Miriam Adelson has jumped into the war between good Jews and bad Jews, saying that “many” Jews have turned against Israel to get “an express ticket to successful assimilation.” Her criticism is a common refrain among Israel supporters, that Jews who support Palestinian rights have a weak connection to their Jewish heritage or are self-haters.
Adelson is of course one of Trump’s biggest donors and married to Sheldon Adelson, who is the president’s biggest donor. A physician, Adelson is the winner of the presidential medal of freedom from Trump and also the richest Israeli. Yesterday the rightwing Israel lobby group, the Israeli American Council, or IAC, circulated a blogpost Adelson wrote in January that bewails the assimilation of Jews. There should be 500,000,000 Jews on earth. But anti-Israel Jews have accepted the teachings of antisemites so as to fit in.
We Jews cannot afford division. There are too few us, and too many others who want us to fail, falter, disperse or perish. Scholars believe that, in King David’s time, three millennia ago, the Jewish population numbered around 5 million. Today, we are 14 million – barely a threefold increase. Consider that the Chinese population is believed to have increased about a hundred-fold over the same period. By rights, we Jews should number at least a half-billion today.
But, all too often, anti-Semitism has had its way: from the Inquisition to the pogroms to the Holocaust…
And hatred for us from the outside has engendered drift and doubt among us: All too many Jews assimilate and are lost to the community because they see no good reason to stay. And all too many of these Jews see anti-Israel activism as an express-ticket to successful assimilation.
As to politics, Adelson says that rightwing Israel lobby groups will fix the problem between American Jews and Israel, just when that divide is growing larger. Some of her magical thinking:
We fully expect that the IAC will continue growing and thus shrink whatever gap might exist between American Jews and Israel. This is the time for us to unite, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, of any affiliation.
Adelson’s definition of Jewish community is plainly a religious Zionist one that defies borders:
[I]t is so important to bring closer the world’s two largest Jewish communities – in Israel and in the United States. We are a giant extended family. Though thousands of miles separate us, we share the same joy and pain, the same glorious birthright and the same burden of the disasters that befell us because of this birthright.
Zionists have thrown themselves into the battle against assimilation because they see the struggle between universalism and particularism in the Jewish community as undermining Israel’s support. Israel supporters often say that the deeper someone’s identification with the Jewish community and/or Jewish religion, the stronger their support for Israel. Jeffrey Goldberg said that Jewish critics of Israel were people with Jewish parents, meaning they had lost connection to their Jewishness. Israel’s million-dollar Genesis Prize– the “Jewish Nobel”– was rolled out as a weapon to fight assimilation.
Bari Weiss of the New York Times, one of Israel’s leading advocates in the U.S., has said that Jews who criticize Israel are just trying to fit in with the non-Jews.
[In ancient times] Jewish boys, teenagers young men were so desperate to fit into the surrounding society and they wanted to pass off as non Jews in the gymnasium where you obviously exercised in the nude, so they actually underwent an ancient surgery to undo their circumcisions… This is real, it’s really real and… the reason I bring that up, is that the desire to be a part of the cool group and the desire to be a part of the group that you always thought was your home, and the deep psychological discomfort of realizing it might not be, is very powerful…
[F]rankly when I look at Jews who support the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement, I feel sympathy because I understand emotionally what is driving that. It’s a deep, deep desire to feel a part of a tribe.
Weiss urged Jews to love Jewish “particularism,” our special role in history. Our specialness is “frankly why we drive people crazy still,” she said.
Similarly, Dennis Ross, the advocate for Israel as White House peace processor, co-chairs an organization, the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, that bewails the lack of increase of Jewish population and works against assimilation. For instance, in this document:
Develop new approaches to limit the erosive effects of assimilation and intermarriage.
We need more Jewish babies to keep Israel strong:
[There is a need to reduce] obstacles that interfere with the birth of a third and fourth child in Israeli families and developing conditions that may facilitate Jewish family growth in both Israel and the Diaspora.
Jewish Zionists like Mrs. Adelson, Ms. Weiss and Mr. Ross are excellent examples of the insanity that is Zionism:
– Mrs Adelson says “We Jews cannot afford division”, (deliberately?) oblivious to the fact that for decades she and other Jewish supremacists have been fostering division.
– Ms. Weiss says “the desire to be a part of the cool group and the desire to be a part of the group that you always thought was your home, and the deep psychological discomfort of realizing it might not be, is very powerful”, seemingly clueless about how that also applies to “the Jewish people”.
– Mr. Ross says “[There is a need to reduce] obstacles that interfere with the birth of a third and fourth child in Israeli* families”, clearly comfortable with his decision to be a supremacist.
If Zionists were truly concerned about the lack of Jews in the world, they would simply make Jewish the bureaucratic nationality of “Jewish State”. Instantly every person living in or up to n-generations removed from geographic Palestine would be Jewish.
But they won’t do that because like all Zionists they know that Jewish is – and they want Jewish to remain – a religion-based identity.
_______________________
(*by which he means Jewish)
Extremes of rhetoric are of the zeitgeist, particularly in the run up to November’s election. (Israel’s never ending election cycle is of a different sort).
Adelson is wrong. Assimilation has already been accomplished and those nominal Jews who have a preoccupation with this issue on the side opposing Israel have already achieved assimilation. And they agree with those who oppose Israel’s existence.
Israel’s behavior on the mere face of it is sufficient to earn the hatred of the Palestinians. That’s the nature of war and of this war with the exile that it entailed for masses of Palestinians. For nonapathetic observers to prefer Likud to the Palestinians means a real disdain for Palestinian self respect and thus those that have already assimilated assimilate this point of view. The assimilation is not complete, that takes a few generations or a century or more and this phase began somewhere after 1945 and gelled in 1967, especially vis a vis Israel.
Had Hitler never arisen, the assimilation of American Jews would probably have proceeded as it had in the early part of the 20th century, with low level antisemitism the rule of the masses (and the elites) but never (Ulysses Grant excepted) on an official level and assimilation was occurring with self hatred as the rule, to the point of real disdain for Jewish roots. It was only in the aftermath of ’67, that someone like Irving Howe would publish In the World of Our Fathers and IB Singer would be hailed as genius. (side thought: pre 67 was embodied by Arendt’s disdain for Jewish sensibilities. Turns out her condemnation of the Judenrat is not controversial, but her assessment of Eichmann was just dead wrong and she chose to believe a lying Nazi, just like she chose to lie with a Nazi.) so the role of Israel in the self respect of american jews as embodied in 1967 does play a role in the process of Jewish assimilation. But it’s 50 years hence and assimilation proceeds apace and the disdain for Israel’s policies and Israel’s war/hatred stance vis a vis the Palestinians is heartfelt, not a path to assimilation, but the result of assimilation.
I am more assimilated than my siblings and my position on Zionism is far to the left of my siblings.
Those who back the Netanyahu view of reality have written off the peace movement of 1993 through 2009 as a failed and misconceived idea. I think doubts regarding the peaceful intent of the Palestinians is not off the mark. In their hearts they want the Zionists to leave and heap upon them whatever rhetoric goes along with the wish of “get out”. Giving sovereignty to the Palestinians is a dangerous idea. But because of the settler nature of the occupation, Israel does not have the luxury of waiting for real peace. The settler nature of the occupation is toxic, dripping poison into the bloodstream of The Land every day, so ending it is imperative despite the danger. Israelis sense the danger, but very few sense the toxicity and they are blind or deaf or whatever sense they are lacking. And Mrs. Adelson disdains the Palestinians and is blind and deaf to the toxicity. And whether the assimilated Jews back the Palestinians for whatever historic reason, they are sensitive to a very real fact: the toxicity of the occupation and Mrs. Adelson is insensate to that fact.
The horrible reality of Zionism was nailed long ago by four wise eminent Jews:
Then Secretary of State for India and the British cabinet’s only Jewish member, Lord Edwin Montagu’s response to Prime Minister Lloyd George following issuance of the illegal 1917 Balfour Declaration: “All my life I have been trying to get out of the ghetto. You want to force me back there.”
Henry Morgenthau Sr., former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, 1919: “Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history…. The very fervour of my feeling for the oppressed of every race and every land, especially for the Jews, those of my own blood and faith, to whom I am bound by every tender tie, impels me to fight with all the greater force against this scheme, which my intelligence tells me can only lead them deeper into the mire of the past, while it professes to be leading them to the heights. Zionism is… a retrogression into the blackest error, and not progress toward the light.” (Quoted by Frank Epp, Whose Land is Palestine? p. 261)
Asked to sign a petition supporting settlement of Jews in Palestine, Sigmund Freud declined: “I cannot…I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state….It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land….I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.” (Letter to Dr. Chaim Koffler Keren HaYassod, Vienna: 2/26/30)
Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, 1944: “The concept of a racial state – the Hitlerian concept- is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved. . . , I urge that we do nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which might well have incalculable consequences.”
“Assimilation” is such a revealing word.
The undertones of a form of racism seem clear.
Jews in America have been “assimilated” for generations now. Surely this fact is evident to Miriam Adelson.