One of Israel’s most fascinating functions for American Jewry is, It is our id. Here we have responsibility, logic, power, and indirection. There they have brawn, testosterone, impulse, straightforwardness. When I was young, women used to say that over in Israel, when a guy is interested in you, he propositions you on the street. When Israelis come to the U.S., they’re incredibly rude (as a rule). Here we work at desk jobs and are urban. There they make the desert bloom and rough it. A lot of this feeling comes out of the Holocaust shadow, of course. Jews would show the world that they were not effete and would not go quietly to their deaths. The Holocaust was an emasculating experience. Consider Ari Ben-Canaan, the Paul Newman character in Exodus. He’s tall, he’s a man of action, he doesn’t whine or natter. He’s the complete opposite of the schlemiel. Back when Jeffrey Goldberg was pushing for the Iraq war at the New Yorker, people used to say that the former IDF soldier was the magazine’s id. Of course, the Palestinians have had to bear the burden of this psychological demonstration for a couple of generations. Even now when I tell my sister, who’s never been to Israel, about abuses in the Occupied Territories, she kind of shrugs as if to say, Hey those guys are tough. I’m all for the id. But projecting all these feelings on to Israelis means the Jewish psyche is unintegrated…
That is how I interpret the Jerusalem Post’s piece reporting on Vanity Fair’s list of the 100 most powerful/important Americans. The JP says that more than half of American leaders are Jewish (by the old journalistic method of counting the names it thinks are Jewish). The JP is being straightforward and sincere about an issue that no one in the U.S. can be direct about. Though Jews will talk about it amongst themselves. Isn’t this important sociological journalism? Don’t these numbers represent a transformation of the Establishment? Shouldn’t our leading journals be doing this story? And you wonder why the Israel lobby is effective… Meanwhile Mort Zuckerman warns on television about the power of the Armenian lobby. I bet he’s on the list. What a dereliction of journalistic duty…
