The Volokh Conspiracy

In this post, Tyler Cowen asks why Russian Jewish immigrants tend to overwhelmingly support the GOP rather than the Democrats. The reasons are actually no mystery. As I have previously explained here and here, Russian Jews are hawkish on foreign policy and their experience with communism leads them to be suspicious of domestic policies that seem socialistic. Also, they dislike the Democratic Party because it was relatively dovish during the Cold War. Immigrants from other communist countries, such as the Cubans and Vietnamese, tend to be Republican for much the same reasons. So Russian Jews are not unusual in this regard. They only seem so by comparison with native-born American Jews, who are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats.

Tyler asks why Russian Jews tend to be opposed to affirmative action and gay marriage. But the vast majority of all white Americans are opposed to affirmative action (64% in this 2009 poll). So Russian immigrant attitudes on this issue are not surprising. They only seem so by comparison with native-born American Jews, who are the only white ethnic group that tends to support affirmative action.

As for gay rights, Russian Jews are indeed far more opposed to them, on average, than native-born whites. The reason, unfortunately, is probably simple homophobia. Anti-gay prejudice is widespread in Russia, with 74% of Russians endorsing the view that gays and lesbians are “morally dissolute or mentally defective persons,” according to a 2010 poll. At least in my experience, Russian Jews are no exception to this general tendency, though younger, more assimilated immigrants are less likely to be anti-gay than those who were older when they arrived. Homophobia aside, most Russian Jews are not socially conservative generally. For example, the vast majority are secular and pro-choice.

Tyler is probably wrong to suggest that Russian Jews’ anti-gay attitudes are part of a general willingness to “affiliate with the American brand of Christianity found in the Republican Party” because “[r]elated strains of thought have been prevalent in Russia for a long time.” The Russian Orthodox Church has little in common with conservative American Protestantism, though both tend to be anti-gay. In any event, most Russian Jews feel little affinity for the Orthodox Church because it has a long history of anti-Semitism and (more recently) collaboration with Communism and Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism.

It is probably the case, however, that Russian Jews have less fear of the religious right than native-born American Jews. In recent Russian history, unlike in the US, the main fomenters of anti-Semitism have been communists and secular Russian nationalists. Russian Jews are therefore less likely to see conservative Christians as natural political enemies, even if the two groups have little in common in terms of their religious and social attitudes.

“Me? Anti-Semitic? You’re the one who’s showing me the Jew pictures.” Here’s the statement, from the Iranian Students News Agency, a site backed by the Iranian government(emphasis added):

National Olympic Committee of Iran sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in opposition to the logo of 2012 London Olympic Games.

The letter calls for designing a new logo and confronting the symbol’s designers.

The letter which was signed by Head of Iranian Olympics Committee, Mohammad Ali Abadi and the Secretary General of Iran’s Olympic Committee Bahram Afsharzade addressed to the president of IOC Jacques Rogge.

“We appreciate the committee’s efforts in line with developing the spirit of Olympism all over the world. We ask for your consideration of the following issue which if neglected, may have destructive effects on the future of sport, especially London Olympic Games in 2012,” the letter said.

“Highlighting the values of Olympic, which ban any sorts of partiality, political, religious and racial measures in this field, may have a leading role to hold London Games better,” he added.

“We have two years ahead to the opening of the games and unfortunately we see the games face with a critical challenge at the beginning which is raised by the racial attitudes of some individuals.”

“As internet documents have proved, using the word Zion in the logo of 2012 Olympic Games is a disgracing action and against Olympic’s valuable mottos.”

“There is no doubt that negligence of the issue from your side may affect the presence of some countries in the games, especially Iran which abides by commitment to the values and principles.”

Iran is the first Islamic country which has officially expressed its opposition to the logo.

Soon after the logo was unveiled, some Muslim graphists objected to it, saying the logo reminds the world “Zion”.

But their objection was snubbed by the local officials in charge of hosting the games who showed no reaction to the oppositions.

IOC and the hosting Committee in London have not showed any reaction to Iran’s oppositions yet.

There’s more at the Guardian (UK); thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

Here’s the 2012 logo, for you to examine for yourselves. But watch out: Maybe you’ll see a man and a woman having sex. In Zion.

The original joke, for those few who don’t know it, is here.

Telegraph:

The head of the National Union of Students [Aaron Porter] had to be led to safety from a tuition fees rally he had been due to address after being surrounded by protesters chanting anti-semitic insults at him....

Mr Porter has faced growing opposition from more militant sections of the student protest movement, which have called on the NUS to take a more radical stance against Government education spending cuts and increases in tuition fees.

And evidence that the frequent anti-Semitism apparent in the British far-left’s anti-Zionist discourse is seeping into other contexts.

UPDATE: There is apparently some debate as to whether the protesters were chanting “you’re ****ing Tory Jew” or “you’re a ****ing Tory too.” Obviously, many hear the former, or they wouldn’t have responded with “no to racism.”

Meanwhile, the Harry’s Place blog reports that Mr. Porter confirms that “just before the march started, I was surrounded by a particularly vicious minority of protesters more intent on shouting threatening and racist abuse at me rather than focusing on the issues.”

I agree with most of what co-blogger Sasha Volokh says in his post on Gal Beckerman’s important new book on the political struggle over Jewish emigration from the USSR.

For example, it is indeed true (and in retrospect, very interesting) that the campaign united many ideologically disparate groups in the US. When I worked for Action for Soviet Jewry in the late 1980s, we had important assistance from political leaders as disparate as Barney Frank and Jesse Helms. It is also true, and and already well-known, that Henry Kissinger was negative about the whole deal, as he was about human rights in general. Recent Nixon tapes revelations about Kissinger’s attitude confirm that.

At the same time, I do have a few disagreements with Sasha and Beckerman’s analysis. Sasha is correct to suggest that much of the more severe repression described in the book “might not have applied to Soviet Jews who kept their heads low and didn’t try to leave.” But of course such people still had to endure the serious ordinary oppression of life in the USSR, including (but far from limited to) widespread official anti-Semitism. I briefly described some of this in the first part of my own immigration memoir. The most important weakness of Beckerman’s book is that he gives very little description of the lives of ordinary Soviet Jews who were not activists or dissidents, and therefore doesn’t clearly explain why so many wanted to leave. The increased repression of the late Brezhnev and Andropov periods had a ripple effect on non-dissidents as well, since they had to be even more careful to avoid offending the authorities than before.

I also have some reservations about Sasha’s and Beckerman’s discussion of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. It is true that the amendment was never waived until 1990. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that its economic sanctions had no effect. The hope of getting it waived or repealed was likely one of the factors that motivated the Soviets to allow increased Jewish (and also German, Armenian, and evangelical Christian) emigration in the 1970s, and later under Gorbachev. Certainly, Soviet officials repeatedly lobbied for a waiver throughout that time, pointing to the increased emigration numbers as justification. The waiver was never granted because the amendment called for fully free emigration (as opposed to mere increases in numbers within a system in which the government retained discretionary power to reject emigration applications at will), which the Soviets did not concede until the late Gorbachev era. But the Soviets, of course, did not know that in advance. Moreover, as Sasha and Beckerman partly recognize, the ongoing battle over the amendment was one of the factors that focused Western public attention on the issue, and thereby gave the Soviets further incentives to liberalize emigration policy, even aside from the trade restrictions themselves. It is actually very difficult to disentangle the impact of Jackson-Vanik from other factors influencing Soviet calculations, and Beckerman doesn’t really succeed in doing so. The debate over the amendment’s effect is part of the much broader debate about the extent to which economic sanctions can influence human rights policy in oppressive regimes, which is similarly contentious.

Another small but annoying flaw of Beckerman’s book is his tendency to describe any right of center activist or organization as “neoconservative” even in cases where the term is clearly inaccurate (e.g. – in the case of the Heritage Foundation, which, especially during the period covered in the book, was led by more traditional conservatives who were on the right long before there were any neoconservatives, and believed that the neocons were far too liberal and too supportive of the welfare state).

Despite these reservations, Beckerman’s book is by far the most thorough account of the political battle over Soviet Jewish emigration so far. Anyone interested in the issue should certainly read it.

UPDATE: I blogged about the ethics of imposing trade restrictions on socialist states in this 2007 post:

Libertarianism is generally seen as requiring free trade. Certainly, libertarian thinkers from Adam Smith to the present have strongly condemned protectionism. How then can a libertarian endorse trade restrictions such as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied free trade to totalitarian states that refused to allow their citizens to emigrate freely?....

Libertarianism does indeed imply free trade between private individuals and firms. But trade with socialist governments is very different. When two private individuals trade with each other, it is reasonable to assume that both legitimately own the goods they exchange. Thus, at least as far as libertarians are concerned, the law should not restrict their transactions unless there is specific proof that one or both are trading in stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired goods. By contrast, a socialist state engaging in international trade is usually exchanging goods that it forcibly acquired from its citizens. The socialist state’s goods are either confiscated from former private owners or produced by compelling workers to work for the state (which they generally must do whether they want to or not, because there is no competitive employment market). Socialist states also make extensive use of out and out forced labor.... Just as in the domestic context libertarianism is perfectly consistent with forbidding trade in stolen goods, in the international context it is consistent with forbidding trade with socialist governments.....

Restrictions on trade with socialist states may or may not be good policy. Sometimes trade with such states can serve important strategic interests (as with US trade with the Soviet Union when the two nations were allied during World War II). Critics of trade sanctions claim that they fail to achieve their goals and may even be counterproductive. Be that as it may, restricting trade with socialist states does not violate any libertarian principles.

but it’s really something to see various anti-Semitic blogs (I’m not going to link to them) trumpeting the fact that a Jewish alleged serial killer from Israel was caught today–even after the accused was revealed to have the obviously Arabic name Abu Elazam (sometimes rendered Abuelazam). I guess we can take comfort in the fact that these folks ain’t too bright.

(Needless to say, the fact that this individual happens to be an Arab is no reflection on Arabs in general, any more than if he were a Jew it would be a reflection on Jews).

Even before Mel Gibson made his infamous anti-Semitic remarks, Gibson became a very unpopular and disliked figure in Hollywood due to the controversy over The Passion of the Christ and his remarks that skirted close to Holocaust denial. After a drunk Gibson said, “Fucking Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” Ari Emanuel, undoubtedly reflecting broader sentiment, wrote, “People in the entertainment community, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him, even if it means a sacrifice to their bottom line.”

It will be interesting to see whether Oliver Stone, who has now expressed the classic anti-Semitic view that “Jews dominate the media,” will receive the same treatment. Stone, in the Sunday Times (original behind paywall):

“Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m.”

Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

Gibson was an easy target for Hollywood liberals and leftists. A right-winger and a religious Catholic, Gibson was the perfect manifestation of Hollywood liberals’ stereotypes of anti-Semites.

Stone, by contrast, is a Buddhist leftist of partial Jewish descent, the kind of person the Hollywood left usually thinks of as “one of the good guys.” Stone even was clever enough to follow his anti-Semitic remark about Jewish domination of the media, noted in the context of Hitler and the Holocaust, with some pablum about the Jewish lobby, Israel, and American foreign policy. This had nothing to do with the topic at hand, but Stone’s apologists will inevitably claim that his remarks were aimed at the “Israel lobby,” and not Jews per se.

So, what will it be for Hollywood liberals? Is anti-Semitism only unacceptable when it comes from right-wing Christians, or equally bad when it comes from non-Christian leftists, who add a bit of anti-Israel window dressing? (The early returns are not promising; so far, the left-wing blogosphere has responded to Stone’s remarks with deafening silence).

UPDATE: I don’t expect our readers to be scholars of anti-Semitism, but it shouldn’t take a scholar to know that talking about Jewish “domination” of the media, in precisely those terms, is what anti-Semites from Henry Ford to Stormfront have trafficked in for decades. Just Google it, and you get David Duke, Whitehistory.com, etc. Whether or not Stone is himself an anti-Semite, he’s no dummy, and surely is aware of the baggage that “Jewish domination of the media” carries.

N.Y. Times:

Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives.

That is the conclusion of two new genetic surveys, the first to use genome-wide scanning devices to compare many Jewish communities around the world.

A major surprise from both surveys is the genetic closeness of the two Jewish communities of Europe, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Ashkenazim thrived in North and Eastern Europe until their devastation by the Hitler regime, and now live mostly in the United States and Israel. The Sephardim were exiled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 and moved to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and the Netherlands.

The two genome surveys extend earlier studies based just on the Y chromosome, the genetic element carried by all men. They refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.

Of course, as I noted previously, the genetic evidence was already quite clear when Sand wrote his book. He’s aware of the evidence, but has so far chalked it up to a conspiracy of Zionist geneticists intent on obscuring the true Khazar origins of Ashkenazic Jews.

Sand’s book won a French journalism prize for the best non-fiction book of the year, which just does to show that in the anti-Zionist atmosphere of the European intelligentsia, no idea is too preposterous to embrace if it serves the cause. Nevertheless, if the French journalists have any integrity, they might reconsider whether this book was eligible for a nonfiction award.

UPDATE: I wrote previously:

I don’t think that Zionism, etc., depends on whether Jews really have common genetic origins or not, anymore than Palestinian identity is any more or less real depending on whether, as some claim, a large percentage of “Palestinian Arabs” had immigrated rather recently from other countries in the Middle East. But I do think that manipulating history for ideological purposes is bad...

In this recent New York Times article, Howard Megdal revives the longstanding claim that anti-Semites on opposing teams tried to prevent Jewish Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg from breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1938 because of anti-Semitism:

Evidence has finally been published that seems to resolve a 72-year-old mystery. When Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers made a run at Babe Ruth’s season home run record, falling two short with 58 in 1938, was he pitched around because he was Jewish? ...

Some members of Greenberg’s family and legions of his fans believed that anti-Semitic pitchers had walked Greenberg often to keep him from a fair shot at Ruth, who set the record in 1927....

Greenberg received many more walks as he chased Ruth in 1938 than he did in the rest of his career. Almost no other hitter going after the home run record had anything like Greenberg’s late-season spike in bases on balls. He had 119 walks to lead the A.L., the only time he did so, and they accounted for 17.5 percent of his 681 plate appearances.

But the way pitchers handled Greenberg early in the season was clearly different than the way they approached him as Ruth’s record came into view....

Over all, Greenberg walked in 15.9 percent of his plate appearances through the end of August 1938. In September, that rate jumped to 20.4 percent. His walk rate was 14.5 percent in 1937 and 15 percent in 1939.

Megdal points out that other hitters who threatened Ruth’s 1927 record of 60 HRs did not have a higher walk rate in September than earlier in the season. He concludes that opposing teams wanted to prevent Greenberg from breaking the record in 1938 because he was Jewish.

The idea that Greenberg was a victim of anti-Semitism in this instance is not implausible. Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in 1930s America, and Greenberg was a victim of anti-Semitic slurs on many occasions. Moreover, by September 1938, the American League pennant race was over (unfortunately, the New York Yankees had run away with their third straight pennant) and opposing teams risked very little by walking Greenberg a few extra times.

Nonetheless, Megdal’s case seems weak. The difference between Greenberg walking in 20.4% of his plate appearances in September and walking in 15.9% is just a handful of walks. It could easily have happened just by random chance. The difference between 119 walks in 1938 and Greenberg’s career record in this respect is also modest. Greenberg had both power and excellent plate discipline -a combination that routinely causes high walk rates. Overall, he had three seasons with over 100 walks and four others with 80 or more. He even led the National League in walks in 1947, the last season of his career when he was well past his prime.

Jack Marshall points out several other shortcomings in Megdal’s statistical analysis here. The bottom line is that Greenberg’s walk rate in 1938 could easily have been accounted for by a combination of random chance and his inherent attributes as a hitter.

It’s also worth noting Greenberg’s own comments on this issue in Lawrence Ritter’s classic book The Glory of their Times (pg. 317):

Some people still have it fixed in their minds that the reason I didn’t break Ruth’s record was [that], because I was Jewish, the ballplayers did everything they could to stop me. That’s pure baloney. The fact of the matter is quite the opposite: so far as I could tell, the players were mostly rooting for me, aside from the pitchers. I remember one game Bill Dickey was catching for the Yankees, he was even telling me what was coming up. The reason I didn’t hit 60 or 61 homers is because I ran out of gas; it had nothing to do with being Jewish.

The American League was a relatively small world in 1938 (there were only eight teams). If opposing players were systematically trying to prevent Greenberg from breaking the record out of anti-Semitic motives, it seems likely that he would have heard about it.

Megdal dismisses Greenberg’s statements on the grounds that it would have been “out of character” for him to blame his failure to break the record on others. But Greenberg did not hesitate to point out the extensive anti-Semitism that he faced on other occasions, and also didn’t hesitate to blame it for bad outcomes when he thought it was warranted. In the very same interview with Ritter, he blamed anti-Semitism on the part of the owners for his decision not to try to become the owner of the Chicago White Sox in the 1960s.

In sum, it’s certainly possible that some opponents walked Greenberg because they didn’t want a Jewish player to break Ruth’s record. But Megdal fails to prove that it actually happened.

UPDATE: Commenter “Michigan & Trumbull” points out that Greenberg’s higher walk rate in September might well have been due to the fact that he had less protection in the lineup than he did earlier in the season. This further undercuts Megdal’s thesis.

Before District of Columbia v. Heller, the 1939 decision United States v. Miller was the Supreme Court’s leading decision on the Second Amendment. Miller was, to put it mildly, obliquely written. As Michael O’Shea has detailed, the opinion seems mainly concerned with whether the gun in question was a militia-type weapon, which would suggest that the decision is congruent with a well-established line of state right to arms cases (some of which were cited in Miller) that all persons had a right to arms, but that the right only encompasses militia-type arms (and not, therefore, Bowie knives or other arms associated with disreputable brawlers). However, Miller is not clearly written, and over the subsequent seven decades, there was much dispute about its meaning. The disputes were almost inevitable, in that Miller is terse and oblique, and, except for a history of the early American militia, provides almost no explication or analysis.

At the oral argument in Heller, Justice Kennedy noted that Miller “kind of ends abruptly.” In the Heller decision, the Court observed that Miller was “virtually unreasoned.” Many scholars have wondered what Justice McReynolds was trying to do by writing such an opinion.

The Heller Court pointed out that many lower courts had “overread” Miller. A recent post on the Legal History Blog provides some evidence that legal scholars may also have overread Miller, for Miller may not have been written to mean much at all, other than perfunctorily upholding the National Firearms Act against a facial challenge. The post highlights Barry Cushman’s 2003 University of Chicago Law Review article Clerking for Scrooge. Cushman’s article reviews the 2002 book The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox: A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR’s Washington.

Since high school, John Knox had been star-struck by the Supreme Court Justices, attempting to strike up correspondences with them, sending them birthday greetings, and so on. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Knox landed a clerkship with Justice James McReynolds for the 1936-37 term. McReynolds preferred to work out of his D.C. apartment, rather than in the Supreme Court’s then-new building. Knox’s role was secretarial. Knox later wrote: “I appreciated his anti-New Deal view and agreed with it, but that was the only thing I could possibly agree with him on. He was selfish to an extreme, vindictive, almost sadistically inclined at times, inconceivably narrow, temperamental, and heaven knows what. All of his employees lived in a reign of terror and were crushed under foot without any hesitation on his part.”

More relevantly for Miller, McReynolds “found great difficulty in expressing himself in writing and, sadly enough, was genuinely lazy.” In the September of the clerkship, Knox had dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Everett Gann. The Ganns were well-connected in Washington; Mrs. Dolly Gann was the sister of Herbert Hoover’s Vice-President, Charles Curtis (1929-33). Mr. Gann was a friend of McReynolds, and accidentally caught McReynolds in a tryst with a woman. Knox recalled Gann’s words: “I concluded finally that he is not really interested in the work of the Court any more. He’s old, evidently bored with life and would probably retire now if he could do so without letting other conservatives on the Court ‘down.’”

While McReynolds was remarkably even-tempered when President Roosevelt announced his Court-packing plan in 1937,

McReynolds appears to have been equally if not more greatly irritated by the amount of work he had to do in the spring of 1937. One of McReynolds’s defining characteristics, on Knox’s account, was sloth. . . . Nor was Knox impressed with the amount of time McReynolds put into the preparation of those opinions he actually did write. The first opinion of the term went through only two drafts, and McReynolds spent only about three and one-half hours working on it, including the hour he had spent studying the briefs of the case before he had begun his dictation. He devoted only slightly more time to his second opinion. Laboring over opinions in a “scholarly” manner was apparently not Mac’s style.

McReynolds was upset when he was assigned the dissent in an important labor law case (Anniston Manufacturing Co v Davis), which he knew would have to be long. His dawdling delayed the release of the opinion, eventually leading the other dissenters to come to his apartment to try to help him get the opinion done. McReynolds finally decided “he was going to employ the ‘paste and shears’ method, quoting verbatim from lower court opinions excerpted in the briefs rather than composing his own prose.”

Now United States v. Miller becomes easier to understand. All eight Justices (Douglas, then new to the Court, did not participate) have voted in conference to uphold the statute. The lower court opinion is a mere conclusory assertion. Miller’s attorney did not even brief or argue the case, but instead told the Court to rely on the Department of Justice brief. (We now know that the district court judge, the local U.S. Attorney, and, perhaps, the defense attorney, were colluding in order to bring the weakest possible case to the Supreme Court, in order to affirm the National Firearms Act.)

So imagine you’re Chief Justice Hughes. Given that you have to assign McReynolds a majority opinion from time to time, Miller is the perfect case. The Court is unanimous, meaning that McReynolds will not be burdened with responding to dissenting arguments. Indeed, since the case is uncontested, writing the majority opinion would be especially easy. McReynold’s product in Miller was consistent with his lazy and slapdash approach. Perhaps the other Justices, while recognizing that there was room for improvement in the opinion, decided not to press McReynolds for changes, lest McReynolds fail to get around to making any revisions, and thereby further delay the progress of the Court’s business.

All of the opinion-writing Justices in District of Columbia v. Heller took their work much more seriously than McReynolds apparently took his work in Miller, and so both the majority opinion and the two dissents directly and carefully addressed many of the important Second Amendment questions which McReynolds had conspicuously ignored.

Three years ago, I wrote:

on the one hand, we have friends of Israel who are too quick to label others anti-Semitic, though I believe that this phenomenon is declining, as it has received increasing scrutiny and criticism. On the other hand, we have critics of Israel who try to portray anyone who defends Israel as a hysteric who sees anti-Semitism everywhere. This seems to be on the rise. And the most vociferous critics of the former phenomenon tend to be the most egregious participants in the latter.

Eric Fingerhut has an excellent post discussing the same phenomenon:

[T]he whole Wieseltier-Sullivan episode has served to illustrate an emerging trend among critics of Israel: Their eagerness to allege that they’ve been accused of being an anti-Semite. I do agree that some of Israel’s defenders are too quick to throw out charges of anti-Semitism or “self-hating Jew,” and that’s lamentable and a problem. But it seems that among many of Israel’s critics, claiming that you’ve been accused of being an anti-Semite has become some sort of bizarre badge of honor. And quite a few of those that have allegedly been accused of being an anti-Semite, according to Wieseltier’s critics, either were never smeared with such a term or were only accused of making a specific problematic remark and not tarred with some broad brush of disliking Jews, as they claim....
Why exactly has claiming you’ve been called an anti-Semite become so cool lately? Could it be that those claiming they’ve been called anti-Semites find it easier to do that that actually defend their positions with facts?

Read the whole thing, as they say.

As with other Israel-related posts, this one is likely to attract some very, uh, vigorous comments, and I’m too busy to moderate, so I’m keeping comments closed.

The New York Times reports on the Andrew Sullivan vs. Leon Wieseltier controversy.  The report is not quite right; it says that Wieseltier accused Sullivan of anti-Semitism, when Wieseltier actually accused Sullivan of recklessly engaging in venomous rhetoric that gives aid and comfort to anti-Semites and stokes anti-Semitism.  This may be cold comfort to Sullivan and his defenders, but we might as well get the story right, and the difference is important for reasons discussed below.  You can read Wieseltier’s original article here, Sullivan’s response here, and Wieseltier’s rejoinder (much better than his original piece, IMHO) here.

I have a few small contributions to make to the debate.  One is that I find it extremely odd that Sullivan is so vociferous in attacking Israel’s defenders (rather than just Israel’s policies) when, as Jonathan Chait points out, he himself rather recently was one of Israel’s most vociferous defenders.  If Sullivan himself was once persuaded that Israel’s cause is just, shouldn’t that lead him to some circumspection about attributing Israel’s support in the U.S. to a nefarious cabal of “neocons”, the “Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing” of the Jewish community, AIPAC, and so forth?  Maybe a lot of people find Israel’s case compelling for the exact same reasons Sullivan did as recently as eight years ago.   But Sullivan is almost uniquely uncharitable to people who hold the views he himself held just a few years ago, so this probably reflects a general “convert going after the heretics” mentality on his part.  Plus, given his blogging about Sarah Palin, Trig, et al., is there much reason to think he hasn’t gone off the deep end generally?

Second, Wieseltier’s notes, in his rejoinder, that Sullivan has apologized a couple of times for engaging in rhetoric perceived to be anti-Semitic, and adds, “There is a lot of this prejudice in the world right now, and this is really no time to be sloppy, or South Parky, about it.”  Wieseltier has stumbled, perhaps inadvertently, on one of the key bones of contention between many Jewish (and some non-Jewish) advocates for Israel and their adversaries (including Jewish adversaries).  The pro-Israel forces note that anti-Semitism is rampant in the Arab/Muslim world, still has a fair number of supporters in the West, that Iran is threatening to wipe out Israel, and so forth.  The plea, then, is to take this into account when criticizing Israel, and try to keep your criticism reasonable, and take care not to invoke anti-Semitic tropes, even by accident. Otherwise you risk stirring additional anti-Semitism, perhaps even leading to a “Second Holocaust.”  After all, the “progressives” who harshly attack Israel are generally the same people who are most sensitive about other forms of racism.

From the critics’ perspective, however, Israel and its perceived bellicosity, and its perceived alliance with bellicose forces in the U.S., is not just a significant violator of Palestinian human rights, but a serious threat to world peace.  [UPDATE: Consider Sullivan--Israeli policy is a "danger to itself and the entire world".] When you are dealing with a country so dangerous, that has such a reservoir of (to them inexplicable) support in the U.S., you can’t treat it with kid gloves.  If a critic of Israel occasionally steps over the line,that’s an understandable reaction to the frustration of beating your head against the wall of pro-Israel public opinion, and pales in comparison to the sins of the “right-wingers” whose “unconditional” support of Israel threatens all of humanity with nuclear annihilation.  And such critics are contemptuous of the idea that care should be taken when discussing legitimate topics that relate to Jewish stereotypes, such as the “Jewish Lobby”–we are supposed to worry, they suggest, about the long-term consequences of legitimate criticism of Israel, when [they think] Israel and its supporters are trying to push the U.S. into a new and disastrous war with Iran?

Finally, and related to the second point, there is a reason why some critics of Israel (some of whom I’ve discussed in this blog) are tempted to use venomous rhetoric against Israel and its supporters that sometimes crosses the line, to various degrees, into hostility to Jews, even if they are personally not only not anti-Semitic, but find it repulsive.   And that is that such rhetoric works.  Arguments based on pure reason are often less successful than arguments that provide reasoned arguments but also appeal to the emotions.  Our civilization has a two thousand year old reservoir of anti-Jewish sentiment that is part of our societal DNA, and appealing to that cultural baggage, even if it’s just latent, makes anti-Israel arguments more powerful and persuasive.   Being anti-Israel doesn’t make one anti-Semitic, but appealing to anti-Semitism does make it easier to persuade people to be anti-Israel.  The very effectiveness of appealing to societal anti-Semitism in criticizing Israel is good reason to avoid it, but also the reason it’s all too common.

Rush Limbaugh made comments on his radio show (scroll down–if you find this post of great interest, you should probably read the whole three-paragraph monologue, which makes the relevant context abundantly clear) suggesting that Pres. Obama may be subtly appealing to anti-Semitism through his attack on “bankers” and “Wall Street,” and that Jewish voters, in return, may be abandoning Obama.

Abe Foxman and the ADL then issued a press release:

Limbaugh told his listeners: “To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

When he comes to understand why his words were so offensive and unacceptable, Limbaugh should apologize.

Now compare the bolded “quotation” from Limbaugh’s show with what he actually said:

Look, folks, there are a lot of people who when you say “banker,” people think “Jewish.”  People who have prejudice is the best way to put it. They have a little prejudice about them. So for some people, “banker” is code word for “Jewish,” and guess who Obama’s assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people, and a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish.  So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

Note that that the ADL press release intentionally cut off the italicized material above in which Limbaugh made it clear that prejudiced people associated “bankers” with Jews.

I find Limbaugh’s comments, even with the full context, to be foolish: I don’t think there is any evidence–and Limbaugh provides none–that Jews even perceive Obama to be appealing to anti-Semitism, nor that Jews in particular are, as Limbaugh suggests, abandoning Obama at a rate greater than other voters.  Charitably, Limbaugh’s remarks were a lame attempt to find a topical reason to plug Norman Podhoretz’s book, Why are Jews Liberals?

But the fact that Limbaugh made a foolish comment unsupported by any evidence hardly makes his comment “borderline anti-Semitic.”  How, exactly, is attacking the other side for allegedly appealing to people’s anti-Jewish prejudices anti-Semitic?

I’d like to give the ADL and Foxman the benefit of the doubt here, but the fact that their press release cuts off the relevant two lines about prejudice argues strongly against it. [I also don't see anything in Limbaugh's remarks that would support Foxman's claim that his is propounding the "notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans," beyond the obvious (and I assume uncontroversial) point that Jews are less likely to vote for someone that they perceive as exploiting prejudices against them.]

Fact is, while leftist types go on and on about the “right-wing” ADL, the core donor base of the ADL is Jewish liberals, and Foxman and company need to go after a conservative or two every once in a while, sometimes with the flimsiest of reasons, to keep their donors happy.

Unfortunately, and perhaps not surprisingly, the same left-wing bloggers (e.g.; and note the irony that this blogger accuses Limbaugh of being an anti-Semite, yet his blogging seems to attract a fair number of blatantly anti-Semitic commenters) who like to call Foxman out when they think he’s being too harsh on critics of Israel are perfectly willing to back him up on this one.  How many of them actually bothered to take the approximately 45 seconds I needed to look up the full transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks (none seem to quote the “prejudiced” lines), I don’t know, but the line between reckless slander and intentional slander isn’t that fine.

Podhoretz, meanwhile, responds here.

An especially pernicious common fallacy is the assumption that if a given group is overrepresented in some field, that must mean that they dominate it, and are using their supposed “domination” to promote the group’s interests. My better half quotes this example described by historian Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times:

Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia [of the Nazis about Jews] was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik? There was very little basis for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist network.

In the 1920s, Jews were indeed overrepresented (relative to their percentage of the general population) among both Bolshevik leaders and international capitalists. At the same time, non-Jews still greatly outnumbered Jews in both groups. A closely related fallacy was the assumption that overrepresentation in a field proved that the Jews involved in it were using it to promote some specifically Jewish interest. In reality, Jewish capitalists tended to behave much like gentile ones, focusing primarily on maximizing their profits. Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky were brutal totalitarians. But their gentile counterparts, such as Lenin and Stalin, were much the same. There was no real evidence that either Jewish capitalists or Jewish communists were promoting specifically Jewish interests in any systematic way. Indeed, Jewish communists in the USSR actually supported the regime’s suppression of Jewish culture and religion.

At this point, readers may be tempted to say that the crude errors of 1920s anti-Semites don’t have any relevance to us. After all, we are a lot smarter and more sophisticated than they were. Perhaps so. But similar fallacies in modern discourse aren’t hard to find, and are certainly not limited to a few anti-Semitic extremists. For example, some 25% of American gentiles believe that “the Jews” deserved at least “a moderate amount” of “blame” for the financial crisis. This view is likely based in large part on extrapolation from the overrepresentation of Jews among prominent bankers and financiers.

Similarly, as co-blogger David Bernstein points out, many people (including prominent scholars such as Mearsheimer and Walt), believe that neoconservatism is a Jewish movement that promotes specifically Jewish interests. As David explained, this belief is primarily based on fallacious deductions from the overrepresentation of Jews among neocon intellectuals. He correctly emphasizes that it ignores key facts: that the views of Jewish neoconservatives differ little from those of gentile ones, that neocon hawkishness on the Arab-Israeli conflict is just one facet of their hawkishness on other foreign policy issues unrelated to Israel (and therefore not likely to to be a specifically Jewish agenda), and that the overrepresentation of Jews among neocons is similar to that in many other intellectual movements (including plenty that were opposed to neoconservatism on most issues). As in Weimar Germany and early 20th century Russia, Jews tend to be overrepresented in numerous intellectual movements because a higher percentage of Jews than gentiles are intellectuals. It’s hard to find a major intellectual movement of the last 100 years where Jews were not overrepresented relative to their percentage of the general population, with the obvious exception of movements that were anti-Semitic or centered around a non-Jewish religion such as Catholicism. For similar reasons, Jews tend to be overrepresented in many occupations that require higher education and intellectual skills, which helps explain why they were and are overrepresented among finance capitalists.

In sum, the fact that Jews are overrepresented in a given field does not prove either that they dominate it or that they are using their supposed domination to advance specifically Jewish interests. No doubt, one can find similar examples involving groups other than Jews. The more general lesson is that such logical fallacies are not limited to Nazis and other long-discredited extremists, and that we should take more care to avoid them.

Here’s the way the New York Times describes an ongoing controversy over whether the Berkeley Daily Planet is obsessively anti-Israel and perhaps anti-Semitic:

For the last six years, The Berkeley Daily Planet has published a freewheeling assortment of submissions from readers, who offer sharp-elbowed views on everything from raucous college parties (generally bad) to the war in Iraq (ditto).

But since March, that running commentary has been under attack by a small but vociferous group of critics who accuse the paper’s editor, Becky O’Malley, of publishing too many letters and other commentary pieces critical of Israel. Those accusations are the basis of a campaign to drive away the paper’s advertisers and a Web site that strongly suggests The Planet and its editor are anti-Semitic....

Still, she says she has no intention of stopping the publication of submitted letters, citing a commitment to free speech that is a legacy of the city where the Free Speech Movement was born in the 1960s....

Ms. O’Malley denies any personal or editorial bias, and bristles at the suggestion that she should not publish letters about Israel ....

“I have the old-fashioned basic liberal thing of believing that the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech,” said Ms. O’Malley....

The paper has published unpopular opinions on other subjects, including a commentary from a local activist arguing that the murder of four Oakland police officers — none of whom were black — by an African-American parolee in March was “karmic justice” for past police killings of civilians. But such pieces are in a section of the paper that clearly states they “do not necessarily reflect the views of the Daily Planet.”

I’ve never heard of the Daily Planet, much less the relevant controversy, but the Times’ piece seemed so one-sidedly favorable to the Planet and its editor that it prompted me to look at John Gertz’s dpwatchdog.com (referenced in the article) to see what the fuss was about.  The site is somewhat rambling and unprofessional, and unfortunately does not generally link to the full text of the op-eds, editorials, and letters it quotes from.

Nevertheless, if the Times is going to cover the controversy, you would think its reporter could at least be bothered to figure out what the controversy actually revolves around.  Below are some of the allegations I learned from the site that I didn’t learn from the Times, allegations that show, specifically, that the controversy is not, as the Times has is, about the Planet publishing uncensored letters to the editor that “do not necessarily reflect the views of the Daily Planet.”

“Becky O’Malley used to claim that, being a free speech absolutist, she publishes everything she receives.  The lack of pro-Israel pieces merely reflected the fact that she received very few.  This was a flatly false statement at the time she was making it, since we have seen quite a number of pro-Israel pieces, which were sent to O’Malley but which she declined to publish.

Then she changed her story.  She called some pro-Israel pieces “Islamophobic,” and she refused to run them for that reason.  She also claimed that pro-Israel articles would “bore” her readers.... When she does publish pro-Israel letters, she has been known to edit their most important sections out.  All of this is thoroughly documented elsewhere on this website.”

“The Berkeley Daily Planet’s own employees share an obsession with Israel, starting with O’Malley herself.  Contrary to O’Malley’s assertion that she does not write about Israel, to date (September 2009) the Berkeley Daily Planet has published 24 editorials written with Becky O’Malley’s own hand and which concern the topic of Israel or the Jews.  She has written on virtually no other part of the world, except, very occasionally on Iraq.”

“Conn Hallinan writes a regularly appearing foreign affairs analysis column for the Berkeley Daily Planet, under the byline, “Dispatches From the Edge.”  Hallinan is in fact from the very edge of the American body politic, being a lifelong Communist.   He is a contributor to various anti-Israel websites, such as PalestineThinkTank.com.  At least 15 of his columns to date entirely or mostly concern Israel, while many more bring Israel into articles written chiefly on other topics.”

Managing editor, Justin DeFreitas has published at least 13 cartoons concerning Israel or the Jews, but only a small handful about all the other situations in the world.  Additionally, there have been numerous “news” articles concerning Israel.... By admission and implication, the Berkeley Daily Planet, while obsessed with Israel, is only interested in one side of the story.

“O’Malley placed an anti-Israel article by well-know anti-Israel activist Henry Norr in the news section instead of in the commentary section where it belonged (August 30, 2005).”

“Both Becky O’Malley and Conn Hallinan (we will consider Hallinan in depth elsewhere) equate Israel and its supporters with the Nazis.  This in itself is a very strong indication of anti-Semitism, while Daily Planet cartoonist, Justin DeFreitas, has used imagery in depicting Israel that is indistinguishable from Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda.”

Gertz also claims that despite its claimed commitment to freedom of speech, the paper has special rules that apply to Jews and Israel only, such that pro-Israel Jews (but no other ethnic groups) may be slurred on ethnic grounds in the paper. (The Times notes that Gertz was attacked in a letter to the paper for wearing the “funniest looking yarmulke,” but fails to note that Gertz points out that he doesn’t wear a yarmulke, making the remark not just a juvenile insult, but a juvenile insult of the sort someone who hates Jews would make, like saying “Obama wears the funniest looking dashiki I have ever seen”).  Gertz also suggests that the paper has a special letters to the editors policy re Israel, so that anti-Israel and even blatantly anti-Semitic letters from readers outside the Bay Area (one of which is noted in the Times) are published, but pro-Israel letters from local residents are “censored.”

In short, Gertz alleges not that the Planet is too indulgent in publishing crankish letters to the editor, but that it has an official editorial policy, adhered to by its editors, columnists, and reporters,  that is obsessive about and extremely hostile to Israel, to the extent that it sometimes crosses the line into overt anti-Semitism.

Again, I had never heard of the Planet, or O’Malley, or Gertz.  But it does strike me that if the Times thinks that the controversy over the Planet’s coverage of Israel and Jews is worth reporting, it should report both the allegations and O’Malley’s defense, not take the line that O’Malley is under seemingly unfair attack for adhering to free speech principles.

UPDATE: Bizarrely, two commenters below seem to think that my block quotations from Gertz’s site mean that I’m endorsing both his general attack on the Planet and all of the specifics in those block quotes.  I should think that it’s very clear that I’m just reporting, not endorsing, his allegations, because I think the Times’ story did not fairly portrary those allegations, and it’s easy to show that this is true by just reprinting them.  But just to be even clearer, the point of my piece is that the Times’ only provided O’Malley/the Planet’s side of the story, and failed to accurately portray Gertz’s allegations.  I did not address whether those allegations are sound in general, much less endorse any or all of Gertz’s specific language. (Further update: perhaps this will clear up the source of the confusion: the block quotes, including internal links, are all Gertz, no me).

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: I do not meet to imply that the author of this article, San Francisco bureau chief Jesse McKinley, is motivated by hostility to Israel or Jews.  Rather, I suspect a combination of sloppy, lazy reporting and the tendency of Times reporters to portray any case in which a media outlet is being criticised as involving trogrlodytes who don’t understand the value of free speech, and treating editors under attack as beleaguered heroes, almost without regard to the merits of the underlying controversy.

Monday’s New York Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming English edition of Emmanuel Faye’s book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935.  In brief, Faye argues that Heidegger’s pro-Nazi views were not incidental, but were at the core of his life’s work. Accordingly, suggests Faye, libraries should remove Heidegger books from the “Philosophy” section, and place them in the “History of Nazism” section. From what I know of Heidegger (he’s discussed in my forthcoming book Aiming for Liberty) his intellectual influence on the 20th century was highly pernicious. Heidegger, like Hitler, wrote books addressing the question of what it means to be a “German,” and came to similar conclusions. Both writers were verbose; Heidegger was superior in the fabrication of elaborate philosophical constructs, while inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly. Given Heidegger’s own dedication to Hitlerism, it seems that Heidegger himself might have considered it appropriate for his books to be shelved next to Mein Kampf.