Three responses to the post on Michael Lerner yesterday based on the New Jersey Jewish News report: 1, from an anonymous Jewish critic, 2, from Jeff Blankfort, 3, from Jack Ross.
1. Lerner is not "going wobbly," Lerner has always been wobbly. He's an enormous PEPster (Progressive except for Palestine). He's one of those Jews who thinks Israel
was paradise until 1967. He's against Right of Return. Ask him how the war started
in '48. I have it in a book somewhere. I went to this Tikkun meeting,
and we each got a copy of the rabbi's book, "Healing Israel/Palestine. " Only the cover iconography had only Jewish messages [Mt. Sinai] Unfortunately I no longer have my copy, but it had an amazing passage
that said something like, "Now imagine if the Palestinians had greeted
the Jewish refugees with open arms instead of tried to kick them out." Something about it all being a "moral failure" on the part of the Palestinians to oppose Jewish immigration.
The
whole experience was like joining the Raelians. Whenever they mentioned Lerner, they were like "the rabbi" all ecstatically. I never went
back.
2. Blankfort:
In founding Tikkun, he took advantage of a genuine desire in the
liberal Jewish community to produce a publication to compete with
Commentary and Moment and in that he did make a positive contribution.
He went too far in his Zionism during the first war on Iraq when he wrote an op-ed in the LA Times saying we should go to war to protect Israel.
(Reprinted in the Washington Jewish Week in 1990, the headline was, "Escalate Now The US must smash Iraq's offensive military capacity"). He and Todd Gitlin have made a mantra of complaining about
anti-Semitism on the left which stems not only from its Israel-bashing,
says Lerner, but that it won't recognize that Jews are among the
oppressed peoples of the world. For a short time, some years back, by
some strange coincidence, I was getting his emails which were fairly
innocuous except for the one in which he mentioned his usual speaking
fee. Spreading spiritual love doesn't come cheap. Which
brings me to the question: What would Jesus charge?
3. Ross:
I don't think he's going wobbly exactly – rather I suspect he just has
so much invested in juxtaposing his identity to what may or may not
have been red herrings ten or twenty years ago and certainly are today,
that is the "hate America/hate Israel"
left. I think that he either doesn't quite realize or else does and
can't quite deal with the fact that it's increasingly mainstream
liberals who are concerned about Israel's behavior–who could care less about "the left"– and that he's not totally
prepared for that situation.
There are a couple of ironies to
this. The first is that it's the flip side of what never ceases to
annoy me about you and so many of your contributors, obsessing about
"PEPs" and why Amy Goodman
or Chomsky aren't out there on something; this concern is irrelevant
when, for all practical purposes, the whole of mainstream
left-of-center opinion, save for the increasingly transparent New
Republic crowd, are no further to the right than J Street.
The
second irony is the opportunity this potentially represents to Lerner,
which is that the "left," which represents the biggest threat to his
values, is not the sectarian left he's been at odds with for so long,
but rather the liberal blogosphere whose values are overwhelmingly
materialistic and vehemently opposed to those of a true religious left
which Lerner represents. If he had the vision, he could become a
leader of this progressive alternative with broader vision.
Never forget that the Jewish press will very often exaggerate a
situation such as this to make a Jewish progressive appear to be more
kosher then they actually are – exactly why they take this approach to Lerner and Rabbis for Human Rights and a more iron-fisted approach to Norman Finkelstein and Jewish Voice for Peace remains somewhat mysterious, but nevertheless it should be noted.
It
remains to be seen how this will all play out, I certainly don't feel
that Lerner's instincts are to tack right but I can understand the
source of his confusion. It remains a season of hope. Yes we can.
Also, he's not a Zionist – he has argued that there is some justice on the side of the Israelis as a people as a legacy of the Holocaust, but he has no truck with Zionism
as an ideology. He specifically attacks "the so called state of the
Jewish people" for engaging in militarism and other anathema to Jewish
values.
Ross adds later: I was not aware of Lerner's antics during the First Gulf War
but I'm not too surprised, and yes he certainly has all the human
failings we should expect of any charismatic religious leader. More to
the point, he probably was pretty much in the Clinton-era Israeli-ish
communitarian mainstream, but he's hardly the only Jewish progressive
who was where the right wing of the Labor Party
was in the 90s and in a very different place today. And we must not
forget that he embraced Walt and Mearsheimer which was a courageous
thing to do when he did it.
