I find Elena Kagan charming, articulate and thoughtful, and her eyes read soulful to me; but I can’t see a stellar accomplishment beyond the goldplated resume. As I’ve said before, there is something entitled and end-of-the-Jewish-story-line about her. She is a careerist, not an outsider, she has hidden whatever passion she has so as not to be disgorged from elite company; and her absence of passion and noteworthy accomplishment suggests just how thin is the borscht of American Jewish life, now that we are inside the Establishment.
Yesterday I caught some of Senator Al Franken’s exchange with Kagan, in which both affirmed with solemnity that Thurgood Marshall was their hero despite Republican attacks on his activism. Marshall, said Franken, was on the side of the downtrodden, and he had interpreted the law to help the downtrodden and powerless, by overthrowing segregated schools.
My chief response to this festival of self-congratulation is that Thurgood Marshall died a long time ago, Brown v Board of Education was nearly 70 years ago! His legacy is alive in many ways, and while I’m sure Franken is making that legacy live in ways I’d be sure to cheer on, when it comes to the key question of our moment regarding the downtrodden over whom we have power, Franken has been a nullity– the freedom of Palestinians. In this case, the authors of the oppression are folks who we know and support. Franken tried to outdo Norm Coleman in his Israel support during their long election fracas last year, and he has taken a conventional stance on Hamas since. You’d think he could exercise leadership, being from Minnesota. I haven’t seen any.
The piety makes me cynical.
I wonder how much of that love of Thurgood Marshall was selfish– in that blacks were surrogates for Jewish hopes, when we were kept outside of the American elite, as the blacks were kept out of the mainstream. So we used their struggle to get through the glass ceiling. Well now we are inside, you have a Jewish Supreme Court nominee being valentined by a few Jewish senators, while the southerner Republicans yap, and the love of Thurgood Marshall feels empty to me, unless it is applied to a real situation over which we have power. Again: the Palestinians.
It makes me a little skeptical about Jewish liberalism. Watching Lindsey Graham praise Thurgood Marshall and desegregation, and push passionately for the "rights of the unborn," a stance that comes with the territory where he lives, S.C., I wondered how much of Jewish liberalism is also culturally-determined by where we grew up. In his book Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Muller says that the affinity of Jews to Communism sprang in some measure from our guilt over privilege. Well, we have been a privileged group through much of recent European history– that is, when they were not slaughtering us– and in the U.S. we are incredibly privileged, and so standing up for the poor is a way to deal with our guilt over the inequity of the class structure. I feel that this has motivated a lot of my actions over the years. I won’t change, I think I’ll always be a liberal; but it’s not like we’ve done anything to fundamentally change the class structure that works for us.
The opening of this Thurgood Marshall festival is the challenge it makes to empowered Jews to take responsibility for others. We governed ourselves for 2000 years without territory, we’ve done a lousy job of governing others, Michael Walzer said. Yes: the mantra I grew up with, Is it good for the Jews? doesn’t work for this day and age, when we are all over the Establishment and the richest group by religion in the U.S. And in the case of the Israel policy, in which standing up for Palestinians would "hurt" Jewish interests in Israel, very few Jews actually stand up for the dispossessed.
Today we learn that British Methodists are asking whether Zionism is consistent with Methodist values. That is moral leadership. The question will become a refrain in religious circles in years to come. And increasingly that conversation will begin in Jewish institutions too. Then, unless they speak up for the downtrodden, Kagan and Franken will look very oldfashioned indeed.
