Sultan Knish
Alan Alda's wife signed a letter denouncing the newly elected left-wing
mayor of New York for doing AIPAC's bidding. The Sandinista supporter
had been accused of many things until then, but being an Israeli stooge
wasn't one of them. Signing the letter, along with the spouse of that
guy from MASH, were Martha Weinman Lear, the wife of the cousin of
liberal producer Norman Lear, Eve Ensler of the Vagina Monologues and
diet guru Jane Hirschmann author of Overcoming Overeating who took a break from obsessing over food to sail on a Jihad cruise to Gaza.
Signing
on to the attack on Bill de Blasio for being a dirty Zionist were such
faded celebrities of the literary left as Erica Jong, who hasn't written
a single book that anyone can name in the forty years since Fear of
Flying first came out and Gloria Steinem, who peaked around that same
time.
These familiar names of the Manhattan cocktail party
circuit who grind their teeth every time they hear Netanyahu's name,
give way to the professional activists, the board members of the toxic
American Jewish World Service, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Dorot,
the Rabbis for Gaza and Rabbis for Obama and the men and women like
Peter Beinart of Open Zion and Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for
Peace who have built their lives around the war on Israel as much as any
Islamic Jihadist tinkering with a Kassam rocket in Gaza.
Joining
them was Kathleen Peratis who, according to her Nation bio is a
"longtime peace activist" who repeatedly calls for boycotting Israel
despite traveling there "at least twice a year for the past twenty
years." It's unclear how she combined the two, perhaps she made sure not
to buy anything from Jews while she was in Israel.
Their names
are equally familiar to a smaller circle of those who fight for and
against Israel and their signatures are as predictable as snowstorms in
winter.
The radical clergy sign on; Rachel Brown Cowan, a
Unitarian who married a Jewish writer for the Village Voice, added
"Rabbi" to her name and has been attacking the Jewish State non-stop
after her husband's death, Rolando Matalon, who has yet to find a Latin
American Marxist group he wouldn't embrace, Ellen Lippmann, a BDS
supporter and Sharon Kleinbaum, a lesbian supporter of the Fast for Gaza that aids and abets the not particularly pro-lesbian Hamas.
Cowan, Lippman and Matalon had also all signed up as
Reading
these names feels like reviewing the membership of a small familiar
club. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone in the club hates
Israel.
Between Erica Jong and Alice Kessler-Harris (the
biographer of Anti-Israel Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, whom
Kessler described as having a "streak of Jewish anti-Semitism") is Peter
A. Joseph who pays for this whole dance, funding everything from Peter
Beinart's Open Zion to the Manhattan JCC whose anti-Israel turn has led
to a pitched battle among members.
Peter A. Joseph revived the
Israel Policy Forum, which had originally been folded into the Center
for American Progress, and turned it into a machine for churning out
anti-Israel letters. Before the IPF merged into CAP, it put out a letter
urging the United States to work with Hamas. Afterward, its tactics
have become slightly subtler, its letters appearing to be pro-Israel
while advocating anti-Israel policies.
The Israel Policy Forum
put out a letter in support of Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel for
Secretary of Defense, despite his ties to the Iran Lobby, signed by
Peter A. Joseph, hedge fund manager Neil Barsky, Marcia Riklis, the
daughter of corporate raider Meshulam Riklis (not by his second wife Pia
Zadora), Jack C. Bendheim, the president of a company that once dumped toxic waste in a Connecticut town, and Risa A. Levine, apparently a real estate lawyer from New York.
Why
was anyone expected to listen to Pia Zadora's stepdaughter and a guy
who once made a documentary about Ed Koch when it came to nominating a
Secretary of Defense? The same reason that Bill de Blasio was supposed
to listen to Alan Alda's wife and a diet guru who hates Israel.
Hating
Israel has become a small petty club for the wealthy left and the
Israel Policy Forum allows assorted obscure figures to assert their
status by denouncing things or demanding things under the banner of an
organization whose only asset is the wealth of a few private equity
backers.
The Jewish Anti-Israel left likes to pretend that it's a
grassroots movement whose voice is being squelched by some nebulous
Jewish establishment when in reality it is an unelected establishment
using its wealth and lingering fame to shout over the majority of
American Jews who support Israel.
These sons, daughters,
stepdaughters, wives and nieces of famous people, fading Feminist
writers, Wall Street millionaires trying to buy social relevance, hippie
social scientists who hit it big with books about food, sex or
childrearing, radical rabbis holding forth to congregations who believe
in religion as little as their preachers, are a phantom establishment,
community leaders without a community except their own mutual
approbation.
The
Jewish Anti-Israel left is a phantom establishment of family
foundations that direct money to networks of organizations that use the
money to hire personnel and send out press releases to their own former
staffers working for newspapers who then write about them maintaining
the illusion of churning activity, when in reality all that is happening
is that money is being moved around.
Anti-Israel Wall Street
figures hire Anti-Israel activists to denounce the Jewish establishment
for not paying enough attention to them. Family foundations run by
privileged leftists send American activists to Israel to set up front
groups to protest against something or other. They hold dinners where
the nieces and nephews, the boycotters and the faded stars of the left
listen to the activists that they pay tell them that any day now,
American Jews will finally come around to their point of view.
Fittingly,
considering the figures involved, the whole thing is a pyramid scheme
except that the only people they can sell anything to is each other.
Every
few weeks the Israel Policy Forum churns out another letter headlined
"Prominent Jews Urge Someone or Other To Do Something" signed by by the
guy who made a Koch documentary, Pia Zadora's stepdaughter, a hedge
funder, another hedge funder, the guy whose company left drums of toxic
waste in Connecticut, the Rabbi who loves the Sandinistas even more than
Bill de Blasio and a retired Democratic congressman who attends the
same cocktail parties.
Every few weeks, the Israel Policy Forum
churns out another letter headlined "Prominent Jews Urge Someone or
Other To Do Something" signed by the guy who made a Koch documentary,
Pia Zadora's stepdaughter, a hedge funder, another hedge funder, the guy
whose company left drums of toxic waste in Connecticut, the Rabbi who
loves the Sandinistas even more than Bill de Blasio and a retired
Democratic congressman who attends the same cocktail parties.
The
phantom establishment floats on a bubble of its own manufactured
prominence. Its letter signers are important because they fund
organizations that put out letters which they then sign. These antics
are not limited to the Israel Policy Forum or even the United States.
A
year after British comedian Stephen Fry appeared on a genealogy
television show to trace his mother's Jewish roots, he signed on to a
letter by British Jews, a group that he had never considered himself a
member of, declaring its "independence" from the British Jewish
establishment. The list included the expected collection of fading
feminist authors, Marxist playwrights, historians and philosophers, as
well as radical sociologists, pop psychologists and professional
activists.
The "coming out party" of Independent Jewish Voices
consisted of non-practicing Marxist Jews who were notorious for hating
Israel, the UK, industry, facts, mirrors and human civilization
announcing that loudly in a letter that was covered by their media
friends.
There is a long history of such letters going back to
the founding of Israel, the names of forgotten self-proclaimed leaders
mixing with a few more notorious figures whose unfortunate legacy has
survived into this time. None of these letters however have counted as
much as a bullet in the rifle of an Israeli soldier standing watch in
the night.
American Jews who worry over these letters from the
phantom establishment of the cocktail party ought to look back and see
how futile the rantings of I.F. Stone, New Dealer Joseph Proskauer, the
rabid Elmer Berger and FDR speechwriter Samuel Rosenman proved to be.
Before
J Street or the Israel Policy Forum, there was Jewish Alternatives to
Zionism headed by "Rabbi" Elmer Berger who had claimed that the
Communist revolution in the Soviet Union meant that Jews no longer
needed "Palestine".
Does
anyone remember Lewis Affelder or Mr. and Mrs. Noel A. Buckner whose
names appeared as sponsors on Jewish Alternatives to Zionism's
stationary? How many remember Mary Louise `Wheezie' Gutman who collected
English ceramics and owned a distillery? The wind of history has blown
past their graves. Their names are smeared ink on yellowed paper while
children play in the streets of Jerusalem.
The phantom
establishment is rootless; it has no links to a people or to a religion.
Its aims are destructive and like all destructive forces, it carries
its own futility with it.
American Jews should contend with
them, but should not be too impressed by them. Their kind has been at it
for generations and, despite all the venom and fury, the boycotts and
screeds, have made less of an impression on Israel than a single Jewish
family in the hills of Shomron.
The phantom establishment is
money and words. There is no blood in its veins or heart in its chest.
It does not go on the way that the Jewish people do because it is not of
them, only against them. When its anger is spent and its letters are
signed, the children will play on in the streets and roads, the hills
and fields of Israel, neither knowing nor caring that there was once a
Jane Hirschmann, a Mrs. Noel A. Buckner, a Rachel Brown Cowan or a
Rebecca Vilkomerson that sought to do them harm.
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