Earlier I alluded
to David Samuels' dreadful profile of
Condoleezza Rice in The Atlantic last year, but now it seems that
Samuels has topped himself with a disgraceful
and incoherent piece on the state of American Jewry. After classily
referring to the "less-evolved" parts of the world, Samuels jumps
right into his thesis, which is that American Jews are under constant attack:
Yes, Jewish life in America remains a flowering paradise compared with the realities
of being a Jew in contemporary Britain or France. But it is impossible to
ignore the fact that America has changed, too. At bookstores in major airports,
I am no longer surprised to be greeted by a pictures of a smiling former U.S.
president comparing Israel to the loathsome apartheid government of South
Africa, or a Harvard professor explaining how a small but powerful coterie of
Jews is responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen America in the
Middle East.
The horror, the horror--Jimmy Carter has published a bad book. Then this:
Lobbyists for AIPAC are being put on trial for the crime of gossiping with
U.S. government officials over lunch, an offense of which every single foreign
lobbyist in Washington--and every working journalist--is guilty. Again, the
American Jewish community is silent, for fear of making things worse.
Is Samuels implying that the lobbyists were put on trial simply because they
were Jewish? There is no evidence for this, but who cares? And anyway, Samuels
is busy taking the entire weight of American Judaism and placing it firmly on
his shoulders:
Every American Jew has been quietly putting together their own pocket-sized
file of stories they would rather not tell the children. There is the story...
"Every" American Jew? That's quite an ambitious statement.
Finally:
In private, I hear it is simply too painful and depressing to contemplate
the idea that there will be no easy peace between Israel and the Palestinians,
that American Jews have become scapegoats for popular unease about terrorism,
that political anti-Semitism has become normative thought among large sectors
of the global intelligentsia, or that the tension between Israel and the United
States will continue to grow as a future administration seeks a way out of the
present morass in Iraq and comes to terms with a nuclear-armed Iran.
One wonders who Samuels is spending his time with, and thus who is telling
him these things. Regardless, it's an astonishingly bad essay.
--Isaac Chotiner