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MASSACRING THE TRUTH The Crisis of Zionism, by Peter Beinart, Times Books, 2012, 196 pp.
Reviewed by Amnon Lord
Aaron David Miller has written that "Obama isn't in love with the idea of Israel."1 We can add, however, that Peter Beinart is in love with the idea of President Obama, and not only him. Many among American Jewry are enamored with the idea of Obama, whose presidency seems to resolve a complex of ideological problems as well as problems of identity and a sense of belonging. In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart reveals this confused intellectual state of mind. Indeed, at the core of this book, supposedly about the crisis of Zionism, is a long chapter about none other than "the Jewish president," Barack Obama. One may suspect that Beinart s writing reflects the crisis among a special stratum of the American Jewish intelligentsia. The Crisis of Zionism may be symptomatic of this state of mind.
Beinart s chapter on Obama is the part of his book that is really worth reading. It is informative and gives the impression of credible and reliable reporting. Reporting here is the keyword, because there is not much of it in this much-talked- about book of some 196 pages. From this chapter, Obama emerges as the dream leader of acore group of American Jewish leftists of "independent means," so to speak. This group would include such individuals as the late Rabbi Arnold Wolf, Betty Lou Saltzman and her father the late Philip Klutznick, Avner Mikva, and others.
"[Obama] had come to Chicago not merely to find a black community, but to find a latter-day civil rights movement, and the movement, he believed, required whites and especially Jews," writes Beinart quoting Obama's biographer David Remnick. In fact, one gets the feelingthat the main ideological and identity-driven motive behind Beinart s intellectual effort is to revive the old Jewish-black alliance of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement. In that sense, his whole progressive vision is retrograde and in some ways even reactionary. This time around, Beinart calls on American Jews to throw Israel to this sacrificial Moloch so as to...