Was American Jewish Zionization Inevitable?

Pro-Obama Jewish Seniors
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Hebrew University Professor Jeremy Haber recently added an entry entitled  One Elderly Jew's Passionate Support of Obama to his blog named The Magnes Zionist.

He writes:

Over the past few months I have had some interesting discussions with a 94-year old Jewish supporter of Barack Obama. The supporter, a prominent real estate developer, was one of the pillars of the Jewish community in his prime. A past president of the local Federation, the Jewish Community Center, and a board member of a big conservative shul, he has led a long and active life of service to the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. I should also mention that he is a life-long liberal, who only once wavered in his support for Democrats, and that was when he supported John Anderson over Jimmy Carter in 1980. (He has come to respect Jimmy Carter in his post-presidency.)

I asked him how he came to support Obama. After all, he seemed to be bucking the demographics: white, elderly, Jewish former businessmen aren't supposed to be in the Obama camp. This is what he told me:

About a year and a half ago, I was given Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. I didn't know anything about him, except that he had given a good speech at the Democratic Convention. Well, I read that book, and I was amazed by his life story, and by his vision for America. On the strength of that book I decided to support the campaign, and I have continued to do so. If anything, I have become more disenchanted with Hillary Clinton, who has run a negative campaign. She comes nowhere near Obama. Most of the people who don't support him don't really know anything about him.

[To read the rest of the article, click here.]

When I study the history and development of the American Jewish community, I have the impression its soul (or public spirit, i.e., Gemeingeist) was gradually hi-jacked.

By leaving E. Europe, Yiddish immigrants to the USA consciously or unconsciously renounced the extremist völkisch racist politics of E. Europe.

Even though I can find all sorts of opportunistic reasons for American Jewish support of

• civil rights, 
• the labor movement, and 
• other progressive causes,

in some sense the motivations were irrelevant because the ultimate results could have provided much more than narrow ethnic benefits.

Yet since the transplantation of the Zionist movement to the USA from Eastern Europe, there seems to have been a gradual Jewish group mental subversion that is apparent in the Zionization

• of American Reform Judaism,
• of the Jewish labor movement, 
• of Jewish philanthropy and 
• of Jewish civil rights efforts

thanks to the efforts of communal leaders like

• Abba Hillel Silver,
• Abraham Cahan, founding editor of the The Forward (Yiddish: פֿאָרווערטס; Forverts), and
• Felix Warburg, a prominent early twentieth century philanthropist and banker.

In order to create a mechanism to control US discourse, Israel advocates had to bring American Jews back to the nineteenth century racist mentality that was common among the Eastern European Yiddish population in the 1870s-1890s.

When Jeremy Haber's father talks about his support of the NAACP, I have the impression of a certain incompleteness of the Zionist indoctrination and of the existence in the past of a different direction that the American Jewish community might have taken.

Unfortunately, the indoctrination of younger pro-Israel Jews seems far more complete and bullet-proof. Like the Neocon leadership, they know they are right.

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