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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Byline: Ben Cohen JNS.ORG

Illiberal world of Bannon

In considering the furor around President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Stephen Bannon, the chief executive officer of the hard-right news website Breitbart, as his chief strategist, let’s start with the perspective of those who have defended him.

On one important level, their anger over the Bannon spat is justified. It is galling to see the behemoths of the liberal left, from MoveOn.org to the New York Times, suddenly discover the threat of antisemitism after showing general indifference to its resurgence in public life during the last 16 years.

Simply put, their negative feelings towards Israel got in the way of acknowledging that larger reality. But, as Israel isn’t a factor in the case of Bannon, they can level the accusation of antisemitism safely, untainted by any association with the Jewish state or its “occupation” of Palestinian territories.

But, there is no meaningful record of statements or actions on Bannon’s part to convict him of the charge of being, on a personal level, antisemitic. And, since Americans tend to understand antisemitism as suggestive of a character defect, it is not surprising that many people also interpreted the attacks upon Bannon as a low blow against his boss, the incoming president.

It’s at precisely this juncture, however, that the Bannon quarrel has gone awry. The issue was never really about Bannon’s own sensibilities and, in fairness, that was never the focus of the much-discussed Anti-Defamation League (ADL) statement on Bannon released Nov. 13. What the ADL said is that Bannon “presides” over the “premier website” of the “alt-right,” which it then defined as “a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed antisemites and racists.”

This raised the legitimate question of whether a man with such associations is suited to one of the country’s top political appointments – whether he can be one of the unifying figures the country needs. But that is not the discussion we have had these past days; it’s all been about the personalities, and not the politics.

David Hirsh, the British academic who has played a key intellectual role in confronting the academic boycott of Israel, put forward a better standard with which to make a judgment at the ADL’s Never is Now Summit on Antisemitism, held in New York Nov. 17. Bannon’s case reminds us, he said, that “antisemitism is about politics, not personal moral failure.”

Our bitterly sectarian politics compromise the discussion of antisemitism and, more broadly, racism and prejudice, in America today. In the debate about Bannon, there seems to be an assumption among his supporters that nobody as implacably opposed as he is to the progressive left – powerful elements of which have allied with Islamists, and enabled the spread of antisemitic discourse in the guise of anti-Zionism – could possibly share any of their flaws.

As a result, Bannon’s defenders adopt many of the same rhetorical tactics that left-wing anti-Zionists deploy when confronted with the charge of antisemitism; listing their Jewish political comrades or friends or relatives, decrying reputational smears without foundation, asserting their fondness for Jewish culture, and so on.

In rushing to Bannon’s aid, they overlook the deeper historical truth that antisemitism has always been promiscuous, finding favor on right and left. Yet, in their alternative imagining, antisemitism is solely a problem of the political left.

Let me offer a brief explanation of why some aspects of Bannon’s intellectual universe should be of concern to anyone who cares about the basic social empathies that are needed to sustain democracy – the same empathies, I would add, that have been badly damaged by the growth of identity politics on the left and right.

Read more at jns.org.

Ben Cohen, senior editor of thetower.org and The Tower Magazine, writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. He is the author of Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014).

Posted on November 25, 2016November 23, 2016Author Ben Cohen JNS.ORGCategories Op-EdTags antisemitism, nationalism, racism, United States
U.S.-Israel relations

U.S.-Israel relations

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, with Michael Oren, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on April 9, 2013. (photo from U.S. State Department via jns.org)

It’s safe to say that in the coming weeks you’ll be reading a great deal about the memoir Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (Random House, June 2015), authored by Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren.

book cover - Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide by Michael OrenOren spent the years 2009-13 as Israel’s envoy in Washington. Once a dual national of both the United States and Israel, the New Jersey-raised Oren had to surrender his U.S. passport at the American embassy in Tel Aviv before taking up his ambassadorial post – an emotionally wrenching episode that he describes in detail. Oren’s complicated identity as an American and an Israeli is a theme that runs throughout the book, and his treatment of this subject is a welcome tonic to the dreary and rather smelly charges of “dual loyalty” that too often accompany examinations of the relationship that Jews in the Diaspora have with the Jewish state.

The main attraction of the book, of course, is its account of the Obama administration’s Middle East policies, and Oren’s candor has already gotten him into trouble. Dan Shapiro, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, who makes several appearances in Oren’s memoir, told Israel’s Army Radio that Ally is “an imaginary account of what happened,” belittling Oren for having, as a mere ambassador, a “limited point of view into ongoing efforts. What he wrote does not reflect the truth.”

This is a serious charge, and it remains to be seen if Shapiro will attempt to substantiate it. In the meantime, it should be pointed out that what makes Ally such a fascinating read is that it provides, from Oren’s perspective, a detailed sense of the bitter atmosphere in both Washington and Jerusalem that underlay diplomatic efforts on the issues we are all intimately familiar with, from the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program to the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Unlike other diplomats, Oren didn’t wait 20 years to publish his story – most of the key individuals in his book, most obviously U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are still in power, and the bilateral tensions that Oren agonizingly explains haven’t been lessened since his departure from Israel’s Washington embassy. Diplomats aren’t supposed to be this transparent, which is why Oren will be regarded in many circles as a man who broke “omertà,” the code of silence which ensures that we ordinary mortals are kept in the dark about what our leaders are saying in private.

While it’s true that Obama comes in for heavy criticism, Oren rubbishes the claim that the president is “anti-Israel.” The reality is more complex; as Oren writes, “the Israel [Obama] cared about was also the Israel whose interests he believed he understood better than its own citizens.” One might add that this paternalistic approach has informed Obama’s stance on the entire region, resulting in a sly policy that presents itself to Americans as a much-desired withdrawal from the Middle East’s endless bloodshed while, at the same time, fundamentally redistributing the region’s balance of power in favor of Iran, whose rulers have spent almost 40 years chanting, “Death to America.”

Read more at jns.org.

Format ImagePosted on June 26, 2015June 25, 2015Author Ben Cohen JNS.ORGCategories BooksTags Barack Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel-U.S. relations, Michael Oren, Middle East
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