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There is a generational struggle, above all, that’s happening among American Jews. The bulk of the people who are leading these protests, these Jewis… - Peter Beinart
" "There is a generational struggle, above all, that’s happening among American Jews. The bulk of the people who are leading these protests, these Jewish people who are protesting in the name of a ceasefire, are young. And what gives me hope is there are people on both sides, Hamas and the Israeli government, who basically see this struggle as a zero-sum struggle of tribe versus tribe, and that logic is going to lead to greater and greater destruction and misery; what I think we’re seeing among young American Jews is a different claim. It’s that this is not a struggle of Jews against Palestinians; it’s a struggle of Jews and Palestinians and people of conscience from all around the world around a series of basic principles. The principle is that there has to be safety and freedom and decent lives for Palestinians, if there is ever going to be safety and decency and dignity for Israeli Jews, as well, that these two people are bound together in a garment of destiny, as Martin Luther King said. And I actually think that it’s this multiracial, multireligious, multiethnic movement that, in this incredibly dark time, is the one thing, I think, that we can cling to as something as a source of hope.
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About Peter Beinart
Peter Alexander Beinart (/ˈbaɪnərt/; born February 28, 1971) is a professor, columnist, journalist, and political commentator who is Jewish and lives in the USA. He is also the author of three books and currently an editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, a contributor to The Atlantic, a political commentator for CNN, and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace.
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Peter Alexander Beinart
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Additional quotes by Peter Beinart
My life has been very different from my grandmother's. But I have seen enough to understand how she feels. When I was thirteen, I watched footage of thousands of emaciated Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of their people since the days when the First Temple stood, trekking through the Sahara to reach the planes that the Jewish state had sent to take them home. When I was fourteen, I saw a squat, bald Russian named Anatoly Sharansky-fresh from eight years in a Soviet jail-raise his hands in triumph as he descended the steps at Ben-Gurion Airport. In those soul-stirring scenes, I saw my grandmother's Zionism-the Zionism of refuge-play out before my eyes. It became my Zionism, too. Like her, I sleep better knowing that the world contains a Jewish state. But not any Jewish state.
I think when historians look back at the periods of repression of free speech in the United States from World War I to the Red Scare of the McCarthy era to the post-9/11 era, tragically, we are writing another chapter now. And it’s being done in part because of the cowardice of university administrators and others, people who were sworn to defend the principles of free speech and academic freedom, because of pressure, as you say, very, very often from donors.
older American Jews generally came of age in an era when a Jew-no matter how secular-was still barred from full entry into the non-Jewish world. That era is gone. As a result, secular Jewish culture has become less distinct from broader American culture. From food to language to comedy to politics, young secular Jews are abandoning the less translatable elements of Jewish ethnicity, and America is assimilating the rest. Thus, Jews rarely eat bialys anymore, but McDonald's now serves bacon, egg, and cheese bagels. Few Jews still speak Yiddish, but in 2011, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, an evangelical Christian, accused Barack Obama of "chutzpah" (which she pronounced "choot-spa") for refusing to cut government spending. Borscht Belt humor is gone, but for much of the 1990s, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David produced the most popular comedy on TV. The socialist and militant labor politics that Jews brought with them from Eastern Europe is a distant memory, but in the 1980s, a young Barack Obama read Saul Alinsky on Chicago's South Side.
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