This afternoon I attended the final session of the Rabbis for Human Rights conference on Judaism and Human Rights, at which my beloved rabbi, Ellen Lippmann, was on a panel with Peter Beinart. It was a bit surreal going to the United Jewish Appeal building, as the dark side of their history is a major theme of my forthcoming book. How Rabbis for Human Rights, which is certainly far more outspoken and frank than J Street, has been deemed kosher by so much of the Jewish establishment remains a mystery to me. But one thing that is clear from this conference and in particular this panel, which had the blessing of The Forward, is that the rush of the mainstream to the Zionist left, akin to the rush to embrace the South African Liberals once apartheid was clearly collapsing, is definitely proceeding apace.
Though I understood it all intellectually, I was not prepared for just how deeply committed to the survival of Zionism Peter Beinart is. He began by talking about his four-year-old son, about hanging an Israeli flag in his bedroom, and about how jarred he can be by some of the things his son says to him coming from an Orthodox pre-school. The general thrust of his talk was that a progressive Zionism which is rooted in a confrontation with Israeli illiberalism can yet be the basis of a youthful American Zionism, even organized along the same lines as Birthright or the Orthodox Israel programs.
There was definitely a Don Quixote quality to the whole thing. And this much I could have anticipated. Just yesterday I read a column he wrote celebrating an Israel Rabbi trying to liberalize the Shas Party from within, proclaiming this as a cause American Jews could embrace. Tilting at windmills indeed.
Up to a point I can admire and sympathize with this, as a philosophical conservative among left-wing Jewish anti-Zionists, as a member of a progressive shul whose favorite philosopher of Judaism is Will Herberg, who himself walked a very lonely path in his Judaism. What nagged at me however was that this was the very conceit that so shook me at the J Street Conference last year: that in the final analysis they are less interested in saving Israel as a Jewish state than in saving Zionism for themselves.
One friend who was also at the J Street Conference, as we reviewed our reasons for not intending to return to the next one, said that his overall impression of it was that it was above all meant to be a feel-good event for the intended audience of aging liberal Zionists. This was certainly the feeling I got today as well. The most perplexing phenomenon was surely that The Forward was getting applause lines that others did not.
None of this, however, should detract from giving Beinart credit where its due. To take just the most breathtaking example, his line on BDS: “The best way for BDS to enter further into the mainstream is for Israel and the American Jewish establishment to keep doing what they’re doing.”
My rabbi, who remains a co-chair of Rabbis for Human Rights, offered some much needed fresh air as usual. She spoke of a recent delegation she led to Israel/Palestine, and in particular of being in Hebron and being deterred by an armed Israeli soldier from walking down the Palestinian road – “we really did learn a lot from the Nazis”. She also made clear that she does not call herself a Zionist, “the term is just a conversation stopper”. One other interesting point was that she endorsed the suggestion of one person she met for the next flotilla – that it consist of largely empty boats so that the people of Gaza could get out.
As for Beinart, while the Don Quixote quality I’ve described should make his sincerity abundantly clear, I do have just the slightest bit of pause. In his recent writings on American politics it is clear he has very shrewdly taken the pulse of American liberalism, and so in this case I must also wonder to what extent he has just shrewdly recognized what the progressive Zionists want to hear and is milking it.
I’ll conclude on this note: there was a lot of talk about who was to blame for the distance between American Jewish youth and Israel. Jane Eisner of The Forward posed the question directly to Beinart – is the blame less with the American Jewish establishment than with parents, teachers, and rabbis?
I’ve talked about this here before. What is most striking to me about my formal religious education in retrospect is that the fundamental premise of Zionism – that the Jews are a “nation” and that we, the Israelis, and all the Jews of the world are of one and the same “nation” – was never spelled out for us. I can only presume that this is so because my teachers and rabbis were simply not quite so credulous as to say this, even if most of them believed it in their heart of hearts.
This condition, of not being credulous enough to be able to plainly articulate one’s beliefs, or to admit what one actually believes to oneself, did not obtain even in totalitarian movements of the past. In short, the root of American Zionism’s crisis is its inability to understand what it even believes.
Jack Ross’s book, Rabbi Outcast, is a biography of the late anti-Zionist leader Elmer Berger.
