Abraham Berkowitz, John Bradford, and Tom A. Milstein
http://okanner.googlepages.com/The_End_of_Exile.pdf
The institution of the territorially-bounded nation-state was invented for the Jewish people.
Israel was the first nation with borders, which is to say, the first nation.
With the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people lost their patrimony – their nationhood. They have since regarded their sojourn on Earth as an Exile. In their dispersion, they have founded many communities among the non-Jews of the world. Some of these seemed quite successful, but always proved impermanent and often quite disastrous. A recent one, the modern European, culminated in the Holocaust.
The horror of the Holocaust remains ultimately ineffable to human sensibilities, but the awful failure of the European Enlightenment’s experiment with Jewish identity is clear. Begun with the soaring hopes of the Enlightenment and propelled by the furious energy of the French Revolution, the promise of full Jewish citizenship in Europe’s community of nations seduced generations of Jews, confident that the magic word “civilization” had at last resolved the contradiction of Jewish statelessness and wiped away the pariah status associated with it.
Notwithstanding this example, the last major exilic community of Jews, citizens of the United States of America, the world’s Enlightenment nation par excellence, maintains its faith in the antinomian premise of Jewish safety secured by the country’s other constitution – not the Constitution written by the Founding Fathers, but the one devised and refined by economists, theologians, socialists and academics: the doctrine of American Exceptionalism.
American Exceptionalism holds that while America inherited all that was finest in European history, it differed by its lack of a feudal tradition, which allowed its Revolution and subsequent development to proceed unadulterated by Europe’s lingering impediments and prejudices, including especially institutionalized Christianity and its ingrained anti-Semitism. As much from this absence as from what it gained from its European forefather, America could then set sail as the unalloyed vessel of liberty in the world, the S.S. Last Best Hope of Mankind. And the doctrine of American Exceptionalism became – in this respect – the theory of American Jewish success.
It is characteristic of such theories that they represent whatever in sights they may embody as eternal verities. This has certainly been true for the Jewish community in America, whose political class has made the act of questioning American Exceptionalism, as it pertains to the Jews, almost tantamount to Holocaust denial. But very little in politics is eternal. Recent events connected with the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency suggest that American Jews are becoming the exception to American Exceptionalism.
These events may be grouped into two categories: those associated with Israel, and those associated with the global crisis of American financial capitalism.
President Obama’s Israel policy centers on his demand that all construction cease in the settlements of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This policy is not new; America has long refused to recognize the legitimacy of such construction. Most American Jews share this view, especially since the inception of the Oslo “peace process.” What is new is its phrasing as an ultimatum with unspecified but implicitly dire consequences for Israel-American relations. Previously, settlement activity corroded but did not really jeopardize the special relationship, and so posed no serious existential problems for the American Jewish community. Now, however, the Obama administration’s intent is deadly serious. This is a sea change in American policy toward Israel. And it therefore presents American Jews with disturbing identity questions: can loyalty to America be reconciled with support for the State of Israel? Can Judaism itself be separated from its ancient commitment to Israel?
The economic collapse affects Jewish life in America directly. From factory work through artisanal labor, to government employment, small business ownership, and the professions, Jewish economic life today has flourished in finance-related industries, including especially those clustered around Wall Street, the investment banks, insurance and real estate. These are the sectors hit particularly hard by the current crisis. Opportunities for young people no longer abound in these fields, and this contraction is keenly felt in Jewish families. More obvious is the immediate financial damage inflicted on Jewish status by the Madoff scheme and non-criminal but more detrimental losses associated with the general collapse of business.
Though not widely commented on, the economic crisis focus on Wall Street inevitably stimulates primeval fears. Jewish names are prominently associated with both the collapse and its attempted remediation. Main Street has everywhere been depicted as the victim and Wall Street the perpetrator of the disaster. “Main Street” is often code for Gentile, as “Wall Street” is for Jew.
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It takes no great feat of imagination to envision a scenario in which these two separate event streams coalesce. One can discern the signs of Obama’s White House back office “minyan” working hard to prevent just such a convergence. But it would be folly for the Jewish people discount such a possibility. The fact that American history provides no precedent for such an event, and that the theory of American Exceptionalism seems to exclude it, are not sufficient grounds for ignoring it.
Deterioration of President Obama’s economic recovery program, coupled with intensified Arab pressure on Obama to demand that Netanyahu end all settlement activity, would generate such a convergence. The community would then face undreamt-of pressures. America will rapidly turn into a place inhospitable to Jews.
Anti-Semitism, though by no means as deeply rooted a phenomenon in the U.S. as it is in Europe (about this the doctrine of Exceptionalism is correct), is never far from the surface of American politics, as the history of populism amply illustrates. It won’t take long for this ugly “socialism of the fools” to detonate in the wake of convergent domestic and foreign policy crises.
Nor will it take long for America’s president to think of tapping this phenomenon as a way out of his political difficulties. In this he would merely be following in the footsteps of his illustrious presidential mentor, FDR, who often had recourse to rather sinister Christian imagery when similarly troubled (e.g. “throwing the money-changers from the Temple”). Notwithstanding its post-Holocaust taboo character, political anti-Semitism remains a powerful weapon.
American Jews trust in Exceptionalism to protect them from this possibility. A mighty faith indeed, on which rests not just the hope of an enduring Jewish future in America, but also the rejection of their history, which emphatically denies the possibility of such a future. But history transcended this faith in 1948, when the context of American Exceptionalism changed radically: the State of Israel came back into existence. For the first time since the Exile began, rejected Jews have a place to go.
This fact too will not be lost on President Obama. It is one thing to taunt Jews when the example of Auschwitz is behind us. But he may very well conclude that it is a different matter when the refuge of Israel exists. If the promise of Zionism is to be taken seriously, Jewish citizenship in states outside of Israel is anomalous. Jews must be awakened from their American Dream so that they may live eyes-wide-open in their Promised Land.
On the other hand, if Zionism is unreal, what are the grounds for maintenance of the Jewish State at all, much less expanding it through settlements into land internationally recognized as Palestinian property?
In this new post-1948 context, the meaning of acts hitherto experienced as annihilative also changes. Citizenship in nations outside of Israel no longer equates to survival. Expulsion is transformed into Exodus. Dispossession becomes repossession. Zionism is fulfilled in the end of Exile, and Barack Hussein Obama may come to see himself, not as Pharaoh, but as a modern-day Moses to the stiff-necked American Jews.
Abraham Berkowitz holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and lives in Efrat, Israel, where he serves as rabbi to a congregation of his fellow settlers.
John Bradford is a New York artist.
Tom A. Milstein is retired from a career in property management in New York City
Thanks Nurit
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