Where the real honour should go

Where the real honour should go

By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
May 11, 2006

Brandeis University is granting celebrity playwright Tony Kushner an honorary doctorate this spring. It’s an appalling decision for America’s “only non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored college or university,” which is named after the great American Zionist, Justice Louis D. Brandeis.

Kushner, an ardent anti-Zionist, once said that “the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity.” Kushner is free to “wish modern Israel hadn’t been born,” as he has also said. But what prompted Brandeis to decide to lionize Kushner this year, especially considering Kushner’s screenwriting input on the movie Munich, Steven Spielberg’s morally obtuse treatment of Palestinian terrorism?

Kushner’s free speech is not in question – he enjoys plenty. Rather, Brandeis’ judgment and values require scrutiny. Honorary doctorates represent universities’ highest values, their loftiest aspirations. Honorees serve as role models for graduating seniors to emulate – and name-drop promiscuously back home.

Kushner is one of many “progressive Jews” who happily lead the pile-on against Israel, feeding the ugly anti-Zionist climate of opinion on campuses and elsewhere. He is a kindred spirit of the 400 “progressive” rabbis who signed a petition this spring begging the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush to continue financing the Palestinian Authority, even as European governments were refusing to pump money into Hamas-run coffers.

Proving that Jews are not monolithically pro-Israel, Kushner has many academic Jewish allies, in Israel and North America. Is Brandeis emulating the many Israeli universities that shamelessly pluck Jewish, and Zionist, heartstrings to fundraise, while fomenting a culture that demonizes Israel, America, and many core western values?

I leave it to the Brandeis community – and Brandeis’ many Jewish donors – to debate Kushner’s undeserved honour. But the Jewish community – and the many Jewish progressives – need the “rigorous, unapologetic skeptical inquiry” that Kushner and other progressives self-righteously demand in order to dissect all our biases.

Amid the bloodiest anti-Semitic outbursts since Nazism, progressive Jews have demonstrated a downright Christian, turn-the-other-cheek approach to Islamism. Yet the same people who can endlessly rationalize Islamist terrorism, and magically perceive a pragmatism in Hamas that few others can see, are instinctively prejudiced against Christian Zionists.

It’s pathological. While millions of Christian Zionists support Israel, tens of millions of Muslims demonize Israel, and Jews, regularly. While right-wing American Christians have raised millions of dollars for Israel, Palestinian terrorists have launched thousands of attacks, eliciting Muslim cheers. While Christian fundamentalists lobby for Israel, Muslim fundamentalists demand Israel’s destruction. While many leading churches have repudiated anti-Semitic elements of their theology, many leading mosques regularly endorse hateful Qur’anic passages that call Jews pigs, monkeys and liars.

I challenge my supposedly open-minded friends, who recoil at Christian evangelicals’ friendship for Israel, to confront their prejudices by reading David Brog’s new book, Standing With Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State.

Brog systematically, intelligently and convincingly catalogues evangelicals’ support for Israel and debunks the popular slurs that doubt Christian Zionists’ motives. As the rare Jew who has bothered studying Christian Zionist beliefs, Brog explains that a recent theological “revolution” repudiated “replacement theology,” which claimed Christians superseded Jews as the Chosen People.

Now, rather than condemning Jews, fundamentalists feel commanded to embrace Jews because of a biblical verse most modern Jews don’t even know – Genesis 12:3, wherein God promises Abraham to “bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you.”

Let’s assess the real threat of Muslim anti-Semitism, which has killed hundreds of Jews already, versus the potential threat of Christian philo-Semitism. And whoever forgets that democratic coalitions often entail marriages of convenience and criticizes the broader Christian right agenda should consider Islamist stances on women, gays and other progressive principles.

Finally, let’s ask the really hard questions: how much of this sympathy for Muslim opponents of Jews combined with this disgust for Christian Zionists is because most Christians are western, white and too much like us? The great poet Robert Frost once said “a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Such self-loathing today is dangerous, not just decadent. David Brog’s important book proves that we owe our Christian allies a second, more informed look, a deep apology, and a renewed alliance against the modern world’s true enemies of fundamental progressive ideals, such as liberty and democracy.

If Brandeis’s dishonourable honour triggers such a debate and re-examination, it will have fulfilled its educational mission.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University. The updated version of his book Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today is being released this spring.

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