“Shame and contrition, because we have not done enough, weigh even more heavily upon the Jews of the free countries [than on the Allied powers]. Not only do we have the greater responsibility of kinsmen, but our own weakness may be one of the causes why so little has been done. The history of our times will one day make bitter reading, when it records that some Jews were so morally uncertain that they denied they were obligated to risk their own safety in order to save other Jews who were being done to death abroad.”
—Ben Halpern, “We and the European Jews,”
Jewish Frontier, August 1943
Early in 1963 the controversy over a single book made it clear how much American Jews were still living “abroad,” in both the shadow of the Holocaust and the afterglow of the creation of the state of Israel. Just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry, a shattered people had declared, in 1948, that the “ever-dying people” had made a miraculous new beginning. But, just as light remains a quality of matter even though blind people don’t see it, neither the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil1 nor her acolytes could see the transcendent meaning in this heroic recovery.
Hannah Arendt’s book first appeared in New Yorker articles of February and March before being published as a book in May. The English novelist George Eliot had predicted (in 1876) that some day, when the Jews were no longer a dispersed people, they would “have a defense, in the court of nations, [just] as the outraged Englishman or American” did. But not even the great sibyl could have prophesied that in the twentieth century “crimes against the Jewish people” would include the destruction of European Jewish civilization.
Arendt’s book aroused a storm of controversy, primarily because it alleged that the Jews had cooperated significantly in their own destruction. Except among her most passionate disciples, it is now generally accepted that Arendt was woefully and willfully mistaken in this central assertion. In 1963 little serious historical research had been done on the subject of the Judenrate. But even to the meager historical material available Arendt paid little attention, preferring secondary sources that supported her accusation of Jewish collaboration. The abrasive effect of the book was increased by its original appearance in the New Yorker—discussion of mass murder alongside the ads for perfume, mink coats, and racing cars—and what Gershom Scholem (the great Jewish scholar who left Germany for Jewish Palestine in 1923) called its “heartless … sneering and malicious” tone toward Jewish leaders.
The rebuttal to Arendt came from Zionists like the journalist and poet Marie Syrkin, but also from non-Zionists like the socialist and literary critic Irving Howe. Howe had defended the Israeli capture of Eichmann in Argentina as a necessary moral act by the victims of Nazi Germany. He was outraged by the fact that Arendt’s articles, which had brought the most serious charges against European Jews, their institutions, and their leaders, had been distributed to a mass audience unequipped to judge them critically, and had then been sealed shut against criticism in the New Yorker itself. The debate took place in the Partisan Review, although Arendt and her acolyte, the left-wing journalist Dwight Macdonald, did their best to stop editor William Phillips from printing critic Lionel Abel’s attack on the book. (Abel, rejecting Arendt’s condemnation of the Jewish Councils for “collaborating” with the Nazi killers, pointed out that in the Ukraine, where there was no Jewish Council to collaborate with the conquerors, the Nazis had nevertheless managed efficiently to destroy more than half a million Jews between November 1941 and June 1942.)
Dispute over the book, which also meant dispute over the state of Israel and over the ingrained intellectual tradition of blaming Jews for the violence unleashed against them, divided the New York intellectuals into opposing camps. Howe’s magazine Dissent organized a public forum on the book early in the fall of 1963; it was attended by nearly five hundred people, who witnessed a debate between Arendt’s detractors, Abel and Syrkin, and defenders like Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg and sociologist Daniel Bell. Like the Dreyfus affair, the Eichmann controversy split families. Although Howe awarded the accolade for the “most judicious words in the whole debate” to Norman Podhoretz,2 Podhoretz’s wife Midge Decter later accused Howe of having arranged a “lynching” of Arendt and her book. Syrkin scoffed at the notion that the haughty Arendt could ever have been a defenseless lamb set upon by a frenzied mob. The symposium, she argued, was not a mere literary controversy about a book, but an examination of widely disseminated allegations of the Jews’ complicity in their own destruction. Howe had performed notable service by involving a previously aloof sector of the Jewish intelligentsia in a consideration of the greatest crime of the century, and brought awareness of the catastrophe to a once indifferent group.
Certainly, the debate had brought awareness to Howe himself. Long after World War II ended, William Phillips recalled that Howe “was haunted by the question of why our intellectual community … had paid so little attention to the Holocaust in the early 1940s … why we had written and talked so little about the Holocaust at the time it was taking place.” One may search the Partisan Review from 1937 through summer 1939 without finding mention of Hitler or Nazism. When writing his autobiography, Howe looked through the old issues of his own journal Labor Action to see how, or whether, he and his socialist comrades had responded to the Holocaust. He found the experience painful, and concluded that Trotskyists, including himself, were only the best of a bad lot of leftist sects, and that this inattention to the destruction of European Jewry was “a serious instance of moral failure on our part.”
Nor was this their only moral failure. The leading New York intellectuals had shown appalling indifference not only to what had been endured by their European brethren but to what had been achieved by the Jews of Palestine. Events of biblical magnitude had occurred within a single decade: a few years after the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish people had created the state of Israel. Like protagonists in a great tragedy, the Jewish people had imposed a pattern of meaning upon otherwise incomprehensible suffering. Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament in 1949, said, “The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.”
Having averted their eyes from the destruction of European Jewry, the “first-rank” Jewish intellectuals now looked away from one of the most impressive assertions of the will to live that a martyred people has ever made. They had been immersed in the twists and turns of literary modernism, the fate of socialism in the USSR and the United States, and in themselves, especially their “alienation” from America and from Judaism and Jews. Indeed, they found their Jewish “identity” precisely in their alienation from Jewishness.
Looking back on this debacle many years later, novelist Saul Bellow admitted to fellow novelist Cynthia Ozick in a letter of 1987 that “it’s perfectly true that ‘Jewish Writers in America’ … missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry. I can’t say how our responsibility can be assessed. We … should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it. Nobody in America seriously took this on and only a few Jews elsewhere (like Primo Levi) were able to comprehend it all. The Jews as a people reacted justly to it. So we have Israel, but in the matter of higher comprehension … there were no minds fit to comprehend.… All parties then are passing the buck and every honest conscience feels the disgrace of it.…” Four years after the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, the Six-Day War of June 1967 presented American Jewish intellectuals with a new challenge, one that, even more than Hannah Arendt had done, brought Holocaust “consciousness” to the fore. Gamal Abdel Nasser, declaring that “Israel’s existence is itself an aggression,” launched a war intended “to turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood.” As in 1948, the Arabs lost the war on the battlefield, but they and their supporters threw their energies into rescinding its results. Having failed to destroy the Jewish state, they commenced an ideological onslaught against Zionism itself. Here, where the Jews were alleged to be adept, the defeated Arabs did much better. Having refused to admit a Jewish state into a region they proclaimed exclusively theirs, they accused the Jews of refusing to accept an Arab (“Palestinian”) state; having launched several wars, countless terror attacks, and an international boycott, they accused Israel of aggression for defending itself. Having exploited Arab refugees they themselves had created and continued to exploit as human refuse, they blamed Israel for Palestinian homelessness.
In transforming their rhetoric from right to left, the Arabs made a calculated appeal to liberals, especially Jewish ones. The latter, as Ruth Wisse has pointed out, were now forced to choose between abandoning their faith in progress and enlightenment, and—once again—abandoning the Jews. Irving Howe saw what was coming. Even more contrite than Bellow about his “moral failure” with respect to the Holocaust, he foresaw the next great moral debacle of American Jewish intellectuals. As the verbal violence of the New Left turned into actual violence in the late sixties, his direst predictions of the “movement’s” fate were being realized, especially by its Jewish cadre of liberal “explainers” of terror and their solemn attachment to the slogan (whose irony they missed entirely) Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. By 1970 Howe found the treachery of the younger generation of Jewish intellectuals literally unspeakable: “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as ‘revolutionary’ the Egyptian dictatorship; … a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah, which pledges to take Tel Aviv. About this, I cannot say more; it is simply too painful.”
The late sixties and early seventies were also the years in which an earlier abandonment of the Jews—by American Jewry’s most beloved and adored politician, FDR—had been made common knowledge among literate people by the books of David Wyman and Henry Feingold.3 They revealed that, as Howe himself put it in World of Our Fathers, the record of the Roosevelt administration in admitting Jewish refugees had been “shameful,” more stony-hearted than that of any European country. To this subject we shall return.
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.…”
—Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire
The questions that should have riveted the attention of American Jewish intellectuals during Hitler’s twelve-year war against European Jewry had long ago been asked in the Bible: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9); and “And Moses said unto the children of Gad and the children of Reuben: ‘Shall your brethren go to the war, and shall ye sit here?’” (Num. 32:6).
Generally, as we have seen, they were not the besetting questions. Has the belated recognition, by such formidable figures as Howe and Bellow, taught their successors among Diaspora Jewry’s learned classes any lessons? Can they respond any more convincingly to Moses’s question to “the children of Reuben” than their ancestors did during World War II? Have they learned, from the moral debacle of their intellectual predecessors, that survival must precede definition?
Many of those “Jewish boys and girls” whose hatred of Israel rendered the usually voluble Howe speechless would go on to become (some still are) well-established figures in journalism and academia, tigers of wrath who became insurrectionaries sitting in endowed university chairs, or editorializing in the New York Times or New Yorker or New York Review of Books. If ideological liberals became unsympathetic to the fate of the Jews in the Middle East because it contradicted their sanguine view of the world, the tenacity of the Arabs’ rejection of Israel and their worldwide campaign to destroy Israel’s moral image by “delegitimization” have brought a mass defection of Jewish liberals from Israel. They fall roughly into three categories.
First, in America as in England, there are the “ashamed Jews,” American cousins of Howard Jacobson’s fictional inventions. They are desperate to escape the negative role in which they are being cast by the alleged sins of Israel. Readers of spiteful broadsides against Israel by American Jewish intellectuals will notice the frequency with which these accusers mention the shame and embarrassment that overcome them at cocktail parties or in faculty lounges. Thus Berkeley history professor Martin Jay’s notorious essay blaming Ariel Sharon for the rise of the new antisemitism begins as follows: “‘No one since Hitler,’ my dinner partner [another Jewish academic] heatedly contended, ‘has done so much damage to the Jews as Ariel Sharon.’ … This stunning accusation [was] made during a gracious faculty soiree in Princeton.”4
Julien Benda, the French Jewish philosopher and novelist, once urged intellectuals of all countries “to tell your nations they are always in the wrong by the simple fact that they are nations.… Plotinus blushed at having a body. You should blush at having a nation.” So far, however, only Jews have responded in substantial numbers to Benda’s advice. The late Tony Judt, history professor at NYU, was perhaps the most famous victim of this newest entry in the nosology of social diseases. “Today,” he wrote, “non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do.… The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews.…”5 Judt saw nothing “disproportionate” in recommending politicide—the end of Israel—as the cure for his insecurity. While Israelis worried about an Arab siege that is currently renewed every three years, Judt worried about embarrassment and how he looked to others.
Second, there are the Jews who nimbly turn their desire to advertise their own goodness by dissociating themselves from a people under attack into a mode of Jewish “identity.” In 1942 the Hebrew writer Haim Hazaz created (in his story “The Sermon”) a literary character who declared that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” That motto has now been replaced by a new one: “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.” Jewish intellectuals who cannot read the alef-beys discover their Jewish “identity” by denouncing Israel for its manifold sins, and call for the dismantling of the very state upon which their identity rests.
A third, perhaps more subtle form of identity creation via anti-Zionism is what might be called “the new Diasporism.” It flourishes mainly among writers and scholars, including those in Jewish Studies who certainly can read the alef-beys. Ironically, this academic specialty, very much like Soviet Jewry’s awareness of and yearning for Israel, came into being in large part because of the exuberance generated by Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. But now many of its practitioners bombard the university presses with manuscripts purporting to discover that the Jewish state, which most Europeans blame for the absence of world peace, should never have come into existence in the first place. They suggest or assert that “the [non-Zionist] roads not taken” would have brought (and may yet bring) a “new” Diaspora golden age. Some of them organize “academic conferences,” which serve, in effect, as kangaroo courts, on “Alternative Histories within and beyond Zionism”; still others churn out articles or monographs or novels celebrating those roads not taken. A few even recommend a one-state solution or a no-state solution or (this from the tone-deaf literary critic George Steiner, like Judt an English product) “a final solution.”
The strategy of the new Diasporists is at once timely and timeless. They dredge up from relative obscurity long-dead Jewish thinkers who opposed Zionism altogether or opposed political Zionism (a Jewish state) at the very time that their liberal and progressive colleagues are discovering that the nation-state is itself obsolete and that Israel is the most pernicious nation-state that exists or has ever existed. But in another sense they are ahistorical and disdainful of time and change because they write as if there were no difference between Jewish opposition to a conjectural Jewish state eighty or a hundred years ago and opposition to a living entity of eight million people (75% of them Jewish) under constant siege by genocidal Islamist fanatics boasting of their intention to “wipe Israel off the map.” These are enemies who already have in place—in Iran, for example—the instruments for its destruction and willing accomplices (in Gaza and Lebanon) as well as ululating bystanders among Israel’s neighbors.
Finally, we have the “Zionists against Israel,” epitomized by an organization called J Street, which misses no opportunity to blacken Israel’s reputation, and very few opportunities to encourage campaigns to delegitimize it, yet insists on calling itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace.”
Its cofounder Daniel Levy calls Israel’s creation “an act that went wrong.” The organization cannot “pick a side” in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. It relentlessly castigates Israel’s leaders for “harping” on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and aspiration to obliterate Israel when they should be resolving “the Palestinian issue.” It derides Israeli actions against terrorism as “escalation” or “cruel brutality,” or—a favorite, of course—“disproportionate”; and it lobbies the American government to oppose the policies of the Israeli government. Funded by such billionaires as George Soros, who boasts of his strong ties to the Obama administration, and fancying itself a (Jewish) government-in-exile, J Street has a “Rabbinic Cabinet” whose members include supporters of Hamas’s relentless bombing of Sderot and also Michael Lerner, the pioneering promoter of the “Palestinian cause” within the Jewish community. Typically, Lerner grants that Palestinian suicide bombings, lynchings, and pogroms may be “immoral,” but Israel is not justified in protecting itself against them because it too is ethically impure. Besides, Israeli military responses to Arab terror are bad for the Jews, in Berkeley and other centers of prophetic morality: they cause “a frightening upsurge in anti-Semitism.”6 “Not since the days of the Communist Party,” the sociologist Werner Cohn has written of J Street, “has there been a comparable spectacle of methodical disingenuousness in American political life.”7
J Street is exceeded in misrepresentation and the pursuit of moral rectitude in disregard not just of reality but of danger (to Israelis, that is) only by Peter Beinart. If American Jewry is really divided between those who judge Judaism by the standards of the New York Times and those who judge the Times by the standards of Judaism, Beinart is the anointed philosopher king of the former group; indeed, it was the Times that published his book, called The Crisis of Zionism (2012), a title that recalls the equally nasty work of 1985 (The Tragedy of Zionism) by Bernard Avishai. Beinart is reported to have been assisted in this attempt to save Israel from itself (in Beinart’s view, its sole mortal enemy)—and America from Israel—by advances from “progressive” Jews of several hundred thousand dollars. This stipend helped him to hire the twenty-four researchers whom he thanks for helping to assemble the 800 footnotes that adorn his prophetic denunciations of fallen Israel.
Believing that Judaism follows an arrow-straight course from Sinai to the left wing of the Democratic Party, Beinart contends that Zionism must do the same. Although second to none in sheer hatred for Israel as it actually exists, Beinart insists on calling himself a Zionist—but a “democratic” one, just like his grandmother. Indeed, “I wrote this book because of my grandmother.” (The grandmothers of Jews who despise Israel must endure, in the next world as well as this one, a constant state of danger.) He supports (more explicitly than J Street) the sixty-five-year-old Arab economic boycott of Israel, but with a difference, intended to preserve the mask of the do-gooder, the fellow who confuses doing good with feeling good about what he is doing. He has urged, since at least 2010—in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and then his book—a “Zionist B.D.S. Movement,” which would boycott, divest from, “sanction,” only the so-called “occupied” territories, the wicked “settlers” and those who deal with them. (The “selective” boycott requires boycotting feta cheese coming from cows in Judea but not companies—such as have been punished by the U.S. Treasury Department—that procure military equipment used by Hezbollah to murder Jews in Nahariya and Acco.)
Beinart is, however, very much against the blockade of Gaza from the sea, sporadically imposed by Israel to prevent the delivery of weapons, and for this reason considers the Hamas-ruled polity still “occupied” territory, many years after Israel’s withdrawal. (It’s true that Israel hasn’t withdrawn totally. As of summer 2014, in the midst of Hamas’s huge rocket bombardment of most of Israel and murderous infiltrations via the infamous Rachel Corrie Memorial Tunnels, Gaza was still receiving all of its gas and electricity, free of charge, from the ruthless Zionist oppressor.) Could Beinart possibly be unaware that Hamas goes to war against Israel every two or three years not because it is “resisting” a (nonexistent) occupation or because it expects military triumph by firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians? Rather, it goes to war because it knows that Israeli counterattack to stop the rockets and destroy the tunnels will inevitably bring civilian Arab deaths and the ensuing propaganda triumph provided by liberals (especially Jewish ones), for whom all Palestinian barbarities are proof of Israeli malevolence?
Beinart published his book at a midpoint in Barack Obama’s presidential trajectory from “first black president” to “first Jewish president” (the title of chapter 5 of Beinart’s book) to “first gay president,” and so provided his hero with the second person of his triune divinity. Lest anyone doubt Obama’s credentials, Beinart conjures up a dream vision in which Rabbi Stephen Wise, meeting with Obama (and those Beinart deems today’s woefully illiberal and unrepresentative Zionist leaders) in the Oval Office, pronounces the president the only genuine Zionist in the room, a liberal one just like himself. (The mind reels at the prospect of Stephen Wise cozying up to Obama favorites like the deranged Turkish antisemite Erdogan and the Egyptian leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi.)
The irony of Beinart’s identification with Wise was pointed out by Sol Stern in a shrewd (and shrewdly entitled) piece called “Beinart the Unwise,” but it merits elaboration. Wise was the most important American Jewish leader throughout FDR’s long years in the White House. Although he wrote to a colleague in 1933 that “FDR has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany,” he came to adore the man who was, after all, commander in chief of the war against Hitler. American Jews, he said, “rightly look up to [FDR], revere him, and love him.… No one would more deeply sorrow than I … if this feeling of Jewish homage … should be changed.” Wise obsequiously (Jeremiah, with whom Beinart confuses himself, would have said idolatrously) referred to Roosevelt as “the all Highest.” In his best-known “Dear Boss” letter to FDR (November 1942) about irrefutable reports of the mass murder of European Jewry, Wise apologized for impinging on the president’s precious time (“I do not wish to add an atom to the awful burden which you are bearing with magic”), confessed that he had kept the terrible information secret and sworn other Jewish leaders to do so, and asked the president not for a rescue plan, but only “a word which may bring solace … to millions of Jews who mourn.” In May 1944 Wise, together with Nahum Goldmann, actually urged FDR’s State Department to deport the leaders of the Bergson Group,8 by far the most effective force at work in America for the rescue of Europe’s Jews. The reasoning of Wise and Goldmann was precisely the apologia Roosevelt used for not admitting Jewish refugees: Bergson activities (rallies, newspaper ads, rabbinical marches on Washington) would stir up the (conjectural) antisemitism of Americans.
By May 2012 Beinart, as a reward for his own sycophancy, was invited to the White House to “share” his views on how to renew the “peace process.” (Michael Lerner, of whom Beinart—especially in his resort to language that turns Israelis into Nazis and Arabs into Jews9—is a more carefully barbered clone, had also, in 1993, been given entrée to the White House. But Lerner was supposed to serve the spiritual needs of Mrs. Clinton rather than the political ones of her husband.) Beinart had become the reincarnation of the Stephen Wise of his dream vision, just as (in his view) Benjamin Netanyahu is the ideological reincarnation of his late father, Benzion Netanyahu. (Bibi’s public endorsement of the idea of a Palestinian state, the very opposite of his father’s views, was for Beinart merely typical Israeli subterfuge.)
The elder Netanyahu, let us recall, had become the preeminent historian of the Spanish Inquisition because he discerned the very truth constantly denied by Beinart: antisemitism is not the result of Jewish misbehavior but of the Jew-haters’ panic. The elder Netanyahu was active in the aforementioned Bergson Group and also executive director of the Revisionists (New Zionist Organization of America), about whom Beinart regurgitates the fixed epithets that, as Orwell observed long ago, progressives reserve for people they don’t like: “fascist” and “militarist.” (Beinart is sublimely ignorant of the fact that Martin Buber used similar language about Labor Zionists.) But Benzion Netanyahu’s greatest sin, in Beinart’s eyes, must surely be that he went regularly to Washington with the express purpose of establishing ties with prominent figures in the Republican Party in order to promote the twin goals of rescue and the Jewish claim to Palestine. (It was due to such renegade efforts by Wise’s Jewish opponents that in 1944 first the Republicans and then—in large part out of political necessity—FDR and the Democrats incorporated support of Israel into their presidential platforms. That is the reason why America remains, even now under a president in whose ostensibly warm heart there is always a cold spot for the Jews, Israel’s sole reliable ally.)
Beinart gave Obama two copies of his book at their May meeting, and in return received Obama’s encouragement to stand firm against his detractors (who by this time included even several “liberal” Zionists): “Hang in there,” Beinart is reported to have been told by the grateful recipient of his adoration. His polemic brings us, full circle, back to the painful subject of American Jewry and the Holocaust, and also to a still more enduring theme: the need to choose between survival and definition. That need was uppermost in the mind of the great Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky (of whom Beinart knows almost nothing except cliché) when he wrote to his adversary Ben-Gurion in 1935 as follows: “I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our ‘state’ will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefillte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way) and I’ll take it. More than that: make it a Yiddish-speaking state, which for me would mean the loss of all the magic in the thing—if there’s no other way, I’ll take that, too.” But Jabotinsky died in 1940, and perhaps could not foresee that the choice of Palestine might require the surrender of all hope for rescuing European Jewry. Were Beinart and his battalion of research assistants to undertake serious research on the subject, they might be surprised to discover that the split between Wise and the Bergson Group over how to rescue European Jewry was not primarily one between left and right but between Zionists and rescuers; and in that struggle his man, Wise, was on the side of the Zionists. In 1962 the historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote that “political Zionists” like Wise “gambled away [the] one chance to save the Jews” by emphasizing the Palestine issue instead of rescue in 1943–44. Samuel Merlin, although he was the cofounder with Menachem Begin of the Herut political party, emphasized that “Bergson once explained to Rabbi Stephen Wise, in a private conversation, that if the rabbi was trapped in a house that was on fire, his main concern would be how to get out alive, not how to get to the Waldorf Astoria.”10
But there is a still more important issue here, one that brings us back to the confessions of regret by Saul Bellow and Irving Howe about their indifference to the destruction of European Jewry during the 1940s. Can Beinart possibly be ignorant of the fact that the record of the Roosevelt administration in helping to save or admit Jewish refugees was abominable? Perhaps—after all, the greatest deceivers are the self-deceivers. Since Beinart knows that in those occasional moments of modesty when Obama does not see himself as a second Lincoln, he imagines himself a second Franklin Roosevelt, Beinart must, if only at some subterranean level, sense that Roosevelt’s abandonment of the Jews is being repeated by Obama’s icy indifference to the plight of Israelis forced to live in what Conor O’Brien called a permanent state of siege. The reason why FDR could rebuff not only the Bergson Group but also Rabbi Wise was clearly defined by Howe in The World of Our Fathers: “The Jewish organizations lacked political leverage with the Roosevelt administration precisely because the American Jewish vote was so completely at the disposal of the president. Had they been able to threaten that, unless the government took more courageous steps to save the refugees, crucial swing votes in crucial states might be withdrawn, it is at least possible that they could have had some effect.”11 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
1.Adolf Eichmann, a leading organizer of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial.
2.The concluding words of Podhoretz’s fierce attack on Arendt were these: “The Final Solution reveals nothing about the victims except that they were mortal beings and hopelessly vulnerable in their weakness.… The Nazis destroyed a third of the Jewish people. In the name of all that is humane, will the remnant never let up on itself?”
3.David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Henry R. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970).
4.Martin Jay, “Ariel Sharon and the Rise of the New Anti-Semitism,” Salmagundi (Winter–Spring 2003).
5.Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003.
6.The Nation, May 2002.
7.“J Street—The Gentle Façade and What’s Behind It,” FringeGroups.com, March 31, 2011.
8.Peter Bergson (a pseudonym for Hillel Kook) was a founding figure, with Menachem Begin, of the Irgun fighting force for Jewish independence in Palestine. But the outbreak of World War II convinced him that rescue of European Jewry was a still more urgent task, and he tried, often spectacularly, to raise awareness in America of the Jewish catastrophe. See David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (New York: The New Press, 2002); Sonya S. Wentling and Rafael Medoff, Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel (Washington, DC: Wyman Institute, 2012); Samuel Merlin, Millions of Jews to Rescue, ed. Rafael Medoff (Washington, DC: Wyman Institute, 2012).
9.In May 2014, for example, Beinart (now working for Ha’aretz) “tweeted” to his 24,000 loyal readers that Jewish “settlers” had perpetrated a “Lag B’Omer pogrom” by burning an Arab orchard of olive trees. In fact, there was no such event, and Ha’aretz had to print a retraction. But Beinart’s use of that word “pogrom” was more noteworthy than the retraction.
10.Merlin, Millions of Jews, 157.
11.The World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 394.