For Israel's 67th History

++I stumbled on an essay that summed up the situation of the Jews in Europe after WWII. It is written by Reinhold Neibuhr in 1942 entitled "Jews After The War" and is prescient. Neibuhr argues that it was not enough to defeat Hitler and Nazism because one form of fascism would reoccur in history. Western countries were not self-critical enough about the anti-semiticism that existed before Hitler made his program for annihilating a race. As he was a Christian theologian, he pointed his finger at his co-religionists and thought anti-semitism would not disappear from Western societies. 

++He felt Jews deserved a homeland where they could feel protected. He wrote that the Zionists were proletarian and understood what their upper-class co-religionists did not--about the nature of European culture and the perpetual dangers it posed to the continued existence of the Jewish race. He also pointed out that Zionists were secular and nationalistic and not simply religious. 

++The second solution to the issue lay with the democracies promoting the notion of pluralism and tolerance where one group nor religion doesn't dominate another but recognizes that the Jewish will to survive is a right and deserves respect. 

++Niebuhr gets highly critical of liberals (in the old fashioned way) insisting that America is a melting pot and that everyone must assimilate to the dominant culture. This leads him off to a wonderful examination of the problems with American democracy. But for the issue at hand, he places great value on a Jewish homeland in Palestine as one form of protection and one of the means of protecting Jews worldwide. 

++Reinhold Neibuhr was one of the last public intellectuals that commanded national respect. John Dewey was another. But our own society has gotten so fragmented that others who emerged either respected influential subcultures or political factions.

++The problem with Neibuhr is that his arguments can be quite dense. But the essay is worth a read in the Library of America edition of his work.  He was also a friend of my grandfather.