The Late, Great American WASP. By Joseph Epstein.

The Late, Great American WASP. By Joseph Epstein. Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2013, Also here.

Nostalgie de la Boue. By Arlene Goldbard. Tikkun Daily Blog, December 23, 2013.


Epstein:

The old U.S. ruling class had plenty of problems. But are we really better off with a country run by the self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy?

 

The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation's most prestigious schools.

 

The acronym WASP derives, of course, from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people, including powerful figures and some presidents, have been white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant but were far from being WASPs. Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton qualified.

 

WASPs were a caste, closed off to all not born within it, with the possible exception of those who crashed the barriers by marrying in. WASP credentials came with lineage, and lineage—that is, proper birth—automatically brought connections to the right institutions. Yale, Princeton and Harvard were the great WASP universities, backed up by Choate, Groton, Andover, Exeter and other prep schools. WASPs tended to live in exclusive neighborhoods: on upper Park and Fifth Avenues in New York, on the Main Line in Philadelphia, the Back Bay in Boston, Lake Forest and Winnetka in Chicago.

 

WASP life, though, was chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. WASPs had their own social clubs and did business with a small number of select investment and legal firms, such as Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell. Many lived on inherited money, soundly invested.

 

The State Department was once dominated by WASPs, and so, too, was the Supreme Court, with one seat traditionally left unoccupied for a Jewish jurist of proper mien. The House of Representatives was never preponderantly WASP, though a number of prominent senators— Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett A. Saltonstall, both of Massachusetts, come to mind—have been WASPs. Looking down on the crudities of quotidian American politics, Henry Adams, a WASP to the highest power, called the dealings of Congress, the horse-trading and corruption and the rest of it, “the dance of democracy.” In one of his short stories, Henry James has characters modeled on Adams and his wife Clover, planning a social evening, say, “Let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.”

 

So dominant was WASP culture that some wealthy families who didn’t qualify by lineage attempted to imitate and live the WASP life. The Catholic Kennedys were the most notable example. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port—the sailing, the clothes, the touch football played on expansive green lawns—was pure WASP mimicry, all of it, except that true WASPs were too upstanding to go in for the unscrupulous business dealings of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. or the feckless philanderings of him and some of his sons.

 

That the Kennedys did their best to imitate WASP life is perhaps not surprising, for in their exclusion, the Irish may have felt the sting of envy for WASPocracy more than any others. The main literary chroniclers of WASP culture— F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or John O’Hara—were Irish. (Both Fitzgerald and O’Hara tried to live their lives on the WASP model.) But the pangs weren’t limited to the Irish alone. To this day, the designer Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz) turns out clothes inspired by his notion of the WASP high life, lived on the gracious margins of expensive leisure.

 

The last WASP president was George H.W. Bush, but there is reason to believe he wasn’t entirely proud of being a WASP. At any rate, he certainly wasn’t featuring it. When running for office he made every attempt to pass himself off as a Texan, declaring a passion for pork rinds and a love for the music of the Oak Ridge Boys. (His son George W. Bush, even though he can claim impeccable WASP lineage and went to the right schools, seems otherwise to have shed all WASPish coloration and become an authentic Texan, happily married to a perfectly middle-class librarian.)

 

That George H.W. Bush felt it strategic not to emphasize his WASP background was a strong sign that the decline of the WASP's prestige in American culture was well on its way. Other signs had arisen much earlier. During the late 1960s, some of the heirs of the Rockefeller clan openly admitted feeling guilty about their wealth and the way their ancestors came by it. By the 1970s, exclusive universities and prep schools began dropping their age-old quotas on Catholics and Jews, lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks. The social cachet of the Episcopal Church, a major WASP institution, drained away as its clergy turned its major energies to leftish causes.

 

Calling something elite, which was how WASPs of an earlier era preferred to think of themselves, became a denunciation. Being a WASP was no longer a source of happy pride but something distasteful if not slightly disgraceful—the old privileges of membership now seeming unjust and therefore badly tainted. An old joke has one bee asking another bee why he is wearing a yarmulke. “Because,” answers the second bee, “I don’t want anyone to take me for a WASP.”

 

The late 1960s put the first serious dent into the WASPs as untitled aristocrats and national leaders. For protesters of that generation, the word WASP didn’t come into play so much as the word Establishment, heretofore chiefly an ecclesiastical term. The Establishment was the protesters’ enemy and target. The Establishment was thought to have sent the country into Vietnam; it was perfectly content with the status quo, with all its restrictions on freedom and tolerance for unjust social arrangements; it stood for all that was uptight and generally repressive in American culture.

 

The Establishment took its place in a long tradition of enemies of American life. This list has included, at various times, Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the military-industrial complex—vague entities all. But there was nothing vague about the Establishment. They were alive and breathing, and they had such names as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, W. Averell Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Joseph Alsop, C. Douglas Dillon, George F. Kennan and Robert McNamara. The WASPs ruled the country, and for those who didn’t much like the country or the directions in which they saw it tending, the WASPs were a great and easily identifiable enemy.

 

The last unashamed WASP to live in the White House was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he, with his penchant for the reform of American society, was considered by many a traitor to his social class. He is also likely to be the last to reside there. WASP culture, though it exists in pockets of private life—country clubs, neighborhoods, a few prep schools and law firms—is finished as a phenomenon of public significance.

 

Much can be—and has been—written about the shortcomings of the WASPocracy. As a class, it was exclusionary and hence tolerant of social prejudice, if not often downright snobbish. Tradition-minded, it tended to be dead to innovation and social change. Imagination wasn't high on its list of admired qualities.

 

Yet the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a 1990 book called The Way of the Wasp, Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were “success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything.”

 

Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren’t, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life. As a ruling class, today’s new meritocracy has failed to provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.

 

Meritocracy is leadership thought to be based on men and women who have earned their way not through the privileges of birth but by merit. La carrière ouverte aux talents: Careers open to the talented, is what Napoleon Bonaparte promised, and it is what any meritocratic system is supposed to provide.

 

The U.S. now fancies itself under a meritocratic system, through which the highest jobs are open to the most talented people, no matter their lineage or social background. And so it might seem, when one considers that our 42nd president, Bill Clinton, came from a broken home in a backwater in Arkansas, while our 44th, Barack Obama, was himself also from a broken home and biracial into the bargain. Sen. Ted Cruz, the man who leads the tea party, is the son of a Cuban émigré.

 

Meritocracy in America starts (and often ends) in what are thought to be the best colleges and universities. On the meritocratic climb, one's mettle is first tested by getting into these institutions—no easy task in the contemporary overcrowded scramble for admission. Then, of course, one must do well within them. In England, it was once said that Waterloo and the empire were built on the playing fields of Eton. The current American imperium appears to have been built at the offices of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SATs.

 

Whether Republican or Democrat, left or right, the leading figures in U.S. public life today were good at school. Bill Clinton had Georgetown, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and Yale Law School on his résumé; Barack Obama had Columbia and Harvard Law School. Their wives, respectively, had Wellesley and Yale Law School and Princeton and Harvard Law School. Cruz went to Princeton and thence to Harvard Law School. Players all—high rollers in the great American game of meritocracy. Their merit resides, presumably, in having been superior students.

 

But is the merit in our meritocracy genuine? Of the two strongest American presidents since 1950— Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan —the first didn’t go to college at all, and the second went to Eureka College, a school affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Eureka, Ill. The notion of Harry Truman as a Princeton man or Ronald Reagan as a Yalie somehow diminishes them both.

 

Apart from mathematics, which demands a high IQ, and science, which requires a distinct aptitude, the only thing that normal undergraduate schooling prepares a person for is . . . more schooling. Having been a good student, in other words, means nothing more than that one was good at school: One had the discipline to do as one was told, learned the skill of quick response to oral and written questions, figured out what professors wanted and gave it to them.

 

Having been a good student, no matter how good the reputation of the school—and most of the good schools, we are coming to learn, are good chiefly in reputation—is no indication of one’s quality or promise as a leader. A good student might even be more than a bit of a follower, a conformist, standing ready to give satisfaction to the powers that be so that one can proceed to the next good school, taking another step up the ladder of meritocracy.

 

What our new meritocrats have failed to evince—and what the older WASP generation prided itself on—is character and the ability to put the well-being of the nation before their own. Character embodied in honorable action is at the heart of the novels and stories of Louis Auchincloss, America’s last unembarrassedly WASP writer. Doing the right thing, especially in the face of temptations to do otherwise, was the WASP test par excellence. Most of our meritocrats, by contrast, seem to be in business for themselves.

 

Trust, honor, character: The elements that have departed U.S. public life with the departure from prominence of WASP culture have not been taken up by the meritocrats. Many meritocrats who enter politics, when retired by the electorate from public life, proceed to careers in lobbying or other special-interest advocacy. University presidents no longer speak to the great issues in education but instead devote themselves to fundraising and public relations, and look to move on to the next, more prestigious university presidency.

 

A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are little more than “greedy pigs” (his words) without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have master’s degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.

 

Thus far in their history, meritocrats, those earnest good students, appear to be about little more than getting on, getting ahead and (above all) getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in criticism of it, was better than that.

 

The WASPs’ day is done. Such leadership as it provided isn’t likely to be revived. Recalling it at its best is a reminder that the meritocracy that has followed it marks something less than clear progress. Rather the reverse.

It’s About the Settlements, Stupid. By David P. Goldman.

It’s About the Settlements, Stupid. By David P. Goldman. PJ Media, December 17, 2013. Also at Middle East Forum.

Goldman:

Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the misnamed occupied territories, are not the obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are the acid test of peace. To argue that peace is conceivable unless the bulk of the settlements remain in place constitutes stupidity or hypocrisy. Leave aside the issue of whether Jews have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Ignore the fact that the settlers live overwhelmingly on what was waste land and turned into gardens, vineyards, and industries which have uplifted the lives of Palestinian Arabs more than all the aid that has passed through (or rather stuck to) the fingers of the kleptocrats of the PA. Leave aside also Israel’s requirement for defensible borders: that is a critical issue but not identical to the continued presence of settlements.

 

Accepting the settlements is the sine qua non of any viable peace agreement. It does Israel no good to defend Israel’s right to exist but to condemn the settlers, as does Alan Dershowitz, not to mention the leaders of liberal Jewish denominations.

 

I believe in land for peace. That is a tautology: In territorial disputes the two main variables always are land and peace. But that implies more land for more peace and less land for less peace. The Palestinian Arabs had an opportunity to accept an Israeli state on just 5,500 square miles of land in 1947, and refused to do so. The armistice lines of 1948 left Israel with 8,550 square miles, and the Arab side refused to accept that. In 1967 Israel took an additional 5,628 square miles of land in dispute under international law; Jordan does not claim it, and no legal Arab authority exists to claim it. It is not “illegally occupied.” It has never been adjudicated by a competent authority.

 

To demand the 1948 armistice lines (the so-called 1967 borders) is to refuse any penalty for refusing to make peace in the past. That is the same as refusing any peace at all. Wars end when one side accepts defeat, and abandons the hope of restoring the status quo ante by force of arms. 1947 was a catastrophe (“Nakba”) for the Palestinian Arabs, to be sure, but it was a catastrophe of their own making; until they accept at least some degree of responsibility for the catastrophe, they will not be reconciled to any peace agreement. That is precisely what Palestine’s negotiator Saeb Erekat meant when he eschewed any recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state because “I cannot change my narrative.” The “narrative” is that the Jews are an alien intrusion into the Muslim Middle East and eventually must be eliminated by one means or another.

 

The Palestinian Arabs are a people in decline, and the vehemence of their leaders reflects the dimness of their future. It is noteworthy that Secretary of State John Kerry continues to talk of a “demographic time bomb” threatening Israel, even though the data show that the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is increasing faster than the Arab population, as former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger observes. That’s based on undisputed data; in fact, Palestinian population data are inflated by an enormous margin, as a 2006 study by the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan University demonstrated:

[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS. . . . The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.

The hold of traditional Muslim society on young Palestinian Arabs, especially young women, is deteriorating: as they gain access to secondary and tertiary education, young Arabs have fewer children and more careers. And the most effective agency for the emancipation of young Arab women is the settler movement. Ariel University across the so-called Green Line is full of young Muslim women in headscarves studying computer science, and the leaders of the Ariel community–Haredi Jews–work with local Arab leaders to recruit talented students.

 

There is a parallel to what I called the “peace of the aging” in Ireland. The Irish got older. The drunken IRA killers I met in Belfast in 1970 as a student journalist had no intention of making peace. They were having too much fun at war. By 1996, when former Sen. George Mitchell presided over the Good Friday Agreement that formally ended the low-intensity civil war in Northern Ireland, those who were left had families and mortgages.

 

Distribution of Irish Population by Age (UN)

By 2040 the Palestinian Arab population will have far fewer young people and far more middle-aged people.

 

Distribution of West Bank Arab Population by Age (UN)

The Irish no longer care. They are neither Catholic nor nationalistic. The IRA thugs of 1970 came from four-child families. Today the Irish have fewer than two children on average. Let the matter simmer for another twenty years, and the Palestinian Arabs will look more like the Irish of 1996 than the Irish of 1970. At that point, the “narrative” will change, because no one will care about the old “narrative.”

 

In the meantime the Israeli settlers have built a garden and a workshop where before there were bare rocks, and thriving communities that are integral parts of Israeli society. It takes longer to get crosstown in Manhattan in traffic than it does to drive from the center of Tel Aviv to Ariel, the largest town in Samaria. This is yet another accomplishment of Jewish ingenuity and industriousness, and it is (or should be) an inspiring example to all who hope for a better life for the peoples of the Middle East. We will know that the Palestinians want peace when they admire rather than abhor this effort.

 

The utopian delusions of the Obama administration, the hypocrisy of the world, and the betrayal–yes, I think that is the right word–of Israeli interests by the liberal American Jewish denominations have put Israel in a painful situation. The threat of economic sanctions from Europe or reduced American military support if Israel refuses to swallow the poisoned bait are not a trivial threat. As Caroline Glick writes today:

With Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our throats, parameters that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms of peace that will destroy the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu needs to adopt a longer-term strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to extricate Israel from the two-state trap.

 

Yes, Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years, non-leftist Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along with the Left, and the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But Kerry’s obsessive harping, and his insistence on pushing forward with his disastrous framework deal forces our hand.

 

Either we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.

Ms. Glick is Israeli, and has a right to urge a particular course of action for her country. I am American, and direct my comments instead to my liberal Jewish co-religionists: Your support for the Obama administration and your betrayal of Jews on our front line in Judea and Samaria is a wicked and disgraceful thing. We must summon all of our strength to prevent this administration from punishing Israel for refusing to commit suicide.

 

As a religious Jew, I believe that Jews are obligated to settle our historic homeland, but I also believe that the preservation of Jewish life takes precedence. If it were possible to achieve a durable and robust peace by abandoning the settlements I would support it. But that is a delusion: we will make ourselves immeasurably less secure by abandoning the settlements than by holding fast to them.

Living Without Solutions in Samaria. By David P. Goldman.

Living without solutions in Samaria. By David P. Goldman (writing as Spengler). Asia Times, September 25, 2012.

Prof. Robert Wistrich on the Betrayal of Israel by the Left.

Pamela Geller Interviews the Preeminent Scholar, Professor Robert Wistrich. Atlas Shrugs, January 22, 2013.

Interview with Professor Robert Wistrich:

 

Q. In what ways has the Left betrayed the Jews and Israel?

 

A. Ever since the late 1940s, the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, through their cynical exploitation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, not only betrayed the Jews but their own self-proclaimed ideals of equality, social justice and opposition to racism. This betrayal continued with the new Left in the 1970s, the anti-globalists and much of the academic Left (in the US as well as in Europe) in our own day. They have demonized and systematically denigrated Israel as if it were the Devil incarnate, the anti-Christ of our time, the ultimate expression of racist oppression.

 

Q. Has your analysis been informed by your early life in the USSR?

 

A. I was much too young to be directly influenced since my parents were repatriated to Poland only a few years after the end of WWII. But my father had twice been imprisoned by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) and his experiences probably inoculated me against any illusions about the “Soviet paradise.” But it was my own direct experience when trapped as a tourist in Prague (at the time of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) which did leave an indelible negative impression of Communism.

 

Q. Why do you think that the Left is so anti-Israel? What are the roots?

 

A. As my new book clearly demonstrates, the ideological sources of left-wing anti-Israelism go back to the late-19th-century emergence of political Zionism. Already then, many socialist ideologues, following Karl Marx, treated the Jews as if they were a phantom nationality, a caste of greedy exploiters whose only real religion was predatory capitalism. These leftists believed that the advent of socialism would abolish not only capitalism but Jewry itself. Neither happened. The establishment of Israel proved their prognosis to be hopelessly wrong. So, what are they left with? Mindless, irrational denigration! The Marxist Left in particular is incapable of escaping from its own self-created ideological straitjacket.

 

Q. But why does the Left identify with Palestinian jihadists, whose values – at least outwardly – seem so very different?

 

A. The Left has always tended to identify with those whom they designate as “the poor,” the “proletariat” or the hapless victims of the capitalist system. However, the international proletariat did not live up to Marxian expectations as the “chosen class” of world history – while the Communist bloc collapsed in 1989-91. The Palestinians represent a substitute form of redemption for all these failed hopes – the prologue and catalyst for a new revolutionary would-be upheaval. And there is always the additional attraction that the Palestinians are fighting the Jews – or rather “The Zionists.” Ergo, they must be supported.

 

Q. And the jihadi component?

 

A. In From Ambivalence to Betrayal, I show that already in the 1920s, Moscow tried (unsuccessfully) to “Bolshevize” the Muslim masses in the East, especially in Palestine. They proposed a “Red Jihad” against Western imperialism and Zionism. There was some common ground. Both Marxists and Islamists divide the world in a simplistic Manichean fashion between forces of light and darkness, ruthless imperialists and downtrodden masses, between oppressors and oppressed. Jihad does have revolutionary potential and can meet Marxist requirements with the help of some dialectical juggling. Moreover, once Palestinians are defined as the absolute victims (a convenient fiction), then Zionists must necessarily be branded as absolute perpetrators and accused of committing “genocide” against them. But as I demonstrate, this is a fantasy-view. Despite its great popularity today, it is really just a “softer” remake of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories so beloved by Nazis and fascists.

 

Q. So why are so many Jews attracted to the Left, despite such attitudes?

 

A. There are several possible explanations. There is, of course, the Biblical tradition (embodied in Moses and the Prophets) of pursuing justice, righteousness and compassion for the poor – embedded in the Jewish cultural DNA. Then there is Jewish social marginality before the 19th century and the relentless persecution over centuries, which made Jews into archetypal victims and outsiders. However, in America and the West (including Israel) where Jews have “made it” they still often “vote like the poor.” Sometimes it even seems that Jews are stuck in a time-warp which makes them always see the enemy on the Right – while remaining blind in the left eye. I do hope that my book will be an eye-opener in that respect.

 

Q. Is this history the reason why so many Jews recently voted for Obama?

 

A. Well, Jews are suckers for what we might call “compassionism” and especially for humanitarian appeals, in sharp contrast to the grotesque anti-Semitic stereotype (on the Right and the Left) of Jewish “huckstering” and rapacity. Compassion is fine, even admirable in many ways. But making an ideology out of it is highly suspect. Some of the worst crimes in modern history have been committed in the name of human rights, solidarity, and defense of the poor – as the record of Soviet-style Communism unmistakably shows. Obama, in American domestic terms, is pretty much a leftist, and Jews as good Liberal Democrats naturally gravitate to him in the United States. It’s proving hard to shift those habits.

 

Q. Why do you say the creation of Israel was a “slap in the face to the Marxist analysis of the ‘Jewish Question?’”

 

A. Because, according to Marxism, the Jews should long ago have disappeared as a nation! An influential sector of the Left, long before Israel’s creation, regarded Zionism as an illegitimate “backward” and reactionary movement. It is true that for a time much of the Left did support Israel (between 1947 and 1967) as long as they could see Jews primarily as poor, persecuted, downtrodden refugees of the Holocaust who were building a “socialist” country of their own. What they could not stomach was a proud, independent, Jewishly self-affirming and militarily efficient Israel able to strike back at (Arab) enemies hell-bent on its destruction. Weeping over dead Jews is fine, but real, living, flesh-and-blood Israelis who vigorously defend their right to exist is apparently, for many on the Left (including some Jews), just too much to take. I would see that attitude as a form of latent, undeclared anti-Semitism. As for Obama, his whole mind-set and natural inclinations seem to me to reflect a kind of Third Worldist ideology. Hence, the retreat from American global supremacy. However, his hostility towards Netanyahu is truly stunning and, I think, ill-advised. Most Israelis are not stupid and they sense the US President’s obvious coldness to their cause, even as he embraces some of their worst enemies, like Egypt’s President Morsi and the Turkish leader, Erdogan (both of whom are fairly rabid Islamic anti-Semites).

 

Q. Following on from that, how then do you explain the refusal to address Islamic Jew-hatred, surely the greatest threat the Jewish people currently faces?

 

A. There are several dangerous strands of self-delusion involved in this refusal. At a more general level there is the notorious inability of Western liberals to internalize the fact that the Iranians and the radical Arab Islamists really mean what they say when they talk about annihilating the Jews, destroying Israel, bringing down America and establishing Islamic supremacy. There is a real failure to grasp the determination of such “true believers” to act on their fanatical principles, despite the overwhelming evidence before our eyes. Precisely the same failure was visible in Western (and Soviet) appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. Remember that even The New York Times was largely in denial about the Holocaust all through the war years. It simply buried the story in the back pages. Today, the liberal media are still whitewashing the Islamo-fascist threat and instead, like so many other deluded liberal voices, they prefer to bash Israel, even though it remains the only authentic democracy in the region. This is bad enough. But there is also a lot of ridiculous posturing in such fashionable positions. For instance, the need to appear as “politically correct” and, above all, not to be vilified as “racist” or as an “Islamophobe.” There are those out there, for whom any critical comments about Islam are a kind of thought-crime. Moreover, since the Western media prefer to remain largely silent about the endemic and vicious Jew-hatred in the Islamic world (while grossly inflating or manufacturing Israel’s fictitious “crimes”), ordinary people – including way too many Jews – have little idea about its genocidal nature. Worse still, even when they know, there is a clear inclination to suppress unpleasant truths rather than face up to them. To stand up to this reality has become an act of real courage in our inverted world.

 

Q. How then do you see Israel’s prospects, surrounded as it is by Islamic supremacists and the threat of annihilation?

 

A. We live in dangerous times, not only for Israel but for the whole world, including America. In my previous book, A Lethal Obsession (2010), I predicted that the rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism would sweep the Arab Middle East. It is a most telling symptom of its deep sickness rather than a solution. There is, unfortunately, no quick fix or instant therapy for the Arab world. Look at Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Democracy is not around the corner nor can it offer much to the hungry Arab masses as long as there is no stable middle-class, no functioning civil society, no way to clean out massive corruption and defuse the toxic incitement and hatred of Israel and the West that is so prevalent. The Jewish State is an oasis of freedom, economic growth, cultural creativity, scientific innovation, military skills and robust democratic values in this desert. It will ride out the storm despite the malevolence and nihilistic self-destructiveness of its enemies, including the Palestinian Hamas. It is, however, vital for the West – and above all America – to stand by its commitments to Israel’s security out of its own interests in regional stability, its good name, and its self-proclaimed mission as a beacon of freedom to the world. Israel has upheld similar values in the face of great adversity. For if America and Europe were to abandon the Jews once more, the damage to Western civilization would, in my view, be irreversible.

The Death of the Left. By Michael Lumish.

The Death of the Left. By Michael Lumish. Israel Thrives, December 17, 2013.

The Palestinian Colonization of the Jewish Mind. By Michael Lumish. Israel Thrives, March 31, 2011.

Israel Has the Right to Exist – Now the Left Must Defend It. By Allan Goldstein. The Algemeiner, December 15, 2013.

Thomas Friedman: “The Middle East Finally Wore Us Out.”

Thomas Friedman on fading foreign news. Interviewed by Howard Kurtz. Video. Media Buzz. Fox News, December 22, 2013. YouTube.




Friedman:

The Middle East finally wore us out, you know, in a sense, even myself. Where it is just so many things going the wrong way in so many places. . . . Not worn out in the sense of my own intellectual curiosity which is still there. But worn out in the sense of I try to write a solutions-oriented column. I don’t do pessimism very well. I find myself out of ideas when it comes to how to navigate out of the problems of this region.

The Arab War Against the Jews. By Ruth Wisse.

The Arab War Against the Jews. By Ruth Wisse. Video. TorahCafé, February 2013.

Professor Ruth Wisse: The Arab War Against the Jews. By Mike Lumish. Israel Thrives, February 28, 2013.

Lumish:

Harvard Professor of Yiddish and Literary Studies, Ruth Wisse, is the author of the very important work, Jews and Power. I’ve put a recent video of Professor Wisse on the right side-bar of Israel Thrives and will leave it there for a week or so. I would very much encourage you guys to give her a close listen because her view is both pristine and correct. This is someone who is not the least bit muddled in her thinking on the Long Arab War Against the Jews.

 

This conflict is not a conflict between equals.  It is an aggression from the much larger Arab-Muslim population in the Middle East toward their former dhimmis and slaves. It represents a hatred toward pluralism in that part of the world by the Arab majority and the refusal to accept the legitimacy of another people on their own land.

 

She argues, correctly, that anti-Zionism is actually worse than anti-Semitism because it incorporates all that anti-Semitism is while expanding it to deny Jewish sovereignty and Jewish self-defense on the land where Jews historically came from.

 

She also maintains that the organization of politics around hatred for the Jew within the Muslim Middle East, as well as within the international left, is not really about the Jews, at all, but about opposition to liberal democracy. The Jewish State of Israel is merely a proxy. It is a fashionable target through which opposition to liberal democracy, and therefore the United States, organizes itself.

 

One thing is certain, if political anti-Semitism, which is the very definition of anti-Zionism, means anything it means portraying Jews as a villain, either as Jews, individually, or in the collective, for the purpose of building political bridges with others around a common hatred.

 

My problem with the international left, and with “progressive Zionists,” the political movements that I come out of, is that they accept the fundamental notion of Jewish guilt upon which the entire ideological structure of political anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is built.

 

In this way, whatever their best intentions, they nonetheless promote the kind of hostility toward us that results in violence and mass killings and war.

 

Until we recognize that we are not guilty of the charges leveled against us (and we aren’t) then we can never convince anyone else of this truth and therefore we can never relieve ourselves of this perpetual hostility.

 

If “as-a-Jew” you tend to think that the Jews of the Middle East, via the government of Israel, is persecuting the Arabs under an imperialistic “Occupation” then you are promoting hatred toward us based on false grounds. There is no “Occupation.” There is 6 million Jews surrounded by 400 million Arabs and those Jews want nothing so much in this world other than to be left the hell alone.

 

What you call the “Occupation” is nothing other than the means of an historically abused minority to finally protect itself from a much larger and hostile majority population in a part of the world where, outside of Israel, itself, very few people share your alleged values of “social justice” and “human rights.”


Anti-Semitism and Tikkun Olam: How Jews Can Best Repair a World in Crisis. By Dr. Ruth Wisse. Video. Shalom TV, January 7, 2013. YouTube.

The ASA’s Boycott of Israel Is Not as Troubling as It Seems. By David Greenberg.

The ASA’s Boycott of Israel Is Not as Troubling as It Seems. By David Greenberg. The New Republic, December 19, 2013.

The Shame of the American Studies Association. By Gary Kulik. History News Network, December 23, 2013.

Divest This!


Greenberg:

The American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israel has made front-page news. The New York Times described the resolution—which bars members from cooperating with Israeli universities—as momentous: “a milestone” for anti-Israel forces, a signal that the boycott against the Jewish state “has begun to make strides in the United States.” Maximalist supporters of the Palestinian cause cheered. Others felt the blast of a chill wind.

 

Make no mistake: the vote is troubling, redolent of some of the darkest moments in modern history. In singling out Israel, of all the world’s imperfect actors, as worthy of ostracism, in designating the Jewish state as uniquely deserving of isolation and economic strangulation, the ASA boycotters have joined the ranks of those who—from the anti-Jewish campaigns of nineteenth-century Europe through the notorious Arab League boycott that dissipated only after Camp David and Oslo—believed that the remnant of humanity known as the Jewish people possesses too much power and must be brought to heel. Their campaign seeks not the defensible goal of ending West Bank settlements as part of a peace agreement, but the essentially anti-Semitic end of marginalizing, delegitimizing, even eliminating the Jewish state.

 

But while the anti-Jewish character of the boycott is (or should be) plain, and while any such display of prejudice is always cause for concern, it’s important to keep this stunt in perspective. Who, precisely, voted for this boycott? Whom does the American Studies Association, with its august-sounding name, represent? What, really, does this vote mean?

 

In truth, it has been a while since the ASA commanded wide respect as a heavyweight professional organization, and its politics are no bellwether of prevailing ideas in higher education. Like the high-school delinquents who from time to time spray swastikas on a Long Island synagogue wall, occasioning transient alarm and winding up on the local news, the ASA boycott ringleaders are by and large a fringe of malcontents—thugs with credentials, vandals in tweed.

 

It’s important for outsiders to this drama to know that the field of American Studies has in recent years lost much of its luster, as Alan Wolfe of Boston College detailed in these pages a decade ago. There are, of course, plenty of reputable professors in American Studies departments around the country, within the ASA, and even among its leaders. But unless you’re a regular at the ASA’s conferences, you’ll likely be confounded by what has come to supplant the mix of U.S. history, literature, and culture that you dabbled in during college.

 

Once an interdisciplinary inquiry into the character of American society, the field used to be led by such eminences as John Hope Franklin, Daniel Aaron, and Daniel Boorstin. With the “post-colonial” turn in academia, however, using the nation-state as a unit of study came to seem parochial in many quarters. One positive result was a surge of creative new scholarship, focusing on how American ideas spread abroad or how America is seen in the eyes of the world or the ways that cultural phenomena transcended national boundaries. But at the same time, much of the energy in AmStud shifted to a cadre of dogmatists who espoused a cartoon view of the United States as a global oppressor. Imperialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism became buzzwords and bugaboos.

 

Moreover, if a large portion of American Studies as a field has descended into ideology and cant, the ASA as a body has led the way. By recklessly merging scholarship and activism, the association has driven away many of the most accomplished writers and thinkers who actually study the United States of America. In gathering support for a letter opposing the boycott, I was amazed by how many of the most serious AmStud scholars told me that they had quit the organization or let their membership lapse, often because of its ridiculous politics. Some typical replies:

 

“The ASA is a disgrace, a shell of its former self. It has been taken up by folks in ideological overdrive who use it as a vehicle for their favorite causes,” emailed David Hollinger, a history professor at UC Berkeley and a former president of the Organization of American Historians.

 

“Obviously this is an outrage. But If I'm surprised, I'm not shocked, given American Studies’ pseudo-scholarly drift in recent years,” said Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University and contributing editor at this magazine, who ran Princeton’s American Studies program for years.

 

“What a disgrace,” said Steve Whitfield, professor of American civilization at Brandeis. “Unfortunately I resigned in a huff from the ASA over two decades ago, so I can’t resign again.”

 

It’s telling that many of the notable scholars who publicly opposed the boycott—Andrew Delbanco, Morris Dickstein, David J. Garrow, Todd Gitlin, Laura Kalman, Jackson Lears, Kathy Peiss, and numerous others—couldn’t vote on the resolution because they didn’t belong to the ASA. Nor is it a coincidence that many other notable opponents—Patricia Nelson Limerick, Elaine Tyler May, Alice Kessler-Harris, Linda Kerber—were past presidents of the ASA. Despite its name, the organization can no longer claim to represent the professors who actually run and populate American Studies programs around the country, or those whose work actually explores the history and character of American culture.

 

Finally, just as the ASA may not represent actual practitioners of American studies, it’s far from clear that the vote even represents the ASA. The anti-Israel measure was hatched by ASA leaders with scant publicity and placed on the agenda with little warning. This stratagem allowed its promoters to get all their ducks in a row, staffing tables to hand out pro-boycott literature—and lollipops!—to attendees at this year’s conference in Washington the weekend before Thanksgiving. Opponents or skeptics had little chance to prepare their own materials or even make plans to attend the meeting.

 

Using techniques out of the old Communist playbook, ASA officials made a pretense of open debate while packing the meetings so as to preclude true discussion. A “Town Hall” organized by Curtis Marez, the association’s president, featured six speakers echoing each other’s agitprop likening Israel to an apartheid state. Organizers passed the boycott resolution around the room of nearly 500 for signing, though no comparable document was circulated for the opposition. (Indeed, after the conference, the National Council—itself stocked with boycott supporters—refused to distribute dissenting arguments to ASA members or post them to its website.) Following the Town Hall, the participants attended an award ceremony (recipient: Angela Davis, a leading boycott advocate) and then the Presidential Address, in which Marez stumped for the measure. An “open discussion” the next day was similarly one-sided.

 

Even the vote of the ASA membership was contrived to ensure passage. The council decreed that any member who wished to abstain had to dig up his or her ASA ID number, log on to the website—and abstain. Needless to say, few took the trouble. Most people abstained by actually abstaining, but their abstentions didn’t count. Fully mobilized, the anti-Israel activists won a decisive majority of the of the 1,252 votes cast—which was also, it is important to underscore, a decisive minority of the body’s actual membership of roughly 5,000. (When I asked Marez and John Stephens, executive director of the ASA, for a response to any aspect of this piece, Stephens directed me to this site without further comment.)

 

In short, the people who approved this resolution were a few hundred strong, the fringe of a fringe. This is not to dismiss concerns about anti-Israel sentiment on campuses today, which is rising and ominous. The ASA vote should be a loud wake-up call, not so much to the Israeli government (which has bigger problems to worry about, including some of its own ministers) as to the American academy. Organized, highly motivated activists are already mobilizing to commandeer other professional associations to advance their extremist agenda, facing minimal resistance because—as Jon Stewart said in the face of a massive Tea Party rally—the rest of us have lives. Those who treasure academic freedom and deplore ethnic discrimination need to take note and fight back.

 

Still, notwithstanding cries from the right, academia has not yet been captured by the zealots. Groups like the American Association of University Professors have weighed in strongly against the boycott, as did a cohort of some 400 university presidents several years back. Collaborations between American and Israeli universities continue apace. As the ASA flap was unfolding, Cornell University and Israel’s Technion were moving forward with their joint Cornell NYC Tech campus—destined to be an intellectually exciting greenhouse of innovation and research in engineering and technology. The vast majority of American professors who currently attend conferences in Israel or co-author papers with Israeli scholars will feel no compunction about continuing to do so.

 

The anti-Israel activists within the American Studies Association may be patting themselves on the back, congratulating themselves on their effort to marginalize Israel. But there is reason to ask whether they, having squandered the good name of a once-proud organization, are in fact simply marginalizing themselves.

Israel and the Disparity Between Academia and Commerce. By David Bergstein.

Israel and the Disparity Between Academia and Commerce. By David Bergstein. The Algemeiner, December 20, 2013.

Bergstein:

Members of the American Studies Association announced Monday that they had voted by a margin of 2:1 in favor of boycotting Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. According to the ASA’s website, their rationale for said boycott stems from, “Israel’s violations of international law and U.N. resolutions.”

 

Such academic boycotts against Israel have occurred for years in Britain — the most infamous example taking place in 2002, when two academic journals fired Israeli professors from their boards on account of their nationality. The ASA’s vote marks the second such occurrence in the US, with the Association for Asian American Studies being the first to do so in April. However, additional academic boycotts may be on the horizon, as the New York Times reported that the Modern Language Association is set to debate “a resolution calling on the State Department to criticize Israel for barring American professors from going to Gaza and the West Bank when invited by Palestinian universities.”

 

By stark contrast, Israel is receiving unprecedented support from the business world, with American companies in particular demonstrating interest in establishing partnerships with Israeli companies and investing in Israel.

 

Warren Buffett has touted Israel as the “most promising investment hub” outside the US, and in May his own Berkshire Hathaway invested $2 billion for a 20 percent stock ownership of Israeli toolmaker, Iscar (he previously owned the other 80%).  As reported by Forbes magazine in 2012, “of its (Iscar’s) 3,000 Israeli employees, roughly half are Jewish and half Arab.”

 

In November, Apple Inc. acquired Tel Aviv-based PrimeSense for a reported $350 million.  The move marked the second acquisition of an Israeli company by Apple, having purchased flash storage chip maker Anobit in 2012.

 

In July, Israeli navigation company, Waze, was acquired by Google for a reported $1 billion. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has said that “investing in Israel was one of Google’s best decisions.” In the last three years, Apple, Google and Facebook have acquired 10 Israeli companies.

 

So why the disparity between the worlds of commerce and academia?

 

I submit that academics have the luxury of operating in theory, while those in business have the burden of applying theory to real world problems. In other words, idealism as opposed to realism. When I conferred with some of my business associates as to why Israel is consistently denigrated on campuses but lauded on Wall Street, they concurred. In short, they felt that academia is not accountable, in the succeed versus fail sense of the word, while commerce most definitely is.

 

Academics can point to Israeli policies in the West Bank and immediately declare them unjust. But without considering critical details — not the least of which being that Israel faces continuous imminent threats to its own existence by numerous enemies sworn to annihilate the Jewish state — or submitting anything resembling a viable alternative, those type of assertions are idealistic and impractical.

 

A theory that does not work in practice is, by its very definition, a flawed theory. This is something that separates those who succeed in the world of business from those who fail. The same cannot be said for academia.

 

Academics can posit theory upon theory, all of which may have broad appeal on the surface and seem quite enticing. Yet, rarely do we see whether or not a theory succeeds when applied in the real world. The academic boycott is a perfect example. Though considered largely symbolic by academia, the boycott can be interpreted as a signal to those without a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of Israel and its policies that such actions from Israel’s strongest ally are acceptable. The potential domino effect from one or two small academic boycotts could eventually threaten Israel’s security, its economic development, and its existence.

 

What will be said of the academic boycott, should such a worst-case scenario unfold? Will the academic boycott be viewed as the impetus for such a calamity? Most likely, the academics who endorsed the boycott will continue operating in their ivory towers, unfettered and without regard for whether future theories will be presented despite their flaws.

 

The state of Israel must remain vigilant and proactive, otherwise it will cease to exist. The same is true in the business world. Israel and American commerce have formed a mutually beneficial partnership. When will the same be said for Israel and American academia?

An Arab & A Jew On: ASA’s Academic Boycott.

An Arab & A Jew On: ASA’s Academic Boycott. Hosted by Ahmed Shihab-Eldin and Mike Sacks. Guests: Chemi Shalev and Yousef Munayyer. HuffPost Live, December 19, 2013.

“An Arab & A Jew” debate BDS and the future of Israel/Palestine. By Annie Robbins. Mondoweiss, December 21, 2013.

Liberal Zionism in the Era of BDS. By Charles H. Manekin.

Liberal Zionism in the Era of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. By Charles H. Manekin (Jerry Haber). The Daily Beast, December 20, 2013.

Kerry Forces Israel’s Moment of Decision. By Caroline Glick.

Kerry forces Israel’s moment of decision. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 16, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it.

 

There was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter storm in a hundred years. All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites and residents of surrounding areas were locked down in their houses, without power, heat, telephone service or water.

 

And all of the sudden, out of nowhere, Kerry appeared. As Hamas-ruled Gazans begged the supposedly hated IDF to come and save them from the floods, and as Israel took over rescue operations for stranded Palestinians living under the rule of the PLO ’s gangster kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria, here was Kerry, telling us that we’d better accept the deal he plans to present us next month, or face the wrath of the US and Europe, and suffer another Palestinian terror war.

 

What is going on? Why can’t Kerry leave Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of the country alone, even for a week, in the middle of a blizzard of biblical proportions? According to leaks from the now five month old negotiations, after 20 rounds of talks, the Palestinians have not budged from the positions they have held to for the past 50 years. They do not accept Israel’s right to exist. They do not recognize the existence of the Jewish people. They do not believe that the Jews have the right to freedom or self-determination. They insist on taking control of our 3,000 year old capital. They demand that we surrender our ability to defend ourselves from foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks and infiltration from the east.

 

There is nothing new here, of course, This was the case 13 years ago at the Camp David summit. This was the case during the Annapolis summit in 2007 and 2008.

 

This was the case when PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of peace in 2008.

 

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it. Although the text of Kerry’s deal has not yet been revealed, we know exactly what it will involve just by listening to what he has already told us.

 

In his speech at the Saban Forum on December 7, Kerry said, “For many years the broad contours of an eventual solution have been absolutely clear, and they were crystallized for the world in December of 2000 when president Clinton laid down the parameters for a final-status agreement. They were reaffirmed through the Annapolis process during the Bush administration.”

 

The Clinton parameters involved a near complete American embrace of the PLO ’s maximalist demands. The Annapolis guidelines went even further in the PLO ’s direction.

 

And now, Kerry intends to put forth his own parameters that will be even more forthcoming to the PLO than either the Clinton or Bush administrations were.

 

Like the Clinton and Bush plans, the Kerry parameters will involve Israeli surrender of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the PLO , which rejects the historical fact that two Jewish temples were built at the site that was and remains the cradle of Jewish civilization and history and holiest site to Judaism.

 

They will involve the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to make room for an anti-Semitic, Jew-free state that maintains its devotion to the destruction of the rump Jewish state.

 

Kerry’s framework deal will involve the mass immigration of hundreds of thousands of foreign-born Arabs, who have been living in al-Qaida-, Hamas- and PLO -controlled UN-run “refugee camps,” for the past four generations.

 

Kerry’s plan will require Israeli society to destroy its cohesion through the dismemberment and destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities. As occurred before the Gaza withdrawal, it will require the government to oversee the demonization and criminalization of well over three million law abiding, patriotic Israeli citizens who oppose the mass expulsions.

 

Kerry’s parameters will require Israel to surrender its ability to defend itself against foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks. As for the Palestinians, implementation of the Kerry parameters will guarantee that all moderate elements in their society, including among Israeli Arabs, will be overwhelmed and destroyed. The PLO state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, like the Hamas state in Gaza, will be breeding grounds for global jihadists. They will actively incite, organize and oversee an armed insurrection of the Arabs of the Galilee and the Negev, meting out punishment for all dissenters.

 

As for the US forces that Kerry proposes deploying to the Jew-free PLO state, they will be targeted by the Palestinians, just as the Palestinians and the Syrians attacked US Marines in Beirut 30 years ago. And like the Marines in Beirut, they will be withdrawn in humiliation and defeat, but the lesson – that the Arabs perceive the Americans and Jews as enemies of equal weight – will not be learned. And, at any rate, unable to defend itself after agreeing to Kerry’s parameters, Israel will cease to be a strategic ally and be transformed into a strategic basket case. Its destruction will interest Kerry and his supporters just as much as the destruction of South Vietnam interested them in 1975.

 

Aside from being a more anti-Israel version of the Clinton parameters and Bush’s framework, Kerry’s parameters, and framework deal, have one other unique and particularly dangerous feature. Until now, US peace plans followed former prime minister Ehud Barak’s dictum that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

 

That is, no hypothetical Israeli concession on Jerusalem, for instance, will be binding unless a final deal is concluded.

 

Kerry indicated at the Saban Forum that his goal is to coerce Israel into making irrevocable concessions up front, before the Palestinians agree to peaceful coexistence.

 

As he put it, “A basic framework will have to address all the core issues – borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, mutual recognition, and an end of claims. And it will have to establish agreed guidelines for subsequent negotiations that will fill out the details in a full-on peace treaty.”

 

For the past five and a half years, Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with US President Barack Obama has been to try to survive him. He’s withstood Obama’s constant demand for Israeli national suicide for “peace” by giving the bare minimum of revocable concession possible to keep Obama at bay.

 

But with Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our throats, parameters that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms of peace that will destroy the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu needs to adopt a longer-term strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to extricate Israel from the two-state trap.

 

Yes, Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years, non-leftist Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along with the Left, and the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But Kerry’s obsessive harping, and his insistence on pushing forward with his disastrous framework deal forces our hand.

 

Either we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.