Marty Peretz

“Yeah, it’s a bummer, but it’s hard to shed any tears over Frank,” Elspeth Reeve was telling The Observer in a phone interview Friday, the day before her husband, U.S. Army Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, joined her at her mother’s house in Missouri for his 30-day leave.

Earlier that week, Ms. Reeve’s former boss, The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, had published a 7000-word piece that concluded by formally retracting three first-person columns that the 24-year-old Mr. Beauchamp had written for the magazine over the summer. Soon after their publication, a chorus of conservative bloggers had raised questions about the veracity of the columns, in which Mr. Beauchamp offered first-person accounts of American troops in Iraq engaging in shocking behavior, such as running over dogs with their Bradleys, and mocking a woman whose face had been disfigured in an explosion. After carrying out a nearly five-month investigation, which involved attempts to corroborate Mr. Beauchamp’s claims with other members of his unit, Mr. Foer had concluded that the stories could not be verified.  read more »

Just days after purchasing the shares from money men Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt, Canadian media giant Can West has completely bought out the New Republic. The Observer first reported in Dec. 2006 (2nd item) that CanWest was taking a majority stake in the company. That was confirmed on Feb 23. Instead of just majority interest, CanWest now owns 100% of the company.

Marty Peretz, who no longer owns part of the magazine, for the first time since 1974, will remain as Editor in Chief.

-Michael Calderone

Full release after the jump  read more »

I can't stop talking about the wonderful-horrible AJC report, it's so changed the landscape. Again I say, give credit where credit is due: this was the AJC's reactionary pushback against Carter and Walt and Mearsheimer, and it blew up on the Jewish right/mainstream when the Times actually chose to write about it. Thus the anti-intellectual, vicious, omerta practices of the Jewish leadership were revealed, to its shame.

But I'm going to try to not be self-serving here. The fascinating thing about this Jewish perestroika is that it liberates everyone. Not just my camp, the anti- or non-Zionist camp that wonders if the dream of a Jewish state hasn't slid hopelessly away, but also the We-are-very-upset-about-Israel's-current-policies-but-we-love-her-and-believe-in-her camp. The Zionist left is angered and embarrassed by the AJC report, feel that it's broadbrush and reactionary, and so are standing up with renewed energy, as if the ball is about to be handed to them, at last—the rightwing having shot itself in the foot.

Gershom Gorenberg, who is in that camp, yesterday said the real story is that the left is alive, it's empowered groups like the Union of Progressive Zionists, which is harshly critical of the occupation. Isn't it great they haven't been thrown off the Israel on Campus Coalition, Gorenberg writes, despite the best efforts of the ZOA. And he is right. Tamara Shapiro, the 24-year-old who runs UPZ, is an amazing young woman, idealistic and tough. She brought Breaking the Silence to America last year; she gets it from the right (ZOA) and the left (me). Now the AJC report has given her more room to operate, by blasting open the debate. (Leonard Fein makes the same point in the Forward this week).

Just as the AJC gave leftish John Judis of the New Republic freedom to talk about something he has probably been secretly bitching about for years: the pressure on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, from people like his boss, Marty Peretz (he didn't say that part out loud). When is Mickey Kaus, another not-all-the-way-on-the-reservation Jewish intellectual whose career has been boosted by Peretz, going to speak up about this pressure? Or Mike Kinsley? Time is now, boys. Everyone's letting their hair down in the sweatlodge.

The best analysis I've seen yet of the politics of the Jewish left in America is from Daniel Sieradski—"Mobius," of Jewschool. He explains to me that the two big roadblocks are a, ideological differences, and b, dough.

I question as to whether recent events indicate the presence of a movement so much as what I regard as fractious groups with overlapping areas of interest and little coordination. Some folks are focused on liberal domestic political issues such as labor practices, women's rights, gay rights, etc., others are focused on shifting the priorities of the Jewish funding establishment away from intermarriage and Israel advocacy towards Jewish education and cultural initiatives; while others yet still are focused on finding a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That last group is broken into left-leaning Zionists (of the Meretz/Labor cadre), post-Zionists (who believe either in two states or a binational solution, yet overall, a solution which respects both Jewish and Palestinian rights), and anti-Zionists who are more often than not anti-Israel reactionaries.  read more »

The one thing these three groups can agree on is that things are headed in the wrong direction and that the mainstream Jewish leadership is steering us down a dark road.

However, it is practically impossible for these groups to collaborate because of:

A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel's interests and the U.S.'s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset with me, including friends.

Well now in The New Republic, John Judis has joined me in legitimizing this question. Here is the money quote:

On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism-- the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith.

This is intellectually valiant work, Judis should be applauded; and TNR praised for running the piece. As for the demand made on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, it is one that anyone who has worked for the New Republic (I did it once, and carried Marty Peretz's anti-U.N. water for him) has experienced.

Wow, I'm just stunned by this. It's another achievement of the AJC report, which Judis's piece addresses (and of Walt-Mearsheimer, who broke the whole thing open). Don't you see what is happening? The dual-loyalty question is being mainstreamed. The degree to which neocons and neolibs and American Jewish journalists generally have been recruited in passive/unconscious identification with Israel is, as I've said here before, a legitimate issue. The suppression in the American Jewish community of any alternative discourse to Zionism—well, thanks to the AJC, the bridges are being dynamited...

Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, was influenced by Hannah Arendt to consider the relationship of Jews to the state, and in 1993 he published a book on the subject, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Marty Peretz blurbed the book, calling it "wise and provocative," and saying that its treatment of the dangers of anti-Semitism in America is "a subject of which everyone has an opinion but about which almost no one likes to think."

Ginsberg is far more pro-Israel than, say, Walt and Mearsheimer, but he was intellectually honest enough to talk about the power of the Israel lobby. The lobby enjoys a reputation as "Washington's most powerful lobby." During the Reagan era, an "important role" for the pro-Israel forces was played by "'neoconservative Jewish intellectuals who used their access to the print and broadcast media to promote national defense." Reagan called on these pro-Israel forces to support his policies in Latin America, and "to portray these policies as part and parcel of the same struggle against communism as Israel's fight against the P.L.O. Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, obliged."

(Then it was Communism. Now it's the fight against Islamic terrorism. Just check the box, and deny the Palestinians basic rights...)

Ginsberg goes even further than Walt and Mearsheimer (as I have in this blog) in the sociologial vein. "Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual, and political life," he states. Indeed, they are "extremely influential." And Jewish "ties to Israel," he notes, have sometimes played a part in accusations of dual loyalty: "the potential result [of these ties and the suspicions they cause] is to undermine the position of Jews in American government and policy-making capacities—long a major source of Jewish influence."

Ginsberg establishes these facts to serve a point of view that Walt and Mearsheimer and leftists like myself would disagree with. He's pro-Israel, and fearful (as I believe David Brooks is, though Ginsberg does not resort to code) about a radical populist reaction against a tiny Jewish elite. Ginsberg is concerned that the gentile American powers-that-be would then sell out the Jews. Fair enough; I have many friends who believe this too: that the U.S. is basically run by the goyim and we Jews are simply convenient, for now, and watch your back. But what if you don't share this concern? What if you are a universalist, as opposed to Peretz/Wieseltier's particularism? What if you were horrified by a visit to the occupied territories (and angered that Jewish particularists cannot even describe the lands as occupied, let alone face what religious nationalist Jews have done there)? What if you are concerned about the way that an extremist U.S. foreign policy has emulated that occupation, alienated the Arab world and made the Middle East more dangerous than ever?

Answer: You should be able to use the same points that Ginsberg marshals—influence, Jewish neoconservativism, and a powerful lobby—without being labelled an anti-Semite.

I've been thinking about something Marty Peretz said at Yivo Institute last week.

Following Niall Ferguson's talk about Jews & Money, a lady in the second row asked whether the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government committed itself to a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, arose from a need by the Brits to gain the support of "influential Jews in the United States," who might help determine the outcome of World War I. Ferguson didn't know the answer, but that didn't keep him from offering insights into Lord Rothschild (to whom Foreign Sec'y Balfour's declaration was addressed) and the Germans and Muslims and other issues. (And I'm not going to try and answer the question here; I don't know, though it's intriguing...)

At one point, Ferguson noted that The New Republic was established by Walter Lippmann during that era, in 1914—if I heard him right, in part out of Zionist concerns—and from the audience Peretz, the grand vizier of the New Republic and chairman of Yivo's overseers, piped up that Louis Brandeis had also helped start the magazine.

My sense is that Peretz misspoke. The usual nutshell on The New Republic is that Lippmann and Herbert Croly helped start it along with the young Felix Frankfurter. I wonder if Peretz meant that future Jewish Supreme Court Justice, not Brandeis?

I'm interested because I happened to have with me at the event a splendid book I just got, The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, family letters, edited by David W. Levy of the University of Oklahoma. Brandeis was the father of American Zionism, and he's fascinating. He was assimilating until he was close to 60, and then, apparently stunned by the Dreyfus case and influenced by an associate of Herzl's with whom he became close, Brandeis grew fearful about the place of the American Jew, pushing the cause behind the scenes even when he got on to the Supreme Court in 1916 (following an antisemitic uprising against his appointment). He was never able to convert Lippmann completely, though the Levy book reveals that Brandeis lobbied for Zionism with the financier Eugene Meyer, Katharine Graham's father, who bought the Washington Post in 1933; and that Meyer kicked in large sums for the cause, $25,000 on one occasion. And yes, Brandeis met with Croly and Lippmann around the time the New Republic began. Maybe what Peretz is referring to.

The letters also show that after the Balfour Declaration, Brandeis was among those who lobbied his friend the President, Woodrow Wilson, to echo the British commitment. As Wilson did in 1918, thereby defying his own State Department. Brandeis subsequently visited Palestine with Frankfurter and a man called Rudolph Sonneborn, the son-in-law of the great American banker Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb. And Sonneborn in 1947 supplied arms to the fledgling state of Israel thru a fictitious entity, the Sonneborn Institute.

All this is from David Levy's fine book.

I go on this historic bender to make a point. Powerful American Jews have played a crucial role in the Zionist cause, often behind the scenes. Marty Peretz knows something about this history. The world of Louis Brandeis and Eugene Meyer and the White House—Peretz, who is a friend of Al Gore's, knows its later incarnations in his fingertips. And how regrettable it is that from the moment that Walt and Mearsheimer addressed the idea of Jewish influence, Peretz's response has been altogether defensive and vituperative, seeking to blacken these scholars as antisemites. There is a great Jewish scholarly tradition that seeks answers to important questions, not obfuscation. What an education it would be to hear Peretz's thoughts on Washington and Israel. Though yes, we got a peep out of him the other night.

The Yivo Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Ashkenazi Jews, has lately reprinted an important attack on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The attack was written in 1921 by the great English journalist Lucien Wolf, who showed that the Protocols, then circulating in Europe, were plagiarized fictions aimed at persecuting Jews.

Yivo's Board of Overseers, chaired by Marty Peretz, has reprinted the cover of Lucien Wolf's book The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs. And a handsome cover it is. On the back of the reprint, Yivo presumes to tell Wolf's biography. It goes on about what a scholar, reporter, and diplomat he was. It says that at Versailles in 1919, he "supported the 'western' position that the Jews were not in fact a separate nation, but should be protected as minority citizens of their respective resident countries."

This vague statement is a dishonest way of treating Wolf's actual significance in Jewish history: he was an anti-Zionist. For most of his life he fought Chaim Weizmann over the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine—although he demanded equal rights and protection for Jews who emigrated there. Wolf, writes Walter Laquer, in A History of Zionism, looked upon Judaism "as a collection of abstract religious principles, upon east European Jewry as an object of compassion and philanthropy, and upon Zionism as, at best, the empty dream of a few misguided idealists." Wolf himself wrote the entry on Zionism in the (magnificent) 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1911. (Thanks to my book-collecting mom, I have it right here.) He dismissed Zionism as an "error" by laying out his liberal belief in the modern nation state:

"Under the influence of religious toleration and the naturalization laws, nationalities are daily losing more of their religious character... With the passing away of anti-Semitism, Jewish nationalism will disappear. If the Jewish people disappear with it, it will only be because either their religious mission in the world has been accomplished, or they have proved themselves unworthy of it."

Yes, Wolf was writing before the Holocaust. But this is what this great Jew believed. Other progressives hold similar views today, including those like myself who are appalled by what a militaristic state Israel is, and by the apartheid policies that I witnessed in Hebron in the West Bank. Indeed some of Wolf's heirs have called for a binational state in Palestine.

The point here is that those who would insulate Israel from criticism, including Peretz, are misrepresenting Jewish history, in this case to stir up fears of a new antisemitism, and to bash Walt and Mearsheimer while they are at it. If you want to invoke Lucien Wolf's legacy, do so by honoring his views. And by showing that there is a tradition on the left of critiquing the implications of establishing a Jewish state. (Yivo knows better. It holds Wolf's papers. And Yivo's own curators describe Wolf's anti-Zionist efforts more honestly here.) One more wrinkle. Wolf believed that Jewish support for a Zionist state would expose Jews in western societies to the charge of dual loyalty. In essence, an issue that is raised by Walt and Mearsheimer's critique of the Israel lobby, and by the deluded war-fervor of White House neocons like Elliott Abrams, who has written that outside of Israel, Jews "are to stand apart from the nation in which they live." (This guy makes policy!) Walter Lippmann also had this concern (per Ronald Steel's bio), which is one reason he did not become a Zionist.

This is the one good thing about Gabriel Schoenfeld's (vicious) attack on Walt and Mearsheimer in the latest Commentary. Schoenfeld knows, and says, that concerns about dual loyalty were active in the minds of Jews who opposed Zionism, back when. Yivo could honor Lucien Wolf by exploring his concerns—now, when Jews need to recover their progressive tradition.

Last night Yivo Institute on W. 16th Street hosted a talk by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson on "Jews and Money." How excited I was to hand over my $15. The center dedicated to the study of Yiddish-speaking Jews was bringing in a heavyweight prof, a biographer of Rothschilds and Warburgs, to anatomize the culture of Jewish success.

What a fizzle. Niall Ferguson was overawed by the SRO New York audience and his Lazard Freres intoducer, an affable machine in a too-long red tie, and did not venture one bold thought on the matter. Most of his talk seemed aimed at gaining the audience's approval by showing that he regarded the alleged affinity of Jews and money as anti-Semitic stereotype from Europe in the 1800s. Jews were no different from other ethnic minorities: Armenians in Turkey, Parsis in India, even Asians at Harvard today. O.K., but what are the facts? How wealthy are Jews? How much are "Wong and Chang," as Ferguson blithely caricatured his top students at Harvard, worth? I read the ad: This was not a talk about history or aspiration but money. Ferguson offered zero data, that's 0 data, on wealth in the U.S. today and confined himself to Germany during Weimar, where he stated Jewish overrepresentation in German elites was on a factor of 33 (to 1, was implicit; his statistics were sadly vague).

The talk took a safe slide at the end into the matter of intermarriage—again, not what Yivo said he was talking about when it asked for my $15, and again in historical terms. Ferguson said that in the 1920s, Hamburg (50 percent) and Berlin (43) had the greatest rates of Jewish intermarriage in Central Europe. Why? Was it the girl wanting to marry in, or the boy marrying out? The novelist/sociologist did not show up for this talk. Though Ferguson said, intriguingly, that high intermarriage rates were a motivator for Nazi ideology, Hitler wanting to purify Aryan blood from "self-assimilators."

Intermarriage allowed him to conclude on a homiletic note that was calculated to please the (Jewish) crowd: "Jews don't necessarily gain much from ceasing to be Jews."

How would you feel if you bought a ticket to a show called "Angelina Jolie Nude" and the guy got out pictures of Angelina as a baby, and naked pictures of her baby? Sore. This is actually a fascinating subject. After all, it was Marty Peretz, the head of Yivo's board of overseers (who had taken the stage first to charmingly introduce Ferguson and the Lazard machine), who warned in the New Republic, when Larry Summers exited Harvard, that it had lost several $100 million gifts. Who did he mean? Harvard, where Ferguson works, has also been subject to Jewish blackmail over former dean Stephen Walt's brave statements on the Israel lobby. Can we talk about this? I guess not; not even Yivo is safe.

Niall—Nile? Kneel? Nail?—said that the true affinity is of Jews for knowledge, that once they have money, they move on to scholarship. He had little more to say on this point either. I thought he was biting his tongue. The only time he seemed halfway free in his expressions was when he said that his own brand, the Scots, tend to dominate England's elites, and had incurred "flickers of resentment" but no expulsionist agendas.

"They know they can't do without us!" he said, with the one emotion he forked over for my $15: pride.

That's what I think about the position of Jews in the American power structure: They know they can't do without us. This is an idea worth considering. I could have stayed home and read a scholar that the hashslinging Ferguson seems not to have read: the great Yuri Slezkine, who has studied the ways that Jews have been/are specially suited to modernity, in contrast to Parsis, Armenians, Scots, Changs and Wongs.

P.S. An interesting idea came up in the Q-and-A. Before he was shouted down, a speechifying questioner said that the ghettos in Eastern Europe and Paris, which were resistant to intermarriage, may have grown out of a desire by Jews themselves to stay apart. There is of course a segregationist element in Jewish organizational life today: the program of Jewish day schools and Jewish camps, aimed at preventing intermarriage. In fact, Peretz might have been endorsing this program in his introductory remarks, when he said (quoting Stephen Greenblatt) that Jews, having done so well at so many aspects of American life, from making money to being doctors and politicians, should do a better job of living as Jews. A pox on intermarriage. What about the poor shiksas?

One great thing about blogging is it reveals a writer's true nature, flaws and all. (Like my flakiness; I try and ground myself but there it is; I think in Kabbala they would say I am too much in my chochma). The latest evidence of this is Marty Peretz's pro-Israel blog, the Spine. Peretz is warm, funny, passionate and charismatic (I've met him), but there's something inevitably superficial and vicious, even scurrilous about him. The dictionary defines scurrilous as coarse abuse, and that's a manner Peretz is comfortable with, more comfortable with than ideas. Note his attack on George Soros and Morton Halperin for daring to launch an anti-AIPAC lobby. His argument boils down to the claim that he saw Halperin "brown-nosing" at a party at Harvard once (as if this were a significant character flaw; brown-nosing is alas the air that the meritocracy, and all other -ocracies, have to breathe), and that Soros doesn't know "shit" about Israel. Scatology 101.

The real fascination here is that in spite of Peretz's repeated dismissals of these events as inconsequential, it appears that Israel's American critics, harder and softer (from binational staters to Rabin-followers), are seeking a unified front on the left and—supplying further evidence for Walt and Mearsheimer's groundbreaking paper—the news of the anti-lobby is in Israel's leading papers, but not here.

Wednesday 31st Editors at the bat!  read more »