More than a month ago here, Lizzy Ratner defended David Simon, creator of the Wire, from criticism by Weiss that Simon self-censors on the Palestine issue. At last, a response.
Your piece praising David Simon of the Wire ends with a challenge to me that you say “scratches” at you: Am I Progressive Only on Palestine? Do I ever talk about American domestic injustices in between my endless talk about Israel and Palestine? And really, as you know, the answer is that I don’t.
Now by and large I think you’re right to be itchy. I ought to be a progressive in other ways. I have tunnel vision, even I get sick of it. But let me try and explain if not wholly justify my silence, and in doing so explore my confusion about American Jewish political identity in 2011.
The context for your challenge was your thanks to David Simon, whose work you love, for daring Jews to give up their legacy of unrivaled persecution, the Holocaust narrative, and notice the people suffering just a few miles away in the American inner cities. Now I don’t know David Simon’s work, but this political stance leaves me cold for two reasons, 1, the suggestion that the problem of the American ghettoes is one that Jews somehow have a special role to play in addressing. And 2, the idea that a Jew can engage as a Jew on the great political problems of our time—or as Simon says, “Surely, the world needs the Jewish mind and spirit for something… fundamental,”—without talking about Israel.
First fallacy. At the Jewish Federations last fall (the same conclave famous for the brave Jewish hecklers of Netanyahu, of whom David Simon was not one) Simon called on the charity to stop giving so much help to Jews and to take on the “Holocaust in slow-motion” that is enveloping blacks in the ghettoes, and in doing so he invoked a special Jewish tradition of social justice– our role to be “a light unto the nations”– and I don’t buy it. I think the call should be to all empowered Americans to do something about the ghettoes. And in fact, the call on Jews to do so, as Jews, seems to me to express a vanity about our political presence that is undeserved given our position in society– and truly my cynicism about our posture and our presence is at the heart of my argument.
Surely there was a time that Jews could speak of a leftwing ethos as Jews. Behind his words, I sense that Simon is invoking a socialist tradition that began in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century when it was the bundists stiring things up. Jews were committed to reforming societies, and while I believe there was a selfish Jewish interest in this reform—we were being denied opportunities, we were an “intellectual proletariat” hanging around the stock markets in the big cities because we couldn’t get jobs (as Herzl put it)—still, there is no doubt we were a central part of that leftwing tradition right up through our presence in communist parties in the 50s and 60s in Europe. And yes we brought that leftwing tradition to the U.S. and played a significant part in left movements, including the communist party, and the civil rights movement. My mother expresses pride in these traditions. Though, saddling my cynicism, I don’t see purely altruistic motives. We were outsiders. And we identified with blacks as an oppressed minority and signed on to their struggle because we wanted to open American society for ourselves too.
Tony Kushner describes the end of this ethos (in a 1998 interview lately flung against him by CAMERA):
I feel that I’m very much a product of what I consider the most important tradition – I’m not a religious Jew and I think the Diasporan Jewish culture has a magnificent history of progressive involvement with the cultures that Jews have found themselves in and interacting with. It’s very much a part of who I am. So yes. It’s a very distressing thing to me that American Jews have lost contact with the traditions of socialism and humanism – I don’t consider myself a humanist but I probably am – but there are important progressive and radical European traditions that arrived with Jews in the U.S. from Germany to Russia that really informed American Jewish consciousness all the way up to the 1950’s, and Roy [Cohn’s] generation is really the generation that succeeded in beginning the severance of that. It still continued in a very lively way which manifested itself most obviously in Jewish support for the Civil Rights movement, but at the same time that that was happening there was this tremendous support for Israel and that’s been part of this calamity– it’s driven international Jewish culture from its progressive base. I don’t know what’s to be done about it, what recourse progressive Jews have to call…I’m sort of floundering for words because I don’t know what to call us at this point.
Surely that progressive ethos had great achievements. We opened American society, we fostered civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights– and yes, our matriarchalism played a role. And today David Simon has incredible status and cultural power.
And this is what leaves me really confused. Apart from voting Democrat and supporting a socially-liberal blue state program, I don’t see the living Jewish ethos that Simon sees. And I’m not really persuaded that he’s doing that much to change our society to be a fairer one. OK, he’s a progressive director who is highlighting progressive themes in his show, but I don’t see much sacrifice or commitment. When Simon praises the service of Catholic workers in the ghettoes, I agree, there is a living ethos drawing on an active spiritual tradition. But show me such a populist ethos in Jewish life.
Yes, Jews have a special status in our society as storytellers; we are as often as not the mediators of the poor’s experience to the ruling class. Lately, for instance, I was very moved by Daniel Zwerdling’s reports on Iraq veterans post-traumatic stress disorder on NPR. They were loving pieces. I’m guessing he’s Jewish; and his role seemed to me a Jewish role; but honestly I don’t see the political dimension of such work. We are not the ones serving in Iraq, by and large, we are not the ones serving in the ghettoes; and telling these stories will in no way alter the structure that preserves us from that service.
We get to tell the horrifying stories about these conditions, and I suppose that is a liberal value; but, here is where I am cynical, I can’t help noticing that it sort of cements our status as privileged mediators. As Tom Stoppard said when someone asked him What’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” about, “It’s about to make me very rich.” And so I’m balked by the most salient fact about the Jewish presence in society, we’re privileged. In that Tablet interview that sparked this dialogue, Simon says that the average Jewish family in New Orleans makes $180,000 a year while the overall average for N.O. families is $30,000; and to address such a privileged community and say that it has a collective special religious obligation to deal with the urban Holocaust seems to me an ethnocentric fantasy. I just don’t see that Jews have a special role to play as social justicers.
Why not appeal to corporate bosses or some other privileged group that is equally implicated in the existing structure? Better yet– why not invoke noblesse oblige—an ethos that actually takes into account these differences?
So while I think you’re right to fault me for not speaking out about these conditions as a leftist, and a progressive, I don’t see why I should be speaking out as a Jew. And I’d note that this website, or my posts on it, have a Jewish character.
Which brings me to the second fallacy.
There is a special Jewish character to political engagement, and that is Israel. You have acknowledged this in your own work, and it’s one reason I admire you. You are taking on elements in the community we both came out of, and you’ve done so with humility, passion and sincerity.
David Simon also comes out of a pro-Israel tradition. In this interview by Vince Beiser at Tablet, we learn that Simon’s father worked on the Soviet Jewry issue for the B’nai Brith and that Elie Wiesel and Teddy Kollek supped at young Simon’s table, and a couple of times Simon mentions the Jewish “nation” and people as having an essential role to play on the world stage. Well, I’m sorry, I’ve seen the role, and I can’t read this without thinking that his family is Zionist and Simon is not engaging on the central Jewish political question that is his inheritance. In fact, in his description of the American ghetto as being the true scene of Jewish engagement, which if Jews don’t follow through on, young Jews will turn away from the whole Jewish project, well, this strikes me as a giant evasion. The real source of disaffection from Jewish communal life, as the sociologists tell us, is the Jewish marriage to Israel.
I would go further and say that an honest assessment of the Jewish presence in American political life right now—when Obama is getting hammered for even mentioning the 1967 lines—is what Israel is doing to American foreign policy in the Middle East. The fact that 9 of 15 congresspeople who call on Obama to expunge the Goldstone Report are Jewish. The fact that Obama’s mild gestures towards fairness (1967) in his speech to AIPAC were said by a Jewish publication to cost him $10 million in contributions. This speaks not just to Zionism’s effect on Jewish life, but the impact of pro-Israel Jews on American policy.
At the risk of relating thrice-told tales, let me say more about my cynicism. I got engaged on these issues because in 2003 my brother said to me that while he had demonstrated against the Vietnam war he wasn’t sure about the Iraq war, because his Jewish newspaper said it could be good for Israel. I found his statement deeply upsetting. It reversed everything I understood to be Jewish traditional political engagement, and it suggested that the “severance” Kushner addresses above is monstrous. It suggested that killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, as the US was bound to do, was justifiable in the name of Israel’s security—just as Egyptian oppression can be endlessly justified for the sake of Israel, or the killing of Rachel Corrie, or the killing of Furkan Dogan.
Whenever I think of my brother’s revelation, I think about one of my favorite descriptions of political emotion, how Christopher Isherwood described fleeing his beloved Berlin in 1933– a place that had given him personal freedom–when the Nazis came to power. He rode a train south with Jews fearing arrest and wrote:
“I feel like a cupboard in which all the clothes are mixed up; everything has got to be thrown out on the floor and sorted. I must stop wondering what I ought to think, how I ought to feel. I must try to discover some basis of genuine feeling and begin with that, no matter how small it is.”
That is the way I felt about Jewishness and the Iraq war. I thought the Iraq war so horrifying that I stopped thinking all those things I OUGHT to think or ought to feel – Jews have been blamed for wars forever, and Jews had nothing to do with the dreadful decision to invade Iraq, polling shows that Jews were against the war more than any other American group—and tried to get to a genuine thought. And that genuine thought was simply this: that support for Israel was hugely important to American Jews and that many of them would justify ANYTHING in its name, and even those who didn’t justify anything in its name would be pretty quiet when the ANYTHING-goes types were standing up pushing for war, and would certainly not say anything about the Israel stuff. The organizations that supported the Iraq war inside Jewish life are pretty staggering, including Reform Jews, the Union for Reform Judaism, as well as leading publications edited by Jews, such as the New Yorker. And of course Bush’s braintrust for the war included many pro-Israel thinkers, including Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
And these people didn’t just happen to be Jewish and in the Establishment. No, they felt a special Jewish obligation to help Israel, one that synagogues impart every Saturday. And this obligation among neoconservatives was a strong propellent of the war.
The Jewish community has still not come to terms with this transformational event in the American Jewish experience: the fact that the neoconservatives could advocate destroying an Arab society in part— in part I emphasize—because it would help Israel. And I can’t get away from its monstrousness. The same monstrousness that is involved in supporting Egyptian dictatorship for decades because it would shore up Israel, and monarchy in Jordan for the same reason, and rightslessness and statelessness across Palestine forever in the name of Jewish freedom.
And another genuine thought I had around the Iraq question was that liberal Jews who understood what Zionism had done to some members of the Jewish community – unhinged them, produced Douglas Feiths with their One Jerusalems and Richard Perles with their 1967 is indefensible, and Chuck Schumers screaming at AIPAC that he is pledged to be Israel’s guardian or Anthony Weiner ranting at the New School that there is no occupation—that liberal Jews have failed their storytelling role, of explaining to Americans what was going on. Lately Paul Krugman wrote another column attacking the elites that got America into the mess in the Middle East. Well, it is only fair for him to speak openly about one elite that he knows well, that component of the Jewish elite whose alpha and omega is support for Israel. I know why he does not do so, because he is afraid of revenge against Jews, because he is concerned with anti-semitism, because he does not want to feed Protocols-like conspiracy thinking. But the result is that Thomas Friedman will talk about the mostly-Jewish neoconservative intellectual role in plotting the Iraq war in Haaretz and not in the New York Times.
And on May 19 when you spoke in New York about our Goldstone book, you were asked why the United States crushed the Goldstone Report and you gave lip service to the Israel lobby as a factor—one line—and then went after your theory, that the U.S. is trying to escape accountability itself in its war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. I believe you referred to the military-industrial complex.
Well I’m just not convinced by that 60-year-old phrase. The military has been among the strongest advocates for doing something about Israel/Palestine—notably Mike Mullen and General Jones, with their statements along the lines that if there was one thing God could do to make the world a safer place it would be to do something about Israel /Palestine—so that leaves the industrial complex. A nameless corporate entity, and god knows a powerful one.
But writers are charged to write about what they know, and you and I actually know the Israel lobby. We know who those people are. They are part of our community. They are terrible hawks. They would justify the crackdown in Syria if it would just preserve Israel. They would rationalize an attack on Iran. They helped reduce Iraq to chaos. So why talk about a nameless corporate boogie man?
I think the Jewish support for Zionism as a sacred charge in American political life, a charge that David Simon’s father accepted when he was freeing Soviet Jewry and hosting Teddy Kollek, has deeply affected our political presence. As a Jewish political writer, this is my inheritance—it’s something I can’t escape. While the charge to look into the ghettoes is my responsibility in a different way, as a privileged American with greater access than others.
Wrapping it up on a personal note: I think you’re right to be scratched by my tunnel vision, I respect the way you can write about the inner cities and also focus on Palestine. I’ve seen the way your breadth touches people – when we spoke about Goldstone at Northeastern Law School, an Israeli came up to you afterward with a confession—and for myself, I get sick of hearing myself talk about Israel and Palestine and my goddamn Jewish identity.
I want to change the channel, I would like to go wider in life. But right now the Jewish community has got a monkey on its back…
