Thursday, March 16, 2023
From Ian:
Perhaps There Are No Bad Jews, but There Certainly Are Bad Books about Them
Pew statistics show Americans view Jews, Protestants, Catholics more favorably than Muslims, Mormons
Perhaps There Are No Bad Jews, but There Certainly Are Bad Books about Them
In Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities, the New Statesman’s Emily Tamkin explores American Jews’ “ever-evolving relationship to the nation’s culture and identity, and each other,” as the publisher’s blurb has it. Tal Fortgang writes in his review:Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, poll finds
Neither systematic enough to be a serious work of history nor bold enough to work as a pop-sociological provocation, Bad Jews is a book about Jewish identity marked by several identity crises. It wants to be critical of the Jews she clearly thinks are “bad,” but it’s committed to treating all things as equally Jewish; it wants to analyze the particularistic while maintaining Tamkin’s universalistic bona fides; it aims for objectivity but slides into hackneyed leftism without realizing. What it ends up doing is either trailing off before each story ends or reciting the kind of pablum you would expect from a mediocre progressive candidate for public office when asked what her Jewishness means to her.
Trendy activist language eventually seeps through. [Tamkin] frequently fixates on the importance of “whiteness,” but toggles between treating it as a legal, cultural, racial, or other category. Her bible is a 1998 book called How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America, as if a UCLA anthropologist named Karen Brodkin provided the world with the definitive history of the Jewish-American experience, and as if her readers could not seriously challenge that “whiteness,” whatever it is, is the force that moves all of American history.
Tamkin’s brand of emotivist universalism . . . knows only two modes: solidarity with victims and iconoclastic rage at villains. It cannot bear the thought of heroic Jews who are neither.
Views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted sharply among Democrats, who said they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in an annual Gallup survey.
The big picture: Overall, most U.S. adults sympathize more with Israelis (54%) than Palestinians (31%), and two-thirds of Americans continue to view Israel favorably. However, views on the Middle East conflict are becoming increasingly polarized in the U.S. by party and by generation.
Flashback: In 2016, 53% of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Israelis, and 23% with the Palestinians.
- By 2022, that gap had virtually disappeared.
- When Gallup conducted this year's poll from Feb. 1-23, just 38% of Democrats chose the Israelis while 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians.
- That shift has been driven largely by Americans born after 1980, a narrow plurality of whom are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis. Americans from older generations are more than twice as likely to sympathize with the Israelis.
- The progressive wing of the Democratic caucus in Congress has also grown increasingly vocal about the Palestinian cause.
Between the lines: Some Israeli officials and analysts have argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made Israel a partisan issue in Washington by aligning so closely with the Republicans.
Yes, but: A majority of Democrats (56%) continue to view Israel favorably. That's down from 63% last year and far lower than the 82% among Republicans, but is broadly in line with previous findings for Democrats over the two decades Gallup has been conducting the survey.
Pew statistics show Americans view Jews, Protestants, Catholics more favorably than Muslims, Mormons
A new survey released by Pew Research Center on March 15 contains positive news for American Jews and certain, but not all, other faith groups stateside.
Among the 42% of non-Jewish Americans who expressed favorable-unfavorable opinions about Jews, 34% were very or somewhat favorable, while 7% were unfavorable. That positive differential—27 points—was the largest of any faith group in the survey.
Among non-Catholics, 26% were very or somewhat favorable and 21% were unfavorable towards Catholics (5 points), while more Americans who aren’t Muslim, atheist or Mormon saw those groups as more unfavorable than favorable.
A total of 17% of non-Muslims saw Muslims favorably, compared to 22% unfavorably (a -5 differential), 17% of non-atheists saw atheism at least somewhat favorably compared to 25 unfavorably (-9 differential) and just 14% of non-Mormons had favorable views of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, compared to 26% unfavorable (-12% differential).
“This survey confirms what we have found repeatedly over the past decade, which is that on the whole, Jews are among the most positively regarded religious groups in America,” Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at Pew Research Center, told JNS. “Overwhelmingly, Americans express either favorable or neutral feelings toward Jews, and relatively few—about 6% in the latest survey—say they view Jews unfavorably.”
No matter how Pew has posed the question about attitudes towards U.S. religious groups over the years, “Jews have topped the list or been tied at the top of the list with a few other groups,” such as Catholics and mainline Protestants, “as the most positively viewed overall,” he said.
The data does not mean that the United States is nearly free of antisemitism. Other sorts of studies show increasing numbers of antisemitic incidents, as well as hate crimes broadly, in the United States in recent years, according to Cooperman.
“In our 2020 survey of U.S. Jews, which came in the wake of violent attacks on Jews at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., we found that 75% of Jewish Americans thought there was more antisemitism in America than there had been five years earlier, and a slight majority (53%) of Jewish Americans said in the 2020 survey that they, personally, felt less safe as a Jewish person in America than they had five years earlier,” he told JNS.
The two findings do not contradict one another, according to Cooperman.
“Both things can be true at the same time—that, on the whole, Jews are well-regarded by their fellow citizens in the United States, and that antisemitic incidents are rising. In fact, when we asked Jewish Americans in 2020 for their thoughts on why antisemitism was rising, relatively few said they thought it was solely because the number of antisemites in the U.S. public had risen. Many more cited a changed atmosphere,” he said.
‘This is the first time we have asked the question this way’
The new Pew analysis is based on a survey of 10,588 U.S. adults, which was conducted between Sept. 13-18, 2022. (The margin of error is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, according to Pew.)
Palestine ranking 2nd amongst the most racist "countries " (I say that lightly as it isn't a country but some people) with around half not wanting any non-Arab neighbours pic.twitter.com/qKe4jzFWM9
— Natalie Zion #EndJewHatred (@natalie_Zion_) March 15, 2023
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