{"id":13403,"date":"2024-01-23T19:39:35","date_gmt":"2024-01-23T17:39:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/?p=13403"},"modified":"2024-01-25T13:24:59","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T11:24:59","slug":"can-zionism-save-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/can-zionism-save-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Zionism Save Academia?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Zionism can offer a way forward to address academia\u2019s growing abandonment of cherished liberal values.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Academics love maligning Zionism as racist, imperialist, settler-colonialist. But Oct. 7 woke up many Americans. The professoriate\u2019s stunningly amoral response to the Hamas rampage exposed academia\u2019s moral rot. Harvard\u2019s Claudine Gay lost her presidency only when a plagiarism scandal undermined her academic credibility \u2013 equivocating about Jew-hatred wasn\u2019t enough (although Jews are being blamed for her ouster, naturally). It\u2019s time to flip the conversation. Zionism is not the problem. In fact, Zionism could be the solution to many of the academy\u2019s ideological ills.<\/p>\n

Although Identity Politics has loomed since the Sixties, this fall\u2019s failures dramatized academia\u2019s fall. Doctrinaire students, professors and administrators have transformed many campuses into Progressive dystopias. They receive billions from the government, corporations and alumni, and from struggling na\u00efve parents, to give our best and brightest a liberal education and the credentials to build America. Nevertheless, the universities created an alternate universe, imposing many values antithetical to their sponsors and to the skills and visions America needs to progress.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, not every academic is \u201cWoke\u201d \u2013 one shorthand used to describe the ideology which others call \u201cantiracism,\u201d \u201cDEI,\u201d \u201ccritical race theory,\u201d \u201canti-colonialism,\u201d \u201cintersectionality,\u201d \u201csocial justice,\u201d or \u201cpostmodernism.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>And just because Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis declared a \u201cWar on Woke\u201d shouldn\u2019t stop intelligent people who detest those politicians from repudiating an ideology that is not just anti-Zionist, but anti-American.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Woke\u2019s real war is not against conservatism \u2013 most Ivy Leaguers don\u2019t take Republicans seriously intellectually. Their war is against the traditional liberalism that long dominated academia, which is why liberals must take back the night.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time for liberals to rediscover Zionism. This movement is liberal at its core. Since the 1880s, many liberals not only supported Zionism, but launched it.<\/p>\n

By contrast, consider the illiberal liberalism guiding today\u2019s campus commissars, who confuse education with indoctrination and cancel anyone who dissents.<\/p>\n

Oppressor-oppressed reductionism:<\/strong>\u00a0This Marxist oversimplification now dominates academia \u2013 three decades after Soviet Communism collapsed. Karl Marx divided the world into capitalist oppressors and the oppressed proletariat. Often ignoring serious class divisions that economically-based affirmative action initiatives could ameliorate, the antiracist impresarios keep demanding more and more race-based advantages. They romanticize people of color while demonizing whites. They celebrate anyone belonging to those \u201csubordinate groups\u201d they welcome at the \u201cintersection\u201d of politically-correct suffering, while defining those they dislike as \u201cwhite\u201d \u2013 even, say, dark-skinned Mizrachi Jews.<\/p>\n

Collective grievances over individual journeys:<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s inevitable. Once you define people by innate characteristics, then leverage whatever they have suffered to help them advance, you create grievance junkies who weaponize differences. This obsession with group identity is often superficial, juxtaposing angry Balkanized politics in public with a superficial \u201cWe are the world\u201d universalism in private.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Challenging this racialism is not racist. It is fighting racism in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>King wanted his children judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. He catalyzed America\u2019s commitment to individual rights rather than racial categorization, and would never have wanted Harvard\u2019s first black president to blame \u201cracial animus\u201d for her plagiarism-scarred mess \u2014 even if some despicable bigots attacked her too.<\/p>\n

Equitable Outcomes over Equal Opportunity:<\/strong>\u00a0The Woke war on liberalism began by refusing to build patiently with individual rights and equal opportunities. Instead, a regime of bean-counting, now bureaucratized by DEI \u2013 Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity \u2013 administrators, judges democratic processes by statistical outcomes of goodies grievance-groups grab, not the purity of the process or genuine achievements. More and more, university classes and professorial careers illustrate what happens when you reason backwards from politicized outcomes, rather than growing forward in systems liberal democrats try making fair and merit-oriented.<\/p>\n

Regressive progressivism over expansive liberalism:<\/strong>\u00a0The intellectual corruption is as dismaying as the Victimology Olympics over who suffered most and thus deserves the greatest payoff. Traditional progressivism was never value-free or uninterested in certain results. But progressives always reasoned forward, using facts to try building a better world. Too many self-described progressives today start with the politically-correct outcome, then fit facts into their worldview.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Postmodernism\u2019s emphasis on \u201cfluid narratives\u201d justifies the intellectual contortionism. These Regressive Progressives buy a European zero-sum approach to politics, economics and society, reflecting the dog-eat-dog pessimism of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The traditional American approach was lighter, more generous, more John Lockean, assuming the pie would always expand as Americans enjoyed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

America as systemically racist and sexist, not a work in progress:<\/strong>\u00a0Starting America\u2019s story with the first slave ship\u2019s arrival in 1619, rather than America\u2019s emergence as an independent liberal democracy in 1776, cements its foundations in its Original Sin of racism. This framing never explains how anyone ever progressed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>But just like conservatives who don\u2019t conserve institutions, progressives who don\u2019t believe in progress betray themselves. These New Nihilists condemn America to a constant vortex of tension, disillusionment and anger, rather than trying to help America spiral ever higher.<\/p>\n

These assumptions and visions contradict America\u2019s pantheon of optimistic reformers, from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. That\u2019s not surprising. What is surprising is how many Zionist philosophers \u2013 and how much of Israeli history \u2013 refute this worldview ideologically.<\/p>\n

Clearly, bigotry persists. But good ideas become bad ones when zealots go all accelerator, no brakes. That\u2019s how the necessary attempt to fight hatred degenerated into cycles of accusation, indignation, demonization and ever-escalating demands for compensation. Suddenly, \u201cwhiteness\u201d is a crime. Self-styled \u201cantiracists\u201d throw around sexist, racist, essentialist terms like \u201cKarens.\u201d And the Hamas rape and massacre \u2014 history\u2019s largest, most publicized and self-promoted act of violence against women \u2014 becomes justified and \u201cexhilarating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critical thought and free debate \u2013 not cancel culture \u2014 prevent such inhuman, soulless, fanatic orthodoxies. You need reality checks, not a star system promoting the same grievance junkies. Your ideology also needs some cross-currents, some tensions. Otherwise, simplistic sloganeering dominates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Herzl. photo: Carl PietznerHerzl<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Zionism has long tempered its intense ideological debates with pragmatism \u2013 because it first needed to solve \u201cthe Jewish problem\u201d and today needs to answer Israel\u2019s various problems. Zionists always balanced the Jewish and democratic traditions, filtered through the immediate need to build a state, along with the broader Jewish mission of saving the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Zionism\u2019s three defining assumptions also contain inherent tensions. Affirming that Jews are a people \u2013 Am Yisrael \u2014 inculcates loyalty, connectedness and responsibility to others, while juggling Judaism with Jewish peoplehood. Recognizing Jews\u2019 rights to their one particular homeland \u2013 Eretz Yisrael \u2014 roots Jews in their tradition, their history, their story, while confronting them with history\u2019s disruptions, their neighbors\u2019 hostility, and Palestinians\u2019 subsequent land claims. And championing Jews\u2019 rights to establish a modern state on that homeland \u2014 Medinat Yisrael \u2014 invites Jews to try realizing their inherited ideas, their modern ideals, their visions.<\/p>\n

At the risk of over-simplifying: If today\u2019s campus is defined by wagging fingers, Zionism mixes the Bible, the sword, the plow, the pen and the computer \u2013 creating richer and healthier fusions.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Zionism\u2019s most influential ideological streams synthesized different ideals. In founding an old-new land \u2013\u00a0altneuland<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 political Zionism combined Judaism and democracy, remembering enough to remain grounded while forgetting enough to soar. Socialist Zionists crossbred the Marxist commitment to egalitarianism with the Jewish need for a functional home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Revisionist Zionists\u2019 intense Jewish nationalism always included individualist liberalism. Meanwhile, Religious Zionists kept Zionism cosmic by incorporating God, the Bible and Judaism into the Zionist story while working, building and fighting when necessary, not just praying and waiting.<\/p>\n

While Zionism, too could be imprisoned in grievance, it mixed in infusions of love: for the Jewish people, the Jewish homeland, democracy, humanity. Still, a great Zionist mystery is how this people scarred by such a dark history generated this ideology of light. In Claude Lanzmann\u2019s epic documentary \u201cShoah,\u201d Yitzhak Zuckerman, who helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, said: \u201cIf you could lick my heart, it would poison you.\u201d But in 1949, Zuckerman helped found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, which today has a population of over 800 people. In the 1950s, Leon Uris interviewed people on the kibbutz while researching his inspiring Zionist novel, \u201cExodus.\u201d And in 2001, Zuckerman\u2019s granddaughter Roni Zuckerman became the first female jet-fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force. As a peacenik friend once told a Palestinian extremist: \u201cYou want \u2018justice\u2019 for becoming homeless \u2013 that\u2019s an abstraction, you\u2019ll never be satisfied; we wanted to solve our problem of homelessness, so we built our state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zionism was always too busy building the future to wallow in the past. It was about tree-planting not belly-aching, encouraging individual and collective effort to redeem Jews and the Jewish people. \u201cWe believe that salvation is to be found in wholesome work in a beloved land,\u201d Theodor Herzl preached. \u201cWork will provide our people with the bread of tomorrow, and moreover, with the honor of the tomorrow, the freedom of tomorrow.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Once established, the State of Israel couldn\u2019t divide the world into Jew-haters and Jew-lovers. Israel enjoys diplomatic relations with 164 countries, many still guilty of Jew-hatred. Even today, while Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of apartheid and lumps together every Arab between \u201cthe River and the Sea,\u201d Israel sifts. It distinguishes between Israeli-Arabs with full citizenship, Palestinians in Area A, B, and C of the territories, and Gazans \u2014 as well as\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Arabs from neighboring countries, between those at peace with Israel and those still hostile.<\/p>\n

One Zionist leader after another dreamed of peace, defining Israel\u2019s enemies by how they behave, not how they look or to what group they belong. Golda Meir\u2019s saying that \u201cWe can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,\u201d but \u201cwe cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children\u201d judges by actions while envisioning better days. Most Politically Correct essentialism lacks such optimism or subtlety.<\/p>\n

True, Israeli society, like all societies, is not prejudice-free. But Israeli law promises every citizen equal rights. On Oct. 7, marauding Gazans killed Israeli-Arabs, Bedouin and Druze. Polls now show majorities of Israeli-Arabs siding with their democratic country, Israel, against Hamas.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Similarly, Israel\u2019s daily death toll reflects its multi-racial, truly diverse society. Israelis equally mourn Ashkenazim, Mizrachim, Ethiopian Jews and Druze as our children, brothers, sisters, friends.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, after a rocky start, Israel created a capitalist economy enabling individuals to advance with the sweat and smarts Americans traditionally valued. Start-Up Nation cannot afford to be as clubby as the Labor Party\u2019s Israel was, or as race-and-gender obsessed as today\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n

Zionism and Americanism are not synonymous \u2013 but they often rhyme. At its core, Zionism is more Jewish, proudly particularistic, building a liberal democracy that isn\u2019t \u201cone out of many\u201d random peoples. Instead, it offers one people, the Jews, a thriving homeland, while including freedom for all \u201cinhabitants,\u201d as Israel\u2019s Declaration of Independence guarantees.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s Jewish character keeps Israel more traditionalist and communal than America \u2013 just as Israel\u2019s Socialist Zionist tradition still reinforces Israel\u2019s collectivist ethos. But healthy doses of Americanism helped save Israel from the start, making the Socialist Zionists the world\u2019s most successful socialists because they were the world\u2019s worst socialists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Shaming every socialist dictatorship, Zionists created the democratic kibbutz and founded a democratic Israel. Both traditional Judaism and American liberalism saved Socialist Zionists from what Marx called the necessary \u201cterror,\u201d which unleashed the socialist tendency to oppress those you\u2019re supposedly saving. After centuries of enduring persecution from others, few Jews would tolerate a dictatorship of Jewish proletarians.<\/p>\n

The Ottoman Turks exiled Israel\u2019s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion to New York during World War I. Ben-Gurion also visited the Soviet Union in 1923. Both experiences deepened the most influential Socialist Zionist\u2019s commitment to private property, civil liberties, democratic elections and the rule of law. Most of Israel\u2019s socialists were Lockean not Hobbesian, as optimistic as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, forever seeking freedom and happiness somewhere, over the rainbow.<\/p>\n

Today, Israel\u2019s meritocracy allows individuals to flourish while maintaining strong family values, a love of tradition and impressive levels of patriotism and national service. Most Israelis reject a faux-universalism that isn\u2019t rooted in family tradition, and group identity. Israelis contribute to the world through collective structures \u2014 from medical breakthroughs to IDF search-and-rescue attempts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These secure individuals building a healthy society benefiting humanity fulfill Theodor Herzl\u2019s 1896 vision in his Zionist manifesto, \u201cDer Judenstaat\u201d: \u201cWe shall live at last as free people on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, modern Israel retains a small-town, Main Street feel. Neighbors know one another, look out for one another, and feel kinship with one another, even while shouting at one another about politics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oct. 7 reminded Israelis that they are forever intertwined for good and bad, a people, also united by common enemies in Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik\u2019s \u201ccovenant of fate.\u201d The common values shaping so many funerals, the passionate commitment to \u201cliving as a free people in our homeland, the Land of Zion\u201d with hope,\u00a0hatikvah<\/i>, reflect a common sense of mission, Soloveitchik\u2019s covenant, \u201cof destiny,\u201d of purpose. And the Zionist revival of the Hebrew language, the development of Israeli art, music and literature, let alone all the national holidays Israelis celebrate together, reflect what we could call a \u201ccovenant of culture.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>The army reinforces all three covenants, generating a sense of unity and mission with its own internal language, culture, and rituals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And despite ongoing battles regarding how to create the world\u2019s first Jewish democracy, Israel\u2019s Jewishness cements Israel\u2019s identity, coats it with historical and spiritual meaning, and fuels an intense commitment to that place and project throughout the Jewish world \u2013 and the broader pro-Israel community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This miraculous us-ness \u2013 \u201cness\u201d is the Hebrew word for miracle \u2013 explains how, despite all its troubles, Israel ranks high on the world happiness index. Israelis enjoy high levels of \u201ctrust, benevolence, and social connections,\u201d which happiness experts say support \u201cwell-being,\u201d even \u201cin times of crisis.\u201d Since Oct. 7, the voluntarism, support, softness and love amid this harsh war has been overwhelming.<\/p>\n

That community spirit, even in a nation of strong individuals, fosters Israelis\u2019 sense of family, community, tradition, history and liberal-democratic nationalism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexis de Tocqueville understood democracy as a state of mind, not just a governing arrangement. It is defined by the songs of the street, the way people live, think and argue day-to-day. Israel today is remarkably stable, democratic and respectful of its citizens individually and collectively.<\/p>\n

Tocqueville identified strong family values as the backbone of a healthy democratic society. Family inculcates loyalty, proportion, commitment, self-sacrifice and a deep, abiding, sometimes complicated but often super-strong, love. Belonging to communities \u2013 extended families \u2013 teaches citizens to care for others, to cooperate. Israel\u2019s high fertility rate of 3.1 children per woman reflects intense family values and an inspiring optimism. In this small traditional country, where even most self-identified \u201csecular\u201d parents treat Friday night dinners as command performances, there\u2019s no such thing as empty nest \u2014 it\u2019s more like revolving door.<\/p>\n

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Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In short, Israelis still live in a small, intimate society that runs on trust \u2013 and keeps generating hope in a virtuous spiral.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>When speaking with Jews and Arabs across Israel, I hear their complaints. Still, when I offer them an imaginary time-machine to go backwards, they admit that Israel 2024 is better than Israel 2004 which is better than Israel 1984, etc. etc. And few Jews would revert to pre-1948, pre-State vulnerability, especially after tasting what Jewish powerlessness feels like amid Palestinian savagery this fall. Jews don\u2019t believe in Original Sin. Zionists see life as dynamic, progressive. They treat problems as mechanical, not systemic, challenges to solve, not curses you cannot break.<\/p>\n

For much of 2023, many American liberals assumed their shared enmity toward Benjamin Netanyahu made them just like Israeli liberals. Indeed, Israeli liberals share American liberals\u2019 desire for social justice, a high minimum wage, robust unions, equal rights for all, acceptance of LGBTQ+ lifestyles and peace.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But, long before Oct. 7, polls show that most Israeli leftists \u2013 like most Israelis \u2013 serve in the army, are supporters of capitalism who feared the judicial reform would threaten Israel\u2019s prosperity, enjoy Friday night dinner with their families, have children or look forward to having them, fast on Yom Kippur, light Hanukkah candles and attend Passover seders. Studies show that more and more Ivy League liberals are unhappy, pessimistic, lonely, alienated, humorless, angry and scared of being cancelled. Israel\u2019s patriotic traditionalist liberals are happy, optimistic individualists, often known for sharp senses of humor, with little tolerance for cancel culture. In short, Zionism created not just a New Jew but an old-new Patriotic liberal \u2014 more Jack Kennedy, the war hero and Cold War liberal, than Ibram X. Kendi.<\/p>\n

Chaim Weizmann summed up Zionism by saying, \u201cMiracles do happen, but one has to work very hard for them.\u201d That can-do spirit helped create a remarkably successful state. It spawned an Israeli people who use history as a guide and anchor, not a set of handcuffs to earlier sins and blind spots. And it counters today\u2019s Poisoned Ivy victimhood, defeatism, racialism, self-loathing, self-pitying groupthink.<\/p>\n

Over a century ago, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook articulated an integrated vision that remains remarkably compelling, on both sides of the Atlantic. His \u201cFourfold Song\u201d starts with those who happily, healthily, sing a song of the self. Others sing a song of the nation, loving the whole Jewish nation. Some transcend borders, singing the song of humanity. And some are so spiritual, they sing a song of the eternal world-to-come. Kook, like most Zionists, most healthy democrats, and most Americans traditionally, embraced them all, \u201cthe song of the soul, the song of the nation, the song of humanity, the song of the world.\u201d He, we, know that at our best, individually and collectively, they harmonize.<\/p>\n

Since the 1880s, Zionists learned much about how to build a successful liberal democratic society from America. Today, can America\u2019s most educated be open to learning some of those lessons from Zionists \u2013 and from their American predecessors too?<\/p>\n

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