Blacks Lift Prohibition on Discussing Urban Dysfunction. Can Jews Do Same Re Foreign-Policy Power?

In the last few hours I’ve watched two remarkable conversations about race on television. Last night on CBS Evening News, national correspondent Byron Pitts asked black leaders in Philadelphia whether the high murder rate there wasn’t a black problem. They agreed it was. Fine journalism–and yes, probably only a black guy could do it. Then this morning on ESPN’s First Down, Skip Bayless and a black reporter whose name I missed talked about the racial angle of the Michael Vick story: whether Vick’s alleged dogfighting activities have a black cultural component, whether the affluent black fan base in Atlanta is behind Vick, and whether blacks countenance dogfighting (Bayless’s line).

Urban dysfunction is the dark side of black culture in America, and Bill Cosby did everyone a favor by breaking the taboo on the issue some years ago. Being a progressive, I think talking about it may actually change things.

I bring the race talk up, as I have before, because the dark side of Jewish achievement/intelligence/family life (all those great positives of the Jewish experience) is the Israel lobby, the use of Jewish social power to effect ends that are not necessarily in the national interest. This dark side is not openly discussed, though it is at the heart of our problems in the Middle East. Why did none of the Democratic presidential candidates in last night’s debate talk about Israel/Palestine? Because they are all dependent on Jewish giving, and the issue is just too hot to handle.

Exhibit A today is A Tragic Legacy, the fine book that came out in June about the self-destruction of the Bush Administration, by the leftlib blogger Glenn Greenwald. I praised this book a month back for fingering the neocons as Israel-centric. A notable achievement. Today I’m going to focus on the taboo the book upholds, by failing to identify the neocons as an intellectual movement with a strong Jewish component.

Greenwald’s theme is that Bush destroyed his administration by accepting a manichean view of the world, good versus evil. Some of that stupid moralism came from his evangelical Christian background. Some of it came from the neocons, in Greenwald’s view. And it has hurt the country by turning the Middle East into an us-against-them struggle, with us on Israel’s side, rather than approaching the Middle East as a highly complex diplomatic and strategic balancing act. So far so good. In his best analysis, Greenwald shows how Iranian and American interests have actually converged on several occasions over the last few years; and therefore how dangerous it is to our statecraft to give any credence to Marty Peretz when he attempts to smear James Baker, who would have us talk to Iran, as a war criminal and antisemite.   

The failure here is that Greenwald can never bring himself to broach an issue that he knows to be a factor: the Jewishness of the neocons. As I have reported here, though it is now widely obfuscated in the wake of the Iraq debacle, the Jewishness of the neocon movement was openly acknowledged in years gone by, including in two leading volumes by fellow travelers: Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, and Murray Friedman’s The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. Recognizing neocons as Jewish is also common sense (which used to be an important part of news judgment). Smart leftie Jews who hate the Iraq war keep dancing up to this line and backing away. Jerrold Nadler did so at Columbia a few months ago, when he brilliantly explained how the neocons had gathered at the gates over 20 years then captured the Bush administration with an arrogant theory–but claimed it wasn’t about Israel. Greenwald goes further, by saying, Yes, for the neocons, it’s all about Israel.

The failure on Greenwald’s part is in refusing to talk about religion as a motivator. Oh, he is happy to talk about the Christian religion as a cause of the Iraq debacle, but he immunizes rightwing Jews from such analysis. When he knows as well as I do that Israel is central to American Jewish considerations. Israel is the "secular religion" of American Jews, per Dershowitz (1997). Israel must be "an extension of [the] life and consciousness" of American Jewry, per the Forward’s Hillel Halkin (1977).

Greenwald’s self-censorship is a significant failure for a number of reasons: Because Greenwald is generally a brave writer (justly garlanded by Markos as "one of the smartest and most important new voices to emerge in politics in years") and if he shies away, you can just imagine how more timid analysts feel; because Iraq is a disaster that is hurting our country and that demands the sharpest, most searching analyses that writers are capable of; and, maybe most important, because we as Jews understand these issues in a way that others don’t, we are empowered in the media, and we owe it to America and to any ideal of democracy that we still have inside us to deal openly with Our Religious Question.

It took great bravery for Byron Pitts to go to Philly and broach the black-crime issue before a national audience. He did it because he wants to heal that community, and he trusts America enough to help him. Leftleaning Jewish writers owe the country the same kind of soulsearching.

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