Tag Archives: Judaism

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Jason Maoz of The Jewish Press wastes a good deal of ink trying to figure out for David Horowitz’s readers why more Jews haven’t come around to the Republican ticket, but can offer only insulting, patronizing theories to the effect that those backwards semites (Maoz et al excepted) just don’t know what’s good for them:

…the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and invariably corrupt…

…Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jew…

…Whether Roosevelt or Truman was deserving of such Jewish support is a question most Jews were reluctant even to ask…

…Adlai Stevenson, a one-term governor of Illinois whose persona of urbane intellectualism set a new standard for the type of candidate favored by Jewish liberals…

…Jews still feared that pulling the Republican lever would cause their right hands to lose their cunning…

…Official” Jewry – that dizzying network of committees, councils, conferences and leagues staffed by liberal flunkies whose Holy Writ is the platform of the Democratic Party and whose daily spiritual sustenance comes from New York Times editorials – was represented in the McGovern campaign…

…it was a combination of old habits and a religious-like devotion to dogmatic liberalism that drove the majority of Jewish voters, not any primary concern for Israel or narrowly defined Jewish interests…

…a conservative Republican, which for most Jews in 1980 (and to a somewhat lesser extent today) was akin to an alien life form: an altogether unfamiliar species…

…Jews were drawn to Mondale for a number of reasons – his Humphrey connection, his New Deal liberalism, and the simple fact that he wasn`t Reagan, to whom most American Jews never took a liking, despite a dramatic improvement in U.S-Israel relations since Mondale`s old boss had been thrown out of office…

…But Clinton would have defeated Bush and Dole even if each had sworn to immediately move the White House to Jerusalem, for the simple reason that Israel has never been the determining factor in how most Jews vote. If it were the determining factor, Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984 would have received a far greater share of the Jewish vote…

…a not inconsiderable number of Orthodox Jews found themselves to be just as susceptible as their secular brethren to the fatal Clinton Mystique…

There are a few basic premises here:

We Jews (besides Maoz) are easily swayed by personality, image, and kitschy references that make us feel important.

We Jews (like Maoz) would oppose attempts by the US government to pressure Israel to behave in the way dictated by Jewish values, or to undertake policies with any hope of bringing closer a just compromise – but (besides Maoz) fail to reward the hawks who are laboring to support the Likudniks because we’re too short-sighted to notice.

We Jews (like Maoz) are wealthy, and we validate that laissez-faire capitalism works, and so our support (contra Maoz) for government policies concerned with social justice must demonstrate some combination of confusion, conformity, pressure, and paranoia.

Starting from there, it’s not surprise that the intrepid reporter, after 7,000 words down and 70 years surveyed, is forced to conclude that

while each of the explanations we`ve cited may have its own degree of merit, and while taken together they may provide an interesting glimpse into the collective psyche of the American Jewish community, the Great Mystery of Jewish voting habits remains just that

At the beginning of his piece, Maoz throws out the idea that there’s resonance between liberalism and Jewish tradition, identity, or values, on the grounds that if that were true, Orthodox Jews – who everyone knows are the real ones – would be the most liberal. Perhaps if Maoz checked out Isaiah – or Exodus, or Jeremiah, or Genesis – he’d find something to at least offer a clue as to why, in his words,

the American Jewish community, the most affluent subgroup in the country, still votes as if it’s one step ahead of the bread lines and the evict notices.

Class traitors? It’d have to be one of the lighter insults we, as a people, have suffered. Could be that Jewish community and tradition offer – for some at least – an imperative to have a stake in being part of a just, free, and democratic community, and to work to build such a nation.

Or maybe it’s just those Jewish grandmothers kvelling when Bill Clinton says “mensch,” and worrying that if he doesn’t get their vote he’ll sick one of those Democratic Party Machines on them.

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Gregg Easterbrook’s recently found himself at the center of a controversy around charges that comments he made on his site about movie violence and Jewish studio executives demonstrated antisemitism. As I made clear in an exchange with Josh Cherniss this summer, I tend as a Jew to try to cultivate a healthy
skepticism of that charge – it’s an ugly one, those who deploy it too easily risk both defaming those who don’t deserve it and lessening the weight of the charge against deserved targets. This looks to me pretty clearly like a case of choosing words poorly and missing the implications they held for someone else reading them. But what struck me in this case is not the unfairness of the charge, but one particular and problematic line used in defense:

From Josh Chafetz:
GREGG EASTERBROOK IS MOST EMPHATICALLY NOT AN ANTI-SEMITE. It would be impossible to work at TNR and be anti-semitic…

From Andrew Sullivan:

He has worked for many years at The New Republic, testimony in itself that he is hardly anything even close to anti-Semitic.

I’m not sure which problematic argument is being advanced here:
That someone who works for an “enlightened,” respectable publication could not be antisemitic?
That someone who works with many Jewish coworkers could not be antisemitic?
That someone who works for a magazine that staunchly supported the war in Iraq could not be antisemitic?

Lemme know what I’m missing. Otherwise, it seems to me that Sullivan and Chafetz reached the right conclusion for awful reasons. This brings me back to Norman Podheretz’ execrable argument that under the Talmudic principle of bitul b’shishim, Pat Robertson’s advancement of the theory that Jews had collaborated with free masons and Illuminati to cause every war in American history by controlling the international monetary system could be excused because of his support for the Israeli Government – and the ADL‘s decision to give Robertson an award. I have no reason to believe that Pat Robertson couldn’t have gotten himself a gig with the New Republic in his heyday if he really wanted one – or that if he did, he would become any less prejudiced.

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Jacob Remes deserves, depending on your judgment, the credit or the blame for pitting Josh Cherniss and I against each other over Tony Auth’s recent cartoon. His original take on Auth’s work is here; his more extensive, and fairly moderated, take, in response to my earlier post, is here. In responding to his eloquent piece, I should start by noting that there is a great deal about which, in principle, Josh and I agree. We stand by the importance of distinctions between anti-Sharon, anti-Israel, and antisemitic sentiment, and recognize that, as he says, “many extreme and dogmatic defenders of Israel,” as well as too many critics of Israel, “casually ignore this distinction, to their great dishonour.” We both maintain that, as Josh says, “we should be careful in how we employ symbols — and may with justice criticize others for not taking such care — ESPECIALLY when we agree with the point they were trying, or may have been trying, to make.” Josh and I both share with Tony Auth an opposition to the “separation fence,” the occupation, and the settlement project. And like Josh, I’ve felt and expressed a special frustration with those who use unjust tactics or offensive rhetoric in the service of a cause I share. The case of Professor Qumsiyeh, to which I alluded in my previous post, who sent to the Yale Coalition for Peace listserve what he believed was the membership list of the pro-war Yale College Students for Democracy, and was actually the list for an Israel discussion listserve, is for me the most telling recent example. Instructively, but not surprisingly, after I and then other students in Yale Peace rebuked him over the listserve, the story was spun as further evidence of the antisemitism of the left without mention that leftists had been the first to condemn his actions.

It doesn’t seem worth devoting too much space to defending myself from an accusation of having “an ideological persecution complex,” especially given Josh’s admission of using my “minor side-comment as an opportunity to express [his] thought” about the attraction of the victim posture. I’ll just say that I agree that demonstrating persecution is not a substitute for demonstrating virtue (Josh’s word choice), while sharing that I think accusations of a “victim mentality” are too often – in other contexts – a substitute for confronting the arguments offered by, or the injustice witnessed by another. I don’t believe (despite being called a Nazi, a self-hating Jew, etc. on occasion) that being a Jewish critic of Israel makes me a victim of some sort. But I also don’t believe that making the personal and empirical observation that much left criticism of Israel “come[s] under fire…as not only critical of the Sharon government but anti-Israel, and not only anti-Israel but antisemitic” represents “a wallowing in victimhood, a sheer love of whining and feeling put upon,” or even a lesser shade of such.

Josh suggests that because Sharon does not appear in Auth’s cartoon, it must be anti-Israel at the least rather than anti-Sharon. Terms like “anti-Israel” are as ambiguous as they are charged – the cartoon is only anti-Israel, as I see it, in the sense that it presents a strident critique of Israel and uses the central symbol of the state in connection with oppression. That may pass Josh’s bar for anti-Israel – I wouldn’t render that inherently anti-Israel any more than I would a depiction of, say, the Statue of Liberty carrying Japanese into internment camps anti-American. To me the cartoon is anti-Sharon in the sense that it dramatically criticizes a policy of the Sharon government, even if Arik himself is absent from the cartoon. But at the center of our dispute isn’t how to draw different shades of political criticism of the state but how to draw the line between political criticism of the state and religious bigotry – the charges being leveled at Tony Auth now are not primarily of offering anti-Israel criticism but rather of offering antisemitic criticism – although much of the criticism comes from people and organizations, I should note, who seem to be interested in charging the latter only when it offers an opportunity to discredit the former.

Josh reads me incorrectly as seeing “the ‘appropriation’ of the Star of David as the symbol for Israel — and, thus, the symbol for supporters of Israel, including diehard Likudniks (and worse) — as somehow making it cease to be a symbol of the Jewish people.” Not at all. The Jewish star today is identified as a symbol of the Jewish faith and people, and as a symbol of the state and government of Israel (while I maintain that the Jewish star is used and has been as a religious symbol, Josh is right to remind me that the historical root and dominant use of the Jewish star is as a symbol of the Jews more than of Judaism). But just as the political symbol doesn’t erase the historic meaning of the star, neither should the latter invalidate the former. Josh seems to be suggesting either the reverse of the statement he attributes to me – that the use of the star as a symbol of the Jewish people makes it invalid as a symbol for Israel – or that the star is a valid symbol for Israel but inaccessible to Israel’s critics. Either of these arguments seems to me rather troubling, both, I think, for obvious reasons. There’s little of substance I would disagree with in Josh’s characterization of the historical and current resonance of the Jewish star – as he says, “It has been worn — sometimes proudly and voluntarily, sometimes forcibly and with shame and fear — by Jews throughout history.” No one could reasonably argue with Josh’s admonishment that “given how potent and fraught symbolic politics are, we should be careful how we employ symbols…” But that said, we should also be careful how we read symbols. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Auth to use the star in the cartoon as representative of the state which imposes the fence on the civilians – the fence and the civilians being the second and third symbols of the cartoon. And I strongly reject the idea – one promulgated on print and around the web, but one which in fairness Josh implied in his original post but seems to have backed away from – that to do so makes Auth a bigot. I can’t think what the better symbol for this particular cartoon would be – the menorah, in my judgment, which appeals on the seal of the state, is a distant second as a national symbol. It also co-exists as a religious symbol (and an evocative one which, like most Jewish symbols, is tinged with memories of oppression), and it lacks the currency in the American consciousness that the star has as a symbol for Israel. Josh’s conclusion may be that a cartoon of this type – combining the national symbol of a state with a symbol of the oppression it’s visiting on others – simply shouldn’t be drawn. I don’t think that’s an easily acceptable conclusion. .And again, I think it’s illustrative that the Israeli government, Israeli politicians, and right-wing lobbies all plaster their material with the symbol of the star. While I might sometimes find such use of the star (much like much of the use of the American flag) tasteless, I wouldn’t deny them that symbol from their vocabulary.

Incidentally, if Auth intentionally adapted a similar-looking Nazi cartoon, obviously that would be tremendously problematic. But absent that, as aesthetically unsettling as the similarities might be, I don’t think the argument that Auth’s cartoon resembles a Nazi one is an effective critique

Josh seems to fail, or decline, to distinguish between provocative and offensive commentary – or between that which offends and that which is offensive. Political cartooning is a provocative medium, and some of its best achievements are among its most provocative. Tony Auth’s cartoon after the lynching of Israeli soldiers in Ramallah on October 12, 2001 (I remember because I was in Hod HaSharon at the time), redrawing the photo of one of the Palestinian killers pressing his blood-stained hands against a window and replacing him with the image of Yassir Arafat, was highly provocative (and like much of Auth’s work, not overly clever). And provoking intentionally – a charge Josh levels against Auth – doesn’t strike me as poor behavior on the part of an artist. But if offensive works are to be condemned (but not – I assume Josh agrees with me – censored), then offensiveness must be some quality – like, say, religious bigotry – beyond being observed to offend some people. I agree with Josh that, “It should be very easy to criticize Israel on its merits right now, and not be open to imputations of anti-Semitism from any reasonable person.” But when critics of Israel are subjected to imputations of antisemitism, we should ask ourselves whether the problem is the critics of Israel, or the critics’ critics. Josh shifts in his post between criticizing Auth for being offensive, and criticizing Auth for opening the left up to attack from the right, for giving “a gift to the Likud.” And while I agree with Josh that one mistake peace movements make is a failure to disavow bigotry promulgated in their name, I’d contend that another mistake peace movements make is allowing themselves to be cowed out of making difficult charges by the threat of being tarred with unjustified accusations of bigotry. There are few to the left of Alan Dershowitz who can criticize Israel in a manner that CAMERA would approve. One of the major obstacles to the execution of a coherent Jewish response to genuine antisemitism is the frequency of spurious charges. As Uri Avnery argued, antisemitism used to be a charge that people shrunk from with haste. Now the real antisemites have safe cover among the increasing ranks of non-antisemitic critics branded with the label. In other words, absolutely there’s a difference between Die Sturmer and (as much as I hold its cartoons in about the same estimation the writers of Seinfeld do) the New Yorker. Which is why treating the New Yorker like Die Sturmer is such a mistake. I’ll admit to being somewhat mystified by Josh’s narrative in which the Likudniks and their American allies were “slinking about silently trying to ignore the marriage law” before Tony Auth spurred them on and rendered them “suddenly up in arms” – I think this may be another case where the “blogosphere” fails to reflect the pulse of the broader populace.

Was Auth’s cartoon the most effective image to convey his message? I’m not sure. But the charges of bigotry leveled against it are unjust, and in many cases, quite suspiciously motivated. I’m glad Josh has backed a few steps away from them. Where Josh accuses Auth of poor political judgment, or failure to advance the cause of the peace movement, I’m skeptical. But his charges of foolish offensiveness I have to reject.

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This Tony Auth cartoon has caused a stir in several Philadelphia, Jewish, and on-line circles since it was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer last Thursday. The cartoon, which depicts a fence in the shape of a Jewish star dividing Palestinian civilians, has come under fire – as do most on the left about Israel – as not only critical of the Sharon government but anti-Israel, and not only anti-Israel but antisemitic. And, as in most but not all cases when Israel is the topic and antisemitism is charged, the charge doesn’t hold weight.

At the heart of the issue with this cartoon is the symbolic use of the Magen David, the Jewish star. Because Auth uses a religious symbol, the argument goes, the cartoon represents a religious – rather than political – slur, a blood libel. Because the star is employed in connection with a depiction of oppression, the cartoon’s message must be that the religion, and the coreligionists, associated with the star are oppressive. But this argument disregards the appropriation of the Jewish star a century ago for the flag of the State of Israel. The star, which appears in the center of the flag framed above and below by horizontal stripes, is its only recognizable symbol, and appears solo in a range of administrative contexts, as understandably is also a mainstay of pro-Sharon lobbies. So why the Magen David does not belong to the lexicon of acceptable symbols for Auth is seems to me difficult to argue.

This may seem like a belated nitpick, but there’s a larger and more persistent issue here. Whatever one believes about the religious nature of the state, I think intellectual honesty demands a recognition that any self-identified religious state inherently blurs the discourse, insofar as most of us legitimize and call for judgments of states and political actors of a type that we don’t want or legitimate of religions or religious groups. But pundits on both sides can fall prey to a desire to have it both ways. A couple months ago I called a Yale professor active on the Yale-Peace listserve on a seeming inability or willful refusal to distinguish between Jews, Zionists, Likudniks, Israelis, and neoconservatives. But the double standard on the right is more subtle and more ubiquitous: Groups that defend the Israeli government are pro-Jewish and speak for Jews, but when critics of Israel conflate the state and the religion it’s bigotry. It would be gratifying to see more politicians willing to distinguish the Jewish community and Arik Sharon when it comes to commentary they agree with and commentary they don’t.

Katha Pollitt, in an essay on flags after September 11, wrote that symbols are doors and it’s time to walk through them (when I asked her in person what she had meant by that quote, she said she didn’t remember ever writing it). Symbolic politics is inherently potent and inherently fraught. And all cartoons are charicature. As cartoonists go, Auth isn’t a particular favorite of mine, although he has his moments. But Auth’s cartoon has three symbols. The first, as described above, is perhaps the primary symbol of the state. The second, Palestinian civilians, exist by the millions in the territory occupied by that state. And the third, the fence in question, is lengthening even now. The criticism of Auth for using the symbol, and the implication that his symbolism is akin to Nazi propaganda and/or is comparing Israelis to Nazis to Nazis, makes it easy to forget that in this case life preceded art. The actual fence, in fact, looks a lot uglier than portrayed in the cartoon. Auth chose to make a statement – not a particularly new one – about the construction of the fence in the name of the star and its impact on men, women, and children. Debatable? Sure. Bigotry? No.

Disagree? Eidelson@Yale.Edu