Opinion

A response to the ‘Washington Post’ blogger who calls me an anti-Semite

The great spiritual challenge to Jews is to deal with our actual status in western societies.

Today in the Washington Post, David Bernstein accuses me of anti-Semitism for a post I did last week titled “Forgiving the Anti-Semites” in which I related several incidents over Passover that touched on issues of Jewish power and victimization. The heart of that post was a friend saying that Israel would not cease to abuse Palestinians until Jews forgave the anti-Semites the atrocities committed against Jews in Europe in the last century. Bernstein says that the piece was passed on to him by a Jewish friend who wrote, “Who thinks like this?” then he calls Mondoweiss a hate site and says that my hatred of Israel blurs into hatred of Jews.

I urge folks to read my original piece, here. I like it, I’m proud of it. And here’s why.

The thrust of the piece is that Jews have to live here now, in an America where we have considerable power. This is the issue Bernstein completely avoids: the remarkable rise of Jews inside the U.S. establishment in the last generation. How do we deal with this? How do we reconcile ourselves to this status? Do we even acknowledge it? Or do we turn a blind eye to it because it is embarrassing or goes against our image of ourselves. Bernstein cannot acknowledge it, but he surely knows that this is a signal fact of the Jewish experience, the American rise. He offers a long meditation on the Jewish experience of persecution in Europe. No doubt– but that was the point of my piece. Dwelling in that victimization narrative is a way of avoiding dealing with who we are today; and we are by and large privileged. If there is one story that captures the Jewish experience of the last 40 years it is this: that Alan Dershowitz threatened to leave Harvard Law School in 1970 or so unless they appointed a Jewish dean. There had been none. Well they did name one, and there have been a couple since, one of whom now sits on the Supreme Court, along with two other Jews appointed by Democratic presidents. In fact the doors opened all over our society in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s; and Dershowitz became a bestselling proponent of Israel. And the Israel lobby cannot be understood outside of that sociological frame. Bill Clinton was embraced by AIPAC over George H.W. Bush in 1992 because he had Jewish friends at his wedding and p.s. he supported the settlement project. Then in the ’90s Bill Kristol purged the Jim Baker “Arabists” from the Republican Party; and Bush’s son ran for president as a supporter of settlements, and got Sheldon Adelson’s money. If you don’t think that this reflects the Jewish rise into the establishment, and the importance of (Zionist) Jewish money to the political process, then you should read the Forward this week, which recognizes that the American political class has a right to discuss the rightwing Zionist influence over the Republican party, stemming from wealth.

I am proud of my Passover piece because I believe this is a great spiritual challenge to Jews: to deal with our actual status in western societies. What would the American Jewish community look like today if we moved beyond viewing ourselves as the eternal victim?

Part of that process means reckoning with our history and the degree to which we were essential to industrialization and the rise of the modern nation state. This is a theme of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, it was at the heart of Benjamin Ginsburg’s Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, and of Jerry Muller’s Capitalism and the Jews. And yes, part of this acknowledgment means wrestling with our role in European societies at the turn of the century, the remarkable transformation that we helped to effect as modern professionals. Bernstein leaves out my quotation of Herzl on this theme; but before the Holocaust, Jews often talked about our economic power (and privately many Jews do so now, too). One of those professionals, Franz Kafka, often wrote in his diaries and letters about our singular presence in Prague and Berlin, and in a landmark statement of self-hatred, wrote to his non-Jewish girlfriend: “At times I’d like to stuff them all, simply as Jews (me included) into, say, the drawer of the laundry chest. Next I’d wait, open the drawer a little to see if they’ve suffocated, and if not, shut the drawer again and keep doing this to the end.” That girlfriend later died in the Holocaust trying to save Jews. So did two of Kafka’s sisters; and I quote that letter not to approve it, but to point out that questions of Jewish status in the west have been deeply perplexing to Jewish writers before me; and these issues also interest me deeply; and to try and blackguard inquiry, as Bernstein does, is a form of censorship aimed at preserving the current order, notably a disastrous Middle East policy.

The adamant refusal by powerful organs such as the Washington Post to examine the Israel lobby and its roots has hurt U.S. foreign policy and undoubtedly hurt a lot of people along the way. And we need smart people to talk about this. The Best and the Brightest helped to (nonviolently) reform the last social order, the one that produced Vietnam; and the social order that produced Iraq also deserves reform. I don’t think that accounting can be done without Jewish reflection. Bernstein mocks me for saying that Brian Roberts runs the largest media company in the world and Chris Matthews works for him and praises Israel. He says that this is evidence of Protocols of the Elders of Zion-like thinking. But that’s just name-calling, aimed at stopping people from looking at actual facts in the media age. It’s like Dana Milbank saying that Walt and Mearsheimer had Teutonic names or David Remnick cracking that if we only got rid of the Israel lobby, Osama bin Laden would have gone back into the construction business. It’s not an answer. And the answer for me is not actually an assault on elites, but their reform, including an aggressive critique of Zionism inside Jewish life. Because Zionism is a discriminatory dangerous ideology, and premised on ideas of Jewish victimization that do not reflect our experience in any way.

I give Bernstein one point. I probably shouldn’t have used the $7,000 a week hotel anecdote straight out of Goodbye Columbus toward the end of the piece. It was shtik-like and cartoonish, and that piece was serious business.

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It’s interesting that Bernstein’s ‘proof’ that MW is a hate site is a MJ Rosenberg’s year-old piece, while just yesterday Rosenberg tweeted a link to the James North-Phil Weiss post at MW about Geller.

The Washington Post has Jennifer Rubin, Richard Cohen, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Bernstein, and Eugene Volokh. I am not sure why Sheldon Adelson once thougth he should buy the Post–they’re doing his work for free.

You should be proud of that piece, Phil. I don’t know how many ‘hits’ it got, but there are 345 comments. It generated discussion and provoked thought. As we all know and you say, we need more not less:

“The adamant refusal by powerful organs such as the Washington Post to examine the Israel lobby and its roots has hurt U.S. foreign policy and undoubtedly hurt a lot of people along the way. And we need smart people to talk about this.”

You should be proud of this piece, too. MW truly is “The War of Ideas in the Middle East”. Instead of climbing aboard and engaging in the discussion, they prefer to hit you with the boom/oar. It’s a testament to the success of MW, albeit unpleasant coming from cowards who don’t even bother commenting here.

@Phil

It is a good piece. You are a good writer.

But you are not going to be able to write one of the most anti-Jewish sites on the web and not be thought of as an anti-Semite. Just to pick the recent example. You don’t like Pamela Geller. Pamela Geller in her most racist diatribe doesn’t advocate doing to Muslim countries what you want to do the Jewish ons. You believe that Pamela Geller is being racist when she incites Muslims and yet you work hard to make sure Jews are incited against on college campuses. I don’t understand how you can quite literally have posts next to each other about Islamaphobia while inciting against Jews. Muslims are vastly vastly more powerful on a global scale than Jews, so it ain’t a power thing. You get grouped with her. You don’t want to get grouped with her stop running an anti-Jewish site.

The issue with anti-semitism is not that you talk about the Zionist lobby or that you want to talk about how Jews handle power or you want to critique Israeli minority policy or… It is that you consistently hold Jews to entirely different standards than those you apply to other groups. Your argument is that the Zionist lobby is uniquely powerful. People like me would put it at the bottom of the top 20 nowhere near the pharmaceutical lobby or the agribusiness lobby. A good deal of what you write about the Zionist lobby is true of most lobbies. You don’t indicate in your writing.
a) You have objections to lobbying as a major component of how America is governed
b) You have specific objections to the Zionist lobby.

Conflating (a), writing about the Zionist lobby with charges that apply to all lobbies is anti-Semitic. It is just like the people who attack blacks for being on public assistance even though far more whites are on public assistance.

Similarly on Israeli “crimes”. Your site is completely biased exclusively focusing on bad stuff about Israel, among bad things presenting the most hostile sources and then further drawing conclusions as if there was no conflicting information. From that bias you are argue for policies that deny Jews any self determination and forever enslave them (at best) to Palestinians. Most Jews have a sense of proportion and balance. They understand that Israel is a young country dealing with the problems of a young nation and they should be rightfully compared to young countries not mature countries: Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Zaire… And in that comparison they come out quite well.

When Pamela Geller says the most negative stuff possible about Muslims cast in the most negative light she gets classified differently than people who write balanced stuff. And that’s irrespective of whether they think she has a good cause or not.

Finally, certainly there are reasonable questions about having a dialogue on how the Jews handle power. This is a conversation the left has wanted to have with Jews since the 1940s, where Jews still think of themselves as a weak minority and no one else in the USA does. That being said, I suspect when they stop thinking of themselves that way America Jews are just going to be another group of white Republicans. Jewish support for the left is nothing like it was 2 generations ago., it is becoming more of a hobby than a point of self image. I think most Jews are liberal because they secular and educated. The dialogue is ultimately going to be for American Jews, “your interests are better aligned with the powerful’s desire to maintain than the powerless’ desire to adjust”. Are you sure you really want what you are asking for?

“You should be proud of that piece…” Just got that right!

What brought out David Berstein in the first place was the honesty of your piece, Philip, in conjunction with its insight and its deep truth. These are not characteristics that we find nowadays in any political discourse, let alone from the professional sophists who will tell any lie to promote Likud policies as they lurk in our country’s newspapers, “think” tanks and television media.