Today Peter Beinart put up a long piece at Open Zion explaining why he’s closing the site. Short version: It took too much time away from his being a writer. Color me confused. I thought he cared about the liberal Zionist cause and about redeeming Jewish democracy, by creating a community that would save Israel. But the site– which started in spring 2012, coincidentally timed to the publication of his book– is closing down after just a year and a half, so he can expand his career, at the Atlantic and Haaretz.
Good for him, but is the word “dedication” in his dictionary? I recall that Noam Sheizaf, who started +972, once said that he wanted to be a film critic, but the occupation was too important, so he devoted himself to politics. Sheizaf’s made a ton of sacrifices to keep his site going.
When New York magazine did a nasty profile of Beinart as a greasy, overly-ambitious operator, I took his side. Now I get this joke from Jason Zengerle’s piece:
In talking to various Jewish journalists about Beinart over the past few months, I heard the words shmegegge and “Sammy Glick,” as well as this joke: “A yeshiva student goes to his rabbi and says, ‘Rabbi, I had a dream last night that I was the leader of a Hasidic court and I had 300 followers.’ The rabbi says, ‘When 300 Hasidim have a dream that you’re their leader, come back and we’ll talk.’ ” More than one called attention to the large picture of Beinart that greets viewers when they visit Open Zion.
Here’s part of Beinart’s explanation from his mea ambitio:
So why will Open Zion close at the end of the year? For only one reason: I want to be a writer again. Running the blog, which meant serving not only as editor but as publisher too—responsible for raising all our money—left little time to do much else besides teach. I couldn’t find the time to write for my own blog. I could barely squeeze out a weekly column for the Daily Beast, let alone write the several longer essays for which I’d been gathering string. I loved Open Zion but more and more felt that it was keeping me from what I wanted to do most.
When Atlantic Media offered me the chance to focus on writing again—via columns for theatlantic.com and essays for National Journal—it felt like a precious opportunity since no ideas-oriented magazine has better navigated transition from print to web. When Haaretz—which is making a major push into the American market—offered me a home for my Israel and Jewish writing as Senior Columnist, I knew I wouldn’t have to abandon the causes Open Zion championed. To work for an American magazine founded in 1857 as part of the struggle for abolition and an Israeli newspaper that has been championing a democratic Jewish state since 1919 fills me with awe.
As sad as I am that Open Zion will close at year’s end, I’d like to think we’re part of a tradition that began long before us and will endure long after. …
I’d like to believe that just as Breira made Open Zion possible, we will pave the way for others. And that one day, young American Jews will be able to plant themselves smack in the center of our community, ask the hardest, most fundamental questions, advocate fiercely for Palestinian rights and dignity, and be told by their elders what they already know in their hearts: That they are doing our people proud.
Beinart is an excellent analyst, and the piece includes this somewhat-irrelevant but superb description of Zionist pressure inside Jewish communal life:
there’s an inevitable tension between being part of a close-knit community and challenging what that community believes. As I began writing critically about Israel, I began to feel it. When I asked one friend to comment on the manuscript of my book, he at first replied that for the sake of our friendship, he would rather not. At the kosher for Passover resort where I had been a speaker for many years (and no longer am), one guest told the proprietors that he wanted a room that would allow him to walk to and from meals without ever laying eyes on me. One Saturday morning when I was walking to synagogue, a man asked me if I was Peter Beinart. When I said yes, he announced—loud enough for his kids and mine to hear—that “I think your politics are shit.”
I’d been expecting some of that. What I hadn’t expected was something else: The yeshiva student in Brooklyn who emailed me because he felt that his school’s depiction of Arabs was inhumane. The middle-aged employee of a right-wing Jewish group who told me she had grown so disturbed by the way her organization depicted Muslims that she began, literally, cold calling local Muslims so she could see for herself if they were as pathological as she had been told. The college student and Birthright alum who almost began to cry at a panel sponsored by the Jewish Federations of North America as she described feeling “betrayed” because what “I’ve been told growing up [about Israel]…a lot of it has not been honest and not been true.”
As these unusual experiences mounted, I began to wonder whether it might be possible to build a different sort of community, a group blog infused with Jewish commitment yet dedicated to a radically open conversation that included Palestinians. When I proposed calling the blog “Zion Square,” which later became “Open Zion,” some supporters said it was too parochial. But that was exactly the point. I didn’t want a purely universalist space, devoid of tribal commitment. I wanted to show that asking the hardest, most painful, questions about Israel could be a Jewish, even Zionist, act….
Right. Then he abandons that “hardest, most painful” building project a year and a half in? Jeez. I wonder if the negative energy got to him. Or if he saw that Israel was going off the edge and he didn’t want to find himself in the company of Max Blumenthal, David Samel, and Rebecca Vilkomerson.
The traditional response would be to find some other person and put them in charge whilst you make a dash for the exit.
I wonder why this strategy was not employed.
Ambitions > principles.
If you took his side too much last time, you bash him a bit too much this time.
Yes, he has a side of craven careerism and he lacks the pure idealism you, Blumenthal and the other editors at this site have, not to mention heroes like David Sheen and others.
He is still going to write about Jewish/Israeli issues on Haaretz.
Look, he will always be a Zionist. He’ll denounce and denounce but he will never abandon, almost no matter how bad it gets. I’ve lost count how many times people like Brad Burston or Carlo Strenger have written a column where they essentially say that’s it, I’m giving up on Israel. Yet there they are next week, doing a new column. Beinart’s going down that path.
In the fight over liberalism and Zionist, he will choose ethnic nationalism, every time. Also, he was the editor of the TNR once, you know, at a record young age. I guess he feels he should be a lot more important. Titles have a funny way of casting aside idealism for some people – even if they all rationalize it while it’s going on.
In brief; Beinart’s one of the better Zionists. But of course, when your bar is Goldberg, Dershowitz and Chait, how hard is that? I think he’s a gifted writer. I enjoy his writing on politics in the American context as well, although it’s less original and less passionate than when he writes on Jewish/Israeli issues.
Has he succeeded, so he can quit?
Has he failed, so he can quit?
Has his goal (whatever it was, maybe giving “Liberal Zionism” a believable and intellectually supportable meaning) become impossible — you know, “you can’t get there from here”? or maybe the simpler goal, defending Israel as it is rather than as people once believed it was or hoped it would be? In which case he might as well give up Zion Square?
Have the rulers of Israel and their AIPAC rooting section in USA become so distasteful that a person of taste and distinction wouldn’t touch them with a 10-foot pole?
Has he taken down the Israeli flag in his children’s bedroom?
Israel is not his problem at the end of the day. Mother Israel drunk or sober and she’s drunk 24/7 on jewish victimhood. He’s probably right to walk way.