I have concluded that there are three categories of Americans calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and blabbering on about a “peaceful and humane” resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. First, there are the anti-Semites, who willfully pretend that the plight of Palestinians isn’t tied to the group’s stated determination to wipe Israel from the map. Then there are the Lennonites, whose brains have been turned to mush by the fantasies of John’s “Imagine.” They want to eliminate war, and stubbornly think that is possible when terrorists and evil-doers like Hamas have forced a reckoning from the beginning of nations. Finally, there are the idiots, ignorant of history, distracted only by loyalties, biases, mob passions and emotion.
It is fascinating to speculate which of these three categories explain Jewish American peace activists like the thousands who marched on Capitol Hill, where they carried Palestinian flags and called for support of “Palestinian rights.” In a related display, hundreds of activists held a sit-in inside one of the Capitol buildings, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, who claim to want a just and peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Playwright, screenwriter and author David Mamet has written a deft analysis of the phenomenon called “How the Democrats betrayed the Jews: The sick thrill of antisemitism has a price.”
Mamet is thoughtful commentator whose mind is usually occupied with ethics problems (almost all of his plays and movies have ethics at their core), and who is currently unpopular with the artistic left ever since he proclaimed that nobody but him had any business deciding what was a good enough reason to buy a gun. Do read the whole piece, but here are some jewels…
- “The New York Times and The New Yorker were run by Jews; they were both our Rialto and our Bible. New York Theatre, in my lifetime, had always been Jewish. The playwrights were Miller, Odets, Elmer Rice, Ben Hecht, Sidney Kingsley; and, later, Arthur Laurents, Lillian Hellman, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Wallace Shawn, and myself.”
Me: Note that Wallace Shawn signed on to idiot Alyssa Milano’s celebrity letter, discussed here.
- We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats, as their policies appealed to the immigrants and the first generation (my parents). A Fair Shake, a safety net, and unionism were manna to the newly arrived — in spite of (in both their and my lifetime) quotas and antisemitic discrimination. The immigrant Jews did well here, and voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And we are voting for him still…Yet Roosevelt’s aid stopped with his assurances, and tens of thousands of Jews died because of his restrictive immigration policies, and millions in Europe because of his refusal to interdict the Holocaust….”
- “Still, today, Jews vote Democratic: electing Presidents who refused to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister (Obama and Biden) in times of “peace”, who gave and give aid to the terrorist state of Iran in exchange for some semi-specified “deal”. American “Aid” to Iran pays for the equipment and ordnance, which is, at this moment, eradicating Jews.”
- “…Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews. And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas.”
- “Many good German Jews in the Thirties ignored their brothers and sisters to the East, and later died with them. My generation, born right after the Holocaust, wondered: “Good God, didn’t you see what was happening around you? Are you literally willing to die rather than admit you were mistaken?” The answer, today, to many liberal American Jews, is “Yes”.”
- “…In response, the world’s Leftist media calls for the chastisement of Israel and support for Palestine, while those who consider themselves mere “liberals” moderate their cowardice by calling for a “ceasefire” — which is to say, a pause while Hamas re-arms…”
Mamet has more, and he is right. Progressives hate him, because he has the courage to write things like this. Ethics Hero.
Ethics Alarms 
I loved the way Mamet described NYC upon his arrival there from Chicago as being wonderfully Jewish. I couldn’t help thinking of Jesse Jackson’s (without consequence) calling New York City “Hymie Town.” Right on, brother. Nice.
Despite the efforts of people like Mamet and Bari Weiss, I don’t see an awakening in liberal American Jewry. Liberal American Jews seem not to see hating and murdering Israelis as antisemitism. It’s evidently okay. It’s just politics, or something. Israelis apparently aren’t real Jews, they’re kinda sorta like Republicans. You know, crazy.
That’s the way it strikes me. It is insane.
“Good God, didn’t you see what was happening around you?”
The late Aaron Zelman, founder of Jews fo the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, caught a lot of flack a couple of decades ago for saying that many Jews who supported gun control had a “gas chamber mentality,” I.e. they would not wake up to reality until they were being herded to the gas chambers, after resistance was too late. He was an apt student of the history of disarmed populations and addressed the topic frequently.
Interesting. He makes a lot of the same points about the history that I have made a few times, and he should, because the history is the history. I have never heard Jews compared to the battered wife of the West, and I’m not sure that is an apt comparison because at least the husband of the battered wife pretends to love her for claims to love her. Let’s not kid ourselves, the vast majority of the places they have been, the Jews have been at best tolerated and at worst hated.
They have voted for Democrats because the Democrats seemed to at least give a damn about them. What never seems to have caught on with them is the fact that to the Democrats, any minority group cuz they claim to support is just a pawn in the bigger game of power. They learned long ago to give people something or appear to give them something and they will vote for you for generations. However, the Democratic Party also counts on these groups learning to be helpless and preferring to be helpless, so they can swoop in and pretend to be there only friends and tell them without them they are nowhere. The blacks have fallen for that line hook line and sinker and that’s why the Democrats start every election with 13% of the votes already in their pocket. The concept of tradition is also very strong in Judaism and Jewish culture, as we all know from Fiddler on the roof, and that includes what political party to vote for. If your father voted for Democrats and your grandfather voted for Democrats and so on, it’s expected that you will too.
The thing is that the woke liberals who are the biggest Democratic base will always be the most important part of that base, and there views and opinions will always be the most important. As jack points out above, that part of the base is composed of anti-semites who sometimes claim they are just anti-zionist, not anti-Semitic, Lennonists, who have swallowed the rhetoric of “Imagine” hook line and sinker and dream of a world where everything is perfect, and emotionalists driven by passions that don’t necessarily make sense. Those folks will always outnumber the Jews, and in fact there is some crossover between the two groups. Let’s not forget, a lot of Jewish people in this nation, like a lot of other religions, belong to the religion in name only, or only as much as it takes to claim the specialness that goes with being different and to them their religion is really not much more than spiritualized leftism. Together these people will always outnumber both the faithful and the practical.
The fact is also that when you join wokism you are expected to sever all other ties. Faith, community, even family need to be left behind if they get in the way of the almighty Woke. To the woke, the Muslims are an oppressed people, especially the Palestinians. To the woke, violence is perfectly all right if it advances their cause. They even count among their number some otherwise committed pacifists who would oppose most other wars, but justify rioting in American streets and assaults on those states they have determined to be bad, and chief among those is israel.
I think some of this is an outgrowth of the weather underground and similar movements during the Vietnam era, proclaimed to be opposed not only to the war in Vietnam but to war generally, then turned around and committed bank robberies, set up police officers to be assassinated, and planned to plan bombs at military installations, or tried to destroy military property in the name of peaceful disarmament. It never occurred to any of these people that they were as bad as those they claim to oppose and that when you stripped away the rhetoric, in the end they were just violent cultists, really no better from the Manson family, they just tried to cover it with better sounding rhetoric (although Manson was a master at rhetoric, a lot of sociopaths are).
So now they cheer for terrorists, some of whom would just as soon put them up against the wall and shoot them if male or stuff them into burqas and rape them at will if female. It’s disgusting is what it is.
Re: “To the woke, violence is perfectly all right if it advances their cause.” and following comments:
We were in Harpers Ferry a couple of days ago, a location made famous, of course, by John Brown. Presentations there told the story of his raid (ironically, ended by troops under the command of a then colonel Robert Lee), but seemed to me to sort of soft-pedal Brown’s actions, noting that “…many consider him a hero”. Brown was a murdering lunatic zealot, who was attempting an actual insurrection to overthrow the Government of the United States. He had created a new Constitution, and had conspired with foreign actors (Canadians) in some of his efforts.
It seems (per my own reading) that monuments to Brown were erected in several northern locations, and as far as I know, are still standing. His murderous insurrection was “good”, unlike the unarmed trespassing protests of Jan. 6th. We know what has happened to monuments of Lee (and his horse), and even Abraham Lincoln and the founders.
Well, yes. Pottawatamie Brown, indeed.
Liberal Jews in the United States tend to be, ironically, “ethnic Jews”, not religious Jews. That was the criteria the Nazis used to wipe people out, by the way. It wasn’t the religious beliefs; it was the biology.
These secular Jews oppose Israel because it’s a theocracy. Sure, Jewish holidays can get some lip service when they come around – in the same way that there are Christmas and Easter Christians out there – but the door to a synagogue is not darkened the rest of the year.
They aren’t Jewish because they are believers. They’re Jewish because their parents and grandparents were Jewish.
Mamet’s claim that German Jews didn’t help their Eastern brethren is a little harsh. German Jews had a hard time helping themselves in the ’30s and ’40s, much less those living in the East. It is true, however, that the assimiliated Jews of Germany and other western countries who were often educated, professionals and had sometimes converted to Christianity looked down upon the poor, uneducated Jews of Eastern Europe who clung to the traditional beliefs.
Richard J. Evans, noted British historian of the Third Reich period, wrote a book about “Hitler Conspiracies” and devoted a chapter to the famed forgery, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. He revealed that the Protocols had been debunked by the 1920’s, the Nazi hierarchy knew that and, thus, didn’t rely on the Protocols all that much. However, they pushed that the “truths” exposed in the Protocols were still valid. Nevertheless, more than one German officer realized that the vast Jewish world order they’d been told was pulling strings behind the scenes couldn’t possibly exist when Jews were so easily herded into camps and surprised at their fate. A global Jewish conspiracy would have surely had the organization and the communication apparatus to warn their fellow religionists.
Because the Jews of the early 20th century were divided among sectarian, political and class systems, they weren’t organized at all. They were incapable of working together to help each other. Like the German Jews of the 1920’s, the secular middle to upper-middle class Jews of the west today look down on their co-religionists (because they don’t follow the same religion at all). That’s why they are looking the other way as the Jews are being killed again.
Israel is not a theocracy. Iran is a theocracy. In Israel the two major political parties, likud and labor are conservative and liberal, but not religious. There are some small religious parties, but they hold a very limited number of seats in the knesset. There is no supreme religious leader like Iran’s Ayatollah Khameini, whose blessing you must get if you are to run at all. Most Israeli jews, or so the people I know who have lived in Israel tell me, or not terribly religious. There are a small minority of ultra orthodox Jews similar to the hasidim who you see in places like Brooklyn in their long black coats and dangling side curls, but they are a very small minority. There are enough, however that there is one unit for the ultra religious in the military for those who choose to serve, although many do not, because theoretically s Jewish scholar working to keep the traditions of their culture alive and pass along their faith is more valuable than a soldier.
You are correct. Thanks for the information.
Not Lennonists, Leninists. The left believes in cultural Marxism. There are only oppressors and the oppressed. The Palestinians are obviously oppressed because they are poorer and browner. Therefore, the Palestinians have to be supported. Jewish Democrats are torn between their ideology of supporting the oppressed (Palestinians) and supporting Jewish interests. If they support the latter, they have to betray the former. You can see which loyalty is stronger.
This does explain why they support stricter gun control laws, while at the same time supporting decarceration and defunding the police, claim that police habitually hunt down and gun down unarmed Black men, and accuse the criminal justice system of being systemically racist.
Their support of stricter gun control laws is based upon their animus of White male conservatives, whom they view as the oppressor class. Their support for decarceration, defunding the police, and their accusations about the police and the criminal justice system, are based on their support for the street thug and the gangbanger, whom they view as oppressed.
In their view, prisons are only for confining White male conservatives.
Mostly good read by Mamet, though with one glaring bit of personal bias/ignorance evident in his reference to Jesus and early Christians (who were Jews, themselves). He was solidly corrected on this in several comments.
Thankfully, there are 2A Jewish groups, like Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and Jews prominent in several legally successful pro-firearms groups in the U.S., Adam Kraut (I’ve attended a symposium where he was the main speaker), of the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation being one such.
I’ve loved Mamet’s work ever since I inadvertantly selected him from a list of playwrights for a college theater class project. It really stuck with me when I saw we shared a birthday and I made it a priority to see as much of his hollywood work as I could. My favorite remains Heist (2001) w/ Gene Hackman followed by Redbelt (2008) w/ Chiwetel Ejiofor and The Spanish Prisoner (1997) w/ Steve Martin.
Some other ones aren’t my favorite, but do have their value. I’ve always wanted him to keep making content – but it just seems like he’s retired or moved back on to stage work.
Yes, he’s a Democrat, vote for the Democrat sort of guy, but I’ve always felt he was a Democrat I could admire because his focus wasn’t “identity politics” and appeared reasonable where it counted.
Anyway, anyone who hasn’t watched the 3 above films, you now have my recommendation – go forth and enjoy!