Gershom Gorenberg

Israeliness and the Art of Mountain-Climbing

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

The news photos of Nadav Ben-Yehuda arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport from Nepal shows a gaunt-faced young man with one hand bound heavily in bandages. Ben-Yehuda became a hero, one could say, because he chose not to conquer the mountain.

I feel personal gratitude to him.  Ever since I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air—more precisely, ever since I mainlined the book’s horrors directly into my nightmares—I’ve believed, or wanted to believe, in the theoretical certainty that an Israeli mountain climber would act as Ben-Yehuda did. Three hundred meters from the peak of Mt. Everest, he turned the theoretical prediction into reality.

Before I talk about Ben-Yehuda, a word more about Krakauer’s book. As you may remember, it’s a first-person account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Everest. Too many people reached the top during the same opening in the weather, which  ended in a savage storm. Nine climbers died while Krakauer was on the mountain. Several people made desperate efforts to save others, even dying in the attempt.

This is just the setting of the nightmare. The nightmare, as Krakauer unflinchingly relates,

Read more

Unorthodoxies

by

Why simply cutting subsidies to haredim will cause suffering, not employment

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

In our last episode, dear viewers, we watched as Israel’s main opposition party, Kadima, sold out its centrist voters and joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—thereby providing the prime minister a reprieve of over a year before he must face the voters. This allows Bibi more time to raise regressive taxes, evade negotiations with the Palestinians, and deride diplomatic efforts to solve the Iranian nuclear issue.

But perhaps there’s a bright spot in this dark plot line. To paraphrase a question I’ve heard repeatedly over the last couple of weeks: Since the new coalition is broad enough to maintain its majority in parliament even if clerical parties walk out, can it finally end one of the strangest and best-known aberrations of Israeli life? Can it end the bizarre pork-barreling that allows most ultra-Orthodox men to spend their life in religious studies rather than working?

Read more

Jerusalem Disunited: What’s Missing From the Celebration

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

Out for my morning bike ride Sunday, I looped up the ridge to Kibbutz Ramat Rachel on the south edge of Jerusalem. Two flocks of teenagers were coming down: the first dressed in white shirts, dark pants and crocheted skullcaps, the second in knee-length skirts and modest blouses. They carried many Israeli flags that waved in a cool mountain breeze, the kind of breeze that is much more common in myths about Jerusalem than in real life and that seemed to have been ordered up special for Jerusalem Day, which is all about myth and not reality. They headed toward the center of town, presumably for the procession into the Old City—a Jerusalem Day custom observed mainly by youth from the religious Zionist right, who inherit hand-me-down Israeli mores when everyone else but right-wing politicians tire of them.

Read more

Elections? Ooh, That’s Scary. Let’s Not.

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column, now up at The American Prospect. Enjoy. And please help keep the Prospect publishing.

Talk about a quick campaign. The latest one in Israel lasted about a week, and there wasn’t even an election at the end.

Just last weekend, local political commentators were enthusing about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactical brilliance in deciding on snap elections more than a year ahead of schedule. The opposition—particularly the centrist Kadima party—was unprepared. Polls purportedly proved that Netanyahu’s Likud would be the only party holding more than a quarter the seats in the next parliament; all the rest would stand in line to join his coalition. An cabinet press release on Sunday named September 4 as election day.

Two days later, the nation awoke to news that Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz had cut a deal with Netanyahu to bring his party into the current coalition. Elections can wait till late 2013, as originally scheduled. Political commentators enthused again, this time about Netanyahu’s brilliance in co-opting one potential rival and frustrating others. Foreign analysts wondered whether Netanyahu’s deal with Mofaz, a former general, would promote or hinder an Israeli strike against Iran.

Brilliance, schmilliance.

Read more

Shouting Points: The Stand With Us Method

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

I found the pamphlets on a table at the Hillel house of a West Coast university. They’d been left by a representative of Stand With Us, the Los-Angeles based member of the “Israel advocacy” family of organizations. The booklets, entitled Israel: Pocket Facts, were the size of missionary tracts of yesteryear—small enough so that you can always keep one with you to consult when your faith is challenged.

On its website, Stand With Us says it aims at helping people “educate their own local campuses and communities about Israel.” Putting “campuses” first appears intentional: Fierce arguments about Israel are more likely on campus than at the average workplace, and some donors worry that Jewish kids are besieged on the quad.

On each page, in large type, Israel: Pocket Facts provides a few easy-to-memorize shouting points with which pro-Israel students can respond to the equally simplistic slogans of anti-Israel students while everyone else wanders off in disgust. Some of the factoids are footnoted. The authors apparently hope that students won’t follow the footnotes to the sources, or learn anything else about Israel, or think with complexity about the issues.

Read more

Please Help The American Prospect

by

Gershom Gorenberg The American Prospect, my journalistic home for the past 10 years, is in danger of closing. The magazine operates as a non-profit, and will only be able to keep publishing with the immediate help of donors. The Prospect is an invaluable source of reporting and progressive political analysis. The loss of the magazine … Read more

Argument Is a Jewish Ideal. With No Exemption for Israeli Policy

by

Gershom Gorenberg

And here’s my new column from Moment Magazine:

The incident repeats itself with small variations. A rabbi somewhere in America writes to ask if I’ll come speak to his congregation about Israeli politics and my recent book, The Unmaking of Israel. Afterward I receive another email: At a meeting of the Israel Committee or the board, he has encountered worry that inviting me could offend right-wing Jews. He asks how I respond to such concerns. Here’s one abridged version of my reply:

Dear ___,

Oy.

Your note reminds me of the apocryphal story about the new rabbi of an American Orthodox congregation who asks the shul president what he should talk about for his first Sabbath sermon. The president says, “Something to do with yiddishkeit.”

“Maybe I’ll talk about Shabbos,” the rabbi says.

“Well,” says the president, “a lot of our members drive to shul. They might take offense.”

“All right, I’ll talk about kashrus,” says the rabbi.

“Actually,” says the president, “some of our members eat in Chinese restaurants. Maybe you should skip that.”

“Fine. I’ll talk about taharas mishpuche,” the rabbi suggests, referring to the laws regarding ritual immersion for women.

Read more

Let’s Not Even Pretend Any More

by

Gershom Gorenberg My new article is up at The American Prospect: The decision broke with a policy that Israel has held for 20 years: no new settlements will be established. Right-wing Israeli governments, in particular, have broadcast that policy as part of their international PR efforts. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his most senior … Read more

Benzion Netanyahu’s Legacies

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: the son whose politics, view of history, and resentments he shaped.

Netanyahu, who died Monday at age 102, was a specialist in the history of the Jews of Spain. In his books, he asserted a revisionist thesis: Spanish Jews converted to Christianity willingly, not under duress. Their willing assimilation did not reduce their neighbors’ hatred of them. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos was not based on religion, nor was Spain’s expulsion of Jews who remained Jewish. Both persecutions expressed economic resentment and racial hate toward Jews. And, he wrote, “Just as the Jews of Germany failed to foresee Hitler’s rise to power… so the Jews of Spain failed to notice… the mountainous wave which was approaching to overwhelm them.”

Read more

Never Before v. Never Again (Professorial Pride Dept.)

by

My former student Sumit Galhotra has an excellent piece up at HuffPo on marking Armenian remembrance day in Jerusalem:

JERUSALEM — As dusk settled over the Old City one evening recently, Noemie Nalbandian stepped into the dimly lit cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. Hundreds of oil lamps hung from the vaulted dome like an army of parachutes in the evening sky. In one corner, Nalbandian lit a candle, performed the sign of the cross, closed her eyes and offered a prayer.

St. James is the center of Armenian life in Jerusalem. Each year on April 24, Nalbandian and hundreds of other Armenians living in Israel gather at the cathedral to commemorate the Armenian genocide. After prayer services, they march to the Turkish consulate singing songs and holding posters demanding that the Turkish government recognize the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. No Israeli officials were expected at the commemoration; indeed, the Israeli government is itself an unmentioned target of the protests since it, too, refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide.

Read more

Chill. The Jews Aren’t Voting Republican.

by

Faith-based policy, nativism, and Ayn Randian economics will not create a Jewish electoral shift.

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

Forecasts of the Great Jewish Shift began as soon as the presidential campaign did: This year, we are told, Jews will finally vote Republican, or at least significantly more of them will than have done so in many a decade, perhaps forever. The predictions are a quadrennial ritual. They are made most often by Jewish Republicans, speaking in the bright voice of a compulsive gambler who knows that on this spin, the little ball will absolutely land on the right number. They are made by social scientists certain that reality will finally behave according to their models. They are made by Jewish Democrats as unable to control their anxiety as someone is to stop a tic. This year’s minor variation is the explanation that Jews will switch because they are upset with Barack Obama’s attitude toward Israel.

As an Israeli political writer, I admit, I am particularly conscious of this ritual, because the Great Jewish Shift (GJS) is the second thing that people want to discuss with me as soon as I get off the plane in America, after they ask me if Benjamin Netanyahu will bomb Iran and before I have put down my suitcase. I do not know if Netanyahu will bomb Iran; he does not tell me such things. However, I submit that there is considerable public evidence that the GJS will not happen this year. A newly released survey of American Jews provides the latest data. History and the Republicans’ demonstrative cluelessness about Jewish voters provide more.

Read more

Bibi as Pharaoh

by

To distract attention from his economic policies, Netanyahu blames the victims

Gershom Gorenberg

My new Daily Beast piece is up:

Spring in Israel this year brings not only Pesah but a whiff in the air of renewed economic protests, like those that swept the country last summer. Activists believe that after a long winter of empty government promises, they can bring Israelis back to mass demonstrations. On the eve of Passover, Benjamin Netanyahu previewed his strategy for coping with popular anger: Turn it against social outsiders. Exploit prejudice. Learn from the European far right, or from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman or perhaps —in the spirit of the season—from Pharaoh.

In a pre-Pesah interview to Ha’aretz, the prime minister referred to the poverty among Israel’s Arab and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and then asserted, “The middle class that went out to the streets feels that it’s paying for the two sectors I mentioned… They’re not always wrong.” (Hebrew text)

'People before Profits'
'People before Profits' Jerusalem, July 2011 (Gershom Gorenberg)

Let’s parse this. Last July, a few young Israelis, organizing through Facebook, started a tent encampment on the center island of a Tel Aviv boulevard. By August, one out of every 20 Israelis marched on the same night against the government’s economic policies—the equivalent of Occupy Wall Street bringing out 15 million Americans out to demonstrate.

According to the prime minister, those protesters’ unhappiness was aimed at Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews—or at least it should be aimed at them for freeloading while the middle class works. So please, protesters, stop chanting, “What’s the answer to privatization? Revolution!” Don’t demand to know why state-owned companies ended up in the hands of a small cadre of oligarchs. Stop noticing that the country that once had the lowest rate of inequality in the West now has one of the highest, nearly matching America’s. Don’t use the expression “piggish capitalism,” with the connotation of treif, for Netanyahu’s dogmatic neoliberalism. Just blame Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox. 

Read more