The Press Injects Race into Bonds Story. Why Not Religion Into Mideast Issues?

The book business sometimes promotes books as "widely anticipated." This is usually a lie, but for Farrar, Straus and Giroux this September, it’s not. A great number of people are breathlessly anticipating the publication of The Israel Lobby book by the redoubtable professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. The Jewish press is aflutter. Haaretz is on tenterhooks. We all have the same question: Can a big book (and FSG apparently intends TIL to be big) on a verboten subject change the American conversation? Will Walt and Mearsheimer finally break out of the Times education page to Nightline and the evening news, where they belonged when their ideas were first published, in London not here, in March last year?

To my way of thinking, their findings of unhealthy influence by the Israel lobby have only been confirmed by the behavior of the press in the last 16 months. Such an important paper, and has anyone tried to explore or extend their observations? Mike Massing wrote a great piece in the New York Review of Books where he nailed down and developed the authors’ (at times impressionistic) assertions about the U.S. Congress. But I can’t think of any other investigative reporting, or explanatory journalism, or Gotcha pieces about the Israel lobby since (apart from blogs like mine). I conclude that the Seal on discussion is still here, and that Israel’s advocates, who tried to paint the work as antisemitism, are praying that the book comes and goes without breaking that seal. (I think they’re wrong, but I’m an optimist.)

I would take this argument further. There seems to me to exist a blanket fear in the mainstream press of going near (my hobbyhorse) the issue of the Jewish presence in our public life. It was nothing last week for TV and the papers to racialize Barry Bonds’s pursuit of the home run record; at least two major networks and the New York Times said that blacks had a different opinion about Bonds than whites. Who injected race into this? The press. Yet when a clear, real issue of religious difference exists in our political culture–American Jewish support for the Jewish state, or the neoconservatives concern for Israel in pushing for the disastrous war in Iraq–no one injects religion. Has anyone in the Jewish press (let alone the mainstream press) even done a poll: What percentage of Americans believe that the Iraq war was a war for Israel? War for oil? etc. I haven’t seen it. Gross negligence.

I bring this all back to Jewish culture, to a sense of Jewish exceptionalism that has been such a large factor in my own life. Gershom Scholem was a great scholar of Jewish history. In The Messianic Idea in Judaism, he puts forward an idea I find intellectually offensive that is germane here. A Zionist, Scholem said (in the 1960s) that Zionism had given Jewish historians a new place to stand. They had freed themselves of the German scholarship of Jewish history of the 19th century. "[A]s Jewish historians we have clearly advanced beyond the vantage point of our predecessors, having learned to insist, and rightly so, that Jewish history is a process that can only be understood when viewed from within…" [his emphasis]

So only Jews could write Jewish history. Scholem said this out of an understanding that Jews were a persecuted people. It is of course understandable in a way. And utterly out of place in a modern post-Holocaust world where Jews have great cultural power in western democracies. History belongs to historians, whatever their color or creed. The silence and fear surrounding Walt and Mearsheimer draw on this prejudice: how dare the goyim write about us!

 

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