‘NYT”s Oren profile says U.S. is pleasant and sedated, but Israel is place of moral passion

The big flattering profile of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in the New York Times today. What to say? First, as James North points out, "Where is the three-column profile of Amira Hass, or Uri Avnery?" That is to say, where is the profile of the Helen Suzman and Nadine Gordimer resistance Jews– thosee women of South Africa, when it counted. Where are the profiles of the Jews who refuse to stand up for ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem? Where is the New York Times on this struggle?

Second, no leftwing American critics are quoted. No Cecilie Surasky or Naomi Klein, whose Jewishness has propelled them in very different directions from Oren, who grew up in upstate New York and then got "the Maccabees forever in their mouths," as Kafka says about the Jewish chauvinists’ statements of longing for Palestine. Where are the liberal Americans? Just this nod to them:

“The fact that Israel is having trouble with liberal America means we need to have someone who understands liberal America,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a longtime friend and journalist who worked with Mr. Oren at the Shalem Center, a center-right research institute in Jerusalem.

[Center right is a charity, there. Ultra. Sheldon Adelson.] Yes and why are they having trouble with liberal America? Because of Jim Crow redux in the West Bank?

Also, there is no discussion of the dual loyalty problem in Zionism. Oren gave up his U.S. citizenship to be an ambassador, the piece says. Well he was dual before then, with his kids in the Israeli army, and this is the problem, the revolving door between Israeli militarism and American Jewish identity. Enough of these people! Why not a profile of new author Daniel Fleshler, who is reexamining Zionist commitment in the light of Goldstone? Or of Richard Goldstone for that matter, and what he learned about Israel from his scrutiny of Bosnia and South Africa?

The piece is also kind to Oren’s scholarship, which as I have said before is to scholarship what military music is to music. In this regard, Jeff Blankfort comments: "Landler calls on a Zionista academic who wrote an op ed defending Israel’s war on Gaza on January 1 for the Washington Post: 

 "I would not call his work ideological,” said Robert J. Lieber, a professor of government at Georgetown who recruited Mr. Oren. “He’s a fine scholar who lets the scholarship lead him.”

Oh what is happening to my people? A wise friend says this of the Jewish identity piece in the Times profile: "Oren’s implied picture of a boring prosperous middle-class American Jewish existence up to age 15 which the discovery of Israel filled with passion. And: the same America/Israel trajectory (with eventual career as permanent interface) as Jeffrey Goldberg and Klein Halevi. American life conceived of by these people as a pleasant but morally dubious condition of permanent sedation. Only Israel can supply the ethnic-religious-moral passion (happily fortified by military action and martial triumphs) without which our lives are sad and empty."