Word: lerner
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...Lerner's vexation is the "narrow self-interest" which he believes pervades America and is the causal force behind all of our social dilemmas. It is such a mind-set, he says, that has fostered the recent burgeoning of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism. He writes: "These kinds of sicknesses are expressions of the dominant selfishness of American society, and we do not believe they can be fully defeated without addressing the need to shift the dominant discourse from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring...
West is likewise attempting to push a distinctly socialist agenda. He sees a solution to the Black-Jewish separation in some version of a fundamentalist common religion that combines the Jewish and Christian faiths. In Jews and Blacks, he says to Lerner: "Both of our traditions place a fundamental stress on what I call non-market values...I'm calling for a dialogue about the relative failure or success of the U.S. experiment in democracy...
...Left may be dying in the Far East, but in the Cambridge Gulag it is alive and well. (The Lerner-West public forum is, in fact, organized by the Democratic Socialists of America at Harvard Divinity School.) Socialism itself is the primary error in judgment of both Lerner and West. Because of their lack of faith in our capitalist republic, they find it necessary to reconstruct the entire nation in order to defeat racism and anti-Semitism...
...most inane and hypocritical aspects of Jews and Blacks do not lie in the authors' resistance to such a quasi-conservative agenda, but their denial that it is even morally legitimate. Lerner criticizes the great Jewish defection from liberalism as fundamentally anti-Jewish, attempting to restrict his people's political freedom. He writes: "It is only if Jews can stay connected to our task as witnesses to God's presence and hence as witnesses to the possibility of transformation from the ethos of selfishness to the ethos of caring (what I call a 'Politics of Meaning') that retaining...
West goes even further than Lerner's hollow warnings of Jewish destruction. He threatens a defensive war against an oncoming American holocaust facing Blacks. "If we don't come up with a multiracial, progressive strategy, then we are simply headed toward Armageddon," he says. "I mean race war...That's quite imaginable in this society...