Jeffrey Goldberg, Excommunicator
Jeffrey Goldberg has ignited a blog conflagration with an attack on Allison Benedikt's coming-of-age tale of her progressive disillusionment with the gung-ho Zionism she sucked up in summer camp. I found Benedikt's narrative riveting, and Goldberg's critique smotheringly self-righteous.
Goldberg asks of Benedikt: "Does she ever try to answer for herself why Israel exists? Or is she happy to subcontract out her thinking about the most important questions facing Jews first to her camp counselors, and then to her husband?" It's true that Benedikt's stances on the issues are barely sketched in, but that in itself suggests neither a lack of thought nor of due diligence. Her focus is on how her changing perceptions registered emotionally, not on the data points that caused them. Hers is not a policy piece; it's a chronicle about how she navigated the family mania for Israel -- and later, her husband's antipathy toward the country -- over the course of a decade and a half or so. Benedikt's response to Goldberg makes this point better than I can.
I want to focus on Goldberg's most poisonous charge -- which he saves for last. I think it reveals more about him than about Benedikt:
And then there is a whole set of other questions: Does she ask herself whether she has a responsibility to make Israel a better, more humane, place? Does she question herself about the consequences of abandoning Israel? Does she think about the sin of the wicked son in the Passover story, and how that sin might echo in her own life?Abandoning Israel? Goldberg seems to have derived that idea from Benedikt's kicker at the close. Let's take a look:
