Adam Levick

The 2nd Propagandist Essay Contest. And the Winner Is

November 16th, 2011

The 2nd Annual Essay Contest for The Propagandist introduced us to some excellent works by our regular contributors as well as first-time pundits. Our readers were treated to critical analysis of issues as far-ranging as Turkey's democratic drift, the threat of jihadism in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden and the consequences of the Arab Spring.

(A quick apology to our contributors and readers in getting the results out. We know we're a few days late. Hopefully, the winner wasn't counting on the prize money to help make a mortgage payment over the weekend.)

Without further ado, the winning submission of the 2nd Annual Essay Contest for The Propagandist is (drumroll, please)...

Better Jews. The Moral Vanity of Israel's Leftist Jewish Critics, by Adam Levick

Here's an excerpt:

This recurring tendency of Jews, such as Murane, to pay greater attention to their own moral performance than to the necessities of survival is a trait which Ruth Wisse characterizes as “moral solipsism”.

In displaying the resilience necessary to survive in exile, many Jews have come to fetishize weakness, and believe that they could pursue their mission as a “light unto the nations” on a
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Better Jews. The Moral Vanity of Israel's Leftist Jewish Critics

October 9th, 2011

Ben Murane, an American Jew and head of New Generations for the left-wing lobbying group New Israel Fund, recently wrote an essay, under his blogging pseudonym KungFuJew, titled, "Reinterpreting Jewish communal service".

The essay attempts to "reinterpret" Jewish communal service in universal terms and represents the quintessential guilt of liberal diaspora Jews over Jewish particularism.

Writes Murane:

Accused, I was, of not caring enough for those other than Jews…of working only for Jews.

Murane has been accused of the sin of working for an organization which focuses primarily on the fate of the Jewish state and evidently felt the need to defend himself from the charge of "selfishness".

Instead of turning the accusation back on his interlocutors, and refuting the suggestion that Jews are unique in caring more about the fate of their own community than others, Murane immediately sought to assuage his guilt about being a Jew who cares about Jews.

There are plenty Jews in my world of the predominantly young and unaffiliated who are tired of the drumming of “Jew Jew Jew” and recoil from its incessant self-centered, self-referential, selfish concerns.

Murane, distinguishing himself from those parochial Jews who, triumph "selfishness", writes:

What I abhor about
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