Jeffrey Goldberg has a big extensively reported piece in the Atlantic on European Jews and whether or not they should leave the Continent. Joseph Cannon is very offended by Goldberg’s conclusion. I have a different reaction. Goldberg is free to have his opinion. It’s based on very personal considerations and his own family history.
It’s disturbing that this is even something under discussion, and I don’t think Goldberg’s reporting about the experiences of Jewish communities in Europe can just be dismissed.
I certainly do not agree with this:
This article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic is a despicable piece of agit-prop designed to convince Jews that they are all unsafe outside of their supposed “homeland.” Jews are being told that the year is still 1944. Jews are being told that all gentiles — every last one of them — are ruthless, mindlessly bloodthirsty Jew-haters, reared on the Protocols and anxious to break out the Zyklon B. Anyone who opposes the Israeli plan to exterminate all Palestinians must be a Jew-hater who wants to exterminate all Jews.
That is not even a remotely fair representation of Goldberg’s article.
In Goldberg’s concluding paragraph he cops to having a biased view.
I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly. But I am also predisposed to think this because I am an American Jew—which is to say, a person who exists because his ancestors made a run for it when they could.
Yeah, I think this is alarmist. But I don’t think it’s agitprop. It appears sincere to me. And Goldberg dutifully reported that many of the European Jews he encountered were very uncomfortable with Netanyahu’s recent recruitment efforts.
The Israeli government, as one might expect, is interested in accelerating the departure of Jews from Europe. Israeli leaders have lectured French Jews about the necessity of aliyah, or emigration to Israel, in ways that have displeased French leaders, including the prime minister, and have also frustrated some French Jewish leaders. “To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray. The state of Israel is your home,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said after the kosher-market attack. (He reprised this entreaty after the attack in Copenhagen a month later.)
Even some French Jews who are contemplating aliyah, and who tend toward the right end of the Israeli political spectrum, told me that they found Netanyahu’s remarks unhelpful. Others noted that life in Israel is not especially tranquil. Jews die violently in Israel, too.
Goldberg did not endorse aliyah as the solution, either.
Yet Israel’s future as a Jewish haven is an open question. Alain Finkielkraut, the French philosopher who is a harsh critic of his country’s management of the jihadist threat, is also a strong critic of current Israeli policy. “It is an irony of history that people who move to Israel as Jews might be moving to a state that in the next decades becomes a binational state with a Jewish minority, because of the occupation of the West Bank and the settlements,” he told me when we talked in Paris in January. “Moving from France to escape the attacks of Arabs to a country that will not be Jewish does not make a lot of sense.”
He never does offer an outright recommendation, but if people follow his ancestors’ example, they’ll immigrate to the United States, not Israel. And nothing Goldberg writes is fairly interpretable as “all gentiles — every last one of them — are ruthless, mindlessly bloodthirsty Jew-haters, reared on the Protocols and anxious to break out the Zyklon B.”
I’m embarrassed by Cannon’s take on this piece.
Is current European anti-Semitism bubbling up from the same old cauldron that empowered the Nazis and led to the Holocaust or is it function of Jews not standing their ground in European countries after the end of WWII and exiting for the creation of Israel? With no Israel, would Muslim immigrants (more specifically, the children of those immigrants) into European countries have fomented anti-Jewish sentiment?
Americans helped facilitate this mess by not welcoming all Jews that chose to immigrate here after WWII and encouraging immigration to Palestine. Whether anti-Jewish racism or not, the Brits understood that a flood of Jewish immigrants to Palestine would be problematical.
Now what? With 80+% of the world’s Jewish population already living in Israel and the US, would more isolation from the rest of the world be a good thing? Practically, how many more immigrants can Israel accommodate? Given a choice between France and NJ, how many would opt for NJ?
Holy shit, Marie. Jews not standing their ground after WWII?
Was there ever a better time to do so? Emigrating from one’s home, the home of one’s ancestors for hundreds of years, isn’t a simple task. Not physically, financially, nor psychologically. If it were, Jews would have gotten the hell out of there, particularly out of Poland, in the 1930s.
As I also said that the US could have/should have welcomed all Jews that chose to emigrate after WWII, was it not clear that I understood and fully supported the desire of any and all Jews to emigrate?
Do you criticize black Americans for not emigrating to Liberia once they were freed? Almost all stayed and attempted to stand their ground. Persevered through the hellish Jim Crow that came next and got out if they were able and persevered through less overt forms of racism outside the south. Was it after the passage of civil rights acts and several Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and 1960s the time for blacks to get out of the south or a better time to stand their ground? Again not my call.
However, if after the Civil War or the successes of the civil rights movement, African-Americans had demanded reparations in the form of one or more states as a separate homeland nation where non-blacks would be second class citizens or residents that were encouraged or urged to go elsewhere and large numbers that couldn’t or wouldn’t were kicked out of their homes and off their lands were shunted into tiny and separate specks of land, the majority in this country would have been outraged.
The Jews that survived the Holocaust were entitled to reparations as were the African-Americans that had been enslaved and Native Americans that were robbed of their lands and culture. It’s best done immediately upon recognition of the wrong that’s been done. When those that had benefited from the wrong pay to make it right.
btw — note there is no comma after WWII in my sentence:
after the end of WWII and exiting for the creation of Israel?
I’m thinking it’s the same cauldron as during the 1930s. And the same issue as for Muslims. Being non-whatever non-Dutch, non-French, non-Danish, even non-British. Different. In a time of austerity that sharpens competition for jobs, educational slots, and so on.
Hannah Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism seems very apt here.
The Muslim immigration into western European countries hasn’t been insignificant since the end of WWII. Although it’s not clear to me that in recent history and prior to the establishment of Israel that conflicts between Jews and Muslims were as intense and on-going as they had been throughout Europe and Russia.
That cauldron needed to be smashed into smithereens and not buried like a zombie for a later return. Expecting the native white populations of those countries to do it on their own was like expecting white southerners to integrate their schools upon the Brown v. Board of Ed decision. Or the more difficult task of integrating schools outside the south where segregation existed independent of “Jim Crow” laws.
what are you talking about? “standing their ground” ??
One of the factors in 1930’s Germany was Hegel’s philosophy of history which has pretty much been put the rest in recent decades except with the Fukuyama and PNAC crowd who are not in Europe. little kids have been learning a different concept of Europe in school from what the WWI and post era kids learned
Many did. Most didn’t.
Not understanding the remainder of your comment in light of the reported recent upsurge in anti-Semitism among white people in Europe. Almost all of them educated after WWII.
well, it’s not from a Hegelian view of history – i.e. thesis and antithesis “greco-roman paganism” and [ancient] Judaism, synthesis = Christianity. i.e. in the Hegelian schema Judaism is not a modern religion is an obsolete vestige of an imperfectly realized perfection of German culture; that’s the seed bed in which Naziism and the concept of extermination of a people took root. that’s gone, except among some dead enders, it’s not what kids are learning in school, but it was what kids were learning in school leading up to the 30’s. Whatever the problems of toleration, it’s about modern religions now.
As for people standing their ground, I don’t think you’re getting the concept of Europe in 1946.
Still not getting why “modern religions” today in Europe are feeding anti-Semitism. Why are the dead-enders (white fascists) rising and increasing in numbers against Jews after decades of peaceful co-existence with this very tiny minority population?
I’m old enough to remember when anti-Semitism was more pronounced in the US. Mostly by those that also used the “N” word. Both have waned over the decades. Seemingly in tandem, but the waning of anti-Semitism within the fundie communities is for a different reason than its waning in the general population.
Thankfully, my mother was physically repulsed by her immigrant mother’s anti-Semitism and got thousands of miles away from those people except for occasional, short visits. In fairness to my grandmother, at around age twelve she was sent to work as a house servant for a middle-class Jewish family and treated very poorly, as most house servants were. Doesn’t excuse her generalizing from her very bad personal experience which wasn’t helped by her Catholicism or any positive experiences with Jews, but her hate wasn’t exclusively abstract.
If I didn’t have an appreciation for what it was like in Europe 1946, why would I have welcomed all Jews into this country? Totally get why all of them would have wanted to get out of there. OTOH, starting over is difficult anywhere one goes.
Again, I didn’t say, “eats, shoots, and leaves” but “eats shoots and leaves.”
No, let me start over. I remarked simply that whatever may be fueling anti Judaism in Europe right now, and I don’t know what the factors are, whatever it is, it is different from the seed bed in which German Naziism arose in a very important way – i.e. the present day abandonment of thinking of history in Hegel’s terms, i.e. it has been abandoned in the intellectual aftermath of WWII, discussion about the Holocaust, etc etc etc. [Hegel had thesis/ antithesis, synthesis, etc as I described in previous comment, where “Judaism” was not understood in non Jewish circles as a contemporary religion but vestigial etc etc., as I wrote above; you should take a look at Hegel’s philosophy of history to get an idea what German kids were raised on] Facts of the 20th century refuted the theoretical framework (I’m simplifying here) and present day no longer accepts that theoretical framework for the most part. The theory was very much a substratum, not always explicit. I did scholarship in a field where we were very aggressively rethinking and reworking conceptual frameworks in light of the 20th century. Very exciting actually. There are, however, a some intellectual dead enders, e.g. Fukuyama, who use a Hegelian historical model, substitute USA for Germany maybe, and they were at least aligned with the PNAC crowd to my knowledge, though I don’t follow them very closely. So my comment was, just that it’s not good to try to think about what’s happening in Europe now in terms of 1930’s Germany since so much is different, especially, re: the Hegelian framework which I believe has been jettisoned in Europe. hope this is clearer.
Will repeat for you as well — Note there is no comma after WWII in my sentence:
after the end of WWII and exiting for the creation of Israel?
Therefore, I didn’t say nor intended to say what you claim I said.
Goldberg was on NPR this morning. Interference from the surrounding hills prevented me from hearing all of it. What I did hear was not consistent with Mr. Cannon’s claims and was delivered in a rather even tone. Smoke but no fire.
I heard it and found it extremely offensive and propagandistic, essentially making the point Netanyahu has been making everywhere from Paris to Washington that all the Jews will die unless they make aliyah as soon as possible, not mentioning Netanyahu once as if it were just a neutral observation of the facts, not acknowledging that a man can “live as a Jew” without wearing a kippa, not acknowledging the existence of European Jews that love their countries and don’t want to leave…
Maybe it was just a really badly conducted interview, because when I looked at the article it was nowhere near that bad, though still very one-sided and claiming an objectivity it doesn’t have. But perhaps Cannon heard the interview and was too enraged to read the article properly.
Also in the NPR piece but a throwaway bothsiderist reference to the “anti-semitism of the left” which “starts out as anti-Zionism and quickly changes”. The Atlantic article is better on this too.
It’s actually a very good article. Goldberg draws an important connection between the fascist right, radical Islamists, and the violence endorsed by both parties. He fails to follow up on his chat with Marine Le Pen, which is disappointing, because the emergence of her party is perhaps the most alarming trend for the future of Jews in France.
One of the most interesting aspects of the article is the infographic that accompanies it. It implies that the recent upswing in terrorism isn’t the major driver of a declining European Jewish populations. Using France as an example — since that’s the country that Goldberg focuses primarily on in the article — the biggest postwar drop in Jewish population was the 50000-person decline between 1978 and 1983. This is roughly equivalent to the decline of the last fifteen years. Yes, the trend is very real, but a decline has been in the works for a long time.
Perhaps most significant population change is the mass exodus of Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union.
I wouldn’t call it good.
I welcome all Jews who wish to come to America to give it a shot and become my neighbor. Israel the country is proto-fascist, not you.
Well, except Jeffrey Goldberg.
If the two war criminals, Netanyahoo and The Corporal(aka Goldberg), want Jews to move to Israel shouldn’t they fix the economy first? Did he mention that Jews are leaving Israel for Europe because Netanyahoo is a screw-up?
Is purposefully messing with someone’s name helpful ever in a conversation? Is that ever persuasive?
Why are you mad that he’s described accurately?
Why would I be mad, just saying you’re not helping yourself by purposefully misspelling his name.
If you don’t intend to persuade anyone, then please carry on.
Also, here is a view on The Corporal’s piece:
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/03/16/the-basic-logic-of-bigotry/
thanks for that Phil. Fred’s take on the article is IMO more accurate than either Cannon’s or BooMan’s.
>>Jews are being told that all gentiles — every last one of them — are ruthless, mindlessly bloodthirsty Jew-haters
the reason this isn’t a fair representation of Goldberg’s article is that Jews are NOT being told it about “gentiles”, they are being told it specifically and repeatedly about Muslims.
The Chapter: Scourge of Our Time with Alain Finkielkraut is written as the Hebdo attack took place and news arrived of the attack on the Kosher Supermarkt at Place de Vincennes. Quite colored … the Jews are under attack, plenty of Islamophobia … feeding the trolls. For journalism a D- to start an article with.
The next paragraph is utter bullshit …
France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif–“dirty Jew”–rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”
Next paragraph of doom is historically false …
The resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe is not–or should not be–a surprise. One of the least surprising phenomena in the history of civilization, in fact, is the persistence of anti-Semitism in Europe, which has been the wellspring of Judeophobia for 1,000 years. Etc. etc.
Recovery by applauding achievements during all the massacres and bloodshed …
Despite this history of sorrow, Jews spent long periods living unmolested in Europe. And even amid the expulsions and persecutions and pogroms, Jewish culture prospered. Rabbis and sages produced texts and wrote liturgical poems that are still used today. Emancipation and enlightenment opened the broader culture to Jews, who came to prominence in politics, philosophy, the arts, and science–Chagall and Kafka, Einstein and Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Durkheim. An entire civilization flourished in Yiddish.
I suggest you look up the new definition of “new-antisemitism” which is equated with anti-Israel to come to the above mentioned statistics. Bibi Netanyhau could have written this shitty piece himself. What a load of misleading and utter propaganda for the cause of a Jewish State, denying the rights of Palestinians. See my comment in earlier diaries here, here and here.
Yesterday Bibi Netanyahu gave prsident Obama a last kick in the butt by claiming he will never cede land to Palestinians, remove Jewish settlers from occupied territories or allow Palestinians to build homes in East-Jerusalem. A bigger jackass than Bibi can’t be found .. Jeffrey Goldberg comes close.
The most discrimination in Western Europe is directed at Muslims, not Jews!! Islamophobia is gaining voter backing, thanks to Fear Inc. a product of USA and ally Israel.
Who is Alain Finkielkraut in France?
○ French Philosopher Finkielkraut: ‘There Is a Clash of Civilizations’
Who is Michel Houellebecq in France?
Famed French author Michel Houellebecq has insisted that his novel “Submission”, which envisions a France ruled by a Muslim government, is not a racist scare story. Nevertheless the novel, which hits bookstores early January, has sparked a media storm.
I suppose Finkielkraut and Houellebecq can shake hands with Dutch politician Geert Wilders and AEI ‘scholar’ Hirshi Ali
Well I believe there is a clash of civilizations going on over there. I find myself in agreement with much of what AF says here. I’m a firm believer in maintaining our distinct cultural identities as much as possible. But, When in Rome …
People hate Jews for a variety of reasons. Whatever Jews do, or don’t do, people will continue to hate them. That doesn’t mean that Jews have a moral right to engage in hateful behavior, or that all hate that’s directed at Jews is directed at them because they’re Jews.
However, this is, in fact, antisemitic: “Anyone who opposes the Israeli plan to exterminate all Palestinians must be a Jew-hater who wants to exterminate all Jews.”
People who understand why calling Bush a chimp is acceptable but calling Obama a chimp is racist shouldn’t have trouble with this concept. If they do, there’s something else going on.
Israelis that have rather recently moved to Europe are not rare. Berlin is a favored destination, among others. Maybe statistics are available somewhere.
I reply to myself: today Netanyahu came definitively out of the closet and let us know that there will be NO Palestinian state as long as he is Prime Minister No the question might be: ‘Is Netanyahu a racist anti-Palestinian?’ Let Goldberg sink his teeth into that juicy titbit.
I thought it was an excellent piece.
And I noted he has picked up a small trend in reporting a degree of warmth between Marine Le Pen’s FN and French Jews whose fears of anti-Semitism are mostly fears of Muslim Jew-hating.
I don’t know which is cart or horse, but I would link this with her recent alignment with Geert Wilders.
Thing is, as a matter of individual safety or that of the whole people, Jews have not been and will never be safer in Israel than in America or most of Europe, most of the time.
Whether or not Israel can remain, in the long or even medium run, a Jewish State.