A week or so back I wrote that in my 50s I am past caring whether someone calls me a self-hating Jew, and a friend asked me to explain this attitude.
When you get to be in your 50s you are stuck with who you are. You think the way you do. The natural course of my thinking these days is to think all the time about the Jewish question in America, what Jewish power is doing to the the Jewish presence in western society and to American foreign policy. I like to think about this stuff. I’m not going to stop myself because of what anyone says about me. I have a, Let the chips fall where they may attitude. Some time ago, Lior Halperin, having mounted an exhibit of Palestinian children's art, told me, "I'm what people call a self-hating Jew," and I felt the liberation in that statement.
I’m aware that it’s an old charge and is wielded by nationalists who attempt to police Jewish life. In 1963 the very-often-smallminded Zionist Gershom Scholem accused Hannah Arendt of lacking love for the Jewish people, and she said that while she was of that people–and everyone is of a people in this big world, which I believe Arendt says elsewhere–she didn’t love peoples or nations, she loved her friends. A decade later Abba Eban accused Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone of feeling guilty at the fact of Jewish survival. This was a smear. I don’t think either man felt that way. It was an underhanded tactic of the sort the Zionists have always used in politics, to get their way. They play rough. They bully and police those who question Jewish nationalism. Lately the JTA has accused Haaretz of the "blood libel" for writing about IDF atrocities.
I recognize that an element of the political combination that I am pursuing here involves people who might have been antisemites in another lifetime. I accept the truth of this. I’ve already spoken of Pat Buchanan. There are isolationists, American firsters, and some people who genuinely resent Jewish power in my camp or don’t know what Jews are and ascribe certain sinister powers to them.. I get that vibe in my emails and see it in the comments section. How do I feel about this and what do I do about it?
I don’t feel great about it. I grew up fearing the antisemites, and lived in a very Jewish world. When I got to college a good friend of mine got out a book of political cartoons and turned with delight to a page on which there were three panels. In the first, an Indian was surveying the land and then a colonist jumped out of the bushes and pushed him off the cliff. Then the colonist was surveying the land, and a Jew with sidelocks jumped out of the bushes and pushed him off the cliff.
I was freaked out. Today that guy is married to a very powerful Jewish woman in the media business. The world’s changed. Antisemitic attitudes have died out or become meaningless. Many former racists voted for Obama. When I was young I expressed racist views from time to time; don't any more. I remember how much I resented the powerful WASPs in college. Yes, some of that came out of my oedipal issues, but in his book on the neocons Jacob Heilbrunn says just what I always knew, that the neocon forefathers were enraged over their exclusion from prestige position. Some of the resentment I sense toward Jews today seems to me an outgrowth of a true fact, Jewish power, and of the failure of the media ever to discuss it. Myself I don’t care that Jews are a dominant segment of media, Hollywood, finance. Those worlds seem permeable and fluid, and there are castes in all societies. Though yes, I hear complaints of clubbiness.
Again I’d go back to the central issue of foreign policy. If you come to the conclusion that dual loyalty has corrupted our policymaking in the Middle East, and you’re a political writer who wants to be engaged in important issues, then you talk about it, come what may. I imagine this was Joe Klein’s reason for talking about the neocons’ dual loyalties in pushing a crazy theory about democracy as a domino theory in the Middle East. Myself this means condemning dual loyalty and the messianic vision of Zionism that has corrupted Judaism as powerfully as the Shabbetai Zevi movement corrupted Judaism in the 1600s, and carried it off a cliff.
I always say that a community has the right to define itself the way it wants to. If they want to put me forever outside the community for these ideas, I think I must respect their freedom. Do I hate my Jewishness? I think not. I think the essential quality of my engagement here is a questioning, an attraction to fairness, a pleasure with ideas, and a comfort in being outside a power structure, that I can trace in my Jewish heroes, like Kafka and Arendt and Mailer.
