***

Might there be at least a couple of those kitschy pseudo-nostalgic cocktails served at places like Kutscher’s Tribeca at the events marking the release of Marni Davis’ first book, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition? Davis, an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, turns the facts of American Jews in the liquor trade—from bootleggers and saloon keepers to kosher vintners and the very rare Jewish Prohibition enforcer—into a tale of prejudice, negotiation, and assimilation. Many American Jews, whether or not they cared to shoot back a thimbleful of schnapps after mussaf, were suspicious of the temperance movement and downright opposed to Prohibition, for good reason: These campaigns often drew upon anti-Semitic Protestant and nativist populism. The trick was for Jews not to let their comfort with the responsible enjoyment of alcohol and their investments in the liquor trade alienate them from other Americans. (Davis quotes a 19th-century rabbi who observed that “the Jew drinks, but he … knows when to stop.”) If you want a symbol of how deeply the liquor trade has mattered to American Jews, take note that the original library at Hebrew Union College, which trains Reform rabbis, was paid for by one of the prominent whiskey distillers of Louisville, Ky.

***

If you pay attention to contemporary fiction—that is, if you read acknowledgment pages—you’ve likely seen Eileen Pollack’s name a lot. As a professor in, and sometimes director of, the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan, she’s had her hand in books as diverse as Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s stories about contemporary Southeast Asia, Sightseeing, and Elizabeth Kostova’s blockbuster vampire romp, The Historian. Pollack’s own latest novel, Breaking and Entering, takes inspiration from her sojourn in the Midwest after a childhood in the Catskills: In the book, a couple of Californians relocate to Michigan, where they’re surrounded by weirdos and prison inmates who believe, for a couple of kooky examples, that Zionists bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building and that “the people we think of today as Jews are the counterfeit Israelites, spurred by jealousy to bring down the true chosen people, by which I mean the white Christian Aryan race.” Unlike Pollack, her characters aren’t always committed to educating Michiganders: “Explaining anything to morons like Sipp and Rosenkrantz,” one of the transplanted Californians—the Jewish one—thinks, in reference to a couple of his interlocutors, “is like banging your head against a wall, which … hurts you a lot more than it hurts anyone else.”

***

What hurts in Ben Marcus’ novel The Flame Alphabet are the sounds of children’s voices. Kids’ speech is literally poisonous, a plague that kills adults. While this dystopian premise will probably feel eerily familiar to anyone who has been on a redeye flight across the aisle from a toddler, Marcus—known for books like The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women that luxuriate in language and defy description except, unsatisfactorily, as “experimental fiction”—is up to more than kvetching about the plight of exhausted, ear-strained parents. Like so many more conventional Jewish writers before him, he’s exploring the gap of communication between generations, and, unsurprisingly, the apocalyptic landscape he describes is littered with markers like the Beth Elohim Synagogue and a rabbi named Burke. Indeed, there’s some speculation, by the novel’s narrator, that the deadly linguistic “poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first.”

***

Whatever you may think of Tony Judt—and, before his death in the summer of 2010, he managed to amass many more admirers, if also more vocal detractors, than the average academic historian of modern Europe—you can’t deny that he lived a fascinating and quintessentially 20th-century Jewish life. Born and raised in England, he summered on kibbutzim as a Zionist teenager and was trained as a historian of France, so he recognized how broad a perspective is necessary to understand modern Europe—he learned Czech late in his career to widen his own. His new book Thinking the Twentieth Century is comprised of conversations between Judt and Yale’s Timothy Snyder, and it was completed weeks before Judt’s death. It shows that his knowledge of languages remained partial: Unlike Snyder, he could not read primary sources in Polish or Ukrainian, which is why, he explains, he felt a collaboration with Snyder would be a valuable use of the limited time and energy he still had as he was dying of ALS. The book is a tribute to Judt’s energy and to his scholarly influence—and it’s surely not the last we’ll hear of him.

When Tony Judt—NYU eminence, mordant historian of 20th-century Europe, essayist, polemicist, and bête noire of Bibi-lovers—died earlier this year, and died young at only 62, those readers anticipating the next installment of Judt’s swan song in the New York Review of Books had a right to feel a correction was in order. The Lou Gehrig’s disease that was so terribly locking Judt’s body down had also loosed from his pen the tender story of an East End Augie March, a young south London teenager whose travels though socialist Zionism and Oxbridge anti-Semitism kept unearthing ever newer and fresher troves of insight until, suddenly, they, stopped. It was an especially gutsy game of chicken with death Judt played, as he marshalled the power of his own writing to condense and sustain his life. By immersing himself, and us, in this great river of final words, Judt the polemicist and sophisticate seemed to rinse himself down to his own immaculate soul, to present himself as he really was: boy, pupil, mensch, Jew, as if the urbane New York Review of Books was his own makeshift mikveh.

There is a pattern in the way our 20th-century lions are doing their last acts, some getting a jump on death, beginning early; some doing it often, replaying death again and again. Who ever imagined when Philip Roth began killing off his alter egos around 25 years ago that he’d still be at it today? Who’d have thought Nathan Zuckerman and his compeers would still be dying in so many interesting works, and not just dying but emerging from each death refreshed and more classic of mien?

This spring at YIVO, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, I heard Roth read what he described as his favorite section from his last book, Nemesis. This is the section in which Bucky Cantor, playground cynosure and diving-board god, teaches his young admiring charges to throw the javelin. In this passage, and in the book overall, the narrative voice is cleaned of all experience, all knowingness, all irony. Bucky’s beautiful quintessentially American vitality is instead delivered through the voice of one who—even though he’s actually seen the hero brought down, shamed, crippled, and embittered—still tells Bucky’s story as if it might come out differently. In his muscled youthful beauty, in his earnestness, in his civic probity and sweet, gentlemanly sexuality, Bucky stands for that American innocence and pluck that thinks—and for no good reason—that it can beat its nemesis. The gee-whiz 1950s ingenuousness of the narrator’s voice is only, Roth demonstrates, a more extreme version of every reader’s own. An author may begin, as Roth did, as far back as the 1980s, to drop the curtain on our striving, horny, earnest Buckys and Zuckys; he may tell us in titles, in book jackets, 10 miles high and in primary colors, year after year, of the nemesis that visits every man. We are dying animals, Roth shouts: All our complaints, all our indignations are, in the end, so much diddling puppetry. Yet no matter how many times it happens, death is always a surprise ending. Whether that nemesis comes on a Korea battlefield or in a pool swimming with polio, whether it comes via heart disease or long-gone Mr. Portnoy’s crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, the only thing more immortal than death is our denial of it. Which also happens to be the grounding of all art.

Whatever one thinks of Harold Bloom’s latest book as a work of literary criticism, it is one of our most robust examples of the swan song as victory lap, high fives all around. Bloom may call The Anatomy of Influence his summa, may regard this book as his capstone address to the “loneliness, fear and dying” that comprise our human condition. But in fact, Bloom’s final address to the abyss is, like Roth’s many Zuckerman tales, the very same one he began in 1973. The Anatomy of Influence is the Anxiety of Influence—minus the anxiety part, and with all the edge filed off the old fear. Not even Bloom could be expected to muster much mortal angst amid so teeming a visionary company as his Anatomy convenes.

Back in the day, of course, the fire-eating critic of the Yale School’s heyday had been finality’s champion. Never one to settle for Keats’ easeful death, Bloom had preferred his deaths more dialectical and their results more zero sum. Bloom’s heroes were Oedipally girded literati who scorched earth, superseding forebears with their great originality and proving themselves in feats of Agon. In Bloom’s earlier work, a poet really had to fall upon the thorns of life and bleed for his immortality. And his critic too, had better come armed for bear.

Continue reading: Titanic clashes

• Christians United for Israel was unusually effusive in its praise for Obama’s pledge to veto a Palestinian statehood resolution in the U.N. Security Council. [JTA]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government says it plans to respond to Turkish rhetoric with silence in an effort not to further exacerbate tensions. [Haaretz]

• Blogger Richard Silverstein: leftist ideologue, or one-man Mideast WikiLeaks? [Forward]

• Some Orthodox Jews were turned off by the official Democratic response to the Weprin loss, which was in part to, well, blame it on the Orthodox. [Ben Smith]

• The last interview Tony Judt ever gave makes me sad, because he is more unfair to Israel than I usually thought of him as being. Here, for the record, is an interview I did with him about a month prior. [The Atlantic]

Why did Israeli ambassador Michael Oren leave his speech at the University of California, Irvine, early last year? It wasn’t because of the pro-Palestinian protesters; it was because of tickets to the Los Angeles Lakers game. Doesn’t he know what happens when Jews go to Lakers games?

• On Syria, does U.S. policy contradict itself? Very well then, argues Aaron David Miller, it contradicts itself. He explains why. [FP]

• Oh. My. God. An Israeli falafel truck dukes it out with a Palestinian-owned restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Instant and essential meta-analysis here.) [Brooklyn Paper via The Awl]

• There’s a lot wrong with Roger Cohen’s piece on Tonys Judt and Kushner—Judt was serious about being a one-stater, for example—but it is worth reading if only for the quotes from Kushner. (And here’s an alternative view.) [IHT]

• Friend-of-The-Scroll Joshua Foer discusses Jews as “People of Memory” and his new book, Moonwalking with Einstein. [Moment/JI Daily]

• Adam Levin, author of The Instructions, won the New York Public Library’s prestigious Young Lions Fiction Award. [Galleycat]

Just … just watch this. Now. And know that The Scroll’s new official catch-phrase is, “WHAT’S A MENSCH?”

Look around the region: Every bloody government and non-state actor has attracted a cohort of Western fans who feed off of the brand of gore in which those institutions specialize. Some people, like former British intelligence official Alastair Crooke, praise Hamas and Hezbollah as proud resistance organizations. As Michael Young, the Lebanese journalist and author of The Ghosts of Martyr Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, says, “To many Westerners it represents an Arab authenticity, in contrast to the pro-democracy March 14 movement whose members too much resemble Westerners like themselves.” An entire Beltway industry, including former and current U.S. policymakers, diplomats, and intelligence officials, is devoted to rapprochement with Syria’s vicious and kleptocratic regime, the importance of which to U.S. regional policy they wildly overstate lest anyone scrutinize too closely how Damascus targets U.S. citizens and U.S. allies. Then there are the cheerleaders for the Islamic Republic of Iran, for whom the country’s leaders and security services are incapable of any rape or murder so vile that would lose it the support even of fans like Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

And let’s not forget the many hundreds of professional and amateur Middle East analysts who have argued since 2003 that Iraq was better under Saddam Hussein. They knew that the Baathist regime prosecuted sectarian wars against Iraqi Kurds and Shia, massacred its neighbors in Iran and Kuwait, used terrorism as an instrument of its regional and international strategy while pursuing a policy of rape, torture, and murder at home.

The more prestigious the forum, the more this kind of moral blindness to the suffering of others and the norms of justice is presented as proof of sophistication. Roger Cohen of the New York Times recently suggested that Hezbollah should be rewarded for killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. With indictments expected soon in the U.N.-sponsored Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is investigating Hariri’s assassination, Hezbollah has, as usual, threatened violence in the event any of its foot soldiers are named—meaning, in Cohen’s view, that “It’s time to drop either-or diplomacy to address a many-shaded reality.”

Yet there can be no real stability where the rule of law is subsidiary to the rule of the jungle—a fact no less true in Lebanon than in the United States. The entire point of the special tribunal is that the international community seeks to hold assassins as accountable for their crimes in the Middle East as they would be anywhere else. So, why does Cohen believe that Hezbollah should be granted impunity for political murder and the Lebanese should forget about justice? Because like many other Western observers of the Middle East, he uses the region as a kind of virtual reality screen on which to project a self-congratulatory vision of a world in which superior beings like himself can naturally expect to live under the sign of law, civility, and morality while lesser beings in other parts of the world are quite naturally ruled by violence. “The sort of justice that Westerners demand as their due seems faintly inauthentic to them when it comes to Middle East. There’s a distaste for people who make these demands,” says Young, the Lebanese journalist. “In this view, there is a double standard; justice is variable; if it creates problems, let’s not go all the way, this is the Middle East after all. But if this were the U.S. or Europe, justice would be much more straightforward.”

Hezbollah presents an interesting problem for the Roger Cohens of the world. The organization he wants to excuse for killing a Lebanese politician is also responsible for the deaths of American civilians, diplomats, and military personnel. “According to reports, members of the special operations unit of Hezbollah will be indicted in the Hariri murder,” says Andrew Tabler, a Lebanon and Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The U.S. government believes that the late leader of this group, Imad Mughniyyah, was the mastermind behind the kidnapping and killing of U.S. educators, officials, and journalists in Beirut in the ’80s and the bombing of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks. In the 1990s we were told this group no longer existed, or was never really part of Hezbollah. But their tune has changed since Imad Mughniyeh’s 2008 assassination in Damascus. Now Hezbollah repeatedly holds him up as a key member of their organization. If for no other reason, the administration is right to support the tribunal because letting these Hezbollah members off the hook would amount to an enormous victory for a group that killed Americans.”

What are the origins of a worldview that would hand over the world to murderers? “For many intellectuals there is a sense of weakness toward the pre-modern,” says Hazem Saghieh, a Lebanese journalist with the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat. “There is a political nostalgia in looking to the past. This manifests itself as a progressive tendency, but it is in fact very reactionary.”

The paradox is that while it is man’s ability to tell good from bad that makes him most human, certain Western intellectuals take the unwillingness, or inability, to do so as a sign of the genius to rise above the small-minded morality of the masses. Excusing Hezbollah may seem like the rational decision-making of a thoughtful intellectual who is observing a society ostensibly different from his own, but in reality the moral universe of the Middle East is no different from in the rest of the world.

It is the parasitic nature of the relationship between Middle Eastern reality and the narcissism of the Western intelligentsia that helps explain the other half of the Middle East’s moral equation: While the murders by Hezbollah, Saddam, and Iran are justified, even celebrated, Israel is censured for actions for which even the United States is normally excused as a matter of course. People like Roger Cohen have no hesitation in holding Israeli soldiers and civilians to a higher standard than he holds the United States. But logical or moral consistency is rarely the point. In the end, the pleasure of holding other people to a higher standard is perversely the same as arguing that they should be held to no standards at all. Both postures elevate the person making such judgments to a godlike place above the antlike creatures whose daily sufferings and misfortunes have meaning only according to the author’s personal whims.

Consider, for instance, Tony Judt, the late historian of modern Europe, who argued that it would be a good thing for the Jewish state to disappear and for millions of other human beings to forfeit their political rights because he was personally frustrated by Israel’s post-1967 political direction. Because the reality of Israel did not fulfill his psychological needs, others were to pay for his disappointments.

In their own minds, Westerners like Cohen and Judt have risen above the facile judgments of their peers in order to understand deeper truths. They are the supermen who rose in place of the idols. However, their problem is that even if the gods did perish, moral judgment was not in their power to take away since is was not them who gave it to us in the first place. These intellectuals who feed their egos with the suffering of others are not gods. They are simply people who are lucky enough to live in the West, where the consequences of their moral blindness are visited on other people, who live far away.

• “My family is not anti-Israel”: An intense profile of the Corries. [NYT]

• On Yiddish and the all-important schm- prefix. [Good]

• Contributing editor Josh Cohen reviews Adam Levin’s The Instructions. Let’s pause to note that I called Levin “the Josh Cohen of the McSweeney’s set” four months ago. [NYT Book Review]

• How the Israeli military successfully integrated openly gay soldiers. [Moment]

• The late Tony Judt on New York City. Must-read. [NYT]

Nextbook Press author David Mamet appears to have written and directed some sort of gonzo, Dada-esque short starring Arianna Huffington. No, but really.

Well, to each his own. It is worth noting Wood’s closing remark, on the novel’s politics, though. Writes Wood:

Formally, The Finkler Question gives voice to a decent Jewish liberalism, in which the question of Israel can be even-handedly debated (Jacobson writes a column for the left-leaning London newspaper the Independent); informally, The Finkler Question is always shading toward the atavistic and reactionary, the constant message being that, just as goys are more goyish than they seem, so Jews are more Jewish than they seem (witness Finkler’s political conversion, from liberal to conservative). Anyone can be an anti-Semite, the author says, but not anyone can be a Jew … .

I … dunno. It is only within the sphere of “decent Jewish liberalism” and a “left-leaning London newspaper” that the “question of Israel can be even-handedly debated”?

The passage is reminiscent of a letter written earlier this year to the New York Times Book Review complaining about Harold Bloom’s review of Anthony Julius’s mammoth history of English anti-Semitism (which Adam Kirsch also reviewed). “If there is more political discussion of [a left-wing nature] in Britain than in America,” the letter-writer argued, “it is not necessarily because the English are so anti-Semitic—or at least, I certainly hope not—but more likely (as [Tony] Judt has pointed out) because most Americans live in almost complete ignorance of the ‘fierce relevance’ of certain political realities and facts.”

The punch line is as predictable as, according to Wood, Jacobson’s are: The letter-writer was James Wood. (“What makes England so intrinsically enlightened?” retorted Leon Wieseltier. “They have The Guardian, I know.”)

Of course, I have a feeling that over at some daily magazine of British life and culture, they are examining this mini-brawl from an entirely different perspective.

Member of the Tribe [The New Yorker]
Letters—The Anti-Semitism Question [NYT Book Review]
The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism [NYT Book Review]
Family Business [TNR]
Related: Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]
Albion’s Shame [Tablet Magazine]
Jewish Funhouse Mirror Is Alive and Not So Well [NYT]
Earlier: Howard Jacobson Pulls Off Man Booker Upset

One imagines him most remembered for those memoirs; for his magnificent studies of mid-20th-century French intellectuals, Past Imperfect and The Burden of Responsibility; and for what was by all accounts his hefty masterpiece, 2005’s Postwar. (For my money—and for yours, too, if you are a New York Review of Books subscriber or an owner of his 2008 collection, Reappraisals—his best essay was his homage to Leszek Kolakowski, his intellectual hero.)

Additionally, Judt will be remembered as perhaps the most eloquent advocate of a so-called one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More precisely, in an extremely buzzed-about 2003 NYRB essay, “Israel: The Alternative”, he predicted that the failure of the Oslo peace process (for which he blamed both sides), continued Israeli settlement-building, and demographic trends would lead either to ethnic cleansing or to a single state. The one-time enthusiastic Zionist had declared the Zionist dream, essentially, dead. “The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin,” he argued of the bi-national state. “But the alternatives are far, far worse.”

In June, reading an op-ed he had just published calling for an end to the Israeli-American special relationship, and knowing that he would almost certainly not be able to take a phone interview, I emailed him a series of questions late at night with half a hope of hearing back, later in the week, that while Professor Judt stands by his essay, he is regretfully unable to reply to interview requests. Instead, within 12 hours I received roughly 500 words responding directly to my fairly pointed questions, a testament to his perennial need to convince, undefeatable even by a disease that mostly paralyzed him.

“So your choice is to lie very bored,” he recently explained of his debilitation, “very vegetative, for a very long time, or else to say ‘sod it, I intend to do something. Well, what’ll I do?’” He added, “If I’d been a plumber, it would be catastrophic. But the thing I have done well all my life is read, write, talk, think, teach, disagree, explain and so on, and I can still do those things.”

Indeed, his defiant, combative, pissed-off, and even humorous reply to me demonstrated, in addition to the expected rhetorical firepower, total (and, in his case, heroic) facility with what was going on in the world. In the late stages of a fatal degenerative disease, he did not capitulate and turn completely inward into what must have seemed a comforting cocoon of family and friends and perhaps self-pity. Instead, he felt compelled to continue to read and think and write—to engage with the world. May we all feel this compulsion when our times are on the horizon.

Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62 [NYT]
Earlier: Tony Judt on The Flotilla, J Street, and ‘Linkage’
Related: The Liveliest Mind in New York
Israel: The Alternative [NYRB]
Race Against Time To Complete Life’s Work [Irish Independent]

You mention the flotilla at the outset, but don’t address it further. What are your opinions of the activists and of the Israeli government’s reaction?
Those onboard were the usual mix: Idealists, genuine NGO types, angry pro-Palestinian activists, and so on. But the Israelis knew that. Their reaction was almost unimaginably pig-headed: It doesn’t show much, other than that the country is increasingly cut off from world opinion. How do they think people will react to what is effectively piracy? They were doomed to be the bad guys—trapped in the logic of their own pointless blockade.

Was there anything else that prompted you to publish this op-ed now?
Not really—the situation has not changed. But this does seem an opportunity to point out that if Israel is a normal state then it just can’t behave this way and be our favorite ally. I think that the present moment may be propitious because the fact that it was Turkey—once Israel’s closest friend in the region, a NATO partner, a Western-oriented Islamic state which is also democratic and one with huge and growing influence in the region—that was affected, offended, and insulted meant that even the White House could not ignore what happened.

You write that Israel “should not” go away. Do you still stand by your apparent endorsement, several years ago, of a single, bi-national state?
I never said Israel should “go away” or anything else. I just wrote that the two-state solution was dying and everyone knew it but pretended otherwise; that it was on the way to becoming “Greater Israel”: A single state with a Jewish minority and therefore no democracy. Under those circumstances, why not rearrange things and create two federal entities within a single state? Nothing to do with “abolishing Israel.” But yes, implicitly the end of an exclusively “Jewish” state. But then four years later [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert pretty much said the same thing, the facts have borne out my prediction, so what did I do wrong?

You say the Israel Lobby is too influential, albeit in a way analogous to other lobbies; and you say that criticism of same shouldn’t be censored, or self-censored. Beyond creating a space for dissent, what do you propose be done to lessen the Israel Lobby’s influence?
Create a counter-lobby. Sure there is J Street, but it is almost always on the defensive, responding to absurd exaggerations from the other side. And anyway, it has no money. The only way to proceed, it seems to me, is to build a counter-opinion, a counter-consensus that the Israel Lobby is bad for America. Actually, it is even worse for Israel, but no one here cares about that. So it is all about creating a public space in which to discuss these things. Hence my essays.

In your final paragraph, you seem to echo the doctrine of “linkage,” which states that ill will stemming from the continued irresolution of the conflict hinders the United States from accomplishing its strategic and even national security goals. Are you familiar with the term or concept? Were you deliberately allying yourself with it? If not, would you ally yourself with it now?
I was not deliberately aligning myself with [Gen. David] Petraeus, etc., but I know perfectly well that in both the Army and the State Department there is growing anger that we are exposing ourselves, from Baghdad to Lahore, to violent reactions and the failure of our policies in some measure because of our association with the Israel of [Prime Minister] Netanyahu and [Foreign Minister] Lieberman. If that’s “linkage,” then I am a linkage man.

What did you think of Peter Beinart’s recent essay in the New York Review of Books? His essay was compared to your earlier one (although it seems to me they actually differ in several important respects).
I thought it was good. And unlike Peter, I don’t feel the need to distance myself from people who partially agree with me lest I be tarred with their brush! But I wish he had gone a bit further, particularly on the question of the abuse of “anti-Semitism”. He could have been very forceful on that—he knows that it is moral blackmail of the lowest order—he has seen it in action at The New Republic.

Israel Without Clichés [NYT]
Earlier: Judt Argues for End to Special Relationship

Judt has been one of the most prominent advocates of a so-called “one-state solution”—the establishment of a single, binational state in Israel and the Palestinian territories—since writing an attention-grabbing essay in the New York Review of Books in 2003. Which is why this op-ed will get more attention, from both right and left, than had Joe Anonymous penned it. (Shmuel Rosner, for example, has already responded.)

Judt bases his central contention around the thesis that the United States’s super-closeness to Israel, combined with ill will stemming from the continued irresolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, actually hinders the United States from achieving several important regional goals, such as managing Iraq and Afghanistan and reining in Iran. For example, for all those things it helps to have Turkey on one’s side:

Along with the oil sheikdoms, Israel is now America’s greatest strategic liability in the Middle East and Central Asia. Thanks to Israel, we are in serious danger of “losing” Turkey: a Muslim democracy, offended at its treatment by the European Union, that is the pivotal actor in Near-Eastern and Central Asian affairs. Without Turkey, the United States will achieve few of its regional objectives … .

In other places, this line of argument has been referred to (usually not in a friendly manner) as “linkage” thesis.

In his article, Judt makes six additional points, in the form of debunked “clichés”:

• Attempts to wish Israel away are wrong (“Israel is not going away, nor should it”), but Israeli attempts to counter “de-legitimization” are counter-productive.

• Though a democracy, Israel “discriminates against non-Jews” and strongly discourages dissent.

• Due to its long history of neighbors that deny its right to exist, Israel has adopted a “pathological” tendency to turn to the use of force. Eventually, though, it will have to negotiate, including with Hamas.

• Before 1967, the Arabs were the mostly intransigent ones; since 1967, the Jews have been. Though terrorism is “morally indefensible,” Israel, as the vastly more powerful actor, ought to be more conscientious of Palestinian grievances and demands so that it wouldn’t come to it.

• The Israel Lobby has done no more—in fact, has done less—“damage” to the United States than the gun, oil, and banking lobbies. Yet, it is “disproportionately powerful,” and not all criticism of it is anti-Semitic.

• “Criticism of Israel, increasingly from non-Israeli Jews, is not predominantly motivated by anti-Semitism. The same is true of contemporary anti-Zionism.” And in fact, attempting to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism will backfire.

Israel Without Clichés
Related: Linked In [Tablet Magazine]
Israel: The Alternative [NYRB]
Earlier: In and Out of Love With Zionism
Iron Man

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay by Peter Beinart—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

***

Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

Here is the essay’s crux: “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.”

Beinart is one-time editor of the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic. He prominently supported the Iraq invasion and specifically chastised fellow Democrats who didn’t. He has since repudiated that support, but even so, it is not a little surprising to see a one-time genuine hawk calling Israeli “new historian” Tom Segev “fearless.” (Under his leadership TNR endorsed Joe Lieberman in the 2004 Democratic primaries. Joe Lieberman!)

And even that is not as jarring as Beinart’s choice of venue. The New York Review of Books is the premier outlet for essays that are critical of Zionism; it famously published Tony Judt’s repudiation of Zionism in 2003. Tellingly, this is Beinart’s first contribution to the journal. Among other things, Beinart’s decision is designed to reassure you that, no, you’re not misreading it, and, yes, his piece really does represent a genuine shift for him. It also means Beinart chose to trade a certain amount of credibility with those who disagree with his conclusions in exchange for solidarity with those who do. Not to be overly cynical, but Beinart’s new book is out in two weeks.

Beinart’s essay may not garner quite the controversy that Judt’s did, but older American Jewish liberals won’t enjoy being told that their strong support for Israel is illiberal. They will make some immediate counterpunches, and will also take issue with Beinart’s handling of the relevant research, which may not suggest a permanent generation gap on the question of Israel (more on this in a bit).

The left will applaud Beinart, although he remains a Zionist—there are no better prizes for them than once-hawkish Jewish apostates. Meanwhile, J Street may be a little afraid to embrace him, even though his critical, liberal Zionism seems like a good match. (Beinart conspicuously does not mention the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group.)

The Orthodox? Well, they won’t be too happy, and few will blame them. (Beinart attends an Orthodox synagogue. Awkward!)

Quick prediction: The sentence that will attract the most ire is, “Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well.” It will be very easy for critics to mention Walt and Mearsheimer as an inspiration.

After the jump: A couple key paragraphs and the anticipated counter-arguments. I’ll round-up the responses in the afternoon, assuming any writers or bloggers decide to respond to Beinart’s essay. (That was a joke.)

Here are what we in the journalism business call the nut grafs:

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.

So what will the rebuttals say?

• At the center of the essay is the contention that young American Jews feel less of an affinity to Israel than their elders, which is based on a couple cited reports. The essay’s critics will accuse Beinart of ignoring subsequent research that called those reports into question, and of abusing the reports’ conclusions. They will point to reports from past decades that suggest that young American Jews always feel less of an affinity for Israel—they grow into it.

• Beinart attacks those who undermine human rights organizations’ work uncovering alleged Israeli abuses. His caveat: “Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible.” Many will find that quite the understatement.

• Beinart’s allegation of Israeli illiberalism ignores the historical and geopolitical contexts in which Israel operates, his critics will say. The liberalism of the bien pensant American Jewish intellectual is a little easier to come by than the liberalism of the embattled Israeli prime minister. Of course, this is part of why the victimhood narrative is important.

• This technically has no bearing on the substance of the piece, but … Beinart has a new book coming out. It’s his first since 2006’s The Good Fight, which argued for muscular liberalism. I have not read his new book, but something called The Icarus Syndrome could only offer fuller regret for his one-time hawkishness. An essay such as this is just the sort of thing to both get attention generally and endear him to the left specifically.

• The choice of venue makes it all too easy for the right to pounce. So easy, in fact, that one must conclude that Beinart isn’t addressing this to the right: It is aimed primarily to energize the left and, in addition, to put the notion in the heads of those who espouse a critical Zionism that they may be running out of time.

• Many, many other things that I’m missing right now, but which I don’t doubt I’ll be reminded of as the day goes on.

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment [NYRB]
Related: King Without a Crown [Tablet Magazine]

But that, actually, wasn’t the controversial part of this speech by the already-controversial co-author of The Israel Lobby (the book which postulates that an overwhelmingly Jewish lobby influences American Israel policy in a way that harms U.S. interests). Even if you don’t agree with this stuff, you should learn to get used to it. The one-state solution has been amply and eloquently advocated for; even Israel’s own defense minister has used the “a” word.

No, what has gotten various folks’ collective goat was Mearsheimer’s decision to divide Jewish Americans into three groups: “New Afrikaners,” “who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state”; “the great ambivalent middle,” which is what it sounds like; and “Righteous Jews,” who “believe that self-determination applies to Palestinians as well as Jews.” It’s this part of the speech that Jeffrey Goldberg compared to something out of Father Coughlin. And, I mean, ‘Righteous Jews’? Even if that’s not some sort of analogy to ‘Righteous Gentiles,’ Mearsheimer can kind of go to hell.

Sample Righteous Jews, according to Mearsheimer, are Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Goldstone, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, and Philip Weiss. Most of those associated with J Street, says Mearsheimer, are Righteous Jews, too (I promise you J Street resents this categorization, and believes Mearsheimer just made its job more difficult). Sample New Afrikaners are also usual suspects: Abraham Foxman, Marty Peretz, Mort Zuckerman, et al. Mearsheimer’s prediction is that the great ambivalent middle, currently vaguely supportive of Israel, will slowly turn against the Jewish state as its fundamentally apartheid character becomes apparent.

Before going further, I’d like to say that the person whom Mearsheimer has most slandered is the intellectual who has probably lent the greatest and most influential firepower to the solution Mearsheimer would like to see reached, that is, the single bi-national state: Tony Judt. Agree with him on Israel or not (I, for one, don’t), Judt is a sensitive, scrupulous, thoughtful, and responsible scholar who, after painstakingly weighing his own affiliations and values, arrived at a policy conclusion. To group him with Norman Finkelstein is obscene.

This list isn’t even accurate, or at least in any way useful. The important distinctions, as Mearsheimer himself says elsewhere in the speech, are whether someone supports a single, bi-national, democratic state; two nationally-based states; or a Jewish-dominated single state. Yet Righteous Jew Roger Cohen believes in a two-state solution; Righteous Jew hotbed J Street vehemently does so as well. Righteous Jew Noam Chomsky, by contrast, eminently does not; and as for Righteous Jew Norman Finkelstein (!!), he is also David Duke’s favorite Jew. If Mearsheimer were striving to be helpful, he would have divided thinkers based on their preferred solutions to the conflict.

Then again, if Mearsheimer were striving to be helpful, he would have divided thinkers. Instead, Mearsheimer divides Jewish thinkers. “Imagine,” The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait writes, “[if] a conservative were to divide the African-American community into the enlightened blacks (Clarence Thomas, Ken Blackwell, Michael Steele, Walter Williams, etc.) who reject paternalistic liberalism, and also happen to represent a tiny fringe within the community, and the bad blacks, who represent the mainstream African-American perspective.” Seriously, just imagine it.

Meanwhile, Mearsheimer’s co-author, Stephen Walt, does distance himself from the speech somewhat—he thinks that it’s too pessimistic. “I hope his speech turns out to be a ‘self-denying prophecy,’” Walt says. “In other words, if enough people are convinced by it, maybe they will act to head off the gloomy future that he foresees.” You mean the key to peace in the Mideast is for people to be convinced by this speech? Boy are we screwed.

“The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners” with Professor John J. Mearsheimer [The Jerusalem Fund]

• Josh Nathan-Kazis responds to a letter written by 13 Jewish organizations trying to secure protection for American college students faced with anti-Semitism with an even bigger, older Jewish question: “Are Jews an ethnic or a religious group?” [Haaretz]

• The minutes from the first meeting of Israel’s provisional government on May 16, 1948, have just been made public. The gathered focused on what to call the officials now known as “ministers”; also in the running was “governor,” about which future Prime Minister Moshe Sharrett said: “This word may have the connotation of bragging, but it is a nice Hebrew word with a pleasant sound to it.” [Ynet]

• On the eve of its 62nd birthday, Israel’s population is 7,587,000—137,000 more than last year—made up of 75 percent Jews. [Ynet]

• The New York Times profiles Eddie Feibusch, a zipper merchant who “overcame not just the Nazis but also Velcro” (hyuk!) and once filled an order for Bernard Madoff in prison. [NYT]

“I am a little caught between satisfaction at my newly increased reach and mild irritation at the reason for it,” he says. “I understand the sense in which it seems as though I am in a hurry. But as you’ll see when you read the book, I am quite convinced that the urgency lies in the external world and all I am doing is drawing attention to it.”

Read the whole thing.

The Liveliest Mind in New York [New York]
Earlier: In and Out of Love With Zionism

For the neophyte fifteen-year-old Londoner encountering the kibbutz for the first time, the effect was exhilarating. Here was “Muscular Judaism” in its most seductive guise: health, exercise, productivity, collective purpose, self-sufficiency, and proud separatism—not to mention the charms of kibbutz children of one’s own generation, apparently free of all the complexes and inhibitions of their European peers.

Judt’s attraction to the world of the kibbutzim and to Labour Zionism failed to win out against his desire to attend university in Europe and the revulsion he felt while serving in the Israeli military. Judt concludes:

Labour Zionism made me, perhaps a trifle prematurely, a universalist social democrat—an unintended consequence which would have horrified my Israeli teachers had they followed my career. But of course they didn’t. I was lost to the cause and thus effectively “dead.”

Read the whole thing. Judt is a remarkable, perceptive writer. (He has also written beautifully about living with, and dying of, Lou Gehrig’s disease.)

Kibbutz [NYRB]
Night [NYRB]

Now suppose that none of it is true.

That’s the thesis of a new book, The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand, who argues that the Jews were not in fact exiled from Israel, and that the bulk of modern Jewry does not descend from the ancient Israelites Rather, he claims, they are the children of converts—North African Berbers and Turkic Khazars—and have no ancestral ties to the land of Israel. Zionism is not a return home, Sand writes, it is the tragic theft of another people’s land. As such, Israel is not the political rebirth of the Jewish nation—it’s a complete fabrication.

Predictably, The Invention of the Jewish People generated a torrent of controversy when it was published in Hebrew last year. Sand’s arguments were hotly debated in newspaper columns and academic journals, with Tom Segev, the post-Zionist “new historian,” acclaiming it as “one of the most fascinating and challenging books” to arrive in Israel in a long time. In March, the French translation, which has sold 45,000 copies—a large number for an academic historian—received the prestigious Aujourd’hui Award, which is given to the year’s best non-fiction book.

But for many—including Sand himself—the real test of the book’s significance will take place October 19, when the left-wing publisher Verso Press brings out the English edition of The Invention of the Jewish People. Supporters and detractors alike are closely watching to see if the book becomes a mainstream publishing controversy or vanishes into the esoteric precincts of academe. “America will be the real battle,” said Sand, who arrives on these shores this month for a series of appearances in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

There is, perhaps, a precedent for this type of work. In 1976, the anti-Communist writer Arthur Koestler published The Thirteenth Tribe, a tendentious little book to which Sand owes a great intellectual debt. Koestler argued that the Jews of Eastern Europe are the descendants of Khazars, a Turkic people who dominated the Russian steppes from the mid-7th century to the beginning of the second millennium. Around 740, the ruling elite of Khazaria converted to Judaism. Koestler speculated that after the collapse of Khazaria those converts drifted westward into Poland, forming the nucleus of Eastern European Jewry. Lacerated by critics, Koestler’s book was nonetheless propelled onto the best-seller list for a few weeks. “Today,” Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, told me, “The Thirteenth Tribe is a combination of discredited and forgotten.”

But Koestler and the Khazar theory he advanced lives on in the fever swamps of the white nationalist movement, where Sand’s ideas have already stirred some interest. “Sand is not publishing this book at a dignified conference in Bern at which scholars of the Middle East debate the origins of the Jews,” said Goldberg, also a Tablet Magazine contributing editor. “He is dropping manufactured facts into a world that in many cases is ready, willing, and happy to believe the absolute worst conspiracy theories about Jews and to use those conspiracy theories to justify physically hurting Jews.” Goldberg views The Invention of the Jewish People as part of a growing body of work designed not only to discredit the idea of Jewish nationalism, but also the idea of Jews themselves. “It is nothing new,” he added, “We survived Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe; we can survive this.”

In a recent interview, Sand acknowledged that his reinterpretation of Jewish history might serve the interests of anti-Semites and other enemies of the Jewish state. “But as a historian my commitment is foremost to what I believe is the truth,” he told me.

But what is Sand’s truth? In the late 19th century, he argues, Jewish intellectuals like Heinrich Graetz, Moses Hess, and Simon Dubnow refashioned Judaism—a diverse religious civilization—into a homogenous collective. Sand writes that they “imaginatively constructed a long, unbroken genealogy” for the Jews out of fragments of religious memories. Prior to that, “world Jewry had been a major religious culture, not a strange, wandering nation.” This historical hoax was later embraced as a useful fiction by the Zionist movement: “To achieve their aims, the Zionists needed to erase existing ethnographic textures, forget specific histories, and take a flying leap backward to an ancient, mythological and religious past.”

“Judaism,” Sand said, “was a very important civilization, and still is in some ways. But the Jews are not a people because they are not bound together by a secular culture like other nations.” Israeli culture, he noted, is secular but it is distinct from Jewish culture in other parts of the world. “Israel does not have a Jewish cinema, a Jewish theatre, or a Jewish literature; it has an Israeli cinema, an Israeli theater, and an Israeli literature,” Sand said. Moreover, he thinks that few Jews living outside of Israel have a stake in Israeli culture, a disinterest amplified by their lack of Hebrew. “A nation is a people that want to be sovereign, but most Jews don’t want to live under Jewish sovereignty.” The idea that a cohesive national identity unites Jews in New York, Moscow, London, and Paris is what Sand called “an ethnocentric myth.”

Born in Austria in 1946, Sand spent his first two years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. His parents, Polish Holocaust survivors, immigrated to Jaffa in 1948. “My parents did not come to Israel by choice,” he said. “For them it was a tragedy. All their life, they couldn’t accept it. And I don’t blame them. Most of the people who came to Israel did not choose to do so; they were not Zionists.” Sand describes himself as a post-Zionist, but his politics are eclectic. “I am not a Zionist because I am a liberal democrat,” he said. “It is not possible to have a Jewish and a democratic state. It would be like America defining itself as a Protestant state. It makes no sense.”

In the late 1960s, Sand joined Matzpen, a now defunct radical group that advocated the de-Zionization of the Israeli state. He left when the party line drifted from challenging Israel’s identity as a Jewish state to questioning whether Israel should exist at all. The experience impressed upon Sand the importance of tempering his politics with pragmatism. “Unlike a lot of other leftists I am not in favor of a one-state solution,” he said referring to the proposed incorporation of Palestinians and Jews into a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. When pushed, Sand will admit that he is not “morally opposed” to one-state but that it is merely a “dream,” not a serious political project. “To have one state for the two societies you need the consensus of both societies, and right now most Israelis don’t want that,” he said. The Invention of the Jewish People is dedicated to the “memory of the refugees who reached this soil and those who were forced to leave.” But Sand opposes anything more substantial than a token right of return for Palestinian refugees. “You cannot recognize Israel’s right to exist and recognize the right of return for six million Palestinians. It is an oxymoron,” he said.

While Sand is quick—and arguably disingenuous—to portray his personal politics as “very moderate,” he doesn’t flinch from describing his work on Jewish historiography and Israel as “radical” and “courageous.” Verso has used adjectives like “bold” and “ambitious” to promote his book. But Hebrew University historian Israel Bartal, among others, has pointed out that Sand’s politics have undermined the credibility of his scholarship. “Sand’s desire for Israel to become a state ‘representing all its citizens’ is certainly worthy of a serious discussion,” Bartal wrote in Haaretz, “but the manner in which he attempts to connect a political platform with the history of the Jewish people from its very beginnings to the present day is bizarre and incoherent.”

Some of Sand’s natural sympathizers fear that the inherent shock value of The Invention of the Jewish People will cause the American media to sensationalize Sand’s thesis. New York University historian Tony Judt, a proponent of the one-state solution who has battled vociferously with critics in the United States, worries that Sand’s book will be received here as just another polemic. “It’s a much more reasoned and thoughtful book than that,” Judt said in an interview. He credits Sand with “blowing open” the “core guiding myth of Zionism.” By demonstrating that Jews are in fact a complete ethnographic and national hodgepodge, Judt argued, Sand’s work normalizes Jewish history. “I hope the book will remove from serious conversation any mention of ancient rights, ancient privileges, or who was given what land by which authority—whether God or King David,” Judt said, adding that an understanding of Jewish history must give way to an honest accounting of contemporary Israeli problems. Such a possibility, Judt added, “is surely good news for everyone.”

But in the Israeli academy Sand’s book has not been received as good news. Alexander Yakobson, a history professor at Hebrew University, said that Sand’s interpretation of Jewish history “gives a bad name to flimsiness.” To him, even if Sand had made a compelling argument about Jewish origins, it would have no bearing on whether the Jews can be considered a nation. “In order to be a people in the modern sense you do not have to be a descent group,” Yakobson said. “What makes a people is their self-determination to regard themselves as a people.” Israel Bartal charged Sand with “intellectual superficiality” and “twisting the rules governing the work of professional historians.” Sand’s alleged sins include the use of misleading citations, disrespect for historical details, and a slippery tendency to present extreme theories as though they reflect the scholarly consensus. Anita Shapira, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, wrote what many believe was the definitive take-down review of Sand’s book for The Journal of Israeli History. In it, Shapira wrote that she found something “warped and objectionable in the assumption that for Jews to integrate into the Middle East they, and they alone of all the peoples in the region, must shed their national identity and historical memories and reconstruct themselves in a way that may (perhaps) find favor with Israeli-Palestinians.”

Yet this barrage of criticism has done little to dampen interest in The Invention of the Jewish People. Translations are underway in a dozen languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian. Sand signed a contract with a Palestinian publisher to release an Arabic-language edition, but the translation was so sloppy that Sand halted publication. “I am very depressed about it,” he said. “I want to write in the preface that I am waiting for an Arab historian to have the courage to write about Arab history in the same way that I wrote Jewish history.”

But at the moment, Sand has his eyes set on America. “I know there are a lot of organized Zionists that cannot accept the sort of criticism I can voice in Israel,” he said. “But I want you to know I am not afraid of Alan Dershowitz.”

Evan R. Goldstein is an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

<B>CORRECTION</B>, November 12: Due to a miscommunication, this article originally attributed to Alexander Yakobson a sentiment he did not express, that Sand’s book is “a pack of lies.” It has been deleted.

Reading American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, the new biography by D.D. Guttenplan, is a reminder of how different things used to be. Stone, a radical journalist who for two decades published a one-man newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, is something like a saint of the American left; from the 1930s through the 1970s, he could be found voicing the extreme-left line on every issue from the New Deal to the Vietnam War. Yet to many American Jewish readers who never saw a copy of the Weekly, I.F. Stone was known as an outspoken Zionist. In late 1945, when Stone arrived in Palestine to cover the mounting conflict between the British, the Jews, and the Arabs, he gave heartfelt support to the Zionist project: “It is the one place in the world where Jews seem completely unafraid…. In Palestine a Jew can be a Jew. Period. Without apologies, without any lengthy arguments as to whether Jews are a race, a religion, a myth, or an accident. He need explain to no one, and he feels profoundly at home; I am willing to attribute this to historic sentimentality but it remains nonetheless a tremendous and inescapable fact.”

Indeed, as Guttenplan shows, Stone was more than a reporter on Palestine; he actively assisted the “Aliyah Bet,” the illegal immigration of European Jewish refugees to Palestine, at a time when the British were still blocking Jewish settlement. In April 1946, Stone went to Europe and traveled with Jewish DPs leaving Germany for Palestine. When the refugees were about to board a ship at Savona, in Italy, they were suddenly stopped by policemen; Stone bought time by waving his State Department press ID and insisting that he not be interfered with. Yehuda Arazi, a Haganah agent helping to smuggle refugees, played along by telling the Italian police “that in America there are two important people, Truman and Stone, and that if the Italians don’t treat us well then Stone will make a big fuss.” The ruse worked: while Stone played for time, the refugees’ ship was able to set sail for Palestine.

Stone’s book based on his adventures, Underground to Palestine, was dedicated to “those anonymous heroes, the Shelikhim [emissaries] of the Haganah,” and he donated much of the profits to their cause. All this creates a slight embarrassment for Guttenplan: how to reconcile Stone’s Zionism with the anti-Zionist consensus on the contemporary left? Guttenplan’s strategy is to dwell on Stone’s consistent, outspoken concern for the Palestinians. Before 1948, Stone advocated a binational state; after 1967, he called for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Israel should “make a virtue of necessity,” he wrote, “by offering to set up an Arab state in these areas, linked in a confederation with Israel and perhaps also with Transjordan. Why not do it with grace and magnanimity instead of grudgingly and in this context provide reparation and settlement?” In this Stone was prescient, but as Guttenplan notes, he was writing out of concern for Israel’s survival: “Stone himself made no pretense to objectivity.” It is noteworthy that this sort of liberal Zionist argument, calling for a two-state solution, is exactly what much of the contemporary left disdains.

Yet American Radical is, on the whole, Guttenplan’s attempt to redeem Stone, and by extension the left of his era, from the criticism and neglect of posterity. As Guttenplan writes in his introduction, by the time Stone died, at the age of 81 in 1989, he had become something of an institution, and his obituaries praised him as a cantankerous individualist, “a journalist’s journalist.” But as Guttenplan’s title suggests, this sort of nonpartisan, noncommittal honor is not what he desires for Stone. Rather, Guttenplan writes, it is “the radical I.F. Stone who has at least as much to teach us as the patron saint of investigative reporting…. Shorn of its political engagements, Stone’s career is reduced to a kind of performance, like a veteran ballplayer or a distinguished actor.”

What this means in practice is that Guttenplan’s “life and times” of Stone devotes a good deal more space to the times than to the life, becoming in effect a history of the American left in the 20th century. About Stone’s personality and private life we learn little, possibly because there is little to learn: he was wholly immersed in the public events of his day, leaving little time for private or family life. Born Isadore Feinstein in 1907, he spent most of his childhood in the Philadelphia area, where his immigrant parents ran a department store in Haddonfield. He was a dedicated journalist from the age of 14, when he took advantage of his father’s absence on a business trip to start publishing a newspaper, called Progress, out of the family home.

He dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to work as a full-time journalist, and by 1933 he was at the New York Post—then a crusading liberal paper, where Stone wrote pro-New Deal editorials. He would go on to write for the legendary PM and The Nation, among other liberal publications, before the rise of McCarthyism made him unemployable, leading him to found the Weekly. Along the way, in 1937, he changed his name to the less Jewish-sounding I.F. Stone—as Guttenplan points out, a common thing to do among Jews of Stone’s generation. At least he didn’t stick with his first attempted pseudonyms, Geoffrey Stone or, still worse, Abelard Stone. To his friends, he remained Izzy, though he bridled when his political enemies made insinuations about his name-change.

Guttenplan makes no bones about the fact that those friends were often Communists. Indeed, as his liberal and conservative critics continue to point out even today, Stone was consistently attracted by Communism, both at home and abroad—a fellow traveler of the Soviet Union and the CPUSA in the 1930s, an admirer of Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Just as Guttenplan’s biography, two decades in the making, arrived in bookstores, another book—Spies by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev—claimed to show, based on evidence from the KGB archives, that in 1936-38 Stone actively cooperated with Soviet agents in America, passing on information and helping to recruit other sympathizers.

Guttenplan vigorously disputes the charge that Stone was a KGB spy, but not because he is especially disturbed by what it might say about Stone’s ideological commitments. A large part of Stone’s authority came from his complete independence—I.F. Stone’s Weekly was a one-man operation, funded wholly by subscriptions—and that authority would be compromised if it turned out that he were taking orders from Moscow. “A journalist who accepts a hidden subsidy from a foreign power betrays not his country but his readers,” Guttenplan writes, and he is highly critical of the liberal anti-Communist journal Encounter, which accepted CIA funding.

But he is not at all disturbed that, in the 1930s and subsequently, Stone’s views usually coincided with Moscow’s, or Havana’s, or Hanoi’s. In 1937, the Moscow show trials, with their unmistakable revelation that the USSR was a totalitarian dictatorship and Stalin a paranoid tyrant, led many American leftists to abandon their admiration of the USSR. Stone, on the other hand, wrote that “revolutions do not take place according to Emily Post. The birth of a new social order, like the birth of a human being, is a painful process.” In 1959, when he went to Havana to meet Castro’s revolutionaries, he told readers of the Weekly that Castro was “pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. In this he strongly resembles Franklin D. Roosevelt,” and, rather more romantically, that Che “was the first man I had ever met whom I thought not just handsome but beautiful…a cross between a faun and a Sunday School print of Jesus.” In 1967, he was rooting for a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam, on the grounds that it would be a rebuke to “everything America stands for”—by which he meant “Boeing and General Electric and Goodyear and General Dynamics.”

Guttenplan quotes all of these damning tributes from I.F. Stone to the Communist dictator of the moment, which by themselves constitute a complete demolition of Stone’s claim to political judgment. Yet he quotes them, not to bury Stone, but to praise him: he was, Guttenplan sums up, “an independent radical who kept hold of his ideals and kept faith with his comrades, without renouncing his freedom to speak his mind.” To any fair-minded reader, however, what Guttenplan’s book shows is how badly Stone chose his comrades, and how easy it is to mix up true ideals with dangerous and damaging illusions. There were many writers of Stone’s era who managed to be liberals without being Communists, and who understood how complex and challenging a creed liberalism really is. Guttenplan has great contempt for such liberal anti-Communists, seeing them as trimmers and hypocrites; but history has shown that it is to them, not to Stone, that we should look for inspiration.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.