Tyler Cowen links to a new book by John Judis on Jewish influence on President Truman’s Middle East policy. I have read and suggested to friends another book on Israeli history that Tyler recommended, Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Also, I recommend Like Dreamers, which looks at the 1967 war in terms of intended and unintended consequences. I will not read Judis, because of some completely unrelated personal issues, which I will put below the fold.
Consider this exercise: flesh out an alternate history in which President Truman does not recognize the Jewish state and Israel’s war for independence fails. State what happens to
1. Arabs in the region
2. Jews in the region
3. Jewish holocaust survivors
4. Jews in Russia
5. Jews in the U.S.
6. The rest of the world
Let me sketch out one ideal scenario: Arabs become secure in terms of sovereignty and status. Feeling good about themselves, they give Jews full rights to own property anywhere and engage in commerce with anyone. They establish democratic modern states embodying civil rights and the rule of law. Holocaust survivors and Russian Jews migrate to the region, as do some American Jews (although not as many as actually migrated). The rest of the world lives quite happily.
I do not think of that as the only scenario, or even the most likely. But the larger alternate-history concept might make for an interesting discussion, if it can be kept civil.
In 1999, When I still had children in high school, John Judis and another parent stirred up a controversy there. Here is a news story from that time. Judis used his position as a columnist for The New Republic to write a piece lambasting the school’s principal. Judis and his ally (who is not a public figure, hence not named here; he is not named in the article, either) accused the principal of undermining a program at the high school. To make sure that local parents got the message, copies of Judis’ column were placed in the mailboxes of parents in our neighborhood, including ours.
Many white parents, including me, had students in the program. The school as a whole was about 25 percent white, 25 percent black, 30 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent other. The principal was black. A number of my friends rallied on the side of Judis and his ally, and they encouraged me to join them. I did not. I was not so attached to the program, and I was quite sure that this was going to create racial animosity where previously there had been none. I was not overly impressed with the principal in general, but I thought she had made reasonable decisions on this issue.
In the midst of the controversy (around the time that the article I linked to was written), a PTA meeting was held in which people aired their views. The energized white parents, particularly Judis’ ally (Judis did not attend), were genuinely shocked to find that their liberal politics and good intentions did not gain support from black parents, and that the latter actually supported the principal.
Anyway, things did not work out as badly as I feared. The racial acrimony seemed to die out within a few years, and the students were much more mature about it than the parents. So the school was ok for my daughters, which is what I cared about.
But I still have not forgiven Judis. He could have expressed his opinion in a local forum, rather than exploiting his position as a columnist in a national magazine. He could have at least had the courage and decency to attend the PTA meeting devoted to the controversy he had created.
Ordinarily, the topic and Tyler’s recommendation would lead me to buy the book. And I am sure that I have bought lots of books written by people who have done worse things in their lives. But there is no way I am buying this one.
I hate the bizarre problems caused by bureaucracy. I can’t even tell what to hate. A leadership program that is anti-elitist?
Well, I imagine every parent could have gotten a sticker that stated “My Child is a Leader at Kennedy”.
All I know is we still have no idea what we are doing. We still don’t understand, let alone know what we should want, with education as a positional good.
And yet the politics has to make choices in real time.
When I was hired as assistant professor in a large and well-ranked public university in the US, we were expressly told that we could not use our title, rank or position to buttress personal opinions that we might express (say, at a PTA meeting). Further, we were warned there would be consequences for not respecting this rule. As a naive twentysomething, I was surprised that the job might have clout. How much more influence would wield someone in national media.
Did they warn us about this when we were 18?
ADDED QUOTATION MARKS TO QUOTE FROM CONTEMPORANEOUS NEWS STORY
I went to the high school under discussion (Kennedy) around the time of these events. I am not a John Judis fan and I agree he used his status and soapbox to agitate in his parental capacity. I knew and liked his daughters. I was not a member of the LTI program, though I confess to being a white (upper) middle class student.
I think you are wrong to defend Sheila Dobbins, the school’s principal.
The LTI program was a good program, albeit rather weak in terms of its selectivity, curriculum, and rigor relative to the International Baccalaureate and Magnet programs at better high schools in the county. The (tacit?) intent of the then relatively young LTI program was to compete with other schools in the county and keep higher-performing students (disproportionately White and Asian) at Kennedy, a generally very poorly performing school.
Sheila Dobbins was a poor principal. Students didn’t like her (you’ll have to take my word), although the wide berth she gave the extraordinarily unruly garnered some gratitude if not respect on their part. She garnered support from African-American parents almost exclusively by tilting at the LTI program and thereby stoking racial tensions.
Teachers didn’t like her (the teachers union circulated negative surveys during the late unpleasantness – http://www.prstech.com/jfk/chart_climate_report1.html ) and 19 percent of Kennedy teachers left the school from 1997 to 1999, compared with a 10 percent average countywide.
Per a newspaper article at the time “In 2000, according to public school data, 20 percent of Kennedy students received federally subsidized lunches.. By that measure, students in six other of Montgomery County’s 23 high schools were as poor or poorer than Kennedy’s. Kennedy nonetheless ranked third from last in SAT scores last year, third from last in the percentage of students taking honors courses, and dead last in the percentage of children doing poorly in school (as measured by grade point average).” Kennedy’s SAT scores dropped an average of 15 points over the three years preceding the brouhaha.
More simply: Kennedy underperformed relative to its demographics and had unique and uniquely racial ugliness during Dobbins tenure despite being one of several schools with similar racial diversity (e.g. Einstein, Wheaton). Why hold Judis responsible for this and not Dobbins? Avoiding crisis at Kennedy was her job, not his. There were many vocal parents, only one principal, and there was a real problem before he published.
Note: Kennedy has not been troubled by racial animus since Joe Rubens (also African American, and once upon a time a football coach of mine) took over as principal, despite Kennedy having become much more Hispanic over the last decade-plus (recall that perceptions of anti-Hispanic discrimination by Kennedy’s administration figured prominently in the 16page MCPS advisory panel report on the Dobbins debacle, but not at all in the press coverage).
Also, I think your historical racial numbers are off. At the time (2000) Kennedy was 40 percent black, 25 percent white, 21 percent Hispanic and 13 percent Asian. By the way, the difference between Kennedy and the broader school system was more stark then; In 2000 MCPS was majority white, while today 2/3 of the Montgomery County student population are racial or ethnic minorities.
A couple of helpful comments:
1) Judis’ book is supposed to be really, really bad history:
http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/730/original-sins/
2) But Shavit’s book is not much better:
http://www.momentmag.com/contrition-confusion-ari-shavit/
and
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/09/the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-ari-shavit-s-my-promised-land.html
http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2013/12/their-tragic-land/
(the last review also takes Yossi Klein Halevi to task a bit — I love Ruth Wisse!)
Anyway, just thought you should know there are other perspectives out there. I don’t know why you think so highly of “cheap chalupas”, but I guess you know the guy and like him.
Thanks for the links. I love Shavit’s book. It’s very passionate and well paced. Halevi’s book also is very well conceived and written. My problem with the Israeli left and with other critics of Israel is that I do not think that they care to answer the sort of exercise I posed in my post. As for Tyler, he likes to prod people to question their strongly-held views. In fact, I think of the exercise that I posed as a Tyler-esque sort of technique.
Ummm … ummm … umm …. I gotta say … I’m a frigging old guy (67) and I have these memories …
It’s a great mistake to look at current American/conservative support for Israel and think “It’s been that way since 1947.” The fact is that liberals and socialists supported a Jewish State up into the 1950s, basically with the idea that history had proven Jews needed a state to protect themselves from antisemites, and conservatives were cool towards that notion, basically because Jews were … you know … Jews. F***ing k*kes. Those sort of people.
A couple of things happened. One was the Sinai Campaign of 1956, in which the Israelis got in a war with Egypt and won rather conclusively. Another was the publication of Leon Uros EXODUS, a huge best seller in the US, establishling for all its readers that Jews fought against Nazis and other oppressers. And then in 1967, the 6 Day War came along to really pound in the notion that Jews Could Fight. And then there was a short lived Arab oil embargo. Only after that did American conservatives begin to embrace Israel.
So. Let me consider your counterfactuals. If there had been no Israeli War of Independence… Arabs in the Middle East hadn’t especially welcomed Jews before WW II; there’s no reason to think they would have become more affectionate afterwards.
What would the position of Jews left in Europe have been without an Isaeli refuge? Well… We know a bit about another despised ethnic minority, decimated by the Nazis, with no place to escape to — the Romani. The Gypsies. Everybody loves Gypsies, right? Everybody welcomes their appearance in a community. We greet their caravans with wild enthusiasm. They’re major characters in all sorts of novels and films. Everybody decent and good spirited just adores Gypsies. Right?
Am I missing something?