NB: For a reply to this review, see Edward Alexander, Reviewer Missed Points of Book Book on Jewish Israel-Haters is Valuable, But Problematic Leon Cohen, Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 2006 “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as ‘revolutionary’ the Egyptian dictatorship… a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah, which pledges to take Tel Aviv. About this, I cannot say more; it is simply too painful.” So wrote historian and renowned “public intellectual” Irving Howe in 1971 in the New York Times Magazine. And with this quotation begins a more recent book that, in contrast, says a lot about this same phenomenon. The book is The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Transaction Publishers, 2006, 283 pages, $39.95). It is an anthology of essays that denounce and try to refute those Jewish intellectuals who “either explicitly advocate Israel’s removal from the family of nations, or else seek to besmirch, vilify, blacken, and delegitimize it so as to render it both morally and politically vulnerable to the onslaught of its (numerous) enemies.” Some of these essays are valuable and useful for pro-Israel activists. I don’t know how anybody with a truly open mind could take seriously linguist and activist Noam Chomsky’s writings on the Arab-Israel conflict after reading the heavily documented essay by the book’s co-editor, Paul Bogdanor, The Devil State: Chomsky’s War Against Israel. Other essays take on historian Tony Judt, author of the infamous “Israel: The Alternative” essay of 2003; political scientist Norman G. Finkelstein, who called Israel “racist” in an interview I did with him for the April 22, 2005 Chronicle; pro-Palestinian Jewish theologian Marc Ellis; and others. Most of the essays do a credible job of refuting arguments and exposing lies, distortions, ignorance and obtuse misunderstandings. But as I read through the book, I found myself feeling increasingly irked by the writers and editors themselves. Emotional reactions Co-editors Bogdanor and Edward Alexander, a former English professor and author of The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies (1988), clearly share Howe’s pain at the existence of anti-Israel Jews. Indeed, they allow their pain to carry over into personal attacks and vituperation. “‘Cowardice’ is the word that springs to mind most often as the suitable epithet for Israel’s Jewish enemies,” they write in their introduction. And this is one of the problems of the book, even for someone like me who basically agrees with the editors and essayists and also feels distressed when meeting or interviewing anti-Israel Jews or reading their works. The editors and some of their contributors also seem eager to attack as an Israel-defamer any Jewish person with whom they disagree on such matters as whether or not Israel should keep the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). For example, though Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine is not treated in one of the essays, the editors devote about a page of their introduction to excoriating him. I have both met Lerner and read his book Healing Israel/Palestine (2003). While I believe he is mistaken about many things, I also believe that he is sincerely trying to do justice to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman does get an essay devoted to him in this collection. To writer Martin Krossel, Friedman is a “Diplomat from Chelm” (the legendary town of fools in Yiddish folklore) because Friedman believes passionately that Israel needs to allow a Palestinian state to form in the West Bank and Gaza. Well, a lot of Israelis who want Israel to remain a Jewish state feel the exact same way. And that leads to the real question I would want to ask of these editors and writers: Do you recognize even the possibility that any Jewish person could disagree with you on good faith grounds over what is best for Israel’s existence and survival? Friedman, Lerner and Jews like them differ vastly from Jews like Chomsky, Finkelstein and Michael Neumann (a Canadian philosophy professor whose book The Case Against Israel I reviewed in the Chronicle’s last Passover edition). The former do believe in the moral legitimacy of Israel’s existence, which the latter deny. But to Alexander, Bogdanor and other writers in this book, it appears, any Jewish people who disagree with them on whatever grounds about what Israel should do - including Israelis who have to live or die with their government’s policies - are enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, no different from Hamas. And this leaves them open to a tu quoque (“you also”) accusation - i.e., they may well be guilty of some of the same demagogic tactics like oversimplification, exaggeration, distortion and bad faith that they accuse their opponents of using. While The Jewish Divide Over Israel is worth reading, one should approach it with caution. Moreover, one should balance it with other books, such as Lerner’s Healing Israel/Palestine, Yaacov Lozowick’s Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars and Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew.