Much as I’ve come to disagree with Marty Peretz, I admit that I hesitate viscerally before criticizing him. Marty opened the pages of the New Republic to me in the 1990s. So attacking him feels like an act of ingratitude, if not a minor violation of oedipal inhibitions toward a one-time mentor. In his own blog, though, Marty appears to have thrown off all inhibitions. He’s turned obscene in print, figuratively and literally, as in his new screed against J Street. Even stranger, he’s exhibiting a definite ultra-Orthodox tendency in defense of his bellicose version of Zionism.
Misunderstanding Identity: The Left and the Neocons Unite
America is the land of freedom. It is the world’s standard for democracy; its ideals of personal freedom and civil rights are the envy of all enlightened citizens of the world.
If you grew up in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, as I did, this is what you learned at school.
The myth of American freedom is a strong one, and one reason it’s strong is that it contains a lot of truth. But the democracy of the United States is hardly perfect and it does not necessarily produce enlightened governments, leaders, and policies.
Paradoxically, the myth of American freedom is strongest today in two groups that see themselves as negations of the other—the neoconservatives and that slice of the American left that might be best defined as subscribers to Harpers and The New York Review of Books. The neocons believe that the way to make the world a better place is for America to export its democracy forcefully—and with force, if necessary. The leftists wouldn’t force anything on anyone, but they do think that if other peoples would just be reasonable and adopt the U.S. constitution, war, conflict, and unreason would give way to well-mannered societies much like those in America’s great suburbs.
There’s a textbook example of this on display in the current issue of Commentary, where that magazine’s assistant editor, David Billet, reviews Bernard Avishai’s new book, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise will Bring Israel Peace at Last.
No Water, No Food: The Younger Dryas, Then and Now
About 12,800 years ago, the global climate suddenly cooled. Here in the Levant, the change also resulted in dry conditions that lasted for about 1,300 years.
I was reminded of this by two headlines today in one of the Levant’s leading newspapers: Israel Faces 350 Million Cubic Meter Shortage In Water Supply; The World Food Price Crisis Comes to Israel: Prices Rose 9% In The Past Year (that one’s only in the Hebrew edition, for some reason).
The cold, dry spell of the twelfth and thirteenth millennia BCE is called the Younger Dryas. Because the first evidence of human farming appears in the archaeological record at the same time (see my earlier post, Childe’s Play: Neolithic Revolution or Evolution), some scholars have hypothesized that, because of the drought of the Younger Dryas, the people living in the area stretching from present-day Israel up through southern Turkey could no longer obtain sufficient food by hunting and gathering and, as a result, had to turn to farming, and then to the establishment of settled, larger communities in order to ensure a more stable and abundant food supply.
Journey to Hebron: Nightmares and Hope
Yehiel and I met Elliott at the appliance repairman’s shed on a side street in South Jerusalem.
Elliott Horowitz, a historian at Bar-Ilan University, had already paid for the almost-new washing machine, with cash that friends have pledged to repay. We wrestled the heavy white hunk of metal into the back of Yehiel’s undersized station wagon, and set off – three guys with skullcaps and graying beards driving to Hebron with a washing machine for a Palestinian stonecutter.
It was Elliott’s idea.
Liberal Israel Lobby: Here, today!
J Street, the new lobby devoted to supporting Israel by supporting peace, goes public today. Here’s part of my column at The American Prospect:
Today’s public launch follows many months of organizing led by the new group’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, a media consultant and former Clinton administration staffer… Unlike existing Jewish peace groups, J Street is registered for tax purposes as a 501(c)(4) organization, meaning that it can operate fully as a lobby. A sister organization, J Street PAC, will endorse and raise money for candidates.
To win J Street PAC’s backing, Ben-Ami told me, a candidate’s position should be that “the single most important step to support Israeli security and U.S. interests is to reach a negotiated peace agreement,
Rav and Shmuel at the Gym: How Should We Begin the Passover Seder?
Between sets of arm curls, Nahum walks over to me and says, “You’re familiar with the disagreement between Rav and Shmuel about the way the Seder should begin?”
Nahum doesn’t look like the kind who works on his biceps—he’s a slender guy in his mid-thirties who wears a black kipah and glasses. He resembles a teacher at a religious high school here in Jerusalem, which in fact he is.
But Nahum, like me, is a regular at the small weight room at the Jerusalem Pool on Emek Refa’im Street. We get a diverse crowd—men and women, jocks and schoolteachers, retired people and teenagers, Jews and Arabs, religious and non-religious; there’s even a macho ultra-Orthodox guy who lets out whoops when he lifts—but I’ll save him for another story.
The conversation, like the crowd, can come from all directions. Nahum is referring to the two leading Babylonian rabbis of the third century CE, whose disputes form part of the first layer of the Gemara, the Talmudic discussions of the laws laid down in the earlier Mishna. The Torah commands the Jews to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt at a discussion-meal conducted by families on the first night of Pesach (Passover). Rav and Shmuel disagreed on how to begin telling the story, and their disagreement is recorded in the Haggadah, the book forms the framework of the Seder night.
Invitation to understanding: Postdoc fellowship
Though this blog isn’t a bulletin board for ads, we occasionally get messages worth passing on. This one is an invitation to scholars to help understanding between Jews and Muslims:
The Jewish-Muslim Initiative at the University of Illinois-Chicago invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Spring semester of 2009. The successful candidate will teach one undergraduate class, give two or three public lectures, and participate in the life of the university. The class may compare Jewish and Muslim views on any topic, or be on any aspect of historical Jewish-Muslim relations.
Weekend Good News Edition: Ad hoc sanity coalition
I was too busy before Shabbat to note a piece of good news buried in my Friday paper (Hebrew only): Meretz Knesset Member Zahava Galon has signed up 30 co-sponsors, a quarter of the house, on a bill to make hiring a prostitute a crime, punishable by up half a year in prison – with an option for the courts to sentence first-time offenders to taking a course on the harm caused by prostitution.
The logic of the bill is simple: In prostitution, there is a victim, and the victim is the prostitute. The fact that a reporter can occasionally find a high-priced call girl to talk about how she likes her work no more changes the wider reality than the fact that an occasional house slave could be found in 1855 Mississippi to talk about how nice Massa treated her.
The co-sponsors represent everyone from the ultra-Orthodox to secularists, from Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsour of the Islamic Movement
Olmert, Barghouti, and Zeno’s Paradox
The following statement was not shouted by a long-time Peace Now activist into a megaphone outside the prime minister’s house:
You have to understand that a very large population of Palestinians lives here…
Take a 50-year-old man who lives here. A man who has spent most of his life – 40 years, since he was a 10-year-old child – under the watch of the Israeli soldier. The same soldier who carries a rifle, for all the most justified reasons in the world. But this is that man’s narrative. Take those who were stripped at the checkpoints only because there might be terrorists among them. Take those who stand for hours at the checkpoints for fear that a booby-trapped car could pass through…
No, those words were Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s, speaking to brigade commanders in the West Bank,
Standing Between: Ilana M. Blumberg’s “Houses of Study”
Ever since Abraham stood in the middle of two rows of dismembered animals, waiting for God to speak, the archetypical Jew has been the one who stands between. Ruth between Moab and Israel, David between sin and repentance; Yohanan ben-Zakkai between the sacred past and the almost inconceivable project of creating a new Judaism without a Temple, Maimonides between the Torah and Aristotle, Moses Mendelssohn between the Torah and the Enlightenment, Gershom Scholem between Berlin and Jerusalem—walking a thin wire between two seeming opposites, and by walking, bringing them together, seems to encapsulate the essence of what it is to be a thinking, creative Jew.
Over the last three decades, the Jews who have stood most in the middle, the ones who have walked the most precarious wire, have been women committed both to Jewish heritage and to living full intellectual lives of a type that heritage long generally denied to females. By now a plethora of books about Jewish feminism, Orthodox feminism, and women in Judaism have been published, but Ilana M. Blumberg’s Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books stands out among them as the one that really enables the reader to experience what it feels like to be a committed religious Jewish woman caught between Jewish tradition and the modern, Western world.
I have but one biography to give for my country
I don’t usually quibble with what’s written about me, but hey! I only have one biography to give for my nation.
Philip Weiss writes at Mondoweiss:
The ’67 War galvanized… young Gershom Gorenberg to move to Israel.
At the time of the 1967 war, I was 11 years old, in 6th grade, living with my parents in Los Angeles. I moved to Israel 10 years later. My decision had nothing to do with the 1967 war. I preferred living here because there is no split between Jewish and general politics, between being a Jew and a citizen. This is the meaning of national liberation:
Obama, Carter and Meshaal: Campaign rhetoric v. policy
Alas, Barack Obama is apparently not reading South Jerusalem. If he were, perhaps his campaign would have responded to Jimmy Carter’s reported plans to meet Hamas leaders in Damascus with something a bit more sophisticated than this statement, carried by JTA (thanks to Ben Smith for the head’s up):
“Senator Obama does not agree with President Carter’s decision to go forward with this meeting because he does not support negotiations with Hamas until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist and abide by past agreements,” the Obama campaign said. “As president, Obama will negotiate directly with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.”
Yes, I understand the electoral logic. Carter, it seems, is nearly as unpopular among pro-Israel voters as Hamas is. Carter has hinted he supports Obama, and then he goes and does this. Obama wants to open up some distance between himself and Carter.
But from a policy perspective, this is a mistake. As I wrote here yesterday, the current administration’s policy toward Hamas has boomeranged.