As a public service, I'm posting this blog entry in full by a friend of mine, Bernie Avishai who is a journalist living partly in Jerusalem, part-time in the U.S. His blog is: http://bernardavishai.blogspot.com/ He eloquently lays out a narrative about Barack Obama and an American dream:

"Tuesday, January 29, 2008 My Jewish Problem—And Ours In 1963, the young editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, wrote a strangely confessional article (the first intimation of what, full-blown, would become his style), which he called “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Its disquieting point, made the year of the March on Washington, was that too much hatred attached to race for integration ever to succeed. Podhoretz offered himself as evidence, confessing to the fear, envy and contempt with which he had grown up in Brooklyn under the siege of “Negro gangs.” Those streets still seemed to him world-historical ground: “There is a fight, they win and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience with cowardice, and my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose.” His solution was radical, and a little titillating, given his admitted weakness for blacks’ “physical grace”: racism could be ended only by mixed raced marriages, what was called (though not usually by people from the Upper West Side) ”miscegenation.” Ultimately, whites and blacks would pair off, have children, and raise up a new American type; “the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.” Indeed, if his own daughter should wish “to marry one,” Podhoretz wrote, he would “rail and rave and rant and tear out my hair,” but then he would hope to have the “courage,” the manliness, to do his “duty” and offer his blessing. What then of the future of American Jews? Podhoretz wasn’t sure, but then he also wasn’t sure why he should be sure. “I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive, though I am less certain as to why we still do. They not only believed that God had given them no choice, but were tied to a memory of past glory and the dream of imminent redemption.” Podhoretz thought it unnecessary to add that educated American Jews did not think this way anymore. Except for the (quaint) Orthodox—or except in the metaphorical sense—Jews did not really believe they had commandments to perform. The categorical imperative was to get a degree."

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