Uncategorized
The Israeli origins of Amitai Etzioni’s big ideas about community
(JTA) — “Although I was born in Germany, my formative years were spent in the early, idealistic days of the cooperative Jewish settlements, in pre-Israel, Palestine,” wrote Amitai Etzioni in his 2003 memoir, “My Brother’s Keeper.”
In writing about his early years in a cooperative settlement called Kfar Shmaryahu, the Israeli-American sociologist and polymath provided the origin story for the big idea that made him famous: communitarianism.
When Etzioni died May 31 at age 94, the obituaries noted how he came to Israel as a young refugee from Nazi Germany and fought in Israel’s war for independence. But few noted his early life in Israel shaped his life’s work. Nor did they note how far Israel had come — for better and for worse — in the years since he lived on a kibbutz, battled as a Palmach commando and studied at the Hebrew University.
Communitarianism is a social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of society, as opposed to the individual, in articulating the good.”[W]hile individual rights surely matter, these rights must be balanced with commitments to the common good — for instance, by protecting the environment and public health,” Etzioni explained.
He also held that the various liberation movements of the 1960s went too far in undermining authority figures and what he called “the accepted standards of upright conduct.”
Because it proposed a “third way” between liberalism and conservatism, communitarianism was also embraced — and ridiculed — on both sides of the aisle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were fans. Some labeled George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” communitarian.
Etzioni left Israel in his mid-twenties for a teaching job at Columbia University. He opposed the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race, activism that propelled him beyond the academy and into the role as a “public intellectual.” He taught ethics for two years at the Harvard Business School before launching into a hybrid discipline he called “socio-economics.” Hired by the Carter administration in 1979 as a senior adviser, he joined the faculty at George Washington University, where he taught international affairs for more than 30 years.
The theories behind communitarianism weren’t new, but Etzioni’s articulation came to wide public attention on the eve of the Clinton presidency, when, according to one profile, it was “supposed to be the Big Idea of the ‘90s, the antidote to ‘Me Generation’ greed and the cure for America’s cynicism, alienation and despair.”
“We need an awakening of values, of caring and commitment,” Etzioni told an interviewer in 1992. “The Communitarians are saying this is possible; in fact, it is inevitable.”
“It was as if I were growing up in a high school of communitarian theory and practice,” wrote Etzioni about his youth spent on an agricultural cooperative in Israel. (Courtesy of Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi)
Although communitarianism never did live up to the hype, Etzioni became a reliable commentator and theorist in a host of fields and causes, including just war, bioethics, national security and privacy.
Although he occasionally wrote about Israel, his roots there were rarely front and center in his work or public image. In his memoir he notes that a lot of readers thought he was Italian. (“Amitai” comes from the Hebrew word for truth; he took “Etzioni” from a folk tale about a boy who learns to protect nature from a tree – “etz” in Hebrew.)
In his memoir, however, he delves deeply into his youth in Israel. “In those days, the country was quite different from what it has since become,” he writes. “[I]t was strongly imbued with the spirit of community (from which the term communitarian arises); most people were dedicated to serving the common good and to erecting a home for Jews escaping Nazi-dominated Europe. It was in that pre-Israel that I first knew the high that one gains when serving a cause greater than oneself.”
His parents were among the founders of the small farming community; a young Etzioni would attend co-op meetings with his father, where members would debate how cooperative they needed to be – a question, he writes, that was never settled.
“It was as if I were growing up in a high school of communitarian theory and practice,” wrote Etzioni.
He also discovered the limits of that practice after a year as a teen on Kibbutz Tel Joseph. He found the kibbutz “excessively communal,” with little tolerance for individuality or privacy. Communitarianism itself would often be attacked on the same grounds: Etzioni would later have a fierce antagonist in the American Civil Liberties Union, which felt some of his calls for limiting privacy and suspending individual rights in the name of the common good went too far.
Etzioni wrote movingly about watching friends die in the fighting for Israel’s independence. Although he never wavered in feeling the war was justified, he lamented that the Jews and Arabs might have avoided the bloodshed had they agreed to the two-state partition that, in 2003, he still felt was inevitable. Nor did he regret Israel’s founding: “The Jewish people require a homeland to protect them not merely from physical annihilation, but also from cultural devastation,” he wrote in 1999.
But perhaps the most fascinating influence on Etzioni’s thinking was the year he spent in a Jerusalem institute set up by Martin Buber, the Vienna-born social philosopher. The formidable faculty included Gershom Scholem on Kabbalah, Yeshayahu Leibowitz on biology and Nechama Leibowitz on Bible.
Etzioni imbibed Buber’s ideas about “I and Thou” relationships – the “unending struggle between the forces that pushed us to relate to other human beings as objects, as Its, rather than as fellow humans, as Thous.”
Etzioni would call this “moral dialogue,” as in his definition of democracy: “[O]ur conception of right and wrong are encountered through moral dialogues that are open and inclusive. It is a persuasive morality, not a coercive one.”
Etzioni’s memoir and his obituaries recall a more hopeful political climate, when right and left could briefly imagine common ground around the common good. They also recall a different Israel, before it largely embraced the free-market economics of the West and let go of many of its communitarian values.
In 2013 Etzioni wrote about his own seeming irrelevance – he called it his “gradual loss of a megaphone” — after his brief flurry of influence. He had no regrets, nor loss of confidence: “Until I am shown that my predictions or prescriptions are ill-founded, or not of service, I will try to get out what must be said. I’ll keep pulling at the oars, however small my boat, however big or choppy the sea.”
—
The post The Israeli origins of Amitai Etzioni’s big ideas about community appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Victory for Mamdani’s candidates prompts Jewish leaders to puzzle over implications
Jewish leaders across the political spectrum nationally were reeling — some in celebration, others suffering through elevated anxiety — after a trio of Congressional candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their primary contests Tuesday by taking out establishment favorites with track records of supporting Israel.
“We’re disappointed in the losses,” said Halie Soifer, chief of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, who argued that two of the losing incumbents, New York City Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, “represent the views of the vast majority of Jewish voters.”
But close observers of the outcomes, which also included the loss of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the contest for an open seat, were struggling to divine the broader meaning of the results.
Did the victories for progressive Brad Lander against Goldman, Claire Valdez against Reynoso and Darializa Avila Chevalier against Espaillat — after all three charged their opponents with enabling genocide by Israel against Palestinians — mark the end for Democratic politicians who hold traditional pro-Israel views?
Or did they represent something more narrow: New York City’s extremely liberal Democratic voting base flexing its muscle, Mamdani’s enduring popularity following his election last November or generalized anger toward a Democratic establishment that has been viewed by many of the party’s voters as too weak against President Donald Trump?
Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokesperson for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a local group that is closely aligned with Mamdani, called Tuesday’s results a “sweeping left victory” but acknowledged it was hard to extrapolate beyond New York City.
“Voters are absolutely not having it for establishment Democrats who refuse to stand up and fight fascism,” Ellman-Golan said .
Some more moderate candidates did score wins outside of New York City. State delegate Adrian Boafo won a crowded race to replace retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer in Maryland with the support of AIPAC and other pro-Israel Democrats.
And even in New York, not every election went to candidates who endorsed Mamdani’s brand of politics. In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s staunchest supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who threw his support to Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year but did not obtain Mamdani’s endorsement for Congress. Blake had repeatedly attacked Torres as purportedly beholden to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee but received just 22% of the vote to 72% for Torres.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — beat Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who promised to divest New York State from Israel Bonds and argued DiNapoli was helping to “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores both supported Israel.
“I don’t think it is transferable elsewhere in New York or throughout the country,” Soifer said, pointing to the power of the Democratic Socialists of America in the city. “While DSA candidates can win in some places, they cannot win everywhere.”
When it comes to Israel, the DSA’s case against establishment Democrats includes on the premise that funds the U.S. is spending on military aid to Israel should be spent on social programs to benefit working Americans. As Mamdani put it at Avila Chevalier’s primary night party, she ran a campaign that “called for a foreign policy of investing in babies and not bombs.”
With other key races still to be decided — including the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, where Israel has emerged as a major fault line — there is no sign that Israel is losing its potency in Democratic contests.
That has left some liberal Jews despairing.
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, released a statement decrying “the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity” and condemning politicians who “demonize supporters of Israel, or deny Israel’s right to exist.”
Some observers also sought to draw contrasts between Tuesday’s insurgent victors. Lander, for example, considers himself a liberal Zionist and has close ties to center-left Jewish organizations in New York City. He partnered with Mamdani during the mayoral race, and Mamdani encouraged him to challenge Goldman despite their differences over Israel.
Lander’s support for a two-state solution — meaning the preservation of a Jewish state in Israel, rather than its elimination in favor of a binational country — also earned him an endorsement from J Street and a warm reception from the New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal pro-Israel group that has expressed concern over Mamdani’s policy positions on Israel.
Margo Hughes-Robinson, director of NYJA, said she was celebrating Lander and Lasher’s victories as “wins for friends of the family.”
There was less cheering among Jewish establishment leaders for the victory of Avila Chevalier, who went from helping to lead the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University two years ago to likely representing the Congressional district that includes the campus.
Avila Chevalier was perhaps the most outspoken opponent of Israel in Tuesday’s races and has staked out positions to Mamdani’s left on the conflict. Avila Chevalier defended her decision to attend a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, which many Jewish leaders — and some outside the community, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — condemned for condoning Hamas violence. She has also called Zionism “an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
Tuesday’s contest also followed the victory of Janeese Lewis George, another candidate endorsed by the DSA, in the Democratic primary for Washington, D.C. mayor last week.
Ron Halber, chief of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said he thought the anti-Zionist left’s success would be relatively short-lived but acknowledged that Israel has an image problem and to fix that they needed to “rehabilitate their behavior.”
“People don’t like the product that pro-Israel Democrats are selling,” Halber said.
The post Victory for Mamdani’s candidates prompts Jewish leaders to puzzle over implications appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel’s cheerleaders lost big in the New York primary
To read the news Wednesday morning, the biggest loser in New York’s primary elections wasn’t a candidate in the race. It wasn’t even a person. It was Israel.
Three candidates who support ending or conditioning American military aid to Israel, all backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, won competitive primaries. The New York Times‘ assessment was blunt: “victories by pro-Palestinian Democrats show the party’s shift on Israel.” So was Politico‘s: “pro-Israel politics just took a huge hit in New York.” This very publication proclaimed the establishment of “a new political machine against Israel.”
Even outside those particularly charged races, the Israeli discourse was overwhelming. Micah Lasher, who won a crowded primary election to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th District, said during the campaign that he was “exhausted” by the focus on Israel.
Which makes it worth asking: Why did Israel become arguably the most prominent faultline in the Democratic primaries in the first place?
As the United States faces a cadre of alarming domestic issues — including the affordability (or lack thereof) of health insurance premiums, the future of abortion access and rising inflation — why should elections in New York be about Israel?
Foreign policy is an important issue for members of Congress, of course. And it’s not unreasonable that voters would want to know where candidates stand on, say, sending weapons to a country about whose wartime conduct many New Yorkers have grave concerns. But I think a lesson from this, which supporters of Israel may not want to learn, is that pro-Israel alarmism over progressive candidates has helped to boost those same candidates, rather than damage their chances.
In other words: the strategy of trying to write candidates out of viability by declaring them insufficiently supportive of Israel — or by suggesting that their positions on Israel mean they’re antisemitic, and shouldn’t hold elected office — hasn’t just not worked. It’s backfired disastrously, increasing the political salience of Israel in ways that hurt support for Israel in Congress.
Much of this is, I think, a downstream effect of last year’s election of Mamdani, during which hundreds of rabbis signed and circulated a letter declaring Mamdani’s politics — which center pro-Palestinian activism and skepticism about Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — a bridge too far. Mamdani’s campaign didn’t center Israel, at least at the start; it was actually about affordability. But the attention from pro-Israel groups and individuals increased the prominence of Israel in the election, so much so that by the time he won first the Democratic primary and then the general election, his victory was seen as being as much about Israel as much as it was affordability.
The same has become true of his endorsed candidates, too.
It’s not of course, that Israel was only important or prominent in these elections because of pro-Israel groups and individuals. There are political activists across the spectrum, including many in the progressive camp, to whom it is indeed the most important issue on the ballot. The same is true for voters. And multiple candidates, including Darializa Avila Chevalier and former Comptroller Brad Lander, were proactive about making their criticism of Israel a key point of their campaigns.
Still, we’re seeing an inversion of the longstanding norms by which staunch supporters of Israel have drawn a line beyond which someone’s politics on the Middle East make them unelectable. Such charges arguably played a role in Keith Ellison’s 2017 defeat in the race to be chair of the Democratic National Committee. As recently as 2022, the story of Andy Levin’s defeat in Michigan was that he, a J Street-aligned Democrat, had been bested by AIPAC.
For some of this week’s losing candidates and their supporters, that playbook backfired in real time.
Three weeks ago, the group Combat Antisemitism dinged Avila Chevalier for attending, in their words, an “October 8 rally celebrating Hamas massacre.” Avila Chevalier’s opponents made her attendance at that rally a talking point against her, which meant that just as her contest ended up being largely about Israel and antisemitism, her victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat did, too.
Rep. Dan Goldman accused Lander, who is also Jewish, of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” in the election. Lander — who said he felt “queasy” in talking about AIPAC, given the reality that there are antisemitic tropes about the group, but still attacked Goldman for his affiliation with them — won in a landslide.
If the Mamdani-backed candidates had lost, it would have been seen as a confirmation that Mamdani was an aberration, and that the old protocol of demanding at least moderate support for Israel from candidates for office in the most Jewish city in the country was still applicable. Instead, their victories seem like confirmation of a new era in Democratic politics when it comes to Israel — potentially not just for New York City, but also for the whole country.
There are good reasons to wonder how widespread that change might be. The AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project, for instance, spent $5.7 million on supporting Adrian Boafo in a Maryland House race, albeit by pouring money into races via ads that didn’t focus on Israel. Boafo, who called for closer ties between Israel and the U.S., won his primary.
But when we consider why, exactly, Israel took up so much space in this week’s primary elections, part of the answer has to be that it was in part because strong supporters of Israel wanted it that way. That things have worked out differently than they might have hoped is a lesson not only about Israel and New Yorkers, but about democratic politics: you can force voters to think about something, but you can’t actually force them to think what you want.
The post Israel’s cheerleaders lost big in the New York primary appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon
Yesterday, Paris experienced two record-breaking events. The first was that the city’s temperature hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower and Louvre to close early. The second occurred at the Panthéon, which remained open to welcome the coffin of Marc Bloch, the first historian to enter this hallowed site.
The event was literally momentous. The massive 18th century structure, dedicated as the Church of Saint Geneviève, was rebranded by French revolutionaries in 1791 as the Panthéon, the monument for those “grands hommes” who devoted their lives to the French Republic. But in a time of relentless racist and antisemitic rhetoric, it was symbolically momentous, as well.
Bloch was born into a French Jewish family that chose to leave Strasbourg for Paris when Germany annexed their native Alsace in 1871. An adolescent during the Dreyfus Affair, Bloch interrupted a promising academic career in 1914, volunteering to serve in World War I. He spent four years in the infantry, then served as an intelligence officer; by war’s end, he had earned two wounds as well as four citations for bravery along with France’s most prestigious medal, the Croix de guerre.
Between the two world wars, Bloch and his friend Lucien Febvre founded Annales d’histoire et économique, a history journal that revolutionized the practice of history, turning away from the focus on great figures and events and towards the mundane and material lives of peoples. Bloch developed the influential, though elusive notion of mentalités: the term he gave to the intellectual and emotional structures that, no less certainly than was the case with material factors, shaped how past generations experienced their world. This theme informed his early book, Les Rois thaumaturges, or The Royal Touch, which examined the relationship between the myth of the king’s healing touch and the powers he was thought to embody.
The persistence of this myth was revealed in the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat of France in 1940 and the nearly divine prestige bestowed on the nation’s new leader Philippe Pétain. The elderly hero of Verdun led a collaborationist regime whose first order of business was to pass a salvo of antisemitic legislation in late 1940 that stripped French Jews of their legal and civil rights. These laws forced Bloch out of his teaching position at the Sorbonne, despite the fact that, though 54 years old, hobbled by arthritis and father of six children, he insisted on rejoining the army in 1938.
Forced to abandon the family apartment in Paris, along with his library of 5,000 books, Bloch and his wife Simonne settled in the southern “Free Zone.” Stripped of his post, he nevertheless continued to practice the metier of historian. But he turned his critical gaze to the present rather than the past, holding fast to his claim—one as relevant now as then — that “when a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bound in honesty, I think, to attack it.”
The result was L’Étrange Défaite, or Strange Defeat, a searing account of how France’s military and political leaders managed to lose this war in a matter of weeks. Written in what Bloch described as a “white heat of rage,” he applied the same approach to these events as he did to those in medieval France, one “concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract.” The principal reason for the debacle, he wrote, was that while the German strategists were fighting the present war, their French counterparts were fighting the last one. With poetic insight, Bloch observed that “thoughts of the last war clung to them because they were the thoughts of their youth. Those days long past had all the brilliance of things seen.”
By 1942, Bloch had come to see that, as a French patriot, he was duty-bound, despite his age, to join the Resistance where he assumed code names ranging from the majestic Narbonne to the mundane Monsieur Blanchard. His good fortune lasted nearly two years when, in the late spring of 1944, he was captured in Lyon, then imprisoned and tortured in its notorious prison Mount Luc. On June 16, he was taken in a truck with two dozen other résistants to an empty field outside the city and summarily shot to death. His buried remains were discovered shortly after the war, as was the manuscript for Strange Defeat.
Inevitably and rightfully, Strange Defeat provided much of the script for the evening ceremony at the Panthéon, which somehow managed to be both severe and stylish. Actors read passages from the book while military guards carried Marc and his wife Simonne’s empty caskets . (Bloch’s family did not want his remains to be removed from the cemetery where he is buried, while Simonne’s remains were never found.) Tellingly, when the caskets were set down inside the vast hall of the monument, an army officer recited, according to Bloch’s wishes, the several military citations for bravery he had received.
In his address, given while standing in front of a column which carried Bloch’s epitaph— dilexit veritatem (“He loved the truth”) — President Emmanuel Macron underscored the tragic relevance of the historian’s life to our own era. Referring to recent efforts made by figures on the extreme rightwing to reclaim Bloch as one of their own, Macron warned against “those who declare themselves more French than you…and yet are always the first to sell out France to hostile powers.” (Among the conditions Bloch’s descendants insisted upon was that representatives from the extreme-rightwing National Rally party could not attend the ceremony.)
But the words written by Bloch, in the introduction to Strange Defeat, are the most powerful evocation of who he was and what he represents. “By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian. I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity.” “I try never to stress my heredity save when I find myself in the presence of an antisemite.” Bloch concludes, simply and beautifully, “I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.”
In the other book he wrote during this period, The Historian’s Craft, Bloch quotes one of his sons who, when still a child, asked him what historians do. (The good historian, Bloch writes, “is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”)
As Bloch would have wished, he will always stand as an exemplar of what, in fact, historians do. And in the life he lived and values he died for, Marc Bloch will always stand as a reminder of what true patriots do.
The post Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon appeared first on The Forward.
