"Red Diaper" goes "Red, White, and Blue"

Take the moral anguish over the use of force in Jewish filmaker Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich."

Contrast that with the muscularly military conservativism of the Jewish "neoconservative" intellectuals and policy makers who helped plan the invasion of Iraq.

This tension is not new.

This writer witnessed it as a graduate student during the "Free Speech Movement" at the University of California, Berkeley more than 40 years ago.

On the one side, along with many who were not Jewish, radical Jewish students and their sometimes youngish professors. On the other a handful of older conservative Jewish scholars, often left in their youth, who turned from diatribe against American culture and capitalism in the 1930's to diatribe against student radicals in the 1960's. One example: sociologist Lewis Feuer.

Back then the left (or "New Left") prevailed -- more critical of anti-communism than of communism, traumatized by the anti-Semitic overtones of McCarthyism. Denouncing American power as imperialism, spurred on by opposition to the Vietnam war and by an alliance with the Civil Rights movement.

In the liberal-radical tradition of Jewish Americana there sometimes seemed a defensive, reflexive "anti-Americanism" critical of gentile values, seeing patriotism as a disguise for anti-Semitism -- sometimes even mocking the American flag. A tendency to apologize for the Soviet Union while criticizing the United States.

It was a tradition which sometimes sought protection from gentile American culture by hiding in the cocoon of abstract European Jewish Marxist thought. A few even spied for the Soviet Union. Apologetics for Stalin in the battle against facism produced a generation of "red diaper babies."

Back then a keen awareness of barriers against Jews in MANY areas of American life. Yet a hungry quest for upward mobility, for respectability and wealth and power in America's law, medicine, cities, suburbs, schools, universities, government and corporations.

******

Forty years later a different form of conservative Jewish thought has emerged in the halls of the White House, in the Pentagon and in countless streams of media.

This includes the "neocons" who helped engineer the Iraq war, after first emerging into public prominence in the Reagan era.

Deeply committed to American cultural, and capitalist power. Seeing now dead Soviet power as anti-Semitic rather than as an ideological beacon for international progress.

This tradition repudiates the "anti anti-communism" of "its youth" and favors global American military dominance as a bulwark against anti-Semitic Arab theocratic totalitarianism, as protection for both American interests and for Israel. While the radical Jewish tradition decries American "imperialism," the "neocons" cry out for an American imperial role as a global saviour.

Like the old style left, Jewish conservatives often see the world as a Manichean struggle between good and evil.

But a difference -- for in this time there is keen awareness that Jews thrive in almost ALL fields of American life. Yet still a hungry quest for respectability, for upward mobility and wealth and power in America's law, medicine, cities, suburbs, schools, universities, government and corporations.

______
Peter Haas, The Future of Jewish Liberalism
Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism
Irving Kristol, Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea
Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev The Haunted Wood
National Security Agency (NSA) The Venona Story