A Jewish Education for an Irate Reader
Should you ban the abusive commenter just because he's a schmuck?
In response to recent JFK Facts coverage, a savant named Jay wrote in one of our comment boards:
Jeff, I didn’t know you hate Jews so much. Go f*** yourself.
Now, I don’t know Jay, and Jay doesn’t know me. So I can only guess why he writes such things. He is a paid subscriber who tests my faith in that sound business credo, The customer is always right. I would respond in kind to his factually erroneous (and physically impossible) observations, save for that sound Christian credo, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I do have the option of banning Jay, because the site’s comment policy bans obscenity. The geniuses of Substack (and I say that with sincere admiration for their platform) give me easy functionality to exclude Jay from JFK Facts conversations. Push a blue button, and we won’t be hearing any more abuse from Jay.
But what good would that do? Rather than do unto Jay as Jay did unto me, I prefer to tell him about my formative Jewish education. I don’t hate Jews, Jay. They made me what I am.
Secular Humanism
I grew up in New York City until I was 14 years old, an experience that once made me think, “I’d like to be half white, half black, and half Jewish.” Well, a Jewish school got me a third of the way there. When I was in sixth grade my Episcopalian parents enrolled me in the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan because they thought it was one of the best schools in the city. They were right. That’s where I learned to write and think, conspire and kvetch, and here we are.
The Ethical Culture Schools (there are three of them) exemplify a tradition started by Felix Adler, the late 19th-century inventor of “secular humanism.” Among the many accomplished assimilated Jewish families on New York’s Upper West and Upper East Sides, his was (and still is) an attractive worldview, an engaged public philosophy detached from religious dogma but inevitably imbued with Jewish traditions of learning and service, along with doses of Immanuel Kant and Ralph Waldo Emerson. My introduction to the Jewish world came from Adler. To wit, “Judaism was not given to the Jews alone, but that its destiny [is] to embrace in one great moral state the whole family of men.”
In short, I lucked into a crash course in Jewish genius. My introduction to Groucho Marx came at the sixth-grade birthday party thrown by Amos Vogel, subversive film scholar and father of a pal. My introduction to Noam Chomsky came in discussions of the Vietnam War in Ethics class. My friends were Gordon, Florman, Jaffe, and Lawrence. (No, not a law firm, just buddies.) I went to so many bar mitzvahs, I can still recite the opening lines by heart: "Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu, Melech haolam." Six decades later, my friend Steve keeps filling in the next lines in hopes I will learn them and convert before it’s too late.
The list of people who graduated from Fieldston, the Ethical Culture high school in the Bronx, is impressive. (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Gil Scott-Heron, among many, many others.) I did not. But I was fortunate to spend two years in those classrooms. From my mostly (but not all) Jewish teachers, I gained an essential foundation for the rest of my education. I have many flaws as a human being, but Jew-hating?
Spare me the hasbara, you schmuck.
Note to Reader Jay
It is true that I am not a Zionist. I was, passively, for a long time, but today’s Zionism is incompatible with the secular, Jewish and humanistic values I absorbed too early to repudiate. If those values are what agitates you about my coverage of the attack on Iran, we at JFK Facts are glad to talk about that consistent with our permissive comment policy.
A personal post I made to the Cannonfire Blog 19 years ago. I would do it differently today, but still apropo...
Anti-Semitism, real and imagined
Not many days ago, this column experienced a bit of a brouhaha over charges of anti-Semitism -- the sort of charges which invariably follow criticism of the Israeli government. One of our readers, Dr. David Stern, offered a very personal and interesting response. He has permitted me to reproduce his email. His words appear below the asterisks.
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In order to place my comments in their proper context, I must tell you a bit about myself. I am Jewish - or at least partly so. I was born and raised Jewish, allowed to date only Jewish girls through high school, and joined a nominally Jewish fraternity in college. Judaism remained my sole source of spirituality until around the age of 30, when I discovered that the many of the concepts and practices of Zen Buddhism were more satisfying. Still, I observe many Jewish holidays, and try to teach my daughter a little about the religion when I can. I have a shared experience with other Jews in growing up with Jewish traditions and experiencing the mild-to-moderate emotional challenges of possessing an often-misunderstood identity not shared by nearly 97% of my friends and neighbors, and so feel a connection, still.
The ovens of Auschwitz had barely gone cold in the minds of the adults around me when I was born in 1959. Sympathy with the Jewish State of Israel was ubiquitous, and I absorbed much of the pro-Israel propaganda I was exposed to in religious school. As a result, I started off an uncritical backer of Israel, and was agreeable to the overall concept of a Jewish State there. The inference that Judaism = Zionism was untroubling until my late teens.
In 1978 I was a freshman in college when a local rabbi came to my nominally Jewish fraternity to round up organized support for Israel. Early in his presentation, he mentioned something about how we as Jews "owed" Israel our support. I apologized for interrupting as I reminded the Rabbi that I was an American, that this nation had done a lot for me, and that I owed my loyalty to the United States. While I supported Israel, I was not an uncritical backer of Israel's actions, and I certainly would not act to support policies that were not in the best interests of my own country. Israel had done nothing for me, and I certainly did not feel like I "owed" them anything. The rabbi first looked stunned, as though I had gone up and punched him in the nose. He then flew into a rage before he abruptly packed up his stuff and left. Some of my Jewish fraternity brothers told me they felt as though I had been disrespectful of the Rabbi -- which I soundly refuted, but not a single one expressed any disagreement with what I said. Remember that, because I think it is important.
A few short years after that incident, Israel invaded Lebanon, and I wanted to go someplace and hide, I was so ashamed. I had still not fully shaken my identity with Israel, even though I had clearly delineated limits to that association. Now I wondered how a nation supposedly founded on Judaism could act in such an immoral fashion. The continuing and intensifying mistreatment of Palestinians also led me to feel more alienated from Israel, and less inclined to be overtly supportive.
It was not until much later that I learned much about the history of Zionism and the conduct of the leaders of that movement that I had not previously known. Even later, I learned that the plight of native Jews was only slightly better than that of the Muslim Palestinians during Israel's early existence. It was at that point it became clear to me: Zionism is not, and never was about or for the protection of Jews from persecution. It was and remains a Machiavellian power move that found a way to take advantage of some basic human weaknesses and insecurities, and turn the darkest instincts of humanity to their advantage. It is only in this context that the full history of Israel's existence and subsequent conduct can be fully understood.
At this point, the Israeli government could collapse from the inside, and after mercifully limited period of bloodletting, reorganize itself as a secular Palestine, where Muslim and Jew were forced to co-exist on equal terms, and it would be the happiest moment of my life.
Obviously, I am not typical of most American Jews, but there is a continuum of opinion and level of involvement among us. I find it personally offensive whenever anyone implies that I as I Jew, I am automatically assumed to be a backer of Israel, or as concerned with Israeli affairs as I am with those of my own country. Given my own personal history, it should seem clear why that would be so.
We Jews are not unlike our fellow Americans in any fundamental way. Most Americans are woefully informed about news and politics in the United States - and our awareness of the rest of the world is and has always been even worse. While Jews generally may be slightly better informed than average, I doubt the difference is all that significant. My point is, the reason "the Jewish Citizenry" is as ill-informed about Israel's internal political scandals is the same as the reason the rest of the country is so ill-informed: The information is not prominently featured in the major media, and most of us don't care that much -- we are too involved in our own lives and the affairs of our own country to seek out additional information about Israel, or any other nation.
People who act and/or think as agents of Israel routinely use charges of bigotry against Jews whenever they need to counter rational criticisms of Israeli conduct that are not easily justified. You should wear those charges as a badge of honor, and a sign that your criticisms are dead-on. And you should not dignify them with a response - no thinking person could possibly buy that argument, and you have no chance of reaching anyone who either agrees with it, or is motivated to go along with it, despite knowing it is a lie. It is a waste of your valuable time and energy, and robs those of us who read your blog of whatever information of value you might produce, had you not been engaging in a straw-man argument with a provocateur.
You may better position yourself to avoid or dismiss these baseless attacks if you avoid making Israeli issues into Jewish issues. If Doc Elsewhere had said, "Makes one wonder if American backers of Israel are as clueless as the rest of us about these problems. And if so, why? And dare we wonder why we hear nothing of any of this here, regardless of the presence of a strong Israeli political infrastructure in the US?" it would have forced the provocateurs to INTRODUCE Judaism into the conversation in order for them to then charge her with anti-Semitism. It also would have avoided the unfair inference that only an insignificant percentage of American Jews can be counted among those not concerned first and foremost with Israeli affairs.
Jeff, you are one of the few journalists I still believe in. You are in search of truth whereas most people today are in search of whatever you shove down their throats or consume on tv. If we stop for a minute and watch what Bibi is actually doing as a head of state you realize if we are not critical of his imperialistic motives then shame on us. It has nothing to do with Jew hate.