How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?--part 2
Recent American Pro-Palestinian Campus Activism in Historical and Personal Perspective
. . . .These considerations make one wonder if back in the springtime Prime Minister Netanyahu counted the U.S. campus protests as a double advantage to him in political predicament: They both lifted Israel’s standing in U.S. public opinion[1] and raised the prospect of his having Donald Trump as the next U.S. President instead of Joe Biden, with whom he had developed voluble difference after October 7. Trump understood that the protests were helping his prospects and those of Republicans generally, and he was quick to take advantage, telling a meeting of Jewish donors that if re-elected he would throw foreign students involved in the protests out of the country.[2]
But it’s unclear: If he has any brains left at all, Netanyahu should not relish a second Trump presidency, since Trump’s manifest risk aversion and contempt for the military makes him a very uncertain partner for a possible joint U.S.-Israeli attack against Iran. If Netanyahu can still think straight, and if his real motives do not concern the favor of American supporters like the Falic family, Biden as lame duck before Inauguration Day and Harris after it—she with Jewish husband, Jewish National Security Advisor, and Jewish Deputy National Security Advisor—will commend themselves as far superior potential partners en extremis.
Note that at the moment the Biden-Harris Administration put in place in the region not just the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group (since switched out for the USS Truman, on its way as I write) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier battle group, but also the guided-missile nuclear submarine USS Georgia, with its 154 Tomahawk Land-Attack Missiles (T-LAMs) with ranges of 1,600 kilometers—suitable for destroying each and every Iranian oil terminal structure on Kharg Island from the USS Georgia’s currently deployed position. Would a theoretical second Trump Administration, in office from January 2021 to date, have done similarly? Given Trump’s erratic reasoning powers, encyclopedic ignorance, and resentment of all who offer him military advice, one could reasonably doubt it.
But 2024 is unlike 1968 or 1972 at least in one important circumstance: The political perturbations behind the protests have concerned someone else’s war, not one of several American offerings available in recent years. We saw nothing on this scale of protest on campus in and after March 2003 with the Iraq War, or in November 2001 upon U.S. military entry into Afghanistan, or over the spring 1999 U.S. bombing of Serbia, or associated with the 1991 Gulf War. Yes, American policy is involved on account of the “special” U.S. relationship with Israel in its many aspects, but most protesters are preoccupied by humanitarian concerns, not policy issues. Fine, but if protesting foreign wars are one’s forte, then why have there been no protests over the enormities happening in Sudan, or over the Chinese government’s oppression bordering on cultural genocide of Tibetans and Uyghurs, or, for that matter, over Russia’s bloody pounding of Ukrainian cities full of civilians?
The answer is almost too obvious: Jewcentricity strikes again. “Jews is news” here and abroad and most other foreigners just aren’t; it’s a Jewcentric tic so deeply rooted in the American mind that we typically don’t even know it when we see it. Of course it is redolent of a double standard; but it always is, in part because Jews in ways both intentional and not tend to insist on it. That’s a Jewcentric emanation, too.
Not only will the campus protests predictably harm the Palestinian cause, but Jewish-American supporters of the current Netanyahu government will harm Israel’s interests, as well. Again Zakheim: “At a time when campus rioters and more violent activists are undermining the Palestinian cause, the last thing Israel should be doing is to have ministers issuing statements that confirm the worst accusations of the country’s American enemies.”
And the current Israeli government has not just been issuing statements: On Israeli Independence Day, which fell on May 14 this year, two Israeli cabinet ministers—Itamar Ben-Gvir and Shlomo Karhi—participated in and addressed a “March to Gaza,” calling for permanent Israeli control and settlement of Gaza and, rather euphemistically in all likelihood, for the “voluntary resettlement” of its Arab inhabitants.[3] The last thing American Jews should do is either applaud or make excuses for such gestures, let alone for actions like settler sabotage of aid convoys to Gaza and attacks on Arab communities in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, in America, Jews have faced a fathomlessly complex dilemma that has been latent for decades, but emerged in full springtime view. It is an historically earned and wise reflex for Jews in diaspora to avoid arguing with one another in public during times of danger and difficulty. That said, some calls for communal unity in support of Israel, despite widespread internal misgivings over the current Israeli coalition’s military and diplomatic tactics, amount to classic examples of “not my country right or wrong.” They aim to stifle Jewish dissent whatever its objective merits may be.
It is not that difficult to distinguish between support for Israel in a war to re-establish deterrence after October 7, a war that any Israeli government would have undertaken, and opposition to its current government’s more expansive if muffled motives and its excessively harsh tactics affecting Palestinian civilians in that war. It is not anti-Zionist, let alone antisemitic, to criticize the Israeli government; lots of Israelis do it daily. It comes down to how one gives voice to the distinction so that those outsiders whose purposes are truly malign cannot readily hijack that criticism. This is easy to state, hard to do.
Striking other balances is similarly difficult. American Jews who endow major American universities have every right to a voice concerning the incompetence, cowardice, and supine complicity that too many elite university leaders displayed after the protests began.[4] On the other hand, those American Jews set on intimidating university leaders into suppressing protected speech and rights to assemble by threatening financial harm to teetering endowment funds, because some protect behaviors are inconvenient to their interests or are otherwise disagreeable to them, are sowing deep resentment.[5]
Insisting on the full conflation of anti-Zionist views with antisemitic ones, too, is also likely to sire negative consequences.[6] Anti-Zionism is antisemitism often enough these days—especially in certain places such as the United Kingdom—that insisting it must always be so harms the credibility of declaiming what actually is so.[7] Most people resent attempts to stifle dissent by means of moral blackmail, and that is what this conflation amounts to. Despite the fact that Jews are a people and not just a religion, much of the body language arrayed to cancel criticism of Israeli government actions has sought in effect to shift the ground of disagreement from differences over a political creed to accusations of traditional anti-Jewish bigotry.[8] Taking that tack to squelch criticism of Israel, even when the criticism is exaggerated or altogether wrongheaded, will stoke anti-Semitism, not stifle it. Jews accusing non-Jews of antisemitism when they sincerely think they are acting virtuously will not often get them to stop; it will anger them and, in not a few cases, turn them into the antisemites they never before were.
Here irony pours forth in buckets: Most American Jews, religious and not-so-religious alike, ignored Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s prescient warning in the wake of the June 1967 War and, in effect, increasingly substituted the State of Israel for the God of Israel over the years. As a political age overtook a religious one within a mere two generations, it was inevitable that many Jews would be drawn to secular sirens without realizing that doing so made it vastly easier for deep-seated gentile animus to slipslide from one form of negative Jewcentric exaggeration to another. Thus, to the extent that the actions of the Israeli government since October 7 of last year have touched off genuinely anti-Zionist sentiment (and not just criticism of particular tactics) it is inevitable that much of it would elide into antisemitism. One could hardly ask for a purer example of Jewcentricity’s quadrant 1 and quadrant 4 walking hand-in-hand, in this case into a new chapter of an old book.
That said, has a wave of global antisemitism arisen as a result of all this? Among many Jews this is a given, and this is nothing special: Emotionalized simplifications common to crisis psychology always conflate. But is it true? There is no question that the Israeli government’s conduct of the war has radically increased criticism of Israel, but not all the criticism qualifies as anti-Zionism and not all of the anti-Zionism qualifies as antisemitism. Most, yes; all, no. To react as though it is all rather than most has the general effect of validating one’s own conflation.
If a new wave of antisemitism is not exactly what we are seeing in the world at large, then what is it? I noted in Jewcentricity that the revolutionary nature of digital communications has allowed antisemitic and even some philosemitic memes to zoom around the globe and alight in places where there never have been and still aren’t significant—or even any—Jewish communities. So we have now a virtual, ethereal form of antisemitism to go with the old-fashioned real world-tethered kind. It could be, therefore, that what we have witnessed since October 7 is just so much pseudo-event antisemitic ranting in the media ether, without much contact or implication for what goes on where normal people deal with everyday challenges and occupations. We must be careful not to confuse mere foam with actual beer.
The only serious way to measure antisemitism is by collecting and interpreting data on violence against Jews and Jewish institutions. Has there been markedly more violence directed against Jews in, say, the ten months after October 7 than in the ten months before it? This is an empirical question, and I have yet to see a persuasive account that makes the answer a clear “yes.” What I have seen suggests that the answer is a weaker “yes.” Ostracism of Jews for being Jews? Yes, lots of new examples of that, notably in the UK but also here—and that unquestionably has a sharp psychological impact. But that is not the same as literal violence. That distinction, however, does not stop those who are sure of a new global tsunami of antisemitism anymore than campus protestors past and future will fail to see what they are sure exists in this or that politico-moral passion play. It is a century-plus old quotation but it remains apt: “For the most part, we do not first see and then define, we define first and then we see.”[10]
Nearly all sentient adults in every Anglospheric culture knows the adage that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”[11] Nevertheless, the childish assumption that noble motives must lead to positive outcomes all else equal—which it never is—seems to resist all forms of wise counsel in the exaggeration-spawning heat of the moment. Maybe America’s Christological origins and nature explain the migration of the solo fide/”believe on me” meme into political life. Or maybe something else altogether produces the delusion that if one pledges fealty to the right abstract beliefs then all the world’s pesky details will thereafter take care of themselves.
Whatever the source, the abject failure of anyone involved in the recent campus mayhem, movement leaders emphatically not excluded, to have sat back and thought before doing counterproductive things has to rank as one of the most consistent features of American political behavior over at least the past 75 years, longer probably. And mark well: This is not just a left-of-center delusion; Reaganism, from the President on down, was lousy with the same sanctimonious extrusions. Reassuring, isn’t it, that at least some things don’t change?
But other things do change. Yet another example of the negative follower effect of telegenically disruptive protest jumps from the explosion of anger in the midst of the COVID visitation over the George Floyd affair. That was a counterproductive near miss as it turned out, revealing a new wrinkle in the negative follower effect dialectic that persists into the current protests.
Never mind what an objectively accurate characterization of those spring and summer 2020 protests would sound like now. The bottom line was that the violence, looting, and overheated “defund the police” rhetoric—whether integral to the 2020 protests or rogue opportunistic sidebars to them—were not popular and hence not productive even by the lights of the purest souls among the protestors. Had Donald Trump not so badly screwed up the U.S. government’s response to COVID, the George Floyd upheavals might have gotten him re-elected in November 2020.
Omar Wasow, then at Princeton and currently an assistant professor of political science at Berkeley, comes to mind in this regard. Dr. Wasow has done meticulous research on the anticipated and unanticipated consequences of leftwing protests. His parents—Jewish father, Afro-American mother—were involved in protest movements back in the day, civil rights and antiwar, as well as with one another, so little Omar breathed adversary culture air from the cradle all the way to his Harvard Ph.D. But he came to have his own considered views of that whole business along the way.
Thus, just days before the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd, Wasow published a irony-of-protest paper in the American Political Science Review based on a careful study of the April-May 1968 protests that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.[12] Those protests turned violent and simmered into a long, hot summer in places like Newark and Washington, D.C. Those events, even more than the antiwar movement’s negative image in public opinion at large, played right into Richard Nixon’s November 1968 “law and order” campaign slogan. So did Wasow worry at the time that the George Floyd protests might get Trump re-elected, and did he say so on record? Yes; and yes he did.[13]
The paper and Wasow’s remarks about its possible applicability to the post-May 25 upheavals vaulted him to near instantaneous notoriety. He quickly became much unloved by the woke Left for daring to state obvious, data-supported truths: Violent protests, or protests depicted by media as more violent than not, were usually politically counterproductive. Wasow was not the only victim of woke worker bees mobilizing to purify its faux-holy hive: David Shor was fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a “progressive” data analytics company, merely for tweeting a summary of Wasow’s paper.
This was new. It was one thing to question the specific Vietnam antiwar movement heroism-and-triumph catechism. Now it was impermissible to question any protest tactic deployed against the hated status quo on the basis that it felt right. Only in an age of spectacle, where appearances and performative virtue-signaling have become more powerful on the cultural Left than substance and actual results—when alarming numbers of people, locked in a seemingly permanent subjectivist adolescence, can no longer distinguish between surreal fictive scripts on the one hand and the real world in all its messy complexity on the other—is such bizarre crypto-theological reasoning even imaginable. It is just as bizarre, merely differently coughed up and intended, as the cultic surreality of the MAGAt Right.
Mob psychology is endlessly fascinating, and its intentional manipulation frightening. Recent campus upheavals were just as layered as ever, with a small cadre of vanguard leftists and self-selected professional activiste outsiders to the campus community gulling a majority of sweet-souled useful idiots into joining a protest, and unknowingly acting as screens for intimidation and occasional violence.[14]
Meanwhile, the latter group, reportedly following their leaders like Eloi robots in the recent protests—another novelty—was teased into joining chants like “Palestine from the river to the sea” without being able to name the river or the sea or understand what the slogan even meant. Few of the foot-soldier protestors have any fact-based idea of what happened in 1948 or 1967, so they could not distinguish between criticisms of Israeli government behavior that made them allies of large numbers Israelis who despise their current coalition and criticisms that made them enemies of virtually all Israelis and most Jews worldwide.
That went, and still goes, for both types of useful idiots: the recently “awoken” type who absurdly apply zero-sum identity politics to the Middle East and so aim their naïveté against “White” Jews and for “Black” Arabs; and the apolitical snowflake types who “just want the hurting to stop.”
As to the former, that explains why after the September 27 hit on Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a Beirut suburb the former Secretary-General evoked more sincere teeth-gnashed mourning in Morningside Heights and the Harvard campus alone than it did in the entire Sunni Arab world. By far the vast majority of Hizballah’s victims over the years have been Arabs, including as many as a million Syrians. But the wokesters don’t know that any more than they know what happened in 1948 or 1967.
As to the latter, pardon a dollop of bitter truth: Most snowflaker protestors do not really care about dead Israelis or dead Palestinians; ever in the eternal now of our distracted affluent culture, they care that their perfect Barbiesque lives have been dragged down by a recalcitrant, and so unaesthetic, reality.
These mostly clueless young, humanitarian-driven protestors might be disturbed from their self-righteous reveries were they to come face to face with the possibility that they have been objective allies of the Trump ’24 campaign. Not so their manipulators: While their mouths led jeers about “Genocide Joe” their convoluted ideologized brains in the main have looked forward to Trump’s re-election, for that, they believe, will reveal the true fascist essence of American evil and thus hasten the revolution, whatever exactly they think that means.
Thus have the ironic consequences of the Vietnam antiwar protests turned into the farce of the anti-Israel 21st-century variety. Most Vietnam War-era protestors never figured out that professional leftists used them for what turned out to be stupidly counterproductive purposes. Same now: Many of today’s protestors will cherish the memories of their heady days of protest as they grow older but not necessarily wiser, imagining all the way to the grave that they did noble and selfless things for a cause larger than themselves. But pure, innocent motives are not enough; sly foxes know how to whisk clueless Pinocchios off to the carnival, and sly foxes are perennially plentiful.
So breathe deeply and enjoy the moment would be my advice; if you ever come to your senses you will feel foolish, and perhaps even worse than that you will finally understand this song lyric excerpt from 1964:
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth, “rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.[15]
Dov Zakheim isn't the only Columbia ‘68 veteran to have commented critically on the recent protests. Mark Rudd was an undergrad at Columbia in 1968, too, spending most of his energy as a student protest leader who eventually ended up joining the Weather Underground. On March 6, 1970 Rudd nearly died with three Weathermen friends when bombs they were preparing for others went off prematurely; a better microcosmic example of protest counterproductivity would be hard to find. Rudd appears in Telltale Hearts as an example of a delusional egomaniac hatching counterproductive protest tactics.
Having lost track of him many years ago, Rudd resurfaced into my consciousness courtesy of a May 9 interview he gave to Judy Maltz of Ha’aretz.[16] I was shocked by some of what Rudd, now 76 years old, told Maltz—shocked but not surprised, since he has always had the knack to shock. But judging only from what I knew of his relative youth, his acquired capacity for reflection and atonement caught me unawares:
. . . the truth is that I suffer from a sort of PTSD because so many of the things I believed and the actions that I took were wrong and had horrible outcomes. I lay awake at night thinking about the big errors I made, and the students are making the same errors now by not making clear that they are for peace and for the humanity of all people. We blurred the line between violence and nonviolence back then, and so are they right now. . . . And I’m not going to defend them because they’re playing into the hands of the right wing in this country. And what terrifies me is that this could end up bringing Trump back into power.
Rudd was not finished:
They’re not supporters of Hamas. They’re supporters of their own stupid ideas. They believe that Hamas is the oppressed, that the oppressed have the right to resist, and that those who are safe—for the most part white kids like themselves—have no right to tell the oppressed what to do. Trust me, I lived this, and friends of mine died because of this stupidity. They are painting themselves into a corner, just like I did.
After commenting on the perduring counterproductivity of riots and violence with specific reference to the second intifada and to October 7, Rudd hit on quadrant number 3 of the Jewcentricity matrix—awkwardly and too hard, regrettably—when he explained why he “sort of dropped out” of the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace organization chapter in New Mexico where he now lives:
The reason I'm not that active anymore is that I can't stand a lot of my fellow Jews. You know, like the story about the synagogue you wouldn't be found dead in? There are a lot of people in JVP who are traumatized by Israel, but it seems to me that they don’t have any perspective. Like if I tell them that New Mexico is also a settler-colonial state, and the only difference between New Mexico and Israel is 100 years, they don’t see the significance of that. In fact, many of my comrades in JVP are so traumatized by Israel that they think it's uniquely evil. But it's not. This is the world we live in and, unfortunately, mass murder, colonialism, and genocide are extraordinarily common.
Israel is not a colonial-settler state and it is not committing genocide in Gaza. Hamas is the party with genocide still on its mind. Colonialism and genocide are not as extraordinarily common today as they were in centuries past, thankfully. For all the distance Rudd has come since 1970, he apparently still cannot get Maxime Rodinson’s classic Marxist nonsense about Israel out of his brain.[17] But at least he sees Jewish self-hatred in the Jewcentric form of exaggerated anti-Israel spleen for what it is.
Finally, as promised, a remembrance of the negative follower effect from 1995 looking back to 1968 penned by one of the most distinguished social scientists of the 20th century: Professor David Riesman.
When Telltale Hearts was about to be released into the wild, so to speak, the New York Times Book Review called on the renown Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom Powers to write it up. Powers did such a superb job that it graced the cover of the September 17, 1995 Book Review section, propelling my book onward to be named a NYT “notable book of the year.” This was much appreciated but also a bit odd since Powers, though effusively positive about many of the book’s qualities, did not explicitly endorse the core thesis that the protests had been somewhere between feckless and counterproductive. He danced around it most gracefully.
As it happened, that dance roused Professor Riesman to write Powers a two-page letter, dated September 28, 1995, essentially defending my argument:
I write to express my appreciation for your review in The New York Times of September 17, 1995, of Mr. Adam Garfinkle’s book. I lived in worlds, of Harvard College and of vocal sociologists, who were morally rather than pragmatically opposed to the war in Vietnam. Whenever I could speak to Harvard College students in their undergraduate Houses, I urged them before they protested the war, to go out to their own home neighborhoods and listen: listen to union leaders, to Chambers of Commerce, to Protestant clergymen, in order to realize the extent to which their own opposition to the war might actually prolong it. . . . As you fully appreciate, our country (and our colleges and universities particularly) still suffer from the loss of authority by all authorities during the protests, particularly student and student-faculty protests--protests which seemed to “Middle America” the voices of the exempt and the privileged.[18]
Clearly, Riesman would not have been surprised by the counterproductive potential of recent protests turned to riots, and his reference to how most Americans interpret the behavior of the “exempt and the privileged” could hardly be more on point, still after all these years. That too, however, was noted in its own literary way even before the Vietnam antiwar movement existed: “. . . the best treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful. Ingratitude, however, is its social function.”[19]
Naturally, once I had seen his letter courtesy of Mr. Powers’s collegiality, I wrote to Professor Riesman thanking him and saying inter alia:
While [Powers] finds my arguments interesting, he still thinks the war was decided in the streets here. I do not, and hence I think your anticipations of the consequences of radical protest at the time, vividly described in your letter, were right on the mark. Not only were you wise, but even prophetic.
Professor Riesman replied with a handwritten note about a week later, expressing general encouragement—appropriately so, since I was 44 years old when Telltale Hearts was published and he was 85—but little more. But I needed nothing more.
That was that, and that is enough of this tale of planetary alignment. Like eclipses, these things mercifully tend to the ephemeral. What the alignment teaches us, I’m afraid, verges on the eternal.
[1] Note: https://x.com/AGHamilton29/status/1793113894053146629
[2] See Rachel Fink, “'I Will Throw Them Out': Trump Tells Jewish Donors He'll Deport Pro-Palestinian Protesters,” Ha’aretz, May 28, 2024.
[3] For details see Noa Shpigel, “’We Must Settle Gaza Now’: Netanyahu Ministers Join “March to Gaza’, Demand Palestinians’ Expulsion,” Ha’aretz, May 15, 2024.
[4] Pace Rep. Elise Stefanik in her show hearings in Congress this past December, the issue was never first and foremost harassment but rather hate speech. A discernible if permeable line exists between First Amendment protections for freedom of speech and assembly on the one hand, and harassment, intimidation, and incitement to violence on the other. Whatever their sins, the three college presidents Stefanik was trying to use as a piñata were in their rights to focus on that line. No line exists between hate speech advocating, for example, a “global intifadah” and the universities’ own speech codes. Why Stefanik missed her own mark, giving her targets more wiggle room than they deserved, remains a mystery.
[5] Three Columbia University deans snarked their way out of their jobs by commenting on this dynamic privately. See Katherine Rosman, “Columbia Removes Three Deans, Saying Their Texts Touched on ‘Antisemitic Tropes’,” New York Times, July 8, 2024. How their private communications became public, what sorts of internal private pressures arose against them as a result, and whether the since-resigned President of Columbia, Nemat Shafik, did the right thing are all interesting aspects of this incident. Not in doubt is the vesuvial resentment the fired deans and their close associates and friends feel concerning the outcome, which will only stoke the already incendiary sentiments at the heart of the issue.
[6] So will, most likely, the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed by Congress on May 1 by a lopsided vote of 320-91. The vote reflected a nasty combination of political fawning and pure ignorance, producing the sort of pandering and mainly symbolic behavior we have become all too familiar with in recent years. I rarely find myself in agreement with the ACLU, but this is one of those times. See the cogent analysis by Jason Willick, “How civil rights law distorts the Antisemitism vs. Anti-Zionism debate,” Washington Post, May 2, 2024.
[7] I thus take exception to Iva Illouz, “The Virtuous Antisemitism of Campus Protests Against Israel,” Ha’aretz, May 21, 2024. The view claiming that anti-Zionism, defined as denying Israel’s right to exist in any borders, is always antisemitic because it displays a double standard, arguing that only Jews as an ethnicity do not deserve a state, is not persuasive. I reject it on tactical grounds, for claiming everything reduces the credibility of claiming anything, and so undermines the efficacy of stating a substantial truth. It is also wrong on two factual counts. First, plenty of other ethnicities—Kurds, Baluch, Ibos, Basques, and more—have been and still are denied a state usually on the basis of pragmatic assessments that allowing or giving them a state would cause too much conflict and pain for others. Some made the same argument in 1947-48, that a Jewish state could not come into being except at the price of massive violence and protracted conflict. Second, the contention that anti-Zionism is always antisemitism would make antisemites out of many if not most Orthodox Jews before the Holocaust—including, for example, Shimshon Refael Hirsch, one of the great Torah exegetes of the 19th century—and this is simply absurd. Exilic Jewish theology did not and does not rule out a re-established Jewish state in the Land of Israel, but it associates that re-establishment with the coming of the messiah and warns against “hastening the end.” It took the mystical creative genius of Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook to reconcile Orthodox Jewish theology with Zionism during the first part of the 20th century. Kook’s theology clearly inspired Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog’s key line in the prayer for the State of Israel, written in 1948 with a little help from Shai Agnon, which describes the state as “the beginning of the dawn of our redemption.” This worked to establish a modus vivendi between secular and religious Zionism without which the entire project would not have become as robust; but perhaps it has worked too well in light of the rapid growth of messianic-nationalist utopianism in Zionist political thought. Rav Kook of course cannot be blamed for this; he was a mystic, not a prophet, and cannot even be blamed for what his son, Tzvi Yehuda, did with his thinking.
[8] This is a complex matter. Jews are a people rather than a simpler ethno-religious group because the ethnic/allele cluster aspect of Jewish identity has been transformed over the past roughly 18 centuries through the workings of an historical membrane through which many Jews passed out of the group and many converts passed in.
[10] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Harcourt Brace, 1922), p. 8.
[11] Regrettably, only a few know Saul Bellow’s mordantly philosophical invention of the Good Intentions Road Paving Company: “The road to hell is paved by the same contractor who paves all the other roads.” The witticism appeared in a New Yorker article on April 26, 2010, but traced to a 1984 letter Bellow wrote to Philip Roth.
[12] Wasow, “Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting,” American Political Science Review 114(3) (August 2020), pp. 638-59, but published online May 21, 2020.doi: 10.1017/S000305542000009X. Just incidentally: Before I communicated with him in July 2020 Wasow had not heard of, let alone read, either John Mueller’s 1973 book or my Telltale Hearts. He needed no help to figure out the negative follower effect for himself.
[13] See for example Isaac Chotiner, “How Violent Protests Change Politics,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2020 and, even more explicitly though less widely circulated, Sujata Gupta, “What the 1960s civil rights protests can teach us about fighting racism today,” ScienceNews, June 5, 2020.
[14] The protest-layering phenomenon is described in my book The Politics of the Nuclear Freeze (Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1984).
[15] Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages,” Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964.
[16] Judy Maltz, “Mark Rudd Led Antiwar Students at Columbia in 1968. He Says Gaza Protestors Are Repeating His Mistakes,” Ha’aretz, May 9, 2024.
[17] Rodinson, a Jewish anti-Zionist Communist like his parents—both of them murdered in Auschwitz in 1943—wrote an essay in 1967 entitled “Israel, fait colonial?” that was published in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes. Quickly translated into English as “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” Rodinson’s work became the standard source on the subject for hard-Left believers of all varieties, and was joined in 1968 by his book Israel and the Arabs, which expanded the earlier essay to claim that Jews were neither a people nor a nation…but the Palestinian Arabs were.
[18] I will gladly share the full text of Riesman’s letter to Powers, with my reply of December 15, 1995 if desired, with anyone expressing a scholarly interest.
[19]From Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, published in late September 1964.