Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism

I arrived home last night to find on my doorstep a copy of the new book Rabbi Outcast: Elmer Berger and American Jewish Anti-Zionism by Jack Ross. How thrilling! I knew Rabbi Berger, who died in 1996, and admired him greatly for his courageous work on behalf of what he called “emancipation and integration” and against Jewish nationalism, or Zionism. (I’ve been reading his book The Jewish Dilemma, published in 1945, a well-reasoned yet passionate critique of Theodor Herzl’s program and beyond.) He was truly the last great Classical Reform Jewish rabbi – Classical Reform Judaism having been founded in opposition to nationalism, to the ideas of diaspora and return to Zion. (“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” –from The Pittsburgh Platform, 1885) Berger was a founder and long time director of the American Council for Judaism, which opposed formation of the state of Israel, and later of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism. Among ACJ's members were Frank Chodorov and Murray Rothbard. (ACJ was the subject of Thomas Kolsky’s 1992 book Jews Against Zionism.)

Here is the publisher Potomac Books’ description:

Dramatic changes have taken place in the last decade with respect to the views of the American Jewish community toward Israel and Zionism. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, the involvement of the Israel lobby in precipitating the Iraq War and promoting war on Iran, and Israel’s widely condemned wars in Lebanon and Gaza, large swaths of the American Jewish community have been disenchanted with Israel and Zionism as at no other time since the founding of the State of Israel.

However, anti-Zionism in America has a long history. Elmer Berger was undoubtedly the best-known Jewish anti-Zionist during most of his lifetime, particularly from World War II through the 1967 Six-Day War and its aftermath. A Reform rabbi, Berger served throughout that period as the executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded by leading Reform rabbis.

Author Jack Ross places liberal Jewish anti-Zionism (as opposed to that of Orthodox or revolutionary socialist Jews) in historical perspective. That brand of anti-Zionism was virtually embodied by Rabbi Berger and his predecessors in the Reform rabbinate. He advocated forcefully for his position, much to the chagrin of his Zionist detractors. The growing renaissance of liberal Jewish anti-Zionism, combined with the forgotten work of Rabbi Berger and the American Council for Judaism, makes a compelling case for revisiting his work in this full-length, definitive biography.

Bravo, Jack Ross!

USS Liberty

Today is the 44th anniversary of the Israeli government's attack on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War. Read about the infamous assault, which killed 34 men, and the shameless cover-up here.

I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, 1990

Learn more here, here, and here. A BBC report begins here. The Wikipedia article is here.

Freedom for Palestine

Op-ed: Obama Flouts the War Powers Resolution

NATO announced that the Libyan intervention will be extended for another three months. So what President Obama said would be a matter of days, not weeks, will in fact last many months. It’s safe to assume that Western powers will be meddling there a year from now.

One thing we know for sure, however, is that the U.S. intervention is doubly illegal. Obama had no legal authority to enter the war, and given that he entered it anyway, the 1973 War Powers Resolution required that on May 20 — 60 days after the intervention began — Obama either procure authorization from Congress or cease all operations.

Read the full op-ed here.

TGIF: Slave Labor and Intellectual Property

In a recent discussion about copyright, my interlocutor suggested that the unauthorized publishing of a book in effect makes a slave of the author because the publisher profits off the author’s labor without consent. But that begs the question by assuming what is in dispute, namely that the publisher took something that belongs to the author. But what?

The rest of TGIF: Slave Labor and Intellectual Property is here.

Madison Avenue Logic

Wouldn't a beer commercial that tells you to "stay thirsty" be telling you not to drink beer?

Freedom and School Choice in American Education

The about-to-be-released book Freedom and School Choice in American Education includes my chapter,“‘Unbounded Liberty, and Even Caprice’: Why ‘School Choice’ Is Dangerous to Education,” which argues that any government involvement in the financing of education must sabotage the free market’s entrepreneurial discovery process and stifle the development of education. The chapter, along with most of the book’s chapters, was presented at a 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Educational Choice (formerly the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice) and the Clemson Center for the Study of Capitalism. The book was edited by Greg Forster and C. Bradley Thompson.

In the book’s foreword Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson writes:

In the strongest statement of all, Sheldon Richman draws upon classic economic theory to make the case that any government involvement–even school vouchers and tax credit subsidies–will ‘forbid the full blossoming of the entrepreneurial environment that is indispensable for optimal education.’ Better than any partial solutions is a commitment to letting the current system implode so that the country, in final desperation, will finally return to free market principles. One wonders whether the charitable tax deduction, an important prop for education’s private sector, survives Richman’s strict prohibition on any government involvement at all….

…We all benefit from Richman’s clear iteration of market theory, as he makes so utterly clear the distance school choice has yet to travel before it even begins to approximate that ideal.

Revisionist History Day, 2011

Today is Revisionist History Day, what others call Memorial Day. Americans are supposed to remember the country's war dead while being thankful that they protected our freedom and served our country. However, reading revisionist history (see a sampling below) or alternative news sites (start with Antiwar.com and don't forget to listen to Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton) teaches that the fallen were doing no such thing. Rather they were and are today serving cynical politicians and the "private" component of the military-industrial complex in the service of the American Empire.

In that spirit, I again quote a passage from the great antiwar movie The Americanization of Emily. You'll find a video of the scene below. This AP photo is a perfect illustration of what "Charlie Madison" is talking about.

I don't trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it's always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows' weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices....

My brother died at Anzio – an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud. . . . [N]ow my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. That’ll be in September. May be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution. What has my mother got for pretending bravery was admirable? She’s under constant sedation and terrified she may wake up one morning and find her last son has run off to be brave. [Emphasis added.]

Enjoy the day. I'll spend some of it reading revisionist history -- Ussama Makdisi's Faith Misplaced: U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001, and watching Emily.




Here's an all-too-incomplete list of books in no particular order:

• Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, by Jeff Riggenbach
• War Is a Lie, by David Swanson
• War Is a Racket, by Smedley D. Butler
  
• Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul Fussell
• Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
• The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, by William Appleman Williams
• The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition, by Arthur Ekirch
• The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic, 1890-1920, by Walter Karp
• The Costs of War, edited by John Denson
• Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, by Stephen Kinzer
• All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer
• Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson
• The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson
• War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
• A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin
• The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, by David Hirst
• Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001, by Ussama Makdisi

TGIF: Lawless Government

Everyone pays lip service to the rule of law. Indeed I’ve never heard of anyone rejecting it as undesirable. (It has been called impossible under prevailing circumstances but that is a different point.) So why is the principle so flagrantly violated with almost no public outrage?

Take President Obama’s intervention in the Libyan civil war. Even if we grant that he could legally enter that conflict by his own unilateral decision – a big if, which we’ll explore below – the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires him after 60 days to cease operations or ask Congress for authorization to continue. One week ago today the clock ran out on the Libyan intervention, yet Obama has neither ceased operations nor asked for authorization.

He’s violated the law.

The rest of TGIF is here.

Thank you, Sen. Paul...

...for your attempt to hold up passage of the Patriot Act.

Lowest of Lows

When we're talking about Congress, identifying a low point is problematic. But in terms of public displays, nothing is lower than its marathon ass-kissing session the other day with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, by implication, the Israel lobby. Simply disgusting.

The next time you hear a member of Congress (with one or two obvious exceptions) talk about freedom, justice, self-determination, and democracy, remember that scene. Palestinians need not apply.

TGIF: End the IMF

The IMF has fostered long-term dependency, perpetual indebtedness, moral hazard, and politicization, while discrediting market reform and forestalling revolutionary liberal change.

Read the rest of TGIF: End the IMF here.

Gotta Read this

Something of Kevin Carson's that I just found:

If libertarians like to think of “a fair day’s wage” as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer’s discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that “a fair day’s work” is equally open-ended. It’s just as much in the worker’s legitimate self-interest to minimize the expenditure of effort per dollar of income as it’s in the employer’s interest to maximize the extraction of effort in a given period of time.

For the authoritarian “libertarians” who believe “vox boss, vox dei,” this suggestion is scandalous. The boss is the only party who can unilaterally rewrite the contract as he goes along. And it’s self-evidently good for the owner or manager to maximize his self-interest in extracting whatever terms he can get away with. Oddly enough, though, these are usually the same people who are most fond of saying that employment is a free market bargain between equals.

For most of us who know what it’s like working under a boss, it’s a simple matter of fairness that we should be as free as the boss to try to shape the undefined terms of the labor contract in a way that maximizes our self-interests. And most of the Wobbly tactics grouped together under the term “direct action on the job” involve just such efforts within the contested space of the job relationship.

Further, these are the very methods a free market labor movement might use, in preference to playing by Wagner Act rules.

Read it all here.

After bin Laden?

So it’s imperative that we not be fooled by appearances. The policymakers will not be using bin Laden’s death as grounds to dismantle the thousand U.S. military installations around the world, to stop supporting torture-loving dictators when they serve “American interests,” to end the violations of Americans’ civil liberties, or to defund the trillion-dollar-plus national security state. That gravy train, which gives prestige to “statesmen,” shapes the global order American-style, and lines the pockets of contractors, is not going to end merely because one man was shot by Navy SEALs.

Read the full op-ed here.

Aristotle and Standup Comedy

How many comedians have one-liners about Aristotle? The only one I know of is the incomparable Shelley Berman (official site here), from whom I learned much in my youth:

Some people say Aristotle died in Chalcis, Euboea. I think Aristotle died of Chalcis Euboea.

Berman these days plays Larry David's father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Classic Berman is here.

TGIF: No Laissez Faire There

What’s often unappreciated is that writers sympathetic to the free market have disparaged the Gilded Age as broadly illiberal and contrary to the spirit of free enterprise.

Read TGIF here.

Op-ed: Obama's Broken Guantanamo Promise

The latest leaks of classified documents, which show that the U.S. government imprisoned hundreds of men at Guantánamo Bay on the most dubious “evidence,” brings to mind the question, Why hasn’t President Obama kept his promise to close the infamous prison that will forever stain America’s honor?

Read the rest of my op-ed here.

No Clean Hands

Even if one believes in capital punishment and thinks it the appropriate penalty for Osama bin Laden, consider who ordered it and what else he has authorized in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. That's more than enough to be disgusted by the news out of Pakistan the other night.

What Intellectual Property Has Wrought

Want to know the cost of bogus intellectual property rights? Read "A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them."

An amazing collection of historic live jazz recordings is in the possession of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, but we might never hear them. Why?

"The potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large—and, more importantly, so uncertain—that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings," wrote David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. "Tracking down all the parties who may have a copyright interest in these performances, and therefore an entitlement to royalty payments (or to enjoining their distribution), is a monumental—and quite possibly an impossible—task."

Read This Book!