Preview

I admit I have not read Martin Indyk’s 688-page love letter to Henry Kissinger, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy. I sort of feel like I have though, as the book has now scored excerpts in The Forward, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as reviews and/or interviews in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Haaretz, The Forward, The Guardian, Jewish Insider, The Jerusalem Post, and CNN.com. Of the above, here is the funniest headline: “Was Henry Kissinger a Misunderstood Idealist?” And here is the worst idea: Perhaps Biden could learn something from America’s most accomplished diplomat, Henry Kissinger.

Indyk thinks Kissinger’s diplomacy with regard to Egypt and Israel before, during, and after the 1973 war was brilliant and idealistically driven. I beg to differ. Kissinger discouraged the Israelis from entering into peace talks with the Egyptians, encouraged the Egyptians to go to war, and encouraged the Israelis to remain unprepared for that war and therefore endure terrible, unnecessary loss of life. He then fought Nixon tooth and nail (together with the Pentagon) to try to stop Nixon from resupplying Israel in the midst of the crisis, though Nixon overruled him. Unless Indyk somehow convinces me otherwise, I will make this argument in my forthcoming book, now tentatively titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Israel, to be published by Basic Books next fall. In the meantime, here are some of Kissinger’s greatest hits on this and related topics, drawn from the draft of what will be that most excellent book.

The Israelis, Kissinger said at various times, were “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “psychopathic,” “fools and common thugs,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” Even worse, however, were American Jews because “they seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.” Of anti-Semitism, Kissinger avers: “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”

Of course Nixon, his boss, may have been America’s most anti-Semitic president (and Spiro Agnew was unquestionably America’s most anti-Semitic vice president). William Safire’s favorite president used to call Kissinger “Jewish, Jewish … Jewish as hell” and “a rag merchant” when Nixon was angry, but “my Jewboy” when apparently in a good mood. Kissinger played to these prejudices. Before the war began, he told one aide that what was needed was “psychological warfare against Israel … which has treated us as no other country could.” He privately threatened that “if the Jewish Community comes after us, we will have to go public with the whole record.” He instructed his State Department colleagues: “We are to see it through and even if they win it will do so much damage to the Jewish community here that it may never recover.” During the lengthy, drawn-out 1974 negotiations over Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai, he told the president, “I have never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest.”

I’ve not seen much talk about Marc Tracy’s big piece “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism” in The New York Times Magazine. I thought it well done, with complicated arguments and emotions portrayed with sensitivity and subtlety (though my friend Rabbi Jill Jacobs did not, as she writes here). I think the piece might have benefited from some more time spent in the Times archives, as this is the latest chapter in a struggle that has been going on among American Jews (and especially among rabbis) for about a half-century. For instance, there is this page-one piece from December 30, 1976: “American Jewish Leaders Are Split Over Issue of Meeting With P.L.O.” Even more useful would have been “SOUL-SEARCHING,” from the May 8, 1988, Times Magazine. Authored during the first intifada by Albert Vorspan, then a leading voice of Reform Jewry, it spoke of American Jews “suffering under the shame and stress of pictures of Israeli brutality televised nightly,” and suggested they would have liked “to crawl into a hole.” Vorspan deemed this depressing reality to be “the price we pay for having made of Israel an icon—a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.” As Don McLean sadly concluded in a decidedly different context, “They would not listen, they’re not listening still. Perhaps they never will.”

(By the way, what was secret idealist Henry Kissinger’s advice to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he instructed his military to put down the teenage rock throwers with “might, power, beatings”? He told them Israel needed to suppress the uprising “brutally and rapidly,” adding: “The first step should be to throw out television, à la South Africa.”)

Speaking of Jews, history, and the echoes of the past that continue to haunt our lives today, for God’s sake, go see the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of the 2003 Public Theater production of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change at Studio 54 if you can.

The autobiographical operetta that “mashes klezmer, spirituals, sixties pop, and half a dozen other genres to create one irrepressible American sound,” as The New Yorker noted, takes place in the fateful month of November 1963 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Caroline is the angry, illiterate Black maid to a complicated Jewish household and does not know what to do with her anger. (Sharon D. Clarke, who plays her in her first Broadway appearance, is more than enough reason to see the play by itself.) Kushner—who I think is by far this country’s most important living dramatist—examines the historical moment from the perspectives of his stand-in, Noah, a sad, motherless eight-year-old boy; his stepmother, a transplanted New York Jew; her father, a Communist rabble-rouser (who wishes Blacks would cut out all this nonviolence bullshit); Caroline’s children, one of whom is caught up in the civil rights struggle; and another maid who is going to night school and getting caught up in the political moment as well. I saw the original and remembered it quite fondly, and even bought the CD, but this production felt far more powerful than the one I remember. The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz writes: “The musical hasn’t just stood the test of time; it has grown into the present—or maybe the present has grown to meet it.” And this endorsement comes across as rather tepid compared to the enthusiasm evident in the rave it received in the Times from Jesse Green, who argued that “the world around ‘Caroline’ has changed in ways that make it seem more prescient, more painful and … more hopeful now than it did back then.” And that review comes across as tepid compared to Helen Shaw in New York magazine, who calls it a candidate for the century’s greatest piece of musical theater. (Prophetically, or perhaps coincidentally, the play actually begins with an attack on the statue of a Confederate general.) So much has been written about Blacks and Jews and continues to be written, but I’ve never seen the issues that underlie this troubled relationship illustrated so sympathetically—and powerfully—as in this magnificent work. It closes on January 9.

I read two books about Israel this past week. The first, Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch of the estimable and admirable New Israel Fund, is one of the best short contemporary guides to the complicated politics of the place I’ve come across, provided the person reading it has an open mind and almost no knowledge of what the hell is happening over there. I particularly admire Sokatch for his title and subtitle, which perfectly explain the book’s purpose. The second one was The State of Israel vs. the Jews by Sylvain Cypel. This is not a well-titled book as the author does not really appear to discuss “Jews” except in the most superficial sense. But if you are in need of a book that compiles virtually every terrible thing that the Israelis have said or done—at least until the closing date for the author’s submissions—you will find it here. You won’t find much context and you certainly won’t find any consideration of the (admittedly, often remote) possibility that Israel had any non-nefarious reasons for anything it did. But for a straightforward indictment, if you want it, here it is, come and get it.

I also saw two movies about Israel this week. The first was a documentary called The Forgotten Ones, about the manner in which Mizrahi Jews (Jews who came from Arab countries) have been historically discriminated against in Israel and how that historic discrimination continues to reverberate today. It’s playing at DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival. If you know nothing about the Israeli “Black Panthers,” this engrossing film will fill that void.

The second, also a documentary, was called Our Natural Right. It’s based on a gimmick, but one that works: The grandchildren of the signers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence return to the hall in Tel Aviv where the document was signed 70 years later and are interviewed both about their lives and about how each one thinks things have since turned out. All (Jewish) Israeli perspectives are represented, including from those who say it would be better to just throw the Arabs out, and those who say there really shouldn’t be an “Israel” at all. It also helps one to recall the heady days of the sadly unrealized promises of that wonderfully idealistic declaration.

I did not see any films at the Other Israel Film Festival, and neither will you, because it ended yesterday. (I tried to, opening night, but the auditorium was full when I got there.) But you can maybe stream some in the future, here.