The Jewish Condition

Challenges and Responses - 1938-2008

Mark Rosenblum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351480512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études juives

This brilliant set of essays poses the paradigm question: are Jews in grave danger today or not? Concern is rooted in the storm clouds of 1938, when the same question arose just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The contributors do not presume that the events of seventy years ago are identical with those today, or that they emanate from the same sources. However, the shared feeling is that Jewish communities worldwide are very much, once again at risk.In post 1938 Germany, the Nazi state began its march toward world conquest, with the destruction of European Jewry as its centerpiece. In an act of willful blindness, Western democratic leaders chose to negotiate and appease the Hitler regime. Many Jewish leaders also chose to minimize the risks. Seven years later, over 50 million people, including six million Jews had been liquidated. In 2008 extremist Islamic forces have spawned a global Jihad. State sponsored terrorism, a war against the West as well as against moderate Islamic states, once again holds the destruction of the Jewish people, and in particular the State of Israel, as a critical goal. The Iranian leadership proclaims that "a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible."Against such a diplomatic and historical background a conference was organized resulting in these essays written by Alan Dershowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Walzer, Leonard Fein and David Price-Jones. The results are varied at the policy level, but unified in appreciator of a disturbing revival of inherited hatred and anti-Semitic outbreaks against Jews both within and outside of Europe. This is a compelling effort that merits the attention of social scientists, policy-makers, and those interested in international relations.

1
Back to the Future: Is it 1938 Again?

Malcolm Hoenlein

The question that was posed was: is this 1938? I can give three answers: yes, no, and could be. It reminds me of when I came back the last time from Israel, and people said to me: “Tell me in a word how it was.” I said “Good.” They said, “Okay, okay, in two words.” I said: “Not good.”

So I’m not going to be able to summarize it quite that quickly, but I will try and address the three options. The real question I have is: do we really want to know? Recall that line from the movie A Few Good Men: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” I’m not sure that we’re prepared to handle the truth. The truth is that the issue is not whether this is 1938 or 1936 or 1934 or 1932, as different people have claimed. What’s important is what lessons we learned from that period that we apply today. No analogy is going to be perfect, maybe not even approximate. But what is relevant are the lessons we learned. That’s why Judaism places such an emphasis on remembrance. Tomorrow is Yom HaZikaron, Remembrance Day. Last week we marked Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, and the word that was chosen to symbolize the Holocaust was not along the lines of “revenge” or “avenge”; it was “Zachor,” remember There is no Hebrew word for history. It’s zechirah, remembrance. And unique to Judaism is that remembrance applies to the future.

Winston Churchill once said, “The further back you look, the further ahead you will see.” President Truman, I recently learned, said that the present is only the history you have yet to experience. Chazal, our sages, said it a thousand years earlier; they understood that experience was the best teacher and only those who look back could be equipped to look forward; that only those who learned the lessons of the past were prepared to meet the challenges of today and the opportunities of tomorrow.

For us, looking back is not about dwelling on the tsuris, the hardships, of the past. We remember them, but for us remembrance is about the future because we know that what we do today determines that future. Learning the lessons of the past enables us to spare future generations those trials and tribulations. If you go back to the Bible, you see that we’re told of our forefathers and foremothers not just their great successes, but their frailties, too, because we are to learn from their experiences. Our whole calendar is geared to being experiential, not just to ritual observance. But we experience what previous generations went through in order for us to learn their lessons and their relevance to today. Zechirah, remembrance, calls on us to go back and look at the period of the 1930s, to understand what happened then. What went wrong? What were the failures? And how do we prevent ourselves from falling into the same traps again?

I believe that this is a watershed period in Jewish history—in world history, American history, too, but definitely in Jewish history. And so this volume is especially important for remembrance, specifically for trying to ascertain the truth that some of us don’t want to wrestle with. So let me start by saying why this is not 1938. Obviously, first and foremost, because we have the Jewish State, with a strong army, with embassies around the world, with an ability to rescue Jewish communities. As we have seen in our lifetimes, the existence of the State of Israel makes possible the rescue of Russian Jews and Ethiopian Jews and Yemenite Jews and Syrian Jews and Iraqi Jews and Iranian Jews, many of whom were written off to Jewish history. So the fact that we have a Jewish state makes all the difference in the world. We have seen the ingathering of the exiles as a result of it, including the last victims of the Holocaust. We have seen that when Jews are in danger, Jewish communities are able to act because there is a Jewish state.

The anti-Semitism that we will talk about is not state-sponsored in most countries. And officials to significant degrees, at least in public pronouncements, renounce anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not universal in all Muslim countries or communities. Furthermore, American Jews are not the same as in 1938. We are not Jews of silence. We are not driven by the same fears or concerns or restraints that at times characterized the Jewish leadership during the thirties and forties. We now have lobbies. We have Jewish activism. We showed it in the Soviet Jewry Movement and in so many other instances. Abba Eban wrote that in World War II Jews had influence in many places but power in none. Today Jews have power. The whole world describes that power today. In politics, it’s not reality that counts, it’s perception. And if the world says you are power-ful, you are powerful, and that enables us to affect—even if we can’t determine—the outcome. We also have a different U.S. government. Republicans and Democrats alike overwhelmingly, by a figure of more than 90 percent, stand up for Israel on virtually every bill. We have a president who, like previous presidents, is a great friend of Israel and of the Jewish people and we see that the American people reject antiSemitism and that more than 70 percent of them, a record number since the creation of the state, express support for Israel. And lastly, there are tens of millions of Christians who stand with Israel and kneel.

So the question is: if all of this is so good, where does the “yes” come in? When we read the Haggadah on Passover, we recited the paragraph “ve-hee she’amdah,” which describes the enemies that arise in every generation. It does not use the past tense. It uses the present tense, describing the enemies “that arise…that seek to destroy us.” This usage is to remind us that the enemies arise in every generation. They may have different geography or different language, different colors on their uniforms, but the enemies are the same. Rabbi Yaakov Kaminetsky asked a question: is it really true that in every generation there are enemies that arise to seek to destroy us? And his answer is taken from the next paragraph that follows in the Haggadah, “tze u’lemad,” go out and learn. It deals with the Biblical figure Lavan, who wanted to destroy everything because he wanted to root out a progenitor, Yaakov, the father of the tribes of Israel. Yaakov, Jacob, lived in relative wealth and prosperity, but he had to be reminded that even at that time, with the appearance of calm, there was an enemy planning and plotting against him. Even in periods when we have relative affluence and relative calm, we have to be reminded all the time of the potential dangers.

That is what zechirah is about—a constant reminder setting off the alarm, teaching us to look beyond the surface to see the underlying reality, which brings me to 1938. As I said there are no analogies that are perfect but there are similarities. There is an implacable enemy driven by an extremist ideology that seeks to wipe out the Jewish State and the Jewish people along with many others. It has the backing of a national government that is engaged in a global war, rallying and exploiting millions of people. When we look at the state of Iran, with its huge capacity in terms of weapons, power, missile capacity, ships, and planes, let alone its nuclear aspirations, when we see other great powers in the Arab world and in the Muslim world teetering, always in danger of falling into the hands of similar extremist regimes, when we see the Jihadi grand designs of Ahmadinejad and others, it gives rise to concern.

Many scholars, including Bernard Lewis, Robert Wistrich, and others, have shown that the Islamist ideology is very similar to Nazi ideology. I won’t go into it now, but their books lay out both visions and show the similarities between them. We are still living in a world where apathy and indifference abound. Just look at the situation in Darfur. We live in a world where the big lie against Jews and Israel still works. We saw it during the war in Lebanon, with one distortion after another: from the 950 pictures that had to be taken out of the Reuters archives to the false story about the bombing of the ambulances by Israel, to the distortion about numbers and who was responsible, and so on. The difference from seventy years ago is that the big lie can be spread a lot faster. The fact that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the No. 2 best seller in the world after the Bible should be a warning. The difference is that the Nazis tried to hide their crimes. The Islamists advertise it. We see a transnational Jihadi Islam, not the Islam of the entire Muslim world, and we have to make the distinction. But truly that Islamism represents a danger to the Jewish people.

In addition, there is a media distortion that misrepresents Israel and the Jewish people all too frequently. We also see the intellectual justifiers of the Islamists, and corruption in general, in significant elements of the academy. We see those who continue to pursue the policy of appeasement, revealing that Europe, in particular, has learned little in the past seventy years. Indeed, recent statistics show that European trade with Iran has gone up 23 percent in the last two years. You’ve all seen the three years of negotiations—I should say humiliations—that they engaged in with Iran. You still see the scapegoating and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the failure of governments to act effectively to root it out. There is a 60 percent increase in anti-Semitism this year in Austria, Germany, and other countries, including Canada and Australia. We see the failure to prosecute anti-Semitic crimes—less than one percent of those who commit acts of crime against Jews in Europe actually are prosecuted and convicted. We see the Jews in Israel being held not to a higher standard but to a double standard.

Now I want to get to the “could be.” The “could be” relates to the potential of this period turning into something much more serious. As I said, I do not believe this is 1938. The differences that I described really do cast this period in a very different light. Bernard Lewis said that he is more worried today than he was in 1941 in England, and he is over ninety-one years old. To take the British example to heart, when we see the combination of traditional anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-globalization, and of course anti-Americanism, coming together in this cocktail of hatred, the consequences are obvious—not only in the statistics that I cited but in many other ways, as well.

In particular, I for one question whether there is a future for Jews in Europe. The demographic statistics speak for themselves. Forty percent of the European births in this generation will be Muslim children. Look at the crime situation. In France alone, there were 50,000 acts of urban violence last year by Muslims; 1,000 cars a week torched; fifty policemen a week beaten up; some 1,400 ghettoes where Jews and Christians cannot live, and all of these are government statistics, not mine. This breakdown of law and order threatens Jews. When a European police chief was asked why he did not respond to the fire-bombing of a synagogue during riots last year, he replied, “Why would I? It happens every day.” It took the government of France three weeks to acknowledge that Ilan Halimi had been a victim of an anti-Semitic crime in his brutal murder. True, the government has taken steps now, belatedly, for education and similar efforts. But to many, it’s too late, and young French Jews are voting with their feet.

In Great Britain, this year, they broke all the records since they began keeping track of anti-Semitic attacks after World War II. The proportion of pro-Israel British is between 17 and 19 percent. It is no wonder that in Europe a recent poll showed that when asked which country is the greatest danger to world peace, Israel ranked No. 1, with over 50 percent of the respondents ranking the Jewish state ahead of Iran and many others. (The United States came in fourth, so they have to try harder.) When asked to describe the most disgusting country in the world, they similarly responded in a separate poll that it was Israel. And there is great fear of what will happen if there is a serious economic downturn in Europe. I was in Berlin a few weeks ago to attend a conference and several of the speakers spoke openly about their concern. The chief rabbi of Great Britain, not a man given to exaggeration, told of a tsunami of anti-Semitism in his country. And the proof of that is in the recent action this past week by the United Kingdom’s National Union of Journalists. Although it only involved 120 or so of the 40,000 members, they voted to boycott Israeli products in the same week that their colleague Alan Johnston was being held in Gaza. And the BBC’s Alan Hart, sixty-five years old with a distinguished career, said in his personal blog that the only one who had to gain from Johnston’s disappearance was the Mossad, who perhaps concealed their operation in kidnapping Johnston.

Last year England’s Academic Union voted to boycott Israel, and Irish cultural and academic associations have done similar things. We see the mayor of London engaging in anti-Semitic vitriol and then getting reelected. Eighty-five percent of the reports on BBC were negative towards Israel and 15 percent were neutral, leaving not much room for positive support. It is what I call the poisoning of the elite. And it is imperative for us to understand it because I believe that what happened in Great Britain is happening here. And the reason you don’t see it is because it’s a cancer that spreads among the intellectual elite and then trickles down. Britain didn’t start off with only 20 percent supporting Israel. That’s an outgrowth of these campaigns.

Chief rabbis of France, Germany, and Norway have warned Jews not to go out wearing obvious Jewish symbols. And we have seen the statistics in Germany. A recent study found that 80 percent of Germans no longer feel that there is a special relationship with Israel and 44 percent expressed anti-Semitic views. In France, when they added a new channel to try and balance the reportage in French and in Arabic and a few other languages, they never mentioned Halimi. They never talked about the attacks on Jews. They never talked about anti-Semitism. And yet, one of the major producers wrote an article last week saying that so much anti-Semitic reaction was received that they shut down their response line. Indeed, we see the radicalization of the Muslim population. The failure of the European governments to properly integrate these populations has meant that their young people have become radicalized, even those of moderate and secular communities like the Turkish expatriates in Germany.

We have many other statistics but time does not allow me to cite them. We see the constant diet of incitement and its impacts. We see the kind of intimidation that results from it, such that you cannot get pro-Israel speakers on most British campuses, nor on most European campuses, and we know that people of that mindset don’t speak out today in the ways that they should. The situation in Iran contributes to this development, not only because of its direct export of violence; indeed, they were responsible for the riots that took place in Great Britain. Consider what a foreign minister of one of Europe’s largest countries said to me recently when I challenged him about why Europe is not standing up. He said, “What do you want from us? We have 20 million Muslims in Europe and you saw the riots.” I asked him, “So you’re telling us that intimidation works and the cancer will grow?”

Intimidation indeed works. The European response to it has been the same policy, the same kind of appeasement that drove Chamberlain to Munich, and Winston Churchill to tell him, upon his return, that in a choice between war and disgrace he chose disgrace. And, Churchill added, now you’ll have war. Europeans have learned little. You see it in the attempts toward moderation and to avoid imposing the economic sanctions that the U.S. has worked out—which indeed are having an effect and which can bring about change. Not a military action, which would only be the result of a failure to take the kind of preventative steps, the kind of effective steps that the sanctions represent.

Hitler used academics and others too. Through them he tried to put responsibility for all the ills that grew out of World War I on the Jews, including the economic, social and political problems. He cut the Jews off from commerce, from education and from social intercourse with the world. These steps paved the way, shortly thereafter, for Kristallnacht, the night when we now know that 1,407 synagogues were destroyed. That, in turn, paved the way ultimately for the final solution. When 300 reporters gathered in the White House a week after Kristallnacht, and asked President Roosevelt what his reaction was, the president said: “I’m outraged.” They asked him what he is going to do for German refugees, and he refused to answer, even as his cousin was then the secretary of immigration. His wife got up in front of Congress and, responding to a bill aimed at saving 20,000 German Jewish children, she remarked that 20,000 adorable children become 20,000 ugly adults. The bill was defeated. Hitler was reported to have told the Chief of Staff: “We’re free to do what we want with the Jews. The world doesn’t care.”

Once again we see the same kind of accusations about Jewish control, about Jewish manipulation, promulgated in academia and in the elite —not only in Europe, but also here. It’s easy to find blame. It’s easy to scapegoat. It’s much easier than trying to have to think through issues. There are social constraints today that didn’t exist in the 1930’s, so it is not appropriate yet to speak against Jews. But can one speak about the corporate entities that represent the Jewish people? Or can one claim “we’re not anti-Semitic, we’re only anti-Zionists”?

A recent study in Great Britain showed conclusively that anti-Zionism is really just a cover for anti-Semitism. That doesn’t mean that you cannot be critical of Israel without being an anti-Semite. If that were the case, 99 percent of Israelis would be anti-Semites. You can be critical without being bigoted. But you cannot demonize, you cannot de-legitimize the state. You can hold it to a higher standard, as we all do, but not to an impossible standard. We have to think, therefore, about the nature and consequences of our criticism. We have to consider the intensity and the veracity and most of all how it is perceived, no matter what the source, even when that source comes from within the Jewish community. It has got to be thought through carefully.

The situation in the United States has deteriorated, I believe, and the trickle from the poisoning of the elite is first becoming visible. It is not always obvious, but what was marginally acceptable on the fringes a year ago is increasingly acceptable in the mainstream today. A lot of this grows out of the Durbin Conference. In 1999, the United Nations convened the conference to deal with Xenophobia, anti-Semitism and hatred. It turned into an orgy of anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Americanism. But what we saw there was the blueprint laid out. Just as they got rid of the South African apartheid state in the twentieth century, they predicted, they will get rid of the Zionist apartheid state in the twenty-first century. And everything we saw there, from divestment to the campaign to squelch and silence supporters of Israel, is increasingly in evidence here today.

They have created an interesting dilemma for us. If we don’t speak out in response, they say, “You see? Everybody agrees.” If we do speak out, they say “You see that? The Jewish Lobby and the Jewish community are squelching any kind of criticism.” Indeed, in the past year we saw the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s original paper attacking the pro-Israel lobby. It did not appear in an American publication, though it was submitted to many; yet this was not because Jewish organizations objected—we didn’t even know about it —but because none of the editors who read it felt it was worthy of publication. Ultimately they had to go to the London Review of Books, which sounds a lot more effective and important than it is. Still, less than a year later they received the largest advance ever given to a professor at Harvard, $750,000, for a book released in September, 2007. They’re invited to campuses across the country and they are now joined by former president Jimmy Carter and his campus crusade. Carter recently told an audience that “as long as American politicians are seen as knee-jerk supporters of Israel, the country’s role as the Middle East peace broker will be endangered.” And he appealed to the audience to demand of their political representatives, to “pledge to you that they will take a balanced position between Israel and the Palestinians.” And I need not tell you how many hundreds of thousands of copies his book sold and how many mistakes, historical mistakes, it contains. Others accuse him of plagiarism, and of many other things, but there is no one who claims that his book is historically accurate. Scott Ritter, meanwhile, is publishing a new book of his own, that will accuse us of being responsible for a war in Iran—and none has even taken place yet. Wesley Clark has stated that the war in Iraq was driven by so-called “New York ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Jewish Condition
• copy
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• Cognitive Dissonance or Denial?—Perhaps Both
• 1. Back to the Future: Is it 1938 Again?
• 2. Lessons from the Past: Hopes for the Future
• 3. What is Living and What is Dead in Jewish Twentieth-Century History
• 4. Can We Choose Politically between Right and Left?
• 5. Echoes of 1938
• 6. The Case for Bombing Iran
• 7. The Right of World Jewry to Criticize Israel
• 8. The Ethical Limits and Ways of Criticizing Israel
• 9. Diaspora Criticism and Advocacy
• 10. Saving American Jewry: Demography, Politics, and Destiny
• 11. 1938 as Paradigm
• 12. From Hatred to Love: Is it Good—or Bad—for the Jews?
• 13. Facing Armageddon—Evangelicals and the Jews
• 14. Social Justice and Jewish Survival
• 15. Europe’s “Terrible Transformation?”
• 16. If Israel Ceased to Exist
• 17. Challenges and Dangers Facing American Jewry
• 18. Dilemmas of Jewish Survival as Seen through the Prism of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
• Contributors
• Index