In The Unbearable Chutzpah of Identity Politics in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia’s Todd Gitlin congratulates himself for criticizing the inanities of identity politics and proudly announces that for his troubles he “was excoriated not only by leftists horrified by my embrace of what they called — intending an insult — a ‘neo-Enlightenment project’ but by so-called conservatives who found me insufficiently appreciative of the horrors of affirmative action and the wonders of contemporary American capitalism’s contributions to equality.”
Having established to his own satisfaction his right to judge whether the anti-identity politics views of others measure up to the lofty standard set by his own example, Gitlin proceeds to find inconsistency, or perhaps hypocrisy, in all those who failed to condemn Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last month to the Congress — the one “interrupted by bipartisan applause sixty times” — in which he declared:
I speak on behalf of the Jewish people and the Jewish state when I say to you, representatives of America: Thank you. [emphases in original]
Shocked by this display of identity politics, Gitlin writes:
I’m waiting for the diehard opponents of identity politics to carve out a moment of criticism for this man who affirms that he speaks for the entire Jewish people—who have not voted on whether the Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah and Hebron are in fact being occupied by foreigners.
Now of course Netanyahu doesn’t speak for all Jews everywhere (indeed, I suspect Gitlin is Jewish, or would be so regarded by many of the Palestinians he supports), but he is the head of the world’s only Jewish state, a state to which most Jews feel at least a measure of devotion (as distinct from loyalty, which is properly reserved for Israelis). To equate those who fail to condemn Netanyahu’s remark with the multicult practitioners of identity politics on the left in the United States — a non-religious state founded on the principle that all its citizens should be treated without regard to race, creed, or color — strikes me as nothing less than bizarre.
Perhaps for his next project Gitlin will discover that the Pope is Catholic, makes no secret of that fact, and nevertheless enjoys the support of many who abhor the racial, ethnic, and religious divisiveness that is at the core of identity politics as preached and practiced by the American left.
