As for Professor Martin Kramer, please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=%22Martin+Kramer%22). (Lily)
Mosaic Magazine（http://mosaicmagazine.com）
"The Spirit of Jewish Conservatism"—A Five-Part Symposium
An extended discussion of our controversial April essay, featuring today: Evelyn Gordon, Peter Berkowitz, Martin Kramer, Yehuda Krinsky, William Galston, David Gelernter, and Joseph Isaac Lifshitz.
1 June 2015
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Editors’ Note: Our April essay, “The Spirit of Jewish Conservatism,” by Eric Cohen, elicited such strong reactions, both in our pages and elsewhere, that we decided to continue the debate in the form of a symposium. Over the course of this week, we’re presenting brief reflections on Cohen’s thesis by 37 leading Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers.
In today’s opening group are Evelyn Gordon, Peter Berkowitz, Martin Kramer, Yehuda Krinsky, William Galston, David Gelernter, and Joseph Isaac Lifshitz. Read them sequentially, or click on a name to jump to an individual contribution, and let us know what you think in the Comments section. We hope you’ll enjoy the mix—and the fray.
by Martin Kramer
Remembering Jewish Socialism
Jewish conservatism? It’s a sign of our times. Jews have more power than at any time in their history. They enjoy sovereign power in Israel, and they have prospered in America perhaps more than any other minority. These are the best of times for Jews, and no one is better served by the ascendance of (mild) nationalism and (humane) capitalism as universal values. Jewish conservatism champions both; Jewish liberalism would undermine them. Eric Cohen rightly identifies this corrosive liberalism as the preeminent threat to Jewry today.
But in our enthusiasm for the status quo, let us not forget that a century ago, Jews were in a very different state, and that they extricated themselves from powerlessness only through revolution. The Zionist revolution cast aside the millennial traditions of passive pietism; in its most fevered (and productive) phases, it elevated the collective above all else, even above the family. In the pursuit of power, especially over land, it enlisted socialist zeal—and a good thing that it did, for a capitalist mode of settlement would have produced not an Israel, but an Algeria. Cohen may be right that “the ideology of modern socialism surely fails the test of Jewish values.” But without a variety of it, Jewish settlement in Palestine might have had too small a territorial footprint to make for a viable state, and Israel might not have enjoyed the Soviet-bloc support it needed at its birth. Socialism failed everyone—except, at a crucial moment, the Jews.
The point is not to question the contemporary primacy of economic freedom and the family. It is to acknowledge that values ultimately must be judged not by whether they conform to some fixed notion of a Jewish “essence,” but whether they assure that Jews will never again find themselves naked in the world, without the power to defend themselves. For the moment, Jewish conservatism as persuasively articulated by Cohen is the perfect vehicle for the preservation of Jewish power as it is. Jewish left-liberalism, as it is purveyed in America and Israel, would put Jewry in peril. But we cannot know what challenges the future may pose, and whether it will require that Jews become revolutionaries yet again.
・Martin Kramer is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem.
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