Manichaeans
My argument so far assumes that in general multiculturalism poses the same questions to American Jews as to other Americans: What type of America do you want to live in? How do you understand the evolution of modern American politics? Only by thinking about these broader questions will American Jews be able to address specifically Jewish concerns about multiculturalism. And at first glance one would imagine that American Jewry, as a minority group, would naturally sympathize with advocacy of a plural society.
Yet today's multiculturalism is often expressed in a spirit quite distant from that of Bourne or Kallen or Dewey. And whereas their formulations almost invariably included Jews, multiculturalism is often identified nowadays with a segment of the left that has, to put it bluntly, a Jewish problem. Sometimes this problem is manifested in an obtuse anti-Zionism, other times in insensitivity to Jewish interests and fears, and sometimes in an inability to rebuke anti-Semites without qualification. The Jew, in short, is the problematic Other. The reproduction of this attitude among some advocates of multiculturalism, especially those with third world orientations, threatens to taint multiculturalism in the same way that Communism unfairly tainted the left as a whole.
The problem doesn't necessarily express itself in outright anti-Semitism like that of Leonard Jeffries, former chairman of Afro-American studies at New York's City College, or in the tendency of some people to speak of Israel with a hiss reminiscent of neoconservative pronouncements about the left. Sometimes this tendency is manifested simply as intellectual numbness when it comes to Jews, a numbness multiculturalists quickly protest when it comes to other groups. Moses Maimonides is rarely on the list of authors these multiculturalists aim to incorporate into the canon. Consider, for instance, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader , a recent, weighty collection of some twenty essays. The only references to Jews and Judaism to be found in it are in passing, and Jewish studies, which has flourished across the United States in the past quarter century, does not exist in it at all, even in the essay entitled "Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities."[36]
The article on ethnic studies is by Ramon A. Gutierrez. See David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
Marx wrote somewhere that in his vision of the future, the conditions for the liberation of one would be the conditions for the liberation of all. If some American Jewish liberals are wary of some advocates of multiculturalism, the reason is plain: it is not always evident that the multicultural "all" includes Jewish culture.Multiculturalism is also fiercely attacked by neoconservatives, who are perhaps the most visible and vocal intellectuals within American Jewry.[37]
"Neoconservative" refers to a group of intellectuals and writers, many of them Jewish, who moved from the left to the right, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. While I continue to use the term here in order to distinguish them, some of their most prominent figures have declared recently that the prefix "neo" is no longer appropriate as they consider themselves to be absorbed into the broader conservative movement that asserted itself in the Reagan era and thereafter. See Irving Kristol, "An Autobiographical Memoir," in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Selected Essays, 1949-1995 (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 40, and Norman Podhoretz, "Neoconservatism: A Eulogy," Commentary, March 1996.
They frequently raise concerns like those I've just outlined. For them, however, criticism of multiculturalism is just one part of a general ideological posture that ought to trouble American Jews—at least as much as issues raised by multiculturalism itself.In the 1970s and 1980s neoconservatives fought publicly against what they called the "adversary culture." They contended that a liberal, educated "new class"—its ranks ranged from intellectuals, professors, and media figures to city planners and public health doctors—was promoting anti-bourgeois values and thereby subverting America's ethos. The battle against
multiculturalism is a follow-up. In fact, the neoconservatives first gained special prominence less as critics of cultural trends than as ferocious anti-Communists. Yet there is a distinct continuity between their earlier incarnation as cold warriors and their anxious campaigns of today. Then, as now, they eagerly obscured distinctions for their own political purposes. Then, the right wanted no sharp differentiation between Communism and the "left" in general; now it wants all types of multiculturalism conflated in the public mind. (Then, as now, part of the left goes along for its own wayward reasons—I will turn to this shortly.)
The cold war is being carried on by other means. Consider, for instance, Irving Kristol's declaration, in Commentary in March 1952, that "there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he like them, is unequivocally anticommunist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism they feel they know no such thing." Then ponder what Kristol, now the éminence grise of neoconservatism, announced four decades later—and four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism:
There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. … Now that the other "Cold War" is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global communist threat. We are, I sometimes feel, starting from ground zero, and it is a conflict I shall be passing on to my children and grandchildren. But it is a far more interesting cold war—intellectually interesting, spiritually interesting—than the war we have so recently won.[38]
Irving Kristol, "My Cold War," The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993): 144. Midge Decter expresses the same sentiments, speaking of "the domestic cold war ... in which there is even less possibility of arriving at understandings and settlements than there was in its now-defunct international namesake." Midge Decter, "The National Prospect" (symposium), Commentary, November 1995, p. 46.
There is a deep consistency in these two statements, and it is to be found in their Manichaeanism. The neoconservative mind-set is curious—conservative in content but rather Bolshevik in style and temper. Its representatives speak as if they were a besieged political minority, a huddled band struggling to proclaim the Truth in the face of evil (such as "liberalism" or "multiculturalism") that has dominated America since the 1960s. Kristol's son William declared in late 1993 that liberals controlled "the commanding heights of American society."[39]
William Kristol, "A Conservative Looks at Liberalism," Commentary, September 1993, p.33.
Yet in 1995, with Rupert Murdoch's financial backing, he was able to launch a weekly magazine. Reading neoconservatives and their progeny, you would never know that the right dominates political discussion on the radio and a good deal of it on television; that conservative think tanks and intellectual journals are abundantly funded while those of the left are generally starved;or that Republicans have sat in the White House for all but seven of the last twenty-seven years.
This sense of siege may be genuine or it may be political pretense. Either way, it probably eased the embrace by Jewish neoconservatives of rightwing Christian fundamentalists (one should recall that a Bolshevik mindset can justify all sorts of alliances). Midge Decter portrays the Christian right as forty million beleaguered souls who only want to thwart powerful, insidious forces that would deny proper religious instruction to their children. The real problem, she believes, is liberal intolerance of fundamentalists.[40]
Midge Decter, lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, November 2, 1995.
Decter is, by her own definition, "engaged in the battle to wrest some saving cultural power from the soiled and grasping hands of the liberal Left."[41]Decter, "The National Prospect," Commentary, November 1995, p. 46.
Fundamentalists, it should be obvious, concur with neoconservatives on many major political issues, none more than the need to war against alleged liberal dominance of American culture. Neoconservatives and fundamentalists have targeted the same enemy and find themselves comfortable together in the same political home. While Decter's figure of forty million may be exaggerated, the organized influence of the Christian Coalition within the Republican party she supports can hardly be minimized.Yet if there is one thing American Jews know about American liberalism, it is that when it has flourished, so have they; about fundamentalists they know no such thing. American Jews long assumed, in contrast to today's neoconservatives, that intensified fundamentalism of any brand enhances intolerance and that growth in fundamentalist political power is cause for concern. History, after all, does not provide copious examples of tolerant fundamentalism, not to mention fundamentalists using political power to pluralist ends. At best fundamentalists—Christian, Jewish, or Moslem—are tolerant when they have no other choice. The Christian Coalition is not concerned solely with religious training. It wants to reshape the education of American children, and it supports candidates in school board elections to this end. Is it intolerance that leads liberals to oppose "creationism" in science curricula? And is it tolerance that inspires neoconservatives to denounce Afrocentrists one moment only to apologize for fundamentalists the next? As a former (and non-Jewish) neoconservative journalist wonders aloud, "How can intellectual conservatives credibly attack Afrocentrists for distorting history while passing in silence over efforts to teach American children that the dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and drowned in Noah's flood?"[42]
Michael Lind, "Why Intellectual Conservatism Died," Dissent, Winter 1995, p. 45. Lind was executive editor of The National Interest.
There is, in fact, a credible way to do so. If you believe liberalism and multiculturalism are the major sources of America's woes (rather than,
say, dramatic transformations in economic life), and if you believe political conservatism inevitably follows from religious belief, then earnest-sounding calls for religiosity become advantageous means of political struggle, irrespective of the actual quality of religiosity that is thereby promoted. Irving Kristol, when asked if it is appropriate for intellectuals without religious belief to recommend it for others, has answered, "Yes."[43]
Irving Kristol quoted in David Frum, Dead Right (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 172.
Here it is worth recalling that a major influence on the Kristols, père et fils , and most Jewish neoconservative intellectuals was Leo Strauss, a political theorist who deemed truth to be accessible solely to an elite properly initiated into philosophy (as he understood it). He believed, moreover, that only such an elite could live in a civilized way with philosophy's truths since they are subversive of myths—like the existence of God—that are needed to bind societies, ensuring that the masses behave reasonably well. Echoing Plato, Strauss writes:
Philosophy or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about "all things" by knowledge of "all things"; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes and thus it endangers society. Hence philosophy or science must remain the preserve of a small minority and philosophers or scientists must respect the opinions on which society rests. To respect opinions is something entirely different from accepting them as true.[44]
Leo Strauss, "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing," in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Writings (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 221-222. Kristol describes Strauss's enormous influence on him in "An Autobiographical Memoir," 7-9.
Public culture in general and religion in particular rest on opinion.
Straussianism provides an important clue to the neoconservatives' preoccupation with culture and universities together with their peculiar crusade for intensified religiosity in the United States, a country that is perhaps the most religious in the West. It also suits the neoconservatives' key ambitions for American Jewry: the delegitimation of liberalism as a plausible inference from Jewish culture and consequently a radical realignment of long-standing Jewish voting patterns. Then there could be a neoconservative Jewry in an intensely Christianized, conservative America, with, I suppose, neoconservative intellectuals, those who know , as go-betweens, as shtadlanim (interceders). The land would be rid of liberalism, secular humanism, and of course multiculturalism. How would tolerance fare? I suppose it wouldn't much need to in this America. In any event, one of the major forms of intolerance as defined by neoconservatives—that of fundamentalists by liberals—would presumably be gone. Stanislas Adotevi, an African philosopher, once remarked of a celebrated black nationalist concept: "Négritude is the black way of being white."[45]
Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., "African-American Studies in the Twenty-first Century," in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 126.
One wonders: Is neoconservatism a Jewish way of being gentile?