Jews of Questionable Taste

In April, a scandalous documentary set the Tribeca Film Festival buzzing. Kirby Dick’s Outrage purported to name closeted gay politicians—and to document their sex lives by interviewing self-identified former partners.

Dick defends the seemingly egregious invasion of privacy by arguing that the most relevant issue is hypocrisy. Another way to regard his film is as blackmail. Closeted gay politicians who voted in what Dick regards as the right way were exempted from exposure: Only those who voted “wrong” were named.

Everyone will have their own view of the rights and wrongs of Dick’s action. What is most interesting to a Jewish audience is the contrast between the gay community’s angry and punitive demand for solidarity and the different mentality that prevails among Jews.

Some of you may have already seen the YouTube video that shows a large group of people wearing T-shirts in Islamic green that proclaim “Boycott Israel” enter the French supermarket Carrefour in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a Parisian suburb. They roam the aisles, removing flowers, fruits, vegetables and anything else that came from Israel, concluding with an angry anti-Israel rally on store premises. All of this proceeds uninterrupted by security or police. The event stirs memories of the anti-Jewish boycotts that prefigured the Nazi Holocaust. With this one difference: A central figure in organizing the rally is Jewish—Olivia Zemmour, a Tunisian-born activist.

The Zemmour case is extreme, but not aberrant. Adam Shapiro, the founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the pro-Palestinian group that set in motion the events that led to the death of the 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie, is Jewish. (Corrie, an ISM activist, tried to block an IDF bulldozer in 2003 in Gaza. The driver did not see her, and she was crushed.) The Brooklyn-born Shapiro argues that “Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics, both violent and nonviolent.”

Gerald Kaufman, a Labor member of the British Parliament, has called for a boycott of Israeli goods. In a speech on January 17, during the war in Gaza, Kaufman explicitly identified Israel with Nazi Germany: “My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her hometown [in Poland]. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.” Apparently concerned that he had not made himself sufficiently explicit, Kaufman added: “On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians. The total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that ‘500 of them were militants.’ That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.”

In 2002, 45 Jews published a hugely publicized open letter in The Guardian repudiating their right of return to Israel. “We regard it as morally wrong that this legal entitlement should be bestowed on us while the very people who should have most right to a genuine ‘return,’ having been forced or terrorized into fleeing, are excluded,” they wrote. Songwriter Leon Rosselson signed, as did Steven Rose, a professor emeritus at Open University prominent in the British campaign to boycott Israeli universities.

These Jews who take their stand against Jews are joined by Tony Judt, the British-born academic at NYU who has called for the abolition of the state of Israel, or, as he puts it, the transformation of “Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one.” By Canadian documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis, great-grandson of a famous Polish Bundist, who now hosts Fault Lines, a particularly agitated program on Al Jazeera’s English-language channel. By Barbara Spinelli, a columnist for La Stampa, one of Italy’s most influential newspapers, who in a 2001 piece claimed, “If one thing is missing in Judaism [it] is a mea culpa vis-à-vis the peoples and individuals who had to pay the price of blood and exile to allow Israel to exist.”

Unlike the conservative gays targeted by Kirby Dick, these Jews do not conceal their origins and identities (although some, like Adam Shapiro, may describe themselves as “ex Jews”). To the contrary, they exploit their identity to enhance the impact of their anti-Jewish speech and action.

As Emanuele Ottolenghi, the executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute, points out, we have seen this all before: “Today, as yesterday, Jewish ‘particularism,’ then religious, now national, remains a thorn in Europe’s side. Today, as yesterday, removing the thorn involves a renunciation of particularism followed by an espousal of the regnant form of universal salvation—then Christianity, now the tenets of humanistic liberalism.…For most [Jews], the choices are to lie low in hopes that the trouble will pass, to pick up and seek life elsewhere, or to resist and oppose to the extent they can.…Some, however, take a different route, finding favor and reward by exerting every effort to assimilate themselves to whatever is required of them, including to the point of publicly dissociating themselves from their people’s history and fate.”

If some filmmaker is looking for an outrage to document for his next movie—that would not be a bad place to begin.

David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is the editor of the political website NewMajority.com.