Perceiving the Hierarchy

As you may have seen, there was antisemitic stabbing/car ramming attack on a UK synagogue on Yom Kippur yesterday. Two Jews were killed (one, apparently, by the police in the course of their response); the attacker was also killed on site.

In the wake of the attack, the New York Times quoted a recently-released report by the Runnymede Trust on the subject of antisemitism in the UK, making the case that the "current approaches designed to tackle the problem [of antisemitism] are not working." Specifically, the report critiques how "The significant funding given by governments to protect Jewish people specifically makes Jewish communities feel safer in the short term but has given rise to perceptions that there is a hierarchy of racisms in the U.K.."

[W]hen the state and political parties put significant energy into combating antisemitic ideas but fail to act with similar force against Islamophobia or structural racism, it confirms the perception of a hierarchy of racism. While this type of state-led opposition to antisemitism can make many Jewish people feel safer in the short-term, it gives life to a competitive victimhood that further pulls apart the horizontal alliances and broad political coalitions required to confront all racisms.

A couple things about this formulation that jumped out at me, but the main one is the acceptance of the narrative that Jews are "anti-discrimination" winners -- winning so much, and so hard, that it's generating understandable resentment that fractures the possibility of cross-group solidarity. The reason this "jumped out" is that one of my earliest public writings on antisemitism specifically addressed this phenomenon in the context of the UK, pointing out that the public perception of Jews being very well- (perhaps over-)protected by anti-discrimination law coexisted with a reality that Jews weren't actually receiving much protection at all.

I won't claim to be an expert on the UK. But the Runnymede report, as far as I can see, does not actually provide much evidence that Jews in reality receive enhanced material support for their security compared to other groups. The only concrete example they provide is the proliferation of Holocaust memorials in contrast to the lack of such memorials for other atrocities suffered by other groups (including ones that the UK is more directly implicated in, like the slave trade). 

I do think there is something to be said about making Holocaust remembrance the be-all-end-all of what "reckoning with past racism looks like". But this has little to do with funding initiatives meant to provide security for Jewish institutions from violent attack.

In the United States, at least, funds meant to bolster security at religious institutions have been made available to applicants of all faiths. Jewish organizations have received a large chunk of the funds (perhaps because Jews are by far the most common targets of religious-based hate crimes), but it would be wrong to say there is a "hierarchy" here. But that doesn't seem to change the fact that there is a perception of a hierarchy; and where perception is not matching reality we need to interrogate more deeply what's driving the perception.

Put simply: it is a common feature of antisemitism to present Jews as "the outgroup that's in" -- the paradigm of protection (perhaps over-protection) to the point where they are seen as hoarding the bounty of public sympathy from groups who need it more. This perception is itself inextricably linked to antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish hyperpower and influence (obviously, Jews can't really be marginalized when it's so clear that they control Congress/the media/the banks/the world), and it is I think a category mistake to assume that the perception is substantially related to an actual, objective assessment of how much protection Jews are or are not receiving. 

Just like with fears of "voter fraud" or anti-vaxx conspiracies, where the underlying complaints about Jews being over-protected are grounded not in rationality but in resentment, a "rational" response will never assuage and the conspiracists will never be accommodated. Eventually, the only "move" in this politics is for Jews to self-abnegate -- to performatively lose, over and over again, even in circumstances where they are being genuinely wronged and deserved genuine protection under well-established and universally-applied principles, so as to "reassure" their neighbors that they aren't winning too much and aren't being given special favors. This is not sustainable, and it is not actually a productive strategy for fighting antisemitism.

I absolutely agree that -- whether in the UK or the US -- the government and other social actors need to take all forms of racism and discrimination with the seriousness they deserve, and direct concrete and tangible resources and proposals to combatting it. But I do not think reinforcing the narrative of "hierarchy" is helpful in this respect. I will keep on tapping the sign: they'd say it about Jews, they'd say it about other groups too. It is not the case that "only the Jews receive such solicitude", it is not the case that "everyone but the Jews receives such solicitude." We should reassess both narratives that assert a clear "hierarchy of racism" that likely is not present and which is itself built upon unhelpful and unproductive resentments.

The Other Reason American Jews Are Distancing Themselves from Israel

The topic of American Jews and Israel growing apart is an omnipresent one in Jewish circles -- a fear I've seen raised for as long as I can remember. Obviously, we're hearing more about it now, particularly as younger Jewish voices become increasingly prominent in protests against Israel and Israel's war in Gaza. But the fear is not new, and there is a familiar rhythm to it.

But while the discussion about the growing gap between American and Israeli Jewry almost inevitably is framed against the backdrop of Gaza and the occupation and settlements, I want to make an entry to this discussion that has nothing to do with Palestine, but whose impact is I think very important and very underrated. Admittedly, given all that's happening in Palestine, that feels almost absurdly self-centered. All I can say to that is that the fraying connection between American Jews and Israel is an important topic, and this is an underdiscussed element of that topic. I offer it not to the exclusion of explanations that are premised on genuine moral or political sentiments about Palestine, but as a complement to them.

So, without further throat-clearing, here is my claim as to one reason American Jews are increasingly distancing themselves from Israel: 

The Israeli establishment is increasingly deeply, openly contemptuous of American Jews.

Again, we can bracket everything having to do with Palestine and Palestinians. There's plenty to talk about there, but I won't talk about it here. Whenever one talks about diaspora Jewish grievances against Israel, one is immediately met with the claim that the diaspora has no claim to speak on matters of "security" in a country they don't live in. There's plenty one could say to that, but fine, we'll leave "security" aside.

Instead, we'll start with a fact that has nothing to do with security: most American Jews are not Orthodox. We're Reform or Conservative (if affiliated at all). But these denominations of Judaism -- the denomination most American Jews identify with -- are not treated equally in Israel. Indeed, they are subject to heaps of contempt, scarcely recognized as Jews at all.

This has tangible consequences. We talk a lot about interfaith families, but there are many Jewish families whose status as Jews in Israel is in doubt. What happens when their matrilineal lineage might be traced back to a woman who had the temerity to convert under the oversight of the Jewish community most American Jews live in? Non-Orthodox conversions are barely recognized even for purposes of the law of return, and that begrudging acceptance doesn't extend to other aspects of Jewish personhood. How insulting, for American Jews to be told that the way we're Jewish isn't good enough to be fully recognized as Jewish in the eyes of Israel.

Insulting -- that's too mild. I can speak for myself here: my wife is Jewish. Her conversion was done under the auspices of the Jewish tradition through which I've lived my entire life. She lives a Jewish life. She celebrates Jewish holidays. She volunteers for Jewish non-profits. As far as I'm concerned, she's as Jewish as I am. To question her Judaism necessarily -- can only -- be based off a denigration of my Judaism. To hear that my Jewish wife, and through her our Jewish children, would not be treated as fully Jewish in a Jewish state is fury-inducing. Every time I think about it, I am filled with rage. How many of us are in similar circumstances? How many of us see our or our loved one's disrespected as Jews by the state that claims our fidelity on the basis of shared peoplehood?

There's more: half of all Jews are forbidden from praying as equals at one of our religion's holiest sites. Try to hold an important religious rite -- your child's Bar Mitzvah, say -- at the Western Wall, and you risk being attacked by an angry mob. It is very much in the realm of argument that the median American Jewish family would face more official, state-sponsored discrimination as Jews in Israel than they would in America.

And that doesn't get into the constant thumbs in the eye the Israeli government seemingly loves to give to the American Jewish people. Netanyahu's speech before Congress. Bragging that they prefer the support of Evangelical Christians over diaspora Jews. The constant ooze of contempt and disdain is impossible to ignore.

A few days ago, a college friend of mine wrote a post about the increasing gap between American Jewish sentiment and pro-Israel politics leaving Zionism with "nowhere to go". He has always been anti-Zionist, and so was of course delighted at the development. But one observation he made for why the trend seemed to be accelerating was that American Jews were increasingly discovering they simply had nothing in common with Israeli Jews. We're fundamentally two different peoples. There's no special bond between us, no particular reason to care more about them (or them us) beyond whatever general humanistic feeling we might have to any other group of people half the world away.

He said this with triumph. Many others will view it mournfully. And to some extent I think he necessarily overstates the case, if only because familial ties unite many (though not all) of us. Even for the rest of us, the severing of a sense of peoplehood is grave and painful, and won't be done easily. As much as some pretend otherwise, diaspora Jews disassociating themselves from Israel is not a free action. It hurts. The whole point of bonds like this is that they persist and endure through difficult and challenging times; they are not meant to be transitory expressions of instrumental alignment. But when a member of your family (literal or figurative) doesn't treat as if you are special, as if you are a member of a special circle of care and concern, that exerts a continual and powerful centrifugal force. Eventually, it will pull (some of? all of?) us apart.

And this problem is not one that can be resolved by the normal proposed solutions. It isn't a matter of young Jews lacking "education" on what's happening in the Middle East. It isn't caused by Jews lacking connection to their Jewish heritage (unless we buy into the notion that Reform and Conservative Jews Don't Count). It isn't attributable to a desire to "fit in" with the cool crowd or following the latest social media trend. It can't be laid at the feet of "Critical Race Theory" or "intersectionality" or whatever buzzword will be screamed across Algemeiner headlines next week. The brute truth is that American Jews are being hammered, again and again and again, with just how little the Israeli establishment thinks of us.

I'm not saying anything especially new here. Six years ago I wrote in the Forward that "Israel doesn't care what American Jews think." (the median social media response I got from Israelis to that column was "you're damn right we don't, and also, fuck you for saying so."). And again, I'm not trying to discount the degree to which Israel's unjust treatment of Palestinians under occupation genuinely, legitimately, and viscerally offends many Jews. 

But what I speak of here is a powerful negative force, and it is not getting better. And at any time, but perhaps especially under times of strain and stress, such a force will have its predictable effects.

How Do Conservatives Explain Negative American Exceptionalism?

Over at the Washington Monthly, Keith Humphreys put up a chart comparing various countries along the axes of homicide rates and incarcerations rates.

Ideally, you'd want to be a country that has low homicide rates and low incarceration rates (Norway, Germany). Countries that have low murder rates, but get there by locking everyone up, are despotic (Iran). Countries that have low incarceration rates but high homicide rates are lawless (Mexico). And the finally, countries which throw everyone into prison but still have high crime rates are "disastrous", and of course, the U.S. of A. falls decisively into this category.

(Kevin Drum thinks violent crime rates are more useful than homicide rates for this sort of illustrations, which reshuffles some of the countries, but not in a way relevant to our purposes since the United States remains a clear disaster.)

I've long been curious how conservatives explain this sort of American exceptionalism -- metrics where America just clearly and unambiguously is far worse than nearly any other peer nation. Why, under the conservative telling, are we so bad at this compared to other countries?

Liberals don't have too much trouble with this problem -- partially because we're less wedded to chest-thumping about "greatest nation on Earth", more saliently because we have an easy explanation (guns + racism) ready to roll. But of course conservatives aren't going to be fans of that explanation. So what do they go with? It can't be "soft on crime" -- again, we're clearly "tougher on crime" than most peer nations (perhaps some "reforms" in that direction could push us into the "despotic" quadrant alongside Iran -- what a cheery thought -- but it doesn't seem to work as an argument). And I can't say I'm drawing much when I try to think about how they purport to explain this phenomenon. Do they just sit in denial of it?

The New Holocaust Minimization from Europe to America

It is a common cliché to claim that 21st century American antisemitism will follow the trajectory of 21st century Europe's, lagging only by a couple of years. I hear it most often in claims that the Democratic Party will inevitably Corbynify (I never hear the follow-up of what is supposed to be the American iteration of "... and then Corbyn is trounced in the general and summarily tossed from his leadership post"). Far less frequently is attention paid to how the American right can and will follow in the footsteps of its European peers.

On that note, I want to put two stories in conversation with one another. The first is a right-wing party in Romania under attack for dismissing Holocaust education as a "minor topic". The second is a Republican legislator in Indiana, State Sen. Scott Baldwin, taking flak for insisting that, under his proposed "anti-CRT' law, educators must and should take a "neutral" stance on Nazism.

The Indiana incident is hardly the first of its kind. From the outset, the anti-CRT push has undercut Holocaust education initiatives -- an utterly predictable consequence that thus far has barely even registered an iota of worry amongst Republicans who just a few months ago were holding themselves as the last hope against an incipient tidal wave of antisemitism (then again, it was barely a year ago when Republicans were still holding themselves out as defenders of free speech in education -- who can keep up?).

But it is worth putting these developments in America in conversation with what's happening in Europe, and why it is exactly that they find the Holocaust to be so disposable. For the most part, it is not that I think that the legislators in Indiana or Texas are secret Hitler admirers. However, I do think they may possess, and be acting on, a sort of annoyed indifference to the Holocaust's preeminence. Much like Republican frustration over how all political scandals end in -gate, there is frustration over how the main "shared" exemplar of pure political evil is a right-wing phenomenon. Sometimes this frustration manifests in absurd attempts to pretend that Nazism was "actually" a left-wing ideology. But another play is to seek to undercut the Holocaust as "just another" historical event, one that shouldn't receive undue attention or be subject to special condemnation. Who cares about the Holocaust when somewhere, someone is reading a book on how to provide support to LGBT youth? It's not pro-Nazi so much as it's anti- expending any resources to fight Nazism or inculcate the view that Nazism is bad. 

On the European side, the new far-right parties are not (yet) outright praising Hitler, but they're very much taking the view that we obsess too much over Hitler. Nazism is a minor blemish, an inkblot, a footnote in an otherwise glorious White European history, and bringing it up is just an obnoxious distraction from the "real" threats posed by immigrants, Muslims, and multiculturalism. And of course, the American right is increasingly lining up with these parties -- Steve King was just a touch ahead of the curve, but the snuggling up to Viktor Orban in Hungary has long since passed into the GOP mainstream. Why should the view of the Holocaust resist the trend? Indeed, the Indiana and Texas cases already show the GOP is happily galloping along with it.

Packing Preparation

I continue to think that adding more states is more likely to occur during the next Democratic administration compared to adding more Supreme Court Justices. But it will be controversial, and, following Machiavelli, anything especially controversial should be done at the very outset of one's tenure as a ruler.* What that means is we want any new state admissions to be part of H.R. 1 (which most people already expect to be a voting rights bill). And in particular, we want the new states set to be added to be ready to go on inauguration day.

This is especially important if we want to extend statehood beyond the most obvious candidate, D.C.. Puerto Rico is a complicated case because statehood has been actively debated there and remains controversial. But there seems to be relatively little discussion of statehood for other American territories, such as Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands. Yet if those territories also were ready to announce, on day one of a Biden administration, that they were applying for statehood, it would be much easier to roll them into a larger bill than trying to mobilize them on the fly.

*  Machiavelli also suggests delegating the task to an underling and then, once it's complete, executing him in a high-profile fashion. Not all of his advice is applicable to the modern day.

What's the Difference Between Impeachment and Faithless Electors?

One of the first plot points on the TV series The Americans occurs in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of President Reagan, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig's famous declaration "I am in control here" while the President was in the hospital.

Among Americans, this statement was roundly mocked as Haig being overzealous and ill-informed. But -- while there certainly was anxiety around the assassination attempt regarding who was behind it, whether it was a military move, etc. -- there wasn't really any concern among the American public that Haig was actually launching a coup.

But (in the show, at least) the Russians don't know that. From their vantage point, a top government official had just seized on the chaos of the assassination attempt to declare himself head of state. Without a sort of deep enmeshment in American law, culture, and society, it could be hard to tell -- from afar -- why Haig's statement wouldn't be seen as really worrisome, and what distinguished it from a "real" coup attempt.

I was thinking about this with respect to two ways the ticket that wins the presidential election (as understood in the conventional sense) could nonetheless be blocked or removed from office. One way is, immediately after election day but before he is inaugurated, "faithless electors" deciding en masse to vote for someone else. So even though Trump and Pence won most electoral votes, they could just decide to vote for Nancy Pelosi and some other Vice President. The other way is, after the President Vice President are inaugurated and seated, Congress impeaches and removes them.

To any American observer, though, these are two very different things. Congress impeaching and convicting Donald Trump would be controversial, no doubt, and high profile. But it is still basically recognized as a valid "move"; it isn't an illicit seizure of power. By contrast, the faithless elector route would not be seen that way. It'd be seen as, more or less, a coup.

But why? Both are formally legal. Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows for the President and Vice President's removal by impeachment (and, under the law, the next person in the Line of Succession is the Speaker of the House). And under the 12th Amendment Electors have the authority to vote for whomever they like for President (I leave aside the issue of "faithless elector" statutes and their applicability -- we can assume that all the faithless electors come from states which do not prohibit such acts).

And it's not a matter of some established tradition either. Sure, we've never had a case where faithless electors have altered the victor of an election. But we've also never impeached and removed a President (two Presidents -- Johnson and Clinton -- were impeached but not removed; Nixon resigned before he could be impeached).

So suppose Congress does impeach Trump and Pence. Your friend from abroad hears the news and worries -- has Nancy Pelosi just announced a coup? How do you explain that that isn't really an accurate description of what happened, in a way that distinguishes the "faithless elector" case?

(As you might imagine, what's really prompted this line of thinking is the "legal" arguments for Juan Guaido claiming the presidency in Venezuela. Even assuming he's obeying the letter of the law -- is this more like an impeachment, or more like a faithless elector? Of course, I think the actual answer is that the "legitimate" legal structures in Venezuela have decayed so severely that trying to think in terms of legitimated legal pathways is just a misfire completely -- we're talking about a country where the Supreme Court, stacked with Maduro loyalists, just outright dissolved the national assembly, after all)

The Future of the "Special Relationship" Between American Jews and Israel

I was invited to write a short piece for a microsymposium on the future of the special relationship between American Jews and America (namely, the idea that America has been historically "exceptional" as being relatively free from antisemitism, and whether that status remains solid going forward).

Look forward to that piece coming out in a few days. Unfortunately, I was in a hurry when I read the prompt, and before I knew it I had written 175 words on the special relationship between American Jews and Israel. Weirdly, I had (mis)read the prompt in considerable detail: I recall being asked about the nature of the "special relationship" between Israel and American Jews, what its future is, whether it's under permanent threat and whether there might be a permanent rupture between the two communities.

None of this was germane to what I was actually asked to write -- so I had to go back to the drawing board. But why waste perfectly good verbiage when I have a blog that lets me publish whatever I want? So here's what I wrote (expanded -- another virtue of the blog is I'm not limited to 175 words) for the ghost symposium -- it's carrying forward themes I wrote about here about the Israeli government not caring what American Jews think.

* * *

The watchword for the American Jewish/Israeli relationship over the next few years will be “reciprocity”. Charles De Gaulle said that “Nations don’t have friends—only interests,” but a “special relationship” is supposed to be more than transactional in nature. For years, American Jews and American Jewish organizations have spent much time, money, and political capital going to bat for Israel and a strong Israel-American alliance. They've done this in even tough or inconvenient environments (one good example: the virtually wall-to-wall Jewish organizational opposition to the Iran Deal, which pitted these groups against a President wildly popular amongst American Jews and which occurred even though polling suggested most American Jews backed the agreement).

Much of the emerging tension in our relationship stems from the realization that the Israeli government feels no corresponding obligation to expend any effort on American Jewish priorities if it requires even a modicum of inconvenience. The “relationship” is entirely one-way.

This comes up with respect to the occupation, but it is even more evident in matters of religious pluralism. Nothing demonstrated Israel’s complete dismissal of American Jewish priorities (even when security issues are not at stake) than the collapse of the Kotel deal. More recently, the Netanyahu government’s response to Pittsburgh—seemingly focused more on propping Trump up than comforting Jews—was similarly self-centered on Israeli, not American Jewish, concerns. And yes, we noticed.

This asymmetry isn't sustainable, and the question is what will break first. On a purely transactional basis, it probably is true that Evangelical Christians can offer a superior deal to Israel than American Jews ever can.  It wasn't an oversight or a mistake when Netanyahu told a group of American Christians "We have no better friends on earth than you" -- American Christians don't make annoying demands for egalitarian prayer spaces or religious pluralism or preserving Israel's liberal democratic character.

The only reason to maintain a special relationship with American Jews is if we are, indeed, viewed as special -- a group for whom there is a genuine and reciprocal care and concern that goes beyond cold-blooded self-interest. It will require Israel to sometimes -- not all the time, not blindly, but sometimes -- take steps that are hard, or inconvenient, or go beyond nakedly political calculations (for example: standing up against anti-Soros conspiracy theories being used to buttress quasi-fascist authoritarian political movements, even if you don't much like the sorts of political organizations Soros backs in Israel. Yeah, it might not the easiest, most convenient political play for Bibi -- but you know what? Suck it up, buttercup: this is bigger than you).

In short, reciprocity is the future -- or not -- of the special relationship between Israel and American Jews. Either both parties will be willing to invest effort and sacrifice on behalf of the other, or neither will.

Big Media David: Israel Doesn't Care About American Jews

I've been on a travel kick this week -- came back to DC for a wedding, stayed for Mother's Day, and now am departing for Minnesota for my wedding tasting(!) -- and, as you may have noticed, haven't really been able to blog. Frankly, given how terrible this week has been, I don't mind being mostly off the grid.

But I did make time to write a column for the Forward on what's been a very painful realization for me: While American Jews care a lot about Israel, Israel doesn't give a damn about American Jews.

We've spent all this time and energy to foster a sense of "connection" between American Jews and Israel, only to discover that it flows almost entirely one way. We'll step up to bat time and again to defend Israel in debates and controversies, even when we're unsure of the wisdom of their particular policy choices. But when we try to assert reciprocity, what do we get?

• A sneering disdain for the two-state solution, or basically any efforts to secure political equality for Palestinians;
• A busted Western Wall agreement;
• Continued fealty to an ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate that openly discriminates against the denominations that represent most American Jews; 
• Invocations and prayers by viciously bigoted Evangelical preachers guaranteed to make American Jews blanche; and
• A level of snuggling up to Donald Trump that might as well constitute a taunt.

On any one of these issues, one might be able to say "Israel's a democracy, it gets to make it's own calls." Nobody is saying American Jews should be able to dictate Israeli policy. But we could justly say Israeli Jews should consider American Jewish perspectives, just as we've often (very often) heard that American Jews should consider Israeli viewpoints. But when time and again, over and over, we're completely ignored to the degree that there's barely even the pretense of considering the position or status of American Jews as a data point of consideration -- well, it becomes very obvious how much we matter in the scheme of things.

Israel, it seems, has made a calculated decision that it can do without American Jews. Whatever we can give them -- votes, aid, opposition to BDS, whatever -- they can get from other sources. Now one might have thought -- and many of us did think -- that the relationship between American and Israeli Jews wasn't one built solely on necessity or self-interest; it didn't depend on what one party could give to the other, it was a relationship grounded on a sense of shared identity and camaraderie. But no longer think that's true. Israel has decided it doesn't need us, and -- more importantly -- that if it doesn't need us, it doesn't care about us.

On Hating the Players While Loving the Game: The Progressive Dilemma in Israel and America

Donald Trump is effectuating a sea change in progressive Zionism.

That's not a novel hypothesis. But I mean to make the argument differently than it's usually presented.

If you asked me five, ten, fifteen years ago to associate "anger" at a country with a political orientation towards that country, I'd have said "revolutionary." If I am outright angry at a country, then I'm saying it needs to be (metaphorically, at least) burned to the ground, flipped over and radically restarted. Those who are angry at America do not also love America -- they think America is a poisoned chalice, a false promise. To be clear, I've never thought (and I don't think now) that dissent is incompatible with loving a nation. But this sort of quaking rage is a different beast -- if this is what one feels, it's because one thinks the entire endeavor is not worth saving.

And yet, right now, the attitude I feel towards America and its leaders is anger. I am angry at Donald Trump, and I'm angry at the congressional Republicans who enable him. More than that, I'm angry at the direction America has taken. Democracies are as they do, and as Richard Rorty once observed, "There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves." So, in a real sense, I'm deeply angry at America.

Many progressives share that sentiment. And some of them, certainly, channel that anger into a revolutionary critique. The election of Trump, and the careening of the Republican Party into a far-right political movement, demonstrates that America as we know it really is corrupted root-to-branch.

Yet most of us, I think, aren't going down that road (whether we should or not is a debate for another time). Our anger is not leading us to the conclusion that America cannot be saved, or that it is in its entirety a failed experiment. We continue to care about America; we continue to love America, we do not think that the current political environment -- rage-inducing as it may be -- indicates that "America" as an idea should be abandoned, tossed aside for something else.

And this, I think, is offering a new model for progressive engagement with Israel. If you asked me five, ten, fifteen years ago, "what is the political orientation towards Israel of someone who is angry at Israel," I'd have said "revolutionary." They want to destroy the Zionist state root-to-branch, and replace it with something else.

For Jews, an unbreakable syllogism created an unstable binary. The syllogism was that "If you're angry at Israel (not just "opposed to X policy", but angry) -- its practices, its leaders, its direction -- then you must want to see it destroyed." And so persons who started to feel anger were forced to choose. If they loved Israel, believed in it as a state, then they couldn't be angry towards it -- they had to sublimate and suppress those feelings, because accepting them meant (by syllogism) that they must want Israel to be destroyed. And by contrast, if that anger was irresistible, if they couldn't not be angry at this policy or that leader or those practices, then they had no choice (again, by syllogism) but to endorse the idea that Israel was a false promise, an indelible corruption, which must be torn out from the ground.

Now, to be sure, there are many people for whom anger at Israel really does come hand-in-hand with seeking its destruction. I'm not saying they don't exist, or that they represent the majority of those who have historically held attitudes like "anger" towards the Israeli state. But I don't think that connection holds syllogistically, and it is (amazingly enough) Donald Trump who has allowed me to see that.

The antipathy I hold towards Bibi Netanyahu is not different in kind to my attitude towards Donald Trump, and to be honest it's not that far off in degree either. And Netanyahu isn't even the worst actor -- proceed to the next circle out (not even to the fringes, but still people well within the Israeli political mainstream), look at your Miri Regevs and your Bezalel Smotrichs and your Naftali Bennetts and your Oren Hazans and your Ayalet Shakeds, and things get far worse. And for progressive Zionists, it is hard not to react to this with despair. I detest these people and all that they stand for, but they represent the dominant political coalition in Israel today. So if I loathe them and their policies ... where does that leave me? What's the point of caring about Israel, if this is the Israel of today?

Well, it leaves me in the same place I'm left vis-a-vis America today. The dominant political coalition in America is repulsive to me, it is horrifying, it is sickening. And yet my reaction to it has not been to throw up my hands and give up on America (nor has it been to softplay just how horrible Trump and his cohorts are). I care about America and believe in the idea of "America" -- maybe I shouldn't, but I do -- and so the implied association between anger and revolutionary rupture has not, yet at least, come to pass.

Donald Trump has illuminated the space for genuinely caring about, and investing in, a political community even as one is repelled by its leaders and its current political orientation. I live in that space every day right now, as an American. And learning how to do that is something that progressive Zionists have desperately needed, because the old binary -- abandon anger, or abandon ship -- wasn't going to work for much longer.

This is a lesson that Jews have learned at least once before. The post-Holocaust theology advocated by scholars like Yitz Greenberg and David Blumenthal have suggested that what Jews need to preserve a relationship with God is the legitimized ability to express anger towards God; in my scholarship I've extended this argument into the political context as well. It's a dangerous lesson because anger is a dangerous emotion, and because (at least in my formulation of it) this sort of anger does not imply any ethical obligation to continue to preserve the relationship going forward.

Nonetheless, one virtue of legitimizing a qualified role for anger in our political relationships is that it need not occupy the field. After the Holocaust, Jews may be angry at God -- but we are not just that. We'd be far more likely to become "just that" if our anger was delegitimized -- a sort of irrational hysteria, or proof that we are no longer Jews -- but it wasn't, and so we haven't.

Maybe I'm too sanguine. In part, this is because I dislike anger as a political emotion. I don't like myself when I'm angry; anger doesn't make me feel validated, it makes me feel sad. More to the point: I don't trust my political instincts when they're inflected by anger. I was not surprised to find that I've specifically critiqued anger as a political emotion in the context of Israel and Palestine. Yet I've also recognized that anger can have productive uses here, if it is appropriately cabined and doesn't metastasize into the dominant mode of relating to the conflict (on this more generally, see also). Because I don't like being angry, I'm less worried about the risk I'll want to stay angry for its own sake -- for me, allowing anger is a means of working through it to someplace more productive. But maybe that's not really the case, or at least not the case for everyone.

That's a nettlesome problem, and I'm not sure how to resolve it. I can't imagine a way of being a progressive Zionist that doesn't allow for one to be positively repelled by the current Israeli political climate, any more than I can imagine being a progressive American today who isn't horrified by our own nation's descent into an alt-right fever dream. Nonetheless, I do think that Trump has crystallized a mode of relating to Israel for progressive Jews that allows us to genuinely, in our bones, be upset at the direction Israel has taken -- not simply a bad headline here or there, but core features of its current politics -- without feeling the need to let go of it entirely. If I can do that for America, I can do it for Israel too.

A Republic, If We Can Keep It

Ben Franklin was always my favorite founding father, at least since I played him in Burning Tree Elementary's Fifth Grade Play (the play was called Let George Do It, but my scene was actually a cut-in from 1776). It may even predate that -- I have to imagine I read Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by his Good Mouse Amos at an even earlier age (an excellent children's book, by the way -- all good children's books contain mice).

Among Dr. Franklin's most famous lines was his reported statement, upon leaving the Constitutional Convention, that we had created "a Republic, if you can keep it."

The constitutional character of America is not something one can take for granted, and it is not something we claim by birthright. We must keep it, each and every day. It is an ongoing responsibility.

But some days are more salient than others. Election days are always among them, and this election day is more meaningful than most. This is the moment where we get to decide what sort of country we want to be. This is the moment where we get to prove that our homilies about law and liberty, equal justice and due process, free speech and free press, are more than just words.

Some of you (like myself) have already voted. If so, thank you. If you are waiting until election day, please make sure to go to the polls. And if you are still unsure of whether it's worth voting, or whether there's time, or whether it matters -- it is, there is, and it does.

America is not perfect, but it is a great Republic -- a haven for millions who have come to these shores seeking a better life, and a model for millions more inspired by our constitutional ideals. I never want America to stop being the sort of place people around the world look up to. I never want America to stop being the sort of place where people believe that they can achieve their dreams. I never want America to stop being the sort of place where people want to immigrate to.

America, is and has been all of these things. They define and demarcate our Republic.

Tomorrow, we will see if a majority of Americans find that Republic to be worth keeping.

Who We Thought They Were

The post convention bump has pushed Donald Trump into the lead in the presidential race. While it's worth taking that news with a grain of salt -- polls bounce around tremendously around convention time, before settling back into place -- it is also a fair moment to think a bit about what a Trump victory would tell us about America.

The Republican primary caused several GOP loyalists to admit that Trump's victory essentially "proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true." Democrats had long alleged that the core of the Republican Party's base was built on simmering white resentment, bigotry, xenophobia, intolerance, and a thirst to get at a diverse range of "thems" who didn't count as real Americans (gays, religious minorities, people of color, women ... the list goes on). Republican elites had viewed this charge as basically a political smear, right up until the monster that they had created through baiting the Tea Party and playing birther-curious broke free of their constraints and ran away the nomination.

But a primary is just a primary. What happens if Trump wins the whole thing? Well, in that case it may well "prove every bad thing leftists have ever said about America is basically true." The left narrative about America, after all, is precisely that the organizing feature of American politics is racism and white supremacy, and that we're deluding ourselves if we think that it did anything but go into a minor hibernation for the last fifty years or so. What does it say about our national trajectory if we can easily turn back George Wallace in 1968 but can't keep Donald Trump out of office in 2016? What retort would we have to the simple statement that racism and xenophobia, as electoral rallying cries, really are what gets folks to "stomp the floor"?

Yet we wouldn't only be learning something about the right, or even America as a whole. If Trump -- a historically bad candidate, with historically low approvals, open in his bigotry and contempt for large swaths of the American public -- wins the election, it would also "prove every bad thing centrists have ever said about the left is basically true." What's been the core of the center's charge? That the left isn't politically serious, that it prefers its own sanctimony to the much scarier work of getting things done, that it is more seduced by the thought of rebellion than the staid and square work of slowly mining in the hard rock. If the left -- too besot with its own "purity" or inchoate resentment against "the establishment" -- can't coalesce to beat back this candidate, it would verify once again its complete and utter impotence as a meaningful force for improving the nation or the world. We have, after all, gone through this dance time and again: Walking away from universal health care in the Nixon administration because it wasn't single-payer and then waiting 40 years to claw our way back to the same basic deal; letting the Freedom of Choice Act fall to interleft squabbling in the 1990s and never getting it near passage since; watching the Occupy movement put economic justice on the political agenda for the first time in a generation and then seeing it promptly collapses in on itself because of an ingrained aversion to sullying itself with actual making a political demand (and let's not even get started on Ralph Nader in 2000). And now we're set to go through it all again.

Finally, we can also draw one lesson if Clinton wins. It would "prove" (not that we'd need proof) "every good thing that the center and left has said about minority groups in America". For it is almost assured that, win or lose, Trump will gain a majority of the white vote. And at that point, it might be worth dusting off William J. Wilson's 1860 essay What Shall We Do With the White People?, asking "are they fit for self-government?" If democracy "is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard," straight white Christian men want Trump; with all the implications that entails for their commitment to (what we've told ourselves are) the basic tenets of the American creed. If Clinton wins, it will be due to passion and commitment of non-white voters going to bat for her in the general election. Given the stakes of this election, it'd be no exaggeration to say that it will have been the American Others -- African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and more -- who will have ultimately saved the American experiment.

What a Dumb Way To End It All

Democracy means your side loses. Which stinks, when you like your side and dislike the other. But that's the way the cookie crumbles. You can't piss and moan about how the system is irrevocably broken everytime you don't win an election. And so while I think Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would be awful, awful presidents who would do disastrous things to this country -- well, that's what happens with voting sometimes. Tough cookies.

Donald Trump is potentially different. With him you really do see the potential for non-hyperbolic apocalypse. Shooting off nuclear weapons at random countries, refusing to respect the rule of law ... he is the first serious presidential candidate in my lifetime who genuinely threatens the fabric of American democracy (and, in its way, global stability, since a destabilized American democracy would also be a global catastrophe).

And if that is the case -- what a stupid way to go! All great powers eventually decline, but one would at least hope that America's would be a little dignified. But the history books about Trump's ascendancy would have to conclude that the greatest, most powerful country in the history of the planet unraveled because it couldn't tolerate someone from the wrong ethnic group being president and decided to throw a collective temper tantrum by electing in the most absurd overt demagogue possible.

Most Democrats continue to think Donald Trump is unelectable come November. I'm inclined to agree -- the case of candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell in the otherwise-GOP-wave year of 2010 indicates that enthusiastic Republican fury manifesting in the nomination of crazy turns off most American voters even in environment's broadly favorable to the GOP -- but who knows? It's all fun and games until somebody gets elected.

The Best of the 2015 AJC Poll of the Jews

The AJC has released its 2015 poll of Jewish political attitudes. There's a lot to unpack here.

Some of it is very topical and gotten a lot of coverage, like the fact that a narrow plurality of Jews support the Iran Deal.

Some of it is very unremarkable, such as the finding that -- as is always the case -- the most important political issue for Jews is the economy (41.7%), not U.S.-Israel Relations (7.2%).

Some of it reflects the positions I hold, like that anti-Semitism is "somewhat of a problem" in the United States (64.2%).

Some of it does not reflect the positions I hold, like that more people approve of how Netanyahu is handling the US/Israel relationship (55.4%) than of how Obama is handling it (48.9%).

Some of it is reassuring, like that 58.9% of American Jews would support dismantling some or all West Bank settlements as "part of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians".

Some of it is deeply alarming, like that 39.2% of American Jews would not support dismantling any settlements as part of a permanent agreement.

But by far the most important finding comes in the "temperature" question that rates countries on a 0-100 scale of "cold" versus "warm" sentiment. As it turns out, while America receives a stellar 84.64 rating, it is not the country American Jews feel most warmly towards. Beating it out with a 84.73 -- less than .1 degrees! -- is, of course, Canada.

Frankly, I think we all knew that even the most patriotic-seeming American Jew secretly bleeds maple syrup. Is it any wonder that Ottawa effectively pulls all the strings in Washington?

I Will Never Yield in My Commitment to Compromise My Principles

A new poll asks what sort of people Americans wish had a greater presence in Congress. There's some interesting findings, but the one that immediately struck me was this:

Gallup finds that by a margin of 63% to 30%, Americans believe the country would be better (as opposed to worse) governed if in political office there were more “people who think it is more important to compromise to get things done than to hold firm to their principles.” Okay. But by a margin of 56% to 38%, they believe life would be better if there were in political office more “people who think it is more important to hold firm to their principles than to compromise to get things done.” These would appear to be diametrically opposed and exclusive propositions, unless “Americans” are saying they want more highly conflicted people in office, or just want more of everything.

I really, really, really wish I could get into the head of the people who prefer both the pro- and anti-compromise positions.

The Insular Cases

I just read an interesting empirical study on Jewish feelings of outsiderness in the United States.* The good news is that most Jews don't feel like outsiders in the United States. So yay for that! But the interesting part of the study, to me, was what accounted for the sentiment. In general, Jews who lived in areas with many other Jews and who had many Jewish friends and acquaintances were far more likely to say they felt included as Americans. By contrast, Jews who were more isolated from other Jews and had fewer Jewish contacts were more likely to feel that they were outsiders in America. Since most Jews live in areas with relatively large Jewish populations, that means most Jews feel relatively included in America.

To me, this finding is quite intuitive. But it does clash with a narrative some forward, that insularity and particularism amongst minority group "ghettoizes" them and prevents their integration into the American mainstream. It turns out that story seems to be wrong. Rather, when a member of a minority group has surrounding structures demonstrating the normalcy of their peers (that they're average, non-exceptional members of the community), it is likely to reinforce the message that there is no conflict between being a member of the minority group and being an American.

The upshot is pluralist. If what we're going for is a polity in which people of all backgrounds feel welcome and included as Americans, the right strategy isn't to try and breakdown particularistic group affiliations. Rather, these groups are essential to the mainstreaming process, because they promote feelings of normalcy and non-exceptionalism amongst the minority group, which in turn renders the surrounding culture less alienating.

* Becka A. Alper & Daniel V.A. Olson, Do Jews Feel Like Outsiders in America?: The Impact of Anti-Semitism, Friendships, and Religious Geography 50 J. Sci. Stud. Religion 822 (2011).

Dead Dictator's Society Roundup

Gaddafi is dead! But other things are happening as well:

* * *

Spencer Ackerman has advance copies of all the headlines that will flow from Gaddafi's death.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) slashes back at the GOP for tying him to fringe anti-Semites in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The consensus amongst non-partisan observers is that anti-Semitic incidents in the movement are marginal (though obviously disturbing and quite sick).

Rich Santorum boldly stands against contraception.

Reflecting on the police shooting of a young Black man who proverbially "did everything right", E.J. Graff worries that her own son will be next.

Deborah Orr is a charming mix of nasty and dumb, but unfortunately this canard of "chosenness" as Jewish supremacism hardly is limited to her.

There's nothing more American than being a second-class citizen. Today, gay and lesbian Americans are the most American of all.

Spy Games

I remember being quite blase when a story broke about Israel spying on the US. I just didn't find it that shocking. Nations -- even friendly nations -- don't take each other at their word. They spy on each other. It didn't surprise me that Israel spies on us, and I'd be shocked if we don't spy on Israel.

And it turns out we do! Again, nothing shocking here. If anything, the most interesting twist is that the leaker was an Israeli Jew working for the FBI on contract, who was worried about what he perceived to be Israel's overly aggressive tendencies (he gave the info he intercepted to a left-wing Jewish blogger). It's such a delicious inversion of the trope that Jews can't be trusted to put American interests over Israeli ones.

Happy 4th of July!

"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America." -- Bill Clinton.

American Territories

Can anyone explain to me why America is still in the business of possessing territories that do not have full voting rights? These would include (of places with permanent populations) Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Marinas Islands, Guam, and the District of Columbia. Politically speaking, of course, there are loads of reasons why these territories exist in a state of effective colonization -- they're too small, they're too likely to vote Democratic, they may desire independence (in Puerto Rico's case, there may be a virtual standoff between independence and statehood forces).


But it seems to me that there is no normative justification whatsoever for this state of affairs. Places should either be independent nations, or should have full voting rights in the country that maintains sovereignty over them -- it's that simple. Even size isn't really a barrier: D.C. is already bigger than Wyoming in terms of population. A unified "Pacifica" state of American Samoa, Northern Marinas Islands, and Guam would be the smallest U.S. state, but not by an unreasonable margin (it'd have roughly 322,000 people, against Wyoming's 563,000). Puerto Rico on its own would already have multiple Representatives in Congress (and would likely be combined with the U.S. Virgin Islands for statehood purposes).

And while I agree that these territories (absent D.C.) should be given an option of independence if they desire (akin to the Marshall Islands, for example), I also think their long-standing governance by the United States has given them a valid claim to statehood, if they want it, that we have an obligation to respect. In fact, I think democratic representation is so important that I don't think it should really be optional -- statehood or independence should be a mandatory choice.

It is frankly embarrassing that this country, which serves as a model for democracy the world over, has large swaths of people under its banner who don't have representation in Congress. It's wrong, and what's more, I can't think of any remotely plausible valid reason for allowing it other than bare inertia.

What Does It Mean To Be Loved?

I just read an article by Rabbi Justin Baird entitled "What if Jews Knew That Americans Love Them?". It was recommended by my childhood friend Joshua Stanton, who is making a name for himself as a rabbinical student doing the yeoman's work building up interfaith dialogue and relationships. He called the article "brilliant and challenging."

Josh's work is invaluable. But Rabbi Baird's article is deeply patronizing and spectacularly superficial in its analysis of what both anti-Semitism and "philo-Semitism" mean. His promotion of it is thus deeply disappointing, as it betrays an exceptionally thin notion of what anti-Semitism means that is, in my view, deeply damaging to the project of Jewish equality and part of a broader, poisonous intellectual trend which does not apply the same standards to anti-Semitism as it does to any other "-ism".

Rabbi Baird alleges that the Jewish community's "anti-Semitism education machine" has effectively brainwashed American Jews (or at least tried to) into believing that Jews are a hated, despised minority in this country. But really, survey data demonstrates that most Americans have rather warm, fuzzy feelings towards American Jews. Consequently, we should understand that anti-Semitism in the United States as a serious social or political influence is mostly a dead letter, and we should concentrate on (a) threats from abroad (which Rabbi Baird concedes still exist), (b) managing our internal affairs (such as dealing with intermarriage and decreased Jewish commitment among younger Jews), and (c) doing "more to help others who are not yet accepted in America."

I don't dispute the survey data. I agree entirely that most Americans have warm feelings towards Jews, and that those feelings are perfectly genuine -- the respondents aren't just lying to pollsters because they're embarrassed to admit that they're secret anti-Semites. And I agree that this is certainly significant -- it's obviously better for any minority group for the majority to think positively of them rather than negatively.

Nonetheless, I don't think this establishes that America is "philo-Semitic" in any robust sense. By "philo-Semitic", I mean a polity that respects Jews qua Jews, particularly, one that respects Jewish difference. Anybody can be friends with someone with whom they share common needs and convergent interests. The true test of equality is whether a group has a right to be different, to have divergent interests, to stake out positions independent of the majority and chart paths others do not wish to explore. Jews share some things in common with the dominant social castes in our society, and along other axes, we're different. A philo-Semitic polity would respect our right to be different, and acknowledge the Jewish voice (as well as other voices) as an independent and valuable contributor in crafting the American nomos.

The survey Rabbi Baird cites is perfectly consistent with my belief that Jews are not respected in this way. Rather, Jews are respected as "Judeo-Christian"; as some sort of subset of the Christian majority, and not as independent actors. A truly differentiated Jewish voice, one that speaks as Jews and is clear and unapologetic about where it differs from Christians and Christianity, has very little presence in the public life. And many of those who consider themselves (and genuinely believe themselves) to be great friends of the Jews are actively patronizing to these assertions of Jewish independence. What we see is not philo-Semitism is that is meant as genuine respect for Jews as equal human beings. What we're seeing is instead the imposition of brute political influence to define the problem out of existence without having to do anything so messy as actually listen to Jewish qua Jewish perspectives.

Before I turn to that case, though, I want to provide some background which will help illuminate some objections I have towards Rabbi Baird's piece. I'm informed here by my main academic focus on anti-racism work in America. There is a lot of scholarship on what it means to oppose racism, less on what it means to oppose anti-Semitism, and almost no cross-pollination between the two fields. The idea that the mechanics of anti-Semitism discourse in America differ in any meaningful sense from racism discourse appears to be universally held, and for the life of me I can't fathom the foundation for it.

First, my background in anti-racism work and the way racism is operationalized in American society makes me extraordinarily suspicious of claims of excessive "card playing" by minority groups. The "race card" is topped by the "'race card' card"; the "anti-Semitism card" is typically trumped by the "'anti-Semitism card' card". The degree to which Jews actually allege "anti-Semitism" is wildly overstated compared to the amount of times it actually happens, and -- as everyone who has been trying in vain to get Fox to pay attention to Glenn Beck's naked anti-Semitism has found out -- the mythos that anti-Semitism is an accusation that can't be ignored and can't be defended against likewise is greatly exaggerated. The main function of this mythology is not to open space for criticizing Jewish institutions (like Israel), but rather to rationalize refusing to listen to Jewish complaints regardless of their validity -- a threshold barrier that indicts and dismisses any claim of anti-Semitism prior to assessing the merits (see also).

I really would like to see some empirical work done on the relative tendency of American Jews to call things anti-Semitic -- how often and what does and doesn't get the label -- rather than have to listen again and again to vapid conventional wisdom that simply assumes an epidemic that I don't think exists. Frankly, I've seen this argument raised too often, with too little hard evidence, in too many contexts for me to take it seriously as anything but concern-trolling.

I mentioned I found Rabbi Baird to be tremendously patronizing, and this is the first dimension that explains why -- lectures to minority groups (whether delivered by a Jew or not, delivered by a person of color or not) about how they're really just imagining their victimization, that they're more or less brainwashed by a culture of victimology that doesn't let them see that hey, everything's equal now -- is Exhibit A in how racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, or any other -ism is marginalized and erased. Yes, it's possible that the Jewish community has a mass communal psychosis. Or it's possible that we have something worth saying that other people ought to listen to, even where it can't be choately expressed. This is anti-racism 101, and it's about time it became anti-anti-Semitism 101 too.

Second, also flowing out of my work in anti-racism circles, is the premise that personal attitudes are the primary, if not solitary, relevant question regarding whether racism or anti-Semitism exists or not. If a person genuinely feels that they're a-okay with Jews or friendly towards Black people, then case closed. It is, in the immortal words of Kimberle Crenshaw, declaring the end of racism "by proclamation alone."

This presupposition is deeply problematic. For starters, it's nearly unfalsifiable -- we have very few ways of gaining insight into what anyone truly believes in their heart of hearts. Anyone can claim to be philo-Semitic -- I mean, Helen Thomas is still insistently telling everyone how much she loves Jews. But putting that aside, the bigger problem is that framing the question this way entirely cedes what is due to Jews to whatever Christians think is their due. If Christians think they're treating Jews fairly, then, ipso facto, Jews are being treated fairly. And why should I make that concession? Why is Jewish equality defined by non-Jews? They had the power to tell us why we were inferior, and now they get the authority to tell us that we're equal? Bullshit. It's epistemically precarious (non-Jews are considerably less likely to know what Jews need in order for us to be truly equal than Jews are) and politically reactionary (reinscribing the same old power arrangements whereby the conditions of Jewish life are set by and for the non-Jewish majority).

Again, the point isn't to say that all these people who say they're friends of Jews are lying -- as I said, I think the survey respondents are answering honestly. The point is that what's being measured isn't any sort of genuine encounter with Jewish lives and experience; what's being measured is how well Christians stack up against a metric they themselves created -- one that may bear little, if any, resemblance to what Jews think constitutes equal respect and equal dignity. That's the question that we should be exploring, and that's the one Rabbi Baird resolutely ignores -- or worse, declares we have no right to ask at all.

Third, insights from the burgeoning literature on the psychology of prejudice (note that while most of this research has been done regarding race, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't apply with equal force to anti-Semitism) should make us appropriately skeptical that conscious attitudes represent the totality of relevant information regarding personal prejudice. Much the opposite: what we've discovered is that the "American dilemma" -- a strong commitment to liberal egalitarianism, paired with deeply ingrained prejudicial biases -- leads to the conscious suppression of these attitudes, which then reemerge as subconscious bias. Moreover, as Jon and Kathleen Hansen have documented, while people "crave justice", they satisfy this craving by the path of least resistance -- which often means simply redefining an unjust state of affairs as just. We should expect, then, that given the choice between a deep, wide-encompassing reckoning with Jewish experiences that might require a substantial and painful reassessment of a bevy of social arrangements and political priors, and simply using their overwhelming political and social dominance to decide that they're already good friends of the Jews, the American Christian community will choose the latter.

These observations interlock with each other to provide a cohesive and coherent explanation for how genuine positive views about Jews can coexist with a social structure that is not remotely philo-Semitic at all. The liberal consensus against anti-Semitism means that everybody needs to craft a self-image that is not anti-Semitic. The assumption that anti-Semitism is only "in the heart" means that it is a concept primarily in control of non-Jews, who, consistent with the desire to not view themselves as anti-Semitic, have every incentive to define anti-Semitism narrowly and, more importantly, in such a way so that it doesn't touch on any beliefs or principles that they actually care about -- the aforementioned path of least resistance. Finally, in order to complete the moral cleansing, it is necessary to excise the residual "anti-Semitism talk", that is, the discourses which make it seem like anti-Semitism is and remains a serious problem (which would destabilize the notion that it is something we really have overcome). It is notable, then, that the one anti-Semitic stereotype that retains quite a bit of vitality in American social and political discourse is the one Rabbi Baird himself invokes -- that Jews are too quick to claim things are anti-Semitic when they're not, that the accusation of anti-Semitism is typically abused, and that the belief that anti-Semitism remains a problem is nothing more than the product of Jewish brainwashing and victim-mongering.

There's plenty of evidence, not the least of which is the survey cited by Rabbi Baird, that indicates positive feelings towards Jews. Is there significant evidence demonstrate actual philo-Semitism in the sense I described it above -- as willingness to hear a Jewish voice that diverges from what one is already telling oneself about what justice means, what a good foreign policy is, what a moral America represents? I think the answer is: clearly not.

Consider the infamous J.D. Hayworth incident, where the (non-Jewish) Hayworth had a staffer tell a synagogue that Hayworth was, in fact, a better and more observant Jew than they were. When the congregation walked out in protest, another Hayworth flack declared "no wonder their are anti-Semites!" What moves are being made here? Obviously, Hayworth and his staffers don't think being Jewish is a bad thing -- they're identifying with it. But they're defining "Jewish" in a way that obviously bears no resemblance to how Jews define themselves, but instead is coterminous with how Hayworth sees himself already. And so Hayworth's observant Christianity in facts makes him a better Jew than the Jews. And when Jews try to protest this arrangement -- try to restate a Jewish identity independent of Hayworth's appropriation -- that's, we're told, the cause of anti-Semitism. Jews are okay so long as Jews are tamed and turned into, in the words of Stephen Feldman, "a quirky Protestant sect". If they try to assert their autonomy, then danger strikes.

What happened to Hayworth's audience has happened to me as well. Perhaps Josh has had the experience of being told by a non-Jewish interlocutor that some position I take -- some fundamentally Jewish position I take -- on abortion, or Israel, or the rights of religious minorities -- makes me a bad Jew. I've had a Christian commenter ask wonderously why, in her view, so many Jews didn't see that the Republican Party was the real "pro-Israel party"? She definitely believed herself a friend of the Jews; she just thought we were all delusional (much like Rabbi Baird, apparently she thought we'd been brainwashed). Nonetheless, I stand by my response to her -- the fact that the bulk of the Jewish community appears to have a different conception of what "pro-Israel" means than that held by Mike Huckabee should by all rights be a sign for Huckabee to reassess. Instead, it's a sign of Jewish pathology. Jews differ from what non-Jews construct as philo-Semitism, and so Jews are marginalized.

Socially speaking, this is most prominently instantiated by the "Judeo-Christian" dynamic, whereby Jews are included by name but excluded in every other respect. As I have previously argued:

“Judeo-Christian”, of course, is a nonsense phrase that is 100% Christian and, where it does happen to overlap with Jewish perspectives, does so completely by accident. And where Jewish ideology clashes even a little bit with Christian hegemony, it is immediately jettisoned from the pantheon. So we get Katherine Harris telling folks that adhering to “Judeo-Christian values” means only electing Christian legislators (presumably, not Jews), and Duncan Hunter explaining that the reason Israel can have gay soldiers but America can’t is because the latter’s combat troops have, you guessed it, “Judeo-Christian values.”

I noted in that post that the dynamic bears disturbing overtones of Christian (and Enlightenment Liberal) supersessionist ideology. But here the point is more basic -- the rhetoric of "Judeo-Christianity" is an integral part of the system of Jewish silencing whereby Jews, having already been "spoken for", are deprived of the opportunity to speak with their own voice. It maintains Christian control over the content of Judaism, preventing any autonomous Jewish existence that might challenge Christian self-image as "friend of the Jews".

I don't want to act like this a problem only of the right. The left does much the same thing. In crafting its Church policy on Israel the Presbyterian Church went out of its way to engage only with those Jewish groups that it viewed as already amenable to its political priors. It was a massive expression of Christian arrogance towards the Jewish community -- that it, not we, gets to decide who to talk to, what to talk about, and what the contours of the discussion will be. I think that the BDS wing of the anti-Israel left is infected with this sort of logic -- instead of grappling with Jews qua Jews and the Jewish community as a whole, they take a few "good Jews" as inoculation against the idea that there is possibly anything for them to talk about or think about with respect to how their politics intersect with an egalitarian treatment of the Jewish community.

Christine Littleton once defined the feminist method as starting "with the very radical act of taking women seriously, believing that what we say about ourselves and our experience is important and valid, even when (or perhaps especially when) it has little or no relationship to what has been or is being said about us." I used that quote as part of the close to my series on anti-Semitism because I think it says something very important, particularly with respect to articles like Rabbi Baird's, which starts with the very reactionary act of assuring his audience not to take Jews seriously, to ignore what we say about ourselves and how we describe our experience as irrelevant in the face of what others say about us. But Philo-Semitism isn't about what Christians say about us. It's about whether they listen to us, not just when we agree, but also (and especially) where we disagree and demand changes.

As I alluded to above, I don't measure my equality based on some stylized thermostat of what feelings other people have in their heart. I measure it based on whether I feel like I have the right to present my own perspective as a Jew and have it be listened to, even when what I say isn't what non-Jews want to hear from me. I want to be able to tell people that radical anti-choice politics bear no relationship to how the Talmud treats the issue of abortion, that my synagogue would happily perform a gay marriage, that declaring America a "Christian nation" whose schools should teach Christianity is profoundly anti-Semitic, and that promoting radical Israeli settlers who demonize Palestinians and would see Israel destroyed is offensive to my faith -- and have them listen. I want to be able to tell people that we have the right to communal autonomy, that while Jews predominantly opposed the Iraq War we also had the same right as anyone else to support or even cheerlead for it, that universalism is not a panacea for anti-Semitism or any other oppression, that our faith should be judged based on what our faith does, not on some generic skepticism towards "faith" -- and have them listen.

And I don't feel that way. I believe that when I speak as a Jew (as opposed to "as a liberal" or "as a man" or "as a scholar on race" or as nearly any other identity I possess), and I say things that don't cohere to how others think Jews should think, I'm systematically ignored and shunted aside by audiences that are, I suspect, universally comprised of persons who think themselves quite friendly towards Jews. I found Rabbi Baird's article to be profoundly disrespectful of huge swaths of the Jewish community who don't think that all we have the right to ask of Christians is that they no longer harbor a conscious wish for our demise. The love that Rabbi Baird identifies is not a love that interests me, because it isn't born out of any respect for Jews qua Jews, for Jews as a group with independent desires, politics, dreams, and aspirations.

In the immortal framing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rabbi Baird is granting "cheap grace" to the Gentile public -- an easy absolution for what should be hard work. Equality is hard, it isn't simply the exorcism of negative thoughts and impure hearts. It entails costs. It entails listening. It entails letting groups that historically have had little control over their fate space to chart their own destiny, and entails a willingness sometimes to give up the privilege of saying "no". That is not something that can be measured by any thermometer. That is true love of an equal, and it's costly, and difficult, and unlikely to come easy. But I know when I see it, and I have faith in my coreligionists that they'll do the same.