Opinion

Iran, American Jews, and ‘dual loyalty’

Jack Ross Author, Rabbi Outcast
Font Size:

The Washington Free Beacon, seconded by Commentary, has pathetically played the thoroughly tattered “anti-Semitism” card in seeking to delegitimize supporters of diplomacy and rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

When the well-respected foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen tweeted, “I do not think Israel is being well served by people they have picked on US side to promote their talking points,” the Free Beacon insisted “Rozen’s suggestion that a Jewish expert is secretly representing the interests of the Israeli government is reminiscent of the longstanding anti-Semitic allegation that Jews have dual loyalties.” Jonathan Tobin at Commentary went further: “The notion that the only reason why someone would oppose administration policy on Iran is that they were ‘picked’ by Israel to ‘promote their talking points’ is one that is dangerously close to the toxic Walt-Mearsheimer ‘Israel Lobby’ thesis that also sought to delegitimize supporters of the Jewish state.”

One need look no further than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself to point out the absurdity of this dissembling. In just the last two weeks, the Prime Minister addressed a gathering of American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and admonished them, in a tone one could easily be forgiven for interpreting as marching orders, that it was their duty to prevent the United States from reaching a diplomatic accord with Iran. Any protest by such scribblers that their primary concern is not the State of Israel, which they frankly and openly profess to be their “homeland,” by now rings as hollow as an American Communist protesting after 1950 that his principal loyalty was not to the Soviet Union.

Indeed, it is the leaders of Israel and the Ameican Jewish establishment – and in fact, to a great extent, even the very existence of the latter – that has held as a sacred first principle the “dual loyalty” of American Jews to the State of Israel. American Judaism, in the main, does not regard itself as a religion in the sense that the term is understood in the modern world. American Jews, in this discourse, are less a religious community than a polity. All of the major denominations of American Judaism are affiliated with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which regards itself as the governing body of the whole American community and has essentially no other purpose than to advocate for the State of Israel. Said “community,” in turn, is regarded to be nothing more than an appendage of the transnational polity called “the Jewish people” of which, according to the official ideology of the State of Israel, the nation is the collectively held possession as opposed to a state of all its citizens.

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, it was vulnerable to predictable lurid charges in part because it was not just aimed at the powerful American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). The authors also insisted on documenting a much wider phenomenon, and their use of the somewhat vague term “Israel lobby” did not properly elaborate that AIPAC, and scores of other politically powerful non-religious Jewish organizations like it, are all affiliates of the larger Conference of Presidents. Peter Beinart’s later essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” spoke more directly to this reality and provided the more apt and precise term “American Jewish Establishment” of which the Israel lobby is merely a part.

The history of this establishment goes back to even before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Throughout the 1930s, the politically ambitious Rabbi Stephen Wise had been seeking to achieve the political consolidation of the American Jewish community through his World Jewish Congress, claiming it would be a “democratic” expression of the will of American Jewry as opposed to the elitist American Jewish Committee, founded by wealthy German Jews in 1906. From August 30 to September 1, 1943, an “American Jewish Conference” was convened which for the first time presumed to speak as a representative body of all American Jewry, and which constitutionally committed them to the Zionist program. This conference was not convened by Wise, however, but by the American Zionist Emergency Council – the direct ancestor of AIPAC – which by 1958 had become the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

Dissent from the presumptions of the American Jewish Conference at the time was considerable. Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was one of the most outspoken opponents. The Jewish Labor Committee, founded a decade earlier by veterans of the anti-Zionist Jewish Socialist Bund, was also highly critical of the conference. And while the leadership of Reform Judaism was increasingly dominated by acolytes of Stephen Wise, several rabbis of the classical school formed the American Council for Judaism, which would be the most active resistance organization to the new American Jewish establishment for the next generation.

In 1957, Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism wrote to his friend Norman Thomas, the venerable American Socialist leader, “I am very much afraid that through a process of erosion of which most Jews today seem to reflect no consciousness whatsoever, Zionism is gradually ‘proving’ most of the allegations which have, at one time or another, been used by the most vicious anti-Semites.” This consciousness finally began to assert itself in the events leading up to the American invasion of Iraq, when AIPAC and others could for the first time be directly implicated in launching a foreign war, as opposed to their more limited demands of the preceding generation such as military aid and vetoing UN resolutions.

The American Jewish establishment only doubled down with its maniacal obsession with attacking Iran, an obsession that simply cannot be explained in rational terms. While one could certainly point to the more lurid (if not always scrupulously translated) statements of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it should be recognized that Iran, the civilization that invented both chess and backgammon, has been all too successful in provoking a blustering and self-destructive response from the war party amassed against it for the last decade.

Examining these pathologies of the American Jewish establishment is not only timely with the hopeful developments toward American rapprochement with Iran, but also in connection to the other major story rocking American Jewry in recent weeks – the publication of a comprehensive survey of American Jews by the Pew Research Center, demonstrating that American Judaism has been by no means immune from the recent sharp decline of religion in American life.

It is certainly questionable whether under any circumstances the emerging decline of American Jewry could have been averted. But there can be no doubt that a principal factor, if not the only factor, has been disenchantment with the doctrinaire foreign nationalism propagated by the American Jewish establishment, especially since the beginning of this new century. Even today, many rabbis will insist that “Jewish life is impossible without Israel at its core,” but an Israel-centered American Jewish life has plainly failed as much or more than any conceivable alternative to ensure a vibrant future for American Judaism.

Thus, when the ideologues at such redoubts as Commentary and Washington Free Beacon snipe about those who would raise the “dual loyalty” canard against American Jews, as in so many other instances, it is a case of bald projection. They only wish that it were so.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel