John Mearsheimer is having a great moment. Adam Kirsch at Tablet has followed up on Robert Kaplan’s glowing profile of Mearsheimer in the Atlantic as a trailblazing thinker with a piece on The Israel Lobby as “an intellectual landmark.” It includes the statement that to judge from its reviews the book convinced no one of its argument. As if the reviews did not originate largely from the lobby itself, or its penumbra, from people like Leslie Gelb who supported the Iraq war, he confessed, so as not to damage his career. Or from Jeffrey Goldberg who of course served in the Israeli army and then promoted the Iraq war because of evidence he had seen that Saddam was acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
An intellectual landmark– and the New York Review of Books has never reviewed it. Some ideas are too unsettling even to be poked at. I think Kirsch rightly describes the book as broaching the subject of Jewish influence. This is a great subject, as Jewish influence has produced magnificent things in the west… for instance the emigration of my grandfathers and so many others of their generation from eastern Europe under the pressure of bankers at the turn of the century… for instance the New York Review of Books’ opposition to the Vietnam War. And yet it is a subject too unsettling to Jews of NYRB editor Robert Silvers’s generation, who see it only through the prism of anti-Semitism, the vocalization of an American society they don’t fully trust.
As Kafka wrote to his friend, the Zionist Max Brod in 1922:
“The dubious aspect of [a recently-published piece of Brod’s] seems to me to be a distinctly Jewish complex of problems, springing from the confusion that the natives are too alien to one, thus distorting reality, and the Jews too close, distorting reality, and therefore one cannot treat the latter or the former with the proper balance.”
At a time of incredible Jewish presence in the establishment, and widespread Jewish intermarriage, it is time to resolve this complex. When Robert Kaplan writes in his piece that the Walt and Mearsheimer piece on the Israel lobby was rejected by the Atlantic in 2005 because editors fiercely questioned its “objectivity,” that is an expression of the complex.
I’ve read the Kirsch piece, and the Kaplan piece. Re the Kirsch, especially. Adam Kirsch is a smart guy, an opinion I’ve come to from reading many of his essays. But when he says that no one was persuaded by TIL, because it got bad reviews– does he actually believe that, or is it just an hasbara line? Because he is smart enough to see that most of the reviewers were Zionist, and to understand that most of the publications which reviewed it were not about to diverge from the Israel line. And to know that the reviews were much better abroad– including Israel, but also England–where the lobby has considerably less power to punish and censure. Kirsch knows that, doesn’t he? And he’s just putting out a sort of party line, which he knows is BS, but still kind of works. Or is he actually deceiving himself? I feel like I know this milieu very well, but this core question still puzzles me.
BTW, Kirsch also criticized the TIL cover, claiming classic anti-semetic tropes, blah blah. Those cliched images are hard to avoid, the cover art for this article http://www.theamericanconservative.com/article/2007/dec/03/00006/ does a pretty good job.
You need to see the Atlantic article in print. Instead of the parenthetical “about some things” there’s a giant asterisk instead. A giant “wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean” if you will.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ona-RhLfRfc
A landmark indeed.
Sadly, the topic of Jewish power is in a warped state of mind for all too many Jews(and non-Jews).
I lament this because I’m in one of those phases where I’m really going ethnic in my booklist. I’m reading up on all the great Jewish Wall St bankers at the turn of last century, people like Jacob Schiff.
There are biographies on him, but even if they are by Jews made for (mostly) Jewish audiences, the things I’ve pieced together by reading his private correspondance(the little that the family has made public) and other books by contemporaries, often Gentiles, is that so much of these books is censored, probably for fear of stoking anti-Semitism.
I understand this, I understand the history and I do not underestimate it. But Schiff’s efforts for the Jews are extraordinary and other prominent Jewish bankers like Warburg, who both would feel completely alien today.
Warburg, in particular, was a great industrialist who believed in thrift and social harmony, progressive taxes and work for all.
He took the long view and saw the needs of the greater society as something above short term profits.
This is Jew I would hope more people would learn about! But even if there was one new book about him by Niall Ferguson, coming from a Gentile conservative perspective, there is still this fear of approaching this topic and to the loss of the current economy in my humble, and slightly ethnocentric, opinion.
From an American/European perspective, you can gain a lot by reading the few books on these Jewish capitalists, but these men had very vibrant Jewish identities and strong lives, in an era where intermarriage was an anomaly and Jews, for better or for good, were extremely close and tightknit.
Therefore, for that Jewish angle you don’t get a lot for your time.
Thinking about their lives and the times they lived in and where the Jewish community was in America at the time, it’s nostalgic and emotional, of course, but it makes you sigh for those times.
Yes, we’ve risen to astronomical heights, but the price for that has been communal rupture, both intermarriage/assimilation as well as isolation and common scorn, secular vs religious, liberal vs neocon and Zionist vs non-Zionist so forth.
The Other has become the other Jew.
Another victim of this rise to power is paranoia about our own success. And paranoia does not make good history books, as I’ve discovered in recent weeks. Sure, part of me want to gloat for my own childish reasons. But part of me wants to get down to the truth, and I dislike airbrushed books.
Perhaps I will have to wait until I am in my sixties, a few decades, until I can read splendid history on this epoch.
It’s sad that so much of contemporary Jewish life is driven by fear, guilt and anxiety.
I understand and empathise with those who follow this path, the education they got instilled this into them, but still, it’s worth to lament.
Landmark…yeah, right.
Just like Love Canal.
Or the tire fire at the junkyard they can never extinguish.
Krauss-
“In many ways, I think this struggle will be far harder than what transpired in South Africa. There was no Afrikaaner lobby in the U.S. And they were defensive about this from the beginning.”
Your comments are insightful and informative – thanks. The deep rooted complexity of Zionism in American life, especially American Jewish life, makes challenging the ideology and its tragic flaws much more daunting than the anti apartheid movement in SA. I would add that, unlike SA, the tragedy of Zionism has a “race against time” cloud that looms over I/P, the US, Europe and the greater ME because of the accelorating genocide against Palestinians and the potential for another Cast Lead or US/Israel war on Iran to grow into a wider regional war/WWIII.