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Multiculturalism: Bad for the Jews? |
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 by Tamar Fox, November 1, 2007 |
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I’m generally a big fan of Jonathan Sacks. I read his To Heal A Fractured World—The Ethics of Responsibility during the high holidays, and thought it was brilliant. As the Chief Rabbi of the UK he’s certainly got my respect (the six different colleges where he’s studied help, too) but I’m not sure I can be on board with his latest cause: Sacks has come out against multiculturalism. 
Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks: he wishes we could all just get along
He has a book coming out in January, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society and apparently the first sentence is "Multiculturalism has run its course and it is time to move on."
According to the Jewish Chronicle
It had been designed to make ethnic and religious minorities feel more at home. But there had been a price to pay, “and it grows year by year”. It led not to integration but to segregation: “It has allowed groups to live separately with no incentive to integrate, and every incentive not to.”
Multiculturalism had made societies “more abrasive, fractured and intolerant”. British politics, he said, had been poisoned by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed for rights.
The effect, he said, had been inexorably divisive. “A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others.”
Sir Jonathan continues his theme in today’s JC, in the first of a series of exclusive essays on “the challenges facing British Jews today”. He talks of a split between the universalists, who want to save the world, and the particularists, who want to save Judaism.
Dr Richard Stone, head of the Stone Ashdown Trust, which backs race-relations organisations, including the Jewish-Muslim Alif Aleph group, said he was “staggered” by the comments.
“My initial response is that he has been reading the words of journalists, who are known enemies of multiculturalism and who are trying to undermine the concept. In my view, multiculturalism is the only hope for the future of this country and we must promote it.”
Apparently Sacks thinks that things like cell phone and email have made it too easy for immigrants to stay embedded in their home cultures and never learn about Western values.
I have to think more about this, but basically, I think we have to accept that in a world where people hop from country to country they’ll want to stay at home in some spiritual way, and that that’s a valid feeling. Multiculturalism isn’t the villain here, it’s poor bureaucratic response to immigrants. When there isn’t any outreach to immigrant communities, what do people expect? And when immigrants are treated poorly, of course they’re going to react in ways that make sense to their home cultures, but perhaps don’t coincide with western values.
Forced assimilation is a bad plan, and so is segregation, be it self-imposed or mandated by the state. But I don’t see how multiculturalism got the short end of the stick here.
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Tamar Fox has an MFA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but she still doesn't like sweet tea. Born and raised in Chicago, she's also lived in Iowa City, Dublin, Oxford, and Jerusalem. When she's not rocking out at honky tonks she teaches More... |
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jaywilton
The rabbi is right;"multiculturalism" is a congame that puts responsible rabbi's out of business as it really means multi-morality.If he were really the intolerant shmuck he's accused of being,he would've opposed multiethnicity.
zbird
You say it's a "valid" feeling for people to "want to stay at home in some spiritual way" (non-pc translation = "keep to their own kind"), yet in the next breath you blame a "poor bureaucratic response to immigrants" for--well, what do you blame it for? If people are having "valid" feelings about their home countries, why is there a problem that some bureaucracy (rather than multiculturalism) needs to be blamed for?
Then you say that "when immigrants are treated poorly... they’re going to react in ways that make sense to their home cultures, but perhaps don’t coincide with western values." Well, I guess to the extent people are influenced by their home cultures (which of course they must be), they will react in ways that reflect those cultures, although I have no idea what you mean by acting in a way that "make[s] sense" of any culture. But why is this only the case "when immigrants are treated poorly"? Couldn't you just as easily say that when immigrants are treated well they will act contrary to western values? Where's your evidence one way or the other?
Also--whatever you ultimately conclude, I think you should be careful about your use of weak language and how it can lead to sloppy thinking. It's very PC and relatively uncontroversial to say things like "stay at home in a spiritual way" or "ways that make sense to their home cultures, but perhaps don’t coincide with western values." You can appear to make a conclusion without actually saying anything. Put some teeth in your language--use a few short anglosaxon words, rather than Latin cognates (as Orwell would say--Google "Politics and the English Language"), and suddenly you'll be forced to take a side.
For example--should immigrant men be forgiven for beating their wives if that "makes sense to their home cultures"? Should immigrant children be kept in their own religious schools (where they won't mix with infidel natives), if that's where they feel at "home in a spiritual sense"? Should young immigrants be permitted/encouraged to intermarry? Should the answer to any of the above questions depend on whether the immigrant in question has suffered from a "poor bureaucratic response"?
By the way--It might seem like I'm disagreeing with you, but the truth is I'm not really sure. I definitely disapprove of multiculturalism when it's taken to ridiculous extremes (i.e.: the German judge who actually did say it was okay for a Turkish immigrant to beat his wife). But multi-culturalism is yet another one of those weak, latin words that can mean anything to anyone. So if you define your terms, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up agreeing.
--Z
Tamar Fox
I don't have time to respond to this now, but I will try to get to it after SHabbat. Many good points.
zbird
--Z
Tamar Fox
Wanting to stay at home in a spiritual way means, to me, having a community (and by that I don't mean neighborhood, I mean circle of friends) similar to the one you had where you came from, and one that can support your religious needs (ie prayer services, food that kosher/halal/vegetarian etc, cemetaries for the deceased in the community and so on) while still observing the laws of the country. I think observing the laws of the country is of utmost importance, but if someone wants to send their kid to a Muslim school I think that's absolutely fine Forcing anyone to go to publicly funded school is a bad idea.
I have absolutely no idea what your second paragraph means, so I'm skipping it.
No offense, but I don't care at all if you agree with me, and I intentionally use vague PC terms because it's a complicated issue with a lot of nuance that can't be addressed in the 500 words I have per day. My point was just that writing off multiculturalism is a bizarre response to modern society, especially coming from a Jewish person. Of course a culture of victimhood is problematic, but if we don't give people quite as many opportunities to see themselves as victims, maybe we won't be feeding into the culture of victimhood. Bureaucracy owes immigrants much more respect and thought than it gives them, and I think the reason people react so violently to this kind of thing is because they get marginalized or simplified and then revert to things that are illegal because following the rules hasn't gotten them anywhere.
Joey Blurtzmann
Definition of multiculturalism-All cultures are superior to Judaism
Female circumcision-good Male circumcision-bad
Palestine-good, Israel-bad
Naqba-worst event of genocide in history, Holocaust-didnt happen
Gay marriage-good, Heterosexual marriage-bad
Killing gays in Iran (an internal Iranian affair), discriminating against gays in US (worse than so-called Holocaust)
Ahamdinejad-good, Foxman-bad
zbird
...was saying that you have no evidence to support your statement that the problems Sacks attributes to multiculturalism are actually the fault of a bureaucracy that somehow mistreats immigrants.
I'm not saying that anyone should be mistreated, but I question your knee-jerk liberal belief that what immigrants need is more/better bureaucratic (I assume you mean "taxpayer-funded") support to make them feel at home--as if they were children in their first year at sleep-away camp who need extra attention from the counselor lest they feel homesick. The U.S. coddles immigrants and non-immigrants alike a lot less than in Europe, where government supported housing, healthcare, jobs, etc. is the norm. Yet somehow the US' immigrants, exposed to the vicissitudes of the market and forced to fend for themselves, are better assimilated and more at peace with the larger society than in Europe (i.e.: see the Paris riots from last year, or the fact that nearly all the 9/11 hijackers, the 3/11 Madrid and the London bombers, were radicalized in Europe).
btw--I'm not trying to make a statement about the degree to which a government should help its citizens and immigrants in general. Frankly, I think the US should "coddle" its residents a lot more when it comes to healthcare. My point is that you shouldn't assume government is the answer to the segregation Rabbi Sacks describes.
--Z