Would you trust someone who assumes for himself a framework of intellectual (so-called) introspection such as this:[a] speculative leap linking textuality and history, or what Walter Cohen calls "[a] commitment to arbitrary connectedness,"or someone who has this conceptualization of Ashkenazi culture, which he can see as having no independent existence but that it is really a…Western European Protestant culture. The culture of the Mizrahi Jews before Zionism and the culture of the Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews) were largely commensurate with the culture of the countries in which they lived.Could you? Should you?This is part of the paradigm of thinking that mindsets the lib/progs (my shorthand term for liberal-progressives) and, eventually, sooner, if not later, it serves as the root of the ‘Jews Blaming Jews’ stain, most recently raised in the Gerald Steinberg and Yitzhak Santis article which highprofiled the issue of ''Jew-washing'', which truly bothered its practicioners as well as those who defend those who put themselves forth as Jews to permit anti-Zionists and Judeophobes to engage in their odious behavior. Of course, as I pointed out, over a century ago there was the Ostjuden phenomenon. That was followed by attempts made to blame the Jews in connection with the Holocaust, not because a failure to use power but because Jews assumed positions of power.As made clear in Christopher Browning''s words as regards Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she displayed a singular distaste for Jewish ‘power’ which reverberates amongst today’s Jewish liberal progressives (lib/pros) today:In perhaps the single most infamous sentence in her provocative book, she wrote: “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people,” and she then endorsed the calculation that “about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish Councils.”And there, too, we read that[in]… The Destruction of the European Jews…focused on the Nazi “machinery of destruction,” [Raul] Hilberg had argued that it was nevertheless “essential to analyze the role of the Jews in their own destruction.”Although there is much to blame Jewish and Zionist leadership at the time of the Holocaust, and before (for example, Jabotinsky''s warnings) yet, for sure, what the lib/progs do is translate that failure and transform it into a critique of all expressions of Jewish power, such as the decision that Prime Minister Netanyahu facing the Iranian threat.Democracy and representation means little for the lib/progs, actually (the assault on Jodi Rudoren is typical). Money means more. Or status as an icon of academia and culture a la the trinity of Oz/Grossman/Yehoshua. Logic and a grasp of the facts also is not very important. Even law professors can display wrongheadedness. The lib/progs can hold an opinion like this:the worst kind of Jewish fundamentalism is insidious. It looks nothing like Al-Qaeda…Assuming mantles and crowns of artificial morality and fake concern for human rights, the “ASHamed Jews”, Jacqueline Rose, Tony Judt, Peter Beinart, Roger Cohen, Tom Friedman, Richard Falk and too many more, recently deceased and living, berate, subvert, twist and corrupt historical records and current reality. They apply a twisted moral scale of immoral equivalency.Daniel Gordis is taking a beating from Avrum Burg at a The Economist forum. Richard Landes is valiantly responding to Shaul Magid. I have been accused of genocide support by Jewish Currents’ Alyssa Goldstein.I have this feeling that our lib/pros are inducing paroxysms of orgiastic hate not so much as a result of defensive arguing but as a true and spiteful dislike of their fellow Jews.Is all this a cultural handicap we Jews possess? Or is it a left-wing thing? ^