To the Editor:
Most of Nathan Glazer’s article, “The Exposed American Jew” [June], struck me as exactly right in tone and substance. But his usual sensitivity to ambiguity and complexity is strangely absent in his discussion of affirmative action.
From reading Mr. Glazer’s remarks on affirmative action one would think that there is nothing wrong with American society that putting HEW out of business wouldn’t cure. Michael Walzer has written that “benign quotas” can be opposed without guilt and anxiety only by one who believes American society to be fundamentally just, with almost all of our citizens having what they deserve. To reiterate a point made by Michael Harrington, Lyndon Johnson, and others a few years ago which now appears to be forgotten by the great majority of those who used to care about it, there are still millions of Americans living poverty-stricken and wretched lives in the richest nation in the history of the world. Affirmative action represents one attempt (perhaps misguided) to remedy that. Jewish Americans are burdened by affirmative-action programs not because they are Jewish but because they are deemed not to fall within the category of a disadvantaged group. This may be of scant consolation to an illegitimately deprived Jewish individual. But it might be some consolation to him (or at least to the social scientist analyzing his plight) to know that he is no worse off than his Wasp or Irish compatriot. The whole subject is a vexed one. Perhaps any legal classification in terms of ethnic group membership is so potentially dangerous to individual rights as to be wrong at any time. That would seem to be Mr. Glazer’s view. I just wish it were more of a problem for him.
Affirmative-action programs seem especially menacing to those who cherish the ideal of an ethnically blind legal system because of the obsessive attention they pay to ethnic group identity. But Mr. Glazer’s argument can be used against almost any liberal social measure which seeks to reduce the gap between the wealthy and the poor. Presumably a more progressive income tax than the one we presently have would tax many Jewish Americans (and other wealthier-than-average citizens) at somewhat higher levels than they presently are taxed., Mr. Glazer’s doctrine of the importance of effects might lead to a position which would be opposed to a more progressive tax for this reason.
The crux of the dispute between us can be stated simply. I believe we have a moral obligation to try and help the disadvantaged, even at the cost of some limited harm to others who are deserving. Mr. Glazer does not.
Peter Connolly
West Hartford, Connecticut
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To the Editor:
Like almost everything that Nathan Glazer writes, “The Exposed American Jew” is informed, intelligent, and stimulating. . . . I agree with most of his points, and he offers his unhappy predictions so tentatively that I am not inclined to criticize them. My comment is restricted to one small but important point.
A substantial educational task is required, Mr. Glazer writes, and I suggest that one way to begin is to abandon the Left-Right dichotomy as a framework for political analysis. When this is related to narrowly economic issues, it can still have a limited relevance to the present complex world. But, more typically, when the issues are partly or wholly social, cultural, or political, then the notion that Good and Evil are divided so simply is misleading.
The “right-wing backlash” that Mr. Glazer and many others expected never developed. Later Mr. Glazer identifies the “right wing” as the present survivals, if any, of such past movements as the Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan. But by the ordinary understanding of the designation it would certainly include also, say, William Buckley, whose position on Israel has been strongly and consistently in line with Mr. Glazer’s argument. Indeed, it would include Nathan Glazer himself, with his blatant support of American democracy and his blunt denunciations of Communist tyranny.
And on the other side Mr. Glazer finds it “startling” that such liberal organs as the New York Times fail to make the—to him—crucial distinction between the open, democratic society of Israel and the authoritarian regimes of the Arab states. How long, O Lord, shall the Times retain its undeserved reputation as the defender of democracy? From the early 1930’s on, this paper has presented the Soviet Union, including all of its Stalinist elements, in the most favorable light that the facts known in the West permitted. Before most Americans knew of Castro’s existence, the Times correspondent was picturing him as a bearded hero. The reporting from Vietnam consistently followed the line that the South was corrupt and undemocratic and the North represented the true will of the people. The Times is opposed to authoritarian regimes only if they are allied to the United States; for at least two generations all the news that is fit to print about those in the Communist camp has been prettied up. With Israel linked implacably to the United States and therefore defined as a local agent of Western imperialism, and with the Arab states more or less associated with Soviet maneuvers in the area, it was inevitable that the general orientation of liberal news media would overcome the reluctance of American Jews to condemn Israel.
Even so, liberals remain highly vulnerable to a charge of anti-Semitism. In the situation that Mr. Glazer analyzes, the main enemy is neither the Wallace movement (though I agree that it bears watching) nor such aberrant types as Noam Chomsky. It is the typical liberal, as represented in the news media, that Mr. Glazer cites. One wonders what the reaction would be if the Anti-Defamation League joined the tiny, but extraordinarily effective, Accuracy in Media in calling to the public’s attention each time James Reston and his confreres strayed from demonstrable fact on matters pertaining to the Near East and American Jews. Nothing, I suggest, would be more effective in taking the bite out of Mr. Glazer’s forecasts about the exposed American Jew.
William Petersen
Department of Sociology
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
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To the Editor:
Yes, the American Jew is “exposed,” but hardly in the ways discussed in Nathan Glazer’s superficial and wrongheaded essay. Let me discuss some of Mr. Glazer’s threats. . . .
What Mr. Glazer euphemistically calls “the new ethnic awareness” may just as easily be seen as a boon, not a threat, to American-Jewish survival. Consider the growth of Jewish studies, of which Robert Alter has eloquently written in these pages [“What Jewish Studies Can Do,” October 1974], the phenomenon of the Jackson Amendment, and the continued public support for American military aid to Israel, as documented recently by Louis Harris in the New York Times Magazine, as well as by the Javits-Schweiker-Bayh letter in support of military and economic aid to Israel, which was signed by 73 other Senators just before President Ford’s meeting with President Sadat in Salzburg this past June.
Mr. Glazer mentions other prominent ethnic minorities—the Lebanese, Chinese, and Armenians among others—but adds that these groups are small, none consisting of more than a few hundred thousand people, whereas there are six million American Jews and they form significant concentrations in key professions and sectors of society. While the position of any ethnic minority in this country is potentially vulnerable, what exactly is it that makes the Jews particularly vulnerable? One can deduce that the Jews’ very size—their disproportionate political influence—makes them less, not more, “exposed” than other groups (“exposed” here meaning vulnerable). And to the truism that “Jews have played a distinctive role as a target for hostility in Western society” must be added the qualification of the distinctive political and social tradition of the United States, where, while there has certainly been an ongoing tradition of anti-Semitism, such anti-Semitism per se has never comprised a mass movement able to achieve national political power; and the terrible legacy of the Holocaust, which should give and has given Jews a powerful, visceral incentive for group strength.
Finally, given Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Buber, Trotsky, Ben-Gurion, and countless others, I am astonished by Mr. Glazer’s unequivocal claim that “There are good reasons why Jews throughout their history in Western Christendom have preferred to avoid attention.”
On Israel: is the whole question of the American Jew’s relation to Israel really reducible to support for a “pariah state” whose people are threatened by “massacre”? At a time when the debate on Israeli foreign policy within Israel itself is at a vastly more sophisticated level (see Alan Dowty, “Israel’s Palestinian Policy,” Midstream, April 1975), and when Israel, according to a recent report on the CBS Evening News, has the capacity to produce atomic bombs, I am most disappointed by Mr. Glazer’s simplistic approach.
I agree with Mr. Glazer that the American Jew should help support Israel’s struggle for security and peace, but I disagree with his implicit assumption that he or she should do so uncritically, merely “shelling out” his or her $167 more than is contributed now, and lobbying for more American arms. Is additional military aid really the only way to achieve security at last for Israel? Is Mr. Glazer, as an American Jew, entirely satisfied with Israel’s policy thus far toward the “occupied territories,” the Palestinians, and the Arabs?
I am also aghast at Mr. Glazer’s statement that Israel was established “to make Jews like everyone else.” The creation of the Jewish state may have been to give the Jews an autonomous territorial and political entity like “everyone else,” but that is hardly the same thing as making “Jews like everyone else,” as even a cursory reading of the Israeli Declaration of Independence reveals.
Also, in speculating about the mass-media attitude toward Israel, Mr. Glazer refers to a few articles from one newspaper and one periodical—the New York Times and Time, respectively. He errs in not offering us conclusions drawn from a methodical study based on a scientific sampling, or even a more thorough impressionistic sampling of the mass media. Even the Op-Ed page of the Times, to which he refers, has offered strong support for Israel from Elie Wiesel, Abba Eban, and others.
Most importantly, Mr. Glazer states that “the only lasting basis for United States support of Israel” is “that the United States is committed to the independence of free nations and of democratic nations most especially,” to which he adds: “One of our problems is that so many American opinion leaders no longer believe this, and that so few of our young people ever did.” As one of those—admittedly skeptical—“young people,” I nevertheless do not appreciate being subsumed under another of Mr. Glazer’s sweeping generalizations. Rather than pontificating about “opinion leaders” and “young people,” it would be helpful if he would be explicit as to exactly whom is he talking about. However, I find the “no longer” of the above quote revealing: perhaps, after a decade which has seen American support for flagrantly undemocratic regimes in South Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, post-Allende Chile, Brazil, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Greece and Portugal before their respective coups, a bit of skepticism about American support for democracy abroad is warranted. . . .
What has this to do with Israel? Simply put: it is a naive distortion of recent American foreign policy to assume that this country’s supposed support for “freedom and democracy” abroad has become enshrined as a principle that will govern our foreign-policy conduct in the future. Rather, foreign policy is overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, dictated by what the textbooks say: a country’s own best interests at a given time. No amount of support for Israel—financial or otherwise—by American Jews will insure Washington’s support of Jerusalem if American and Israeli interests diverge; indeed, as Theodore Draper has pointed out in COMMENTARY [“The United States and Israel,” April], those interests have already begun to diverge. But there is nothing “new” in this: surely Mr. Glazer remembers the precedent of 1956-57, when a nascent concern for détente brought the U.S. and USSR together once before on behalf of Egypt and against an ongoing Israeli presence in the Sinai desert.
How then, is the American Jew “exposed”? Simply, in that realm which Mr. Glazer should know best, but about which he writes least: socially, especially in terms of assimilation. The causes of assimilation are complex, having to do with the nature of American-Jewish prosperity, mobility, and suburban life; the quality or lack of quality of much of Jewish education; the relative lack of a pervasive anti-Semitism, the sometimes plutocratic nature of American Jewish communal leadership; and, not least, . . . the nature of publications such as COMMENTARY which publish distressingly little material about modern Jewish culture, theology, and philosophy, history, or even internal communal issues. . . .
In short, if the American Jew is “exposed,” it is hardly because of Mr. Glazer’s “new” reasons, but because of the “old” ones, the lack of sufficient positive Jewish identity and assertion in American culture.
David M. Szonyi
New York City
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To the Editor:
The eerie touch-and-go quality which now informs American-Israeli relations amply justifies Nathan Glazer’s reiteration of the responsibility of the American Jewish community for making Israel’s case in Washington. There is, however, something disturbing about the precise case which he wants American Jews to present. Pragmatic considerations, as he correctly notes, are too unreliable a basis upon which to found American support for Israel: Foggy Bottom pragmatists would look no further than the Persian Gulf. But in the principled American commitment which he proposes as an alternative, Mr. Glazer adopts an innocence which is unbecoming after the protracted Vietnam debacle, and which, more importantly, can only work against Israel’s short- and long-term right to determine its own destiny.
Mr. Glazer believes that the United States should commit itself to Israel because “the United States defends democracies, and it defends the independence of small, threatened nations.” But the United States does not defend democracies—Mr. Glazer’s rationalizations of U.S. policy in Spain, Portugal, and Greece are uncomfortably like that macabre logic according to which you burn a village in order to save it, and I doubt whether the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Greeks who suffered under their respective regimes would have been convinced. (Mr. Glazer’s comment about Chile is just unbelievable. Nor did his, and others’, very justifiable fears of Communist success in Portugal induce the U.S. to lift a finger in support of Soares and the Socialist majority.) The United States has not so much defended the independence of small, threatened nations as it has threatened the independence of small and beleaguered ones. If there has been a common denominator in all American foreign policy of recent times, it is one of ruthless and unprincipled intervention in the affairs of whatever country the U.S. has viewed as either positively or negatively relevant to its interests. It is, after all, one thing to act democratically, and quite another ingeniously to label your interests democracy.
The much-vaunted and somewhat welcome recoil from the 60’s which is now in progress might just throw the baby out with the bathwater. While it was not at all surprising that the enthusiastically heralded orgy of American post-Vietnam introspection never came off, it is very distressing to find Mr. Glazer’s litany of American virtues in its place. Particularly in light of the investigative revelations now emanating daily from Washington, Mr. Glazer’s confidence in America seems utterly unjustified, and quite wilful. Perhaps one could account for such present perceptions of America and its relation to Israel in terms of a legitimate disenchantment with the détente myth: Somalia is only the most recent of a long list of indications that the Russians are playing it both ways—indeed, that for all the ostensible sanity of Big Power leaders concerning nuclear weapons, the spheres-of-influence planet of the cold war is to their minds by no means a thing of the past. (Helsinki cannot end the cold war, but at best temporarily cordialize it.) And so one can reason that Israel not being Communist, and Russia being evil (not to mention anti-Semitic), Israel obviously belongs in the American camp, because America is good. (All of which is as simplistic as the equations of the devout Left, which also sees America and Israel as essentially the same, although it judges their identity a bit differently.)
But, firstly, though Israel is of course a democracy and is committed to many principles to which America is, at least in theory, committed—a similarity of purposes which is of course a salient part of the Israeli case in Washington—Israel is also (or perhaps once was) committed to something other than an American-style polity. Israel is by no means, nor should it ever become, a little America in the Middle East. It was a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, tenet of Zionism that the Jewish state would be sovereign to determine its own internal and external policy.
Secondly, and more practically, the behavior of the U.S. toward its friends has not been such as to inspire confidence: the U.S. has a nasty habit of often supporting its friends the way a rope supports a hanging man. If there is anything which Kissinger cannot tolerate, it is the slightest deviation by allies from Washington’s grand design. The pressure tactics which he and his President recently applied to Israel are in this respect very telling and should serve as a warning: when Ford and Kissinger tell Rabin that they are acting in Israel’s best interests, what they are really doing is attempting to decide for Israel what her best interests are. It was Israel’s refusal to acquiesce in such tutelage in matters of its own survival which to a large extent accounted for the ungraceful stalls in the negotiations which eventually led to the most recent agreements.
The present situation in Israel vis-à-vis the U.S. is not at all dissimilar to that of those countries, in Europe and elsewhere, which are likewise trying to do their own work themselves, to steer a relatively self-determined course and avoid the kind of Mephistophelian support which is the only support America and Russia know how to extend. To rush headlong and completely into the arms of Washington the way Mr. Glazer suggests might in its own way become as much of a threat to a sovereign Israel as its hostile neighbors. The really urgent task for the American Jewish community is to argue persuasively for a respectful American commitment to Israel, for various ideological and strategic reasons appropriate, but neither patronizing nor paternal; to delineate a correspondence of interests which does not require of Israel an unqualified homogeneity or subordination. Of course this is a far more difficult task than that suggested by Mr. Glazer—to ask such respect of Kissinger is like asking water of a stone—but it is at least more candid about the squalid American style in international relations as well as about Israel’s hopes and ambitions for itself.
Leon Wieseltier
New York City
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Nathan Glazer writes:
To Peter Connolly: I specifically did not criticize affirmative action because it would hurt Jews directly. I think that evaluating any policy in terms of whether it is good or bad for Jews is crude, vulgar, and ineffective. If it is just or right or good for the commonwealth, it is a good policy. And so many policies that statistically can be said to “hurt Jews” more than others (because more Jews are businessmen, or professors, or city-dwellers, or prosperous, or what not) are policies I would fully support. What I object to in affirmative action is, first, that it is designed to make ethnic and racial distinctions the bases for specific public action, either to harm or to benefit. I believe these distinctions will become permanent (because it is difficult to withdraw a benefit once given), will spread to include additional minority groups, and, in a complex multi-ethnic society such as ours, the results will inevitably be divisive. Finally, if we are interested in helping the poor and the underprivileged, we should help those specific categories, and not all blacks, Spanish-surnamed-Americans, Asian-Americans, and the like, for in each of these groups varying percentages of individuals are poor and underprivileged. Thus my argument cannot be used against any liberal measure: it can only be used against measures which say, “because you are of this racial or ethnic group, you will, for that reason alone, receive a governmental benefit, or be denied one.”
This is my basic argument against affirmative action: it is also true that, speaking in a Jewish context, I said groups which are “better off” (Wasps, Jews) will now be considered at fault, responsible, for the fate of groups which are worse off. It is only this political consequence of accepting affirmative action that I see as a danger to Jews. (Wasps may survive the reputation of being better off because they exploited others; there are enough of them. But as for Jews. . . .)
To William Petersen: I quite agree that “Left” and “Right” seem to have outlived much of their usefulness. I prefer a distinction which emphasizes freedom or its absence.
To David Szonyi and Leon Wieseltier: Here I concentrate only on the position of the State of Israel and the basis on which American support may be retained. I do not understand people who say, as Messrs. Szonyi and Wieseltier do, that the United States has no interest in the support of democracies and small states, that it favors dictatorships as well as its own interests, and yet, in spite of all this, either (a) Israel can survive (Szonyi), or (b) the United States may still be induced to support Israel (Wieseltier). How does Mr. Szonyi expect Israel to survive when it is surrounded by enemy states increasing in wealth and military power; when the United States is the only state which will provide Israel with the modern arms necessary for its defense; when Portugal, Greece, and Turkey no longer provide stopping places for the provisioning of Israel in the event of war; when all but an occasional European state will at best abstain when Israel is denounced or expelled from every international forum in the world as—yes—a pariah state?
Neither Mr. Szonyi nor Mr. Wieseltier thinks that the support of Israel is in the American interest. What then do they expect? Do they really believe that Israel will survive through its own atom bombs? That we can convert the “Mephistophelian” support which Mr. Wieseltier believes is the only kind the United States knows how to extend, into “respectful” support for Israel on the basis of (unspecified) ideological and strategic common interests? I would urge Mr. Szonyi and Mr. Wieseltier to reconsider what they have written in regard to American policy and its fundamental thrust. The “flagrantly undemocratic” regimes we have supported in South Vietnam and South Korea were infinitely more democratic and free than the totalitarian regimes which threatened them, aside from the fact that they were willing to live at peace with their totalitarian neighbors, and their neighbors were not. Can they be unaware that our policies in relation to Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey (which were in any case all freer and more open than the Communist states) were designed solely to support NATO, an anti-Communist alliance which miraculously has kept Europe prosperous and free and peaceful despite the overwhelming military power of Soviet Russia now for thirty years?
I would plead with Mr. Szonyi and Mr. Wieseltier to reconsider the basic thrust of American foreign policy, despite its errors, failures, disasters. If they still conclude that American foreign policy is indifferent to democracy and the independence of small states, then they should honestly face up to what must happen to Israel. They cannot preserve both their view of the United States and their hope that Israel will survive.
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