Jews Who Don't Support Trump "Disloyal" to Themselves and Israel--What's That About?

So, Jews are supposed to be conservative now. They aren't, by and large -- but evidently they're supposed to be.

According to what story? To understand ourselves, we need to find out what story we're in. Let's do the same thing as a society: what story are we in, and what do Jews have to do with Trump?

Depending on how the story plays, "the Jews" are a wedge issue. The Arab world has been using that wedge to divide America and can also use it to distract their own restive populations at home. If that's your story, what's not to like?

Within western civilization, one side of the story is connecting Jews with money and blaming them for the economy. On the other side, conversely, are stories that connect Jews with socialism, communism and radicalism in general.

I learned somewhere that the Soviet Union initiated the Zionists-as-Nazis meme back in the '50s to sow division and antagonism in the West, yet the rapidity with which the story ignited and spread surprised even them. Supposedly the meme also became big in Germany in the second generation after the Holocaust. Anti-Zionism took off in Europe in concert with anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism -- understandable among America's adversaries, or those for whom America was a symbol of evil, or those who simply thought America needed taking down a peg. Stories are political.

At first America was relatively sheltered from anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda. Although I felt foreshocks as early as the '80s, people like me who had been conditioned to keep their heads stuck in the sand could continue to do so. The anti-Zionist story remained hidden or on the fringes.

Not until I became involved in a liberal (that is, left-leaning) church I attended with my Christian husband was I fully confronted with this narrative to which they were receptive and were actively spreading. Around the same time, anti-Zionism was emerging on American university campuses, where Jews were increasingly being denigrated as "Zionists."

These experiences of mine began a dozen years ago, but when, looking for help in understanding and coping with the story, I turned to the Jewish community -- or, in my case, returned to the Jewish community -- I was still being told how there's so little antisemitism in America and how lucky we are. That, too, has changed, although it's very difficult, almost impossible, for liberal Jews (the majority of Jews I know) to acknowledge that that this part of the story has been coming from the left, including liberal churches and clergy we consider allies.

In the story, from the perspective of much of liberal America,"good Jews" are the ones who don't act too Jewish or practice Judaism and especially the ones who condemn Israel. The story makes it a no-no for Jews to love or maintain any positive connection to Israel at all -- a hard sell for most Jews. In other words it's a polarizing story whereby a Jew is "for 'em or against 'em"  -- "for us or against us."  That makes it easy to say who "the bad Jews" are: all the rest.

That makes for a story with a clear and present "bad guy:" Jews.

That also makes for a conspiratorial story. As such, Jews are frequently characterized as holding undue influence over America's foreign policy. Often, on the sophisticated left, other terms -- neocons, neocapitalists, neoliberals (as well as "Zionists") -- are substituted for "Jew." Sounds better and provides cover, plausible deniability, and even blindness to the workings of one's own thought processes. Permits the storyteller du jour to claim they are just telling it like it is.

Anti-Zionism justifies putting all Jews except for the self-proclaimed good ones -- those who have "converted to" the dominant story -- into the same basket with Israel. Doing so is framed as "just criticizing Israel," rather than, say, antisemitism.

Theological arguments can be brought to bear in support of the story, the claim, for example, that Jews "misunderstand" their covenant to be about the land or fail to jettison their particularity in recognition that "all are one in Christ." (Perhaps related to the latter, it remains a meme that Jews got persecuted because they "set themselves apart.")

And so the story became useful as a political tool of division, in the process, exacerbating the division among Jews themselves. We've got an echo chamber going: Jews calling each other "self-hating" and, meanwhile, in the populace at large, the left and right taking turns saying which Jews are the "bad" ones.

Trump has bought into the story, except for him the good Jews are the very ones the left says are bad. He agrees with the left in casting Jews as conservative, nay, Trumpist. They're loyal, to themselves, Israel, and him.

The story not only became useful as a tool of division for those standing outside of America but also provided a useful political tool for the left -- the proverbial "common enemy," or scapegoat, being a tempting way to assemble a following in rough times. It's easier and safer to say who you're against than to call attention to what you're for.

To be effective, a story must work. We know we shouldn't hate or hold others up for hateful treatment, but claiming Jews "deserve it" opens a loophole.

It does not hurt that saying Jews do deserve it has a long tradition. The story seems new, and in a sense is new to those born since World War II. However, we should say "new all over again," for it is not new.

Relatively subtle until recently, hidden behind some church doors or restricted to campus, only after much prior effort and in the last few years has it jumped the firebreaks into the public square.

Is the story anti-Israel but not anti-Jew? So claim its proponents. But only the intellectual elite can keep the two apart in their story, and even then not for long. I've come to consider as sophistry the epiphenomenon of advice on 'when it's okay to criticize Israel,' since critique of Israel the country and anti-Zionism are two different entities, apples and oranges.

In the story from the left, anti-Zionism masquerades as a social-justice movement, just as, a hundred years ago, antisemitism was "science."

The Zionism of the story is a hijacked term that has been turned into a pejorative, "Zio" being a stand-in for "Jew" in its old pejorative sense.

What Zionism means outside of that dominant story is a wish for a homeland for the Jewish people, and, now that there is a homeland, gratitude for that homeland. That's a simplified version of what Zionism is in the Jewish people's own story. Anti-Zionism has no beneficial impact on the country of Israel. It does not move it to the left. It does not further the anti-Zionists' stated goal of peace. Instead, the more Israel is attacked or demonized, the more right-wing it becomes. Meanwhile Israel's denouncers cling to their narrative.  It's their story and they're sticking to it.

Trump's reversal of the story won't help. It too is polarizing. Israel, from the other angle all bad, is now supposed to be all good. Neither is true. And watch out for friends like Trump.

Well, of course, the other side already had Jew standing in for conservative since whatever they don't like is represented by Jew. The difference being, naturally, that those other guys were more subtle about it.

From the first, Christians created an alternate "Judaism" to define themselves over and against. The antidote is for Jews to say what Judaism is.

According to Karen L. King, the early church took from Judaism what was popular and called that "Christianity;" they called the residue "Judaism." They made that residue their foil and Jews their Other.

Being the Other means standing for whatever is wrong and bad. Having an Other means having a garbage dump -- somewhere to put whatever you don't want to keep, including internal conflict. Especially internal conflict. The Other morphs as the story requires. When "white" was good, Jews weren't quite, and now that it isn't, Jews are the essence of whiteness.

In this story, a Jew is a political statement. "The Jews" are now to stand for the right wing, the Trumpists, notwithstanding that most Jews are liberals.

Thus we have Jews being told what they are, put in their place. They have their designated role to play in somebody else's story. To coin a phrase, It's the story, stupid.

Trump is only amplifying what was already reverberating around society, making it explicit and saying it out loud. And with friends like Trump, you don't need enemies.

...The antidote being to speak up.

From Peddlers to Department Stores -- Here and Elsewhere

Our local paper here in Atlanta, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, runs a feature called Deja News (déjà vu, get it?), made up of the headlines and front-page news of prior eras. The entry for May 3, 2019 is on the death on May 2, 1975 of Richard Rich, who had been at the helm of Rich's Department store. The story also makes reference to the trajectory of Sears, Roebuck and Company in Atlanta, and that's what reminded me of something I'd been meaning to write.

In late 2017, when I was researching Atlanta history for my review of the novel Darktown, I came across The Bitter Southerner's history of Sears and its impact on Atlanta and the South. I was reading happily along until I came to the following paragraphs on the boon that Sears and, eventually, other department stores had been for the South. 

In the severe economic depression that followed the Civil War, there were few opportunities for Southerners to make contact with the broader world. The only places to shop were at overpriced general stores that popped up along the rail lines. Here, choices were limited and prices steep. Quite often, farmers found themselves in crippling debt to the general stores, especially after a failed harvest.

Even worse, carpetbaggers, swindlers, peddlers, and snake-oil salesmen preyed upon the desperate region. They took particular advantage of women tending the house while their husbands worked in the fields or elsewhere.

The Bitter Southerner is a modern online publication that advertises itself as above hate, primarily meaning racism, I think, since racism has been America's original sin, but a racism fundamentally defined by skin color. Unawares though the writers and/or publisher may be, that second paragraph caters to another variety of racism, or, if you will, to anti-immigrant hate. Peddlers in America were immigrants and after a certain point were mostly Jews. Anti-peddler sentiment in Europe, where Jews often were condemned to a lifetime of peddling, was of long duration, with names for peddlers such as "hawkers" illustrating the predatory way in which they were seen. The Bitter Southerner characterization suggests the majority culture was peddling -- pun intended -- the same notion: that peddlers -- not yet established nor even of Anglo-Saxon or Northern European descent -- were a threat and danger, especially to wives in the home.

Unbeknownst to themselves, then, if The Bitter Southerner's picture represents accurate historical memory, they are recycling old European prejudices. The language used on the South -- here, I'm referring to "carpetbaggers" -- suggests those prejudices from across the pond were being intermixed with the "lost cause" mentality -- not exactly indicative of liberality and freedom from hate -- but again that claim represents some degree of fixation on white-on-black racism.

I hadn't previously heard anti-immigrant prejudice juxtaposed to the advent of department stores, that is, with department stores seen as representing salvation from peddlers and other unsavory forms of salesmanship. However, the anti-immigrant aspect is not itself unusual.

"Our peaceful rural districts as they are liable to be infested if this Russian exodus of the persecuted Hebrews continues much longer." The Judge, American Humor Magazine, July 8,1882. (Courtesy of the Antisemitic Literature Collection American Jewish Historical Society, New York and Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Located online on May 21, 2019, here. 

When I utilized The Bitter Southerner's "contact us" option, the respondent was not open to my input. I got a brusque response (no longer available to me) that we'd have to agree to disagree.

His argument would likely be that the characterization is based on fact.

In those days nearly everyone -- earlier Jewish immigrants who had already established themselves and people who were part of the Protestant hegemony alike -- thought the incoming Eastern European Jews should take to the land, associating the tendency toward trade and business with unhealthiness. But for the most part farming did not match up with opportunity or with the immigrants' skill set.

Prejudice notwithstanding, peddlers can be seen as representing a wave, not of swindlers and snake-oil salesmen, but of change and modernity -- typically so threatening to established values and mores -- and, not only that, but also the beginnings of empowerment of women and marginalized people.  In America, during the long nineteenth century of immigration to the U.S., many Jewish newcomers began their lives in the New World as peddlers, bringing commerce to far-flung reaches of the country and serving to bring diverse elements of the population into the economy -- newly freed black people, Native Americans, impoverished southerners, westward migrants, miners who otherwise would have been bound to company stores -- everywhere that established commerce had yet to reach. In this way peddling served as outreach, even as Sears, Roebuck and Company later did in a more visible manner. Not only was peddling beneficial to the developing economy, it was also helping to weave the country into a unified whole.

In that connection, see my book review of Hasia Diner's Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way.    

What began as peddling morphed into trade, as the peddlers not only sold their wares but also traded for scrap and native products such as ginseng, thus contributing to the earliest beginnings of financial emancipation of women. Not only that, but the issuing of small advances or loans by the peddlers became the first small roots of an eventual banking industry. In these ways, peddling contributed to the vertical development of, first, small businesses, and eventually larger industries.

Jews could get jobs in Jewish-run businesses, whereas they could not advance in gentile businesses.

Many a small town had a dry-goods store, colloquially known as the "Jew store." (See my book review of Stella Suberman's The Jew Store.)  Such stores became nodes from which newer immigrants could venture further afield as peddlers, perhaps in the long run to establish a store of their own.

Here's a quote from Melissa Fay Greene's 1996 book The Temple Bombing, relying in part on the words of George Goodwin, "a public relations executive, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and local history buff, born in 1917":

Atlanta after the Civil War was the perfect locale for the mingling of aristocratic southern breeding, taste, and musty old money, with carpetbagger know-how, northern contacts, and new wealth. It was a city with a brick-and-iron heart clanging with trains and fuming with cotton mills, whose far edges softened into miles of green and flowering neighborhoods. "Atlanta welcomed the carpetbaggers," said Goodwin. "Morris Rich [a Temple founder whose little dry-goods store became Rich's Department Store, the largest in the Southeast] was a carpetbagger."

Continuing, from later in the book:

In 1867, Morris Rich opened a little dry-goods store in the ruins of Atlanta. A downpour came on the day he opened; the streets ran like muddy rivers; he laid down planks across the wet red clay to protect the footwear of customers he hoped would come. He offered fifty-cent corsets and twenty-five-cent stockings, and he accepted chickens, eggs, and turnip greens in lieu of money when necessary.

In 1882, M. Rich and Brothers opened up in new, larger quarters with great fanfare and publicity. The Atlanta Constitution hailed the new Rich's as "an emporium of fashion and design ... acknowledged by all who have seen it to be the most complete establishment of its kind in the South, New Orleans, even, not to be excepted." In l906 when the store enlarged again, the Atlanta Journal enthused: "Atlanta's womankind has received a most wonderful New Year's gift."

As we look back, our welcoming of Rich's, Sears, and other department stores may seem inevitable. But it was not.

Eric Goldstein's 2006 book The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity describes the ambivalence about popular culture and technology that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, blaming Jews for destroying Christian values for their own enrichment, whether through Hollywood or materialism. But in America the majority population wanted the benefits of culture and commerce. They never overwhelmingly rejected it. (See my book review of The Price of Whiteness here.)

In Germany, the progress from peddler to small dry-goods store to department store was not accepted, judging from the description of Paul Lerner's 2015 book The Consuming Temple, which I have yet to read. In Germany under Nazi influence, the Jewishness at the root of department stores and commercial life (as of peddling) remained the primary focus. There, department stores weren't seen as any kind of gift, but instead as an enticement and a danger to society and to its women.

Whether lauded or condemned, department stores don't represent a break from the earlier primitive-seeming roots of commerce in peddling. Instead, peddling and department stores are points along a continuum.

Don't get me wrong; there could have been bad apples among the peddlers. But they would not have been the ones who succeeded.

Out in the remote parts of the country, a peddler not only had to sell his wares in order to succeed. He also was likely to be dependent on his customers for food and shelter -- for his very survival. He had to have people skills. He needed the empathy to intuit his customers' needs. He was an emissary from parts afar. He could not be an entrepreneur alone but was also a carrier of news, an intermediary, a communicator.

Ammonia

Today I'm recovering from a stomach virus, and my mind turned to a time in my youth when I'd had what we used to call "the flu." It was a gastrointestinal bug with fever. We referred to it as flu, and much later I was surprised to learn that influenza is a respiratory illness, not fever and vomiting.

In 1964 or '65 I was working at Sears, Roebuck & Co. on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta (now Ponce City Market, after a stint as City Hall East), my first full-time job, although I'd also worked there the summers after my Junior and Senior high school years. In the interim I went away to college but returned after one year to work my way through Georgia State College--and marry my boyfriend.

As I said, on the particular occasion I'm remembering, I'd been sick, and sometime during the first day after returning, I felt faint and dizzy. Did I lay my head down on my desk? Or maybe I told my supervisor I didn't feel well.

At any rate, in those days, Sears had a nurse who, as I remember, worked up on the top floor, and I was sent upstairs. I don't know what I expected, but what happened is that I was given a small cup of ammonia, not to sniff (as in smelling salts), but to drink.

This cured my faintness right away. It also cured me of any desire ever to return to see that nurse.

I have thought of this incident a number of times over the years, maybe even when I haven't been sick. Mercifully, in adulthood I've rarely had the stomach flu. I believe it's been ten years since the last time, but it hasn't been ten years since I thought of that ammonia.

Although I've always known immediately what it was that I drank, today I had a senior moment and couldn't say its name. I had to search for cues on the internet and ask my husband what I'd said when telling this story previously. I searched treatments for fainting, but no luck. Then, remembering it had something to do with refrigerants, I was searching under that, until my husband suggested ammonia. Bingo.

Here is the odd part. Although ammonia is used in smelling salts, nothing I could find showed an oral usage, and in fact ammonia is a poison. However, this U.S. National Library of Medicine site says you can be poisoned by breathing it or if you "if you swallow or touch products that contain very large amounts of ammonia." So I couldn't have been given straight ammonia. It packed a punch, though. And that smell!

I've been asking a few nurses I know, but they're only in their sixties and never heard of that usage of ammonia. Then I asked a doctor in the same age group whom I know casually. And he said he doesn't believe me. Just like a doctor. Make that just like a man.

I'm not coming up with anything about oral ammonia for fainting but find it hard to believe Sears had managed to employ some rogue Big Nurse. Hopefully I can trace down this practice, but I'll need to ask some nurses or doctors in their eighties. And from the south.