Brandeis University

A couple of times now, I've posted items imagining Jimmy Carter as being motivated by a spiritual debt to Anwar Sadat. Carter made Sadat stay at Camp David in 1978 when he wanted to leave; and Sadat gave his life for the accords he signed there. Now Carter is making up to his old friend.

Well I'm finally reading Carter's book, and I'm wrong. Carter is passionless (as James Fallows told us many years ago). He describes Sadat as the closest friend he formed in all his presidential meetings, but Sadat's 1981 assassination is dismissed in a couple of brief references. No tears are shed, no guilt expressed. Carter is utterly impersonal. His speech the other day at Brandeis was that way too—he dropped a few (Jewish) names, like Stu Eisenstadt and Stephen Breyer, but there wasn't really a friendly word about anyone. Compare him to Bill Clinton's tearful speech at Terry McAuliffe's book party at Four Seasons the other night—they're night and day.

It's worth remembering that Carter was a submarine commander who trained at Annapolis and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He's a technocrat, and a Christian. His motivation in writing his bombshell book is largely technocratic: there's a big problem here, I'm going to try and fix it. The prose in this book is dry. Carter saved his emotional moments for NBC News and Brandeis. The most emotional moment I've come to is when he's running in East Jerusalem with two Israeli soldiers accompanying him and one runs ahead and kicks the newspapers out of the hands of some Arabs who are sitting and reading the papers, to make sure they're not hiding guns. Carter goes over to apologize. He's still offended by that behavior, as he should be.

One of Jimmy Carter's most powerful points at Brandeis Tuesday was a challenge to Brandeis to organize its own trip to the Occupied Territories to find out whether he was exaggerating the horrible conditions that Palestinians face. "See for yourself." That's an important issue. Today's Christian Science Monitor has a strong piece by former S.D. Sen. James Abourezk talking about the Israel lobby's use of congressional trips to sway political opinion to the view that one side has the moral high ground in the unending cycle of violence there.

According to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, congressional filings show Israel as the top foreign destination for privately sponsored trips. Nearly 10 percent of overseas congressional trips taken between 2000 and 2005 were to Israel. Most are paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, a sister organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby group.

New rules require all trips to be pre-approved by the House Ethics Committee, but Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts says this setup will guarantee that tours of Israel continue. Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported consensus among Jewish groups that "the new legislation would be an inconvenience, but wouldn't seriously hamper the trips to Israel that are considered a critical component of congressional support for Israel."

These trips are defended as "educational." In reality, as I know from my many colleagues in the House and Senate who participated in them, they offer Israeli propagandists an opportunity to expose members of Congress to only their side of the story. The Israeli narrative of how the nation was created, and Israeli justifications for its brutal policies omit important truths about the Israeli takeover and occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Abourezk doesn't know about the journalists. The journos who have taken one-sided junkets to Israel don't have to declare them...

When I was a kid, my parents had an expression, WASPy Jews. It was based in part on our one German-Jewish relative: Trudy (a pseudonym). Trudy was cold, straightforward, and wealthy. German Jews and Eastern-European Jews used to be the Sunnis and Shi'ites of American Jewish life. Having lately visited Trudy, I wanted to record some impressions.

Trudy grew up in the 1930s in Westchester, in a big house with a 40-foot living room. Her father was a German who emigrated at the turn of the century to open a branch of a family business. He was worldly. He went skiing in Switzerland in natty attire, he flew airplanes, and his attitudes were typical of assimilating Jews of his generation. He told his daughter that Judaism was a religion, it was not a nation. So he was anti-Zionist. Once Trudy asked her father who the two pretty blonde girls were in the photograph in the living room. "Those are your cousins; they died in the war," he said. Along with many other relatives or hers, in concentration camps. But the word Holocaust was not used.  read more »

M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he's balanced by Alan Dershowitz.

It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to what amounts to an academic boycott of a former President for criticizing Israel.... We look like mini-Joe McCarthys and we are all being hurt by this...

Israelis themselves just laugh. How is it, they ask, that they can debate Israel-Palestine with absolute freedom but we Americans are afraid to...

Invite Carter to speak. Alone. Like any other speaker. Your students can handle it. Trust me. Trust them.

The Boston Herald reports that the Dershowitz act was dreamed up by Brandeis trustee Stuart Eizenstat, a former Carter adviser, along with Brandeis Prez Jehuda Reinharz. Just like when the New York Theatre Workshop decided it could only put on Rachel Corrie's show last spring if it was suitably "contextualized," with pro-Israel voices. These paroxysms speak to the same lesson: the Israel lobby isn't a control room in Washington, it's a general climate of fear about Israel's future that clouds the minds of goodthinking liberals who are empowered—with the ability to shut off debate. Even a former president lacks standing.

But watch out. The success of Carter's book, the contract to Walt/Mearsheimer, the Corrie run at the Minetta Lane, the Iraq Study Group's hail Mary to Syria—the world is changing.

I've been thinking about something Marty Peretz said at Yivo Institute last week.

Following Niall Ferguson's talk about Jews & Money, a lady in the second row asked whether the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government committed itself to a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, arose from a need by the Brits to gain the support of "influential Jews in the United States," who might help determine the outcome of World War I. Ferguson didn't know the answer, but that didn't keep him from offering insights into Lord Rothschild (to whom Foreign Sec'y Balfour's declaration was addressed) and the Germans and Muslims and other issues. (And I'm not going to try and answer the question here; I don't know, though it's intriguing...)

At one point, Ferguson noted that The New Republic was established by Walter Lippmann during that era, in 1914—if I heard him right, in part out of Zionist concerns—and from the audience Peretz, the grand vizier of the New Republic and chairman of Yivo's overseers, piped up that Louis Brandeis had also helped start the magazine.

My sense is that Peretz misspoke. The usual nutshell on The New Republic is that Lippmann and Herbert Croly helped start it along with the young Felix Frankfurter. I wonder if Peretz meant that future Jewish Supreme Court Justice, not Brandeis?

I'm interested because I happened to have with me at the event a splendid book I just got, The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, family letters, edited by David W. Levy of the University of Oklahoma. Brandeis was the father of American Zionism, and he's fascinating. He was assimilating until he was close to 60, and then, apparently stunned by the Dreyfus case and influenced by an associate of Herzl's with whom he became close, Brandeis grew fearful about the place of the American Jew, pushing the cause behind the scenes even when he got on to the Supreme Court in 1916 (following an antisemitic uprising against his appointment). He was never able to convert Lippmann completely, though the Levy book reveals that Brandeis lobbied for Zionism with the financier Eugene Meyer, Katharine Graham's father, who bought the Washington Post in 1933; and that Meyer kicked in large sums for the cause, $25,000 on one occasion. And yes, Brandeis met with Croly and Lippmann around the time the New Republic began. Maybe what Peretz is referring to.

The letters also show that after the Balfour Declaration, Brandeis was among those who lobbied his friend the President, Woodrow Wilson, to echo the British commitment. As Wilson did in 1918, thereby defying his own State Department. Brandeis subsequently visited Palestine with Frankfurter and a man called Rudolph Sonneborn, the son-in-law of the great American banker Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb. And Sonneborn in 1947 supplied arms to the fledgling state of Israel thru a fictitious entity, the Sonneborn Institute.

All this is from David Levy's fine book.

I go on this historic bender to make a point. Powerful American Jews have played a crucial role in the Zionist cause, often behind the scenes. Marty Peretz knows something about this history. The world of Louis Brandeis and Eugene Meyer and the White House—Peretz, who is a friend of Al Gore's, knows its later incarnations in his fingertips. And how regrettable it is that from the moment that Walt and Mearsheimer addressed the idea of Jewish influence, Peretz's response has been altogether defensive and vituperative, seeking to blacken these scholars as antisemites. There is a great Jewish scholarly tradition that seeks answers to important questions, not obfuscation. What an education it would be to hear Peretz's thoughts on Washington and Israel. Though yes, we got a peep out of him the other night.

When Brandeis shut down an exhibit of Palestinian art last week, the organizer promptly found a new home for it across town at MIT. Then this week a group of Brandeis faculty started a petition drive to have the exhibit brought back to Brandeis. They have gotten 90 signatures, including many Jews. I've posted it below. Yes the art was censored, but it's up again, with a ton of attention.

The support underscores something Alan Dershowitz says—that universities are hotbeds of leftwing thought. I agree. The question is why? Why are leftwing ideas that are marginalized elsewhere in the culture doing fine at universities?

I think the answer is, There's nowhere else for these ideas to go; and they are less dangerous in universities than, say, in Washington. Consider the alternatives. It's virtually impossible to be a leftwing intellectual in the Washington thinktank community: you don't get funded. Yes there's George Soros, but he's the exception that proves the rule. It's fine to be a leftleaning liberal in the Maistream Media, where everyone is a Democrat who supports abortion and has murmurous questions about Iraq; but you can't be too outspoken about it, or again you'll get marginalized. Weekly opinion magazines are also not very hospitable to lefties, and it can't be easy to be a leftwing analyst in the Executive Branch staff positions that help form policy. All those Arabists at State, for instance, keeping their heads down. Colleges are the only game in town.

It is a conservative-dominated country. Big business plays a huge role in our public life. It funds the thinktanks and the media. It funds campaigns. There are tons of privileged Americans with leftwing views, but not many places for them to actually apply their thinking. The universities are deemed harmless enough. There these thinkers will only educate young people, in places far from Washington.  read more »

The sad part for the left is that its braintrust is so unengaged in the real world. Its idea-people are alienated, and don't have a practical bone in their bodies. They get to hold forth at dinner parties.

Yesterday when I asked Brandeis troublemaker Lior Halperin whether she was Jewish, she said, "Yes. I'm what people call a self-hating Jew." I said, "I love you, Lior. Me too."

I'm not a good Jew. I'm probably a bad Jew. I don't go to shul, don't believe in the Old Testament God, married a Christian, (would have) raised my (nonexistent) kids Buddhist/nothing, and have tons of impure thoughts. Didn't serve in the Israeli Army like Lior. But it's my politics in particular that make me fishy. And truthfully, various good intelligent estimable highminded Jews say I'm a self-hating Jew; and maybe they know, and therefore maybe I am, and maybe I shouldn't fight it. So, O.K., like, let's move on, and in between crawling out from under my rock, and back to it, can I express my opinion?

This to me is one of the revelations of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the Israel lobby. These two profs in their 50s knew they'd get called anti-semites if they said what they believed, but they decided to go ahead and say it anyway. They didn't care. They accepted the label, as the price of saying something important. Dershowitz says they destroyed their professional reputations by saying that, and Grant Smith (of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy) says Dershowitz is right, they did destroy their reputations, in certain quarters. But not in others.

The Boston Globe put the Brandeis censorship on its front page today (and did a better job than I did of writing it up!).

Dennis Nealon, a spokesman for Brandeis, tells me the school did take down the exhibit.

"The university had to make a decision. We were getting complaints from people that the exhibit was one-dimensional. There was no other context... It was as if someone was looking at this issue with one eye closed. People were upset and confused. Some people found the images distrubing. We had to make a decision."

Nealon says that the school hopes to mount the exhibit after all, some day, but with context.

This is, by the way, precisely what happened in the case of the Rachel Corrie play cancelled, or postponed, who knows, in February by the New York Theatre Workshop. It couldn't mount the show without more context, it said. It needed to palliate or balance Rachel Corrie's harsh words about the Occupation.

When will Americans be able to hear a differing point of view on the Israel/Palestine situation without having to explain those views away?

P.S. Lior Halperin tells me she won't let Brandeis have the show. "They took it down without asking me. I'm taking it away from this place."

An exhibit of 17 paintings done by Palestinian children that was mounted in a library at Brandeis University last week was taken down over the weekend by the Brandeis administration. That's from Lior Halperin, a 27-year-old Israeli sophomore at Brandeis, who fought resistance from the school to put on the show in the first place. I'm waiting for a call back from the Brandeis administrator who is said to have taken the show down.

Halperin says that MIT has offered to mount the show, she'll take it there.

The show of pictures from kids in a refugee camp in Bethlehem was (shockingly) an effort by Halperin to bring the humanity of the victims of Israel's occupation to the American Jewish community. "If we are going to find a partner for peace, we have to listen to the other side," Halperin says. "These are voices who are longing for a land and longing for a home, we have to respect that."

Here, for instance, is a painting by 16-year-old Hussam Al-Azza, who says, "I want to tell the world about Palestine, and I ask them to search for the reality about our case."

Let's be clear. The show was provocative: one kid painted a flag of Palestine on Israel, almost all the kids spoke in the accompanying texts of liberating Palestine, ending the occupation, returning to their grandparents' homes in what is now Israel. But, did you notice—the Middle East is a violent mess. We need to do more listening, not less.

One unfortunate aspect of the Jewish community's rigidity on these issues is that it is shutting out evolving ideas about Israel's future from the left; and the left needs to be heard.

These days the political mainstream is all for a two-state solution. Right-wing Israelis are even for it, because of the "demographic" problem: the Arab birthrate in the occupied territories threatens to make Israel responsible for a "state" that is mostly Arab. So Israel wants to withdraw from a lot of the West Bank, and put up that big wall, and wash its hands of the Arabs forever. Can it do that? Probably not. It's just a formula for more mistrust, more violence, more separation. Especially if the border is not negotiated through an international process. And meanwhile, voices on the left—the same voices on the left that were pushing for a two-state solution 25 years ago when the mainstream said they were crazy—are now beginning to push for a one-state solution, a unified land where Palestinians and Jews live in peaceful co-existence, which is what Halperin believes. I know, that's crazy. And everyone else has such reasonable answers.  read more »

The American painter Paul Georges, who died last year at the age of 78, was a big man who thought bi  read more »