RUTHFULLY YOURS

These remarkable essays by Edward Alexander bring intellectual precision, moral fearlessness and literary elegance to bear on a syndrome that could be called “Jewish suicidalism.” That is almost the right name for it, save that the leaders of this trend – portraits delineated by Alexander – exempt themselves from the condemnations they rain down on their fellows. The motivational patterns that Alexander exposes cannot, as is sometimes claimed, reduce to self-hatred. Rather, shown in vivid detail are the workings of opportunistic self-love.

Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of books that span literary, cultural and Jewish worlds. In his latest book (Transaction Publishers, 2015), Alexander’s contemporary survey is a wide one, though it does not pretend to exhaustiveness.

In “Michael Lerner: Hillary Clinton’s Jewish Rasputin,” we meet the founder of the magazine Tikkun, “the omnipresent, gentile-appointed voice of the Jewish community,” but meet him at an earlier career stage, back when he incited mob violence and threatened lawsuits to intimidate his opponents.

In “Antisemitism Denial: The Berkeley School,” we meet Judith Butler who urges progressive people to fight antisemitism but thinks it “wildly improbable that somebody examining the divestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had) as condoning antisemitism.” Alexander compares Butler’s puzzlement to that of Dickens, who did not know what to make of Fagin, the villainous Jew he had created in Oliver Twist. “The reason for Dickens’s puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did indeed not ‘make’ Fagin, and therefore didn’t know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the collective folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young—to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add ‘Zionist imperialist and occupier.’”

The type described in Jews Against Themselves is not new. Drawing on recent research into this phenomenon, by Sander Gilman, Ruth Wisse and others, Alexander traces the genre historically to its medieval prototypes. Throughout the era of triumphalist Christianity, there were Jewish informers – my term not his – who converted to the dominant religion. Innocent themselves, they deflected attacks onto other, also innocent Jews, thereby becoming actually guilty, this time of towering betrayals.

Pope Gregory IX, who ordered the Talmud publicly burned in Paris and Rome, was acting on the seemingly expert, vilifying “explications” of Talmud presented to him in 1239 by Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert and member of the Dominican Order. A few years later, Pablo Christiani made his coming out as a Christian credible and deadly by orchestrating the celebrated public “disputations” (really show trials) of 1263, in which Nachmanides was forced to defend Judaism against Christiani’s accusations, under intellectually disabling rules of engagement. So also, it may have been another convert, Johannes (Josef) Pffefferkorn, who gave Martin Luther the inspiration and precedent for his destructive campaigns against the Jews of Germany. Luther justified his lootings and burnings in The Jews and Their Lies, which ended up a favorite on Hitler’s bookshelf.

Does the United States need nuclear weapons? What role do they play? And if they are valuable, how much should we spend supporting such a nuclear deterrent? In addition, what level of nuclear weapons should we aim to achieve to maintain stability and deterrence? And finally, does the type of nuclear deterrent maintained by the United States bear a relationship to whether nuclear weapons proliferate in the world, especially in Iran and North Korea?

The Center for Strategic and International Studies held a day long conversation on these questions on May 5th. Joe Cirincione, the President of the Ploughshares Fund laid out a four part narrative that the US was (1) maintaining a vastly bloated nuclear deterrent, (2) unnecessary for our security, (3) unaffordable, and (4) in need of at least an immediate unilateral one-third reduction in American nuclear forces to jump start efforts to get to zero nuclear weapons world-wide.

Cirincione further claimed that such an initiative was perfectly sensible because President Ronald Reagan had supported in his second inaugural the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons and had put such a proposal on the table in negotiations with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986. The implication being of course that if such a proposal was made three decades ago by the leaders off the two nation’s with the largest nuclear arsenals during the height of the Cold War, then why not make it again especially in that President Barack Obama in his Prague speech in 2009 called for nuclear abolition as well.

Let first start with getting the history right. President Reagan repeatedly called for getting rid of “nuclear dangers” and considered that central to his defense policy. This was reflected in three areas: support for 50% reductions in ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads; building a missile defense against nuclear attacks; and keeping a strong nuclear deterrent that emphasized stability which was the basis for the proposal to eliminate multiple warheads from being deployed on land based missiles.

In Iceland, the American President did not support getting rid of all nuclear weapons. Reagan supported getting rid of ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads which were the most dangerous. They were termed “fast flyers” which because of their speed were considered the most destabilizing in a crisis. Soviet President Gorbachev countered with a proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons but also ban the deployment of missile defenses, which led to the collapse of the negotiations. In reality, Gorbachev had no intention of giving up all of Russia’s nuclear weapons especially the smaller tactical and shorter range nuclear weapons the Russian maintained by the many thousands which they have never agreed to limit or reduce in any arms control deal concluded with the United States.

Stephen H. Balch is the Director of the Texas Tech Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Lubbock, Texas

Moral one-upmanship lifts the preacher and lowers the congregation, and while secularisation has reduced sin’s potential to incite a pulpiteer’s scolding that has not prevented the emergence of new rebukes. Think here of the many PC “isms” said to signify indelible wickedness.
Rarely has so much changed within a lifetime. Yesterday’s outré and outcast recast as inquisitors; great nations in demographic collapse; primal human practices like marriage, veritable specie constants, condemned as iniquitous and beyond rational defence, and most surprisingly, all happening peaceably, with little alteration in surface political forms. No wonder elders scratch their heads, as do those few historically literate young. This essay proposes to settle their confusions by revealing the deepest drivers of these astonishing and revolutionary changes.

Most revolutions have been sudden and explosive—this one is more a continuing burn. One might thus be tempted to mistake its passages for normal cultural evolution—if at an accelerated pace. But they’re not. Their relatively incremental nature does, however, contain the reason why the revolution has been so thoroughgoing, why it has ground so exceeding small. Abjuring the turbulent savagery of its predecessors, it has spared bodies for the sake of a more protracted and promising labour—the remake of souls.

The revolution’s transformations have certainly not just been the cumulative “Hayekian” outcome of individuated choice, social evolution’s signature. Rather, they’ve been substantially managed and top-down; judicial command, legislative rescript, bureaucratic dictate, and, most of all, incessant, intense and self-conscious preachment, indispensable to their unfolding. The revolution has doubtless taken advantage of spontaneous changes, especially those arising from the hedonic culture of mass affluence, but it has channelled their energies, steering rather than drifting on their currents, and by so doing has shifted the weight of social and political power in a unique and decisive way.

Nor is the direction of its changes resulting in a more reality-tested world, as disaggregated, evolutionary choice might be expected to do, but—typical of top-down impositions—one increasingly remote from experiential anchorage; one in which common sense is supplanted by fantasies delusive in most every respect but their correspondence to the interests of the cadres who weave them.

How We Advocated for the Iran Deal

In recent years, few things have been as exhaustively debated or written about than the Iran deal.

That debate reignited this week after a long article about me included a section about the Iran deal. There are many issues raised in an article of this length, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to respond to those topics in the weeks and months to come.

However, given the importance of the questions raised about the Iran deal over the last few days, I want to make several points about one issue: how we advocated for the deal.

First, we never made any secret of our interest in pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. President Obama campaigned on that position in 2008. We pursued several diplomatic efforts with Iran during the President’s first term, and the fact that there were discreet channels of communication established with Iran in 2012 is something that we confirmed publicly. However, we did not have any serious prospect of reaching a nuclear deal until after the election of Hasan Rouhani in 2013. Yes, we had discussions with the Iranians before that, but they did not get anywhere. After the Rouhani government took office, our confidential negotiations with the Iranians accelerated, and quickly led to public negotiations within the P5+1 process that began at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013. Whatever your analysis of the relative weight of moderates or hard-liners in the Iranian system, there is no question that we were able to achieve a deal only after a change in the Iranian Administration.

Second, we did aggressively make the case for the Iran deal during the congressional review mandated by statute last summer, as it was imperative that the facts of the deal be understood for it to be implemented. Opponents of the deal had no difficulty in making their case — through commentary, a paid media campaign, and the distribution of materials making a variety of arguments against the deal. Tough and fair questions were raised; sometimes, there were also inaccuracies about the nature of the deal.‎ Given our interest in making sure that any misinformation was corrected, and that people understood our policy, we made a concerted effort to provide information about the deal to any interested party, including to outside organizations and any journalists covering the issue. This effort to get information out with fact sheets, graphics, briefings, and social media was no secret — it was well reported on at the time. Of course the objective of that kind of effort is to build as much public support as you can — that’s a function of White House communications.