From the Swamp, A Truth

For years now, it has been fashionable among thoughtful observers of the American political scene to pair every statement opposing anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish prejudice with the proviso that being hostile to some specific policy or policies of the State of Israel does not ipso facto qualify the holder of such an opinion as an anti-Semite. This has become so normal that most of us who listen carefully whenever non-Jews speak about anti-Semitism hardly even register the comment. And, of course, there really are people out there who merely oppose this or that policy adopted or pursued by one or another Israeli government without being motivated by some deeply rooted hatred of Jews but. I myself am in that category: don’t I personally oppose certain specific Israeli policies, and specifically when they are inimical with the kind of freedom of religion we Americans enjoy and but of which Israelis can only dream?

But then there are those who are specifically not opposed to some single policy of some specific Israeli government, but who are opposed to the State of Israel existing at all. In some circles, it is considered possible—at least in some extended theoretical way—to argue that such people too are not really motivated by anti-Semitism, that they are merely proposing an alternate political agenda for the Middle East: one that does not include a Jewish state at all. But within the Jewish world we know better, or at least most of us do. In that regard, I was very impressed by an essay published in the new journal Sapir just this last spring by Ammiel Hirsch, the rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. Rabbi Hirsch is an interesting personality: an ordainee of the Hebrew Union College in New York, but also a member of the New York State Bar with a law degree from the London School of Economics and a former tank commander in the IDF. His prose is both articulate and intelligent. And his essay of last spring, “Judaism and Zionism are Inseparable,” made a strong impression on me. He didn’t really make any arguments that were unfamiliar to me. Nor did he adduce any sources I hadn’t previous read. But what he did do was say clearly and forcefully something I have been saying a bit less clearly and forcefully from the bimah for years: that rejecting the right of Jewish people to exist politically as well as spiritually is tantamount to denying Jews the right to exist at all and that there is no more precise definition of anti-Semitism that that. (To read Rabbi Hirsch’s essay, click here.)

And now I see that the most rabid anti-Israelists have come around to agreeing with Rabbi Hirsch. I am referring to the Mapping Project, undertaken by radical anti-Israel activists in Massachusetts and endorsed by BDS Boston, which last week published a map of 482 organizations that, in the opinion of its members, deserve to be “disrupted” and eventually “dismantled” because of their pro-Israel policies and politics. But only some of these organizations have anything specifically to do with Israel. And, so, on the list are local police departments, the offices of both of Massachusetts’ senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, the offices of the Boston Globe…and, in the words of the Boston Jewish Community Council, “virtually every Jewish organization in the Commonwealth, along with its leadership.” In other words, the far-left organizers of this undertaking—who were not quite so brave as to publish own names alongside their work—have come around to agreeing with Ammiel Hirsch that even if thinking Jews and Judaism have a right to exist and thinking that the State of Israel has a right to exist are not precisely the same thing, theirs is a distinction without a difference. And that being viscerally opposed to the existence of Israel should lead naturally to embracing anti-Semitism, and precisely because, in the end, there is no such thing as Judaism that doesn’t have Zionism—the belief in the right of the Jewish people to exist in its own homeland as an independent political entity—as one of its constituent elements. The lunatic fringe on the right—visible to most New York Jews only as a vile side-show at the Israel Parade each spring—joins the less-radical left in rejecting Rabbi Hirsch’s argument. But those of us who occupy the large middle ground between the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum understand that the Mapping Project—for all its horrifically vituperative rhetoric—has correctly seized a basic truth: that there simply is no possibility of being a faithful Jewish person without feeling a deep and ineradicable connection to the Land of Israel and, in modern times, to the State of Israel.

Nor is this “just” about attitudes and opinions. An essay by Gilead Ini published on the CAMERA website a few days ago noted that “the BDS activists behind the map appear to encourage violence against those on the list—including Jewish students, artists, worshipers, and philanthropists, and the organizations they support. (The organizations the appear on the map include such innocuous ones the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston, the Jewish Arts Collaborative, and the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts.) ‘These entities [i.e., those organizations, including synagogues] exist in the physical world and can be disrupted in the physical world,’ the Mapping Project asserts and specifies that its members “hope people will use our map to help figure out how to push back effectively.’” Nor is the specific way the Mapping people hope to push back effectively left unspecified: the project’s website says specifically that its “goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them….Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.” Also listed, by the way, are the names of the individuals in leadership positions in those institutions and organizations.

And so we see the extreme anti-Israelists among us crossing the line from merely opposing this or that Israeli policy to declaring war on Jews in general. And yet, for all I find their threats unnerving and beyond distressing, I think that their basic assumption—that to be a Jew other than in name only means to stand with Israel—is correct.

The question that remains is how the Jewish community will respond. To wave these people away as crazy haters who will eventually drown in the swill of their own poison rhetoric will not sound like a rational response to anyone familiar with the history of Germany Jewry in the 1930s. But what should our response be? All sorts of politicians have issued condemnatory statements—including Representatives Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Ayanna Presley (D-Mass.), Richie Torre (D-New York), Jerry Nadler (D-New York), and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), as well as Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy. So that’s comforting. A little. But the real question is not how many politicians are willing to condemn this kind of Nazi-style targeting of any and all Jewish institutions first for “disruption” and then for “dismantling,” but what exactly can be done to eliminate this kind of violent extremism from developing from threat to reality. To begin, we should ask each of the politicians who issued strongly condemnatory statements what they actually plan to do to make Jewish institutions and Jewish people safe. Words, after all, are cheap. And what American politician wasn’t on record opposing Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s with words?

Return to Munich?

 I spent the week leading up to Shavuot reading Robert Harris’s excellent novel, Munich, which I enjoyed very much and somehow hadn’t gotten to until now. (I usually read books made into movies before seeing the film, but made the mistake this time of reversing the order. The movie, starring Jeremy Irons, George McKay, and Jannis Niewöhner, was good enough—but I found the book to be far more compelling.) Nor was this an unusual choice for me: I’ve been a huge fan of Harris since his 1992 breakout bestseller, Fatherland, and have read all of his books published since then. I especially liked his “Cicero” trilogy (the books were published in the U.S. as Imperium, Conspirata, and Dictator), which books were and are the best and most exciting lawyer-novels I’ve read. But Harris’ several books that are set against the background of events leading up to or taking place during the Second World War (Fatherland, Enigma, Munich, and V-2) are in a class by themselves. I recommend them all.

I was drawn to read Munich specifically because of the parallel I am seeing increasingly clearly between the situation facing the world in 1938, when the Germans were about to go to war for the sole purpose of seizing the territory of a country—in this case Czechoslovakia—that it felt had no “real” right to exist, and the one facing us now in 2022, as Russia pursues a war of ruthless brutality against a neighboring country regarding which its leader feels similarly. Nor are those the only parallels: the fact that a serious portion of the Czechoslovak population in the region called the Sudetenland was made up of ethnic Germans who spoken German as their native tongue and who regarded Germany as their homeland gave Hitler the fig leaf he at that point still felt he needed to justify invasion as liberation, not at all unlike the way that Vladimir Putin has attempted to justify his invasion of Ukraine with reference to the 17.5% of the Ukrainian population that self-defines as ethnically Russian.

The world remembers Neville Chamberlain, British P.M. from 1937 to 1940, as the quintessential appeaser, as the man who famously signed over the territory of someone else’s country to the Germans for the sake of preserving “peace in our time,” words that have come to have—to say the very least—a hollow ring when spoken against the background of what was yet to come. (The Munich Conference of 1938 took place precisely so that France and the U.K. could feel good—or, at least, less bad—about stepping back from their unambiguous commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia so that the Germans wouldn’t need to start an actual war to seize the territory they wished to acquire.) The point of Harris’s novel is to provide some shading for that portrait of Chamberlain as a gun-shy coward who was prepared to do anything at all to keep Hitler from going to war, much less as a fool who lacked the insight to see through Hitler’s phony assurances that the transfer of the Sudetenland to German control constituted the sole territorial adjustment that Germany wished to make to the map of Europe.

The ”real” issue, Harris suggests, was the fact that there was no way imaginable that Britain could have won if war had broken out in 1938—at which time the Royal Air Force  had exactly twenty fighter planes “with working guns” to protect the entire nation—and that behind Chamberlain’s endlessly mocked decision to hand over a serous chunk of someone else’s to Germany was his need to stall for time so that Britain could be far more ready to fight before war actually did break out. And, indeed, it seems quite correct that the outcome of the Battle of Britain was as it was precisely because it began in the summer of 1940 instead of in 1938. When a nation is motivated by the almost certain knowledge that it is about to face a ruthless foe in all-out war, two years can be a long time!

I have been drawn to reading about Munich lately because I see a certain level of Ukraine-fatigue setting into our national approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No longer a front-page issue unless a significant number of civilians are killed, the war has settled into our national consciousness as a bad thing happening to someone else’s country by an aggressor nation we hold no sympathy for…but who we also have zero interest in actually going to war against.

Nor am I intuiting this based on my own survey of the news: President Biden published an essay in the Times just last week in which he made that precise point unambiguously and plainly. The President started off by explaining that our goal in Ukraine is straightforward and clear: our nation wants, he wrote, “to see a democratic, independent, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.” And then he went on to opine that, in his opinion, only a diplomatic solution will serve truly to end the conflict. Nor did the President look away from the fact that the Russians do not seem eager or even slightly inclined to resolve the conflict peacefully. Indeed, our commitment to continue to provide the Ukrainians with the kind of arms and rocket systems they will need to keep the Russians from winning the war is rooted, he wrote clearly, in the assumption that those negotiations will come about precisely when the Russians finally realize they have embarked on a war they simply cannot win.

And then the President got to his real point. “So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked,” he wrote unambiguously, “we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces. We are not enabling or encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia.” So that was clear enough and the President’s principles were no less transparent. We want the Ukrainians to win. We will provide them with billions of dollars’ worth of arms. We will stand by them diplomatically and emotionally. But we will not enter this war. In other words, we’ll do what we can—but if the Ukrainians lose, they will have to live with the consequences of their own defeat. (To read the President’s essay in full, click here.)

Is Joe Biden our Neville Chamberlain? Or, to ask the same question in different words: is our decision to support Ukraine with money and guns but ultimately to leave the Ukrainians to their fate the moral equivalent of the decision of the French and British more than eighty years ago to denounce the German threat to invade Czechoslovakia but ultimately to leave the Czechs and Slovaks to theirs? The parallel is not exact. The Brits and the French specifically did not send massive amounts of money and arms to Czechoslovakia. The Germans specifically hadn’t invaded and were only threatening to—and the Munich Agreement actually did result in a peaceful transfer of territory without simultaneously plunging the world into war. But it also gave the Germans another year to prepare their offense and to stockpile their weapons so that when, a year later, Germany unilaterally invaded Poland (and without first asking the permission of the U.K. or France), their success in crushing the Poles was more or less guaranteed. Where things went from there, we all know—so the real question, the one that matters, is what would have happened if the Munich Conference had never taken place, if Germany launched a military invasion of Czechoslovakia, and if the U.K. and France had gone to war forcefully and aggressively in 1938. Would Germany have been defeated? Would the rest, including the Shoah, never have happened? If the French and the Brits had honored their commitment to Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity, would events have quickly led to regime change in Berlin? Would the U.S. have joined such a principled, just war against a ruthless aggressor state…or would FDR still have dithered until the Japanese finally forced our hand?

These are tantalizing questions that have no answers. Czechoslovakia’s so-called allies declined to honor their commitments and allowed themselves to feel good about betraying an ally by telling themselves that Hitler probably meant it when he insisted that his troops would only cross the border into another country this one single time. Putin too has indicated that he has no plan to occupy the countries of the former Soviet Union one by one, much less that he hopes to paste back together the old USSR and recast it as a new Russian Empire. Nor, of course, does the fact that Hitler betrayed his own pledge necessarily imply that Putin will. In the best-case scenario, Ukraine wins. In the second-best-case scenario, Ukraine loses and Putin honors his commitment to attack no other nations. Well worth noting is that no nation of the former Soviet Union is a member of NATO, so all Putin really has to do to avoid a World War with the West is to keep his hands off of Finland and Sweden, supposing they manage to join NATO. If the West wouldn’t intervene to save Ukraine, why would anyone expect it to intervene to save Latvia or Moldova? I suppose we all know the answer to that question. And so, of course, does Vladimir Putin.

Looking back, there are lessons to be learned. Of them, the simplest are that buying bullies off rarely works in the long run, that peace and appeasement are similar concepts only etymologically and not at all politically, and that fantasizing that giving in to a bully’s demands will somehow discourage that bully from making even more demands is folly. For the moment, the Ukrainians appear to be holding their own. But time is on the Russians’ side—and in a very big way. So the real question is what we will do if the tide turns dramatically and a Ukrainian defeat seems imminent. That is the question to which we, the people, should be demanding an answer and which the President specifically failed to address in his op-ed piece. We should be demanding the answer to that question now, long before we have actually come to that crossroads and have to make a game-time decision which path to take forward.

 

Memorial Day 2022

Memorial Day has undergone several serious changes since I was a boy. For one thing, it had a different name: when I was growing up, the holiday was mostly called Decoration Day. (The idea was that people went to the graves of soldiers who died in the course of our nation’s wars and decorated them with flowers and other kinds of suitable symbols.) And it had a fixed date, too: Decoration Day was May 30 from Civil War times up until 1970 when Congress voted both formally to change the name to Memorial Day and to fix its annual occurrence on the last Monday of May regardless of that day’s actual date.

But the single biggest shift has been the slow move away from seeing the day as a somber day on which to acknowledge the more than 1.3 million Americans who have died in in the service of our country by visiting their graves or by otherwise acknowledging their supreme sacrifice to one mostly celebrated, to extent it is celebrated at all, as a day for giant blow-out sales and as the unofficial first day of summer. Is that fair to say? It feels like that to me: each year the President participates in a somber wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington and the rest of everybody goes to the beach.

Where that strange ambivalence comes from, who can say? To some extent it has to do with the pride earlier generations took in the bravery displayed by the men and women of our Armed Forces in the Spanish-American War, in World Wars I and II, and in Korea, and the confused set of emotions that inheres even today in the legacy of Vietnam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor has the legacy of the Civil War been a simple one to negotiate: to expect the citizens of our Southern states to mourn the loss of those soldiers who died defending the integrity of the Union but not the scores of thousands of Confederate soldiers from their own states who died in their leaders’ vain effort to dismember the Union and to tear it asunder by force—that seems like a battle best not fought at all. Nor is this in any sense not a competition: for years, April 26 was observed across the South as Confederate Memorial Day for years and the practice has never fully died out—Confederate Memorial Day is still a holiday in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama—nor is it rooted in sentiments that have fully and completely died out (to which fact the ongoing kerfuffle over statues memorializing Confederate leaders and soldiers unambiguously testifies).

So we Americans bring a mixed bag of emotions to the table as we arrive at Memorial Day each year. Still, you would think there could be a way to move past the politics and to grieve nationally for the well more than a million young men and women who died in our nation’s service without becoming inextricably tangled up in extraneous details. Yes, you are allowed to think our incursion into Iraq was foolish and ill-conceived. And you are certainly allowed think—as I certainly do—that the soldiers who fought to dismantle the Union during the 1860s were, to say the very least, misguided in their zeal. I have my own complex set of emotions about Vietnam. (I would have more or less definitely been drafted in February of 1972 if Congress hadn’t voted to end the draft at the end of January of that year.) But the challenge of Memorial Day should not be decisively to resolve all these complicated issues, but rather to encourage the citizenry to set them aside and to think instead of the endless thousands of young people whose lives were cut short because of their willingness to take the ultimate risk in the service of their—our—nation. Focusing on the circumstances of their deaths would be, in this specific context, both pointless and counterproductive. Our nation has grown to its position of stature and power in the world because of those who served and serve. And if honoring those whose lives were cut short requires looking past politics to honor virtues like courage, patriotism, selflessness, and virtue, then so be it.

In 1882, the most celebrated and beloved of our national poets was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He led a remarkable life too, one I enjoyed reading in detail about in Charles C. Calhoun’s book, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, which I came across a few years ago and recommend to all. He spent his life teaching first at Bowdoin College in Maine (where he had himself earlier on gone to school and been classmates with Nathaniel Hawthorne and future president Franklin Pierce) and at Harvard. And he was incredibly productive, producing in the course of his lifetime some sixteen volumes of poetry, countless translations (including the first American translation of Dante), as well as many novels and plays.

At the very end of his life, shortly before his death in March of 1882, Longfellow wrote one of his last poems, “Decoration Day.” Was he was prompted by some preternatural sense that he wouldn’t live until the end of May and so needed to write his poem while he still could? No one can say, but he did write his poem and he finished it too, then sent it into The Atlantic, a magazine he had earlier on helped to found, where it was published in the June issue of that year. More than any other work I know, Longfellow expresses exactly the twin sentiments I was describing above: that sense that people who die in their nation’s service deserve to be honored for their readiness and willingness to serve, and that the political climate that led to the war or to the conflict that led to the battle that led to that person’s death need not be part of the story at all. He ignores all that, not even deigning to nod in that direction. Instead, he addresses the young dead lying in their earthen graves and tells them that their service is complete and their task done, and that they have earned the right to rest in peace.

And so, in honor of Memorial Day this year I would like to offer to you Longfellow’s great poem, “Decoration Day.”

Decoration Day

by

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest

On this Field of the Grounded Arms,

Where foes no more molest,

Nor sentry’s shot alarms.

Ye have slept on the ground before,

And started to your feet

At the cannon’s sudden roar,

Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death

No sound your slumber breaks;

Here is no fevered breath,

No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,

Untrampled lies the sod;

The shouts of battle cease,

It is the truce of God.

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!

The thoughts of men shall be

As sentinels to keep

Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green

We deck with fragrant flowers

Yours has the suffering been,

The memory shall be ours.