According to the version of Jewish history that I grew up with, Jews are not people like everyone else. This idea would never have been stated so succinctly, but many Jewish children were given to understand that we were special. An American Jewish child, Philip Roth once told an Israeli audience, inherited “no body of learning and no language and, finally, no Lord — which seems to me a significant thing to be missing.” Instead, one got a psychology. “And the psychology can be translated into three words — ‘Jews are better.’ This is what I knew from the beginning: Somehow Jews were better. I’m saying this as a point of psychology; I’m not pronouncing it as a fact.”
If our history had been ghastly, persecution had come with a compensation, bequeathing us a unique sensitivity to injustice, a determination to heal the world arising from a purer set of motives that had perdured even in the absence of faith, as well as a dispensation from the rules that govern the behavior of other people.
This is the narrative that the journalist Peter Beinart confronts in the opening pages of BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A Reckoning (Knopf, 172 pp., $26). The book is addressed to a progressive friend with whom Beinart has fallen out. After Oct. 7, he writes, “one of our closest family friends asked my wife whether we believed that Israel bore any responsibility for the carnage. She answered yes. He said he would never speak to us again.” Every Jewish person who has spoken out on Palestine has such a friend, someone who believes that Jewish virtue translates into Israeli virtue, and exempts that state from the normal laws of humanity.
“We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world,” Beinart writes. “Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hard-wired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense.”
For years, and at great personal cost, Beinart has been one of the most influential Jewish voices for Palestine, even as he continues to attend a predominantly Zionist Orthodox synagogue. Beinart is often praised as courageous for speaking out on this subject, but the most courageous thing about him might just be his simple assertion that Jews might be “fallible human beings.”
Beinart used to describe himself as a “liberal Zionist,” a position he has since left behind. He is sympathetic to the Jewish sense of vulnerability — he offers a granular accounting of the Hamas attacks — while nevertheless condemning the Israeli state. “Again and again, we are ordered to accept a Jewish state’s ‘right to exist,’” he says, arguing that “the legitimacy of a Jewish state — like the holiness of the Jewish people — is conditional on how it behaves.”
The method here is as much scriptural as it is political. Calmly and concisely, Beinart demolishes the usual defenses of Israel with reference to stories from within the Jewish tradition that show Jewish people as both the conquerors and the conquered. (The Israelite invasion of Canaan, after the exodus from Egypt in the 13th century B.C., and the domination of the seven tribes that lived there, he notes, often goes unmentioned.) His goal is to wrestle with the knottiness and ambiguity in our sacred texts and correct for the omissions in the mythology of purity that so many of us were taught as children and that many continue to subscribe to as adults.
Whoever believes that Beinart is exaggerating should turn to Senator Chuck Schumer’s ANTISEMITISM IN AMERICA: A Warning (Grand Central, 234 pp., $28), written with the political speechwriter Josh Molofsky. In this telling, Jewish people are first and foremost victims of antisemitism, a “light sleeper” that needs only the tiniest nudge to burst into full genocidal efflorescence: “Antisemitism just is. Has been. Will always be.” And so we must never forget the Holocaust while defending “plucky little Israel,” whose opponents spread “conspiracy theories” and question its “right to exist” by applying “double standards.”
Schumer provides a brief chronicle of ancient Jewish history that, just as Beinart describes, omits stories to make a cleaner narrative. Still, he wants to be seen as forging compromise, insisting that he is a progressive who is open to “legitimate criticism” of Israel — open, that is, as long as it hews exactly to the speech code that he is determined to enforce.
Can you criticize the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Schumer once ate pastrami sandwiches in Brooklyn? Yes, he writes, partly because Netanyahu doesn’t support a two-state solution, and partly, and perhaps most egregiously, because he sympathizes with a rival political party in the United States. You can even take Netanyahu to task for impeding relief efforts to Gaza and for the scale of civilian casualties in the conflict — just don’t call those things genocide.
Schumer writes that antisemitism is a significant threat that waxes and wanes, and Beinart agrees, pointing to three studies that show that “when Israel kills more Palestinians, Jews around the world report more discrimination and abuse.” If this is true, wouldn’t a responsible Jewish leader strain every muscle to ensure that fewer Palestinians get killed? Schumer did call for restraint in Israeli bombardment last year, but he never went so far as to seriously threaten the steady flow of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons that the United States sends to Israel. This was a threat that the Democratic president was willing to make, even if it was a bluff.
Is the real danger to the Jews the signs reading “NO NORMALCY DURING GENOCIDE” that Schumer describes seeing taped to the laptops of students occupying a Harvard library, or is it the worldwide revulsion unleashed by a Jewish military’s bombing of schools and hospitals? The senator recently acknowledged that Biden’s unconditional backing of Israel might have hurt his party at least “a little,” but in “Antisemitism in America” Schumer doesn’t meaningfully explore how this choice might have contributed to the success of a movement that, he writes, gives a “feeling of safe harbor” to people who make Hitler salutes.
Sifting through some troubling polls, Schumer pays lip service to the many Jews who are ashamed of U.S. support for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but he also suggests that these people, and all Americans, need to brush up on the Shoah. “For those of us whose relations perished in the Holocaust,” he notes, “hearing Israel and Jewish supporters of Israel being accused of genocide is vicious.” But what about the many Jews who might have derived a different lesson from the horrors of genocide, and who find their ancestors’ suffering used to justify the infliction of suffering on others to be an intolerable insult?
The struggle among Jewish Americans to find a moral path forward in the midst of a broader crisis has a long history, as the essayist and critic Richard Kreitner shows in FEAR NO PHARAOH: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 401 pp., $32), a portrait of six prominent Jews in 19th-century America whose views on slavery diverged wildly, and sometimes violently. Kreitner introduces us to colorful and often unexpected characters like Ernestine Rose — a feminist abolition activist who was one of the most affecting speakers of her time — and Judah Benjamin, a brilliant lawyer who became the Confederate secretary of state.
If the story of race, slavery and disunion is an old one, Kreitner has found a fresh way to tell it, and he manages to compress a historical panorama of decades into an efficient narrative that never feels rushed or confusing. This would be an achievement for any writer, but what makes his book even more impressive is the way he avoids both the antisemitic trope that Jews were the chief financial players in the trans-Atlantic slave trade — a favorite canard of American neo-Nazis and the Nation of Islam — as well as the opposite theory: that all Jews were innocent. “Jewish butchers owned slaves. Jewish lawyers owned slaves,” he writes. “A Jewish dentist in Charleston owned 12 people.”
Kreitner makes clear that voicing opposition to slavery, especially as a Jew, took guts; many did, but at grave risk — Jews were not supposed to draw attention to themselves. Still, the central figures in “Fear No Pharaoh” read the same Judaic stories in very different ways, bending them to their own politics. Kreitner points out that many Jews did not find an antislavery message in the Book of Exodus, partly because “as soon as the ancient Hebrews escape enslavement,” he writes, “they devote their attention to coming up with laws governing the same oppressive institution they just fled.”
Some American Jews were passionately for slavery and others passionately against it — and some, like everybody else in every time and place, nestled, self-protectively, somewhere in the middle. A man named Moses Levy, trying not to stick out in the antebellum South, owned dozens of enslaved people who worked his Florida sugar plantation. Based on his understanding of Scripture, he endeavored to free them by the age of 21. As he grew older, Levy became more outspokenly abolitionist, a fact that alienated him from his son, who married a Christian woman from Kentucky, changed his name to seem less Jewish and pushed for the perpetuation of slavery and states’ rights as a U.S. senator in the 1840s.
By embracing rather than avoiding such complexities, Kreitner has produced the best book I have ever read about the Jews in 19th-century America. His history shows them as valorous and corrupt; racists and liberators. Their souls are great and petty and, more often, both. They are, in other words, fully human. At last.
The post The Long Struggle of Jewish Americans Over Their Country’s Crises appeared first on New York Times.
