Why Should I Bring Up a Writer's Jewishness?
What difference does it make what religion Leonard Greene is? In the name of fair reporting, why not report the religion of every person mentioned in every article about the Middle East—like Mearsheimer, Walt and Rachel Corrie? Maybe you can put a little yellow star next to the Jews, and a red one next to the ones with "Jewish sounding names".
Anonymous has a good point. Issues should be discussed on their merits. Whereas I'm being ad hominem, talking about the man. This is a hard one to think through. Some answers:
1. It's a blog. Blogging is personal in a way that print is not. That's why it's been so liberating to speech, also why it's maintained its subterranean status with respect to the main discourse.
2. All of us think ethnicity is relevant. When we read the letters in the Times about a Middle East story, we always look at the byline and think, Is he Jewish? Is he Muslim? Where's he coming from?
3. We do that because these issues are to some degree informed by these matters. My hobbyhorse (well one of them, anyway) is the way that the Jewish community has by and large shifted right over foreign policy, to support the most hawkish policies, because of Israel. I'm always thankful for the exceptions. Hence: Greene.
4. Maybe the discourse needs more transparency over precisely this question. When Zbigniew Brzezinski laments in Foreign Policy
"Arab Americans by and large have been excluded from serious participation in the U.S. policy process,"he is talking about ethnicity—and fairminded people at once see the justice of his point. One thing I admire about Elliott Abrams and Norman Podhoretz is that they speak plainly and openly of their Jewishness in defending Israel. Abrams wrote (nine years ago, before he went into deep cover in the White House):
Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart—except in Israel—from the rest of the population.... It implies...a state of mind in which Jews acknowledge their participation in a covenant now five thousand years old and extending endlessly into the future.
One of the reasons I'm a bad Jew is that I was recruited in this nationalism myself as a young man, especially after the '67 war, when we danced over the Israeli victory and my parents' best friends moved to Israel to support the state, but then I fell off the 5000-year-old nationalist covenant wagon in my assimilating adulthood. I call myself bad because I have struggled with those historically-engraved feelings that Abrams invokes so forcefully and plainly. And this is precisely what I don't admire about David Frum, Paul Berman, and Tom Friedman. I sense to varying degrees that a devotion to Israel was a key part of their political and emotional education, as it was to mine and Abrams's. Why else does Berman never use the word "occupation" in his book on these matters, and belittles Palestinian aspirations with the mocking suggestion that the Israeli settlements "had driven masses of Palestinians out of their minds." I believe Israel is very important to these writers. Shouldn't they now and then be open about this?
"All of us think ethnicity is relevant."
In America, this is called pre-judgement a.k.a. prejudice.
If someone with a "Black" name writes about the factory farming is it because Blacks like fried chicken?
What about all those gay Jews- isn't that part of the Jewish agenda?
You words are so clouded by prejudice that they become nothing more than uninformed opinion.
You know very little about Judaism and the history of the PLO. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, particularly with these issues.
Using your ethnicity to build your credibility makes your work even more preposterous and pathetic.
Your not an objective liberal. You're an opinionated bigot, with a pre-judgement on everyone based on their name and appearance.
Jew is to middle-east conflict as black is to factory farming?
But seriously, we need to distinguish between conversation which is social and writing which is public. All of of say shit in private which we wouldn't say in public.
We should not attack someone for remarks the way we would attack them for a book.
The question of whether one's ethnicity affects one's politics is empirical, and the answer is usually that it does indeed affect them, in 90% or so of all cases, though there is a remaining 10% who make honest (and laudable) attempts to surmount their own intellectual and cultural background. Whether they are ever really successful is another matter. It can be argued that much Jewish leftism is simply a disguised Judaism with pseudo-universalist pretensions. Look at the disingenuous way Soviet Communist Party Jews assumed they could create and maintain their own, separate, identity within the Party, as if Jewishness stood above the Marxist nationalities doctrine.
Of course ethnicity is important. It's especially important when you talk to Likudniks who think God gave them the Middle East, because the first time you say "the Palestinians need a homeland too" they trot out Hitler, the Holocaust and what they maintain is the inherent anti-Semitism of criticizing Israel. If you can point out that you are also Jewish (and thus presumably not motivated by age-old antipathy toward members of the tribe) it tends to slow them down a step. Of course then they call you a "self-hating Jew," even though virtually no one has ever seen such a creature and for all practical purposes they probably don't exist.
Jews, Muslims and Christians all believe that G-d promised the Land of Israel to the Avraham, the father of the Jewish people.
The notion of a "Palestinian Arab nation" having ancient attachments to the Holy Land ia a hoax. Arafat was born in Egypt. There has never been a Palestinian state governed by Arab Palestinians in history, nor was there ever a serious Arab-Palestinian national movement until 1964. It is a "manufactured" national culture- one whose primary purpose is to destroy the Jewish State. The so-called "Palestinian" Arabs need a place to live in security and prosperity. However, you need to get along with you neighbors to achieve this.
Unless you believe the Bible (which I do not) all the above remarks about 'Pals' are equally true of 'Israel'.
Jews, Muslims and Christians all believe that G-d promised the Land of Israel to the Avraham, the father of the Jewish people.
And all of them are wrong too.
anyway it is a typically jewish tendentious and mendacious mistatement. Abraham (in the foundation myth, it goes without saying, or should do) was the father of not only Isaac but of Ishmael too.
The first stage of a