Wow. Such a good piece. It helps highlight that maybe much of the current anti-semitism is really anti-institutionalism. Anecdotally, when I reflect on the anti-semitic-ish voices, it seems like they always come from anti-institutional voices (on both the right and the left).
I think there's some of that. There's also the old conspiracy theories that a cabal of Jews is controlling these institutions. But there is also just some straight up antisemitism.
I read this differently. Just as non-Jewish elites have abandoned any Protestant ethic and sense of obligation, the writer, senior counsel to the Palantir CEO, wants the Jewish community to abandon their sense of ethical obligations to become primarily transactional towards their own country.
The article is more interesting when viewed as a reflection of elite thinking. He doesn't care that the world is more transactional, that is is what he is comfortable with. He talks about Jewish community engagement as if it was just a cynical strategy, one that cannot be abandoned too soon. My impression is that he wants the Jewish community to dump past ethical norms that actually helped them succeed and embrace the type of world in which he personally thrives. I suspect many Jewish Americans would be inclined to disassociate themselves from this article.
A problem in many Western countries is that the general population is expected to take a common good, social trust approach to issues while the elites are largely transactional. In that sense it can be necessary to become more transactional in response. But this article is a reflection of the problem, not an example of the solution.
I think a lower trust, more transactional society is an empirical reality we are being forced to adjust to. It's easy to say that we should go back to the previous way - and I agree that would be excellent in many ways - but where is the roadmap to get there? Nobody has given a realistic one that I've seen.
I agree with your argument, we cannot play a social trust, common good game when the other side is not. The problem is the article is at a whole other level, written by someone who is so transactional in his thinking to the point of being a caricature. He did not realize that as senior counsel to the Palantir CEO it could be a problem to use Middle East sovereign funds as a model for relating to American society? This may be a common attitude in elite circles, the rest of us, Jewish or otherwise, cannot get away with walking around like TV mob bosses saying "It's all just business."
The article reveals just how transactional our elites are, as such I agree we need to become more transactional in response. At the same time, it might still be a good idea to distance oneself from the attitudes shown by the author.
I understand that. But why not? A movement is nothing more than a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that happen to coincide. Socialists are gonna socialist. Elitists are gonna elite. But what about elitism screams evangelical?
I can see Jews taking the suggested path as a secular one because being Jewish can be a racial identity, a religious identify or both and their problem is a world-wide one, hence Israel. Even so, remember, the idea of Israel was initially anathema to religious Jews. It seems to me that it would be foolish to ignore the religious aspect of any such action. (Though, like you, I am not Jewish.)
But an even greater question for me would be how can one even talk about trying to get evangelicals to pursue elitism unless it is understood and acknowledged that God and the Holy Spirit are going to be at the center of any decision they make? They would need to be recruited and I don't see how you are going to recruit them on more than an individual basis. I don't recall any place in the Bible where God said, if you can't beat them, join them.
Unrelated to the above: have you read the books of Chaim Potok? They are amazingly beautiful.
I read this article when Arnold Kling linked it and I thought it was interesting if a little muddled and deeply incorrect in its generalization of Jewish history in Europe. For example, it is flatly incorrect that Jews did not have de jure rights in Europe. There was no system of universal rights. Rather, all rights were particularized and negotiated between groups and overlapping regimes of authority. Many of these were recorded in formal written agreements, bills, proclamations, charters, and the like, especially on the continent.
The pattern in the most general sense across all Europe is "Jews make deals with kings and emperors. Eventually that king or emperor has problems or there is a succession crisis. Aspirants then either apply pressure to or wipe out the Jewish community, and they either succeed or the higher authority puts a stop to it." When the minority is small, the flip to Negative World is often dramatic and devastating.
The problems faced by Christians and Jews in NW are rather different in the US because of the two prongs of the First Amendment: free exercise and non-establishment, made thoroughly national by the 14th Amendment. But in the US, over the course of the 20th century, secular liberals were able to establish a secular religion to do the things an established religion usually would. Many of the NW conflicts are between the limits of constitutionally-protected free expression against the ever-waxing powers of the shadow established religion.
It's an interesting idea, but the idea of an ethnic group claiming to be a "sovereign people" gets me twitchy, and I would say that of anyone from Armenians to Serbs.
Secular Jewish ethnocentrism is mostly dead among the younger generations. I haven't been able to figure out if this guy is religious, but he seems to be the rare Gen Z/Zillennial Jew who still thinks and talks about Jewishness like a Boomer.
Over the next 20-40 years, secular/Reformed Jewish-Americans will evaporate as Boomers and Gen X die off and the diminished Jewish-American community will be mostly religious, divided between Modern Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, in which case there will start to be more similarities between Jews and the shrinking pious Christian minority (which will also be greatly diminished as Boomers and Gen X die off).
Though in the event that the future shapes up as Aaron is suggesting, that doesn't necessarily mean we will be allies: the relationship between pious Jews and pious Christians will still be transactional in nature, like every other relationship. But there might well be tactics to learn from one another.
Wow. Such a good piece. It helps highlight that maybe much of the current anti-semitism is really anti-institutionalism. Anecdotally, when I reflect on the anti-semitic-ish voices, it seems like they always come from anti-institutional voices (on both the right and the left).
I think there's some of that. There's also the old conspiracy theories that a cabal of Jews is controlling these institutions. But there is also just some straight up antisemitism.
I read this differently. Just as non-Jewish elites have abandoned any Protestant ethic and sense of obligation, the writer, senior counsel to the Palantir CEO, wants the Jewish community to abandon their sense of ethical obligations to become primarily transactional towards their own country.
The article is more interesting when viewed as a reflection of elite thinking. He doesn't care that the world is more transactional, that is is what he is comfortable with. He talks about Jewish community engagement as if it was just a cynical strategy, one that cannot be abandoned too soon. My impression is that he wants the Jewish community to dump past ethical norms that actually helped them succeed and embrace the type of world in which he personally thrives. I suspect many Jewish Americans would be inclined to disassociate themselves from this article.
A problem in many Western countries is that the general population is expected to take a common good, social trust approach to issues while the elites are largely transactional. In that sense it can be necessary to become more transactional in response. But this article is a reflection of the problem, not an example of the solution.
I think a lower trust, more transactional society is an empirical reality we are being forced to adjust to. It's easy to say that we should go back to the previous way - and I agree that would be excellent in many ways - but where is the roadmap to get there? Nobody has given a realistic one that I've seen.
I agree with your argument, we cannot play a social trust, common good game when the other side is not. The problem is the article is at a whole other level, written by someone who is so transactional in his thinking to the point of being a caricature. He did not realize that as senior counsel to the Palantir CEO it could be a problem to use Middle East sovereign funds as a model for relating to American society? This may be a common attitude in elite circles, the rest of us, Jewish or otherwise, cannot get away with walking around like TV mob bosses saying "It's all just business."
The article reveals just how transactional our elites are, as such I agree we need to become more transactional in response. At the same time, it might still be a good idea to distance oneself from the attitudes shown by the author.
Aaron,
Where is God in all this? I'm referring to both this column and the column from January 27.
They weren't intended as theological tracts.
I understand that. But why not? A movement is nothing more than a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that happen to coincide. Socialists are gonna socialist. Elitists are gonna elite. But what about elitism screams evangelical?
I can see Jews taking the suggested path as a secular one because being Jewish can be a racial identity, a religious identify or both and their problem is a world-wide one, hence Israel. Even so, remember, the idea of Israel was initially anathema to religious Jews. It seems to me that it would be foolish to ignore the religious aspect of any such action. (Though, like you, I am not Jewish.)
But an even greater question for me would be how can one even talk about trying to get evangelicals to pursue elitism unless it is understood and acknowledged that God and the Holy Spirit are going to be at the center of any decision they make? They would need to be recruited and I don't see how you are going to recruit them on more than an individual basis. I don't recall any place in the Bible where God said, if you can't beat them, join them.
Unrelated to the above: have you read the books of Chaim Potok? They are amazingly beautiful.
I read this article when Arnold Kling linked it and I thought it was interesting if a little muddled and deeply incorrect in its generalization of Jewish history in Europe. For example, it is flatly incorrect that Jews did not have de jure rights in Europe. There was no system of universal rights. Rather, all rights were particularized and negotiated between groups and overlapping regimes of authority. Many of these were recorded in formal written agreements, bills, proclamations, charters, and the like, especially on the continent.
The pattern in the most general sense across all Europe is "Jews make deals with kings and emperors. Eventually that king or emperor has problems or there is a succession crisis. Aspirants then either apply pressure to or wipe out the Jewish community, and they either succeed or the higher authority puts a stop to it." When the minority is small, the flip to Negative World is often dramatic and devastating.
The problems faced by Christians and Jews in NW are rather different in the US because of the two prongs of the First Amendment: free exercise and non-establishment, made thoroughly national by the 14th Amendment. But in the US, over the course of the 20th century, secular liberals were able to establish a secular religion to do the things an established religion usually would. Many of the NW conflicts are between the limits of constitutionally-protected free expression against the ever-waxing powers of the shadow established religion.
It's an interesting idea, but the idea of an ethnic group claiming to be a "sovereign people" gets me twitchy, and I would say that of anyone from Armenians to Serbs.
Secular Jewish ethnocentrism is mostly dead among the younger generations. I haven't been able to figure out if this guy is religious, but he seems to be the rare Gen Z/Zillennial Jew who still thinks and talks about Jewishness like a Boomer.
Over the next 20-40 years, secular/Reformed Jewish-Americans will evaporate as Boomers and Gen X die off and the diminished Jewish-American community will be mostly religious, divided between Modern Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, in which case there will start to be more similarities between Jews and the shrinking pious Christian minority (which will also be greatly diminished as Boomers and Gen X die off).
Though in the event that the future shapes up as Aaron is suggesting, that doesn't necessarily mean we will be allies: the relationship between pious Jews and pious Christians will still be transactional in nature, like every other relationship. But there might well be tactics to learn from one another.