“Kol Nidrei reminds us that though we make commitments under duress, ultimately we are accountable only to the higher values of Justice and Righteousness,” Daniel Sieradski, a young Jewish writer and activist who organized the event, told the crowd, reciting a labor organizer’s midrash. (Right-wing critics would be correct to note that, if it were 100 years ago, Sieradski and the others would be inciting socialist riots on the Lower East Side; what they fail to see, here as elsewhere, is that it isn’t 100 years ago, and today you couldn’t find a minyan to form that riot.)

Today, we are thinking about a different kind of commitment made under duress. A big part of our financial crisis was caused by a banking system which misled and pressured, which up-sold and implored us to sign without reading, where fraud was rampant, and where caution was absent. Because of those external problems, many good hardworking people were steered, under a sort of duress, into financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer.

Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another [on this day] to think about what this means practically or what policies we should adopt as a country.

Note the clear values; note, also, the immediate disclaimer about how those values are to be implemented. (In yesterday’s New York Times, Tablet Magazine contributor Todd Gitlin expertly explored how far Occupy Wall Street’s essentially anarchist, policy-free plank has gotten them—and argues it won’t take them much further.)

I was lucky to have been there. Participating, politics took on an emotional poignancy they rarely do, and the spiritual issues we are commanded to think about during Yom Kippur—including those raised in the haftarah, from Isaiah, in which we are exhorted to think of what kind of fast God truly desires—were made as real and personal as my learning has told me they should be. Besides all of which, it was immensely moving to be a part of a group of Jews practicing our religion publicly and peaceably; I schepped naches from the organizers, who were very clearly putting hard-earned Jewish summer camp experience to good use; I felt like I was part of a community, in the way that the concept of the minyan is supposed to encourage.

Halal vendors dotted the outskirts, prompting one smart aleck to remark that we were their worst nightmare: several hundred Jews who weren’t eating. A couple onlookers claimed that the firm Brown Brothers Harriman, whose very tall building we all faced when looking east, had helped finance the Nazis, and that Bush’s grandfather had been a part of it. This cynic chalked the rambling up to dorm-room investigative journalism, until a quick Google revealed it to be totally true. Though I tend not to be one for crunchier variants of Judaism, the few moments of schmaltz were outweighed by the moral seriousness of the larger mission. And the politics should have been welcome to, let’s say, the open-minded. “I will be more accountable for Palestine. Aleinu,” was followed by, “I will be more accountable for Israel. Aleinu.” Afterward, a few folks pulled out instruments—a violin, a guitar—and there was dancing. “Early rabbinic texts call Yom Kippur one of the two happiest days of the year,” George Davis, our rabbi for the evening, told us. “What makes this day happy? It is the day of forgiveness.”

What seems undeniable is that the service, less than trying to advance a cause, was trying to be a cause. The organizers did not intend primarily to argue for a certain vision of society; they endeavored to be that society, in this instance an observant Jewish slice of it, in which members of all different denominations (Sieradski told me that from the chazzan to the machzorim, official Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox organs had all chipped in), political beliefs, and—emphasis here—classes and sexual orientations can come together to share in ancient ritual.

In this, the service was a perfect match for Occupy Wall Street itself, which to this point has been most successful in simply (to crib from Gandhi) being the change it wishes to see in the world rather than enacting it on a systemic level. A trip back to Lower Manhattan yesterday confirmed this. There is a fascinating, functioning mini-society in Zuccotti Park. There is a food line. There is a medical station, with a doctor on call. There is a newspaper (including a Spanish edition, a copy of which I proudly own). There are exhibits, almost as in a museum, showing new and better ways to live.

The politics yesterday remained focused on “occupying Wall Street”—calling to account a system that rewards the richest one percent with 40 percent of the country’s wealth and that allows financial tycoons who pay low tax rates and exploited the ignorance of the less-well-off to have prime membership in that top one percent. (Wall Street is responding: reportedly, JPMorgan Chase’s weekly email on the global economy was titled, “Tikkun Olam.”) Around 4, there was a rally led by clergy, and a rabbi got up and recited Isaiah on fasting. I saw a sign that read, “End the Occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.” I saw anti-Obama signs; I saw pro-Obama signs. What was almost totally lacking were any of the things you worry about. I saw a sign that read, “Finally, an occupation a radical Jew can get behind,” and if you don’t see that as harmless, I fear how much must trouble your sleep. I saw a solitary guy spouting Che. Will he be joined by more? That would be very, very sad.

If only there were another Jewish celebration that could continue with the theme of benevolent occupation. Say, a holiday in which you build a makeshift house and eat and sleep in it.

What’s that you say? It starts Wednesday night?

Yes, folks, it’s true: I can confirm that Sieradski and friends will be building an Occupy Wall Street sukkah.

Yom Kippur Prayers for Corporate Atonement at Occupy Wall Street [Religion Dispatches]
Related: The Left Declares Its Independence [NYT]
Earlier: Panic in Zuccotti Park

• Organizers of this year’s Gaza flotilla say it will be twice as large as last year’s and depart in the third week of June so that it is after the Turkish elections—not that Turkey’s government is officially connected. [AP/WP]

• Normally retrograde Shas spiritual adviser Rabbi Ovadia Yosef cited doctors in encouraging his followers to quit smoking. Progress! [JPost/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Mideast expert Gilles Kepel advises President Obama to invest his “political capital” from the Bin Laden killing into resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [NYT]

•The Simon Wiesenthal Center is anti-Washington City Paper and just honored Tom Cruise. I’ll never understand Los Angeles. [JTA]

• Todd Gitlin offers an original and important perspective into the Kushner-CUNY mess: Namely, why should somebody like Jeffrey Wiesenfeld be a trustee of a major public university in the first place? [Chronicle of Higher Ed.]

Fred Karger, undoubtedly Tablet Magazine’s favorite Republican presidential candidate, has an ad that truly can only be described as trippy. But surely even conservatives dig Frisbee?

But the profile depicts someone much more complex than the caricature of Peretz, furthered by his enemies but buttressed by his own blogposts, as a ranting, right-wing, and—there’s really no denying it—occasionally racist pundit. Partly, this more balanced view of Peretz is the result of a peace process so stagnant that someone on the right cannot help but seem like a moderate (Palestinian President Salam Fayyad is “a very modernizing person, but I would doubt that he commands loyalty,” Peretz says, and one can easily imagine someone with opposite views nodding in agreement). And partly, this more balanced view of Peretz may also be the result of the fact that Peretz—despite being, as the article’s title has it, “in Exile” from most of the things that have defined his seven decades (the United States, Harvard, his now-ex-wife, The New Republic)—cooperated with the profile and so presumably had some ability to craft the narrative it tells. This is not pure supposition on my part: Earlier this fall, a reporter on assignment for Tablet Magazine tried to interview Peretz about his participation in an English-language teaching program in Jaffa (which the profile opens with), only to be told Peretz wanted nothing written about his trip.

The article’s most important contribution to the public record is its filling in of the recent controversy surrounding Peretz’s remark, “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims,” and the brouhaha it led to at Harvard. There good reporting about his unhappy childhood and about his long, tapering, and finally finished marriage. There is some choice inside-baseball stuff (longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier remains a close friend of Peretz’s, but they no longer discuss Israel, which makes sense; TNR writer John Judis “knows zero” about Israel, Peretz opines, which isn’t true). There is one timeless line—“I mean, fuck these fancy Upper West Side rabbis,” Peretz complains—and another, from the writer Fouad Ajami, that seems really to get at the man: “Arabs understand Marty. He has that Middle Eastern quality: me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world.”

And yet the true defense of Martin Peretz (besides the fact that he and his wife funded the presidential campaign of maybe the most worthy politician of the past fifty years, Eugene McCarthy) comes in one of those indelibly New York-y sidebars that runs alongside the article. It depicts the chronology of The New Republic’s editors: Michael Kinsley; Hendrik Hertzberg; Andrew Sullivan; Peter Beinart; Frank Foer. Those are some of the best and most important journalists of the past quarter-century, and Peretz sponsored them all, and in certain cases discovered them. You could add in a dozen or two-dozen more writers—Charles Krauthammer; Margaret Talbot; Jonathan Chait; Hanna Rosin; James Wood; Ruth Franklin—whom we perhaps would not have heard of were it not for Peretz. This is to say nothing of Wieseltier, whom Peretz has given rein to run the back of TNR’s book for 30 years, to nearly everyone’s benefit (I say “nearly” because one is obliged to spill a drop for some of the writers reviewed there).

Peretz’s legacy is his magazine. And so the best news the article brings is that Peretz’s magazine will soon discontinue the worst thing about it—Peretz’s blog.

Peretz in Exile [New York]
Related: Facts on the Ground
Earlier: Harvard Cancels Peretz Speech

He arrives in the Arab village of Silwan during one of its famed regular Friday-afternoon protests, which frequently attract prominent Israeli left-wing activists.

On this occasion, the 300 to 400 demonstrators, some banging drums, were in a festive mood, perhaps because they knew that former President Jimmy Carter and former Irish President Mary Robinson were expected. They were mostly young, almost entirely Israeli, and cheered on by an encampment of young Palestinians. These Friday afternoon gatherings have evolved into the quintessential rituals of the Israeli left. On a Saturday evening last March, some 3,000 protesters showed up.

At the dot of 4 p.m., Carter’s limo drove up. Chants began: “Carr-terr! Carr-terr!” Carter and Robinson waded into the crowd, Carter was handed a bullhorn and offered “congratulations” to the protesters for “trying to resolve this injustice peacefully.” He deplored “demolition” and “confiscation.” Carter, the president who brokered a peace treaty between Israel and its most formidable military enemy, is regularly, vehemently, reviled by the Israeli right and its American supporters. At the Mt. Zion Hotel, his name was synonymous with the devil incarnate.

Facts on the Ground

It tells of Joseph, now reconciled with his treacherous brothers, and his struggle to keep Egypt afloat during a terrible and prolonged drought. Disgruntled, the people come to Joseph and demand satisfaction. “Give us food,” they say. “Why should we die in your presence, since the money has been used up?” But Joseph is tough and effective. He collects all the remaining cash, barters food for livestock, and sustains the economy throughout a volatile period. He is a paragon of good government and the embodiment of personal responsibility.

Assange is not. The man who famously expressed his glee at crushing bastards has never specified just who the bastards might be, but his behavior leaves little room for doubt: While he does not appear to be a classical, ideological anarchist, Assange seems imbued with the lawless spirit that represents so much of what is good and what is reprehensible about the Internet; the bastards he enjoys crushing are people with power, and it is their power, more than any concrete fault or inherent flaw, that makes them worthy of crushing.

Rising to Assange’s defense this week, Glenn Greenwald criticized a column by my friend and co-author Todd Gitlin, who condemned Wikileaks. Taking offense with the assertion that the Wikileaks leak was an indiscriminate data dump, Greenwald argued instead that Assange and Co. acted responsibly and judiciously. “WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has,” Greenwald wrote. “Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.). Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm.”

But the partnership between Wikileaks and the media is not an easy one. How uneasy? The New York Times—as the paper’s Executive Editor, Bill Keller, recently told readers in an online conversation—is “not a ‘media partner’” of Wikileaks. It’s hard to imagine the Gray Lady going to such lengths to disassociate itself from, say, Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg, and for good reason: Before giving his purloined documents to the Times, Ellsberg sent copies to Henry Kissinger and Senators William Fulbright and George McGovern, pleading with them to reevaluate the Vietnam war. Only after none was taken did he turn to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Assange, on the other hand, took a different route. As the AP reports, “days before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property.”

These are more than just divergent attitudes. To Daniel Ellsberg, whistle-blowing was the final step that came only after every other imaginable course of action has disappointed. Assange made no such concentrated effort. The invitation he extended the ambassador is as disingenuous as the one offered to the media: Unlike Ellsberg, Assange had the Internet, and, most likely, he intended to publish the documents no matter what and let his so-called partners in the press, the U.S. government, and just about everybody else scramble to cast themselves in the drama he was writing and directing.

Which makes Assange the anti-Joseph. While the ancient Hebrew, a high official in the Pharaoh’s court, used his power to protect the institution of government during trying times, Assange used his technological savvy to elevate himself to the government’s level, impudently offering the State Department a shot at a joint copy-editing effort as if the American ambassador in London and the founder of a website were equally endowed partners.

Herein lies the problem: To think that an individual and an institution—a government, an embassy, an army—are entitled to the same privileges and expectations and should butt heads on the same playing field, leveled by technology, is not only spurious but suggests a deep ontological confusion. Governments have their powers and responsibilities, and Assange seems envious of the former and oblivious of the latter.

It is a shame, then, that the often-astute Greenwald missed the larger point of Gitlin’s piece, namely that Assange and his fellow Wikileakers are interested not in reforming government but in subduing it. They want the machinations of military and diplomatic affairs—machinations that must, by definition and necessity, remain frequently unlit—made visible for all to see and inspect, but, possessing no understanding of how government actually works, offer no concrete ideas for enlightenment. This is the raw and terrible power of the data dump as metaphor; that Assange preselected a few of his many documents for publication does little to endow him with responsibility or respectability. In leaking the documents—be it some or all of them—without bothering, as Ellsberg had, to put them in the appropriate context and draw concrete conclusions and try first to bring them to the attention of higher-ups in the government, Assange is like a child who hurls a brick through a window and then boasts of having exposed the fragility of glass.

Among the more interesting news on the Wikileaks front this week was Assange’s announcement that he’d sent the cables obtained by Wikileaks—all of them—to more than 100,000 supporters around the world with the instructions to reveal them should something happen to Assange or his organization. The files, he assured worried souls, were thoroughly encrypted. Beyond the obvious irony on display—a hacker’s assurance that the information he wants protected is perfectly safe—this act calls into question Greenwald’s assertion that Assange never indiscriminately published his entire trove. Sending a file to more than 100,000 people, even if it is encrypted, is an act of publishing; that Assange’s lawyer labeled the file the “thermonuclear device” further suggests that the Wikileaks mindset is more reminiscent of the rogue bent on destruction than of the activist committed to change.

In his long lifetime, Joseph had his share of both activists and rogues. And he had the wisdom and wherewithal to bless the former—even when, like his brothers, they were guilty of terrible sins—and vehemently reject the latter. Let us follow his lead.

News, however, that Harvard’s Social Studies Department dropped him as a speaker at its upcoming 50th anniversary celebration forces the issue.

And the issue is this: Despite Peretz’s legalistic retraction (albeit of a different sentence, regarding not extending First Amendment protections to Muslims) and sincere atonement—his Kol Nidre and his Yom Kippur, if you will—this is not the first time he has written something racist, and it isn’t the fifteenth time, either. While I am not sure if this was the best choice of medium, someone has made a Twitter feed documenting the dozens of questionable—no, make that unquestionably out-of-bounds—things Peretz has said over the years. We all publish things we would take back. But the tonnage of these quotations and the consistency of their content demonstrate that Peretz’s insensitivity and bigotry toward Muslims and Arabs (er, and black people) yank him out of the realm of people you should be reading on the subject.

So whom should you be reading? Today Todd Gitlin eloquently argued that Peretz’s latest comment came at exactly the wrong time. “When the margins crawl with insanity,” he wrote, “it is all the more important for the vital center of calm, reasonable, evidence-based thought to hold.” Where is that vital center? You could start with where Gitlin’s essay was published: The New Republic. You could continue with the best thing you will read concerning the Islamic center, which was published in … The New Republic. See my point? It will be a tremendous shame if a reader were to stop taking Peretz’s magazine seriously just because he has (correctly) stopped taking Peretz’s own writing seriously. But even though such a reader would be the one to blame for that decision, I hope Peretz would find it regrettable, and I hope he will do his part to prevent it from happening. In a word: Stop.

Peretz Dropped As Harvard Event Speaker [JTA]
Related: This Manichean Moment [TNR]
@martyperetz [Twitter]

• Chicago Mayor Richard Daley surprisingly announced he won’t run for re-election. White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, long rumored to be on his way out after the midterms, has said he would like the job someday. You do the math. [The Caucus]

• Credit where it’s due: The Anti-Defamation League initiated and is sponsoring the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques to provide support to Muslim communities facing local opposition to proposed mosques. [ADL]

• As 5771 dawns, Israel’s population grew to more than 7.6 million—nearly 5.8 million of which are Jews. [JTA]

• Where are the Great Rabbis of old? [Slate]

• Our very own Liel Leibovitz and Todd Gitlin—co-writers of the forthcoming The Chosen Peoples—argue that Israelis and Palestinians should seek to understand each other’s religious and historical investments in the land they share. [LAT]

An Obama shana tova.

But in the past few years, Horowitz (who appeared in Tablet Magazine last week in a debate over the “Ground Zero mosque”) has also produced two small, philosophically searching, extraordinarily dark memoirs: The End of Time, from 2005, about his diagnosis of prostate cancer, and A Cracking of the Heart, published last year, about the loss of his daughter. In these works, Horowitz has much to say about contemporary Jewish ethics—and particularly about the popular concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world,” which he sees as dangerously utopian. If Jews believe they have “a mission to repair the world by bringing about the rule of God’s law on earth,” he argues in The End of Time, they may stop at nothing to see that will done.

Coming from Horowitz, this might seem like a predictably contrarian stance. After all, in Jewish discourse over the past few decades, tikkun olam has become a phrase almost as ubiquitous as Shabbat shalom. Hillel, about whom Joseph Telushkin has written a new biography for the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters series, was the first to apply the concept to interpreting Jewish law. Codified in the Mishnah, elaborated by the Kabbalists as an injunction to restore the world to its divine order, and retrieved from obscurity by the Jewish Renewal movement in the 1960s and ’70s, the term has a connotation of progressive politics but is used today in a broad range of Jewish contexts to signify social action of all sorts. But in fact, Horowitz’s critique seems to have anticipated new rumblings in the Jewish zeitgeist: a reconsideration, from quarters more mainstream than his own, of tikkun olam.

“It’s a new trope on the right,” said Todd Gitlin, co-author with Tablet Magazine staffer Liel Leibovitz of a forthcoming book on the concept of “chosen people” and an occasional sparring partner with Horowitz. Gitlin said he encountered the tikkun olam backlash at a conclave last year, where he heard Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman take aim at the concept. “It suggests that the errors of the left are rooted in a theological mistake—and by implication, these are bad Jews who have forsaken their own people because of a misinterpretation of a text.”

Even Michael Lerner, the rabbi most deeply associated with “tikkun olam”—his magazine Tikkun helped launch the term to prominence in the 1980s—has his qualms.

“As my analysis began to sweep through the Jewish world in the mid-’90s, more and more Jewish organizations were looking for a quick fix,” Lerner said in an email. According to Lerner, such organizations tacked the phrase to occasional volunteer projects but still have yet to address deeper political issues. “It was the adoption of the language of tikkun olam without its substance that has provided some Jews with a new way of feeling proud of their Judaism on the cheap.” (Another progressive rabbi, Jill Jacobs, noted in a 2008 essay that some of her colleagues have suggested tossing out the term or “putting it on a twenty-year hiatus.”)

As Gitlin suggested, Horowitz argues that a theological mistake undergirds the leftist thinking of those like Lerner, whom he called a “menace” in an interview. (“Leftist,” in Horowitz’s usage, is a broad term; it seems to extend, for instance, to most people who vote for Democrats.) While leftists, he claims, hew to the notion that people are born pure and are corrupted by society, conservatives accept the fact that, as he writes in The End of Time, “a black hole lies at the bottom of every human soul.” (Sometimes, for an agnostic Jew, Horowitz sounds very Catholic. “We were given a perfect world, better than socialism,” he told Tablet. “And we couldn’t refrain from the temptation to do evil. I wish that I’d been taught a doctrine of original sin.”)

Coming from this philosophical position, Horowitz believes that attempts at tikkun olam are grave folly. Adherents to the concept—and particularly, those who have tied Jewish ethics to liberal politics—“believe you can make the world holy,” he said in an interview. “And that’s the most dangerous idea around. That’s the Mohammed Atta idea; that’s the idea of the guy who murdered the abortion doctor.” In The End of Time, Horowitz ultimately calls for a kind of anti-humanist existentialism. “Every life is an injustice,” he concludes. “And no one can fix it.” His argument culminates in a disavowal of “Moses, Jesus, Buddha, the Hindu gurus” for their naive encomiums to empathy.

In A Cracking of the Heart, Horowitz’s tone moves from aggrieved to grieving, and his attitude toward tikkun olam shifts slightly along with it. Horowitz’s daughter, Sarah, who had often served as her father’s political interlocutor, died at age 44 in 2008 from complications of Turner syndrome. Sarah was active in a progressive corner of the Jewish world deeply invested in the notion of tikkun olam—“a particular bone of our contentions,” Horowitz wrote. (Tablet Magazine’s predecessor site published an interview with Sarah Horowitz on the subject shortly before her death.) After she died, Horowitz found in Sarah’s apartment a page from the manuscript of The End of Time, which he remembered sending to his daughter in the spirit of debate. “You are not smarter than Moses, Jesus and Buddha,” she had wryly noted in the margins—and to some extent, he conceded.

Others who have inveighed against tikkun olam have done so in more measured terms. Foxman acknowledged that he’d taken a swipe at the concept at last year’s Jewish People’s Policy Planning Conference but said that his problem was not with tikkun olam as a value but with its current ubiquity in religious discourse. “What I’ve been critical of is those who have sold Judaism as, ‘All you have to do is love universally and that’s Judaism,’ ” Foxman said. “It’s not—it’s ersatz Judaism. It’s Judaism lite.” It also, Foxman added pointedly, has the potential to elevate political action on behalf of others while brushing past the theological significance of acting on behalf of Jews.

A similar debate has arisen in mainstream rabbinic circles. In 2006, Gordon Tucker, a Conservative movement leader who serves as rabbi at Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York, delivered a Rosh Hashanah sermon that rebutted an oration being given by a Modern Orthodox rabbi a few suburbs away. The latter sermon, which Tucker had previewed at a rabbinical seminar, was called “The Two Most Dangerous Words in the Hebrew Language”; Tucker said he was “shaken” to hear that the two words were tikkun olam. (Jeremiah Wohlberg, the now-retired author of that sermon, did not respond to calls for comment.)

Asked whether he believed Horowitz’s critique held water, Tucker said that the rabbis of old who originated the concept had specifically guarded against Horowitz’s fears. “The rabbinic tradition is decidedly not utopian, in that it accepts the need to live and work in an imperfect world, and yet at the same time promotes the idea of an obligation to work in the direction of perfecting the world more than it already is,” he wrote in an email. “The words tikkun olam, after all, come from that same non-utopian rabbinic tradition.”

Marissa Brostoff is a former staff writer at Tablet Magazine. She is currently studying for a doctorate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The Hollywood jargon isn’t entirely inappropriate. The scolding sermon in question, by the prophet Isaiah, has everything a blockbuster can hope for: Sex (“how has she become a harlot, a faithful city”)! Corruption (“everyone loves bribes and runs after payments”)! A happy ending (“Zion shall be redeemed through justice and her penitent through righteousness”)! Good luck getting all that from a bunch of brooding vampires.

Isaiah laments the moral depravity of his people and preaches justice and compassion. While his fellow Israelites engage in worldly pursuits, he devotes himself to ethereal visions. This is why this Shabbat is called “Shabbat Hazon,” or the Shabbat of the vision: As we prepare to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, we’re instructed to reflect on Isaiah’s divinations and chart our own course toward repentance and redemption.

And what’s true for Jewish people is even more pressing for the Jewish state.

For the past year, I have frequently used this column to tie the prophets’ ire to Israel’s contemporary woes. Too often, I was saddened to discover in the ancient rebukes sharp lessons for modern times. The lamentations felt fresh, as if the sinfulness and hard-heartedness that so pained Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the rest of their holy ilk were committed not in biblical times but just a short while ago. But this week, I wish to linger on no specific ill. This week, I’d like to think about vision.

It’s a strange thing, of course, to believe that a state must have a vision. The overwhelming majority of nations, after all, owe their existence not to some ephemeral organizing principle but to geographical proximities, historical consequences, and ethnic similarities. They inhabit contiguous slivers of land long enough to mine for shared cultures and common ways. They become nations the way animals become fossils, a centuries-long journey in which a once-living entity becomes an immutable part of the landscape.

Israel is not such a nation. Israel was founded on an idea. It came to be because generations of Jews looked back at the covenant between God and his Chosen People and decided that they could no longer wait for the Messiah to lead them to the Promised Land. They had a vision. Some called it Zionism, others mixed in elements of socialism or militarism or literature or labor or religion. But the Jewish vision hadn’t changed in millennia. It remained the same from the destruction of the Temple onward. The vision called for an independent and just Jewish community in the Land of Israel, the sort the Lord had in mind when he spoke, at Sinai, of a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. That was the vision that propelled scores to war and hardship, the vision in whose name I and so many others took up arms. And that vision, alas, is in peril.

The problem isn’t left versus right. It has nothing to do with Palestinian violence or the Iranian threat. It looms far above the petty concerns that fill up the pages of our newspapers and our dinner-table conversations. The problem is existential: Israel, I believe, has lost its vision.

How else to explain a nation that so desperately and candidly craves peace and yet time and again lends its unequivocal support to military escapades that gain nothing but calumny? How to account for a population that disagrees bitterly with the settlers’ zealous dream of grasping on to Judea and Samaria yet votes enthusiastically for those politicians who continue to build more and more Jewish outposts on the West Bank’s contentious hills? What do we say when no plan is in sight, no hope foreseeable, and the sole comfort comes from slinging mud at enemies, real or imagined?

These days, I can think of little else. These questions are at the heart of a new book I’ve co-written with Todd Gitlin—The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election—and I hope to have the opportunity to discuss them in greater length in the fall. For now, however, I can say this: The way out is further in. If—as Todd and I became convinced when researching our book—Israel wants to be a Jewish state, then let it be a Jewish state. Let it take Isaiah’s warning seriously and commit itself once more not merely to the mechanics of Judaism—its rituals and rigidities, its tired symbols and battered tropes—but to its wonderful and wild and vibrant soul, the same spirit that witnessed the birth of monotheism and made it its mission to tell the world of God and his mercy. Let it listen to the prophet and abandon its fantasies of might and money. Instead of accusing the world of hypocrisy for judging Israel by a different standard than the one habitually applied to other nations, let it cheer and reply that any nation that was forged in the crucible of divine election, that was founded on faith in being God’s favorites sons, has no choice but to accept double standards as a matter of fact. Let it learn to tell the difference between the malicious few who burn with hatred and the perplexed many who look at Israel’s actions and wonder—as every sensible and conscientious person must wonder—just what kind of future the Jewish state imagines for itself.

As we ponder these questions, let us praise the instruments of war or the pirouettes of peace, each of us according to her or his heart; for some the road might be clear, for others pebbled with the debris of broken promises and shattered dreams. But let us never stop thinking about our vision, and let our vision never stray far from that bequeathed to us from above. This summer, if you have only one thought of transcendence and fate, let this be the one.

“Our history,” he writes, “is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.” The Jews survived not by virtue of virtue, or wisdom, or moral—or any other kind of—intelligence, he argues, but by dumb luck. In fact, we had better beware of those who rank us high for excellence, since they may soon be sharpening their guillotines when we fall short of the presumptuous standard we ourselves claim.

Chabon works his way to the conclusion that we Jews have been hoist by our own petard. What’s at fault are our exalted standards: “Let us not, henceforward, judge Israel or seek to have it judged for its intelligence, for its prowess, for its righteousness or for its moral authority,” he says, “by any standard other than the pathetic, debased and rickety one that we apply, so inconsistently and self-servingly, to ourselves and to everybody else.”

The idea of the Jews as a chosen people, Chabon maintains, is the fruit of a poisoned tree. Yet what to do with the tree, he doesn’t say. Should it be uprooted? Without it, what remains of Judaism? We think the estimable author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union underestimates the bizarre idea of chosenness—peculiar, even incredible as it may be. The idea is stranger and richer than he grants, and might indeed, if properly understood, offer a way out of the trap that the present government of Israel has burrowed its way into.

Two years ago, when the two of us first set out to think our way into a book about the concept of chosenness, we felt much as he feels now. We are secular types. Like him, we felt queasy about the exceptionalism that holds one nation—any nation—to be more exalted than others. We thought that divine election was nothing but a dangerous folly that Jews—and Americans, too, whose sense of nationood stems from being “God’s new Israel”—ought to abandon or overcome.

But our reading of history and some of Judaism’s core texts—from the Bible onward—convinced us to think again. The idea of chosenness is more than presumptuous—though it is that. It is also foundational. Who are the Jews in the first place if not a people that believe that their ancestor was singled out—if unaccountably—by God?

According to Genesis, after all, God’s choice of Abraham is at first unmotivated. His first covenant, after all, was with Noah because the man was righteous, and for his sake God would honor “all flesh that is upon the earth.” But His later covenant with Abraham, it is said, will generate a whole particular people to be God’s own. This is mystifying, since it owes nothing to any particular quality of Abraham’s. But eventually God will clarify by delivering divine law to Moses and the Israelites. In a way, the Jewish people have invented the idea of chosenness, but in truth, the idea of chosenness has also invented the Jewish people. Such is Judaism’s wonderfully inverted logic: First comes redemption, only then reasons.

What the Jews get in the bargain is as much ordeal as assurance. Other peoples do not necessarily appreciate the Jews claiming the land. Massacres ensue, and bitter conflicts, and exile. Yet somehow, across the centuries, the Jews doggedly and ingeniously believe themselves to be God’s dearest children, bound by a set of edicts. They remain distinct—they survive as a people. When Chabon credits Jewish survival to blind luck, he ignores the essential significance of the idea of chosenness—that only by believing themselves to be God’s dearest children, and therefore bound to principles that distinguish them from the nations of man, do the Jews manage to retain their distinct identity. Now, as in the days of Abraham, we owe all to this rich and strange idea.

What to do with such an onerous and baffling conviction? The Torah provides little clarification. God tells the Israelites that they are destined to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The exact terms of service are never revealed. In perplexity over the meaning of the fundamental contract of their existence—a contract as obscure as it is formative—the Jews devote themselves to parsing texts. They become a kingdom of critics. Trying to work out the meaning of holiness, figuring out their moral responsibilities to themselves and to others—this is their mission. As Chabon writes, the message is decidedly ambiguous. But this is the Jews’ saving paradox. Rather than place our faith in the divine, we are supposed to figure out our duties for ourselves.

Seen in this light, chosenness is central to the existence of the Jews. It’s an unearthly idea but not an inhuman one. To reclaim it is not a warrant for smugness but a holy obligation. True, the work of reclaiming it runs a sizable risk: That exceptionalism will gather unwarranted praise as well as undue scrutiny. So be it. The Jewish state has received both in generous portions. Now, it must reject both out of hand—in the name of a deep understanding of chosenness. If it is to thrive, it must heed neither the cooing nor the calumny. To be chosen means to spend one’s days trying to ascertain what it means to be chosen, a quest that, if undertaken with an open mind and an honest heart, leads to the growth of the spirit.

It would be unwise to allow sole custody over this volatile idea to zealots of any persuasion. The idea of chosenness is too deeply ingrained in us to be overlooked, patronized, or definitively repealed. Whether or not we believe that the descendants of Abraham were singled out, in perpetuity, by God, and whether or not we find this to be an outlandish, if not offensive, notion—no matter what, we must grapple with it, for it is, behind our backs, grappling with us.

Chosen, but Not Special [NYT]
The Chosen Peoples [Amazon]

Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz are co-authors of the upcoming The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, published in September by Simon & Schuster.

Ruth R. Wisse: Seventeen years ago I published If I Am Not For Myself, a book on the “liberal betrayal of the Jews,” which addresses Norman Podhoretz’s question, arriving at similar conclusions by a different route. It is often assumed that Jews are “liberal” out of compassion for the poor, sympathy for the downtrodden, and other generous impulses rooted in the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, or, repairing the world. I have never accepted this self-congratulatory idea. In my experience, when Jews interpret their Judaism as liberalism it is because, to paraphrase Sholem Aleichem, “It is harder to be a Jew.” Those who substitute “liberal” for “Jew” as the basis of self-definition often fail to protect the rights of their own people, or worse, condone the aggression of their adversaries in the name of promoting peace.

To be sure, as Podhoretz amply illustrates, there are strong liberal features within Jewish tradition that define and sustain the Jewish way of life. These include a politics of self-accountability, respect for the individual and rule of law, and toleration of other religions and cultures. Herzl’s Zionism was at once a plan to create a liberal Jewish society and to save European liberalism from anti-Semitism. But paradoxically, the liberalizing elements in Judaism have contributed to making Jews an irresistible target of anti-liberals. This often forces a choice between Jewishness, which is liberal, and liberalism, which sacrifices the Jews to its vision of universal brotherhood.

The demographer Sergio Della Pergola estimates that were it not for the destruction of European Jewry, there could now be as many as 32 million Jews in the world rather than the several million fewer than there were in 1939. A demographically stronger people would discourage aggression and make Jews a less attractive political foil. Can one count on liberals to take the lead in strengthening, defending, and celebrating the Jewish people and its homeland? I don’t think so. May they prove me wrong.

Ruth R. Wisse is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her latest book, Jews and Power was published by Nextbook Press.

Morris Dickstein: As immigrant groups gain success in America, as their children and grandchildren climb the economic ladder, their politics usually follows their pocketbooks. With some exceptions, Jews have not kept to this pattern, confounding the received wisdom of sociologists and the fervent hopes of neoconservatives, who have repeatedly promised to deliver the Jewish vote to an ever more conservative Republican Party. Why?

Most Jews have remained liberals because they are, well, Jews. Their social conscience dates back to the laws of Moses and the moral injunctions of the Hebrew prophets. Their word for charity, tsedakah, is virtually the same as their word justice, tsedek, and their word for a righteous man, tsadik. Their fathers and grandfathers grew up poor. Strangely, they remember where they came from, and even more strangely, they empathize with others who are still struggling. Their subliminal memories go back not only to the ghetto and the tenement but to the condition of being despised outsiders, humiliated, persecuted, even killed.

This memory of oppression is built into their DNA, like the adjuration in the Torah and the Haggadah never to forget that they were once slaves in Egypt. But there are real memories as well. As a child in the Ukraine, my mother recalled being hidden under piles of hay when local pogroms broke out, and she remembered hearing bloodcurdling stories of much larger pogroms that took place hundreds of years earlier. The Holocaust renewed such memories, if they needed renewing. They enabled American Jews, living in moderate comfort, to identify with the plight of poor blacks, as they still encourage liberal Israelis to sympathize with the condition of Palestinians, so long as they are not actively killing Jews.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jewish nationalists have a different reading of this history of persecution. They turn inward, circling the wagons. But this same history transformed most secular Jews into ethical universalists. Imperfectly, since they are human beings, they learned to live by Kant’s categorical imperative, essentially a version of the Golden Rule. My teacher, Sidney Morgenbesser, following Hillel, once formulated this as “Do not unto others as you would not have others do unto you.”

In short, Jews bought into the historical forces that liberated them: the Enlightenment, with its faith in universal human rights, and the French Revolution, with its insistence on equality, a career open to talents. Without these developments, Western Jews would still be locked in ghettos, deprived of all economic and political rights. The United States, with its unparalleled freedoms, would simply never have happened. Many Jews also invested their hopes in socialism, as a fulfillment of this egalitarian vision, and especially in labor unions as its concrete realization. The New Deal was their charter of economic freedom, their coming of age. In remarkable numbers they sought higher education for their children, which liberalized them further by enlarging their sense of history.

Even when this romance with the left disappointed them, when the movement seemed to betray its original ideals, those values themselves have kept their hold on ordinary Jews, including those living privileged lives in circumstances freer than any that Jews have ever enjoyed. This is a minor miracle, one still to be celebrated.

Morris Dickstein’s new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, has just been published by W. W. Norton.

Jonah Goldberg: Why are Jews liberal? In all its various forms, there is probably no question I get asked more. I have not yet had the pleasure of being edified by Norman Podhoretz’s take, which I’m told is a great read, so let me offer a sliver of my own answer to the question.

The liberalism of American Jews is, I believe, what social scientists would call an over-determined phenomenon. Some of it has to do with broader social trends that Jews are not immune to. The over-educated often drift toward liberalism out of the arrogance that they’re smart enough to have all the answers. The wealthy, contrary to much liberal propaganda, are trending more liberal every day, particularly among “idea worker” types. Secularism is one of the most reliable indices of liberalism and many Jews seem to think that secularism is a religious imperative.

Then there are the various and sundry factors derived from the unique history of the Jews. In Old Europe, Jews were often a special class who looked to the throne for protection from the anti-Semitic rabble and the pogroms (“If only the Czar knew!”). This gives Jews a long heritage of viewing statism as a survival strategy. The big wave of Jews who came to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century brought the thriving fad of socialism with them and they saw an America that seemed to confirm the need for leftwing reform.

Anti-Semitism was long associated with institutions that seemed more Republican and conservative (the reverse is closer to the truth today). Harry Truman was a midwife to Israel’s birth.

And that introduces the Holocaust. The impact of the Holocaust cuts deep and long. But one result has been a tendency among American Jews to think that fighting for a progressive, statist, vision of “social justice” is a moral, even definitional, imperative for Jews today.

There’s also the simple fact that people tend to share the views of their parents. Contrary to the cultural mythology of children rebelling from their parents, the vast majority of people inherit their politics, just like their eye color, from their Mom and Dad. Perhaps, because Jews mix politics and religion so thoroughly, this tendency is even stronger among members of the tribe.

The knot of Jewish liberalism is large, old and has many strands. It will take a long time to untie it.

Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

Todd Gitlin: Among all ethnicities, Jews voted for Barack Obama in proportions second only to African-Americans. A population who do not strictly vote their pocketbooks! This sounds like some kind of scandal, if not an act of unaccountable blindness or even self-hatred. But if there is a scandal, it is one with a lineage. The liberalism of American Jews is not a new story.

Or could it be that Jews are not violating their self-interest at all? That they’re actually so smart as to realize that it’s in their class interest to elect Democrats because, whatever their rhetoric of equal rights, Democrats are in practice kinder to citizens who make their money the way Jews make their money—from the professions, disproportionately? I suppose someone could crunch the numbers and confirm or deny that Jews are secret, or unconscious, self-seekers after all. But I suspect that, in the end, it would turn out that Jews benefited materially from Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s picnics-for-the-prosperous more than they have under Democratic presidents. The anomaly of the Jews’ political counterintuitive allegiance would remain.

It might be supposed, then, that Judaism itself—something about its doctrines and observances—accounts for the violation of material self-interest. After all, while its doctrinal history is tangled and frequently self-contradictory, Judaism speaks of justice. It doesn’t speak only of justice, but it speaks of moral obligations both to members and strangers.

But there are strong justice motifs in other religions as well, and Jews who do not practice Judaism are no less liberal than those who do. Are we talking, then, about a different relation to the religion one professes? Are American Jews more devout—more sincere, in some sense—than other Americans? I do not know just what would constitute evidence for a yes.

Is it that Democratic presidents have satisfied Jews’ feelings for Israel better than Republicans? That seems implausible.

I know no better hypothesis that the following: Jews pride themselves on defying self-interest. They rejoice in the anomaly. This is in no small part because the theological foundation of Judaism is the belief that one’s people were chosen to carry out a unique relation to divine purpose. Jews may not be more devout than others, but somehow—and I do not understand quite how—we relish the opportunity to answer the question, “If I am for myself alone, what do I amount to?” with liberalism’s great appeal, which is to self-transcendence.

Todd Gitlin, a onetime president of Students for a Democratic Society who teaches at Columbia University, is the author of 12 books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

Ron Radosh: To understand why Jews in America today are overwhelmingly liberal, one has to start with their history in this country, beginning with their mass immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia from the 1880’s through the 1920’s. This group of first generation immigrants were escaping from oppressive anti-Semitism, which limited their horizons in every conceivable way, to a society that held out the promise of a life lived in freedom. And when they got here it was the Democrats, organized in the big city machines, who more or less welcomed them and who became familiar figures.

By the 1930s, many of those who were first attracted to union militancy and socialism left the ranks of these movements, and aligned with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, whose programs gave them union recognition (through the Wagner Act) which meant an entrée into the middle class. The New Deal also gave them Social Security. Most American Jews revered F.D.R. and loyalty to the New Deal and the Democratic Party became a matter of faith.

Some Zionist leaders around the time of Israel’s founding, especially Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, argued that Jews should not be beholden to one political party and sought bi-partisan support for the creation of a Jewish State. But despite the crucial support of many Republicans, Silver’s pleas fell on deaf ears among most of his brethren who continued to be loyal Democrats.

Today’s Jews are in a far different position than their ancestors. They no longer face what was once rampant anti-Semitism. They hold leading positions in all walks of life. Their children no longer face a Jewish quota in the elite colleges and universities. Yet, despite the reality of their situation, they still hold to the liberalism that has become a sine qua non of what it means to be Jewish. They act as if God would strike them dead should they pull the lever on Election Day for a Republican candidate.

Then there is the matter of religion. As they assimilated, many Jews became secular. For a time, Israel became a substitute for organized Judaism and the synagogue. But as time moved on, the identification with Israel subsided, leaving many Jews either hyper-critical of Israel, removed from identifying with the Jewish State, or as Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Commentary forum on this question, “secular and universalist.” Their liberalism is symbolized in a most extreme form by the “Judaism” advocated by Rabbi Michael Lerner, who preaches in his “Tikkun community” and journal, Tikkun, that to be Jewish means to favor a left-wing agenda at home and an emphasis on being critical of Israel while apologizing for Palestinian intransigence. This, he argues, is what flows from the ethics of the Torah and the teachings of Judaism.

The election of Barack Obama has served to reinforce the tendency of American Jews to remain liberal. One can argue till one is blue in the face that Obama’s policies are harmful to both Jews at home and Israel abroad, that his so-called outreach to the Muslim world is dangerous, and that his decision to avoid dealing with the threat of a nuclear Iran is likely to destabilize the entire Middle East. It will be to no avail. Jews were actively involved in the first phase of the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s, and as the playwright Carol Gould writes, “the ascension of Barack Obama symbolizes a dream fulfilled to a generation of Jewish Americans who were at the forefront of black liberation and to younger voters who saw him as a symbol of total change.” Were her activist parents still alive, she says, they would be “kvelling over the election of Obama.”

Ron Radosh is the co-author of A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.

The Gang, which paralyzed West Germany in the 1970s, was a hallucinatory cult of would-be Maoist urban guerrillas who over the better part of a decade hurled Molotov cocktails, robbed banks, bombed American military bases, kidnapped and killed government officials, businessmen, and police, arranged to hijack a passenger plane, drove the police crazy, drove the media wild, immolated themselves and others, and succeeded in galvanizing the young of West Germany into vicarious roles in a self-conceived urban guerrilla war—against, as they said, imperialism, the Vietnam war, Israel, and consumer capitalism.

As they careened along their arc of moral giddiness toward the apocalypse, the Baader-Meinhof Gang had all the heart and brains of an action movie—no surprise, since in more ways than one they were inspired by action movies. The German journalist Stefan Aust, who worked with Ulrike Meinhof during her journalistic days and wrote the book on which the screenplay of director Uri Edel’s new film The Baader-Meinhof Complex is based, told Fred Kaplan, writing for The New York Times, that the charismatic young tough Andreas Baader liked to tell people that “his favorite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers.” Baader, the star-leader, had an eye for branding, and paid “a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.”

What the Group wanted was nothing short of “total revolution,” in the words of one of its ideologues, Gudrun Ensslin, who once exclaimed: “in order to get no less than everything, in order to be liberated, means hate, means an effective killing machine.”

Language like that points to an ideological slipperiness resembling today’s jihadists’—a slipperiness that would have been wrestled with in a sophisticated film, which Edel’s effort is not. It was, after all, something of a sentimental convenience and something of a generational accident that Baader-Meinhof declared themselves to be on the Left at all. As the film doesn’t note, Ensslin as a teenager was partial to some views that would conventionally be called right-wing, along with others that would ordinarily be considered left-wing. Their lawyer and ideological counselor, Horst Mahler, now in his seventies, has spent his last dozen years as a professional anti-Semite and is currently serving a long sentence for Holocaust denial. But action movies are not strong on backstory, let alone exploring a history in which the modern party that most efficiently transformed itself into a “killing machine” called itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It’s a pity that a two-and-an-hour-long movie is so busy with capers and shootouts that it fails to explore this—to say the least—interesting topic.

As the film does make plain, Baader-Meinhof’s “issues” (to pirate a line from the 60s) , were not the issue, nor was their analysis lucid. They were not a political party dickering over a platform, nor a vast movement piecing together a plausible strategy out of some inchoate but slowly clarifying sentiment. The Baader-Meinhof Gang longed for the absolute, the utter purgation, the ultimate purification, the overthrowing of everything less. Their intoxication was not original to them. The bringing down of the pillars (let them fall where they may) is a grand theme running throughout German romanticism—and, the lust for the final apocalypse was not only German. It was an American radical who said in 1969, as a faction called the Weathermen were readying themselves to go underground to plant bombs, “I feel like turning myself into a brick and hurling myself.”

The gang’s trajectory was full of bang-bang and blow-up and stick-your hands-up, and their flamboyant car thefts, fire fights and ambushes, combined with ham-handed police responses, galvanized millions of young Germans who were at least half-consciously looking for a way to hold their parental generation accountable for Nazism, at a time when the upper ranks of German society (including the prime minister between 1966 and 1969) was, in fact, riddled with former Nazis. Ensslin (played by the spunky Johanna Wokalek), who turned her fierce, ignorant boyfriend Andreas Baader into a Leninist-talking household name, once told a group of less ferocious radicals: “You can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven’t. We must arm ourselves!”

This was in 1967, after a West Berlin policeman killed a protesting student for demonstrating against the Shah of Iran. From Ensslin’s lips to the ears of the young thief Baader, whom she introduced to the joy of anti-imperialism, and soon, together, they were planting two firebombs in department stores in Frankfurt am Main, for, in Ensslin’s frame of mind, West Germans were lost in a stupor of consumerism, and only firebombs would blow them out of their apathetic collusion with the forces of imperialism.

Of this conviction, Ensslin’s father, a rigorous Lutheran minister in the grip of noble angst, said during her trial that she reached “a state of almost ecstatic self-realization, of holy self-realization.” It was perceptive of him, if chilling, to speak of his daughter’s transfiguration in Gnostic rather than intellectual terms, for the faction’s ideas were the barest of bones. Baader himself had all the ideas of a Molotov cocktail, and the sensuous-lipped Moritz Bleibtreu plays him that way. The closest the movie Baader gets to a thought is this remark he throws at Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine guerrillas in a 1970 Jordanian training camp when they object to the bare-breasted female Germans: “Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together. Fucking and shooting are the same.” Ejected by the Palestinians, Baader & Co. headed back to Germany to resume their lethal adventures.

If the movie passes lightly over the ideas that were presumably the point of the crusade, then, it is in this respect accurate, as when the movie’s Ensslin confronts the journalist Ulrike Meinhof (the splendid Martina Gedeck), not yet having burned her bridges and thrown in with the Gang, with the challenge: “Do you think your theoretical masturbation will change anything?” When Ensslin proclaims, “We need a new morality,” what she means is more like no morality at all.

But the relative verisimilitude of Complex conceals its deficiency, which is the deficiency shared by its entire genre of action-history film. It suffers from the reductive quality that Arthur Miller once described to me as the “simple recognition of reality,” which is characteristic of naturalism. The student movement is brutally set on by the police. (True.) Some of the movement’s outliers resolve on “action.” By “action,” they mean violence. No alternative is proposed. The student movement is the gateway drug. What gives the movie its momentum is its sense of inevitability, for once they are launched on their course, Baader, Meinhof, and the rest are stick-figures of the Zeitgeist, not choosing human beings. They purport to be doing politics but they are doing Triumph of the Will, the absence of politics. Nobody on screen seems ever to have thought that anything could be accomplished by civil disobedience, or by any other means of changing the world besides shooting it up.

But this is only to say that the reality of Baader-Meinhof, hallucinatory as it was, was built on a delusion shared by many—that the vast crimes of the recent German past could be purged with effusions of terror and could not be purged in any other manner. The film can’t be faulted for depicting them in all their crudity. At one point, as the smart police official (played by an underutilized Bruno Ganz) says, according to a respectable poll, a quarter of West Germans under 40 said they felt “a certain sympathy” with the Gang; one in ten said they would be willing to hide one of the gang from the cops. “We must change conditions,” he says, in a sort of self-parody of liberal hand-wringing. In truth, the Gang was destroyed without global reforms—though it took years after the Vietnam War ended. At another point the Ganz character declares that what motivates Baader-Meinhof is “a myth.” The contradiction doesn’t strike him—or anyone else in the film. The movie, almost as tedious as it is breathless, moves on to the next kinetic moment.

Todd Gitlin, a onetime president of Students for a Democratic Society who teaches at Columbia University, is the author of 12 books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.