[expat1000]

Sultan Knish/Daniel Greenfield Ping List. FReepmail me to get on or off.

[ClearCase_guy]

The Nazis have been defeated, the last of them is dying now, but the Universalists continue their long war against us.

Bertoldt Brecht was a Communist, but his play "Arturo Ui" is interesting. It centers on a Chicago gangster who is obviously modeled on Hitler. The play shows the rise of political tyranny as simple thuggery (which it is). In the play, the gangster Ui is killed, but someone observes: "The bitch that bore him is in heat again."

There is never an ending to the struggle.

[the invisib1e hand]

Bump.

[arasina]

The Jewish Universalists lost faith in G-d, but they did not lose faith in humanity.

That's the nugget in the entire well-written piece. The battle between the "Never Again" (Nationalists) and the "Teach Tolerance" (Universalists) is actually a battle about faith. Believers vs. Humanists. Visionaries vs. Blinders-On. They have opposing worldviews.

To so many Jewish liberals, Israel is coded with the dangerous message that Jews are no longer committed to the great humanitarian revolution and the dream of a better world. That they would rather claim a chunk of real estate and protect it, than join the workers and peasants of the world in the ranks of the social justice movements, that they would rather cling to a narrow identity than melt into a borderless brotherhood of man.

That was why Israel was controversial long before 1948. It was why everyone on the left from Lenin to H.G. Wells denounced the idea and denounced the Jews as selfish counterrevolutionary bastards for wanting such a thing. It is why it is still controversial today.

I didn't know that about H.G. Wells until I read this article!

[Upstate NY Guy]

Excellent piece. I am finally starting to understand how some American Jews can be so far left and how they seem to oppose Israel. "Teach Tolerance" versus "Never Again" and Universalists versus Nationalists goes a long way toward explaining this paradox.

Thanks for posting.

[khelus]

Thanks for posting this really great essay.

[Excellence]

The Moslems don’t want to distroy Israel because they are Universalists, and the Universalists don’t seem to have a problem with Islam. This is a very frustrating reality.

[x]

I don't what to be the guy who says, "This is an example of the 'straw man' fallacy" (or maybe I do, just this once), but like so much else in life it's a continuum.

Most Jews, most people, aren't pure Nationalists or pure Universalists. They fit in somewhere in the middle. It's possible that some of the Jews he disagrees with really want to disappear as a people, but most probably don't.

The author creates an oversimplified dichotomy that doesn't reflect the complexities of the real world (and he seems to want to make "good German" mean any number of irreconcilable things).

[rmlew]

ping