Thread by @HusseinAboubak

A particular strain of Jewish activist-intellectuals, from Marx to Soros, Rosa Luxemburg, and Trotsky to Chomsky (Bin Laden's favorite intellectual), symbolized a certain modern utopian compulsive behavior that was many times describes as "Jewish." Those thinkers, /1

overwhelmingly represented on the international left, came to represent for some Jewish idealism, the tikkun olameque impulse at its finest. For others, they came to represent the manifestation of the paranoid antisemitic imagination: the rootless Jewish cosmopolitanism, and /2

the menace of Jewish internationalism that justified antisemitic pogroms and murder,. In either cases, they came to represent either the ideal of the un-Jewish Jew or, conversely, the very Jewish Jew, depending on where one stands. They either have the self-validation of the /3

antisemitic paranoia or the best weapon against it. Here it is important to state my opinion that this strain of revolutionary Jewish thinker-activist didn't cause antisemitism but consciously or unconsciously was responding to it. Their obsessive quest to submerge all of us, /4

including Judaism, under the ocean of universalist rightness was one way to escape the nearly eternal recurrence of antisemitic tsunamis. But in doing so, and here things will get tricky for me, they were missing on the core wisdom of Judaism and stepping away from Judaism as /5

far as possible. Traditionally speaking, Hillel and Shamai disagreed on the answer to every single question that was put in front of them. They disagreed on all but one question, was HaShem's creation of the universe a good thing or a bad thing? The Rabbinic rivals agreed, /6

creating the world was a horrible thing. Mind you, this answer came centuries of before medieval European pogroms and the Holocaust to admit the inescapable and profoundly tragic nature of life from a tradition in which "choosing life" is a divine imperative. Thou shalt choose/7

life and bear its tragedies, seems to be the message. The same Jewish tradition produced the utopian messianic ideal while consciously stipulating it to be so otherworldly that it will be the final hour and the end of times if (and when) it comes to be true. How could it be? /8

Hopeless yet hopeful? Disposed yet redeemed? This is the true character of the wisdom of Judaism, the ability to live in the tension of the impossible paradox, to affirm life and its tragic nature at the same time. To confirm the pain, yet to have absolute faith, even if it /9

was an absurd and senseless faith, in the certainty of redemption, in the inevitability of the triumph of the absolute good, even if one is leading a Job's senseless life. To paraphrase Rosenzweig, if creation was a tragedy, then revelation is the promise to the final /10

redemption and the final homecoming.
This brings us back to the question, those anxious and troubled souls, their revolutionary impulses, their moralistic dispositions, are they Jewish or un-Jewish? I would say they are most definitely both Jewish and not Jewish, /11

for to be Jewish is to be human, and to be human is to take part in the tragedy of the universe, to paraphrase the Rabbis. As for the ideas themselves and where they stand from the historical Jewish intellectual tradition, no, they are very not Jewish. /12

(P.S I know writing about anything Jewish is controversial and this is bound to piss off some ppl but just tweeting my mind and my personal opinions)

The question was and remains what will be man's response to the tragedy of life? While the Romans postulated Virtue to be the only honorable response to Fortuna, Judaism insists on faith, but neither ever suggested that the answer should be perpetual resentment.

To conclude, I also would like to sound profound skepticism at the cultural identity of the tragic thinkers, any cultural identity, for resentment and disdain are not anyone's monopoly for if we try to name the likes of Edward Said, Wael Hallaq, Sayed Qutb, Galbraith, Hobsbawm,

Darwish, Qaradawi, Foucault, Sartre, Lukács, Althusser, Khomini, Badiou, etc. we are likely to run out of the oceans if they were ink.