So which category of Jew are you?

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
02 May '10

Mark 2010 as the year it became acceptable for a professor who serves as the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago to deliver a lecture that proposes how to define, and distinguish between, various categories of Jews.

So are you curious to find out if you qualify for the category of "righteous Jew", or whether you will find yourself denounced as one of the Jewish "new Afrikaners"? Or will you perhaps be counted as part of the "great ambivalent middle"?

Anyone interested in understanding the issue in its full academic "depth" (think "bottom of the barrel") might want to consult the original lecture of Professor John Mearsheimer, who introduced these categories when he delivered the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC, on 29 April 2010.

First, it is important to note the title of Professor Mearsheimer's lecture: "The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. New Afrikaners". When you read or listen to the relatively long lecture, you will see that the part where he explains how he categorizes Jews (or, to be precise, "American Jews who care deeply about Israel") comes only toward the end of the lecture. Up to this point, Mearsheimer presents his reasoning - based on highly selective facts, misrepresentations and cherry-picked polls - for his conclusion that "there is going to be a Greater Israel between the Jordan and the Mediterranean."

Mearsheimer then sets out to speculate about the question who will live in the "Greater Israel" he predicts and what kind of political system will be adopted in this entity. After devoting a few paragraphs to insinuating that Israel is only too eager to find some pretext to expel "massive numbers of Palestinians from Greater Israel", Mearsheimer argues that in his view, the "most likely outcome in the absence of a two-state solution is that Greater Israel will become a full-fledged apartheid state."

It is in this context that he turns to the question of whether American Jews and the "lobby" would continue to support Israel, and he then proceeds to offer his advice on how to categorize "American Jews who care deeply about Israel" - and it is truly revealing that it is this issue that gets highlighted in the lecture's title.

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