Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School says in a piece in the NYT pointing out that Elena Kagan will make it three Jews on the Supreme Court, and no Protestants. It’s easy for him to say, he’s a winner. Also, Feldman served in the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Iraq war and occupation. Was Zionism, which has a religious component, a factor in support for the Iraq war among Jews manning the establishment?
By the way, Feldman doesn’t credit E. Digby Baltzell with helping to open the blueblood doors in the ’60s. His book the Protestant Establishment was very important, though; it said that a caste of WASPs was keeping out the talented, including many Jews. The honest question that Feldman won’t go near here is whether the networks that I was part of at Harvard in the 70s, the rising Jewish establishment that lifted him too, didn’t have a castelike quality. Certainly we looked out for one another. Is it mere coincidence that Lawrence Summers, a Jew, taps Elena Kagan to be dean of the Law School? What is our Jewish obligation, as winners, to hire diversely? (And yes, I include myself).
P.S. Here is Adam Garfinkle, also of the Iraq war braintrust, writing in Jewcentricity about religion and the neocons, and showing that religion matters very much indeed:
Neoconservatives are the purest expression of two phenomena simultaneously. First, they are an American Jewish example of the broad modern tendency for religious energies to attach themselves to politics, and second, they are an expression of stereoscopic chosenness, having filtered out the realism-inducing study of Jewish history and replaced it with the heroic narratives of American and modern Zionist histories…
Neoconservatives tend to unite aroudd the conviction that small, beleaguered groups of chosen believers can prevail over all odds if they stick to their beliefs… If this sounds like the sort of reaction one would have expected from Jews in centuries past who were assailed in their ghettoes and small villages by masses of threatening ignoramuses around them, that’s no coincidents. There really is such a thing as the moral chauvinism of the downtrodden…
