Abe Foxman of the ADL has responded to Joe Klein’s blog where he said that Jewish neoconservatives had divided loyalties in supporting the Iraq war:
It
is inappropriate to identify a group that clearly has Jews and non-Jews
within its ranks by singling out the Jews or, worse, identifying all of
them as “Jewish.” Again, if you consider the history that has seen
Jews vilified as a group that keeps to itself, is conspiratorial and
has dual loyalties, you will better understand our concern.
Neoconservatives have the right to make their case without having their religion brought up. So,
too, do those on the opposite end of the political spectrum, whether
Jewish or not. Religious beliefs are personal, and matters of faith
belong in the heart, in the church and in the home. In addition, you
play into classic notions about Jews by suggesting that, in their
analysis, the neoconservatives were only thinking about Israel’s
interests and not that of their own country.
This is good and highminded, but hogwashian. As three smart Jewish authors have demonstrated (Murray Friedman, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Jacob Heilbrunn), the neoconservative movement came out of the Jewish community. Love of Israel was central. Religious beliefs aren’t always personal. I wish they were, they’re not. Pat Robertson’s religious views are pretty political, and everyone gets to talk about them. Doug Feith came out of a militant Zionist background to support the Iraq war, and do so as a policymaker. Just because he doesn’t want to talk about it in his new book doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t.
Klein’s comment, which happily is getting tons of attention, touches on The faultline in Jewish public life today–the extent to which blind support for Israel’s militant and racist policies has corrupted precincts of the American Jewish community. Not all of us. Let the foodfight, I mean soulsearching, begin. Zionists vs. antiZionists and nonZionists. And yes, it will be a lot like the conversations over that last extremist fever that swept the Jewish community 80 years ago: Communism. I bet I would have been a Communist. God did me a great favor by letting me be born in 1955, so I could enter a different moment in history.
