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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
After the Passover massacre, American Jews have rejected their proud tradition of universalism and embraced its opposite: tribalism.
Apr 16, 2002 | In the days after a Palestinian suicide bomber slew 28 Israelis at a Passover Seder, as the Israeli army besieged Yasser Arafat in Ramallah, a young man named Adam Shapiro found himself trapped there, too, while tending to the chairman's wounded bodyguards through a humanitarian aid group. The spectacle of an American Jew keeping wartime company with the Palestinian Authority leader brought denunciations of Shapiro as a traitor, an enemy, a veritable John Walker Lindh. His parents in Brooklyn received so many death threats they went into hiding.
Yet Shapiro in many ways embodied one of the most durable and admirable traits in the American Jewish character: universalism. His mother and father were New York teachers, part of the grand tradition of American Jewish commitment to public education. In an interview with the Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper, Shapiro traced his commitment to the Palestinian cause to his studies of the Holocaust, with a protest against the Rwandan genocide a stop along the way.
The universalistic tradition in American Jewish life goes back to Western Europe, to the intellectual daring of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, the artistic adventures of Weimar Germany, the radical social experiments of "Red Vienna." Driven out of Europe by the Nazis, it manifested itself on American soil through labor unions, the civil rights crusade, the antiwar movement and, most recently, the peace process set into motion by the Oslo Accord in 1993.
But now, for a great many American Jews, all that universalism looks unspeakably naive, a luxury unsuited for a lethal world. Adam Shapiro appears less a traitor than a "freier," a Hebrew word for Israel's ultimate insult: a sucker. Almost two years after Yasser Arafat spurned Ehud Barak's peace offer at Camp David, 18 months after the Palestinians resumed armed struggle, many American Jews have reluctantly embraced universalism's opposite: tribalism.
Tribalism is the part of Jewish consciousness forged by two millennia of exile and persecution, by blood libel and inquisition and holocaust. It is the part that cannot quite bring itself to trust even the unparalleled acceptance and social mobility Jews have enjoyed in the United States. And precisely because tribalism's fears have borne so little resemblance to the American reality -- three dozen Jews in Congress, rampant intermarriage, "The Producers," the greatest hit in Broadway history -- it had steadily waned in postwar decades. Or it had until the Seder in Netanya.
The Passover massacre accomplished what no other atrocity of the intifada did. It brought into the streets a massive number of Jews from across denominational and ideological spectra, from die-hard believers in the messianic nationalism of Greater Israel to supporters of the Israeli reservists who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. The public outcry that has followed, in turn, reflected the private soul-searching of countless individuals, especially those who had put their faith in the peace process.
"During the Oslo period, universalism asserted itself and there was a flowering of progressive sentiment," says Kenneth D. Wald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies the political behavior of American Jewry. "But the al-Aksa intifada restored the tribal sense and the recent bombing intensified it beyond levels seen since the Six-Day War." "Indeed," says Wald, "I'm struck at how tribal I feel these days."
The transformation of American Jewish opinion has outpaced the ability of pollsters to record it. The most recent surveys, primarily from 2001, indicate that while a majority of American Jews still favor a negotiated settlement, their acceptance of Arafat as a partner has fallen dramatically. Melvin Allerhand, a psychologist in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who has worked extensively in Israel and the United States on Arab-Jewish reconciliation, put the change in clinical terms: "When a crisis comes, people turn to extremes. For an American Jew, that means in this case becoming more tribalistic, less universalistic. From having reviled Sharon to supporting Sharon. Where previously the view was to keep talking, not to use bullets, now the discussion is, Yes, we know we have to do something to stop it.' The only question is how far you go."
