Jesse Alexander Myerson has an excellent meditation on Bernie Sanders’s throw-back Jewish identity at the Village Voice. There is a romance in the piece: Yiddish socialists who fought their persecution in Europe brought the fight for emancipation to the U.S. and transformed our country (that was a long time before neoconservatism and neoliberalism also transformed our country). And the piece is religious, too, inasmuch as Myerson quotes Scripture.
But the ending is terrific. It clearly identifies the sociocultural changes inside the Jewish community that made Zionism an ethos for the affluent. And clearly links anti-Zionism with a Jewish progressive tradition, of which Bernie Sanders is a part. Anti-Zionism is coming in, folks. Myerson’s piece is on the front page of the Village Voice, with the headline, “Heretic.” The Zionist/ant-Zionist debate is beginning to happen.
Myerson:
Despite the appeal of Zionism, many Jews still veered left: Thousands joined the civil rights movement, appalled by the treatment of black people in the South, building on the legacy of the Jewish CIO organizers who had helped lay early groundwork for the sit-ins and freedom rides. Despite being limited in number in American society, Jews were overrepresented in activist circles: It is not a coincidence that a rabbi, Abraham Heschel, walked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, or that two of the most prominent murder victims of the movement, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were Jewish. A young Bernie Sanders was among them, too, committing civil disobedience in protest of housing discrimination in Chicago.
Many American Jews, however, took a stand on the wrong side of those struggles. In a single generation, formerly working-class Jews who’d been concentrated in the Lower East Side, Grand Concourse, and Flatbush had spread out to Great Neck, Scarsdale, and New Jersey, becoming suburban homeowners and “professionals,” assimilated into that American Dream of upwardly mobile whiteness. The “there goes the neighborhood” attitude that attended white flight boiled over during the 1968 NYC teachers’ strike, which pitted mainly suburban Jews against the black communities that had replaced them in what was now the “inner city.” At the same time, but thousands of miles away, Israel undertook an aggressive expansion and occupation in Palestine, making manifest the country’s ideological shift toward right-wing Zionism. That Zionism found voice in this country as well, becoming the most salient and powerful political philosophy for American Jews.
The magnitude of this change is difficult to overstate. The internationalism of the pre-war American Jewry was supplanted by nationalism. Our egalitarian commitment was replaced by exceptionalism. Our agitation against war was undermined by ceaseless colonialism in Palestine. Jews have been instructed that the cluster bombs and night patrols blanketing the Holy Land are necessary to preserve our heritage. We have to wonder: Has the shift to militant nationalism robbed us of a Jewish heritage worth preserving?
That’s a great question. And a religious one. Some young Jews may say, I don’t want any of this old time religion. Some may reject any resort to religious fables when dealing with present day human rights questions.
“Our egalitarian commitment was replaced by exceptionalism. Our agitation against war was undermined by ceaseless colonialism in Palestine. Jews have been instructed that the cluster bombs and night patrols blanketing the Holy Land are necessary to preserve our heritage. We have to wonder: Has the shift to militant nationalism robbed us of a Jewish heritage worth preserving? ”
Yowser.
And MW has been a huge part of helping this ongoing shift of attitudes and awareness to grow.
The “yuge” differences between Clinton’s (die hard neocon) Aipac speech and Sanders Aipac speech (not read at Aipac) demonstrate the massive difference between Clinton’s foreign policy leanings (actions in Iraq, Libya, Syria) and Sanders far more reasonable and sane foreign policy leanings
Oh gawd. Pieces like these are only for people who see the world in Black and White. What nonsense. A good deal of those Yiddishe socialists were also Zionists; the largest Zionist youth group was Hashomer Hatzair.
Critical comment about Sanders’ failure to mention his Jewishness has zero to do with Zionism. It is an appropriate critique of Sanders’ habit of omitting his Jewishness altogether, as he routinely does by referring to himself as the child of Polish immigrants, without mentioning the fact of his Jewishness. And it’s telling that Jesse Myerson sees this kind of thing as Jewish. Because that’s the typical anti-Zionist Jew; a leftist who cares little for the religion at all and perhaps, would rather see it disappear into history.
Bernie Sanders is indeed a Zionist, and that’s an inconvenient fact that Jesse Myerson ignores.
“The magnitude of this change is difficult to overstate.”
Indeed, at the time of the Six Day War who could have predicted the unprecedented rise in Jewish Zionist power and that the Holocaust would be a more potent symbol in 2016 than in 1956?
I don’t disagree with the commenters who minimize the difference as a practical matter, but, nevertheless, when’s the last time a POTUS candidate even touched upon what the Establishment lambasts as wild-eyed “moral equivalency” by publicly supporting the Palestinians by name, not just the self-described Jewish state of Israel?
I didn’t like the piece. It was reflective of an Ashkenazi cultural domination. Just as Jesse accuses Zionists, and rightly so, of taking Judaism hostage, he is guilty of the same by talking of a general “Jewish tradition” and then only refers to Ashkenazi history.