PROFESSOR MEARSHEIMER AND HIS USEFUL JEWS: DANIEL BALSON
By DANIEL BALSON
At some point in the early part of the 20th century, the Tsarist authorities deemed my great grandfather to be a “useful Jew.” He was a pianist and his musical talents fit nicely with Russia’s classical preoccupation with high European culture.
And so, under this vulgar appellation, he was issued the necessary documents and permitted to leave the area where men of his caste were kept. He moved to St. Petersburg to teach at a musical conservatory and joined the ethnic Russian population under whose caprice he lived, but to whom he would never truly belong—even after his conversion to Orthodoxy.
Some 80 years later, my family and I left the Soviet Union and moved to the United States where we could define our own identity without the help of paternalistic Tsars and commissars. Had I been born a century ago, I don’t know whether I would have qualified as a “useful Jew” or a useless one and, truth be told, until last week I never found the occasion to wonder.
On April 29, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer delivered a speech titled “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners.” Mr. Mearsheimer is one of America’s more celebrated political scientists. In 2006, he and a co-author wrote an article-turned-book called “The Israel Lobby,” arguing that advocates for the Jewish state have manipulated U.S. foreign policy in a way that harms American interests.
In last week’s talk, given at the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C., Mr. Mearsheimer explained that “American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories.” Since I don’t know many American Jews who are apathetic about Israel’s fate, and since I had no idea that an entire ethnicity could be so neatly compartmentalized, it seemed prudent to continue reading the transcript.
Mr. Mearsheimer refers to the first category as “Righteous Jews.” According to him, they include radicals like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, as well as more reasonable individuals like New York Times columnist Roger Cohen.
The second category, those that could be described as hawkish on Israel, Mr. Mearsheimer calls the “New Afrikaners.” This reference to supporters of apartheid encompasses the Jews that he doesn’t like; they include the heads of most American Jewish political organizations as well as right-of-center media figures. He refers to the third category as the “great ambivalent middle,” those who are apparently undecided about Israel.
The speech contains a litany of other bizarre and unsubstantiated claims: Zionism’s core beliefs are deeply hostile to the establishment of a Palestinian state, many young Israelis hold racist views towards Palestinians, and so on.
But it was Mr. Mearsheimer’s taxonomy of the Jewish citizens of this country that captivated me the most. I’m not sure where I fall on his rubric. I had always considered myself simply a Jewish-American, but perhaps I truly am “righteous” or alternatively a “new Afrikaner.”
Nor am I sure where to place all the other Jews that I have encountered in my life. The ones who so generously helped my family when we arrived in this country as refugees seemed quite “righteous,” but they are associated with some of the organizations Mr. Mearsheimer deemed evil, or at least accomplices to it.
Such distinctions should be considered beyond the pale. Would a professor get a respectful hearing if he divided black men into “righteous African-Americans” and “Malcolm X types”?
A college friend, born and raised in Canada but of Chinese descent, once remarked to me that the U.S. is so great because it is the country where people are least likely to ask where you’re “really” from. Yet Mr. Mearsheimer seems convinced of his ability to divine who one really is. One imagines that the word American wouldn’t satisfy his inquiry.
Surely the crude categorization of an entire set of people according to political proclivities has no place in the 21st century. The illiberal political condition of Tsarist Russia enabled cultural arbiters to define minorities any way they pleased. Thank goodness America accords the likes of Mr. Mearsheimer no such right.
Mr. Balson is an M.A. candidate at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Comments are closed.
