to niqnaq.wordpress.com
That was Phil who posted. Haven't y'll developed an ear yet for writing voices?
As for Phil, is there a Pulitzer-like award for sweeping generalizations? :-)
Pulitzer Prize, I mean.
phil just doesn't talk like that. c'mon.
Now I really start to think, there must be something seriously wrong with you.
Have you read the article?
ok, it's phil. he must have been smoking the same stuff as me, the stuff that gets my hub lights flashing, you know,
Magnificent piece — the best article I've read in weeks. This sets a new standard for Mondoweiss.
An important piece even if it highlights Phil's theme of renouncing Jewish exceptionalism and authority as a way of asserting Jewish exceptionalism and authority. I am Catholic. My father, who grew up in a shack with no running water or electricity, wound up with a graduate degree from Georgetown U. because he had the good fortune of being identified early on by the local Catholic church as a promising student. But he didn't use the model of his experience as a template for me and my siblings. It was the so-called Jewish emphasis on the importance of education that was the theme drilled into our heads. That emphasis still exists to a degree, but my impression is that a sense of entitlement exists in the Jewish community, similar to the one that once infected the protestant blue bloods of the first half of the 20th century. In my yuppie, upper middle class world, recent immigrants from India, Pakistan, and China are often the most dedicated and academically successful of students. And, to be perfectly blunt, I really have no stake in the ongoing professional success of the self-identified Jewish sector of American society. If the families of the most gifted American writers, scientists, doctors, etc. of the 21st century originally came from Mumbai instead of Central Europe, what do I care? I'll still be pushing myself and my kids just the same.
The operative factor, though, is the particular, apparently fortuitous, set of circumstances that leads to intermarriage. It isn't entirely fortuitous, socially; it has to do with the common activities in the society concerned that brings together the respective social interests.
- which in fact is a difference between the US and the UK; the UK, as its name suggests, is still formally speaking a monarchy, with an aristocracy, and 'Anglo-Jewry' as it is known, has a distinct niche here in relation to that. The US has a sort of 'pseudo-aristocracy' and US Jewry plays a role in relation to that which is comparable but the whole thing is less formalised than in the UK.
I think Phil was taking a cheap shot at Adam.
PHIL: "Memo to Jews: We're in IQ freefall."
ME: Welcome to the club!
"Jews like Diaspora life."
This is because Jews are, for the most part, unable to maintain their own permanent/settled nation without the heavy assistance of others (Israel is kept afloat by the Americans, English, Germans, donations from the Jewish diaspora, etc) or without persecuting others (the Palestinians and the nations which surround Israel); it seems that it some sense that Jews may be destined to live at the whims of other more dominant peoples/nations as a rootless and even parasitic minority group.
"IQ free fall"
The fact that Jews have been historically unable and unwilling to maintain a settled and permanent state with an ethnic Jewish majority proves their near-total lack of ability in issues of statecraft and nation-building and administration, which in some ways proves a lack of macro-IQ and long-term thinking, that of being able to maintain a nation for the Jewish people instead of always living (and leeching) in the nations of others; as commenter 'Ed' says above: "Jews being forced to administer a nation instead of relentlessly critiquing and ridiculing the administration of others from the peanut gallery is healthy. It forces them to grow up, which much of diaspora Jewry never has, to this day."
If and when Jews (and I mean the large majority, meaning at least 95% of World Jewry) finally settle down in to their own nation PERMANENTLY and give up the gypsy lifestyle they'll realize that they aren't any more special or smarter than anyone else – they will become normal (settled life does that to you) like any other group of people do when they are settled and in it for the long haul.
If anything, Israel (as a quasi-settled Jewish state) proves that Jews are not a 'special' or 'chosen' people, because since Israeli Jews have been semi-permanently planted they have regressed to the human mean.
It's a sad fact that the 'smart Jews' are immigrating away from Israel (to NJ, as Weiss says here), because those are precisely the types of Jews Israel needs right now to help fix the place.
My impression of Israeli Jewish culture suggests that whether or not they are any more special or smarter, they are definitely weirder. As a matter of fact, this is what I like about them.
Polly: "Phil, don't lose all the goyim in one fell swoop with the 'Jews are smarter' bit."
I don't think we're all that fragile, Polly, and we do recognize brains when we see them. Jews as a group might be quite smart but when they let their yearning for Israel enter the mix all of a sudden they start taking totally indefensible positions, which makes them look dumb. Maybe the rule is, smart as a whip till Israel comes up, then incredibly dense.
Ari: 'If anything, Israel (as a quasi-settled Jewish state) proves that Jews are not a 'special' or 'chosen' people, because since Israeli Jews have been semi-permanently planted they have regressed to the human mean.'
This is one reason dainty diaspora Jewish liberals who want to continue to live out their childish, Peter Pan "chosen" fantasies despise Israel. There are plenty of good reasons for despising Israel, but this is not one of them.
Interesting opinion essay by Philip Weiss on the effect of Zionism on the Jewish community. Hans Kohn, who was one of the world's leading authorities on nationalism, posed the following questions on the issue.
"Might not perhaps the "abnormal" existence of the Jews represent a higher form of historical development than territorial nationalism? Has not the diaspora been an essential part of Jewish existence? Did it not secure Jewish survival better than the state could do? [65] Hans Kohn, "Zion and the Jewish National Idea," The Menorah Journal, Autumn-Winter 1958, p.45.
Quoted in my article "Jewish Critics of Zionism."
http://www.mepc.org/journal/9012_corrigan.asp
Ed Corrigan
Don't you enjoy my devastatingly accurate essays?