Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Philip Weiss went to a CAMERA conference:

Yesterday CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) held a conference on fighting “Jewish defamers of Israel.” A couple hundred people in the basement of the Park Avenue Synagogue– that beacon to assimilationist German Jews. I found the conference enormously encouraging.

For one thing, the group was almost all older generation. I put the average age at 62. Even the snacks were out of date, all brownies and sweet muffins and cupcakes with a quarter inch of icing. This group is more out of the mainstream than I am! For another thing, I recognized these older Jews as my people. I felt comfortable with them. I had a warm reunion with an old friend from the Jewish scientific community that I went to as a boy, and we talked about antisemitism in the newspaper business. All the people in the room were Jews with a traditional sense of ethnic cohesion: Jews who feel deeply isolated from the gentile community and have little sense of the death of anti-Semitism in America. Several of the speakers had old world accents. Walt and Mearsheimer’s names were invoked again and again, from start to finish, as if they were Nazis.

This description meshes with my own experiences. Although I’ve also been noticing younger Zionists who seem as strongly and dogmatically pro-Israel as these older conference attendees, I do think more have dropped the past’s Zionist fervor. I certainly see this in my own family, most recently during a trip to New York two weeks ago for a relative’s ultra-Orthodox wedding. My extended multi-cultural family is multi-religious and multi-racial, and although the Jewish religious core’s support for Israel is unbreakable, the views of the others range completely across the spectrum. I imagine this is the audience CAMERA would like to bring back.

Weiss goes on to this:

The CAMERA people are losing and they know it. Near the end Cynthia Ozick was asked how we should go about delegitimizing the delegitimizers of the Jewish state and she sighed and said, “It’s hopeless.” …..

…
The reason It’s hopeless for the other side is that there was, in the basement of the synagogue, little to zero acknowledgement of the three great realities that are feeding Jewish post-Zionism. 1, the end of anti-Semitism. My old friend and I talked about a Jewish Daily News columnist who refused to hire Jews. That was 50 years ago. The injury is fresh. As the memories of anti-Semitism are for my parents. And they are virtually meaningless to young Americans. A panelist very briefly acknowledged this at the end, saying that Jews are so comfortable in America, how do we stir them? 2, the Israeli occupation of Arab lands and Israel’s brutal treatment of Palestinians were at no time acknowledged, but endlessly rationalized. The separate roadway system for settlers and Palestinian Arabs–rationalized. The incursion into Jenin–whitewashed. And so on. This sort of denial went on in South Africa during the campaign against apartheid. Young people don’t feel quite so defiant. 3, Not a word about Iraq. I have this feeling often in conservative Jewish gatherings. Iraq doesn’t touch them. It’s not a big deal to them, they are removed from it, they are for a hawkish policy in the Mideast and so they talk about Darfur/Sudan more than Baghdad.

Technorati Tags: anti-Semitism, CAMERA, Israel, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, Zionism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.