I was clearing brush for my mother this morning when I realized I have had a more intensely Jewish life in the last couple of days than in years. Two nights ago I was up till 2 a.m. at an outdoor vigil/seder run by non-Zionist Jews on the street in Philly. Last night it was more of the same, with a couple of non- and anti-Zionists. First hanging out at a big bourgeois seder at a relative's, then scooting off on our own to a bar till late at night to talk. One of us had been at a seder at the Four Seasons. I didn't get to bed till 3:30, and that feeling I have tried to express before, that anti-Zionism is the new Zionism– that all the excitement that Zionism had intellectually, politically and socially 100 years ago, as a liberation story– now that feeling surrounds anti-Zionism, post-Zionism. The feeling that the best of the next generation of idealistic Jewish intellectuals are drawn to this idea, because it will liberate us from the misery of the Israeli apartheid experience done this morning and yesterday and tomorrow, in our name.
Here are some random quotations, who knows how accurate as to fact, culled from a night of red wine and spring:
–Roger Cohen is taking over from Jeffrey Goldberg as the most important Jewish journalist in the American press. Did you see his latest great piece on the Iran hysteria yesterday? Well he called Goldberg Netanyahu's "stenographer." (Hey, and I called Goldberg Netanyahu's amanuensis, a more pretentious way of saying the same thing.)
–That Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street is very very smart. J Street knows just what it is doing. Did you see how he challenged Rabbi Steve Gutow at the 92d Street Y? No, you didn't– oh, he said to him, we are happy to co-sponsor a poll of Jewish attitudes with any leading Jewish organization. And Gutow demurred. You know why, because the Jewish organizations are afraid of popular Jewish opinion, they know that most American Jews are for talking to Hamas.
–Oh J Street is smart. And the Obama administration is counting on them to build a base inside Jewish life. Obama who is the first Jewish president, after Clinton was the first Jewish president, having a seder in the White House tonight.
–Jim Lobe of Interpress, the leading critic of the neocons, is like an oracle.
–We have to be like the neocons. We have to find each other and gain support and talk up our ideas together. They had a lot of stuff we didn't have– money, institutions. But we have a humanist idea. Oh but how do we find one another? My whole process has taken place in my own head, for years… They had all their clubs and treehouses…
–What is it with Lieberman. Do we have any idea here who he is? You should see the way that the Russians in Israeli society are drawn to him. A lot of them aren't even Jewish. They want civil marriage. Because they're Christians! Can you imagine if there was real journalism in our country about who this guy is? A
–And American Jews know this. A lot of them do. They are sick about what is happening. Sickened and scared. That is J Street's power…
–Did you see the Judea Pearl piece in the LA Times, responding to the Ehrenreich piece on anti-Zionism? Well Pearl said that anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. Did you see that? Do you understand what that means? Flip it around. He is saying that Zionism is more important than Semitism! He is saying that a 100-year-old ideology started by a journalist is more important than the first monotheistic religion that is 2000 years old! Do you understand that??
I imagine I will have to fact-check this later. I am trying to convey the spirit of the night. Now I'm hung over. How exciting to feel a sense of actual Jewish community after alienation from the pugnacious Jewish nationalism that has prevailed most of my life.
And I'm sorry if this strikes some readers as exclusive. It's not, it's all about a new relationship between the Jewish idea, in a word, an idea of intelligence, and the Other. All are welcome.
