The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

Benjamin Netanyahu; drawing by John Springs


Peter Beinart

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.

The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.

cont'd

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/?pagination=false

Isn't that un-American?

to withdraw from conquered land." And I really think this was all Helen Thomas was highlighting.

So freaaking interesting. I can't stand the current Israeli government right now and this helps me absolve myself of the guilt. Thank God. I might even be a latent Jew.

The author claims that "saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age."

But there's no way this particular genii can be put back in the bottle. The liberal aspects of Zionism were based on things like the socialist leanings of the early Zionists and the hope that Israel could serve as a kind of laboratory for new, progressive ways of organizing a society.

But that particular rationale is gone beyond retrieving. Not only is Israel never going to be like that again, but the world is never going to be like that again. Early 20th century progressivism is dead and buried -- which is one reason young Jewish liberals see nothing in Zionism that corresponds to their own liberalism, and a lot that flies in the face of their deep belief in tolerance and multiculturalism.

As a result of losing its progressive aspects, Zionism has been stripped down to the nationalist, racist, militarist, and increasingly ultra-orthodox residue that was always there around the edges -- but now it's all that's left. And it's only going to get nastier.

This is one reason I'm persistently skeptical about a two-state solution. (I mean, even aside from the fact that it's politically and economically non-viable.) The only model of Israel society that could appeal to Jewish liberals today would be one that was completely open, multicultural, and devoted to racial and gender equality. And that just ain't gonna happen.