The New York Times Magazine tries and fails to undo the damage done Marty Peretz in the recent New York Magazine profile with a long inside-the-gang piece about the editor by a former intern, Stephen Rodrick that quotes only his buddies, misspells Theodor Herzl’s name and notes that poor Peretz has Degas pictures on his wall. The piece says that Peretz is vicious because his father was so mean to him, but the transparency vanishes when it comes to living people: “That vision of Israel was in evidence at a dinner Peretz held later that evening at a posh kosher restaurant [evidently in Jerusalem]. There was a filmmaker, a writer, the wife of a bureau chief and a philosopher. Peretz sat in the place of honor.” Yes who is the wife of the bureau chief? Ethan Bronner’s wife? Why does the Times hide this detail? And who is the philosopher, Moshe Halbertal? The filmmaker? What a protection racket!
There is typically a lot of boorish and reflexive Zionism in the piece, the statement that Israel “may have changed,” whatever that means, more of Peretz’s unapologetic Islamophobia, and the detail that Peretz put a picture of the Last Supper on the wall of a conference room at the New Republic, with IDF soldiers in the place of the apostles.
It is time that someone begin to explain to NYT readers, many of them Jewish, that Jewish life is burdened by messianic nationalism; it will take Jews two generations to recover from this fever.From Ezra Mendelsohn’s fine book, On Modern Jewish Politics:
In 1934 the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis stated: “Realizing, then, as everyone of us should, that in the spread of intolerance, we Jews are always the first victims, it behooves us to be especially watchful of our own conduct and not commit the folly of believing that similar illiberalisms may not develop among ourselves…. We should be especially on guard against the development in Jewish circles of narrow and trivial conceptions of culture, of chauvinistic nationalism…”
Whatever one may think of such sentiments, there is no doubt that here was located the Achilles heel of Jewish nationalism of the Zionist type, a problem to which it really had (and has) no ready answer.
Mendelsohn, a professor at Hebrew University, wrote that in 1993, in Israel. The New York Times continues to indulge the chauvinists whose only answer to this problem is hatred.
