My Gmail drafts folder has a message that I began on October 7 and never sent. It stays there as a testament to… something. Similarly, I began this a month two months before October 7. I kept returning to it, then shelving it. I’ll never send the email. I’m keeping it there as a reminder. This I’m putting out although I’m still not satisfied with it and probably never will be.
Tell me your name and with 90% accuracy I can guess your race, ethnicity, class, place of national origin, and age.
I’m not sure where or when I encountered my first Nimrod in real life. It had to have been in Israel, and though I can’t remember the occasion, I’m sure that I had to stifle the urge not to laugh out loud. I still laugh whenever I see the name. It’s a good thing I’ve never met one in real life in NYC, I’d embarrass myself. Except now the mirth is tinged with sadness, and recently, anger. You see, I think it’s the Nimrods who brought this upon us, but as usual, I get ahead of myself.
Nimrod is a not-uncommon name for a middle-aged secular Israeli. He is condemned by Rabbinic Judaism as an evil idolater. Omri and Amatziah are two others—but Nimrod takes the cake for un-Judaic behavior.
So why, in the Jewish state of all places, would these names be so common?
When I first began this (in October 2023!), I pulled punches. But it’s February 18, 22, 2024, and many things have revealed themselves to me since that black day, October 7, so let it rip: secular Israeli culture is entirely based on hating traditional Jewish religious culture. Entirely. Is there anything more to it than that? meaning: anything original. Any Israeli baseball, jazz, or country music? Not a thing.
Everything in Israel that’s good is begged, borrowed, or stolen, and always from the traditional Jewish cultures of the world-spanning Diaspora. Of the bad, the less said the better. (For now.)
But I’m not even referring to cultural bits and pieces, which float in the medium of secular culture like fruit in Jello. I’m referring to the animating impulse of secular Zionism. That animating impulse, more than indigenous rights, more than Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, more than saving Jewish life, more than any of those airy ideals, is hatred of traditional Jewish culture.
When you grasp that, a lot of other things become brutally clear. Why do Communists hate Zionism so much, when they’re just fine with any other form of nationalism?1 Because Zionism is in competition with Communism for the same souls—the energetic, intelligent comrades who powered the Russian Revolution and who formed the most impressive cadres of Communist parties in all the Eastern European satellite states were anti-religious Jews. This is a fact that embarrasses Jews, friends, of Jews, and makes anti-Semites salivate. But it’s the truth. (The difference between Communist Jews and nationalists who happened to be Communist is worth a book length study.)
Secular Israeli culture is a cut off your nose to spite your face culture. That energy helped to create the state, but in its current state secular Israeli culture is purely destructive. It has nothing to give. All it does is destroy. And they know that. They know that they have no truly indigenous ideas to bestow on future generations, which is why they allow the religious to get away with so much shit. It’s why they allow the “radical” settlers to settle contended land. They have no answer to the silent accusations of the religious, which amount to this: “Who are you and what are you doing here? What’s so Jewish about a Staples in the middle of a city with Bauhaus architecture, built on sand dunes?”
But as John Lennon said, “everything is its opposite” so the anti-religious culture was far more rooted in the old religion than a truly secular, non-religious culture would have been.
If they had simply been non-religious, they’d have called their sons Sargon, or Marduk, or Billy Bob, or Nigel, or Hamza or Ahmed.2 But they wanted to stick it in the faces of the religious so they took names from the sacred texts—the names of the anti-or non-Jewish Jews. (That said, I don’t know of any guys named Esau. Yishai is the Hebrew origin for Jesse.)3
Hence the enthusiasm for perverse names that go against traditional Judaism, which only evoke and entrench the prior authoritative source. Everything is its opposite.
Because most human beings aren’t political fanatics, including Israelis, a lot of religious customs persisted. It’s very hard to wipe out a culture, as one revolutionist after another has discovered to his dismay.4
That said, there’s a massive chasm between the two camps, a basic difference in the worldview of the two groups, and this radiates in every direction, coloring one’s opinions on cultural and political matters.
This was revealed in the huge demonstrations against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms. It’s hard to recall them because the current crisis is so all-encompassing, but only a few months ago Israel was convulsed by massive antigovernment street demonstrations. 5
Ostensibly the demonstrations were about judicial reform. Judicial reform is something you have to study, and I wasn’t going to do that.
I checked out. America’s my country and my problem.
I will say that it didn’t strike me as anything a good leader couldn’t resolve with wisdom. I had a gut feeling that there was probably right and wrong on both sides. Judicial reform isn’t slavery—great moral dilemma bound up in powerful economic interests. There was probably right and wrong on both sides in the slavery issue too, but at the end of the day, slavery in 1860 was indefensible. Judicial reform? C’mon.
BUT I also sensed that the issue went beyond mere governmental reorganization. It was about the legitimacy of world views.
I wasn’t crazy about either side. I’ve already said what I think about the seculars, although my feelings weren’t as pronounced then. But I’m not a religious-nationalist either. However, in this case, I was totally opposed to the seculars methods. They were the Israeli version of our Woke Army in both their methods and their goals. They behaved exactly like the post-Floyd rioters of the summer of 2020. The demonstrators were dominating public space because they couldn’t dominate at the ballot box. This is not democracy. It’s mob rule.
Although I said I didn’t like Israel’s woke army, I do sympathize with their plight, to an extent. Israel has no separation between religion and state. For that reason, secular Israelis put up with loads of intrusive shit from the religious, stuff that any average American would consider outrageous. Every major aspect of life in Israel is controlled by the religious. And the reason for this is… I’ve said so already. Right now, the only thing keeping Israel from being a Staples outlet with Hebrew lettering is the old religion.
I have to bite my tongue when Israeli propagandists on Twitter tout Israel as a beacon of secular freedom. Yes, you can live a totally modern, woke lifestyle in Israel, but with the proviso that the religious are in charge of the basics, the stuff that really matters.
Secular Israelis call Tel Aviv and environs “The Bubble,” meaning that they enact the outward manifestations of a normal life, but in their hearts they know it isn’t true. If the anti-Israel crowd were smart, they would focus on this. (Don’t spread it around.)
Shabbat observance is enforced in Israel. I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I lived there, Saturdays were a ghost town, even in Tel Aviv6.
I remember one instance in which the religious were squawking about McDonald’s in Israel being open on Shabbat, so a bunch of hilonim organized a car pool to eat there on Shabbat. You see, you’re not supposed to drive on Shabbat, so the hilonim fought back by breaking a Jewish law… by driving to a Micky D’s… on shabbat.
I felt a combination of pity and sympathy for them. For being forced to conform to a ridiculous religious rule and also for the way in which they expressed their opposition. Driving your car to an American fast-food joint on the Sabbath was so sad and empty and self-defeating.
I can understand the impulse behind the religious proscription—can’t we have one day that’s holy?—although I totally disagree with the element of compulsion. But I do understand their motivation. The motivation of the Nimrods in driving to McDonald’s on Shabbat is completely empty and based on nothing real.
Like naming your kid Nimrod. It’s an example of a people in flight from the only identity it has ever had.
“Nimrodism”: the empty, fake performance of dissent.
Israel’s Supreme Court has issued rulings acknowledging the legality of civil marriages performed abroad. The Rabbinate puts up with that. As long as they get to decide who marries whom, they don’t care what the Supreme Court says. In fact, if anything it underscores their power.
It’s bullshit. It’s a backdoor way of tolerating something that should be a basic right of every consenting adult in a liberal democracy.
Why not focus on getting civil marriage in Israel? Maybe because the Nimrods don’t want civil marriage in Israel, they just want the lifestyle perks of a secular society while ceding the deeper issues of societal organization to the religious because like them or not, they’re an anchor in the storm.
I was struck by how many of the secular demonstrators in the mass anti-Netanyahu demonstrations were not about the issue of judicial reform. They were about “LGBTQ.”
TEL AVIV — Pictures of the protests that have swept Israel since January show seas of blue and white Israeli flags filling the streets of Tel Aviv — a representation of a deep belief in the promise of Israeli democracy.
But on the ground, the flags are a lot more colorful. There’s dots of pink, representing women’s rights; there are rainbow flags, to represent LGBTQ+ concerns; and Palestinian flags7, to protest Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.8
….
This divide is evident on the streets. The protests are biggest in Tel Aviv, an affluent and secular metropolis known for its thriving tech industry and its LGBTQ+ pride parade. There, the protests feel like the weekend’s must-do event: The atmosphere is almost like that of a concert, with celebrity performances from Eurovision stars such as Netta Berzilai, as well as stages, screens and vendors. Elsewhere, in remote towns, the protests are smaller, and often meet with jeers from passersby.
In the U.S., stories about the protests focus on the political machinations of the conservative, religious coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu. On the streets, however, the protests are about everyday life. They are filled with people protesting for their own identities — as queer people, as activists, as academics and doctors and soldiers whose work relies on secular democracy — as they fight for the country’s.
For gay Israelis, the new limitations on the courts threaten to stymie their life plans. Though Israel’s tourism industry relies heavily on advertising Tel Aviv’s gay-friendly beaches and nightlife, many see the courts as the only body protecting their right to live freely.
And so on. I was struck by the phrases, “everyday life” and “queer people.” Pardon me but I’d think that the right to get married to person of the opposite sex in a civil ceremony is a lot more important to the “everyday life” of most people. Not in Israel. There, every day life (for hilonim) is more concerned with the right of Jewish gay men to breed babies from Nepali surrogates than Jewish, Christian, and Muslim adults of the opposite sex to get married.
Israel is a country with a totally misshapen culture in which a shrinking minority shrilly insists on luxury beliefs like “LGBTQ” while forsaking the fight for a truly free, civil society, which would sanction civil marriage for men and women.
That’s what happens in a country of Nimrods.
זה הגורל שלי (that is my fate).
Many years ago I pulled a book off the shelves at what used to be called The Donnell Library because of its cover. It’s a great cover, don’t you think?
The image is of an aerogramme, which is how we used to communicate back in the pre-internet Stone Age.
The author’s name was unfamiliar to me. It turned out that he had something of a name in the Midstream/Commentary circles I referred to above.
I devoured the book in one setting. The book had a profound effect on me although I hated the author’s writing style. I didn’t or couldn’t verbalize what about it annoyed me so. It took 40 years to digest my meal.
The book is in the form of six letters from an American who had moved to Israel to his exact counterpart in America: an American Jew engaged with Jewish life who insisted on the validity of the Diaspora.
Halkin’s point was that diaspora Jewish life was doomed not because of anti-Semitism, which Jews have always found a way to get around (except that Nazi thing), but because of assimilation to a dominant, welcoming culture. He concluded that except for a diehard Orthodox core, Jews would boil off into the general population and disappear, not due to hate, but a bit too much love. In one letter he went through the litany, which at the time shocked me: high intermarriage, low birth rates. Extinction.
This was usually a warning issued by the religious. But Halkin wasn’t religious, not was he wish-washy secular. He was actively anti-religious. He thought the Jews needed to be saved from the fatally debilitating effects of Judaism by secular Zionism. He and his wife moved to Israel in 1970.9
The book is well worth a read because to my knowledge it is the only popular book that engages with the core concept of Diaspora v. Zion from a secular perspective. It’s full of perceptive insights about Jewish history. Read this book and you’ll understand from a different but mutually supportive perspective Carmichael’s observation and Jews and Communism. He’s also a fierce, funny critic of secular Israeli culture from a secular perspective.
Halkin nailed what makes a people a people, the definition of culture, and how that relates to the reality of Israeli culture. I loved that part. I had thought of most of these concepts about culture and peoplehood but never in a systematic way.
It’s also horribly verbose. He bashes every idea to the ground and writes sentences so convoluted and comma-ridden you feel you’re in the presence of someone who never comes up for air.
Here’s Halkin on culture (Screenshot from the Internet Library):
It goes on.
Geez.
Joking aside, I supplied that example because this is his core argument as a secular Jew who wants to create a secular Jewish culture in the only place where it has a fighting chance of succeeding. And he makes an essential point in this passage. You don’t need symphony orchestras to make a people. You need “mamaloschen”—mother tongue.
But at the end of the day, his verbose, overwrought style is not my real problem with the book, which is this: it’s intellectually dishonest. It doesn’t honestly deal with the core problem of whether a secular Jewish culture in Israel can be created on the corpse of the Jewish religion. Not just without it—on its corpse. What arrogance! Not only did Halkin think it was possible to create a country in the middle of a coalition of hostile states, he wanted to destroy a 2,000 year old religion!)
If I had been able to ask Halkin a question, it would have been this:
“Look here (a phrase Halkin enjoys using), I understand that you lost your faith yet you want the Jews to survive as Jews. You say the only place they can do that is in a country of their own where they can make the rules and create a truly Jewish culture in reference to nothing but their own history and texts—desacralized. I might agree with you. But you’re vague about how this happens. You seem to be saying that it’s a natural process like giving a plant fertile soil, water, and sunlight. I’m not so sure. I think a culture needs something more than that, otherwise why would French peasants have built the Cathedral of Chartres? Do you think Jews are fundamentally so different from the French that they can do what the French could not?
“Why did the Zionists have to establish a Jewish state in Palestine/Eretz Israel of all places? In fact, you answered that question yourself, but only half-way. You said, ‘because it was only to Eretz Israel that all Jews, even the least religious, resonated emotionally.’”
“I agree with that, but I reject that as a satisfactory answer from a secular man. In the final analysis, it’s an appeal to the majesty and authority of religion. I know you have an answer to this. You’ll spin a complex tale of culture-based-on-religion-but-not-really-religion, but I’m not going to take this any further. This argument is in bad faith, and I’ve no interest in taking part in yet another bad faith argument about Zionism.
“There’s no such thing as a truly secular Israeli. The core of belief in the Zionist project is based on a profoundly religious imperative and given the objective difficulties of building a state in that part of the world, only a divine mission justifies it.”
Halkin only had bad things to say about religion. He still does. You’ll have to trust my memory on this, but in an interview back in the aughts he was asked about the persistence of religion and why he didn’t deal with that in his book.
His answer (paraphrasing): “religion didn’t interest him.”
Halkin is now at 84 laments the death of his dream. He thinks we’re seeing the last of secular Israel, the experiment failed and that secular Israel will be devoured by settler fanatics. This is not the fault of Muslim enmity, it’s the fault of the old religion. Halkin writes, this time to a real (anti-Zionist) interlocutor:
If there is still a difference between us, it is that you take satisfaction (though I hope not just that) in what has happened and I feel only pain. And there is another difference, too. You put the blame on Zionism, and I put it on Judaism, of whose fantasies and delusions Zionism sought to cure us only to become infected with them itself. Zionism wanted to make us a normal people. It failed and grew warped in the process. Yet today, too, I honor the physician who sought to heal the patient rather than save only his own skin.
By chance, I came across this in an article about the protests:
There are even two ways of identifying as Jewish in Hebrew. One bartender I was chatting with, whose grandparents fought in the Palmach, an underground Jewish army that fought for Israeli independence, drew a careful line between protecting the state’s ethnic Jewish identity — “yehudia” — while separating out its religious Jewishness, “yehudi.”
Theoretically anyone can convert to Judaism. But you can’t convert to an ethnicity.
Strikes me that Halkin’s secular Zionism succeeded all too well. He’s just not honest about what that means.
So came October 7, and the Middle East, that roach motel of places (“you check in, you don’t check out”) came knocking on my door.
One of the many new names I encountered was Ran Harnevo, who denounced what he called liberal hypocrisy about Hamas crimes:
He couldn’t understand how good people who support all the good things didn’t support Israel.
“We’re not less liberal than Paddy (Cosgrove) or Great (Thunberg) or AOC…”
And so on.
I looked him up and if there isn’t a more perfect example of a Tel Aviv hiloni, I don’t know who is. He was in fact one of the key organizers of the anti-Bibi demonstrations.
Here is a screenshot of his pinned tweet:
My two followers, this post is long enough. I will not bother to deconstruct Ran Harnevo’s abject, pathetic trash. Suffice it to say that Hungary is a liberal democracy with a separation of powers and religious freedom. They also have a prime minister who has taken a nationalist rational, sane position in this world of mass migration and political disruption. He doesn’t want his small country to be overrun by Muslims. He’s friendly with Netanyahu. All of this earns him a finger-stabbing video and the enmity of Ran Harnevo.
Never mind that Hungary is one of the few countries in Europe where Jews are safe. Never mind that Orban banned pro-terrorist political demonstrations. Never mind that Orban is doing exactly for Hungary what any Israeli PM would do—preventing the mass migration of people who would destroy the state.
I looked at the names of the people who had responded to that tweet.
Near the top was a man named Nimrod.
LINKS
Joel Carmichael Wikipedia. Speaking of names, I have no idea how a guy named Lipsky who worked in Jewish affairs all his life ended up with the name Carmichael. I also assume both his wives were not Jewish and that his Jewishness ended with him. His granddaughter Emily is a typical product of the artsy left.
Nimrod: Archaeological Evidence
Jewish Opposition to political Zionism
McDonald’s in the Holy Land (not specifically about the above but related)
Internet Archive Letters to An American Jewish Friend
Halkin’s Lament: On That Distant Day
Ran Harnevo Hates Viktor Orban
Full credit for that insight to Joel Carmichael, former editor of the amusingly named Midstream, which used to be the JV to Commentary’s varsity team. I’m not exactly sure where I read it, but it could not have been in Midstream because I didn’t read it. Perhaps it was in his depressing, thought-provoking book, The Satanizing of the Jews. Which sounds more and more prophetic as days on on…
This perversity has a parallel with the modern left. The modern left loves every nationalist movement but one: Zionism. And it’s not because of traditional anti-Semitism. It’s because deep down, they realize that Zionism takes away their best brains. It’s competition.
In Russia there was a parallel phenomenon of naming your son dumb names like “Spartak.”
More than a few times secular Israelis would ask me to explain the philo-Semitic aspect of American culture to them. This was understandable. Most were recent descendants of people who had gotten to Israel or its pre-state version by the skin of their teeth. A couple of times I tried to explain to them that names like “Rachel,” “Rebecca,” and “Joshua,” were upper-class Protestant names. They just couldn’t process that. Couldn’t process how anything that had a Jewish tinge would ever be taken on by an elite as a marker of high status.
And there’s an ethnic component to this. The rabid anti-religious Zionists are almost all Ashkenazi. That’s another story for another day.
Update: these differences have been asserting themselves in the last few days.ju
I remember taking a quickie vacay to Italy. Still in my Israel mode, I asked the pension owner whether things were open on Sunday and he looked at me like I was a Stupid American. I didn’t enlighten him. Stupid American who had just come from a country where the religious bloc has teeth.
I wonder how that has aged.
Emphasis added. Of course, Israel hasn’t formally occupied Gaza since 2005. It does dominate it. But it would dominate its surroundings no matter what.
I recently read Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock.” While reading it occurred to me that Philip Roth might have read this book because this intellectual duel was echoed in comic, distorted form in “Operation Shylock.”
Nothing about the role of bugs bunny in the current definition of nimrod?
I may have misunderstood but I could not quite figure out if this post is the one from your drafts folder, or if that was something unrelated. Either way, I know from experience it’s hard to take an old copy and figure out how to make it relevant for today. You have to edit the temporal text and make sure all the subjects and verbs agree, then figure out if you even still agree with what you wrote in the first place.
I have been spending more time than I thought possible since October 7 trying to understand how I missed that powder keg and what’s going to happen next. I did not realize how different the secular Jews were, although I suspected as much given that I live in NY and I have to deal with them in local politics. I wonder to what degree the true religion of this group is actually the social justice movement and its phony, performative heroism.
When gay rights first started to become the loud issue online I remember feeling very puzzled that people were really scraping the bottom of the bucket to find “human rights” issues to be bothered with. But that’s all they have, I think. And I want to be supportive and tolerant of whatever makes people happy but their happiness requires owning institutional power and forcing others to repeat their catechisms, as well, and that’s not right.