Not-Bernard Lazare on anti-Semitism

Daniel Lazare (any relation to Bernard?) writes in The Nation:

In The Jewish Century... Yuri Slezkine, a Russian-Jewish historian now ensconced at Berkeley, mounts an elaborate counterargument. Jews are not unique, he maintains in his fascinating new study, and it is only European provincialism that makes them seem that way. Otherwise, they are of a type that is very common the world over: border crossers, ethnic transgressors and other nomadic and seminomadic elements who enter into complicated relations with host nations that are complementary and symbiotic.

Interesting argument. But is it only "provicialism" that makes Marilyn Monroe the ultimate sex icon, or the Beatles the ultimate band? Or Hitler the ultimate criminal? Sometimes entities are unique, even if they have parallels in other cultures or even within their own. But what makes Jews unique is that, even in remote places where there are no Jews, places far from the universal center that is the Upper West Side, there are opinions about "the Jews." Lazare, however, seems to understand this. As I have not (yet) read Slezkine's book, I should only comment on Lazare's review itself:

But while he regards the Soviet experiment as a failure, [Slezkine] believes "the Jewish century" presented the Jews with a series of choices, none of them completely satisfactory. They could lose themselves in the Mercurian transformation of imperial Russia. They could immigrate to the United States, a country founded by Protestant Mercurians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and take their place alongside all the other Mercurianized immigrant groups as part of a general celebration of American "diversity" and "ethnicity" (however bogus those terms may be). Or they could turn Zionist, move to Palestine and become tillers of the soil, Apollonian peasant warriors in a world struggling to leave all that behind.

The first choice led to a dead end when Stalin's neo-Apollonian Russification policy led to a resurgence of anti-Semitism. The second has led to Bush, while the third has led to permanent warfare in an ethno-chauvinist state that Slezkine describes as "the sole Western survivor (along with Turkey, perhaps) of the integral nationalism of interwar Europe." The very concept of a Jewish state, he adds, is the contemporary equivalent "of such politically illegitimate concepts as 'Germany for the Germans' and 'Greater Serbia,'" while "the rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life." American and Israeli Jews should not automatically assume that their choice was the right one.

And then:

If Jews benefited from the good will shown toward Israel before the 1967 war, the question is whether they will suffer from growing revulsion felt for it afterward. Anti-Semitism is the anti-Zionism of fools, but there are a lot of fools in the world, and all too many of them are falling into it already. It is morally catastrophic that a people who once allied with the most advanced, democratic currents in the world should now find themselves in bed with the most backward, e.g., all those "Christian Zionists" running around in Bush's America. Remarkably, the Jewish question is no closer to resolution at the start of the twenty-first century than it was at the start of the twentieth.

In other words, who are those crazy Jews, those Zionists and Israelis, who would give up being special and progressive and avant-garde intellectuals/peddlers/moneylenders in favor of being just another racist, nationalistic, ordinary country? Why not embrace your membership in the people to end all peoples, or, if not that, then in one of the many peoples whose uniqueness will lead us to the future and beyond?

Lazare, it seems, misses the appeal of Israel. Or at least what I find appealing about Israel. While everywhere else, Jews are and have for millenia been identified as "special," in Israel, Jews can be boring, or, if interesting, they are interesting merely as individuals, or, at the very least, for some reason other than being Jewish. While people will always be put into boxes no matter where they live, there's something admirable about a drive to move in the opposite direction, about a desire to be recognized (and liked or disliked) as yourself, rather than for mere facts of your birth. This, as I have said before, is the same reason that I am in favor of same-sex marriage, or more specifically, why I am against the left-wing critique of same-sex marriage, which is that gays are interesting/subversive/"special" and marriage will ruin all that. My feeling is, let marriage ruin all that, and let those gays who actually are creative/artistic/"special" prove that by doing something more interesting than expressing their sexual and companionship preferences. Why should anyone be born with a duty to be interesting? So maybe Israel had to take a step back (i.e. be more ethnocentric than other "Western" countries) to take a step forward. I happen to believe Lazare exaggerates the extent to which Israel stepped backward, but that's for another post. But for "Jewish" to become no more "special" than "French" or "German" or "American," and thus to allow Jews to be impressive as individuals if they happen to be impressive individuals, and to lead quiet, mundane lives if not, Israel's existence is a step in the right direction.