Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry

by Paul Breines

In this exploration of the contemporary moral identity of American Jews, the author examines how images of Israel avenging Auschwitz affect the way many Jews think about the Middle East and other aspects of politics and culture.

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 1984

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rereading for the first time in, what 20 years? And wow, amazing to realize how formative this was for my thinking about Israel's relation to the European Jewish past, about American Jews' relations to and fantasies about Israel, and about Zionists' feelings toward both of those, especially their conscious and often essentially anti-Semitic notions of how the strong, tough sabra would supplant and essentially erase the weak, cowering shtetl Jew. (As Breines notes, in the part I'd forgotten, American-Jewish tough guy fantasies often endorse this, celebrating legions of muscular blond heroes, Jewish James Bonds whose manliness rejects the weakness of lily-livered liberal peacenik Americans-even their hands are manly!--and the intellectual currents of that shtetl past.) This must have introduced me to Babel (did I start reading him because his Benya Krik stories are mentioned here?) and Jabotinsky and maybe Singer (I feel like this is my first encounter with Singer's work before I went through almost all of it), not to mention the importance of 1967 and 1973; I'd already read my Roth. The other thing to note is the old-style close-reading lit crit here--there's very little theory, but a lot of sharp, smart, intelligent parsing of sentences and adjectives and grammar, literal and cultural, to explore just how much there was an actual past of tough Jews, even in that in-between period, the perceived absence of which spurred a much more problematic vision that has had often ruinous consequences. Very glad I pulled it off the shelf to reread and think about.