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From nikst@glasnet.ru Fri Aug 29 20:52:44 1997 Message-Id: <m0x4ccf-001A94N@mail.glas.apc.org> X-SMTP-Spy: Real message sender is nikst@glasnet.ru via ppp686.glas.apc.org From: "nikst" <nikst@glasnet.ru> Subject: Sud'ba yevreyev v Amerike Date: Sat, 30 Aug 1997 05:40:27 +0400 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1155 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Windows-1251

THE WASHINGTON TIMES August 29, 1997 The end for U.S. Jewry? By Richard Grenier You know this is a Protestant country," Franklin D. Roosevelt once said to economist Leo Crowley and Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary, "and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance. It is up to you to go along with anything I want." ... . . . The Presidency of Jack Kennedy abolished forever the notion that American Catholics are here under sufferance. And Jews? On this 100th anniversary of the founding of the Zionist movement, the position of our Jewish minority is singular. The danger for Jews, oddly, is that in the foreseeable future they might be so well assimilated they become extinct. ..... . . . This might surprise many gentiles as never before have so many Jews occupied high positions in American politics, giant corporations, the media, the academy, science, law, medicine, intellectual life, not to mention Wall Street. Both U.S. senators from California are Jews, and last year a Jew, Sen. Arlen Specter, was a serious candidate for the presidency. A generation ago this would have been unthinkable. .... . . . But the eminence of our Jewish high-achievers is deceptive. Not long ago Jews represented something under four percent of the American population. Today they represent two percent. Jews once lived in dense urban settlements in the Northeast, half of them in New York alone. Today 40 percent of Jews live in the South and West. In Denver and Phoenix the intermarriage rate with gentiles is 72 percent -- the harbinger of doom. For as the Jewish population spreads over the country, and assimilates ever more readily, synagogue affiliation declines steadily. ...... . . . Of the 6.8 million people of Jewish descent in this country, almost 20 percent are now practicing Christians, and another 16 percent profess no religion and consider themselves secular Jews or not Jews at all. For centuries persecution paradoxically helped preserve Judaism, while many Jews now expect that tolerance, in the end, will do them in. ... . . . Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan and now president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, alarmed by this drift, has just published a brilliant book, "Faith or Fear" (The Free Press). In Mr. Abrams' view, Jews in America, as things are going, are headed straight for extinction. The only thing that will preserve them, he writes, is true religious faith. Without it they're in danger of disappearing like the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel. ...... . . . Meanwhile, a special issue of The New Republic has appeared devoted to "Zionism at 100." The magazine's editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz has written a grand celebratory article on "The God That Did Not Fail." Mr. Peretz once told me he doesn't believe in God but believes in "the Jewish people," describing for me the funeral service for an eminent Jew during which a friend whispered to him, "Do you realize that of the country's ten leading micro-biologists (I forget the profession) eight are in this room?" To which Mr. Peretz replied pungently, "Praying to a God in whom they do not believe." .... . . . Mr. Peretz is thus a splendid, highly articulate example of Mr. Abrams' "secular Jew" -- and a passionate zionist. Indignant at people who believe that the state of Israel would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the Holocaust, he declares with deep regret that but for the Holocaust there would now be in the world, not 13 million Jews, but "scores of millions." At the end of World War II the gates of Israel would have been stormed, not by thousands of Jews, but by millions. The god that failed, of course, was communism. Whereas zionism grew and triumphed. ...... . . . Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was the most prominent American to hold high position in our government while throwing himself heart and soul into the zionist movement. Brandeis refused to resign from the Court to assume the titular leadership of the World Zionist Organization because he wanted to demonstrate that there was no contradiction between remaining "attached to America while working for a Jewish homeland in Palestine." Justice Brandeis saw no conflict in his position: holding high office in America while deeply involved in the political, financial, and intellectual affairs of a nation in the making --which was after all to become a foreign country. I'm not sure how many Americans today would agree with him. .... . . . But the question isn't what other Americans would think of this kind of double allegiance, or whether the two allegiances might some day be in conflict, but whether Jews, without God, defining themselves as simply an ethnic subgroup, will even survive. One of the reasons there has been such loss of religious faith among America's Jews lies in the nature of their religious practices, to which the practices of Islam (Sunni) bear a strong resemblance: circumcision, prayer, special dietary rules, no pork, no graven images, no musical instruments in the house of worship, concentration on living a godly life here below with little talk of the hereafter and absolutely no messianic talk of eternal life. .... . . . I thus fully agree with Mr. Abrams. Jews will certainly survive in America for a time, but without God, on their present course, they'll eventually be gone. *************** "Bednaya-bednaya" Amerika! U nas ne tak. I eto xorosho illustriruyet sleduyushchij anekdot: Umirayet staryj armyanin. I vot sobral on vsyu svoyu bol'shuyu semyu u svoyego smertnogo lozha. Oni vse dumali, chto rech pojdyot o nasledstve. No tot povyol rech o drugom. K udivleniyu sobravshixsya, on stal goryacho ubezhdat' ix: "Beregite yevreyev!" "Beregite yevreyev!" I kogda on zametil udivlenie na licax sobravshixsya, on iz poslednix sil poyasnil: "Kogda ischeznet poslednij yevrej, oni voz'mutsya za nas, armyan"... I ispustil dux. Tut vot pishut, chto v Amerike, vrode, k etomu idyot. Neuzheli pravda?..;-) *************** RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol 1, No. 106, Part I, 29 August 1997 ARMENIAN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENTS SIGN TREATY. Levon Ter- Petrossyan and Yeltsin, meeting on the second day of Ter- Petrossyan's state visit to Moscow, signed a treaty on friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance, Russian media reported on 29 August. Yeltsin commented that the treaty "meets the vital and lasting interests of the two states." The two leaders also signed several agreements, including on the transit of oil across Armenia. ************* K chemu by eto? ----- End of forwarded message from nikst ----- - Igor.