Marty Peretz says he was misquoted by an Israeli journalist, quotes we picked up the other day in translation. Ben Smith runs interference for him at Politico. “I have only pidgin Hebrew, which is the only English the reporter who interviewed me possessed,” Peretz told Smith. My source Ofer is unconvinced. “What does he think, that a reporter for Calcalist doesn’t speak English? Does he think this is Israel circa 1962?” That’s funny. You can read Peretz’s sanitized version of the interview at the first link above.
Peretz goes on to attack me and say he hasn’t talked to me in more than 40 years. I didn’t know Peretz when I was 10.
Here’s the thing: I respected the heck out of Marty Peretz all through college and the years after. I really looked up to him. He had charisma, as we say in Yiddish. He was kind to me, he helped my career, he offered to get me into an investment fund for young journalists, at times he was a mentor figure. We last talked as friends around the Bush-Gore battle of 2000.
Our difference is not personal; it is over Jewish identity: Do Jews integrate in western societies, or are Jews nationalists? I am an integrator, always have been, because things have worked out very well for Jews in the U.S. and I defer to that experience. He has been a nationalist forever, and as he says at that interview, blocked non-nationalists from writing for The New Republic in his role as a pillar of the Israel lobby. I didn’t come out on my views then– was afraid to say a word about Israel, till Peretz’s colleagues helped to bring us the Iraq war, I believe partly for Jewish nationalist reasons (Beinart, Lawrence Kaplan).
These are serious issues. They are rooted deeply in Jewish history and will work themselves out over the next century. I believe that I am on the right side of history, as Egypt shows; and that Peretz is on the wrong side of history, as his Islamophobic flailings show. He and I should talk this out as adults, and we should do it on the Yivo stage. Yivo and the Center for Jewish History, which this month feature endless exhibits on anti-semitism and the destruction of Jewish businesses in Germany decades ago and the “miracle” of Israel’s birth with American Jewish support: Yivo and the Center for Jewish History are as afraid of this conversation as Peretz is, because they know in their hearts what Jewish nationalism has done: It has inscribed the Jewish experience of persecution on the Palestinian body, yes like the murderous device in Kafka’s the Trial.
Young Jews deserve nothing less than to have a full hearing of what integrationism, nationalism, occupation and anti-semitism mean in this era.
