Unorthodox Judaism
A common complaint among the far-right (and increasingly far-left) commentariat of the Internet is that Jews attach a magical aura about themselves while criticizing others. Ironically, such complainants usually cite Jewish sources to support their claim: Israel Shahak, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky.
However, these names are Jewish in only a nominal sense, coming from the same tradition of psychic disequilibrium that produced Karl Marx and the only Jew Hitler ever liked, Otto Weininger. More interesting are the authentically Jewish yet self-critical voices of a magazine like Zeek. In a recent article, Shaul Magid writes of three dogmas of contemporary Judaism:
I predict this sort of self-criticism will become increasingly common in mainstream Judaism as the older generation that still retains memories of popular Christian, as opposed to Muslim anti-Semitism dies out. Zeek is of the more or less doctrinaire left, but as I try to allude to in this blog, there are more innovative resources for unorthodox Jews in the thought of pre-war, predominantly German-Jewish thinkers. Men like Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss inhabited the same intellectual milieu as Carl Schmitt and Ernst Junger, defying easy left-right categorizations.
My own take on contemporary Jewish dogma goes something like this:
1) Israel was highly admirable as a country of free-thinking pioneers, and is becoming much less so as a country of rabbinist zealots. If the armies of the Muslim world amass at Israel's borders, I will enlist in the IDF. In the meantime I have no desire to defend its every move or migrate there. "The Promised Land" is a metaphysical construct before it is a nation-state, or else we're no different than the Serbs.
2) The Holocaust was an evil. Measuring evils against each other is ugly and futile. Defining yourself by an evil verges on the sadomasochistic. There are lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, about human nature and the existence of God, which concern all of humanity. Jacob Taubes once remarked that he found it difficult to judge Germans who became Nazis, because he was never given the option of becoming one. We should not hesitate before such challenging thoughts.
3) If intermarriage is bad for Jews, we must draw the logical conclusion that it is bad for all peoples. A second option: proselytize! Have millions of Africans convert to Judaism and reinvigorate the religion like they reinvigorated Catholicism. Convert the Palestinians for that matter! If maintaining a high intellectual standard is the issue, proselytize exclusively among Asians. Either way, the status quo position reeks of hypocrisy and shallow thinking.
However, these names are Jewish in only a nominal sense, coming from the same tradition of psychic disequilibrium that produced Karl Marx and the only Jew Hitler ever liked, Otto Weininger. More interesting are the authentically Jewish yet self-critical voices of a magazine like Zeek. In a recent article, Shaul Magid writes of three dogmas of contemporary Judaism:
(1) pro-Israelism (as distinct from Zionism); (2) the uniqueness of the Holocaust (as distinct from Holocaust memorialization); and (3) the war against intermarriage. . . .
The first is a political allegiance to a country we don’t live in; the second is an argument (uniqueness) about an event that affects all of us but that most of us did not experience and sets rigid boundaries as to what the Holocaust “means” and how it should be remembered; and the third is a reality that speaks, in part, to the success and not failure of Jewry in America — integration and acculturation.
I predict this sort of self-criticism will become increasingly common in mainstream Judaism as the older generation that still retains memories of popular Christian, as opposed to Muslim anti-Semitism dies out. Zeek is of the more or less doctrinaire left, but as I try to allude to in this blog, there are more innovative resources for unorthodox Jews in the thought of pre-war, predominantly German-Jewish thinkers. Men like Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss inhabited the same intellectual milieu as Carl Schmitt and Ernst Junger, defying easy left-right categorizations.
My own take on contemporary Jewish dogma goes something like this:
1) Israel was highly admirable as a country of free-thinking pioneers, and is becoming much less so as a country of rabbinist zealots. If the armies of the Muslim world amass at Israel's borders, I will enlist in the IDF. In the meantime I have no desire to defend its every move or migrate there. "The Promised Land" is a metaphysical construct before it is a nation-state, or else we're no different than the Serbs.
2) The Holocaust was an evil. Measuring evils against each other is ugly and futile. Defining yourself by an evil verges on the sadomasochistic. There are lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, about human nature and the existence of God, which concern all of humanity. Jacob Taubes once remarked that he found it difficult to judge Germans who became Nazis, because he was never given the option of becoming one. We should not hesitate before such challenging thoughts.
3) If intermarriage is bad for Jews, we must draw the logical conclusion that it is bad for all peoples. A second option: proselytize! Have millions of Africans convert to Judaism and reinvigorate the religion like they reinvigorated Catholicism. Convert the Palestinians for that matter! If maintaining a high intellectual standard is the issue, proselytize exclusively among Asians. Either way, the status quo position reeks of hypocrisy and shallow thinking.
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