The Roots of Rootlessness: Part II - Walter Lippmann

 

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Reform Judaism

 Assimilation is one thing - betrayal is another.  Italian Americans assimilate into American culture; Irish Americans do as well; Asians likewise, as do African Americans.  Jews, however, are a special case.  A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st Century.  Most ethnic groups strove to assert their unique national and cultural identities.  Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos - all had something to prove.  It would seem, however, that rather than having something to prove, American Jews had something to disprove. While African Americans were demanding that American society recognize their African roots and heritage, American Jews were demanding disassociation from their people's similar struggle for national liberation: the re-establishment of Israel and Zionism.  Progressive America - and the world, for that matter - began to enshrine ethnic and national movements from Putamayo Indians to Lakota Sioux. For Jews, it became a kind of cultural game of musical chairs.  Many American Jews - if they still chose to identified as such - decided that they weren't going to play.  Instead, they would become the game's referees.  When you're a referee, you will never be a loser.  And you won't have to compete with everyone else scrambling for a seat.  They would  steam-clean themselves of any ethnic and nationalist identity.  They would become COWS (Citizens of the World).   American Jews (aka Progressive Jews who would eventually become the overwhelming majority of self-identified Jews) decided that they would become uber-Americans in the sense that they would function above the rough and tumble of ethnic and national competition.  Being a referee is a no-risk persona.   American Jews could become un-Jews.  All they had to do was to morph into good people.  Having developed the theory of "The Other", projecting their own past oppression onto that avatar, American Jews became champions of the oppressed - so long as the oppressed was someone other than Jews.  Ironically, the decriers of "The Other" became the chief architects of constructing their fellow Jews as "Other."  In order to remain safe and to validate their Progressive credentials, they felt it necessary to point out to the gentile world the bad Jews in their midst.  The famous Viennese-American psychoanlayst, Heinz Hartmann,  predicted the so-called Stockholm Syndrome when he coined the phrase "Identification with the Aggressor." The fact that Jews would champion every other ethno-nationalist group (so long as it met muster in the Progressive lexicon) was seen as no contradiction to their own identity trajectory.

The sequence of the Holocaust followed closely by the re-establishment of the Jews' ancient homeland in Israel presented a quandary.  Just at the time when most American Jews were seeking to seamlessly blend into the American social fabric, along came European extermination trumped, in part, by national redemption.   The collision of self-erasure with the triumph of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust inevitably signaled the victory of assimilation to the point of disappearance.  If anything, the unstated lesson of The Holocaust was to teach American Jews that, above all, it's dangerous to be a Jew.  The answer was to become invisible.  To be small meant to be invisible and hence, not a target.   Rabbis began to rail against "Triumphalism."  And what could be more triumphal than the re-establishment of the Jewish national homeland after 2000 years? 

In spite of its socialist origins, Israel increasingly became the target of traditional Islamic and Arab antisemitism masquerading as Progressive, anti-colonialist ire.  The genius of their strategy lay in their ability to anneal fundamentalist Islam  - along with its anti-Progressive core to a naive Progressive movement - from one end of the earth to another.   To be pro-Israel eventually came to mean pro-Reaction and pro-Colonialism.  

But the roots of anti-Israel sentiment predate the founding of the state in 1948.  The seeds of self-erasure and fear of being identified as a Jew in any shape or form have been germinating in America for hundreds of years.  Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism, presided over the famous Pittsburgh Convention of 1885 in which was declared:

"We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state".

Just as the admission ticket to European salons and professions in the 18th and 19th centuries became the Baptismal Certificate, Progressive American Jews  decided early on that opposition to and denigration of Israel and Zionism would open all doors to them on this side of the Atlantic.

The trajectory self-erasure is confirmed by every succeeding poll of American Jews:  More mixed marriages, fewer children schooled in Judaism, and, most disturbing of all: A pattern of 3 C's in relation to Israel's survival.  They are Cowardice, Complicity and Collapse.  This series will examine this sad phenomenon by looking at a number of representative leaders.

Among the shapers of American public opinion and the theoriticians of public opinion in the last hundred years, no individual looms as influential and powerful as Walter Lippmann.  A self-described elitist, contemptuous of "the bewildered herd", Lippmann was born to an upper middle class, German-Jewish family which distanced itself from any association with a Jewish community.  Precocious, good looking (in a distinctly non-Jewish way) and privileged, he was one of the first Jews to enter Harvard.  Ironically, Lippmann favored Harvard President Lowell's Jewish quotas.
In 1913 he founded The New Republic and was quickly elevated to Presidential adviser by Woodrow Wilson and was appointed to the Committee on Public Information whose mission was to produce anti German propaganda to facilitate U.S. entry to World War I.   Lippmann helped fashion Wilson's ill-fated 14 Points presented at Versailles.  Un-Jewishness, he soon realized, would be no impediment in propelling him to public prominence.  As his biographer Ronald Steel commented, "He criticized the Jews for being 'different' rather than the Gentiles for emphasizing and punishing those differences."  He would become the archetype of the de-racinated Jew for later, successful public figures like Madeleine Albright.  His animus towards and fear of being identified as a Jew was shared by his contemporary, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations and popularizer of Sigmund Freud, his uncle.  Dismissive of the threat posed by the Nazis, even the revelations of the extermination camps apparently had no effect on Lippmann.  His columns assiduously avoided any reference to the Holocaust.  He once described Hitler as "statesmanlike."   He even opposed the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, considering them "victors'" justice.  He revealed his animus towards Jews by statements like this following the question of punishing Germany collectively for the depredations of the Nazis:
“Would it be fair to judge the French by the Terror, Protestantism by the Ku Klux Klan, the Catholic Church by the Inquisition" or, "the Jews by their parvenus?"

Fancying himself a serious philosopher after his emblazonment on the cover of Time Magazine in 1937, he produced The Public Philosophy which earned him generally poor reviews by critics who considered his analysis of Natural Law puerile and incomplete.
For decades his opinions were sought by Presidents and other public officials.  A central figure helping to shape policy towards the Soviet Union, he coined the phrase, "Cold War." Today, Lippmans's haughty style and pronouncements seem to have cast the mold for current pundits. To be fair, his analysis of the Soviet Union and Communist China do stand the test of time, especially his early revelations of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930's.  But the heirs to his style and his loathing of Jews walk among us. We need look no further than Noam Chomsky.  Next time...Edward Bernays, progenitor of spin.
In depth link (interview with Lippmann biographer, Ronald Steel):