California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude. By Joel Kotkin.

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude. By Joel Kotkin. JoelKotkin.com, October 5, 2013. Also at The Daily Beast, New Geography.

Kotkin:

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

 

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

 

At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.

 

Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.

 

Some of these trends can be found nationwide, but they have become pronounced and are metastasizing more quickly in the Golden State. As late as the 80s, the state was about as egalitarian as the rest of the country. Now, for the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

 

The Role of the Tech Oligarchs.

 

California produces more new billionaires than any place this side of oligarchic Russia or crony capitalist China. By some estimates the Golden State is home to one out of every nine of the world’s billionaires. In 2011 the state was home to 90 billionaires, 20 more than second place New York and more than twice as many as booming Texas.

 

The state’s digital oligarchy, surely without intention, is increasingly driving the state’s lurch towards feudalism. Silicon Valley’s wealth reflects the fortunes of a handful of companies that dominate an information economy that itself is increasingly oligopolistic.  In contrast to the traditionally conservative or libertarian ethos of the entrepreneurial class, the oligarchy is increasingly allied with the nominally populist Democratic Party and its regulatory agenda. Along with the public sector, Hollywood, and their media claque, they present California as “the spiritual inspiration” for modern “progressives” across the country.

 

Through their embrace of and financial support for the state’s regulatory regime, the oligarchs have made job creation in non tech-businesses—manufacturing, energy, agriculture—increasingly difficult through “green energy” initiatives that are also sure to boost already high utility costs. One critic, state Democratic Senator Roderick Wright from heavily minority Inglewood, compares the state’s regulatory regime to the “vig” or high interest charged by the Mafia, calling it a major reason for disinvestment in many industries. 

Yet even in Silicon Valley, the expansion of prosperity has been extraordinarily limited. Due to enormous losses suffered in the current tech bubble, tech job creation in Silicon Valley has barely reached its 2000 level. In contrast, previous tech booms, such as the one in the 90s, doubled the ranks of the tech community. Some, like UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, advance the dubious claim that those jobs are more stable than those created in Texas. But even if we concede that point for the moment,  the Valley’s growth primarily benefits its denizens but not most Californians. Since the recession, California remains down something like 500,000 jobs, a 3.5 percent loss, while its Lone Star rival has boosted its employment by a remarkable 931,000, a gain of more than 9 percent.

 

Much of this has to do with the changing nature of California’s increasingly elite—driven economy. Back in the 80s and even the 90s, the state’s tech sector produced industrial jobs that sparked prosperity not only in places like Palo Alto, but also in the more hardscrabble areas in San Jose and even inland cities such as Sacramento. The once huge California aerospace industry, centered in Los Angeles, employed hundreds of thousands, not only engineers but skilled technicians, assemblers, and administrators.

 

This picture has changed over the past decade. California’s tech manufacturing sector has shrunk, and those employed in Silicon Valley are increasingly well-compensated programmers, engineers and marketers. There has been little growth in good-paying blue collar or even middle management jobs. Since 2001 state production of “middle skill” jobs—those that generally require two years of training after high-school—have grown roughly half as quickly as the national average and one-tenth as fast as similar jobs in arch-rival Texas.

 

“The job creation has changed,” says Leslie Parks, a long-time San Jose economic development official. “We used to be the whole food chain and create all sorts of middle class jobs. Now, increasingly, we don’t design the future—we just think about it. That makes some people rich, but not many.”

 

In the midst of the current Silicon Valley boom, incomes for local Hispanics and African-Americans, who together account for one third of the population, have actually declined—18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos between 2009 and 2011, prompting one local booster to admit that “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”

 

The Geography of Inequality

 

Geography, caste, and land ownership increasingly distinguish California’s classes from one another. As Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and the wealthier suburbs in the Bay Area have enjoyed steady income growth during the current bubble, much of the state, notes economist Bill Watkins, endures Depression-like conditions, with stretches of poverty more reminiscent of a developing country than the epicenter of advanced capitalism.

 

Once you get outside the Bay Area, unemployment in many of the state’s largest counties—Sacramento, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Fresno, and Oakland—soars into the double digits. Indeed, among the 20 American cities with the highest unemployment rates, a remarkable 11 are in California, led by Merced’s mind-boggling 22 percent rate.

 

This amounts to what conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson has labeled “liberal apartheid,” a sharp divide between a well-heeled, mostly white and Asian population located along the California coast, and a largely poor, heavily Latino working class in the interior. But the class divide is also evident within  the large metro areas, despite their huge concentrations of affluent individuals. Los Angeles, for example, has the third highest rate of inequality of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, and the Bay Area ranks seventh.

 

The current surge of California triumphalism, trumpeted mostly by the ruling Democrats and their eastern media allies, seems to ignore the reality faced by residents in many parts of the state. The current surge of wealth among the coastal elites, boosted by rises in property, stock, and other assets, has staved off a much feared state bankruptcy. Yet the the state’s more intractible problems cannot be addressed if growth remains restricted to a handful of favored areas and industries. This will become increasingly clear when, as is inevitable, the current tech and property boom fades, depriving the state of the taxes paid by high income individuals.

 

The gap between the oligarchic class and everyone else seems increasingly permanent. A critical component of assuring class mobility, California’s once widely admired public schools were recently ranked near the absolute bottom in the country. Think about this: despite the state’s huge tech sector, California eighth graders scored 47th out of the 51 states in science testing. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg and other oligarchs are so anxious to import “techno coolies” from abroad.

 

As in medieval times, land ownership, particularly along the coast, has become increasingly difficult for those not in the upper class. In 2012, four California markets—San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles—ranked as the most unaffordable relative to income in the nation. The impact of these prices falls particularly on the poor. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39 percent of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their income on housing, as do 35 percent in the San Francisco metro area—both higher than 31 percent in the New York area and well above the national rate of 24 percent. This is likely to get much worse given that California median housing prices rose 31 percent in the year ending May 2013. In the Bay Area the increase was an amazing 43 percent.

 

Even skilled workers are affected by these prices. An analysis done for National Core, a major developer of low income housing, found that prices in such areas as Orange County are so high that even a biomedical engineer earning more than $100,000 a year could not afford to buy a home there. This, as well as the unbalanced economy, has weakened California’s hold on aspirational families, something that threatens the very dream that has attracted  millions to the state.

 

This is a far cry from the 50s and 60s, when California abounded in new owner-occupied single family homes. Historian Sam Bass Warner suggested that this constituted “the glory of Los Angeles and an expression of its design for living.” Yet today the L.A. home ownership rate, like that of New York, stands at about half the national average of 65 percent. This is particularly true among working class and minority households. Atlanta’s African-American home ownership rate is approximately 40 percent above that of San Jose or Los Angeles, and approximately 50 percent higher than San Francisco.

 

This feudalizing trend is likely to worsen due to draconian land regulations that will put the remaining stock of single family houses ever further out of reach, something that seems related to a reduction in child-bearing in the state. As the “Ozzie and Harriet” model erodes, many Californians end up as modern day land serfs, renting and paying someone else’s mortgage. If they seek to start a family, their tendency is to look elsewhere, ironically even in places such as Oklahoma and Texas, places that once sent eager migrants to the Golden State.

 

Breaking Down the New Feudalism: The Emerging Class Structure

 

The emerging class structure of neo-feudalism, like its European and Asian antecedents, is far more complex than simply a matter of the gilded “them” and the broad “us.” To work as a system, as we can now see in California, we need to understand the broader, more divergent class structure that is emerging.

 

The Oligarchs: The swelling number of billionaires in the state, particularly in Silicon Valley, has enhanced power that is emerging into something like the old aristocratic French second estate. Through public advocacy and philanthropy, the oligarchs have tended to embrace California’s “green” agenda, with a very negative impact on traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction. Like the aristocrats who saw all value in land, and dismissed other commerce as unworthy, they believe all value belongs to those who own the increasingly abstracted information revolution than has made them so fabulously rich.

 

The Clerisy: The Oligarchs may have the money, but by themselves they cannot control a huge state like California, much less America. Gentry domination requires allies with a broader social base and their own political power. In the Middle Ages, this role was played largely by the church; in today’s hyper-secular America, the job of shaping the masses has fallen to the government apparat, the professoriat, and the media, which together constitute our new Clerisy. The Clerisy generally defines societal priorities, defends “right-thinking” oligarchs, and chastises those, like traditional energy companies, that deviate from their theology.

 

The New Serfs: If current trends continue, the fastest growing class will be the permanently property-less. This group includes welfare recipients and other government dependents but also the far more numerous working poor. In the past, the working poor had reasonable aspirations for a better life, epitomized by property ownership or better prospects for their children. Now, with increasingly little prospect of advancement, California’s serfs depend on the Clerisy to produce benefits making their permanent impoverishment less gruesome. This sad result remains inevitable as long as the state’s economy bifurcates between a small high-wage, tech-oriented sector, and an expanding number of lower wage jobs in hospitality, health services, and personal service jobs. As a result, the working class, stunted in their drive to achieve the California dream, now represents the largest portion of domestic migrants out of the state.

 

The Yeomanry: In neo-feudalist California, the biggest losers tend to be the old private sector middle class. This includes largely small business owners, professionals, and skilled workers in traditional industries most targeted by regulatory shifts and higher taxes. Once catered to by both parties, the yeomanry have become increasingly irrelevant as California has evolved into a one-party state where the ruling Democrats have achieved a potentially permanent, sizable majority consisting largely of the clerisy and the serf class, and funded by the oligarchs. Unable to influence government and largely disdained by the clerisy, these middle income Californians are becoming a permanent outsider group, much like the old Third Estate in early medieval times, forced to pay ever higher taxes as well as soaring utility bills and required to follow regulations imposed by people who often have little use for their “middle class” suburban values.

 

The Political Implications of Neo-Feudalism

 

As Marx, among others, has suggested, class structures contain within them the seeds of their dissolution. In New York, a city that is arguably as feudal as anything in California, the  emergence of mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio reflected growing  antagonism—particularly among the remaining yeoman and serf class— towards the gentry urbanism epitomized by Mayor Michael “Luxury City” Bloomberg.

 

Yet except for occasional rumbling from the left, neo-feudalism likely represents the future. Certainly in California, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit with the intellectual and political skills needed to oversee a neo-feudal society, remains all but unassailable politically. If Brown, or his policies, are to be contested, the challenge will likely come from left-wing activists who find his policies insufficiently supportive of the spending demanded by the clerisy and the serfs or insufficiently zealous in their pursuit of environmental purity.

 

The economy in California and elsewhere likely will determine the viability of neo-feudalism. If a weaker economy forces state and local government budget cutbacks, there could be a bruising conflict as the various classes fight over diminishing spoils. But it’s perhaps more likely that we will see enough slow growth so that Brown will be able to keep both the clerisy and the serfs sufficiently satisfied. If that is the case, the new feudal system could shape the evolution of the American class structure for decades to come.

Rich People Just Care Less. By Daniel Goleman.

Rich People Just Care Less. By Daniel Goleman. New York Times, October 5, 2013.

The Triumph of Ideology. By Robert J. Samuelson.

The Triumph of Ideology. By Robert J. Samuelson. Real Clear Politics, October 7, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Even Richard Hofstadter Would Be Amazed by Tea Party Extremism. By Robert Brent Toplin. History News Network, October 7, 2013.


Samuelson:

The government “shutdown” can teach us a lot about American politics. Even after it’s over, a central question will remain. Why did they do it? Why did congressional Republicans trigger a shutdown for which they would predictably be blamed and from which they could win few Democratic concessions? The conventional answer blames stupidity, craziness and fanaticism. This is too glib and partisan. It misses a deeper cause that, I believe, helps explain why politics has become more dysfunctional.

 

By dysfunctional, I mean that it’s less able to mediate differences and conflicts. This is, after all, a central purpose of politics. Broadly speaking, conflicts originate from interest groups and ideologies. The curse of U.S. politics is that it’s become less about interests and more about ideologies — and ideologies breed moral absolutes, rigid agendas and strong emotions.

 

To be sure, interest-group politics can involve huge stakes and fierce disputes: farmers seeking subsidies, multinational companies plugging tax breaks, Social Security recipients protecting benefits. Sometimes compromises satisfy everyone, but even when they don’t, spillovers are usually modest. Although adversaries may detest each other, their ill will tends to focus on narrow disagreements.

 

By contrast, ideological differences are expansive and explosive. To me, “ideology” extends beyond an explicit political philosophy. It includes broad differences in lifestyles and basic assumptions about America’s best interests. In recent decades, ideological issues have occupied more of the political stage for both left and right. The argument over the size of government is a proxy for a deep divide. The left sees bigger government as a tool for social justice; the right fears it’s a threat to freedom. Moral crusades abound. “Saving the planet” (global warming) is one. Preventing “murder” is another: that’s gun control for the left and outlawing abortion for the right. The left’s campaign for “gay rights” is the right’s quest to save the “traditional family.”

 

Just why partisan differences have widened is controversial, but they clearly have. “[B]asic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years,” said a 2012 Pew opinion study. One question asked about the need for “stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment.” Among Democrats, 93 percent agreed, the same as in 1992; for Republicans, agreement was 47 percent, down from 86 percent in 1992. Large gaps have also opened on the social safety net, minority preferences and immigration. Some centrists are alienated; more count themselves as “independents.”

 

A crucial difference between interest-group and ideological politics is what motivates people to join. For interest-group politics, the reason is simple — self-interest. People enjoy directly the fruits of their political involvement. Farmers get subsidies; Social Security recipients, checks. By contrast, the foot soldiers of ideological causes don’t usually enlist for tangible benefits for themselves but for a sense that they’re making the world a better place. Their reward is feeling good about themselves.

 

I’ve called this “the politics of self-esteem” — and it profoundly alters politics. For starters, it suggests that you don’t just disagree with your adversaries; you also look down on them as morally inferior. It’s harder to compromise when differences involve powerful moral convictions. Indeed, if politics’ subconscious payoff is higher self-esteem, it makes sense not to cooperate at all. Consorting with the devil will make you feel worse, not better. What’s more satisfying is to prove your superiority by depicting your opponents as dangerous, thoughtless and morally bankrupt. Cable TV and the Internet feast on such outbursts.

 

All this relates to the present. Why do House Republicans persist when the self-inflicted damage is so great? In a CBS poll this past week, 44 percent blamed Republicans for the shutdown while 35 percent blamed the Democrats. One answer is that “standing on principle” bolsters their self-esteem. Tea party types can feel they’ve affirmed their moral courage.

 

Similarly, the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) — the cause of so much conflict — exemplifies the politics of self-esteem. Its main advocates, starting with the president, all have health insurance; they won’t benefit directly. But the ACA serves as a platform for them to assert their moral superiority. They care about people, while their opponents are heartless. (Ignored is the fact that improvements in people’s health will, at best, be modest. Many uninsured are healthy; others already receive care.)

 

The triumph of ideology is one of the great political upheavals of recent decades. It is, of course, partial; it coexists with interest-group politics and always will. It’s also full of paradoxes. On both the left and right, many activists are intelligent, sincere and hardworking. But the addition of so many high-minded people — usually “true believers” in some cause — to the political system has made it work worse. It increasingly fails to conciliate or, on many major issues, to decide.

Israel, the Palestinians, and the One-State Illusion. By Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Israel, the Palestinians, and the one-state illusion. By Jeremy Ben-Ami. Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2013.

Rethinking the Two-State Solution. By Neve Gordon. NJBR, October 1, 2013.

Bibi in 1989 Supported Palestinian Mass Expulsions. By Richard Silverstein. Tikun Olam, January 13, 2011.


Ben-Ami:

The world is far too familiar with the seemingly intractable problem: Jews and Palestinians who live in the same small stretch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and, despite decades of trying to divide the land into two independent states, seem incapable of agreeing on how to do it. Some progressive activists, pundits and political scientists are so frustrated by that failure that they now offer an alternative: Stop trying to divide what can’t be divided and start figuring out how to live together as one big, happy family in one binational state.

 

It’s easy to see why this idea has some superficial attraction, especially for American liberals who have become used to lauding the development in our own nation of an increasingly multiethnic, multicultural society. If we all manage to get along here in the United States, surely Israelis and Palestinians could get along just fine in some imaginary singular state — call it “Israelistine.”

 

Political scientists even have their own word for such an arrangement — “consociationalism.” It borrows heavily from the positive experience of solving the conflict in Northern Ireland. They imagine Israelis and Palestinians abandoning their deep-rooted yearning to control their own destinies in favor of an arrangement in which each would respect the other side's identity and ethos, including linguistic diversity, culture and religion.

 

Unfortunately, this concept has no connection to reality in today’s Middle East.

 

The idealistic roots of this longing for coexistence run deep in Western history and find expression, for instance, in Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and its ringing call for all men to become brothers. Of course, Schiller’s poem was penned just before the French Revolution, the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars.

 

But a quick review of political trends around the world shows that we’re living a very different reality. The former Yugoslavia split into seven nations amid a frenzy of bloodshed and ethnic cleansing; French- and Flemish-speaking Belgians are barely on speaking terms; Catalans are joining hands in a human chain 250 miles long to demand a split from Spain; Czechs and Slovaks agreed to go their separate ways. Even the Scots will get to vote soon on whether to leave the United Kingdom.

 

And then there is the Middle East, where the fabric of multinational coexistence, enforced for centuries by the Ottomans and more recently by military strongmen, is violently unraveling before our eyes.

 

Lebanon is divided among Shiites, Sunnis, Christians and Druze and barely hanging together. Iraq remains tormented by bloody terrorist attacks. Egypt’s Coptic minority is a frequent target of attacks, and Syria has disintegrated into all-out civil war.

 

A two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians offers the two sides a way to avoid such a fate. It’s the only way to give them both what they want: national self-determination. That is why both sides keep returning to the negotiating table.

 

Seeking a two-state solution is not idealism — it’s intensely practical. It simply recognizes that these peoples both crave independent states in which they can find full expression of their national identities.

 

For Jews, it’s a matter of having one place in the world where they are not the minority. It’s a haven, yes, but more than that, it’s a place where the national language is Hebrew, where Jewish festivals are celebrated as state holidays, where the Jewish Sabbath is observed and where a national identity for the Jewish people can be forged.

 

For Palestinians, it’s a matter of moving beyond decades of exile, of being strangers and often refugees in other people's lands, of taking control of a territory of their own and forging their own future free of interference from others.

 

We ought to be intensely thankful that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians agree on the solution to the problem and have vowed to bring it about peacefully. When all around them they see chaos and inhumanity, when an entire region has fallen into an abyss of barbarism, their negotiations, rebooted in the last few months, offer a different paradigm much closer to the example of the Czechs and Slovaks than to the Serbs and Bosnians.

 

Make no mistake: Getting there is going to be tough. The parties need all the help and support they can get from the United States and the rest of the international community. They need imaginative mediation and patient diplomacy backed by firm U.S. leadership. They may well require the resolve of an American president willing to step in at the right moment with a plan that both sides can accept.

 

What nobody needs are delusional visions of one-state fantasists whose remedies have no connection with the real world. We live in an era of nation states and, unfortunately, also in an era of ethnic wars. We seem to be becoming more tribal and more sectarian, not less. We may feel that this is not a good thing, but it is reality.

 

The two-state solution offers a way to avoid more war and more conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As long as it remains viable, we should all be working as hard as we can to make it a reality.

What Obama Doesn’t Get About U.S. Power. By Bruce Thornton.

What Obama Doesn’t Get About U.S. Power. By Bruce Thornton. Real Clear World, October 5, 2013. Also at Defining Ideas.

Why the Right Fights. By Ross Douthat.

Why the Right Fights. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, October 2, 2013.

The Gospel According to Bill O’Reilly’s New Book “Killing Jesus.” By Candida Moss.

The Gospel According to Bill O’Reilly’s New Book “Killing Jesus.” By Candida Moss. The Daily Beast, September 27, 2013.

O’Reilly Confronts Professor Who Criticized Him Over Killing Jesus Book. By Josh Feldman. Mediaite, October 2, 2013. With video.

Bill O’Reilly Argues Jesus Theology With Socialist Professor. Video. MichaelSavage4Prez, October 2, 2013. YouTube. Also here, here, here.

The Gospel According to Bill O’Reilly? Video and Transcript. 60 Minutes. CBS News, September 29, 2013. Real Clear Politics. YouTube.

A Response to Richard Dawkins. By Dennis Prager.

A Response to Richard Dawkins. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, October 1, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

It’s Insane That People Still Doubt Darwin. By Richard Dawkins.

It’s insane that people still doubt Darwin. By Richard Dawkins. Salon, September 29, 2013.

Dawkins: Religion no moral compass. By Jason Miks. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, September 27, 2013.

White Feminists and Korean Fundamentalists. By Peter Berger.

White Feminists and Korean Fundamentalists. By Peter Berger. The American Interest, October 2, 2013.

Marriage and the Construction of Reality. By Peter L. Berger and Hansfried Kellner. Readings in Social Psychology: Perspective and Method. Bryan Byers, ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1993. Chapter 27, pp. 220-229. Originally published in Diogenes, Vol. 12, No. 46 (June 1964).

Benjamin Serra Bosch Becomes the Voice of Spain’s “Lost Generation.” By Fiona Govan.

Spaniard becomes voice of country’s “lost generation.” By Fiona Govan. The Telegraph, October 1, 2013.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 1, 2013.

A Portrait of Jewish Americans. Pew Research, October 1, 2013. Summary. Also at the New York Times.

American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012. By Elizabeth Tighe, Leonard Saxe, Raquel Magidin de Kramer, Daniel Parmer. Steinhardt Social Research Institute, September 2013. PDF.

Jews Bound by Shared Beliefs Even as Markers of Faith Fade, Pew Study Shows. By Josh Nathan-Kazis. The Jewish Daily Forward, October 1, 2013.

Jews Express Wide Criticism of Israel in Pew Survey But Leaders Dismiss Findings. By Josh Nathan-Kazis. The Jewish Daily Forward, October 2, 2013.

Jews Are Leaving Faith Behind. Is That Bad for the Jews? By Jessica Grose. Slate, October 1, 2013.

American Jews are Secular, Intermarried, and Assimilated. By Gabriel Roth. Slate, October 3, 2013.

Analyzing the New Report on Trends in American Judaism. By Jacob Kamaras. The Algemeiner, October 3, 2013. Also at JNS.org.

Poll Shows Major Shift in Identity of U.S. Jews. By Laurie Goodstein. New York Times, October 1, 2013.

Once Again, Jews Is News. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, October 2, 2013.

Philip Berg: A Counter-Obit. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, September 23, 2013.

Pew poll: 1 in 5 American Jews have “no religion.” By Sam Sokol. Jerusalem Post, October 1, 2013.

In Pew poll on American Jewish identity, “caring about Israel” is way behind “working for justice.” By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, October 14, 2013.

A Poll Causes Jews to Ask, What Does It Mean to Be Jewish? By Marc Tracy. The New Republic, October 1, 2013.

What Defines an American Jew? New Study Reveals Divides on Identity, Religion, and Views on Israel. By Jaweed Kaleem. The Huffington Post, October 1, 2013.

Leonard Saxe interviewed by Rabbi Joseph Potasnik and Deacon Kevin McCormack on Pew and SSRI studies. Audio. Religion on the Line. WABC, October 6, 2013. Interview begins at 48:00 in the audio file.


Tobin:

The release today of a Pew Research Center study about American Jews contained little that was surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the community in the last generation. Optimists will point to the numbers that tell us that 94 percent of Jews say they are proud of their identity. Three-quarters say they have a “strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people.” A lot of attention is also going to the survey result that points to a whopping 42 percent who think having a sense of humor is somehow integral to being Jewish as opposed to a far smaller figure who say the same for Jewish religious law. But once we stop chuckling about the disproportionate influence of Comedy Central Jews, this survey must be seen for what it is: a portrait of a shrinking community whose non-Orthodox majority has only an amorphous sense of what it means to be a Jew—however they define it—and rates of assimilation that portend a rapid demographic decline in terms of absolute numbers and affiliation.

 

This means the American Jewry of the future will be more Orthodox but also far smaller than the already tiny community of the present day. Such a population will be less inclined to support Jewish philanthropies aimed at helping members of their own community or care about Israel. It should also cause non-Orthodox Jewish groups and denominations to take a hard look at their policies that, as I wrote in a response to a Jack Wertheimer essay in Mosaic on intermarriage earlier this month, are clearly failing. A counterproductive yet popular emphasis on outreach to those on the margins of the community must be replaced with a new concentration on strengthening rather than ignoring the core.

 

To acknowledge the dismal future that this charts for the community should not be confused with exaggerated claims about American Jewry disappearing. There are still an estimated 5.3 million people who claim Jewish identity and a critical mass of them are still raising Jewish children, many of whom will affiliate with religious denominations and have an affinity for Israel. But the breakdown of the data shows that among the non-Orthodox majority in the United States—a group that composes approximately 90 percent of the community—most are not marrying Jews or giving their kids a Jewish education. Indeed, the two elements of American Jewry that seem to be growing at the most rapid rates are the Orthodox and those who consider themselves to be Jewish in some way but have no religion, a group that makes up 22 percent of those polled. While, as Pew points out, secularism has always been part of American Jewish culture, most of those with no religion are not raising Jewish children or participating in or supporting Jewish institutions. Moreover, more than half of non-Orthodox Jews are also marrying non-Jews with the overwhelming majority of these families also giving their children no Jewish education.

 

The problem here is not just the absolute numbers of those Jews drifting away. It is the survey results that make it clear that an increasingly large number of Jews have notions of Jewish identity that are based on values not likely to promote future generations of Jewish life on these shores.

 

For example, “leading an ethical or moral life” or “working for justice or equality”—elements that 69 percent and 56 percent of Jews say is what it means to be Jewish—are integral to Judaism. But they are beliefs that are also integral to other faiths and even compatible with being non-religious. Simply being a good person or fighting for good causes makes you a nice human being but not necessarily a Jew. Remembering the Holocaust—a point embraced by 73 percent of those surveyed—is also important. But as vital a lesson as the Holocaust is, it is not a positive vision of Jewish life that can serve as a paradigm for the future. Ideas such as being part of a community or observing Jewish law have far less support, but it is those notions upon which a community is built. For all of the popularity of secular and purely cultural Judaism, the survey indicates that in a nation where Jews remain a small minority and where all are free to assimilate, these concepts are halfway houses to assimilation, not a path to a viable future.

 

The only theological point upon which the majority of those polled agree is that believing in the divinity of Jesus means you are not a Jew. That’s understandable given that this is still an overwhelmingly Christian nation. But again, this is hardly a factor that can serve as a building block for Jewish identity. If Jewish denominations are all suffering record levels of dropouts, it can be traced to the fact that a community in a free society that is based on such loose notions rather than the strong bonds of faith cannot hope to retain much of its membership.

 

Israel remains important to most Jews and that is a hopeful sign since it remains the vital center of Jewish life in our time. But here again those numbers are skewed since the rates of interest in Israel are far higher among the Orthodox and lower among the growing numbers with no religion and affiliation. Critics of Israel will point to the fact that pluralities disapprove of settlements and think the government of the Jewish state isn’t doing enough to make peace with the Palestinians. Those are debatable notions, but the far smaller number of American Jews who think the Palestinians are sincere about wanting peace shows that the majority is not completely detached from the reality of the Middle East.

 

As for domestic political considerations, like other polls of American Jewry, the survey shows the overwhelming majority are liberals and loyal to the Democrats. Since those numbers are reversed among the Orthodox, one should expect a gradual rise in the total of those who vote for the Republicans. Yet even with the Orthodox population growing far more rapidly than the rest of the community, it may take several decades for the GOP to make up that ground if at all.

 

Overall, the survey tells us that the falloff of Jewish affiliation among the young and the non-Orthodox is already considerable and will only grow in the future. If Jewish organizations want to have any sort of impact on these numbers, it will require them to cast off their illusions about the value of outreach, which has clearly failed. A community that is primarily defined by being inclusive or by values that are not specific to Judaism is dooming itself to irrelevance. Instead of accepting assimilation, Jewish groups must resist it whenever possible and concentrate their efforts on encouragement and investment in those elements that produce Jews rather than people with only a dim grasp of what it means to be part of the Jewish people. Only with major investments in those institutions that build Jewish identity such as schools, synagogues, and camps as well as trips to Israel can American Jewry stop or even lessen this demographic slide. The numbers show us that a largely secular, non-religious American Jewish community is well on its way to assimilating itself into a marginal group with only a vestigial memory of Jewish life as well as notions about food and humor that should not be mistaken for a communal values.

 

If these trends continue or worsen, Jewish life and Judaism will not die in America. But it will be smaller, less diverse, and be increasingly unable to support the institutions that have been built here. That is not the same thing as disappearing, but for the majority of those who are not committed to a community of faith, however they choose to define it Jewishly, it will be a distinction without a difference.

Gaza Suffers as Hamas Fights for Survival. By Jonathan Cook.

Gaza suffers as Hamas fights for survival on several fronts. By Jonathan Cook. The National, October 1, 2013.

Rethinking the Two-State Solution. By Neve Gordon.

Rethinking the two-state solution. By Neve Gordon. Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2013.

Gordon:

In the 2012 elections, J Street, the relatively new pro-Israel lobby whose stated purpose is to promote a progressive peace agenda in the Middle East, says its PAC disbursed more than $1.8 million to candidates from 26 states, thus helping eight Senate and 63 House hopefuls win their races. Among the winners are the chairs and ranking members of five committees, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee, as well as chairs and ranking members of more than 30 subcommittees.

 

Within a mere five years of its establishment, J Street has gone a long way toward fulfilling its initial goal of becoming an alternative voice to the powerful, hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which reportedly has 12 full-time lobbyists and spends nearly $3 million annually on its efforts. At its annual conference, which ends today, J Street expects about 3,000 attendees — AIPAC's drew 13,000. Still, the fledgling organization has succeeded in making room for welcome dissent within mainstream political debates about Israel, and it has begun to redefine what it means to be “pro-Israel” on Capitol Hill.

 

But J Street also has a deep-seated problem that it will need to address if it wants to continue being politically relevant. 

Basically, J Street presents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in starkly binary terms: Either the rivals have to reach a two-state solution or disaster will ensue. Why disaster? Because entrenching the status quo, in which millions of Palestinians living in areas controlled by Israel are not citizens, would amount to an apartheid state, while any one-state solution would eventually lead to the demise of the Jewish majority. Both apartheid and the end of Israel as a Jewish state are, in J Street’s view, disastrous.

 

But J Street needs to start thinking outside this box. Many experts from across the political spectrum now say the two-state solution is no longer viable. Two decades after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo peace accords, more than 500,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the settler lobby boasts a compliant Knesset coalition, and the Palestinians continue to be beset by deepening divisions. Notwithstanding the current negotiations initiated by Secretary of State John F. Kerry, if J Street does not want to find itself promoting an irrelevant political program, it will need to begin thinking about an alternative that guarantees both democracy and a certain strain of Zionism, but also advocates a single state in which Jews and Palestinians live together as equals.

 

Northern Ireland offers a real-life model of a just and equitable one-state solution because it accommodates ethno-national distinctions between citizens. In political science it’s called “consociationalism.”

 

Premised on collective and individual entitlements, a consociational government guarantees group representation, ensures power sharing in the executive branch and offers group vetoes. It could assure both the Israeli and the Palestinian communities that no important decision would be made without the broad consent of representatives of both groups. No less important is the notion of “parity of esteem,” one of the core concepts of the Northern Ireland peace process. It requires each side to respect the other side’s identity and ethos, including linguistic diversity, culture and religion.

 

In order to guarantee political equality to the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland, the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement assigned essentially equal status to two executive roles — the first and deputy first ministers. Each group has an equal number of legislative committee chairmanships, and membership balance on public bodies, including the judiciary and police forces. Israelis and Palestinians would have to create their own model, and at least initially, it might be good to add to this basic setup internal territorial partition of certain areas, but with porous borders.

 

Consociationalism offers a tenable framework for beginning to address the contradictions arising from Israel’s wish to concurrently sustain its Jewish character, control territory in which 4.5 million Palestinians live, and maintain a democratic system.

 

Granted, the odds appear to favor the long-standing, widely desired two-state solution. For J Street to switch to a one-state option would be like betting on a horse whose odds are 50 to 1, instead of the two-state horse's 25 to 1. But the two-state horse is very old and there is little chance that it will ever win. The one-state is still a colt and just began its training.

 

The demographic reality calls upon J Street to choose between a strictly Jewish state and a democratic state. The question now is whether the new lobby will have the foresight and audacity to follow the footsteps of major Zionist intellectuals who supported a binational state — like the great philosopher Martin Buber and the founder and first president of Hebrew University, Judah Magnes — and take the road less traveled.

The Alawites, Ethnic Cleansing, and Syria’s Future. By Franck Salameh.

The Alawites, Ethnic Cleansing, and Syria’s Future. By Franck Salameh. The National Interest, September 30, 2013.

Imagining a Remapped Middle East. By Robin Wright. NJBR, September 29, 2013.

The Border Between Israel and Palestine: The Elephant in the Map Room. By Frank Jacobs. NJBR, September 21, 2013.

Small Homogeneous States Only Solution for Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar. IMRA, April 1, 2011.

The Arab Collapse. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, May 20, 2013. With related articles on the possible fragmentation of the Middle East on ethnic and sectarian lines.


Salameh:

Whatever the outcome of the current Syrian crisis, the sectarian killings that have been raging for the past two and a half years, and which might have reached new paroxysms of savagery in August 2013, all bear the telltale markings of ethnic cleansing, impending fragmentation, and ultimately the Balkanization of a country formerly known as Syria.

 

“Ethnic cleansing” is not a phrase to be uttered in vain; its tortured tales are stained with heartbreak and bloodshed, its sad trails spattered with chronicles of dispossession and forced population movements. As a concept, “ethnic cleansing” traces its semantic origins to the Balkans during the early 1990s, but its inglorious history is as old as history itself, its deeds recorded in the sacred writs and annals of nations, its crimes premeditated, designed to eliminate undesired populations with the aim of building ethnically, religiously, or culturally homogenous regions in once mixed or disputed territories. Syria, as a complex of ethno-religious and linguistic mosaics, living a brittle and uneasy peace under the rule of an apprehensive and historically oppressed community, falls within the patterns of deeply divided societies susceptible to ethnic conflagrations. And so, since the early days of the insurgency in early 2011, Syria’s troubles were pointing in the direction of an impending sectarian boiling point. And Assad, a child of the catacombs, an accursed minoritarian, an Alawite upstart whose family made good and bequeathed him the throne of the Sunni’s overlord, was not about to throw it all away and deliver a redeemed community back to its oppressors. Some Pollyanna in 2011 might have thought it opportune to ride the winds of an ill-conceived “Arab Spring”, doodling some rosy freedom slogan on a wall in Daraa. But Assad’s appetite was not for self-immolation so as to feed the flame of someone else’s freedom. Safeguarding one’s own trumps all other virtues in the creed of persecuted Levantine minorities, Alawites included, and Assad was not about to betray that sacred writ. Indeed, he has yet to have a “bad day” as he continues to prosecute this fight for self-preservation, and as he forges on, coming ever closer to carving out an Alawite heartland. But that “bad day” came and went, with Obama’s posturing and abrupt retreat, and Assad triumphed yet again. Today, with the regional and international response to his brutality as incoherent as ever, Assad remains the winner of this conflict, and he endures, more determined, consolidating an eventual rump state.

 

The opposition to Assad remains a motley assortment of Islamists, with some reformers and liberals interspersed in-between, most of whom loathe each other, perhaps more than they hate Assad himself. What’s more, Assad’s military remains largely loyal and determined, his popular base remains intact and committed, and American policy—or lack thereof—remains his greatest ally, and so he remains firmly ensconced at the helm. Like his father Hafez before him, Bashar al-Assad is a skilled strategist and a patient master of time; he is wily, deliberate, coolheaded, and coldblooded; a crafty murderer and a seasoned statesman at once, qualities that a flamboyant hothead like Muammar Qaddafi, a kleptocratic oligarch like Zine al Abidine Ben-Ali, and a fossilized military veteran like Hosni Mubarak all lacked. And so it is unlikely that Assad’s fate will come anywhere near Qaddafi’s, Ben-Ali’s, or Mubarak’s—although predictions are the praxis of the foolhardy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

A medical doctor by training, Bashar al-Assad has a cruel and criminal mind with a tender, dorky patina and an endearing speech impediment. But it is a grave mistake to dismiss him as dim-witted, delusional, or an unwilling figurehead; nor is he a thug or run-of-the-mill despot lashing out arbitrarily and in despair. The fact that he has lasted this long, fending off legions of international jihadis and bottomless supplies of Saudi and Qatari petrodollars streaming into Syria, all speak to the possibility that Assad may be doing something right. What Assad began claiming in early 2011, about battling foreign Islamists, has become a reality. Even if this had not been the case then, today Assad is clearly fighting a sinister and determined coalition of vicious Islamists and triumphalist divine warriors.

 

Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and the reluctance and incoherence met in the world’s (especially America’s) response, clearly fit into his calculus and his adept reading of American policy. In fact, not only is Assad comfortable with Obama’s inaction—and lately, Obama’s decision to outsource America’s dealing with the Syrian crisis to Russia—but Washington’s (non)policy is an important component of Assad’s survival, and possibly his eventual triumph. The more mixed signals Assad continues to receive, the more emboldened he will become to finish the job.

 

In the end, partition, anathema as it may be to those still emotionally attached to the Sykes-Picot order, may end up being the more humane solution to the Syrian crisis. An undefeated Assad ruling over the entirety of Syria will likely be more vicious than the current chemical Assad. Conversely, a united (or even a fragmented) Syria under the bevies of jihadiscurrently roaming its landscape is a nightmare of apocalyptic ramifications; a horrifying prospect not only to Alawites, but also to moderate Sunnis, liberals, and minorities who are not particularly enthralled with the idea of an Islamist Syria. Jihadisare also a bane to Syria’s neighbors, diverse countries whose societies are as fragmented, disparate, and variegated as Syria’s.

 

For the time being, Assad’s most immediate concern appears to be maintaining control over the “north-south highway” linking Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Holding on to this corridor, and clearing out resistance or pushing it further east, is crucial to the fortification and safeguarding of the future state that he seems to be envisaging. It is not per chance that the most important battles raging in Syria today have been occurring along this corridor—for all intents and purposes, the eastern flank of the Alawite State.

 

Even if Damascus should fall to the rebels—keeping in mind that Damascus remains ultimately a prize of primarily symbolic, not strategic, importance—the Damascus-Aleppo highway would remain the more important rampart of the Alawite sanctuary and, perhaps equally importantly, its passageway to the Shiite areas of eastern Lebanon—namely the Bekaa Valley and ultimately the Lebanese port-city of Tripoli. That was the whole idea behind the battle for Qusayr this past summer, and Hezbollah’s involvement in that fight alongside Assad’s forces. Now, whether Assad overtly declares an Alawite canton or keeps feigning a desire for a whole, unified Syria, the battles around the aforementioned corridors and the maintenance of this side of Syria under Assad’s control are of crucial importance because: 1) keeping these regions will mean that Assad and his community have survived the Sunni onslaught, and 2) this prospective, armored, Russian- and Iranian-supported rump state will eventually become an important bargaining chip for Assad and his community should a peaceful negotiation for an end-of-conflict (and a return to a unitary Syria) become an eventuality.

 

Another issue of crucial importance in this calculus is not only the future of Syria alone, but the fact that Syria’s reconfiguration into sectarian mini-states will have an effect on the remainder of the Levantine mosaic. For, even if the rebels do not defeat Assad, they are likely to remain in their areas of influence—more or less as demarcated by the current front lines—preventing a reversion to a Syrian status quo ante. Furthermore, the Alawites and other Syrian minorities, having remained largely in Assad’s camp, have no place in any configuration of a future unitary Syria. This is an eventuality that Assad père had foreseen and began planning for in the early 1980s, after the Hama massacre.

 

One must not lose sight of the fact that, historically speaking, and contrary to prevalent belief, the Alawites wanted no part of the “Unitary Syria” that emerged out of Franco-British bickering in the Levant of the interwar period. Indeed, when the French inherited the Ottoman Vilayets (governorates) of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Alexandretta in 1918, they opted to turn them into six autonomous entities reflecting previous Ottoman administrative realities. Ergo, in 1920, those entities became the State of Greater Lebanon (which in 1926 gave birth to the Republic of Lebanon), the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo, the State of the Druze Mountain, the State of the Alawite Mountain (corresponding roughly to what the Alawites are reconstituting today), and the Sanjak of Alexandretta (ceded to Turkey in 1938 to become the Province of Hatay.)

 

But when Arab nationalists began pressuring the British on the question of “Arab unity,” urging them to make good on pledges made to the Sharif of Mecca during the Great War, the Alawites demured. In fact, Bashar al-Assad’s own grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, was among leading Alawite notables who, until 1944, continued to lobby French Mandatory authorities to resist British and Arab designs aimed at stitching together the States of Aleppo, Damascus, Druze, and Alawite Mountains into a new republic to be christened Syria. Dismayed by the prospects of the Alawite State ending up as an addendum to a future Syrian entity, the elder Assad held repeated meetings with French diplomats and intellectuals, and dispatched a stream of memos to the Quai d’Orsay demanding that the State of the Alawite Mountain—given legal recognition in 1920—be attached to the Republic of Lebanon, rather than any future Syrian federation. In one such memo addressed to French PM Léon Bluhm, Ali Sulayman al-Assad argued that any future united Arab Syrian entity would put in place a regime dominated by fanaticism and intolerance toward non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities. He stressed that “the spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation.” A united Syria, concluded Assad’s 1936 memo,

will only mean the enslavement of the Alawite people; [the French] may think that it is possible to ensure the rights of the Alawites and the minorities by treaty. We assure you that treaties have no value in relation to the Islamic mentality in Syria. […] The Alawi people appeal to the French government […] and request […] a guarantee of their freedom and independence within their small territory,” [in the confines of the Alawite Mountain.]

Echoes of this can be felt in Bashar al-Assad’s conduct today. Memories run deep in the Middle East, especially among persecuted minorities. The Assads remain haunted by the trauma and deprivation that have checkered their history. A mere generation ago, their daughters in a Syria dominated by Sunni Arabs were being sold into servitude, to suffer a lifetime of toils in the households of urban Sunni notables. This is not a past that the Alawites want restituted in a future Sunni-dominated Syria. And if it means breaking Syria in order to avoid such subjugation, then this is a small price to pay for Alawite dignity and security.

 

For nearly half a century, Syria’s Alawites have dodged persecution and humiliation, and they have safeguarded communal sanity and identity by dominating Syria. They did so by co-opting power centers and ruling a unitary state under the guise of Arab nationalism, an ideology that they flaunted with ostentation and bombast, even though they might not have been true believers. Today the lip-service that they paid to this failed ideology, and the image that they built for themselves as committed Arab nationalists, are coming undone. Ghosts of Sulayman al-Assad are coming back to life. And so, retreating to a fortified Alawite state may be the only option left in Bashar al-Assad’s bag of tricks. Anything less is tantamount to communal suicide. Anything feigning reconciliation, or power-sharing, or repackaging and brandishing once more vain Arabist credentials, will be lost on Assad’s foes. The Arab nationalist train, with its redeemed Alawite community, has already left the station, and a return trip does not figure on the schedule.

 

And so the battles that continue to rage on in Syria, and the cruelties that seem unlikely to abate, will be waged for the purpose of geographic, and demographic rearrangements—ethnic cleansing by another name. At the pinnacle of their power, the dynasts of the house of Assad had encouraged Alawite internal migrations to major urban centers such as Damascus and Aleppo. But they also maintained their traditional heartland and its Mediterranean littoral as almost exclusively Alawite—a core territory stretching from Tartus in the south, near the Lebanon border, to the outskirts of Turkey’s Antakya in the north. One might guess that of Assad’s main concerns today, besides the protection and reinforcement of the Alawite canton, would be maintaining safe havens and passageways for an Alawite “diaspora” scattered about the hinterland, laying down the groundwork for an eventual return and a secure “ascent” to the Alawite Mountain.

The ethno-religious divisions of Syria. Map of the French Mandate. Wikimedia.