Ancestor worship, and ambivalent membership

After four years of Trump and over a year of global pandemic, may we American Jews be more vulnerable? There are many targets for the “bat-shit crazy” right now but I think that Jews are a likely one. Or am I a prisoner of my Jewish origins?

A commonplace in Jewish education is that at every generation someone rises up against us. The belief that in every generation arise persecutors to kill us leaves us anxious to not be caught unaware.

It might be sensible to ask: What attitude and stance does that engender among Jews? Might we even consider what that myth of ourselves engenders in our behavior — behavior which endangers us — among non-Jews?

There are signs of a spiral into an ugly void — in the right’s obsession with activist/philanthropist George Soros, and the Fox mainstreaming of the Great Replacement theory which casts “elites” (easily, Jews) as the engineers of American “White Genocide.”

American Jews may find ourselves in a wrong-footed position of trying to argue that Jews are not an “elite” and are not overrepresented in whatever center of power is being cited.

Wrong-footed because disavowal of what are points of pride in other circumstances.

This coexists with the hard-Right obsession with supporting Israel and what they call Judeo-Christian tradition.

A most uncomfortable and unacceptable quality of a group member is to blur membership, and ambiguate with what gaze one is viewing — of insider or outsider. In the Passover seder, the “wicked child” refuses to identify with the group. This may mean a taboo of seeing ourselves as others may see us.

Do we have a mistaken confidence because we have Torah? 

Is there something special about Jewish identity anxiety and how we express it while we’re citizens, elsewhere, outside the State of Israel?

The landscape of the non-Zionist Jew is awkward to walk. I, a Jew who is not a Zionist, see Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism — opposed to Jews truly being part of other countries than Israel.

Jewish ethno-religious myth is no basis for deciding rule in Palestine. Certainly it wouldn’t be something to suggest to a Palestinian?  It would be a bad joke. Jews worldwide coalescing again to rule some sort of revived Judea in cosmopolitan Palestine is an absurdity.

The Israeli state began with a paramilitary campaign of displacement that is still ongoing. In occupied Palestine, non-Jews are locked out from governance and live besieged.

The State of Israel and denying the trauma to Palestinian populations dominate American Jewish consciousness. Within the organized American Jewry, one feels one is living Orwell’s quote, “Truth is treason in an empire of lies.”

I’m afraid of mainstream Jewish leadership as dangerous to Jews. They’ve given up on any responsibility to speak about the vices of Jewish nationalism. Apparently, to them, we can never be monsters.

Hostility to Palestinian well-being and human rights should have an equal opprobrium to anti-Semitism, if we are to take Hillel seriously — What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.

If the suppression of Palestinian rights by Zionist effort is self-evident, and a majority of Jews are complacent or compliant with that, is there something self-evidently wrong with the majority of Jews? 

If so, how to break through the defense of anti-Semitism dogma, that criticism from gentiles doesn’t count?

Being an older person, I’m starting to understand that nothing fundamentally may change in my lifetime regarding the “plight” of Palestinians: That plight being losers of their homeland because Jews gained theirs.

I’m thinking that my concern for Palestinians may be a self-interested concern about a load of guilt that is burdening Jews.  Could that be an expression of a belief in a Jewish nation or coherent identity? Am I a Jewish nationalist, after all?

NYU scholar Emmaia Gelman writes of the hazard of reinforcing Jewish nationalism inadvertently by the phenomenon of American “as-a-Jew” positioning while dealing with Israel/Palestine — ​playing in two archetypes​, of Ellis Island huddled masses and model minority, but not subversive or challenging of the American Empire’s professed virtue or Zionism’s primary claim of “Jewish” nationhood.

Like the people of the United States united by their constitution, Jews are united by doctrines — monotheism, Torah. With the paradoxical confounding fact of ethnic particularism, the “seed of Abraham” fancy. We imagine every other member descendant as the nobility of Judea, and every other one to be some great scholar or sage.

So, shared doctrine of faith, and shared tribal identity.

Mutually reinforcing, but the tribal can be dangerous to out groups. And which is more ennobling? And is it really accurate to describe a “tribe” that spans so many additional identities?

A call to “Jewish” morality by implication positions oneself in a contrast to less-moral others.  The “as-a-Jew” positioning for criticism of Israel becomes a cryptic reinforcement of Jewish nationalism.

Not that more examples are needed after the last 100 years, but the ethnic cleansing of another neighborhood of Jerusalem, the anti-Arab pogroms, the vicious burning of olive trees, attacks of worshipers at Al-Aqsa, constant use of military might against civilians, must lead to the question, to the realization,

Are we as a people (if we exist as a people) a Light unto the Nations, or is our narrative a self-intoxication that every ethnic group indulges in?

Maybe we aren’t so great?

Are we too proud, too arrogant, too glowing with self-regard? That is the question, whether our identity is a spur to self-improvement, or does it provide assurance that improvement is not necessary?

There is a Jewish litany of pride we recite about ourselves, of ethical and secular achievement.

The litany continues, that Jews are the most moral, and at the same time most self-aware and introspective, people known to exist. That no group has experienced the length of our persecutions, with less reason and with more grace and creativity.

If Not Now (INN) organization tweets,

The second half of INN post explains the practical necessity of the first half — that “Jewish” work for Palestinian rights can counter “Jewish” Zionism.  But the necessity reinforces Zionist conception of Jewish nationhood.

The assumption is that when we speak “as-a-Jew” we have more power to influence than Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

See Rep. Tlaib’s 10-minute May 13 House speech at this link.

Ex-Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer said May 9 that Israel should “invest more” in American Evangelicals than American Jews because American Jews are more critical of Israel.

“People have to understand, the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the Evangelical Christians,” Dermer said.

Dermer’s prescription that Israel ally ever more fully with American Evangelicals, many of whom are Christian nationalists who don’t respect American Jews’ rights as citizens in the United States, may help fulfil modern Zionist founder Theodor Herzl’s analysis that wherever Jews prosper, they engender pressure to be ejected.

In this case, it would be because Jews had not supported a foreign state, an ironic turn indeed.

Of course, nothing decisive is likely to happen, until it does. The theme of this article is that Jews are in danger. From what, is the question. We are quite comfortable carrying our trouble with us.

We expect it, it confirms the script of our existence, and it steels lawless impudence in Palestine. That certainty of Jewish moral punctilio may loose more bombs on Gaza, weaponry on Palestinians within and without ’48, and Jewish nationalist lynch mobs chanting, breaking, and hunting.

We hold a certainty we are most moral people.  The IDF explanations of why this or that building was razed by terror from their jets is a point in the “laws of war.”

Each step is kashered, as the totality is a treif mayhem of a modern air force on a civilians.

In a sort of reverse of Abraham’s plea for Sodom– if there are ten righteous citizens, save the city– if there is possibly one guilty, many Arabs must suffer.

It is a lie that the only two attitudes to have to Jews are anti-Semitism or acceptance of Jewish self-appreciation. It is a truth that Israel’s behavior will entangle with American Jews.

We have been here before. In December 1947 American Jewish Committee analyst Milton Himmelfarb wrote there had been two reasons for the AJC to change position to support partition and the establishment of a Jewish state. The first was the need for an immediate refuge for Displaced Persons in Europe.

The second reason is that it gradually became clear that failure to establish a Jewish state could bring about perhaps a worse state of affairs than the actual establishment of the state. The [Jewish] terrorists’ activities in Palestine… led a number of AJC people to wonder whether a Jewish state was the chief enemy. They began to feel that after the state was created, the daily papers in New York at least would no longer carry headlines screaming of King David Hotel explosions and hangings of British sergeants; in short, “better an evil end than an endless evil.”

It may have been an evil, but it was not an end. It unleashed the Jewish nationalist project that now is finding admiration from a new axis of fascists and racists in the United States.

Israel has the approval of white nationalist Richard Spencer, speaker at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally where marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us!”

I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you [Jews] want a secure homeland in Israel.

Like all people, Jews want secure homelands. As a Jew in America, I want America to be that homeland.