Jews and Economic Justice

I was at the greasy spoon around the corner from the college. The coffee was nearly as old as I am, though in better shape; it was so strong, my spoon stood erect in it. A drunk sat next to me. “Wass your motto?” he slurred. “My motto? I don't have a motto.” “You gots to have motto. Evrb'dy has a motto.” I fobbed him off with: “Don't accost people in greasy spoons.” He smiled, and as he rolled off his stool onto the grimy floor, he muttered, “Thas' a good one. Don' accos...”

This set me to thinking. If it's true what the drunk had said, that everyone needs a motto, is there a motto for the Jewish people? How to decide? Hold a contest? What's the universal quality that has characterized the Jewish people and how can it be phrased succinctly? Then I remembered a conversation I'd had at a wedding table and it came to me. “Justice, justice, you shall pursue.” It's from Deuteronomy, a quintessential Jewish book; but do we abide by it?

At that wedding I was seated next to an executive of a company that manufactures hobby items. He informed that while corporate was in South Carolina the actual product was made in China. I frowned. “I see you don’t like that.” “I don’t” I replied and discussed economics and social justice for the rest of the evening. “Unions forced us to do it,” he explained. I smelled a rat. “Let me guess,” I rejoindered, as you are in South Carolina there never were any union affiliated workers from whom you took away manufacturing jobs.” He admitted the truth of that but then came back with “labor in America is too expensive.” I came back with “Labor in China is being ruthlessly exploited by the most capitalistic communists never envisioned by Karl Marx!” He said that profits were shared with employees. I asked if the Chinese workers who actually made his products were receiving their shares, and he said, “No, they are not our employees, we contract that work out.” “What do the workers who used to manufacture your products do now?” I asked, “The ones whose jobs you sent overseas.” “They work in the service industry,” he said. “America is becoming a service economy, not a manufacturing one.” “Were they stock brokers, physicians, dentists, teachers?” He glowered and said “No, the service they perform is as security guards, telemarketers, that sort of thing.” “And do you think they get as much satisfaction doing that as they would if they were actually making something, participating in the manufacturing process?” He reminded me that I was a pie-in-the-sky academic while he worked in the real world where the bottom line was all that mattered. I reminded him that his former employees also lived in the real world, hand to mouth, where the bottom line matters even more, and so do the workers in China. I only wish I knew then what I know now, about tainted dog food, lead paint in Barbie dolls, bite-sized magnets attached to toys, all products of cheap unregulated labor in China.

If labor is being exploited it used to be the Jewish response that this is an abomination and Jews rallied in defense of the oppressed. And now? A few months ago I wrote about the Conservative movement's Jewish Law and Standards committee on which only three rabbis out of twenty-five had voted that workers employed by Jews should get a living wage. Rabbis against a living wage? Is this what Moses meant when he wrote “Justice, justice, thou shall pursue”? I’m thinking maybe not. So maybe this isn't such a good motto. But then I remembered that in another column I quoted a Reconstructionist rabbi, who in a Passover reflection had written: “If we only pour ten drops of wine from our cups and do nothing more, we do not understand the significance of our act. Our joy cannot be complete when there is harshness, cruelty, or suffering in the world. We cannot wait for others to tackle the injustices of our time.”
The aphorism is that if you save one person’s life it’s as though you’ve saved the whole world. Is the converse true? If you ignore one man’s economic injustice is it as though you’ve cheated the whole world? “Justice, justice, you shall pursue”—a motto or a pious irrelevance? Are Jews more concerned with holding the moral high ground or with maintaining the bottom line?

Anti-Semites of right and left

Recently in The Forward and in the New York Times reference was made to the revival of Jewish culture in Poland. Jewish style restaurants opening, klezmer bands playing, derelict synagogues being restored, a Festival of Jewish culture every June which brings thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. “The only thing missing, really,” the Times reporter noted, “are Jews.” Both pieces discussed the usually tortured relationship between Poles and the Jews who used to live among them. Before the Nazi invasion one-tenth of the population was Jewish (3.5 million people), now there are only about 10,000 in the whole country. Before the Nazis, Poland was a land of persecution. After the Nazis there were renewed pogroms when surviving Jews tried to return home, and again in the late '60s in response to the Communist anger over the success of Israel in '67 and the associated “blame the Jews for the civil unrest” of 1968. A Polish friend tells me that to this day Poles see the greatest threats to their national existence coming from Germany, Russia and the Jews. He added that he was not listing the perceived threats in order. “But there are no Jews in Poland,” I said. “Yes,” he said “but there are anti-Semites.” So this Jewish revival, largely by Christians, is as welcome as it is surprising. But why this sudden interest in reviving a destroyed culture? Maybe its a progressive counterpoint to conservative nationalist strains in Polish politics.

In another Times story complaints are made about a Polish priest, Tadeusz Rydzyk who has a radio program which he has used as a springboard to create “a conservative Catholic media empire.” Both on the air and in secretly taped conversations Fr. Rydzyk has been heard making anti-Semitic remarks. He says that he is the victim of entrapment and suggests that the tapes had been tampered with, but he's not denied making the statements.

An American friend, who loves to send me stuff off the Internet demonstrating that “the left” is becoming, or already is, anti-Semitic, sent me a story out of England. Caveat: I trust nothing that people send on the Internet without first running it through one or more of the urban legends sites. I've seen nothing yet that contradicts this, but I can't swear to it. The piece says that opposition to the Iraq war and loathing of Israel has led the self-styled 'anti-racist' Left to make common cause with Islamonazis. And “anti-Zionism” soon tips over into straight- forward Antisemitism. A Daily Observer columnist comments on what he calls the casual anti-Jewish sentiment around Left-wing dinner tables and in the salons of Islington. (In the 1930's, of course, it was conservatives who held these dinner parties and over the table made snide anti-Jewish remarks.) He is appalled by the way in which his old comrades-in-arms have embraced terrorist groups like Hezbollah, one of the most anti-Semitic organizations on Earth. There's more, but you get the point. A Labour MP says he's disgusted at the way many on the Left have become almost casually and routinely anti-Semitic. “We wouldn't have seen this ten or 15 years ago. This idea that in some way there's a conspiracy of Jews running the world goes back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the last century. We've seen this before, and now it's resurgent.” The author of the Internet piece concludes with the usual “the American left is anti-Israel” statement that makes me suspect the validity of the whole. Well, to right wing ideologues, I guess that's true, but there are many people left of center, farther left than I am (if you can imagine such a thing) who love Israel and what it has been able to accomplish despite its myriad problems. And there are no right-wing anti-Semitic bigots here? P'lease!
So what gives here? Conservatives are anti-Semitic in Poland, Liberals are anti-Semitic in England. Was Herzl right? Do Jews carry antisemitism with us in our knapsacks as we are forced to wander from place to place? He was writing in a different era, of course, when from Russia to France anti-Jewish outbreaks were endemic (pogroms in the former, Anti-Dreyfusards in the latter). Or in the post-holocaust world is “anti-Semite” merely what you call your political opponents? Comments?