Dogmatism of the Left

...The whole lifeless litany of the Left, that is...

...Shorris, who thinks that "ye-huda" in Hebrew means "Jew", thinks also that Judaism is a liberal religion...

...There is not an argument to be found in this entire book...

...It is not entirely about charity...

...He must be instructed at least a little, though, in the real political character of Judaism...

...There are broad moral principles in Judaism that may be invoked in support of many different policies (Shorris has his mercy and Podhoretz has his: the quality of mercy is always strained), but Judaism is a poor reason for choosing one over another...

...He shares this view to a certain extent with Norman Podhoretz, whose recent memoir depicts those who did not come to his conclusions—Lionel Trilling, for example—as having not a different mind but a failed will...

...Their moral and political doctrines were developed in a strange universe that is pretty much gone...

...Commentary, in other words, is not what Yahweh was thinking of...

...They concluded that the attainment of civil liberties for the Jews required reform in the West and revolution in the East...

...Shorris likes to call the neoconservatives "inauthentic...

...He does not consider whether there are currents in the Left that have turned against the Jews—or, for that matter, against social justice, human rights, peace, and mercy...

...It is the sort of attack, however, that makes you want to rise to their defense...

...Arguments must be met by arguments...

...liberals, who are still sitting shiva for Hubert Humphrey...

...Shorris will further find, if he looks into "the Law," that it insists that church not be separate from state, and that the sexual perversions be punished by death...

...The entire community was not transformed, however...

...The Jews went over to the Left, then, because it was in their interest...

...It puts the test of political troth upon the Left, not upon the Jews...

...The other side can do the same, and more precisely...

...They have arrived at a political position for their own reasons, and frequently these are good reasons, yet they require the agreement of their ancestors...

...It will not edify him...

...Shorris imputes that association to "the demands for social justice of the Hebrew prophets...

...Unfortunately, not many liberal or Left-wing Jews of the last century cared very much for the prophets, and they cared even less for the rabbis...

...It is also a misreading of "the historic association of the Jews with the Left...

...The best that can be said about Shorris' sociomoral explanation of neoconservatism is that some of its intellectuals have been part of a political transformation that has overtaken certain distinguished segments of the American Jewish community...

...They acted in the name of an unsentimentally secular vision of the world...

...He should have a look at it sometime...

...Shorris' thesis is that the neoconservatives have broken faith with Judaism: They "have forgotten who they are...

...Jews, he believes, should be above interests...

...There is no " Jewish" position on busing, the MX missile, or supply-side economics...

...Now Podhoretz is treated to a taste of his own medicine, and no less unfairly...

...His view of the life of the mind goes something like this: people with whom he agrees have ideas, people with whom he disagrees have motives...

...besides, the soiling story has been told before...

...She will have a lot to answer for, but not for her deviation from the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov...

...The new definition, according to Shorris, is "the pursuit of interests over the pursuit of ethics...

...This is Left-wing racism...

...Liberals do not sufficiently grasp the strangeness of that universe, as they do not grasp the strangeness of many others...

...they propose that "Jews accept a new ethical definition of themselves, a definition contrary to much, perhaps most, of what has defined us since our historical beginning in the desert after we were sojourners in Egypt...

...Shorris' conception of the Left is, to put it mildly, uncritical: "When they were still on the Left, Jewish interests meant social justice, human rights, peace, a world in which mercy prevailed...

...but for each of those pages there are many turgid tomes that teach the most unpro-gressive kind of particularism...

...He does not believe this about blacks...

...The ideas of the neoconservatives should be judged for their truth or falsehood, not for their conformity to ancient canon...

...there are none...

...Has he no mercy...

...This book is not the first to consider neoconservatism as primarily an American Jewish phenomenon...

...contributor, "New York Review of Books," "Dissent," "New Republic," New York "Times" EARL SHORRIS' little pamphlet is an attack upon the neoconservatives...

...There was no middle class in Russia, which may have been the most tragic fact about its Revolution...

...Most liberals andconservativesarenot...

...It is beside the point that Jeane Kirkpatrick is a bad Jew...

...The famous defection of American Jews from the Left to the Right never happened...

...It makes no sense, in any case, to call the rabbis either liberal or conservative...

...Actually, this is his view of Jewish politics only...

...That older authority is the Jewish tradition...

...Shorris understands almost nothing about the life of the mind, the nature of politics, or Judaism...

...Not much is gained by it...

...Maimonides' greatness has nothing to do with his usefulness to Democratic Socialism...

...Shorris frequently invokes "the Law...

...A great deal, apparently, is self-evident—that capitalism is bad for the Jews, that affirmative action is not a quota system, that Alger Hiss was innocent, that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is imperialism, that the Soviet Union is behind in the arms race and would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, and so on...

...It is small wonder that Shorris offers no good arguments for some of these propositions...

...As long as it is believed, on the other hand, that there is an essential identity of spirit, an isomorphism of ideas, between the tradition of the Left and the tradition of the Jews, it is a sign of "inauthenticity" for a Jew to change his mind...

...It would take too long, however, to instruct Shorris in the real political history of the Left, in the high incidence of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism in the social systems it has spawned...

...It is also extremely vulgar...

...Most American Jews remain Left-of-center Democrats, a little lonelier than they were in the past...

...They do not see that this kind of a commitment to Judaism's teachings is based solely upon moral and political convenience, that it is a spiritual consumerism...

...they are spiritually unbecoming...

...blacks may have interests...

...They have nothing to be embarrassed about...

...Of course a great many neoconservatives are Jews...

...Even there, however, Jews were most prominent among the Mensheviks and the Ka-dets—among those who wanted democracy before industry, who argued that freedom should come before equality...

...After all, many Jewish ideas have been false, and many non-Jewish ideas have been true...

...There is great nobility in the pursuit of your interests, of your right to vote and to work and to study...

...His arguments about the future of freedom in the world, about the ideological and political responsibilities of the United States in its competition with the Soviet Union, are reduced by Shorris to a "desire for power" and a "preference for vulgarity...

...They are, in the main, theocratic texts...

...The truth is that "the Law" should be kept out of Jewish politics, except by those who are prepared to live by it...

...The importance of this phenomenon is not sufficiently appreciated...

...They have learned not to require the agreement of their parents...

...and even the laws of charity, which are indeed classics of compassion, care not very much about the welfare of non-Jews...

...Shorris' many other mistakes I let pass...

...Like the blacks, Mr...

...but not every idea that a Jew has is a Jewish idea...

...The strident support of the Left for the PLO, for example, troubles him not at all...

...He also should cast no first stones about authenticity...

...They believe, when they go rifling through the rabbis in search of blurbs for the welfare state, that they are being good Jews...

...Neoconservatism will not be refuted by gossip...

...Such an analysis is the conventional wisdom...

...Shorris, like the blacks...

...I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing in the Jewish tradition that can give nourishment to a liberal, but there is at least as much, and probably more, that can give nourishment to a conservative...

...And Democratic Socialism is in trouble if it cannot do without Maimonides...

...If only for that, he should not be forgiven...

...A man whose son calls himself a "Marxist-Leninist" at the age of 12 surely cannot tolerate that the Jewish alliance with the tradition was tactical...

...and therefore they allied themselves with the middle class in the West and the proletariat in the East...

...His view of politics is that it is not about interests...

...They are being only sentimental Jews...

...The reason that Left-wing Jews like Shorris are so threatened by the ideology of interests is simple...

...He speaks about the Left in slogans...

...There are pages in the prophets, it is true, that teach "universalism," which is very dear to Shorris...

...They are not instructive...

...All this is, for a number of reasons, profoundly pernicious...

...There is a great deal, moreover, about which even Maimonides has nothing to say...

...Shorris is playing a dangerous game, in other words, when he enlists Judaism in support of his views...

...He cannot have read too many of its texts...

...His purpose, he writes, is "to confront the [neoconservative] movement with an older authority...

...Shorris does not see that such an analysis is tantamount to an admission of intellectual defeat...