LEONARD FEIN
LEONARD FEIN GUEST COLUMNIST It is only the conservatives, Prager asserts, who defend Israel ardently. This has become a popular complaint against liberals of late, and it is time to put it to...
...Those Jews who see a conflict between traditional Judaism and contemporary politics, as many do, are in my view mistaken...
...Tom while blacks who characterize this nation as endemically racist are deemed the only legitimate black spokespeople...
...The heart of his fulmination against Jewish liberals is a tired rehash of myopic observations first brought to Jewish public attention by Irving Kristol in the pages of Commentary...
...Must we re-argue Jeanne Kirkpatrick's empty thesis yet again...
...If liberals are soft on communism, they are also hard on Israel...
...The one takes an essentially Hobbesian view of the universe: The world is a nasty and brutish jungle...
...How can it be, he asks, that the Jews will not draw the appropriate conclusions from the fact that "liberals and Democrats were completely wrong on the most important world- and Israel-related issue of our time...
...There is, Prager tells us, anti-semitism on the left...
...First, he says, there's human nature...
...And yes, sometimes we stumble...
...Happily, Israel enjoys bipartisan support...
...And, finally, Prager observes that liberals are trapped by the historic association between antisemitism and the Right, and do not recognize that Christianity and the Right in America "provide Jews with most of their close allies on the most important issue of Jewish survival—the well-being of Israel...
...What matters, really matters, is the continuing separation of church and state in this nation, for that is what creates the space for Jews to be Jews...
...Prager wants us to take seriously the trivia of party conventions, with their blather and bluster...
...True enough— but if one were to check the party affiliations of those who engage in.active antisemitism in this country, from the desecration of graves to Holocaust revisionism to social discrimination, my guess is they'd load up, and heavily, in the non-liberal column...
...Liberal Jews have hearts that sometimes bleed too easily and knees that sometimes jerk too readily...
...Politics is (or ought to be) not a substitute for religion, but an implication of religion...
...And it was, after all, Jimmy Carter who elevated human rights to the level of a fundamental guide in international affairs...
...On the whole, however, Jews prefer to stand with the prophets, with what may fairly be called the Jewish view, as contrasted with the classical Calvinist view, Prager's clear preference...
...Here he takes an immensely complex issue, one which serious people argue vehemently and thoughtfully, and gives us as evidence for his position the old business of Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panthers, an odd left-over from a very different era...
...We are creatures of habit, and if we start out as liberals, odds are we will remain liberals...
...Then what of the 400 or so Israeli generals who have publicly voiced their concerns that the policies of Israel's government threaten Israel's safety...
...But the truth is that the Gulf war is only Prager's device for grabbing our attention...
...Lordie, lordie...
...now we know the ineffectiveness of the Patriot missile...
...Ron Brown...
...now we know what sort of country it is we chose to defend, with its kangaroo courts and its cruel sentences...
...Here again, Prager laments the Democrats' rhetorical failure: We "were not even able to declare communism an evil," as if the word were all that matters, as if manifestos, slogans and declarations are the essential distinctions between the liberals and the illiberals...
...Given what we now know, perhaps even Prager would agree that the best policy would be to keep the non-liberals, the other party, in storage until the day a war starts, then be brought out to fight the war, and at its end be prompdy returned to where they obviously belong in times when men and women of good sense devote themselves not to the winning of wars but to their prevention...
...This has become a popular complaint against liberals of late, and it is time to put it to rest...
...What Jewish liberals believe is that the confused and twisted road to social justice is the safest and the lightest road for us to walk...
...the blame lies with Dennis Prager and others like him, with all those who love parades, oil and macho bluster...
...That preposterous formulation should tell us who is really trapped by the past Israel has allies on both right and left, but the notion that most of Israel's close allies are on the Right is so far from the observable facts as to suggest that Prager is not merely trapped by the 1960s but is hopelessly traumatized by them...
...Thank God," Prager says in his closing peroration, "the liberals and their party were not in power the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait...
...No one in Washington who believes that President Bush's opposition to the proposed civil rights legislation turns, as the president claims it does, on the matter of quotas...
...Inertial momentum...
...Whether the question be foreign aid, with which many Republicans still have a hard time, or military sales to Israel's enemies, with which many Republicans still have too easy a time, it is on Democratic members that Israel relies most heavily...
...Does Prager really believe that such distress is incompatible with ardent support for Israel's safety...
...Perhaps there are some people on the left who fit Prager's strange assertion— but as well tar liberalism with these warts as saddle Dennis Prager with responsibility for David Duke...
...Or doesn't that count...
...Now, in short, we know that an administration that performed brilliantly in mobilizing the wartime alliance and in galvanizing American public opinion had not a clue as to what the war's last chapter should be...
...And whose fault is it that the conservatives were in power the day after the war, the day the Kurds were abandoned, left to the Iraqi tanks and gunships until the liberals and their party and, yes, even some conservatives, finally leaned so hard on the president that he had to respond...
...It is true that elements within the American liberal camp have been seduced into vanessing* with the PLO, take untoward delight in broadcasting Israel's failings and failures...
...Liberals, Prager argues, have been soft on communism...
...We "opposed every effort to confront the world's greatest evil since Hitler...
...Prager's third explanation of Jewish adherence to liberalism is that we have made of liberalism a functional equivalent of religion—and, for many of us, it has become a substitute for Judaism...
...Now we know about the Kurds and the Shi'ites...
...In that regard, with which political disposition, pray tell, are Jews more safe...
...But on examination, his caution is no more than a kvetch...
...it is only the conservatives, Prager asserts, who defend Israel ardendy...
...Big deal...
...That, and parody: The American atmosphere today, Prager says, is one "in which a black who proclaims faith in America is considered an Uncle * The reference is to Vanessa Redgrave.—Ed...
...But if God gets the credit for that, who gets the blame for the fact that the liberals and their party were not in power the day and the month and the year before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the day, the month and the year during which the administration in power coddled Hussein, refused (despite liberal warnings) to treat him as an outlaw, preferred profit to principle...
...Little wonder: What, after all, can one say of the civil rights record of the Reagan-Bush administration...
...It assumes selfishness, and it takes as its first priority the need for some stability amidst the chaos—law and order, if you will...
...But once again, where it counts most—for example, in Congress—the core support for Israel comes from Democrats rather than from Republicans...
...Liberals opposed dictators of the Right and of the Left, and we objected to an American foreign policy that rewarded any and all anticommunists, no matter how reprehensible...
...Prager argues in his June 1991 column that most Jews stay liberal for antique reasons that have no serious justification, not in light of the harm he alleges our liberalism does to both Jewish morals and Jewish interests...
...Doug Wilder...
...Prager's entering wedge is the war in the Gulf...
...And now, therefore, we should know that those who preferred a different course, those who preferred the path of sanctions (including, it seems, General Colin Powell himself), were—at the very least—not "completely" wrong, as Prager so glibly asserts...
...Jews are liberals for diverse reasons, among which inertia, idealism, religious imperatives and the historic association between antisemitism and the Right all figure...
...I refer here to the core of that support...
...Well, maybe...
...Leave poor God out of it...
...This has become a popular complaint against liberals of late, and it is time to put it to rest...
...It doesn't wash...
...Can Prager not know that what liberals opposed was a foreign policy fixated on the totalitarianism of the Left yet indifferent to the authoritarianism of the Right...
...Yes, many liberals are upset by the policies of Israel's government these days...
...Surely it was not liberal presidents who created a federal judiciary that is slowly whittiing away at the separation of church and state...
...Having nothing to say in defence of the Republican record on race in the 80s and 90s, we get this rerun of the 60s instead...
...He likely wrote his article in the excitement of the war's official conclusion and did not foresee its dismal aftermath...
...They are no more persuasive five years later in the pages of MOMENT...
...Take Dennis Prager, for example...
...But the issue of safety for American Jews is not determined by convention resolutions...
...This is so and is a pity...
...Not that it matters much, one way or the other...
...It is true, I think, that two different worldviews inform the two camps...
...now we know how much of Saddam Hussein's sinister military machine was left intact...
...Bill Green...
...it is an argument against the misinterpretations of both liberalism and Judaism, misinterpretations of which Prager, as it turns out, is no less guilty than are the militantly secularized liberals...
...Now we know—and Prager presumably knows, too—what we did not know and did not want to know when the president blew the whisde oh the war...
...Now we know, or should, that we were the all-too-willing victims of a marvelous manipulation...
...But there are some other reasons, too, among which our concern for a fair, a decent, an equitable society—for both reasons of self-interest and concern for the public weal—is central...
...Were he even half right in his depiction of the virtues of conservatism and the dangers of liberalism, we would all be in his debt...
...But that is no argument against liberalism...
...Leaving aside his inflated rhetoric, here we must give Prager the benefit of the doubt...
...It is determined principally by the laws of the land as applied by the courts...
...Prager wants us to believe that the conservative record on race in America is to be preferred to the liberal record...
...the Democrats, he complains, failed at their convention to denounce antisemitism, but the Republicans did not...
...This leads him to puzzle the question of why Jews, who ought to know better, persist in their adherence to liberalism...
...He offers us a four-part explanation...
...better a knee that jerks than rigor mortis...
...8> Political scientist Leonard Fein is the founder and former editor of MOMENT...
...But better a heart that bleeds than a politics of sclerosis...
...And second, there's the liberal preoccupation with motives: Jews perceive liberalism as idealistic, conservatism as rooted in selfishness...
...The second takes a prophetic view of the universe: It sees human beings as God's partners in the pursuit of justice, and it holds that until there is justice, there will not be stability...
...But Prager is convinced that it does, along with the rest of his indictment of American liberalism...
...To peace, with honor...
...From these two views very different political orientations derive—and each is susceptible to perverse excess...
Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5
