I’ve long argued here that American Jewry won’t be healed, and neither will American leadership, till we come to terms with the neocons as an expression of a hawkish Jewish interest in the Middle East, and a powerful expression at that. For this conversation to take place, it is necessary for liberal and leftwing Jews, even centrists, to turn on their cousins whose thinking they understand intimately–the hawkish neocons–and explain how fears for Israel came to pervade the Jewish establishment post-67 and ’73. It means, in essence, trusting America enough to say, "Guess what, Junior just blew up the neighborhood with his rocket set…" Can the Jewish family do that?
So far the leaders of this conversation have been outside the Jewish family: Walt and Mearsheimer. Though lately Jacob Heilbrunn has joined in with his book on the neocons. And now, on his new blog the writer Bernard Avishai comes close to turning Junior in with a discussion of Jews as a special interest. Avishai writes of neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz:
Podhoretz’s real breakthrough came,
not when he reimagined blacks as more or less permanent adversaries,
but when he reimagined Jews as a more or less permanent interest
group—when he reimagined the old liberalism as a trendy behaviorism and
argued that “Jewish interests” (protection of wealth, “support for
Israel,” etc.) required nothing more than a common sense use of power.
[Emphasis Weiss’s]… The liberalism we once knew assumed fallible citizens, skeptical of received wisdoms, struggling to come up with some common, provisionally defined good. Podhoretz
assumed us to be atomized bundles of appetites, organized into
“socialized” groups, getting what we can from a competition for
inherently scarce goods (like money, power and fame). Old liberals were interested in rights; now we were right to have interests.What’s the Jewish interest?… what if this was always the wrong question? What
if American Jews are not an interest group but restless, loosely
connected citizens—curiously proud of (what Aharon Appelfeld calls)
their “fate,” not Christian but not unChristian, no longer immigrants,
educated and well-off, to be sure, but still not quite comfortable,
looking to make sense of themselves in an evolving America? What if, by choosing, they show themselves who they are?
