1.

In November a close friend who's a builder broke his neck working on a roof, and a couple weeks later a few friends of his went to finish the job for him. I worked with two other guys in the sun on a big house, an estate in a forested ravine. I know the homeowner too. He’s odd-- thin and crooked and goggly-eyed, always on the lookout. I walk a lot through the woods around here and I end up trespassing now and then. Once when I came down that ravine, he drove up to me when I was out on the road and sort of confronted me. 

We were on the roof when one of the carpenters brought up the Palestinians. He knows about this website. He said, it’s wrong the way those people are treated. It’s disgraceful. Then he asked me to tell him about the occupation.

I told him about kids not getting out of Gaza to get their scholarships, and he said, And it’s all because of the United States.

The taller carpenter was further up the roof putting on sheathing and he objected. You can’t judge the Israelis. We’d do exactly the same if we had gone through what they went through. The smaller carpenter got into it with him. What would we do if someone came over here and took our land, he said. I was tucked under the eaves holding soffit strips for the taller guy to screw down, and grinning devilishly.

He said, You want to get rid of Israel? There’s a good reason it’s there, that would be like the Holocaust all over again. I’m not saying that, the smaller one said.

The smaller guy went off to get another sheet of plywood and I could see him talking with the homeowner. The homeowner had been raking the yard as we talked. The smaller carpenter came back and said something under his breath to the other carpenter. The taller one passed it on to me: He wants us to stop talking about Israel. It upsets him. He is Jewish.

The conversation shut down. Later I felt a wave of sympathy for the homeowner. He is strange, he has a European name. I think he must be the child of Holocaust survivors. It is not hard to assign him a tortuous back story, barely escaping Poland via North Africa, wealth from German reparations. I can’t help identify with his helpless, rootless feeling. Still it didn’t excuse him shutting down the conversation.

2.

A friend of my wife came to visit around the holiday and on a whim he decided to drop in on a finance mogul who lives near us and had been sending him emails to try and get him to consult on a job. We drove up to the man’s town in my wife’s friend’s car and took a while to find the address.

It was a forbidding estate. Towering stone pillars and a steel gate. But by chance as we stopped outside the gate, it slid open. Shazaam. We passed huge sculptures on the driveway going down to a lake.

Of course, we weren’t expected. But my wife and her friend are both streetsmart drop-in artists. I find it excruciating. I hunched in the back of the car as they sauntered brashly up to the huge oaken front door. I could hear them jabbering with the man and his wife over the intercom.

How did you get in? How did you get through the gate? Who did you say you are? Translation: you have some nerve.

But my wife and her friend are charming, and soon she came back out and summoned me to come in too. Everyone had a drink. The man showed us around the vast house…. pornographic art and polished stone shower slabs from Uzbekistan and Timbuktu, walls that move on electric hidden cables, televisions that glide out of walls, an amphiteater above the water seating hundreds of close friends, a theater with gas fires along the wall. We were lucky to catch him home, in one of his four houses. You get the picture.

My wife and her friend were marveling, but I was embarrassed, because I'm Jewish and so was the mogul. This was shameless. And I saw it all coming when we drove down past the hulking sculptures. Is this what my great people have come to? It was like Gatsby throwing down shirts on the bed to impress Nick Carraway, but in this case it was exotic building materials, and none of the wit. But I guess WASPs lived like this once, when they were driving the economy.

My wife and her friend wore delighted smiles but I felt a need to excuse him inwardly. I said to him, You must have grown up poor. “My father was an immigrant laborer in South Africa,” he said with bite, as though he had said it many times before. “I grew up in [an American city] with bare plywood floors. I decided I was never going to live that way again.”

An American story. Though I wish it weren’t my people.

3.

My property touches another guy’s land at the back, a businessman and devout Christian. His wife sends out cards that warn people against being B.U.S.Y. Bustling under Satan’s Yoke.

He's a big hunter, and the only times I’ve seen him were in the woods. Twice I’ve disturbed his hunt, trespassing on his land to walk to a friend’s house over the ridge. One year I passed his camouflaged treestand with my dog and looked up and there he stood twenty feet above me with a black mask on. He nodded once like a fell superhero, gazing angrily. It froze my blood.

A year later I came over the rise with the dog and he was walking the ridge with a gun. This time he yelled at me for scaring off the deer he had been tracking for the last two hours. My dog had ruined the hunt. He said he had excused me the year before because he understood people trespassed. Still. I was silent, nodding shamefully.

I sent him a note later apologizing, and promised not to do it again.

But I did it again. Last month. I didn’t realize it was still bow season. There was a camouflage box tent on the ridge, and he must have been inside it. He called my neighbor to chew her out. What did he say to you? I asked her. She said, he’s waiting for Jew season to open. We laughed. It was her joke, not the hunter’s. She is married to a Jew, a mixed couple, like me.

Though later I reflected, I never felt scared of him, never, not even when he was stalking the ridge with his gun. Don’t go old-school on me now. No one is thinking that way.

4.

My neighbor Terry called me because he was going to cut down some telephone poles in the state park. I rushed off to help him. Terry is an official trail maintainer for New York-New Jersey trail conference and he keeps up a loop through a state park not far from my house. Sometimes I help him when he’s out there with his chain saw.

I was wild to do the telephone poles because, come on, who wouldn't want to chop down telephone poles? Also, they clutter this trail, and I like the woods. But the other reason is because Terry is Jewish. Not Jewish in any of the conventional ways. He is a teacher, he’s outdoorsy as hell, he’s built like a brick shithouse, he worked for 25 years as a telephone lineman. He is Hannah Arendt’s kind of Jew—Hannah Arendt who said that the kibbutz was the greatest Jewish achievement of the 20th century and who disdained wealth and “moneygrubbing.”

I like being with another Jew who understands my love of physical labor. As Terry cut the poles, I pulled on the wires to make them come down the right way. It was cold, and I came up with a joke. Terry used to work at Goldman, Sachs, and that’s how he learned to use a chain saw. "They taught you that on the trading floor at Goldman, Sachs, you don’t fool me," I said. Terry grinned and felled another telephone pole.

We carried four and five foot lengths of pole to fill a culvert on a creek that was washed out by Irene.

The next day Terry emailed me to say the Parks people have been all over him. We were out of line. There’s creosote in the poles. He’s got to move them all out.

I wrote back, No good deed goes unpunished, didn’t they teach you that lesson at Goldman?

Terry wrote back to say, he's named after his grandfather, Edwin Posner, who was Chairman of the American Stock Exchange twice, because the government asked him the second time to clean up corruption.

Well Terry, you've moved up in my book.

5.

I needed to borrow my friend’s hammer drill, the guy who broke his neck. He lives two-and-a-half miles from me, and I’ve tried to look in on him every day or so. For a while my wife arranged a schedule for friends to bring him meals. But he's healed well, and now he’s able enough not to need anyone to cook for him.

I called him on new year's day and said, I’ll take away your garbage if I can borrow that hammer drill. Sure, he said.

I stayed to watch some of the football game then went in the back for two big bags of garbage. Can I take them through the house? I asked. Sure, he said.

I hit the Christmas tree going past it and an ornament shattered. A big one.

He said, Oh hell, my favorite, my great-grandmother gave it to us.

I got on my knees to clean it up and my fingers trembled as I tore open the garbage bag to stick the shards in. I felt like hell. I felt so bad I didn’t ask for the hammer drill after all. When I got home I told my wife and she consoled me. It was the first day of the new year and I’d already crapped it up. I’d resolved to be orderly, I'd crapped it up. She said, You’ve been a good friend to him, don’t worry.

In the morning she was on-line looking for antique Christmas ornaments. I went to my desk and set up the paypal to buy one from Estonia for $40. Me, buying Christmas ornaments on January 2.

Then my wife called out to me in a sharp voice. A something-wrong voice. I went into her office. She had called my friend to tell him how shitty I felt, and he told her, Didn’t he get that I was joking? That was a nothing ornament. 

Later I heard my wife telling the story on me. This is how dramatic Phil is, she said. Or, this is how gullible. I’ve never been streetsmart either-- another of my resolutions.

I still needed that hammer drill. I called my friend and offered to move his logpile into the house for him. I drove down. I was going to grab that drill.

h/t The Awl's 15 Most Delightful Internet Films of 2011 post for the videos. Here are some more:

For the last few months I’ve been reading a classic of philosemitism: the "Martha Quest" novels of Doris Lessing. Set in Southern Rhodesia in 1936-1949 and published in England in the 1950s, the first four of these books trace the youth of a fiercely independent child of British colonials born, as Lessing was, in 1919.

Lessing is famous as a "kaffir-lover," to use the racist slang hurled against her; her hatred of the color bar resulted in her leaving Rhodesia for England in 1949 and culminated in her winning the Nobel Prize four years ago. But there are no major black characters in these novels, and really Martha Quest is a Jew lover. Determined to overcome her parents' anti-Semitism, she gravitates to the Jews in the provincial capital of Salisbury (now Harare, Zimbabwe).

A fatherly Jewish lawyer gives Martha a job so that she can leave her parents’ farm and move to the city. There Martha  loses her virginity to one Jew (Eastern European "scum," he says), marries another (German Communist refugee), and has an intense affair with a third (Zionist Communist). A Jewish doctor prescribes contraception and tells her she's too far along for an abortion. Martha's Jewish friend Stella sets the bar on fashion and decoration, while Jasmine Cohen sets the bar on politics. Jasmine's cousin Abraham dies fighting in Spain-- and Jews are all over the small Communist party group Martha joins. (In her actual autobiography, Lessing has said that the Jewish mentors in these books were based on real people.)

But my business here is not to count the many Jews in these books. It is to express pride in my inheritance as it was perceived by a non-Jew. The sense pours through these books that were it not for the Jews of that generation and their “ancient culture,” Doris Lessing could never have become Doris Lessing. As brilliant a writer as she is, Lessing needed to break out of the thick racist porridge of the land-based cultures that surrounded her—the British colonials with their "Sports Club" snobbery and the Dutch Afrikaaner men with thighs like “pillars”—and to do so she threw herself on intellectually-sophisticated Jews.

At the beginning of the Martha Quest story, there are the Cohen boys, Joss and Solly, the “brilliant” sons of a shopowner in the small town of Banket, who recognize adolescent Martha’s intelligence and send packages of books to her every week or two. From the books of Communism and psychology, “Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside.” This becomes her greatest “weapon” in life, literary consciousness:

“She was not only miserable, she would focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station….”

The Cohen boys in their Kosher household--Solly a Trotskyite Zionist, Joss a Marxist--are exact cousins of the Jewish intellectuals at City College in the 1930s.

At the other end of the Rhodesian books is Martha's tormented lover Thomas Stern, a paranoid refugee from Poland who has lost his sisters in the Holocaust and veers self-destructively from Communism to business, from Jewish terrorism in Palestine to human rights work on behalf of blacks. By scoffing at Martha's urging that he renounce violence, Stern gives the Martha Quest books their title: The Children of Violence series. But Stern is not only called to violence, he's called to retail:

“So you see how hard it is to escape one’s fate, Martha? In Poland, middle-men, money-makers—the Stern Brothers. And here? My brother’s a rich man already, and we left Poland with what we had on our backs, eight years ago.”

A lot of my writing on this site is critical of the Jewish political presence in modern America. But I have a chauvinist streak of my own, and Lessing's non-Jewish eye confirms it in me. The Jewish gift helped to form Doris Lessing as a young writer: the cerebral, text-bound life of persecuted Jews gave her awareness of the world and encouraged her to deliver the savage-sympathetic portrait of white colonial society that would make her name in England in the 1950s. That life is the Jewish culture that I was born into-- outsiders, people of the book, harsh critics of the social structure.

[Joss Cohen] fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:

‘You repudiate the colour bar?’

‘But of course.’

‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’

‘Naturally’—this with a touch of impatience.

‘You are an atheist?’

‘You know quite well that I am.’

‘You believe in socialism?’

‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.

Doris Lessing was an early adopter. Her philosemitism parallels the philosemitism of non-Jewish intellectuals in the States in the 40s and 50s, Edmund Wilson for instance, and anticipates by a generation or two full-blown American philosemitism of the meritocracy-- when the White House was loaded with Jewish advisers, when Clinton put two Jews on the Supreme Court, when Jews became university presidents and started google and facebook and craigslist, and neocons guided our foreign policy.

American philosemitism reflects the Jewish contribution to this society. Recently I was told that the world still envies the U.S. because of four industries we have that no one else has (universities/research, film/media, software, and finance), and all these industries are as full of Jews as Doris Lessing’s early novels were. As Scott McConnell, who had something of Doris Lessing’s own Jewish-engendered intellectual awakening when he joined the Commentary neoconservative crowd in the 1980s, has told me, America is thankful to Jews because they are driving the economy. I think this recognition pervades Establishment culture. When I fault Chris Matthews for never talking about the Israel lobby, I must be aware that the network that gives him his salary was built and is now owned by Jewish entrepreneurs in the new global economy. When we try and explain the dismissal of Ron Paul, it is because he above all candidates is representative of an Establishment structure that has no truck with Jews-- as opposed to Romney with his neoconservative advisers, Gingrich with his Sheldon Adelson money and Barack Obama with his Axelrods and AIPACs and Crowns. When I marvel that Robert Kagan works for Romney and his wife works for Obama without anyone raising an eyebrow, or that Stuart Levey the former Under Secretary of Treasury worked for Bush and Obama without a hitch—again, this is a measure of the large Jewish presence in the Establishment. Jewish gifts have propelled the new economy, such as it is. And when people accuse Occupy Wall Street of anti-semitism, it is in part because Occupy are critics of the new economy, and much of that economy was built by Jews.

Back when we were outsiders, Hannah Arendt warned Jews about reverence for wealth: liberal Zionists, she wrote, "failed to... attack the role of Jewish finance in the political structure of Jewish life." 

That same warning is sounded in the Martha Quest books, from the restless Communist Zionist Thomas Stern:

“Unlike you, when I work, I think in terms of money. I’m learning that it's terrifyingly easy to make money.”

She laughed...

“I don’t want you to laugh about money. I’ve got to outwit it. I’ve got to find a way of not becoming Thomas Stern, rich merchant of this city.”

The beauty and tragedy of the Children of Violence series is that Thomas Stern does outwit that fate, at the cost of his own life. But modern American Jews are still stuck with Stern's contradictions. We’re Zionists, and we've been incredibly successful. With the success has come something that none of the provincial Jews in Lessing's philosemitic saga ever dreamed of having: power, which has eroded our outsiderness and endangered our detachment—that dispassionate eye on misery, that clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead.

It is not that Jews are incapable of that detachment. Many are. But the Cohen boys shared that gift a long time ago, and it is no longer just ours.

We've had a Netflicks DVD of The Social Network hanging around the house for months. My wife watched it ages ago, by herself, but because I'm so dependent, I've been pressing her to watch it again, with me. Last night I almost got her to do it, till she frowned and said she found the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg "anti-Semitic." Well then I was bound and determined to see the movie. I took it over to a friend's house, and watched it there.

My wife is on to something. The portrait of Zuckerberg in the movie is repulsive, and it ends up being generic, a portrait of the new striving American Jewish meritocratic billionaire. Given that this portrait was brought to us by a production team that included Jews-- writer Aaron Sorkin and mega-producer Scott Rudin among others--I relate it to my own disaffection with the new Jewish establishment. Watching the film, I remembered that I'm not the only one who goes around counting my people in the news, and not the only one ashamed of what the winners look like. Am I self-hater? No. Just a little disgusted.

It's really hard to believe that Zuckerberg is as bad as he's made out to be. He's a soulless anti-Gatsby, clamoring for inclusion, and clamoring for hedonism, but without any affection. The joyless Jewish Harvard social milieu from which Zuckerberg springs are a crude caricature in this film-- and certainly misrepresent Harvard in 2003. I don't think Zuckerberg really cared about getting into a WASPy club; besides, those clubs weren't even WASPy anymore. But the social divide the film captures was certainly true of Sorkin and my generation: we felt ourselves to be confined to a grind community built around law and guilt, and wondered about how much wild fun those goyim were having with girls and drugs. We wanted a part of that; and the desire to be at the fun party is what drives Zuckerberg in this movie. The movie uses Phillips Exeter, the fancy private school Zuckerberg went to, as a rapier against him: he's continually shown wearing PE t-shirts.

Yes, all the WASPs are caricatured here. The Winkelvosses are a vicious joke about gentile privilege. But I'm not interested in the WASP caricatures, I'm interested in what my wife gleaned in the Zuckerberg portrayal. The character played by Jesse Eisenberg only cares about elites and the big score. He has no friends, because he fucks everyone over, beginning with the first scene when he disses the girl who just dumped him on a blog by talking about her bra size. He screws the Winkelvosses and the math whiz on whom he depends for a crucial algorithm to build his website, Eduardo Saverin. And yes Saverin is Jewish, from Brazil, but he doesn't really relieve the picture of Jewish piggitude. That picture is filled out by Harvard President Larry Summers, who looks like a pig (as played by Douglas Urbanski) and crudely tells the Winkelvoss twins that they are wrong to be demanding relief from Harvard for the fact that Zuckerberg stole an idea from them.

The Winkelvosses are a WASP joke because they are following an entitled American code of honor in pursuing Zuckerberg through the Harvard hierarchy, but if they're a joke-- their lawyer is called Hotchkiss-- Zuckerberg and Summers are the new ugly breed of success. I spent a lot of time with Scott Rudin once and know he has a great sociological mind; I can just see him and Sorkin sitting around laughing about how Jews have taken over the Establishment, the same thing I often write about here. And let's show the world how they're doing it-- ugly.

Is the Zuckerberg picture anti-Semitic? Well it comes close. I started thinking about Zuckerberg's recent facebook pictures, including the one below, and thinking, well

Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan

he can't be that much of a dick. Still, this movie strikes me as a landmark in a great tradition, the Jewish literary hatred of money. From I.L. Peretz's short stories about the Polish ghetto to Philip Roth's viciousness toward the Patimkins in Goodbye, Columbus, there is a Jewish tradition of afflicting the reverence of wealth in our community.

Kafka put it best in his undelivered letter to his father of 1919, upbraiding him for the Jewish "materials" he had tried to give him: 

This was the religious material that was handed on to me, to which may be added at most the outstretched hand pointing to "the sons of the millionaire Fuchs," who attended the synagogue with their father on the High Holy Days. How one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as fast as possible, I could not understand; precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoted action.

I remember that outstretched hand of reverence in my life. I remember being told to worship the Blaustein family in Baltimore (he of Standard Oil and the famous dialogue with Ben-Gurion about, we ain't moving to Israel) and bridling. And I put this film in that category: hatred of the millionaire Fuchs. A fine tradition, but it made this film hard to watch.

Israel isn't good for the Jews anymore. That's the news from New York.

It happened in the last week, or the last two years. A feeling has taken root deep in the American Jewish community that Israel is hurting us, hurting our standing in the world and our future. The restrictions on democracy, the curbs on women, the intransigence vis-a-vis the Palestinians when Obama has demanded movement, the indifference to the Arab Spring-- Israel is a society we no longer recognize as Jewish like we're Jewish, and worst of all, its militarism is exposing American Jews to the accusation that we are dually loyal. And we don't like that: We're Americans.

The straw that broke the camel's back was clearly the oafish ad campaign that targeted Christmas and intermarriage-- the ad campaign that Netanyahu cancelled. Even rightwing Israel lobbyists were stunned by how clueless the ad campaign was. But it was an expression of genuine Israeli attitudes. And that is what's so scary: American Jews are waking up to the fact that Israeli society is nothing like ours. Hillary Clinton could only launch her criticism of religious restrictions on women in Israel because she knows that American Jews feel this way. Ambassador Howard Gutman was speaking for many sensible American Jews when he said that Israeli policies are hurting Jews by fostering anti-Semitism. 

We are integrators. We live in America because we want to be Jews in a diverse society. That is the spirit of American Jewish life by and large. And now these Zionists--separatists whom we never completely trusted when we were arguing with them in Eastern Europe--are quietly understood to have hijacked Jewishness and taken it to a dark ugly place. And their cake is cooked; Israel has produced "apartheid on steroids," as a Jewish leader in the Nation wrote this fall; he wanted no part of it.

Still, the separatists, the neoconservatives, including Elliott Abrams--who said that Jews must stand apart in every society they live in except Israel, the very opposite of the integrationist creed-- are trying to take our country even further, to an attack on Iran! On Friday the Secretary of Defense said emphatically this is not in America's interests:

[Attacking Iran] would only, I think, ultimately not destroy their ability to produce an atomic weapon, but simply delay it – number one.  Of greater concern to me are the unintended consequences, which would be that ultimately it would have a backlash and the regime that is weak now, a regime that is isolated would suddenly be able to reestablish itself, suddenly be able to get support in the region, and suddenly instead of being isolated would get the greater support in a region that right now views it as a pariah.  Thirdly, the United States would obviously be blamed and we could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, striking our ships, striking our military bases.  Fourthly – there are economic consequences to that attack – severe economic consequences that could impact a very fragile economy in Europe and a fragile economy here in the United States.  

            And lastly I think that the consequence could be that we would have an escalation that would take place that would not only involve many lives, but I think could consume the Middle East in a confrontation and a conflict that we would regret. 

Could anyone be more clear? And still the hard right Israel lobby pushes for us to attack Iran. But we Jews are Americans!

A hundred years ago Louis Brandeis's dubious achievement was to mingle American Jewish identity with Zionism. Brandeis converted to Zionism (in order to get a Supreme Court seat; Wilson wanted a representative Jew, not a rich German Jew), and declared that to be a good American Jew was to be a Zionist, that love for two ideas of homeland was just fine.

And now Brandeis's achievement is being reversed. Who can love that "homeland"? Israeli values are incompatible with American Jewish values. Even Jeffrey Goldberg says the occupation is a "moral disaster." Well guess what, it's been going on for 44 years! In its segregated buses and roads, in its ad campaigns that targets intermarriage and Christmas, in the refusal to end the occupation-- Israel is a different society than ours. 

Here our children marry non-Jews and even celebrate Christmas, and it's all good. Here intolerance is definitely not cool.

J Street saw this coming a couple of years ago--Our staff is all intermarried and they have Buddhist seders, said Jeremy Ben-Ami. Now that consciousness is taking hold in the larger Jewish community. We're integrators, we like our privilege in American society and understand that it carries obligations. And the petulant rage of the neocons at Leon Panetta's statement is merely a reflection of the neocons' growing isolation. Norman Finkelstein has been saying this for months now: American Jews are liberals, they will part ways with Israel out of profound differences. Donna Nevel has said it too: American Jews believe in social justice.

Years ago Walt and Mearsheimer described the profound risks of the Israel lobby to the Jewish presence in the U.S. The neocons smeared them as anti-Semites, as they are smearing Howard Gutman now. But take heart, Gutman, today Walt and Mearsheimer's view is common place, and echoed in the heart of Jewish life. David Remnick bristles that the American Jewish community is no longer going to be a patsy to rightwing Israel: "Sorry, it can’t go on this way. The  Jewish community is not just a nice breakfast at the Regency." Tom Friedman says that Obama is being held "hostage" by the powerful Israel lobby. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken says that the "Jewish lobby" in the U.S. is standing by apartheid. At the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations in Denver, a woman from Encounter admitted that all that pro-Israel history they fed the children was a "snowjob."

Ben Smith's piece in Politico today, "Israel rift roils Democratic ranks," is an announcement that these disturbances are now reaching the political establishment. The American Jewish community, which is the backbone of the Democratic Party, is breaking in two over support for Israel, and the presidential election campaign this year will at last bring that support out into the political battlefield, with Jews on both sides of the question, and non-Jews invited to speak their minds.

And the best Americans will speak up for Palestinian rights. When Jews Say No! came out against the Gaza slaughter that massacred 400  innocent children in 22 efficient days, when Jewish Voice for Peace endorsed the boycott, they did so as members of a Jewish community, participating openly in a diverse society. 

Hannah Arendt predicted this 60 years ago, when she wrote that by launching its existence violently, Israel was on its way to becoming a small warrior tribe like Sparta:

"Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestinian Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people."

That separation has now happened. Because more and more of us who care about Jewish life, as an integral part of western society, need to separate ourselves from an ethos of separation. We understand, Israel isn't good for the Jews.

Some of you may have noticed a new feature we’re calling Beyondoweiss. It's my bag: it's for personal and idiosyncratic posts that I do like this or this, often touching on marriage, though some of them, like this one, touch on the central concerns of the site.

We decided to do this for a couple of reasons. This website began as a personal blog at the New York Observer nearly six years ago. Overawed by the freedom of the internet, pleased that I did not have a news burden of writing for the front page, I did a lot of flakey-stupid posts like this one about a half avocado in my refrigerator. But I also did a lot of personal writing about Jewish identity and the Jewish presence in the Establishment and my intermarriage and my response to the Middle East, and those posts helped to animate this site. As Adam Horowitz said to me, when he signed on in 2008--with the commitment that he would not be writing such posts; go figure!--my personal narrative gave Americans a way to get into the issue. It felt important to both of us to keep a place for that stuff on the site. My dear boss at the Observer had come up with the name Mondo, and now Adam, a great editor in his own right, came up with Beyondo.

That name sets that material off a little. We have promised again and again to professionalize the site, and to us that means: more reliable news gathering, more influence in the discourse, more access to Palestinian voices, and a concerted effort to nurture brave new talent (many, many people helped me to become a writer and journalist). It means trying to give this site a lasting footing.

This site began like so many other internet sites as an outlet for a misfit who was hugely frustrated. The surest sign of its success is that it was taken over by the creative forces of social media—all the commenters and contributors who know more about the issue than I do. But I still crave the personal freedom of this medium, and the freedom from the news burden, and that’s why I liked the idea. I’m not sure where Beyondo will go. I might take it into water issues and literary and environmental concerns, maybe I’ll throw in a diary or two.

In one episode in the book, liberal colonial women stage a performance by "colored" children for a white audience in the capital, Salisbury (now Harare). The organizer of the show, Mrs. Maynard, is upset that she is not getting much help from young lefties, including the heroine of the book, Martha Quest (who like her creator leaves the colony for England in 1949).

The passage below explains Mr. and Mrs. Maynard's colonial mindset. The Maynards are liberals. Mrs. Maynard had grown up thinking of herself as a "rebel." And at the very end of the passage, the reference to young people is to Martha's set, the young lefties.

For it is by no means an accident that people find themselves in the colonies. Mrs. Maynard, as a girl [in England], had infuriated her family by refusing to get married at the right time. Instead, she had become a crusader for better housing in Whitechapel. She had been prevented from marrying a penniless clergyman who was similarly devoted only by the greatest effort on the part of her relations. As a revenge she had married Mr. Maynard: Africa had seemed to her both romantic and suitably exasperating to her family. She had seen herself ministering to grateful savages. And Mr. Maynard had left England because he found it insular. They had both been rebels, of a kind. Perhaps the strongest strand in their relationship was the feeling that they were rebels against tradition--even now, when their first concern was to uphold it.

For that matter, there is no white person in the colonies who has not arrived there for some similar reason: they are crusaders against tyranny to a man. Which accounts for that shrill note of protest when the world suggests that it is both stupid and old-fashioned to suppress native populations: for when these same colonials are passionately engaged in fighting against a minimum wage of one pound a month, or advocating the sjambok [whip] as a means of guidance for the uncivilized, they are always, in the bottom of their hearts, quite convinced that this too is part of their character as rebels against the tyranny and conservatism of the mother country which they left as adventurers into a free world.

Mrs. Maynard was quite genuine in her cry that these young people must feel with her in helping the unfortunate half-castes; that they should not must kill her idea of herself as a fearless and progressive person.

Put aside Goodman's contention that the editor of Adbusters, the magazine that put out the original call to occupy Wall Street on September 17, is an anti-Semite (see Phil Weiss on that argument here). 

Goodman doesn't accurately describe the role of Adbusters in the protests, which, despite their call to occupy Wall Street, is minimal.  Instead, she writes:

It isn’t just a few crackpots engaging in anti-Semitism incidents at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Apparently, the main organizer behind the movement – Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn – has a history of anti-Jewish writing...

That’s not to say the Occupy Wall Street movement itself is anti-Semitic. But if the top organizer behind the Tea Party turned out to have published a blacklist of American Jews he claimed had dual loyalty to the U.S. and Israel, the backlash from the media would be massive. And if the top leader of the Tea Party fought a legal battle with the U.S. Holocaust Museum over an offensive collage he made using Warsaw Ghetto photos, politicians certainly wouldn’t be lining up to support the movement.

Goodman is flat-out wrong on some basic facts about the Occupy Wall Street protests.  There is no leader; the movement's website itself states that they are a "leaderless resistance movement."  To say that the editor of Adbusters is a "main organizer" or a "top leader" is false.  Here's Nathan Schneider in The Nation explaining the Adbusters connection to the Wall Street protesters (my emphasis):

Q: I hear that Adbusters organized Occupy Wall Street? Or Anonymous? Or US Day of Rage? Just who put this together anyway?

A: All of the above, and more. Adbusters made the initial call in mid-July, and also produced a very sexy poster with a ballerina posed atop the Charging Bull statue and riot police in the background. US Day of Rage, the mainly internet-based creation of IT strategist Alexa O’Brien, got involved too and did a lot of the early legwork and tweeting. Anonymous—in its various and multiform visages—joined in late August. On the ground in New York, though, most of the planning was done by people involved in the NYC General Assembly, a collection of activists, artists and students first convened by folks who had been involved in New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts. That coalition of students and union workers had just finished a three-week occupation near City Hall called Bloombergville protesting the mayor’s plans for budget cuts and layoffs. They had learned from the experience and were itching to do it again, this time with the hope of having a bigger impact. But no one person or group is running the Wall Street occupation entirely

It's no surprise that the right is trying to derail a growing and popular movement, and that the most ardent defenders of Israel have begun to attack protests that have anti-war, anti-occupation and anti-corporate leanings.  But at least get the story straight. 

Alex Kane, a freelance journalist based in New York City, blogs at alexbkane.wordpress.com.  Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Beck routinely gushes over with praise for the Jews - unlike African Americans and welfare queens, he argues, "the Jews conquered slavery." But he also denigrates particular Jews with Holocaust references and suggests that Left-wing Israelis are self-hating Jews. I think that Beck has, unconsciously, incorporated anti-Semitism into his screeds because anti-Semitism is part of the foundation of modern anti-Left ideologies.

These ideologies have "evolved" from castigating Jews as subversive capitalist financiers to seeing their (now communist) hands in the civil rights and labor movements that the American Right despises so. Christian Zionism is useful to Beck and his cohorts because by loudly proclaiming their support for Zionism, they don't have to look their anti-Left dogmas hard in the mirror and acknowledge that they have roots in early 20th century Western anti-Semitism. As the conservative Jewish magazine FrontPage puts it about anti-Semitism today,

"The International Jew" mythos "can be boiled down to an idea that still resonates: every attempt to achieve some kind of extra-national organizing, aka “globalization,” can be traced back to the Protocols."

Beck has, of course, found his Dreyfus/Trotsky/Rothschild in the person of George Soros. Soros, as an "extra-national organizer" philanthropist, is depicted among the American Right as an accomplice in the Nazi Holocaust and a financial puppet master pulling the strings of "the Left" to achieve his sinister "liberal" agenda. The accusation prompted significant outrage, but Beck stayed in the saddle at Fox (as Soros is controversial enough anyway that Fox could fob off the resulting rabbinical condemnations and outcry from other media outlets). While the corporatists who bankroll the American Right are for corporate extra-national organizing, any other manifestations of globalization - i.e., what the Soros Foundation, the National Labor Relations Board or Amnesty International do - are anathema and Bolshevist. This is why anti-unionism and anti-regulation sentiment loom larger in GOP tirades than their bases's well-expressed anti-globalization sentiments.

Some sources believe that Fox decided to cancel Beck's show earlier this year after he attacked Simon Greer, head of Jewish Funds for Justice. When Greer offered his thoughts on charity, Beck called him out: "This [talk about the common good] leads to death camps. A Jew, of all people, should know that. This is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany." "Elites" like Greer, Beck argues again and again, will seek to build a "Progressive utopia, that only ends in death camps." But Greer is not nearly as partisan as Soros; and his faith-based approach is something the American right claims to support over "welfarism."

Beck, who insists he is not anti-Semitic, isn't above alluding to Jews as a whole being self-destructive, closet communists/fascists. Just before he held his "Restoring Courage" rally in Jerusalem, he said that the Tel Aviv J14 protests were Left-wing subversives. He sarcastically intoned the specter of "Islamocommunist" - J14 was presumably handing out flyers with Hamas reps - and suggested that the whole protest movement is being funded by an international conspiracy of Left-wing financiers.

The concept of a cabal of financiers funding world dissent - we've heard that before. Whether Beck realizes it or not, Adolf Hitler often prophesied that "if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." And it's a favorite propaganda theme of Iran's bombastic Mahmoud Ahmadinejahd and other tinplate tyrants trying to distract their own publics from domestic problems.

But Beck's ideological grandfather is Henry Ford, who gave "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" a print run in a national newspaper and was honored by Nazi diplomats, actions that have stained his reputation forever.

Ford, being an automaker, had a lot of interchangable conspiracies. He liked to interchange "the Jew" with "the union" or "Wall Street" in his post-WWI rants, a time period when he became increasingly close-minded and fatalistic. The industrialist claimed that unions were actually run by Jewish financiers and that he, ever the humanitarian, would not allow them to harm his workers (he had his own "Service Department" for doing that: Detroit gangsters armed with machine guns and lengths of pipe). Ford only publicly reputed his anti-Semitism after it became a serious PR problem for him, though according to those closest to him. "The Jew" became an implicit member of the elite, and Ford (despite his wealth), always saw himself as being outside that elite.

It is worth nothing that some of the most prominent Beck supporters have been opponents of civil rights legislation and opposed to the very principle of unionism. They claim that these things sap American greatness and are secretly tied to communism. Ford fought tooth and nail to keep the United Auto Workers Union out of Detroit - his scorn for them redoubled by the presence of Jewish union organizers. The union's Detroit leader was Walter Reuther, was a socialist immigrant who worked closely with American Jewish leaders to organize workers in the 1930s. Reuther was also, in his later years, a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights movement, along with many other secular Jews and reform-minded rabbis (Reuther, who was also a Zionist, clearly saw the Jewish struggle for equal rights playing out among African Americans in the 1960s).

The role American Jews played in organizing American workers and the early civil rights movement was significant - and all such organizing efforts have been and are loathed by conservatives. Red baiting, Jew baiting and black baiting increasingly came together, but this was approaching the fringes of respectability (and electability).

So, by the 1990s, pro-segregation and anti-labor forces had come together - consciously, in fact - to try and reverse the gains of organized labor and non-whites under the "anti-elitist" banner of restoring "states rights." The anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-labor populism in the U.S. today is very much the cloth that modern American conservativism is cut from. Gone is the wording "The International Jew," but the spirit is very much there, and that spirit animates Glenn Beck's ideologies: "liberal Jews" alias "the elite," alias "the communists," have once again become the enemies of American freedom and dignity - that is, they are Democratic sheeple and, in actuality, insufficiently Jewish!

One of Beck's recommended readings for his listeners, "The Red Network," is a good example of how "the Elite" can be easily conflated with "Jews." Written in the 1930s by a pro-Nazi American historian named Elizabeth Dilling, Beck proclaimed on his show (starting at 1:10 in this clip) that the work is an authoritative volume on communism. He also noted that the book cogently demonstrates the links between organized labor and communism - then started castigating the U.S.'s "communist" teachers' unions.

Beck seems to have missed the parts in the book where those labor activists were called scheming Russian Jews. "The Red Network," when not railing against African Americans, portrays Jews as either self-defeating pacifists or militant Bolshevik agitators, responsible for Germany's WWI defeat: "conspiring, revolutionary Communist Jews" betrayed Germany in WWI and then, according to Dilling (and Hitler), sought to take the country over in the 1920s on Moscow's orders. Beck's response to criticism of the book was to claim that he hardly remembered reading it a few days before and to denounce "the Left" for trying to paint him as an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer.

Some of the Henry Ford pedigree is visible in the man the Jewish Journal calls Beck's "mentor and guru, Mormon extremist W. Cleon Skousen, a hardcore racist and anti-Semite. Beck frequently totes Skousen's writings on his show, even though Skousen has long been an ardent opponent of African-American civil rights and sees communists behind everything (including African-American civil rights, of course).

Then there are the bizarre sermons of American evangelical leader John Hagee, a man Beck has had on his show numerous times. Hagee blames the Rothschilds, the Federal Reserve and the Illuminati for America's economic woes, seems to be taking a page from "The Eternal Jew," a Nazi propaganda film that said that:

"The Jews are sitting at all junctions of the world's money markets . . . their capital enables them to terrorize world exchanges, world opinion, and world politics."

Hagee's views are, on the surface, pretty straightforward. He is a Muslim-bashing, Christian Zionist. His favor has been courted by people like Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman (who once favorably compared him to Moses). And he believes that Christians are the shepherds of the Jews. What more could a Zionist ask for?

Well, a Zionist might want to ask what happens to the sheep in the long run. For the end of the world to go as Hagee envisons, all Jews must return to Greater Israel and prepare for the end times. After most of the world is destroyed, Jesus Christ will return to Earth and reign from Jerusalem for a millennium. And then, as a reward for their shepherding of the Jews up to this point, Jesus will send the good Christians into Heaven for a seven year grace period while the anti-Christ moves to destroy Jerusalem.

Perhaps because of the role Jerusalem must play in this scenario for the end times is why Glenn Beck is saying that:

“The last one to attack is Jerusalem. It is the symbol of so much power. It is not their [Muslims'] most sacred site. It is a sacred site and the root of all of us. It cannot be lost. It cannot be lost.”

This is the legacy of the tsarist spies who wrote the Protocols, of European fascism, of members of the American Right such as Father Charles Coughlin, David Duke and the John Birch Society, and most recently, of repressive foreign leaders who have used Israel's depredations as a rallying point for their people to take attention away from their own.
 
And it is a legacy that Glenn Beck is part of. As the Jewish Journal rightly puts it, Beck and all of his cohorts are no friends of Israel (or Palestinians). They are a false front for reactionary racism and anti-labor agendas that have been blended together in DC backrooms. And, increasingly, American Jews are buying into this spiel as social conservativism and all or nothing pro-Israel politics turn traditionalists against liberals.

A Gay German Jewish anti-Christ. Illuminati, Alan Greenspan and the Rothschilds. Gestapo Soros and Kapo Greer. Socialism with Islamist Characteristics. All of these thoughts can fit comfortably inside Beck's head because they come back to the original boogeyman of the 20th century whose specter has made his, and Hagee's, careers possible: the enduring myth of "The International Jew" among the American Right.

With friends like this, who needs Ahmadinejad?

What then is 'dignity' in the worldview espoused in both liberal and reactionary broadsheets? It appears that the mark of dignity is the ability to remain silent in the face of horrific human rights abuses, agreeing to be cultural ambassadors for Israel as part of its cynical campaign to present an apartheid state as an enlightened democracy; it is going into partnership with the Israeli Defence Forces, which are daily enforcing a brutal occupation, enabling the violent colonisation of Palestinian land, harassing, arresting and torturing peaceful protesters against the Israeli state's crimes. Dignity is just standing calmly and silently, turning your back on the problem.

Can dignity also be about risking being booed, shouted at and despised for spoiling people's fun at a public cultural event so as to deliver an urgent message about human rights and international law? Was it also uncouth to loudly decry the destruction of the Gaza Music School in January 2009 during Israel's Operation Cast Lead massacre in Gaza? Do not these protesters insist on the world recognising the dignity denied to Palestinians living under occupation and an apartheid system by daring to carry out an inevitably unpopular boycott action?

This is the end of any meaningful notion of civilization if dignity is reduced to 'not making a scene', desiring to be counted as one of the civilized, respectable majority of cultural consumers and producers, respecting the status quo, revering power structures with their heinous inequalities. It is a very narrow definition of 'dignity'.

One also notices the language of class hatred employed by detractors of the Palestine solidarity activists, depressingly familiar to anyone who has grown up in England: activists are dismissed as worthless 'thugs', 'hooligans', 'yobs'. Of course, they are also charged with being anti-Semites and Nazi blackshirts (See JC editor, Stephen Pollard's piece, also in the Telegraph, 'A Proms protest with a whiff of Weimar about it'), but this hateful slander cannot even be dignified with a response.