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Stuart Schoffman: Anxious Anniversary
Foul winds are blowing in Washington. Israel and AIPAC are being tarred as spies. FBI agents tail respectable diplomats and longtime lobbyists. A cabal of Jewish officials is suspected of steering U.S. policy in Iraq and Iran in directions more favorable to Israel than to American interests. The charge of "dual loyalty" and the specter of Jonathan Pollard acquire fresh currency.
The night after the Larry Franklin story broke in the American press, I was in my living room in Jerusalem, watching CNN International. Anchorman Jonathan Aiken welcomed a gent named Jeff Beatty, an American identified solely as a "terrorism expert" and "security expert." They chatted chummily, like two guys over drinks. There�s no such thing as a "friend" in the intelligence business, Beatty declared. I sat bolt upright as I heard him offhandedly reckon that Israel has 12 agents inside the Defense Department, where Franklin works as a policy analyst. Was I dreaming? What did he mean? Moles? Paid informants? Card-carrying neocons? Contributors to the UJA? I flashed back half a century to Senator Joe McCarthy, who claimed to have a list of 205 Communists in the State Department. In those days the issue was "Who Lost China" to the Reds; now it�s Who Got Us into Iraq. But rather than challenge Beatty as to the basis of this bizarre claim, Aiken fed him a soft question: Yet Israel denies that they spy on the U.S., right? Ho ho, chuckled Beatty, come on, really, you remember Goebbels, back in Hitler�s time, the man who invented the Big Lie? -- if you make the lie big enough, everyone will believe you. Me, I could hardly believe my ears.
Don�t get me wrong. I am not schooled in the normative subtleties of intelligence-gathering and have no idea whether at some point red lines were crossed, unwittingly or otherwise, by Larry Franklin or any of the people he spoke to as a matter of professional routine. What I am responding to is how this story has been presented and spun. Take a far more innocuous example: The writer of a widely published AP article, headlined in the version I saw as "Controversy�s No Stranger to AIPAC, Washington�s Jewish Juggernaut," remarks that the pro-Israel lobby "has a hold on the mechanisms of power that has been called mystical." Mystical? As in kabbalah, or cabala? It�s a short step from "mystical" to supernatural, demonic, diabolical -- qualities imputed to the Jews since antiquity. How can such a small, oft-persecuted group remain so successful, so influential? Simple answer: dirty tricks.
It strikes me as supremely ironic that the Franklin affair is being played out at the exact moment that American Jewry is celebrating its 350th anniversary. It was in September 1654 that 23 Jews, refugees from Brazil, famously landed in New Amsterdam, an event seen as marking the dawn of Jewish life in the United States. That same year, Charles Chauncy succeeded Henry Dunster as president of Harvard. Jews delight in noting that both men were eminent Hebraists. But as Shalom Goldman of Emory University stresses in his fine new book "God�s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew & the American Imagination," the Colonial identification with the Biblical Israelites -- which persists in America�s self-conception to this day -- should not be confused with unalloyed affection for the Jewish people. Ezra Stiles, the Newport preacher and Yale president who corresponded in fluent Hebrew with his good friend Rabbi Hayyim Carigal, also fretted in his diary in 1770 about an alleged "secret intelligence office" in London, "intirely [sic] a Jew Affair," which was privy to "every Occurrence of any consequence in America."
A new exhibition called "From Haven to Home" opened in early September at the Library of Congress to mark the auspicious anniversary. Among the 150 items on display is an 1818 letter from Thomas Jefferson to the journalist-politician Mordecai Manuel Noah, the most prominent American Jew of his time. "Our laws," observed the wise ex-president, put "all on an equal footing," yet "the prejudice still scowling on your section of our religion, altho� the elder one, cannot be unfelt by yourselves." Is this not still true? Or will American Jews, as they stroll through the exhibit -- and kvell over the lyrics to "God Bless America" in Irving Berlin�s very own hand, and admire the copy of the Theory of Relativity, penned and donated by Albert Einstein in 1943 to raise money for War Bonds -- come away reassured of their place in the sunniest of all diasporas, confident that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past in Judeo-Christian America, the trumped-up bugbear of over-anxious communal leaders?
Fifty years ago, at a ceremony marking the American Jewish Tercentenary, in Boston�s Symphony Hall, Harvard president Nathan Pusey commended the "Jewish contribution to the settlement and building of this country," but added that this "is not essentially different from other cultural groups who were coming to America at the same time." For Pusey, the great Jewish contribution "both here and abroad" was not "in business, nor in music, nor in the professions," but rather "the vision of ethical monotheism ... the broad spiritual tradition that stems from Jerusalem."
Uttered a few weeks after Joe McCarthy was finally censured by the U.S. Senate, these words are worth a closer look. In 1954, the American Jewish Historical Society, which reprinted Pusey�s address in its journal, still felt the need to trumpet, in its official statement of objectives, the Jewish claim on America: "It is known that Jews and Spain and Portugal lent no inconsiderable aid to the voyages that led to the discovery of America ... Others contributed liberally to the Continental treasury, at critical periods, to aid in the establishment of Independence." In 2004, the Society simply declares its mission "to foster awareness and appreciation of the American Jewish heritage," with no mention made of the centrality of Jews to the American project.
That centrality is now taken for granted. The names Brandeis and Spielberg and many thousands more testify to the remarkable journey American Jewry has made since 1654, indeed since 1924, when the great wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was shut down by the same nativist impulses that swirl on to this day. So long as Jews are prominent and powerful, there will be those who darkly wonder why. In thwarting their designs, it is our ethical heritage that will always serve us best.
October 4, 2004
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