20 (pt. 1)
JEWISH INFLUENCE IN
POPULAR CULTURE
"If
anything distinguishes American Jews today within the context of American
society
it is the special deference that society accords them."
--
Charles Liebman/Stephen Cohen, p. 7
"I
have found that being Catholic means having less status than
being Jewish. I see it in the media, in the newspapers,
in the
intonations; I do not see how one can avoid that feeling
or
sensibility."
-- Michael
Novak, [in Stallsworth, p. 71]
"I'm
half Jewish and half nothing."
(four-year-old
boy in an elevator, to his friend), [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245]
"Too many Jews have turned away
from the modern project, from
the Enlightenment and the idea of progress, to barricade
themselves in an angry tribalism." -- Norman Birnbaum,
Tikkun,
p. 111
"The Jews in America ... have
become very powerful as a lobby and
can afford the luxury of being hypersensitive. Any little
thing that
you say in criticism is seen as a criticism against the
people. They
seem to want to be seen as infallible."
-- South
African Bishop Desmond Tutu,
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
"When Jews see themselves as
superior to all other human beings
... they are claiming license to do what is forbidden
to others."
--
Yehoshafat Harkabi, former chief
of
Israeli military
intelligence, p. 180
"I didn't hear that polio was
cured today. I heard that a Jewish
doctor cured polio today." -- Godfrey Cambridge, Black comedian,
SIMONS, p.
135-136
"[Black Americans have] an envy
of the Jewish position and an
exaggerated notion of their power, which is standard in
the
anti-Semitic imagination." -- Henry Feingold, Jewish scholar, p. 77
"American Jews have exerted an
extraordinary impact upon the
character of the United States."
-- Stephen
Whitfield, Jewish scholar, [AMERICAN
SPACE, p.20]
"It is all very puzzling. Who
are these people, Christians wonder,
who have moved so rapidly from obscurity to positions
of
prominence, even influence, in American society ... [and]
why
do Jews seek to
stick together so much?"
-- Charles Silberman, Jewish scholar, p.
26
"The period after World War II, especially,
was a time of advance.
Before then Jews had moved into the entertainment
field, dominating
Hollywood, and had begun to move into medicine,
the sciences,
academia, journalism, and cultural life in general.
By the 1960s,
they
were disproportionately represented in most professions having to do
with the creation or dissemination of culture."
--
Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
1982, p. 96
"Jews in America are a power
group; is it unreasonable for some
people to ask whether Jews have too much power?"
-- Jerome Chanes, Jewish scholar, [in Weiss,
p. 32]
"We Jews still prepare ourselves
to fight the things the world
plans on doing to us. It ain't true ... Jews are not victims.
We are
the players." -- J. J. Goldberg
[in Silverstein, B., p. 5]
Transcending religion, race, or any other
traditional Judaic reference, modern American Jewry is often described these
days as a voluntary (from the perspective of the individual, not the community,
which claims Jews by birth to the "community of fate") polity, a secular organizational
network with emphasis upon social, educational, economic and political activism. It is an organization that unifies atheists
and the religious, rich and the less affluent, Sephardim, Ashkenazi, and any
other self-defined "Jew" within a communal solidarity to Jewish
"peoplehood" and its four unifying pillars of Jewish identity: 1)
belief in a communal identity of historic persecution and victimhood and the
uniqueness of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, 2) belief in the omnipresent
threat of an irrational anti-Semitism, 3) allegiance to the modern state of
Israel, and 4) a dedication to helping others Jews.
The secular Jewish polity is a very adjusted
model of the old obsolete "kehillah" self-governing organization
that the Jewish community in Europe used to mediate with -- and distance itself
from -- the surrounding non-Jewish people and cultures. While today's Jewish
polity is world's apart in method and structure from the old institution,
its purpose for existence today has moved towards what is was in ancient times:
Jewish people distinct from, and often at the expense of, others. (Since the
late 1960s, there has been a major shift in fundamental American Jewish attitudes:
from helping fellow Jews assimilate fully into American mainstream society,
to its polar opposite: massive amounts of money raised to support all aspects
of "being Jewish.”) [SINGER,
p. 220] The largest and best known expression of this polity is the United
Jewish Appeal, an entity that has some 225 "federation'" sub-branches
throughout the country. (In 1999, the UJA merged with other groups to form
the "United Jewish Communities.") Such organizations claim a supportive
base of 95% of all Jews in America. [WOOCHER] (One UJA fundraising brochure
summed up its sense of itself by stating that "the programs of [our]
agencies ... are not merely organizational endeavors, even 'good works' ...
they are expressions of the essential meaning of Jewishness." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 19]) By 1980, 4,600 "key leaders" traveled to Israel that year
alone on UJA "missions." [SILBERMAN, p. 198]]
Still other Jewish polity expressions (what
Daniel Elazar describes as "government-like institutions" [ELAZAR,
p. 217] include B'nai Brith (and its Anti-Defamation League), Haddassah, the
American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council
for Jewish Women, and a variety of overtly Zionist organizations, most linked
to the American Zion Federation. The central Jewish lobbying organ for Israel
is the American Israel Political Action Committee -- AIPAC. By 1982 Jewish
Americans had "no less than 340 national organizations." [KREFETZ,
p. 71] More than eighty were expressly Zionist or other pro-Israeli groups.
[WAXMAN, p. 134]
This modern American Jewish polity is often
noted as a quintessential "civil religion," a secular belief system
that elicits deeply-felt allegiance of religious depth and proportion. "It
has become a commonplace in recent years," notes Peter Novick, "that
Israel and the Holocaust are the twin pillars of American Jewish 'civil religion'
-- the symbols that bind together Jews in the United States whether they are
believers or nonbelievers, on the political right, left, or center."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 147] (The modern Jewish attachment to Judaism as a formal
religion in most of the twentieth century has been weak. A 1971 study revealed
that only 17% of American Jews attended religious services more than once
a month; this was in comparison to 65% of non-Jews who did so). [FORSTER,
p. 128] As in any religion, the secular Jewish polity beliefs are articles
of faith. They need not make logical sense to an outside observer; even some
of its adherents may recognize -- and struggle to resolve -- various incongruencies,
paradoxes, and hypocrisies in its central tenets. As the Random House dust
jacket blurb noted for James Yaffe's 1968 volume The American Jews: Portrait
of a Split Personality, "no people on earth are more riddled by contradictions
than the American Jews." [YAFFE, 1968]
These inconsistencies largely stem from
Jewish attempts to rationalize their traditional (and current) notions of
their exalted selves as the Chosen People in the context of a modern western
society that socializes against such chauvinism, a pan-human perspective that
most Jews themselves give public lip service. Jewish reluctance to surrender,
however, (whatever form of) their self-perceived hereditary specialness as
central to Jewish identity has created for some a lingering moral and psychological
dilemma, one that the Jewish polity resolves by dissimulation and/or equivocation,
by enforcing the preposterous and paradoxical Jewish myth that it is Jewish
chauvinistic exceptionality itself that created the notion of pan-human universality.
"[The Jewish polity believes that] America is, after all, created in
their [Jewish] image," says Jonathan Woocher, "and in pursuing the
civil Jewish version of Jewish destiny, they are merely reinforcing the terms
of America's own understanding." [WOOCHER, p. 102]
"Whether Jews define themselves as
'just Jewish,' 'ethnic Jews,' 'nonreligious Jews,' or some other phrase that
classified them as more assimilated," noted Gary Tobin in 1988, "most
know that they are different from other Americans.... [TOBIN, p. 70] ... For
most Jews, there continues to be a 'them' and an 'us,' even though the 'us'
is in some ways part of the 'them' ... [TOBIN, p. 73] ... The majority of
American Jews continue to struggle to maintain their separate identity."
[TOBIN, p. 74] "Despite their strong desire for integration into American
society," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1972, "Jews do not, on the whole
intermarry and do maintain themselves apart. How to resolve this contradiction
is one of the major dilemmas of Judaism in America." [GLAZER, p. 10]
This "contradiction" is clearly
manifest in the very principles of Jewish identity that are diametrically
opposed to the founding principles of Americanism. As Adam Garfinkle observes:
"The principle of individualist equality
that flows from American
sacred texts and the American experience
cannot be reconciled with
the hierarchical, communal principle
that flows from halakhah,
Jewish religious law. Many try and
some claim success, but
'success' is mere illusion. Most American
Jews have two religions
the way some men have one wife and
one mistress, or some women
one husband and one lover. It is a
condition that can be managed,
learned from, even enjoyed, some times
for long periods. But it can
never be brought to true reconciliation."
[GARFINKLE, p. 4]
After
a 1950s survey of American Jews, researcher Joseph Adelson noted the "confusion"
some Jews had in grappling with stereotypes about Jews that seemed to them
to be true, all centering on the contradictions of Jewish identity and "self-hatred"
(i.e., self-criticism):
"It
should be emphasized that the nonauthoritarian [a 1950s-era term for the
non-prejudiced] are not free from conflicts
and confusions about being Jewish;
indeed, they frequently seem more disturbed
than do the authoritarian [i.e.,
"prejudiced" Jews who put
stock in some stereotypes], in part because of a
lesser rigidity of defense and in part
because their political beliefs are often at
variance with underlying feelings concerning
Jewishness [the human universalist/Jewish
chauvinist tension].
It is doubtful whether many individuals, Jewish or Gentile, can
completely
avoid incorporating our society's stereotype of the Jew. The point is
that the authoritarian Jew accepts
the stereotype and recasts it to meet the
circumstance of his Jewishness; the
nonauthoritarian Jew rejects its validity,
fights its existence within himself,
and is sometimes ridden by guilt when he
unable to do so completely." [ADLESON,
J., 1960, p. 479]
Zalman Posner, in championing the Orthodox
Chabad Lubavitcher religious world view and bemoaning the fact that there
are too many secular Jews who have been misguided by concepts of human universalism,
addresses the religious root in the conflict between "Christian"
identity and Jewry's traditionally separatist, and intolerant, core:
"I suggest that the American Jew conceives
of religion and discusses it in
Christian terms. He grapples with religious
difficulties, because
a Jew must examine Judaism, but he does so
with Christian categories. His conflict
is not necessarily a Jewish one, but one of reconciling
divergent viewpoints,
the Jewish and the Christian, that were never
intended to be reconciled, for
they represent thoroughly different values."
[POSNER, Z., p. 31]
Stephen Steinlight, a former American Jewish
Committee official, observes that
"Jews regularly identify with 'belief
in social justice' as the second most important
factor in their Jewish identity; it is trumped
only by a 'sense of peoplehood.' It also
explains the long Jewish involvement in and flirtation
with Marxism. But it is
fair to say that Jewish universalistic tendencies
and tribalism have always existed
in an uneasy dialectic. We are at once the
most open of peoples and one second
to none in intensity of national feeling.
Having made this important distinction, it
must
be admitted that the essence of the process of my [Jewish] nationalist training
was to inculcate the belief that the primary division
in the world was between 'us'
and
'them.' Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang
those anthems, usually with real feeling,
but it was clear where our primary loyalty was
meant
to reside." [STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"The American Jew,"says Charles Liebman,
"is torn between two sets of values -- those of integration and acceptance
into American society and those of Jewish group survival. Those values appear
to me to be incompatible." [LIEBMAN, C., THE AMBIVALENT ..., p. vii;
QUOTED IN O'BRIEN, 2000] As Paul Cowan once underscored about his renewed
Jewish identity, and the distinctness between that and being American:
"Until 1976, when I was thirty-six, I had always identified as an American
Jew. Now I am an American and a Jew. I live at once in the years 1982 and
5743, the Jewish year in which I am publishing this book." [COWAN,
P., 1982, p. 3]
"Every prayer and ritual observance
in Judaism,” says Arthur Koestler, "proclaims membership to an ancient
race, which automatically separates the Jew from the racial and historic past
of the people whose midst he lives." [KOESTLER, p. 287] "Above all," says rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, "the otherness of Jewish law as something given by God and interpreted
by authoritative rabbis runs counter to the fundamental thought of modernity."
[SACKS, J. p. 157] "Traditional views of the Gentile and the fear of
anti-Semitism persist," wrote Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen in 1990,
".... This sense of estrangement from the non-Jew and fear of the non-Jew
remain not only for Israelis and not only for those most deeply committed
to the Jewish tradition." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 40]
Edward Bernard Glick notes his people's tradtional
identity like this:
"The Jewish people (as the American
dictionary calls them), dos yiddische folk
(as Yiddish speakers refer to themselves), and
am yisrael or ha'am ha'yehudi
(as Hebrew speakers refer to the concept) denote
a transnational, multilingual,
historical, and religious group which professes
a oneness, a unity, a whole, a
solidarity, and a partnership that predates
by millenia the modern Jewish state.
The concept applies to all Jews in the world,
whether they realize it or not,
whether they want it or not, and whether they
they like it or not. For Jewish
peoplehood is Judaism, which is a religion
in the gentile sense. And the proof
of this is that no other religious group in
the world so steadily and so steadfastly
calls itself a people. Do the multifarous denominations
of American Protestantism,
concerned
as they may be with the fate of foreign Protestants, call themselves the
Methodist people, the Baptist people, the Episcopalian
people, or the Presbyterian
people? Do American Catholics ... call themselves
the Catholic people, even though
catholic is
a synonym for universal? Do American Muslims, American Hindus, and
American
Buddhists use the word in reference to their creeds? No." [GLICK, E.,
1982, p. 125]
As large numbers of Jews left the hearts
of big cities over the years, in 1959 Rabbi Albert Gordon's study called Jews
in Suburbia noted that "Jews seldom come to know non-Jews any better
in suburbia than they did in the big city ... To what extent is this condition
the result of Jewish self-segregation? Scrutinizing each of the communities
in this study with this question in mind, I discovered first of all that ...
their closest friendships are reserved for other Jews who have the same community,
class, synagogual and organizational interests. This primary friendship is
natural -- and characteristic of every kind of suburb." [GORDON, A.,
p. 170] Arthur Hertzberg notes that
in post-World War II America, "even those Jews who affirmed neither religious
nor ethnic identity admitted that they were most comfortable with other Jews.
Even the most 'anti-Jewish' Jews reported that at least four out of five of
their friends were Jews. This was true even of people of Jewish origin who
had converted to one of the branches of Christianity. Jewish businessmen and
professionals ... did business much of the time with Americans of all origins
and persuasions. They lunched often with their customers or clients, but they
went home to have dinner and play cards, or to play golf on weekends, or to
go to the theater or symphony, with other Jews." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989,
p. 325]
"In one study," noted Susan Schneider
in the 1980s, "78% of the Jews (as compared to 14% of Protestants) say
that they have 'regular interactions' with at least five households of [their]
relatives. What may be a uniquely Jewish way of keeping the kinship ties is
the 'cousins' club,' meeting regularly to create family networks that reinforce
every member's sense of belonging, of having a reference group or 'home room'
even in adulthood." [SCHNEIDER, p. 265] "Jews appear to be, by origin
and authentic nature, a tribe," says Jewish author Eric Kahler, "a
primordial social structure and hence, in spite of their dispersion the closest
related of historical communities, closer related among each other than the
locally associated members of a modern nation." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p.
10-11]
By scholarly -- or any other -- accounts,
the Jewish tradition of a clannish collectivism and communal self-promotive
unity -- religiously or otherwise -- endures for most Jews today. "The
American Jewish community is cohesive," wrote Alan Zuckerman in 1991,
"... Because most American Jews occupy distinctive niches in the general
social, economic, and political structure of the United States, each Jew makes
decisions about friends, husband or wife, neighbors, workmates, and political
associates from a set of persons, most of whom are Jews... [ZUCKERMAN, p.
15] ... The ties of residential concentration and social class place the American
Jewish community into a distinctive niche in the general society." [ZUCKERMAN,
p. 22] "The community of class and status among Jews," says Calvin
Goldscheider, [and] occupational concentration and educational achievement
at high levels [results] in [Jewish] social bonds, economic networks, and
common lifestyles and interests ... [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 135].. . The common
assumption that increased levels of education and occupation would lead to
assimilation of the American Jewish community [into mainstream society] ...
seems to be unfounded. An examination of the empirical evidence has pointed
to the very opposite conclusion. The uniqueness of the stratification profile
and the distinctive social mobility patterns of American Jews mark Jews off
from others and binds Jews to each other." [GOLDSCHEIDER, p. 136] "The commonality of class and status among
Jews," agrees Esther Wilder, "is distinctive and results in social
bonds, economic networks, common lifestyles and interests." [WILDER,
6-96]
"In America as elsewhere," noted
Benjamin Ginsberg in 1994, "... Jews are outsiders who are often more
successful than their hosts ... And, to make matters worse, Jews often, secretly
or not so secretly, conceive themselves to be morally and intellectually superior
to their neighbors." [GINZBURG, p. 8] "To be a Jew," wrote
Eugene Borowitz in the 1970s," means to have a bond with every other
Jew -- and somehow know how to find him." [SILBERMAN, p. 76] "In
social intercourse with other Jews," says Theodore Reik, "informality
and familiarity form a kind of inner security, a 'we-feeling.' They know each
other and there are not many things which need to be explained. Meeting and
speaking with other Jews is accompanied by the feeling that they are 'my kind
of people.' It is what [Sigmund] Freud calls 'the clear awareness of an inner
identity, the secret of the same inner construction.'" [REIK, T., 1962,
p. 228-229]
Early in his acting career, Marlon Brando
recalls walking with a Jewish friend in New York City:
"There was a woman in front of us with
blond hair wearing a mink
coat and we were talking about her, when
Caroline said, 'She's
Jewish.' I asked, 'How do you know?' She
answered, 'Well, it's
because ... I don't know, she's just Jewish.'
I said, 'You mean to
say, just because she has blond hair and
a mink --" She interrupted,
'Look, I'm a Jew, and I know what Jews are
like from the front,
back, side or top.' 'Well, how can you tell
a Jew from a non-Jew?'
She replied, 'Well, you have to be Jewish
to know that.' I was
stunned, and I thought Caroline had remarkable
powers of
perception." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994,
p. 75]
Erich Kahler recalls and incident involving
a fellow Jew (poet Richard Beer-Hofmann) in Berlin:
"His face was wrapped in a woolen scarf
[against the cold] so that
only his eyes could be seen. An old orthodox
Jew in his caftan came
down the stairs and stopped him. 'The gentleman
is one of us (Der
Herr ist einer von uns),' he said to Beer-Hofmann,
'he will tell me
how I can get to the Nollendorfplatz.' The
eyes alone were enough
to reveal a Jew to a Jew." [KAHLER,
E., 1967, p. 6]
Former New York Times Executive Editor
Max Frankel notes the following in his autobiography:
"The best reporters and editors normally
have no race, sex, or religion. They
may charm or muscle their way into strange
places, but they try not to THINK
male or female, black or Jewish. Still, there
always comes a time for exceptions.
I remember reliving the shudders of refugee
life at the sight of Hungarians trudging
across
a frozen frontier swamp. I never totally banished that twinge of smug American
security when interviewing high-ranking
Germans. And there's no denying the
conspiratorial
bond that suddenly appeared when an old man on a park bench in Kiev
whispered,
BIST AH YID? Are you a Jew? was a question often put to me, and
with decidedly different inflections. In Communist
countries, it came from Jews
who meant thereby to ask whether they could
trust me with seditious conversation.
In Israel, it was asked to discover whether
I would ever put my feelings for the Jewish
state
ahead of my journalistic mission. Now that I had charge of editorials at the
Times, the question was usually hurled
with contempt; I was obviously a Jew, but
in the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy
one for daring to criticize the Israeli
government.
So whenever I turned to the subject of Israel, there was no escaping
my skin." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 397]
"Jewish civilization should have vanished
a long time ago," says Henry Feingold, "that it did not and does
not may also be part of Jewish exceptionalism. It may well be that Judaism
is governed by different rules ... Jews are a subgroup in this dynamic society;
but they are also more Jewish, as measured by the concern for Jewish people
throughout the world." [FEINGOLD, p. 52] "90% [of American Jews]
claim to feel 'very close' or 'fairly close' to other Jews," noted Alan
Zuckerman in 1991, " ... Even when they select non-Jews [as spouses and
friends], most Jews have strong ties which pull them back to the Jewish community."
[ZUCKERMAN, p. 27] "The Jews," noted Jonathan Rieder in his
study of Jews and Italians in a section of Brooklyn, "had a pronounced
feeling of ethnic honor, another sign of their willingness to invest in loyalties
beyond the nuclear family. The articulateness of Jewish identity, and the
capacity for immersion in the collective experience of Jewish suffering, ran
contrary to the muteness of Canarasie Italians about their ethnicity."
[REIDER, J., 1985, p. 46]
In 1993 Joel Kotkin noted that "an
estimated 50 per cent or more of American Jews send their children to an ethnic
school, and over three-quarters of young men undergo the traditional bar mitzvah
ceremony. In contrast, counterpart systems promoting specifically Italian
or German language, culture, and history largely have disappeared in most
major countries of immigration. Even among inter-married couples ... a large
majority claim that most of their friends were Jews." [KOTKIN, p. 35]
In 1988 eight of ten American Jews still participated in some sort of yearly
Passover ritual. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN,
p. 6] One study showed that as late as the 1970s, "96% of American Jews
only had Jewish relatives, 77% had all their closest friends as Jews, 60%
belonged to Jewish community organizations, virtually all of them gave to
Jewish charities, and 90% felt a strong attachment to Israel." [FORSTER,
p. 129]
In a 1982 study of the American Jewish community,
"61% of the respondents reported that 'all,' 'almost all,' or 'most'
of their friends were Jewish. "About two-thirds of American Jews still
form their closest friendships with other Jews," noted Stephen Whitfield
in 1988, "The process of acculturation may have blurred distinctions
between Jews and their gentile neighbors, but a sense of peoplehood has not
been entirely suppressed." [WHITFIELD, AM, p. 6] In 1988 Gary Tobin could still write that "a
study of the Jewish population of New York City found 70% of respondents saying
that all of their three close friends are Jewish." [TOBIN, p. 69] In
a 1990 survey of American Jews, 60% selected the statement "I see the
Jewish people as an extension of my family"; only 23% disagreed. 74%
agreed that "As a Jew I have a special responsibility to help other Jews";
only 14% disagreed. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 18] (Jews in Russia? Jewish scholar
Zvi Gitelman in 1994 "found that Jews overwhelmingly reported that their
closest friends were Jewish." [SACKS, M., 1998, p. 264]
"No matter where I was," says
Ze'ev Chafets, about his travels across America in 1986, "-- in a Jewish
farm town in New England or a black synagogue in Queens, in a gay temple in
San Francisco or among the Jews of the Louisiana bayou -- I always felt at
home. I came to the United States feeling like an Israeli; I left reminded
that I am also, as a friend in Detroit put it, an MOT -- a Member of the Tribe."
[CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 8-9]
Stephen Bloom notes his enduring Jewish identity this
way:
"Despite the lack of Jewish worship and
observance, and my family's total
assimilation into everything American and secular,
we were thoroughly Jewish
as was our very essence. The world was split
into two distinct halves: Jews
and gentiles. Jews were always sought in business
or social dealings over
gentiles. A common expresion used by Jews to
describe a slow, dense
person
was -- and still is -- 'He's got a goyisher kop,' which literally means
'He's got a gentile head' but figuratively means
'slow-witted.' First question
when I came home and boasted of making a new
friend was 'Is he Jewish?'
'God forbid!' (my father's expression) if I
should ever go out with a gentile
girl, and 'Oy vey!' (which literally means 'Oh,
pain!') if I ever got serious
with her. All my parents' friends were Jews."
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 63]
"This
clannishness, as it appears to others," says Charles Silberman, "is
rooted in the sense of destiny that Jews the world over share with one another
-- a destiny that has some transcendent (and transcendental) significance."
[SILBERMAN, p. 76] ("The destiny of the Jewish people," writes Jean
Francois Steiner, " ... no earthly power has ever been able to defeat."
[HOWE, p. 445]) This clustering, in the largest sense, has a very geographical
flavor; over 95% of American Jews congregate in cities and nearby suburbs;
in fact, 80% of them live in only ten population centers -- New York City
and Los Angeles are the two largest. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 6] A
third of all American Jews live in the New York-New Jersey area. [SILBIGER,
S., 2000, p. 5] (City-wise, by 1999, the greater Miami Jewish population,
about 653,000 people, ranked second only behind New York City). [BELKIN, D.,
5-6-99] Linking modern Jewish American geography to their roots in a separatist
ghetto past, in 1978 Nachum Goldmann added that "even today Jews have
a tendency to live in a neighborhood of their own, in an environment that
facilitates the life of their community." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66]
[Click here for world geography of the Jews] (American
Jews are overwhelmingly of Eastern European background. By the late 1950s,
more than four-fifths were estimated to be of Eastern European descent). [GRINSTEIN,
H., 1959, p. 73]
In London, England, the Jewish Chronicle noted in
2002 the results of a local survey:
"London Jews also like to be near other Jews. More than 97 per cent in
North and North West London say they know of another Jewish resident in the
same street, while more than half (two-thirds in the North West) have a next-door
Jewish neighbor. More than 80 per cent in the North East, and more than 90
per cent in the North West, have a Jewish neighbour within three doors away."
[JEWISH CHRONICLE, 12-6-02, p. 31] [Note: South London percentages are much, much smaller
-- poorer part of town?]
Decades earlier, the descendants of other
peoples who had immigrated to America with the last major Jewish wave had
already assimilated into American culture. In 1964, Arthur Hertzberg was noting
that "the grandchildren of the Italians, the Slavs and the rest have
become completely assimilated culturally ... The ... European immigrants of
the last century have failed to provide Jews with a parallel for their devotion
to some continuity for their own subculture." [HERTZBERG, p. 287]
James Yaffe notes that
"In 1962 AJC [the American Jewish
Committee] studied the Jewish
community in Baltimore and came to these
conclusions: Jewish
employees are much more likely to work
for Jewish employers;
although most Jews claim they don't care
what religion their doctor
or lawyer professes, they nevertheless
use Jewish doctors 95 percent
of the time and Jewish lawyers 87 percent
of the time; the great majority
of them say that it doesn't matter to them
if their children go to a school
that has only Jewish pupils in it -- yet
90 percent send their children to
schools which are predominantly Jewish."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 65]
In 1973, Harry Golden noted that:
"Affluence and the census explain two
of the obvious characteristics
of Jewish mobility: when Jews move, they
all move at once and they
all want to move to the same place. For Jews
want the enclave. They
cluster." [GOLDEN, H., 1973, p. 43]
This clustering has a transnational flavor.
As Harold Troper noted about the Jews of Canada in 1999:
"Even today, no other ethnic group
in Canada is as institutionally
complete, nor does any other group have
a comparable degree of
communal self-awareness, as measured by
knowledge of organizations
and leaders, voluntarism and reading of
the ethnic press, community
fund raising, and individual self-identification.
Compared to most other
groups, and certainly compared to other
ethno-European groups, Jews
are a highly identified, unassimilated group
... Many Jews in Canada
demonstrate a deeply held feeling of mutual
interdependence and
transnational identification with Jews everywhere
that defies any
explanation." [TROPER, H., 1999, p.
228, 232]
This is what the Jewish Chronicle
noted about London Jews, as reported by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research,
in 2002:
"80 per cent had watched a programme of Jewish interest [in the past
year], 53 per cent had read a book on a Jewish topic, while just 10 per cent
had not participated in any kind Jewish cultural activity or bought a piece
of Judaica of any kind. A third had attended a Jewish lecture, and one in
five a synagogue adult-education programme; 24 per cent had been to a Jewish
film, theatre or music event; and 24 per cent had visited a Jewish museum
outside the UK. Around 60 per cent had been to at least one Jewish educational
or cultural event ... More than half of those surveyed had done some type
of voluntary work for their synagogue or another Jewish organisation in the
past year ... As many as 13 per cent had served as a trustee on a Jewish charit
... Forty-six per cent attached highest priority to Jewish causes in the UK;
20 per cent to general British charities; 14 per cent to Israel; and 11 per
cent equally to Jewish and Israeli charities [i.e., noted that 71% of Jews
placed higher priority on Judeo-centric welfare over pan-British welfare,
which received only a 20% priority figure] ... 'What is absolutely apparent,'
the report comments, 'is that London Jews have long sinced ceased to comprise
a religious group. They are truly an ethnie (ethnic group) within British
society, with shared historical memories, a myth of common ancestry ... and
an overall sense of solidarity ... More than 90 per cent think it important
for their children to mix with in Jewish social groups, and 89 per cent are
willing to send their children on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly high"
figure, the report notes, given the conflict in the Middle East." [JEWISH
CHRONICLE, 12-6-2002, p. 31]
Jonathan Woocher, in his volume about the
Jewish American polity, notes that: "The civil religion knows that the
goals of Jewish group survival and social integration [with mainstream American
society] are indeed in tension. Civic Judaism's world view and ethos in fact
incorporates a host of assertions which are potentially contradictory."
These include the Jewish insistence that they are "under siege"
while they enjoy unprecedented freedom, prosperity, and opportunity in America,
the notion that all Jews are "one people" when in fact they are
-- in modern times -- as diverse as any other group in every possible manner
(except perhaps, throughout most of the world, for their usual similarities
in relatively high income and social status), the idea that the modern state
of Israel is their "home" when they have perfectly fine homes here
(indeed, homes that are even "safer" than the Jewish ones overseas),
the common secular Jewish belief that Judaism's distinctive ideals are social
justice, equality, et al when mainstream American society's ideals are (and
have always been since the founding of the nation) no different, and the expending
of so much time, energy, and money on themselves as Jews (much of it internationally)
when the American social contract expects a foremost Jewish responsibility to
their fellow Americans (or simply fellow humans) as equal members of the American
polity. "Civic Judaism," notes Woocher, "is ... a religion
of thorough-going ambivalence, of paradox, and inconsistency." [WOOCHER,
p. 98] We might also add the fact
that Jews portray themselves always as victims, when they are in fact the
wealthiest and most influential ethnic group in America.
While, David Davis, a Jewish professor
at Yale can, like most American Jews, completely mythologize Jewish history
as "a testing ground for American ideals, especially the ideal of apportioning
rewards according to individual merit as opposed to hereditary privilege or
ethnic identity," [DAVIS, D., p. 27] another Jewish professor, Adam Garfinkel,
states more honestly, and bluntly, that "the underlying harmony between
Jewish and American values vanishes upon close inspection." [GARFINKLE,
p 5]
Concerned about his peoples' modern schizophrenic
identity, Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner wrote:
"Why American Jews sustain the
contradictory position of deeming
the state of Israel to be critical
to their own existence as a distinctive,
self-sustaining group in American
society, and also insisting that
they and their future find permanent
place within American society,
has to be worked out. Here is a strange
civil religion ... What is
puzzling is not that political events
-- the destruction of a group, the
formation of a national state --
should generate dislocation in society
and so in people's imagination. It
is that the state of dislocation
should be made into a permanent and,
if truth be told, normative
condition of a group." [NEUSNER,
STRANGER, p. 3]
Among the most disturbing paradoxes, however
(one not lost to many Jews, but rarely addressed publicly) is the one that
James Madison foresaw in the very establishing of the American constitution.
In a free society of competing ideas and interests, there is always the inevitable
danger that a powerful "faction" (or factions) could successfully coagulate
to disbalance the fullest expression of pluralistic opinion and subvert the
idealized democratic process. The obvious example of this is the innocent
"one person, one vote" democratic principle which is a trivial cosmetic
to hide the powerful economic interests that function offstage where real political power, influence,
and decision-making lies. Ironically, in the honing of the modern liberal
American state of multicultural and pluralistic tolerance (which Jews were
influential in demanding, to the letter of the law, in recent decades) the
conditions were established whereby American Jewry could launch itself as
a minority "superpower," to the inevitable detriment of others in
the American social experiment, Arabs, and those in other parts of the Third
World, and at the expense of the very pluralistic ideals which Jews have exploited
to chauvinist ends. In the American cultural tradition of "rugged individualism,"
the relentless Jewish collectivist entity -- economic, political, and social
-- could, and is, vanquishing all foes in its aim of Jewish exclusionist allegiances,
an aim that ironically seeks to bend the full American polity to the Jewish
exclusionist will. This aim has thus far been successful, especially per American
popular views toward the modern state of Israel. Part of the strategy (intentionally
or de facto) is to weaken all competing unification efforts by potentially
larger non-Jewish polities; numerically weaker ones (i.e., "minorities")
have served as Jewish allies in so far as the Jewish polity may lead them
to expressly Jewish goals and benefits. In recent history other American ethnic
groups -- particularly Blacks -- have rebelled against Jewish hegemony in
the modern contesting tribal battles called multiculturalism, which Jews were
instrumental in creating to protect their own "particularism."
Indeed, the modern American milieu of "cultural
pluralism" (laid bare, the celebration of ethnic ethnocentrism as a foundation
of the American cultural milieu) affords the American Jewish community the
safest framework for its own expression of global Jewish nationalism. Zionism,
the modern secular ideology of transnational Jewish allegiance (a hard-core
political creed and not merely
a champion of Jewish "culture"), owes much of its success to its
careful nurturing amidst America's Jewry and American society at-large. An
Israeli professor of history, Allon Gal, notes that
"A major characteristic of American
Zionist ideology is its acceptance
of the concept that has become known as
'cultural pluralism' ... This
philosophy ... has typified American Zionist
thought since the early
twentieth century ... True, the focus
of Zionist interest has been on
building an autonomous Jewish community
in Palestine. But the
successful development of the Jewish community
in America and its
constructive relationship with the pluralistic
society at large have always
loomed large in American Zionist thought
and deed. Living in
democratic and pluralistic America,
Zionists
looked for a
general American rationale for creating the Jewish state against many
heavy
odds." [GAL, p. 20]
"Pluralism," remarks Kevin MacDonald,
"serves internal Jewish [American] interests because it legitimizes the
internal Jewish interests in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest
in Jewish group commitments and non-assimilation." [MCDONALD, INVOLVEMENT,
p. 296] The Jew in America, warned Israel's first prime minister David Ben
Gurion, "faces death by a kiss -- a slow and imperceptible decline into
the abyss of assimilation." [WEYL, N., 1968, p 293-294] "Solomon
Schechter," noted Allon Gal, "the chief architect of Conservative
Judaism [one of the major branches of the faith today], supported Zionism
in 1906 mainly 'as the great bulwark against assimilation.'" [GAL, A.,
1986, p. 376]
Jews have been the foremost activists in molding
public institutions and opinon towards what is today called "political
correctness," intergroup "tolerance," the celebration of
ethnic differences, and and multiculturalism. "While the intergroup
relations field included representatives of various racial, religious, and
ethnic communities," notes Stuart Svonkin,
"Jewish organizations played the leading
role indefining the movements tactics and
objectives. Among the Jewish agencies that
became involved in intergroup
relations, the American Jewish Committee (AJC),
the Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith (ADL), and the American Jewish
Congress (AJC) were the most
active and influiential. These three national
secular agencies aspired to function
as the Jewish community's department of state
formulating and implementing
policies to shape American Jewry's relations
with other American communities
... The AJCongress explicitly favored cultural
pluralism and strongly supported
Jewish nationalism. These two commitments
were closely connected; Horace
Kallen, who deveoped the theory of cultural
pluralism, was himself an
ardent champion of both the AJCongress and
American Zionism."
[SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 1, 23]
This man, Kallen, most credited with the
conception and development of cultural pluralism
(the ethnocentric vehicle by which Zionism could unobjectionably thrive
in the United States) was an American Jewish professor, most active in the
teens and 1920s. He argued a sharp
distinction between "nationality" (being Jewish) and "citizenship"
(being American). [SCHMIDT, p. 38] One author calls Kallen "the grandfather
of multiculturalism;" his important collection of essays was entitled
Culture and Democracy in the United States. "Although the ideas
contained within it had little impact at the time," says John Miller,
"they became enormously influential later in the century. Horace Kallen
was the first multiculturalist." [MILLER, p. 80]
Kallen was also so great a Zionist that
he was the "leader and guiding spirit" of "an elite secret
society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for 'Pharisee' and 'separatist.'"
[GROSE, p. 54, 53] "You will
be subject," stated the inductor in the Parushim swearing-in ceremony,
"to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time,
in any place, and at any cost." [SCHMIDT, p. 77] Kallen wrote to the
prominent German Zionist, Max Nordeau, in 1914, saying, "[I] t happened
to be my turn to lead the secret organization here in America which is aiming
to turn the Zionist movement in a political direction, from within. Our order
is called Parushim ... Our present purpose is one of quiet propaganda and
education in 'the political idea' ... It is our desire and plan to organize
brotherhoods all over the world." [SCHMIDT, p. 79] "[A]n organization
which has the aims we have," Kallen wrote to a fellow American Zionist
leader, "must work silently, and through education and infection rather
than through force and noise." [SCHMIDT, p. 83] Under great influence of Kallen's thinking
was a Jewish United States Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis (who was
also the eventual director of the Federation of American Zionists). "Certainly
Kallen wished to 'instruct' Brandeis," notes Sarah Schmidt, "and
perhaps, covertly, even to manipulate him. But Kallen's preference was for
the role of anonymous, self-effacing string puller." [SCHMIDT, p. 85]
"Against those powerful Jews who argued
that a Jewish nationalism was unpatriotic and seditious," notes Kevin
Avruch, "Brandeis put forth the contrary notion: 'Zionism is the Pilgrim
inspiration and impulse over again.'" [AVRUCH, K., 1981, p. 30]
Using the idea of cultural pluralism to
buttress his Zionist arguments, Horace Kallen, notes David Levering Lewis,
"rejected assimilation and proposed instead that Jews retain their 'racial'
uniqueness, the better to enrich American society." [HERTZBERG, p. 283, LEWIS p. 553] Henry Feingold notes that:
"Writing in the definitive Harvard
Encyclopedia of American Ethnic
Groups, Philip Gleason finds
a 'racialist' dimension in Kallen's
approach to the pluralism idea and suggests
that the number of Jewish
thinkers attracted to the notion --
Franz Boas, Mordecai Kaplan, and
others -- has the earmarks of a Jewish
intellectual conspiracy to create
space for a Jewish culture. There may
be some truth in that idea ... The
legitimacy of Zionism would not have
been established without the
ideological rationale put forward by
the cultural pluralists."
[FEINGOLD, p. 54]
Kallen wrote that "[human associations]
have constituted communities tending to preserve and to sustain the continuity
of the physical stock. Empirically, race is nothing more than this continuity
confirmed and enchanneled in basic social inheritances. It is hardly distinguishable
from nationality." [in MILLER, J., p. 84] He also asserted that "men may change
their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies,
to a greater or less extent; they cannot change their grandfathers."
[BIALE, D., 1998, p. 25] Elsewhere, Kallen addressed the idea of anti-Semitism
as the veritable foundation of Jewish identity: "Anti-Semitism imposes
a unity upon Jews whether they like it or not ... Only by working together
may each be better defended than if he worked alone. This fact should guide
Jewish education ... It has to recognize that Jews are members of one another;
that each Jew carries a responsibility, not only as an individual but as a
member of a group called Jews." [KALLEN, 1954, p. 188-189]
Working for decades for acceptance in American
society at-large, many Jews have even deceptively championed -- for popular
consumption -- Judeo-centric Zionism,
however incongruously, as a universalistic
creed. As Allon Gal observes
"American Zionist thinkers emphasized
the non-nationalist or
'higher' social and ethical goals as the
fulfillment of Zionism;
the rationale of Zionism was perceived as
it service to the
betterment of mankind. In pure form this
ideology held that
serving the human race was the only, or
the chief test of
Zionism." [GAL, 1986, p. 363]
The
notion of a "mission" to serve humanity (although there is absolutely
no evidence that Zionism has ever benefited anyone on earth but Jews) blended
well with American democratic ideals and self-conceptions. With the acceptance
of cultural pluralism and its institution into the American social fabric,
notes Peter Grose, "the way lay open ... to link Jewish group identity,
through Zionism, to the American Dream." [GROSE, p. 55] "Once Kallen
became convinced that the American Zionist movement was developing in accord
with his ideas," notes Sarah Schmidt, "he began to use his contacts
with the non-Jewish media as 'propagandists' for the Zionist cause."
[SCHMIDT, p. 93]
(By World War II, Zionist propagandistic
activities had enormously grown and accelerated. As Zionist historian Melvin
Urofsky notes: "The Zionists, throughout the war period, carefully cultivated
Christian America. From a standpoint of practical politics alone, the Zionists
recognized that only if the larger community supported their aims would they
be able to influence government policy. A minority, no matter how effacious
its propaganda or skillful public relations, no matter how many important
contacts it has made, cannot affect American foreign policy unless it either
neutralizes the majority or wins it over to active support of its cause."
[UROFSKY, 1978, p. 35] )
Yet even an American environment of mutually
tolerant ethnicities is not what traditional Jewish identity really seeks.
Zionism is not only interested in "foreign policy." As Arthur Hertzberg
wrote in a B'nai B'rith publication in 1964:
"[Cultural pluralism] has not ...
succeeded in achieving its very patent
'Jewish' purpose, to reorganize America
in such a fashion that all of its
various communities would so live their
lives that the Jews could, in the
very act of being themselves, be just
like everybody else. There are two
keys to this failure: politics and culture.
In both dimensions the Jews
have acted uniquely and not like any of
the other minorities."
[HERTZBERG, p. 284]
In other words, even in a revised American
socio-cultural system that been entirely reformed to accommodate "patent
Jewish purpose," cultural pluralism is still not enough for those Jews
who refuse to completely assimilate, it is merely a means to discretely reach
strata even more foreign to the founding principles of America: Jews implicitly
demand a special dimension of "uniqueness" -- their own caste --
outside the realm of all others in the American experiment, by which they
can connect to their Jewish brethren throughout the world.
Even Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer who is generally credited with
popularizing the term "The Melting Pot"
(the long-dead concept of America as a kind of homogenized 'soup' of
immigrant cultures) to describe American society (via his successful 1908
play of the same name), was eventually a Zionist. "He gave more and more
of his energy to this cause as time passed, and retreated from his earlier
position of racial and religious mixture." [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 289-290]
(This is what Zangwill wrote about the traditions of his own people: "Beware
of the goyim, his elders told Jacob ... They are goyim, foes of the faith, beings of darkness ... drunkards and bullies,
swift with the fist or bludgeon, many in species, but the worst of the goyim are the creatures called Christians."
[GONEN, p. 133]
Nathan Glazer still felt confident in publishing
the following in 1972 in his classic volume, American Judaism:
"There are different branches
of Judaism today, and they take
somewhat different attitudes to assimilation,
but even the most liberal
interpretation of Judaism must fight
the assimilation of the Jews ...
Jews have been prominent in the fight
to forward the assimilation of
ethnic groups ... [Yet] there comes
a time -- and it is just about upon
us -- when American Jews become aware
of a contradiction between
the kind of society America wants
it to become -- and indeed the kind
of society most Jews want it to be
-- and the demands of the Jewish
religion. This religion after all,
prohibits inter-marriage, asserts that
Jews are a people apart, and insists
that they consider themselves in
exile until God restores them to the
land of Israel." [GLAZER, p. 9]
(In a footnote Glazer partially exempts
the Reform Judaism
movement who "don't consider
themselves in exile; they do
disapprove of intermarriage.")
Richard L. Rubenstein, among many Jewish
intellectuals, increasingly echoes such entrenched "particularist"
themes (and, hence, Zionism) in the 1990s, arguing that: "The secular
humanist is most cognizant of abstract universal values that are shared with
other human beings ... [but] one must be a particular kind of person to be
a person at all. The conception of humanity in general is a meaningless and
tragic abstraction." [RUBENSTEIN, R. p. 238]
"Cultural pluralism," says Henry Feingold, "...
became part of a strategy to permit more space for the expression of Jewish
particularity ... some argue that, in its unwavering support of Israel, American
Jewry had gone beyond its bounds. If that is true, it is a measure of America's
extraordinary tolerance of American Jewry's particularity." [FEINGOLD,
p. 149] "Legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst
of a majority's host society," says Howard Sachar, "pluralism functioned
as an intellectual anchorage for an educated Jewish second generation ...
until the emergence of Zionism in the post-World War II years swept through
American Jewry with a climactic redemption fervor of its own." [MCDONALD,
p. 299]
Strident activists at all levels in shaping
American culture, Jewish organizations have long fought for open and diverse
immigration to America, mainly to divert the homogeneity of Christian culture
around them. In an increasingly diverse society, Jews are less easily singled
out for criticism or attack. "Increasing ethnic heterogeneity,"
noted Jewish activist Earl Raab, "as a result of immigration, has made
it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to
develop." [MCDONALD, p. 300] "Jewish influence on immigration policy,"
observed Kevin McDonald, "was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education,
and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation
in markers of economic success and political influence ... [Jews] were able
to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources
in pursuing their political aims." [MCDONALD, JEWISH, p. 301]
In the 1920, Horace Kallen's ideological
counterpoint, American sociologist Edward Ross, criticized "the endeavor
of Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States," [MCDONALD,
p. 319] especially in lobbying for more and more Jewish immigrations to America.
"The systematic campaign," complained Ross, "in newspapers
and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist
fears is waged by one and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National
Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications." [MCDONALD,
p. 312] (Even today, 300,000 Israeli citizens are living in America;
from a total Jewish Israeli population of about four million people, this
means that every thirteenth Israeli lives in the United States, extremely
favorable American immigration policy towards that country).
Later, as part of a concerted strategy,
notes Irving Kristol,
"Ever since the Holocaust and the
emergence of the state of Israel,
American Jews have been reaching towards
a more explicit and
meaningful Jewish identity, and have been
moving away from the
universalist secular humanism that was
so prominent a feature in their
prewar thinking. But while American Jews
want to become more Jewish,
they do not want American Christians to
become more Christian."
[in FEIN, p. 245]
Jewish deconstructive attack upon the Christian
world view may be noted more recently in an incident in 1994 when the preeminent
Jewish American "defense agency", the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai B'rith, turned on the conservative Christian community with venom, publishing
a report entitled The Religious Right: the Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism
in America. It proclaimed that the conservative Christian movement was
an "exclusionist" movement seeking to "restore what it perceived
as the ruins of a Christian nation by seeking more closely to unite its version
of Christianity with state power." [SILK, p. 296] The ADL attack caught
the Christian community by surprise. Outraged, they pointed out that their
own struggle for a voice in America was no different than anyone else’s, including
Jews.
A major focus of the ADL assault was upon
Pat Robertson, a leader of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting
Network, a man who has for years even hired a formal Jewish liaison -- Ben
Waldman -- to act on his behalf in
the Jewish community. (The head of Robertson's legal center, the American
Center for Law and Justice, is Jay Sekulow, a Christian who was born Jewish.
Another Christian, Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition,
was also born to a Jewish mother). [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 275] Robertson was
particularly outraged by the Jewish attack, and noted his stellar record in
supporting Jewish and Israeli issues. The Christian Broadcasting Network,
for example, had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Jewish
Appeal and other Jewish charities; Robertson had also lobbied American politicians
against arms sales to Arab adversaries of Israel. He even was involved in
supportive activities for convicted Jewish American spy (for Israel), Jonathan
Pollard. [SILK, p. 297] The Christian Coalition responded with its own report
that documented the inaccuracies and offenses in the ADL's efforts to stifle
Christian expressions within the context of religious pluralism, A Campaign
of Falsehoods: The Anti-Defamation
League's Defamation of Religious Conservatives.
A rare voice of reason in the Jewish community,
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, noted publications by both the ADL and the American Jewish
Committee (for example, its The Political
Activity of the Religious Right: A Critical Analysis) that defamed the
Christian community, writing:
"[The ADL] published a book filled
with unfair and untrue defamation
of religious conservatives. It contained
such unrestrained invective
as, 'The religious Right brings to the debate
over moral and social
issues a rhetoric of fear, suspicion and
even hatred.' As a rabbi and
a Jew, I was embarrassed at the tone of
both of these books. Had any
Christian association published anything
comparable about the Jewish
community, cries of anti-Semitism would
have rung out far and wide --
and been justified ... [LAPIN, D., 1999,
p. 40] ... Even a quick glance
at publications and direct-mail appeals
from the Anti-Defamation League,
American Jewish Committee, American Jewish
Congress and others,
reveals a level of rhetoric that far exceeds
the bounds of civilized
political discourse. Their words demonstrate
that many Jewish
organizations do not merely consider devout,
politically active
Christians to be misguided -- they consider
them evil. I believe that
if the term anti-Semitism is to retain any
intellectual and moral
integrity, we must also today admit to the
term anti-Christianism. If
one is to be fought, then surely both should
be." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p.
41]
(Meanwhile, a Jewish ethnic magazine can feature,
merely as a curiosity, a "Modern Orthodox" rabbi, Mayer Schiller,
for his championing of "race separation." The magazine explains
that the rabbi, a teacher in good standing at the Yeshiva University High
School for Boys, doesn't teach "hatred for racial minorities, but a rejection
of post-Enlightenment universalism and secularism.") [EDEN, A., 4-13-01]
Jewish anti-Christian bashing is expressed
in many ways. In 1999, Rabbi Fred Guttman wrote an angry editorial in a Greensboro,
North Carolina, newspaper, complaining about an earlier article in the paper
about a Christian business directory. "The guide," the directory's
publisher had explained, "performs a service for the Christian consumer,
enabling him to find and do business with fellow believers." [WILLIS,
V., 1999, 11-15-99, p. B1] Incredibly, not only did Rabbi Guttman decide for
everyone that the story had no news value, he also had the profound gall to
compare the nature of such a directory (that sought merely to network in business
with other dedicated Christians) to be parallel to Nazi intent! How so? "As a Jew reading
this article," he complained,
"I could not help but recall the Nuremberg
laws of 1935 [the Nazi
race laws]. These laws mandated a boycott
of all non-Aryan businesses
in Germany ... The guide implies that there
should be an economic
boycott of non-Christian businesses. Thus,
the parallel to the Nuremberg
laws is certainly fitting. Even more disturbing
was the forum that the
News and Record chose to give such
free and positive publicity to
such a nonnewsworthy item. It saddened
me that a group that
encourages bias and bigotry through de
facto economic boycotts
would receive support from the News
and Record. At the very least,
the News and Record should consider
taking an editorial stance against
this so-called 'Christian' yellow pages."
[GUTTMAN, F., 11-26-99, p.
A22]
Rabbi Gutman's outrageous attack upon, and
defamation of, a local Christian interest in networking with like-minded people
created a stir in the Greensboro area. Gutman's hypocrisy is breath-taking.
Throughout multi-cultural America there are Iranian business directories,
Arab business directories, Armenian business directories, Muslim business
directories, and many others including, of course, Jewish business directories.
(See, for example, the national Jewish "yellow pages" by Sharon
and Michael Strassfeld. Or the one called The Jewish Yellow Pages: A Directory of Goods and Services by Mae
Rockland Tupa. Or note England's Benjamin Cohen who became a millionaire at
age 17 for his Jewishnet Internet
site. He "started Jewishnet from
his bedroom and aimed to provide a business directory for the community.")
[DAILY MAIL, 1-6-2000, p. 83] And the intensity of Jewish collective support
for each other has few, if any (as we will continue to explore), equals in
modern America.
In another version of the usual Jewish double
standard and anti-Christian attack, in 2000, Texas governor and presidential
candidate George W. Bush, was publicly assailed by the American Jewish Congress
for declaring June 10, 2000 as "Jesus Christ Day" in Texas (formal
state recognition of the tenth anniversary of a grassroots "March for
Jesus" day). The AJC complained that the governor "affixed his signature
and the seal of the state of Texas to a proclamation establishing 'Jesus Day'
[which] demonstrates the willingness to place the imprimatur of government
literally on one faith." Bush's office responded by noting that the AJC
never complained when the U.S. Congress had earlier proclaimed a day commemorating
ultra-Orthodox Hassidic rabbi Menachem Schneerson.
Nor did the AJC complain about Bush's formal Texas proclamations that
created an "Honor Israel Day," a "Holocaust Remembrance"
day, a day honoring Austin's Orthodox Chabad House, a commemorative day for
the Baha'i religion, and a special day of honor for a community
of Sikhs. Even Bush's Republican (partisan) colleague, Matt Brooks, head of
the Republican Jewish Coalition, observed that "This is again a sad example
of the American Jewish Congress and other organizations showing their anti-Christian
bias. The Jewish community has to stop beating up on Christians for belief
in their faith." [FINGERHUT, E., 7-13-2000]
Four months after Bush's "Jesus Day"
proclamation, a New York Times reporter, Laurie Goodsein, still was
reporting that
"What seemed purely ceremonial has
turned into a controversy for
George Bush. As word of Texas's Jesus Day
has spread through
the email, Jewish newspapers and church-state
separatists, the
Republican presidential nominee has come
under criticism for
insensitivity to people of non-Christian
faiths and a disregard for
the First Amendment." [GOODSTEIN,
L., 8-6-2000, p. 14]
As scholar Kevin MacDonald writes about the undercurrent at work
in such Jewish anti-Christian activism:
"It is not surprising that a powerful
strand of Jewish intellectual activity
in the twentieth century has been to
pathologize highly cohesive,
collective gentile social structures,
gentile nationalism, gentile
authoritarian political groups, and
gentile ethnocentrism. It is clearly in
the interests of Jews to advocate the
continuation of the quintessential
Western cultural commitment to individualism
as the best environment
for the continuation of Jewish collectivism."
[MACDONALD, p. 264]
"Nothing is more foreign to the spirit
of Judaism," noted influential pre-Zionist author Moses Hess in the 19th
century, "than the idea of the egoistic salvation of the isolated individual."
[WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 126]
The implications of Jewish collectivism
in capitalist society were addressed by a prominent Jewish socialist, Bernard
Lazare, in France, in 1894:
"Bourgeois society is based entirely
upon competition between man and
in the field of the daily necessities of
life. It affords us the spectacle of
individuals fighting bitterly one against
the other ... In this state of society
Darwin's principle of the struggle of life
dominates ... If we conceive,
then, in the midst of such a community,
based upon egoistic action,
associations of citizens strongly organized
and gifted, animated for many
centuries by the spirit of common action,
and knowing by instinct and
experience, the advantages which they may
derive from union, it is
certain that such organizations by directing
their activity towards the
same end as that pursued by the scattered
individuals around them will
possess such an advantage in the struggle
as to assure them an easy
victory. This is just the role which is being played by the Jews
of the
middle class in modern society ... [LAZARE,
p. 168] ... The Jew ...
increases his advantage by uniting with
his co-religionists possessed of
similar virtues, and thus augments his
powers by acting in common with
his brethren; the inevitable result being
that they out-distance their rivals
in the pursuit of any common end. In the
midst of a disunited middle
class, whose members are engaged in a perpetual
struggle against one
another, the Jews stand united as one.
This is the secret of their
success." [LAZARE, p. 169]
In our own day, the effect of an economically
empowered Jewish "extended family" actually enforcing a disempowered
Gentile individualism has profound political implications, grossly advantageous
to Jews. Following the classical pattern of Jewish and upper strata Gentile
collusion against the non-Jewish masses (as evidenced throughout history with
everything from Court Jews in league
with absolute monarchs to Jewish communists as an integral part of Russian
totalitarian elite), one recent study suggested that, even today, high status
non-Jews tended to be individualist in attitude, disinclined to join groups,
but were often found in economic and political association with Jews. [MACDONALD,
p. 264]
The typical institutionalized Jewish
device these days to "pathologize" Gentile group affiliations is
to stigmatize them as being anti-Semitic in nature: morally, and -- more importantly -- legally, impermissible
in the American universalistic fabric. (Hence, a rabbi can gain public forum
and be taken seriously in declaring that local Christian efforts to economically
collectivize is a manifestation of Nazi fascism, while, at the same time,
a cornerstone of Jewish identity to this day is that very same thing). The Jewish polity (led by its collectivized
"defense agency" heads -- the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish
Committee, American Jewish Congress, over 100 Jewish "community relations
councils," et al) functions as a massive, unified "attack dog"
to destroy any semblance in others of a solidarity similar to their own, or,
rather, any that could pose a power threat to Jewish collectivism.
Some Jews believe, says Benedict Viviano, "that Jews ... are safest
when Christians are weak ... Thus [such Jews] ... foster publications which
blame the Church for all the suffering of the Jews throughout history in an
undifferentiated fashion." [VIVIANO, p. 354] In historical overview,
as Jewish author Walter Jacob notes,
"The Jewish scholars of the mid-nineteenth
century realized that the
Church could now be attacked without fear
of retaliation. Its power
had faded, and its influence was constantly
diminishing. The decline
of Christianity was a hopeful sign. Jewish
scholars saw it as beneficial
for Judaism and mankind, for they believed
that Judaism or a new
religion akin to it would eventually become
dominant. Although this
optimism is gone, the weakening of Christianity
is still welcomed by
many contemporary Jews." [JACOB, W.,
1974, p. 230]
Jewish-born
Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis has come to play a profoundly influential
role in modern America. Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter
note Freud's views of Christianity, at root in this psychological movement:
"Though it is sometimes forgotten today,
Freud's work was profoundly
subversive to the cultural underpinnings of
European Christian society,
a subversiveness of which he was not unaware.
There is evidence that some
of the impetus for the creation of psychoanalysis
lay in his hostility to
Christianity." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 125]
These two scholars also note the nature of
the widespread modern Jewish leftist/liberal/radical assault upon the Christian
world:
"In sum, the aim of the Jewish radical
is to estrange the Christian
from society, as he feels estranged from it.
The fact that the United
States is no longer 'Christian' in any real
sense, or that Jews have
moved to positions of considerable power and
influence, is of
little import. Its Christian base is still
unconsciously identified
as the decisive oppressive element ... Thus
many radical Jews,
even when they do not identify with Judaism,
unconsciously
retain a generalized hostility to Christian
culture. Again, Portnoy
[the leader character in Philip Roth's Portnoy's
Complaint] is a
good example. Only on the analyst's couch
is he willing to admit
the hostility he feels." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 125]
Russian-Israeli author Israel Shamir notes
that Jewish hatred for Christians and Christianity is a consistent theme
to this very day:
"Rami Rozen expressed the Jewish tradition
in a long feature in a major Israeli
Israeli newspaper Haaretz: 'Jews feel
toward Jesus today what they felt in 4c or
in the Middle Ages ... it is not fear, it is hatred
and despise [sic]. For centuries
Jews concealed from Christians their hate
to Jesus, and this tradition continues
even now. 'He is revolting and repulsive,"
said an important modern religious
Jewish thinker. Rozen writes that this 'repulsion
passed from observant Jews
to the general Israeli public." [SHAMIR,
I., 2001]
Secular Jewish journalist Stephen Bloom was surprised
when an ultra-Orthodox Jew reprimanded him for saying hello to a non-Jewish
stranger:
"'The goyim,' Lazar told me, as we crossed
the street again, three blocks from the
shul, 'will always be goyim, no matter
how nice they are to you. So what's the
point?' Lazar's comments underscored the Hasidim's
contempt for non-Jews,
which wasn't limited to the Postville [Iowa]
gentiles, but to all Christians ... But
if truth be told, Lazar's anti-gentile sentiment
wasn't limited to just Hasidic Jews.
The Hasidim put into practice what many Jews
just talked about. Lazar's
gentile-bashing reminded me of the Yiddish
aphorism Er shmekt nit un er
shtinkt nit ('He doesn't smell and he
doesn't stink'), used derisively to describe
non-Jews, who are viewed as inconsequential
and unimportant. The maxim
wasn't very different from the expression
my own parents used about the
simpleton who's got a goyisher kop
[non-Jewish head]."
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 196]
Jewish author Paul Cowan notes what happened when
a group of Jews and their Christian spouses all got together in a room to
air out their differences:
"In one of our largest,
most polarized groups almost all the gentiles perceived
the Jews' responses [to Christianity] as another
sign of their clannishness.
'You seem to me like a wall of people,' said
a New York-born Catholic who
was married to a Jew from Philadelphia. 'When
I'm around Jews, I feel like
a persecuted minority.' 'I was just amazed
at all the hostility,' said a woman
from rural Pennsylvania who raised as a Mennonite
but now describes herself
as an agnostic. 'None of the Jews here seem able
to tolerate religious differences.'
Her husband, who was born into a very prosperous,
very assimilated Jewish
family, agreed, 'I'm not used to Jews victimizing
other people.'
It wasn't victimization.
The exercise had unleashed a powerful tribal memory.
But the words Jews used to describe the cross
enraged most Christians. 'I've
been married to you for three years and I
didn't realize you had such
disrespectful feelings about my religion,'
a Methodist woman said to her
Jewish husband." [COWAN, P., 1987, p.
184]
How deep is modern American Jewry's animosity
to others? In one 1988 study, a third of Jewish respondents went so far
as to regard "the religious and racial identities" of even Catholic
and Black liberal Democrats
"as grounds for suspicion."
Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen attribute this paranoia to Jewish
beliefs "from their mythic past. Strong nationalist, ethnic, or religious
loyalties of Gentiles increase the likelihood of their being anti-Semitic. The safest
goy is one devoid of strong group commitments." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 48-48] Jewish suspicion, distrust, and disdain for non-Jews is so great
that even converts to Judaism --
those who are incapable of claiming an expressly hereditary lineage to the Jewish Chosen People mythology --
are subject to widespread Jewish rejection and discrimination. "The
strong familistic thrust among Jews," remark Liebman and Cohen, "has
meant that converts have been treated with some degree of suspicion. At
the very least, it has meant that Jews do not relate to converts in the
same way they relate to those born Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 23]
Even overtly anti-Semitic non-Jewish organizations
like the Ku Klux Klan (successfully marginalized from mainstream white society)
and the Nation of Islam (unsuccessfully marginalized from mainstream Black
society) are -- however condemned and attacked by Jewish strategists -- essentially
other peoples' echoes of the genetically-based Chosen People ethos, a Jewish
gift to mankind. Why is the idea of
American Jewry banding tightly together expressly for their own interests
and advancement any less repulsive than "white people" (or anybody
else) doing the same, especially when Jews, by all measures of economic and
political influence, are as a "special interest" group incomparably
far more powerful? The fact that American Jewry can get away with it in the illusory
world of "public relations" is due to grand design. The important
difference between Jews and others is that the Jewish polity is -- as it has
been throughout the centuries -- dissimulative
in its hostility and suspicion of the non-Jewish Other; the Ku Klux Klan and
the Nation of Islam are overt
in their animosity to, and "separateness" from, those who are not
their racial and ideological kindred.
(Note, for example, the results of a case
of a Ku Klux Klan lawsuit in 2000 against the University of Missouri at St.
Louis. The Klan sought to purchase a 15-second promotion after National Public
Radio's "All Things Considered" program at the college radio station.
The university refused the Klan air time, claiming that subsequent bad publicity
would damage the university economically, and an Appeals court upheld the
college's decision. As disreputable as the KKK's overt racism is to most Americans,
the Klan's lawyer, Robert Herman (who is Jewish), had a valid point about
free speech double standards when
he noted that "if the radio decides its listeners don't care for Jews,
can they keep Jews off the air too?") [MCMURRAY, J., 2-17, 2000]
In a discussion about left wing Jewish
efforts "to change society," Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and
S. Robert Lichter note that
"The basic thrust is to undermine all
aspects of culture which contributed
to his or her own marginality. Thus Jews
in the United States and Europe
have been in the forefront of not only
political radicalism, but also
various forms of cultural subversion ...
Often such subversion involves
an attack upon genuine inequities or irrationalities.
However, the attack is
generally not directed at the particular
inequity or irrationality per se.
Rather, such inequities or irrationalities
are used as a means for achieving
a larger purpose: the general weakening
of the social order itself."
[ROTHMAN, p. 130, in Prager,
p. 70]
Elsewhere, they note:
"In almost every country about which we
have information, a segment of the
Jewish
community played a very vital role in movements designed to
undermine the existing order. This was true
even in the United States
where Jews have achieved unparalleled economic,
cultural, and
social success." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 110]
"Modern political history," notes
Jewish author Philip Mendes, "indicates a clear connection between being
Jewish and being radical." [MENDES, P., 1993, p. 9]
Maurice Samuel, a Zionist and popular Jewish
American chauvinist in his time, put Jewish radicalism this way, in his confrontational
book of 1924, You Gentiles:
"We Jews are the destroyers, will remain
the destroyers forever,
NOTHING that you will do will meet our
needs and demands. We will
forever destroy because we need a world
of our own, a God-world,
which is not your [Gentile] nature to build
... Those of us who fail to
understand that truth will always be found
in alliance with your rebellious
factions until disillusionment comes, the
wretched fate which scattered us
through your midst has thrust this unwelcome
role upon us."
[BRENNER , ZIONISM, p. 23]
Samuel, a naturalized American citizen and secretary of the Zionist
Organization of America, was no marginalized crank. Louis Kaplan notes that
he "played a major role in re-Judaizing American Jewry from the 1920s
until his death in 1972 ... Samuel
reminded the Jewish-born universalist of his day (and ours) that love of humanity
is too nebulous and superficial, even mawkish. Concern for all human beings
begins with caring for the specific. Let
the individual Jew hold dear the Jewish people." Samuel, adds Emmanuel Goldsmith, "played a major role in the
emergence of the American Jew's sense of Jewish identity and in the American Jews' definition of Jewishness."
And Milton Hindus called Samuel "the most popular platform personality
of American Jewry." [KAPLAN, p. 453-465]
"A powerful force driving Jews toward
radicalism is their sense of alienation from American society," says
Nathaniel Weyl, "... They often espouse values at variance with those
of the majority and coalesce in a congregation or political party with the
characteristics of a despised elite." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 148-149] Sam Lehman-Wilzig, like many Jews, in the Zionist
journal Midstream romanticizes the Jewish deconstruction of the non-Jewish
world, asserting that Jews are the essential seed of human progress and enlightenment:
"Whether outside the campus or inside
the laboratory, the Jews continue
to heroically challenge the political
and intellectual conventional wisdoms
of the age ... By constantly constituting
an 'oppositionist' force on the
world scene ... the Jew continually constitutes
a mighty thorn in the side
of world society." [LEHMAN-WILZIG,
p. 24]
Jewish left-wing radical Saul Alinsky even introduced
his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, with this dubious inspiration:
"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder
acknowledgement to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and
history (and who is to know where
mythology leaves off and history begins -- or
which is which), the first radical
known to man who rebelled against the establishment
and did it so effectively that
he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."
[ALINSKY, S., 1971, pre-
table of contents page]
In the religious sphere, Jewish attacks
upon Christian collectivism in America, effecting strategies to insure Christian
religious marginalization, have gone
on for decades now. "In its newly
adopted role as a beleaguered minority," notes an unsympathetic David
Hollinger, "... the complaint of Christians as the 'newest minority'
insists that Christians are discriminated against, and that their opinions
are not taken seriously. Everyone but traditional Christians, it seems, gets
the chance to speak out." [HOLLINGER, p. 33] Jewish legal lobbyists realize
that there is no particular "Christian" polity without religion
as its base (and even this is divided along various sectarian lines). While
there is certainly residual "Christian" influence in the values
and mores of a secularized
Christian people, there is no collective, secular, nationalist Christian political entity equivalent to that of
the Jews'. The Christian polity dissolves, or is atomized, when secularized;
Jewish solidarity endures secularly, transformed along the mythological base
of its hereditary line, its
historical transnational Jewish
patriotism, and its "we-them" principles, whether religious or not.
Indeed, Judaism has always been preserved as both a religion and a nationalist entity -- a "nation-religion."
Or, as Jewish scholar Nicholas de Lange, observes, "To be a Jew means
first and foremost to belong to a group, the Jewish people, and the religious
beliefs are secondary, in a sense, to this corporate allegiance." [DE
LANGE, N., p. 4] In modern times most Jews have discarded the Judaic religion
but renewed the nationalist foundation
of their collective self-identity. As such, the American constitutional principle
that "separates between Church and state" plays into non-religious
Jewish hands; hence, most American Jews understand themselves not fitting
into a religious context, but rather as an elite (and usually racial), secular
caste in the American system.
Alice Bloch is an activist feminist and
lesbian, two identities that are emphatically rejected by traditional Judaism.
Yet Bloch remains ardently "Jewish," noting her identity -- that
so much mystifies non-Jewish acquaintances -- this way:
"Jewish identity is important to me
because being Jewish
is an integral part of myself: it's my inheritance,
my roots. Christian
women sometimes have a hard time understanding
this, because
Christian identity is so much tied up with
religious beliefs. It is
possible to be an ex-Catholic or an ex-Baptist,
but it is not possible
to be an ex-Jew." [BLOCH, p. 117]
About 20 gay synagogues have even been created
throughout America in the last three decades, places where homosexual men
and women assert a Jewish religious identity, despite the fact that mainstream
Judaism rejects them. [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 76]
Sylvia Boorstein, a former psychologist who
teaches meditation and Buddhism in northern California's affluent Marin county,
has even written a book about how she manages being an "observant Jew"
and a Buddhist at the same time, somehow grafting the Buddha onto her root
identity. "I am a Jew," she writes, "because my parents were
mild-mannered, cheerful best friends who loved me enormously, and they were
Jews. I am a prayerful, devout Jew because I am a Buddhist." While visiting
Jerusalem, she notes troubles she had with some Israelis, but then reaches
back into the Holocaust epic, thinking, 'I'm in the middle of a locker room
with naked Jewish women, and we're all safe here.' And I was so happy that
these women about who I'd been harboring all these terrible thoughts were
alive, I was overwhelmed with love for them. I thought, 'This is wonderful.
They can swim however they want. Now I have my values straight.'" [BERSON,
M., 4-5-97; TULLER, D., 3-9-97]
"Jewish Buddhists," seemingly
a contradiction in terms, are fond of calling themselves JUBUs. [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 6] Roger Kamenetz notes the
case of friend Marc Lieberman:
"He married a fellow Buddhist practitioner,
Nancy Garfield, in a
Vietnamese Buddhist temple in San Francisco.
Not just a phase
anymore. Still, when I visited them in
San Francisco, I noted that
he made kiddush on Friday night and sent
his son from his first
marriage to a Hebrew school. Even as a
Buddhist he seemed a
better Jew than I was." [KAMENETZ,
R., 1994, p. 10]
Psychologist Wendy Orange also flirted with
Buddhism, but in later years returned full-force to her Jewish identity, even
moving to Israel. The beginning of her return to her tribal identity, as she
recounts, began with a dream:
"It's the Jewish High Holidays, but
I'm at a Buddhist retreat. Meditations
are over; I drift towards a run-down section
of town where I enter a
dissolute tavern. That's when I hear Hebrew
melodies. They grow louder,
obliterating the Buddhist chants and gongs.
When the sad cantorial
fades away, I sidle up to a degenerate guy
and am, at the dream's end,
madly trying to kiss him, even though he's
more or less drowning in his
beer." [ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 14]
Ms. Orange wondered what this dream meant.
Her Jewish therapist had an answer:
"Oh, that's an easy one. This dream
points to your neglected Judaism.
It's telling you to search for your ethnic
roots .... Your dream shows
that you're 'drunk' on the wrong religious
practices. Study the great
Jewish scholars now. One day, with luck,
you'll go to Israel."
[ORANGE, W., 2000, p. 15]
Alan
Lew has written his own book on the Jewish Buddhist theme, with the
twist that he followed the universalistic path of Zen to ultimately return
to his tribal home as a rabbi:
"[There was] a guru named Rudrananda,
or, as he was known, Rudi. Rudi's
real name was Albert Rudolph. He was a Jewish
guy who grew up in Brooklyn
... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 51] ... One day Norman
[also Jewish] invited me to
come with him to the San Francisco Zen Center
to hear a famous Japanese
Zen master talk. At least half the people
at the Zen Center were Jewish, but the
Japanese Zen master, thinking that since he
was in America everyone was Christian,
based his lecture on a text from the Gospel
... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 60] ... [At the
Berkeley Zen center] Mel Weitsman, the Zen
priest, would already be seated ...
There were usually only about four to six
people present at any session. Sometimes
we would joke about how there weren't enough
for a minyan, realizing most
of us were Jews -- Mel, his wife, Liz Horowitz,
Norman, another man named Ron
Nester, and me ... [LEW, A. 1999, p. 63] ...
The Zen Center I belonged to was
a strong, positive community, and the connections
beteween the people were
deep and real, but it wasn't a blood connection.
There was not the essential
and permanent bond that comes with family.
I felt this most strongly when I
took [son] Steve with me to holiday gatherings
at the zendo [Zen center]. Looking
through the window at this Jewish family across
the way, I experienced a profound
and surprising sense of longing ... [LEW,
A., 1999, p. 99] [At a Los Padres
mountains Zen monastery] there was a ceremony
for the installation of
Steve Weintraub, the new head monk, or shuso
... Like me, Steve Weintraub
had grown up on Brooklyn ... Steve Weintraub
was of course Jewish. Whenever
I came into the room, I checked to see who
there looked Jewish. I wondered
if anyone knew that I was Jewish, and if they
cared. I had been doing
this unconsciously ever since we molved to
Pleasantville, but I had just
|recently become conscious of it. The more I meditated,
the more aware I
became of the contents of my unconscious mind."
[LEW, A., 1999, p. 111]
Lew eventually had an "Orthodox Jewish wedding."
[LEW, A., 1999, p. 142] His next wife, Sherril Jaffe, a writer, was also
Jewish. [LEW, A., 1999, p. 145] Lew ended up at the Jewish Theological Seminary
in Manhattan where "JTS required rabbinical students to spend one year
in Israel." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 202] In Israel, he notes, "there
was a deep joy to being in Israel and studying Torah in Jerusalem. I had
the familiar sense of coming home." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 207] At the
Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Lew is at first intimidated by a black-dressed
Chasid leading prayers, but suddenly recognizes him:
"Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and
I realized that I knew him from Sproul
Plaza in Berkeley [University of California]!
The long ponytail that he used to wear
then had migrated around the side of his head
and had become sidelocks. He
was a middle-class Jewish kid from New Jersey.
Sixteen years ago he had
been pretending to be a native American; now
he was pretending to be a
Chasid." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 212]
Lew eventually ended up in the San Francisco
area again as a rabbi. "Jews," he says,
"who had been practicing Buddhists started
lining up outside my office to speak
to me. Some of them had been practicing Buddhists
for twenty or thirty years,
and they were quite happy with it; nevertheless,
they felt haunted by their
Jewishness, and they had never been able to
shake it. They begged me to suggest
something for them to do about it. I didn't
know what to tell them. Norman and I
decided to hold a colloqium, a panel discussion
on Judaism and Buddhism. He
and I and several teachers of Jewish meditation
would be on the panel. We
expected around fifty people, but hundreds
of people showed up. What
did they all want? ... My goal was to help
Jews deepen their Jewish practice
with Buddhist-style meditation techniques,
and Norman's interest was in
reaching out to Jewish Buddhists who wanted
to have some way to express
their Jewishness." [LEW, A., 1999, p.
286]
"It was in a Buddhist monastery, meditating,
" concludes Lew near the end of his volume, "that I realized who
I really am. I am a Jew. A Jew can use the practice of meditation to illuminate
his or her Jewish soul. And meditation can help us slow down enough so that
we can once again experience the beauty of the Jewish path." [LEW,
A., 1999, p. 306]
Joachim Prinz noted, in 1973 (in his volume
about the community of Jews who faked their lives as Christians for centuries
in Spain), the "Jewish" Muslims (the jadidim) of the Meshed
area of Iran:
"They fast during the holy weeks of Ramadan
and also on Yom Kppur, the Jewish
Day of Atonement. They celebrate all the Jewish
as well as the Mohammedan holidays,
but economic necessity forces them to keep
their shops open on the Jewish Sabbath
... After a hundred years after their incomplete
conversion the jadidim retain a
dual allegiance to the law of the Koran and
that of the Torah which poses neither
a religious nor a psychological problem for
them." [PRINZ, UJ., 1973, p. 7]
Elsewhere Prinz notes the case of Franz von
Mendelssohn, of German Jewish descent, whose family was -- for generations
-- Christian:
"When Hitler came to powr the head of
the banking house, Franz von Mendelssohn ...
was president of the Lutheran Churches in
Germany ... [He] announced that he
had resigned from his office in the Church,
although, even according to the anti-
Jewish Nuremberg Laws, he was considered an
Aryan. 'I feel,' he said with great
emotion, 'that a descendant of the Jewish
philosopher Moses Mendelssohn could
no longer pretend' ... '[It is] too late,'
he said, 'Too late for me [to return to Judaism].
I and my ancestors have been brought up as
believing Christians for four
generations. I can only return to my people,
not to its faith. I identify with their
pain, their fate, their pride.' He did not
return to Judaism, but his daughter,
Eleanora von Mendelssoh, a well-known actress,
became an Orthodox Jew."
[PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 12-13]
Famed Holocaust guru Elie Wisel describes
French Catholic Cardinal (and possibly the next pope) Jean Marie-Lustiger's
enduring Jewish identity:
"He insists that having been born a Jew,
he will die a Jew ... [WIESEL, E., 1999,
p. 170] ... 'I feel Jewish,' the archbishop
responds. 'I refuse to renounce my
roots, my Jewishness' .... He goes on to make
the point that his Jewishness
annoys anti-Semites and that this does not displease
him. Why should he make
them happy by turning his back on the people
they execrate?' [WIESEL, E., 1999,
p. 171] ... [He] is determined to remain a
son of the Jewish people ... He
acts accordingly; anyone who requests his
assistance in defending a Jewish
cause can count on his support ... During
the scandalous affair of the Carmelite
convent
a Auschwitz [the 'scandal' was that nuns wanted to keep a cross at their
convent next to the former concentration camp,
against international Jewish demands
to take it down] , for example, his interventions
[on behalf of Jews] must have raised
a few eyebrows in Rome. As must his sympathy for
the State of Israel, of which he
is the most devoted defender inside the Catholic
Church." [WIESEL, E., 1999, p.
171-172]
Simon Wisenthal notes the case of prominent
Austrian poltician Otto Bauer:
"Jews were the founders of the Social
Democatic Party in Austria. Always
the leadership was Jewish -- from Viktor
Adler to Otto Bauer. Yes, Adler
became a Protestant but Bauer once said:
'I am a Jew, but for me is the Judaism
not a nation, not a religion, but a shared
fate.' And you cannot leave it because
then you are a deserter. This why he remained
a Jew.'" [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 345]
Secular Jew Stephen Bloom puts Jewish identity
like this:
"I was a Jew through and through, from
my curly brown hair and robust nose
to
the synapses in my brain and the corpuscles of my blood. A day, an hour,
didn't
go by without my reflecting in some way on
my culture and my religion. Religious
culture and devotion to faith are two different
things, and while I wasn't willing to
to become more attached to the organizational
rigors of my faith, I wasn't about
to let go of what I carried inside me every
day." [BLOOM S., 2001, p. 21]
Anne
Roiphe notes, even in the secular world, the pseudo-religious dimension
(the faith) of modern Jewish
identity to its tribal foundation, Zionism, and its Israel-centeredness:
"Zionism, religious or political, is
still mystical in nature. It requires a
passionate emotional commitment to the redemption
[of Jews] -- it
is not a position for rationalists, for
universalists. It requires unthinking
commitment to one side of the story. It
grants the rewards of [Jewish]
togetherness." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 31-32]
When professor Blu Greenberg was asked what
it meant to her to be a Jew, she replied:
"How can I answer that question? Everything
in my life has always been
connected to my Jewishness. For me, being
Jewish is the same thing
as being alive. They're inseparable."
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 25]
As Jean-Francois Steiner has noted about
his Jewish identity: "The Jew, more than any other man, realizes himself
within his national community; as a Jew he can exist only insofar as he belongs
to it." [STEINER, J., 1967, p. 149]
Meanwhile, the continuing institutionalized
efforts of the nationalist Jewish polity to impugn, weaken, and reconstruct
non-Jewish organizations to Jewish qualifications is expressed even in continuous
attacks upon the Catholic Church. It is another age-old Jewish moral double
standard: one application for themselves, and another for others. While unified
Jewish lobbying organizations can successfully pressure (using arguments of
universalism and ethnic and religious tolerance) even the Vatican to formally
excise traditional references to "Jews who killed Christ" in their
seminal New Testament literature, (proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1965 in a
document known as Nostra Aetate),
the entire foundation of Jewish Talmudic racism, exclusionism, anti-Christian
and anti-Gentile malice and chauvinism can go not only unchallenged, but completely
unmentioned. Always. And
not only does it go unmentioned, but to dare to raise such pertinent subjects
is condemned as Gentile bigotry! Israel Shahak notes the supreme Jewish audacity
and hypocrisy in still using the Holocaust to guilt-trip Christians into changing
aspects of their very religious doctrine (per perceptions of Jews) without
getting good faith Jewish "religious adjustments" (or even secular
ones) in return.
Take one of the most aggressive Jewish
demands in Christian terrain. Riding Gentile sympathy for Jewish suffering
in the Holocaust, Jews have successfully demanded a change in official Catholic
(and other Christian) belief; the Church has accordingly excised from its
formal teachings the notion that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion
of Christ. Yet, Jewish religious literature itself actually takes full credit for killing Christ. "According to
the Talmud," notes Israel Shahak, "Jesus was executed by a proper
rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt
of rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources which mention his execution
are quite happy to take responsibility for it. In the Talmudic account the
Romans are not even mentioned." [SHAHAK, p. ] According to the millennia-old
Jewish book about Jesus -- Tol'doth Yeshu, Jewish professor Joseph
Klausner notes that "the sages of Israel recognized [Jesus] and arrested
him. They took and hanged him on the eve of Passover." [KLAUSNER, p.
54] "Jesus," notes the 1997
Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "was arrested as a potential
revolutionary and executed (by crucifixion) by order of the Roman procurator
Pontius Pilate, probably at the instigation of Jewish circles who feared the
Roman reaction to messianic agitation." [WERBLOWSKY, Z., p. 368]
Another Israeli, Israel
Shamir, notes the usual dissimulation of modern Jewry, this time regarding
the killing of Christ:
"Joseph Dan, a professor of Jewish mysticism
in Heberew University in
Jerusalem, writing on the death of Jesus stated,
'The modern Jewish apologists,
hesitantly adopted by the church, preferred
to put the blame on Romans.
But the medieval Jew did not wish to pass the
buck. He tried to prove that
Jesus had to be killed, and he was proud of
killing Him. The Jews hated and
despised Christ and Christians.' Actually, adds
professor Dan, there is little
place to doubt that the Jewish enemies of Jesus
cause his execution."
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Typically, Jewish professor Ellis Rivkin
proposes that Jews could not be responsible for the death of Christ, because
it was, rather, the "system's" fault.
"If," he says, "we are to assess responsibility, we
once again find ourselves laying it at the feet of the Roman imperial system
... It was not the Jewish people who
crucified Jesus, and it was not
the Roman people -- it was the imperial system, a system that victimized
the Jews, victimized the Romans, and victimized the spirit of God." [author's
emphases: RIVKIN, p. 256] By this all-encompassing victimhood logic then,
it is abstract ideas (and not people) that bear ultimate responsibility for
human crimes, and we may thereby absolve all
victims of German fascism, defined in this manner to include even the
Nazi perpetrators themselves, who must be understood as mere pawns, caught
in the web of social forces greater than them.
In
any case, releasing modern Jews from the group responsibility for the historic
accusation that they killed Christ has no forgiveness counterpart in the Jewish
community where anti-Christian animosity -- and even hatred -- runs deep,
so much so that Christians are branded as being generically anti-Semitic.
Christianity itself is even repeatedly declared by many as a foundation of
German Nazism. And a collective guilt is often demanded upon
all of Christian heritage.
"The Catholic Church has certainly
gone a long way in transforming its theology of Judaism," liberal rabbi
Byron Sherwin noted in 1992, "particularly in comparison to the way things
were before the Second Vatican Council. Theological changes have led to changes
in relations with Judaism. The Jewish community, I think, has so far not responded."
[SHERWIN, p. 154-155] "Since the late 1960's," says J.J. Goldberg,
"the [formal] dialogue [between Christian and Jewish organizations] brought
extensive changes in Church teachings about Judaism. Oddly, there has been
no reciprocation: to the frustration of Catholic participants, Jewish participants
have never agreed to an examination of Jewish teaching, because of an Orthodox
ban on interreligious 'disputation.'" [GOLDBERG, p. 62]
This is an old and enduring Jewish theme.
In fact, such one-sided manipulation is an unshakably endemic part of "being
Jewish," as we can see in Karl Marx's critique about the subject 150
years ago:
"When the Jew demands emancipation
from the Christian state, he
asks that the Christian state gives
up its religious prejudices. Does
he, the Jew, give up his religious prejudice?
What right, therefore,
has he to demand of others the abdication
of their religion?"
[CRUSE, p. 169]
Jewish myopia on the subject of Christian-Jewish
relations is always a given. This is how rabbi Byron Sherwin, vice-president
of the Spertus College of Judaism in Chicago and advocate of a "dialogue"
with Catholicism in Poland completely neglects the self-enforced nationalist,
separatist core of Jewish history and identity (noted throughout scholarship
everywhere as the Jewish "nation apart" self-conception), charging
that common Polish perceptions of this Jewish fact is a foundation for irrational
anti-Semitism:
"When I came here [to Poland] for
the first time, I was shocked
by the terminology 'Polish nation' and
'Jewish nation.' This
terminology assumes that, even though they
lived in Poland,
the Jews were not part of the Polish nation
or people. If you
start with the assumption that someone
is an outsider, that
very assumption is the basis for prejudice."
[SHERWIN, p. 162]
Sherwin's view, of course, represents the
best (most Jews do not even feign a working relationship with the organized
Catholic community) the Jewish community has in "dialogue" with
Catholicism. Sherwin's view is the usual historical revisionism (via the modern
myths of multicultural tolerance) to completely gloss over endemic -- past
and enduring -- Jewish ethnocentrism. Jews
have always understood themselves everywhere in their diaspora as "outsiders."
In 1976 a Catholic priest, Father Andrew
Greeley, wrote with agitation about the ages-old Jewish double moral standard:
"A Jewish leader chided me because
Catholics were not vigorous
enough in their support of Israel. It
was not, he told me, high enough on
our agenda. I asked him how high Ulster
was on his. He told me that
was different. How different?"
After addressing continuous anti-Catholic
prejudice in America, Father Greeley then added, "The point is that such
attitudes are so unquestionably held by the New York liberal intellectual
establishment (and particularly by its Jewish component) that they have become
undiscussable assumptions." [GREELEY, p. 75]
The continuous exhortations by Jews to crucify
Christianity itself (and particularly the Catholic Church) as innately malevolent
is institutionalized in the Jewish community. The Christian faith is relentlessly
forced into a defensive posture against an omnipresent Jewish ideological
aggression that ceaselessly makes demands from its self-celebrated position
of higher moral certitude (per its "unique" Holocaust perch). The
Catholic Church is especially badgered and harassed as worldwide Jewry demands
a humbling "apology" for not doing more to help the Jews in World
War II; some Jews go so far as to insinuate that Catholic church members were
somehow active murderers. The Jewish onslaught of Catholicism is so incessant,
and accepted by the western mass media so unquestioningly, that in 1997 the
New York Times ran a headline proclaiming:
"Apology and the Holocaust. The
Pope's In a Confessional and the
Jews are Listening." [BOHLEN, p.
10]
Let us reflect upon the conceptual implications
here. The traditional form of a confession is this: the confessor (the Pope)
gets on his knees to the listener/pardoner (the Jews) who mediates between
confessor and God. In January 1998 the Jewish Week interviewed new
Anti-Defamation League chairman Howard Berkowitz who -- with nine other audacious
associates -- were soon to visit the Pope in the Vatican. What for? Interfaith
"dialogue?" Berkowitz said that
"We want to talk to him about opening
the Vatican archives as they relate
to World War II ... We want to see baptismal
records and other
documents regarding the church's activities
during the Holocaust. We
have developed a good relationship with
members of his senior staff and
we want to explore these things."
[AIN, S., ADL, p. 9]
Here then we have the ADL and the World
Jewish Congress, poised as self-appointed police powers, chutzpah-supreme,
arrogantly demanding another religious organization's private records, as
part of the Grand Jewish Inquisition. If the Jewish Interrogators have only
Goodness at heart, let us suggest that, in good faith, they first open their
own closets for public scrutiny (as the ADL was so reluctant to do when sued
by a host of individuals and organizations for illegal spying upon them in
1993). Especially interesting would be to see how they act in America as foreign
agents for Israel. A confessional to kneel down and come clean to the American
people is always open to them.
"Deep in the files of the State Department,"
notes Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley in 1997, "someone
found a dispatch from the 1940s reporting a rumor that Nazi money stolen from
Jews had ended up in the vaults at the Vatican. B'nai B'rith, adopting the
tone of a prosecuting attorney, has demanded access to Vatican archives to
determine whether the rumor is true." [GREELEY, 1997, p. B14] Greeley's
newspaper editorial was called "Cheap Shots at Catholic Church."
For decades now, since the "Holocaust,"
Jewish organizations have been aggressively lobbying the Catholic church for
religious concessions (and more). In a 1960s case, Jewish commentator James
Yaffe suggested concerted Jewish intrigue:
"Much has been written about Jewish
influence on Vatican II [changes in
formal Church perspectives about Jews]:
how ADL and AJC both sent
lobbyists to Rome; how Cardinal Cushing
of Boston set up an audience
with the Pope for Rabbi Heschel and the
Jewish Theological Seminary;
how an audience was granted to the wife
of a millionaire who had just
given a large endowment to Pro Deo University;
how an audience was
granted was to Ambassador Arthur Goldberg;
how Rabbi Tanenbaum
was the only Jew left in the Vatican when
the statement as finally issued.
It's a good story, a kind of theological
James Bond adventure." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 48]
In 1998, concerning another concerted Jewish
demand, "in a long awaited apology," the Pope publicly proclaimed
regret for the "errors and failures" of Roman Catholics during the
Holocaust era. "The apology," noted the Boston Herald, "contained
in a 12-page document released in Rome yesterday wasn't good enough for Jewish
leaders in Boston and around the world who said the statement was 'too little
too late.'" [SULLIVAN, p. 10] "It is ironic," wrote David Novak, himself Jewish, "that
the Pope should be the focus of criticism, inasmuch as there has been no other
pontiff in modern times, perhaps in all history, who has done more to develop
a rapprochement with the Jewish people and Judaism ... My own view is that
the Jewish response [to the Pope's "apology"] is largely mistaken,
and that it reflects a misunderstanding not only of Catholic theology but
of Jewish theology as well. The Jewish leaders' reactions were not just uncharitable,
they were also unjust." [NOVAK, 1999]
In 1992, a similar concentrated Jewish
attack upon the entire nation of (largely Catholic) France was fielded by
President Francois Mitterand. The Jewish community was pressuring the government
to issue a public apology for anti-Semitism during World War II. Mitterand
refused. "The issue," noted the (Montreal) Gazette,"
is one of the most emotional in modern France." [GAZETTE, 7-15-92]
In 1999, on the occasion of the Pope's visit
to Israel, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz began a story with the following,
reflecting the intense Jewish antipathy towards Catholicism:
"It is important to bear in mind that
the extermination of the Jews
during the Holocaust was conceived and perpetrated
by Hitler,
not by the Catholic Church. For Europeans,
this almost goes without
saying. In Israel in recent years however,
one might have got a rather
different impression." [CREMONESI,
L., 3-22-2000]
In any of a myriad of possible ways the
Pope offends the Jewish community. His 1987 crime? He met with Kurt Waldheim,
the head of the United Nations who
was assailed by Jewish groups for alleged Nazi connections during World War
II. When the Pope later visited San Francisco, local Jews found cause to march
in street demonstrations against the Catholic leader. The local left-wing
Jewish magazine, Tikkun, even took out ads in the local media declaring
that "The Catholic Church has been responsible for the deaths of more
Jews than the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]." [BIALE/ROSENBAUM,
p. 251] The chief rabbi, Robert Kirschner,
of San Francisco's oldest synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, took the occasion to
preach an especially zealous sermon about the "anti-Judaism" of
Catholicism. David Biale and Fred Rosenbaum note the immediate results of
his anti-Christian attack in the liberal San Francisco community:
"Kirschner wept when he learned of
a specific case in which a
Catholic woman, accompanying her Jewish
husband to the temple
for the first time, became distraught upon
hearing the sermon and,
convinced that Jews regularly preached hatred
of Christianity,
vowed never to return to the synagogue again.
Other mixed couples
put letters under his office door, informing
him, in several instances,
that his remarks had driven a wedge between husband and wife."
[BIALE/ROSENBAUM, p. 258]
A Jewish folk singer, Hugh Blumenfeld, noted
in 1999 American Jewish resistance to even listen to a song of "whimsy"
he had written about Jesus:
"It's funny. They had a great time
with it all through Israel. But
with an American Jewish audience, sometimes
all you have to do
is say the word 'Jesus' and they go ballistic."
[KATZ-STONE, 1999, p.
47]
The Jewish resistance to a mutually honest
and open dialogue between the two faiths runs deep in the Jewish community;
for Jews, "interfaith dialogue" is simply Christian theological
concessions demanded by Jewish attackers. Another typical example of Jewish
enmity for Christians was Rabbi Barry Cytron's disturbing experience in a
Minnesota-area Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue program he helped to pioneer.
The first presentation, by Jewish and Christian religious authorities, was
to a mostly Catholic, and a minority Protestant, audience. They, wrote Rabbi
Cytron, "welcomed the opportunity to hear our thoughts. The questions
they asked were challenging and thought provoking. Most of all, they were
gracious and hospitable." The second interfaith presentation was before
a Jewish audience whose mood "was not warm and gracious, but cold and
angry. [They weren't] particularly interested in dialogue ... Why were they
so angry? Why so unrelenting in their view of Christianity? Why so harsh in
their judgments?" [CYTRON, p. 11-12]
(Compare this kind of widespread Jewish
animosity for Christianity with Stanley Lippman's acceptance as a computer
programmer for the Board of Global Ministries of the World Methodist Church.
This organization even paid for his further studies -- a master's degree in
computer science. Lippman is today the "principal software engineer"
at Walt Disney Studios. [SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH, J., 7-20, 98] Can we imagine a
comparable openness to Gentile employment in the heart of the Jewish Theological
Seminary, which is only a few blocks away in Manhattan from the Methodist
center?)
As Jewish author James Yaffe noted in 1968:
"The Jew and the Christian enter into
dialogue for entirely different
motives. The Christian wants to learn more
about Judaism and
Jewish life. His sense of guilt has made
him dissatisfied with his
present view of Christianity; he hopes to
find values in Judaism
which will help him rethink his Christian
ideas. But the Jew's motive
is much simpler. He wants Christian anti-Semitism
to come to an
end. He wants the Christian to admit the
harm he's done and stop
doing it. He may not be conscious that he
has this motive. He may
sincerely believe that he has joined the
dialogue in order to
exchange ideas, broaden his horizons, learn
more about Christianity.
But once the formalities are over, anti-Semitism
is the only subject
he really wants to discuss." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 47]
This is the Jewish polemic Walter Jacob
noted about the rival faith in 1974, in his volume "Christianity Through
Jewish Eyes":
"Many [Jewish] thinkers, and a host
of minor writers, preachers,
and essayists, used the new found freedom
from the ghetto as an
opportunity to vent their feelings against
the religion of the oppressor
... In Western Europe, after Voltaire,
almost anything could be said
with impunity ... The beginnings of this
Jewish study of Christianity
were rather angry, as if polemic were necessary
to arouse interest in
the problem and the air had to be cleared
before a true discussion could
begin ... The complacency of the Christian
majority had to be shaken
and Judaism shown to be an equal, if not
superior, form of religion."
[JACOB, W., 1974, p. 2]
Such Jewish attitudes are long standing.
And "angry" Jewish polemics continues unabated. A sympathetic book
(The Nazarene) by prominent Jewish author Sholem Asch in the 1950s
about Jesus Christ even caused him to be "isolated from a significant
portion of the American Jewish intellectual establishment." The ostracized
work's crime, notes Peter Goldsmith, was that it was "an attempt to claim
a place for Jesus among figures of Jewish inspiration." [GOLDSMITH, P.,
p. 88]
In 1997 Oakland, California's Catholic
Holy Names College (whose faculty, quite liberally, is about 10% Jewish) faced
newsworthy controversy when a number of Jewish faculty members complained
about a play being produced on campus about Edith Stein, a Jew who made the
decision to become a Catholic nun in 1933 in Poland. Promotional photographs
for the play were attacked for making the actress playing Stein look "grim
and serious" as a Jew and happier as a Catholic. "The pictures sent
a certain feeling through me," said Martin Lampert, a Jewish professor
of psychology at the college, they "could be viewed as: Judaism isn't
the way to go but Christianity is." [CAPLANE, p. 1a]
"Christmas," says popularly known
Jewish polemicist and lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, "the most joyous holiday
to Christians, has been among the most dreaded of days throughout Jewish history
... The nativity scene ... is not a religious symbol ...; it is an insult to the memory of the
many Jews for not accepting the divine birth depicted in the 'secular' nativity
scene." [DERSHOWITZ, CHUTZPAH, p. 332] The idea that the nativity scene
is not a religious symbol is of course strange news to the millions of Christians
who had been thinking it was. As we see here, and time and time again, for
the many Jews like Dershowitiz (who pride themselves on being "liberal,"
"open-minded," et al) being a Christian is to be a virtual criminal,
a living "insult" to Jews.
Likewise there is deep Jewish contempt for
Easter, the day Christians celebrate
in commemoration of the resurrection of Christ. When popular Jewish theologian
Emil Fackenheim thinks of Easter, for instance, he insists upon somehow seeing
Jewish dead bodies and Nazi concentration camps; Christianity is equated
with German fascism: "[Christianity's]
greatest celebration has unhappy memories for Jews -- and, after Auschwitz,
for conscientious Christians too." [FACKENHEIM, HOLO, p. 18] "Our [daughter] Kate," adds Jewish
author Ann Roiphe, "does not believe in Christian charity (reports of
pogroms have caused her to regard Easter as more than a matter of bunnies
and jelly beans)." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 13]
In 1999, prominent author Mary McCarthy took
offense to depictions of Christianity in Philip Roth's novel The Counterlife.
"I'm not a Christian (I don't believe in God)," she wrote to him,
"but to the extent that I am and can't help being one (just as a 'nice
Jewish boy' can't help being Jewish), I bridle at your picture of Christianity.
There's more to Christmas trees, that is, to the idea of Incarnation, than
Jew hatred ... I confess that the crib with angels and animals and a star
is to me a more sympathetic idea than the Wailing Wall." [MCCARTHY, p.
98]
In 1999, Eugene Fisher, Associate Director
of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the National
Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote with concern about the continual shrillness
of Jewish attack upon the Church:
"Many Catholics are understandably
confused as to why some in
the Jewish community feel constrained to
second guess so much of what
are, after all, internal matters of the
life of the church ... Why beat up
Catholics all the time. Why not go after
somebody else once and a
while? ... So how is it that when we recognize
our American story in
the Jewish-American story, many Jews seem
to miss what is to us
the obvious point, that to attack the papacy
is to raise up for us the
specter of the Nativist bigotry we thought
we had left behind after
John F. Kennedy's campaign for the Presidency?
... If Jews are to
communicate with American Catholics, there
will need to be a
softening of the rhetoric until the volume
is turned down enough
so that we Catholics can hear what they
are saying. Right now, the
discourse is too loud to be comprehensible."
[FISHER, E., 9-11-99]
In 1999 too, the Vatican's liaison to the
Jewish community, Edward Cardinal Cassidy, broke off discussions with the
Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation, an organization that tended
to function as an appendage of the World Jewish Congress (the WJC, as well
as the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, and other Jewish
organizations, has been consistently publishing critical reports about Vatican
policies). [GREENBERG, Dealing, 1999, p. 12] "Those secular organizations
that pretended to be the sole representatives of world Jewry, as far as we
are concerned, are not valid [interfaith discussion] partners," complained
Vatican aide, Father Remi Hoeckman, "They are campaigning against the
Church." [GREENBERG, Battle, 1999, p. 13] A special problem too is that Orthodox Jewish
organizations are never part of the "interfaith dialogue" process.
As the Jewish Week notes, traditional
elitist Jewish thinking holds that Jews "should not engage in theological
discussions with gentiles." [GREENBERG, Battle, 1999, p. 13]
Christians are everywhere bullied by demanding
Jewish accusers. Rabbi Daniel Lapin has expressed concern about Jewish bigotry
towards the Christian faith:
"To attempt to intimidate people of
other faiths into being afraid
to speak openly of their beliefs is, in
my mind, one of the most
foolhardy things the Jewish community has
ever done. It is wrong.
It is immoral. It is hypocritical. And it
is dreadfully unwise politics.
Let us pray that it doesn't come back to
haunt us." [LAPIN, D., 1999,
p. 289]
In 1998 Jewish scholar Susannah Heschel
openly explained the concerted Jewish effort to reconstruct Christianity to
Jewish wishes in today's academe, a formidable base for attack in American
society at-large:
"Jewish studies [at universities] emerged
not as a politically neutral field
concerned with describing the history of
the Jews but as a politically
charged effort to reconceive Christian history as well ... Telling
the story
of Christ's origins from a Jewish perspective
was an act of Jewish self-
empowerment ... Jewish theologians initiated
an effort to destroy the
image of Judaism in Christian theology
as part of their project of self-
definition ... Modern Jewish thought has
been formed not simply by
creating a Jewish historical narrative
but by attempting a rebirth of the
Christian mythic potential under Jewish
auspices ... The modern Jewish
retelling of Christian origins is not merely
a matter of Jews wishing to 'set
the record straight.' Rather, it demonstrates
Jewish desire to enter the
Christian myth, become its hero, and claim
the power inherent in
it." [HERSCHEL, S., p. 107, 109, 110]
This -- which is based upon the Jewish
creation, enforcement, and exploitation of Christian "guilt" for
the Holocaust, politically melded to the myths of the state of Israel -- is evidenced popularly in the following
Businesses Week news item in 1998 :
"Organizers of the Israel Jubilee
Conference, scheduled for April 29
through May 3 in Orlando, Florida, today
announced a massive effort
to mobilize America's estimated 15 million
pro-active, pro-Israel
Christians to strike a blow against anti-Semitism
in the United States
and around the world. During the coming
weeks, 50,000-100,000
Christians are expected to sign a pledge
of solidarity with Israel,
making a 'personal commitment to view
any anti-Semitic act against
a Jewish individual, family, business,
or synagogue as an act against
one's own church, and to oppose it by
every means possible."
[BUSINESS WEEK]
Meanwhile, Jews relentlessly subvert, attack,
and deconstruct whatever might be defined as a "Christian" world
view (and never the Jewish one) throughout American culture. In the academic
world of art, for example, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton admitted in
1996 that
"There is a relentless subversion
of Christian art that proceeds in the
work of many Jewish art historians."
[LIPTON, p. 288]
In an article that notes widespread Gentile
avoidance of saying anything that could be remotely construed as even slightly
offensive to Jewry, Jewish professor Nancy Jo Silberman-Federman closes
her article about humorous Hanukkah cards by describing this one, a put-down
of Christian tradition:
"Cha*nu*kah (Kha'noo'ka), n: 1. Festive
holiday when people of Jewish
ancestry joyously celebrate not having
to put a large dead pine in their
living room." [SILBERMAN-FEDERMAN,
p. 227]
When in recent years Stephen Dubner rejected
his parents' conversion from Judaism to Christianity, he gravitated towards
Jewish Orthodoxy and an old theme. "The more vigorously I embraced Judaism,"
he said, "the more vigorously I was inclined to assail Catholicism."
[ELIE, p. 19] ("On what grounds
had [my father] so grossly obliterated my birthright?" proclaimed Dubner,
"What kind of Jew would do that to a son?"[DUBNER, p. 228] ) The
influential late 19th century Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, once even
wrote his friend Moses Hess (early theorist of what became Zionism), saying,
"We must above all work to shatter Christianity." [LINDEMANN, ESAU'S,
p. 91] Animosity towards Catholicism and betraying
Jewish "self-haters" is so great among Jews that in Argentina, Orthodox
Jews even "boycotted the 1985 [Catholic-Jewish relations] conference
because of the presence of Bishop Jean Lustiger of Paris, a converted Jew."
[SINGER, D., 1989, p. 289]
"It may be the effect of working on
this book for many months now," wrote author Ann Roiphe about her project
on the Jewish persecution tradition and Jewish identity in America, "it
may be the result of constant reading of Jewish history, but I am feeling
a new and peculiar irrational hostility to my Christian neighbors ... The
Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John works as well as reciting
the story of the little pigs to Jack the Ripper as he is about to go out into
the London night." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 121]
In Israel, the ancient Jewish contempt
and hatred for -- and discrimination against -- Christianity is institutionalized.
The former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadiah Yosef, when asked what
a Jew should do when he comes across a Bible that contains both the Old and
New Testaments, advised that the Christian part should be torn out and burned.
[SHULWEISS, p. 56-57] (In 2000, Ovadia's
grandson, Yonatan Yosef made the international Jewish news when he "was
accused of stockpiling weapons for a right-wing organization that attacks
Arabs.") [GLEIT/HAUSMAN, 2-18-00] The popular American musical play,
Jesus Christ Superstar, was banned in Israel. [AVISHAI, B.,
p. 301]
Also in the Jewish state, Yeshofat Harakabi
noted with dismay in 1989 that "two young men exhumed the body of a Christian
woman who had not converted to Judaism from her grave in a Jewish cemetery,
even though she had lived for many years as a member of the secular Jewish
community, and her son had served in the Israeli army and regarded himself
as a Jew. The two were tried and convicted but, as was reported in the press,
the local religious court and the Israeli Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem expressed
support for the deed." [HARKABI, p. 180-181] Such Orthodox defilation
and grave-robbing was against the Anghelevici family, whose matriarch, a Gentile,
born a Christian, had married a Jew. After repeated insistence by the family
that she be buried next to her daughter in a Jewish cemetery, "the body
was found one morning flung on the outskirts of a nearby Moslem cemetery."
[HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 176]
Georges Tamarin noted in 1973 that "the
Hebrew University decided to remove a group of statues representing Moses,
Jesus, and Mohammed donated by a famous sculptor, because of the angry reaction
of some Orthodox professors. The trustees of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv
refused to accept the donation of an organ, since some of the spectators might
be reminded of a church; the directors of Kol Yisrael felt obliged to explain
why it permitted Prof. Flusser to mention the life of Jesus (which might have
a missionary influence!) in a talk about the significance of the Galilee."
[TAMARIN, p. 59]
"According to a recent report in the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz," noted Rabbi Harold Schulweiss in
1989, "Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg, the winner of the Israeli prize in Judaica,
stated that he supported 'the application of the halacha
that a Gentile should not live in Jerusalem.' According to Rabbi Waldenburg,
'in order to apply the halacha correctly, we should have to expel all
Gentiles from Jerusalem and purify it completely.' Another Ha'aretz
report tells us that the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu,
interprets halacha as forbidding Jews in Israel from selling apartments --
'not even one' -- to Gentiles." [SCHULWEISS, p. 57] Earlier, noted Michael
Jansen, "there has been violence against Gentile places of worship and
two Russian nuns living in the Ein Karem suburb of Jerusalem were murdered."
[JANSEN, p. 17] In 1983, a group of students from a Jewish religious school
disrupted a classical music concert in Jerusalem featuring Handel's "Messiah"
(which is based on a Christian theme). [JANSEN, p. 16] "It was learned
afterward that Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapiro had sanctioned a nonviolent
demonstration [against the Handel concert]." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 59]
And Uri Huppert reports that in 1984
"a Jerusalem church was damaged in
an attack similar to the torching
of a Baptist Church in the summer of 1983.
That attack was reminiscent
of an attack on a much wider scale twenty
years earlier, when one
thousand yeshiva students went on a wild
rampage against Catholic
churches in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."
[HUPPERT, U., 1988, pl. 109-
110]
In 2000, notes the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,
"[A U.S. State Department report gives]
special emphasis to the plight
of Jehovah's Witnesses [in Israel] ... This
year's report says that 120
complaints [about Jewish harassment] submitted
to the police by members
of this sect in 1998 and 1999 went unanswered."
[RATNER, D., 9-21-
2000]
In 1997, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot
reported that
"Two weeks ago on Saturday night hundreds
of Orthodox Jews broke
into the community's place of worship,
totally demolished it and
stole the public address equipment. The
books and pamphlets were
piled in the yard and a large bonfire
was lit. While the books were
burning, Orthodox Jews danced around the
bonfire. Alvin Neuport,
a veteran member of the Jehovah's Witnesses
community said,
'... Although the destruction and arson
took place on the main street,
a short distance from the home of Member
of the Knesset Maxim
Levy, who is also Lydda's mayor, and hundreds
of people danced
around the bonfire, no one stopped them.
Only when the onwer of an
adjacent shop feared that the fire would
spread, were the police called
in.'" [KOREN, 3-30-97]
In 1997, a news report noted the horrible
case of a Jew in New Jersey:
"A jury recommended a life sentence
on Monday for a Jewish man who
said he drugged and suffocated his children
because he could not allow
his ex-wife to raise them as Christians.
Attorneys for Avi Kostner, 52,
argued that mental illness had warped
his sense of reality, and pushed
him to kill his children." [SUN-SENTINEL,
p. 3A]
In 1990, 150 Jewish nationalist zealots
aggravated religious tensions during Easter week in the Old City of Jerusalem
by moving into a 72-room building, St. John's Hospice, in the center of the
Christian quarter, "only yards" from the Holy Sepulcher, the reputed
site of the tomb of Jesus in Christian tradition. The intention was to establish
a strong Jewish presence towards eventual expansion throughout all non-Jewish
sectors of the Old City. The unspoken long-term intention is to make the whole
area Jewish. "Armed Jewish settlers,"
notes Glenn Frankel, "escorted by Israeli police, had occupied the site
in the middle of the night ... , a move that caused howls of protests from
Christian leaders in the United States and Europe and deeply embarrassed American
Jewish leaders." [FRANKEL, p. 232] "For ten days," says Victor
Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, "the Israeli government denied any role in
the event. Finally it admitted that it had secretly funneled $1.8 million
to the group, 40% of the cost of subletting the complex." [OSTROVSKY,
p. 334]
Six years earlier, Israeli journalist Lesley
Hazeleton noted an incident involving an American Jew in the Holy City:
"Only a few months in Israel, [he]
had joined a yeshiva provocatively
set up in the Moslem Quarter of the Old
City, and rented a room in
the Christian Quarter nearby. On Easter
Saturday that year, which
was also Shabbat, a Syrian Orthodox procession
returning from
services at the Holy Sepulcher had paused
beneath his window,
headed by a troop of boy scouts playing
drums. The drums drove
him mad with anger; they were an intolerable
desecration of the
holiness of his Sabbath day. So he had poured
a cauldron of
boiling water onto the boys in the street
below. Five were taken
to the hospital for treatment of burns."
[HAZELETON, L., 1984,
p. 109]
In 2001, The Jewish Week noted:
"Violence against Christians in Jerusalem appears
to be rising as concerns
increase over the millenium and its affect on
fervent cult groups making
pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Israeli officials
said this week. Jerusalem
police said they are investigating a recent
wave of threats and assaults
against Christian organizations in Jeruslalem.
In one incident, vandals
hurled stones at Jerusalem's St. Andrew's Church
of Scotland two
weeks ago, breaking several of its stained-glass
windows. In another
wave of incidents, photographs of a bullet shot
through the forehead of
of one of the Swiss Catholic women whose apartment
in the ultra-Orthodox
neighborhood of Mea She'arim was burned down
last November were
plastered outsdie two churches and a Bible bookstore
on New Year's
Eve, police said ... The bookstore, a non-denominational
organization,
publishes Bibles in different languages. [Owner
Judy] McClean believes
the incident was the result of [Jewish ultra-Orthodox]
haredi violence
against Christian organizations." [GREENBERG,
E., 1-22-99, p. 45]
In 2001, Russian/Israeli Israel Shamir noted
that:
"On Christmas Eve, according to a report
in the Jerusalem local paper, Kol
Ha-lr, Hassids customarily do not read holy
books, as it could save Jesus
from eternal punishment (the Talmud teaches
that Jesus boils in hell). This
custom was dying out, but Hassids, the fervent
nationalists, brought it
back to life. I still remember old Jews spitting
while passing by a church,
and cursing the dead, while passing by a Christian
cemetery. Last
year in Jerusalem, a Jew decided to refresh
the tradition. He spat at [the]
Holy Cross, carried in the procession along
the city. Police saved him
from further trouble, but the court fined him
$50, despite his claim that
he just fulfilled his religious duty. "
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]
In 1999, in a clear policy to politically
"divide and conquer" Arabs of Christian and Muslim faith in Israel,
the Israeli government allowed a mosque to built in Jesus Christ's hometown,
Nazareth, next to a hallowed Christian shrine. Israeli policy on the matter,
noted the Los Angeles Times, "set off bitter recriminations between
the Vatican and Israel ... The Vatican said Israel bore the responsibility
for 'creating the basis for instigating divisions." "The decision
of the Israeli government," noted a Vatican spokesman, "seems to
lay the foundation for future conflicts and tensions between the two communities,
Christian and Islam." [LA TIMES, 11-24-99]
In 1997 a proposed bill was even sent to
the Israeli Knesset [parliament] to make mere
possession of [Christian] "missionary" literature in the
Jewish state a criminal offense. "Will
it be illegal," wondered a Christian observer in Israel, "to possess
a New Testament?" [HALEVI, Y, p. 17-18] Also in Israel, in recent history the messianic
Gush Emunim organization has revitalized a Middle-Ages Jewish prayer requesting
God to see to it that Christians, Jewish apostates, and heretics "may
perish instantly." "This
process of reversion," noted Israel Shahak, "happened in the period
when the Catholic Church ... removed from its Good Friday service a prayer
which asked the Lord to have mercy on Jews, heretics, etc.
This
prayer was thought by most Jewish leaders to be offensive and even anti-Semitic."
[SHAHAK, p. 93]
"Even today," notes another Israeli
author, Israel Shamir,
"Jews in Israel refer to Jesus by the demeaning
word Yeshu (instead of Yeshua),
meaning 'Perish his name.' There is an ongoing
argument, whether His name was
turned into a swear word, or [the] other way
around. In a similar pun, the Gospel
is called 'Avon Gilaion,' the booklet of Sin."
[SHAMIR, I., 2001]
In the context
of all this, Rabbi Yechiel Epstein, founder and president of the International
Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), has yet managed to acquire over
$20 million in donations from well-meaning (and incredibly ignorant) American
Christians to finance immigration to Israel and the absorption of Russians
and Ethiopian Jews into the Jewish state. [COHEN, C., 1999]
In 1999, the IFCJ commissioned a Gallup poll in Israel, discovering
-- to their shock -- that 75 percent of the Israeli respondents knew so
little about Christianity that they were not even aware that December 25
was a Christian holiday. As Israel Shamir notes about such exploited, and gullible,
Christians:
"The majority of the Christian Zionists
are simple misled souls, people of good intentions but
little knowledge. They think they 'support Jews,' but they promote the Christ-hating
spirit among the Jews. It was not in
vain that a hero of the Zionist Bible, Leon Uris
[author of Exodus], kept a poster in his
room saying 'We crucified Christ.' It was
not in vain that an Israeli soldier on the
roadblock to Bethlehem told me yesterday,
'We starve the beasts. It was not in vain
that the Gospel was burned on a stake
Israel, while anti-Gospel literature
is widely spread; that new immigrant Jews
embracing Christianity are persecuted
and deported; that every preacher of the
Christian faith in Israel can be sent
to jail according to new anti-Christian laws;
that Israeli archeologists erase the
Christian holy sites and memories off the face of
the Holy Land.") [SHAMIR, I., 2001]
Conversely, while Israelis know nothing about
Christianity but disdain, a massive pro-Israel lobby does a virtually air-tight
job in socializing Christian tourists in Israel to one-sided Jewish propaganda:
particularly emphasizing the theme of noble Jewish defense against hostile,
antisemitic Arabs. As James Wall, former editor of The Christian Century
and a visitor to Israel nearly twenty times, noted in 2000:
"Another brick in the passionate firewall
that defends Israel from criticism
is less well known but no less effective
-- the systematic development
and control of the tourist trade among American
Christian church pastors
and laity. In controlling its Bible land
tourism, Israel can insure that tour
members hear only good things about Israel
and can make it difficult
for tourists to have any sort of meaningful
discourse with Palestinians."
[WALL, J., 2000, p. 9]
Dominated by Jewish tour guides, few Christian tourists ever get
to even see Christian Palestinians, let alone hear their version of the Israel-Arab
conflict. Many American pastors are even provided free trips to Israel by
tour agencies as bait to bring paying parishioners later. "The pastors
are nominal tour leaders under the Israeli-approved guides," says Wall,
"... These experiences are almost always devoid of any interaction with
Palestinian Christian organizations." [WALL, J., 2000, p. 10]
Back in America, meanwhile, Jewish lobbying
organizations continue to intrude upon and disrupt Christian affairs -- local
or international -- with impunity. In
2001, the Simon Wiesenthal Center embarked on a campaign to economically boycott
the international YMCA center in Geneva because the Jewish lobbying group
didn't like a YMCA report that criticized Israel's abuse of Palestinians.
The Wiesenthal organization also had the gall to lodge a formal protest in
1993 with the Vatican for its consideration of the sainthood of Pope Pius
XII. His alleged crime? Doing nothing to save the Jews during World War II.
"While it is normally not the practice of non-Catholics to comment on
the worthiness of the Church's candidates for sainthood," wrote the Center's
Rabbi Marvin Hier, "Pope Pius XII must surely qualify as an exception
to the rules." [RESPONSE, p. 10, Spring 1993] (Likewise, Jewish
lobbying groups -- ever meddling in Christian internal affairs -- found "insult"
and "mischief" with the Russian Orthodox Church's decision to canonize
the last of Russian's Romanov tsars, Nicholas II). [FORWARD, 8-25-00, p. 8]
In 1999, a controversial book by non-Jewish
author John Cornwell rode the wave of popular Jewish hostility towards the
much maligned Pope. Sensationally entitled "Hitler's Pope," the
essence of this hack-job volume may be gleaned by this extraordinary editorial
comment from Commonweal magazine: "Once again, the conventional
wisdom seems to treat Catholicism and fascism as synonyms." [COMMONWEAL,
11-5-99]
Cornwell condemns Pope Pius XII as an anti-Semite;
his main piece of evidence is a single letter he found in which the Pope speaks
harshly about his own experience with Jewish communists who headed a violent
coup in post-World War I Germany. "Pacelli's [the Pope's] constant harping
on the Jewishness of this party of power usurpers [Bolsheviks]," asserts
Cornwell, "is consistent with the growing and widespread belief among
Germans that the Jews were the instigators of the Bolshevik revolution, their
principal aim was the destruction of Christian civilization. But there is
something about the passage that is repugnant and ominous. The repeated references
to the Jewishness of these [communist] individuals, amid the catalogue of
epithets describing their physical and moral repulsiveness, gives an impression
of stereotypical anti-Semitic contempt." [CORNWELL, p. 75]
Among the critical responses to Cornwell's
book was that of Ronald Rychlak, who argues that Cornwell's book was "not
a work of honest scholarship, and was written to justify a conclusion that
had been reached in advance." [RYCHLAK, R., 4-2000] Rychlak attacks Cornwell's
theses from the very start of the book -- its cover:
"[The book] carried a picture of Pacelli
dressed in formal diplomatic
regalia as he leaves a reception given for
German President Hindenburg
in 1927. Beside him stands a soldier of
the Weimer republic. Those who
do not recognize the differences in uniform
details could easily confuse
the Weimer soldier with a Nazi soldier because
their distinctive and
similar helmets. Use of this photograph,
especially when coupled with
such a provocative title as Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII,
gives the impression that Pope Pius XII
is leaving a meeting with Hitler.
Unfortunately, this is not the only dishonest
aspect of the book."
[RYCHLAK, R., 4-2000]
The Jewish attack on Pope Pius XII had
become a crusade. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen had
joined in with his own syndicated column, proclaiming that "Pius XII
is unsuited for sainthood." [COHEN, R., p. 11A] For Rabbi Hier's part,
he later added that "there is no denying that Pius XII did wonderful
work to rescue the Jews of Rome in late '43 and '44. But where was he when
he could have made a difference in saving the lives of six million Jews?"
[SULLIVAN, p. 10]
Hier refers to the fact that the Pope, even
according to Jewish researcher Picas Lipid, was instrumental in saving as
many as 800,000 Jewish lives. [WENISCH, p. 7D]
In 1958, at Pope Pius Ixia’s death, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Golda
Emir stated that "we share in the grief of humanity when fearful martyrdom
came to our people, the Pope's voice was raised for its victims ... We mourn
a great servant of peace." [WENISCH, p. 7D]
In broader perspective, Rabbi Hier's moral
chauvinism and chutzpah in meddling in Church business is mind-boggling. While
the Pope is condemned for the crime of "silence," in June 1994 the
Chicago Tribune noted that another rabbi (Orthodox, just like Hier)
had something very public to say. Rabbi Shlomo Goren made a public call for
all Jews to commit murder. In the
midst of the painstaking peace process between Israel and the Palestinians,
Rabbi Goren declared that "as long as [Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat]
declares jihad against the Jews and works to wrest Jerusalem from our hands,
his status is that of one who intends to kill, and every Jew is commanded
to kill him." [HUNDLEY, p 1, 6]
Is Rabbi Goren a nut? A madman convinced
that his religion tells its followers to kill people? An obscure fanatic that
no one would ever take seriously? Rabbi Goren was the closest thing to a Pope
a Jew can be. From 1973 to 1983 he was
the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel. The public call for Arafat's murder
also came from a Jerusalem City Councilman, Shmuel Meir (who was not reprimanded
by the mayor), and Knesset member Hanan Porat. Can we imagine in the 1990s
a Pope or a priest publicly announcing that all Christians should join in
murder, as religious policy, like the Jews? (This commandment to kill [called
a din rodef] is sanctioned by Jewish tradition.
In 1999, the Chief Sephardic Rabbi
of Jerusalem, Shalom Masbash, even issued such a death sentence against two
Jewish members of his own congregation. [WORLD PRESS REVIEW, 7-99] )
Rest assured no Wiesenthal letters of complaint
headed out to Israel in protest of a living former Jewish "Pope,"
or any other rabbi, commanding murder. Rather, they would turn to assail some
imagined Christian slight against Jews, like for instance, the formal Simon
Wiesenthal Center complaint against a Memphis-area intra-Christian organization
of sixty Black and White churches organized to fight racism along Christian
tenets. Their crime? They didn't invite Jews to a Christian
organization. [RESPONSE, p. 11, WINTER 1992] (What intra-Jewish religious
aggregation -- encompassing Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Falasha, Sephardim,
or any other conceivable expressly Jewish conglomeration -- has, for any purpose,
ever included Christians?)
In 2001, Israel's Chief Rabbi Meir Lau
broadened the Jewish religious sanction of murder. As the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz reported, while the Jewish state was being internationally
condemned for its policy of assassinations against Palestinians:
"Israel's practice of killing Palestinian
militants has the full backing of Jewish
religious law, according to a statement made
yesterday by Chief Rabbi Israel
Meir Lau. Quoting ancient sages and Biblical
passages, Lau explained that
Israel is now fighting a war of commandment,
mandated by God. Lau referred
to an oft-quoted Jewish precept, He who comes
to kill you, rise up and kill
him first." [HAARETZ, 7-27-01]
The Jewish strategy to propel Jewish chauvinism
under the shield of the values of pluralistic tolerance in the lands in which
they live, and at the same time attack parallel expressions of Christian solidarity,
is not new. The respected historian, D. W. Brogan, noted its existence, for
example, in France of the 1880s:
"In certain parts of the [French] administration,
it was rare to find a
practicing Catholic in a position of power.
A Jewish prefect could, with
impunity, observe Passover, but a prefect
who was openly zealous in the
observance of Easter might find himself
under violent attack from a paper
like the Lauterne, whose main stock
in trade was anti-clerical scurrility,
and whose editor was a Jew, the great 'priest-eater,'
Eugene Mayer."
[LINDEMANN, p. 69]
In 1995 a Polish priest, and a pastor of
the successful anti-communist Solidarity movement, Henryk Jankowski, came
under attack as an anti-Semite for his public comments about Jews, particularly
those about Jerzy Urban who, the reverend said, "publicly declares he
is a Jew, and who insults [our] national feelings, our president, and the
Polish-born pope, the church, and its primate." [JER POST, 6-28-95] "Urban," noted the Jerusalem
Post, "the widely despised communist government spokesman during
Poland's martial law crackdown in the early 1980s, is now the editor and owner
of a strongly anti-Catholic weekly publication, known for obscenity."
[JER POST, p6-28-95]
Over the centuries and with the recent self-promotive
tool of American cultural pluralism, the traditional Jewish moral worldview
has largely overtaken traditional Christian values. This is far from an irrational
"anti-Semitic canard," but a self-evident truth. One need only look
to what Christian and Jewish values were in the Middle Ages. Christianity
sanctified human universality, humility, poverty, and non-materialism. The
ideals of the Chosen People were "particularist,"
usurious, exploitive, and materialist. Even
stripped of its religious base, which value system today is pre-eminent? Which
looks more familiar to us?
In the mid-1800s, Karl Marx, had a sharply
caustic view of Jewish economic and materialist influence in Europe, arguing
that
"The Jews have emancipated themselves
to the extent that Christians
have become Jews ... Money is the zealous
one God of Israel, beside
which no other God may stand. Money degraded
all the gods of
mankind, therefore robbed the whole world,
of both nature and man,
of its original value. Money is the essence
of man's life and work,
which has become alienated from him. This
alien monster rules him
and he worships it. The God of the Jews
has become secularized and
is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange
is the Jews' real God."
[MARX, K., 1959, p. 38, p. 40]
As Jewish scholar Gordon Lafar notes about
the different moral emphases of Judaism (particularist) and Christianity (universalist):
"The debate between universalism and
particularism is thus partly also a
debate between self-interest and self-sacrifice,
between the selfish and
selfless. Part of the rationale for universalism
is that it embodied a
rejection, or at least a suppression, of
self-interest. To advocate a
particularist position is, at least to
some extent, to accept an ethic that is
comfortable with self-interested behavior."
[LAFAR, p. 201]
As Lafar also notes, "Neither poverty
nor humility are Jewish virtues, and the tradition is largely devoid of stories
glorifying the virtuous poor man." Poverty and humility were virtues of Christianity; self-sacrifice
was central to the moral code of the human family concept, central teachings
of the Christ who is anathema to the traditional Jewish world view. Christ
taught that the poor and the dispossessed were blessed; he reportedly knocked
over in disgust the money changing tables in the Jewish temple, after all.
However one looks at it, whether Christ was the son of God, a man, or merely
a legend, the ultimate sacrifice of his life for all human beings is -- on
compassionate, pan-human, universalistic terms -- a very noble story. This
sacrifice is, of course, in sharp distinction to Jewish "particularist"
tenets whereby Christ's sacrifice for everyone is regarded solely as the ultimate
act of a Jewish betrayer.
In 2000, an upstate New York newspaper
highlighted the problems the Catholic Church was having nationwide in finding
young men interested in careers as priests:
"[The Church] blame a modern society
that glorifies young millionaires
who make their fortunes on the Internet
and Wall Street -- but not priests
who must take a vow of poverty." [NOGAS,
C., 2000, p. 4A]
"One of the great intellectual champions
of human universalism, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant,"
notes Lafar, "explicitly equates morality with self-denial and immorality
with self-interest." [LAFAR, p. 200] In this vein, notes Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, "twentieth century Jewish history seemed conclusively to refute
the universalism of the Enlightenment. Particularism had returned to Jewish
thought." [SACKS, J., ONE, p. 11
In 1937, with the rise of Nazi fascism in
Europe, an editorial in the liberal Protestant Christian Century poignantly
confronted (in a way that is forbidden today) some of the obvious reasons
for anti-Semitism, underscoring the tenets of traditional Judaism:
"Any group in the cultural life
of the community which deliberately
insulates itself by nondemocratic barriers
against the free movement
of the democratic process is inevitably
in for bad treatment ... Everyone
knows that the psychology of society is
such that any group is a
social irritant if it insists upon being
a permanent minority, and utilizes
undemocratic means to maintain itself as
such.
The only religion compatible with democracy
is one which
conceives of itself as universal, and offers
itself to all men and all
races, and cultures. The Jewish religion,
or any other religion, is an
alien element in American democracy unless
it proclaims itself as
a universal faith, and proceeds upon such
a conviction to persuade
us all to be Jews ... Judaism ... has been
racial, in the sense of
hereditary, culture sanctions by its religion.
It has been such through
the ages ... Does Christianity submit any
more readily to the democratic
process than Judaism and Jews? The answer
... is a positive yes.
Christianity is not and never has been
a racial faith." [MORRISSON, p.
862-863]
In the religious context, how about yet
another Jewish double standard? While modern Jewry obsessively calls to task
-- morally, politically, legally, and every other way -- even the slightest
evidence of negative opinion about Jews by others (all lumped by Jews under
the generic heading of "anti-Semitism"), and Christian theologians
have been "reworking and emending various passages from the New Testament
thought to be anti-Judaic in teaching," [WILSON, p. 33] Liebman and Cohen
remark that "it is remarkable how traditional negative images [about
Gentiles by Jews] are sustained despite their tenuous relation to the objective
conditions and experience of American Jews. We suspect that these images have
retained their resonance because they remain central to the conceptions of
Judaism and what it means to be a Jew. One cannot choose to remain Jewish,
least of all in a society that offers the option of not remaining Jewish,
unless one has a positive conception of the Jewish self as opposed to the
Gentile other. One way to sustain such a conception is by maintaining an image
of the anti-Semitic Gentile." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 55] (The classical Jewish stereotype of a non-Jew
-- still widely maintained -- includes the presumption that Gentiles are uncontrollable
anti-Semites, primitive in nature and unrefined, brutish, uninterested and
unable to perform conceptually, unable to have loving families, are untrustworthy
in business with Jews, and are veritable alcoholics.) [LEIBMAN/COHEN p. 51]
As we have repeatedly seen, Jewry's double
standards are continuous through history. As Franz Mehring notes about European
Jewry in the Enlightenment's early years:
"The Jews were delighted when enlightened
criticism took the Christian
religion to task, for they had themselves
always cursed it, but when the
same criticism turned its attention to the
Jewish religion they howled
aloud as though humanity itself was betrayed."
[MEHRING, p. 97]
************************************
A civic religion has, like any religion,
specific rituals. Perhaps not surprisingly, Jonathan Woocher notes that the
most important ritual in the modern Jewish polity that has survived Orthodox
synagogue culture is fundraising. "The elements [of the fundraising ritual],"
he says, "have often been criticized and satirized for their shallowness
and ostentatiousness on the one hand, and their over-heated rhetoric and pretentiousness
on the other ... Despite this, the ritual [of the fundraising] campaign has
been a singularly effective instrument for mobilizing Jews and producing a
sense of communal solidarity." [WOOCHER, p. 151] By 1973 the United Jewish
Appeal system alone collected $600 million a year. "The UJA campaigns," notes Israeli
critic Matti Golan, "have become the focus of Jewish activity. In fact,
they're the glue that holds Jewish life in America together." [GOLAN,
p. 104] By the 1980s at least half of UJA money was yearly going to Israel.
"Over 50 percent of the UJA's allocations," notes Edward Shapiro,
"support social, welfare, educational and economic development projects
in Israel. And the importance of Israel and the UJA defined status within
the Jewish community." [SHAPIRO, Jewish Americans, p. 170] "The UJA is not just a service organization
and its federations," notes Israeli professor Menachem Kaufman, "Since
1948 it has been a living link between the American Jewish community and Israel."
[KAUFMAN, M., p. 219]
In 1960, one Jewish commentator, James Warburg,
ran into trouble when he questioned
whether donations to the UJA should continue to be tax-deductible. As Melvin
Urofsky notes:
"Why should donations to the UJA be
tax-deductible, he asked,
'when so large a proportion of them flow
directly or indirectly into
the hands of a foreign government which
openly engages in propaganda
attempting to influence the policy of the
government of the
United States?'" [UROFSKY, M., 1978,
p. 341]
Israeli universities raise another $100
million a year from diaspora sources for the Jewish state; the Hadassah organizations
raise another $50 million a year for their own projects in Israel. [ELAZAR,
p. 230] The Israel Bond organization
also each year "sells about half a billion dollars in Israeli bonds to
American Jews and their friends." [SHAPIRO, Jewish Americans,
p. 170] "Thirty-five of the largest and most active of the national organizations,"
notes Chaim Waxman, "are affiliated with the Conference of Presidents
of Major Jewish American Organizations, for which Zionist and pro-Israel activity
is the major emphasis." [ZWEIGENHAFT, p. 103] "Secrecy is, perhaps, the most outstanding
characteristic of the conference's activities," says David Whalen, "While
hardly the proverbial 'Learned Elders of Zion,' the Conference seems to believe
that it can advocate Jewish causes most effectively from behind a veil of
sorts ... The Conference's charter is not public ... The Conference seeks
to discourage internal discord from translating into uncoordinated or ambiguous
support for Israel. To this end a formal yet mysterious relationship has been
developed with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)."
[WHALEN, p. 78-79] "In the early 1950s, with Israel having consolidated
its statehood," notes Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, "all the major
American Jewish groups turned Zionist." [RAVIV, p. 55]
"Virtually all the great names of Jewish
business," notes Joel Kotkin, "-- Rothschild, Kadoorie, and Warburg
among them -- contributed to the building of the state [of Israel]. "
[KOTKIN, p. 33] By 1991, Israel had still remained a giant welfare state.
Thanks to Jewish international philanthropy and Jewish lobbying for American
government largesse, "Israel had emerged as the single largest recipient
of charity, grants, and assistance per capita in the world, the bulk of it
from America." [KOTKIN, p. 66]
By
1985, that year's gifts and endowments to the Federation/UJA totaled $1.128
billion [KOSMIM, p. 20], and it has averaged nearly a billion dollars each
year ever since. [HALBERSTAM, p. 41] Total Jewish philanthropy through various
agencies to a realm of causes in 1985 was estimated by one researcher to be
$3.1 billion, more money than the Gross National Product of some Third world
countries, and more than the military budgets of nations like Cuba and Turkey.
[KOSMIM, p. 28] Looked at another way, the United Jewish Appeal raises yearly
more money than the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association,
the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the March of Dimes, and the National Easter
Seal Society, combined. [WHITFIELD,
AM, p. 14] Of all Jewish charity,
by the 1970s two-thirds were believed to be to expressly Jewish causes, the
rest to hospitals, museums, colleges, and other such institutions in which
Jews usually also had a stake. [KOSSIM, p. 20]
Jewish money, wherever it went, had enormous effect.
"Around the turn of the present century," notes David Dalin, "a
handful of Jews, mostly of German origin, came to exercise a profound influence
on American philanhtropy, creating a multiplicity of charitable institutions
that continue to shape our world. It was an impressive group, including in
its ranks the banker Jacob Schiff, the financier Felix Warburg, the industrialists
Daniel and Simon Guggenheim, the merchant Nathan Straus, and the jurists Julian
Mack and Mayer Sulzberger. But its foremost member was surely [Sear-Roebuck
magnate] Julius Rosenwald." [DALIN, D., 1998]
Generalized philanthropy is of course also
valuable for tax write-offs. Take the case of the Jewish chief of the Walt
Disney corporation, Michael Eisner. He "put Disney [stock] shares into
his personal foundation. For Mr. Eisner, as for any donor in his situation,
the donation had two tax advantages: it reduced his taxable income, perhaps
by the full $116 million, and he did not have to pay capital gains taxes on
the donated shares." [NY TIMES, 12-20-98, p. 10] Forbes magazine notes the case of wealthy elderly Jewish
real estate developer Robert R. Riser, who was angered that, at his (and his
wife's) death, some $40 million of his fortune would probably go to inheritance
taxes. By creating a private foundation, notes Forbes, "if all
goes according to plan ... the family's medical and Jewish charities will
get tens of millions; the IRS, nothing." [NOVACK, J., 11-10-99]
"Jews are twenty-three times as likely
to establish foundations for Jewish causes than Catholic are for Catholic
causes, or Protestant for Protestant causes." [HALBERSTAM, p. 41] In
the 1987 edition of the Foundation Directory, country-based grant programs
included 75 for Israel, 13 for the entirety of all the countries of Africa,
4 for Italy, 3 for Poland, 6 for France, and 2 for Scotland. [KOSMIN, p. 24] In one 1978-80 survey of American Jews in a
leadership development programs, notes Kevin MacDonald, "51% agreed that
providing social and legal services for Jews was a high priority, and only
2% viewed it as a low priority. However, only 4% agreed that providing social
and welfare services for anyone in need was a high priority, compared to 7%
who viewed it as a low priority." [MACDONALD, p. 102] By 1993, a variety of Jewish private money
sources, like the Charles H. Revson
and Wexner foundations (distinct from the UJA and other Jewish "club"
organizations), were estimated to have a total "financial giving capacity
of $350-500 million, "oriented toward the collective well-being of the
Jewish people." [ISRAEL, R. p. 1]
The largest Jewish philanthropy organization
in America -- with assets of $1.8 billion -- is the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg
Foundation. It is estimated that about two-thirds of its funding goes to Jewish
causes. [MOMENT, 12-31-98, p. 57] From Italy, the $50 million heading to Israel
at the death of Aladar Fleischman was "one of the largest bequests by
an individual to Israeli organizations." [PERRY, V., 6-10-99] From Canada,
the ultra-Orthodox Reichmann family "ranked among the most munificent
philanthropists of this century, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars,
almost all of it to narrowly benefit their coreligionists. At the peak of
[the Reichmann's] Olympia and York's prosperity, the family supported a thousand
schools and other religious institutions scattered around the world but concentrated
in Israel." [BIANCO, p. xvi] Jewish organization studies determined in 1996 that there were about
3,500 foundations that provided money to "something Jewish." By
1999, according to the Jewish Funders Network, this figure was 5,500. [GOLDMAN,
J., 4-29-99] In 2001 Jewish business writer
Steven Silbiger wrote that "there are now more than seven thousand indpendent
Jewish foundations funded by individuals or families with total assets estimated
at $10 billion ot $15 billion." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 47]
Jews are also adept at getting huge sums from non-Jewish foundations.
In 2000, for example, five Philadelphia-area Jewish organizations, including
the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Philadelphia, landed $4.65 million
from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Three of the four grant recipients were linked
to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. [SILVERSTEIN, M., 1-13-2000,
p. 11]
In 1998, Newsday noted that
"This year, for the first time, United
Jewish Appeal's gift of $300 million
to Israel is likely to be eclipsed by philanthropic
aid sent there by family
foundations and tax-exempt 'American Friends
of ... ' organizations. And
that does not take into account additional
uncounted millions that flow
from Jews in the United States directly
to religious institutions in Israel."
[FRIEDMAN, J., p. A7] (Nor does this include
the yearly billions of
dollars effectively lobbied from unknowing
American taxpayers for Israel
-- see later chapter)
A Jewish American journalist, Glenn Frankel,
writes that some Israelis are not always thankful for the huge sums of money
coming their way:
"[Israelis] saw American Jewish money
increasingly was going to the
most entrenched, reactionary and corrupt
elements of their society --
the political machines and small party
interests that sustained Israel's
social and political paralysis ... [Israeli
author Mati] Golan defines the
relationship between American Jews and
Israeli Jews as corrupt,
superficial, and deceitful. He finds repugnant
the UJA fundraising
campaigns that exploit and distort Israel's
problems in order to raise
money. He mocks the hypocrisy of American
Jews who ... assuage
their guilty consciences and their insecurities
by donating money to
Israel ... Many Israelis believed that
diaspora Jews were moral cowards;
still, both sides needed one another."
[FRANKEL, G., p. 215, 216, 218]
American Jews also send millions of dollars
to Israel for its presidential and other political campaigns. The Jerusalem
Post wrote that "American Jews contributed $6 million to $8 million
to Israeli campaigns in the 1996 elections, despite the 1994 [Israeli] law
barring foreign donations [to political campaigns]." [COHLER-ESSES, L.,
2-19-99, p. 1]
J. Bruce Nichols, an official at the Carnegie
Council on Ethics and International Affairs, also notes the maverick political
complexion of the major Jewish organization involved in international Jewish
immigration, refugee, and resettlement issues. "The AJDC [American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee]," he notes, "to this day has always
received the bulk of its [economic and other] support from the Jewish community.
This fact has at times encouraged an almost brash sense of independence of
Jewish philanthropy from the aims of [the American government]." [NICHOLS,
p. 40]
In 1984 Carl Levin, a Jewish Congressman
from Michigan, publicly complained about American Jewry's lack of commitment
to the universalist fabric of America and their non-Jewish neighbors. The
Jewish Week noted that Levin believed
"Jews as individuals and groups lag
behind other religious groups in
lobbying their Congressmen on issues of
universal concern, and their
activity makes conspicuous the lesser
lobbying of Jewish groups for
such concerns ... He said he received
and welcomed many visits and
calls and mail from Jewish groups ' about
Israel, about Soviet Jewry and
about Ethiopian Jews.' But he felt he
was 'not lobbied enough by many
of the groups and individuals about concerns
that are not, strictly
speaking, Jewish." [GOLLAB, 10-19-84,
p. 10]
Beyond "general considerations"
about themselves, notes Jewish scholar Gordon Lafar, "lies a deeper commitment
that extends only to fellow Jews: the obligation to actively promote their
welfare and the acceptance of an ongoing responsibility to guarantee their
well-being." [LAFAR, p. 195] "The organized Jewish community,"
notes Irving Howe, "... favors in-group solidarity above all." [HOWE,
1982, p. 259]
In 1961 Jewish sociologist Daniel Bell
wrote:
"One is a Jew, discharging one's
obligation as a Jew, through
membership in Jewish organizations. In the embourgeoisement
of
Jewish life in America, the community
has become institutionalized
around fund raising, and the index of
an individual's importance too
often is the amount of money he donates
to hospitals, defense
agencies, philanthropic groups, and
the like. The manifest ends are the
community functions being served, but
frequently the latent end is the
personal prestige -- yichus. This kind of institutional life
may even lend
itself to historic forms of corruption:
of simony, when those who have
risen high in Jewish organizations receive
their rewards in appointive
office in Jewish life; and of indulgences,
when leadership is simply the
reward of wealth. And in performance of charity as a way of Jewish
life, self-satisfaction may take on
the face of righteousness. The most
sensitive of the Jewish agency professionals,
lawyers, and businessmen
have often deplored this situation,
yet are trapped in the system."
[BELL, REFLECTIONS, p. 319]
"How can a community such as this,"
complained William Zukerman, editor of the Jewish Newsletter,
"whose highest ideal is mechanical
fund-raising, be a source of
nobility and greatness? Can the interminable
big-and-even-bigger
Bond and UJA drives, the Hadassah teas,
the gaudy banquets,
the garish publicity and appalling bad taste,
be the soil from which
greatness will spring? Can salesmanship,
even when clothed with
the mantle of philanthropy, be anything
but shallow and sterile?"
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 226]
"In most communities," notes Stephen
Isaacs, "if a Jew fails to make a name professionally or politically,
being a big giver to federation is usually the principal route to his becoming
a member of a Jewish country club." [ISAACS, p. 19] "With fundraising
the major priority," said Edward Shapiro in 1992, "the emphasis
in contemporary Jewish life is on philanthropy rather than Jewish learning
or piety. The local Jewish federations, rather than the synagogue or the yeshiva,
has become the major point of Jewish life and the major dispenser of prestige
... Many observers have severely criticized this 'check book' Judaism, but
they have been unable to suggest any alternative to even this attenuated Jewish
identity that would appeal to acculturated and sophisticated Jews." [SHAPIRO,
E., Jewish Americans, p. 170]
As former World Zionist Organization president
Nahum Goldmann noted in 1978: "Another feature characteristic of Americans
in general, and therefore Jews in particular, is the influence wielded by
finance in the United States ... In America Jewish life is dominated by the
rich ... The 'money men' concentrate on consolidating their social position:
it costs money to become president of a big community organization."
[GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 152] (This focus on money to Jewish causes is so intense
that in 2000 a Pittsburgh synagogue even made the news for suing a member
of its congregation who reneged on a pledge; the $900 he ultimately gave was deemed too far short of an
earlier $25,000 promise. Legal proceedings against him were soon instituted.)
[GRAHAM, J., 7-31-2000, p. 6]
In 1998, in an article entitled "Titans
of Industry Join Forces for Jewish Philanthropy," the Wall Street
Journal noted the existence of a "Mega Group" of about twenty
extremely powerful Jewish businessmen whose meetings were exclusively, and
entirely, about "being Jewish." Formal members included Leslie Wexner
(chairman of The Limited, Inc.), Edgar and Charles Bronfman (of Seagram's/PolyGram/Universal
Studios, et al), Charles Schusterman of Samson Investment Company, Baltimore
real estate tycoon Harvey Meyeroff, Leonard Abramson (the founder of U.S.
Healthcare), Lester Crown (who, among other things, is a military defense
mogul), Laurence Tisch (chairman of Loew's and former chairman of CBS), financier
Michael Steinhardt, Max Fisher (a Detroit area tycoon), and Marvin Lender
(a bagel mogul). The Journal wrote:
"'We want to make it cool to be Jewish,'
says Edgar Bronfman, whose
company's keen sense of image has made
it one of the world's most
successful marketers." [MILLER, L.,
5-4-98, p. B1]
By 2000, Jewish organizations had committed
$210 million in its "Birthright Israel" program to give young American
Jews (ages 18-26) round-trip airfare to Israel and 10 days of "educational
programming" about Jewish identity and its links to modern Israel. [PR
NEWSWIRE, 6-15-2000] From Palm Beach, Florida, in an unrelated program to
connect Jews to a Zionist root, the Commission of Jewish Education's "Newlywed
Israel Incentive" program even pays local Jews who get married $2000
to take their honeymoon in Israel. [HAYES, R., p. 1B]
"American Jews are obsessed with their
own perpetuation," noted Jonathan Rosenblum in a 1998 issue of the
Jerusalem Post, "Millions of dollars of federation money are earmarked
every year for projects in Jewish continuity, and a group of 11 Jewish millionaires
recently committed $18 million to the creation of Jewish day schools across
denominational lines. One finds no comparable level of concern among any other
ethnic group." [ROSENBLUM, p. 8]
The central icon of allegiance for Jewish
transnational solidarity and the major object of Jewish money rites is the
modern state of Israel, the country which, says Nathan Glazer, "after
1967 ... became the religion of American Jews." [LIPSET, p. 157] "Nobody can deny the intensity of the
American Jew's feelings about the state of Israel," noted James Yaffe
in 1968, "Polls taken in 1967 during the six-day war showed that 99 percent
of all American Jews supported Israel wholeheartedly against the Arab nations.
Hardly any Jews who lived through those days didn't feel a weight of anxiety
on his spirits -- and a wild elation when the weight was finally lifted."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 181] "The [1967] war," says Jack Wertheimer,
"... converted American Jewry to Zionism. Whereas American Jews had demonstrated
sympathy in the past, Israel was now incorporated into the very structure
of American Jewish identity." [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 30] Even earlier
though, "today all Jews are Zionists," noted a Buffalo (New
York) rabbi as early as 1936, "That is as true as any statement so brief
can be in so controversial a field as Jewish life." [ADLER/CONNOLLY,
1960, p. 390, 460] "American
Jewry is deeply committed to the state of Israel," wrote Monford Harris
in 1965, "of this there can be no doubt." [HARRIS, M., 1965, p.
80]
As Milton Plesur noted in 1982:
"Another issue that concerned postwar American
Jewish community was that of
Zionism and the special relationship between
American Jews and the state of
Israel. Zionism had come to influence the organizational
structure of Jewish life
on both the national and local levels. Mosts
synagogues, Jewish community
centers, religious schools, and virtually all
the organizational societies that
composed the American Jewish community espoused
the Zionist cause."
[PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 194]
In 1981, a World Jewish Congress report noted
"In the past three decades, Israel has
served most Western Jews as a
surrogate for the traditional Judaism from which
they had strayed. Concern
and support for Israel increasingly became the
chief source and expression
of their sense of Jewish identity. Fund raising,
chiefly for Israel, and political
activity to ensure the security and survival
of Israel, have been the major
activities of Jewish organizations during this
period, especially in the United
States [WALINSKY, L., 1981, p. 61] ... There
can be no doubt that Israel
will continue to play the central role in Jewish
life." [WALINSKY, L., 1981,
p. 69]
"Solidarity between the Jews of the
west, Israel, the Soviet Union, and threatened diaspora communities has become
more than the object of activism," says British rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
"it has become a carrier of identity." [SACKS, J., One, p.
11] "I speak to many Jewish communities around the world," says
Yitzhak Herzog, "and what strikes me is that each community is of a different
nature than the other. The common denominator that I find in all is Israel.
They are obsessed with Israel and you can say that Israel, in effect, has
become their religion, as well as a social and political idea which they are
involved." [HERZOG, p. 20] "Jewish communities throughout the
world," noted Irving Louis Horowitz in 1976, "have increased their
'particularistic' interests in Israel, often at the expense of their 'universalistic'
concerns for others. Israel unifies the Jewish community worldwide, giving
it a sense of solidarity that transcends psychological anxieties and geographical
differences, however sharp or obscure." [HOROWITZ, I., 1976, p. 361]
Even in Costa Rica, for example, a Jewish
scholar noted in 1987 that "today, as in the past, Costa Rican Jewry
has tended to adopt a unified political stance only vis-a-vis the question
of the state of Israel." [GUDMUNDSON, p. 229]
Venezuela? "Nearly a thousand Venezuelan Jews have settled in
Israel," noted Howard Sachar in 1985, "Zionism is also the principal
motif of Venezuelan Jewish education." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 266] Brazil? "It seems," says Henrique
Rattner, "that the main objective of Jewish politics in Brazil today
concern the defense of specifically Jewish interests in the fight against
anti-Semitism and the preservation of the state of Israel and of the Brazilian
Jewish community's identification with it." [RATTNER, p. 199]
France? "No other western Jewish community
has been as passionately pro-Israel as French Jewry," noted the Jerusalem
Post in 1997, "--defying media charges of dual loyalty ... More than
30,000 French Jews visit Israel each year and over a thousand are currently
studying at Israeli universities." [PICKETT, W., p. 7] The Jews of Brussels, in Belgium? "An
affluent community, the 24,000 Jews of Brussels have developed their own version
of a United Jewish Appeal. Contributions are generous and the lion's share
goes to Israel. If Brussels Jewry evinces a distinguishing feature, it is
its Zionism and secular character." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 46]
South Africa? "South Africa's small
but influential Jewish population of 118,000," wrote Seymour Hersh about
the late 1970s and early 1980s, "were always large contributors to Israeli
bond drives and charities; now [with the 1977 election of Israeli prime minister
Menachem Begin] they became more vocal in their support for Israel's more
conservative political parties, including Menachem Begin's Likud Party."
[HERSH, S., p. 264] "Zionism had from its beginnings cast a spell upon
the Jews of South Africa," adds Barnet Litvinoff. [LITVINOFF, B., p.
184] "Nowhere else in the Jewish world, conceivably," observes Howard
Sachar, "was Zionism so integral a feature of Jewishness as South Africa
... South African Jewry has not rested in its exertions on Israel's behalf.
The Zionist Federation remains by far the most important organization in Jewish
life." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 187, 190]
Canada? In 1999, in Montreal, the Quebec
prime minister's brother, Gerard Bouchard, "initiated a conference for
French and Jewish Quebecers because he wanted to know why, as a minority,
Jews are not more sensitive to French Quebecers fears for the survival of
their culture [in English-dominated Canada] and why they seem to focus on
anti-Semitism in Quebec and not in English Canada and why they do not have
more sympathy for Quebec sovereignty when they themselves had such an attraction
to Israel." [ARNOLD, J., p. 3, 25] "American
Jews automatically think of themselves as Americans," noted Jewish commentator
Barnet Litvinoff in 1969, "but in Canada they are primarily Jews. Hence
Zionism makes much more headway in Canada than the U.S.A. ... In Canada, as
in Britain, there exists a comprehensive Jewish representative organization
making for tribal unity and discipline." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 172] "Montreal
Jews," noted Erna Paris in 1980, "are notably dedicated to Israel
and observably generous in their contributions to the United Jewish Appeal."
[PARIS, E., p. 102] "Among the priorities of the Canadian Jewish polity,"
noted Harold Troper in 1999, "is defining and promoting the relationship
between Jews in Canada, Jews in Israel, and Jews in other parts of the diaspora."
[TROPER, H., 1999, p. 230]
Russia? American Jewish efforts to Zionize
the Jews of former communist Russia was noted in a 1999 article in the Baltimore
Jewish Times: "United States Jewish groups have contributed heavily
to building synagogues, community centers, and schools in Russia ... Privately,
many Jewish leaders say that community building encourages many [Russian]
Jews to make aliyah [emigration
to Israel] by building a sense of Jewish identity that will be Israel-centered."
[BESSER, 4-30-99, p. 30] And as Irving Horowitz noted as early as 1979, "The
fact that Israel can call upon a hidden Jewish constituency overt in the United
States and covert in the Soviet Union does indeed give weight and substance
to the Israeli claim that it is not simply a small power which can be regulated
or mortgaged at the behest of the major powers, but a force of international
socio-economic weight as well as national interests." [HOROTWITZ, I.,
1979, p. 104]
Argentina? Like many -- probably most --
Jews, news mogul Jacobo Timerman equates raising verifiably troubling questions
about Jewish collectivist behavior the world over as tantamount to expressions
of Nazism:
"In Argentina, in 1980, thirty-five
years after Hitler's defeat, on the
army-controlled television channel in Buenos
Aires, one heard the
following questions voiced by a journalist
who has practiced his
profession for twenty years and is not
naive, the brother of a general
who heads the press services of the military
government: Why aren't
there any poor Jews? Why do Jews give so
much money to Israel?
Why don't Jews marry Catholics? Why do
Jews consider themselves
superior? A repetition of the insults and
defamations of Nazi rulers,
stemming from one of the most powerful
forces in Argentine life,
the army. It's easy enough to react to
this anti-Semitic campaign, to
feel offended." [TIMERMAN, J., 1981,
p. 144]
In 2001, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
featured an article about the immigrant Jewish Iranian community in that city,
based on a familiar theme:
"Persian Jews are facing challenges familiar
to previous generations of Jewish
immigrants; among them, dilution of traditional
values and assimilation. 'There
is no question there is an influence of materialism,'
[Sam] Kermanian [head of
the Iranian-American Jewish Federation] said.
'Some of the old values are still
holding the community together, but, obviously,
this is something that will not
last forever. We know that within a generation
or two, we will assimilate into
a larger landsape. Our goal is to make sure
that we assimilate into the American
Jewish community rather than the secular American
landscape." [AUSHENKER,
M., 6-20-01]
Incredibly, of all the cultural, ethnic,
and religious aspects of being Jewish, in a 1988 Los Angeles Times
national survey 17% of American Jews believed that support for the state of
Israel was the most important
part of their Jewish identity. [WAXMAN, p. 137] Even more startling, a 1990 American Jewish Committee survey of
"American Jewish leaders" across the country found that 81% listed
the "safety of Israel as the most important item on the Jewish agenda
today." Nearly half of the leaders were under fifty years old, 94% were
married to fellow Jews (plus 3% to spouses who had converted to Judaism),
a quarter of them had a household income between $200,000 and $499,000, and
another third between $100,000-$199,000. [AIN, SURVEY, p. 28]
A 1983 poll of American Jews at-large found
that 20% had even written to an elected official on behalf of Israel. [BRENNER,
p. 123] The 1990 National Jewish Population
Survey found that 76% of American Jews described themselves at least "somewhat
attached to Israel." [HALBERSTAM, p. 188] Of high importance to an overwhelming
number of those who call themselves Jews, 85% of Jewish respondents in the
1983 poll favored strong United States support for Israel, a figure that is
consistent with other surveys. [WAXMAN, p. 136-137] (Meanwhile, says Jewish critic Lenni Brenner,
"American Jewry has one of the weakest military traditions in America.
Many Jewish immigrants came here to get away from conscription."
[BRENNER, p. 131]
In 2001, a survey of American Jews by the Israel
Policy Forum, the Jewish Week, and the Wilstein Institute of Jewish
Policy Studies
found that 89% of respondents felt "strongly favorable" or "somewhat
favorable" toward Israel. (Only 3% felt "somewhat unfavorable"
and 2% "strongly unfavorable" toward the Jewish state. 5% ventured
no opinion and 1% didn't answer). 59% also felt "strongly" or "somewhat
favorable" to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who at the time was
facing a possible trial in Belgium for war crimes in Lebanon. The top five
"most important issues or problems facing the Jewish community in the
United States" were not considered to be poverty, urban blight, health
care, pollution, etc. They were 1) Anti-Semitism, 2) Peace and Security for
Israel, 3) Terrorism, 4) Intermarriage (marriage to non-Jews), and 5) U.S.-Israeli
relations. [JEWISH WEEK, 11-20-01]
A 1998 national poll conducted by the
Los Angeles Times and Newsday found that 43% of American Jewish
respondents had donated money to Israel in the past year; 60% of those over
65 years of age said they had given money in the same time period to the Jewish
state. [FRIEDMAN, J., p. A7] "For me to be a Jew today," said Canadian
Sarah Tobin in 1990 (she had lived in Israel for a few years),
"means having a personal relationship
with Israel. This is my bottom
line, my definition of Judaism. Israel is
the overriding reality in Jewish
life today. It tempers, it touches, it colors
every aspect of our Jewish
behavior and thoughts ... Most of the Americans
who support Israel
don't know any Israelis at all ... What
is my connectedness? My
connectedness is the concept, the mythology.
Reality is secondary.
It can't change my connectedness."
[STARR, J., 1990, p. 148-149]
"For tens of thousands of Jewish Americans,"
says Joyce Starr,
"Israel has become so central to their
lives that dedication to 'the
country' has become a religion unto itself,
without religiosity. Deeply
committed American Jews spend the better
part of their working
and/or leisure hours thinking about, working
on behalf of, and
worrying about the State of Israel ... The
centrality of Israel to the
lives of committed American Jews is all
but impossible for Israelis
to fathom. Israel has become the anchor
of life, the psychological
spring of renewal, the singular rationale
for feelings of self-worth
for hundreds of thousands of American Jews."
[STARR, 1990, p.
159]
"The image of Israel," note Charles
Liebman and Steven Cohen, "so central to the lives of American Jews,
is projected as that of a country surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction
... And the Holocaust itself, which along with Israel has assumed central
symbolic importance in American Jewish life, reminds Jews above all of their
precarious status among the hostile Gentiles. These themes tend to be combined
in appeals by Jewish organizations for funds." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 32]
"American Jewish life," wrote Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab in 1995,
"embodies a kind of 'cultural Zionism,' which recognizes Israel as its
spiritual center, inspiring rather than assembling the Jews of the world."
[LIPSET/RAAB, p. 130] Since 1967, notes Allon Gal, "virtually all American
Jewish community organizations have become supporters of the Jewish state
and have developed some variation of 'a vision of Israel.' [GAL, p. 13]
Since 1967 too, notes Theodore Solotaroff, "the survival of Israel
has been the paramount concern of organized Jewish life and probably the paramount
source of Jewish identity." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 279]
"The oneness that holds Jews together,"
says Edward Shapiro, "is no longer Judaism or anti-Semitism but Israel
... Israel provides the link that bonds Jews together, no matter how remote
they might be from any involvement in Jewish society or religious life. The
Jewish thing most Jews have in common [is] ... contributing at least a nominal
sum to the United Jewish Appeal." [SHAPIRO, E., Jewish American,
p. 169] "Central to the understanding of American Jewish identity,"
notes Marla Brettschneider," is this idea of being pro-Israel ... By
the 1970s, as the [Jewish] mainstream organizations began to wield unprecedented
power in Washington D.C., the litmus test for the stance constituting such
an attitude reached hegemonic proportions ... Many had come to feel that on
issues relating to Israel, the American Jewish community had become a closed
political space, an area where neither dissent, nor even debate, is tolerated."
[BRETTSCHNEIDER, M., Cornerstone, p. 1-2]
Research studies by the American Jewish
Committee, noted David Schnall in 1987,
"indicate that U. S. Jews overwhelmingly
support Israel by every
standard definition of the term. Over
90 per cent said they paid special
attention to media reports about Israel,
and a similar proportion
declared themselves 'pro-Israeli' or
'very pro-Israeli.' In addition,
about three-quarters said that caring about Israel was a very
important
part of their Jewish identity and that
they frequently talked about Israel
with friends and relatives." [SCHNALL,
p. 122]
In 2001, the United Jewish Communities
(formerly the United Jewish Appeal)-- the foremost Jewish solidarity organization
-- announced its new "$4 million solidarity campaign titled 'Israel Now'"
to propagandize for the Jewish state and sanitize its miserable human rights
record towards the Palestinians. "Campaign highlights" included:
* "Heavy promotion of solidarity missions to Israel."
* "Advocacy- and media-training for campus and
community activists ... 'to train
their
leadership to become strong advocates on behalf of Israel.'"
* "A 'media tour' that will take Israeli spokesmen
and U. S. Middle East
experts -- scholars, journalists and other
opinion-shapers -- into key communities
across
North America to meet with local media."
* "A Solidarity Shabbat on Sept. 22-23 that will reach
out to synagogues,
churches and university campuses to show that
'support for Israel extends
beyond the Jewish community.'" [JORDAN,
M., 6-19-01]
Ironically, and astoundingly, few Jews have
firsthand knowledge of the object of their intense allegiance and dedication
--- Israel. 85% of all American Jews have never visited Israel (1989); this
even included Ivan Boesky, then chairman of the New York City-UJA Federation.
[GOLDIN, p. 8] (A 1990 survey suggested
75% of American Jews between the ages of 26-44 had never visited Israel).
[WAXMAN, C., Weakening, p. 383] "Not one percent, not even .001
percent of American Jews," complained Israeli scholar Etan Levine, "come
to settle here; not one in 10,000 join our ranks. More German Christians than
American Jews come here as tourists." [LEVINE, E., p. 208-223]
The relatively few Americans who do go to
Israel tend to visit under the auspices of various propagandizing tour packages.
"Most American Jews," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "are
ignorant of even the most rudimentary features of Israeli life. For example,
fewer than a third of our sample of American Jews in 1986 knew (or guessed)
that Menachem Begin (a former prime minister and veteran of the right-wing
Likud bloc) and Shimon Peres (then Prime Minister and head of the Labour alignment)
were members of different parties." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 83-84]
A long term Jewish-American resident in
Israel, Ze'ev Chafets, noted that
"I was visiting Rachel's Tomb, near
Bethelehem, when a tour bus full of
American Jews arrived. They were straight
out of central casting,
dressed in bermudas and sports shirts
with little alligators over the
pockets, weighted down by expensive cameras
and souvenirs of the
Holy Land. As they crowded into the tiny
building that housed the
tomb, an old Yemenite Jew dressed in
a dirty robe and wearing
long side curls hung on the fringe of
the group. He held out his hand,
palms up, in the universal posture of
supplication, mumbling Hebrew
psalms as he approached one of the tourists.
"Beat it," the American
said roughly. "I'm not giving any
money to an Arab." "He's not an
Arab," the tour guide explained,
'He's a Jew.'" [CHAFETS, p. 221]
Ann Roiphe notes her Jewish American psychoanalyst
friend Anna Ornstein "who says that nothing destroys her more than a
threat to Israeli safety ... It is possible to be connected to the events
in Israel without ever having set foot on the soil or having made plans to
move. That is one of the contradictions and complications of being Jewish."
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 187]
Of those few American Jews who have seen
up close the day to day realities of the Israeli state, other than as a tourist,
most are disillusioned. From 1948-68 for example, of the 20,000 American Jews
who immigrated to Israel, nine out of ten came back to live in the States.
[ZWEIGENHAFT, p. 83-84] Overall, since 1948, about half of the Jews who moved
to Israel returned to America. [STARR, J., 1990, p. 179] In fact, "Israelis
emigrating to the United States, yordim, have far outnumbered American Jews moving to Israel."
[LIPSET/RAAB, p. 131] [For that matter, in 1985 more New York Jews went to
Israel dead (387), to be buried, than to live (76)]. [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN,
p. 14] In a 1963 investigation of immigration to Israel, "in some cases,"
said Harold Isaacs, the reasons American Jews moved to Israel "had to
do not with being an American or a Jew but being one's own peculiar and troubled
self with problems that they were trying to solve by running off from one
place to another. Many people mentioned this as a factor, but almost always,
of course, in talking about somebody else." [ISAACS, H, p. 71] ("I
was told," added Isaacs, "that there had been eleven cases the previous
year of mentally ill people who had been shipped off to Israel by relatives
in America and who had been shipped right back to America by health officials."
[ISAACS, H, p. 72]
Melvin Urofsky notes another problem for
those who decide to move to Israel, that even among a nation of Jews, the
sense of "Otherness" endured:
"The novelty of living in an entirely
Jewish surrounding, of no longer
feeling unique because of one's Jewishness,
soon wore off, only to
be replaced by a sense of being different
because one was an American."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 272]
And what exactly is Israel? What are its tenets towards other people? How does it compare
to the democratic and universalist principles of America? What kind of country
does world Jewry so emphatically support? A later chapter will address this
issue at length, but for now, here's what Jewish reporter Leon Hadar, a former
correspondent for Israel's Jerusalem Post, observes about the double
standards of Jewish political allegiance, and its consequent mythmaking:
"Members of the American Jewish community
have been in the
forefront of the struggle for civil and
human rights, separation of
church and state and for free immigration
to the United States.
They would have been the first to protest
any attempt to impose
Christianity as a state religion in America,
to pass a "law of return"
limiting immigration to white Christians, or to force citizens to
carry identity cards indicating their religion
or ethnic origin. But
those same American Jews do not question
their support for a
state [Israel] which applies these and other
discriminatory policies
in its treatment of its Christian and Muslim
minorities." [HADAR, p. 27]
A survey of 443 Jews in a "leadership
training" program (1978-80) at the United Jewish Appeal revealed a range
of disturbing attitudes among leadership in the American Jewish polity. Every
single one of them agreed with the statement "When the state of Israel
is threatened, all Jews are threatened." From there, 70% of the respondents
stated that they were more emotionally moved by listening to Israel's nation
anthem (the Hatikvah) than the Star-Spangled Banner. (Another 7% of the total
"weren't sure" about it.) 97% of these people even believed that
the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors was the most important
problem facing American Jews. Yet by almost a two to one margin these
future Jewish leaders rejected the notion that Jews are "overly concerned
with Israel." 95% even declared that "I'm happy to be an American."
Not surprisingly, over 60% agreed with the assertion (even in this non-religious
context) that "The Jewish people is the Chosen People." Another
15% claimed they "weren't sure" if they were the Chosen People or
not, leaving only the remaining 15% to outright reject this age-old source
of Jewish racism and chauvinism, and inevitable Gentile hostility. "Perhaps
... the most important [myth of civil Judaism]," says Jonathan Woocher,
"[is] the barely distinguished reaffirmation of the myth of Jews as a
chosen people ... In short, the myths of civil Judaism are the myths of a
modern messianic religion." [WOOCHER, p. 131-132] "A secular holiness,"
notes Emil Fackenheim," side by side with the religious, is becoming
manifest in contemporary Jewish existence." [SACKS, J., p. 136]
Particularly noteworthy in the UJA survey
was the Jewish leadership response to the statement "The primary loyalty
of American Jews must be to the United States and their fellow Americans."
Over 50% (58, 52, and 56 per cent in three distinct groups) disagreed.
Coupled with the "not sure" response, 77, 67, and 71% of these future
Jewish polity leaders did not agree with this statement of loyalty
to their fellow Americans.
In this context, it is certainly legitimate
to wonder about the implications of the well known statement by the prominent
20th century American rabbi, Stephen Wise: "I may have been an American
for sixty-four years, but I have been a Jew for four thousand years."
[HERTZLER, p. 76]
Such clues to American Jewish nationalist
sentiments -- certainly among the UJA leadership -- have been a continuous
public relations problem throughout their history around the world: the issue
of "dual Jewish loyalty," one primary loyalty to international Jewry
as a transnational brotherhood, and a second loyalty to the non-Jewish societies
in which they live. This second loyalty has existed only since the Enlightenment.
Before that Jews harbored no pretense of loyalty to the non-Jewish societies
in which they lived. "The Jewish case [in Europe]," says Jacob Katz,
"has often been compared with that of other religious minorities, such
as the Catholics in England or the Protestants in Austria. As opposed to these
minorities, however, who in all respects were regarded as part of the local
population, Jews perceived themselves, and were perceived by others, as belonging
to another country." [KATZ, J. J. Jew, p.
In 1942, before modern Israel was even founded,
J.O. Hertzler wrote that the non-Jew typically
"feels that the Jew, despite
his protestations to the contrary, is still a
'foreigner' at heart; still divided in his loyalties and sympathy;
still
not completely a national, not quite
one with him; still living 'off' him
but now with him. Many of the Jews, he feels, are still
a people more
interested in their own nation and their own people than in their
allegiance to the countries in which
they have thrown their lot....
[Non-Jews] do not cherish among them people who want to
be part
of them and yet separate from
them." [HERTZLER, p. 77]
"The more committed majority among
Jews," wrote Arthur Hertzberg twenty-two years later, "represents
a uniqueness in both culture and politics, an apartness from all other Americans,
that they both will and choose." [HERTZBERG, p. 293] (This aspect of
Jewish American identity was dramatically manifest in 1825 when Mordechai
Noah, the former American consul to Tunis, bought land on an island in the
Niagra River in upstate New York to create a Jewish separatist colony from
other Americans.) [SCHMIDT, p. 7]
Ever present and enduring, in 1996 Henry
Feingold noted that
"It is a residual feeling of belonging
to the Jewish people that gives
American Jewry a strange and persistent
duality that is reflected in
virtually every facet of their experience
in America. They are in America
but never completely of it. Something is
held back ... I have called this
phenomenon 'American Jewish exceptionalism,'
by which I mean not its
superior achievement but the unique duality
it possesses." [FEINGOLD,
p. 35]
Feingold's "exceptionalism" --
a not too subtle play on the Chosen People idea -- exists (and by traditional Jewish definition, always will) for those
who insist upon the classical exclusionist, particularist, elitist and nationalist
tenets of "being Jewish," and is the primary source for anti-Jewish
hostility , popularly mystified by Jewry today as an irrationally demonic
"anti-Semitism." "Anti-Semitism," notes Oliver Cox, "tends
to be triggered by a dominant society's recognition of Jewish participation
in cultural advantages of the community, to an enviable degree, but still
remaining alienated from the parent group. Jews, in other words, tend to identify
with the host people according to their own advantage." [COX, p. 184]
A recent real-life paradigm of this --
in sensational form -- is the story of a fabulously wealthy Jewish
business tycoon (who once even owned the New York Daily News), as told
by John Gross:
"A
Jew from an obscure part of the Eastern Central Europe arrived in
England. Starting from nowhere, he accumulated
a vast fortune. Those
who knew him realized he has amassed
it by the most ruthless and
brutal means, though he is able to keep
up a facade as a public
benefactor. He changes his name to one
which nobody would take to
be Jewish; when the question of his
Jewishness is raised, he announces
that he is a member of the Church of
England ... Then, in his later
years, he reverts to his origins. He
dies, and although for most of his
career he has been firmly embedded in
English public life, his is buried
in Israel. His funeral -- an Orthodox
Jewish funeral -- takes place on the
Mount of Olives, amid a blaze of international
publicity. Within days of
his dying, his malfeasances are exposed:
they involve colossal
swindles of a particularly nasty kind,
including ripping off five hundred
million pounds from a pension fund.
Thousands of ordinary workers
see their pensions disappear .... In
fact what I have given you is an
account (if anything a toned down account)
of the career of the late
Robert Maxwell." [GROSS, p. 380-381] (Some of Maxwell's own
words were read at his funeral, including
these: "I do believe in the
ethical lessons of Judaism. I love and
admire my peoples' devotion to
the study of the Torah. I definitely
see myself as a Jew. I was born a
Jew, and I shall die a Jew, so help
me God." [MAXWELL, E. p. 35]
Gross' telling of this tale was in a panel
discussion about "anti-Semitism;" there was no noticeable anti-Jewish
reaction to Maxwell's lifelong deceit. "An affair of this magnitude,"
says Gross, "would once have produced a torrent of antisemitic comments,
possibly even antisemitic violence. In the 1990s, the dogs didn't bark."
Dogs barking or not, in a frank discussion
of what Adam Garfinkle calls the "two religions of American Jews"
-- Judaism (and its chauvinist particularism) versus Americanism (and its
avowed universalism) -- in 1996 he
noted that:
"Properly understood, the two conflicting
belief systems claim allegiance
over most of the same realm; it follows that no one can be fully
true
to both." [GARFINKLE, p. 4]
This classic irresolvable Jewish universalist-particularist
tension is evidenced in the remarks of Louis Brandeis, a Jewish Associate
Justice of the United States Supreme Court and prominent community leader
in the early twentieth century (Brandeis University is also named after him).
In 1910 he said:
"Habits of living or thought which
tend to keep alive differences of
origin or classifying men according
to their beliefs are inconsistent with
the American ideal of brotherhood, and
are disloyal." [LEWIS, p. 544]
Five years later Brandeis said the irreconcilable:
"To be good Americans, we must be
better Jews, and to better Jews,
we must become Zionists." [LEWIS,
555]
Brandeis, notes Edward Shapiro, "was
careful to describe Jews as a 'people' and not a 'nation,' in part because
he did not want Zionists to appear un-American and guilty of 'dual loyalty.'"
[SHAPIRO, Jewish Americans, p. 160-161]
A popular slogan in circulation among American
Zionists at the time was "Silence in America, Service in Palestine."
[LEWIS, p. 554] Such open sentiment in 1916 worried prominent Jewish American
financier Jacob Schiff:
"Thanks to the preaching and machinations
of Jewish nationalists we
[Jews] are gradually being forced into
a class by ourselves and if this
continues, it will not be many years before
we shall be looked upon by
our fellow citizens as an entirely separate
class, whose interests are
different than the grass [roots] of American
people." [LEWIS, p. 554]
Schiff also resisted the Zionists elsewhere,
insisting that, "I am an American
pure and simple and cannot possibly belong to two nations." [SCHMIDT,
p. xi] In the same era, the (Jewish)
American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, worried that Zionism "would
cost the Jews of America most of what they had gained in liberty, equality,
and fraternity." [AUERBACH, p. 336] "As Zionism grew stronger in America," notes James Yaffe,
"the reaction against it [by some Jews] grew stronger too. From the beginning
most of the German Jews [in America] were opposed to it ... It wasn't long
before [Zionism] began to seem less nonsensical and distasteful than downright
dangerous. What these obstreperous Zionists seemed to be saying was that a
Jew in America owed his first allegiance to some foreign country. The louder
and longer they went on saying this, the more chance there was that somebody
besides their fellow Jews would hear them ... The horrid old question was
raised, What will the goyim think?"
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 184]
"In maintaining a dualistic relationship,"
wrote J.O. Hertzler, "[Jews] run counter to all the principles of acceptance
and assimilation, realistically considered. To become one with a people, particularly
in the sway of modern nationalisms, you have to cease being, and wanting to
be, something else at the same time... The Jew alienates himself from every
people of the world among whom he seeks refuge. As long as he preserves his
racial and spiritual unity, he cannot hope to have complete civil and personal
unity with non-Jews. 'Special' minorities are suspected, not accepted."
[HERTZLER, p. 77]
The enduring issue of dual loyalty took
formal shape in the modern nation-state era with the 1860 birth, in France,
of the International Israelite Alliance -- the granddaddy of Jewish "defense
agencies" -- an organization that sought, very publicly, a transnational
Jewish solidarity. One of its members, a French politician, Isaac Adolphe
Cremieux, went against French government policy in cooperating with France's
enemies, England and Austria, in attempting to free a group of Jews accused
of murdering a monk in far away Damascus.
Jewish activists in the issue included the very powerful Rothschild,
Montefiore, and Arnstein banking families, and various European, American,
and Egyptian statesmen were heavily lobbied. With the ultimate release of
the imprisoned Jews, says Howard Sachar, "the diplomats saw the deeper
issue: the complex machinery of a modern foreign ministry had been thrown
out of gear largely by the persistence of a handful of Jews." [SACHAR,
p. 144] "What was hailed as a new solidarity by Jews," says Albert
Lindemann, "appeared as the reaffirmation or reemergence of a very old
and ominous one to other observers. For them
Jews remained, as they had been for centuries, a peculiar nation spread
throughout the nations of Europe." [LINDEMANN, p. 38]
The issue of dual loyalty remains today,
more so than ever with the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel
in 1948. As the president of the World Zionist Congress, Nahum Goldmann,
boldly proclaimed in 1959, "American Jews must have the courage to openly
declare that they entertain dual loyalty, one to the land in which they live
and one to Israel." [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 293]
This perspective has been taken deeply to
the American Jewish heart and in "multicultural" America, Jewish
dual loyalty is openly celebrated. "Never in modern times," wrote
Michael Meyer in 1990, "have Jews in the West been more committed to
Jewish peoplehood. And most of them see Israel as its chief embodiment."
[GORNY, p. 235] "As Zionist ideology assumed a central role in Jewish
identity," says Israeli Meron Benvenisti, "doubts about it amount
to the negation of Jewish consciousness." [BENVENISTI, p. xi] "There
is no single Jewish community in this country," said Bruce Arbit (head
of a computer company that identifies Jews for mailing lists) in 1986, "There
are different groups with varying ideologies. The only thing that unites them
is support for Israel." [CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 53] American Jews funnel
hundreds of millions of dollars to the Israeli state every year out of their
own (and others') pockets, as well as billions more that Jewish lobbyists
shake out of the United States government and American taxpayers for foreign
aid. Huge efforts must be exerted in the Jewish community to stifle and disguise
this issue, mainly in reinforcing American popular ignorance and uninformed
opinion, securing that most non-Jews
have not the slightest idea that there is even an issue to investigate.
"It is alarming," wrote a Jewish
anti-Zionist, William Zukerman, in the decade after the founding of the state
of Israel,
"to discover how Israeli nationalism
has penetrated into American life
and thought. It has not only deeply affected
organized Jewish communal
life, philanthropy, the synagogue, the press,
the lecture forum, social
centers and clubs, but it is also attempting
to influence American
literature, at least that literature created
by American Jews ...
[ZUKERMAN, p. 126] ... The average Zionist
is very sensitive about
the question of double loyalty. The fanatic
becomes furious when the
subject is merely mentioned; the more tolerant
person tries to evade it.
But none can escape it. The specter of dual
loyalty doggedly follows
Zionism like its shadow ... [ZUKERMAN, p.
228] ... This new
nationalism and spirituality ... can convert
American Jewry into a
'colony,' or worse yet, into a satellite
which takes orders and lives
merely for the sake of its ideological parent."
[ZUKERMAN, p. 232]
In 1982, another Jewish anti-Zionist, Alfred Lilienthal, wrote that
"This and this alone is the issue:
will American Jews allow Zionism to
separate themselves from America as a
special collective whose fate is
outside and beyond the American fate?
... The sentimental affection that
Americans of Irish (or Italians or French)
birth have for their country of
origins offers no analogy to the feeling
toward Israel exhibited by many
American Jews ... It is beneath anybody's
self-respect to go on
pretending that Zionism was merely an
attempt to enrich American
folklore by promoting a Jewish counterpart
to the St. Patrick's Day
Parade. Zionism is a hard-headed political
creed which proposes to
subject American Jews to the sovereignty
of Israel." [LILIENTHAL, p.
231]
"This curious [Jewish] feeling [for
Israel]," says Jewish author James Yaffe, "has very little in common,
I think, with anything that the Irishman feels for the Free State or the Italian
for Sicily. No Sicilian ever loved his country for its military power; no
Irishman in his right mind ever praised the Free State for its tremendous
economic expansion. What they feel for the old country is all nostalgia, but
the American Jew's feeling for Israel has something else in it." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 190] "American Jews have a profound dedication to Israel,"
noted Irving Friedman, the executive vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal
in 1973. [GOLDEN, H., 1973, p. 120] "Even if they are not Zionists according
to classic definition," noted David Mittelberg in 1999, "most American
Jews are pro-Israel. They support Israel 'politically, economically, and emotionally.'"
[MITTELBERG, D., 1999, p. 7] "[F]or virtually all the Jews in Canarsie
[an area of Brooklyn, New York]," wrote Jonathan Reider in his study
of Jews and Italians there, "the observant and the faithless, Zionism
was inseparable from the issue of [Jewish] communal survival." [REIDER,
J., 1985, p. 47]
Former American Jewish Committee official Stephen
Steinlight admits Jewish "dual loyalty" freely; it began to trouble
him when the balkanized American society Jews have been instrumental in creating
seemed to be threatening Jewish interests (i.e., that other minority groups
were seizing the Jewish-inspired model):
"We cannot pretend we are only part of the solution
when we are also part of the
problem; we have no less difficult a balancing
act between group loyalty and a
wider sense of belonging to America. That America
has tolerated this dual
loyalty -- we get a free pass, I suspect, largely
over Christian guilt about the
Holocaust -- makes it no less a reality."
[STEINLIGHT, S., OCTOBER 2001]
"In recent years," notes Jewish scholar
Peter Novick, "it has become not just permissible but in some circles
laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty.
'We are Jews first and whatever else second,' says Rabbi Haskel Lookstein,
the author of a searing indictment of American Jews' reaction to the Holocaust."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 34]
"No other people in the world is so
attached to its country of origin -- Palestine [i.e., Israel] -- as the Jews,"
wrote Nahum Goldmann, head of the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist
Organization,
"who are bound by feeling and religion,
as well as by utterly mystical
ties ... [GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 7] ... The
Jews are the most separatist
people in the world. Their belief in the
notion of the chosen people is
the basis of their entire religion. All
down the centuries the Jews have
intensified their separation from the non-Jewish world; they have
rejected,
and still do reject, mixed marriages; they
have put up one wall after
another to protect their existence as a
people apart, and have built
their ghettos with their own hands."
[GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 8]
In 1959, in a survey of 1,000 teachers
in Jewish schools in the United States, only 48 were found to be "teaching
Israel as a subject of study." By the early 1980s, 98% "included
Israel/Zionism in some form or another as part of the curriculum." [ACKERMAN,
W, p. 179-180] By 1996, some 40-45%
of all American Jewish children attended part-time Jewish schools where there
is, notes Walter Ackerman, "an increased commitment to the idea that
Israel is central to the identity of Jews growing up in America." Noting
the preponderance of Israelis actually teaching the courses in Jewish American
schools, he adds that "today it is doubtful that Jewish education in
the United States could function without Israelis." [ACKERMAN, W, p.
187-188]
As James Yaffe noted in 1968:
"Synagogues around the country have
become Israel-minded: they raise
money for Israel; they say prayers for Israel
on the Sabbath; they display
Israeli flags and play Israeli melodies;
they teach Israeli folk songs and
dances in their religious schools; they
sell Israeli popular art, like dolls,
prayer shawls ... Israel has also become
a major political issue among
American Jews. Most of them don't know what
the Diaspora is and
aren't aware of being in it, yet they would
almost automatically vote
against any politician, Jew or gentile,
who they felt was anti-Israel."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 187]
In a textbook for Jewish high school students
published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1964, Rabbi Roland
Gittelsohn tells his students:
"Our continued financial and political
help is still needed by Israel ... Intelligent,
well-trained Americans can help Israel immeasurably
by their willingness to
to volunteer for limited periods of service
there. During the Arab War of 1948,
many young Americans -- including some Christians
-- volunteered for
military service on Israel's behalf because
they saw in the new State
an expression of the highest and finest American
ideals of democracy."
[GITTLESOHN, R., 1964, p. 223-224]
"Popular Jewish attitudes [have] underwent
a profound 'Israelization,'" wrote Peter Novick in 1999,
"The hallmark of the good Jew became the
depth of his or her commitment
to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations,
near-total Jewish illiteracy,
even intermarriage, were all permissible; lack
of enthusiasm for the Israeli
cause (not to speak of public criticism of Israel)
became unforgiveable ...
The presence of Israeli artifacts in the living
room became as mandatory
as a mezuzah on the doorpost. (In none of this
was any knowledge of
Israel required. A survey in the 1980s revealed
that fewer than a third of
American Jews knew that the archenemies Menachem
Begin and Shimon
Peres were members of different parties)."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 148]
"In a bulletin of the Washington Heights,
New York, Sunday School of the Y.M.H.A. and Y.W.H.A. (Sunday School Life,
Chanukah issue)," noted Alfred Lilienthal in 1982, "one reads this
extraordinary pledge of young Americans: 'Here is our pledge, Israel: I pledge
my loyalty to God, to the Torah and to the Jewish people and to the Jewish
state ... When a questionnaire was issued to pupils of the public school system
in Galveston, Texas, 102 students answered the question 'What is your nationality?'
with 'Jewish.'" [LILIENTHAL, p. 23] And the results of such socialization? Take,
for example, the case in 1999 when an American Jewish teenager, Abraham Derman,
made international news when he cut through a razor wire fence at Boston's
Logan airport, climbed into an open jet unnoticed, and rode with other passengers
to London. Why? He "told investigators that he wanted to go to Israel
and had hopes the stunt would help him get a job with Mossad [Israel's international
spy agency]." [BORGER, J., 7-30-99, p. 15]
Somewhat similarly, in 1997, California-born
Israeli soldier Adam Sager made Jewish American news for winning an Israeli
Defense Force poetry contest. "The poet's affinity for Israel surfaced
at a young age," noted the Jewish Bulletin. "Ever since I
was 5," said Sager, "my
parents would ask me, 'Adam, what do you want for your birthday?' And I would
always answer, 'I want to go to Israel.'" [KATZ, L., 1997, p. 29] "Between
the years 1966 and 1993," notes David Mittelberg, "just over a quarter
of a million Jewish youngsters from all over the world participated in some
type of educational program in Israel under the auspices of the Jewish Agency."
[MITTELBERG, D., 1999, p. 13]
In 1981, Jewish author Ann Roiphe went to
her daughter's kindergarten class and listened to another mother gush about
her own child drawing pictures of the Star of David:
"Look at that Jewish star, look at
the picture of her family. She knows
she's Jewish. Jewish and family; those are
the two pillars of her identity.
Isn't that really healthy?" [ROIPHE,
1981, p. 50]
Roiphe,
looking around the room at non-Jewish children, observed that "None of
the Christian children had drawn crosses or churches." [ROIPHE, 1981,
p. 52]
"To the extent that we may identify
Zionism with support for Israel," notes David Schnall, " -- and
there will be some who object to this identification -- the United States
Jewish community has been 'Zionized.' The battles of the past -- fears of
dual loyalties ... have not so much
been won as made irrelevant." [SCHNALL, p. 122]
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in America,
and worries about increased balkanization of American ethnic cultures that
could undercut Jewish ethnocentric interests , Stephen Steinlight (former
Director of National Affairs for the American Jewish Committee) had some confessing
to do:
"We
cannot consider the inevitable consequences of current [immigration]
trends -- not the least among them diminished
Jewish political power -- with
detachment ... We Jews need to be especially
sensitive to the multinational model
this crowd (many of them Jewish) is promoting.
Why? Because one person’s
'celebration' of his own diversity, foreign
ties, and the maintenance of cultural
and religious traditions that set him apart
is another’s balkanizing identity politics.
We are not immune from the reality of multiple
identities or the charge of divided
loyalties, a classic staple of anti-Semitism,
and we must recognize that our own
patterns are easily assailed, and we need to
find ways of defending them more
effectively as the debate goes on. Much public
opinion survey research undertaken
in recent years continues to indicate that
large numbers of Americans, particularly
people of color, assert that Jews are more
loyal to Israel than the United States.
For Jews, it is at best hypocritical, and,
worse, an example of an utter lack of
self-awareness, not to recognize that we are
up to our necks in this problem. This
has been especially true once we were sufficiently
accepted in the United States
to feel confident enough to go public with
our own identity politics. But this
newfound confidence carries its own costs;
people are observing us closely,
and what they see in our behavior is not always
distinct from what we loudly
decry in others. One has to be amused, even
amazed, when colleagues in the
organized Jewish world wring their hands about
black nationalism, Afrocentrism,
or with cultural separatism in general — without
considering Jewish behavioral
parallels. Where has our vaunted Jewish self-awareness
flown? I’ll confess it, at
least: like thousands of other typical Jewish
kids of my generation, I was reared
as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist.
Every summer for two months for
10 formative years during my childhood and
adolescence I attended Jewish summer
camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign
flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting
its colors, sang a foreign national anthem,
learned a foreign language, learned foreign
folk songs and dances, and was taught that
Israel was the true homeland. Emigration
to Israel was considered the highest virtue,
and, like many other Jewish teens of my
generation,
I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I
contemplated
that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the
superiority of my people to the gentiles who
had oppressed us. We were taught to
view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people
from whom sudden gusts of
hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive,
intelligent, and moral than
ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson
of our dark history is that we
could rely on no one." [STEINLIGHT,
S., OCTOBER 2001]
"No other ethnic group in American
history has so extensive an involvement with a foreign nation [Israel],"
wrote Melvyn Urofsky in 1975, "No other nation relies upon a body of
private individuals who are neither residents nor citizens of their land to
underwrite a major portion of their budget. American Jews buy Israeli bonds,
give generously to the United Jewish Appeal, lobby [American] government representatives
to pursue pro-Israel policy, travel to Israel (where they are greeted with
'Welcome Home' signs), respond to every crisis in that part of the world,
and yet maintain passionately that they are Americans first and Jews afterward."
[UROFSKY, p. 1]
Jewish "peoplehood," Zionism,
and all other nationalist allegiances to Israel today are in fact enduring
abrogrations of the very condition for the granting of equal rights to Jews
with the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century, as epitomized
in the famous quote by Clermont Tonnerre in 1791:
"Everything shall be denied to the
Jews as a nation; everything should be
granted to them as individuals. They are
obliged to become citizens.
Some argue that they do not want to be.
Let them say this themselves
and let them be expelled. It is impossible
for them to be a nation within a
nation." [FEUERLICHT, p. 45]
As England's Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew
Congregations, Jonathan Sacks, noted 200 years later:
"Enlightenment thought had stressed
the idea of universal humanity
on one hand and the abstract individual
on the other, freed from the
constraints of tradition to make his own
world of meanings through
his choices. This was a language into which
traditional Jewish identity
could not be translated ... The terms of
emancipation liberated Jews
as individuals, not as a collectivity."
[SACKS, J., One, p. 9-10]
"To have insisted on apartness, of
course," notes Leonard Fein, "has meant also to reject the liberal
dogma of universalism. The extraordinary tension, within the Jewish communities
of Europe, between those who saw the Enlightenment, with its presumed tolerance
and humanity, as the best hope for Jewish survival, and those who insisted
on clinging to more traditional and more parochial patterns, is an argument
which has not yet been put to rest." [FEIN, Israel, p. 6]
The question, as always, begs to be answered,
yet again in our own day, as it has always been : As a collective group, where
do primary Jewish loyalties really lie? With America, or with Israel?
With fellow human beings at hand, or Jews across the world? Do Jewish loyalties
lie primarily in contributing to the improvement of deteriorating socio-economic
environment in the universalist land in which they live, or does their honest
allegiance point first to Israel and the particularist demands of Jewish brotherhood?
How do Jews explain it when they not only have "dual loyalties"
to America and Israel, but even dual passports (as is a virtual certainty
with any American Jew who emigrates to Israel) to these countries as well?
(At the same time it is illegal in the respective states in America to even
hold dual-state drivers' licenses). American Jewry answers the question the way it
has for decades: bringing up the question of dual loyalty, they argue, is
a malicious act of anti-Semitism and their dual passports, dual allegiances,
and deep roots in Israel are merely "an expression of American democracy."
"Many American Jews," notes J. Bruce Nichols, "feel a dual
loyalty to the United States and to Israel. Public political criticism of
Israel is taken by some as a personal attack on the American Jewish community,
Israel's chief supporters." [NICHOLS, p. 164]
The political and ethical absurdity of
American Jewish immigrants to Israel still maintaining their legal right to
vote in American elections on issues they may not even know or care about
(save how they affect their new country, Israel), is well illustrated in a
1988 article in The Jewish Week:
"Thousands of immigrants from the
United States, holding dual United
States-Israeli citizenships, are voting
in two elections this month. As
Americans they will have a say in the
November 8 presidential elections;
as Israelis, they voted November 1 for
prime minister. On domestic
issues in the United States they may
be poorly informed, but when it
comes to Israel and the Middle East,
they know better than most
American Jews." [REBIBO, p. 7]
The basis for this situation stems from
the 1960s when an American Jew had his citizenship revoked for voting in an
Israeli election. He filed suit (Efroyin
v. Rusk) to get it back, and on May 29, 1967 the United States Supreme
Court "ruled that Congress did not have the power to pass laws depriving
Americans of their nationality without their consent." [ISAACS, p. 6]
"The Israeli government quickly revised its immigration laws to enable
Americans to 'back into' Israeli citizenship without having to give up their
American rights." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 362] Thanks to such American
Jewish legal efforts and lobbying, dual citizenship -- formerly forbidden
-- was now assured. (This particular case was convenient and curiously well-timed
for those American Jews operating that very moment -- some in military capacities
-- in Israel. On June 5, 1967, one week after the Supreme Court ruling, Israel
attacked Arab positions to begin the Six Day War. Between 1,000 and 1,500
Jews of American citizenship served in the Israeli army in this military clash).
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 180] On the other hand, in 1987 the U. S. State Department
repeatedly protested "discrimination" in Israeli passport policy,
especially "the confiscation of passports and other restrictions on American
citizens of Palestinian Arab origin when they arrive in Israel.") [JEWISH
WEEK, 5-22-87]
Before the modern state of Israel was even
founded, as Melvin Urofsky notes:
"As early as May 1945, Palestinian
Jewish leaders, preparing for the
possibility that they would have to fight
for independence, had looked
to the United States as a possible reservoir
of [Jewish] soldiers ...
Haganah [forerunner to the Israeli army]
began serious recruitment
of these [Jewish American military] veterans
in the fall of 1947
through such cover agencies as Land and
Labor for Palestine, the
Palestine Vocational Service, and Service
Airways. Under the guise
of informing prospective settlers about
Palestine, these front groups,
all connected and financed through the Sonneborn
Institute, spread
the news that a variety of interesting jobs
were about to open in the
Holy Land ... In order to protect the citizenship
of the Americans,
Israeli officials administered an oath of
allegiance, so that it could
be said they served 'with' rather than 'in'
the Israel armed forces."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 180-181]
"Under the then current [American]
law," notes Joseph Heckelman, in explaining this dissimulative allegiance
oath, "taking an abstract oath of allegiance to a foreign government
(or voting in a foreign election) was clearly a cardinal offense, whereas
actually risking one's life in the service of a foreign government could be
presumed to be less reprehensible." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 181] Among
those Jewish Americans killed in the Israel's 1947-48 war with the Arabs was
West Point graduate David "Mickey" Marcus, a Colonel in the American
army and member of Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff in World War II. "Of
the more than three thousand men buried at the United States Military Academy
at West Point," noted Melvin Urofsky in 1978, "Mickey Marcus is
the only one to have been killed while fighting under a foreign flag."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 182]
Among the most disturbing dimensions to
this kind of two-faced positioning is the chameleon-like status of the recent
right-wing prime minister of Israel: Benyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu (whose
father taught at Cornell University in New York) spent the first grade in
Israel, the second and third in the United States, grades 4-8 in Jerusalem,
and high school in Philadelphia. He served in the Israeli military and then
received a BA and MA degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He has always held dual American/Israeli citizenship, which allowed him to
garner American student loans for his college education. Although he has publicly
claimed to have relinquished his American citizenship to serve as the Israeli
prime minister, no one has ever been allowed access to his actual records
on the subject. "Interestingly," notes Israeli political scientist
Neve Gordon," the status of his [citizenship] files in the United States
has not changed, so according to U.S. law Netanyahu remains a U.S. citizen."
[GORDON, N, p. 11]
The most sensational expression of the
dual loyalty issue in America in recent years was the 1987 case of Jonathan
Pollard, an American-born Jew who worked in a sensitive position in the U.S.
Navy. Pollard became a spy for the Israeli government
and passed along more than 800 "top secret" documents to his "first
loyalty." For seventeen months he had been in daily contact with Israeli
co-conspirators, two of whom were given military promotions in Israel after
Pollard's spying concluded. [BOOKBINDER, p. 130] The United States government prosecutor in
the case, Joseph di Genova, stated that Pollard's spying "was the largest
physical compromise of United States classified information in the twentieth
century." The Defense Secretary at the time of Pollard's arrest, Caspar
Weinberger, wrote a 46-page document to the Federal Court, noting that he
"could not conceive of greater harm to national security' than Pollard's
deeds. [FITCHETT, J., p. 1]At the first news of the Pollard case, an American
Jewish Committee member in Washington DC warned that "if it was perceived
in America that we had come to the defense of Pollard because he's a Jew,
our credibility as a Jewish community would be down to zero overnight and
Israel would be the loser." [BOOKBINDER, p. 132]
But as the story about the Jewish American
spy unraveled, it didn't turn out to be as threatening to the Jewish community
as some has feared. After all, one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole
Pollard affair was that so few Americans had any grasp of what was going on
in the case. A New York Times/CBS poll in 1987 was undertaken one month after
Pollard's sentencing and attendant news publicity about military promotions
for two Israeli liaisons who aided in Pollard's spying. "A very surprising
finding," says Hyman Bookbinder, "was the amount of general ignorance
of the Pollard case. Only 18% of American non-Jews knew that it was Israel
for whom Pollard had spied. 13% thought it had been the Soviet Union!"
[BOOKBINDER, p. 137] That same year saw no cut in America's economic aid to
Israel "despite the Federal budget crisis that required protracted negotiations
and cuts in many domestic programs. The full $3 billion for Israel in military
and economic aid, the same as the preceding year, was approved -- all of it outright grant." [BOOKBINDER,
p.]
Within a few years the proclamation could
be heard in the Jewish community that Pollard was sentenced to prison for
so long, not for his crime, but because of anti-Semitism. [DERSHOWITZ, p.
309] "Israel must become intimately involved
in the Jonathan Pollard case," the (New York) Jewish Week editorialized
in 1991, "Israel's founders envisioned a state that would protect any
Jew, wherever, who suffered from anti-Semitism. Pollard is unquestionably
such a victim." [JEWISH WEEK, 5-31-91, p. 24] "Grass roots Jews
reacted with mixed and complex emotions," says Alan Dershowitz, Pollard's
lawyer, " .... But some Jews were ... understanding of, if not sympathetic
with, a Jewish zealot who put Israeli survival -- at least as he perceived
it -- before the bureaucratic niceties of the [United States] classification
system ... [DERSHOWITZ, p. 285] ... Momentum began to build slowly on Pollard's
behalf in both Israel and the United States. There was still no public criticism
[of Pollard's sentence] by the Israeli government or by the major Jewish organizations.
But the [Jewish] mood was changing perceptibly in Pollard's favor." [DERSHOWITZ,
p. 304] Amidst the "changes" was a 1990 supportive
statement for leniency towards Pollard signed by the American Jewish Congress
and the West Coast B'nai B'rith. Further
support came from prominent Jewish public figures, Eli Wiesel and Arthur Hertzberg,
a former President of the World Jewish Congress -- Philip Klutznick,
the leaders of three major rabbinical seminaries, and the Washington
Board of Rabbis who asked the President to commute Pollard's sentence. [GINZBURG,
p. 217] In January 1996 the state of Israel awarded
Pollack, still imprisoned, formal Israeli citizenship. "Pollack's lawyers,"
noted the Boston Globe, "hope the Israeli government will act
to free him the same as it does prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action."
[BOSGLO, 1-25-96] (It wasn't until 1998 that Israel formally admitted Pollard
spied for them).
By late 1997 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu claimed to have raised the issue of Pollard's release to Israel
with President Clinton on three occasions, and for the first time an Israeli
official -- Immigration Absorption Minister Yuli Edelstein -- visited Pollard
in prison. In December 1997 Netanyahu's "diaspora affairs adviser,"
Bobby Brown, declared that "the time for mercy has come ... The feeling
throughout Israel is that we should do whatever we can to try and help bring
about the American decision to free him." [AIN, S, p. 35] (This reflected Israeli public opinion. A newspaper
poll found that 90% of those surveyed in the Jewish nation thought their country
should help Pollard and his wife, who was also implicated, in a lesser degree,
in the spying. [FRANKEL, p. 218] One innovative tact in Pollard's defense
in the American Jewish community is to change a defense into an assault, charging
that not only was the convict's long prison sentence motivated by anti-Semitism,
but that Israel was entitled to whatever information he stole from
the U.S. military. In a 1998 issue of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles,
Anne Roiphe appealed to fellow Jews, saying
"Maybe we haven't found the smoking
gun [of anti-Semitism], but most
of us believe in some way [Pollard's] unequal
treatment, this odd matter
of why Israel didn't have the information
Pollard gave them, is related to
anti-Semitism." [ROIPHE, Jewish
Leaders, p. 8]
An extremely rare voice in the Jewish community
was that of Joseph Aaron:
"The Jewish community's behavior [about
the Pollard case] has been
shameful. Almost all Jews, and even more
sickeningly, almost all
Jewish organizations have taken up Pollard's
cause. They have called
for his release and have either stated or
implied that anti-Semitism is
keeping him in jail ... Now you have to
believe that every top American
official -- Democrat or Republican, civilian
and military, executive branch
and legislative -- is an anti-Semite or
you've got to recognize that Pollard
did such overwhelming harm that all agree
he must be punished by staying
in prison the rest of his life. Still, most
American Jews call for his release
... how many Jews have I heard say, 'Well,
he was doing it for Israel' --
as if that made it OK or at least not so
bad, as if doing it for Israel is any
kind of excuse or explanation or factor."
[AARON, J., 2000, p. 21]
A few years later after Pollard, a Jewish
army engineer, David Tenenbaum admitted to passing along classified information
to an Israeli officer at the United States Army Tank Automotive and Armament
Command in the Detroit area. [JEWISH BULLETIN, Inter] In fact, from the mid
1960s to mid 1980s there have been 40 formal United States investigations
into Americans working for Israel. [FINDLEY, p. 125] By 1963, notes Seymour Hersh, American officials
felt that "extensive penetration of the United States government [by
spies for Israel] needed to be curbed." [HERSH, S., p. 162]
A 1979 CIA report noted that "Israelis
devote a considerable proportion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific
and technical intelligence. This has included attempts to penetrate certain
classified defense projects in the United States and other Western nations."
[GREEN, S, p. 253] In 1971, for instance,
a Swiss court sentenced a Jewish-Swiss engineer, Alfred Frauenknecht, to four
and a half years in prison, "but only after he had transferred to Mossad
[Israel's CIA] agents some 200,000 blueprints and the specifications for the
precise machine tools used in the Mirage's [the French-Swiss military jet]
construction." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 235]
In 2001, Shawn Pine, a Jewish reserve officer in the
U. S. Army, charged anti-Semitism when he was stripped of his security clearance
and was forced "to give up command of an intelligence unit." Why?
Pine, born in America, emigrated to Israel and served in its army in the late
1970s. He returned to the U.S., went back to college, and served for nine
years in the U.S. Army. Bouncing back to Israel in 1995, he studied at Hebrew
University and served part time in the Israel Defense Forces. As the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency put it: "Anti-Israel feelings may be 'endemic'
in the U.S. Army's intelligence, Pine believes. 'When they see a Jew, they
see Jonathan Pollard,' he said." [SAMBER, S., 10-29-01]
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Israeli Mossad
officer and secret agent, left that organization because of moral conscience.
In his 1990 book, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad
Officer, Ostrovsky reported that about two dozen Israeli agents are "actively
spying, recruiting, organizing and carrying out covert activities, mainly
in New York and Washington, which they refer to as their playground."
[OSTROVSKY, p. 269]
Throughout the world, many Jewish citizens
of other nations in all walks of life function as extensions of Israel's CIA.
They are called, in Hebrew, sayanim.
("Our greatest advantage," noted Mossad official Shmuel Toledano,
in reviewing his career in the Israeli spy agency, "was always that we
had people who could pass for any nationality. Arabs, Germans, whatever."
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 191] ) These sayanim,
says Ostrovsky
"are a unique and important part of
the Mossad's operation. Sayanim
--
assistants -- must be 100 per cent Jewish.
They live abroad, and though
they are not Israeli citizens, many are
reached through their relatives in
Israel ... There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London
alone there are about 2,000 who are active,
and another 5,000 on the
[Mossad] list. They fulfill many different
roles. A car sayan, for
example, running a rental agency, could
help the Mossad get a car
without having to complete the usual documentation.
An apartment
sayan
would find accommodation without raising suspicions, a bank
sayan
could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a
doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to police,
and so on. The idea is to have a pool
of people available when needed
who can provide services but will keep
quiet about them out of loyalty
to the cause ... One thing you know for
sure is that even if a Jewish
person knows it is the Mossad, he might
not agree to work with you --
but he won't turn you in. You have at
your disposal a nonrisk
recruitment system that actually gives
you a pool of millions of Jewish
people to tap from outside your own borders
... The one problem with
the system is that the Mossad does not
seem to care how devastating it
could be to the status of the Jewish people
in the diaspora if it was
known." [OSTROVSKY, p. 86-87]
In an unprecedented action, at the request
of the state of Israel in 1990, an
American judge banned publication of Victor Ostrovsky's book (from which the
above quotation is excerpted) until the New York State Supreme Court Appellate
Division rescinded the censorship. "The Israeli government," noted
the Jewish Week, "claimed the book could imperil Mossad agents
by blowing their cover." [JEWISH WEEK, 9-21-90, p. 20] In 1995 Ostrowsky
sued a Canadian television station that interviewed an Israeli journalist,
Yosef Lapid, who proclaimed on air that he hoped "a decent Jew in Canada"
would assassinate the telltale former Mossad member. [KEZWER, G., 2-12-95,
p. 8] Ostrovsky's house in Canada was also burned down.
Loyal Jews of various nations work in the
service Mossad. In 1999, for example, the Jerusalem Report reported
an interview it had with former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's son:
JR: "Israel gave the CIA a copy of
your father's famous speech
denouncing Stalin, delivered behind
closed doors at the 20th
Party Congress in 1956. How did the
[Israeli] Mossad get a hold
of it?"
Sergei K. : "The daughter of a Polish
party leader had a Jewish boyfriend,
and that boy worked for the Mossad.
The boyfriend found a copy
of the speech on the Polish leader's
desk and 'borrowed' it for a
while." [JERUSALEM REPORT, 9-13-99]
One such sayan, New York-based Jewish
American Howard Schack, even wrote a book about his adventures as a volunteer
for Mossad, entitled A Spy in Canaan. My Secret Life as a Jewish-American
Businessman Spying for Israel in Arab Lands. "What did I," he
wondered one day, "
"a middle-aged Jewish-American businessman,
have to offer [Israel]? The next
day as I sat at my desk in my construction company
I realized that before me
lay something that might prove useful to Israel.
Heaped on my desk were
plans and specifications for an offshore naval
expansion program in the Red
Sea and Persian Gulf that had been put out for
bids by Saudi Arabia. These
plans had come to me quite routinely. My firm
had exactly the experience
needed to carry out portions of the project.
Reviewing the plans, I wondered
if the government of Israel was aware of them
... I had had dealings with
with foreign governments that took me all over
the globe, bringing me in
contact with hundreds of executives who did business
worldwide, especially
in the Middle East." [SCHACK, H.. 1993,
p. 7]
Schack -- member of the Chamber of Commerce,
the Shriners and Kiwanis clubs, and other community organizations [SCHACK,
H., 1993, p. 17] -- contacted the Israeli consulate in Washington DC, offering
his espionage services for Israel. "I conduct business in the Middle
East," he explained to a consular official, "I have access to projects
such as public buildings and massive capital development projects from Kuwait
to Libya. My credentials permit me to work intimately with Western firms that
have construction contracts in those countries." [SCHACK, H., 1993, p.
8] Schack was soon assigned to a Mossad "handler" and was
even provided a spy camera.
From the very formation of the modern state
of Israel, American Jewish sayanim have aided the Jewish state at high
administrative levels. A good example was a Jewish American 'mole' in the
United States veteran's bureaucracy. Thousands of American Jews served in
the Israeli military during the founding of the Israeli state in 1947-48,
despite a United States State Department decree noting that those who enter
foreign armies "cease to be entitled recognition as [U.S.] citizens during
the period of such service," and that they would lose their American
passports. [GREEN, p. 52] Nonetheless,
in 1948 a Unites States Security Group of Army Intelligence report noted that
"There presently exists among [branches
of Israel's armed forces] a plan
to recruit former [U.S., almost all Jewish]
army officers ... It was
reported that someone in the Pentagon
who had access to [classified]
officers' AGO (Adjutant General's Office)
files and who is making
available to these organizations the
names of former officers thus
qualified." [GREEN, p. 53]
This Pentagon source was identified as Colonel
Elliot A. Niles, "an ardent Zionist, formerly a high official of B'nai
B'rith." His brother, David, was an aide to President Harry S. Truman,
"one of two or three most influential persons in the White House on Middle
East policy matters." [GREEN, p. 54]
Meanwhile, while American Jews can vociferously
condemn with indignation the well-earned suspicions of their dual national
loyalty which they themselves (quite literally by the millions) have solidly
secured for their entire community, in Israel the standards for the evaluation
of entire groups of people is quite another matter, where the actions of a
handful of people indict
as suspect a community of millions. Take the case of Ze'ev Chafets, Head of
Israel's Government Press Office, an American Jew who immigrated to Israel,
and his refusal to allow Palestinian laborers to work in his Jerusalem home:
"Is it fair to discriminate against
everyone for the crimes of the few?
Maybe not, but how do you tell the good
guys from the terrorists?"
[FRANKEL, p. 239]
In the Middle East context, Michael Bar-Zohar
notes the omnipresence of Jewish spies (working for "Shai," the
early Israeli spy organization) during the British rule of Palestine:
"No one know when or how or where the ubiquitious,
wraith-like Intelligence
Service of the Resistance originated. The British
knew it existed, but they
could never put their finger on its nerve center,
identify its directors, or
discover its headquarters in spite of the fact that
there were thousands of
Shai agents. Nearly all the Jewish police, military
officers, and inspectors
worked for Shai unbeknownst to their British
bosses and their Arab
colleagues. The same was true of postal workers,
telephone operators,
hotel chambermaids, cafe waiters, newspapermen,
secretaries, typists,
and the Jewish department heads in the British
bureaucratic system.
Shai also maintained networks of Arab agents
who reported on what
went on in the headquarters of the Arab tribes
and in the secret
meetings of influential Palestinians ... It
was seldom that a confidential
telephone conversation, an exchange of official
correspondence, or a
coded telegram escaped detection by the invisible
antennae of the
Jewish espionage." [BAR-ZOHAR, M., 1972,
p. 19-20]
In today's world, dual loyalty, ever encouraged
in the Jewish community (i.e., Jewish chauvinism and allegiance to Israel
as an inalienable American democratic
right), left completely unchallenged by all in modern American culture for
fear of being branded an 'anti-Semite," has invariably given arrogant
rise to nakedly hostile and subversive statements by those obsessed with Jewish identity. Consider the words of Jane Delynne,
an American Jew who has reaped the benefits of life in America with three
published novels, an Elizabeth Janeway Prize for Prose Writing, a Book of
the Month Club Fellowship, and a New York Foundation Fellowship for the Arts.
Her forum, from which the following is quoted, is not some obscure, fanatic
off-the-edge cult magazine, but a 1989 book on Jewish identity by powerhouse
publisher Random House, a fact that testifies to the disturbing acceptability
of this kind of attitude -- as a legitimate opinion -- in the Jewish American
community:
"The existence of Israel is the reaffirmation
of Jews as the chosen
people ... Israel is suffused for me with
a moral meaning absent from the
existence of any other nation in the world.
If there was a war between
the United States and Israel, I would
choose Israel. Sometimes I think I
am secretly glad for] its occasional brutality
so that the world will know
there is a monster out there -- a monster
who will never forget [the
Holocaust]. Although in general I believe
in nuclear disarmament, I am
glad
Israel has the atomic bomb, and the continued existence of Israel is
the only cause for which I consider it
justifiable to use nuclear weapons.
Let me put this in its starkest and ugliest
light: I am not sure, but I
believe that, if the choice were between
the survival of Israel and that of
the remaining 4 or 6 billion people of
the world, I would choose the 4
million [Jews]." [DELYNN, p. 65]
Such a conviction merits serious attention
for many reasons, among them the fact that some American Jews were even instrumental
in helping Israel secretly develop its own arsenal of nuclear bombs. Seymour
Hersh notes that:
"A few American nuclear physicists
were known to have emigrated to
Israel after World War II; one was a veteran
of the Manhattan Project
[America's nuclear bomb-making effort]
who had worked until 1956 in
the most sensitive areas of nuclear reactor
design ... The CIA had even
been tipped off about the fact that Israel
was raising large sums of
money for Dimona [the site of Israel's
nuclear bomb center] from the
American Jewish community." [HERSH,
p. 58]
Among the friends of Ernst David Bergmann
(the "founder" of the Israelli atom bomb, whose father was one of
leading rabbis in Berlin) was Lewis Strauss, the American Jewish chairman
of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. Strauss knew well of Israel's
clandestine efforts to build nuclear weaponry. "Strauss's [Jewish] background
and his strong feelings about the Holocaust," notes Seymour Hersh, "cannot
be disregarded in analyzing why he did not tell anyone -- especially [his
AEC chairman predecessor and eventual head of the CIA] John McCone --
about Dimona. Fair or not, the issue of 'dual loyalty' -- exemplified
by Strauss's actions -- has been a very real concern to the American intelligence
community since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948." [HERSH,
p. 89]
Another Jewish American sometimes mentioned
as possibly influential in the development of Israel's nuclear bombs was Zalman
Shapiro who had a nuclear fuel processing business in Pennsylvania. Shapiro
was an activist in the Zionist Organization of America. In 1965, the Atomic
Energy Commission found that 200 pounds of enriched uranium was missing from
his company's storehouses. Nothing was ever proven, but the "CIA ...
found Shapiro's longstanding ties to Israel to be of continuing interest ...
Shapiro, as the CIA and AEC never learned, did have a secret life. He had
met and befriended many of Israel's senior nuclear scientists." [HERSH,
S., p. 247]
"The dual loyalty question,"
wrote Anne Roiphe, like Jane DeLynne, in
a 1995 volume (which included articles
by prominent Jewish authors, including Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation
League), "is one that anti-Semites use to isolate us politically in America.
We're not supposed to discuss it. But the truth is that ... we are only Americans
as long as America reins in its anti-Semites. We are Jews forever under all
circumstances." [ROIPHE/CHANES,
p. 464]
"Under all circumstances." What
conclusions should the reasonable, impartial, and just observer make about
the following Zionist volume that is published every year in Israel? In English,
it is entitled, Who's Who in Israel and Jewish Personalities from All Over
the World. More bluntly, however, in its seminal version in Hebrew it
is called, Who's Who In Israel and In the Work for Israel Abroad. [See
national library online OCLC subfield] Those
Jews listed in the volume who are noted to be "working for Israel abroad"
include:
* Frank Lautenberg, a Jewish American
U.S. senator from New Jersey
and former chairman of the United
Jewish Appeal
* Paul Rose, a former member of the British Parliament
* Arne Melchoir, member of the Danish
Parliament (and former
member of the Danish Zionist
Federation)
* Lionel Stoleru, the Minister of Planning
for the French government
(and chairman of the France-Israel
Chamber of Commerce)
* Simone Weil, member of the French Parliament
(and former president
of that organization)
* Roy Welensky, former Prime Minister
of the Federation of Rhodesia
and Nyassland
* Stanley Clinton Davis, a former member
of the Belgium Parliament
[A
reader of this work states that he was a member of the British Parliament]
* Michael M. Fidler, former member of
the British Parliament
* Benzion Netanyahu, professor of Judaic
Studies at Cornell University
and father of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
* Fredman Lincoln, president of the Royal
Navy Reserve Officer's
Club in England
* Abraham Foxman, National Director of
the Anti-Defamation League
* Stanley Fuld, retired chief judge for
the state of New York
* Ezra Kolet, retired Joint Secretary
and Chief Controller of Chartering
for the government of India
Others on the list include the Leonard
Bernstein (the famous composer), actor Theodore Bikel, Edgar Bronfman (chairman
of the World Jewish Congress), and others who live throughout the many countries
of the world as judges, newsmen, bankers, lawyers, dentists, real estate moguls,
librarians, and other distinguished careers. In 1987, nearly a million adult
American Jews (of a total man, woman, and child U.S. population of approximately
six million people) felt it important enough to actually register to vote
in that year's World Zionist Congress elections. [GOLDBERG, JJ, 9-12-97] By
the 1940s, 955,000 American Jews (of a total man, woman, and child population
of 5 million) "formally belonged to one of dozens of Zionist organizations."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 126] Yet even those who are not formal members of such
organizations often have strong attachments to Zionist policies and the state
of Israel. As Kevin Avruch notes about studies of American Jews who immigrated
to Israel in the late 1960s and early 1970s: "Anywhere from 40 to 65
percent of all American olim [immigrants to Israel] were not members of any Zionist organization
in the United States ... It is important to understand that commitment to
Zionist ideology can exist quite separate from a concomitant commitment to
Zionist organizations." [AVRUCH, K., 1981, p. 50]
To begin to understand the origins of the
insistent Jewish dual loyalty conviction, we must refer of course to Jewish
genetic "Chosen People" and "Nation Apart" foundations
of identity. As Jewish scholar Will Herberg observes, "Built into [the
Jewish] being is a transnational, transcultural, transpolitical dimension
that makes him irrevocably and irreducibly 'different.'" [HERBERG, p.
272] But it is also necessary to spotlight another keystone of traditional
Jewish identity throughout the world: galut,
a Hebrew word meaning "exile." Originally (and for many still today)
grounded in religious conviction, the notion of galut has been emphatically renewed in contemporary
Zionist secular ideology. The basic premise of galut is
that Jews are everywhere estranged and alienated from the people and cultures
around them, they are intrinsically unfulfilled and restrained as Jews, this
condition is innately irresolvable, and the only true remedy for Jewish dissatisfaction
in galut is -- in both religious
Orthodoxy and Zionist ideology -- a return to the homeland of Israel.
"The golah [galut/exile],"
says A.B. Yehoshua in his article entitled Exile as a Neurotic Condition,
"and our attitude to it defines the essence of the Jew." [YEHOSHUA,
A., p. 15]
"Down through its history," notes
the Encyclopedia Judaica, "the feeling of galut has been one of the most permanent and prolific incentives in Jewish
thought." [ENCY JUD, v. 7, p. 294] In traditional religious terms, "the
very soul of the Jew is affected in the galut, which renders him 'unclean with inequities' (Song R. 8:14)
... The galut detracts from the
completeness of the Kingdom of Heaven (Mid. PS to 97:1) ... [ENCY JUD v.7, p. 279] ... From the beginning
the galut [starting with the Biblical
exile from the Holy Land to Egypt] was a phenomenon which demanded an explanation
... The [religious] sages could not be satisfied with a general answer about
the sins of the [Jewish] people, and they gave their opinion about the specified
causes of the destruction of the second temple. Unlike the first exile, which
resulted in idol worship, incest, and the shedding of innocent blood, the
second destruction [of the temple] was caused by baseless hatred and love
of money (Yoma 9b)." [ ENCY JUD, v.7, p. 78]
In modern Israel, notes Batya Keinan, an
official of the Zionist/Socialist MAPAM party, "The lowest and most disgusting
thing you can say about someone in Israel is 'He's galuti,' meaning from the Diaspora and
not one of us." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 165] As recently as 2000, the president
of Israel, Moshe Katsav, was still publicly calling for Jews worldwide to
give up their lives in other countries and move en masse to Israel. [HOFFMAN,
G., 9-11-2000]
Samuel Heilman notes this traditional Jewish
separatist view in today's ultra-Orthodox:
"Many of [the ultra-Orthodox] tried
to remain strangers and sojourners
in the contemporary secular world. That
was the essential message they
read in the promise by God in Leviticus
20:26: 'And I will separate you
from the nations to be for Me.' One should
not try to be a Frenchman,
a German, an American, or even a secular
Israeli or any other kind of
citizen, but always a Jew. The world beyond
the Jewish one was
essentially evil and one must 'distance
oneself from it ... so as to not
learn its ways.' Jews could never forget
that they were in exile."
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 18]
"Abraham cut this groove," says Rabbi
Arthur Hertzberg,
"and his descendants deepened it. Jews
in every era have struggled to
reconcile two opposing inclinations. They
have wanted to maintain
a separate and special culture, even as they
have wanted to be accepted
by the majority. This desire to be both different
and the same is the
root of great turmoil on three levels: It is
the source of tension within
the souls of individual Jews who do not know
to which culture they
belong; Jewish factions keep quarreling with
one another about how
much of the majority culture is admissible before
it compromises the
Jewish character; and Jews are always trying
to achieve equilibrium
with the rest of society, balancing their otherness
with their desire
for inclusion." [HERTZBERG, 1998, p. 49;
quoted in O'BRIEN, 2000]
In 1921, Jewish immigrant Maurice Samuel
became an American citizen. Yet Samuel, a prolific author, and a secular Zionist,
only three years later wrote:
"If I have long pondered this question
of the Jews and gentile it is
because I suspect from the first dawning
of Jewish self-consciousness
that Jew and gentile are two worlds, that
between you gentiles and us
Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf ....
[SAMUEL, You, p. 9] .... I do
not believe that this primal difference
between gentile and Jew is
reconcilable." [SAMUEL, You,
p. 23]
This ancient religious self-perception of
Jewish identity, equally manifest in a secular, usually Zionist, form, has
profound impact in mainstream Jewry's general sense of its communal self and
its position in the United States. Shalom Carmy notes that "One way of
keeping alive a sense of Galut in America is to inculcate an instinct to snideness
toward 'their' [non-Jewish] culture, from baseball to apple pie. Another is
to limit, as a matter of principle, active concern for the affairs of American
society, to cultivate a studied schadenfroh
toward the moral adversities that rock it. The most forceful way of nursing
an awareness of Galut, however, is to dwell on anti-Semitism." [SHALOM,
p. 60-61]
"My own feeling is that Galut is still
very much part of the Jewish community," noted Justin Hertog, a faculty
member at Vassar College, during an academic conference about the subject,
"... My self-conception of my Jewishness is always in tension with my
identity as an American. And I presume that most American Jews feel the same
... The assumption that Jews should desire to 'integrate' [into American,
or any other, non-Jewish society] seems wrong to me. Why should Jews desire
to give up all they have suffered over the millennia? Why should Jews attempt
to be like American Christians?" [HERTOG, p. 14] "To be honest," says Janet Kirschheimer, an assistant
to the president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership,
"I have never felt truly American. I grew up in two different worlds:
one that diddn't exist any more [her parents were from Germany] and one in
which I didn't feel at home [America]." [KIRSCHHEIMER, J., 4-5-01]
"America may be a very comfortable
and accommodating exile and many even be favorable to many forms of Jewish
creativity," noted Bruce Saposnik of New York University at the same
gathering, "Jews will choose to live
here both comfortably and Jewishly. They will nevertheless always be
living in exile." [SAPOSNIK, p. 37] "Exile diminishes the soul of
every Jew -- in Israel or abroad," added Yosef Abramowitz, "who
have not found union between the self and her or his Jewish self. Exile diminishes
the collectivity of the Jewish people where a union has not been created by
Jews ... And Exile, Galut, is Jewish life in America." [ABRAMOWITZ, p.
18] "Deuteronomy 12:29-13:19
is a passage of warning," says Jewish college freshman Steven Stryer,
"directed at the Israelites entering Canaan. The problem of assimilation
that is addressed are familiar to Jews today, in Israel and the United States."
[STRYER, p. 90]
Popular Jewish American author Cynthia Ozick
addresses galut and its alienation
from non-Jewish culture this way:
"As we more and more pour not only
the Jewish sensibility, but the
Jewish vision, into the vessel of English,
we achieve the profoundest
invention of all: a language for our need,
our possibility, our
overwhelming idea. If out of this new language we can produce a
Yavneh for our generation within an alien
culture, we will have made
something worthwhile out of the American
Diaspora, however long
or short its duration." [OZICK, p.
34] [Yavneh was town where Jews
were allowed to have a religious academy
under Roman rule. "It was
out of Yavneh," says Ozick, "that
the definition of Jewish life as a
community in exile was derived." [OZICK,
p. 35]
(Meanwhile, in view of this issue of Jewish-American
unassimilability and the role of Israel in it all, a note of irony. In 1998
a few hundred people held a rally in front of the offices of the Boston
Herald newspaper in protest of an article by (Jewish columnist) Don Feder
who had called Puerto Ricans "inassimilable." He "described
Puerto Ricans as immigrants -- even though they have been citizens of the
United States since 1917 -- and equated Spanish speakers to criminals, welfare
recipients, and aliens." The Hispanic protesters demanded a personal
apology from Feder, noted the Boston Globe, but "Feder has been
in Israel and unavailable for comment." [VALDES-RODRIGUEZ, p. B4] )
David Ben-Gurion, the widely revered first
prime minister of modern Israel, once stated that "the basis of Zionism
is neither friendship nor sympathy but the love of Israel, of the state of
Israel ... It must be unconditional love. There must be complete solidarity
with the state and people of Israel." [LILIENTHAL, p. 231] This, of course,
underscores a huge, but unspoken, problem in America -- widespread Jewish American sympathy, allegiance,
and, for many, primary loyalty
to Israel. Jews are numerous in important positions of power throughout American
society, including the military and defense contracting firms. In 1996 a Pentagon
security office issued an internal memo warning employees about Israeli (and
other "close ally" countries) efforts to steal military and intelligence
secrets. Jews were singled out as an example of susceptibility, by virtue
of their "strong ethnic ties" to the Jewish nation. The Pentagon
memo more generally noted that other country's search for spies and traitors
focused on "ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and exploitation
and identification of individual frailties" of American citizens. "Placing
Israeli nationals in key industries," the memo also said, "... is
a technique utilized with great success." The warning also cited Israeli
theft of optics information and radar test equipment in the past.
By any measure of rational, historical,
moral, and experiential examination, the memo addressed a legitimate issue
of concern, but modern America is --
for all its 'political correctness' -- completely paralyzed in coping with
it. For fear of offending American Jewry for an honest assessment of a reality
that the American Jewish community itself has created for its individual members,
the Pentagon was positioned as "discriminatory" and had to disavow
and condemn the warning when it was leaked to a Jewish magazine. "This
Pentagon memo' is a distressing charge," declared Anti-Defamation League
Director Abraham Foxman, "which impugns American Jews and borders on
anti-Semitism." [SMITH, p. A1] Certainly the President of the United
States -- beholding to so much Jewish economic and political influence --
cannot speak freely about the issue of Jewish dual loyalty. Seymour Lipset
and Earl Raab note that "as recently as 1992 President George Bush complained
bitterly that 'thousands' of Presidential lobbyists, obviously mobilized by
American Jewish organizations, had descended on Washington to oppose his position
on certain loan guarantees ... for Israel. Jews saw this as a dual-loyalty
reference, and the President eventually made an apology." [LIPSET/RAAB,
p. 128]
With absolutely no one around with the courage
to stand up to the charge of "anti-Semitism," Jews are increasingly
emboldened to test the limits of dual loyalty tolerance even in American intelligence
agencies. In 1999, for example, Adam Ciralsky, a Jewish CIA employee began
proceedings to sue the spy unit for anti-Semitism. His lawyer was Neil Sher,
the former head of Israel's foremost lobbying organization in America, AIPAC.
Ciralsky's loyalties had become suspect to his employer when he failed a lie-detector
test when questioned about his family's "contacts with right-wing politicians
like Prime Minister Netanyahu," and whether his family donated money
to "Israeli government causes." "I think that it is important
that he state openly he and his family's support of the [Israeli right-wing]
Likud party," noted one commentator in a CIA document. "He may be
simply withholding on this issue, because it paints him and his family as
extreme supporters of Israeli hard-liners in the Likud Party, and he wishes
to avoid being seen as a lover of Israel." [HENRY, M., p.4] Another CIA
memo noted that Ciralsky's lack of candor "will not be misunderstood
by the CIA, for we are sophisticated and broadminded enough to understand
the unique ties that bind American Jews to their brethren in Israel."
[HENRY, M., p. 4] The Jerusalem Post noted that Ciralsky's dual loyalty
suspicion was "not the first such case. An FBI counterintelligence agent
won a six-figure settlement and a lifetime annuity for being suspended after
a trip to Israel." [KOHN, M., p. 9B] Ciralsky was investigated, noted
a Florida newspaper, because he "did not fully reveal a relationship
with two people holding dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, both employees of Israeli
defense firms with possible ties to Israeli intelligence." [PRESS JOURNAL,
2-7-2000]
"CIA memos," noted the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency, "single out Ciralsky's Jewish background, including
his proficiency in Hebrew, trips to Israel and a Judaic studies minor in college
... He was also asked about connection to his great-grandfather's first cousin,
Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president. He was not, however, asked about
a previous internship at AIPAC [Israel's American lobbying organization]."
[DORF, 4-14-99, p. 13] For popular American consumption, TV's "60 Minutes"
perspective (via Jewish reporter Leslie Stahl) on the Ciralsky case was that
"the former CIA lawyer says he is not a spy and was targeted for investigations
because he is a religious Jew." [60 MINUTES, online, 2-6-2000]
"[My client's] family visited, they
support Israel, they support Jewish causes like the UJA, buying Israel Bonds,"
Ciralsky's lawyer declared, "If contributing to UJA and Israel Bonds
makes one suspicious and questions your loyalty, then the majority of American
Jews would be under suspicion." [HENRY, M., p.4]
And here -- the irony of his statement beyond
the lawyer's grasp -- we have the crux of the problem, a condition that Zionism
is creating for the Jewish community at-large.
In a similar kind of attack, with the legal
aid of B'nai B'rith Canada's "League for Human Rights," charges
of anti-Semitism in the Canadian armed forces were made in Canada in 1998
by a Jewish naval reserve officer, Andrew Liebman. He was allegedly told in
1991 that, with high tensions in the Middle East,
he could not be granted a promotion to a high position in the Arab
country of Bahrain during the Persian Gulf War because he was Jewish. The
Canadian Forces' policy was "designed," the Forces argued, "to
maintain peacekeepers' neutrality and [to] avoid inflating already-tense situations."
B'nai B'rith wanted Jews anywhere and everywhere, no matter what the surrounding
conditions, and asked a Canadian court to rule that country's policy had been
discriminatory and unconstitutional. [CSILLAG, R., p. 3]
Investigations of Jewish loyalties are not
unwarranted. The issue of dual loyalty in the spy context, for example, has
a very substantial history in the American Jewish community with some disturbing
precedents during the post-World War II American-Soviet "Cold War."
In recent years, with the collapse of the Soviet Union's communist regime,
KGB and FBI archives have been increasingly accessible for scholarly examination
and it is has become starkly clear that a large proportion of American spies
for communist Russia were Jewish. They were instrumental in helping the Soviet
Union secure American nuclear bomb secrets, as well as other espionage. In
the 1950s, notes Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, "fear that the Jewishness
of so many of the atom-bomb spy suspects would provoke an anti-Semitic reaction
led to a defensive attempt [by Jewish organizations] to prove the patriotism
of America's Jewish community and 'scare off' Jews who might be attracted
to the Left." [RADOSH/MILTON, p. 353]
"What has proven most disturbing,"
noted the Jewish Exponent in 1999,
"is the picture we have of the extent
of the betrayal -- truly overwhelming
in sheer bulk. The fact that many Jewish
[American] radicals participated
in espionage [for Russia] sticks in peoples'
throats ... Spies, spies
everywhere ... [Recent books about the subject]
are invaluable for what
they add to our knowledge of the [Cold War]
period and may yet spur a
bout of soul-searching among the remnants
of the progressive community
in America, so many of whom were -- and
are -- Jewish ... [Such
betrayers] allowed the Soviet Union to develop
atomic weapons years
before it may have been [otherwise] possible."
[LEITER, p. 46]
Kevin MacDonald notes the 1950s case of
Andhil Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee and his exploring of Jewish
defensive strategies over the
"repercussions of the fact that the
great majority of communist spies
were Jews ... Fineberg suggested that the
best way to combat this
threat to Jews was to de-emphasize Jewish
group identity of 'good
Jews' like Bernard Baruch as well as a
'bad Jews' like the communist
spies. Identifying people like Bernard
Baruch as Jews 'reinforces the
concept of group responsibility' and 'the
residue in the mind of the
average American person whom the editorial
is intended to influence,
is likely to be, 'But why is it all those
atomic spies are all Jews?'
Fineberg argued that an attempt by Communist
Party members to
portray their persecution as anti-Semitism
would be 'devastating' to
Jews generally and recommended that the
AJCommitttee reply to
charges linking Jews and communism to the
effect that 'criminals
operate as individuals, not as members
of religious or racial groups.'"
[MACDONALD, p. 25]
A variety of people of course functioned
as spies during the Cold War, but among the disturbing implications of such
recent revelations is that the Soviet
side of the Russian spy system was in large part Jewish too; a critical
examination of the Soviet transnational spy system points in no small way to Jewish networking. As high-ranking KGB officer
Pavel Sudoplatev noted in 1994, "The men and women [in Russia] who were
most influential in acquiring atomic bomb secrets for the Soviet Union were
all later purged because they were Jewish [i.e., Soviet intelligence officers
were eventually driven from the ranks because of allegations of a 'Zionist
conspiracy' within it]." [SUDOPLATEV] Or, as Jewish scholars Stanley
Rothman and S. Robert Lichter noted in 1982:
"Allen Weinstein's study, Perjury,
seems to indicate that Jews constituted
a substantial majority of known members of the
Soviet underground apparatus
in the United States during the 1930s. Soviet
agents whose backgrounds
were probably Jewish include J. Peters, Lee
Pressman, Harry Dexter White,
Marian Bachrach, Hedda Gompertz, and many others."
[ROTHMAN/
LICHTGER, 1982, p. 100]
On the American side of the Soviet spy network,
perhaps the most famous spy case in American history centered on two Jewish
communists -- Ethel and Julius Rosenberg -- who were convicted and executed
in 1953 for passing along secrets to the Soviet Union. Harry Gold and David
Greenglass were also Jewish accomplices. Until recent intelligence disclosures,
for decades many Jews have held that the Rosenbergs "were blameless [and]
... that the couple had been framed by the FBI and had been executed out of
a mixture of anti-Semitism and the government's wish to set an example to
all self-professed radicals." Recent investigations, however, noted the
Jewish Exponent, "had to conclude that their subjects were guilty
as charged." [LEITER, 2-4-99, p. 57]
Curiously, "by design or destiny,"
also said the Exponent, "all the principals in the [Rosenberg]
case were Jews. The presiding judge was Irving Kaufman, the prosecutor Irving
Saypole was assisted by Roy Cohn, and the defense lawyers were Alexander and
Emmanuel Bloch, father and son. To redress the balance, the jury was all gentile."
[LUVIA, Y., 7-2-93, p. 1x] (This situation paralleled a similar court case
in South Africa, the Rivonia trial, where there was a "prevalence of
Jews in the [Communist] Party ... In a striking echo of the Rosenberg Trial
in this country," notes David Biale, the prosecuting attorney, Percy
Yutar, was himself Jewish and may have been partly motivated to show that
Jews could be loyal to the regime.") [BIALE, D., 2000, p. 64]
"The [Rosenberg] jury complexion,
noted the Toronto Star in 1986, "has prompted charges that the
Rosenbergs were victims of an anti-Semitic cabal." [AGES, A., p. M5]
By 1999, however, the Jewish Exponent
noted that "with the unearthing of voluminous evidence from the files
of the FBI and the Kremlin, those who cling to the notion that Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg and [Gentile] Alger Hiss were innocent deserve to be compared
to people who believe the world is flat." [TOBIN, J., 3-11-95, p. 33]
Peter Novick notes the dimensions of Jewish communist
spies in that era:
"Lucy Dawidowicz -- later well known as
an historian of the Holocaust, but
in these years the American Jewish Committee's
expert on the percentage
of Jews among 'hostile witnesses' before various
investigative bodies. Jews,
she found, often made up 75 percent or more
of the totals. Worst of all,
producing something near panic among mainstream
Jewish organizations,
was the number of Jews figuring in espionage
prosecutions: the Amerasia
case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon
case -- culminating in
that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations,
the case of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold,
and David Greenglass."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 92]
There was also Nathan Silvermaster, "a
Russian-born economist who worked for the [American] Farm Securities Administration
[and] established a network of friends in government to provide Soviets material
and to aid the U.S.S.R. during World War II." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 189] Jewish-Russian Isak Akhmerov was the Soviet control officer of Yakov
Golos (also Jewish), "the chief organizer of espionage activities through
the American communist party." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 219] Gregory Kheifetz, Jewish too and one of the
main organizers of the American Communist Party, had worldwide assignments
from the Russians. [SUDOPLATOV, p. 84-85] Soviet agent Naum Isakovich Eitingen
"used his connections in the [American] Jewish community to obtain new
papers and identity." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 79] The Rosenberg's Russian case
officer was also Jewish, Sam Semyonov (real name: Abe Taubman).
Controversial, prominent, and fabulously
wealthy Jewish entrepreneur and art philanthropist Armand Hammer had long
been under suspicion -- he was called by his secretary "the Pimp of the
Politburo." [KUROPAS, p. 7] "Armand and his father," notes
Edward Epstein, "had become crucial parts of the Soviet clandestine organization
[in America] ... [EPSTEIN, 1996, p.
103] ... By 1940, British intelligence had developed a lengthy dossier on
Hammer. It identified him and his associates as part of the Soviet 'secret
regime' in the West." [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 152] FBI files notes that Hammer
"had been a Soviet courier," "he had laundered funds for the
Soviet Union," "he had helped recruit Soviet spies and position
them in the United States government," and "he had been, in the
1920s, a key link in a network that provided money to espionage rings in New
York and London." [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 170]
Carl Blumay notes the fundamentally Jewish
nature of Hammer's contacts in early Soviet Russia:
"From the moment of his arrival [in
Russia] he was surrounded by old
family friends, among them Ludwig Martens,
whom Lenin had appointed
to head the Soviet mining industry after
his deportation from the United
States; Boris Reinstein, whose functions
as Soviet propaganda minister
included serving as guide to visiting Americans;
Julius Hammer's
[Armand's father's] partner, Abe Heller,
whom the State Department
categorized as 'a notorious Bolshevik'; and
the Hammer family's
European representative, Boris Mishell, whose
first assignment was to
locate a Mercedes Benz for Armand."
[BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 43]
Maurice Halperin, who while heading "the
research department of the Office of Strategic Services, America's main intelligence
agency at the time, gave hundreds of American diplomatic cables to the KGB."
[LEITER, p. 46] Bella Gold in the U.S. Commerce Department and Sonya Gold
in the U.S. Treasury Department [WEINSTEIN, A.; VASSILEV, p. 167] were among
those working with the aforementioned Nathan Silvermaster, a U.S. Treasury
Department official who was also working as a Soviet espionage "group
handler."
Theodore Hall (also Jewish: original last
name Holtzberg), while working on the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico,
was "the only American scientist known to have given the Soviet Union
details on the design of an atom bomb." [ALBRIGHT/KUNSTEL, p. 9-17] In
1945, Philip Jaffe, editor of Amerasia magazine, was arrested by the
FBI. "Jaffe," noted the Jewish Exponent, "[was] a committed
sympathizer [and had] contacts with Soviet intelligence agents and said he
wanted to spy for them." [LEITER, 8-22-96]
The only known U.S. Congressman to have
spied (beginning in 1937) for the Russians was also Jewish, Samuel Dickstein,
for fifteen years a Democratic Congressman from New York, and later a judge.
The Russian NKVD (precursor to the KGB) codenamed Dickstein "the Crook"
because of his "mercenary instincts." Consummate hypocrite and deceiver,
Congressman Dickstein was also "the founding father" of the (HUAC)
House Un-American Activities Committee -- the organization that sought to
expose Russian communist agents in American government and popular culture
in the 1950s. [GUARDIAN, 1-27-99, p. 6] (Ten of the nineteen people subpoenaed
by HUAC were Jewish, as were six of the ten who were indicted by the committee).
[NAVASKY, p. 113]
Among non-Jewish Americans spying for the
Soviets were some whose espionage roots revolved around sexual affairs with
Jewish Russian agents: Elizabeth Bentley was the aforementioned Jacob Golos'
lover. [WEINSTEIN/VASSELIV, p. 84] Martha Dodd's partner was Soviet agent
Boris Vinogradov. In Bentley's case, after Golos died, she defected from the
espionage ranks. Jewish Soviet agent Joseph Katz was assigned the task of
killing her, but the murder was never carried out. [WEINSTEIN/VASSELIV, p.
108] In Dodd's case, she never knew that her love affair with Vinogradov was
being directed from Moscow. She eventually married wealthy Jewish-American
businessman Alfred Stern, who also became involved in Soviet espionage activities.
Stern was influential in setting up a music business, with a Jewish-American
Hollywood producer, Boris Morros, as a front for Soviet espionage efforts.
"Most Americans who spied for Moscow during the 1930s," notes Allen
Weinstein and Alexander Vasselev, "were antifascist admirers of the Soviet
Union whose involvement in espionage had ideological roots. There were two
noteworthy exceptions, one a U.S. Congressman [the aforementioned Samuel Dickstein]
and the other a Hollywood producer [Boris Morros]. [Both] offered their services
as Soviet agents for a price tag." [WEINSTEIN/VASSILEV, photo section]
Even Marilyn Monroe's Jewish psychoanalyst, Ralph Greenson, was secretly an
agent for the communist Comintern. (Monroe had a series of romantic affairs
with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and innocently shared
information she gleaned from him with Greenson). [WOLFE, D., p. 384]
In later years, the only known Soviet spy
to have penetrated the CIA (1973-77), described "in intelligence circles
... as one of the most important spies in United States history" was
Karl Koecher. He was also Jewish. Koecher, notes Ronald Kessler, "gave
his Czech handlers and the KGB details of dozens of 'top secret' CIA operations
targeted at the Soviets and U.S. allies alike. He supplied them with classified
CIA documents, lists of photographs of CIA employees in the United States
and overseas and names of U.S. government officials who might be blackmailed
into cooperating with the Soviets." Koecher and his wife Hana were enjoyed
their American stay in the fullest of ways; they were extremely active in
group sex orgies, nudist retreats, and wife-swapping events. [KESSLER, 4-17-88,
p. C1]
There were a significant number of Jews
working on the American Los Alamos nuclear bomb project, including some from
other countries like Hans Berthe, Emilio Segre, and Edward Teller. (Jewish
equivalents in England included Rudolf Peierls). Such Jewish immigrants were
so important in the development of the bomb that Richard Rhodes, in his Pulitzer-prize
winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, devotes an entire chapter to
their "exodus" from Europe, particularly Germany and Hungary. Jewish
scientists involved in the bomb, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, even managed
to get Jewish economist Alexander Sachs to convey to President Franklin D.
Roosevelt the urgency of building the nuclear weapon. A colleague jokingly
called immigrant Jewish bomb developers Szilard, Teller, and Eugene Wigner
"the Hungarian conspiracy." [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 306, 308]
The director of the atomic bomb program
was also Jewish, J. Robert Oppenheimer. "I had had a continuing, smoldering
fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany," he once said. [RHODES,
R., 1988, p. 445] The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, for that matter,
in that era was also Jewish, David Lilienthal. "The most vital information
for developing the first atomic bomb," says former top KGB official Pavel
Sudoplatov, "came from scientists designing the American atomic bomb
at Los Alamos, New Mexico -- Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard."
[SUDOPLATOV, p. 172] (Of the three, Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife was).
Jewish Soviet agents Gregory Kheifetz and Elizabeth Zarubin "persuaded
Oppenheimer to share information with 'antifascists of German origin' ...
Oppenheimer, together with Fermi and Szilard, helped [the Soviets] place moles
in Tennessee, Los Alamos, and Chicago as assistants in those three [nuclear]
labs." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 190] Others seminally influential with Oppenheimer
included Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels and Yiddish poet Itzik Feffer (later
murdered in Soviet purges) -- Russian nationals on a tour of the United States
with the Moscow Yiddish State Art Theatre. [SUDOPLATOV, p. 188] Soviet intelligence
noted in 1944 that Oppenheimer, head of America's nuclear weapon program,
was a "secret member" of the American Communist Party. [WEINSTEIN/VASSILEV,
p. 183-184] For Szilard's part, the army's head of atomic bomb security, Leslie
Richard Groves, thought the scientist was "the kind of man that any employer
would have fired as a troublemaker." "Groves," says Richard
Rhodes, "seems to attributed Szilard's brashness to the fact that he
was a Jew." [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 502] Groves also suspected the scientist
of being a spy and had him put under surveillance, but caught him doing nothing
illegal. [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 506-507]
(Jewish involvement in weapons to invoke "holocausts"
are a steady theme. In later years the "father of the neutron bomb"
was also Jewish: Samuel Cohen. "Few people know the man behind the neutron
bomb," noted the New York Times in 1982, "J. Robert Oppenheimer
and Edward Teller, the key scientists in the development of the atomic and
hydrogen bombs, are well known but only dedicated students of weaponry have
heard of Mr. Cohen.") [NEW YORK TIMES, 3-28-82, sec. 1, p. 34]
On the Soviet side of the Russian-American
spy rings, "the [Russian] men and women who were most influential in
acquiring atomic secrets for the Soviet Union were all later purged because
they were Jewish." [SCHECHTER, p. 301] These early 1950s purges in Russia
(centering on alleged Zionist intrigue in the Russian intelligence agency
and other departments) began with the alleged "confessions" of Naum
Shvartsmann, whose own job was to edit "falsified confessions extracted
from prisoners." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 300-301] Brutal Soviet dictator Josef
Stalin grew suspicious of increasing Russian Jewish interest in the new nation
of Israel. The principal focus of this concern was the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee, an organization created to raise support for the Soviet Union from
western Jewry in lobbying other governments against the threat of Hitler.
But, to Stalin's chagrin, the JAC soon "brought an extraordinary stirring
of Jewish consciousness in its own ranks, reflecting the prevalent mood of
Soviet Jewry as a whole ... [It expressed] feelings of [Jewish] national solidarity
and Jewish pride ... They were frequently so carried away by their faith and
enthusiasm as to overlook the JAC dominant objective, namely, that of spreading
Soviet propaganda ... JAC speakers and writers increasingly resorted to biblical
imagery, Talmudic references, and Jewish historic symbols." [GILBOA,
p. 46-48] Soviet poet Perets Markish, for example, publicly talked about "Jewish
brothers" around the world, declaring that "we are one people, and
now we are becoming one army." [GILBOA, p. 47]
For Stalin, the JAC was turning into a anti-communist threat. Voices
were also heard around the world like that of Chief Rabbi J. H. Hertz who
announced that, "Let us remember that if we do our full duty, we not
only help to smash Hitlerism, but bring
back Russian Jewry to the fold of Israel." [author's italics:
GILBOA, p. 54]
Shortly after the founding of Israel in
1948, Foreign Minister Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union. Her arrival, notes
Stuart Kahan, "brought with it a welcome far beyond anything contemplated.
Soviet Jews poured into the streets of Moscow. They surrounded her hotel day
and night. Her very appearance brought thunderous roars of approbation. Stalin
was in shock. He called an emergency meeting: 'The Jews have still not been
able to adapt themselves or become acclimatized like other minorities. Only
very few can -- or want to ... They constitute an ever present danger. Every
Muscovite Jew has foreign connections. We are threatened by the danger of
Zionism.'" [KAHAN, S., p. 250] Among those deeply moved by Meir's visit
was Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav
Molotov. Joshua Rubenstein notes that Zhemchuzhina met
"members of the Israeli delegation
at a diplomatic reception ... [and]
she could hardly restrain herself. 'I've
heard you attend the synagogue,'
Zhemchuzhina told Golda Meir, speaking in
Yiddish. 'Very good. Keep
going. The Jews want to see you.' When Meir
asked how she knew
Yiddish so well, Zhemchuzhina proudly responded,
'Ich bin a Yiddische
tochter'
(I am a daughter of the Jewish people), a phrase she repeated
several times. Zhemchuzhina asked about
life in Israel, about the Negev
[desert], and conditions on the kibbutzim.
She parted from them with
tears in her eyes, saying, 'I wish all will
go well for you there and then
it will be good for all Jews.' " [Rubenstein,
J., p. 262]
Zhemchuzhina herself was arrested by Soviet
security a couple months later and sent into exile.
Although Zionism was banned in Russia
under tsarist rule, Nora Levin notes that in the year of the Russian revolution,
1917, the Zionist movement had 300,000 members (of a total Jewish population
of 3.5 million) in 1,200 chapters throughout the country. [LEVIN, N., 1988,
p. 3, 7] Zionism prevailed in many pan-Jewish organizations -- for example, 60% of the vote in the All-Russian Jewish Congress. In nine
Ukrainian provinces, in 193 kehillas
(traditional Jewish self-governing bodies), 36% (the largest number of any
ideological group) of the delegates were Zionists. "When the Bolsheviks
took power," notes Nora Levin, "Zionism was unquestionably the dominant
movement in Russian Jewish life." [LEVIN, N. 1988, p. 7, 87] Zionism's
free expression after the Russian revolution was stifled by 1919, however,
when the new communist government perceived the demands of expressly Jewish
nationalism to be a threat. That year the new government also began forcing
Zionist offices to close. Communist Party leader V.I. Lenin had called Jewish
demands for national autonomy a "Zionist idea ... [one which] is reactionary
in its political implications." [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 17] "There is no doubt," says professor
Norma Levin, "that had the [Russian] anti-Zionist campaign been relaxed,
many Jews would have joined or rejoined Zionist groups, thus crippling communist
control." [LEVIN, N. 1988, p. 94]
The theme of purges of various dissidents,
real and imagined, in communist ranks, is a continuous one in Soviet history.
Jews were periodically one of the major targets. Ironically, anti-Zionist
purges in the 1930s "were all under [Jewish communist leader Lazar Kaganovich's]
orchestration, and he relished it ... All Jewish cultural institutions were
liquidated. The Communist Party apparatus and the ministries at all levels
were purged of Jewish personnel." In the later anti-Zionist purge, prominent
Russian Jewish leader S. M. Mikhoels "was shot to death in Minsk ...
the order had been given by Lazar with Stalin's approval." [KAHAN, S.,
p. 250]
Common Jewish-enforced convention in the
West holds that Stalin's anti-Zionist purge (and others in Soviet history)
was rooted in baseless anti-Semitism. (Jews, of course, were not the only
ones subject to brutal purges in the Russian communist past. As Jonathan Franklin
notes, "it would be totally erroneous to suggest that the Jews were the
only victims of the purges. Initially, at least in the years 1949-51, those
communists suspected of national deviation ... were in the greatest danger
and, throughout, 'Titoism' remained a major form of anathema held in readiness
to fall almost at random on the leaders of the [communist] bloc countries."
[FRANKLIN, J., p. 320] ) Philosemitic former KGB official Pavel Sudoplatov,
whose perspective is that of a man with a Jewish wife who was a lieutenant
in the Russian spy organization, condemns the 1950s anti-Zionist purge as
unwarranted. Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff notes, however, that "any
Jew who does not absolutely denounce Zionism can, with some truth, be charged
with accepting it. By this interpretation, the [Zionist] movement is [in 1969]
strong in the Soviet Union." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 87]
Or, as Sylvia Rothchild notes:
"In 1965, Elie Wiesel was in Moscow
in time to witness the Simchat
Torah celebration. He was astonished to
find crowds of young people
dancing and singing in front of the synagogue
on Arkhipova Street,
as he reports 'openly celebrating their
faith in the people of Israel.'"
[ROTHCHILD, S., 1985, p. 19]
Whatever the case, the charge of "Zionist
conspiracy" as a "fifth column" looms as an endless, terrible
cycle. Those with primary allegiance to the Jewish state invariably create
suspicion in others for all Jews in positions of political power. Those Jews
innocent of Zionist allegiance nonetheless gravitate towards Israel as insurance
against anti-Jewish hostility. Hence, the problem -- in a self-fulfilling
loop -- grows like the nature of anti-Semitism itself: Gentile suspicion of,
and outrage at, Jewish alienation and intrigue, followed in consequence by
further Jewish alienation, followed by further Gentile alienation, and so
forth. Prominent Jewish Russian Zionist Natan Sharansky (famous among international
Jewry for his fight to emigrate to Israel) stated the problem succinctly:
"I loved Russian culture ... but I was a Jew because of anti-Semitism."
When Sharansky was interrogated by the KGB for his Zionist activities, he
writes that "I was eager to show the agent that I was a loyal citizen
just like him, although I already knew in my heart that wasn't true."
[SHARANSKY, p. xiv]
With the Soviet purge of Jews in its intelligence
ranks, 50 colonels and generals were arrested, including the Deputy Minister
of Security, Andrej Sverdlov, son of the first president of the Soviet Union.
Such Jewish characters as Grigori Maironovsky, head of the "top secret
toxicological laboratory" who had "personally liquidated a number
of the most important enemies of the Communist Party and the Soviet government"
[SUDOPLATOV, p. 279] also met their ends. Jews, notes Sudoplatev, were deeply
entrenched in the communist elite everywhere: "Key members of the Politburo
like Voroshilov and Molotov had Jewish wives; Kaganovich was Jewish."
[SUDOPLATOV, p. 300] (Even in America, Earl Browder, for many years
the head of the American Communist Party, had a Jewish wife, Raissa Berkman.
Polish communist strongman Wladeslaw Gomulka also had a Jewish wife.) [CHECINSKI,
M., 1982, p. 82]
Although there was also a purge of Zionist
Jews in the Soviet system in 1922-23 (particularly members of the Politzi
Zion: "Police of Zion"), by 1933 "in every major ministry at
the time, Jews held top positions." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 288] By 1937, "some students of the Kremlin
power struggle put the number of Jewish military officers executed at 500,
not less than twenty of them generals." In power struggles not solely
aimed at Jews, one-third of the 75,000 Red Army officers were purged from
the ranks of communist leadership. [LITVINOFF, B., p. 79]
In September 1948, not long after the declaration of the founding of
the new nation of Israel, a Jewish Communist Party member, Ilya Ehrenburg
(later an elected member of the elite Supreme Soviet), "published a bitter
tirade in Pravda against those Jews who looked with approval at Israel and
Zionism." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 84]
In Czecheslovakia, Rudolf Slansky, the Vice-Premier
of the country, and "considered the most powerful man in the country"
was put on trial in 1952 along with the Deputy Ministers of National Defense,
State Security, Foreign Trade, and Finance. Of the 14 on trial, 11 were Jewish.
Romania's Jewish Foreign Minister, Anna Pauker, also were tried. "Large
numbers of Rumanian Jews," notes Barnet Litvinoff, "were imprisoned
on the grounds of Zionist activities." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 90]
One Jewish Czech of intrigue, Otto Katz, had "developed a number
of Communist cells in the Hollywood film community and was a key participant
in the conspiracy to kill Foreign Minister Masaryk. He was executed during
the Slansky purges." [GREENBERG, M., p. 44]
Indictments against Slansky and other Jewish
communist leaders in Europe stemmed in large part from association with American
Jews (and self-proclaimed communists) Noel and Hermann Field, who were involved
in a variety of European intrigues and were ultimately imprisoned for allegedly
spying for the United States. [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 76-85]
Further along in the Soviet spy world, other
Jewish Soviet intelligence operators in America included George Gamo, who
provided Moscow with "the names of left wing [American] students who
might be recruited to supply secret information," [SUDOPLATOV, p. 192]
Lev Vasilevsky, who from Mexico City headed efforts to get information from
nuclear bomb director Oppenheimer, and Leonid Eitingon, who set up two Polish
Jewish agents on America's west coast. The early lead scientist in Moscow's
intelligence agency who studied stolen atomic spy secrets was also Jewish,
Yakov Petrovich Terletsky.
Fleeing Stalinism, the most prominent Soviet
spy ever to defect to America, General Alexander Orlov (originally Leiba Lazarevich
Feldbin) was also Jewish. In the 1930s Orlov set up a Soviet spy school outside
of Barcelona. An American Jew, Morris Cohen, "became one of the elitist
of the elite at the special school," [ALBRIGHT, p. 31] and Cohen's first
Russian spy controller in New York was also Jewish, the aforementioned Semyon
Semyonov. [ALBRIGHT, p. 33] "Why [defector] Orlov never told American
authorities about Cohen after the general received asylum in the United States
in mid-1938 remains Orlov's secret." [ALBRIGHT, p. 32] Senator James
O. Eastland once called Orlov "the highest ranking officer of the Soviet
State Security [later KGB] ever to come to the side of the free world."
Yet, with access these days to KGB archives, in an entire 1993 volume about
Orlov, John Costello and Oleg Tsarev assert that "Orlov had played a
subtle game of wits, first with the FBI and then with CIA interrogators. This
enabled the Soviet agents he recruited and former colleagues he could have
identified to continue clandestine operations against the West. Orlov's case
was therefore a classic: it was the record of a man squeezed between divided
loyalties with little room to maneuver." [COSTELLO/TSAREV, p. 10-11,
p. xi, xii] (Other prominent Soviet Jews who defected to the U.S. were Valter
Krivitsky (Samuel Ginzburg) and Ignati Reis (Natan Poretsky). [VAKSBERG, p.
97] )
From Poland, Jozef Swiatlo, also Jewish,
"won international fame on account of
his defection in 1953. [He] was
head of Section One [in the Polish government],
which dealt with foreign
intelligence services and their infiltration
into key party and state
positions." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p.
70-71]
Another Polish Jew, Jerzy Bryn, a diplomat,
attempted to defect from Poland to the West, changed his mind, and was sentenced
to life in prison for treason. [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 152]
Elsewhere, the "most senior Soviet
intelligence officer ever convicted in America," Colonel Rudolf Abel,
[ALBRIGHT, p. 245] was also Jewish, later freed in 1962 in exchange for American
spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers. Likewise, the "Resident Director
of all Soviet spy networks in France between World Wars I and II" was
Jewish, Ignace Reiss. [GREENBERG, M., p. 44]
In Britain, shockingly, the fifth Soviet
spy known to have penetrated British intelligence was an heir to the fabulously
wealthy capitalist Rothschild fortune, Nathaniel Meyer Victor Rothschild.
An entire volume, entitled "The Fifth Man," about his betrayal was
published in 1994. Rothschild "supplied espionage material to the Russians
on work in everything from nuclear weaponry and radar to germ warfare developments
at the biological center." [PERRY, p. xxii] Roland Perry also notes that
Rothschild "was camouflaged as the Fifth Man by virtue of his powerful
position in the [British] Establishment. The vast wealth of his banking dynasty
embedded him in the power elite more than the other members of the [spy] Ring
of Five. It was a perfect cover and served to shield him. He seemed the epitome
of the ruling class in twentieth century Britain, and therefore the least
likely to be a traitor ... Rothschild was more loyal to his Jewish heritage
than anything English ... Rothschild assisted in the creation of a homeland
[Israel] for the Jews who had been dispossessed [in Europe]." [PERRY,
p. xl]
Another of the preeminent five Soviet spies
in Great Britain was (non-Jew) Kim Philby. Alice Kohlman, notes the Jerusalem
Post, was "the Jewish woman who had been Kim Philby's first wife,
and by some accounts, instrumental in leading the young Philby to work as
a Soviet agent." [ARAD, p. 21] Klaus Fuchs is another non-Jewish
spy who served ten years in a British prison. A Jewish espionage associate,
Ruth Werner (born Kuczynski), was never caught.
Canada? Erna Paris notes that
"The highest ranking Jew in the Canada
Communist Party was Sam
Carr [born Shloime Kogan] ... Carr's crucial
role as principal recruiter
of Soviet spies was revealed in the 1946
Royal [Canadian] Commission
on Espionage." [PARIS, p. 171]
Canada also had its own Jewish Congressman-traitor:
"The man who actually transmitted
Canadian atomic information
to Russia was Fred Rose (born Rosenberg),
the only communist
MP [Member of Parliament] ... The effects
of Rose's conviction
ricocheted through the Jewish community
of Montreal ... The
primarily Jewish voters of Cartier [an
area in Montreal] ... found
themselves represented in Parliament by
a convicted spy." [PARIS, p.
174, 175, 181]
Upon release from prison in 1951, Rose moved to communist Poland.
[PARIS, p. 176]
Communist East Germany? "Markus Wolf,
the mastermind of former East Germany's spy network" was in 1993 "charged
with treason, espionage, and bribery." In recent years, noted the Associated
Press, Wolf "has had more appreciation of his Jewish roots."
[COSTELLO, K., 5-3-93]
In the years leading up to, and during,
World War II, a Polish Jew, Leopold
Trepper, headed a Soviet spy ring (known as the "Red Orchestra")
in western Europe that was able to infiltrate the Nazi General Staff in the
early 1940s. Trepper was an early member of the Zionist Hechalutz organization.
[PERRAULT, p 16] Likewise, in the early 1930s, another Jewish communist, Isiah
Bir (nicknamed "Fantomas") headed a Soviet spy ring in France. His
number two man in command, Alter Strom, was also Jewish. [PERRAULT, p. 18]
In Trepper's network, in earlier years,
a traitor to his organization was an unnamed Dutch Jew, a "former head
of a Soviet Spy ring in the United States." [PERRAULT, p. 21] Trepper's spy network, notes Gilles Perrault,
consisted of "a high proportion of Jews." [PERRAULT, p. 49] These
included Leo Grossvogel, Jules Jasper, "Camille," the Sokols, Abraham
Raichman, "Captain" Gurevich, and many others. Trepper survived
the war and, under the alias Leiba Domb, became a publisher, specializing
in "Jewish classical literature."
[PERRAULT, p. 509]
During World War I, Dr. Isaac
Strauss, a Jewish spy for Germany, was arrested in the United States. [BENDERSKY,
J., 2000, p. 56] Incredibly, there were even Jewish spies working for Hitler's
Aryan fascism, some of whom "had prewar careers as criminals ... The
fact that several were so easily 'turned' [to work for Hitler] suggests that
opportunism, rather than ideology, was often the dominant motive." Such
spies included Hans Arnheim (sentenced to death in 1940 by the French who
captured him) and Joseph Jakobs (part-Jewish; sentenced to death by the British
in 1941). Rudolph Korda, a Hungarian-Jewish journalist, also headed a German
spy ring til 1942. Karl Molnar (described as "part Jew"), chief
of the Hungarian intelligence in Istanbul, was "a valuable collaborator
with the Abwehr [the Nazi intelligence organization]." Ivan Lissner,
described as "a German half-Jew," was a collaborator in Germany
itself; he was even a Nazi party member. In Shanghai, Hans Mosberg served
Nazi spy interests. "The terrible fact," noted the Jerusalem
Post, "remains that their actions contributed, each in his own degree,
to the Nazis' anti-Jewish and anti-human war machine." [WASSERSTEIN,
B., 4-9-99, p. 5B]
* In
1999, Iran tersely rejected the formal protests lodged by the French minister
of France "that the arrest [of 13 Iranian] Jews [on accusations of spying
for Israel] was intolerable." The ambassador "summoned the Iranian
ambassador [in France] to express France's anger." [INTERNATIONAL HERALD
TRIBUNE, 6-22-99, p. 4] This small item meriting international attention and
formal French "outrage" bears further scrutiny. Most such news reports
on the subject neither itemized the charges against the Jews, nor evidence
for or against them. As always, the reportage of such an occasion, with no
context whatsoever, merely encourages the reader to absorb between the lines
evidence of yet another case of endemic, irrational anti-Semitism. This time
from Iran. Yet there are strong historical contexts and precedents for such
accusation. Israel's Mossad was long prominent in the former Iranian Shah's
secret police network (See later chapter). As recently as March 1998 too,
three Mossad agents made the news after trying to bug a Muslim activist's
home in London. Only a few days later another four Israeli spy members were
arrested in Switzerland after bugging another Lebanese Muslim's home. These
incidents, and the failed attempt to assassinate an anti-Israel Hamas official
in Jordan, forced the head of Mossad, Danny Yatom, to resign. [MAHNAIMI, U.,
1998]
And there has always been widespread Israeli spying on Arab countries,
using Israeli Jews who originally came from those very lands.
Take for example, Israel's
original spying unit on Arabs called Shin Mem 18, [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 43] created
for the "infiltration and implantation of Israeli agents in Arab countries."
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 43] Or take for example the case of Yolande Harmer, "born
in Egypt to a Turkish-Jewish mother," who" posed as a journalist
in her home country and took "on a succession of lovers, some of them
simultaneously, mostly from Egypt's rich and powerful and from the foreign
diplomatic corps in Cairo." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 61]
In 1998, the Times of London noted the profoundly ruthless
and dedicated degree that Israeli espionage can go. In a newly-discovered
story, the paper revealed that "members of an Israeli undercover unit
in the 1950s went so far as to marry Muslim women and have children by them
to ward off suspicion ... The unit was designed for long-term espionage. Its
members, Sephardim from a variety of Arab countries, were taught to speak
in Palestinian accents ... Ironically, because they had been so rigorously
taught the Koran, some became teachers, which gave them perfect cover for
spying." [WALKER, C., 9-30-98] (So,
when seemingly ridiculous Polish communist-era "antisemitic and anti-Zionist
propaganda" proclaimed that "Jews had been instructed by their 'world
center' command post to marry Polish girls in order to gain influence over
the population and thus be able to pursue their subversive and espionage activities
more effectively," what are we to reasonably think of it? [CHEMCINSKI, M.,
1982, p. 217]
Other Israeli spying units (later blending into today's Mossad)
using indigenous Arab-speaking Jews included Shai (the Arab Division of the
Jewish Agency political department) and Palmach's "Arab Platoon."
In the 1950s an Israeli spy, Major Avraham Dar, "recruited a group of
Egyptian Jewish youngsters and set up underground [Zionist] cells in Cairo
and Alexandria." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 108]
In 1954 "the [Jewish] Egyptian network embarked on its bombing
spree ... [However] a bomb went off prematurely in the pocket of one of the
group, Philip Natanson, as he was about to enter the Rio Cinema in Alexandria.
Natanson was arrested and that night the Egyptian security police arrested
the rest of the network: Dr. Moshe Marzuk, Shmuel Azzar, Marcelle Ninio, Victor
Levi, Robert Dassa, Meir Za'afran, Meir Meynhas, Eli Ya'akov, and Azzar Cohen."
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 111]
Quite possibly echoing the recent Jewish-Iranian spy accusation,
Israeli intelligence "activated a wide range of European contacts to
try to improve the treatment or obtain the release of the Cairo defendants.
Among those approached were French parliamentarians such as Coure de Marville
and Daniel Maier and leading British and French lawyers." [BLACK/MORRIS,
p. 113] The West German government
was even persuaded to act on behalf of one of the Israeli spies, Max Binnet,
recognizing his questionable German citizenship. "After his death,"
note Ian Black and Benny Morris, "in a rare piece of inter-Arab intelligence
cooperation, the Iraqis informed Cairo that Binnet ... had been mentioned
in the 1951 Mossad ring trial in Baghdad [regarding] the extensive spy network that had operated
in Iraq and Iran." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 113]
In 1965, in another situation, Eli Cohn, born and raised in Egypt,
was the "first Israeli spy caught and executed as an Israeli." [BLACK/MORRIS,
p. 48]
In Morocco, in the 1950s "hundreds of Jewish volunteers
were mobilized in a Mossad-led Jewish self-defense organization." [BLACK/MORRIS,
p. 176] "Over 100 [Jewish Moroccans] went abroad -- mostly to Israel
-- for military training, though some were trained in Morocco itself: cells
and 'units' were organized in the main towns (eventually there were twelve
local units); arms were bought and dispensed in underground caches ... The
members were trained in the uses of pistols, sub-machine guns and knives.
At its height [the Jewish Moroccan secret cell] had 600 members (and in Algeria
and Tunisia, another 600 altogether)." [MORRIS/BLACK, p. 176]
Zionist intrigue in Eastern Europe? From the early years of the
Israeli state, note Ian Black and Benny Morris, "new Jewish immigrants
[to Israel] from behind the Iron Curtain, Israeli diplomatic missions, and
Jewish communities in Eastern Europe all served as valuable sources of intelligence."
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 136]
In response to French parliamentary speaker Laurent Fabius' recent
call to release the imprisoned Iranian Jews before a trial, Iran's
Tehran
Times responded, saying that "Mr. Fabius is
probably under the influence of Zionists." [AGENCE PRESSE FRANCE, 7-3-99]
Fabius too is of Jewish heritage.
ADDITIONS:
"London Jews comprise a relatively affluent group
of people with middle-class lifestyles, according to a report published today
by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research ["A Portrait of Jews in London
and the South East: A Community Study," "the largest (survey) ever
conducted of Jews in Britain," (2,965 people) ]. And, while details of
their income are being kept under wraps, they are 'high on the socio-economic
scale.' Around one-third describe themselves as employers in large organisations
or in higher managerial and professional occupations, and another third in
'lower professional and higher technical and supervisiory' work. Only one
per cent are engaged in 'routine' occupations."
"80 per cent had watched a programme of Jewish interest [in the past
year], 53 per cent had read a book on a Jewish topic, while just 10 per cent
had not participated in any kind Jewish cultural activity or bought a piece
of Judaica of any kind. A third had attended a Jewish lecture, and one in
five a synagogue adult-education programme; 24 per cent had been to a Jewish
film, theatre or music event; and 24 per cent had visited a Jewish museum
outside the UK. Around 60 per cent had been to at least one Jewish educational
or cultural event."
"More than half of those surveyed had done some type of voluntary work
for their synagogue or another Jewish organisation in the past year ... As
many as 13 per cent had served as a trustee on a Jewish charity."
"Forty-six per cent attached highest priority to Jewish causes in the
UK; 20 per cent to general British charities; 14 per cent to Israel; and 11
per cent equally to Jewish and Israeli charities."
"'What is absolutely apparent,' the report comments, 'is that London
Jews have long sinced ceased to comprise a religious group. They are truly
an ethnie (ethnic group) within British society, with shared historical memories,
a myth of common ancestry ... and an overall sense of solidarity."
"London Jews also like to be near other Jews. More than 97 per cent in
North and North West London say they know of another Jewish resident in the
same street, while more than half (two-thirds in the North West) have a next-door
Jewish neighbor. More than 80 per cent in the North East, and more than 90
per cent in the North West, have a Jewish neighbour within three doors away."
[Note: South London percentages are much, much smaller -- poorer part of town?]
"More than 90 per cent think it important for their children to mix with
in Jewish social groups, and 89 per cent are willing to send their children
on an Israel trip -- an "amazingly high" figure, the report notes,
given the conflict in the Middle East."
FROM: The Way We Live Now, Jewish Chronicle [Great Britain], December 6, 2002,
p. 31
