Will Israel Live to 100?
Don't be seduced by the recent hopeful signs: in the long run the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain a problem without a solution
by Benjamin Schwarz
The Kosher Conversion
The market for kosher food is growing, for reasons both practical and spiritual
by Corby Kummer
In the Footsteps of Tocqueville
How does America look to foreign eyes? This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, our keenest interpreter. The Atlantic asked another Frenchman to travel deep into America and report on what he found. This is a long, long aricle with stops all over the country. Here is what the author saw in Brooklyn:
And then, finally, the two events for which I have come. A meeting at... on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Sixteenth Avenue... a meeting of the Council of Wise Men of the Torah. Sitting around a long table where an old master with a white beard is enthroned, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, Rebbe of Novominsk and spiritual leader of the Agudath Israel of America, an assembly of rabbis, very handsome, very poetic. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this; it seems to come out of a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Two strange characters turn up who have come, to put it bluntly, to negotiate for the support of the Orthodox Jews for President Bush and his camp.
One of them, Norm Coleman, Jewish, a Republican candidate for a Senate seat from Minnesota, is a sort of blond yuppie with exceedingly white teeth and the smile of a wolf.
The other is Rick Santorum, Catholic, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. I would interview him the next day, during a break in the convention, and he would explain to me that as a Catholic he is a fervent supporter of Israel and that traditional Catholics and Orthodox Jews see God and the world in similar ways.
Thank you, Coleman begins, beneath the suspicious and faintly amused gaze of the rabbis. Thank you, not just for being here but for being, for existing … I was born not far from here, but you embody another world … This world is an example … Your world is a model … Vote for me.
Your faith, Santorum adds, even more ingratiating, desperately trying, like a child, to meet the gaze of Rabbi Perlow, who, in the big black satin coat that he won't remove during the entire meeting, his face sealed off, withdrawn, seems completely absent—your faith is my own. The example of your faith and your belonging is what helps me live and believe. Tomorrow I have to talk to a devout assembly of Christians. Well, I hope you know that when I talk to them about faith, about the power and grandeur of hope, it's you I'll be thinking about. It's your example I'll bear in mind.
And the rabbis—diffident, ironic, with an air of immense disdain, and the drifting attention of people who have seen everything, heard everything, and who observe this sales pitch from their age-old summit of history and wisdom—are silently bored, ask a few questions, consult one another with a glance, and end up saying, just like that, without insisting, without abandoning their conspicuous detachment from whatever is not, directly or indirectly, linked to their religious concerns: Well, then, since you must know, here is what our community needs for its schools, synagogues, health services, and support for Israel in its struggle against terrorism.
In this scene, in this confrontation between faith and greed, between the highest demands of the spirit and the crass indifference of fishers for votes, I don't know who should be blamed. Maybe there's no need to blame anyone, and I'm just present at one of those operations of bargaining or lobbying that are the common bill of fare of the "civic pragmatism" ... But there's one thing, nonetheless, I'm sure of. ... I didn't feel that Rick Santorum and Norm Coleman were the sincere friends they claimed to be, or that they would make this country an unfailing supporter of Israel. I listened to them. Observed them. I saw clearly, in each of them, the requisite consideration for a powerful, close-knit community that held a part of their political destiny in its hands.But what of a situation in which the community in question was less powerful? What of the day when another community, which makes hatred of the Jewish people the heart of its program, acquires more power? And beyond all that, what about the brilliant evangelical Protestant idea of the need to ensure a peaceful, faithful, and above all Jewish Israel for when the (Christian) Day of Judgment comes? How can one not feel that this is the very kind of argument that lasts as long as great misunderstandings last? Perhaps I'm wrong. But I wouldn't like to bet on American support for the survivors of the Shoah if it came down to depending, really depending, on an outlook of this sort.