Do the Jews Really Not Belong in the United States?

I think that this is the logical outcome of supporting Israel as American politicians have been trained to do. On the recent thread about the Israeli election I thought about pointing out that roughly the same numbers of Jews like in the U.S. as in Israel, and that the real change in this balance is projected to have nothing to do with massacre or with immigration /emigration but rather with assimilation. But this isn’t a Jewish site and it felt like there would be too much that would have to be painstakingly explained for it to be worth it.

I would not say: “an ancient, not altogether wholesome, notion that the Jews are somehow different.”

I would say: “an accurate recognition that, historically, Christians’ attitudes toward Jews are very different from their attitudes toward other Christians.”

Seems to me that it would be a failure to recognize the Christian potential for anti-semitism that would be “not altogether wholesome” here, no?

Brad DeLong

Even without referring to recent history, one can say this: minorities embedded in a larger community who want to maintain their separate identities in any meaningful way have reason to be fearful on the one hand of being assimilated, and on the other, of becoming targets of opportunity for disaffected members of the majority. Anti-semitism in the United States may not be a major cause for concern today, but if I were a Jew, I wouldn’t assume that this will always be the case. That said, it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone could think of Israel as a safe haven for Jews now, even if it once might have seemed so to committed Zionists.

Corey,
Some of my great-grandparents were refugees from Byelorus at about the same time – a time when anyone with a white skin and free of certain infectious diseases could easily immigrate to the US, and also a time when a Jew in America could expect to face systemic prejudice ranging from exclusion from schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, up to physical violence and the occasional lynching. But when it mattered, when Jews came to the US not as generic European immigrants but as refugees fleeing persecution, they were turned away. After the war, the Jewish survivors of the holocaust, who still faced persecution and even murder, were locked up in Displaced Persons camps, not offered an American haven. When in response to the founding of Israel and the Nakba many Arabic and Islamic countries persecuted their Jewish citizens, the US did not offer a haven. When it became possible for Jews to flee the Soviet Union and then Russia, they were welcomed into Israel and into Germany – not into the US. When Ethiopean Jews fled famine and persecution, the doors of the US were not open to them.

So, yeah, almost completely ahistorical.

Lynchings, Palmer deportations, racially discriminatory immigration policies in the twenties, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, wars on people of color overseas, Guantanamo…19th century horrors we really haven’t come to terms with…

…there may be other minorities I might currently worry more about than Jews, but I can’t guarantee the safety and equal treatment of any minority in the United States in high stress global circumstances.

If things go 1930s level bad, (this is unlikely, but not impossible in my mind, but the scenarios do not leave Israel as a good refuge) Canada and Mexico might be options.

3: China and Japan have had some anti-Semitic outbreaks, even post-WWII. It is tough to explain.

When it became possible for Jews to flee the Soviet Union and then Russia, they were welcomed into Israel and into Germany – not into the US.

This would be news to lots of my neighbors in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

What Brad said. But also . . . .

Rich Puchalsky @1 mentions assimilation, and thereby hangs a tail risk. The American protections enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble and 14A are individual; a future in which every Jew enjoys them until there are no more Jews is, in American terms, a perfectly acceptable way to secure blessings to ourselves and our posterity. But to a Jew as a theological matter, and to a Zionist as a practical political matter, salvation is national rather than personal: kol Yisrael ‘arevim ze le’ze (all Israel are surety to each other). The US (or any liberal democracy) makes its guarantees to Jews, not to the Jews; the guarantee that only Israel seeks, however unreliably and improbably, to offer is and ought to be the “only” one of its kind. (Also, there is the matter of timescale: what’s two and a quarter centuries between Pharaohs?)

Bianca @12 writes: I don’t think most Jews my age or younger, even if they reflexively “support Israel,” think in terms of emigrating even in some dire future.

I don’t know the broad demographics, but anecdotal perspectives vary. About a quarter of the US-born kids who became bar or bat mitzvah in our little minyan in the last thirty years are now Israeli. Nobody sees anything dire about it, and I would be surprised if even one of them voted for Bibi.

Is there any Jew in the US who considers Israel to be a foreign nation as much as say, Botswana or India or Argentina?

Is it fair to parse Biden that closely? I don’t think he’s the sort to speak especially carefully.

*Also, wasn’t it the Jews who started this whole thing about being somehow different? (Half-Jew here.)

**Guarantees. They look great on paper.

Bianca,

The Talmud bit (Shavuot 39b, כל ישראל ערבים ×–×” בזה) hyperlinks straight back to the curses in parshat Behukotai, specifically verse 37, “they shall stumble one upon another when none pursue.” It’s not a tidy promise that Jews will be safe when we rely upon each other, merely a warning that for this chosen people there is no other hope on offer. Ben Franklin may have had this very verse in mind when he spoke of hanging together, or separately.

I agree with Mattski. It’s wrong to read too much into what Biden says about anything. He is the sort who starts with an uncontroversial notion (“Israel is important to some American Jews”) and talks until Very Bad Stuff comes out. He does not mean to say that America is not a safe place for Jews, and would be stunned to discover that you thought he meant that. Just my opinion.

As mattski says, parsing Biden too closely is a tricky business e.g. Henry’s recent explained to a Washington Post audience —

he cracked a joke that is causing great unhappiness among one, somewhat unwilling group of Irish people — Ulster Unionists. When opening the door to the delegation, he joked that “if you’re wearing orange, you’re not welcome in here.”

Of course, the Orangemen are probably quite welcome in Israel.

Corey @ 10

Point taken. I think, though, that other commenters have the right of it insofar as they’re taking Biden’s off-the-cuff, foot-in-mouth remark as not so much an indicator of the hidden wellsprings of government policy as of Biden’s own internal confusion. It is, after all, hardly the only example of something deeply awry in Biden’s thought processes.

In the broader context, self-determination can mean all sorts of things, but often it means something as simple as arriving a place where you can see welcoming family all around you rather than hostile strangers, even if that turns ought later to be more illusion than reality. The Jewish community in the U.S. has an admirable — and remarkably successful — record of solidarity in defending itself against bigotry, but I can also understand why someone might think that if the ADL ever failed, the IDF would still be there.

Thanks to JWB @31 for directing me to the original quotation.

It really makes a *big* difference to the significance of Biden’s quote if the Jews whose safety he claims is dependent on the state of Israel are exactly: Jews who live in Israel.

And having now read the original quotation, that looks like a far more plausible interpretation of what Biden meant than the interpretation according to which he was saying that *American* Jews are only safe in Israel.

Yes, yes, he was addressing an audience that contained some Americans in it, too. But his remarks were directed to the Israeli visitors. The introductory anecdote from Golda Meir makes that clear.

Corey, I think this is somewhat of a tempest in a tea-pot: JB was not saying that American Jews are only safe in Israel. He was saying that Jews in Israel are dependent for their safety on the continued stability of Israel, and quoting Meir’s “no place else to go” line in order to emphasize that.

As a liberal, religious American Jew, I know that the argument — which I’ve heard many times before — that only Israel is a truly reliable place for Jews to live is a *lie*. It may be a place that welcomes Jews … who fit certain definitions of “Jewish” … but it is *not* a place where Judaism as I know and believe in it can be practiced.

For instance, it’s not a place where my friend, the female Jewish Renewal rabbi, could perform a marriage for my other friends, the gay men. It’s not a place where Bat Mitzvahs are a normal part of the Jewish life cycle. Even Jeffrey Goldberg has said:

It has been true for decades that Jews in the U.S. have more freedom of religion than Jews in Israel

And what kind of Jewish refuge is it, really, where we can’t practice Judaism as we understand it, and as we feel it is best for us to do?

Israel is a bait-and-switch. The idea that we should depend on a nation, *any* nation, for Jewish existence is idolatry, because there’s only One we should depend on. Not all Jews who wander are lost.

Biden is mindlessly echoing Netanyahu’s line, when in fact, Jews are leaving Israel in droves. NY is filled with ex-pats.

We could turn it around. Where would Israel be without the US?

There is some ambiguity over what the statement meant. You chose to run with the most inflammatory reading, while not even alerting your readers to the existence of an equally plausible innocuous reading.

(Yes, equally plausible, if not more so. If you think it is significant that the White House has not clarified the ambiguity, then let me introduce you to the term “strategic ambiguity.”)

This is the behavior of a clickbait artist, not a scholar. You need to decide which one you are.

@Corey Robin

Warren Terra has the better of the argument regarding the US as a historical haven for persecuted Jews. Your assertion is, at best, historically accurate in a limited way, some of the time.

First reaction, utter disbelief. Second reaction, Obama is his boss. This is why I have a license to carry. We will never let what happened in Europe happen here. We will not go down without a fight. We financed the American revolution. Fought and died in every war that America has fought. We believe in freedom for all. Yes, I am a Jew first, but I am a Jewish American. I will fight and maybe die protecting your freedom Mr. Biden. I expect no less from you. If you or any other soul that calls him or herself an American, and is unwilling to make that commitment, then he of she should surrender their American citizenship and return to whence they came or plan to reside in HELL.

– – – – – America’s current tolerance towards Jews will never change, and the fact that the United States was almost entirely unwilling to accept Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe is wholly irrelevant to this discussion. – – – – –

Given the incredible growth of hard right wing christianism over the last 30 years and its apparently insatiable appetite for persecution complexes and imposing itself on others through government I would personally be quite hesitant to use the world ‘never’.

Almost every time I go to shul (Reform), someone publicly says something like “Israel is the only absolute refuge for Jews” or even “Jewish survival in America depends on Israel” (I have no idea how that’s supposed to work). As Corey says @39, quoting Goldberg, the idea that Jews can find more safety in Israel than America is quite common among Jews of Biden’s generation — which is also the campaign- and congregation-donor generation.

I figured the point of Corey’s posts was, among other things, to let that group of Jews (and their gentile friends, like Biden) know that many other Jews don’t see it that way — and that younger Jews are especially unlikely to see it that way.

I’m adding that this may be even more true for those of us who are religious & non-Orthodox. Israel offers a “place of refuge” where we can’t practice Judaism as we do in America: how can that *possibly* be better?

But, coming from a religious perspective, what do you expect from people (not just Biden by any means) who say “There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel”. That makes a WARNING WARNING BEEP BEEP sound in my head, because I remember that there’s only One who’s supposed to be my refuge, my rock, my safety, my absolute and enduring guarantee. That’s why I say it’s idolatry: it’s putting a thing in the place of the One.

[Private to oldster, nothing of general interest.]

It’s interesting that the version of this tediously often repeated Biden soundbite for which we have an official transcript leaves no room for ambiguity about which Jews at risk this story habitually brings to his mind.

“That trip was almost four decades ago, but I remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday. And it drove home all that my father had spoken of — randomly, occasionally but consistently — over the previous 15 years. And he told me as a young boy, that Israel and Jews in the world had no place else to go with absolute certitude.”

This is Biden speaking at a remove of fifty years about what for him was apparently a formative political verity, compatible with the American patriotism that drove him into public service. “Israel and Jews in the world” from 1958-73 could mean North Africa; it could certainly mean the Soviet Union. It could allude back to the huge aliyah of the previous decade, to the DP camps in Europe, and to the Ship of Fools and other desperate stories of the Holocaust years. It could look forward retrospectively to Jews in distress in Ethiopia or almost anywhere. What it cannot mean, in the plain sense of this sourced version of the speech, is Obama’s steadfast America.

I’m adding that this may be even more true for those of us who are religious & non-Orthodox. Israel offers a “place of refuge” where we can’t practice Judaism as we do in America: how can that *possibly* be better?

Depends what we’re doing it for — I agree it can’t possibly be easier. (זָכַרְנוּ, אֶת-הַדָּגָה, אֲשֶׁר-נֹאכַל בְּמִצְרַיִם, חִנָּם; אֵת הַקִּשֻּׁאִים, וְאֵת הָאֲבַטִּחִים, וְאֶת-הֶחָצִיר וְאֶת-הַבְּצָלִים, וְאֶת-הַשּׁוּמִים.)

I happened to hear this morning, re-broadcast on C-Span radio, a good chunk of Ted Cruz’s frightful (and actually also somewhat frightening) announcement-of-his-candidacy speech at Liberty University. One of the biggest applause lines was Cruz saying that, unlike Obama, he would not “boycott” (Cruz used that word, as I recall) Netanyahu but embrace him. The whole audience, presumably made up entirely of conservative and/or evangelical Christians, burst into lengthy and loud applause.

I agree w Corey that what Biden said is somewhat weird and troubling (though possibly explicable, as some commenters suggest, by Biden’s age (i.e., the generation he belongs to) and what his father told him when he was a little kid). But I find the right-wing Christian/right-wing Israeli connection rather more troubling.

Of course what Cruz doesn’t bother to say is that Obama (unfortunately in my view) has in no way tried to diminish US military support of and cooperation with Israel, despite Obama’s obvious lack of pleasure about some of Netanyahu’s statements during the recent Israeli election campaign.

I don’t mean to derail the thread — you all can go back to arguing about what Biden meant, etc. etc.

I think it’s possible to believe both that there’s some truth to Biden’s words and that he shouldn’t have said them. I can buy the idea that we shouldn’t entirely trust the Gentile majority to protect us, whether or not that implies that Israel is the best solution. And I don’t really object when other American Jews wax cynical about the trustworthiness of the US (or other countries) in this regard. But when a high-ranking non-Jewish member of the US government says it, it sounds uncomfortably like a threat, or at least a disconcerting lack of intention to do anything about the problem.

I’m usually suspicious of this kind of thing, but Corey’s hypotheticals about other minorities seem apt here. Obviously, it’s pretty sensible for Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics and others to distrust US promises of support; but the US should, nevertheless, keep promising to support them, not start saying “hey, we’re clearly a bunch of jerks, you’d better find someone else to help you out.” It’s one thing to say “don’t look to the government to protect you,” and quite another for the government to say “don’t look to us to protect you.”

On the other hand, is there really anything more going on here than somewhat clumsy pandering? Biden is trying to echo the kind of language very regularly used by pro-Israel Jews, and neither he nor his speechwriter noticed the problem with putting this kind of language in the mouth of a Gentile vice-president.

A sort-of response to Doctor Science.

A group identity is a double-edged sword. It provides us with ready made friends and ready made enemies. It provides us with a feeling of belonging and a feeling of identity. It provides a pretext for abuse. The Egyptians enslaved the Jews at least in part because the Jews were a distinctly identifiable minority. Europeans and Americans enslaved Africans in no small part because of the convenience of skin color as a distinguishing characteristic.

The Jewish tradition includes a lot of emphasis on ‘otherness,’ which I think has a tendency towards some vicious cycles:

-We were persecuted, so we turned inward.
-Turning inward made it easier to say things like, ‘chosen by God.’
-We turned inward, so we were persecuted.

ISTM all religion grows up around the universal spiritual experience of selfless rapture, often referred to as “revelation,” and inevitably the institutions that accrete around spiritual leaders become corrupted and removed from their original inspiration. The mystical experience–deep and not really translatable into words–of oneness, of the sameness of human life is what gives rise to moral teachings like Hillel’s One Leg.

The highest calling of religion, in so far as it reflects these universal spiritual truths, is the abandoning of separation between self and other. So, I hold out hope that parochial religious identity, slowly and surely, dissolves as it progresses.

Sorry to be obscure — was trying to be friendly, one liberal religious Jew to another. Numbers 11:5. And a happy and kosher Pesaḥ to you and the whole Science family!

Well, yeah, it is an alarming statement.

But, I think it says a lot more about JB’s fitness as (potential) president than it does about the status of Jews in the U.S.

(Draft Warren for 2016)

” Why does Israel offer protection? What is the mechanism by which this happens? ”

The same way american police forces offer protection, aparrently; by assassinating the children of poor brown people.

So Joe Biden just admitted the Constitution is a useless piece of parchment, what’s new. Now, I want to know what about the rest of us, what’s our external guarantee? I know there isn’t one if your black, native (American doesn’t seem quite right), Polynesian (Hawaiian, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands). The aboriginals are still in for a long, slow screwing over.

As to the rest of us, I hope it’s something better than some racists nation occupying land forcibly removed from the owners and surrounded by people who want us dead…. wait, did I just describe the history of the Israel or the USA, no wonder we have a special relationship.

[Private to oldster, again.]

Have you ever had a student who just gets things wronger and wronger when asked to read more closely? Re @71, take a particularly critical look at the word “hospitable” in the paragraph cited by the OP.

(1) US Jews being hospitable will not suffice to guarantee their own safety.

(2) US Jews being hospitable will not suffice to guarantee the safety of Israeli or other non-US Jews needing hospitality.

A desperate attempt might be made to save the first reading by intuiting something like:

(1a) US non-Jews (“you”) being hospitable will not suffice to guarantee the safety of US Jews (also “you”).

But, you know, there comes a point.

Biden: “You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable … you are in the United States”

Robin: “When Biden says “hospitable,” whom is he speaking of? Whom does he mean the US is being hospitable to?”

There’s definitely a subject/object problem as between these two. I’ll put a stake in the ground and say, as a native English speaker, that “you” (listeners, US Jews) and not “the United States” is the subject of the dependent clause in the first sentence, and that “are”, being a copulative, does not admit of an accusative. Further, without some imaginative leap like my (1a) @73, the imputed “hospitable to” finds no indirect object for which “whom” in the second sentence is grammatically salvageable.

oldster @76: The real factual issue that will decide between the reading Goldberg et al. adopt and the reading that JWB proposed is this: did JB believe he was addressing citizens of Israel in a mixed crowd of some Israelis and some Americans?

No. Stipulating an exclusively American audience (as I did; I have no information about Israelis in the crowd if any), the “you” becomes US Jews throughout, and the guarantee remains, as a natural segue from the Golda anecdote (and as explicitly stated in the 2010 paraphrase of the same speech I cited @53) a guarantee for Jews of Israel and of (other parts of) the world.

I am not sure I understand your objection to Biden addressing US Jews (no pivot) with the safety of Israeli Jews the topic, if indeed you have one. The safety of Israeli Jews is, after all, the primary foreign policy concern of US Jews who would come out to hear this speech.

“Clickbait” was indeed harsh, if you don’t mind my saying so, and your apology pleases me as I hope it will the OP. Imputing bad motives is, even in extreme cases, less charitable than disputing a misreading.

In fact, it all comes down to the first quoted sentence (and the Golda quote before it).

“She looked straight ahead and she said, ‘We [Israelis] have no place else to go.’” He paused, and repeated: “‘We [Israelis, she told me] have no place else to go.’”

“Folks,” he continued, “there is no place else [for X] to go, and you [US Jews] understand that in your bones.

Solving for X, I get “Israelis” as the unique answer consistent with the natural flow of the speech, with the “hospitable” remark that follows, and with other deliveries of the speech on public record. Goldberg reads it differently, but he’s a troll with a known agenda. People responding to Goldberg read it differently, but they wouldn’t be responding to him if they couldn’t contrive a case that he is saying something.

@Joshua Burton 81
One problem is that you’re assuming Biden is using “hospitable” correctly and appropriately in the context, which is, IMO, a somewhat dubious assumption. He cd have meant “hospitable” as in: you [US Jews] being ‘friendly to’, i.e. part of, American life. That wd be consistent with “engaged”, “deeply involved,” etc. Or he cd have been mixing up two subjects in one phrase.

Is Corey actually making the argument that if Jonah “Liberal Fascism” Goldverg said it that it must be true?

This must be a first in the history of Crooked Timber.

Ah, I knew it was too weird to be true.

When did Palestine’s Jewish population exceed that of the U.S.? Probably in the aftermath of World War II. Before the 1920’s, America was the homeland of the Jews. It wasn’t much of a sanctuary between then and the 60’s, and perhaps millions died because of that, but historically America has been a place where Jews did pretty well. Both my senators are Jewish as is a third of the Supreme Court.

As an American, I strenuously object to the notion that members of a persecuted religious group are only safe in a country they control. That was surely the motivation of the Puritans in Massachusetts, but the Constitution put in place a guarantee of universal liberty of conscience, ““a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance” , which has proven to be a more robust solution than the alternatives. An immense landmass separated by oceans from traditional theocracies has perhaps also been helpful.

Of course Jews have faced discrimination in the U.S. So have most immigrant groups. It’s always been a brutal country, but it’s also a very big country. Wall Street shut out anyone who wasn’t a white-shoe Yankee, one among many equal-opportunity bigots. So? Movies are a new thing, no gatekeepers, and California provides sunlight nearly year-round, thus Hollywood. My state also seems to be an alternative homeland for Armenians, Iranians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, what have you, as I’m reminded whenever I’m mailed a ballot pamphlet with notices in half a dozen alphabets.

The American model identifies safety and strength with liberty and diversity. That’s not to say we do a good of living up to our ideals, just that historically it’s been a place where refugees have thrived.

@ Bad Jim, #89
Without looking up the numbers, I would be extremely strongly inclined to suspect that before the 1920s Poland was the homeland of the Jews, or perhaps the Tsarist Russian Empire was.

And considering that two branches of our government are controlled by a bunch of neanderthals who are openly hostile to everyone who isn’t a conservative Christian like themselves, and usually a White one, the picture you paint of an inclusive and diverse America is strikingly incomplete. Sure, it describes the urban, educated society I live in, too – but it’s not a nation all of our compatriots live in; it might not even be the one the majority live in.

I guess as an outsider to US politics Im missing something, as I tend to agree with Phil @38 that Dana Milbank’s sentence is bizarre and irrational on every level. It strikes me as being up there, logically,with the thinking behind the militia movements arming against Obama.

On the sentence from Corey Robin that is causing such consternation :

“A country that once offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world”

If it was tweaked ever so slightly to:

“A country that (relative to any country in modern world history, with the exception of Israel) has offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world”

Would this be accurate ?

Corey Robin, your writeup was particularly illuminating for me.

You’re descended, like many Americans from one of the lucky ones. Your ancestors made it as Jews in a largely non-Jewish country, and you view that as normal and possibly even desirable.

Israelis are largely descended from the unlucky ones. They lost their relatives, their homes, became refugees and DPs, because their own countries didn’t want them and other countries wouldn’t take them. So they view living as a minority as an ever present danger to life and limb.

It’s a big gap and I don’t know how it can be bridged.

@Ronan #93

It would be accurate as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. Saying the US has been more welcoming to Jews than most other countries is pretty weak sauce. And when it counted most, the door was closed.

Parsing what Biden said doesn’t seem to me to be that important. He was incoherent, pandering, etc. I was interested in the post because of what it says about larger elements of history, not about Biden. Specifically, it’s good to look at the differences between the Jewish American experience and the black American experience (which is why the original Salon article brings up Malcolm X, and why my poem @ 52 is phrased as a reply to Langston Hughes). Black peoples’ ancestors were forceably brought here in large enough numbers so that they have to be committed to this place whether they want to be or not. As individuals or families they can leave, but the black population of America as a whole can’t really consider emigration as a workable solution to e.g. the problems of police shooting their kids and disproportionately locking their teenagers up in jail. Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again is a work of genius, but it reaches for a universality that isn’t quite there. Is it a universality that *should* be there? Different question.

On the issue of the U.S. as haven (or not) for persecuted Jews:

As Corey pointed out, a lot of Jews came to the U.S. from Russia and E Europe around the turn of the 20th cent. This was before the restrictive immigration legislation of c.1920 (not the exact date; I’m not looking it up). Although some members of this wave of immigration were swindled/exploited by people pushing utopian-village-schemes-in-Colorado etc. that turned out to be false (I know of one specific case of this, at any rate), on the whole the members of this wave of immigration fared well in the U.S., or if they themselves had to struggle their children and grandchildren fared, on the whole, quite well. As one commenter above mentioned, if, say, one’s grandparents came in this wave of immigration, one is likely, with considerable justification, to see the U.S. of the late 19th / early 20th cent. as a haven. For many, it was.

The history of the 1920s and the 1930s, after the immigration laws became more restrictive, is of a less welcoming U.S. But for a (qualified) defense of FDR in this connection, see Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (note: I haven’t read it but am aware of their basic argument).

Vanya @ 100: “No, the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the homeland of the Jews, but since partition in the late 18th century, the Jews in Galicia, on the Austrian run part of old Poland, had had it better than Jews on the Russian side.”

As I allude to @ 52, “the homeland of the Jews” has always been within some empire or other for 2000 years. That empire always leaves propaganda behind about how great it was, and the people who survive it as Jews survive it on the basis of getting out at the right time.

As for a biblical Jewish homeland, I think that the basic argument about that was between Josephus and the heroes of the Masada. One of them left descendants who may well have become our ancestors, the others killed their families.

This thread has really taken off. I’m surprised so many Jews seem to be fine with this idea of Israel as a bolthole. I wonder how the prevalence of this idea affects the chances a Jew will become President—wouldn’t s/he be perceived to have a divided loyalty unless s/he distanced her/himself from this view?

Lynne #105 – “wouldn’t s/he be perceived to have a divided loyalty unless s/he distanced her/himself from this view?”

Some American Jews do in fact have divided loyalty. (I did, for a long time.) It could be argued that Joseph Lieberman, who came very close to becoming vice president 15 years ago, is one of them. I’m not sure of the extent (if any) to which his ethnic/religious affiliation was a political liability.

please insert a “notwithstanding” before the closing paren

@JWB: “why suppose incoherence [in service of anything whatsoever] as a null hypothesis?”

Forget it, Josh, it’s Joe Biden Town.

Also, what Rich said @99.

We should have let all the refugees in before the war and given the Jews Texas in 1947. That would have saved lives, eliminated a cause of friction in the Middle East, put a friendly power on top of oil, and civilized Texas. Hell, throw in Oklahoma, too.

Gator90 @107
I understand (sort of) where you’re coming from here, but personally I wd be very wary of the phrase/accusation ‘divided loyalty,’ given its use during the McCarthy era. I think Lieberman thought there was a near-complete coincidence of interest betw Israel and the US. I suppose you cd call that divided loyalty, but I wd prefer other labels for it, e.g. misguided.

Anglo Texans would have reacted with extreme violence, CJ. They were busy slaughtering Hispanics at roughly the same time the Palestinians killed Jewish civilians in riots during the early 20’s. The death toll in Texas was much larger, from what I remember reading.

Thanks for spoiling my reverie, Donald. I was dreaming of barbecued blintzes and about to compose a CT quiz to find the best name for Houston’s Jewish-inspired NFL team…

bianca steele 119

I guess I should go read the whole Salon column, because you are reacting to that and, since I haven’t yet read it, I’m perhaps not fully grasping all the points. So at some point before this thread closes (I hope) I will have read the Salon column and may return to this.

But w.r.t this:
The idea that the State of Israel was being granted a kind of international-political emancipation and now some notional “international law” requires the other nations of the world to treat it with the kind of respect it supposedly now deserves (a kind of respect it feels the Palestinians are “obviously” not entitled to yet), and that if Israel treats other peoples badly, it’s exactly what every other similarly situated group does all the time.

Some people in Israel may indeed hold this idea: i.e., we are a state, we are entitled to do pretty much whatever we want. (It may be in some ways the de facto view of the current Israeli government, though I doubt they would ever phrase it that way.) But I’m not sure much of anyone else, apart from the most ardent supporters, holds this idea as a theoretical matter (whether they hold it as a practical matter is a somewhat different question). International law, ‘notional’ or otherwise, does not require states to accept illegal acts by another state, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is widely (and correctly, IMO) considered to be illegal under international law. You may say “so what? No one has done much of anything about it” and you would be right. Which again highlights the theory v. practice question.

There is a long-running debate about whether international law is really ‘law’ and, even if it is law, whether it’s simply a tool of the most powerful states, etc. Aspects of your comment sort of touch on these contentious matters, but it’s not something I want to get into here.

I am wondering about the phrase “divided loyalty”. Is there someone who doesn’t have divided loyalties? Myself, I am officially an american citizen, but my foreign policy sympathies often fall on the opposite side of the American government’s. This isn’t because I think “real” American interests aren’t served by the government, but because I have a loyalty to a cosmopolitan vision of how things should be. In fact, my loyalty to the US is a very restricted thing. In the eighteenth century, because the rulers of nations were ultimately bound to their dynastic families rather than the people, the sense that one should be loyal to a nation was extremely attenuated. Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, etc. had no problem boundary crossing, and expressed loyalties not to a nation, but to an ideal of citizenship that was defined by humanity.
I think that there were many Jews in the nineteenth century who looked back on this ideal as one to give their loyalty to – and I think the mass murder of Jews in the twentieth century dealt that ideal a deathblow. Or at least set it way way back.
Still, that doesn’t mean the Likud version of zionism is the only alternative left. In actual fact, if the high end estimate of Jews in the U.S. is to be believed, there are more Jews in the US – 6.8 million – than in Israel. Which reverses Biden’s claim – it is the US that seems to be the ultimate sanctuary of the Jews. The US doesn’t have to advertise itself strenously to achieve this status, as Israel does, either.
http://www.brandeis.edu/ssri/pdfs/AmJewishPopEst2012.pdf

Re Zionism, I agree w/ most of what rewenzo says @118 (as an analytical matter, I mean). That was the theory: “a Jewish controlled state that has full sovereignty.” And as long as a ‘mainstream’ Jewish-dominated political party is in charge in Israel and the nuclear arsenal is intact, it has some plausibility. But the trouble w this whole discussion is that the scenario presupposed, the US becoming a place from which Jews have to flee, is extremely unlikely. It’s just not a v. interesting basis on which to say much of anything other than “look at stupid Joe Biden and what he said and why aren’t people more ruffled by it.” Occam’s Razor might suggest that many people aren’t more ruffled by it b.c they know Joe Biden occasionally says stupid things.

LFC @127

It’s not ridiculous to Zionist thought, and is therefore probably not ridiculous to anyone in the room with Joe Biden.

Zionism as a political philosophy came into being before World War I. The Holocaust, the Israeli War of Independence, the Expulsions from North Africa and the Middle East, the whole history of the Soviet Union did little to discredit the idea that non-Jewish governments cannot be trusted to safeguard the rights of their Jewish citizens.

There’s also a very popular strain of thought that learned from the Holocaust’s origin in Germany that it is precisely the nations to which Jews are most assimilated that present the most dangerous threat. Or, in its weak form, “If it can happen in Germany, it can happen anywhere.”

I would imagine that the people in the room with Biden are all donors to AIPAC and very susceptible to that thinking. To them, it is naive to suggest they can rely on the US (or Canada, or the UK or whoever) to be different, and acknowledging that they can’t was Biden’s pandering. It sounds ridiculous (and somewhat threatening) when thought about too much, but it is what it is.

the US becoming a place from which Jews have to flee

I am actually imagining additional more complicated, indirect scenarios involving Empire’s US overseas interests.

Ok, wild, unimaginable, just grant me some space for play.

The US/NATO and Russia fighting a proxy war in Ukraine with much invested materially and ideologically and Right Sector quasi-Nazis take power in the Ukraine and start a progrom. US denies there are any anti-semites there and denies any repression going on. Fairly absurd because of a lot of internal Ukrainian complications, and it is hard to sort out the warlords and their affiliations. But…

The point being that as long as there is an Israel there will or could be a powerful nation willing to defend Jews worldwide, or threaten with nukes or military might to prevent a local extermination, without consideration of conflicting interests, like oil profits. The US is really not such a country.

Has the existence of Israel actually lessened actual antisemitic practices worldwide in the years of its existence?

There are certainly many other factors. Consider it an honest question.

The one state solution is incompatible with knowing anything about the history of Lebanon over the past 50 years.

CM: “It is a rhetorical choice–and it would be a very strange, unusual rhetorical choice–to talk about Italian-Americans’ sense of separateness or their divided loyalties or about private Italian-American sentiments about Italy. ”

I believe that there was a whole lot of tok about German-American’s sense of separateness or divided loyalties just before WW I, and whether they would oppose the war traitorously. Around WW II, of course, America preemptively locked up Japanese-Americans because of their presumptive divided loyalties. Muslims are targeted for spying on right now in America because of their “sense of separateness” and presumptive interest in terrorism. So this is an American tradition and I guess that we should be proudly included in it as Americans.

My grandfather was investigated by the FBI before WWII when a group of Italian-American businessmen raised funds for a statue of Columbus and, apparently, received some money from an organization under the influence of Mussolini.

CJColucci wrote:

We should have let all the refugees in before the war and given the Jews Texas in 1947.

Yeah, yeah. How about a different panhandle, one in Alaska, where it’s easier to come by lox?

rewenzo wrote:

The prequel to that story was of course Sepharad the previous locale where Jews were, at least in memory, if not assimilated, than more nearly full participants in society than they had been anywhere since the destruction of the 2nd temple.

Mike Schilling 03.30.15 at 7:54 pm @ 135:

‘The one state solution is incompatible with knowing anything about the history of Lebanon over the past 50 years.’

Israel-Palestine seems rather different from Lebanon to me.

But in any case the one-state solution is inevitable because it already exists.

There were Zionists in the Polish ghettoes, and I don’t think it’d be fair to say that they were interested in the escalation of anti-semitism. Besides, for lots of Jews the idea of Israel is bound up with their identity as a Jew, even if they don’t have the slightest intention to emigrate – so that good news for Israel is by definition good news for the Jews, and attacks on Israel are assumed to be attacks on the Jews. So perhaps it’d be fairer to say that Zionism assumes – at best – the continuation of anti-semitism around the world, against which migration to Israel is ultimately the only safeguard.

There are way more than three options, particularly since there are two Palestinian quasi governments at odds now.

There is the possibility of four states for example. Gaza, Israel, Judah (crazy settlers), and Palestine (whatever is left of the West Bank). Depending on how one looks at it and the course of the Syrian Civil War, there is a possibility of a Druze state encompassing the Golan as well.

Not a direct response to the above, but – what I think is really important about Israel/Palestine is that there is no status quo. Normality as far as the Israeli state is concerned is a process of continual encroachment – where last year’s encroachments, and the year before last’s, are treated as normal & unchallengeable, while this year’s are embedded and plans are drawn up for next year’s. If nothing changes – which is part of what the two-state flim-flam is all about – then things will carry on changing, for the worse. I can’t see an endgame, except one in which all Palestinians end up in bantustans. Then the bantustans get smaller. Then they’re blockaded. Then they’re invaded…

I speak as someone who heard an Amos Oz lecture in my early 20s – courtesy of a kibbutznik friend – and came home to announce to my startled left-wing family that I was a Zionist. (Only the nice kind – the kind that believes in peaceful coexistence, possibly even within a single state, we can work out the details later, let’s just stop all the fighting eh?) I’m afraid I was sold an absolute crock.

@122

I’m reading, though it feels like I’m re-reading, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s, We.

“The Benefactor’s opponent is I-330, a woman so liberated that even today one can only surmise what a jolt she must have delivered to the systems of her first readers. Gorgeous by nature, she is happy to enhance her beauty by the outlawed cosmetics and perfumes obtainable by stealth. She drinks and smokes, activists known to the Numbers of OneState only through historical study. She enjoys sex but is not above using it as a weapon for the movement. She is big-hearted enough to find shelter for her rival, O-90, who wants to go through with the crime of bearing D-503’s child. She is powerful enough to be the leader of a revolutionary underground, the Mephi. And she is courageous enough to endure the Benefactor’s worst tortures and die rather than talk. She is the philosophical voice of Zamyatin’s favorite idea, the central thematic of the book.

When some two years after We was finished, Zamyatin got around to putting this idea into essay form, he used the speech of I-330 as an epigraph. The essay is titled “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters” (1923). The epigraph derives from Record 30, the philosophical core of the book. She stumps the mathematician and engineer D-503 by asking him to name the final number. To his objection that the number of numbers is infinite, she replies that so is the number of revolutions. There can be no final revolution. One imagines how sweetly this fell upon the ear of the Bolsheviks, whose first business, was to root out and destroy the slightest suspicion of the second.

The two forces at war, like the Country and the City, the Mephi and OneState, are Energy and Entropy. Zamyatin’s essay tends to be overrated as an essay simply because it is so splendid as a commentary on his masterpiece. For all its characteristic brevity and briskness, the essay manages to drop some weighty names: Louis XIV, Euclid, Lobachevsky, Galileo, Babeuf, Darwin, Lamarck, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, and others. One eloquent name is suppressed, that of Heraclitus, possibly because it was Heraclitus who, some 500 years before Christ, gave the central idea of the essay its classical expression.

Nothing is final. The only reality is change.”

[From the introduction to my copy, by Clarence Brown, Princeton, New Jersey, 1992]

To return but to be unable to stay. For long. Perhaps there are worse things than those that AS describes. All the same ones but of the opposite gender.

Look at what happened to Amy Winehouse. Like Whitney Houston, no Britney Spears like redemption for her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HLY1NTe04M

If you get the chance, watch the Day She Went to Dingle . . . it almost feels like she was the female equivalent of Jesus, 2k year later, filmed for posterity, before being crucified.

@ 153

Heraclitus indeed.

Man on Wire . . . touches the heart because it shows us that a technology that enables such destruction, can also show us something truly beautiful.

What happened to those beautiful gestures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10SPHevZFZY

Does one justify the other?

Hard to answer for us mere mortals.

What will remain of Hurricane Katrina, for example, will it be one song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_r_AZj3VZQ

Try to imagine that one single person, a human, pushed a button that via a series of other humans, caused those buildings to fall. To cause chaos. Utter chaos. For no other reason. Because they could not wait to see what happens next. Because they wanted to make what happened next.

The human use of human beings, via their minds, via satellite, needs attention.

Period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WdUWI9GTXQ

[In the meantime, the story of the man who walked into that village, saw the whole town about to stone the adulteress to death and drew a line in the sand . . . well, who would not walk away, after that question.]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/the_odyssey.shtml

Rich Puchalsky 03.31.15 at 1:13 pm
‘ “It may be that almost everyone really likes the flimflam”
Wait, the Palestinians like the flimflam?

Why not? The PA gets to play government and state, providing jobs and social status to numerous politicians, officials, bureaucrats, hangers-on, party apparatchiks, leeches, spies, saboteurs, and so forth. Hamas gets to do a similar if more edgy thing. Money flows in for skimmers to skim. The jihadis get to talk up their fantasy of driving the infidels into the sea and blow up the occasional pizza parlor. The ordinary people may not like it, but they do vote for this sort of leadership.

If I were king of the Arabs, I would tell my subjects to throw themselves into the arms of Israel, and say, ‘You wanted me, you fought for me, you got me: now I’m yours and you are mine — forever. Now make an honest ethnic-religious group of me!’ Where reason, wisdom, and brute force have failed, there is still soap opera.

Mattski–I know CJ was kidding about Texas, but it reminded me of a time when a Texan friend of mine saw a Tom Segev book on my shelves about the Mandate period and smugly said that Palestinians were killing Jews then too. I was too slow-witted to point out the obvious about human rights in Texas in the 1920’s–this was me, rising to the occasion 12 years later.

Israel’s claim to benefit the Jews rests in great part on its ability to offer automatic citizenship and refugee status to Jews from countries less hospitable than America. American Jews don’t and shouldn’t need it, one reason why Biden’s statement is so shocking.

Or would be, if there were an iota of supporting evidence that Biden’s statement was about American Jews, rather than to American Jews about oppressed Jews as (I have tediously and laboriously pointed out) it appears to be, and earlier published versions of it certainly were. A hundred comments later, for me, the lingering interest is entirely psychological and rather prurient: why do you want to be shocked, or if that’s too intrusive why do you choose to be shocked, when you have a clean alternative (just fairly read Biden’s actual words, resolve not to let Goldberg do this to you again, and move on) wide open in front of you?

The referent of “you” is folks (American Jews, his audience). The elided subject of “go” is them (Israeli Jews, Golda’s “we”), just as in the previous sentence. The identification of the two is nowhere supported — is the claim that “you” can’t care about “them” in your bones, and therefore the emotional force of the sentence implies the identity? I’m still struggling to see how that reading is plausible, even in the absence of all the outside evidence I’ve adduced against it.

Joshua Burton 162
if there were an iota of supporting evidence that Biden’s statement was about American Jews, rather than to American Jews about oppressed Jews as (I have tediously and laboriously pointed out) it appears to be, and earlier published versions of it certainly were.

Joshua, obviously there is at least an iota of evidence against your reading, and that evidence, for me at any rate, is Biden’s reference to “no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee.” That Biden says “no matter how deeply involved you [American Jews] are in the United States” suggests he might well be making a point about the ultimate guarantor of safety either for American Jews or for Jews in general (incl. those in the US). I’m just reading the quote that the OP opened with. Even with the Golda Meir context, there’s still a reasonable case to be made that it’s addressed to American Jews. I don’t know whether it was or not in Biden’s intention, but for you to claim that there is no evidence to support any reading other than your own is a stretch, I think.

Oy. It is addressed to American Jews; no one is disputing that. The question is whether it’s about American Jews, crucially in Biden’s mind or peripherally in the mind of his audience. The sentence you quote is very strong evidence that it’s not: being consequential and engaged in the US is a wash for your own safety, but (if the political process works at all, which no elected leader doubts) a boon for the safety of those on whose behalf you engage. And being hospitable in the US to yourself makes no sense at all — if “you” is US Jews, as we seem to agree, then the hospitality “you” offer is to “not you.”

With a running start in that direction (which we don’t have) I can fracture the sentence and make “hospitable” into some sort of inept circumlocution for “amiable,” a quality of a guest rather than a host, but that’s not what the word means. So to even admit a reading other than mine, you have to believe that Biden’s words are (1) badly formed, (2) shocking to patriotic sensibility, (3) unlike what he said when he used the same anecdote in 2010, and (4) carefully enough thought out be dicta, rather than merely a gaffe. With both high and low gates to clear, it’s a jump, a stretch and a limbo bend.

As people have said over and over and over, this is Biden . . . .

Then who cares? But anyway, surely you see this is circular, unless you believe he is literally incapable of talking coherently, to the extent that the coherent reading is materially suspect on that sole ground.

considerable back-and-forth about this earlier in the thread, which did not, IMO, end with a clear-cut, unambiguous ‘victory’ for your interpretation

“Sir, I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.” I have never claimed to be victorious on this, but so far I am substantively unopposed.

I’m largely agnostic on the question of what Biden meant to say, but why is Biden’s general incoherence really relevant here ? Wasnt this a pre planned speech given to an important set of donors/backers ? So a written speech rather than one he’s freewheeling ? Surely the assumption would be that whatever he said is what he planned to say.

I also think PGD’s second paragraph is completly right, and is why I found the ‘safe haven’ exchange so odd.

OK, this time Mr. Robin’s position is a bit clearer; the bandwagon argument is still beneath response (the people who are writing about this are self-selected; reading it as I do, I wouldn’t have used column inches on it if an unkind fate had thrust me into “the media universe”), but I am happy to engage substantively: I now withdraw (as hasty, so early in the thread…) my last remark @170.

But let’s say Biden is making this claim: “You American Jews understand in your bones that the only guarantee for the survival of the State of Israel [or the Jews of Israel] is…the State of Israel.”

It’s “Jews of,” as with Meir, and yes, let’s say that. In fact, let’s unpack it.

You American Jews came to hear me, Obama’s bulldog on Israel, because the survival of the Jews of Israel is something you care about “in your bones.” You would like to think that being hospitable (Emma Lazarus’s poem!) and consequential (seder at the White House!) and engaged (here we are!) will help them, but Golda said — to me! — that it’s not enough. They’ve spoken to me, they’ve spoken to you — you know they mean it, and (MS St. Louis!) “in your bones” you know they are right. You can’t save them from the Iranian bogeyman by promising them refuge here. Their only safety (and, as I said in 2010, and my dad said to me in the 1950s) the only safety for Jews in bad places worldwide, is a strong Israel. So that’s what you turn out to apply your US influence to, and Barack and I (always!) have your back. (Never again! NEVER AGAIN! fade to UJA commercial)

There’s a lot in there that itself doesn’t make too much sense (my little parentheses are somewhat derisory), but it’s made entirely of known and typical tropes — you’re soaking in it. The claim that it’s what he said, because it’s what the words mean and what Biden believes and what his audience wanted to hear and what he’s always said, is the one I’m making, and still making sense with.

Fuzzy Dunlop @171: Israel as a last refuge for Jews including Jewish Americans is the thing that people talk about

I’d be the last to dispute it, in the long-view abstract: as I said @17: “what’s two and a quarter centuries between Pharaohs?” No American Jew who ever sat at a seder table is complacent about the American guarantee for posterity into epic time. There is room for two opinions about whether the Zionist dream, reshit smichat ge’ulateinu (beginning of the dawn of our redemption) is a way off the Wheel; surely nothing else but death or final assimilation is.

Even further, I’ve mentioned in this thread that (actually more than, by my count) a quarter of my local Jewish circle are US citizens with their genetic future now in Israel, so the idea of Americans taking that long view seriously in their practical lives is not new to me. But none of them feel pushed; they feel pulled. And when Biden talks about “nowhere else,” he’s not understood to be talking about Skokie grandparents having to follow their kids to Modi’in, nor about their distant descendants fleeing the Post-American Reich. He’s understood to be talking about what Skokie voters can do to keep their kids in Modi’in (and those nice neighbors of theirs from Moldova and Tunisia and Ethiopia) safe in the next ten years. (Namely, redoubling the US commitment to keeping Modi’in on the map.)

showing that I’m wrong, how I’m wrong

(1) “Hospitable” reverses subject/object on your reading; on mine, it means what the word means.

(2) “Nowhere else to go” means the same group throughout on my reading; on yours, it jumps across the Atlantic between Meir’s sentence and Biden’s. (Your best argument here, by the way, would hang heavily on Golda Meir herself being a naturalized US citizen, and her “we” therefore including American Jews. But there’s still a leap from an Israeli politician meaning that about us — which they generally do — and a non-Jewish US politician meaning it.)

(3) In the 2010 speech, for which we have a clean official White House transcript, Biden walks the same path through the same talking points, and makes it explicit that he is talking, and his dad was talking, specifically about Israeli Jews and Jews who were in peril in the 1960s. Your theory either reinterprets that speech (a longer and steeper uphill slog), or it argues that this time the same words mean different things, clearly enough to broadcast your outrage at. (No one invited you to headline this; the burden of proof on what it might mean surely falls to the person who takes offense at it!)

(4) Goldberg is sitting back with his feet up and laughing at you. Do Not Feed the Energy Creature.

But you knew all that.

Sorry, it’s just a really simple point. That Israel is the ultimate guarantor of Israeli citizens is blindingly obvious. How involved “you”—for any value of “you”—are in American life, the activities of Fluxus, or the fortunes of the Pittsburgh Steelers is utterly and completely irrelevant. So the idea that Biden is saying “there is no other absolute guarantee” for Israeli citizens is beyond bizarre given everything else he says building up to it.

I guess this sounds snarky or snide. I’m not going to apologize for it.

js. @184: Your argument proves too much. That Russia was the ultimate guarantor of Russian Jewish citizens may have been blindingly obvious, but four fifths of them in the last 25 years have found it false. How involved US Jews have been in political and philanthropic life was deeply relevant for Russian Jews who came to the US with help from family services and UJA; for Russian Jews who stayed and rebooted Jewish religious life with help from the Joint Distribution Committee and Chabad; for Russian Jews who came to Israel with help from Misrad haKlita and private megadonors.

What Biden is saying is that this isn’t like that: if Israel goes down in flames, there isn’t enough tzedakah in the world to tidy up the pieces. Even some Russian Jews had nowhere else to go (and of the three options, they have done conspicuously best in Israel), but in the crunch Israelis really, really have nowhere else to go. He’s saying this, of course, to people who already believe it, whether as an applause line, a campaign promise or an affinity fraud. It may not be true, but to that audience, with this history, it’s very far from bizarre.

Biden’s campaign book, Promises to Keep (summer 2007), page 143:

“Listening closely to these leaders had been an incredible window onto the personal intimacy of diplomacy. I remember an early meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir where she could see my despair at the prospects for peace and security for Israel. I found her bucking me up but also giving me an unforgettable lesson in the strength and weakness of the Israeli position: “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle against the Arabs,” Meir told me. “We have nowhere else to go.” On my first trip to China after renormalization . . . .”

Make that one about rescuing US Jews, even peripherally, and I will surrender.

JW Burton @183

Golda’s job is Israeli pluck: “nowhere else to go” from her side means keep on winning until peace, or else. Biden’s job is US policy: “nowhere else to go” from his side means, however much we’d like to, we can’t help them by taking them all in when they lose; if we help them at all, it has to be by keeping Israel strong until peace. In 1973, that’s what each of them would mean: same proposition, different roles. In 2015, Meir’s words still mean to Biden what they meant in 1973, to Biden.

There is some plausibility to this, and I strongly suspect that Biden’s main *intended* message was probably about the need to keep “Israel strong until peace.” He was speaking off-the-cuff, however, and this standard intended US policy message (esp. to an audience partly or entirely composed of Jewish campaign donors) came out of his mouth in a way that let people in the media and other commenters interpret it in the way Corey says “the media universe” interpreted it.

For that result, Biden has no one to blame but himself and, more specifically, his inability (on this occasion, though it wasn’t unique to this occasion) to use the English language to convey precisely, clearly, and unambiguously the substance of what he intended to say.

JWB @186:

So… Israel is the ultimate guarantor not of Israeli citizens but of Jews worldwide, including possibly American Jews. Which moreover is something that even American Jews might “feel in their bones”. I guess I don’t see what in Corey’s reading you’re disagreeing with.

Fuck! Gujarat 2002, obviously.

I mean, what kinds of conclusions would you draw from Gujarat 2002, exactly?

In this context? That even horrible pogroms don’t raise the spectre of a complete physical extinction of Indian Hindus or of Indian Muslims to the level of an American fundraising soundbite. This trivial truth is overdetermined: there are a lot of sufficient explanations, but I guess I’d have to find somebody surprised by it to decide whether any of them is necessary.

I count only two evictions (Babylon and Rome) during that time. The original exile started out as an Egyptian holiday, i.e., the original move was voluntary (well, maybe not Joseph, and after him, Benjamin, but the rest of his family fer sure). You may hear something about it in a couple of days.

Unless, of course, you are instead counting the 10 lost tribes of Israel deported by the Neo-Assyrians, (but Judah stayed in place at that time, not being exiled for the first time until about a century and a half later, so …)

As several others here have said, I think Mr. Biden is being overparsed. His speech was mostly phatic: saying the right thing to the right people on the right occasion. The fact that it doesn’t make much sense is beside the point. He is a politician practicing his craft, not a philosopher.

Why so many Americans are so wrought up about a foreign country does strike me as an interesting question.

lfc @189- I think you’re clarification is right

“As several others here have said, I think Mr. Biden is being overparsed. His speech was mostly phatic: saying the right thing to the right people on the right occasion. The fact that it doesn’t make much sense is beside the point.”

Let me try again.

If we should ever see a circumstance in which Jewish Americans had to flee this country in fear of their lives, the United States will have been fatally broken. It truly is a worse case scenario. The country as we currently understand it will have died. And Biden should have said that he would fight to the death to avoid such an event. Not, “never mind, no bid deal, you will always have Israel.”

If we should ever see a circumstance in which Jewish Americans had to flee this country in fear of their lives, the United States will have been fatally broken. It truly is a worse case scenario. The country as we currently understand it will have died.

Not to mention that if that happens, the existence of Israel won’t matter one damn bit.

The concept that Jewish Americans somehow need further guarantees of their safety is hilarious. Perhaps Biden doesn’t think they have enough influence in our government and our media. Astounding.

Mike Furlan @ 203: “If we should ever see a circumstance in which Jewish Americans had to flee this country in fear of their lives, the United States will have been fatally broken. It truly is a worse case scenario. The country as we currently understand it will have died.”

The interest that this thread has for me lies not in whatever Biden said, but in this kind of rhetoric. (Previously stated @ 132.) From my viewpoint, the country has already been fatally broken in some respects, and of course not because Jews have to flee it. But we do live within an extensive security and spying apparatus, ethnically directed to shoot and imprison black people and to spy on Muslims, to choose just two representative ethnicities (one perennial and one de jour). Our external warmaking is in no way under the control of anything resembling democratic processes or control.

But “fatally broken” implies a recent break, and if you look back at U.S. history you see that this kind of thing is universal. It’s not merely that the U.S. has (e.g.) not always been a haven for Jews: the U.S. regularly goes through spasms where it decides that some ethnicity is suspect and puts them under heightened security or suspicion. That’s what’s so bad about the “the U.S. is trustworthy, it would never do anything like this” rhetoric. The U.S. would never lock up a whole ethnic group in camps? Tell Japanese-Americans that. And that was from one of the more sympathetic, social-democratic U.S. leaders.

No one can say with a straight face that the U.S. would never do such a thing. That is not to say that Jews in the U.S. have any reason to worry in particular, but that no one in the U.S. can depend on the propaganda about our freedoms.

Re: Rich Puchalsky

I can’t disagree, you views are correct. I just have a slightly different opinion. Mainly that what we are talking about would be a break from past history.

The event that I think Biden was speaking of was a full on Third Reich Holocaust. I do not think it was ever the intention of the US to totally exterminate any group of people. The Native American case would be the closest. But I don’t see where we in the past have attempted to make the Continent Native American free, or African American Free, or Japanese Free.

Now what might come in the future? I agree as humans we are certainly capable of sinking as low as any group that has come before us. However, as a sitting US Vice President, Biden should have made risen above the Rumsfeld “stuff happens” attitude.

D. Johnson
Any reason why my earlier comment is still under moderation? I’m not sure how that works, because it normally doesn’t happen. There’s a link–maybe that triggers it?

I believe comments go into moderation at random. (There also may be certain triggers; I don’t know.) Once in moderation, they stay there until a CT administrator releases them. The time for that can vary depending on when one of them next checks the queue. It doesn’t hurt to leave a comment, as you just did, saying you have one stuck in moderation. But anyway, sooner or later they get released.

“But I don’t see where we in the past have attempted to make the Continent Native American free, or African American Free, or Japanese Free.”

Who’s the “we” here? There were certainly significant factions in the US that sought to make the US “Native American free” (Andrew Jackson’s backers?), and Liberia was envisioned as a start of making the US African American free. Some of the time, some of those factions held considerable power within the US political system.

As the survival of Jews as a group in Europe – despite the worst Hitler could do – demonstrates, genocide is not easy where it involves a large group. The US has been able to kill or assimilate into extinction numerous native groups, but others hang on, even in the face of harsher persecution than anything anti-Semitism in the US has inflicted on its targets.

“I do not think it was ever the intention of the US to totally exterminate any group of people.”

This is the soft bigotry of low expectations, isn’t it? Saying that only being as bad as the Nazis is really bad is setting a pretty low bar. Let’s imagine that there was a group of Orthodox Jews in a town named, oh, Ferguson NY, and that the police made a habit of differential enforcement for them. You know how the rest of this story goes. Or let’s say that every Rabbi in the U.S. was under electronic surveillance and prominent synagogues were infiltrated by police informers looking to make terrorism cases, that new buildings intended as synagogues couldn’t even be built because of public antipathy towards Jews. Don’t you think that Jews would be saying maybe the U.S. is not really the guarantor of our rights?

@ Jeffrey Goldberg

Lynn Margulis:

Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number.

I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of interest to animals . . . very tardy on the evolutionary scene, and they give us little real insight into the major sources of evolution’s creativity. By “codifying ignorance” I refer in part to the fact that they miss four of the five kingdoms of life . . . bacteria, protoctista, fungi, and plants.

[RIP]

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/08/robert-mccrum-lucky-survivor-stroke-treatment-revolution

Of absolutely no relevance to the OP (or pretty much anything else about this thread), and about a day and a half late (Sorry, but work interferes with the important things of life, work and tax prep, work, tax prep and …) but Somebody’s wrong on the internet!

LFC wrote:

Wasn’t it Biden who got in trouble in one of his past presidential campaigns for lifting, unacknowledged, some passages from Tony Blair? I hold no brief at all for Blair when it comes to his politics on the Iraq war etc., but Blair would never have said anything quite this mangled in terms of the syntax and referents.

It was Neil Kinnock the last of the pseudo-lefty leaders of the Labour Party. I don’t recall much about his relationship with the English language nor his history of mangling syntax and referents.

So take that, LFC!

[Never Again. Never Agai. Never Aga. Never Aga. Never Ag. Never A. Etc.]

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/apr/23/features11.g21

“I’ll be completely honest with you: Even we haven’t yet solved the problem of happiness with 100 percent accuracy. Twice a day – from 16:00 to 17:00 and again from 21:00 to 22:00 – the single mighty organism breaks down into its individual cells. These are the personal hours, as established by the Table. During these hours you’ll see that some are in their rooms with the blinds modestly lowered; others are walking along the avenue in step with the brass beat of the March; still others, like me at this moment, will be at their desks. But I firmly believe – let them call me idealist and dreamer – but I firmly believe that, sooner or later, one day, we’ll find a place for even these hours in the general formula. One day all 86,400 seconds will be on the Table of Hours.

I’ve read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom – that is, in disorganized wildness. But of all the things the very hardest for me to believe was how the governmental powers of that time, even if it was still embryonic, could have permitted people to live without even a semblance of our Table, without obligatory walks, without precisely established mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it pleased them. Some historians even claim that in those days lights burned on the streets all night, people were out walking and driving on the streets all night long.

Now, that’s something I simply cannot get through my head. No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been, still they must have understood that living like this was just murder, a capital crime – except it was slow day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man – that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives – that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years – that was not a crime! No really, isn’t that funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn’t solve it. All their Kants together couldn’t solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kants to construct a system of scientific ethics – that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division and multiplication).”

Reverse engineered, Ted Hughes ‘Thought Fox’ seems ever more cap-it-all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK6SpVLqatQ

http://www.garygreenbergonline.com/

[If you can get access, perhaps take a look at a tape of the WEF at Davos in 2010, I think it was, when Klaus Schwab asked Desmond Tutu, what he thought was the solution to the then still very febrile financial crisis. ]

Mike Furlan @ 222

“2. There has never been an attempt to exterminate Native Americans, just because they were Native Americans. ”

I don’t think this statement is true for any reasonable meaning of the words. American history is replete with examples of ‘attempts to exterminate Native Americans just because they were Native Americans’, many with either explicit or implicit state sanction. If anything, the official program looks remarkably familiar: Starting with an ethnic group enjoying rights under the law, first pass legislation to restrict those rights; then pass legislation to seize their property; then forcibly relocate them to the hinterlands; then systematically starve and exploit them; then directly kill them when they inevitably resist this procedure; and include everyone, e.g. Noncombatant women and children in the killing. You can argue that, at some point, the program ground to a halt before achieving its aims, but I don’t think you can credibly argue that there wasn’t such a program carried out over decades.

If the U.S. really did go full Gestapo would emigration to Israel help much? For the sake of convenience, it might even be helpful to a possible American Hitler to have so many Jews living in one small settler state surrounded by neighbors with unreliable attitudes and a restive indigenous population.

I think that, as noted above, Biden was just unthinkingly spouting the Zionist line. Too bad Joe will likely not be participating in the primaries. It would have been entertaining.

plurality

Nitpick: some denomination has a plurality by definition (the one with more adherents than any other). I think you mean a majority…….?

Heaven (TM) forbid.

[overheardinbenjaminclementinelandeastwesterday]

Dear/Snr . . . I see Barack Obama shaking hands with Vladimir Putin in Jerusalem.

Mid summer 2015. The longest day.

With a genuine smiles.

Rand Paul/Colin Powell. 2016. One hopes.

@228: Possibly, but the Americans who insist most noisily on the Christianity of the U.S. also tend to be the ones who support most strongly a heavily militarized Jewish state with its boot on the neck of the local Arabs. It is true that many of these also anticipate a mass Jewish conversion at some future point, but since such a fantasy Armageddon is unlikely to occur, it doesn’t seem like something Jewish Americans really need to fret about. The only religious group at even remote risk of expulsion from the U.S. would surely be Muslims.

“Nothing they should ‘fret about’ except that it’s grotesquely anti-semitic. I guess if *that* doesn’t bother you…”

Been over that in a recent thread: characterizing the belief that for the End Times predictions to come true then specifically all Jews have to be converted or killed as anti-semitic is apparently some weird Althusserian contortion.

That could never lead to anything: the U.S. has never had a religious revival.

*all Jews have to be converted or killed as anti-semitic is apparently some weird Althusserian contortion.*

That could never lead to anything: the U.S. has never had a religious revival.

One of the current load of GOP pres. contenders actually called for a religious revival the other day (sorry, can’t/won’t remember which). But my point was to highlight (I hoped anyway) how ethically repulsive it is for Jews to ally with (a vast number) of anti-semites in an attempt to bolster a strictly political state – completely aside from any incipient manifestation of anti-semitism. That it is foolish in a directly instrumental sense you’d think would be even more obvious.

Shorter Beryl and others: It’s not repulsive for a political state which claims to speak for all Jews to ally itself semi-permamently with anti-semites.

@marcel proust 222

You are right. It was Neil Kinnock, of course. I stand corrected.

Substituting Kinnock doesn’t change the underlying point, such as it was, since neither Blair nor, I think, Kinnock matched Biden’s more-than-occasional proclivity to mangle words.

Mizner in Jacobin: It’s not just The Lobby

Just to fill out the picture of repulsively cynical behavior (and to not impute it exclusively to hasbara-type trolls or Israeli politicians).