I am thankful for all the comments on the Ace Greenberg "Jewish geography" post of yesterday. One thing I'd say to Richard Witty is that he lives in the sticks; and I am talking about an establishment network. These guys are focused on the wheelhouse, in New York and Washington. The WASP/Gentleman's Agreement analogy seems to me a helpful one because what motivated Digby Baltzell to write The Protestant Establishment in 1964 and condemn his own elite tribe (the entitled WASPs) as an exclusive "caste" was Baltzell's sense of discrimination and suppression of talent (the Jews, then). A good thing he did, too. The WASP leadership was serving us Vietnam on the silver service. As the "parallel establishment" (Jacob Heilbrunn's excellent phrase for Jewish neoconservatives) served us Iraq.
One of the things about the Jewish rise is that my people have such a sense of being outsiders and persecuted that it is very difficult for us to look on our own position as being a powerful one. Thus the leading book on the sociology of the new multicultural elite, Bobos by David Brooks, has a lot about WASPs in its index but nothing about Jews. He doesn't want to go near that question. Which is to say that the very people, journalists and scholars, who are responsible for examining such trends (and yes, Jews have disproportionate roles in that cohort) end up denying it. I think this is an important factor in the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer by the New Yorker, the Times, Jeffrey Goldberg et al. The thinking goes: We have meager power. We have clawed our way by our fingernails in the teeth of the old order to get what power we have. Walt and Mearsheimer are now attacking our meager power. I am going to use my power to bash them. The Jewish segment of the Establishment also rose against Jimmy Carter. Goldberg called him a "pharisee," I believe. Now Ehud Olmert, a Jew, speaks of apartheid, so that's different!
The real issue here isn't tribal idiosyncrasy, to which every tribe is prey (and honey, I know; I've hung with Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, Polynesians, and WASPs on my way to this blog), but bandwidth and access in today's elite. Jews have been reported to make up 30 percent of Supreme Court clerks. Meritocracy, you say; but when all three execs of the Tampa Bay Rays are (apparently) Jewish, can we wonder about clubby culture in the elite? I saw that clubbiness at the Harvard Crimson when I worked at the newspaper, and heard talk about such clubbiness even in the Harvard Government Department, where I took courses from both the late Judith Shklar and Michael Walzer.
The bigger issue: Where are critics of Israel in the American discourse? How many of them can get employment? Lately Brian Lehrer, the popular leftlib talkshow host on WNYC, did "30 issues in 30 days" for the presidential campaign, and devoted just one show to "Iran, Israel, and the Middle East" (nothing about Palestine mind you, even as One-Jerusalem is all that Sheldon Adelson and Lieberman seem to care about); and his respondents re Israel were Jerrold Nadler and Zev Chafets. Brian that's not fair: Nadler sends his kids to Jewish schools, Chafets emigrated to Israel to work for a former terrorist, Begin. Not a Palestinian or non-Zionist or Arabist in sight. I.e., even on the left, there's no bandwidth. I say that this is a condition of power. When you look at Walter Russell Mead, a three-barrelled Protestant minister's son, attacking Walt and Mearsheimer in Foreign Affairs, how much is that a reflection of Mead's need for employment at CFR, which I am certain relies a lot on big Jewish donors? Your response is, Well if it is so hard, then how come Walt and Mearsheimer got $750,000 from a major publishing house? Good point. The world is changing.
