“How long halt ye between two opinions?”
—1 Kings 18:21
American Jewry is often said to be divided between those who judge Judaism by the principles of the New York Times and those who judge the New York Times by the principles of Judaism. The former group was elated by University of Massachusetts professor Joseph Levine’s clarion call “Questioning the Jewish State” (Times of March 9, 2013), which advocated the erasure of Israel from the family of nations. The latter group was dismayed and nauseated, and confirmed in its view that expecting ordinary decency from “progressive” Jewish professors is like trying to warm yourself by the light of the moon. The former, composed in large part of what Gershom Scholem called “clever Jews” who fear nothing in this world (and maybe the next as well) so much as being called “reactionary,” agreed with Levine’s insistence that he not be labeled antisemitic just because he singled out Israel, among all the nations of the world, as deserving of dissolution. The latter thought the real question is whether Levine should be called a moral nonentity because he has made himself an accessory before the fact to the genocide dreamed of (and already inspiring murderous action) by Ahmadinejad, Hizbullah, Erdogan, Hamas, and numerous other “Islamist” eschatologists. (I’ve heard some ill-tempered members of this second group say that they looked forward to a New York Times discussion of whether Levine himself has an inalienable “right to exist.”)
Those Jews who judge the New York Times by the standards of Judaism believe that the creation of the state of Israel was one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame, one of the greatest affirmations of the will to live ever made by a martyred people, and a uniquely hopeful sign for humanity itself. They tend also to cling to Orwell’s view that some ideas—like the virtue of Jewish powerlessness—are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them.
Those who judge Judaism by the standards of the Times boast (as Irving Howe put it) of not having “danced in the streets when Ben-Gurion declared that the Jews, like other peoples, had a state of their own.” They believe (as does a majority of today’s Germans too) that Israel is the chief obstacle to world peace, a diversion from such liberal desiderata as gay marriage and unlimited access to abortion, and indeed the principal cause of most of the world’s evils with the (possible) exception of global warming.
Professor Levine’s polemic draws on sources both ancient and modern. It harkens back—albeit in the clumsy and verbose manner of somebody who “unpacks” rather than articulates ideas—to the earliest known ancient, non-Jewish document that mentions Israel by name. It is found on a monument from 1215 BCE (possessed by the British Museum) in which King Merneptah, the Egyptian forerunner of Chmielnicki, Hitler, Nasser, and Ahmadinejad, declares that “Israel is extinguished, its seed is no more.”
Levine, to be sure, is a philosopher, and not—on the surface, at least—a political agitator and propagandist, although he identifies himself (who could have guessed?) as a man of the left. Up to a point, Levine has some respectable predecessors among fellow philosophers. In 1932, for example, Julien Benda, a French philosopher (and novelist), addressed the “European nation” as follows: “Intellectuals of all countries, you must be the ones to tell your nations that they are always in the wrong by the single fact that they are nations.… Plotinus blushed at having a body. You should blush at having a nation.” But whereas Benda called for philosophers of all nations to blush, Levine believes in blushing only by Jews for the Jewish nation. Although the imperfections he imputes to Israel because it calls itself “Jewish” manifest themselves—a hundredfold—in scores of members of the United Nations, he demands the dissolution only of the Jewish nation—not the twenty-two Arab ones, or the numerous Christian ones, or the fifty-seven members of the League of Islamic Cooperation. Like all Israel dissolutionists—one-state solution advocates, no-state solution advocates, and (this from George Steiner) “final solution” advocates—he insists that Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic. Perhaps the Times will soon invite him to cast his philosophic eye over a country called the United Kingdom, widely reputed to be democratic, and yet possessed of an official Protestant church, a Protestant monarch, a Protestant educational system (and all this in a once-Catholic country).
Levine has also attached himself, not unwittingly, to what Raul Hilberg called the last version of that ever-shortening sentence that expressed Europe’s anti-Jewish policies over the centuries. “The missionaries of Christianity,” wrote Hilberg, “had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: you have no right to live.” Levine admits to a slight uneasiness about the resemblance between his challenging Israel’s “right to exist” and the Nazis’ disputing the Jews’ “right to live.” But confidence in his own infallibility carries him quickly over this abyss, as if it were just an unfortunate coincidence of diction and phrasing. In fact, of course, it makes him complicit in what Hannah Arendt famously defined as the crime against humanity, “an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the ‘human status’ without which the very words ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning.”
The editors of the Times, inflamed by the zeal of the proselytizer, consider a Jew’s polemic advocating removal of Israel from the world so valuable that, just a week later, March 17, they published what might be called “applied Levine” in the form of a lavishly illustrated cover story entitled “If There Is a Third Intifada, We Want to Be the Ones Who Started It.” Levine had declared the compelling need for politicide; and here was Ben Ehrenreich offering his modest proposal explaining how and by whom it could be done. Ehrenreich had qualified for this important NYTimes assignment four years earlier by publishing an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Zionism Is the Problem.” Not only did it prevent harmonious relations between Jews and Arabs—it introduced into a region well-known for its rich ethnic and religious diversity a monolithic Jewish state, which must, by definition, be “exclusive” or else practice “ethnic cleansing.” Ehrenreich’s obsession with the potentiality for Jewish ethnic cleansing, Jewish religious fanaticism, and Jewish “apartheid” contrasted sharply with his entire indifference to the actuality of what the surrounding Arab and Muslim nations have already achieved, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, in all those lines of endeavor. Like Levine he had set forth the compelling urgency of politicide (dissolution would be too weak a word) for the ill-conceived and uniquely evil country called Israel. Surely the Jews were not “entitled” to a homeland just because they had had a rather rough time of it during World War II (and earlier). But Ehrenreich set a standard for hyperbolic slander that not even the Massachusetts sage Levine has been able to match: Israel is worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime because, for no apparent reason that Ehrenreich can think of, it attacks civilians in Gaza, a place ruled by the local version of the Moslem Brotherhood (not to mention the German Nazis) called Hamas.
But whereas Levine (assuming that his surname would silence anybody tempted to call him an antisemite) identified himself primarily as “a Leftist,” Ehrenreich chose to identify himself and to write (in that by now risible locution) primarily as a Jew, who had been taught (by Marxist grandparents, to be sure) and still believes in a kindergarten version of Jewish history usually called Leidensgeschichte (“suffering history”). Like many “progressive” Jews Ehrenreich has discovered that voting for Barack Obama and supporting homosexual marriage and abortion rights are not quite sufficient to sustain a Jewish identity: only anti-Zionism will do that. For no extra charge, he placed himself in the “prophetic tradition” of Jeremiah and Amos, having apparently forgotten that although these two did believe that the Babylonians and other miscreants acted as God’s Cossacks in punishing Israel for its sins, they did not—as Ehrenreich, in the centuries-old manner of Jewish apostates, certainly does—set themselves apart from Jerusalem and identify with its enemies—just how fully would be revealed a few years later. (In assessing Ehrenreich’s claim to descent from the Hebrew prophets, I leave aside the matter of literary power, in which realm he is much closer to Thomas Friedman than to Amos and Jeremiah.)
The Times Magazine spread portrays, with love, sympathy, and sycophancy, the villagers (without exception charming “people like you and me”) of Nabi Saleh in the disputed territories who (so Ehrenreich hopes) will provide the manpower for the next intifada. (The last one, lest we forget, killed over a thousand Israelis and maimed ten times that number in acts of which animals would be ashamed.) The Times’s cover photos included at least two children among the budding heroes and heroines of the hoped for “Third Intifada.” One of them, eleven-year-old Ahed Tamimi, had already been honored by Turkey’s demagogic Jew-hating Prime Minister Erdogan (Barack Obama’s “favorite European leader”) for her much-photographed provocations of Israeli soldiers. Another member of the Tamimi family, Ahlan, remains (in Ehrenreich’s treacly prose) “much loved in Nabi Saleh.” And why? The parents of another child, Arnold and Frimet Roth, explain:
That’s all he [Ehrenreich] writes about Ahlan Tamimi but we can tell you more. She is a Jordanian who was 21 years old and the news-reader on official Palestinian Authority television when she signed on with Hamas to become a terrorist. She engineered, planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in 2001. She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb. The outcome (15 killed, a sixteenth still in a vegetative state today, 130 injured) was so uplifting to her that she has gone on camera again and again to say, smiling into the camera lens, how proud she is of what she did. She is entirely free of regret.”1
This little detail about “much loved” Ahlan is missing from Ehrenreich’s saints’ tale. Also missing is a quotation of the raison d’être of Hamas, the organization that may already, in summer 2014, have begun Intifada Three, as stated in Article Seven of its founding covenant: “The Prophet, … peace be upon him, says: ‘The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’”2
The question that entered my mind when reading Ehenreich’s adoring portrait of these trainees in “resistance” to the “occupation” was the following: “Couldn’t something like this celebration of past and potential murderers of Jews have been published in the Dearborn Independent?” My first reply was “of course.” This hateful paper, which was financed by Henry Ford from 1919 to 1927 and reached a circulation of 900,000 in 1925, has long been considered the most antisemitic of American newspapers. But my second reply was “no, not really—the Dearborn Independent stopped short of explicitly inciting murder of, or violence against, Jews.” Moreover, its publisher Henry Ford in 1927 apologized, in an open letter to Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee, for “the wrong done to the Jews as fellow-men and brothers” by his paper, and asked “their forgiveness for the harm that I have unintentionally committed.”3 Will the Sulzberger family ever do the same? Probably not—for NYTimes editors know no limits where the “Palestinian” issue is concerned. For them the dividing line between moral and immoral, permitted and forbidden, is like the receding horizon; they keep moving toward it, but can never quite reach it.
A year after Ehrenreich’s celebration of murderers past and future, in June 2014, a fierce controversy erupted over New York’s Metropolitan Opera plan to perform (and disseminate in hundreds of movie theaters) an operatic production called “The Death of Klinghoffer.” The opera (originally performed years earlier in England) depicts the murder of an aging and disabled American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, by Palestinian Arab terrorists during their 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Klinghoffer was shot in the head and chest and then, still in his wheelchair, shoved into the sea. The libretto, composed by an American Jewish convert to the Church of England (in which she now serves as a parish priest), sympathetically portrays the killers and their apologia (not apology) for murder.
The Times editorial board, on June 20, endorsed the opera, deplored the cancellation of the scheduled simulcasts, and urged the Met to resist pressure by Jewish groups to cancel the eight performances still scheduled for live production at the Met. It further suggested that the opera be accompanied (precisely as the murderers and their adoring followers wished) by public discussions about “the Middle East conflict.” (No doubt the Times would, for a suitable fee, offer its resident experts on the subject—Thomas Friedman or Jodi Rudoren—as moderators.)
One might have thought that a paper so concerned with its own history and the need for repair of an institutional reputation badly tarnished by its deliberate obfuscation of the dimensions of Germany’s war against European Jewry4 would be more cautious about giving free rein to the untidy passions of its Jewish Israel-haters and their friends. But no: the motto on the Sulzberger family’s coat of arms appears to be: UNASHAMED. So important to the paper is the goal of converting those Jews who still, in the words of Elijah on Mt. Carmel, “halt between two opinions,” and bringing them to the side of Baal.
One can only hope that this overzealousness at the Times has served to remind at least some of its Jewish readers of a truth that Saul Bellow stated in 1976: “There is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot.… The Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.”5
1.See “Simply Adorable Kids of the Third Intifada—Cute and Cuddly,” Jerusalem Post, March 23, 2013.
2.Also killed in the Sbarro bombing was an Israeli teenager named Malki Roth. Some time before being murdered by Ehrenreich’s “much loved” Ahlan Tamimi, she had addressed a Rosh Hashanah letter to God expressing the hope that she would live another year, and that the Messiah would arrive. This so infuriated the Anglo-Jewish Israel hater Jacqueline Rose that, in the course of one of her countless apologias for mass murderers as “people driven to extremes,” she rhapsodized about bonding with Islamist fanatics, lashed out against “those wishing to denigrate suicide bombers and their culture,” and insisted that that “culture” is superior to the Jewish culture of the butchered Malki Roth. Rose, a psychoanalytic literary critic, helps one to understand why enemies of psychoanalysis sometimes disparage it as being the disease it purports to cure.
3.See Statement by Henry Ford: Regarding Charges Against Jews Made in His Publications, The Dearborn Independent, and a Series of Pamphlets Entitled ‘The International Jew,’ Together With an Explanatory Statement by Louis Marshall, President of The American Jewish Committee, and His Reply to Mr. Ford (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1927.
4.See the books on this subject by Deborah Lipstadt (Beyond Belief: The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust: 1933–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1986) and Laurel Leff, Buried By the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
5.Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back (New York: Viking, 1976), 26.