Many of the non Ashkenazi Jews I know are not as Zionist as the European ones and when they come to America they are not so much against Israel as they come to America to survive and make a buck to bring back home... what is more many really don't want to go back to the army. It isn't so much that they don't support Israel, they do and they support it strongly, but they might not want to become career soldiers and coming to America is their chance at opportunity. If anything the born American European Jews have a home here and are more apt to become politically involved. I come from this background for instance and it was assumed that my political allegiance was to the left, but that was just the stereotype that people like Yglesias push. It is hard for Jews now to not support Israel, since the U.N. Goldstone Report was proven to be a fraud. there are Sephardic Jews like my father's family who were here for hundreds of years before the Eastern European Jews started showing up. Those Sephards were loyal to George Washington, Israel did not yet exist. Jews such as Harmon Hendricks and Washington's friend Rabbi Sextius. Other Sephardic Jews in my family would be Emma Lazarus, the poet and activist for both women's issues and other social ills of the era. She also was a staunch Zionist. Lazarus was the fourth of seven children of Moshe Lazarus and Esther Nathan, Portuguese Sephardic Jews whose families had been settled in New York since the colonial period. She was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. Her writings attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He corresponded with her until his death. She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term Zionism. In the winter of 1882, multitudes of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York; Lazarus taught technical education to help them become self-supporting. Her most famous work is "The New Colossus", which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
Not exactly what Yglesias is talking about. I don't think Yglesias knows WTF Yglesias is talking about.
Wondering why most Israelis don't think like him anymore, Matt Yglesias claims that Israel is afflicted with 'post-Jewish Zionism.'
The existence of Christian Zionists is, of course, not new. But what is new is that Israeli politics has drifted toward the hawkish right over the past ten years even as Jewish Americans remain on the progressive left. That change in Israeli politics, meanwhile, has been in part driven by a demographic shift away from the kind of secular ashkenazi Jews who predominate in the American population. At the same time, Christian Zionist sentiment has boomed in America and the Palestinian cause has never been less popular among America’s overwhelmingly non-Jewish population.
This is all part of what I’ve called the trend toward post-Jewish Zionism. That’s not to say that there are no Jewish Zionists in the United States (or Canada, etc.) but merely to observe that Jews as such are decreasingly relevant to the politics of Israel. In Europe, too, we’re seeing a boom of far-right parties (True Finns, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, the Danish People’s Party) with strong pro-Israel stands.
But look at whom he is defining as 'post-Jewish.'
Daniel Levy's article on Israeli demographics is also relevant to this. If you're a typical Jewish American, this is quite literally not your father's Israel. The Palestinian, Haredi, "national Orthodox," and Russian immigrant shares of the population have all grown substantially.
While it's true that the Haredi, national Orthodox (by which I assume he means National Religious) and Russian immigrant (by the way, most of whom are not religious and many of whom are not Jewish at all) populations have grown, that does not explain why Israelis have become what Yglesias calls 'hawkish right,' nor does it explain why fewer and fewer Israelis are sympathetic to the 'Palestinian' cause.
The Likud gets very few Haredi votes and probably not a whole lot of National Religious votes or Russian immigrant votes either. What's driven Israel to the right is not changing demographics but changing perceptions of the possibility of peace (without scare quotes) with the 'Palestinians.' Most Israelis have realized the truth over the last 6-11 years (look up those dates): That it's not peace or a state that the 'Palestinians' want. It's that they want to destroy the Jewish state. We won't roll over and play dead for them.
Some people would call that kind of shift democracy.
And by the way, those Haredim and National Religious Jews are more Jewish (in practice) than Yglesias will ever be. I would definitely not call them 'post Jewish.' That's absurd.
Matt Yglesias, at Think Progress, writes about the Daily Caller op-ed in which Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Gevalt) castigates American Jews for not being his kind of American Jew. (Next up: Joe Walsh wishes wimmin were still ladies!)
I won't pile more on Walsh -- it seems gratuitous at this stage -- but Yglesias seems to have contracted Walsh's unseemly "they're all alike" affect in this passage:
Israeli politics has drifted toward the hawkish right over the past ten years even as Jewish Americans remain on the progressive left. That change in Israeli politics, meanwhile, has been in part driven by a demographic shift away from the kind of secular ashkenazi Jews who predominate in the American population.
Say what? Ashkenazim have a genetic predisposition toward liberal democracy?
Let me put it this way: Vus?
