Making YIVO a Zionist Organization

New Overt Unofficial Israel Lobbying Organization
Followup: Ahmadinejad, Columbia Faculty Politics, Martin Peretz, Islamic Fascism
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

According to Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss,

A friend just got the latest YIVO bulletin, which is not available at the Yiddish institute's website, and reports the following:

It includes a full page diatribe against Walt-Mearsheimer that concludes that W and M "presented a one-sided version of Israel and Middle East history by manufacturing fictional arguments for the sole purpose of supporting and furthering anti-Semitism throughout the United States and the world."
 
Unbelievable.  YIVO is a scholarly institution whose goal is to preserve the language and culture of Eastern European Jews.  In joining this debate in this way they are enlisting the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs in the AIPAC cause, as if millions of the 6,000,000 weren't socialists, communists, and anti-Zionists along with Orthodox Jews, Zionists, assimilationists, etc.
 
YIVO has nothing to do with Israel.  And they are willing to forego donations from all those who do not believe that endless war is in the best interests of Israel. 

It is dismaying to me because Yivo is the place where these things ought to be discussed openly. But Martin Peretz is a leading figure on Yivo's board, and he has helped to sacrifice the institution's scholarly purpose to one of essentially dual loyalty.

This development makes me think of Nadia Abu el Haj's book Facts on the Ground, Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Peretz is applying the same tools he uses in pro-Israel political manipulation to refashioning the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and by logical extension Yiddish history as well. The region being excavated is not Palestine/the Land of Israel but is instead the territory of historical-political discourse.

 

In the future, Oyf vas badarfn yidn a land (Why do Jews Need a Land of their Own) by Sholem Aleichem will almost certainly be politically correct at YIVO, but  ישראל ארץ אין רײזע מײן (Meyn Reyze in Erets Yisroel) by the mainstream Yiddish journalist Dr. B. Hofman will almost certainly be on the index of forbidden books.*

 

For Phil such a change a YIVO shows even more reason to talk about the Israel Lobby.

Meantime, the left will have to conduct the discussion. Lately the estimable blogger Tony Karon wrote that Walt and Mearsheimer got it wrong about the Israel lobby because they failed to recognize the "deeply-entrenched [pro-Israel] tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function quite independently of the lobby's interventions." I don't think he's right about those "tropes." As Eban says, the State Department wanted to cut and run on partition after it proved that it would produce endless strife in Palestine. Even Truman was going wobbly. Yes there are militarists and Christian Zionists who play a role in the policy-making. But the realest trope is the lobby itself, which has been around now for over 60 years...

Time.Com senior editor Tony Karon replied,

The point I was trying to make is that a lot of the general AIPAC lines have been internalized in the U.S. political mainstream. And in the process, AIPAC has established itself as synonymous not just with Israel, but with philo-Semitism. What you see at that annual AIPAC conference where Democrats and Republicans line up to kiss ass is a graphic demonstration of the fact that AIPAC no longer even needs to go after the politicians, they come to AIPAC cap in hand.

It's not even a behavior or a principle about which mainstream politicians bother to think any more, it's par for the course. I guess that's what I was trying to get at...

Tony Karon's original blog entry concluded,

Remnick's own Israel bubble has been taking a bit of a battering of late: Just three weeks ago, he found himelf compelled to write a subtle smear of Avrum Burg, largely attributing the former Knesset speaker's renunciation of Zionism to his supposed personality defects! Plainly, Remnick has little appetite for engaging with Burg's notion that, as he put it, he had always considered himself a human being, a Jew and a Zionist until he began to recognize that his Zionism negated the other two aspects of his identity.

 

Burg, like Mearsheimer and Walt, had clearly made Remnick uncomfortable. But he's substantially correct in challenging the M&W idea that the lobby is singularly responsible for policing America's public discourse on Israel. After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces. Nor did anyone tell Kinsley to try and shoot down Jimmy Carter's apartheid argument. Just as important as challenging the Israel lobby is drawing attention to the deep-rooted tropes of knee-jerk defensiveness in sections of the liberal-Jewish intelligentsia that allows them to avert their eyes and cling to fantasy when Israel is an agent of oppression. [Remnick's criticism of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy appeared in the September 3, 2007 New Yorker.]

The claim above in red is only superficially true from my limited observation of the journalistic industry and from my greater observation of the finance industry.

 

One can build up a lot of credit with the powers that be with the sort of effort and content that Remnick put into his articles.

 

Jonathan Wells's attacks on the Islamic Society of Boston at the behest of the David Project, which is an Israel Advocacy organization, got him his transfer to Fox News even though in theory Fox News and the Boston Herald are supposed to be independently owned.

 

[It boggles the mind, but the FCC relaxed the rules on media cross ownership shortly after I began to make my concerns about the Fox Herald relationship public among my contacts in the Boston news industry. See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/08/sale-of-boston-herald.html , which I published several months after looking into conflict over the Roxbury Mosque and after discussing the issue with several local attorneys specializing in media regulations and law.]

 

In the finance industry there are networks of Jewish professionals that protect one another and that pass around insider info. Someone that advances the wrong opinion on Israel can get cut off. Someone that expresses the right opinions advances.

 

There are payoffs for pro-Israel support and not deep tropes.

 

Another source of common pro-Israel opinion is the movie industry. Melani Macalister discusses the relationship between pop culture and perceived national interest. See http://www.eaazi.org/ThorsProvoni/history/naaplecture.htm#_ednref26 .

 

Yet, every marketing study that I have read on the subject indicates that what pro-Israel film has created, anti-Israel film can uncreate.

 

No one should be particularly surprised that the Hollywood Crowd (powerful Jews in the film industry) make it really difficult to produce and distribute Palestinian-sympathetic film.

 

Look at the grief that Spielberg got for giving approximately 20 seconds to the Palestinian point of view in Munich  -- my investment models, which now taken into account Zionist and Palestinian-sympathetic content, indicate that the gross ticket revenue was only 1/3 what it should have been. Was there purposeful mismarketing  at the lower ranks?

 

Note

 

* Like many American Jews today, Hofman  (Tsivyon) naively supported Zionism in 1919 according to the NY Times ("Expects Migration of the Jews," January 19, 1919, Sunday, Page 17) but changed his mind after visiting Palestine and seeing Zionist behavior for himself.

 

Sphere: Related Content