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April 18,
2003
This
Much is True: We Remember
Jews Like Us
by
BRUCE JACKSON
They're spreading poison about American Jews.
Many of the people spreading this poison
are Jews themselves, a relatively small group that wants to convince
everybody (or at least everybody in power) that the great bulk
of us think the way they do, which we don't. Some non-Jews, like
Pat Buchanan and other less-rabid but no less invidious bigots,
but find it a good way to stereotype us: Jews all think alike,
dontcha know. It's weird and freaky when militant right-wing
Jews can hook up with old-fashioned anti-Semites to stereotype
the rest of us, but these are weird and freaky times.
The basic tenets of the present poison
seem to be these:
* American Jews support Israel's policies
whatever they are;
* American Jews believe the settlements
in the Occupied territories are a God-given right;
* American Jews believe Ariel Sharon
has peace on his mind but can't get there only because evil Palestinians
keep blowing themselves up and forcing him to respond by blowing
up or driving tanks through their families' houses and orchards;
* American Jews think all issues of world
peace must be subsumed to Israel's security, as defined by the
Israeli government;
* American Jews favor current U.S. unilateralism
and have contempt for the United Nations because it is full of
mean little countries that don't like Israel.
And most important of all: any American
Jew who rejects the aforementioned is a "self-hating Jew."
SELF-HATING JEWS
Could any goy have thought that one up?
"You disagree with my politics, therefore you are a self-hating
Jew. The problem, the ethical issues, the guilt are all yours."
Freud would have danced all over it.
You respond, "No, man, you're WRONG
about all of it. Let's go over the facts."
They listen, politely, or not, and at
the end they say,"See? I told you, you're a self-hating
Jew."
True-believers of whatever stripe find
ratification wherever they look. In the court where the conclusion
is foregone, all facts serve only to convict.
I first heard the phrase "self-hating
Jew" in Greenwich Village in the 1980s when a group from
the Jewish Defense League, Meyer Kahane's militant organization,
stood in the street yelling it at William Kunstler's house. I
looked out the window, saw the bared teeth and raised fists and
thought that they looked and comported themselves very much like
Hitler Jugend, missing only the armbands.
Kunstler's comment on them was, "Pay
them no mind. They don't know what they're talking about. That's
the silliest thing to call me. I don't hate myself. Everybody
knows I love myself."
I went out of the house and before I'd
even stepped from the doorway to the top of the steps they were
yelling "Self-hating Jew! Self-hating Jew!" at me.
I yelled back, "But you don't even know if I'm Jewish."
They didn't care. They kept yelling "Self-hating Jew"
until I reached the police barricade at Christopher Street, whereupon
they started yelling at the house again.
LUNATIC STUFF
I'm not making this lunatic stuff up
and neither am I waxing rhetorical.
All reliable studies and surveys show
that the great majority of American Jews, whatever the level
of their support for Israel itself, oppose unilateralism, think
the United Nations an important forum, favor a Palestinian state,
are opposed to the settlements in the Occupied Territories, oppose
Sharon's militancy, are sickened and appalled by the images of
Israeli tanks destroying homes, villages and vineyards, and are
desperate for the killing and dying on both sides to stop now.
Not after every potentially suicidal Palestinian is wiped out.
Not after the world is made perfect. Now.
The neocon and radical right, though
a numerical minority, have politicians running scared. One example
of that is New York Senator Charles Schumer, who recently told
students at an upstate Catholic military school that he was now
in favor of pre-emptive wars. "Pollster John Zogby said
Schumer's tough posture is a political move to appeal to pro-war
upstate voters and elements of the Jewish community in New York
City," wrote Buffalo News Washington bureau chief Doug Turner.
Zogby "said polls show a majority of Jewish voters nationally
and in New York State oppose war with Iraq. 'But the loudest
voices in the Jewish community, the hard-line conservatives who
favor the war, are politically the strongest,' Zogby said. 'I
think he's bidding for the Likud vote,' Zogby joked, referring
to the party of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon."
Given the evidence of those surveys,
why do Schumer and otherwise sensible members of Congress act
as if these bullies of the right represented even a large minority
of us? Maybe for the same reason they continue to base U.S. Caribbean
policy on the hysterical voices of the small Cuban exile community
in Miami. Remember how Al Gore (D.), Dan Burton (R) and so many
of the rest fell over one another trying to be politically correct
and make political capital in the Elian Gonzalez soap opera three
years ago? They're terrified of groups of middle-class people
who scream at them and they think such screamers are more likely
to vote and write checks than people who speak softly or rationally.
More and more I hear that those militaristic Jews in and advising
the Bush administration--such as Paul Wolfowitz inside the White
House and William Kristol on the outside--prove where Jews are
at, politically. Nonsense. That only proves what political stripe
of Jews are in favor in the Bush White House.
Wolfowitz and Kristol are Americans who
are Jewish and who are part of the American Conservative Right.
Why single them out as Jews and then blame the rest of us Jews
for them? Most of us don't like or agree with those ideologues
either. Blaming the rest of us for them is like blaming the Methodists
for Dick Cheney or Baptists for John Ashcroft. It's not the religion
that made those people what they are. Wolfowitz, Kristol, Cheney
and Ashcroft would be the way they are if they were Zoroastrians.
JEWS LIKE US
In spring 2001, I started working on
a book the working title of which is "Jews like us."
I thought it might be useful to give some of the Jews who don't
scream a chance to say what they think about being Jewish in
America now. I stopped working on the book when everything got
cranked up after 9/11, but I've started doing interviews again.
I have basically one question I ask everybody: "You say
you're Jewish. What do you mean by that?"
The responses are astonishing in their
variety. I'm continually amazed at the huge range of stories,
opinion, and analysis. The only generalization I can make about
it is this: hardly any of it comes close to the militant neocon
line. Sure, there are some groups in which the ideology is locked
down tight and some individuals for whom Sharon's version of
Israel's security needs transcends all reason and decency. But
that's the minority. Painting us all with the Wolfowitz-Kristol
brush, saying, in effect, that our considered political and ethnical
opinions are worthless, is just today's trendy way to be anti-semitic,
no matter who is doing it.
There is an ever-growing number of organizations
of American Jews trying to get the word out that the press and
politicians should look beyond the noisy minority. (Links to
the web sites of Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel, Not
in My Name, Jews Against the Occupation and Brit Tzedik v'Shalom
are listed below.) Thus far, they seem to have made little impact.
Their activities get almost no coverage in the press and few
members of Congress consider them the same kind of threat as
the militant right or the neocons.
Perhaps they've been too polite. Perhaps
they will have to start making the same kind of noise that has
so frightened Chuck Schumer and so many other powerful people
in Washington. Perhaps the will have to remind those politicians
that they also vote and write checks, and that of all the things
you can accuse us Jews of there is at least one that is true:
we remember.
Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel
http://www.jppi.org/
Not in My Name
http://www.nimn.org/
Jews Against the Occupation http://www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org/
Brit Tzedik v'Shalom: Jewish Alliance
for Justice and Peace http://www.btvshalom.org/
Bruce Jackson
is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University of Buffalo. He edits Buffalo Report.
His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
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