Alexander - Jews Against Themselves

JEWS
AGAINST
THEMSELVES

JEWS
AGAINST
THEMSELVES

Edward Alexander

Transaction Publishers

New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

Copyright 2015 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, 10 Corporate Place South, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854. www.transactionpub.com

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014034988

ISBN: 978-1-4128-5603-4 (cloth); 978-1-4128-5682-9 (paper)

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Edward, author.

Jews against themselves / Edward Alexander.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-4128-5603-4

1. Israel and the diaspora. 2. Jews--United States--Attitudes toward Israel. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Influence. 4. Jews--United States--Intellectual life. 5. Arab-Israeli conflict--Foreign public opinion, American. 6. Public opinion--United States. 7. Israel--Foreign public opinion, American. I. Title.

DS132.A44 2015

305.8924--dc23

2014034988

Sadie and Harry Alexander

Sadies Last Apartment

here we are asea

in spice jars of hearing aid batteries

mothballs nestled like spider eggs among the canned goods

enough spools of colored thread to bandolier a tailors brigade

the makers mark on the dinner plates saved for best

isnt Rozenburg but union bug

take care and dry your eyes

with salted fingertips

orbit the rim of a sturdy dish and try to make it sing

like a glass harmonica but what rings out

is a full-throated stoneware chorus

a brother/sisterhood of potters

kicking the wheel of memory

take care and tune your ear to it

listen for the thud and wet shatter

of a milk bottle your grandfathers hand deployed

to keep his friend from the wrong side of the picket line

the same hand

that proffered chocolate coins and silver dollars

and bade you

take these tokens for the long ride home

the tunnel oscillates light and shadow

the passing trains of past and present chunter through

black and gold pulsate a syncopated tick and hum

in the scissoring interstices

on the hypnotic dial of Harrys watch

like the third rail of every untold story

take care and keep your distance

but come close now for the journey back

three brothers in the stifling hold of the Gothland

names and ages shifting like silt on the ocean floor

one will meet this dark-haired whipsmart girl

who darts undaunted across a bustling avenue

they will dance the Charleston on a tenement roof

take care to remember:

the body is a strict boss but the spirit doesnt punch the clock

Rebecca Alexander 9-7-2014

Antisemitism directed at oneself was an original Jewish creation. I dont know of any other nation so flooded with self-criticism. Even after the Holocaust harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims. The Jewish ability to internalize any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves is one of the marvels of human nature. Day and night that feeling produces dread, sensitivity, self-criticism and sometimes self-destruction.

Aharon Appelfeld (New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1988)

For help and suggestions of various kinds, I am grateful to David Alexander, Rebecca Alexander, Jerold Auerbach, Paul Bogdanor, Maier Deshell (zl), Rivkah Fishman, Jonathan Imber, Rob Jacobs, Laurie Josephs, Ruth King, Neal Kozodoy, Jonathan Marks, Andrew McIntosh, Louis Offen, Cynthia Ozick, Nikolai Popov, Walter Reich, Alvin Rosenfeld, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Todd Warnick, Douglas Wertheimer.

I am grateful to the following journals for permission to reprint essays, in whole or in part.

Algemeiner

Choose Your Side: The New York Times or Judaism, March 18, 2013.

Jews Against Themselves, May 14, 2014.

Chicago Jewish Star

Ashamed Jews: The Finkler Question, December 10, 2010.

Commentary Magazine

Liberalism and Zionism, February 1986.

Noam Chomsky and Holocaust Denial, November 1993.

Disraeli and Marx, June 1994, October 1996.

Jewish Press

Jewish Israel-Haters Convert Their Dead Grandmothers: A New Mormonism?, January 28, 2011.

Society (A Springer Periodical)

Past and Present, January/February 2013.

The Weekly Standard

Americas Academic Boycotters, December 2013.

The Campus Is Conquered , November 10, 2014.

The New Apostasy, in Historical Perspective

This book is about the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews, waged from 1933 to 1945. The enormity of this apostasy cannot be measured without identifying what and whom its practitioners embrace. In the Middle East, Israel is surrounded by enemies who, both of their own volition and as agents of the genocidal Iranian regime, are not merely bent on Israels destruction but deem it their own raison dtre, being far less interested in building up their own societies than in destroying the society of their neighbor. Appeasement of Iran itself, despite its undisguised, relentless drive to obtain nuclear weapons, and its constant reiteration of the goal of obliterating Israel, is now the order of the day even in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Nor does Europe, which not very long ago destroyed its own civilization in the process of erasing its Jewish population, present a happier scene. Raul Hilberg once encapsulated the history of Europes treatment of its Jewish minority as follows: The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.it impossible for most Jews (perhaps even those who felt the need to return to a continent whose rivers once flowed with Jewish blood) to live as Jews in Poland or Germany or France. As if this were not enough to threaten the continuation of Jewish life in Europe, there is the little matter of the old continents inability to cope with the Israelophobia and generalized Jew-hatred of its rapidly multiplying and increasingly violent Muslim minority except by blaming its woes on its (peaceful) Jewish minority, especially those Jews who assert Israels right to exist, and do so in countries that not so long ago questioned Jews right to live.

Almost as menacing as the physical threat to Jewish existence posed by genocidally inclined Persians and Arabs and Muslim sympathizers beyond measure is the new climate of opinion, succinctly described by David Nirenberg: We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of Israel.

In the summer of 2014, Israels self-defense against thousands of Hamas bombardments of its cities from the southern border and north to Haifa brought tens of thousands of violent, often murderous, anti-Jewish rioters into the streets of London, Belfast, Paris, Oslo, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Berlin. This led to desperate warnings from several heads of government that Europeans should remember how their destruction of European Jewish civilization in World War II had also set their own civilization ablaze. During July 2014 there were larger demonstrations in support of Hamas in European cities than in any Arab capital. The European mob that used to chant