A vocal segment of public opinion has responded in a remarkable way to George W. Bush’s victory. Many Jewish Democrats have blamed loyalty to Israel at the expense of loyalty to the United States, on the part of some Jews and many Evangelical Christians, as the reason for this “travesty” – a view likely shared by others.
There is a certain inchoate wisdom in this startling response. In a philosophical though not truly a practical sense, Israel really is at the heart of this dispute.
The election can well be seen as a battle between two philosophies – assimilationism and Zionism – which emerged out of Jewish attempts to deal with modernity 150 years ago. At that time, the dominant force was the assimilationist view. Its thesis was that the modern world was less wedded to its religious identity and therefore might be less hostile to Jews. Jews might become accepted in higher education and in additional sectors of the economy if they gave up their ‘alien’ religious practices and moved to integrate themselves within the larger society. Before, there had never been any point in selling out: no one was buying unless you completely and abruptly changed – religion, language, accent, habits, etc. – which for most Jews was too much to swallow at once.
Many Jews, including most Jews in Western Europe and the U.S., tried this approach and found that it worked, but not as well as expected. The Christian majority was still attached to elements of a religious culture that Jews found foreign and unwelcoming so long as they maintained any separate identity. These differences led to continued social and economic discrimination that rankled. The new Jews, who had learned to see themselves as equal “citizens” rather than as one nationality in a polyglot world, were less understanding of this type of exclusionary loyalty. They had given up their own culture and loyalties as the price of modernity and had not received the full wages of their sacrifice.
Many Jews came to believe that the change they had undergone should be the definition of citizenship and that those who retained “atavistic” identities and beliefs were being disloyal to the modern ideal. It seemed that to achieve full acceptance it was not enough to assimilate oneself, but one also had to fully assimilate the broader society to a new common identity that all could share equally – a breathtaking and audacious intellectual leap.
What Americans call “liberalism” is the broad result of this outlook. Socialism/Communism can be understood as the movement that most fully expressed these yearnings, essentially by forming a new religion that would sweep away the old loyalties and beliefs by force and then require all to join it on a fully equal basis. Because of its inherent appeal to powerless intellectuals, and with Jews forming an increasing presence in academia, liberalism conquered the universities. From there, liberalism came to represent the dominant point of view among the educated classes.
A striking feature of liberalism has been the propensity of its adherents to consider the majority identity always as guilty until proven innocent and to consider minorities as always in the right. The seemingly irrational tendency of modern elites to take the side of any foreign or minority group – however inimical its values to their own and however hostile it may be to them and to the society in which they live ? can be laid at the doorstep of this philosophy.
Assimilated Jews did not simply preach this philosophy, they lived it – and why not? They had no power to lose and they had already sacrificed their culture. Initially, many Jews clearly did benefit. Society, in particular the universities, became more open and the rights and position of Jews continued to progress.