An Idea Betrayed

Juliana Geran Pilon

Description

In calling America “the almost chosen nation,” Abraham Lincoln invoked at once the Old Testament and the Founders’ belief in the two covenantal communities’ common ideal: equal liberty. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that ideal. Our Constitution instituted it. Although it took the Civil War to abolish the original sin of slavery, equal freedom defined the nation’s philosophical foundation. Beginning late in the nineteenth century, however, that vision of liberty under constitutionally limited government mutated into progressivism. An aggressive mix of collectivism and scientism, fueled by Marxism and other toxic European ideologies, its early expression was eugenics, its later ambitious central planning. Meanwhile, an influx of immigrants during times of economic displacement would kindle widespread xenophobia, while populist distrust of financial profit, often associated with Jews, would stoke anti-Semitism. Over time, equal freedom fell into disrepute. Among the idea-elites, “right-wing” and “conservative” became pejoratives. But the rise of the Soviet Union and the aftermath of World War II proved a watershed for Americans, especially for American Jews, for those developments placed the liberal idea in a clarifying geopolitical context. Today, with equality and equity often used synonymously, a conflation of anti-capitalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism has gained prominence while Islamists make common cause with the enemies of freedom from within. Given the stakes, Jews must reassert the basic principles of their ancient tradition, which are also America’s.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Jewish Studies
• HISTORY
• Religión
• General officer
• Ideology
• Antisemitism
• Religion
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 08 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680538298
• Langue: English

Extrait

An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and The American Left
Juliana Geran Pilon
Academica Press
Washington ∼ London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pilon, Juliana Geran, author.
Title: An idea betrayed : jews, liberalism, and the american left / Juliana Geran Pilon
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023933051| ISBN 9781680538281 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781680538304 (paperback) | ISBN 9781680538298 (ebook)
Copyright 2023 Juliana Geran Pilon
By the same author:
Notes from the Other Side of Night
The Bloody Flag: Post-Communist Nationalism in East-Central Europe – Spotlight on Romania
Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice
Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve
The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World
The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom
Cover photo: Detail from Hanukkah lamp designed by Manfred Anson (1922-2012) to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Anson, who escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager, later reunited with family who had immigrated to the United States. The lamp is located in the National Museum of American History.
For my parents Charlotte and Peter Geran of blessed memory, fortunate survivors of the Holocaust in Romania, with gratitude for having defied the Communist regime’s prohibition against celebrating Passover; and after seventeen years of waiting for permission to emigrate, finally bringing our family to this great country. They are always with me.
May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.
George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Savannah, Georgia, June 14, 1790
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.
George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790
Flash forward to the 1960s, when Jews were both agents and beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement that finally extended the legal promise of America to all its citizens.… American Jews have been no doomsaying Daniels at Belshazzar’s feast but equal partners in this great experiment, and we bear our share of responsibility – no more and no less – for the Republic whose benefits we reap. If America fails us, it fails itself, but the failure is equally ours.
Ruth R. Wisse, “ Is the Writing on the Wall for America ’ s Jews? ” Mosaic , August 8, 2022
The risk of woke ideology is not, of course, limited to the spread of antisemitism. It is a fundamental threat to the liberal idea in America. …In my judgment, the role of the Jew is not to join forces with the ideological fads of the day, but to stand up for independent thought and the liberal principles on which the democracies of the world were founded.
Natan Sharansky, Foreword to Woke Antisemitism (2022)
Contents Introduction: “Not like the brazen giant” Chapter I: The Liberal Idea in America Chapter II: New Eden across the Atlantic Chapter III: Liberalism Gets Hijacked Chapter IV: National Socialism Chapter V: Internationalized “Liberalism” Chapter VI: America’s Jewish Problem Chapter VII: Revolutionary “Liberalism” and the Jews Chapter VIII: Statist “Liberalism” Chapter IX: Global Anti-Liberalism and Antisemitism Conclusion: “Freedom in the Fullest Sense” Notes Bibliography Index
Introduction:
“Not like the brazen giant”
The sevenfold rays of broken glass
Over thy sorrow joyously will pass,
For God called up the slaughter and the spring together,
The slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny weather!
- Hayyim Nahman Bialik, “The City of Slaughter” (1903)
None of us slept on the way over from Paris. And not just because of the menacing rumblings of the wabbly propeller (actually, not bad for 1962) that could keep awake the deaf, let alone a bunch of Jewish immigrants praying they would be spared forty years in the wilderness - most didn’t have that much time left. The majority were from Romania, though others hailed from as far as Morocco, and who knows where else. But all of us, all night, did what Jews do best: worry.
It was the usual Semitic sort of worry, a mixture of hope and fear. Above all, hope: that in this fancy New World, which none of us had ever seen, we might be treated like everyone else, as equals. Fear too: that we would indeed be so treated, despite having next to no assets besides ill-fitting clothes. Our skills were largely obsolete, and most of us could speak no English. Well, so be it; no whining, get with the program.
Sure, we were equal before God. That much we didn’t doubt; we were Jews after all, even if our identity came mostly by osmosis, as much culturally-imbibed as visceral. But we had heard that we really would be equally treated by laws that applied to everyone, at least theoretically. OK, maybe; but what about in practice? Would this island-continent prove, in the end, as forbidding to us as a desert? We didn’t even have a Moses to assure us that, God willing, it will all work out. Besides, even if God willed it, it was now up to us, which wasn’t all that comforting. Anyway, who’s worried about forty years when you don’t even have forty cents.
Perhaps if we had glimpsed that Statue of Liberty everyone talked about, the Deity of Diaspora, we might have felt a little better. Unfortunately, it was hard to spot from an airplane, especially above the clouds. In any event, could we have believed her promise, inscribed on the plaque at her feet, that all of her homeless, tempest-tossed children would be truly welcome? Ragged as we were?
Maybe it would have helped to know that its words had been penned by a young poet, Emma Lazarus, who had also been Jewish, indeed descended from the very first group of Hebrews to settle where we had landed, albeit three centuries earlier, in 1654. They had been fleeing from Brazil, where they had settled after expulsion from Portugal and, earlier still, from Spain (as it happens, alongside my father’s ancestors - who had headed East instead). Those twenty-three peripatetic descendants of Jacob, who had wavered off course into New rather than Old Amsterdam (toward which they had been headed), were eventually, if reluctantly, allowed to stay. A mere two centuries or so later, their Emma would become a famous poet! So if they, equally destitute, had survived and even thrived, why shouldn’t we?
Our plane was approaching Manhattan, revealing a surreal skyline against the sunniest June day we had ever seen before or, I daresay, since. Were we awake, alive, sane? Could those obelisk-shaped objects be real buildings, or were we hallucinating? The rumbling grew to an apocalyptic roar, the huge rip of unfolding wheels announcing the jolt of descent - heart-stopping, had our hearts not already stopped, in mid-breath. We remembered to exhale, then emerged, dazed, into the light, a burning bush in the pit of our stomachs. Was it the heartburn of being reborn, absent an umbilical cord?
Reborn we had to be. And so we proved to be, my little family, indeed with astonishing rapidity. It didn’t have to take forty years to get used to not being a slave if you had never really been one. Because thanks to my parents’ good sense, we had somehow kept our wits about ourselves during all those years under communism.
Though clearly risky if it had been discovered or even suspected, it actually hadn’t been that hard to see through the clumsy attempts by the mandarins of the Communist Party to camouflage their naked overfed bellies. Their ill-fitting ideological suits ready-made in Moscow, one-size-fits-all, were too obviously transparent. But even the stupidest little girl knew to keep her trap shut: there was no point in pointing out the imperial nudity so patently manifest. That had been her nursery school lesson number one. (Also numbers two and three.)
The little girl wasn’t so stupid as not to notice how her parents used the never-read newspapers only as toilet paper, nor how they listened intently to a barely audible radio broadcast after they thought her asleep. And how they would tell their friends jokes in a whisper, believing she couldn’t overhear. True, she didn’t get the punchline; but she knew better than to ask questions when there would be no answers.
More puzzling was grandma’s Friday night ritual of candle lighting. As she draped her always-neatly combed hair in a gossamer-thin scarf, and whispered some mysterious incantation while circling lovingly above the lights, why did tears fall softly on her face? Was this her way of asking questions? Maybe it was her way of getting answers.
Until the answers stopped. A few months after we had arrived in America in June, the children she had not seen in four decades would make it clear it was far too late for her. Then her tears merely accompanied her kaddish: for the relatives sent to Auschwitz who were never mentioned, and for the severely paralyzed adult son for whom she had cared for over three decades, who had died in Paris on our way over from Romania. Before long, she would melt into the darkness that long ago claimed all the dreams she barely dared to have.
The Mother of Exiles, as Emma Lazarus called the secular goddess of Liberty, couldn’t keep the promise she made to all those