The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

[Pirate Smile]

This is extremely interesting.

FYI - Luntz Warning!

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
by Peter Beinart

In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”

That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/

[madrchsod]

1. that was a very interesting article.

clears up a few nagging questions on what happened to jewish/israeli liberalism.

[Pirate Smile]

2. Yes, it does. The bizarre disconnect and resulting cognitive dissonance have made this

topic just ... practically impossible to discuss. Politically ... well, we see how minefields are everywhere for the Obama Administration. Ugghh.

edit to add - you have to get to the last page to see Luntz's scumming handiwork come through. I suppose we can keep an eye out for if they start following his recommendation:

In 2004, in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished hundreds of houses in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Watching television, a veteran Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw an elderly Palestinian woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins of her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother.

In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is suffocating within organized American Jewish life. To begin with, he watched. In my experience, there is an epidemic of not watching among American Zionists today. A Red Cross study on malnutrition in the Gaza Strip, a bill in the Knesset to allow Jewish neighborhoods to bar entry to Israeli Arabs, an Israeli human rights report on settlers burning Palestinian olive groves, three more Palestinian teenagers shot—it’s unpleasant. Rationalizing and minimizing Palestinian suffering has become a kind of game. In a more recent report on how to foster Zionism among America’s young, Luntz urges American Jewish groups to use the word “Arabs, not Palestinians,” since “the term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and oppression,” while “‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam.”

Of course, Israel—like the United States—must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream “no.” After all, Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring American universities; settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?

[shaayecanaan]

3. It happened with the WASPs as well...

Up until the 1940s, Anglo-Saxons here used to refer to England as "home" in novels and articles in women's magazines. Nowadays, you would struggle to get more than 200 people to turn up to the airport for the arrival of the Queen, and probably less than that if it were raining.

It has relatively little to do with Israel's government, I suspect, and rather more to do with the simple passage of time.

[Pirate Smile]

5. I read (I can't remember where) that it is by the third generation when a group

becomes fully assimilated. This isn't exactly the same thing but I think it works because of the passage of time and, as the article mentions, because there were events that the older generation lived through which made them relate so closely to Israel.

The article stated how the First generation tended to settle in the US in groups, surrounded by people from the same country, speak that language, etc. They usually married someone whose family had come from the same "old-country" which is reasonable since that is who they would meet living in a Community which included mostly people with the same immigrant background They were talking about the Irish, Italians, Germans, etc.

The Second generation was likely to marry outside of the group, speak mainly English, etc.

By the Third generation, they were just like everybody else in the US - and viewed themselves that way. They probably had multiple countries where their ancestors came from instead of just one.

The article said younger Jews said "them" about Israel instead of "we" which older Jews used. Not a perfect comparison but it hits the same main point IMO.

The article was about how people need to stop freaking out (like Pat Buchanan) about Hispanics speaking Spanish instead of English, living in communities together or identifying somewhat with their native country. The point was - don't worry about it. Every group did the same thing when there was a large influx of immigrants (they were talking about the Irish in particular) and people freaked out back then saying they wouldn't assimilate in "normal" American culture. There was a backlash against the immigrant community but they were quickly folded (three generations) into the US culture just like the rest of the Country.

I hope that made sense. It is late and I'm getting tired. :)

[IndianaGreen]

4. We can babble all we want about Israel in the Diaspora

but ultimately, it will be the Israelis that will determine their own destiny.

We have to fix America's increasingly insurmountable problems and have no time to worry about the Middle East. The only thing we can do is to stop our government from being in the Middle East, and from selling armaments to some of the worst human rights abusers on this planet.

[Pirate Smile]

6. kick