“This book is about the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.”
Thus begins professor emeritus Edward Alexander’s latest work, “Jews Against Themselves” (Transaction Publishers). Published last month, the book is comprised of 18 essays penned over the last 30 years with titles like “Noam Chomsky and Holocaust Denial,” “Michael Lerner: Hillary Clinton’s Jewish Rasputin,” and “Choose Your Side: The New York Times or Judaism.”
Before his retirement in 2004, Alexander taught English at the University of Washington. His previous works include “The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies,” “Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew,” and “The Holocaust and the War of Ideas.”
The Jewish Press: Why do you think so many Jews continue to support the Democratic Party and President Obama when it is almost undeniable that the Republican Party is far more pro-Israel?
Alexander: That’s a very tough question. It’s at least a decade since Gabriel Schoenfeld demonstrated in his book The Return of Anti-Semitism the extent to which blatant anti-Semitism had found a home within the Democratic Party. But Jewish voters have continued in their old habits nevertheless.
At the national conventions of the Democratic Party, the only thing that gets more cheers from the crowd than abortion without limits and other forms of forbidden fruit is hostility to Israel. Again, this has raised no alarm bells for the majority of Jewish voters. Jewish life in America is worm-eaten with a debased liberalism unequalled even in Great Britain.
Can you elaborate?
One of the main reasons – perhaps the main reason – David Cameron won an unexpected victory in the recent British election is that British Jews in marginal districts turned massively against their beloved Labor Party due to its fanatical Israelophobia.
Here in the United States, Obama made it clear from the outset of his presidential campaigns and earliest speeches that he had demoted American Jewry and was entirely indifferent to the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. He also made Al Sharpton – the supreme race racketeer – his adviser on racial matters.
This was in sharp contrast to George W. Bush, who openly denounced the return of European anti-Semitism in a speech in London in 2003. At a White House reception I complimented Bush for this speech, and he replied: “It’s even worse there than you can imagine.”
In Jews Against Themselves, you call Jews who hate the state of Israel “anorexics.” What do you mean by that?
Anorexics express their resistance to growing up and managing their own affairs by starving themselves. Jewish “anorexics” want the Jewish people to live without a national body – a state – because having one forces them to manage their own affairs instead of counting on the gentiles.
You also write that such Jews live very secular private lives but often identify as Jews publicly to lend greater weight to their anti-Zionist activities. You call them “men at home, Jews in public.”
It’s a reversal of the slogan of Jewish maskilim: “Be a Jew at home, and a man in public.” In a 1942 Hebrew short story by Haim Hazaz, a character says, “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” Nowadays, in countless instances, the slogan is: “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”
How do you account for Jews who join Israel’s enemies in denouncing and boycotting the Jewish state?
It would be risky to assign a single motive to what I have called “modern Jewish apostates.”
Some of them – forgetting, if they ever knew, Zionism’s rejection of chosenness – reject the Jewish state because, in their view, far from being a “light unto the nations,” it exhibits many of the flaws of other nation-states and isn’t yet a light even unto Jews. So if it isn’t that, it shouldn’t exist at all in their view.
Some people argue that without a strong basis in Torah and tradition, a Jew is less likely to understand why he’s different from other people and, as a result, becomes increasingly uncomfortable, defensive, even self-hating. Do you agree with this analysis?
Only up to a point. I don’t think it can explain everything. There are too many exceptions that challenge the rule. I’ve personally known, and been influenced by, numerous Jews who had little in the way of Torah and religious tradition, yet labored mightily on behalf of Israel: Marie Syrkin, Shmuel Katz, and Hillel Daleski, among others.
What’s your Jewish background?
My father and grandfather marched me off to Rabbi Z. Harry Gutstein’s Talmud Torah Beth Israel (located, providentially, at 500 Herzl Street, Brooklyn) when I was a young boy. There I was a better than average student in Hebrew, Yiddish Reading and Writing, Prayers, Bible, and Laws and Customs.
Both my grandfathers were central figures in their Brooklyn shuls – one located in the basement of Beth-El Hospital, the other on Kingston Avenue near Eastern Parkway. My father, a shoemaker, and my mother presided over a strictly observant Jewish home.
What were your experiences like at the University of Washington as a pro-Israel professor?
Very lonely after the mid ‘70s. I was disliked but never “punished” academically by colleagues – unless one counts being dropped down the memory hole by the current Jewish Studies faculty whose official history of the program at my university begins after I departed the chairmanship, which I held for its first decade.
In Jews Against Themselves, you quote author Ian Buruma who wrote a decade ago that the “Palestinian cause has become the universal litmus of liberal credentials.” How does supporting a people seeking the destruction of another people make one a liberal?
Modern liberals, of course, don’t admit that; it goes against the liberal unwillingness to credit the existence and tenacity of evil. Recall the liberal failure, embodied in The New York Times, to publicize the German massacres of Jews during the Holocaust. Today, the Times and the numerous Jews who view it as their Shulchan Aruch hold Israelis responsible for the 67-year old Arab refusal to accept Israel.
For the liberal mind, each Arab atrocity against Jews only serves to confirm the lurid accusations made against the Jews themselves. The viler the atrocity, the greater the Jewish guilt. As Abba Kovner once acidly wrote: “There is always someone more guilty – the victim, the victim.”
Is there anything we can do about Jews who work against Israel?
Stop treating them with conciliatory gestures, honors, flattery, and oily sycophancy. Do not assume that every liberal fad must at once be called up to the Torah. Remember that exclusion is as much a function of human intellect as inclusion. And view them as apostates – Jews who, in Maimonides’s words, are indifferent to their people when they are in distress and therefore have no share in the World to Come.