The American part of being a Liberal American Jew
S.A.M. said:
People seem to be on the wrong track here. The issue is not Israel or what Israelis think or do - the issue is "liberal" American Jews who equate civic equality for minorities with genocide.
Whats wrong with that picture? Its like "liberal" American black joins the KKK? Huh?
Well, I think part of what you're seeing is an expected result, and that's not a negative thing. The basic paradox you're describing is pretty blatant, so people are grabbing onto things that aren't quite so obviously resolved:
Yes, there is something counterintuitive about civic equality equating to genocide.
But here's the thing:
Especially for a Jew.
Yes, the cutural allusion is clear, but it is also counterintuitive. That is, we cannot limit an American Jewish identity politic strictly to its Judaism. It is also
American, and thus entitled to be as apparently counterintuitive, openly dysfunctional, stupidly anti-American, or otherwise bogglingly self-contradictory as any other identity politic.
It's not fair to the black guy to expect him to view the police department with an automatically cynical eye. It is not fair to the woman to oblige her to feminism. And it is not fair to the Jew to expect the Holocaust to have any logical place in the identity politic. We cannot bind all Jews to Hitler for all time.
We cannot insist that any given Jew always share the picture frame with Hitler and Sharon.
American Jews are American, and one of the great quirks of American culture is that people often come to demand of our American system exactly what they're entitled to, even though they don't actually believe people should have all those rights to begin with. An American is predisposed toward spending what is theirs while saying they shouldn't have it in the first place.
Look at the title of this thread. One can argue the same point on any given day without the words "liberal" or "Jew" in the sentence.
So, first:
Yes, people see exactly the problem you're pointing to.
And then:
But the phenomenon exists in the American culture regardless of political, cultural, or ethnic identity factors.
That's where you're running into that crippling dissonance. You're not actually supposed to wrap your head around it. The question—
Do American Jews now consider it illiberal to receive the same civil rights as non-Jews?
—can be written without mentioning Jews. Or blacks, or indigenous tribal descendants.
Or anyone, really, more specifically than Americans. And if we pause to consider the number of people from nations abroad who would disagree with American decadence but also, should circumstance ever find them in such a situation, invoke every last right they could find in the American judicial system civil or criminal, we don't even need to make it about Americans.
Is there not something paradoxical about
anyone, anywhere, who might ever have said jack squat about justice ... &c.?
Now, let's just add a bit of sweetener:
It's you. Do you really think, in any weather, given so obvious a thread focus and that craven need to find some reason to disagree wtih you ... okay, that's not
entirely fair. It only counts for the usual suspects.
But, yes, people are eggshelling it for, well, varius reasons. But it starts with the facts of how obvious is the problem you're referring to, and, well, the fact that it's you, and thus the one thing some folks won't do is simply shrug and move on.
