Six Lies Most People Believe About U.S. Public Schools. By Joy Pullmann.

Six Lies Most People Believe About U.S. Public Schools. By Joy Pullmann. The Federalist, September 23, 2013.

Raise standards for teachers and free them to teach. By Joy Pullmann. Washington Examiner, July 2, 2013.

Teacher Prep Review 2013 Report. By Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee, and Kate Walsh. National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2013. PDF.

Beyond Words: Causes, Consequences, and Cures for Palestinian Authority Hate Speech. By David Pollock.

Beyond Words: Causes, Consequences, and Cures for Palestinian Authority Hate Speech. By David Pollock. The Washington Institute. Policy Focus 124, September 2013. Also at Real Clear World. PDF.

Israel Wants Peace. Period. By Israel Kasnett.

Israel wants peace. Period. By Israel Kasnett. Al Jazeera, September 13, 2013. Also at Yahoo! News.

The White Queen: Amanda Hale on the Visions of Margaret Beaufort. By Chris Harvey.

The White Queen: Amanda Hale on the Visions of Margaret Beaufort. By Chris Harvey. The Telegraph, August 18, 2013.

Amanda Hale as Margaret Beaufort in The White Queen.

The War That Must Not Be Named Flares Up In Kenya. By Walter Russell Mead.

The War That Must Not Be Named Flares Up In Kenya. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, September 22, 2013.

Good Populism, Bad Populism. By Ross Douthat.

Good Populism, Bad Populism. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, September 21, 2013.

Israel Should Annul the Oslo Accords. By Danny Danon.

Israel Should Annul the Oslo Accords. By Danny Danon. New York Times, September 20, 2013.

Danon:

JERUSALEM — THIS month marks 20 years since the signing of the first of the Oslo Accords between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Two decades after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat stood on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton, Israelis and Palestinians are again in the midst of the umpteenth round of negotiations.

 

Despite these efforts, true peace seems as distant as it did before the secret talks in Oslo were revealed to the world. The government of Israel must admit that we made a mistake and declare that the Oslo process has failed.

 

Only by officially annulling the Oslo Accords will we have the opportunity to rethink the existing paradigm and hopefully lay the foundations for a more realistic modus vivendi between the Jews and Arabs of this region.

 

Despite attempts to rewrite recent history by fringe elements, the failure of the Oslo framework cannot be attributed to a lack of will and persistence by Israel. What didn’t we try? We attempted direct negotiations, third-party mediators, public conferences and back-channel talks. We staged withdrawals and unilateral disengagements, established joint Israeli-Palestinian military patrols in Gaza and deployed American-trained security forces in the West Bank. None of this worked.

 

The P.L.O., and later the Palestinian Authority, never truly accepted that Israel, as the national state and homeland of the Jewish people, was here to stay. No amount of impressive ceremonies, cosmetic changes to the P.L.O. charter and Palestinian doublespeak to Western media outlets about their commitment to peace was able to change this grim fact.

 

To understand the mind-boggling scope of Oslo’s failure, it is best to look at the statistics. According to the organization B’Tselem, during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, six years before Mr. Rabin’s attempt to recast the archterrorist Yasir Arafat as a peacemaker, 160 Israelis were murdered in Palestinian terror attacks. In the mid- to late-1990s, as successive Israeli governments negotiated with the Palestinians, and Mr. Arafat and his cronies repeatedly swore they were doing their utmost to end terrorism, 240 Israelis were brutally killed as suicide bombs and other heinous terrorist acts targeting unarmed civilians were unleashed in every corner of our nation.

 

Things did not get better after Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the Palestinians an offer in 2000 that, judging by his landslide defeat in the election a few months later, was way beyond what most Israelis supported. Between then and September 2010, 1,083 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

 

The Oslo process did not bring peace; it brought increased bloodshed. We must end this farce by announcing the immediate suspension of the accords.

 

Little impact would be felt by average Israelis and Palestinians. Those who would suffer most would be full-time negotiators like Martin S. Indyk and Saeb Erekat, who would find themselves out of a job after 20 years of gainful employment in the peace process industry.

 

What should replace Oslo’s false promise? We should implement what I have called a “three-state solution.” In the future, the final status of the Palestinians will be determined in a regional agreement involving Jordan and Egypt, when the latter has been restabilized. All the region’s states must participate in the process of creating a long-term solution for the Palestinian problem.

 

In the short term, the Palestinians will continue to have autonomy over their civilian lives while Israel remains in charge of security throughout Judea and Samaria, commonly referred to as the West Bank. Following an initial period, the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria could continue to develop their society as part of an agreement involving Israel and Jordan. Similarly, Gaza residents could work with Israel and Egypt to create a society that granted them full civil authority over their lives in a manner that was acceptable to all sides.

 

Most veterans of the peace process will mock this proposal, protesting that there is no way it would be accepted by the Palestinians. Their argument may seem convincing today, but as I often remind my critics, our region is unpredictable. Had you told any Middle East expert five years ago that two successive Egyptian presidents would be deposed and Bashar al-Assad’s regime would be in the midst of a bloody civil war, you, too, would have been mocked. Things change. We can make them change.

 

I am aware that even if the Palestinians accepted this plan, we would still have to deal with a fundamentalist Hamas regime in Gaza and continuing instability in Egypt. No plan for Israeli-Arab peace can be fully implemented until these issues are resolved.

 

In the short term, Israel’s only option is to manage this conflict by refusing to compromise when it comes to the security of Israeli citizens. At the same time, our government should take all steps possible to improve the economic well-being of the Palestinians.

 

The dissolution of the Oslo Accords would serve as the official act validating what we already know — that this failed framework is totally irrelevant in 2013. Once the Palestinians were ready to sit down and seriously discuss how our two peoples, through this new paradigm, could live side by side in peace and prosperity, they would find willing partners across the political spectrum in Israel.

 

It may not be the utopian peace promised to all of us on that sunny day in September 1993, but in the harsh realities of the Middle East, this may be the best we can hope for and the sole realistic chance for our children to grow up in a world less violent than previous generations have had to endure.

Daniel Gordis vs. Peter Beinart on the “Crisis” in Zionism.

Peter Beinart’s Mis-Identity Crisis. By Daniel Gordis. Jerusalem Post, April 11, 2012. Also at DanielGordis.org.

Daniel Gordis and the Jewish Nation-State. By Sigal Samuel. The Daily Beast, February 18, 2013.


Gordis:

Peter Beinart is right. The relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state is indeed in crisis. Beinart and his title are just wrong about what the crisis is. What we face, as his book accidentally demonstrates, is not The Crisis of Zionism, but a crisis of American Judaism.

 

The Crisis of Zionism is, as countless reviewers have already noted, an Israel-bashing-fest. The second intifada was Israel’s fault: It “erupted because while many Israelis genuinely believed that [Ehud] Barak was trying to end the occupation, Palestinians felt it was closing in on them.” Israel attacks terrorists “nestled amid a stateless and thus largely defenseless Palestinian population,” as if the terrorists’ decision to lodge there were Israel’s fault. Such myopia abounds.

 

Israel is blamed everywhere in this book, often thoughtlessly. The most obvious example is the one with which the book opens. Beinart watched a video of a young Palestinian boy wailing uncontrollably as Israeli troops arrested his father for “stealing water,” and found himself “staring in mute horror” at his computer screen. He is right, of course, that it is painful to watch a five-year-old weeping as his father is arrested. But Beinart is so anxious to blame Israel that he abandons any investigative savvy. Haaretz, not known for its enthusiastic support of the occupation that so troubles Beinart, reported that Fadel Jaber was actually arrested on suspicion of attacking the police. Border Police sources also suggested that the whole scene of the sobbing five-year-old was staged for the cameras. And everyone admits that Jaber was breaking the law.

 

Why, though, does Beinart never even wonder if there is an Israeli side to the story, never entertain the possibility that Jaber deserved to be arrested? The mere fact that Israeli actions cause people pain is too much for him to bear.

 

Here, then, is the rub, and the central question that I kept asking myself as I read the book: Why do Beinart and his ilk expect their Zionist bride to be free of all blemish? And worse, what is the reason for their instinctively blaming the bride they allegedly love, without asking whether anyone else might bear some responsibility for the painful realities they witness?

 

Why is there not one mention of the extraordinary social organizations in Israel, or the many cultural, literary and other accomplishments of Jews and Arabs in Israeli society? Why does one finish the book with the sense that Beinart, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, actually detests Israel? Why are assaults on Israel described in the cold language of the pathologist, while the scene with Jaber is so emotional? When Beinart mentions Gilad Shalit, this is all he has to say: “Hamas was not innocent in all this: it had abducted an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and refused to release him until Israel released Palestinians in its jails.” That’s it?! No mention of the fact that Schalit was captured inside Israeli territory? Or that Hamas never once allowed the Red Cross to visit him? Or that Schalit emerged from captivity emaciated? Or that he was held in virtual solitary confinement, with no sunlight, for five hellish years?

 

Where’s the Jewish soul here? What kind of Jewish observer weeps over young Khaled Jaber but has nothing else to say about Schalit? It’s worse than infuriating; it’s stunningly sad.

 

Again, the pathologist: Discussing the March 2011 murder of the Fogel family, Beinart first says, “[The terrorists] murdered Ehud and Ruth Fogel and three of their children, Yoav, Elad and Hadas, in their beds. Elad, aged four, was strangled to death. Hadas, aged three months, was decapitated.” Even about the Fogels, he can summon no emotion?

 

Then, unbelievably, Beinart has this to say: “But what distinguishes Palestinian terrorism and settler terrorism is the Israeli government’s response.” Really? That’s all that distinguishes Palestinian and Jewish terror? How about the fact that there have been very, very few incidents of Jewish terror, while the Palestinians have turned it into a cottage industry? How about the fact that Israeli society detests the Jews who do this sort of thing, while Palestinian society lionizes them? Why does Beinart not mention those enormous differences? His sort of accusation and absurd misrepresentation is what one would expect from the enemies of Israel, not someone who professes love for the Jewish state. When Beinart and I debated some time ago, I actually left the evening believing that he loved Israel. This book convinced me that I was horribly mistaken.

 

BUT WHY does he hate Israel so? Time and again, Beinart seems just bewildered that the Israel on which he was raised, that “Little Engine that Could” of swampdraining pioneers and noble soldiers, could commit the acts that he’s now suddenly discovering. In the War of Independence, Beinart tells us (as if he has uncovered something interesting), “Zionist forces committed abuses so terrible that David Ben-Gurion... declared himself ‘shocked by the deeds that have reached my ears.’”

 

What’s truly interesting about this, of course, is not Ben-Gurion’s shock, but Beinart’s. Does Beinart really expect Israel to have fought 10 wars (depending on how you count, but I include the War of Independence, the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War, the first intifada, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead) without occasional terrible misdeeds being committed? Seriously? How could someone as smart as Beinart be so naïve? What disturbs him so deeply about Israel that he suspends his prodigious intellectual capacity and assumes a stance of consistently stunned disappointment?

 

Beinart’s problem, most fundamentally, is that the American liberalism with which he is so infatuated does not comfortably have a place for Jewish ethnic nationalism.

 

Throughout the book, the words “liberal” or “democratic” are always positives. And what means “negative” or “shameful”? In Beinart’s book, the word is “tribal.” Every time he uses the word “tribal,” he means “distasteful.” “Liberalism was out,” he laments early in the book, and “tribalism was in.” Or “ethically, the ADL and AJC are caught between the liberalism that defined organized American Jewish life before 1967 and the tribalism that has dominated it since.” “Among younger non-Orthodox Jews,” he later says smugly, “tribalism is in steep decline.” What is wrong with the settlers is that they have “tribal privilege” much “like the British in India, Serbs in Kosovo, and whites in the segregated South.”

 

Really? Israel, in which Beduin women graduate from medical school, is like the segregated South? Surely Beinart knows better. So why the relentless attack?

 

BEINART’S PROBLEM isn’t really with Israel. It’s with Judaism. Bottom line, what troubles Beinart isn’t what’s happened to Zionism. What troubles him is the dimension of Jewish life that he can’t abide, but of which Zionism insists on reminding him. And that element is the undeniable fact that Judaism is tribal.

 

Judaism, in its earliest phases, was actually composed of tribes. Even after the tribes mostly disappeared, a deeply tribal sense continued to color the lenses through which Jews viewed the world. The Book of Esther is a book about peoplehood (Esther 3:8) and the dangers of forgetting our tribalism when acceptance by the foreign majority becomes too tempting (4:14). In the story of Ruth, tribalism comes before even God when joining the Jews: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). Other peoples, too, define human beings on the basis of what people they come from. When the ship on which Jonah has run away is beset by a storm, the other sailors ask him, “What is your country, and of what people are you?” (Jonah 1:8) The list is virtually endless.

 

I don’t know which kiddush Beinart recited on the first night of Passover, but surely he knows that most Jews begin the main portion of the kiddush by praising God “who has chosen us from among all the nations, raising us above other languages.” Has he noticed that the blessing before being called up to the Torah thanks God for “choosing us from among all the nations,” or that we end Shabbat with havdala, noting that God distinguishes between “holy and profane, light and dark, between Israel and the nations”? What about the Mishna’s claim in Bikkurim (1:4) that converts may not recite the phrase that “God swore to our ancestors” because they are not of our tribe (a position that Maimonides overruled, interestingly) or the Talmud’s claim that “converts are as burdensome to [the people of] Israel as leprosy” (Yevamot 47b), presumably because the mere idea of having people join a tribe is counterintuitive?

 

Does Beinart’s Haggada not contain the line “Pour out Your wrath upon the nations”? And does that phrase mean nothing? Judaism is many things, but it is undeniably tribal. The crisis that Beinart feels stems from the fact that he cannot abide Judaism’s tribalism; the State of Israel is simply caught in the crossfire between Beinart and the religion that so deeply conflicts him.

 

NOW, WE can surely debate whether or not Jewish tribalism – a view of the world that says that we are not just like everyone else, that we are distinct and ought to remain that way – is one with which we are comfortable. We can debate whether or not this element of Judaism invariably leads to illegitimate Jewish senses of supremacy. But what we cannot debate is that that is what Judaism has always been. Had Beinart argued that a tribal Judaism has outlived its usefulness, that would not have been very new (Reform Judaism made that claim a long time ago, though it has largely retreated from that position), but it would have been interesting. And honest. And fair.

 

Some of us, myself included – as in my forthcoming book The Promise of Israel – would then respond that the very tribalism that so troubles Beinart is actually essential. Why? Because it is tribalism, the very opposite of the universalism that so enthralls Beinart, that is key to our being someone, of having something to contribute to humanity. No one has said it better than Michael Sandel, who wrote in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice:

 

“We cannot regard ourselves as independent . . . without . . . understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have. . . . They go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the ‘natural duties’ I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments which taken together partly define the person I am. . . . To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments such as these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth.”

 

One can surely disagree with Sandel. That is the debate that Peter Beinart wants to have; he just doesn’t know it. He believes that a tribal Judaism is one of which we should be ashamed. A Judaism of which we could be genuinely proud would be a universalist Judaism that taught Jews to be “sympathetic to the rights of Palestinians. . . at least as [much] as global warming, health care, gay rights and a dozen other issues.”

 

In the universalized Judaism for which Beinart yearns, however, there would be no place for Israel. Jews would not need a refuge, for they would fit in everywhere. They would not reside in the Middle East, for the creation of the Jewish state (like the creation of every other state) required the displacement of people. So the only way for this basically-unnecessary-Israel to be tolerable is for it to be perfect. If people are arrested and their children cry, Beinart cannot bear it. If Israel fights 10 wars in 65 years and there are terrible incidents, Zionism is in crisis. So he will discuss Jewish losses with the frigid pathos of a pathologist, but weep at the pain that Israel causes. He will hold Israel accountable to standards that are utterly unreachable and unrealistic, because in a world in which tribalism is the real problem, Beinart can feel the love only so long as the bride is utterly beyond reproach.

 

WE DON’T marry perfect spouses, though, and we don’t raise perfect children. Love is tested in the messiness of life, in the thick of triumphs and disappointments. Israel fails us all in many ways, but it’s also an astounding story of the revitalization of the Jewish people, of a democracy built by people who for the most part did not come from democracies.

 

Beinart’s real problem is that Israel is not, and was never meant to be, a felafel-eating, Hebrew speaking version of the United States. It is not ethnic-neutral. It was created, and our children die for it, not simply so there can be another democracy in the Middle East. Is one more democracy worth my soldier son’s risking his life? No, it’s not. Israel is about the revitalization of the Jewish people. It is, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “of the Jews, by the Jews and for the Jews,” all while protecting and honoring those who are not Jewish. Are we perfect? Hardly. But do we aspire to America’s ideal of a democracy? Not at all. We’re about something very different.

 

As Beinart himself admits, his cadre of mostly young American Jews is essentially Jewishly illiterate. They know nothing of Judaism’s intellectual depth, can say nothing about the classical Jewish canon, have no sense of what great ideas Judaism has brought to the world. They are thus utterly incapable of articulating what a Jewish state not committed to America’s ideals might be about. Confused and disappointed, they grow ashamed of us. For us to fit their universalistic world, in which nothing Jewish is of supreme value, they need us to be perfect. When we’re not, they cannot abide us.

 

We Jews have been here before. Until recently, it had typically been the enemies of the Jews who demanded that we drop our differentness in order to be accepted. Today, it’s the Jews themselves, or some of them. Wise Jews, however, will know better than to believe that becoming just like everyone else will do us any good. Leaving aside the fact that such a move would mean abdicating the very essence of Judaism and that it would produce an anemic ethos incapable of attracting anyone of real substance, it will also never succeed in getting the world to like the Jews. As Israel Zangwill, the famed British Zionist, wrote scathingly a century ago:

 

“The poor people of Kishinev tried to save themselves by putting in their windows sacred Russian images. It is our history in a nutshell. In moments of danger we put up the flag of the enemy. And it avails nothing in the long run – the image-imitators at Kishinev were the people particularly chosen for crucifixion.”

 

It is no accident that Beinart’s book is among the most discussed – and reviled – in recent memory. For the book is not really about Israel. It is about the unsustainable new Judaism of which he is a selfappointed prophet, and to which, sadly, many young American Jews seem to be attracted, its self-consuming malignant core notwithstanding.

 

I can think of no reaction more apt than that of Deuteronomy 13:12: “Let all of Israel hear and be filled with fear.”


The State of Righteousness. By Michael Walzer. The Huffington Post, April 24, 2012.

Walzer:

So what is this half-way Zionism?

 

It is first of all the emotion-laden belief of someone who grew up during World War Two that the Jews need a state, and that this need is so critical and so urgent that it overrides whatever injustices statehood has brought. We still have to oppose the injustices with all the resources we can muster, but we can't give up the State. So I participate vicariously in Israeli politics by supporting my social-democratic and peacenik friends. I want the state to be as good as it can be, but above all I want it to be.

 

My Zionism is also a universal statism. I think that everybody who needs a state should have one, not only the Jews but also the Armenians, the Kurds, the Tibetans, the South Sudanese – and the Palestinians. The modern state is the only effective agency for physical protection, economic management and welfare provision. What the most oppressed and impoverished people in the world today most need is a state of their own, a decent state acting on their behalf. I feel some hostility, therefore, toward people who want to “transcend” the state – and I am especially hostile toward those who insist that the transcendence has to begin with the Jews.

 

My Zionism is a secular nationalism. The Jewish people have a twofold character: We are a nation – Am Yisrael, the people Israel – and we are what Americans call a “community of faith.” This is not a common combination; it is shaped by the peculiar history of the Jews. But statehood requires separation: the Jewish state should be an expression of the people, not of the faith (which many of our people don’t share, at least not in its orthodox form). We know from our history that the world can get very nasty when religious faith and political power are joined. Zionism should empower citizens; it should deny power to all those who claim it on religious grounds; it should not empower zealots. State schools in Israel, it seems to me, can legitimately promote Jewishness – in the same way that state schools in Norway promote Norwegianess – but they can’t promote Judaism. And of course minority groups, in Israel as in Norway, must have every opportunity to associate for the promotion of their own culture.

 

My hatzi aliyah obviously doesn’t commit me to “the negation of the exile.” Jewish history is too complicated to support the idea that it can have only one continuation in one place. There are many ways of being Jewish, and many places, given emancipation and democratic citizenship, where Jewish life can flourish. But we will flourish more securely, with greater self-respect, and with greater cultural depth, if we are connected not only to our diasporic states but also to a Jewish state. The Zionist project is central to Jewish life because it has led to the revival of the Hebrew language and the creation of a modern Hebrew culture – novels, poems, plays and films of remarkable power – and because it makes possible the enactment of what many of us have always imagined to be Jewish values: justice, above all.

 

This is a test that we shouldn’t want to avoid: can this people, our people, stateless for almost 2,000 years, create a state that men and women around the world will look at and say, as in Deuteronomy 4:8, “And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous?”

 

Needless to say, we are not there yet, not even close. High ambition requires a long life, and Israel is a very young state.


Daniel Gordis vs. Peter Beinart on the “Crisis” in Zionism. Video. Tablet Magazine, May 2, 2012. Livestream. At Israel Matzav. At Tablet. Highlights of the debate posted by Daniel Gordis on YouTube.

Beinart, Gordis Debate In Front of Packed House. By Dan Klein. Tablet, May 3, 2012.

Watch live streaming video from tabletmagazine at livestream.com

Daniel Gordis: Beinart, Realist on Israel, Romanticist on Palestinians. Video. Daniel Gordis, May 20, 2012. YouTube.

The Border Between Israel and Palestine: The Elephant in the Map Room. By Frank Jacobs.

The Elephant in the Map Room. By Frank Jacobs. New York Times, August 7, 2012.

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.

Katy Perry: Roar

Katy Perry: Roar (Official). Video. KatyPerryVEVO, September 5, 2013. YouTube. Also here.

Katy Perry: Making of the Roar Music Video. KatyPerryVEVO, November 14, 2013. YouTube.

On the Crisis of Zionism. By Rick Perlstein.

On the Crisis of Zionism. By Rick Perlstein. Rolling Stone, May 2, 2012.

Perlstein:

As an adult, I’ve always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents’ circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal. What I didn’t fully comprehend, until now, was why. Beinart unearths a story of 1970s politics that was unknown to me – except as I so intimately lived it – showing that at the root of this sense of embattled tribalism was a transformation worked by the leaders of right-leaning American Jewish organizations, who traded in their founding (liberal) aspirations to universal justice for a wagon-circling parochalism.

 

I knew how the 1967 simultaneous Soviet-backed invasion of Israel by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which put Israel’s very survival at stake, profoundly intensified American Jews’ emotional connection to the Jewish state. (One marvelous detail Beinart uncovers: a small Oklahoma synagogue sold its building so they could send the proceeds to Israel to aid the cause.) What I didn’t realize was how deliberately establishment Jewish leaders of this period substituted victimhood – the sense that Jews always and everywhere were at risk of being wiped out, should they drop their guard – for liberalism, “as a strategy for defending Israel,” and as “the defining ideology of organized American Jewish life.” The president of the American Jewish Congress, for example, an organization founded in 1906 that once was so soppily universalist in focus they had considered changing their name to the “Institute for Human Relations,” lamented in 1970 that young Jews “lack a sense of ‘being Jewish’” because the Holocaust was not “seared into” their memories. So educational materials were developed to do the searing right quick – in part, by way of simulations “designed to help children imagine that they were experiencing the trauma firsthand.” (I remember those: We were supposed to pretend to be Jews in Germany, hiding from Nazis – though in my case the exercise was called off at the last minute when parents, to their credit, protested. We did, however, pretend to be Jews running the British blockade of Palestine.)

 

The next AJC president wrote in 1982 that the reason such trauma education was necessary was “so that our children will know who they really are.” Who we really are: a stunning admonition. Who we really were, as a 1974 book coauthored by the head of the Anti-Defamation League and quoted by Beinart were martyrs – and “tolerable” to the rest of the world “only as victims . . . and when [our] situation changes so that [we] are either no longer victims or appear not to be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render [us] victims again.” The usefulness of that bizarre, passively voiced tautology springs from its nihilism: Actually existing Jewish power can only be taken as evidence that the deluge must be right around the corner.

 

The notion that violent paranoia must be taught as the moral center of Judaism has persisted to recent times, as I learned on a trip to Israel where a young cousin of mine was Bar Mitzvahed at Masada (tellingly, a military site, not a religious one), and during which he and his unwitting friends were directed to read a poem about the Warsaw Ghetto while standing on a monument to destroyed European shtetls:

At my Bar Mitzvah, I lifted my voice and sang.

At his Bar Mitzvah, he lifted his fists and fought.

At my Bar Mitzvah, I wore a new tallit over a new suit.

At his Bar Mitvah he wore a rifle an bullets over a suit of rags.

At my Bar Mitzvah, I started my road to life.

At his Bar Mitzvah, he began his road to martyrdom.

It follows that the actual world we kids inherited, in which Jews now serving on the Supreme Court outnumber Protestants three to zero and a Jew serves as House majority leader and the Jew who used to be the president's chief of staff runs our third largest city, and in which Israel is a nuclear-armed regional superpower can really be only a mirage. “Is It 1939?” Malcolm Honlein, the head of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, asked in a 2010 speech. It just might be, was his answer. Which is why he displays in his office a photoshopped image of Israeli F-15s liberating Auschwitz. Six million Jews are once more getting ready to die.

 

This was the moral education that I found so dissatisfying in my youth, as it trickled down to medium-sized Midwestern burgs – a disingenous muddle of irrationalism, intellectual double standards, and whiny special pleading. I learned that because Israel was a “democracy,” with Arab citizens and political parties, discrimination against those Arabs was not a problem – but also that it was appropriate for the Israeli Defense Forces to harass Arabs at random because, I remember hearing, “they don't wear signs around their neck saying ‘good Arab’ and ‘bad Arab.’” I was solemnly informed that groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were biased against Israel and that the State Department was full of anti-Semites. I heard men who seemed otherwise utterly apolitical and non-intellectual rehearse elaborate they-started-it narratives starring conspirators like the Mufti of Jerusalem, who gulled Arabs into eagerly abandoning their homes, which happened to make room for Zionist pioneers who had never been anything but magnanimous toward them. I got the message, loud and clear, that those of us living lives of bland comfort far from enemy-circled Israel had no right, no standing to criticize the Jewish state; and to just shut up and send the check to Jewish organizations, the better to salve your conscience.

 

The ideology extended to theology. The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God’s name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel’s “miraculous” military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion’s side. (God had help, I later learned as a professional historian: More American materiel were shipped to Israel in just ten days during the 1973 Yom Kippur War than over the entire eleven months of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, which also helps explain why, in my youth, Richard Nixon was seen by many Jews to have got a raw deal on Watergate.)

 

All of which left me, in my youth, feeling utterly uninterested in Judaism, which to me appeared inherently barren: If you found dubious the proposition that Israel as it existed protected Jews around the world – rather than making them more vulnerable through the injustices it perpetrated – there was really nothing spiritual left.

 

And what has the embrace of victimhood wrought for American Jews? “In city after city,” Beinart points out, they “have built Holocaust memorials. . . . The Jewish schools in those cities are often decrepit, mediocre, and unaffordable, but there is no shortage of places to learn how Jews died. . . . When a community builds better memorials than schools – when it raises children more familiar with Auschwitz that with Simchat Torah [that means “rejoicing in the law”; proving his argument, I had to look it up] – the lesson of those memorials cannot be: Honor the dead by leading, informed, committed Jewish lives. Nor is the lesson: Honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews which live under Jewish rule . . . Instead, the implicit lesson is: Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel.” The memorial-builders, he writes, “began hoarding the Holocaust.” Yes! This to me was stunning to read, remembering how a museum in the ghetto devoted to “America’s Black Holocaust” made Milwaukee Jews seethe: that word, “Holocaust,” belonged to us.

 

There are, of course, good reasons for Jews to be informed about the history of the bad intentions that much of the rest of the world has harbored toward us. Beinart elucidated them beautifully in a stunning essay in the magazine Transition, which I read when it came out sixteen years ago and remember indelibly. But even more powerfully, that essay also laid out the dangers of circling the wagons. He wrote about his grandmother, who said “Jews are like rats,” fleeing sinking ships. In The Crisis of Zionism he lists the ships his own family has been forced to abandon over the generations: first escaping “a Spanish town cleansed of Jews five hundred years ago”; then now-defunct Jewish communities in Greece and Turkey; then the war-torn Belgian Congo, whence they fled to South Africa.

 

In South Africa, Jews found “rich soil,” Beinart writes — “and poisoned soil as well.” In a system driven by a “mania for classification and segregation,” the South African state “used the traditional Jewish desire to remain distinct as a lever to guarantee their support for a political system based on racial separation and hierarchy.” But Beinart found something to admire in South African Jews, something revelatory: They were “less reliant on victimology. While American Jews pour money into Holocaust memorials, South African Jews have focused on Jewish education.”

 

The Crisis of Zionism raises up as heroes a new wave of liberal young people leading informed, committed Jewish lives right here among us. The facts he elicits about them should be profoundly sobering to establishment Jewish leaders like Malcolm Honlein with his Israeli F-15s: men and women in the “independent minyanim” movement (minyanim are small prayer groups), who “grew up Reform or Conservative [the less hardcore-religious branches of Judaism], but through Jewish school, summer camp, or adult study . . . gained a level of religious literacy far beyond that of most Reform or Conservative Jews.” Members of this Jewish renaissance marry other Jews 93 percent of the time: What ensures Jewishness, he concludes, “is not victimhood, but Jewish knowledge as a vehicle of Jewish meaning.” Even more stunningly, a survey of the new movement’s leadership found that although they “had spent more time in Israel than their elders and were more likely to speak Hebrew” – 56 percent had lived there more than four months at a time, double that of older leaders – and “only 32 percent strongly agreed that Israel was a very important part of their Jewish identity.”

 

But why? “They are,” Beinart says, “deeply troubled by Israel’s policies” – specifically its insistence on expanding settlements in the territory west of the Jordan River that Israel began occupying following the 1967 war. Though Israel is often described as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” these occupied territories are not democratic: Israeli settlers there, for instance, enjoy their own system of roads, from which Arabs are banned, and when Arabs violate Israeli law they are tried before military courts where only one percent are ever found innocent. And, he argues, since the settlers and their representatives – people like the settler who deliberately drove his car into a cabinet minister, then was made a representative of the settlers’ governing council; the settler who shot a classics professor in 2002 who was helping a Palestinian farmer harvest his vineyards, and went free; and the head of the West Bank’s rabbinical council who called Baruch Goldstein, the settler-assassin of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers, “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust” – are becoming more integrated into the governing institutions of Israel itself, this threatens the survival of a democratic Jewish state itself.

 

It is a debate I am unqualified to adjudicate. The deeply unsatisfying tribalism that marred the religious education of my youth laid an unpromising foundation; and though I respect the way in which many people I love have carved deeply satisfying spiritual lives for themselves in Judaism, many in the same independent minyanim movement Beinart so admires, my religious direction tended elsewhere. As for Israel, I don’t think of it much. Even in a career as a political writer given to disputation, the sheer viciousness (which you’ll see from the hate mail this piece produces: I plan to publish it) faced by those who criticize not merely Israel, but certain specific de rigeur formulations about Israel, turned me off the entire subject. Instead, and I’ve never admitted this publicly before, the deeply saturated irrationalism surrounding it as I was growing up was what made me fascinated with political irrationalism as such – and helps explain why I ended up a scholar of the American far-right.

 

That reflexive intimidation, in the end, is what most fascinates me about The Crisis of Zionism. I'd heard great things from friends about the book — but read almost nothing admiring about it in the public prints. People are cowed at the thought of taking on the shrieking Israel absolutists, the ones who imagine themselves every day saving six million lives and their critics as hastening the slaughter. Apropos: In one stunning story Beinart tells in his book, a group of young Jewish leaders declined to stand together at a Jewish gathering and sing the national anthem, but also declined to join a public resolution opposing settlement growth: “In the organized Jewish world, left-leaning young Jews often rely on establishment Jewish institutions for financial support. And publicly criticism is an excellent way to endanger that support.” Again and again, he prints quotations from unidentified sources, who apparently fear attaching their name to even innocuous opinions: like the former official of the American Defamation League who says it is “first and foremost a fund-raising organization”; and the “prominent Jewish journalist” who remarks that one major institutional conference “looks like the day room at the old-age home.”

 

Another anonymous source is a “senior State Department official,” who recently traveled with Secretary Clinton from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the West Bank: “There was a kind of silence and people were careful, but it was like, my God, you crossed that border and it was apartheid.” For the most prominent victim of this climate of intimidation, and the retreat from reason and empirical observation it enforces, is the president whose Chicago home sits across the street from a venerable synagogue where, Beinart argues, he learned from the Jewish community that embraced him a Zionism that was both deeply felt and opposed to settlement growth. But then Barack Obama moved into the White House, where he found it impossible to follow through on his convictions, thanks to “Jewish pressure,” as a revealing headline in Time magazine puts it.

 

Jewish pressure issues from people like Malcolm Honlein, not from any preponderance of actual Jews; polling finds “the gap between Jews and other Americans has not narrowed at all” on approval of Obama, and only 10 percent of American Jews make Israel their primary voting issue. “Members of Congress,” Beinart concludes, “worried that the administration did not fully grasp what he had gotten himself into” when he made a halt to the growth in settlements by the Israeli government a precondition for further diplomatic progress. Now, however, he has given up, and his statements sound like “they were faxed to his office by the Israeli prime minister’s office,” according to one Israeli commentary Beinart quotes. “‘If you’re going to pick a fight with a bully, you need to win.’” This quote is from a “Congressional staffer who works on Israel policy” – who, naturally, asked not to be named.

No Jewish People Without Israel. By Daniel Gordis.

No Jewish People Without Israel. By Daniel Gordis. Tablet, August 20, 2012.

Reconciling Modern Biblical Scholarship With Traditional Orthodox Belief. By Yair Rosenberg.

Reconciling Modern Biblical Scholarship With Traditional Orthodox Belief. By Yair Rosenberg. Tablet, September 18, 2013.

Avraham Avinu is My Father: Thoughts on Torah, History, and Judaism. By Rabbi Zev Farber, Ph.D. TheTorah.com.

Why National Identity Still Matters. By Robert Kaplan.

Who Are We? Why National Identity Still Matters. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, September 19, 2013.

The Decline of College. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Decline of College. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, September 19, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Syria Postmortem. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Syria Postmortem. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, September 19, 2013.

Syria’s Refugees: The Catastrophe.

Syria’s Refugees: The Catastrophe. By Hugh Eakin and Alisa Roth. The New York Review of Books, October 10, 2013. Also here.

Arafat Destroyed the Dream of Oslo for Palestinians. By Shlomi Eldar.

Arafat Destroyed the Dream of Oslo for Palestinians. By Shlomi Eldar. Al Monitor, September 13, 2013.

Will Bibi Trade Iran for Palestine? By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Will Bibi Trade Iran for Palestine? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, September 18, 2013.

Netanyahu to US: Iran for Palestine? By Ben Caspit. Al Monitor, September 17, 2013.

The Myth of Israeli Self-Reliance. By Ben Caspit. Al Monitor, September 13, 2013.

17 coalition MKs warn PM: We oppose a Palestinian state. By Raphael Ahren. The Times of Israel, September 17, 2013.

The Privilege of Marriage. By Amber Lapp and Bradford Wilcox.

The Privilege of Marriage. By Amber Lapp and Bradford Wilcox. National Review, September 30, 2013.

Balance, Not Parity. By Maggie Gallagher. National Review, September 30, 2013.

Capitalism’s Triumph. By Michael Tanner.

Capitalism’s Triumph. By Michael Tanner. National Review Online, September 18, 2013.

Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem. By Charles Murray. Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2012.

Ideology Trumps American Strategy in Syria. By George Friedman.

Ideology Trumps American Strategy in Syria. By George Friedman. Real Clear World, September 17, 2013.

Being Muslim in America After 9/11.

Being Muslim in America after 9/11. Video. Fareed Zakaria with Ayad Akhtar and Aasif Mandvi. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, September 16, 2013. Transcript.

Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, Season 2: Jerusalem.

Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, Season 2: Jerusalem. Video. ATTHET0PITTSJUSTUS, September 16, 2013. YouTube. Originally shown on CNN, September 15, 2013.

Anthony Bourdain explains the Israel-Palestine conflict through food. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, September 18, 2013. Also here.

TV chef Bourdain reveals Jewish heritage during show in Israel. By Jordana Horn. The Times of Israel, September 16, 2013.

Watching Anthony Bourdain in Palestine. By Maysoon Zayid. The Daily Beast, September 19, 2013.

Transcript of Fareed Zakaria interview with Anthony Bourdain. GPS. CNN, September 15, 2013.

Israel Relieves Suffering in Gaza, Egypt Intensifies It. By Walter Russell Mead.

Israel Relieves Suffering in Gaza, Egypt Intensifies It. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, September 18, 2013.

Mead:

We’re not holding our breath for the BBC and others to roll out the maps and discover that in fact Egypt also shares a border with Gaza that it likes to abuse and refuses to open. Nor are we calling for any “Israel Saves Palestinians from Arabs” headlines; Israel does not and should not get a free pass in reporting about Gaza. But the lack of  MSM enthusiasm for stories about the role neighboring Arab states play in Palestinian suffering is hard to understand given stories like these. It almost makes one suspect that something more than concern for the Palestinians’ suffering is at work.