Filling in for Nick Kristof at the New York Times (hey, how come Gershom Gorenberg, Eric Alterman, and Bernard Avishai didn’t get this kind of press access?) Peter Beinart describes the generational divide inside Jewish life and admits that his Zionist position is essentially conservative.
He explains that young American Jews don’t give a hoot about Jewish sovereignty somewhere else — let alone the need for Israel so that we can have “cultural expression”. And Beinart anticipates the day when anti-Zionism returns with a vengeance into Jewish life.
my book argues that Jews need a state for self-protection and cultural expression, but worries that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank menaces the democratic ideals upon which the state was founded. Some in the organized American Jewish community think this places me on the left. I disagree. I actually occupy a shrinking center of American Jews fiercely committed to Israel’s existence but profoundly troubled by its current course…
Zionism has not always been a consensus position in American Jewish life. Before Israel’s creation, and even to some degree before 1967, substantial elements within American Jewry questioned the notion of Jewish sovereignty.
I fear that unless something changes, those earlier divisions will reemerge in the years to come. The more permanent Israel’s occupation of the West Bank becomes, the more American Jews will be forced to choose between a Jewish state that is not fully democratic and a binational state that loses its Jewish character. And faced with that choice, a great chasm will divide American Jewry: with most older American Jews on one side, and many non-Orthodox, younger American Jews on the other.
Saving Israel as a democratic Jewish state and preserving the Zionist consensus in American Jewish life are two sides of the same struggle.
Beinart is right to distinguish himself from young Jews with multicultural democratic values. He is one of those young people whom older people love.
Also I would point out that Beinart calling for Israel as a fount for Jewish “cultural expression” is unconvincing. This is a guy who has been on Fresh Air, the 92d Street Y stage, WNYC, the Washington Post, the Washington Convention Center, and a bunch of other American platforms. Do Jews really require a country in the Middle East to get their voices out? Beinart would say, I’m talking about Jewish culture. That raises the question, Why do empowered American Jews here not fulfill his “cultural” requirements? And what’s wrong with that?
What’s the annual rate of Jews who make aliyah to Israel? 4800? If even that?
At the same time you have an emigration rate of Israeli Jews to America at about the same rate.
So for years the net migration of Jews to Israel from America was pitiful and it hasn’t changed and probably won’t be changed dramatically for the next decade. If anything, the net emigration could probably accelerate in the coming years if things turn ugly and Israel becomes a state in which there are not only wars frequently but where war is permanent(and Israel is fast going to such a place).
Herzl’s dream of Israel, as the central cultural life of World Jewry, has collapsed. Israeli Jews differ from their American equivalents increasingly every year. Judaism is cheap in a country where it’s all around you and you don’t have to make an effort.
Israel has instead become our ‘insurance policy’ and our intellectual pet project. It gives us a cause to unite behind, to stem the ‘disease of assimilation’ as rabbi Stephen Wise recently castigated it in a sermon intended to attack Beinart.
It’s also a way for secular, atheist Jews like, say, Alan Dershowitz or Sheldon Adelson who have been in Las Vegas or Hollywood all their careers and not exactly had a deep spiritual life. By being an extreme Zionist, they feel they can redeem their Jewish deficit.
But this blinkered support for Israel, which has long ago moved beyond mere self-defence and now moved into the territory of wars of aggression, makes anti-Semitism in the West slowly re-awakening. People start to take notice that being pro-Israel all of a sudden means you have to support aggressive wars, or else being accused of being in favor of a second Holocaust. And those wars aren’t even local skirmishes anymore, they can totally wreck these people’s pension plans, their family income and their jobs. Not to mention the source of recruitment for fundamentalist ideologies.
That is what you get when a state starts getting everything it wants, everything it points at. Without exception like a spoiled child with temper tantrums. Of course, Israel has since long ago moved beyond such harmless metaphores.
But it also means that to have a true Jewish revival, two things have to happen. The first is to slowly let go of the Holocaust as a central part of Jewish identity as it corrupts your world outlook and makes you filled with venomous paranoia about the goys. The Holocaust should never be forgotten but it shouldn’t be the one thing that ties all Jews together. And the second is Israel. Judaism should return to it’s humanistic roots. But it’s much harder to build something genuine up. To answer the complex questions of young Jews about the ethnocentric streak of Judaism in a time of amazing liberal tolerance and progress.
To these Jews, the older American Jewry, in a sign of their own deficient Jewish understanding, have given only fear, shame and religious nationalism – layered with Holocaust alarmism.
It works to some extent of keeping Jews in check. But at what cost? The quality of someone’s Judaism is equally – if not more – important than merely being engaged – and for what reasons. And the militaristic uses of Israel as a blunt tool to rally Jews around a common cause has cheaped Judaism beyond belief. To be a ‘real’ Jew these days means equating your Jewishness to militaristic bloodlust, and if you don’t support that you’re a ‘self-hating Jew’.
This is, to put it bluntly, a disaster waiting to happen, if it is not already happening.
Beinart: Jews need a state for self-protection and cultural expression
The former hasn’t actually worked out all that well (Jews are far safer elsewhere, and to the extent that they aren’t, Israel usually has something to do with it), and the latter may require a focal community and society (cultural Zionism), but it does not require a state.
David Hazony points out that there’s a growing chasm between America’s Jews and Israeli ones, and that if it isn’t addressed the American Jews are cutting themselves out of the Jewish conversation. Oddly, this means that right-wing Hazony, left-wing Beinart and Phil Weiss all agree on the fundamental trajectory. Israel is ever more detached from America’s Jews
http://forward.com/articles/154253/memo-to-american-jews-learn-hebrew/?p=all
Daniel Gordis says that Beinart’s problem is with the fundamental characteristic of Judaism which sees itself as a tribe; Beinart can’t live with that concept.
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=265690
(Though the Palestinians could, as well as the Russians, the Greeks, the Baluchies, the Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Irish, Argentinians, and most other national groups in the early 21st entury).
The one place where Gordis and Hazony part from Phil Wiess is the significance of all this for Israel. The Israelis (probably about 85% of them) aren’t even noticing the growing distance from America’s Jews, because they’re no longer a central part of their world. Beinart thinks his opinions and those of his (non-Orthodox) fellow American Jews are central to the well-being of Israel. Phil hopes, fervently, that a rift between American Jews and Israel will profoundly effect Israel.
Peter Beinart is calling for a boycott of products made in the Occupied Territories in a new interview with the German magazine stern: “Grass untergräbt seine Argumente” [“Grass Undermines His Own Arguments”]:
I doubt the utility of Israel for promoting Jewish “cultural expression” as far as language goes. Not to be excessively USA-centric, but I don’t speak or read Hebrew. How many Americans do? How many Jews do in the world outside Israel?
Is Hebrew really a good language, a useful language, for Jewish “cultural expression” in the broad world? In a world where Jews are glad to live in many places, safely (as it appears to be today)? today, the universal “lingua franca” is English, not French and certainly not Hebrew. Go to any scientific conference.
I do understand the near universalism of Yiddish in my parents’ generation, and Yiddish did seem to be a satisfactory language for Jewish “cultural expression” up til 1920 or maybe 1950 (I wouldn’t know, but after he learned German in high school, my father spoke German to his mother who spoke to him in Yiddish), but Yiddish seems getting lost as a living language and is (I am told) generally ignored and disparaged in Israel.
For me, communicating in Hebrew is like using code, because so few people understand it. The reason Americans (esp. Jews) do not know what’s going on in Israel and the OPTs — even though it is regularly published in Hebrew — is that Hebrew is not a useful language for Jewish cultural expression — outside Israel.
For our purposes on this blog, for the purpose of promoting justice for Palestinians, think how much better the world would apprehend the situation if Israel’s principal language (and principal language of publication) were English.