Why the Jews are never included

Michael Ledeen has a very thoughtful piece at NRO, wherein he makes a potent point:

…many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren’t there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know.

It’s one of those things that few people have the courage to say up front – that many, many elites would be quite happy to see Israel simply cease to be.

Ledeen goes out of his way, later, in clarifying that many American elitists would also like to see Israel forced into the ocean. What I find so very disheartening is that so many of these elite folks are themselves Jewish. “Anglo-assimilated” if you wish, but still – and ever – Jewish.

I have a thought about why Israel-as-terror-victim goes unmentioned in Britain and, really by the American left. Partly, it is because of the rules and contraints of politically-correct speech among the chattering classes. If you want to belong, you daren’t mouth an unsophisticated thought, and to some, those Jews are “unsophisticated, arrogant and too-clever-by-half”, all at the same time. Wanting to maintain clear lines of distinction between the elites and their lessers, (the Jews) and also to keep the “Arab street” appeased, it is so much safer, in the end, to sniff in disdain at the former while absent-mindedly patting the heads of the latter, as though they were mildly amusing, if brain-damaged stepchildren.

In America, I think Israel is disliked by the left – most notably by leftist/secularized Jews – for such a simple reason that it is sad, really. It’s simply an adolescent insecurity that cannot be mastered – or perhaps it is willfully being fed, I’m not certain. The secular American Jews, casting off any remnant of Jewishness they can (excepting those traits which their friends find “endearing,” as in Billy Crystal’s uber-cute schtick, the occasional “bubeleh” and so on), are almost phobic about the possibility that they might be stained by “those embarrassing Jews,” who dare to bring up Israel or morality or God.

I once worked at a brokerage house with a Jewish woman who wanted no part of Jews. She had done the rhinoplasty-and-Anglicized-name thing. She looked Italian and married four times, each husband a WASP.

Forced, on one occasion to work with her (she made me nuts for several reasons) I watched as she spoke very disrespectfully to a broker who was keenly Jewish – who kept Kosher, went to Temple, and looked like a Nazi caricature of The Jew. When he walked away, I asked her why she had been so inappropriately hard on him and she wrinkled her nose, “he’s such a JEW! He makes all of us look like schmucks!”

She really hated him for it – hated the idea that someone might put her in the same class and camp as a “stereotypical Jew” and therefore reject her. Basically, she was afraid of being kicked off the cool kids table in the high school cafeteria that was her life.

I think for a lot of elite and leftist Jews, it is the same – they hate noisy, independent, stubborn Israel and wish it would just go away and leave them to their shiksa trophy wives and their formerly restricted clubs. Having cast off the heavy yoke of being the Chosen People of God – heavily blessed, but despised by the rest of the world, they hate seeing these moralistic neocons coming along and reminding them – perhaps guilting them – that Judaism is not merely about a creed, but about a race, too – one given a great responsibility…a people given the unfathomable gift of suffering, in all of its mystery and grace.

They don’t want to suffer and go through all that crap. Why should an accident of geneology force it on them? They could just as easily been born patrician Episcopalians!

I begin to think the secularist, leftist Jews simply don’t want to own any of it, and therefore they prefer to utterly distance themselves from their Jewish heritage and history – even to the point of hating “those Jews…”

So much of being part of the left is about belonging to all that is “current” (and fleeting), and the constant threat of being left behind for the unforgivable sin of being insufficiently “cool.” Having been admitted into the elitist club, they fear being despised and thus rejected. They just want to get to the Hamptons and sip wine with Muffy and Brad, while joining in on the American version of the British sniff-and-pat, play golf and cling with white-knuckles to that oh-so-cool-and-envied “popular” lunch table.

They are quick to “not include” the Jews in the list of sympathetic victims of terrorism…because to do so may get them “not included” with their crowd.

And if they are rejected by the cool kids…they will only be…Jews. Everyone’s victims, and unincluded.

UPDATE: I have had some interesting (and very civil) emails since posting this, and I wanted to clarify something. I am in no way suggesting that secular Jews – even “leftist” secular Jews – are people of bad character, only that they’re not being careful.

I don’t expect all Jews to be Zionists, or even particularly religious. I do expect them to remember that they are Jews – a people apart – and to be mindful of what is stirring around them. History has shown us that when anti-semitism is moving in a powerful thrust, every Jew is in danger, no matter how “well assimilated” he or she may be. That is an uncomfortable thing for some to hear, I know – but it has been ever thus. No matter how positive the contributions, the Jew is always, ultimately, “that Jew.”

It has been a few years since I have seen Schindler’s List, so maybe I am getting this wrong, but wasn’t there a scene in the prison camp where a Jewish female architect tried to show her worth to the Nazi’s – only to be shot in cold blood by the commander as he walked by? Only a film, true, but such stories abound.

The bottom line – after many, many words – is that a Jew will never be exempt from anti-semitic persecution because he has “fit in” and “contributed”, and distanced himself from Zionism or even from “too Jewish” people. Anti-Semites do not distinguish between “good” Jews and “bad” once the masks are off. Some Jews understand this. Some do not.

Also, Sigmund Carl and Alfred have further thoughts, from the perspective of history.