Mondoweiss

'Walk Around Harvard. What Are the Names on the Buildings?'

A couple days ago I was talking to a well-connected woman who has met Steve Walt, the former Harvard dean and anatomist of the Israel lobby, and she offered this characterization: Walt is the brilliant nerd type, "the smartest kid in the high school. He loves ideas. He doesn't care who comes up with a good one." Then the woman said that Walt had been surprised by the response two years ago to his paper. "He is naive." 

I asked why she felt that way.

My Wife Criticizes My 'Intense,' 'Insecure,' 'Immigrant' Behavior at Party

I blogged about a conversation about Palestine I had a dinner party last Saturday night. Well something else took place that my wife has brought up since.

After dinner, at about 10:30, when people were slouching around drunkenly on couches, talking, my wife's dinner partner came to the table with a big wooden chess set, and opened it up. He had learned to play chess a couple weeks back. This guy is goodlooking, gay, courtly, mischievous; "Michael." When he had come to the party he'd seen me hugging someone else and demanded a hug from me, too. I said, "But I'm homophobic." He thought that was funny and kept putting his arm around me after that.

My wife learned to play chess a couple years ago and she and Michael started playing. But every couple of minutes she called out to me to help her. I tried to ignore the demands. I have mixed feelings about chess. I'm not that good at it, yet it's utterly fascinating, I find it engaging, etc. I did show her how to establish her pawns, and respond to an attack from Michael's bishop.

I stayed away for a few minutes then the next time I walked by my wife was down her Queen and a bishop. Wow. What had happened? She tugged at my sleeve to stay, and I stood by her chair, hovering over the board. Meanwhile Michael had gotten reinforcement; our host, "Sam," sat next to him.

I started doing the moves for my wife, and whenever she wanted to talk about strategy openly, I hushed her. I didn't want the other side to sense any weakness or hesitation, just shock and awe as we silently crushed them. We attacked, and soon I had Michael's Queen in a cross. I can't take real credit for this; he didn't fully comprehend what was going on. 

Sam kept making fun of me. He would wave his hands over the board to try and distract me or tease me. He has a penchant for teasing. I couldn't see the board; and I flared, "Dammit Sam, stop it!" A little angrily. Then Sam teased, "Look at that face, it's simian." My look of concentration and intimidation.

Anyway, I nailed Michael's Queen and another piece or so then walked away. My wife still had a losing position. I'm not sure how it came out. I did notice that Michael didn't say goodnight to me. And I could tell my wife was upset at me for flaring at Sam. So when I said goodnight to Sam, I apologized for being unmannerly, and he said, "Oh you're crazy, you are the greatest!"

My wife has since said that I was too intense, that it scared people. They think I'm about to get violent or pop off. (Popping off is one of my specialties.) I asked her if she thought of this behavior as Jewish. My wife and I often compare tribal traits with one another. When we began going out 18 years ago this was more of an area of tension; I detected antisemitism in various relations of hers, and she detected "anti-anti-semitism" in various relations of mine. I don't mean to make light of this. It was a real field of difference, and we've gotten over it by and large. Anyway, she said, Yes she thought of it as Jewish in the sense that her own background, WASP, entails being well-bred. They give getting-along-socially the highest value. They want other people to feel comfortable in social settings. They mask their primal feelings. Even on the tennis court? Yes even on the tennis court, there is a ton of etiquette, she said. Where my behavior was ill-bred and competitive, she said.

I just quizzed her about it now, in the bathtub. She said she doesn't think of it as Jewish per se, but more "immigrant"-like behavior. "Insecure." There are tons of well-bred Jews who know how to behave at a dinner party.

I'm not sure where I come down on this. I was working on a book for a while called "The Assimilationist," but left off because my (former) publisher rejected the proposal, also because the political questions surrounding Jewish identity became far more compelling to me--and still are--than the social/personal questions. Yet it's also true that the social and personal seem to affect one's political activities, to a greater or lesser degree. (C.f., Jeffrey Goldberg feeling in his 20's that the Diaspora was the disease and moving to Israel the cure--from which eventuated, I believe, his conviction that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and it would be a fabulous thing if the U.S. invaded.)

The odd thing about the evening is that I felt really good playing chess. I felt fulfilled and powerful. Leaning over my wife, I felt my mind in motion; I felt like I was melting away the hypocrisy and social fakery of a party and being who I am, a cerebral person. My wife saw my insecurity; and I accept that. My challenge is to exercise my mental powers without being an a-----e, which has never been easy for me, and which I believe is my own nuttiness, not a tribal trait. The Yiddish word for that is mishigos.

'Patriots' Owner's Wife Says Her Sons Could Fight for Israel, Not U.S.

On her recent visit to the Jewish state, the Jerusalem Post asked Myra Kraft, a leader in American Jewish philanthropy to Israel and the wife of Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, how she would feel about one of her four sons moving to Israel and joining the army.

I would go with him. I always wanted to live here. As for joining the army, over Vietnam, I would have had an issue, because I didn't believe in it. The same goes for the war in Iraq. I don't know why we're there. I would hate to have one of my sons fighting there. Iran's the problem, not Iraq. But, as far as fighting for Israel is concerned, there is no problem.

The JPost asked what issues she'll take into account in the coming U.S. election:

Israel, the economy, the plans for getting out of Iraq quickly.

I find Myra Kraft's comments both troubling and understandable. Understandable because she is the daughter of a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Massachusetts. As a little girl she collected money from neighbors for  Palestine. I imagine she has never felt completely secure in the west emotionally, given her father's experience. His family was annihilated. So she feels great loyalty to Israel. I know Zionists like this. 

I'm troubled because of her indifference to the larger American scene, in which she is a player.  The Krafts have real power in the U.S., beginning with ownership of the Patriots. Robert Kraft is a dedicated alum of Columbia University and has given tons of money to the school. After the pro-Israel David Project blew apart Columbia in 2005 with its attack on the Middle East department, Kraft did a great thing and gave $500,000 to a fund for intercultural awareness and dialogue to try and heal his school. He has funded the Kraft Center for Jewish Life, which houses Hillel and a cafe that calls Israeli food "a taste of home"--whose home? And Columbia President Lee Bollinger surely had Kraft's largesse in mind when he attacked Ahmadinejad before introducing the Iranian President at the campus  last year. Bollinger needs guys like Kraft to fund his new dream campus in Harlem...

The Krafts seem to look on Israel as a home. They count Ehud Olmert as a friend, also Netanyahu. Myra thinks Israel is a great country and that it's badly portrayed in the media--people are afraid to go because there will be suicide bombings. There seems to be no awareness of the suffering Israel is causing. When she urges Christians to go and see what a great place it is, I don't think she's including Arab-Americans, who according to the Arab-American Institute, face terrible discrimination when they try and visit Israel and the Occupied Territories. Time and again the U.S. has honored its promises to the Jews for freedom in American society. Yet Jewish leadership helps to rubbish minority rights in Palestine. If her sons were in the IDF, they would be serving an occupation.

Mostly I'm troubled by her parochialism. She is a member of the American establishment, and she thinks always of Israel. Is this the way leaders should act?

In '85 Michelle Obama Assailed Assimilation, Saying It Kept Her 'on the Periphery of Society'

Politico has posted Michelle Obama's thesis in sociology from 1985: "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." The work is an at-times agonized treatise on the racial divide. Going to Princeton, the woman then named Michelle Robinson wrote, will "likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant." Huh. Look who's coming to the South Lawn...

Obama's study focused on issues of assimilation and separation. She seems clearly to favor separation. She wanted blacks to identify with other blacks, even when they became successful, and to be concerned with the "plight" of poor blacks. She seems distressed by a trend she documented: that while blacks tend to associate more with other blacks before and during Princeton, once they graduated they tend to associate more with whites. Their identification went down "drastically." Many successful blacks were "ashamed" of their culture but also guilty about "betraying" blackness.

Elements of Black culture which make it unique from White culture, such as its music, its language, the struggles and a 'consciousness' shared by its people may be attributed to the injustices and oppressions suffered by this race of people which are not comparable to the experiences of any other race of people through this country's history.

I am sure that Michelle Obama's views on these matters have changed over 23 years, as she's followed the trajectory she documented, of associating more with whites. She is now a full participant in American society. I bet her sense of blackness has gone way down.

Still, I'm fascinated by her thesis because her view of the specialness of black culture is not so different from the Jewish particularist view of the specialness of Jewish culture. So it's where you sit. Also, the conflict she frames of "separation/pluralism" versus "integration/assimilation" is a conflict in the Jewish community too. Commentary Magazine, for instance, regularly runs scholarly statements about the unique history and character of Jews. And the Jewish political theorist Michael Walzer has said that Jews are "not simply at home" in America, we worry that we're about to get thrown out. Sort of like Michelle Obama feeling peripheral.

Obama's thesis and personal story show that feelings of racial exclusion/separation are wholly understandable when members of that race feel they are not full participants in society. But imagine if Michelle Obama were to express these attitudes now? Well, her husband's campaign would be over. I don't think many white voters would want to be represented by someone who felt alienated from the society and identified mostly with other blacks.

This was my beef with Joe Lieberman and Elliott Abrams. Lieberman ran as vice president even as he maintained membership in Jewish organizations that had firm policies against Jews marrying non-Jews, policies Lieberman did not condemn. Abrams became a Middle East adviser even after he had written a book saying that Jews who don't live in Israel must remain "apart" from the society in which they live. I'm not saying it's wrong to have these views. What's wrong is to have high position in U.S. government and hold these views. They justify a dual loyalty to the U.S. and Israel in ways not so different from Michelle Obama's feelings of being peripheral: the Jewish state is a necessary haven for Jews because gentiles will exclude them in the west.

The key difference between my ethnic family and Michelle Obama's is that her and her husband's complex identification issues will be keenly examined over months to come. We are going to hear about their blackness till the cows come home. We will hear them talk about their feelings about being black on "60 Minutes," or to Matt Lauer, because these feelings have such important political consequences. I am sure the Obamas will firmly describe themselves as assimilationist.

I want to see an open discussion of Jewish identity along the same lines. The sort of feelings Michelle Obama had in 1985, of separation and oppression, of betrayal and integration, are having a large and silent effect on our foreign policy.

An Antisemitic Joke From My Youth, and What It Says About the Elite

Another thing historian Ilan Pappe said is that the "elites" of the world have made a mess of Israel/Palestine. He meant the American elite too, the political establishment, the Israel lobby. I went for a walk today and got thinking about my own meritocratic elite.

Back when I was in college, at Harvard, I was friends of a very WASPy kid from New England who was the subject of some fascination to my urban Jewish friends and me. He was a hipster but incredibly preppie too, and he had a very WASPy name. He was nice enough to be friends with us, but he was 150 proof gentile. I'm not going to identify him because this story could only hurt people. He had a dry friendly manner. One time he corrected my grammar, saying, "If Shakespeare had used 'like' as a conjunction he would have written 'Like You Like It.'" Anyway, one day I was visiting him when he showed me a book of political cartoons that had an antisemitic cartoon in it. In the first frame, an Indian guy was standing on a cliff surveying his domain, then an English colonist crept up out of the bushes and pushed him off the cliff. In the third frame the colonist was fat and happy, looking out over his domain, and then in the fourth frame a Jewish guy came up out of the bushes. Ha ha. I found it upsetting, to see this thing in Kirkland House.

I bring it up because my old friend is today married to a very influential person, also nameless, who is Jewish. They're an emblematic couple: The prejudice and stereotype among gentiles of my generation was not so engrained or virulent that they would refuse to join with Jews in the elite. I saw all that happen in my lifetime. It ought to be celebrated. But doing that would mean acknowledging that Jews aren't outsiders in American society; and many Jews like that status...

British-Jewish Disillusionment in Israel Comes to Off-Broadway

My friend Garrett Eisler informs me that film director Mike Leigh's new play, Two Thousand Years, which has sold out in London, has come to off-Broadway, and is all about stuff I talk about on this blog: Jewish identity around issues of assimilation and Israel...  From Eisler's review in Time Out:

Like Leigh himself, the middle-aged parents hail from a Socialist Zionist background and retain their utopian leftist passion, but have grown disillusioned with Israel. Their cosmopolitan daughter (Natasha Lyonne) makes her parents proud as an international human-rights activist, but their son horrifies them when he turns to Orthodox Judaism for answers. The work crackles with Leigh’s signature humor (a characteristically Jewish sense of tragicomedy, he feels), but underneath it seems to lie, in the laudatory words of Guardian critic Michael Billington, an exploration of “the loss of faith” in “a world in which people have increasingly lost their beliefs in politics, religion and social progress.”

Further evidence that European attitudes towards Israel are invading our shores. Hallelujah!

Obama Puts an End to Identity Politics

I'm still washing in the waves of Obama's great speech last Thursday night. The most fascinating thing to me is that he did not speak of his blackness, at least as I recall the speech. He began by saying, "They said this day would never happen--" But it wasn't just about a black guy winning Iowa. He wasn't offering himself as a racial hero. He meant the insiders, the Hillaryites, the old school, the experienced. He did talk about his own background, but again as I recall, it was in strictly personal, highly-individuated terms: he was the product of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas.

Obama is the melting pot. Gone are the days of identity politics. Have you noticed that the young people who are supporting him don't speak of him as black. We want a black man in the White House. Of course everyone knows this, but I believe his supporters actually are being color-blind, and Obama's mixed-raceness makes this sort of new American faith possible.

The melting pot was out of favor in American life for the last generation. Nathan Glazer and D.P. Moynihan got rid of it in their book, and my people and the blacks helped to push it out too, by asserting our right to feel proud of who we are. I'm black and I'm proud. Or, I'm not going to hide my Jewishness.

We are all sick of identity politics. Identity politics is Sunnis v Shi'ites and Muslims v Christians. It is hatefulness. Have you noticed the American Express ad where the father and son go back to the old country, Norway, to rediscover their roots, and have all these Norwegian adventures, on their Amex card? It is a sweet ad. Then at the end of the ad they discover that they are actually Swedish, and so they must fly to Stockholm. Ha ha. The ad is based on an absurd premise, that people with Swedish roots think that their grandfather was from Norway. I've lived in Minnesota; people out there don't make that mistake. What the ad is about is what Obama is about: This roots talk is in the end trivial, it's time to get past it. Boy is America exciting right now!

I'm Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas

I'm pretty new to Christmas, but it seems to me that multiculturalism is transforming the religious holiday into a generic American holiday not that different from Thanksgiving. My gentile in-laws tell me that this is an old trend. Still I can't help offering the following very impressionistic observations of 2007 Christmas.

--Most tasteful Christmas display in my little town was by one of my intermarried brethren. Hey we're everywhere.
--I show up at a Christmas party and a kid shakes my hand and says, "Happy Eid."
--No grace at my wife's family's Christmas dinner. No talk of going to church. Both used to happen.
--The rising tide of "Happy Holidays" language, even from the President.
--My niece makes matzoh balls at her Christmas dinner (she loves them) and declares that she wants "a Jewish Christmas," i.e., let's order takeout Chinese and then go to the movies.

That last comment especially tells me that as Jews and gentiles mingle in the ruling class, the old rituals are being transformed. This was my most comfortable Christmas in nearly 20 of them, I don't know why, it didn't feel quite as otherworldly to me. Jewish Christmas. It doesn't matter how anti-assimilationist you are; it's going to happen....

Anti-WASP, Anti-Jew. Assimilationist.

My wife and I were driving out to get Indian takeout for the Christmas party we were hosting when we passed the hunble house of one of our favorite friends, this very lowkey guy who does web design for a spiritual sort of thinktank. I said to my wife, you could have married him, right? And she said, that’s about the only kind of WASP I could marry. I asked her about it, and she said that she had always been somewhat anti-WASP. That she had wanted to marry out of her tribe because no one had ever placed a high value in her culture on the “Life that is not examined is not worth living,” which is the sort of life she wanted to have. She said that Jews do that more. She tended to find WASPs assumptive and smug. I said maybe it was a class thing, and she said, No she felt it was part of the culture. I was somewhat surprised but also freed by the comment. I feel a similar impatience with my native culture. It has its own kind of arrogance, a sense that because we’re the leaders of education and media and free inquiry, and we’re righteous outsiders, we don’t have anything to answer for. There is no sense of our own American reality, no accountability for our effect on foreign policy and world history due to the Jewish state, and when two professors try to bring it up, they get screamed at, called antisemites. I’m saying I couldn’t have married a Jew who was ethnocentric, not unless they were openly challenging the Jewish state’s brutal treatment of Palestinians.

I also wonder if this isn’t all rationalization; if my wife and I aren’t temperamentally the kind of people who would want out of our native cultures out of pure curiosity no matter where we were from. Sometimes I imagine being Irish Catholic, or in the Latino immigrant culture. I think I’d want out in a hurry. The mixing up’s more interesting to me.

Kevin MacDonald and the Politics of WASP Resentment

My work has been embraced by Kevin MacDonald, a UC-Long Beach prof of psychology who has become controversial for his views of Jews. On his blog, MacDonald writes of my recent post on the Jewish presence in the establishment:

Jews won the culture war without a shot being fired and without the losing side seeming to realize that it was a war with real winners and real losers — where the losers have not only given up their cultural preeminence, but have failed to stand up to the ultimate denouement: demographic displacement from lands they had controlled for centuries. The new elite retains its outsider feelings toward their new subjects — a hostile elite in the United States as it was in the Soviet Union.

...Weiss seems to feel a twinge of guilt about the role of Jews as victors in the culture war — guilt stemming from his understanding that the new elite has some very glaring moral failings of its own, including its own brand of ethnocentrism that seems far deeper than anything imagined by the WASPs.   

The danger for Jews is that non-Jews will come to realize the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and see Jewish involvement in the displacement of European-descended peoples as resulting from ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Ultimately, Europeans may come to realize that the conflict is really about the ethnic displacement of themselves as a people.

Speaking for myself, it would be difficult for me not to have developed something of a sense of my peoplehood after delving into the 2000-year history of Jews who were intensely concerned about preserving their people and their culture. As I’ve come to realize, preserving one’s people and culture is a virtual human universal.

I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold. He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud. When he speaks, feelingly, of the displacement of WASPs, he is giving voice to a declension and hurt that I've seen even in gentile friends of mine, and that is rarely expressed. He understands how important Jewish history is to this moment in world and U.S. history. He is concerned about Palestinian human rights and the Israel lobby's astonishing ability to remove Palestinian suffering from the American discourse. Still, in the end I reject the embrace.

What's troubling about MacDonald is that he's a racialist. Everything he says always goes back to immutable racial categories. Thus the existence of the Jewish state doesn't provoke him  to look for a more idealistic social model, no it rationalizes for him a WASP ethnocentrism. Everyone in their own ethnic corner. Stay there. All that talk of European-descended peoples in the above passage. The very ethnocentrism I found stifling in my own Jewish cultural milieu and stifling too when I encountered the WASP version at my college. He's a racialist too in that he seems always to reduce Jewish personality to certain traits. I even agree somewhat about some of these traits. For instance, I read in one of his essays that Jews are "psychologically intense." Well I'm psychologically intense, my brother is psychologically intense. But my sister isn't. Maybe it's a real tendency but it feels vague and a little vicious. Then there's his rap on Jewish ethnocentrism. I agree that Jews tend to be ethnocentric. As an assimilationist Jew, I am intensely aware of this trait. The Jewish law against intermarriage smacks of racism in today's America (even Jews agree, in opinion surveys; and mad Joe Lieberman lied about these laws when he ran for president 8 years ago). As Norman Mailer observed to the American Conservative, post-Holocaust Jews are fixated on the question, "Is it good for the Jews?" Pure ethnocentrism, and grotesque-- when you consider the cultural and political power Jews have achieved in the U.S.

The problem with MacDonald's formulations, though, is that he seems to hoot (I say "seems" because I've just skimmed a few of his statements) at the idea of Jewish suffering, seems to overlook the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on Jewish life. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, once said that it took seven generations to overcome great historical grievances.  I'm sure I'm misremembering his lines. But the trauma of having nearly half your people wiped out--is there any empathy for the effects of that in MacDonald?

MacDonald and I agree that the reality of America today is one where Jews are incredibly empowered. And yes I feel Jewish guilt over this, especially after what the neocons did to Iraq. I am nauseated by a lot of the ways of the meritocratic establishment-- as I was nauseated by the gentile one before it. I am nauseated by the materialism that has taken over Jewish American culture, and its dehumanization of Arabs. But why does MacDonald describe America's as a Jewish establishment? This is crude and likely wrong. It's a mixed establishment, with Jews in many prominent roles. There's no precision in his statements.

More important, MacDonald's racialism removes the possibility that people can change their team, or that teams can change their character. I'm much more hopeful on this score. Cultures and tribes are changing all the time. The WASPs are a lot more attractive now, for instance, than when they were on top. They seem less materialistic, they run environmental groups, etc. I think my people are changing too. If we're so ethnocentric, then how come 62 percent of Jews under 35 are intermarrying? There's a universalist strain among young Jews that is getting deeper and wider all the time. Real events shaped the outlook and emotions of my parents' and grandparents' generation--including Russian shtetl and Holocaust. And real events--privilege and influence--will shape the outlook of the best of the next generation.