Jeffrey Goldberg: Beinart, Chait, and that Disappearing Zionist Feeling
[Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, he has reported from the Middle East and Africa. He also writes the magazine's advice column.]
Peter Beinart has a new essay (in the New York Review of Books) about the slow death (or possibly not-so-slow death) of Zionist feeling among young, liberal Jews, caused mainly by what he perceives to be the American Jewish establishment's acquiescence to the spread of official intolerance in Israel....
I've only read through Beinart's essay quickly (though not so quickly that I haven't already exchanged a couple of e-mails with him about it) and I think it is in many ways analytically valid, if unsympathetic to some of the existential challenges faced by Israelis. But the essay's placement, in the New York Review of Books, the one-stop shopping source for bien-pensant anti-Israelism, is semi-tragic. If Beinart's goal is to talk to the great mass of American Jews who support the institutions of American Jewry but who are troubled by certain trends in Israeli politics, this is not the way to do it. Who is he trying to convince? Timothy Garton Ash? Peter should have published this essay on Tablet, or some other sort of publication not associated with Tony Judt's disproportionate hatred of Jewish nationalism....
Read entire article at The Atlantic
Peter Beinart has a new essay (in the New York Review of Books) about the slow death (or possibly not-so-slow death) of Zionist feeling among young, liberal Jews, caused mainly by what he perceives to be the American Jewish establishment's acquiescence to the spread of official intolerance in Israel....
I've only read through Beinart's essay quickly (though not so quickly that I haven't already exchanged a couple of e-mails with him about it) and I think it is in many ways analytically valid, if unsympathetic to some of the existential challenges faced by Israelis. But the essay's placement, in the New York Review of Books, the one-stop shopping source for bien-pensant anti-Israelism, is semi-tragic. If Beinart's goal is to talk to the great mass of American Jews who support the institutions of American Jewry but who are troubled by certain trends in Israeli politics, this is not the way to do it. Who is he trying to convince? Timothy Garton Ash? Peter should have published this essay on Tablet, or some other sort of publication not associated with Tony Judt's disproportionate hatred of Jewish nationalism....