Relationship Status for American Jews and Muslims: It's Complicated

This week, Reform Grand Rebbe Eric Yoffie spoke at the convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In his speech, Yoffie deplored the "profound ignorance" of Islam in the US, and its demonization by "opportunists." Yet at the same time, Yoffie challenged American Muslims to combat the anti-Semitism that is rampant in the Muslim world.

The Reform movement determined that ISNA was a genuine partner for interfaith dialogue after it shifted its position from terrorism is bad (except when it is against Israel) to terrorism is bad (even when it kills Jews.) ISNA's efforts to allay Jewish concerns were met with skepticism elsewhere in Jewish Alphabet soup.

Yoffie's overture drew criticism from David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee.

"Here is another discredited group eager for mainstream recognition," Harris wrote in a blog on the Web site of The Jerusalem Post. "Inadvertently, in the name of inter-religious dialogue, [Yoffie] gave it."

Fortunately for ISNA, while the URJ represents 1.5 million congregants, a plurality of affiliated American Jews, while the AJC represents...the AJC (although to be fair, it performs its role as the Jewish Brookings Institution quite ably).

The skepticism towards ISNA and other American Muslims organizations has a genuine basis. As an initial mater, it is unclear how representative any of the American Muslim organizations really are. Wahhabis and other external groups are spending millions in an effort to strangle a tolerant, indigenous American Islam in its cradle. (Indeed, Jewcy contributor Stephen Suleymain Schwartz has in the past identified ISNA as playing a central role in that campaign.) Leaders of American Muslim organizations have been disingenuous about ties to Islamism, utilizing double-speak to dupe well-intentioned dialogue partners. Finally, even genuinely moderate and tolerant American Muslim leaders have been prone to have an irrational blind spot when it comes to Israel. (It should be noted that the leading critics of American Muslim organizations are often considered quite controversial themselves.)

However, it is critical that American Jews engage in meaningful dialogue with American Muslims, and that dialogue cannot be limited to groups on the guest list at the American Enterprise Institute. There is tremendous ignorance of Judaism in the American Muslim community, and only through engagement can we combat the pernicious leakage of Antisemitism from the wider Muslim world.

Moreover, given the season, it is time that American Jews take a hard look at our own behavior. Far too many of us have let real concerns regarding terror and Israel be used as cover for rank racism and wholesale defamation of a sister faith. Group libels that we would never allow pass against any other group are laughed off. Absurd questions of whether American Muslims are capable of fully participating in American democracy are entertained. The entire Koran is judged by its most problematic passages. The first elected American Muslim congressman is subjected to invective by prominent Jewish pundits and unfair scrutiny by the Jewish defense organizations. We of all people - who have a history of being deemed foreign and impossible to assimilate - should know better than to contribute to a 21st century Know-Nothing movement.

It is too soon to tell whether ISNA's reformation is genuine or whether its invitation to Yoffie will result in genuine, sustained dialogue between our communities. However, for our sake and theirs, we can only hope that a true corner has been turned.

Cross-posted at Jewcy.

Young American Jews Without Connection to Israel Alienated From Israel, Study Confirms

The findings in the most recent Kelman/Cohen studyare not as blazingly obvious as "men want hot women", but they are nonetheless unsurprising.

Based on the responses of more than 1,700 non-Orthodox American Jews of all ages, the study indicates that successively younger age groups show a greater detachment from the State of Israel.

According to the report, which was based on statistics collected as part of the 2007 National Survey of American Jews between December 20, 2006, and January 28, 2007, less than half of Jews under the age of 35 believe Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy, compared to 78 percent of those over 65. Sixty-six percent of Jews aged 50-64 believe it would be a personal tragedy, compared to 54% aged 35-49.

The study doesn't even lend itself to the favorite American Jewish pastime of fruitless hand-wringing in that there is an obvious policy solution to this "dilemma.":

The new study showed sharp differences in levels of attachment to Israel between people who have visited the country and those who have not. Among those who have never been to Israel, the number of those with a high level of attachment is less than half that of those who have visited at least once (19% vs 42%). Additionally, the level of attachment grows with the amount of time spent in Israel. Thirty-four percent of those who have traveled to Israel once are highly attached to Israel, while only 17% of them report low levels of attachment.

The numbers go up as the time spent in the country increases. Fifty-four percent of those who have traveled to Israel two or more times are highly attached, while less than 10% report low levels of attachment. Meanwhile, 68% of those who have lived in Israel for a semester or year-long program show high levels of attachment.

That last paragraph should be quite effective in rousting up additional funds for Birthright (which given the study's sponsors, was probably the point of the study in the first place).

Not surprisingly, the Post article contaiins the requisite quotes from young, progressive American Jews who express their "detachment" from Israel. But what the findings really show is that young American Jews are increasingly alienated not from the reality of Israel, but of the myth of Israel. The Israel presented in Hebrew schools is one of child-like simplicity - SabraLand!- with the less convenient aspects of Israeli history and society omitted. Without a more sophisticated understanding of Israel, American Jews are ill equipped to respond to the counter-myths that are peddled by anti-Zionists at American universities, which they embrace or at least triangulate. On the other hand, those American Jews who get to personally experience Israel and all of its contradictions - the incredible surface rudeness and underlying warmth of the people, the wonder of Ben and Jerry's and McDonald's being just down the road from the Old City of Jerusalem - develop a mature love for the country, one that can withstand Israel's very human failings and the shifting currents of political fashion.

Cross-posted at Jewcy

Shalom Aleichem/Salaam Aleikum to Self-Segregation

Controversy continues to swirl around the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York and (as Michael previously noted) its bizarro cousin, the Hebrew-language Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, Florida. The criticism of both schools is driven by skepticism regarding the secular nature of the schools. It is easy to dismiss the critics as the usual suspects, from Daniel Pipes to the ACLU, but the schools have also drawn criticism from less ideological figures. Recently in the New York Times Magazine, Jewcy's favorite constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman took the view that the projects of isolating Islam from a Arab cultural curriculum and Judaism from Jewish cultural curriculum were ultimately futile tasks, and therefore both schools were of dubious constitutional legitimacy.

Although it cannot be known for certain before they have begun instruction, Khalil Gibran and Ben Gamla seem poised to teach religion as a set of beliefs to be embraced rather than as a set of ideas susceptible to secular, critical examination. What, after all, is the point of a Jewish cultural school if not to bring the students to appreciation and acceptance of Jewish values? And what are those values if not the outgrowth of Judaism's millenniums of religious faith and practice? Not that Judaism without God is impossible. Secular Zionism sought to redirect yearning for God's redemption toward a national homeland. Likewise, Arab nationalism was born from the effort to supplant Islamic religious membership with a secular, cultural identity. But in both cases, the surgery designed to excise God was only partly successful, and there is ample reason to anticipate a recurrence in the classroom as there has been in the rest of the world.

If Feldman is right that Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran are properly viewed as publicly funded religious schools, they clearly run afoul of the Establishment Clause. If one principle has held constant in the swirling morass that is the Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence, it is that the direct provision of public funds for religious indoctrination is treyf. If this red line is breached, the result will be the creation of multiple and parallel religious establishments - something the Founders clearly rejected.

Given this, the case of religious charter schools calls into serious question the Court's recent jurisprudence in school funding cases, which has held that parochial schools can be funded through public voucher programs. In the 2002 case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Court upheld Cleveland's voucher program despite its inclusion of parochial schools on the grounds that the funding was: (1) distributed through neutral criteria and (2) directed to religious schools as a result the individual private choices of parents. Both of these conditions are also present in a religious charter school context - charters are granted on religious neutral criteria and parents freely elect to send their children to particular charter schools. Thus, the constitutionality of vouchers seems to rest on the mere fact that funds technically pass through the hands of parents on route to funding religious indoctrination, an empty and formalistic distinction.

Even if Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran could somehow scrub their texts of references to tefilah and salat, tzedaka and zakat, these schools would still be problematic in that they amount to publicly financed self-segregation. It is understandable why parents might want to send little Avi and Ibrahim to these schools. They provide an affordable way to help stem assimilation, through homogeneous social networks and literacy in the native languages of Jewish and Islamic civilizations. But as laudable as these goals from the view of parents, they should not be funded by the American taxpayer. One of the reasons why America has been so successful in integrating its immigrants is that they are thrown into the melting pot of the public school systems. Social networks become mixed, loyalties cross-cutting. If you have any doubts of whether our system works, the European model of state-sponsored religious schools and its failure to integrate Europe's Muslim immigrants stands in sharp contrast. (Or for a more extreme example, Israel's fractured education system and its failure to promote understanding between secular Jews, religious Jews and Israeli Arabs.)

Sure, a case can be made that Ben Gamla is a less problematic than Khalil Gibran as a matter of education policy. American Jews are already well integrated into American society, and the American Jewish success story would make any Jewish public school attractive to non-Jews. (Already Ben Gamla appears to have attracted a significant Black and Latino population.) But it is simply untenable to have a policy of permitting ethnocentric public schools for some cultures and not others and Arab and Muslim Americans would rightly be offended by such a policy.

There is a way out of both the constitutional and policy dilemmas posed by Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran, one which can retain the primary benefits of these programs. Create charter schools that offer language immersion for multiple cultures- Chinese, Swahili, Farsi - under one roof. Better yet, pair the Hebrew and Arabic language school together, and have Avi and Ibrahim recite Shakespeare and dissect frogs next to each other. Since the Rambam already plenty of schools (as well as a Kentucky Derby favorite) named for him, why not Ibn Ezra-Ibn Rushd. It has a nice ring to it.

Cross-posted at Jewcy.

Mearshimer & Walt: The Questions They Never Asked

Everybody's favorite academic realists turned anti-Israel polemicists are back. Mearshimer and Walt's book-length expansion of their infamous "Israel Lobby" hits the stores next week. As a result, we will soon see, both in print and in the blogosphere, a rehash of the original debates that surrounded the publication of the article along with a phony debate over whether the book "fixes" the various flaws exposed by M&W's critics.

The initial reports are, with the exception of addressing the gaping hole that resulted from the near total absence of Christian Zionism in the original , the book essential duplicates the original argument. And while the various factual inaccuracies that have been pointed out help clarify that M&W had long left the province of rigorous academic thought, it is the fundamental flaws in the structure of the argument itself that exposed the original for the fraud that it was. Which means that for the book to indeed "fix" what was wrong in the original, it has a massive reconstruction project that M&W based on their post-article martyr tour have no intention of undertaking.

M&W's original article had essentially three elements. First, M&W asserted that there is a disconnect between US policy towards Israel and more broadly in the Middle East and the US's strategic interests. Second, M&W argued that this disconnect is due to the power and influence of the "Israel Lobby." Third, M&W purports to describe how the "Lobby" effects the disconnect between US interests and policies.

M&W gave their paper all the trapping of legitimate scholarship - a myriad of footnotes and a dry, dispassionate tone. What they did not provide, however, was rigor. If M&W were truly interested in examining the issues they posed in their paper, rather than backfilling an argument to a conclusion they had already reached, they would have had to have asked and answered the following questions:

(1) Is there in fact a disconnect between US policy towards Israel and the Middle East & US strategic interests?

This is of course the question that M&W seem best qualified to address given their past scholarship and credentials. Whatever one thinks of the merits of a rigorous Realist analysis, one would expect M&W to construct one, providing a detailed and nuanced cost-benefit analysis from a realist perspective of the American-Israeli "special relationship."

Instead, M&W treat the foundation stone of their argument as self-evident. They make a cursory argument regarding the diminution of Israel's value after the Cold War. However, the rest of this section, which discusses the liabilities that the US-Israel partnership imposes on the US's relationships with the other regimes in the region, relies mainly on a recitation of self-serving statements of Arab political elites without further analysis.

The reason M&W view the cost-benefit analysis of the current US-Israel relationship to be so self-evidently negative is that included at the heart of this analysis is an assumption that the large cost of the Iraq war should be attributed to the US- Israel relationship. Most of the criticism of the claim that the Israel Lobby led ths US into Iraq has focused on the conspiratorial and latently anti-Semitic aspects of it. But the dubiousness of the Israel-Iraq link is equally damning to M&W's substantive analysis. If the true costs of the US-Israeli relationship are limited to lucrative aid packages and peeved oil barons, then it is impossible to construct a Realist analysis that results in these costs overwhelming the benefits provided by the strategic US-Israeli partnership.

(2) Are there other reasons (besides the Israel Lobby) that explain this disconnect?

The obvious factors to look at here overlap but are essentially ideological and political - the moral claims of the Israeli position and the cultural affinity of the two nations. (The very idea that moral concerns lay outside our strategic interests is itself problematic, but at least consistent with "realist" doctrine.) These factors could either move elite or public opinion towards Israel and away from the "correct" policy that would result from a "dispassionate" Realist analysis.

In an odd move for a pair of Realists, the only attention given to this question is lengthy, scatter-shot attempt to rebut the moral case for Israel. This consists mainly of stringing together various tropes of anti-Israel propaganda and concluding that any tension between strategic necessity and moral principle is illusory. This entire exercise is a fraud, because M&W would reject the notion that even if the moral scorecard came out differently the result should be different.

What M&W do not however shed any light on the critical factor of public opinion. They do not answer the question of whether US's Israel policy is out of line not only with how American's should see US interests (if we were fortunate enough to be ruled by an American Bismarck), but how Americans actually view US interests.

Moving onto the M&W section on how the Israel Lobby purportedly functions, you would expect an analysis of the following:

(3) How do foreign policy lobbies function?

A scholarly article would properly set the Israel Lobby in context. How effective are foreign policy lobbies, domestic and foreign, at shifting U.S. policies? Does this salience of the issue reduce the impact of lobbies? For example, the anti-Castro Cuban emigrant lobby has traditionally had a stranglehold over our Cuba policy, an issue that most Americans are wholly indiffirent towards. M&W are proposing that the Israel Lobby is strong enough not only to steer low profile military aid packages Israel's direction, but to drag America into full-scale armed conflict. It would help in evaluating the feasibility of this claim if there is any historical precedent supporting it.

(4) Are there other foreign policy lobbies shaping our policy towards Israel and Middle East?

Similarly, a scholarly article would address the various other interests that compete to shape American Middle East policy - military contractors, domestic oil companies, trans-national corporations, the Saudis and other oil exporters, etc. M&W show absolutely no interest in these countervailing factors. To some extent, M&W avoid this area because it is far outside their realm of expertise. But another reason for the absence is that these lobbies all reinforce the Hamiltonian Realist agenda, which sees securing strategic resources and promoting American corporate interests as twin pillars of American foreign policy goals.

(5) What are the Israel Lobby's goals? What have been its greatest successes and failures?

You would think that this question would be at the heart of any genuine analysis of the "Israel Lobby's" power and influence. M&W have a unfocused discussion about the goals of securing the West Bank and preserving Israeli military hegemony. Additionally, M&W make much out of AIPAC's influence in a handful of Congressional elections. Yet, amazingly M&W do not even begin to touch on the high-profile showdowns between U.S. administrations and Israel during the past 30 years, or the success or failure of pro-Israel advocates in shifting American policy. There is absolutely no analysis of the First Lebanon war, the AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia, the Bush/Baker-Shamir showdown over settlement expansion or the Clinton administration's hands-on supervision of the Oslo process.

(6) Who is the Israel Lobby? What is the relationship between the Israel Lobby and American Jews?

M&W's failure to examine what the Israel Lobby has and has not achieved is connected intimately with their failure to clearly define exactly who the "Israel Lobby" is. On the one hand, it is relatively straightforward challenge to document AIPAC's successes and failures. On the other hand, once the "Israel Lobby" is expanded to an amorphous group that includes all American Jews with warm feelings towards Israel, any honest analysis would expose the competing jumble of contradictory viewpoints and agendas of such a group.

M&W appear to be trapped by the backfilling nature of their argument, which is designed to ultimately reach the Iraq war. However, neither AIPAC nor Israel were at the front of the line beating the drums for war with Iraq. The case for blaming Israel for the Iraq debacle requires tabbing various neocons in the Bush administration as agents of the Israel Lobby. But putting aside the quite laughable assertion that Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld were less powerful than Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz, there is the serious problem that the neocon agenda frequently differed from that of the formal pro-Israel Lobbies, let alone that of the Zionist liberals who had previously embraced the Oslo process.

Mearshimer and Walt thus fail to seriously ask let alone answer any of the questions that would need in order to undertake a serious academic study of the impact of pro-Israel lobbies on American foreign policy. The result was an article that relied on innuendo, conspiracy and polemic to fill in its gaping logical and analytic holes. A mere tweaking or expansion of the article (e.g. sprinkling in a chapter on Christian Zionism or expanding the polemic to US-Syrian relations) can't possibly salvage the book as a serious work of scholarship. Unfortunately, these "fixes" will be enough to sell many copies to an audience that either doesn't know what scholarly analysis looks like or doesn't care.

Harry Potter and the Shabbes Goy

The worldwide launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, scheduled for this coming Shabbat, has provoked a furious response from Shas minister Eli Yishai. Yishair threatened to employ the full weight of Israel's Hours of Work and Rest Laws, which preclude labor on Shabbat, against book stores that participate in the simultaneous worldwide launch, scheduled for 2:01 a.m. Saturday morning. Not to be outdone, the head of the Ashkenazi fundamentalist UTJ went further, condemning the Potter books "defective messages", clearly upset that Christian fundamentalists had beat him to this point six books ago. (Magic is clearly avodah zarah, unless it involves aged rabbis blessing amulets that can be used as Shas campaign props.)

However, I'm sympathetic to the conflict between Potter-mania and Shabbat. (Fortunately for me, one of the benefits of living in the treifa medina is having Amazon.com deliver your pre-ordered copies to your doorstep.) Therefore, I would propose a couple of compromise solutions to the dilemma:

1. Deliver the books with a Shabbat Floo Network, programmed before sundown to run continuously between the book stores and Israeli homes.

2. Have the clerks, after enjoying a full and restful Shabbat, employ Time-Turners on Motzei Shabbat to travel back to 2:01

3. Employ House Elves as Shabbes Goys.

Sweet and Jewcy

Jewcy has been hosting a fascinating discussion on ADL's egregious decision to lobby against formal recognition of the Armenian genocide. One of my pontifications on the topic has been plucked from obscurity to a place of honor in Jewcy's Daily Shvitz.

I would like to thank the Shvitz for the kind words, and welcome any Jewcy readers who wandered over to my humble blog.

I also want to acknowledge that I am fully aware that days after skewering Foxman's pretensions to Middle East punditry, I indulged my own weakness for commenting on the subject. So in fairness to Abe, I promise that as soon as I am selected to run the ADL, I'll quit the Israel blogging.

Hakuna Fatah-ta

The Peace Process is back in full swing. If the prisoner release and accompanying editorials urging additional Israeli concessions to strengthen Fatah weren't clear enough indications, the Bush administration's announcement of full fledged Peace Conference confirms it.

The "West Bank First" plan comes in the wake of the Hamas victory in Gaza, which put a bloody coda on the failure of the "Gaza First" plan trotted out after Israel's unilateral withdrawal. From Day One, the plan was doomed, as the greenhouses left behind on the settlement sites were looted and quickly replaced with rocket launchers. A democratic election contested by rival armed militia-parties failed to solve the Palestinian internal disarray and hopes for the burdens of governance to moderate Hamas proved futile.

Now however, the Fatah collapse in Gaza has led to the corpse of Oslo be reanimated once again - in the West Bank at least. Once again, Israel and Fatah are ostensibly negotiating over a transition to a two-state solution, entailing in a Fatah-run state in most of the West Bank (and at least theoretically, Gaza.) From all indications, the Bush Administration, Olmert and the Peace Processors (and their cheerleaders in the punditocracy) appear bent on repeating the same mistakes that doomed Oslo.

First and foremost, they are continuing to build a Peace Process around a cult of personality. The entire edifice of Oslo was based on the shaky foundation of Arafat. Every Israeli concession, and every American intervention was focused on one goal - strengthening Arafat in the hopes he would deliver his end of the bargain. As a result, Arafat's refusal to put away the terror option and fully commit to a negotiated two-state solution doomed Oslo. Moreover, rather than leaving the Palestinians the building blocks towards statehood, the Oslo years left Palestinians poorer in everything but militias.

Despite this, the latest chatter from the Peace Processors is centered around one goal: strengthening Abbas. Once again, the entire process is dependent on the whims and capacities of the head of Fatah. It is All About Abbas. As a result, the tough work of building functional institutions of Palestinian governance is being shunted aside for photo-op summits. The release of Fatah militia are presented to Abbas, but little is being done to give the average Palestinian a peace dividend.

One would hope that some lessons were learned from the fiasco of Oslo. That this time, Israeli concessions will be tethered to concrete steps taken by Fatah, and the US and the EU would focus not only on Fatah's ability to control terror, but also on its ability to deliver sound government and services. Further, one would hope that Jordan and Egypt would be brought in to play an intimate day-to-day role in ensuring progress is made, and not simply permitted to take cynicallyl disengage between summit meetings. And most importantly, that the Bush administration realize the folly of waiting for some grand breakthrough of a final status agreement, rather than pressing for concrete steps towards dismantling settlements and resettling refugees immediately so that even if the plan fails, progress is made to an ultimate solution to the problem.

But then again, for the Peace Processors, these are unnecessary quibbles with that get the great vision of the Two-State Solution. As long as hands are shaking, light-bulbs are flashing and symbolic Israeli concessions keep flowing to Abbas, there is nothing to worry about it. Hakuna Fatah-ta.

Rays of Light for Darfur

Just in time for the Yom HaShoah season, President Bush has rediscovered the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Bush threated to apply additional sanctions on the Sudanese government should they fail to take action to stop the violence. Bush's speech should be applauded, for no other reason than the possibility that positive reinforcement might spur him into serious action. However, in order to be worthy of anything louder than a golf clap or two, Bush needs to translate his strong, if sporadic rhetoric into concrete action. It is long past time that discussions of establishing a no-fly moved from the realm of the hypothetical.

Two other recent developments give cause for more hope than the recent stirrings from the White House. The first is the recent discussions between the various rebel militia groups and representatives of Darfur Arab tribes about forming a common front against the Sudanese government. While there is something unseemly about the whole process (especially given the leading role the Arab tribes of Darfur have had in committing the janjaweed massacres), a radical change in the political order of Darfur would likely stem the tide of the genocide. The rule of thugs who do not commit genocide is surely preferable to the rule of thugs that do commit genocide.

Even more promising however, is the first sign of the Chinese government's reevaluating its position of providing diplomatic cover for the Sudanese regime.

A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

In an op-ed in the WSJ, Farrow had warned Spielberg, who is a serving as an advisor to China for the games, that he could "go down in history Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games." Spielberg immediately noted his concerns to the Chinese government, who in turn dispatched Zhai to Sudan to pass along the word that China was no longer agnostic about genocide.

If the Chinese are indeed serious about removing their political cover for their Sudanese clients, the idea of international diplomatic pressure actually impacting Sudanese policy is no longer farcical. Genocide for the Sudanese regime is a counter-insurgency tactic, not a theological commitment. Real pressure very well may result in real results. If so, we should thank the courage of Mia Farrow, and the anonymous Chinese official who fondly recalled watching their first pirated video of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Progressive Jews: Lifting Up the Prophetic Voice in a Time of Propoganda

The AJC's essay on Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism has provoked an intense debate in the American Jewish community. Rosenfeld's paper has its flaws, the most serious one being its conflation of virulent anti-Zionism with more benign a-Zionist navel gazing. However, the essay's core insight regarding the dangers of anti-Zionist rhetoric and hyperbolic criticism of progressive Jews in the context of the recent wave of anti-Semitism is fundamentally correct. With a few notable exceptions (Gershom Gorenberg in particular) the response of progressive Jews has been universally dismissive. The AJC is charged with trying to silence "all criticism" of Israel by equating it with anti-Semitism. The charge is wholly unfounded. Rosenfeld's principal targets in the essay criticize Israel's legitimacy, not its policies. But his sloppiness leads his endorsement of debate over Israeli policies to ring hollow and pro forma.


The AJC paper raises a particular dilemma faced by Justice-seeking Jews – how to maintain faith with the universalistic, prophetic elements of Judaism while avoiding the providing of rhetorical cover for the new anti-Semitism. For genuinely progressive Jews (as opposed to leftists who claim their Jewish ancestry when convenient for rhetorical purposes), the prophetic imperative is central to our identity. The Jewish people are chosen (whether by G-d or through their unique historical experience) for the task of tikkun olam (repairing the world). We are made holy through our righteousness. The Jewish state therefore should be more than merely a state like any other, it should be an or l'goyim (light unto the nations).


Accordingly, justice-seeking Jews are compelled to point out where Israel has missed the mark. The widening gap between rich and poor, the neglect of the environment and rampant corruption are all blights. The discriminatory short-changing of budgetary resources for Israel's Arab citizens is a travesty. Moreover, Israel's fighting of its just war of self-defense is not without blemish. The occupation of the West Bank is corrosive. There is acquiesence to settlement expansion and degradation of Palestinian civilians that is untethered to Israel's security needs. These problems are all pressing, and cannot wait for the resolution Israel's security problems or the emergence of the Arab and Islamic worlds from their current state of dysfunction. This too, is a requirement of the prophetic imperative – the time for righteousness is always now, not in some messianic future.

And yet, Israel is in a war in which its enemies seek not merely its retreat, but its elimination. Israel's enemies understand the modern battlefield, and they have conducted a ideological offensive to complement the spasms of terror that for now is all they can marshal against Israel. This propaganda campaign seeks to de-legitimize Jewish sovereignity and to legitimize the killing of Jews as valid response to the "crimes" of Zionism. Anti-Zionist propaganda exploits progressive biases by the selective embrace and cooption of liberal and progressive values. Anti-Zionists do not stop with attacking Israel, but cleverly train their rhetorical fire on Diaspora Zionists as well.

Progressive Jews are particularly susceptible to the themes of anti-Zionist propaganda. In particular, they are highly supceptible to what Richard Landes has brilliantly termed as Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome - "it is all our fault; and if we can only be better, we can fix anything/everything." This is after all, what the prophetic tradition teaches us - that we as Jews are to focus on our failings, our failure to live up to our high moral standards. Yet, as Landes aptly notes such self-criticism "leads to a kind of self-absorption in which one loses any sense of the other side of any conflict." The result is a prophetic narcissism - criticism of Israel without context in the name of meeting the moral perfectionist needs of the progressive Jews, rather than seeking a just solution to the conflict. This one-sided focus on the sins of the Jewish state meshes perfectly with anti-Zionist narratives. The words of progressive Jews are wielded as tools to convince non-Jewish progressives to opppose Israel.

Right-wing Zionists, such as Morton Klein of the ZOA, would take the last point to a logical,extreme conclusion - because any criticism of Israel could play into the hand of anti-Zionists, no public criticism (except that of insufficient hawkishness) by American Jews is warranted. This, however, is simply an unacceptable answer for a progressive Zionist. If Israel can survive the intense, lively internal debate regarding its policies and values, it can surely survive participation in these debates by concerned Diaspora Jews. The following are some guidelines for how to think about responsible criticism of Israel.

Anti-Zionism Is Out of Bounds

This is a pretty easy red line to follow. Now is simply not the time to debate the merits of a Jewish state. Perhaps in some distant post-nationalist future where anti-Semitism in the Diaspora is a distant memory the merits of the Zionist project can be debated, but in the here and now the elimination of Jewish state will cost the lives of far too many Jews.
This does not rule out a-Zionist (or for the semantically challenged "post-Zionist") navel gazing – progressive Jews should feel free to talk all they want about how Israel doesn't "speak" to them.

Avoid Anti-Zionist Buzzwords

The prophetic voice lends itself to hyperbole, especially in the face of inertia. The problem is that when progressive Jews channel their inner Jeremiah – excoriating Israel's failings in the sharpest possible language they wind up repeating anti-Zionist talking points. Terms like "Nazi" and "apartheid" draw inapt comparisons and their value for shock effect and hyperbolic intensity is outweighed by the harm. The "Nazis" represent the highest form of evil and the greatest threat to civilization in modern times. A state that engages in "Nazi" policies is one that should be eliminated. Similarly, an "apartheid" regime that is constructed around racism, and therefore should be an international pariah. There are accurate ways to condemn the vices of Israeli policies without resorting to language that denotes Israel as beyond redemption.

Fight Both Fronts With Equal Passion

Progressive Jews should be just as willing to face the wrath of progressives by denying dishonest tropes about Israel as they are willing to face the anger of other Zionists by speaking unpleasant truths about Israel. Taking a "no enemies to the left" stance results in progressive Jews staying silent in front of slanderous attacks on Israel and other Jews. The alleged imbalance of power between right-wing Zionists and anti-Zionists is not only myopic given the strength of anti-Zionism outside Jewish circles and the United States, but also an abdication of responsibility.

Commit to Intellectual Honesty

Similarly, progressive Jews need to be intellectually honest in their criticism. This means acknowledging facts that exculpate Israeli actions as much as those which incriminate them, regardless of whether these fact facts support right-wing Zionist narratives. In particular, progressive Jews need to self-diagnose for Masochistic Omniopotence Syndrome - to acknowledge the limitations of Jews and Israel in unilaterally making peace. (Camp David revisionism is a particularly egregious example - progressive Jews would much rather uncritically adopt Palestinian spin on the talks than deal with the serious obstacles to peace raised by Fatah's strategic decision to respond to Barak's offer with violence.)

Have Some Humility

Unlike Amos or Isaiah, modern progressive Jews don't have direct Divine guidance when we engage in prophetic rhetoric. Just as the Israelis making policy are falliable in their judgment so are the critics of these policies. The command to pursue justice is blindingly obvious, but the route there is not always clear.

King of the GMs

In an article that sets quantative analysis in sports back by at least a decade, Forbes.com has declared 76ers GM Billy King to be the 3rd best General Manager in professional sports. (The same survey ranked T-Wolves GM Kevin McHale, who has repeated failed to assemble a decent supporting case for Kevin Garnett, at #1.) Forbes arrived at its results through a ridiculous "formula" which compared a team's regular season winning percentage under its current GM against the last three seasons of the GM's predecessor, factoring in salary "containment." King ranks near the top of Forbes list because (1) the 76ers won a whopping .260 of their games in the three seasons before he formally became GM in 1997, and (2) Larry Brown and Allen Iverson led the 76ers to the playoffs for 5 of the next 6 seasons. Thus, according to Forbes, King is a genius. Therefore, according to common sense, Forbes has no idea what its talking about.

The most obvious problem with the Forbes formula is that it wholly ignores championships or post-season success. For example, the Forbes system would rate the 2005 Super Bowl champion Steelers as less succesfull than the previous year's 15-1 team that fell short. But the central assumption that skews Forbes' results is that a team's prior record is a useful surrogate for the challenges faced by an incoming GM. To the contrary, many critical factors of future success (e.g. the age of key players, avaialbility of high draft picks and cap space) vary radically between teams with similar won-loss records. These are all reasons why the Forbes model cannot compare GMs within sports, let alone between them.

So what then can we say about the Billy King years? Forbes is right that a GM should be judged based not only the ultimate results, but also on the resources he had to work with. Absent a complex statistical model the best we can do is simply evaluate the actual moves he made - the draft picks, contracts and trades that he made.

Any analysis of King needs to put aside the Larry Brown era from 1998-2003, where Brown was de facto GM. King deserves neither the credit for Brown's on-court brilliance nor the blame for Brown's myopic personell decisions. King inherited from Brown a flawed squad that had been eliminated in the 2nd round of the playoffs. Iverson was in his prime, but the 76ers principal additional "assets" were Keith Van Horn, who had recently flamed out in the playoffs, undersized power forward Kenny Thomas and defensive stalwarts McKie and Snow, both on the wrong side of 30. In addition, Brown left King with no cap space and no draft picks in 2 of the next three drafts. On the whole, a perfect time for Brown to jump off a sinking ship.

The Draft

King has had only 2 first rounders in 4 years, none higher than #9. With these picks, King has found a very good (if not great) player in Andre Iguodala and legitimate shooting specialist/6th man in Kyle Korver. Rodney Carney has not impressed in his rookie year, but along with Louis Williams has potential. Grade: B+.


Contracts


King inked three outright horrible deals - resigning Coleman to $9 million a year at age 36, commiting more than $50 million plus over 7 years to the mediocre Thomas and a mid-level deal to end-of-bencher Brian Skinner. (Only Willie Green's injury saved King from adding a fourth to that list.) King's arguably overpayed enigmatic center Samuel Dalembert and Korver as well, but given their youth and the market for players with their skills these deals are defensible. The extension of Iverson to a max deal was something than any GM in the league would have done. Grade: D+.


Trades


The only reason why Van Horn and a 1st rounder for a washed up Glenn Robinson and Marc Jackson wasn't a complete disaster was the provision that kicked in this year that let the 76ers substitute cash for the pick. The Webber deal didn't work on the court, but cleaned up King's messes by getting rid of the Thomas, Skinner and Corliss Williamson (who was acquired for Coleman). Finally, King waited far too long to trade Iverson and in return received Andre Miller, Joe Smith and 2 late 1st round picks - which if the 76ers post-trade .500 play has shown to be too much present talent and not enough potential. Grade: C-


Overall


An exceptional GM might have rebuilt a contender around Iverson; a good GM certainly would have gotten more in return for the Answer. But King's inclusion in the Sports Guy's Bad GM Summit may not be fully earned either. The post-Iverson 76ers appear to be a good draft away from competing for a playoff spot in the East. On the other hand, the odds of the 76ers landing a player they can build another championship run around seems very long. Grade: C-

Zagat's for Shuls

For all the problems with market-driven Judaism, there is one major benefit - it keeps synagogues and other institutions accountable to the needs of their members. I've often joked that given American Jews different tastes and preferences, what is really needed is a Zagat's guide for shuls, to help guide the serious shul shopper.


So, I can only say that the latest idea from the fertile mind of Mobius, Shul Shopper is genius:


Imagine the possible reviews:


Temple Beth Suburb (Services: 15, Facilities: 25, Programming: 17)

Congregants "dressed to the nines" flock to this stately, large, Conservative synagogue known for its "erudite rabbi" and "golden-tongued cantor." If your mind wanders during Musaf, there is plenty to gaze at in the spectacular stained-glass windows of the sanctuary or the brilliant Judaica collection in the lobby. The prized Speakers Series features a literal who's who's of American Jewry, capped by an annual lecture in which Alan Dershowitz presents his latest book. Critics claim that the davening lacks ruach, that the Hebrew school is a "soulless, Bar Mitzvah factory" and "good luck finding a kosher kitchen outside of the shul."


Minyan Meah Achuz (Services: 28, Facilities: 12, Programming: 25)

What began a traditonal egalitarian minyan is now considered to be "one of the most dynamic communities in America." Meah Achuz feauturs spirited prayer led with hauting melodies sung in 6-part harmony, lunch and learns from rising rabbinic stars and holiday programs with overflowing attendance. While the church basement decor is "not much to look at," survey applicants say the exact opposite about the "hip, attractive" 20 and 30-something crowd. Dissenters kvetch "if you don't know the service well, you'll get lost real quick" and snark "not everybody went to an Ivy League School - some of them went to Wesleyan and Duke..."

Any similarities to actual congregations are fully intentional.

Meeting W. at the CAFE

Gregg Easterbrook, writing in Slate points out something that jaded advocates of energy reform may have overlooked from the SOTU, which is that while Bush offerred mere rhetoric (the famous "addicted to foreign oil") in last year's SOTU, this time around W. is actually putting at least the first steps towards genuine energy conservation on the table.

Last Tuesday, Bush proposed that the CAFE standard grow 4 percent stricter per year. Essentially, this would mean that each new model year would need to get one mpg better gas mileage than cars from the year before. The last time the federal fuel-economy standard was strengthened was 1988. Nineteen years with zero progress on mpg is the leading reason U.S. petroleum consumption continues to rise.

Easterbrook wonders why Bush's proposal has met with a collective yawns from the mainstream press. Easterbrook then riffs on one of his pet themes during the Bush administration, which is that W. is not nearly the environmental despoiler he is made out to be. This happens to be one of the few areas where Easterbook, a incisive and contrarian thinker has repeatedly fallen flat. Perhaps Bush's critics demagogued a bit on mercury standards, but it strains credulity that an administration that repeatedly let industry draft environmental legislation, packed the EPA and Interior with corporate hacks and denied the existence of climate change for 6 years was anything other than a disaster for the environment.

Still, Easterbrook has a point - for the first time Bush seems to be putting something real on the table. Unlike the majority of Bush's SOTU initiatives (e.g. his tax cut for personal health insurance masquerading as health care reform), the CAFE proposal provides the Dems with a dilemma in that it is a genuinely sound public policy. Ignore Bush's offer, and they are complicit in maintaining the disastrous energy policy that 12 years of GOP/Big Oil control of Congress has wrought. Take Bush seriously (despite his utter lack of credibility on this front) and pass his proposal and you provide him with a genuine bipartisan accomplishment.

So what should the Dems do? Take him up on the offer. Unlike health care reform, energy reform can be done just as effectively in stages and every bit helps. Rather than waiting on a "comprehensive" energy reform bill that gives the GOP minority and Bush a chance to throw issues like ANWR drilling or ethanol subsidies into the mix, they should fast-track a CAFE standards bill modeled on Bush's proposal and put it on his desk to force him to pack his rhetoric with action. Either he signs it and everybody wins, or he vetoes it and gives Hilary, Obama or whoever is the Dem candidate in 2008 one more issue to attack the GOP's vulnerability on energy and the environment.

ON SECOND THOUGHT:


As Kevin Drum points out, on actual inspection Bush's CAFE plan has some serious flaws, with obvious loopholes written into the program. (It proves that my environmental wonk skills have grown rusty from years of disuse.) Anyway, strike the part about modeling the program after Bush's proposal - but the Dems should still fast-track a CAFE standards bill with teeth. Of course, the environmental policy wonk in me notes that a gas tax would be a far more efficient way of achieving the same goal of reducing fuel efficiency, but living in a nation where cheap gas is considered a constitutional right, that's not going to happen any time soon.

Post-Post-Zionism

I don't get Post-Zionism. Its the not that the concept is difficult to wrap my head around. The idea is quite simple - that a Jewish state in Israel is no longer necessary or desirable. When I was first exposed to Post-Zionism, in Israel during the heady days of Oslo, it had a logic to it; it was wrong, but at least it made theoretical sense. Jewish nationalism after all would be an anachronism in a New Middle East, where Jews and Arabs lived together in peace, harmony. and hummus. Israeli post-Zionism in the Oslo era came from secular Israelis' ennui with living in the Jew among the nations. Post-Zionism was the desperate plea of Sheinkin Street for normalcy, for the sunshine of the Tel Aviv midrachov to escape from the dark shadow of the Judean hills.

But the latest wave of self-professed Post-Zionists are primarily progressive American Jews. The term, like many monikers employing "post" is embraced as an emblem of generational pride. It is a cry of disastified Hebrew School alumni who found the three pillar Holocaust, Israel, Federation model of civic American Judaism uninspired (not to mention the spiritual deadness of rote Bar-Mitzvah drilling.) I empathise with their plight. How could any of us not emerged at least "post-" something from that experience. I myself, came out post-denominational - I highly recommend it.

But those who would purport to claim that they've moved "beyond" Zionism, have the obligation of at least weaving a narrative of how Zionism became obsolete. The Sheinkin Street post-Zionists had such a narrative. Israel was created to provide Jews with a safe haven so that they could pursue a normal life (to the extent Aviv Geffen can be considered "normal") like anyone else. Imminent peace with its Arab neighbors meant that Zionism had accomplished its goal. Israel could now progress to being a state of all its citizens - allowing for an Israeli identity distinct from its Jewish roots. The problem with Olso post-Zionism was that Oslo proved to be a chimera. Peace was not just around the corner; rather what was around the corner terror campaign waged against the very symbols of normalcy of the post-Zionist dream: pizza parlors, cafes and university cafeterias.

The young American post-Zionists (or purely for the purpose of coining a gratuitous acronyms, YAPZ) don't speak of a messianic New Middle East. Rather, the YAPZ speak of the messiness of Zionism and their personal dillusionment with it. YAPZ are discomforted by the excesses of Jewish nationalism, indeed with the idea of a nationalism itself. They recoil at what fee as pressure to conform to the party line from the mainstream American Jewish community. YAPZ reject the idea that secular Jewish culture should be centered in Israel; rejecting a negation of the cultural Diaspora as much as they do the negation of the political Diaspora.

What YAPZ do not however, is provide a coherent narrative of the obsolescence of Zionism. Certainly, there is value in reclaiming Yiddish culture, but the idea that Israel has ceased to be an incubator of Jewish cultural creativity is absurd. One might not like all of the ideas emanating from Israel, but it remains a fertile source for Jewish evolution, if for no other reason than the sharp contrast it provides with American Jewish life. The concept that Israel has fulfilled its political mission - and that the Jewish people will be more secure should Israel lose its Jewish status runs headlong into present realities of Arab politics and the long historical track record of the Jewish Diaspora.

So, all of passionate arguments of the YAPZ reject not Zionism itself, but rather the childish, emotive brand that spoke to American Jews in the 1960s and 1970s - Boomer Zionism. But rather than replacing the childish Zionism of their parents with a mature, nuanced Zionism, YAPZ have turned to adolescent rebellion in choosing to identify themselves as "beyond" or indifferent to the Zionist project.

In reality the majority of these self-proclaimed Post Zionists are simply Zionists who oppose expansion of the settlements, or Zionists who believe Palestinian rights deserve more consideration, or Zionists who believe that American Jews should be able to criticize Israeli politics, or Zionists who prefer to listen to neo-klezmer than Sarit Hadad.

Above all these, bright, passionate, progressive American Jews need to see that it is time to stop rebelling against an Zionism they are embarrased by and time to start building a Zionism they can embrace.

Marginalizing or Mainstreaming Jewish Anti-Zionism

The AJC, the Brookings Institute of the American Jewish community, has recently published a controversial new report by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism", which essentially charges certain left-wing Jewish thinkers with giving "aid and comfort" to the anti-Semites. The targets of the reports range from explicit Jewish anti-Zionists such as Noam Chomsky and NYU professor Tony Judt to progressive Jewish writers such as Douglass Rushkoff and Daniel Boyarin, whose relationship with Israel is far more ambivalent.

Mobius, the creator of the progressive Jewish blog Jewschool, attacked the report in one of his trademark blistering blog posts and again in a radio interview on the show "Beyond the Pale".

...[T]here is no safe space for legitimate criticism of Israel within the Jewish community itself. Those who question Israeli policies are hastily isolated, demonized, marginalized and excluded. The resentment of this treatment frequently results in movement towards the farthest fringes of the discourse and the adoption of a tarnished impression of the Jewish community.

At one level, Mobius is correct. The goal of the AJC report is precisely to ensure that certain views about Israel that are prominent among progressives remain marginal in American Jewish discourse. Rosenfeld does so by linking these views to anti-Semitism. Mobius, however, muddies the water a bit in his attack. Surely, anti-Zionists such as Chomsky and Judt are not merely "questioning Israeli policies." They are questioning the very existence of the state of Israel.

It is precisely this blurring of the line between Jewish anti-Zionism and other progressive Jewish criticism of Israel that is most serious problem with the Rosenfeld report. The report notes the dangers of hyberbolic rhetoric by Jews criticizing Israel; yet certainly some of this rhetoric comes from Progressive Zionists, who are seeking to reform the Jewish State rather than erase it. Similarly, a writer like Douglass Rushkoff, who finds difficultly idenitifying with Israel and finds meaning in univeraslist elements of the Jewish tradition, is best characterized as a-Zionist or ambi-Zionist. Rosenfeld paints with too broad a brush.

This lack of clarity, however, is not at the heart of Mobius' problem with the AJC and mainstream American Jewish community. Rather Mobius' main issue is that "opposing Jewish statehood for ethical, moral or religious reasons, or criticizing Israel for those reasons, is defined as antisemitic." In other words, Mobius objects to the effort to marginalize all progressive Jewish voices critical of Israel, including the anti-Zionists.

The question, therefore, is should anti-Zionism be mainstreamed in American Jewish discourse, invited back from the sidelines, where it has been banished since the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel. I believe it should not, for two reasons.

First, there is some merit to Rosenfeld's claim that Jewish anti-Zionism feeds into and abets anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. There are certainly non anti-Semitic variants of anti-Zionism. Tony Judt, for example, appears to be motivated by a genuine post-nationalism prevalent in many European intellectuals. Similarly, there are academic arguments to be as to whether Zionism was the best solution to the "Jewish Question" in the 20th Century; but what is done is done, the overwhelming majority of the world's Jews outside North America have been gathered into the historic Jewish homeland. The idea of peaceful, stable, binational state given the current state of the Arab world is farcical. There is no end to a Jewish state in Israel that will not lead to tremendous Jewish suffering. Even those progressives who are ambivalent with the idea of Israel need to honestly address the reality of Israel.

Moreover, the "new anti-Semitism" described by the AJC is not a Zionist propaganda construction. There is a virulent rise in Jew-hatred, most significantly from radical Islam, that uses opposition to Israel as a front. The careful academic parsing of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism pales in the face of the blood libels played on Arab state television or the cartoons that pass for "political commentary" in Arab or Iranian newspapers. This is true engine of anti-Zionism in the world today, in which arguments against nationalism, ethnocentrism, and human right violations are focused solely on one nation - which is not coincidentally the Jewish nation.

Second, progresisve Jewish support and even tolerance of anti-Zionism is a disaster for Progressive Zionism. It blurs the line between criticism of Israeli policies and Israel itself.
It plays right into right-wing Zionists who dismiss all criticism of Israel as masking an agenda to destroy Israel. It saps energy away from those Diaspora Jews such as the New Israel Fund whose vision of Israel as a "light unto nations" runs counter to the American Jews who support the competing visions of the settlers and the haredim. Progressive Zionism acknowledges that Israel is imperfect, that Jewish nationalism - like all nationalism - is problematic, that there is a moral cost to assuring the security and freedom of the Jewish people.

Given the reality of the world today, anti-Zionism remains a dangerous idea, one that is rightly marginalized in the American Jewish community. However, considering the major problems facing Israel, external and internal, physical, moral and spiritual, the need for a vigorous Progressive Zionism has never been greater.