Thursday, September 10, 2009

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News

























from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News


Link to Sultan Knish















I Do Not Know Any Liberal Jews



Posted: 09 Sep 2009 07:59 PM PDT



Lately there has been an outbreak of articles asking the old
question, "Why are Jews Liberals ?" Personally I don't really know any
liberal Jews. Of the three synagogues I go to, only one man voted for
Obama, and hardly a day went by without that sole fact resulting in heated
arguments with the regulars that often seemed on the verge of breaking out
into fistfights.










Next week I will be heading out to Williamsburg, the Brooklyn
neighborhood where three quarters of the residents speak Yiddish, and
where McCain defeated Obama by a comfortable 84 to 16 percent margin. This
in a borough where Obama won overall by nearly 80 percent. The last time I
visited Williamsburg, I saw McCain bumper stickers on the cars of
Chassidim, who are usually as likely to attach national election stickers
to their bumpers as they are to break dance, and Chassidic ladies
admiring
Sarah Palin's look
, which is not too different from their
own.

To encounter liberal Jews, I usually have to log on to the
internet, or leave behind the working class Jewish neighborhoods, for the
Upper East Side, Park Slope or the pricey suburbs of upstate New York that
are about as racially diverse as a serving of vanilla ice cream. The
working class Jews of the shabby Brooklyn neighborhoods, left behind in
the liberal social experiment, are the Jews I know, and they are very
different from the lawyers, reverends and organization presidents with
million dollar apartments, who are the self-proclaimed "public face" of
American Jewry, thanks to a healthy supply of letterheads testifying to
that organizational fact.

I am often asked why Jews are liberals,
by which they mean to ask, Why do Jews vote liberal and support liberal
causes that are destructive to their own interests. And being Jewish, I
usually answer that question with another question. Why do the British and
the French import millions of radical Muslims to destroy their own
countries against their own interests? Why did so many Americans vote a
radical Marxist into office whose own pastor was on television shouting,
"God Damn America"?

The answer is that there are two kinds of
Jews, just as there are two kinds of Englishmen and two kinds of
Americans. And the difference between them is easy enough to sniff out. If
you ask one of those Williamsburg Jews why he's Jewish, he will reply with
an extended lecture about the covenant with Abraham and the one G-d made
with the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, the desert mountain, not the
hospital. He will talk about the family that stretches back thousands of
years to Jacob and the accompanying tradition from father to son, and
mother to daughter. If you ask an Obama voter why he is Jewish, he is
likely to answer something about his appreciation for the philosophy of
Tikkun Olam, and making the world a better place through prophetic social
justice, or some equally watered down form of liberalism with a Jewish
stamp placed on it.

The difference is that to the former being
Jewish is a fundamental commitment to his identity. To the latter, being
Jewish is an optional part of his commitment to being a good liberal. Or
as one liberal Jewish blogger explained, that he has a rolodex of
identities, and that Jewish is only one card in the big spinning rolodex
that includes such entries as San Franciscan, LGBT, Graphic Media Artist,
Activist for Social Justice, and of course that all time great
universalist entry, Human Being. It is of course no shock at all that the
Jewish card doesn't come up first on that list, and that it is only
tolerated on the list to the extent that it fits in with the more
important cards on that list.

This is an identity crisis that is
most commonly seen among Jews, but far from alien to the rest of the West.
Universalism has become the common form of moral rhetoric, the goal being
to transcend parochial identities, to maximize diversity and teach the
world to sing. "Don't the Pakistanis, Indonesians, Lebanese and Somalis
have as much right to be in this country as we do," is the argument
repeated from Sydney to London to Oslo. Substitute illegal aliens and you
have the American version of it. The new 9/11 curriculum will ask students
to decide whether America should defend itself, or embrace a "Global
Buddy" system through soft power.

The Jews you see are the canary
in the coal mine, in more ways than just the obvious. And universalism was
widely tested on Jews, before it was tested on anyone else. The bargain
that the French Revolution made implicitly and Napoleon made explicitly
with the Jews, was that they would be allowed political and social
equality, so long as they agreed to blend in, assimilate and discard any
beliefs or observances that the state frowned upon. This soon became the
default liberal standard for admitting Jews to the table. Or as the great
socialist playwright and admirer of Stalin, George Bernard Shaw put it
rather plainly; "
Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race... can
go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop
being Jews and start being human beings
."

By the 19th century
there were two kinds of Jews, Jews and universalist "Human Beings", who
scrubbed Jerusalem out of their prayers, disdained Jewishness as
parochial, and remade their identities and beliefs in the mold of the
liberal Christian clergy they looked up to. These Jews joined the ranks of
great "Human Beings" such as H.G. Wells or Bertrand Russell, and of course
Shaw himself. Together these Jewish and Christian "Human Beings"
campaigned against war and for international brotherhood. They supported
the USSR and condemned the US. They turned their houses of worship into
stages for preaching socialism and liberalism.

Today it is the 21st century and there are more "Human
Beings" than ever, some of whom used to be Jewish or Episcopalian or
Catholic. The "Human Beings" agitate on behalf of admitting more refugees
to Australia, of filling the cities of Europe with the throat slitters of
the East, or dismantling American borders and ending the War on Terror.
Gitmo outrages them, Israeli checkpoints make their hearts bleed and they
can't sleep for worry over the polar bears. They are no longer Englishmen,
Americans, Jews, Frenchmen or Australians. They are "Human Beings" in the
broadest sense. No more parochial identities for them.

Shaw's
"Human Beings", the rise of a post-national and post-religious man is
here. At least in First World countries. "Human Beings" who care about
anything and everything besides their own flesh and blood. Who worship at
the altar of a Utopian kingdom of socialist heaven on earth, a religion
stripped not of dogma, but of the supernatural, investing all its faith in
flesh and blood messiahs of hope and change. They may attend houses of
worship from various faiths, but their eyes are lifted to one great dream
alone. The dream of a united humanity as a great kiln in which their
identities of the present will be torched as a great sacrifice for a
better world.

So yes indeed, there are a great many liberal Jews,
and while 77 percent of Jews did not vote for Obama, as the often
inaccurately
bandied about
number would have you believe, but many did. Despite
Obama's distaste for Israel and though his domestic policies would hurt
Jews as well. Because they did not vote as Jews, they voted as "Human
Beings".

Nor can it be any surprise that more Jews left behind
that which they were long ago, to join the Universalist Church of Man. The
average Christian did not have to sacrifice his beliefs and identity to
become a doctor, a lawyer or a journalist. The Jew did. Since the French
Revolution began the wave of Republican Europe, Jews have faced that
choice in Europe and America. The great Shaw demand, To be Jews or to be
"Human Beings" and join in the post-identity party. It is no surprise that
so many made the Universalist choice.

In the early 20th century,
the District Superintendent of the Lower East Side's public schools, Julia
Richman campaigned to shut down Jewish schools, fought against teaching
children Yiddish or Hebrew, and washed out their mouths with soap if they
did. Julia Richman viewed Jews as dirty, did her best to stamp out Jewish
beliefs and traditions, and stated in public that the pushcart peddlers of
the Lower East Side should be deported back to Russia, at a time when Jews
there faced brutal pogroms. Richman herself happened to be Jewish, but
really she was one of those "Human Beings". Today Richman is remembered as
a liberal heroine, which seems fit. Julia Richman and those like her
helped create the liberal Jew of the present, his identity washed out and
replaced with an energetic desire to create social change, to do his or
her part in the great post-national and post-religious Utopia.

The
"Human Beings" of today, who may have last names like Goldberg or Levine
or Cohen, know a good deal more about the plight of the working people of
El Salvador or the LGBT community in Mexico or the Palestinian Arabs in
Gaza, than they do about anything Jewish. Their votes for Obama had
nothing to do with being Jewish, what they have in the way of theology is
indistinguishable from liberal ideology. They had to do with saving the
poor tortured souls in Gitmo, providing Federally funded abortions to
everyone, banning transgender discrimination, stopping the Israeli bombing
of Hamas and saving the earth from global warming.

Those are not
the concerns of Jews I know, but that is because I only know Jews, not
"Human Beings". The Jews I know work for a living, focus their concerns on
raising their children, and worry about their families, both here and in
Israel. The "Human Beings" by contrast agitate, pull down salaries for
opening funds that distribute grant money from funding networks to promote
diversity and non-violence in the wake of 9/11. Their identities are on a
rolodex, and sometimes the rolodex comes up Jewish, more often it comes up
not.

They are victims too in a way, just like the English, French
and Swedish youth who march in rallies against war and for social justice,
without even understanding the consequences of what they are doing,
because their identities have been stolen from them. They are the product
of broken families, the shards of nations and peoples who have been torn
apart by an ideology that was hostile to patriotism, to religion and to
the old ways.







Throughout the day I encounter Jews, rich and poor, religious
and irreligious, young and old. And there is a common thread that binds me
to them, for they are my family. They may not always be lovable as
individuals, but they are family. And one does not choose one's family.
This fundamental understanding is the difference between the Traditional
and the Postmodern, in which all identities are choices composed of equal
parts self-indulgence and the accompanying guilt over it.






I can honestly say that I do not know any
Liberal Jews, only the occasional "Human Being", better known as the Obama
voter. Now and then I encounter these "Human Beings" and there are things
which we can chat about, books and movies, art and philosophy, but they
are not my family. They are strangers, estranged by the great gulf of
universalism that tears away roots and leaves behind only thin air. They
are "Human Beings" without roots or identity, only the great clamor of
social outrage stewing inside the otherwise empty kettles of their hearts.
The final graduates of Miss Julia Richman's academy of humanity, their
minds as washed out with soap as their mouths, eager to save the world,
without any idea of what they are saving the world for.






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