“What a dreary compromise is life!” exclaimed the hero of Norman Mailer’s abortive magnum opus, The Man Who Studied Yoga.1 And so life is a dreary compromise for most of us, which is why we go to films to see people who do all the things we don’t do in real life, like punch out our bosses, or sleep with them, or steal sick cars, or blow shit up, and just basically kick ass like there’s no tomorrow, and devil take the hindmost. But there is another, and more substantial, way to experience vicariously a life without limits; we can have a cause.
In particular, we can imagine another land that is not like this one, where life is not a dreary compromise, but an honest to God war between Good and Evil, and we can take sides. During the American Civil War, many “radicals” in Europe identified passionately with the Union; during the Spanish Civil War, many leftists in the U.S. (and Europe) felt the same way about the “Republicans”. Today, of course, in the U.S., many Jews and evangelicals feel that way about Israel; and around the world, many leftists feel the same way about Palestine. Thanks to the horrible crimes of Hamas, and Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza in response, both these dreams are in collision. I am horrified by the absolute sadism of the Hamas assault on the innocent Israeli people; but I also believe that Israel cannot achieve its war aims in Gaza, and thus will end up killing tens of thousands of people—and turning the lives of two million upside down—for no purpose, repeating the U.S. efforts/crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan—crimes that our immense power and geographic isolation allowed us to commit with near impunity, a grotesque luxury that is not available to the Israelis. As a result, we see a vicious outburst of antisemitism in the U.S. and, indeed, all around the world.
I believe that, for decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, the constant pressure from supporters of Israel in the U.S.—symbolized by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, (AIPAC), even though the evangelicals generally maintain their own separate organizations—has corrupted both the U.S. and Israel, making Israel subject to no law other than its own will, a will that under that latest manifestation of right-wing Israeli politics is moving closer and closer to the outright annexation, aka “conquest”, of both the West Bank and Jerusalem, the conclusion of a long process that began decades ago, that the U.S. should have halted but never did, that the Trump administration aggressively pushed forward, and the Biden administration seems utterly unwilling to resist.
While Palestinians are being oppressed, and murdered, in the Middle East, Jews around the world are subject to an outbreak of open antisemitism such as we innocents wanted to believe would never occur again, both on the “hard-nosed”, race war right and the hysterically virtuous left. All at once it is considered fashionable to hate Jews. On the right, as far as I can tell, it is the same old blood and soil racism that never goes away, but usually never makes it into polite discourse. But now the likes of Tucker Carlson is making it “polite”—bow tie fascism, I suppose. On the left—perhaps simply because I know it better—things appear more complex.
One of the largely unspoken cultural phenomena in the U.S. is black antisemitism. Back in the early sixties my Jewish girlfriend (I am not Jewish, as I always remark in any of these articles involving Israel) told me about black resentment in Harlem regarding Jewish landlords, and my interest in jazz led me to learn about resentments between black musicians and their Jewish agents, which, of course, continue to occur in show business today, although the contract disputes deal with millions, at a minimum, rather than thousands. Back in the sixties, James Baldwin tried to explain what he considered as “legitimate” antisemitism, though in doing so he simply revealed his bigotry, his self pity, and his ignorance of free market economics,2 and I will take the liberty of both summarizing and deconstructing his “argument” as follows:
Damn these Jews! They come into our neighborhoods, and sell us junk, like liquor, and candy, and cigarettes, stuff that’s no good for us, and we waste our money on the junk they sell us until we have nothing left. And then they take our money out of our neighborhoods and live in their fancy, safe uptown neighborhoods that we can’t afford! If only we didn’t waste our money on that stuff they trick us into buying! If only we were thrifty, and diligent and self-disciplined! You know, like the Jews! If only we worked hard and saved our money! You know, like the Jews! Damn those Jews! It’s all their fault that we can’t live like Jews!
In the late sixties it became fashionable in the New Left—the “true” Left—to reject with particular vigor the “Old Left”, which, among other things, often led the new true believers to consciously reject, and consciously offend, the old left, which was often heavily Jewish. Substacker Andrew Sullivan quotes former New Republic owner Marty Peretz on the disastrous outcome of a “National Conference for New Politics” that Peretz had helped organize in 1968:
One night, after most people had gone back to their motels, I came downstairs to find blacks and whites together on my porch singing anti-Semitic songs about Jewish landlords overcharging and evicting black tenants in Harlem. Most of the whites singing were Jews, and I could see they were enjoying a kind of vicarious thrill, a subversive titillation, that went through them as they sang. I threw them off the porch.
There are, I suspect, fewer Jews singing antisemitic songs these days, but unfortunately more on the left are singing them, as the woke fashion for proving one’s self to be passionate and “dangerous” (and thus not “bourgeois”)—by oppressing the oppressors, by making hatred and contempt a good thing—becomes ever more fashionable among the nation’s elite. For the more credentialed you are, the more you are obliged to show that you hold credentials in contempt—for only the truly credentialed can afford to despise them. (I discuss this phenomenon, and much else, at great length in a 33,000 word post entitled CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.)
Afterwords
Those seeking better informed thoughts on Israel and Palestine than mine can try the likes of Daniel Drezner and Peter Beinart.
More of my own thoughts on the current situation in the Middle East and its impact on life here in the U.S. can be found here, here, here, and here.
1. The few (utterly uninteresting) fragments of TMWSY that Mailer managed to squeeze out before his novelistic imagination failed him are preserved in his 1959 pseudo soul-bearing mélange of scraps, false starts, and leavings, Advertisements for Myself, whose packaged swagger was carefully designed to conceal the fact that Mailer was trying—and ultimately succeeding—to close out his book contract with the hapless folks at G. P. Putnam’s, who were expecting another The Naked and the Dead and didn’t get it.
2. As a highly self-conscious “artist”, Baldwin was no doubt proud of his ignorance of free-market economics. In fact, it was his loss.
Very well written = Lots of Food for Thought