Israel Matzav

Telling the stupid Jews to wake up and smell the coffee

David Solway describes a feeling I often have. It's a feeling of disgust with smart people who - due to their ideological blinders - are not capable of seeing how their words are capable of destroying their own people. It's bad enough when the non-Jews try to destroy us. When our own people try to destroy us from within it's even worse. They don't realize that they too will be brought down with us.

When I was dating, we used to refer to the difference between book smarts and common sense smarts. While everyone wanted a spouse who had book smarts (hey - we're Jews!), no one wanted a brainy spouse with no common sense. These people - the Richard Goldstone's and Tony Judt's and Daniel Barenboim's and Tom Segev's of the World - have no common sense. They don't see what they are doing to themselves while they drag the rest of us down.

Israel, we know, is on the cutting edge of brain science, providing key elements in terms of staff, resources, and infrastructure for the ongoing Blue Brain Project. The Jerusalem center for neural computation is the most advanced such institute in the world. Speaking metaphorically, it is rather ironic that discoveries in the field of neurocomputation do not necessarily carry over into daily practice, down-to-earth reasonableness, and, let’s say, survival acumen. For many Jews, what fills the space where gi should be — when they are not shamelessly exploiting their anti-Zionism for their own profit and advantage — are dreams, visions and tractionless speculations, grand schemes for a better world, and an ethereal sense of ideal justice oblivious to the corrugations of reality. This for the most part is what constitutes the “Jewish sensibility”: local proficiency wedded to utopian exhalations.

We might say that the distinction between general intelligence and specific intelligence is like that between honey and sugar. What the bees do is different from what the beets do. General intelligence is undifferentiatedly curious, wide-ranging, and panoramic; specific intelligence is specialized, rooted in particulars, and fixed inside a bounded expertise, no matter how flexible its perimeters. We Jews, it seems, are good at si but there is far too little gi among us, and we will pay in suffering for this deficit unless we eventually learn to think outside the boxcar.

I write this as a Jew who is utterly mortified by the self-injurious imbecility I see escalating throughout the community to which I presumably belong. The propagation of foolish ideas, lunatic affiliations, and galloping myopia among an otherwise accomplished people has left me not only bewildered but also, it pains me to confess, resentful. With too few exceptions, the “peaceniks” march toward a calamity of their own devising; Jewish organizations naively succumb to the “charm offensives” of their deceptive adversaries; and the “intellectuals,” true to their class, are intoxicated with earnest inanities and clever-sounding verbiage. This is especially true of many Israeli academics who are in the forefront of “Israel Apartheid Week” hatefests and who, in the words of former chair of Hillel UK, Brenda Katten, “educate toward the demise of Israel.” Jews have to be smarter than that. For Jews do not enjoy the luxury of historical illiteracy or the tainted privilege of self-denial. They cannot, like Peter Schlemiel, lose their shadow, no matter how hard they work at it — as if one could indemnify oneself against oneself, as if, to quote Horace Kallen, one could change one’s grandfather. Ehrich Weisz, aka Harry Houdini, was a Jewish escape artist but even he, the Master, was taken off guard and could not evade the bitter dereliction that lay in store for him.

Let us make no mistake about this, the darkness is rising again. The “culture of hatred” that Robert Wistrich (whom Ruthie Blum Leibowitz interviewed recently for Pajamas) minutely anatomizes in A Lethal Obsession, a phenomenon, as he writes, “that has over centuries produced an almost unfathomable abyss of dehumanization of the Jews,” is growing increasingly pervasive in the modern world. What, then, can one say to a lineage of self-defectors and sand-eyed agonists, these Jewish dream merchants on the one hand and machers on the other, these airy Margolits or squalid Goldstones trading respectively in the coin of delirium or betrayal? Perhaps just one thing.

Time to wake up and smell the cordite.

When I was dating, we used to refer to the difference between book smarts and common sense smarts. While everyone wanted a spouse who had book smarts (hey - we're Jews!), but no one wanted a brainy spouse with no common sense. These people - the Richard Goldstone's and Tony Judt's and Daniel Barenboim's and Tom Segev's of the World - have no common sense. They don't see what they are doing to themselves while they drag the rest of us down. And it's frustrating to watch them try to destroy us. Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:48 AM