In 1970, Tom Wolfe penned an essay for New York Magazine entitled ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ staking his claim along with Joan Didion and Truman Capote to the upper echelons of what was a hip new kind of journalism that was literary, ambitious, and unafraid to move with style. It aspired to be as creative as the wild world of the 1960’s and 1970’s that it chronicled.
Wolf’s subject matter was a good one: a fundraiser held by the great composer and cultural doyenne Leonard Bernstein at his Upper West Side Apartment to support the Black Panthers, a radical organization dedicated to Black Supremacy. The irony that the largely white and Jewish crowd was fawning and funding a group dedicated to racial violence is so sharp that it still cuts.
Wolfe’s typewriter comes alive setting the bourgeois aspirations of Bernstein’s set alongside their yen for exactly the kind of militancy that would undo them first. Wolf has a kind of wary respect for the Panthers themselves. It’s the hapless liberals that the piece indicts. They eat hors d'oeuvres with gusto lest their eyes catch the guillotine glinting offscreen.
I’ve been thinking about radical chic these past weeks, because the same dynamic has emerged in elite intellectual, influencer, and media circles around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even as Israel sought to defend itself during a rain of rockets from Hamas, the cool kids on social media, late night TV, and the halls of Congress decided that this was less complicated conflict than Good vs. Evil, and that the Jewish State, naturally, falls into the latter category.
All of this would be nothing but airhead posturing if the circulation of this language has not contributed to a wave of violence against Jews all over the world. It turns out that calling the Jewish State a colonist, apartheid, illegitimate place makes people want to hunt and hurt Jews, wherever they can find them.
Radical chic is a pose, but it can also lead to a pogrom. Anti-Semitic incidents are up 450% in England, and L.A., Miami, and New York have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrators attack Jews in recent days. Shops are being smashed, diners beaten up, and cars festooned with Palestinian flags have been videoed broadcasting such inspiring messages as “Fuck the Jews and rape their daughters.” It is indisputable to me that among the myriad of threats Jews face from the far left and right, pro-Palestinian politics are at the top of the threat list.
Violence in Jerusalem and Gaza will likely change little: Hamas still runs a terror state on Israel’s southern border, and the upsurge of violence will likely extend Bibi’s tenure well past yet another expiration date, just when it seemed like his ministerial clock would run out.. Despite thousands of rockets ripping across the sky and eruptions of violence all over the country, the basic fundamentals held. Hamas is capable of inflicting harm but not the destruction and mass casualties it seeks. Israel remains resilient, as nearly three out of every four did not want a premature ceasefire. The IDF remains an imperfect miracle: given enough time, it will eventually gain the upper hand.
So much for the state of affairs in the Middle East. But if stalemate largely reigns there, there are sea changes at work here at home. Politicians like Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush, who had previously dabbled in overt hostility to Israel, moved decisively into the anti-Zionist camp, sensing that their Jewish constituents, who largely support Israel, would either acquiesce or were dispensable. The chic politicians realized that the hip place to be was with Palestine, or at least #Palestine.
But it wasn’t only politicians who got wise to the fact that Israel, a tiny state that has had to fight for its survival every day, is actually entirely to blame for well, everything. John Oliver and Trevor Noah joined the pile in, with the two comedians earnestly enumerating Israel’s sins. Apparently, this is what passes for bravery these days.
They were joined by noted foreign policy thinkers like the Hadids, who beamed anti-Israel slander to millions: nearly three times as many people follow Gigi as there are Jews in the world. For those with more highbrow tastes, the New Yorker union tweeted solidarity with Palestinians “from the river to the sea.” It was deleted after the belated realization that this was a call for dismantling Israel and doing who knows what (take a guess) with its Jewish population.
It’s not just the mandarins and the models. Friends on my own Instagram feed, Jews and non-Jews, are recycling memes that throw around words like ‘colonial’ and ‘apartheid’ with reckless abandon, clearly taking cues from a progressive catechism that is as sure of its cartoonish understanding of the conflict as it is heedless of the danger its slander poses.
Consider, then, the condition of the Jew and the Jewish State in the age of Palestine Chic. The former is targeted wherever she is, because distinguishing between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is like counting how many angels dance on the head of a pin. The latter is guilty no matter what it does, short of self-immolation: if it occupies (West Bank), or if it withdraws (Gaza). The memo has gone out that supporting Israel is the most severe ideological heresy, a sin against the left and the oppressed.
All of this should be immensely clarifying for everyone who sees that this brand of politics is insane. Standing up for Israel’s right to defend itself doesn’t make you a fascist or anti-Palestinian or a conservative: it just makes you normal. Too many Jews are too eager to fit in with their fellow travelers, throwing Israel overboard to gain a seat on a far-left ship that no sane person should want to be on anyway.
Acknowledging complexity is not retrograde: it is the only way to a better future. To be truly radical and counter-cultural is not to throw Israel under the bus or lecture pro-Israel Jews about “structures of oppression” or encourage them to “do the work:” believe me, we know these things in our blood, better than the woke scolds ever will.
The real punk-rock position, then, is to resist the mob, not give in to it. If the cool kids have gone crazy, forget about them. If the story they tell seems like a cross between a cartoon and an op-ed from an Oberlin freshman grafted onto Instagram, just call bullshit. They’ll move on to the next fad soon enough.
Israel is here to stay. It is a cause worth losing a follower over, or being a little bit uncool for. Who would want to peak in high school, anyway?
A
Rooting for Israel is like fawning over Dr. Mengele. It's a tad worse than being uncool.