The Troubles of the Jews
The mind operates by means of emphasis, especially the mind in the grip of fear or anger. When it brings order to the welter of experience, the mind sometimes exceeds the requirements of coherence and proceeds to exercises in simplification. Out of our many identities, we select one; out of our many loves, we select one; out of our many threats, we select one. Life is more easily managed this way. And we fit in more easily this way: such choices are determined chiefly by how we wish to be known by others, and by what others demand of us in the way of personal validity in our time. And so we choose single symbols of ourselves, and the rest, which may include some of our strongest capacities, is left to languish, undetected and undeveloped. Complexity is never trending. It is true that the appeal to complexity can become complacent and ponderous and an alibi for mental inaction; but surely nothing of consequence is ever simple. Surely the truth about us is that we are many things, we have many commitments, and we suffer many troubles. We take our pleasures in many places. We fight on many fronts.
Perhaps nothing is more responsible for our myopias than our politics. Identify friend or foe, to borrow the naval code, is the rule. Those appear to be the only kinds of other people in existence. The Schmittians among us should take heart: we are living in the dystopia that their sordid hero described. Consider the question of our security. Our future depends significantly on how we conceive of the “foe.” If we misdescribe the danger we face, our powers will fail us. But in keeping with our pathologically synchronized political culture, or, to put it another way, in keeping with the growing repudiation of the liberal mentality, we are losing our mental dexterity in the confrontation with what threatens us. “Precarity” is the shibboleth of the day, and there is certainly a basis in reality for the popularity of the term; but “precarities” would be more accurate. The weakening of our sense of multiplicity has become one of our most significant vulnerabilities. Ideology is a method for seeing less than is there. We elect to see less, in exchange for the confidence that what we have seen we have mastered. It is a satisfying contraction.
Even if we cannot proceed without frameworks with which to interpret experience, frameworks are blinders. That is why we are so often surprised, and ambushed; why crisis always finds us catching up. I remember when I first learned this lesson. I was a young student of modern Jewish history, and in the study of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state I came upon the famous pronouncement by David Ben Gurion in 1939: “We will fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler and we will fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper.” The White Paper, an act of supreme callousness that would be right at home in our era of scorn for the stateless, was an instrument of the British government that severely curtailed Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine, with the aim of eventually banning it altogether. In 1939! I took away a larger point from Ben Gurion’s strategy in extremis. It is that there is never only a single danger. The challenges are always multiple and simultaneous. This is not as obvious as it sounds, because it requires certain mental adjustments that do not comport well with simple pictures, with intellectual italics, with “systemic” analysis, with holistic explanations. In the Jewish community in Palestine, there were many Jews who overcame their opposition to the British occupiers to fight alongside them against the Nazis, and there were even some Jews who overcame their opposition to fascism to fight the British occupiers (the history of Jewish fascism did not begin with Kahane and Ben Gvir); but Ben Gurion was insisting upon a double struggle, because history had afflicted the Jews with more than a single enemy, more than a single cruelty. And sometimes the challenges are not all external: I was schooled in the art of the double struggle, the fight on many fronts, by some of my teachers, who were in the valiant minority of American intellectuals in the 1950s who denounced Joseph Stalin and Joseph McCarthy with equal vehemence. No excuses were accepted and no extenuations were made. And if the double struggle made no sense according to the politics of the day, so much the worse for the politics of the day.
The contemporary Jewish community is now faced with the prospect of a double struggle, but so far it has demonstrated only a skill for singleness. The Jewish left wants to know only one thing, the Jewish right wants to know only another thing. Right now it should be the duty of American Jews to fight the anti-Semitism outside the Jewish world and the anti-democratic decay inside the Jewish world, and on the basis of the same principles.
One of the most impressive accomplishments of the fight against anti-Semitism is the literature — scholarly and philosophical — that has been created about it and against it. There is very little new to say about it, except to insist upon its eternal recurrence and to document its recent manifestations. But a succinct characterization of the malignancy is useful, and the finest one I know was recently written by Anthony Julius, the British Jewish intellectual and lawyer who is an authority on the terrible subject.
Antisemitism consists of false and hostile beliefs about Jews, the Jewish religion, Jewish institutions or Jewish projects; these beliefs often lead to injurious things being said or done to Jews or their projects, or said about them. It has several modes of existence. Principally: it is a family of discourses; it conditions or deforms institutions and institutional practices; it is a choice made by individual men and women. Antisemitism variously threatens Jewish lives, Jewish security, and Jewish morale. It would deny to Jews rights others enjoy; it would withhold from them equality of treatment and regard. Antisemitism does not just injure Jews. It also encourages misconceptions about the causes of social conflicts, and of human suffering and social deprivation, thereby prolonging their existence, to general disadvantage. By denying Jews the opportunity of making contributions to society, it injures all society’s members. It corrupts political discourse; it taints political life; its injustices towards Jews are precedent-establishing. It even injures antisemites, degrading them and making them stupid.
By now it should not be controversial to say that no party or ideology or community or movement is immune to anti-Semitism. The Jews have been despised by universalists and by particularists, by cosmopolitans and by nationalists, by communists and by fascists, by socialists and by capitalists, by progressives and by reactionaries, by the secular and by the religious, by white people and by people of color, by intellectuals and by populists, by monarchs and by republicans, by philosophers and by farmers, by monsters and by nice people, in a multitude of languages and in a multitude of cultures, and in places where there were no Jews. The absence of the object of a prejudice does not weaken it, and sometimes strengthens it. (Anti-Semitism in German universities between the wars was highest in the universities where there were no Jewish students.) That is because a prejudice is not caused by its object, and the notion that it is caused by its object, a commonplace notion, is itself a repetition of the prejudice.
It is racist to seek the cause of racism in black people. It is misogynist to seek the cause of misogyny in women. It is homophobic to seek the cause of homophobia in gay people. And it is anti-Semitic to seek the cause of anti-Semitism in Jews. Prejudice is an expression of the prejudiced individual, of his or her inner turmoil, which is the result of his or her education and experience; or of a society with its own inner wounds and needs, most notably its desperate desire for scapegoats for its failures. Nobody ever went looking for a scapegoat without finding one. Bigotry is an internal disfiguration, not an empirical inference or a conclusion warranted by facts from the outside. Its essentially subjective and fantastic character, its invincible indifference to evidence, is what accounts for its tenacity and its durability. Hallucinations cannot be refuted; they can only be delegitimated and disarmed.
All this, as I say, should be uncontroversial; but it is not. Almost nobody acknowledges the politically non-partisan nature of anti-Semitism, its infernal ubiquity. In the United States, for example, many Jews are certain that anti-Semitism is mainly or solely a phenomenon of the right. The Trump years certainly gave them abundant reasons to think so. (Trump himself pioneered a new type of villain in this tale: the pro-Israel anti-Semite.) The massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the torch-lit Nurembergish march in Charlottesville, the dramatic statistical spike in incidents of anti-Semitic violence around the country, the mainstreaming of politicians who believe in Jewish space lasers — the anti-Semitism that has characterized the American right for a century and longer has finally been allowed to come out from under its rock and leap onto our platforms and take its seats in Congress. This remains a national disgrace, and no amount of trade between Israel and the Emirates, which was the Trump administration’s most significant contribution to the well-being of the Jewish state, can mitigate or erase the stain. (If we did have a space laser, who does Marjorie Taylor Greene think would be its first target?)
These awful developments have left Jewish progressives with the warm feeling that the spread of anti-Semitism has little to do with them, that the fight against anti-Semitism is a progressive fight against the forces of reaction, which it partly is. Riveted by the bigot without, they overlook the bigot within. They are strangely unemphatic about the fight, for political reasons: the sane right, the saving remnant of American conservatism, and of course the Jewish right, has taken it up, and who would want to march with them? After all, some otherwise odious Republicans have been laudably exercised by Jew-hatred in America. Christian evangelicals have also risen to protest. Myself, I am grateful to them for their attention to the perils that beset my people, even if I cannot share their politics and their theological grounds for it. In times of trouble, friends are friends.
Jewish progressives have spoken only softly, if at all, about the Judeophobia in their own midst. What has anti-Semitism to do with them? They appear to believe that they have clean hands in this matter. Jean Améry, writing in 1969 about earlier manifestation of righteous intolerance on the New Left, called this “virtuous anti-Semitism.” But now it turns out that some of the most glittering Congressional tribunes of the people, some of the stellar leftists in American politics, have required remedial training in respect for Jews. I am not especially moved by Ilhan Omar’s or Rashida Tlaib’s learning curve, because a lack of bigotry should be an elementary expectation in a decent society. They had no good reason to say anti-Semitic things in the first place. Were they ignorant? All racists are ignorant.
I am not arguing against forgiveness; like you, I have needed it myself. But I have for a long time believed that the test of a person’s probity is his willingness to criticize his own community and to suffer unpopularity in his own congregation. Solidarity can sometimes make people stupid. The response of the progressives to the embarrassing revelations of their comrades’ bigotry was mainly to denounce the critics as racists and Islamophobes. They behaved like a sect. But my favorite example of progressivism’s tolerance of its internecine anti-Semitism is the somewhat hapless case of Trayvon White. He is a progressive politician, a young African American who represents underserved and disadvantaged neighborhoods on the city council in Washington, D.C.. In 2018, on a fine morning in March when the city was startled by snow flurries, the councilman posted this: “Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation … And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.” The Jewish community was offended, he met with a group of rabbis and lay leaders, he apologized, and he was sentenced to a visit to the Holocaust Museum. The tour of the museum was ninety minutes long. He left early. Everybody seemed satisfied by his promise to develop “a deeper understanding” of anti-Semitism. It was an admirable pledge. But how satisfied would he and his supporters be by the promise of a white supremacist to develop a deeper understanding of racism? Would the left leave it at that? White was reelected two years later with sixty percent of the vote.
The sotto voce of the American left about anti-Semitism (there are exceptions) is owed also to its bizarre notion that the Jews are a race — more specifically, that they are white, and so the color of their skin invalidates their claim on empathy and enrolls them permanently in the ranks of the essentially privileged. Anybody who knows anything about Jewish history will acknowledge that this is meretricious nonsense. We come in many colors and no color has protected us. One afternoon I sat with Yehuda Amichai in a hummus joint in the central market in Jerusalem, and as we watched the polychromatic spectacle of the Jewish shoppers he turned to me and said: “Anybody who thinks that the Jews are a race should have some hummus here.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to Israel. The diffidence of the American left about anti-Semitism is owed mostly to its diffidence about Israel. Well, not diffidence, exactly; hostility. Omar’s and Tlaib’s ugly comments about Jews were extenuated by their supporters as sympathy for the Palestinians. This, it was felt, pardoned their antipathy to — what? Israel? But they were not slandering Israel. They were slandering Jews. Tlaib is a Palestinian American. If you were Palestinian, wouldn’t you have mean things to say about Jews? Is this hard to understand? Actually, it is easy to understand: Jews, too, have been wounded and angry, and political expressions of Jewish rage are befouling Israeli politics and society. No, the Judeophobia of Palestinians is not hard to understand; but it is hard to tolerate. Are some bigotries more acceptable than others? The progressive patience with Palestinian anti-Semitism, like the progressive patience with the ruinous state of Palestinian politics generally, is an insult to the moral intelligence of Palestinians. It is rank Corbynism. A left-wing American Jewish writer, whose commitment to a better world carried him all the way to condemning the campaign against anti-Semitism (or “‘anti-Semitism’”) as “a threat to freedom,” helpfully explained that “Palestinians do not grow more tolerant of Jews when brutalized by a Jewish state.” Of course they don’t. But so what? The Islamophobia of the Israeli right is similarly absolved by reference to Palestinian violence. Or so they think. The misdeeds of the other cannot absolve one of the misdeeds of one’s own. It is not hard-hearted to denounce the racism of victims.
The defense of criticism of Israeli behavior seems to have become a prohibition against criticism of Palestinian behavior. This, as Salam Fayyad once remarked, is no favor to the Palestinians. (And where exactly are the critics of Israel who are being muzzled? Criticism of Israel, right or wrong, is everywhere; it is the bon ton; a good career move. At least on the campuses, it is pro-Israeli speech that is mortally uncool, that struggles to be heard and even permitted.) Anti-Semitism, if this needs to be repeated, is a grave and primary sin. The occupation of the West Bank is not a sufficient reason to retweet the work of an anti-Semitic cartoonist, which Tlaib and Omar did after they were idiotically banned by the Israeli government from visiting Israel. There is never a sufficient reason to proliferate anti-Semitism. Tlaib’s anti-Zionism may be fueled by her family’s experience, but with her talk of American Jews’ double loyalty (are Israel’s supporters in Congress any more ardent in their support for Israel than she is in her support for Palestine?) and in her “from the river to the sea” language she went beyond anti-Zionism. She confirmed the view of those who believe that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
So is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semitism? No, but anti-Semitism helps. If, by anti-Zionism, you mean that the Jews have no right to a state of their own, or are not a people with the same privileges and entitlements as other peoples in the era of nationalism and the nation-state; or that the Jewish state merits greater punishment than other states receive for the same, or greater, abuses and crimes; or that every Jew, and every Israeli Jew, is representative of all Jews and the entirety of the Jewish people, then you cannot be spared the most severe judgement: you are an anti-Semite. Go straight to the Holocaust Museum. Even though Israeli policies in the occupied territories are often indefensible, and even though Israel is partially responsible for the apparently indefinite deferral of a solution to the conflict, thereby preparing the ground for a historical catastrophe, the intensity of the hatred of Israel on this blood-soaked and nauseatingly unjust planet is psychotic — which is to say, it has morphed in many places from criticism into prejudice.
Maligning Jews will do nothing to improve the lot of the Palestinians. While the history of anti-Semitism should not bar anybody from criticizing Israel, even ferociously, if you are going to criticize Israel, mind the line. (While the history of racism should not bar anybody from criticizing the African American community, even ferociously, if you are going to criticize the black community, mind the line.) I recommend this wariness not to suppress argument but to encourage humaneness. The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism may seem analytically sound, but this is historically inflamed territory, there have been too many injurious consequences of sloppy thinking, and suspicion is justified. The border between the critique of Israel’s policies and the critique of Israel’s existence has too often been transgressed. And the criticism of Israeli policies is hardly made more persuasive when it is accompanied by hatred — or perhaps it is, in certain quarters and factions. (Though some of us, it should be noted, chastise Israel out of love.)
In his book Outsiders, the German literary scholar Hans Mayer, a Jewish socialist who fled to France in 1933 and after the war wandered homelessly between the two Germanies, wrote that “whoever attacks Zionism, but by no means wishes to say anything against the Jews, is fooling himself or others. The state of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants to destroy it, avowedly or by means of a policy which cannot but result in its annihilation, is dealing in the anti-Jewish hatred that has been with us since time immemorial.” This, I’m afraid, is the burden that anti-Zionism must bear — its occupational hazard, if you will. The policy of annihilation against which Mayer warns, moreover, need not be violent; there are peaceful ways, demographic and political ways, to erase the Jewish state. The moral onus is on the haters. And, again, if you wish to understand their hatred of Jews, do not study Jews. They are not the anti-Semites. The notion that anything that Israel does is in any way a warrant for anti-Semitism is simply disgusting.
Synagogues across America are now giving classes in how to respond to an active shooter. Where on the left is the outrage? Surely this is no less outrageous than the grotesque composition of the Israeli government. Everybody has their favorite victims, of course, but this is nothing to be proud of. The expansion of empathy is the duty of every person and every party, but I know of none who have so far acquitted themselves completely of their duty. This ethical malfeasance is especially embarrassing in universalists. In 1917, in a letter to a friend, Rosa Luxemburg wrote these infamous sentences: “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch… They resound with me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” As it happens, in her political agitation Luxemburg was not as indifferent to anti-Semitism as she boasted here. But what sort of a boast is this?
There are historical circumstances, I suppose, in which the universal must be most forcefully asserted, and historical circumstances in which the particular must take pride of place — but the goal of all these avowals must be the establishment of an equilibrium among our magnitudes, a truce between our generality and our specificity. We must try to be as moved by the plight of the far as by the plight of the near, by the misfortune of others as by the misfortune of our own. Yet the defense of one’s own is not a mark of smallness. It is not “tribal” to fight for your own existence. It is a sacred obligation and a rudimentary sign of self-respect. Nor does it foreclose “clouds and birds and human tears.” There are universal grounds for the defense of the particular, for the simple reason that there are no victims who are not humans. Indeed, dehumanization is the very condition of victimization. Luxemburg (and her spiritual heirs) never recognized the irony of her position: since one’s own origins are also contained in “the entire world,” the rejection of one’s origins, whatever else it is, is a flaw in one’s universalism. So there are no excuses for any of the orientations. A feral response to anti-Semitism should be a matter of honor, and not only for Jews. Like black lives, Jewish lives matter.
The Jewish right has been more vocal about the anti-Semitic resurgence, which is admirable, though it teaches that all the anti-Semitism in America is the work of the woke left. Like the Jewish left, the Jewish right is partially right and partially wrong. It appears that nobody has an interest in the whole truth about anti-Semitism, because it is politically and philosophically inconvenient. Yet it should be recalled that the massacre at the Tree of Life was not perpetrated by the ACLU, nor were the attacks at Poway and Colleyville and Kansas City. Jewish Trumpists (the phrase itself is what is known in Judaism as a desecration of God’s name) must reckon with the incontrovertible historical fact that the alt-right, from Steve Bannon in 2016 to the Proud Boys in 2021, along with its white supremacism and its anti-Semitism, was regarded by the forty-fifth president as a political asset, as a part of his base. (His very base base.) At least Omar and Tlaib never killed anybody.
The problem with the Jewish right’s efforts against anti-Semitism is that they are premised on the assumption that they are the best Jews. This self-congratulation, and its attendant condescension toward Jews who do not think or live as they do, runs through everything they say. (If Orthodox Jewry loved itself any more than it already does, it would violate the commandment against idolatry.) A sterling illustration of this was a piece in The New York Times, excerpted from a best-selling book, by the enterprising Bari Weiss, called “To Fight Anti-Semitism, Be a Proud Jew.” This is high school uplift; I wrote it in high school. It is also somewhat baffling as an analysis of the problem. Are the Hasidic men who are regularly beaten on the streets of New York ashamed of their Jewishness? Or the shuls in New Jersey that hold services under police protection? Weiss, like other Jewish right-wingers, commits the cardinal mistake of explaining anti-Semitism in terms of Jewish behavior. She poses a choice: “Does safety come from contorting ourselves to look more like everybody else? Or does it come from drilling down into the wellspring of what made us special to begin with?” In fact, safety comes from physical bravery and security systems and law enforcement and community discipline and political engagement and the support of government. (And in the Jewish state, an army.) Even Jews who may be wavering in their beliefs and their practices, whose pride may be mixed with ambivalence, even Jewish “nones,” deserve to be safe.
Weiss contends that there are two arguments about the sources of safety. “The first line of argument insists that safety for Jews comes by accommodating ourselves to the demands of our surrounding society. If we can just show that we are perfect Greeks, patriotic Germans, and so on, then they’d love us.” And patriotic Americans, too? The Jewish right’s equivalence of Americanism and Judaism — to the absurd extent of having persuaded themselves that the American Founders were inspired primarily by Jewish sources — is reminiscent of nothing so much as German Jewry’s equivalence of Deutschtum and Judentum. “To the opposing side,” she continues, “this political and cultural strategy was only a recipe for delayed humiliation and pain. Lasting security for Jews, the counterargument goes, was always saved by leaders and movements, from the Maccabees to the Zionists, that urged us to be our fullest, freest selves — even if doing so made us deeply unpopular and despised.” Never mind that lasting security was precisely not what the Maccabees, or the Hasmoneans, achieved. Weiss has not thought very deeply about assimilation, integration, separation, and appropriation in Jewish history.
“In these trying times,” the sermon continues, “our best strategy is to build, without shame, a Judaism and a Jewish people and a Jewish state that are not only safe and resilient but also generative, humane, joyful, and life-affirming. A Judaism capable of lighting a fire in every Jewish soul — and in the souls of everyone who throws in his or her lot with ours.” Amen, sister. Such a radiant Jewish civilization should be our objective even in times of perfect security, if there is such a time. But who, in this account, are the Jewish children of light and who are the Jewish children of darkness? The shameful thing about Weiss’ rhapsodic pride is that it holds other Jews responsible for their own imperilment. It repeats the old canard that Jewish self-hatred or Jewish inauthenticity or Jewish assimilation brought anti-Semitism upon us. Thus she taunts those Jews who insist that the “the real problem are those with their kippot.” She thinks they are spineless. This is very nasty. Pride takes many forms, especially in ethnicity-mad America. As far as I know, the young Jewish men who are removing their kippot on various campuses and in various cities are doing so not out of shame but out of fear. Should they be martyred for a yarmulke? (Judaism says not.) They are certainly not like “the Israelite slaves [who] chose to remain in Egypt,” as Weiss obnoxiously describes the millions of American Jews who are less noisy about their heritage than she is.
Or is the problem really that so many of them do not wear kippot in the first place? But that is an entirely different question, having to do with the rise of secularism, the modern rupture of Judaism into the denominations, and individual freedom. A Jew has a right not to cover his head if a covering does not represent the character of his Jewish identity. The greatest Jewish leaders in modern history, the greatest leaders in Zionist history, were bare-headed heroes. Anyway, anti-Semites do not distinguish between types of Jews, or interest themselves in the dialectics of Jewish identity. For them, we are all the same. They vandalize synagogues and communal institutions of every stripe; they assault Jews with kippot and without kippot, our secular brethren and our religious brethren. We owe solidarity, therefore, to all our brethren. In the Jewish tradition this is called ahavat yisrael, the love of the Jewish people. Many Jews who proclaim it fall short of it; maybe we all do. But do not denounce Jews as a way of defending them. In 1939, in an essay called “When Facing Danger,” one of his profound studies of Jews under pressure, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin wisely observed that “it is not similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but interdependence of fate.”
For Jews, the times are rich in tribulations. Even as we witness the resurgence of anti-Semitism and its sickening role in American politics, we behold also the ascendancy of chauvinism, xenophobia, intolerance, homophobia, Islamophobia, and theocratic hubris in the political success of the new Israeli right. In America, ethno-nationalism was in power for four years, and seeks to return to power; in Israel, it is in power now. I leave for another day the significant matter of ethno-nationalism as a deformation of nationalism, and more specifically of the liberal nationalism that established both the United States and Israel. Here I am more concerned with the descent of the Jewish right into the post-liberal swamp, with its apologetics for the Orbanization of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, with its miserable indifference to millions of Jews in Israel and the world over. The Jewish right has an ahavat yisrael problem, even if no suggestion could offend it more.
There is nothing incendiary about my characterization of the Israeli government. All the traits that I have listed are accurate, based on a plain reading of the pronouncements of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (who once described himself as “a fascist homophobe”) , and other members of the unholy union of their extremist parties Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and Religious Zionism, and Deputy Minister Avi Maoz, and a variety of ultra-Orthodox and haredi figures (Sephardi and Ashkenazi), and some Likud hacks, and their leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who has undergone a transformation for the worse, if that was possible. He is exactly as opportunistic and ruthlessly self-aggrandizing as he always was, but he is no longer the “liberal conservative” whose years in America imbued him with a reverence for democratic principles and procedures. Netanyahu has become the patron of intolerance and corruption. He is the king of the rot. The strikingly large demonstrations against his government were provoked by more than partisanship. A kind of shock animated them, a horror beyond politics, a panicked feeling that in his pursuit of office Netanyahu was betraying the foundational values of the state; and also a kind of shame that it has come to this, that there are fascists in the halls of Jewish power. Many Israeli centrists and also some conservatives have participated in the mass indignation. Their objective is to prevent a crisis from becoming a turning point.
In the view of Elliott Abrams, however, all this was “Jewish hysterics.” Writing in Commentary, Abrams begins by sensitively remarking that the “firebrands” Ben Gvir and Smotrich “have taken many highly incendiary positions. Not only are there doubts and concerns to be expected; opposition to them and criticism of them will be entirely an appropriate feature of the new Israeli political moment.” And having gotten his to-be-sure sentences out of the way, he goes to work. He is angry about the criticism, the “extreme rhetoric and extreme positions,” of American Jews in their strictures against the new Israeli government. These dissents originate, he writes ominously, in “deeper reasons than mere parroting of Israeli voices.” They express “long and deeply held positions.” What are those compromising positions? Be patient. Abrams cites the open letter that three hundred and thirty American rabbis signed declaring that representatives of Ben Gvir’s, Smotrich’s and Maoz’s parties would no longer be welcome in their synagogues, because they “deny our rights, our heritage, and the rights of the most vulnerable among us.” Every one of those allegations is verified by the policy proposals and the contemptuous language of Religious Zionism and Otzmah Yehudit (Jewish Power), the parties of the “firebrands”; but what strikes Abrams about this protest is that “not one Orthodox rabbi signed the petition.” We are getting warmer.
The issue, in a word, is religion. Abrams disparagingly cites a remarkable essay by Hillel Halkin, one of the most formidable Jewish intellectuals of our day, in which he despairingly broke ranks (a neoconservative specialty in days gone by) with his right-wing Jewish comrades on the question of the new Israeli government, and (these are Halkin’s words about himself) “put [the blame] on Judaism, of whose fantasies and delusions Zionism sought to cure us only to become infected with them itself.” Halkin’s sin is secularism, or loyalty to the spirit in which the state was established. I would not myself dismiss Judaism as “fantasies and delusions,” not at all; but the truth or falsehood of Judaism should have no bearing upon the question of its place in an open Zionist order. Israel was founded as a secular state with freedom of religion. But “Halkin’s line,” Abrams writes, “is simply not a winner in Israeli elections,” in utter indifference to any integrity that Halkin’s Zionism might possess. Not a winner? In a war over identity, the primary consideration should not be expedience. In support of his operative’s view of the situation, Abrams cites Yossi Klein Halevi’s observation that Netanyahu’s voters wished “to save Israel as a Jewish state.” “While a majority of Israeli Jews are committed to maintaining Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state,” Klein Halevi explained, “if forced to choose between them, most would almost certainly opt for its Jewish identity.” (Abrams composed his essay before Klein Halevi came out against the Netanyahu government and implored American Jews to do the same.)
Now, the only existing threat to the Jewish identity of the Jewish state is the one-state solution. But this is not what Netanyahu and his apologists have in mind when they seek to alarm Jews about the Jewishness of the state. They endorse not only a Jewish state, but a specific kind of Jewish state. “This is the struggle, if you will,” Abrams writes in a particularly imperishable sentence, “between those who go to the beach on Shabbat and those who go to synagogues.” A Kulturkampf in flip-flops! Abrams writes like a truant officer. The splendid pluralism of Israeli Jewish life, the coexistence of beachballs and kiddush cups, is not pleasing to him, just as it has never been pleasing to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and haredi communities. Like them, he believes that we are witnessing a “Judaism/Zionism debate,” as if it must be one or the other, as if there have not been many interpenetrations of Judaism and Zionism in the years of Israel’s existence and before, as if the possibility that Judaism should have no political connection to Zionism is not worth considering. “Israel’s Jewish identity is the issue,” he writes, “and centrist voters, or voters on the left, must convince their fellow citizens they do not view Judaism and halakha as outmoded tribal customs that should be jettisoned as soon as public opinion permits.”
Halakha! My blood ran cold when I read that word, and my tefillin are never far from me. Why on earth do Israeli centrists have to say nice things about halakha? It is not the law of the land. Let those who wish to observe Jewish law observe it. Let them build their yeshivas and their shuls and flourish within them, even if their neighbors dislike their way of life. The dislike anyway runs both ways. As far as I can see, nobody is preventing pious Jews from living according to their idea of Jewish piety. If they cannot bear to see other Jews living differently, then they were born two hundred years too late. As for Netanyahu, he has admitted that he fasted on Yom Kippur for the first time in his life before the recent election, thereby placing himself in the long line of Machiavellian conservatives for whom religion is of merely political utility.
Abrams’ argument is that Israel is changing and that we, American Jews, must accept the changes. Needless to say, the Jewish right has demonstrated no such acquiescence to political facts when an Israeli government has pursued policies of which it disapproves, such as attempting to make peace. Hysterics, indeed. “The 1950s or 1960s Israel of Labor socialism may have resembled the Upper West Side,” Abrams continues,
but the Israel that is developing before our eyes does not. It is truly a Jewish state, increasingly peopled — and in part now governed — by Jews who believe in the God of the Hebrew Bible and for whom the practice of the religion of Judaism is the most important aspect of their lives. Can American Jews accept this Israel, or will it alienate all but the Orthodox — who practice that same religion?
Where to begin? For a start, there is no way in which the Upper West Side substantially resembled the Israel of the 1950s and 1960s — nobody made the desert bloom on Broadway; and I hasten to add that in those decades, the Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn, with not a single subscriber to Dissent among them, learned to admire the sun-tanned, beach-going, Torah-neglecting, collectivist Jews in Israel. Moreover, there is no reason to fear that, on the dark day when Hezbollah unleashes its arsenal of missiles on Tel Aviv, Israel will find American Jewish support only in the Orthodox community. (Abrams knows this.) But it is rattling to infer that in 1967 and in 1973, and in all of Israel’s campaigns in its defense, what was being defended was a deficient Jewish state, not “truly a Jewish state.” Where in the founding documents of Israel was it decreed that the Jewishness of the Jewish state was to be defined religiously? Zionism, again, is compatible with all kinds of Jewishnesses, religious and secular, because it defines the Jews as a people or a nation. Its capaciousness was one of the secrets of its success (though its spirit of welcome sometimes disappeared when Jews of non-European origin found refuge in the state).
Abrams defines Israel’s Jewishness in terms of Judaism, which is bad enough. What is worse is that he defines it in terms of only a part, a small part, of Judaism. In his sectarian way, he cares only about Orthodox Jews; and his essay is an extended insult to all the Conservative and Reform Jews in America whose support for Israel, even when they criticize it, is beyond reproach. An insult, that is, to the overwhelming majority of American Jews. According to the Pew survey in 2020, Orthodox Jews comprised nine percent of American Jewish adults, and seventeen percent of Jews between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine identify as Orthodox. The fecundity of the Orthodox community is enormous, and mazel tov to them all, so let us for the sake of argument double the Pew figures and say that the Orthodox represent twenty percent of the American Jewish community. Is Abrams prepared, like Netanyahu’s government and like the haredim, to write off three quarters or so of his community? This is what I mean by an ahavat yisrael problem. Or does he not even regard them as his community? But they are our brothers and our sisters! They, too, deserve to be recognized as “Jews who believe in the God of the Hebrew Bible and for whom the practice of the religion of Judaism is the most important aspect of their lives,” because the defining feature of modern Judaism, like it or not, is that there is more than one way to believe in that God and to practice that religion. I confess that I have my own qualms about the spiritual and intellectual quality of some of the Conservative and Reform congregations that I have visited, but I do not have the temerity to expel them, on those grounds or on any grounds, from my conception of my people.
There is freedom of religion in Israel, but there is not freedom of Jewish religion. American Jews, Abrams remarks, “denounce restrictions on non-Orthodox worship that most Israeli Jews find to be second-tier issues at most.” When did questions of rights come to be decided by polls? Most Israelis find the Palestinian question, too, to be a second-tier issue, but it is not an act of friendship to encourage them in that delusion. Abrams says that “if one thinks of the leaders of major American Jewish organizations, and of the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist rabbinate, is there any question which coalition they favored in the Israeli election — the one led by Lapid or the one led by Netanyahu?” But there is no mystery here. The coalition led by Lapid treated Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jews with dignity and the coalition led by Netanyahu did not. Do the Orthodox, too, not support Israeli parties that look favorably upon them? Or is everything they do for the sake of heaven? Their enforcer is the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the most poisonous institution in contemporary Jewish life, which years ago was taken over by the least enlightened and least humane elements in the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community. The Chief Rabbinate was not created by God at Sinai. It was created in 1920 by an ordinance of the British Mandatory authorities in Palestine. It is a pontifical office in a religion that has no pope. The basis of its authority is not halakhic but political. It is an engine of exclusion, a pitiless enemy of Jewish unity. Why should Reform, Constructive, and Reconstructionist Jews passively accept its rulings, or the contempt that its political supporters have shown for them? And why should the state endorse halakhic notions of identity and membership? Was the state created by God at Sinai, or by His sages?
The most disturbing sentence in Abrams’ diatribe is this one: “It is an obvious principle to American Jews that all people should be treated alike, while most Israelis would find it simple madness to apply that principle to Israelis and Palestinians.” If that is so, it is an occasion for sorrow; but I detect no sorrow in Abrams’ words. Make the appropriate translations and you will have the worldview of Donald Trump, in whose administration Abrams served. As for “most Israelis”: both blocs in the recent election emerged with 49.5 percent of the vote. Since the Lapid bloc included also Arab votes, it seems correct to say that a plurality of Jews supported the Netanyahu bloc, but this was hardly a mandate-conferring majority. A fight is on. And it is a fight over first principles. The anti-democratic view to which Abrams would have us accommodate ourselves represents nothing less than a rejection of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which was a milestone in the reconciliation of the universal and the particular, and one of the glories of modernity. This is Article 13: “[The State of Israel] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” Could it be more ringing?
From a fine recent study of the historical and philosophical origins of the document by Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Sigler, I learn that its first drafter relied heavily on the American Declaration of Independence and the English Bill of Rights, and that it was Ben Gurion himself who, at the last minute, added the word “sex” to that wondrous inventory of rights. The Zionist founders were serious about democracy. (The Zionist state has practiced it imperfectly.) And along comes Abrams to tell us that most Israelis care more about security than about human rights, and that’s that. When governments in other countries adopt an anti-democratic ethos, when other peoples turn against liberalism and its ideal of equality, we — many American Jews — Commentary too, I believe — assail them and wage a war of ideas. Why should Israel be different? The Torah and the Talmud are full of injunctions to reprove and remonstrate with your own kind.
But now some of the same American Jewish patriots who are hoarse with proud reminders that on the Liberty Bell there appears a verse from Leviticus — “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” — these same people, Zionists all, appear to deny the relevance of this verse, this Hebrew verse, to the state of the people whose ancestors introduced its idea to the world. And appeals to security will not settle the matter, because it has been one of the controlling assumptions of the Jewish state since its inception that there should be no contradiction between safety and justice. The Declaration of Independence championed human rights in 1948, at the hour of Israel’s greatest vulnerability. The imminent invasion of seven Arab armies did not impede or impair its liberalism. Nor did its political liberalism abridge its national pride, or its proclamation of natural rights mitigate its proclamation of historical rights. In this way the Declaration of Independence, with its weak religiosity, was ironically consistent with a remarkable legacy of the Jews in exile: they never used their adversity as an alibi for a relaxation of their own ethical standards for themselves. The enmity that surrounded them was never taken up as an excuse for laxness about right and wrong.
The opposition to Netanyahu’s shameful government is an expression of that old ideal of Jewish self-rigor in times of crisis. Abrams, by contrast, prefers that we make exceptions for ourselves. And finally he resorts to the cheapest argument of all. American Jews, he scolds, “do not live with the threats to safety and even life that face Israelis.” But neither does he! What if he is wrong, and the incitements of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and the settler vigilantism that they have already provoked, lead to an intifada, and the Iranians instruct Hezbollah to launch? What if he is wrong, and the Netanyahu government enacts a revision of the Law of Return under the guidance of the ultra-Orthodox rabbinical establishment, so that Jews in flight from persecution will not be admitted into the country and Zionism will be thereby vanquished? What if he is wrong, and the judicial reform that Netanyahu seeks (and not exactly for reasons of philosophy) leaves Israel — a state without a constitution or a bicameral legislature or a federal system — with even fewer checks and balances than it already has, and at the mercy of executive power and even of authoritarian rule? None of these bleak scenarios are implausible, and if they come to pass Abrams will not be there to experience the consequences of his erroneous views. Which is not say, of course, that he should silence himself. It is to say only that he should desist from intimidating people with other opinions by suggesting that they are playing fast and loose with Jewish lives. Insofar as any of our opinions will be responsible for outcomes in Israel, we all run this risk. How, really, could he, or anyone in the American Jewish community, be silent? We criticize Russia when we do not live in Russia; we criticize China when we do not live in China; we criticize Venezuela when we do not live in Venezuela; but we criticize Israel, as Abrams too has done, even though we do not live there, because we are mingled with it, because we share a peoplehood with it, because our hearts easily defy our distance from it, because (as Kurt Lewin said) we are interdependent in fate.
As with the great debate about America, there is nothing wrong with the great debate about Israel that would not be somewhat ameliorated if everybody were to locate their discomfort zones and learn to exist within them. Discomfort zones are the detox centers of identity. They cripple sectarian politics. They shake the walls. They introduce a therapeutic awareness of complexity and an invigorating sense of humility about the overwhelming reality of other people and their perspectives. They are the antithesis of anxiety, because they quicken. If the Jewish left and the Jewish right could only find their discomfort zones, if they could be made to feel uncomfortable about their smugness and their settledness, we might all be more comfortable, and therefore more courageous, in rising together to meet yet another century that will not leave the Jews alone.