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April 2007
Opinion
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Who Dares Criticize Israel?
It is no surprise Alvin Rosenfeld’s article is creating a furor. The casualties of his onslaughts are rational dissent and language itself.
If you’re a Jew who has ever said or written anything critical of Israel, then you may be contributing to an “intellectual and political climate that helps to foster” hostility toward the Jewish state and exacerbates hatred against Jews, according to Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University. Last winter, the American Jewish Committee published Rosenfeld’s essay, “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” creating a furor among Jews that has spilled into the mainstream press and refuses to die down.
Like many others, I take issue with Rosenfeld’s basic thesis. But what concerns me most is his pernicious misuse of the word “progressive,” and the collateral damage caused by his lumping respected cultural figures—like historian Tony Judt, playwright Tony Kushner, poet Adrienne Rich and columnist Richard Cohen—with rabid anti-Zionists and execrable anti-Semites.
Rosenfeld blurs the distinction between views that deserve critical analysis and serious rebuttal with the work of attack dogs who seek an end to the Jewish state. He also either misrepresents or totally ignores pro-Zionist writers and other passionate Americans whose devotion to Israel inspires protest against policies they consider misguided.
Furthermore, he conflates a broad spectrum into a narrow stripe, then opines that all “progressives” share “a suspicion of Jews” and “an emphatic dislike of the Jewish state.” Worse yet, from its title on, his paper links the “P” word with the “A” word, defining the “new anti-Semitism” as “denigration, derision, scorn, and rebuke directed against the Jewish state,” and “an aggressive mood of censure and hostility” that has “led to an outbreak of malicious activities” against Jews around the world.
Notice how his sly quotation marks around the “P” word effectively belittle the term? The word “progressive” has become a shorthand descriptor for the politics of social change, the last socially acceptable label for dissent. I think the word is important enough to defend. Labels build solidarity and make it easier to organize collective action around common goals. (Think “pro-life,” or “family values.”) Take our vocabulary away from us and activist forces are crippled from the start. If “Jewish progressive” becomes synonymous with “Jew-hating,” then concerned Israel-watchers, already hard-pressed to define their nuanced positions in the face of the right’s sledgehammer slogans, will have to find a new term, and the English language doesn’t offer many alternatives.
In Rosenfeld’s hands, “progressive” has become a defamatory weapon. Case in point: He repeatedly smears the anthology edited by Kushner and Alisa Solomon, Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. You’d never know the book contains opinions of all sorts, including those of Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Rabbi Judah L. Magnes (the first president of Hebrew University), Henry Siegman (director of the U.S./Middle East Project of the Council on Foreign Relations), Blanche Weisen Cook (Eleanor Roosevelt’s biographer), and Susannah Heschel (professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth). And yours truly: My contribution is an explicitly “pro-Zionist” piece justifying the Jewish right of return. It is symptomatic of Rosenfeld’s flabby methodology and intellectual irresponsibility that he “disappears” our voices.
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and Israel’s “sometimes harsh treatment of Palestinian Arabs,” are acknowledged in the AJC paper, not to probe the rightness of those policies but because they’ve “drawn a great deal of negative attention.” Rosenfeld concedes that “criticizing such policies and actions is, in itself, not anti-Semitic.” Yet his constant association of progressives with Jew-haters makes this a hollow disclaimer. He dismisses the large category of pro-Israel, pro-Zionist Jews who challenge the actions of the Jewish state but never its existence. He ridicules thinkers who argue from the prophetic tradition; rather than address their points on the merits, he calls them “pious,” or “self-validating,” on the grounds that they use “high-sounding terms like ‘peace,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘reconciliation.’” He does not mention a single critic whose views he considers marginally within the pale.
The casualties of his onslaught are rational dissent and language itself. Rosenfeld has applied a scholarly gloss to a trend that for years has proliferated in certain precincts of the Jewish community—the silencing of anyone who contradicts the establishment line. The AJC, sadly, is his enabler. That such a respectable institution would publish this broad attack on “progressives” is especially troubling in light of two parallel developments. In January, when Jimmy Carter was invited to speak at Brandeis University, major funders withdrew their support for the school. And that same month, the Zionist Organization of America attempted to expel the Union of Progressive Zionists from the Israel on Campus Coalition because the union brought Israeli army veterans to colleges to speak about alleged Israeli abuses of Palestinians.
The Talmud records that Rabbis Hillel and Shammai had more than 300 differences of opinion. From their time to the denominational schisms of today, Jews have always been a contentious people. Properly so. In “The Ethics of Rebuke,” published in The Journal of Textual Reasoning, Boston University professor Michael Zank highlights the rabbinic obligation “to rebuke or reprove one’s neighbor ‘or you will incur guilt yourself,’” and emphasizes that this “refers to one’s fellow Israelite. There is no legal obligation to reprove the stranger.”
So I want to be clear: I fault the AJC for publishing this paper not because it fuels communal conflicts but because its demonizing rhetoric has a chilling effect on open debate and reasonable dissent. Likewise, I fault Alvin Rosenfeld not for rebuking other Jews, but for doing so by means of distortion, innuendo and guilt-by-association. On these points, I believe Rabbis Hillel and Shammai would both agree.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is at work on her tenth book, a novel entitled The Man in the Playground.