Robert Gottlieb reviews a volume of Leonard Bernstein’s letters in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:
[W]hat really mattered to him?
He’s not going to tell us, but the Letters, read in conjunction with Humphrey Burton’s excellent 1994 biography, Leonard Bernstein, suggest that there were three things that motored him: music, of course; his family, despite (or because of) the conflicts; his Judaism (and his belief in Israel). The money, the celebrity, the sex were front and center, but not, in the long run, central.
So Israel was a motor of Bernstein’s actions. But in the rest of this review, there is not another word about the place, and a lot about sex, music and family. We learn about Bernstein’s likely affairs with Aaron Copland and Dmitri Mitropoulos, about the understanding that his wife Felicia expressed to Bernstein after she married him in 1951 that he was gay and he was going to have affairs; and about his busting loose in the 1970s and leaving her for a young man and her cursing him to die a lonely feeble man.
Don’t get me wrong. This is fascinating stuff. But the omission is the psychological fallacy, Jewish intellectual indifference to our political conditions alongside keen interest in our social ones. Here was an American celebrity who took Israel more seriously than his flings, who spent a lot of time going out to Israel even as he was hosting fundraisers for the Black Panthers back in the U.S. I’m interested. How do you support a Jewish state far from here that you don’t have to live in and that discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens and support a revolutionary black group in the country that you do live in? Bernstein’s stance is the essence of what is today a terrific malady in the Jewish community: PEP (Progressive Except Palestine). But Gottlieb and The New York Review of Books editors are in the bubble. Israel’s a great good thing established long ago and it’ll be here forever, and meanwhile let’s gossip about other members of the elite. (The review contains delicious morsels about Martha Gellhorn, Jackie Kennedy, Paul Bowles and Ernest Hemingway.) When actually we live very much in history, and Bernstein knew it, and he figured it out wrong. And that’s a problem.
P.S. The article is very hard on Bernstein and contains a great line about Bernstein’s mysterious psyche worth taping to the wall: “The confusion between genius and narcissism, heroism and self-pity, generosity and exploitation remains unresolved.”
“How do you support a Jewish state far from here that you don’t have to live in and that discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens and support a revolutionary black group in the country that you do live in? ”
I’m curious. How do you not support a democracy that offers greater rights for its minority citizens than any state in the Middle East but not condemn the other states in the region where nobody, including minorities, has civil liberties?
The answer? You’re not fighting for human rights. You’re fighting against Jews having what Muslims and Christians have many times over. That you would reach back to Bernstein to make this kind of ridiculous point (especially since in Bernstein’s time, Israel was a cause celebre amongst progressives for its socialism) shows how far off your moral compass is.
Bernstein was a great musician; what else do you want of the guy? So he loved Israel, but this didn’t make him any less great. It was his Saturday morning concerts on CBS that got me hooked on classics. He spoke about music with the same electrifying passion that Carl Sagan spoke about the stars.
Sure it makes him less great *as a person* not as a composer.
It suggests that either he was morally inconsistent in his support of the Zionist project and of radical black groups like the Black Panthers or that he only supported the latter for self-serving reasons – such as an expression of the sort of attitude seen in Jodi Rudoren’s husband’s artistic efforts.
It’s ethnic nationalism. For me it is in some ways quite logical. If you’re an ethnic nationalist, but at the same time an ethnic minority, you have a self-interest in keeping the country you live in liberal and diverse. It is easier to live in a country where no major ethnic group dominates, and as such it becomes harder to be discriminated against.
The measure of progressivism is not how you act when you’re a small minority and have a consistent self-interest in keeping the liberal politics as strong as possible.
The question is: how do you act when you’re in the majority.
Bernstein showed quite clearly that he, like many others who claim to be liberal, are not that liberal when his group is the one who stands to lose their demographic grip. But this is not just a Jewish phenomenom. If you look at Chinese people, it’s the same. It’s a universal human character trait; a lot of people are ethnic nationalists by nature. And in a situation when you’re a minority, the most logical thing from an ethnic nationalist standpoint is to weaken everyone else and to affirm a liberal foundation, that keeps you safe. When you’re in a majority, and you’re not a liberal and an ethnic nationalist, the way to proceed is to control the demographic majority of that country and if that clashes with liberal values; so be it.
I’ve long held out that non-white(which I define as white gentile Christians in this case) ethnic nationalism is an issue the left has never dealt with. Although it may be uncomfortable to ask, we should also ask how many Palestinians who are now asking for liberal democracy in Israel – and I mean genuine liberal democracy, would be comfortable with the same in Palestine? I remember Ahmed Moor, for example, saying he’s fine with ethnic nationalism in Palestine. Well, that’s problematic. And in some ways a PEP syndrome itself, but from the Palestinian side.
So it’s not just a Jewish topic, and not just related to Palestine, there’s a lot of people being hypocrites with their liberal values as soon as they are in the ethnic majority, even if it’s about a country they don’t live in at the moment but could consider living in the future. (I’m sure aliyah crossed his mind more than a few times).
Lenny Bernstein was a man of contradictions, whether in his marriage and lifestyle (gay affairs) or in his politics. I once saw a film of Bernstein conducting classical music at an Israeli locale (some outdoor Roman amphitheater). It brought him great joy to play for the people who represented the renewed Jewish life that had sprouted in Israel after the devastation of WWII. Of course if he had seen it through the eyes of the Palestinian refugees, he would not have played. But he viewed it as an affirmation of Jewishness, his Jewishness and his audience’s Jewishness. How to accomplish Jewish affirmation without treading upon Palestinian rights (let alone affirmation) is something that Israel has not discovered. But why dismiss Lenny’s affirmation of his own Jewishness?