Today on NPR's morning show, Daniel Schorr had more to say about the miracle on the Hudson than he did about Gaza, and not much about Gaza at all. So Schorr is mute before the horror while his contemporary Bill Moyers, using the eyes in his head, says it's Dante's inferno. Schorr's mother lit candles for Palestine. And so the flame of Zionism still flickers in the liberal American Jewish heart.
The American Jewish lib/left tradition will never be the same. It has been AWOL on Gaza. Reform Judaism has cheered the massacres ahead, the American Conservative has taken the high ground, and bold new worldly voices have emerged at the periphery of Jewish life amid respectable denunciation, from JATO to J Street to Daniel Levy to Adam Horowitz.
The leftlib abdication can be seen all around us. The New York Review of Books has been unpardonably silent on Gaza; at last it runs Roger Cohen's piece. Pretty good, but it is too little, too late for the leading journal of the left. Cohen says the Gaza attack is "wrong" and that the Israeli narrative has "run its course," true and helpful, yes, but altogether the tone is "despondent." Cohen is not enraged but engaged with Israel's myth of itself.
"holocaust"—are untenable: a Jewish minority in any Arab state of the
size of the Arab minority in Israel is unimaginable. Israel remains a
small island of relatively liberal democracy in a repressive Arab sea.
But it is ghettoizing itself…
Oh come on, man, share the Holocaust a little as the daughters of that howling Palestinian doctor are destroyed in the twinkling of an eye in the barb-wire hellground no one can escape. Cohen uses the word "gyre." That strikes me as too literary, when you have the burned bodies of children everywhere. While my progressive friend the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel brings in college Frenchies Derrida and Jean Renoir, in arguing that all the criticism of Israel is just anti-semitism. Look at what the Chinese are doing to the Tibetans, Wurtzel says, but
May or may not be doing wrong. Abdication (answered, helpfully, by Seth Freedman.)
Jack Ross adds:
The current issue of TAC is nothing less then a watershed moment – Mearsheimer
and Daniel Levy in the same pages, on the same side of the barricade.
It's an important discussion as to why the liberals are AWOL, and I've
always insisted that in most cases the culprit is "liberalism" rather
than the Jewish angle, but clearly the progressive-realist marriage is
taking place. (Insert Weissian jive prose about Obama getting on board
here).
