It follows that the actual world we kids inherited, in which Jews now serving on the Supreme Court outnumber Protestants three to zero and a Jew serves as House majority leader and the Jew who used to be the president’s chief of staff runs our third largest city, and in which Israel is a nuclear-armed regional superpower can really be only a mirage. “Is It 1939?” Malcolm Honlein, the head of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, asked in a 2010 speech. It just might be, was his answer. Which is why he displays in his office a photoshopped image of Israeli F-15s liberating Auschwitz. Six million Jews are once more getting ready to die.

This was the moral education that I found so dissatisfying in my youth, as it trickled down to medium-sized Midwestern burgs – a disingenous muddle of a irrationalism, intellectual double standards, and whiny special pleading. I learned that because Israel was a “democracy,” with Arab citizens and political parties, discrimination against those Arabs was not a problem – but also that it was appropriate for the Israeli Defense Forces to harass Arabs at random because, I remember hearing, “they don’t wear signs around their neck saying ‘good Arab’ and ‘bad Arab.’” I was solemnly informed that groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were biased against Israel and that the State Department was full of anti-Semites. I heard men who seemed otherwise utterly apolitical and non-intellectual rehearse elaborate they-started-it narratives starring conspirators like the Mufti of Jerusalem, who gulled Arabs into eagerly abandoning their homes, which happened to make room for Zionist pioneers who had never been anything but magnanimous toward them. I got the message, loud and clear, that those of us living lives of bland comfort far from enemy-circled Israel had no right, no standing to criticize the Jewish state; and to just shut up and send the check to Jewish organizations, the better to salve your conscience.

The ideology extended to theology. The only times during my religious instruction I remember hearing God’s name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel’s “miraculous” military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion’s side. (God had help, I later learned as a professional historian: More American materiel were shipped to Israel in just ten days during the 1973 Yom Kippur War than over the entire eleven months of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, which also helps explain why, in my youth, Richard Nixon was seen by many Jews to have got a raw deal on Watergate.)

All of which left me, in my youth, feeling utterly uninterested in Judaism, which to me appeared inherently barren: If you found dubious the proposition that Israel as it existed protected Jews around the world – rather than making them more vulnerable through the injustices it perpetrated – there was really nothing spiritual left.

(Source: azspot)