Jewish-American Paradoxes

Two Jews may have three points of view but you can bet your bottom shekel that the pugnacious pair will both be liberal.  Jews the world over tend to lean left, and Jewish Americans are no exception.  “Jews earn like Episcopalians,” scholar Milton Himmelfarb observed in the 1950s, “and vote like Puerto Ricans.”  Still do.

Such liberalism does not end at the water’s edge.  Jewish Americans are equally progressive on matters of foreign policy, Israel included.  They may strongly identify with the Jewish state, but this visceral bond does not translate into carte blanche support.  There is ample evidence of the moderation.  One recent poll found that 72 percent of Jewish Americans support US pressure on both Israel and its Arab neighbors to reach a peace accord.  More strikingly, 57 percent of respondents favor exerting pressure on Israel alone while roughly the same number oppose settlement expansion.

If the polls bear out a heartening absence of mindless tribalism, they also obscure some interesting dichotomies.  Notably, Jewish Americans’ views of Israel vary significantly by age group.  Younger Jewish Americans are less likely to identify themselves as pro-Israel or Zionist; indeed, only 54 percent of non-Orthodox Jews under 35, according to one survey, are “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state,” in contrast to 80 percent of those 65 and older.

The origins of this discrepancy date to the Six-Day War.  Before the conflict, Jewish Americans typically viewed Israel with a surprising detachment sometimes bordering on apathy.  The martial rhetoric by Arab leaders, however, stirred deep-seated fears of annihilation indelibly etched into Jews’ collective unconscious by the Holocaust.  With the wound rubbed raw, the threat to Israel became personal, not least because of a Holocaust-induced perception that Jews in the Diaspora still required a refuge of last resort.  “You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!” historian Tony Judt recalls being told at a dinner party.  “We Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day.”

For their part, younger Jewish Americans, who have come of age in the fading shadow of the Holocaust, are less encumbered by the specter of eliminationist anti-Semitism.  As a result, they do not demand the sort of party discipline advocated by Judt’s dinner companion.  This measure of freedom from history’s burdens allows this generation to see Israel more fully, warts and all. 

The principle wart, of course, is the ongoing occupation of the West Bank.  Fault for the conflict is diffuse, but Israel’s share of the blame has taken its toll on Jewish Americans, as its actions seem to derogate from the cherished liberal ideals that are so integral to Jewish tradition.  Thus, the Six-Day War, which awakened a passionate identification with Israel in the post-World War II generation of Jewish Americans, simultaneously sowed the seeds of disillusionment with the Jewish state for succeeding generations because of the occupation stemming from the conflict.

But this is not the paradox of importance here.  To flesh that one out we must return to the older generation of Jewish Americans whose support of Israel is deeply and passionately felt, and often unconditional.

That support, as we have seen, is inextricably linked to the Jewish nature of the Jewish state.  In many other respects, however, this older generation is thoroughly secular.  So secular, in fact, that they have not made sure to impart to their children a strong sense of Jewish identity: over half of Jewish Americans now marry outside the faith.  If the trend is not reversed, American Jewry may well effectively vanish. 

The incongruity is glaring.  On the one hand, these older Jewish Americans tend to adamantly back Israel, oftentimes zealously.  Yet, their passion for the Jewish state is matched by apathy about Judaism closer to home.  In other words, they care deeply about threats to Jews thousands of miles away but are complicit in an existential threat confronting Jews in their own country.  Such is the paradox of Jewish-American Paradoxes.

The trauma of the Holocaust undoubtedly explains much of the oftentimes-contradictory impulses and actions of a generation that came of age so soon after it.  But how so?  How exactly did the near-extermination of European Jewry create such distortions?  

A question raised in 1942 by Emanuel Ringelblum lends some insight.  Ringelblum, a Polish Jew confined to the Warsaw ghetto, wondered as the liquidation neared completion, “Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?”  The Nazis, Ringelblum thought, had terrorized Jews into passivity.  He, for one, would not be similarly cowed, and indeed he managed to escape from the ghetto.

Ringelblum’s question demanded that a new Jew rise phoenix-like from the very literal ashes of the Holocaust.  The post-Holocaust Jew would, like Ringelblum, not quietly submit to the unspeakable cruelties so often visited on him.  He would control his fate.  Physical empowerment would be central to his new identity.  Indeed, once back in his ancestral homeland, this virile Jew would make the desert bloom by the sweat of his brow.  But most importantly, he would be a fighter, a Spartan.  So was born what Hannah Arendt characterized in 1948 as a rising “warrior tribe” of Jews in Palestine. 

Going from the European frying pan to the Middle Eastern fire confirmed the necessity of this metamorphosis, as Arabs would prove to be similarly intolerant.  In such a context, it was understandable that Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, took great pride in this new warrior incarnation that, despite the long odds, turned back one threat after the next, arresting the long Jewish narrative of victimization in the process.  Ringelblum’s ghost, it might be said, had been vanquished.

This new warrior tribe has some unlikely admirers.  Israeli historian and leading expert on fascism Zeev Sternhell points out that far right parties in Europe, long hostile to Jews, are inspired by Israel’s apparent lack of moral restraint when using military force.  That the country’s foes are primarily Muslim is part and parcel of the extreme right’s admiration, as Islamophobia has largely replaced anti-Semitism in Europe.  A similar process has occurred in the US, especially post-9/11, only the fear of Muslims has replaced the fear of communism.

Ringelblum’s rhetorical question, however, is not just a call for self-help.  It is also an indictment of his fellow Jews for complicity in their own annihilation.  Of course, almost all Holocaust victims were powerless to alter their fate—a fate also shared by millions of trained Soviet soldiers, the mentally handicapped, political dissidents, gypsies, and gays, amongst others.  The doomed also included, with tragic irony, Ringelblum himself, who, having managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto, was eventually captured by the Gestapo, tortured and killed.  Nevertheless, the blame-the-victim sentiment endures.

Consider Defiance.  The film, released in 2008, depicts the true story of four Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe who survived by escaping into the Belarusian forests.  Eventually, 1,500 Jewish refugees joined them.  Defiance’s director Edward Zwick had no interest in doing another Holocaust-themed film “about victims.”  He then learned about the Bielski brothers.  “Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns.”  Behold, warrior Jews.  And who better to play one of these tough “Yids” than James Bond himself, Daniel Craig?

Serving in the film as an analog to the heroic Bielskis are the learned Jews who, by contrast, are passive and feckless.  In one scene early in the movie, a Jew in spectacles drops a beam while constructing shelter in the forest.  When asked whether he has ever used a hammer, the nebbish explains, “I am an intellectual,” eliciting derisive laughter from the Bielskis.

Later, the same Jew, now wielding a hammer skillfully, proudly announces, “If my friends at the New Socialist Club could see me now.  I haven’t read a book in months.”  His redemption is complete.  Still, the Bielski brothers understand the nature of their burdensome charges.  They are, as one reminds, “Pretentious Jews.  Jews who stuck up their noses at us [warrior Jews].”    Similar contempt is reserved for the dithering Jewish elders in a nearby city who counsel their community to remain in their ghetto as it is slowly liquidated rather than abscond to the forest.

Defiance, a cinematic representation of Ringelblum’s question, reveals the dark underbelly of the warrior ethos: its disdain for the Jew whose intellectual prowess is inextricably linked to his physical meekness and inability to summon the will to defend himself when threatened.  It profoundly rejects Jewish tradition, which for millennia has prized learning, as intellectual achievement, it holds, led but to the crematoria.

By attacking such a fundamental aspect of what being Jewish has meant to Jews, perversely blaming it for abetting their historical persecution, the warrior ethos exposes an insidious self-hate.  This contempt for Jews explains why the Paradoxes, at once, have ensured that their offspring are free of a shameful association with a people seen as complicit in their habitual brutalization while dogmatically supporting a martial Jewish state.  Such is Semitic anti-Semitism.  Tony Judt puts it more charitably: “Commemoration in the Diaspora [of Jewish persecution, specifically the Holocaust] is doubly exploited: to justify uncompromising Israelophilia and to service lachrymose self-regard.”

The passing of the Paradoxes will have great implications.  For better or worse, lower rates of Jewish intermarriage in America will not be one of them.  It will, however, positively alter US foreign policy towards Israel.  Change is already afoot.  It can be seen in the rising clout of J Street, a pro-Israel lobby that, unlike AIPAC, recognizes that doctrinaire “support” for the Jewish state is neither in the interest of the US or Israel. 

The coming prominence of post post-Holocaust Jewish Americans will also redefine what it means to be Jewish.  Unlike those who came of age in the shadow of unspeakable carnage, the new generation is freer to take pride in the rich fullness of Jewish history, transcending the oftentimes-negative associations of their elders.  Judt, marveling at the decline of religion in the lives of Jewish American, observes, “Being Jewish largely consists of remembering what it once meant to be Jewish.”  He’s right, though in the future it won’t be remembering only the bad things.

In other important ways, though, the passing of the Jewish-American Paradoxes will not usher in fundamental change.  It is certain that, as ever, two Jews will continue to have three points of view.