Monday evening roundup

WTF? and WTF????

I didn't find Michael Pollan's analysis of the rise of the food movement particularly interesting, but I know my handful of regular readers would be disappointed if I didn't link to it.

What caught my eye, from the same source, was this piece on younger American Jews on Israel, particularly paired with last week's thought-provoking, powerful New Yorker fiction. I don't know whether the writer of the latter was endorsing the positions of his protagonists; I know that I could see where he was coming from, and I could see that he might have wanted to argue that when you haven't been there, who are you to judge. But I know that that mentality--kill them before they kill us--and the fear-mongering that perpetuates it has been at the root of many a genocide, and that at some point, you have to break the cycle and move to a paradigm of seeing whether you can not kill and still not be killed. My mom would say, 'what do you know?' But "what do you know is not an argument." If I thought she'd read it, I'd send her the former article, which I'll excerpt here:

the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

and

Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”

But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive.

and

But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.

***
A Post contributor on why we moralize and how to do it better:

A long line of reformers directed their moral rage at poverty, hunger, racism, segregation, sexism or other forms of injustice, turning the focus from individual sinners to communal wrongs.

Martin Luther King Jr. described the social gospel beautifully when he called on his listeners to become good Samaritans, to forget their selfish desires and to care for needy people of every race. King stood squarely in an American tradition of reformers stretching from William Jennings Bryan ("You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold") to Franklin Roosevelt ("These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is . . . to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men") and Lyndon Johnson ("Should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be [racially] unequal . . . then we will have failed as a people and as a nation"). From this perspective, political morality means worrying less about teen sex and more about ministering to our neighbors.

Do I have to start smiling at fellow passengers? I see her point but this is just one side of things; what if you get an RM prototype?