By Micha Odenheimer | 05/11/2009
Michael Walzer, a political theorist and philosopher at Princeton University, remains passionately involved in trying to clarify ethical imperatives in global crisis situations. Since 1957, Walzer has been involved in Israel personally, politically, and intellectually. Micha Odenheimer speaks with an individual who has carved out a space for himself as a left-wing supporter of Israel, dueling it out in written combat with the country's anti-Zionist critics.
Michael Walzer, widely regarded as one of the leading political theorists in the world today, embodies that rare quality that our Sages so highly valued: נאה דורש
ונאה מקיים—a person who lives up to his principles. One of the major strands in his thinking over the course of many years has been his insistence that political philosophers and social critics remain rooted organically in their own people and society, as observers from the inside. Walzer has lived up to this charge as a Jew. Since his first trip to Israel in 1957, Walzer has been involved in Israel personally, politically, and intellectually. He has carved out a space for himself as a left-wing supporter of Israel, dueling it out in written combat with anti-Zionist critics of Israel such as Palestinian eminence Edward Said and Tony Judt—a Jew who has used his platform as a public intellectual to call for the dismantling of the Jewish state, and a contemporary example of what Walzer might call an “unconnected critic.”
Since 1980, Prof. Walzer has been a permanent faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Intellectually, he has spent much of his time over the last decade presiding over a collaborative project called The Jewish Political Tradition, which he has edited together with Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam Zohar and Yair Lorberbaum of the Hartman Institute. The first volume of a projected four, “Authority” was published in the year 2000 and was published in a Hebrew translation in 2007. The second volume, “Membership” appeared in English in 2003. Walzer is also co-editor of the social democratic magazine Dissent, which was founded by Irving Howe as a vehicle for the anti-communist Left and made famous outside intellectual circles through Woody Allen's quip in Annie Hall that if Dissent and Commentary ever merged they could call the magazine Dysentery.
Moral philosophy has traditionally been obsessed with finding principles and axioms, often abstractions, through which to create a universal ethics. Walzer remains passionately involved in trying to clarify ethical imperatives in global crisis situations—his book Just and Unjust Wars is considered a modern classic, and he has also written about how to create criteria for outside military intervention in internal genocidal conflicts. But for Walzer, ethics and social critique spring from what he calls the “thickness” of local cultures, from common perceptions of justice in everyday life, from collective memory and history, from the richness of associations that make for communal life.
Eretz Acheret spoke with Walzer in Mevaseret Zion, where he was staying with one of his many Israeli friends.
Hanna Arendt says you can't love a people—that perhaps such love is the root of evils such as fascism. And Gershom Scholem says, No, there is such a thing as Ahavat Yisrael. Where would you come out on that?
I guess we need to be careful in our loving. We love individuals, but we love individuals partly because of who they are and whether they are close to us and some individuals are loved unconditionally, we are prepared to help them, to be with them in bad times without asking questions, and those people are the members of our family. I don't think Ahavat Yisrael extends to Medinat Yisrael. I don't think you can love a state. That is a modern form of idolatry. I'm not sure about loving a land—although you can love a landscape or a particular vision of a place. But can you love a people? Yes, I think you can love a people in just that sense of how you love the members of your family. The love is focused on individuals, but in part because they are like us: they have a history, which is our history, they have a culture that's our culture. They recognize names and places and jokes. I don't think you can have a human life without accepting the context of a community of that kind.
The Talmud says that the sign of a Jew is that they are rachmanim, bayshanim, gomlei hasadim (compassionate, humble, benevolent). If they don't have that sign, perhaps their Jewishness should be questioned. Do peoples have a particular quality, a character?
I don't think so. They have their recognizable features that extend to most of their members because of cultural upbringing, language, history. But I don't think the doctrine of national character is terribly useful. And I certainly know a lot of Jews that don't fit the description that you just gave. One sign of Ahavat Yisrael might be that you feel especially critical of those people, because they don't live up to a certain standard in a characteristic you would like to see as representative of us.
How would you explain the very important distinction that you made between loving a people and loving a state? There are, after all, a lot of people who are very devoted, who love the state of Israel because of what it represents to them, Jewish power, the dignity it gives to Jews. How do you explain to people: Yes, love a people, but don't love a state?
You can be glad there is a state of Israel. You can be grateful to the people who sustain and guard the state. You can be admiring—or critical—of the policies of the state. You want to sustain the capacity for criticism that is especially important in politics, although it is important in families too. So what is the difference between a family and a state? With a state we want to be able to say: We made the state. If we didn't make it right, we can make it again. That is the great shift that takes place in modernity, from the organic imagery—the body politic—to mechanical imagery: checks and balances, the ship of state. The state is an instrument; it is our instrument. It is enormously valuable; people need to have an instrument of this sort. But it is not a body; it does not have the quality of personhood.
Are the Jewish people that you grew up with—and I understand that you grew up in the Bronx when it was filled with Jewish immigrants?
Only for the first 9 years. Afterwards we were in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a steel town.
You grew up among first-generation immigrants.
My parents were born in America. My mother was the only one of her siblings, though, who grew up in America.
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Are American Jews still Jews the way they were Jews when you grew up? Or has the “bourgeoisification,” the assimilation into American culture, the cutting off from their roots, made them unrecognizable?
Well, certainly there were changes already in my generation. My parents had only Jewish friends. I don't think after we moved to Johnstown, which had a very lively but small Jewish community, I don't think my parents ever set foot in the home of a non-Jew. They were never invited; some of our neighbors never talked to us. But I went to a public school. Most of my friends were non-Jews. I was in and out of their houses all the time, and they, in our houses. That difference is enormous and it continues. The enclosure of the Jewish community has just collapsed. The whole gentile world is appealingly open, and Jews have moved into it.
There is an American sociologist named Jeffrey Alexander. He points out that intermarriage is a two-way process and that is a sign of the enormous attractiveness of Jews in America that so many goyim want to marry Jews. It's not just Jews trying to push themselves into the gentile community--gentiles are eager for Jewish spouses. That is certainly different than it was in my parent's generation. It's not assimilation, its integration. With blacks we were in favor of integration. We were all integrationists during the civil rights movement. Jews are also integrating.
Isn't it different to have to make a conscious effort to remain Jewish? Your parents didn't have to do that. They were just Jews, you could see it on their faces and hear it in their speech. Now we have to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into continuity. Isn't there a danger that Jewishness has somehow become something artificial, abstract?
What we say in the States is “voluntary.” Every Jewish congregation is a voluntary association and it is easy not to be a member. On the other hand, if you want to have a Jewish life, you pretty much have to join a congregation. What you described—how the previous generation just lived in a Jewish world, that is pretty much gone. So you have to decide. You send your kids to a Jewish summer camp, to a Jewish after-school. You look for a place like Brandeis University or University of Pennsylvania, which is 50% Jewish, to increase their chance of meeting another Jew.
What about Israelis? Are they recognizably Jewish? Or are they something different?
Certainly many Israelis are different. But the range is from Ultra-Orthodox to secular, from left to right. You know, I grew up in a world where I thought Judaism and socialism were the same thing. Now I have discovered the neoconservative Jews in the US, and Likudniks and worse here. So yes…Jewishness has changed. But we wanted to be normal. And it turns out that there are two paths to normality. One is emancipation in democratic states, and the other is sovereignty in a Jewish state. And they both produce an extraordinary variety of ways of being Jewish.
Does Ahavat Yisrael also change, now that we have the possibility of normalcy through emancipation and sovereignty?
You have to imagine the uncle in our family who voted Republican and no one would talk to him. There are now many, many Jews who figuratively we might not want to talk to. And yet we do feel a tie. And in time of trouble we would stand by them. And why? That is very hard to explain. But I think to produce human beings without those kinds of feelings would be a great human loss.
Why would it be a loss? What's wrong with just feeling identification with humanity as a whole?
We have an identification with humanity as a whole. American Jews are leading the campaign for Darfur. We have a very strong humanistic commitment. But that passion, it seems to me—insofar as it is real and emotionally authentic—has to draw on more local and immediate passions. We learn to love in expanding series of communities, and I don't think you can love humanity if you are incapable of loving more local groupings of human beings.
Here in Israel we often get the sense that some of the secular left critics lack the ability to empathize with their own people. Does that strike a chord with you as being true? And if so, why?
It may be a sign of identification. If someone says: I'm opposed to every form of nationalism, but especially Zionism, that may be a very strong sign of identification.
It may be a sign of identification. If someone says: I'm opposed to every form of nationalism, but especially Zionism, that may be a very strong sign of identification.
And you have it this phenomenon in America too, with the Noam Chomskys and the Tony Judts.
Right. And we had it during the Vietnam War, this critique of “Amerika” spelled with a “k” (suggesting that America is like Nazi Germany–MO) or with three Ks (for the Ku Klux Klan–MO)—far beyond anything that the actual situation called for. It seemed to come out of some terrible disappointment, some terrible sense of loss. That could only come from identification of some kind with another America—“America Acheret.” Now I think the critique of Israel policy from the near left, the moderate secular left, which I identify with, is entirely consistent and even required by Ahavat Yisrael.
You are saying that the deep sense of alienation from the aspirations of their own people that you find in some left-wing intellectuals here is not a particularly Jewish phenomenon.
I think this happens in many places and with many ideological groupings. And there is also an element of extraordinary idealism, as there was in the group of Jews like Buber and his friends, who argued for a bi-national state, who argued against political Zionism back in the twenties. There is a kind of idealism and naiveté. It seems to me that in people like Tony Judt (an American- Jewish intellectual who has argued for a bi-national state today–MO), there is also a willful blindness about what would actually happen if a bi-national state would be established here. He has a picture of America. Noam Chomsky as well. Chomsky is brutally critical of everything American, and yet when he looks at the rest of the world, what he wants is America. He doesn't like nation-states, especially Jewish nation-states. He wants people to live in multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-religious communities—the image in his head is always America. One of the things that seems important to me for people on the left to acknowledge is that there have to be other political arrangements possible. And the nation-state is one of those arrangements. An example I always use is Norway. Norway separated from Sweden in order to preserve their language, their history. And the Norwegian state is a little engine for the reproduction of Norwegian-ness. And no one in the world objects. So we need to learn something about possible alternatives from examples like that.
It seems to me that people like Chomsky or Ilan Pappe, Jews on the far left, find it difficult to feel Jewish vulnerability—or perhaps they repress those feelings.
Let's start with America. I remember when the Rosenbergs were exposed as spies at their trial and my parents were scared to death. They thought there would be pogroms against American Jews or something—I don't know what they thought. And this rubbed off on me a little bit, but not that much. I was already much more secure than they were in our peculiar galut (diaspora). My children are much more secure than I am in America. It's a sign of success, I suppose, American Jewish success. In Israel also, you are certainly vulnerable, you live with much greater danger than the Netherlands or Denmark; on the other hand, you are a sovereign state with a very powerful defense force and with greater recognition and acceptance in the world than many Israelis are ready to admit…I think it would be a sign of Zionist maturity to recognize not only the danger but also the achievement of strength. Israelis often talk as if they are still living in a Polish ghetto. So yes, there are people on the far left who pretend that dangers don't exist, and there are people on the right who pretend that the whole world is against us. We need a sophisticated account of our own situation.
So how do you weigh, for example, the prevalence in the Islamic world of antisemitic propaganda, and the resurgence of antisemitic ideology against the strength of the Israeli army? How do you calibrate?
I'm not a strategist, [but] the ideological challenge is very serious. We need to respond and we need to insist that decent people around the world respond. We also need to acknowledge that within the Arab world there are people who are afraid of radical Islam and who are quite eager for some kind of settlement. Israel should be actively engaged with those people. That is part of what it means to have a state. A state can respond diplomatically and politically and strategically in ways that a ghetto cannot. I know, as you do, how real the dangers are. I also have a strong sense of possibility.
I want to mention two experiences, one I had last night and one I'm going to have when I finish talking to you: Last night I attended a shiva. I walked into an apartment building and found the apartment with the door open, because during a shiva the door is left open. That gave me a feeling of what you call “thickness”—the thickness of ethics that are based on cultural practices…The experience I am going to have is that I'm about to have my first Kosher McDonalds at the Mevaseret Zion mall. What I want to ask you is this: When you talk about the cultural “thickness” from which ethics emerges, in the Jewish case to what extent is that connected to religious practice? To what extent does globalization threaten this kind of thickness?
Achad Ha'am says somewhere that secular Jews understand that the God of Israel played an enormous part in the history of the Jews, even if the God of Israel doesn't exist. The culture of the people and of the nation is shaped in the most radical ways by religion…I've often felt at funerals of Jewish secular left figures that no one knew what to say, no one knew when to weep. The structure of the event hadn't been reproduced in a secular way—and maybe it can't be. The culture is religious, although in the Reform Temple of Johnstown Pennsylvania, Chanuka was a holiday of national resurrection, and a more important holiday because of that. And it worked. I don't know if it is better to teach people that Matityahu was actually our Khomeini. Maybe not. I don't think the religious culture is itself an unchanging thing—it has changed radically over time— and I don't think the secular or non-Orthodox adaptations of it are necessarily going to be unable to reproduce themselves across generations. I have a very strong sense of possibility.
You don't believe that the globalization of the economy will threaten local particularity?
Well so far, it has intensified particularisms, because of reactions against globalization.
Well so far, it has intensified particularisms, because of reactions against globalization.
But is the particularism really “thick,” or is it the abstract desire to hold on to something whose roots and ground are really disappearing?
Sometimes perhaps. In the hands of the rulers of Singapore, the revival of Confucianism is entirely artificial; it's a ruling ideology used by the government. But I suspect that the revival of Confucianism in China is a serious effort to replace a failed communism, [and] that [it] will attach itself to the history and culture of the ordinary people.
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You have been coming to Israel now since 1957. Has Israel changed? Has it become less itself and more Western? Or has it changed, but still remained rooted in its Israeliness or Jewishness?
It's become much more diverse. It's become more religious. When I first started coming, the Sephardi community was smaller and more marginal, and now it is central. One could still believe what I think Ben Gurion believed when he made his deal with the Hazon Ish, that one day haredi culture would be like the Mennonites or the Amish in America. And secularization, that all the national liberation movements believed would happen, did not, and Israel is one of the clear signs. I gave a lecture in Tel Aviv a year ago on national liberation in Israel, India, and Algeria. In all three, you had a secular national liberation movement that succeeded in producing a state; and in the same time scale—thirty, forty years later—you have a religious revival with a very, very strong political character challenging the liberationist ideology...In all three countries, too, the people who I think of us as the aging militants of national liberation are amazed at this turn of events, of what they thought [they were] not so much repressing as replacing. It didn't need to be repressed because the inevitable momentum of history was the demystification of the world.
What was the miscalculation or the misunderstanding?
I think in all three cases, the effort at producing an alternative culture, a liberationist culture, the product was too thin. I don't think it had to be. You see this in the Zionist case. The negation of the galut was one enormously powerful tendency that shaped the ideology of the state. But there was another tendency, which might be represented by something like Bialik's collection of Aggadic texts. Bialik wrote somewhere about the necessary ingathering of texts as well as people. This counter-tendency somehow didn't triumph. What people in the secular left have to aim at is a critical engagement with the tradition so as to produce something that is richer.
Do you think that Jews, because of their affluence in America, have lost touch with their historic empathy for the poor?
It's true that there is no significant Jewish proletariat in the United States any more. The Jews are on the staff of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union but they are not in the ranks. But I don't know what to say about that. One doesn't really want to raise one's children to sew dresses in a sweat shop. The politics of American Jews have been remarkably steady on the liberal left, despite all the predictions that this was going to change. In the last congressional elections, despite George Bush's strong support for Israel, something like 84% of Jews voted Democratic—I think the only group that surpassed this percentage was the blacks. And that 84% was higher than in the fifties, in Eisenhower's time, when 35% of Jews voted for Eisenhower. And this isn't only reflected in national elections when it is most clear. But on any tax bond issue, any issue about raising local education, Jews are way out of kilter with the rest of population with their willingness to support higher taxes to enable better public education or for the environment or for all kinds of purposes. On almost every other issue and most crucially on welfare issues, education issues, environmental issues, the Jews are as left as they have ever been.
Despite the neoconservatives?
Despite the neocons and the prominence of Jews among them. And the neocons themselves are also Bolsheviks of a kind. I mean the nearest analogy to the American army marching on Baghdad in order to create democracy is the Red Army marching on Warsaw to create communism in Poland. And those are equally improbable projects. And I think it is the same kind of ideological idealism that is reflected in both of them. So it is not entirely strange for me that in the Bush administration there were a lot of Jews, but they tended to be of this kind: ideological, idealistic, wrongheaded I think, but they were not the hard men of imperial politics.
Despite the neocons and the prominence of Jews among them. And the neocons themselves are also Bolsheviks of a kind. I mean the nearest analogy to the American army marching on Baghdad in order to create democracy is the Red Army marching on Warsaw to create communism in Poland. And those are equally improbable projects. And I think it is the same kind of ideological idealism that is reflected in both of them. So it is not entirely strange for me that in the Bush administration there were a lot of Jews, but they tended to be of this kind: ideological, idealistic, wrongheaded I think, but they were not the hard men of imperial politics.
Yet I have heard you quoted as saying that Dissent, the social-democratic magazine you edit, is a movement magazine without a movement. It's hard to get traction on getting political power behind a critique of capitalist politics today.
Dissent is a social-democratic magazine and there is no social-democratic politics in the United States today. There is no sense that we have identified a historical agent of transformation such as the proletariat was thought to be. There is no sense that history is on our side. There is no sense that any kind of popular mobilization is imminent. There is no ability to sustain youth groups that developed around all the old left movements. All that is, for the moment, gone. And if it reappears, it will have to reappear in some kind of global context, or at least global reference, because global capitalism…is now at a stage like domestic capitalism [was] in Europe in the 19th century. It is producing the same kind of inequalities, [and] it should be producing the same kind of movements, except that no one knows what is the arena for global protest movements. The nation states provided a political arena and space for mobilizations. The globe doesn't, or doesn't yet. But if there is to be a revival of that kind of politics, somehow it has to be able to find a global space and I suspect there will be a lot of Jews moving around in that space…What we need is a movement that isn't opposed to globalization but sees globalization as an opportunity to raise living standards all over the world, to raise health standards to give people a better life. And you want to seize that moment...When there is a global politics that isn't anti-modern, it might also turn out not to be anti-Israel, because those things go together and have often in the 20th century and in Islam today—anti-modern and anti-Jewish go together.
Here in Israel itself, the government has embraced quite an extreme form of capitalism, although some things, like the decent public health system we still have, remain from the more socialist past. Is there a danger that social solidarity is eroding because of this?
I do think that common citizenship does depend on avoiding radical inequality. And I also believe that radical inequality—and this may be my optimistic side—will produce political protest. You may not have it here until there is peace, which might be like saying until the messiah comes, but the politics of war and peace can't coincide with politics on economic and social issues. We found that out in Vietnam, where the anti-war movement literally split the Democratic Party, with the working class base refusing to join the anti-war movement and remaining hostile to it.
What would you place in the public realm that should never be privatized?
There are some things that everyone agrees should remain in the public realm. I strongly believe that police [should] be in the public realm, although we now have private police all over the United States patrolling the gated communities and such. I believe that prisons should not be privatized—I've written about that (in 1985, Walzer wrote a brief article for the New Republic, in which he expressed his opposition to private prisons; his opinion on the subject was recently submitted to Israel's Supreme Court as part of the arguments against privatization of prisons in Israel–MO). When citizens punish their fellow citizens, it should be a public act, and the public should take responsibility for the infliction of punishment. There should be a commitment to the common welfare of citizens, and that can take many different forms. I think that the worldwide experience suggests that health care crucially has to be public and that gross inequalities cannot be tolerated in a decent society.
In Israel, as the government has withdrawn some of its support from public institutions there has been the expectation that philanthropy will step up to the plate, that the very wealthy will fill in for the government. This is true certainly for institutions of learning. Is there a danger in that?
Well, there should be tax-supported schools. I should have included education along with health and security. This is not a common socialist position, but I have always believed in the value of philanthropy. There is a Zionist critique of tzedakah, there is a socialist critique of charity in all its forms, and I think that there is something wrong with that. You don't want a society in which all public services are provided by civil servants. You want a society where a lot of the caretaking is voluntary and not bureaucratic, and you want a society in which people learn to give from their own substance. I think that is important in politics. I would regulate the size of political gifts to parties, but I would not stop fundraising, because this is one of the ways in which we measure the intensity of popular feeling; if people are willing to dig in and support a political movement, that is a sign of its strength, and you want that test. You don't want them to be dependent on millionaires but you want them to be dependent on the commitment of ordinary people. And that same thing should be true of welfare institutions. Why is the Jewish nursing home in New Jersey better than a city-run nursing home? It is better because of all the people that come and volunteer and donate money beyond what Medicare gives. It's better because of the sense of communal responsibility. Gifts of time and energy as well as money are philanthropic. And we want to encourage all gifts of that kind. That was Richard Titmuss's great insight. Titmuss was a British sociologist who argued against paying for blood donations saying that this should be an expression of altruism, and arguing that [if] you could focus on the altruistic appeal you could actually increase donations. The good society would certainly be the society in which tzedakah was a major commitment.
You've been coming here for 50 years. Do you get a charge out of coming here? Do you find something here that you don't find in the United States?
Yeah, sure. When we first came here, on every plane when you saw land, people would start singing. That doesn't happen anymore. So the immediate thrill of the sudden appearance of the Jewish state is gone I guess. But yes. There is a Jewish politics in the United States, in Russia, in South Africa in Argentina. But only in Israel is there a Jewish high politics. A politics of war and peace. A politics of full self-determination. That is why so many Jews all around the world are focused on the news from here. I think Achad Ha'am was wrong when he thought the Jewish community here would be a spiritual or cultural center. I'm not sure that has happened. But it is certainly a political center. And that is very important and very exciting. There is an intensity of political engagement here that is missing anywhere else.
How did your involvement in Jewish texts begin?
Well you know, Exodus and Revolution is the product of my bar mitzvah. Ki Tisa was my bar mitzvah parshah—I didn't want to read the part about the killing of the idol worshippers. But then I taught at Harvard for many years, history of political thought, and never included Maimonides or other Jewish figures. For many years, Marx was my Jew. I guess it was the experience of writing Exodus and Revolution, and showing the manuscript to Moshe Greenberg and David Hartman, and being encouraged by that and the experience of the philosophy conference at Hartman Institute, that made me think that this engagement was necessary, that there was a problem with the cultural reproduction of Jewishness, and that that problem was that Jewish intellectuals, writers, novelists, with some exceptions, were not engaged with the tradition. The engagement can also be critical opposition but the engagement is necessary.
Well you know, Exodus and Revolution is the product of my bar mitzvah. Ki Tisa was my bar mitzvah parshah—I didn't want to read the part about the killing of the idol worshippers. But then I taught at Harvard for many years, history of political thought, and never included Maimonides or other Jewish figures. For many years, Marx was my Jew. I guess it was the experience of writing Exodus and Revolution, and showing the manuscript to Moshe Greenberg and David Hartman, and being encouraged by that and the experience of the philosophy conference at Hartman Institute, that made me think that this engagement was necessary, that there was a problem with the cultural reproduction of Jewishness, and that that problem was that Jewish intellectuals, writers, novelists, with some exceptions, were not engaged with the tradition. The engagement can also be critical opposition but the engagement is necessary.
What is there to be learned from the Jewish political tradition?
Much of what is most interesting has to do with the experience of exile…The communities in exile are not like anything that has ever existed, and the experience of sustaining a national life without territory and without sovereignty, and most of the time without coercive power, is extraordinary. To learn how that was done has been a great experience for me. I had a sense of how that was done in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In 1948, when I was 13, I attended the UJA banquet that was held every year. Every Jew in town had to come. There was a speaker from New York, and then pledge cards were filled out at the table. After you filled them out, you put them in a little envelope and passed them to the head table, where Sam Papekorn, who owned the biggest furniture store and knew everybody's business, would open up the envelope and read the card. If the pledge wasn't enough, he would tear up the card and pass it back to the table. We had no power to tax, but this was coercion of a very significant kind. And that, in fact, was the secret of exilic Jewry—that there was the kind of solidarity that allowed social pressure to work the way sovereignty works. Yes, and so we raised money and so we survived.
