Together at the Tikvah Project’s opening public forum are, from left, Michael Walzer, Leora Batnitzky, and William Kristol.
Photos by Marilyn Silverstein
November 27, 2008
Two leading American-Jewish intellectuals from opposing sides of the political spectrum debated at a Nov. 17 program as Princeton University launched its new Tikvah Project on Jewish Thought.
The evening forum — Should Jews Be Democrats or Republicans? — featured Michael Walzer, coeditor of the left-wing quarterly Dissent and professor emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and William Kristol, founder and editor of the right-wing magazine The Weekly Standard.
The forum capped an all-day Inaugural Seminar on Jewish Thought, which brought together some 40 scholars and students for panel discussions about the future of Jewish theology, the Bible in American democracy, and Zionism in Jewish thought.
The Tikvah Project, which seeks to strengthen undergraduate interest in Jewish thought and bring Jewish history and ideas into dialogue with other traditions, is being funded by a $4.5 million grant from the New York-based Tikvah Fund.
Close to 200 people filled the seats in the Dodds Auditorium at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs for the evening program.
“I’ve always believed that the near-left is where Jews belong,” said Walzer, a member of the Tikvah Project’s advisory board, “and that’s where Jews have been ever since emancipation in overwhelming numbers in every democratic country.”
Walzer attributed the Jewish majority’s tendency to near-left politics to the experience or the memory of persecution, and also to the Passover injunction that requires Jews to imagine that they themselves were slaves in Egypt.
“All of that pushes us leftward,” he said. “Among ethnic groups, we are the strongest supporters of an open, liberal society.”
Michael Walzer, left, engages William Kristol in conversation before the program.
That perspective leads Jews to defend human rights, civil liberties, and religious tolerance, he said, and it explains the Jewish impulse to care for the poor, the elderly, and the needy, and also to provide support for the common good.
“Even when we are not apprehensive for ourselves,” Walzer said, “we know that the tzedaka impulse is also the way of justice.…
“Jews are rightfully among the staunchest supporters of the welfare state,” he added. “Tzedaka is one of the critical ideas that pushes Jews to the near-left…. I believe this is a politics worth conserving. It does us honor.”
‘Conservatism of fear’
Kristol, a member of the Tikvah Fund board of directors, chose not to answer the question asked in the forum’s title. Instead, he launched into a meandering overview of how existential threats to Israel and the rise of the evangelical Christian right influence Jewish voting habits. The only time he spoke to the evening’s question was to dispute Walzer’s thesis.
“Those Jews who are most involved in the [Jewish] tradition in the United States are actually less liberal than Jews who are less observant,” Kristol said.
“The notion that tradition puts Jews on the Left — there are an awful lot of traditional Jews who have moved away from the Left. I don’t think Jewish tradition pushes one way or another.”
Walzer countered that the conservatism of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews stems from a time before emancipation.
“We were the people of the king. We clung to the king. We feared pogroms, and this is still the politics of Orthodox Jews,” he said.
Some Orthodox prayer books still retain a prayer for the state to “deal kindly with us” — a prayer copied from an old prayer for the king, according to Walzer.
“That’s not the plea of a democratic system,” he said. “That’s a galut [Diaspora] position, and that, I think, ultimately explains ultra-Orthodox conservatism. It’s a conservatism of fear.”
During the question-and-answer period, New Jersey Jewish News pressed Kristol to speak to the evening’s question and to discuss the traditions, values, and impulses that drive him as a Jew to be on the Right.
“I guess I really resist the question about Jewish values and traditions,” he responded. “I just think it’s hard to find a correlation. If I was a Christian, I’d be a right-wing lunatic as well.”
Several participants welcomed the advent of the Tikvah Project.
“This is a great opportunity for Princeton and for Jewish thought,” said Leora Batnitzky, professor of religion and director of the Tikvah Project at Princeton.
Judaic scholar Michael Fishbane, who is in residence at Princeton as the inaugural Tikvah Fellow, said that the project will offer the community “new avenues for reflection.”
“I think it has wonderful potential,” said Fishbane, who is the Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. “It will give people a new language of reflection, and provide new avenues of thinking about very complex subjects.”
Rabbi James Diamond, a lecturer in Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, also welcomed the launch of the project.
“I think it’s a salutary development that the Tikvah program is interested in bridging the distance between academic Jewish studies and the interests of the community at large,” said Diamond, former director of Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life. “It’s going to force the Judaic studies program to do things that speak to the wider community, not just the academic community. And this is a good example.”
--TOP--
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
