When Victims Rule

1 20 JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE, PART I "If anything distinguishes American Jews today within the context of American society it is the special deference that society accords them -- Charles Liebman/Stephen Cohen, p. 7 "I have found that being Catholic means having less status than being Jewish. I see it in the media, in the newspapers, in the intonations; I do not see how one can avoid that feeling or sensibility." -- Michael Novak, [in Stallsworth, p. 71] "I'm half Jewish and half nothing." (four-year-old boy in an elevator, to his friend), [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245] "Too many Jews have turned away from the modern project, from the Enlightenment and the idea of progress, to barricade themselves in an angry tribalism." -- Norman Birnbaum, Tikkun, p. 111 "The Jews in America ... have become very powerful as a lobby and can afford the luxury of being hypersensitive. Any little thing that you say in criticism is seen as a criticism against the people. They seem to want to be seen as infallible." -- South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Winner "When Jews see themselves as superior to all other human beings ... they are claiming license to do what is forbidden to others." -- Yehoshafat Harkabi, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, p. 180 "I didn't hear that polio was cured today. I heard that a Jewish doctor cured polio today." -- Godfrey Cambridge, Black comedian, SIMONS, p. 135-136 "[Black Americans have] an envy of the Jewish position and an exaggerated notion of their power, which is standard in the anti-Semitic imagination." -- Henry Feingold, Jewish scholar, p. 77 "American Jews have exerted an extraordinary impact upon the character of the United States." -- Stephen Whitfield, Jewish scholar, [AMERICAN SPACE, p.20] "It is all very puzzling. Who are these people, Christians wonder, who have moved so rapidly from obscurity to positions of prominence, even influence, in American society ... [and] why do Jews seek to stick together so much?" -- Charles Silberman, Jewish scholar, p. 26 "The period after World War II, especially, was a time of advance. Before then Jews had moved into the entertainment field, dominating Hollywood, and had begun to move into medicine, the sciences, academia, journalism, and cultural life in general. By the 1960s, they were disproportionately 1 2 represented in most professions having to do with the creation or dissemination of culture." -- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors, 1982, p. 96 "Jews in America are a power group; is it unreasonable for some people to ask whether Jews have too much power?" -- Jerome Chanes, Jewish scholar, [in Weiss, p. 32] "We Jews still prepare ourselves to fight the things the world plans on doing to us. It ain't true ... Jews are not victims. We are the players." -- J. J. Goldberg [in Silverstein, B., p. 5] Transcending religion, race, or any other traditional Judaic reference, modern American Jewry is often described these days as a voluntary (from the perspective of the individual, not the community, which claims Jews by birth to the "community of fate") polity, a secular organizational network with emphasis upon social, educational, economic and political activism. It is an organization that unifies atheists and the religious, rich and the less affluent, Sephardim, Ashkenazi, and any other self-defined "Jew" within a communal solidarity to Jewish "peoplehood" and its four unifying pillars of Jewish identity: 1) belief in a communal identity of historic persecution and victimhood and the uniqueness of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, 2) belief in the omnipresent threat of an irrational anti-Semitism, 3) allegiance to the modern state of Israel, and 4) a dedication to helping others Jews. The secular Jewish polity is a very adjusted model of the old obsolete "kehillah" self-governing organization that the Jewish community in Europe used to mediate with -- and distance itself from -- the surrounding non-Jewish people and cultures. While today's Jewish polity is world's apart in method and structure from the old institution, its purpose for existence today has moved towards what is was in ancient times: Jewish people distinct from, and often at the expense of, others. (Since the late 1960s, there has been a major shift in fundamental American Jewish attitudes: from helping fellow Jews assimilate fully into American mainstream society, to its polar opposite: massive amounts of money raised to support all aspects of "being Jewish.”) [SINGER, p. 220] The largest and best known expression of this polity is the United Jewish Appeal, an entity that has some 225 "federation'" sub-branches throughout the country. (In 1999, the UJA merged with other groups to form the "United Jewish Communities.") Such organizations claim a supportive base of 95% of all Jews in America. [WOOCHER] (One UJA fundraising brochure summed up its sense of itself by stating that "the programs of [our] agencies ... are not merely organizational endeavors, even 'good works' ... they are expressions of the essential meaning of Jewishness." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 19]) By 1980, 4,600 "key leaders" traveled to Israel that year alone on UJA "missions." [SILBERMAN, p. 198]] Still other Jewish polity expressions (what Daniel Elazar describes as "government-like institutions" [ELAZAR, p. 217] include B'nai Brith (and its Anti-Defamation League), Haddassah, the American Jewish 2 3 Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council for Jewish Women, and a variety of overtly Zionist organizations, most linked to the American Zion Federation. The central Jewish lobbying organ for Israel is the American Israel Political Action Committee -- AIPAC. By 1982 Jewish Americans had "no less than 340 national organizations." [KREFETZ, p. 71] More than eighty were expressly Zionist or other pro-Israeli groups. [WAXMAN, p. 134] This modern American Jewish polity is often noted as a quintessential "civil religion," a secular belief system that elicits deeply-felt allegiance of religious depth and proportion. "It has become a commonplace in recent years," notes Peter Novick, "that Israel and the Holocaust are the twin pillars of American Jewish 'civil religion' -- the symbols that bind together Jews in the United States whether they are believers or nonbelievers, on the political right, left, or center." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 147] (The modern Jewish attachment to Judaism as a formal religion in most of the twentieth century has been weak. A 1971 study revealed that only 17% of American Jews attended religious services more than once a month; this was in comparison to 65% of non-Jews who did so). [FORSTER, p. 128] As in any religion, the secular Jewish polity beliefs are articles of faith. They need not make logical sense to an outside observer; even some of its adherents may recognize -- and struggle to resolve -- various incongruencies, paradoxes, and hypocrisies in its central tenets. As the Random House dust jacket blurb noted for James Yaffe's 1968 volume The American Jews: Portrait of a Split Personality, "no people on earth are more riddled by contradictions than the American Jews." [YAFFE, 1968] These inconsistencies largely stem from Jewish attempts to rationalize their traditional (and current) notions of their exalted selves as the Chosen People in the context of a modern western society that socializes against such chauvinism, a pan-human perspective that most Jews themselves give public lip service. Jewish reluctance to surrender, however, (whatever form of) their self-perceived hereditary specialness as central to Jewish identity has created for some a lingering moral and psychological dilemma, one that the Jewish polity resolves by dissimulation and/or equivocation, by enforcing the preposterous and paradoxical Jewish myth that it is Jewish chauvinistic exceptionality itself that created the notion of pan-human universality. "[The Jewish polity believes that] America is, after all, created in their [Jewish] image," says Jonathan Woocher, "and in pursuing the civil Jewish version of Jewish destiny, they are merely reinforcing the terms of America's own understanding." [WOOCHER, p. 102] "Whether Jews define themselves as 'just Jewish,' 'ethnic Jews,' 'nonreligious Jews,' or some other phrase that classified them as more assimilated," noted Gary Tobin in 1988, "most know that they are different from other Americans.... [TOBIN, p. 70] ... For most Jews, there continues to be a 'them' and an 'us,' even though the 'us' is in some ways part of the 'them' ... [TOBIN, p. 73] ... The majority of American Jews continue to struggle to maintain their separate identity." [TOBIN, p. 74] "Despite their strong desire for integration into American society," wrote Nathan Glazer in 1972, "Jews do not, on the whole intermarry and do maintain themselves apart. How to resolve this contradiction is one of the major dilemmas of Judaism in America." [GLAZER, p. 10] This "contradiction" is clearly manifest in the very principles of Jewish identity that are diametrically opposed to the founding principles of Americanism. As Adam Garfinkle observes: 3 4 "The principle of individualist equality that flows from American sacred texts and the American experience cannot be reconciled with the hierarchical, communal principle that flows from halakhah, Jewish religious law. Many try and some claim success, but 'success' is mere illusion. Most American Jews have two religions the way some men have one wife and one mistress, or some women one husband and one lover. It is a condition that

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