Let Me Get This Out Of The Way: Some Of My Best Friends Are Jews
I grew up in a Jewish part of Brooklyn. Just about everyone in my schools (PS-197 and Madison High) was either Jewish or Italian. We ate a lot of Italian food and thought Italians were kind of honorary Jews. There was a stereotype of Jews as brainy, smarter than other people, a form of prejudice not based on any factual basis since the objective reality is that intelligence is not determined by ethnicity, religion or any other demographic characteristic. But what is true is that throughout history Jews have been disproportionately represented in certain intellectual and academic fields, such as science, medicine, finance, and the arts, attributable to factors such as access to education, cultural emphasis on learning and historical occupations (e.g., money lending, which required literacy and numeracy) and as a result, Jews have been associated with intellectual pursuits and achievement. (In most European countries during the Middle Ages and even after that, Jews faced legal restrictions on land ownership and were barred from many professions and guilds. These discriminatory practices limited the economic opportunities available to them and pushed them into occupations that were not subject to these restrictions.)
It is true that Jewish culture places a strong emphasis on education and learning. The value placed on scholarship and intellectualism within Jewish communities may contribute to the perception of Jews as highly educated but it’s important to not mix up schooling and intelligence. This particular stereotype has been perpetuated and reinforced through cultural representations in media, literature, and popular culture. In film, television, literature and other forms of media, Jewish characters are often depicted as intelligent, educated and successful, contributing to the perpetuation of the stereotype. Think of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Władysław Szpilman in The Pianist, Leonard Hofstadter and Howard Holowitz in The Big Bang Theory, Rachel Menken in Mad Men, Midge in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders in The Chosen, Alexander in Portnoy’s Complaint or even the 2 protagonists, Joe and Sam, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Think of George Santos pretending to be Jewish in his short, ridiculous political career. Or consider how in his book, Trumped (1991), John O'Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City reported that Señor T made offensive comments about black accountants and said he preferred to have Jews counting his money. “I think that the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It's not anything they can control... Don't you agree? The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” This isn’t just racist, it’s also deeply anti-Semitic.
It’s not a stereotype to note that Jews overwhelmingly vote for Democrats (between 75 and 80%)— not counting the 2% or so of American Jews who are part of the Hasidic community, which tends to vote, along with other ultra-Orthodox Jews— overwhelmingly for Republicans. Despite that, Trump has been attacking Jews as unpatriotic and as anti-Israel for voting for Democrats. He did it again on Monday. Trump is a long-time anti-Semite who thinks he can get away with it because his grandchildren are Orthodox Jews. During an interview with a neo-Nazi media outlet Monday night, he blathered that “Any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel and frankly, should be spoken to [and that Biden is] totally on the side of the Palestinians… A lot of it’s habit. Jewish people by habit, they just, they vote for the Democrats and Black people, by habit, vote for the Democrats.”
My old friend Rick Perlstein is a Jewish-American best know for his highly acclaimed, best-selling, scholarly books on Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. But in February the American Prospect published a piece he wrote, The Neglected History of the State of Israel. Perlstein has been reading Eran Kaplan’s book, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism And Its Ideological Legacy, about proudly, unabashedly fascist Zionists. One of the leaders of the pre-WWII movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was known as “il duce.”
“Like all fascists,” wrote Perlstein, “Revisionists believed the most exemplary lives were lived in violence, in pursuit of return to a racially pure arcadia. Their rivals, the Labor Zionists, who beat out the Revisionists in the political battle to establish the Jewish state in their own image, hardly shrank from violence, of course. But they saw it as a necessary evil— and defensive. Revisionists believed in violence, offensive violence, as a positive good. ‘Now it is not enough to learn how to shoot,’ Jabotinsky’s successor as Revisionist leader put it in 1945, five years after Jabotinsky’s death. ‘In the name of historical justice, in the name of life’s instinct, in the name of truth— we must shoot.’ And like all fascisms, it expressed an overwhelming ethnic chauvinism… ‘Revisionism was, first and foremost,’ Kaplan writes, ‘an attack on modernity… an attempt to revise the course of Jewish history and release it from the hands of the champions of such ideals as progress, rationality, and universal right.’”
You might imagine, if you had a typical American education like mine, this doctrine could never get far among Jews, of all people, who introduced the world to those ideals. “Western civilization,” as my high school world history teacher said, “walks on two legs: Jerusalem and Athens.” Dancing in circles, kibbutzim, wars only because hostile neighbors forced them on us: That was what the typical American Jewish education taught us Israel was all about.
Only if you were more sophisticated in such matters would you know that in 1977, the very same young Revisionist who praised killing “in the name of life’s instinct, in the name of truth” became Israel’s prime minister. As a commander in Israel’s War of Independence, Menachem Begin wrote a telegram to his forces who had just massacred over a hundred Arabs before razing their village: “Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou has chosen us for conquest.” In 1946, an underground militia Begin led set a bomb in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, in an attempt to chase the British out of the country, that murdered 91 civilians.
I’m no expert on Israeli history and politics… I am, however, an expert on how another nation— this one— has made forgetting, repressing, and distorting the ugliest parts of its past a foundation of its self-understanding. Generations learned about happy slaves from Gone With the Wind, and even the best-informed white observers— like me— were only vaguely aware of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where airplanes literally bombed a thriving Black neighborhood out of existence, slaughtering hundreds, until an HBO show based on a comic book brought it to the cultural fore. I feel like I have something valuable to say about this particular America-Israel special relationship— partly based on what I haven’t known.
…Kaplan starts his 2005 monograph by noting that this “dark side of the Zionist dream… has long been ignored and overlooked by both the Zionist (and Israeli) academic and the political leadership.” Just so: I have a textbook, Understanding Israel, by the distinguished Israeli academic Amos Elon, published in 1976 for the American Sunday school market, written on a high school level. It mentions Jabotinsky and Revisionism precisely once.
…Reading up on revisionism, your head might spin at how many of the things you understood as Judaism and Zionism, like bet follows aleph, simply are not so. For instance, everyone has heard the joke “Two Jews, three opinions.”
Now, I will never hear it again without cringing.
Kaplan quotes Amos Oz: “Israel is a fiery collection of arguments, and I like it this way.” Jabotinsky did not like it that way. He was a political monist. “In a healthy soul there is only one ideal,” he wrote. Same for nations: Like Maoists pursuing cultural revolution, Revisionists wished to “purge the Zionist agenda of all other aspirations.” Kaplan summarizes their ideal: “When a person is one with the nation, there is no room for individuality.”
Astonishingly, Revisionists abjured the entire tradition of rabbinic learning: The Hebrew Bible, as a heroic chronicle of a race mighty of warlords, required no interpretation. They especially despised any interpretation that found in Judaism a universalist moral vision— especially the socialist one of their Labor Zionist rivals, the tradition that won the battle to determine Israel’s reality and future.
Until, that is, having won that battle, Labor Zionism, by this late date, lost the war.
…In Jabotinsky’s allegorical novel Samson, Samson’s father teaches the future warrior king, “It is a sin to rape the land. She is our mother.” Kaplan paraphrases the lesson: Liberated from the farmer’s life, “Samson’s spiritual powers become so great that by merely standing by the side of the road, he made traveling merchants stop and give him their goods.” He continued: “Revisionist ideology called upon Jabotinsky’s disciples to follow the same path, to become what Yoseph Klausner, the Revisionist historian and author, described as the ideal warrior … ‘the warrior of life as part of life itself.’”
…You may know how the story of Revisionism and Israel now plays out. Jabotinsky had a close associate named Benzion, who begat a son, Benjamin Netanyahu, who as prime minister, Kaplan notes, is if anything closer to Jabotinsky’s original Revisionist vision. Begin focused mostly on Revisionism’s vision of territorial conquest. “To Begin,” Kaplan writes, “the Jews were in a constant battle against Amalek.”
If you’ve been following the news from Gaza, you’ll understand the reference.
…Say it plain: one set of Jewish values… celebrates razing Arab villages, just like another set of American values than my own celebrates razing Black ones. In both cases, it is up to people with a stake in those nations to give their all to determine that the humane set of values prevails.
Yesterday, for PunchBowl, Andrew Desiderio and John Bresnahan noted that “This is a watershed moment for the Democratic Party when it comes to the U.S.-Israel relationship. With a few outliers, Democrats seem largely comfortable with Biden’s more aggressive posture toward Netanyahu in the wake of an IDF airstrike that killed seven humanitarian aid relief workers last week. Top Democratic leaders, including senior White House officials, are also engaging more closely with members of Israel’s opposition parties. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid met with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-MD) on Monday, with more meetings to follow. ‘For decades it was almost impermissible politically to have any objections to the way that one of our allies conducted itself,’ Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) told us. ‘But now this is more like a normal relationship, where the friendship underlies all of it. But friendship does not mean that we obey each other.’”
Progressive voters don’t want to hear about Biden’s posture and his so-called threats. He will either break with the Revisionist Zionists and their madness, or he and his administration will be forever cursed by history for giving us Trump II. As Patrick Toomey but it to me yesterday, “There is no door number three available to them.”
Desiderio and Bresnahan reported that Biden’s close ally, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), “said Israel’s actions on humanitarian aid and a potential military operation in Rafah ‘are all going to matter’ as Biden crafts U.S. policy moving forward. Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jack Reed (D-RI) took it a step further, saying that Netanyahu ‘should depart’ from his post, as should Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, of course, has already called for new elections in Israel to replace Netanyahu. The shift among Democrats raises questions about whether a bill that includes unconditional Israel funding could make it through both chambers of Congress today— even with Ukraine aid as the centerpiece. ‘It’s fair, at some point, if we don’t see positive change, to make decisions on what kind of aid we’re providing and what [Israel] can use it for,’ Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) said. When the Senate passed the foreign aid bill in February, the only Democratic Caucus member to oppose it was Bernie Sanders. A lot has transpired in the last two months that raises serious doubts about whether Democrats would accept another Israel package without new restrictions.”