Better Jews. The Moral Vanity of Israel’s Leftist Jewish Critics

Here’s an essay I had published yesterday at The Propagandist.

Ben Murane, an American Jew and head of New Generations for the left-wing lobbying group New Israel Fund, recently wrote an essay, under his blogging pseudonym  KungFuJew, titled, “Reinterpreting Jewish communal service“.

The essay attempts to “reinterpret” Jewish communal service in universal terms and represents the quintessential guilt of liberal diaspora Jews over Jewish particularism.

Writes Murane:

Accused, I was, of not caring enough for those other than Jews…of working only for Jews.

Murane has been accused of the sin of working for an organization which focuses primarily on the fate of the Jewish state and evidently felt the need to defend himself  from the charge of “selfishness”.

Instead of turning the accusation back on his interlocutors, and refuting the suggestion that Jews are unique in caring more about the fate of their own community than others, Murane immediately sought to assuage his guilt about being a Jew who cares about Jews.

There are plenty Jews in my world of the predominantly young and unaffiliated who are tired of the drumming of “Jew Jew Jew” and recoil from its incessant self-centered, self-referential, selfish concerns.

Murane, distinguishing himself from those parochial Jews who, triumph “selfishness”, writes:

What I abhor about the fight “against” intermarriage is the drive to identify and then root out non-Jewishness to protect us against its invasion.

Here, Murane  flirts with noxious idea that Jewish particularism is inherently chauvinist, racist, and illiberal, and distinguishes himself from those evidently unenlightened Jewish souls who champion Jewish values, Jewish people-hood, and Jewish survival.

Read the rest of the essay here

 

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