Sunday, September 27, 2009

Podhoretz

"I have always thought that there were (to oversimplify somewhat) two kinds of Jews in American political life — those who saw Jews’ experience with discrimination and persecution as an example of a broader and more generic phenomenon that embraced similar discrimination and persecution based on skin color, gender, sexual orientation and other categories of invidious discriminations; and those who, like Podhoretz, saw Jews’ experience with discrimination and persecution as exceptional and singular, and worse by far than all others’...He has now become a man so self-centered in his own sense of exceptionalism that he cannot understand why everyone in the first group doesn’t rush to join him. He has not only lost the ability to feel for or identify with the persecution of others; he has lost all ability to see why anyone else would."