At least in NYRB it's possible to discuss seriously what it means to be Jewish in America (and how that relates to Israel)

From the NYU website: The Remarque Institute was created at New York University in 1995 under the direction of Professor Tony Judt to support and promote the study and discussion of Europe and its near neighbors; to encourage greater mutual understanding between Americans and Europeans; and to host talks and debates on subjects of common concern and topical significance. The Institute was named after Erich Maria Remarque, whose widow, Paulette Goddard, made a generous bequest to New York University.

"I reject the authority of the rabbis -- all of them (and for this I have rabbinical authority on my side). I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals. I don't make a point of socializing with Jews in particular -- and for the most part I haven't married them. I am not a 'lapsed' Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don't 'love Israel' (either in the modern sense or in the original generic meaning of loving the Jewish people), and I don't care if the sentiment is reciprocated. But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise."

-- Tony Judt, in the "memoir piece" "Toni,"
in the May 13 New York Review of Books

by Ken

As I mentioned Sunday, the British-American historian Tony Judt has been publishing an extraordinary series of "memoir pieces" in the NYRB. On Sunday I wrote about the first of two that appeared in the May 13 issue, called "Austerity," where he recalled the conditions of deprivation, and consquent austerity, in the postwar decade in Britain into which he was born, and in which "the greatest age of reform in modern British history" took place.

He worked his way to a proposition that I find remarkable -- boldface emphasis added:

Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we deserve from those who now govern us.Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we deserve from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order.

Our subject today is quite different. In the other May 13 piece, "Toni" (the link is above, but unfortunately only the start of the piece is available free on the website). Judt explores "the curiosities of Jewish identity," which he has found even more curious since coming to the U.S. "Most American Jews of my acquaintance," he writes, "are not particularly well informed about Jewish culture or history; they are blithely ignorant of Yiddish or Hebrew and rarely attend religious ceremonies. When they do, they behave in ways that strike me as curious." In fact, he finds much of the way in which American Jews express our Jewishness curious, not least the slavish devotion to Israel, and particularly the increasingly right-wing and increasingly appalling government.

In "Toni," Judt recalls this tableau:

Some years ago I attended a gala benefit dinner in Manhattan for prominent celebrities in the arts and journalism. Halfway through the ceremonies, a middle-aged man leaned across the table and glared at me: "Are you Tony Judt? You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!" Primed for such interrogations, I asked him what was so terrible about what I had written. "I don't know. You may be right -- I've never been to Israel. But we Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day."

Again looking back through his personal history, Judt notes that for the generation of his parents, immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the sense of Jewishness might have died out if not for the rise of Hitler.

A generation of emancipated young Jews, many of whom had fondly imagined themselves fully integrated into a post-communitarian world, was forcibly re-introduced to Judaism as civic identity: one that they were no longer free to decline. Religion -- once the foundation of Jewish experience -- was pushed ever further to the margin. In Hitler's wake, Zionism (hitherto a sectarian minority preference) became a realistic option. Jewishness became a secular attribute, externally attributed.

And in this country, he says, the after-effect has been "a sensitivity to past suffering that can appear disproportionate even to fellow Jews."

Shortly after publishing an essay on Israel's future, I was invited to London for an interview with The Jewish Chronicle -- the local Jewish paper of record. I went with trepidation, anticipating further aspersions upon my imperfect identification with the Chosen People. To my surprise, the editor turned off the microphone: "Before we start," she began, "I'd like to ask you something. How can you stand to live among those awful American Jews?"

"And yet," he continues, "maybe those 'awful American Jews' are onto something despite themselves."

For what can it mean -- following the decline of faith, the abatement of persecution, and the fragmentation of community -- to insist upon one's Jewishness? A "Jewish" state where one has no intention of living and whose intolerant clerisy excludes ever more Jews from official recognition? An "ethnic" membership criterion that one would be embarrassed to invoke for any other purpose?

The "Holocaust obsession" of American Jews, he suggests, "provides reference, liturgy, example, and moral instruction -- as well as historical proximity." And yet, he asks, "Are we really Jews for no better reason than that Hitler sought to exterminate our grandparents? If we fail to rise above this consideration, our grandchildren will have little cause to identify with us."

Remembering is important, he insists, but as "part of a broader social obligation by no means confined to Jews."

I choose to invoke a Jewish past that is impervious to orthodoxy: that opens conversations rather than closes them. Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling: the dafka[contrarian]-like quality of awkwardness and dissent for which we were once known. It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other peoples' conventions; we should also be the most unforgiving critics of our own. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

There is one brief paragraph left in the piece, but in order to quote it I have to go back to Judt's opening invocation of the Toni of the title: his father's first cousin Toni Avegael, whom Tony never knew, though he knew her older sister Lily, "a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London." Toni Avegael "was born in Antwerp and lived there most of her life." Judt thinks of the Avegael sisters "whenever I ask myself -- or am asked -- what it means to be Jewish."

Here's that final paragraph of the piece:

Toni Avegael was transported to Auschwitz in 1942 and gassed to death there as a Jew. I am named after her.

SPEAKING OF AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAEL: PETER
BEINART TAKES ON THE AMERICAN JEWISH ESTABLISHMENT

There has been a lot of chatter about a piece in the current NYRB by Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic (and now a political commentator on The Daily Beast), called "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment." It's a sound piece, and worth reading, but I doubt that there's much that will be new to anyone who's been paying attention to the evolution of attitudes among American Jews toward both their religion and the state of Israel. I suspect that the only reason the piece has caused such a furor is the identity of the writer.

Beinart starts from the perplexity of the powerful American Jewish infrastructure, as represented by groups like the muscular pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, at the frightening (to them) loss of concern for Israel among younger American Jews. As Tony Judt points out in "Toni" -- and Beinart makes essentially the same point -- they have no personal recollection of persecution, whether by Cossacks or Nazis.

Beinart makes what I think is an unexceptionable connection between this state of affairs and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong attitude of those masters of the American Jewish agenda, who have made Zionism incompatible with the traditional liberalism of American Jews.

[T]he leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States -- so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel -- is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where {the students polled by the dean of Republican pollsters, Frank Luntz, at the instigation of a group of Jewish philanthropists] wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

As Beinart notes, and American Jews are never allowed by that Israel-can-do-no-wrong leadership to acknowledge, a debate about appropriate Israeli attitudes and behavior toward its Arab citizens and neighbors has raged for decades in Israel.

The forces of bigotry, reaction, and hatred have long since had the upper hand, but still haven't silenced the voices of those who understand that the hardliners' way is a guarantee of the destruction of Israel, except possibly as an apartheid state. Of course American Jewish leaders and the people who follow them go berserk when you talk about Israel as an apartheid state, but to deny that that's where Israel is headed, if it isn't already there, is possible only if you're either a groaning imbecile or a thuggish liar.

Beinart doesn't put it quite that bluntly, but he comes remarkably close, and he is unflinching in examining the terrifying attitudes of the people who drive policymaking in present-day Israel. Some of what he reports -- namely a widely held attitude that is openly eliminationist -- is new to me, and is awfuler than what I already knew or even suspected. Much of the rest is sound but hardly unfamiliar or surprising to American Jews who have found, at last, a sane public voice in the thinking person's pro-Israel lobby, J Street.

As I say, I really have no major complaint with Beinart's piece, except that so little of it is new. It may be that coming from him the case will reach bastions of American illiberal Zionism -- a phrase he uses which I quite like. Which brings us back to that basic fact of who Beinart is: for more than decade a top editor, and for some seven years the editor, of what we might call the house organ of American illiberal Zionism, The New Republic. And as some commentators have pointed out, even now this piece appears in the NYRB, to whose readers the basic argument is old hat, and not in The New Republic.

To put it another way, if Beinart is now taking on the American Jewish establishment, what about those years in which he was, if not part of that establishment, then a highly outspoken tool of it? There is the vaguest reference to possible past error (looking through the piece again quickly I can't even find it), but that really doesn't add up to acknowledgment. It would have been nice if he had chosen to come clean in that regard.

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