Aphorisms


There's nothing so bad, that adding government can't make it worse. -- The Immigrant

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. -- Ronald Reagan

*******
Read the next two together:

Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'Emergency'." -- Herbert Hoover

This is too good a crisis to waste. -- Rahm Emanuel

*******
Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -- Fredric Bastiat, French Economist (30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850)

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to another. -- François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire, (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778)

The problem with socialism is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people's money. -- Margaret Thatcher

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. -- Winston Churchill

Friday, September 17, 2021

 #152: American Jinos, Israelis, and the Election

November 17, 2020

Why do American Jews and Israelis have such different political inclinations?

American Jewry is absorbist (“assimilationist”), while Israeli Jewry is nationalist.

I

About 5,000 years ago, living among the Hittites, Abraham famously said to them, “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you.”

And until recently in living memory, all his descendants lived exactly as he did, as strangers and sojourners in foreign lands. The friendliness of those lands varied enormously, but even when it was there, it was never reliable. So, what were Jews to do and what are Jews to do now?

Their options have always been very limited: 1) remain unapologetically identifiable, 2) be absorbed (commonly called “assimilated”), or 3) escape to a friendlier venue. Each of these options has always had attendant costs and benefits.

All things considered, American Jews have seen option 2), absorption, as the best. Putting it in religious terms, option 1) is that of living Orthodox, which can be risky. Option 3) has involved a lot of risky relocations and only in recent times has had the shelter of Israel available. This has left only absorption, which has taken the form of being either Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist. According to PEW research, 90% of American Jews are non-Orthodox.

On the other hand, in Israel, according to Wikipedia, in a “2010 a report released by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics showed that 8% of Israel’s Jewish population defines itself as ultra-Orthodox, 12% as Orthodox, 13% as traditional-religious, 25% as traditional, and 42% as secular, on a descending scale of religiosity.”

However you parse those numbers, it’s clear that Israeli Jews are anywhere from three to five times as religious as American Jews. This alone is enough to indicate two different cultures. One is thus tempted to ask:

Why are Israeli Jews more religious?

But this question is instructively wrong. The better question is:

Why are American Jews less religious?

I say that this is the revealing question because, on the face of it, American Jews are making counter-intuitive political decisions which seem to correlate with their (lack of) religiosity. The more religious they are, the more their political stances make sense; the less religious, the less they make sense. This has been the case since the Russian Revolution, but has never been seen in such stark clarity as in the current presidential U.S. election. The Democrat Party has never been as explicitly anti-Semitic as it is now, and Jews have never seen an administration as explicitly pro-Israel as that of President Trump. Yet, American Jews voted 70% for the Democrat, Joe Biden. On the other hand, 83% of the Orthodox voters voted pro Trump. In addition, most Israelis love not only President Trump, but Evangelicals as well. This suggests that there is something about the non-religiosity which is determining non-rational counter-intuitive political behaviour.

And the answer, I think, is that absorption is seen as the strategically most attractive option in the U.S. but not in Israel.

And absorption inevitably involves abandoning the element which has unified the Jewish people over thousands of years, specifically their religion. This movement is supported by increasing marriage outside the faith, loss of Hebrew, and the collaboration of American rabbis with the anti-Semitic Protestant churches.

Alternatively, the state of Israel is supported by a nationalism based on a common language and a common religion, a nationalism which is strategically essential to its survival.

And one of the less appealing costs of absorption, an otherwise attractive option, is that of having to vote sometimes against your own interests. It’s simple, really: if you wanna be a member of our club, then our enemies are your enemies, whether you like them or not. That’s the deal! And give up that old-timey religion! It leads to nationalism, and we don’t like nationalists here, even if, or especially when, they’re Jews!

There’s a complex relationship here between religion, absorption, and nationalism. For more on Jewish nationalism and the international Left, see my blog post #143.

Staying alive suggests different decisions and such different decisions lead to different cultures. As the Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” So, what are the local cultural differences?

II

Jews living in the U.S. live in a sea of non-Jews containing varying degrees of anti-Semitism. But this anti-Semitism varies greatly with time, place, and, most important, the degree to which a Jew is identifiable. Being absorbed means above all else being merged into the environment. Since the road to success in recent decades in the U.S. has been through academe, assimilation has meant merging and blending with the dominant academic culture, a culture which is almost universally secular.

In other words, being blandly Jewish/Protestant secular has been incentivised by the American environment and Jews have predictably responded positively to this offer: give up your identity and enjoy the material benefits of success.

The numbers seem to suggest that Israelis are more resistant to the siren call of material success, but nothing is farther from the truth.  Israelis are easily as materialistic as any other group. The difference between the U.S. and Israel for Jews is not that one group is greedier than the other, it is rather that there does not exist in Israel the same incentive to assimilate. But there does exist an equal and opposite incentive to nationalism.

To put it another way, Jews in Israel also live in a sea of anti-Semitic non-Jews. Israel has been and is surrounded by Islamic hostiles. But while assimilation is a rational way of dealing with anti-Semitism in the American context, it is most certainly not in the Islamic context. It is quite possible to become a faux Protestant and live comfortably with that, if bad faith is your thing. It would be immeasurably more difficult to become a faux Muslim in, say, Jordan and live comfortably (or very long) with that. Though, of course, the Spanish Marranos did manage with varying success to pull it off with Christianity in the 15th C.

On the contrary, there exists in Israel an important and opposite incentive to retain the Jewish identity since the very existence of Israel is precisely as a Jewish State. And a Jewish State is one with Jewish citizens. Recognizably Jewish citizens. Nationalism is absolutely essential to Israel’s survival within its geographical context. Only nationalism gives the Israeli citizenry the will to persist against overwhelming surrounding hatred and enmity.

III

There are a number of factors which reinforce the impulse to be absorbed, just as there are factors in Israel reinforcing the impulse to retain cultural/religious difference.

For example, it is not surprising that the Episcopalian church has been wrestling with inside forces intent on using the Church in support of the anti-Israel BDS (divestment) movement. Are these forces motivated by moral concerns over the Palestinian issue? Perhaps. But since these same voices never speak out against Palestinian terrorism, the idea is suspect. Is it rather simple old fashioned anti-Semitism? Possibly for some, but perhaps underlying it is this: assimilate or die! The good news on this is that it would mean that the Episcopalian anti Semites are not racial anti Semites; the bad news is that they’re still religious anti-Semites.

Here’s the bottom line: Protestants are happy to accept Jews as long as they don’t insist on being “Jewish.”

But the Episcopalians and other Protestants pushing absorption are not preaching to a hostile audience. American Jews look down their noses at the Evangelicals who love them as they are, but they suck up embarrassingly to the “elitist” Protestants. I guess, if you’re going to sell your birthright, you may as well make it worthwhile by selling it to the “upper class.”

In addition, American non-Orthodox synagogues are all-in with the Protestants on pushing the Leftist “social justice” agenda. Their excuse is that the Torah is all about “living the moral life.”

IV

I’ll end with mentioning that religiosity has been under assault since the European 18th C Enlightenment when the burgeoning science identified the church as its competitor and enemy. This was not the birth of merely a branch of knowledge, it was the birth of an all encompassing new faith which was mandated to resolve all human problems including the moral and political. It is no coincidence that Marxism represented itself as a “scientific” solution to humanity’s problems. Marxism was the lineal descendant of the Enlightenment.

Russian intellectuals and aristocracy thought of themselves as the pupils of Europe, primarily of France. Many of them could speak and read Western European languages and consumed the post-Enlightenment literatures which were increasingly socialistic, even well before the “Communist Manifesto.” More and more, these European doctrines filtered into the Russian downtrodden masses which included more and more Jews.

Those Jews tended to reject their ancestral religion as primitive superstition and took on the new European anarchist socialist doctrines as their new religion. They thought they were abandoning the superstitious religious past and committing themselves to the new modern non religious scientific doctrines of the advanced Europeans. They didn’t see that they were simply redirecting their religious needs and passions to a new narrative which didn’t include the word “God.” The transition was easy since traditional Judaism contained a strong moral component which resembled the messages of socialism. These Jews in effect retained their ancestral religion, gave it another name, shifted from the bible to Das Capital, and became its fanatic acolytes. It was a religion, nonetheless, and they gave it all the mindless uncritical passion and loyalty that is the hall mark of the religious devotee.

Many, many of these anarchist socialist devotee were among the Jewish masses who found their way to the United States from around 1880 to around 1910. Their children and their children’s children find assimilating to the American Protestant culture an effortless transition, they have become Jinos: Jews in Name Only.

This does not augur well for the future.

No comments:

Post a Comment