The latest New York Review of Books contains an ad for a book from Macmillan that says, "The politics of Israeli governments in recent years and a drift to neo-conservatism among segments of Diaspora Jewry have substantially polarized the Jewish community abroad."
This is true, and a great story; I wish the press would cover it. Though of course, the press's failure is my opportunity. Funnily enough, I just got a link in my inbox that speaks to the issue raised by the ad: neoconservatism and Jewish identity.
Five years ago, neoconservative David Brooks wrote about his son's bar mitzvah and said that Holocaust stories should be central to the bar mitzvah ceremony, which should mingle recent Jewish history with the Torah, which is also "history," he said.
[T]here will be reminders that we're mysteriously bound by things that
happened before we were born and to people, now dead, whose lives are
interwoven with our own. 'What their species is for animals and
plants, that is history for human beings,' the 19th-century historian
Johann Droysen observed.
In today's [bar mitzvah] ceremony the Book of
Exodus will mingle with the Holocaust…
Note that Brooks is suggesting that religion–the Torah, constituting "history"– is as strong as species is for plants and animals: an utter divider. (Don't marry a non-Jew!) And he uses the most anti-Semitic moment in history to anchor this point. And thus Brooks, a conservative and a religious Jew, constructs a Jewish identity out of a "mysterious" mix of history and myth, which binds his son, ala Abraham and Isaac. This is not just religious talk. Brooks is also a political actor; and as the neoconservative support for the Iraq war and for the Israeli occupation show, this construction of identity has political consequences.
This is not just a division between neoconservatives and non-neoconservative Jews. It is in American political culture. Identity is fluid, as Obama has demonstrated; and we don't have to construct identity from divisive elements.
