Political Observer on Bret Stephens’ diatribe.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Oct 04, 2024

The opening paragraphs of Mr. Stephens diatribe open with ‘American Jews were aware’ that become a momentary leitmotif ‘we were aware’ though that ‘we’ is so rhetorically inflated, as to be applicable to the ‘many’ lost in his diatribe…

‘American Jews were aware’ & ‘We were aware’ repeated seven times before Stephens resort to subtitles:

Awakenings

In a brief 809 words Stephen’s maps part of the political & moral trajectory of his diatribe, and it’s Cast of Characters, and the appearance of underlined texts and links alone as references. The Victimhood Narrative takes shape:

After Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.

It happened in innumerable ways, large and small.

Editor: a brief collection of those characters, actors salvaged from this section: the very notion that Labor Organizer, and the author of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, has anything in common with Stephens is not just disingenuous, but self-serving! And Harvey Milk was Gay! The Victimhood Deck is shuffled:

…

Few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to progressive causes than American Jews: Samuel Gompers and labor unionism; Betty Friedan and feminism; Harvey Milk and gay rights; Abraham Joshua Heschel and civil rights; Robert Bernstein and human rights. A proud history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.

…

Editor: ‘a Manichaean view on the left’ : in sum the ‘Left’ is not, nor will never be ‘one of us’ The Tribe! Then what of Marx, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida? Stephen’s possible quip, ‘Who are they’ ?

It won’t end because anti-Zionism has a self-righteous fervor that will attract followers and inspire militancy. It won’t end because politics in America are moving toward forms of illiberalism — conspiracy thinking and nativism on the right, a Manichaean view on the left that the world is neatly divided between the oppressors and the oppressed — that are congenial to classic antisemitism. And it won’t end because most Jews will not forsake what it means to be Jewish so that we may be more acceptable to those who despise us.

Editor: The Reader now confronts the sub-topic of ‘Illusions’.

Illusions

Editor: 876 words and more of those sentence fragments attached dangling in paragraphs, I will post the most – this is propaganda the more hyperbolic the better, in ‘Stephen’s World’

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There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.

…

…Abe Foxman, who was then the director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a 2014 news release. “The falling number of incidents targeting Jews is another indication of just how far we have come in finding full acceptance in society.”

…

But now we had arrived. We were Jerry Seinfeld and Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” and Adam Sandler crooning his “Hanukkah Song” on “Saturday Night Live.” We were Alan Greenspan, the celebrated maestro of central banking, and Rick Levin, the first Jewish president of Yale, and Nora Ephron, the country’s most beloved screenwriter, and Steven Spielberg, the most acclaimed director.

…

Today there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League, where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and at times threatened. Backward in cities like Oakland, Calif., where Jewish families pulled their kids out of public schools in protest of an antisemitic curriculum. Backward in literary circles, where being identified as a Zionist — even if it’s of the most progressive kind or has little to do with an author’s work — can lead to ostracism and cancellation

…

I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.

I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do

Reckonings

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Editor: ‘Ancestral Knowledge’ is another way of excusing the ongoing Genocide in Gaza, and the attacks on Lebanon, a potential attack on Iran, and WWIII?

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Oct. 7 and the worldwide reaction to it began the jarring process of restoring that ancestral knowledge. Most of us still don’t quite know what to do with it.

Do we carry on more or less as before, on the Solomonic view that this too shall pass? Do we go on offense by withholding donations to the institutions that have harmed us or suing them or calling for congressional hearings or taking out Super Bowl ads to raise alarms about antisemitism? Do we reach out to communities (within and without the Jewish world) from whom we feel alienated so that they may hear from us, and vice versa? Do we invest more heavily in Jewish education, so that more Jewish parents can have good options for an affordable Jewish day school and more 18-year-olds can have meaningful gap years in Israel?

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Editor: I’ll end my comment here, predicated on the utter ignorance of Stephen’s knowing anything other that what he experienced: except by a selfless act of reimagining one’s self as ‘other’!

To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.

Editor: Mr. Stephens is a propagandist! And ignorant of Emmanuel Levinas, in this case, or like so many that cultivate ignorance, in the name of political advancement, simple opportunism, or constricting usable propaganda: that mimics the trapping of thought, without it’s underlying commitment to veracity, intellectual honesty and transparency!

Political Observer