Monday, March 11, 2019
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: No one loses a debate over anti-Semitism. Except Jews.
Ross Douthat: Is Anti-Semitism Exceptional? The inevitable decline of left-wing philo-Semitism.
Seth Mandel: No one loses a debate over anti-Semitism. Except Jews.
Here’s the thing, though: None of this is going to hurt anyone involved, politically.
The Democratic Party’s behavior last week was unconscionable. Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) led the rebellion against Pelosi’s symbolic denunciation of anti-Semitism, calling the idea of a reprimand “hurtful.” Four presidential candidates — Bernie Sanders, Kamala D. Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand — made it clear they feared Ocasio-Cortez, not the speaker. Sanders said umbrage at Omar’s comments was an attempt at “stifling” debate. Harris took it a step further and said those offended were putting Omar in danger.
It’ll cost the party nothing.
Please stop with the predictions that the Jewish vote in 2020 is suddenly up for grabs. Democrats may have thrown Jews who were offended by Omar under the bus, but they’ll file provisional ballots while looking up at the rear axle if they have to. And Republicans who think they don’t play a role in that are fooling themselves. “We finally censured Steve King after he won his ninth term” isn’t the bumper sticker of a party that’s done everything in its power to reach Jewish voters — especially when it’s still led by a president who infamously equivocated on racist, anti-Semitic marchers in Charlottesville.
The irony is the vote Thursday proves just how wrong Omar and anyone else who sees shadowy powers directing Washington really are. Far from controlling the conversation, Jews are powerless to stop it.
Anti-Semitism is not a partisan issue, no matter how it might have looked last week. Anti-Semitism is a virus. It mutates and adapts to survive and thrive under whatever conditions currently prevail.
The defense many Democrats made of Omar’s statements is that they weren’t anti-Semitic, they were targeting Israel and its allies in Washington. But anti-Semitism often hides behind “anti-Zionism.” As Izabella Tabarovsky, who grew up in the Soviet Union, wrote in the Forward about one such case, “It was under the banner of anti-Zionism that Soviet anti-Semitism blossomed.” From the outside, the Soviet campaign against Zionism may have looked like criticism of an external-facing ideology, but to those living under the Soviet thumb, the truth was plain: “We were targets of anti-Semitic insults in the streets. Our educational and professional opportunities were diminished. When I was deciding what college I wanted to apply to to study foreign languages, I learned that my top two schools were off limits to me: They prepared students for careers in foreign service, and these were closed to the untrustworthy Jews.”
Ross Douthat: Is Anti-Semitism Exceptional? The inevitable decline of left-wing philo-Semitism.
Finally, a great deal of the new anti-Semitism — from the recent wave of hate crimes in New York City to the anti-Jewish violence befouling Europe — would still be coming from minority and immigrant communities that are seen as essential to left-of-center and especially radical-left politics going forward, making them more difficult than right-wing anti-Semitism for the left to full-throatedly condemn.Reviews of Friedman's 'Spies of No Country'
Of course right-wing anti-Semites haven’t gone away either — which is part of why anti-anti-Omar Democrats can tell themselves that by downgrading Jewish exceptionalism, trading a specific philo-Semitism for a general politics of all-bigotry-is-bad, they are asking liberal Jews to make a sacrifice that’s essential for the greater good of defeating the greater enemy, which is still the reactionary right.
Whether this argument works depends in part on what the post-Trump right ultimately becomes — whether there’s a way to marry nationalism and philo-Semitism, perhaps wooing Jewish voters rightward, or whether any form of right-wing populism inevitably brings anti-Semitism roaring back.
But it also depends on whether the assumptions of Omar’s left-wing defenders are justified — whether anti-Semitism can be contained if it’s treated as one form of bigotry among many, or whether the perverse resilience of Jew-hatred is such that cultures choose between philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism, with only a swift downward slope lying in between.
'Spies of No Country' proves the point that Israel's early Arabic-speaking spies had no country to call their own own - except Israel, writes Lily Meyer for NPR:
For half a decade, Friedman has been working hard, and publicly, to dispel easy narratives about Israel. He rose to attention — and controversy — through a pair of essays about media bias in coverage of Israel, and has remained on the beat ever since. His perspective is unusual: Israeli by choice, he clarifies his own bias in every piece but he writes to complicate, not to defend. In his third book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, Friedman rejects the narrative of Israel as a country filled with Europeans and their descendants, motivated by memories and guilt like my grandfather's. And he does it through a spy story.
Spies of No Country focuses on a fledgling Israeli intelligence unit called the Arab Section, and on four of its spies. The Arab Section emerged at the tail end of British colonialism, at a moment when the Palestine was filling with Jews. The British had made hazy promises, but none clear enough to prevent the war that ensued. The Jews in Palestine formed an army, which in turn formed the Arab Section, a fledgling espionage operation easiest to understand as a version of the Soviets' Directorate S. Where the USSR trained Russians to live in America, though, the Arab Section did something much murkier. It trained Middle Eastern Jews to embed themselves in the very countries they were from.
Friedman builds his story around four such Jews: Gamliel Cohen, Havakuk Cohen, Isaac Shoshan, and Yakuba Cohen. (None of the Cohens were related.) All four were native Arabic speakers. Yakuba grew up in Palestine, Havakuk in Yemen, and Gamliel and Isaac in Syria. In present-day Israeli parlance, they were Mizrahi. In the parlance of the Arab Section, they were not spies but mista'arvim, a word Friedman often uses in its full English translation: Ones Who Become Like Arabs. But it's hard to parse what made them like Arabs. "They were native to the Arab world," Friedman writes, "as native as Arabs. If the key to belonging to the Arabic nation was the Arabic language, as the Arab nationalists claimed, they were inside. So were they really...pretending to be Arabs, or were they pretending to be people who weren't Arabs pretending to be Arabs?"
