Shaul Magid
This is interesting. Peter Beinart is now getting criticized by a member of his own camp, another liberal Zionist. Shaul Magid is famous in Jewish circles. He was on the J Street rabbinical board (in his Beinart review he says he felt betrayed by J Street’s capitulation), he is a scholar of Jewish history at Indiana University. He writes in Religion Dispatches that Beinart ignores the fact that the settlements are directed, authorized, and approved by Israelis. This point has been made before but Magid is very clear:
The settlements are not distinct from the state, they are an integral part of it.
Israel is a legislative democracy (its flaws notwithstanding), so its elected officials must be viewed as representing the majority of the population. This may be more complex in a parliamentary democracy but it is still the foundation upon which we call something a democracy. Israelis elected a parliament that supports the settlements. Polls indicate that if elections were held in Israel tomorrow the coalition would be even more rightist. Israeli high school mock elections held in 2009 gave present Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a settler and vocal advocate of the settlement movement, a clear victory as Prime Minister.
Given that, whatever polls say regarding a majority of Israelis’ “willingness” to end the occupation, when they go to ballot box as a collective, they indicate otherwise. American Jews need to take seriously the real likelihood that Israelis (not just Netanyahu) simply do not want to end the occupation for all kinds of reasons. For many American Jews this causes cognitive dissonance—but they may have to deal with it.
This raises the issue of why American Jews simply don’t throw in the towel on the Jewish state and say, Let’s have what we like over here: democracy!! (Shaul Magid, what’s the answer to that challenge?)
Then Magid goes on to hammer Beinart’s segregationist views as the views of his grandmother’s generation. (As I’ve said before, Beinart is the kind of young person old people love). What’s fascinating about this argument is that Magid, who is a really smart guy, sought to segregate his own children, and then discovered when his son was grown up that he’d missed out on diversity. Wasn’t that obvious?
Second, when Beinart speaks of intermarriage he speaks as if he’s from his grandmother’s generation. Intermarriage is a reality American Jews will have to deal with. It’s not going away nor, I would argue, should it. American Jews intermarry at a rate commensurate with many other minority populations in America (excluding blacks and Latinos), so is Beinart suggesting ethnic groups should only marry one another? Or is he saying that intermarriage between a Polish Catholic and a Korean Presbyterian is fine but that Jews should only marry other Jews? It may be that the intermarried Jew cares less about Israel, but rectifying this reality by making an exceptionalist claim about the Jews, making them “anomalous” (a label with ominous anti-Semitic coattails) is not the answer.
…the case Beinart makes for more Jewish education should make those on the left a little uncomfortable….
Having sent three children through a Jewish school system in Boston (modern Orthodox, Conservative, and non-denominational) I can personally attest that one of the real deficiencies in the otherwise laudable effort to make young Jews literate in the tradition is that they grow up interacting almost exclusively with Jews, have only Jewish friends, and know about the world around them primarily through a Jewish lens. You can have all the classes you want in global community, tolerance, liberalism, etc., but when it’s a classroom of Jews being taught by a Jew using mostly Jewish resources (and on vacation many of these children go to… Jewish summer camps!), that message may not resonate very far, whatever the noble intensions.
My son, now 28, recently told me he didn’t have a non-Jewish friend until he was in 12th grade when he first attended a public high school. Non-Jews were simply the “other.” … Beinart’s strong advocacy of sending one’s children to schools where everyone is the same in order to teach them how to be generous to those who are different requires a bit more scrutiny. Would he advocate a society where all ethnic groups only went to school with their own? This is the case in Israel and it has contributed to the creation of a society filled with alienation and hatred on both sides, precisely the kind of society Beinart rightly criticizes in the book.
…sequestering young Jews so that they only learn with one another, marry one another and have children who will do the same is hardly the way to create a liberal humanistic society that can offer a viable alternative to the problems contemporary Jews face.
Beautiful argument. Though I do find it remarkable that a Jewish scholar would be so immured in a Jewish world as to wake up to this truth only after he’d segregated his own children. Wasn’t this a truth we learned in the ’70s? The Jewish discourse is actually somewhat primitive on this score. And given our power and status in U.S. society, the conversation is actually unseemly.
Allison Deger has a post up about Joseph Dana’s great review at the National of Beinart’s book. I want to add my two cents (and thanks to Annie for passing the Dana along).
The essence of Dana’s critique is the problem posed to Beinart by Joseph Dana himself– a good Jewish intellectual who loves Jewish history and culture but who sees Jewish renewal in a commitment to democracy, not exclusivity. Dana:
Perhaps the actual crisis of Zionism is the fact that liberal Zionist writers, who deeply care for Israel, are unable or unwilling to accept that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is increasingly being defined as a battle over rights and equality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians are coalescing around nonviolent boycotts targeting Israel’s system of inequality while Israel is destroying its own democratic foundations in an attempt to protect its ideology of exclusion. Rigorous critique of Zionism, not Israeli settlements, is the first step towards safeguarding Israel as a haven for Jews while preventing the country from sliding deeper into moral bankruptcy.
This is a wonderful insight because it gets at the undemocratic nature of Beinart’s discourse. He seems to want to limit the Israel conversation to Jews attached to a Jewish homeland. But Palestinians and leftwingers have a very different discourse. Isn’t it actually democratic to let them speak?
Dana also takes this jab:
Evidently not strong enough for him to emigrate from New York to Jerusalem, Beinart has a deeply emotional relationship with Zionism…
I love this argument. Why don’t people make it more often? The truth is that Beinart is as useful to the Jewish state here as he is in Israel, maybe more useful because Israel has always been dependent on world powers. It does not have the consent of its neighbors or subjects. So it must grapple the U.S. to its soul with hoops of steel.
“…sequestering young Jews so that they only learn with one another, marry one another and have children who will do the same is hardly the way to create a liberal humanistic society that can offer a viable alternative to the problems contemporary Jews face.”
I have the feeling that Israelis have given up on liberalism now that the wagons are circled. Name one Israeli government minister or Kadima front bencher who would qualify as liberal in the West. Liberalism appears to be a diaspora thing .
It’s very sad to note the absence of any significant Israeli cultural critiques of a doomed system.
“Sequestering young people in religious/ethnic schools breeds alienation and hatred”
It doesn’t have to. Government policy is more important. Religious schools can be a positive force in society. Israel is dysfunctional because of the army and the settlers.
Here’s my thing about the “inter-marriage” bit — it seems like its assumed that the jewish parent loses out on the deal when it comes to the religion of their children. As in “if I marry a christian, my kids will be christians” — I never got this, seems like a defeatist argument. Personally, I think inter-marriage offers a unique opportunity to “show-off” judaism, its teachings and traditions. Think of it like a try-out.
In my hometown, there are lots of mixed faith families, so to me, discussions of “inter-marriage” are dated, to put it charitably. Judaism’s slogan should be “the more the merrier” and maybe with more non-ethnic jews in the jewish fold, we might work past this deep tribalism, where two people who love each other are in some quarters considered a threat to the larger group.
Several things. First of all, Magid overstates Beinart’s argument. Beinart is not a segregationist. If there was a way to educate Jewish children in their religion without parochial schools, I’m sure Beinart would not be opposed to it. The fact of the matter is that outside of the day school community, children do not generally receive good Jewish educations. It also does not make Beinart a “segregationist” to favor giving Jewish children a parochial education. Are parents who choose to send their kids to Catholic schools “segregationists?” Parents who choose to send their kids to Islamic schools? Parents who send their kids to elitist private schools? Parents who send their kids to public schools in districts that are disproportionate white or black?
The word segregationist is false and inflammatory.
You also, frankly, show a complete disregard for the choices and needs of religious Jews that necessitates some of the insularity that, say, Christians do not have to worry about. Jews require kosher food. Kids cannot get kosher food in a non-kosher camp. They cannot get a kosher lunch in a public school. They cannot access activities that take place on Saturdays, which many do. Are religious Jews wrong to want these things for their children? Are they “segregationist” because they choose to feed their children kosher food? Should religious parents deny their children these experiences just to satisfy some left-wing elitist’s vision of diversity?
And in Europe, where much higher percentages of Jewish children attend some sort of parochial school, there is no problem with their assimilation into the general culture of their societies that I know of.
No matter what our communal success, we are still a religious and ethnic minority, and our challenges are not all the same as are Christian brethren.
What is your plan for conveying our tradition, Phil? Do you think it’s worth educating Jewish children? Or would you rather not convey the Jewish religion at all?
Second: The experience of Shaul Magid’s children is not the experience of everyone who went to day school. I went to day school and went to arts camp during the summer and had plenty of non-Jewish friends. There are, again, challenges for people who observe, from kosher food to standards of morality. I myself am not orthodox, but having grown up around orthodox people, I can attest to the shocking ignorance of most left-wing Jews who are not observant, both from the standpoint of religious knowledge, and from the standpoint of the challenges faced by those they criticize for their insularity.
Parents who care enough, particularly those living in urban areas, should have no trouble whatsoever ensuring that their kids play with a diverse group of children.
“I love this argument. Why don’t people make it more often? ”
Because it’s a red herring and could be just as easily used against Palestinians who live abroad.
Zionism never posited that every Jew had to move to Israel now. There is a place for the diaspora in the ideology.