JustASC

I came back from vacation with a bum shoulder, so it’s been hard to blog. But enjoy my latest column , about the “pro-Israel wars”:

The New Israel Fund under attack. Right-wing Jewish groups accusing left-wing Jewish groups of undermining Israel. Left-wing groups accusing right-wing groups of stifling dissent. A Likud-led government in power in Israel.

When did 2010 become 1990?

The ADL’s Abe Foxman turns film critic, recommending “Inglourious Basterds” for an Academy Award:

Putting a new twist on the Holocaust genre for a new time and a new audience was none other than the renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. While he opens his Inglourious Basterds with a scene repeated untold times during the Holocaust – a Jewish family hidden by a Christian family is discovered by a Nazi commandant and executed – the film morphs into an allegory about good and evil and the no-holds-barred efforts to defeat the evil personified by Hitler, his henchmen and his Nazi regime.

Employing drama, comedy and romance with the quintessential Quentin Tarantino touch, the film is entertaining, yet thought-provoking. Hopefully the millions who see it will understand the horrors of the Holocaust and echo my view of “if only it were true!” Like its predecessors Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, Inglourious Basterds should be recognized with an Academy Award.

Not to be a nudzh, but I can think of a few reasons why “Basterds” is not the “good for the Jews” movie of the year:

– At a time when Israel is facing libelous accusations of war crimes for its actions in Gaza, “Basterds” portrays a unit of Jewish soldiers as avenging murderers who gleefully discard niceties like the Geneva Convention.  So much for “purity of arms.”

– Revenge fantasies are the fantasies of the weak. Twelve year old boys invent comic book heroes to destroy their middle school enemies; Jewish writers and artists created superheroes to wage the battles they were losing in Brooklyn and and their relatives were losing in Auschwitz. Tarantino isn’t Jewish, but in creating Jewish fantasy heroes, he underlines both the actual futility of Jewish resistance in WWII, and validates the accusation that Jews were led like sheep to slaughter.

– Doesn’t alternate history falsify history as much as inaccurate history?  “Basterds” is at least two movies — a terrifyingly realistic  portrait of a Nazi Jew hunter and his cat and mouse games with his victims, and a cartoonish exploitation flick about slaughtering Hitler and his top henchmen. Does the “new audience” Foxman writes about know enough about WWII to separate the real from the fantastical?

– I wonder if Foxman would have been quite so enthusiastic if the same film had been made in Germany by a German director. I  can just imagine the ADL press release: “While the director is to be praised for his clear anti-Nazi stance, his picture  obscures  the historical record of World War II, and ignores, and thus threatens to mock, the real and insurmountable obstacles that prevented meaningful Jewish resistance to the Nazi’s Final Solution.”

I’m taking a few days off next week.

David Brog, the executive director of Christians United for Israel, has a problem with J Street, and explains why in this oped for JTA.

A lot of it has to do with J Street’s criticism of CUFI (see here and here for example). What’s interesting is that both groups, one on the right and one on the left, seem to be mirror images of each other, each calling the other undeserving of the “pro-Israel” label.

Here’s Brog:

Most pro-Israel organizations, including Christians United for Israel, support the positions of the democratically elected government of Israel. We do not live within Hamas or Hezbollah missile range. We do not send our children off to the Israeli army. Whatever our personal views, we in CUFI believe that the difficult decisions about Israeli policy must be made by those who will most directly bear the consequences of the decisions: the Israeli people.

J Street’s leaders, by contrast, are confident that they know better than Israel’s voters. Like many in the pro-Israel community, J Street supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American pressure on the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table and cease anti-Israel incitement. Unlike many of us, however, J Street also favors U.S. pressure on Jerusalem, continuing to see Israel as a barrier to peace despite the Palestinians’ repeated rejections of Israeli offers of statehood. Rather than persuade the Israeli people through reasoned debate, J Street has sought to override their will through American fiat.

Hmm. And yet earlier in the piece, Brog writes that when J Street was formed, he

welcomed J Street’s stated desire to “broaden the public and policy debate in the U.S. about the Middle East.” It disturbed me that there were those who would seek to preclude any reasonable voice from competing in the marketplace of ideas. 

I’m not sure how “broadening the public policy debate” is inconsistent with J Street’s views on the proper role of the U.S. government in brokering a peace process. I mean, if you are going to have a meaningful debate over policy, in Israel and the United States, it’s going to have to include the United States, and it might differ from the stated policies of the Israeli government. Otherwise, it’s not a debate.  Brog seems to be arguing that it’s okay for pro-Israel groups to disagree about Israel — just don’t tell anybody.

This goes back to the pre-Rabin era of pro-Israel politics, when the biggest Jewish organizations demanded “consensus” and Jewish critics of Israeli policy were ostracized. I thought that era ended when Norman Podhoretz, writing in Commentary in April 1993, nullified his prior belief “that American Jews had no moral right to criticize Israel’s security policies.”

Oddly, J Street also used the “consensus” standard as a cudgel in a July 2008 petition asking Joe Lieberman to cancel a planned appearance at a CUFI event:

 “The purportedly ‘pro-Israel’ views of (CUFI founder John] Hagee and his supporters bear little to no resemblance to the consensus of the vast majority of American Jews, who strongly support a negotiated, two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and active engagement by the United States to facilitate it,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director of J Street, the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.

CUFI which describes itself as “pro-Israel,” opposes efforts by the Israeli government to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through territorial compromise. Trading land for peace is viewed as antithetical to “God’s will” and as an impediment to the group’s apocalyptic quest to precipitate the biblical Battle of Armageddon, in which all Jews will either be killed or converted to Christianity in advance of Jesus’ return.

By putting “pro-Israel” in quotes, the J Street petition suggested that you can’t call yourself “pro-Israel” if you oppose efforts “by the Israeli government to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through territorial compromise.”

I think everyone has to take a deep breath here. All those who consider themselves “pro-Israel” have to find away to disagree with each other without impugning the others’ motives or “pro-Israel” credentials. We have to stop trying to define those who disagree with us out of a mythical “consensus.” If you truly believe in “broadening the public policy debate,” then you have to tolerate those whose views you find wrong-headed — or at least stop trying to delegitimize them.

Of course, a lot of folks in the pro-Israel community do not believe in broadening the public policy debate — or at least at a time when the sitting Israeli government seems to share their views. That’s a strategy. But it is an impractical, unenforceable, and short-sighted strategy, and it dooms us to bitter fights like these.

“Pro-Israel” is to the Israeli debate what “patriotic” is to the American debate: A word that one side uses to discredit another, as opposed to one that could remind us of the love we share.

Here’s an alarming headline from the Religion Dispatches site:

New Report: More Sex in the Pulpit

I changed my mind over whether Ethan Bronner’s son’s service in the IDF creates an untenable conflict of interest for the Times’ Israel burea chief:

And for about five minutes there I agreed with Hoyt that perhaps, given the passions of the Mideast, Bronner should be reassigned for the duration of his son’s IDF service. But two writers whom I respect, Ron Kampeas of the JTA and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, turned me around.

Goldberg, a Jew who has covered Israel and is friendly with Arabs who have done the same, fiercely defends the idea that reporters can separate their personal attachments from their reporting. Kampeas, meanwhile, has defended Palestinian colleagues, knowing that attempts to discredit them on ethnic or religious grounds would backfire on Jewish reporters.

Hoyt raised a fair question. Keller provides a reasonable response: Note the biography, but judge the writer on his or her work. Insist on full disclosure, and insist that the writer do his or her job professionally.

Leon Wieseltier has a typically dense (in the sense of intensely argued) takedown of Andrew Sullivan’s various pronouncements on Israel, neocons, and Israel’s centrality in the American and global argument.

Sullivan dashes off some icky and off-putting posts, but I’m not sure they deserve the kind of full-court press Wieseltier applies to them. And he comes close to accusing Sullivan of anti-Semitism for doing what we all do, which is talking about political tendencies among Jews as representing aspects of Jewish political expression. Wieseltier complains:

And this is not all that is disgusting about Sullivan’s approach. His assumption, in his outburst about “the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,” that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one. Bigotry has always made representatives of individuals, and discerned the voice of the group in the voice of every one of its members. Is everything that every gay man says a gay statement?

Well, no. But if a gay man closely identified with the positions he takes on gay causes takes a position on a gay issue (same-sex marriage, for example) and seems representative of a certain line of thought shared with other gay men who are similarly involved politically, we might refer to his position as “representative” of  one segment of gay opinion on a subject.

So when a writer like Charles Krauthammer, who is closely identified with his strong defense of Israel and has a following among other Jews who are similarly engaged Jewishly and share his views on Israel, writes on Israel or the war on terror, it isn’t unreasonable to think he represents a segment of the Jewish community.

The Jewish press does this all the time — we talk of Jewish liberals and Jewish conservatives and Jewish progressives and Jewish neocons not because we are anti-Semites because we recognize a distinct Jewish polity that is represented by distinct political fault lines — especially when it comes to Israel, Iran, and the war on terror,  issues the political and philanthropic leadership class has made, for better or worse, Jewish issues.

That being said, Wieseltier writes brilliantly on Sullivan’s contention that clearing the “Israel-Palestine question off the table would help us tackle Jihadism immensely” by defusing Muslim anger at America and the West. Writes Wieseltier:

As a matter of numinous conviction, the jihadists are anti-Americans and anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, and their anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. They do not want to take the Israel-Palestine question off the table, they want to take Israel off the map. Their goals are literal and maximal. Their worldview is unfalsifiable; their “paradigm” does not “shift.” They do not make Sullivan’s distinction between Israel’s existence and Israel’s actions. If the two-state solution were to come into being, the jihadists would consider their job half-done.  

Ron Kampeas of JTA and Jeffrey Goldberg weigh in on the debate over Ethan Bronner’s Israeli soldier-son. Both think it would be a horrible idea to reassign Bronner under the pressure of “anti-Israel propagandists.” And they defend the idea that reporters can separate their personal attachment from their coverage of the conflicts to which their assigned. Ron sees another danger:

This initiative is a big fat welcome mat for folks who want to marginalize and even criminalize Palestinian reporting [by which he means reporting by Palestinians for western news outlets -- asc], a phenomenon I addressed here.

Listen up: This is a standard that would essentially kill the concept of the “local hire,” rob us (the global “us”) essential insights into conflicts around the globe, and reduce media credibility just when it needs as much reinforcement as it can get.

This is compelling stuff, and made me think twice about agreeing with the Times’ ombusdman that Bronner should be reassigned. But I responded to Ron’s post with the following comments, which I post while acknowledging that I can be convinced otherwise:

Western news organizations tolerate, as opposed to prefer, “local hires” because they are affordable; they have certain skill sets –language, mostly, and hard-won experience on the ground—that their own home-grown staff do not; and they have access to areas that are hostile or inaccessible to outsiders.

The whole concept of a “foreign correspondent” was for decades based on the idea that we send one of “ours” over “there.” The fact of his or her “otherness,” it was long felt, would only enhance the reporting — they would presumably have the skills to tell the country’s story, but keep a critical distance by dint of their “foreignness” and thus tell their story more objectively and dispassionately than a local hire could be expected to. In fact, it was seen as an occupational hazard were a reporter to “go native.”

Ron, you are suggesting a different model—a globalized newspaper, that instead of sending its own staff overseas outsources its reporting to “local hires.” I’m not sure I see the difference between that and merely carrying dispatches from other foreign news outlets. Why shouldn’t the Times just close its Israel bureau and translate articles from Maariv or Haaretz in some sort of reciprocal arrangement? It would be cheaper, and certainly the average Israeli native reporter has more “essential insights” into the region than a guy who has been imported from outside, even if that guy was there for a number of years.

If media had infinite means and universal access to hotspots, they would certainly eschew the whole notion of local hires, and prefer instead to dispatch correspondents who were hired, trained and promoted according to the same standards of its local and national staffs. Local hires are a capitulation to reality, not a journalistic ideal by any means.

In the case of the Times bureau chief, I don’t think you have to be a “savage partisan,” to use Bill Keller’s phrase, to worry that a transplanted American reporter who has become fully integrated into a society might be in danger of losing his or her critical distance. Or to suggest that local hires may not be the ideal way to cover a conflict.

The son of New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner has enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces. The Times’ ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, takes up a debate that I discussed earlier here. Critics of Israel, as opposed to pro-Israel activists, seemed to have raised the issue of Bronner’s son’s service first.

Before rendering judgment about whether the boy’s service represents an untenable conflict of interest for Bronner and the Times, Hoyt acknowledges, and quotes others who say, that the Times‘ Israel coverage is often considered biased by activists on both sides. He also notes that, for people who presumably aren’t predisposed to judge Times coverage for ideological correctness, Bronner’s credentials, track record, and professionalism are impeccable.

That being said, Hoyt concludes that the Times should reassign Bronner, on the grounds that no matter the quality of Bronner’s work, readers would rightly detect a conflict:

But, stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.

Times executive editor Bill Keller disagrees. He writes that the Times’ has other reporters whose biographies might appear to pose a conflict with their assignments, but that the paper’s editors are able to discern when such ties are untenable and when such ties actually enhance the reporter’s understanding of a beat:

My point is not that Ethan’s family connections to Israel are irrelevant. They are significant, and both he and his editors should be alert for the possibility that they would compromise his work. How those connections affect his innermost feelings about the country and its conflicts, I don’t know. I suspect they supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack. I suspect they make him even more tuned-in to the sensitivities of readers on both sides, and more careful to go the extra mile in the interest of fairness. I do know he has reported scrupulously and insightfully on Israelis and Palestinians for many years. And I have no doubt that if a situation arose that presented a real conflict of interest, as opposed to an imaginary or hypothetical one, we would discuss it, and he would not hesitate to recuse himself.

Keller’s piece is also notable in the anger he directs at the “savage partisans” among the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian crowd, each of whom is convinced that the Times is biased against their side. He writes:

It’s not just that we value the expertise and integrity of a journalist who has covered this most difficult of stories extraordinarily well for more than a quarter century. It’s not just that we are reluctant to capitulate to the more savage partisans who make that assignment so difficult — and who make the fairmindedness of a correspondent like Ethan so precious and courageous.

Phew. There’s more. And in this describes the logical consequences were the Times to begin to apply identity litmus tests to its reporting staff: 

Readers, like reporters, bring their own lives to the newspaper. Sometimes, when these readers are unshakeably convinced of something, they bring blinding prejudice and a tendency to see what they want to see. As you well know, nowhere is that so true as in Israel and the neighboring Palestinian lands. If we send a Jewish correspondent to Jerusalem, the zealots on one side will accuse him of being a Zionist and on the other side of being a self-loathing Jew, and then they will parse every word he writes to find the phrase that confirms what they already believe while overlooking all evidence to the contrary. So to prevent any appearance of bias, would you say we should not send Jewish reporters to Israel? If so, what about assigning Jewish reporters to countries hostile to Israel? What about reporters married to Jews? Married to Israelis? Married to Arabs? Married to evangelical Christians? (They also have some strong views on the Holy Land.) What about reporters who have close friends in Israel? Ethical judgments that start from prejudice lead pretty quickly to absurdity, and pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.

That’s a little unfair. I think the question about a foreign correspondent with a soldier-son in the army of the nation he is covering is a little different than the objections of partisans, like Philip Weiss, who have baldly suggested that Jewish reporters can’t cover the Mideast with professional detachment. I think the question about Bronner’s soldier-son, even if asked by someone who is convinced Bronner is too pro-Israel (like Stephen Walt), is fair. We ask such questions about former soldiers covering the military, or Congressional correspondents with spouses who serve in government. The attacks on the Times for Bronner’s coverage have been vicious, but this doesn’t seem to be the discussion in which Keller should be settling those scores.

I think Keller provides a reasonable response to the Bronner question: Judge the writer on his or her work, and not on the biography. Insist on full disclosure, but also insist that the writer does his or her job professionally.

And yet, if I were a paper as important at the Times, covering a hotbed of controversy like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I would worry about the constant distraction that will arise when a reporter’s son is serving on one side of a conflict he is meant to cover objectively. Bronner may be a good man and a superb reporter, and no Times reporter will ever escape the ideological judgment of the critics, but I’d be wary of any reporter whose family is so invested in the narrative he is covering. Aren’t foreign correspondnets regularly rotated so they aren’t tempted to “go native,” or is that an obsolete practice? 

I’m with Hoyt in reassigning Bronner – not because it will appease the “savage partisans” but because it will represent what seems like a good journalistic practice.

My old Forward colleague Lisa Keys writes about Jewish gourmands’ bacon fetish: Is it sacrilege? An inevitable symbol of our post-ethnic, multi-identity era? A cynical marketing ploy on the part of hipsters?

Writes Lisa:

And to many Jews, the allure of pork is simply irresistible. “It’s the ultimate taboo,” says Dan Levine, who as “Porky LeSwine” is the co-founder of BbqJew.com, dedicated to news about North Carolina pork barbecue, a topic which enjoys religious-like devotion. “Where we live, pork is in so many dishes,” says the Chapel Hill resident. “It’s a flavoring ingredient in everything from vegetables to cornbread.”

The “ultimate taboo” also makes a great marketing tool. “It gives us a bit of identity and sets us apart in the barbecue world,” says David Rosen, a co-founder of Jubon’s, a competitive barbecue-making enterprise with a name that plays on the words “Jew” and “Ubon’s,” the Yazoo City, Mississippi, barbecue restaurant that mentored the team. The team mascot is a yarmulke-wearing pig, and its slogan is, “At least the salt is kosher.” “It’s a little controversial, but so what?” Rosen says. “We’re not out to offend.”

Of course not. Who would possibly be offended by a yarmulke-wearing pig?

At first, the article reminds me of the comedian Nick Kroll’s joke: “You know who likes fried chicken? Black people. You know who else likes fried chicken? EVERYbody.” (Full disclosure: I grew up in a nonkosher home. Bacon is freakin’ delicious.)

It’s not the bacon-eating that bugs me — rather, it’s their need to wrap (sometimes literally) their bacon-eating around Jewish symbols and references (L.A.’s Gorbals restaurant serves “bacon-wrapped matzo balls, pork belly braised in Manischewitz, and Israeli couscous pudding with bacon brittle”).

I react to this trend the way I did after reading an essay at Jewcy that celebrated the hipster Jews’ embrace of the pork taboo. Here’s what I wrote in response:

Why does this Jewcy bacon fetish sound so — trite? It’s like the secular kibbutzim that would hold a Yom Kippur feast. It sounds like rebellion, but seems more like a plea for attention — and attention from the very people they were presumably rebelling against, the way a grade school boy will yank the hair of a girl he likes. The kibbutz could have just ignored Yom Kippur altogether. Now THAT would have been rebellion.

Instead, the Yom Kippur feast, like Jewcy’s bacon obsession, is based on a need to broadcast “the type of Jews we aren’t,” as opposed to the “type of Jews we are.” So while you consider bacon “a completely gratuitous and delicious rebellion FROM a defining tenet of Judaism,” what are you FOR, exactly, beside proudly and loudly flouting those tenets? When the Reform movement issued its Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, which nullified the laws of kashrut, the goal wasn’t just to rebel or celebrate forbidden, um, fruit. It was a principled stand, intrinsic to their understanding of “modern spiritual elevation” — to which they felt the ancient laws were actually a hindrance.

 What I’d love to read is your essay, not on why it’s so “hilarious” and taboo to eat bacon, but how your relationship to food and tradition — the kosher and the trayf. the sacred and the profane — shapes who you ARE as a Jew, not who you AREN’T.