JustASC

Something’s bubbling up, not so much inspired by Peter Beinart’s call for a “Liberal Zionism,” but drinking from the same well.

From a petition by longtime Jewish-American Zionist doves, to responses to Beinart’s essay, there’s a sense that Liberal Zionists — unapologetically Zionist but insistent on the two-state solution — are seeking to distinguish themselves from a Left that cares more about isolating Israel than they do about its security or future.

They’ll still be attacked from the Right, no doubt, but the “anti-Israel” charges will have less chance of sticking.

Here’s Beinart on the “Liberal Zionist” dilemma:

Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Jeffrey Goldberg, who intends to debate Beinart but is in many ways sympathetic to his argument, says he feels lonely as a “Liberal Zionist” :

Who else is still out there arguing that you can be liberal and Zionist at the same time, meaning, pro-Israel and anti-occupation? There’s Leon Wieseltier, of course, but who else? Tom Friedman is in the same camp (and has been there for a long time) but he pays only intermittent attention to the problem.

Goldberg puts Beinart in the LZ camp, along with Jonathan Chait of the New Republic. Chait doesn’t buy a lot of Beinart’s argument, but essentially agrees with him on the pressures facing Liberal Zionism:

Liberal Zionism is being squeezed on both ends by opponents who seek to define it out of existence. Conservatives wish to define Zionism as a conservative idea, so that any sympathizer of Israel must support the Republican Party. Left-wing critics of Israel, likewise, have found their most potent rhetorical tool to be describing any supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance, from Likudniks to Meretz Party doves, as neoconservatives, so as to brand support for Israel as right-wing and unacceptable.

And yet the Liberal Zionists aren’t giving up. A number of important doves, impeccably credentialed in the Jewish world, are collecting names on a petition to support the “American government’s vigorous encouragement of the parties to make the concessions necessary for negotiations to advance.”

The list of endorsers, including Steven M. Cohen (the sociologist), Rabbi Rachel Cowan, Prof. Hasia Diner, Rabbi Irwin Kula, and Prof. Michael Walzer, are reliable doves, but unlike J Street are impervious to the charge that they are “anti-Israel” or anti-Zionist.

You can note the differences in the language of their petition:

Israel faces existential threats, both from without and from within. We do not take these lightly, but we reject the view that they are Israel’s inevitable destiny.

Some of us have lived and worked in Israel; all of us have visited there many times. We resonate strongly with Israel’s Declaration of Independence when it asserts that it is “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.” We believe without reservation that “Israel is the national home of the Jewish people,” and we therefore feel both entitled and obligated to make our views known.

Together with all Israeli citizens, both Jews and Arabs, we lament the decades of death and destruction that have plagued the Land of Israel. We categorically condemn terrorism and we mourn the tragic loss of blood and treasure that has afflicted the region over the years. At the same time, we abhor the continuing occupation that has persisted for far too long; it cannot and should not be sustained.

The success of this is petition will be if, as per Chait, it manages to piss off the Left and the Right.  I think there’s enought there to do both, and the debate for Israel’s future will be all the richer for it.

And this will differ from the normal Nobel Prizes how?

Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky is promoting a program that will grant a Nobel-style prize, worth $1 million, to be granted once a year to a Jew from Israel or the Diaspora for making a significant contribution to all of humanity.

 The goal of the prize is to award Jewish contribution to the world in a number of fields, including art, science, medicine, and more.

Far be it from me to defend Pat Buchanan, but I don’t think critics of his attack on the Elena Kagan nomination understand what makes it so objectionable.

(more…)

This is already getting a lot of attention: Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart argues that the American Jewish establishment’s uncritical stance toward Israel and their constant alarms over Israel’s future are alienating a generation of young American Jews from Zionism. Writes Beinart:

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

Beinart writes of a “different Zionist calling”:

 It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.

For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?

If you’ve ever been the victim of a bad or indifferent copy editor, you’ll appreciate British writer Giles Coren’s letter to his editors at the Times of London. Apparently, where Coren had written of boys and girls “wondering where to go for a nosh,” it appeared in print as “wondering where to go for nosh.”

Explains Goren:

‘Nosh’, as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German ‘naschen’. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, ‘nosh’, means simply ‘food’. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the ‘a’. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, ‘nosh’ means “a session of eating” – in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of ‘scoff’. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn’t mean? I don’t know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever

Wow. And this is probably the friendliest part of his note.

But I know how he feels. I once wrote an article for a magazine in which I referred, properly, to the “provenance” of an archaeological find. They changed it to “providence,” making me look like a dolt. What was especially galling was that the editor also edited an archaeology magazine.

But I’m sure I’ve done the same to writers. In fact, I know I have.

(Hat tip: Larry Yudelson)

My dream of anything but a tuna foot-long at Subway’s continues to founder. The Jewish Star explains.

Best quote:

“It was really not such a big deal,” said David Sax, author of Saving the Deli, a history of the Jewish delicatessen. “It may be officially kosher but it’s spiritually traife.”

A YouTube video features top Israeli singers declaring “Ani Yehudi — I am a Jew” and celebrating Jewish diversity:

Many of the 75,000-plus visitors discuss what I noticed immediately — all the soloists are males. Women show up at the end as part of a choir. Was this an accomodation for the observant singers, who hold by the injunction against “kol isha,” hearing the voice of a woman in song?

If you can deal with the boys club, it’s a stirring and welcome song.

I’m no fan of Daniel Pipes, whose war-on-terror hawkishness often shades far too closely to war-on-Islam bigotry. But to say that Pipes often fails to distinguish between Islam and Islamism is not the same as saying Islamism – that is, an extremist ideology whose proponents support deadly atttacks on non-believing non-combatants — is not a real and obvious threat to people around the world (including Muslims).

Robert Wright fails to grasp this reality in  a column today, suggesting anyone who thinks the Times Square Bomber was driven by “jihadi  intent” is merely taking a page from the “Bush-Cheney playbook.” Wright wants us to focus not on the “actual jihadis” whose circle the bomber seemed to join, but rather on the “other explanations” that might have brought him into their arms — namely his frustration at his financial problems, anger over US drone strikes in Pakistan, and perhaps emotional problems.

Recognizing complexity is all well and good, but to essentially deny that there is a legitimate threat from imams who preach jihad, those who finance it, and those who train others to carry it out,  is just nuts. Says Wright:

Obviously (I hope), to say that American policies may cause terrorism isn’t to say that America is to blame for terrorism.

But then he goes on to say exactly that. The war in Iraq. The drone attacks in Pakistan. The troop escalation in Afghanistan. All three seem to justify, according to Wright, radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki’s contention that America is at “war with Islam.”

Wright writes with more confidence than fact when he asserts that the Times Square bomber might never have been “radicalized” if not for America’s actions in the Middle East. The two attacks on the WTC preceded all the US actions above, and there seemed to be a pretty effective jihadi recruitment effort already in place as the various wars rolled out. You can certainly question whether these wars are worth the blood and treasure, but you don’t have to give a free pass to the extremists, or deny that they propose a threat divorced from the current political reality.

Another aspect of the “war on Islam” trope that puzzles me: Can’t you argue, that in trying to root out the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, America is waging war on behalf of one part of the Islamic world — the moderate, civil, nonviolent part — against a vicious enemy drenched in the blood of fellow Muslims?

NJ Gov. Chris Christie signed a proclamation in honor of Jewish-American Heritage Month, in the presence of various rabbis associated with Chabad of Central and Southern New Jersey.

Here’s the pic from the “Chabad.info” Web site. Notice anything unusual?

That’s right: They have blurred the face of Kim Guadagno, NJ’s female Lt. Governor. It’s not an anomaly: Poke around the site, and you’ll find they blur the faces of other women as well. In some parts of the fervently Orthodox world, blurring the photographs of women in the name of “modesty” is common practice.

New Jersey, I should mention, has rival Chabad organizations. There’s Chabad of Central and Southern New Jersey, which is affiliated with the rabbi who runs the Chabad house at Rutgers University, and is more widely affiliated with the Israel-headquartered faction behind the Chabad.info site.  (The site for Rutgers Chabad and CCSNJ does not, it should be noted, blur women’s faces.) The other organization is Lubavitch of New Jersey, affiliated with Morristown’s Rabbinical College of America, and thus part of Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters, the Brooklyn-based network of Chabad houses that most people are familiar with. Its news site does not blur women’s faces.

I’m a big believer in pluralism, and defend the diversity of beliefs and behaviors in the Jewish community. But this tests my limits. Blurring the faces of half the adult population is both demeaning to women and a poor reflection on the self-control of  the men. (And if this is about “modesty,” why blur the faces and not the bodies?)

And it’s also a chillul Hashem, in that it negatively reflects on the whole Torah lifestyle. As Cynthia Ozick wrote years ago, shouldn’t pious men, steeped in Torah and mitzvot, be better prepared than others for sexual restraint? What is the purpose of Torah and mitzvot, if not to train a person to overcome his or her baser instincts? If men are so weak as to be tempted by the sight of a woman’s face — any woman’s face – what does that say about the effectiveness of their Jewish learning?

This is the exact same thinking behind the burka. It’s unfortunate to see it in this century, in this or any setting.

This handsome fellow (or gal) is on the lawn by my office window.