RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Deuteronomy, the people of Israel are told that their enemies will come from one direction but will flee in seven. Nowadays, something like the opposite seems to be true, with Israel’s enemies coming at her from many directions. One of these is from within. These internal enemies are the subject of Jews Against Themselves, a collection of 18 essays written over a span of 30 years by the scholar Edward Alexander. Alexander describes “the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.” He notes that there are always readers astonished to learn that Israel-bashing Jews exist. But precisely these home-grown haters are the ones who “play a disproportionate role in blackening Israel’s image.”

Like Jewish apostates of medieval times, these “modern Jewish apostates,” carry out with greater zeal than non-Jews the persecution of their brethren. But there are differences between the medieval and modern apostate. In medieval times, Jews fled from their religion. Today, they trumpet their Jewishness. Here Alexander quotes Cynthia Ozick: “So it is as self-declared Jews, as loyal and honorable Jews, as Jews in the line of the prophets … that we nowadays hear arguments against the survival, or the necessity, or the legitimacy of the state of Israel.”

W e have been an admirer of David Isaac’s commendable documentary series, “Zionism 101”. It is a beautiful constructed graphic Baedeker and comprehensive guide to the origins and evolution of religious and political Zionism. We count him among the leading defenders of Israel, the Jewish nation and the Diaspora, the ‘galut’. Thus, I found it in character for him to publish a review of a new book of withering essays by University of Washington scholar, Edward Alexander, “Jews Against Themselves”. Isaac’s review of Alexander‘s collection of jeremiads, “The Enemy Within” published in today’s Washington Free Beacon excoriates these diverse ‘shadtlanim’ beyond the usual suspects. Isaac pays tribute to Alexander withering and acerbic wit in these essays. He writes:

Alexander describes “the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.” He notes that there are always readers astonished to learn that Israel-bashing Jews exist. But precisely these home-grown haters are the ones who “play a disproportionate role in basic

Isaac notes Alexander’s theme threading his oeuvre defending Israel against the usual and not so usual suspects::

The dark, creepy murk of Steven Spielberg’s 2011 Lincoln also seeps into his new film, Bridge of Spies, an account of the 1957 exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union of captured espionage agents, the Russian Colonel Rudolph Abel and the American pilot Gary Francis Powers. This gloom can be attributed to Spielberg’s suggestion, in both films, of American political anxiety. After the ebullient history of Amistad, he has gone to the shadowy partisan chicanery behind Lincoln’s 14th Amendment to the Constitution and now to this consideration of the United States’ lack of innocence in global matters. Scenes of Abel’s and Powers’s secretive missions, and eventual imprisonment, juxtapose how our government and military matched Russia’s unprincipled subterfuge.

In Lincoln the weird darkness passed for cynical realism, but in Bridge of Spies it conveys disillusionment. When attorney James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) defends Abel before the Supreme Court, the imagery is overcast, somber; when Powers is detained by a Russian court, sunlight shines through the casements. Seem anti-American? In visual terms, Bridge of Spies is an ACLU movie. Through Donovan’s difficult maneuvers (against public disapproval and family discouragement), Spielberg pursues the sanctity of civil-liberties issues. Donovan, an insurance lawyer who served at the Nuremberg trials, must fight Cold War paranoia — presented as an eternal threat to America democracy.