Those Who Forget the Past (65 page)

The melancholy encounter with anti-Semitism is not, after all, coequal with Jewish history; the history of oppression belongs to the culture of the oppressors. The long, long Jewish narrative is in reality a procession of ideas and ideals, of ethical legislation and ethical striving, of the study of books and the making of books. It is not a chronicle of victimhood, despite the centuries of travail, and despite the corruptions of the hour, when the vocabulary of human rights is too often turned ubiquitously on its head. So contaminated have the most treasured humanist words become, that when one happens on a mass of placards emblazoned with “peace,” “justice,” and the like, one can see almost at once what is afoot—a collection of so-called anti-globalization rioters declaiming defamation of Israel, or an anti-Zionist campus demonstration (not always peaceful), or any anti-Zionist herd of lockstep radicals, such as ANSWER, or the self-proclaimed International Parliament of Writers, or the International Solidarity Movement, which (in the name of human rights) shields terrorists. Or even persons who are distinguished and upright. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched at Selma, and who was impassioned in protesting the Vietnam war, appealed to his peace-and-justice colleagues to sign a declaration condemning the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics. Too many refused.

It is long past time (pace Buruma, pace Butler) when the duplicitous “rift” between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be logically sustained. Whether in its secular or religious expression, Zionism is, in essence, the modern flowering of a vast series of diverse intellectual and pietistic movements, all of them steeped in the yearning for human dignity—symbolized by the Exodus from slavery—that has characterized Jewish civilization for millennia. Contempt and defamation from without have sometimes infiltrated the abject psyches of defeatist Jews, who then begin to judge themselves according to the prevailing canards. Such Jews certainly are
not
what is commonly called self-haters, since they are motivated by the preening self-love that congratulates itself on always “seeing the other side.” Not self-haters, no; low moral cowards, rather, often trailing uplifting slogans.

Anti-Semitism is a foolish word; we appear to be stuck with it. “Semitism” has virtually no meaning. The Semites are a linguistic group encompassing Hebrew, Akkadian, Amharic, and Arabic. The argument one occasionally gets wind of—that Arabs, being Semites, cannot be charged with anti-Semitism, or that any objection to Arab political conduct is itself an instance of anti-Semitism—is nothing if not risible. Anti-Semitism (a term fabricated a century ago by a euphemistic German anti-Semite) signifies hatred of Jews, and hatred's easy corollary: a steady drive to weaken, to hurt, and to extirpate Jews.

Still, one must ask: why the Jews? A sad old joke pluckily confronts the enigma.

—The Jews and the bicyclists are at the bottom of all the world's ills.

—Why the bicyclists?

—Why the Jews?

—implying that blaming one set of irrelevancies is just as irrational as blaming the other. Ah, but it is never the bicyclists, and it is always the Jews. There are innumerable social, economic, and political speculations as to cause: scapegoatism; envy; exclusionary practices; the temptation of a demographic majority to subjugate a demographic minority; the attempt by corrupt rulers to deflect attention from the failings of their tyrannical regimes; and more. But any of these can burst out in any society against any people—so why
always
the Jews? A metaphysical explanation is proffered: the forceful popular resistance to what Jewish civilization represents—the standard of ethical monotheism and its demands on personal and social conscience. Or else it is proposed, in Freudian terms, that Christianity and Islam, each in its turn, sought to undo the parent religion, which was seen as an authoritative rival it was needful to surpass and displace.

This last notion, however, has no standing in contemporary Christianity. In nearly all Christian communities, there is remorse for the old theologically instigated crimes, and serious internal moral restitution, much of it of a very high order. But a salient fact remains, perhaps impolitic to note: relief has come through Christianity's having long been depleted of temporal power. Today's Islamists, by contrast, are supported and succored by states: Iran, Syria (and Lebanon, its vassal), Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt (which suppresses its domestic extremists, while its official press, film industry, and other institutions encourage anti-Zionist incitements). Iranian weapons flood into Gaza, whether by sea or through tunnels from Egypt. Saudi Arabia not long ago unashamedly broadcast a telethon to collect millions to be sent to Palestinian terror gangs; it continues today as Hamas's chief funder. And though Saddam Hussein is finally gone, it will not be forgotten that he honored and enriched the families of suicide bombers. (I observe a telltale omission: those who deny any linkage between Iraq and terror universally discount Saddam's lavish payments to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)

The riddle of anti-Semitism—why always the Jews?— survives as an apparently eternal irritant. The German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, writing in 1916 (in italics) of
“hatred of the Jews,”
remarked to a friend, “You know as well as I do that all its realistic arguments are only fashionable cloaks.” The state of Israel is our era's fashionable cloak—mainly on the Left in the West, and centrally and endemically among the populations of the Muslim despotisms. But if one cannot account for the tenacity of anti-Semitism, one can readily identify it. It wears its chic disguises. It breeds on the tongues of liars. The lies may be noisy and primitive and preposterous, like the widespread Islamist charge (doggerelized by New Jersey's poet laureate) that a Jewish conspiracy leveled the Twin Towers. Or the lies may take the form of skilled patter in a respectable timbre, while retailing sleight-of-hand trickeries—such as the hallucinatory notion that the defensive measures of a perennially beleaguered people constitute colonization and victimization; or that the Jewish state is to blame for the aggressions committed against it. Lies shoot up from the rioters in Gaza and Ramallah. Insinuations ripple out of the high tables of Oxbridge. And steadily, whether from the street or the salon, one hears the enduring old cry:
Hep! Hep! Hep!

October 2003

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

PART ONE: AWAKENINGS

JONATHAN ROSEN
is the author of the novel
Eve's Apple
and of
The
Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds.
His essays and articles have appeared in
The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and
The American Scholar.
His new novel,
Joy Comes in the Morning,
will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the fall of 2004. He is editorial director of Nextbook, where he is creating a series of short books on Jewish subjects, in partnership with Schocken Books.

PAUL BERMAN
writes on literature and politics for
The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review
and
Magazine, Dissent,
and other journals. He is the author of
Terror and Liberalism, The Passionof Joschka Fischer,
and
A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political
Journey of the Generation of 1968.

DAVID BROOKS
was a senior editor at
The Weekly Standard
and a commentator on PBS's
News Hour,
and is now an op-ed columnist for
The New York Times.
He is the author of
Bobos in Paradise
.

BARBARA AMIEL
is a columnist for the London
Telegraph.

HAROLD EVANS
is the former editor of the London
Sunday Times,
and the author of
The American Century.

LAWRENCE SUMMERS
was secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration and is currently president of Harvard University.

PART TWO: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

BEREL
LANG
, professor of humanities at Trinity College, is the author of
Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, Heidegger's Silence,
and
Holocaust Representation,
among other books.

ROBERT S. WISTRICH holds the Neuberger Chair for Modern European History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is head of its International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author and editor of twenty-three books, several of which have won international awards. These include
Socialism and the
Jews
(Oxford University Press, 1982);
The Jews of Vienna in the Age
of Franz Joseph
(Oxford, 1989), which won the Austrian State Prize for Danubian History; and
Anti-Semitism, the Longest Hatred
(Pantheon, 1992), which received the H. H. Wingate Prize for nonfiction in the U.K. It was also the basis for the PBS film documentary, which Professor Wistrich scripted and co-edited. His most recent books are:
Hitler and the Holocaust
(Random House, 2001) and the edited volume
Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism?
(Princeton, 2002).

GABRIEL SCHOENFELD
is the senior editor of
Commentary
and the author of
The Return of Anti-Semitism.

PART THREE: ONE DEATH, ONE LIE

JUDEA PEARL
is the father of the late Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (
www.danielpearl.org
).

THANE
ROSENBAUM
, the former literary editor of
Tikkun,
is the author of
Second Hand Smoke, The Golems of Gotham,
and
The Myth
of Moral Justice.
His articles appear in
The New York Times,
the
Los
Angeles Times,
and
The Wall Street Journal.

SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author most recently of
Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for
the Soul of American Jewry.

TOM GROSS
is former Middle East reporter for the London
Sunday
Telegraph
and the New York
Daily News
. Gross maintains a weblist that reports on anti-Semitism in the media and politics.

DR. DAVID ZANGEN
, head of the Pediatric Endocrine Service at Mt. Scopus Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem, was chief medical officer of a brigade in the Jenin area during Operation Defensive Shield.

PART FOUR: THE ULTIMATE STAKES: THE SECOND-HOLOCAUST DEBATE

PHILIP ROTH
is one of America's most honored novelists. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in fiction in addition to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

RON ROSENBAUM
see
“About the Editor.”

LEON WIESELTIER
is literary editor of
The New Republic,
author of
Kaddish,
and editor of
The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,
a selection of Lionel Trilling's essays.

RUTH R. WISSE
, the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, is the author most recently of
The Modern Jewish Canon
(Free Press) and contributes to many journals.

PART FIVE: THE FACTS ON THE GROUND IN FRANCE

MARIE BRENNER
is a special correspondent for
Vanity Fair
and the author of five books. Her piece on the Abner Louima incident won a Front Page Award and her report on tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wiegand was made into the film
The Insider
.

PART SIX: THE SHIFT FROM RIGHT TO LEFT

MELANIE PHILLIPS
has been a columnist for the London
Times
and the London
Daily Mail.
She was awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996; her most recent book is
The Ascent of Women
.

DR. LAURIE ZOLOTH
was director of the Jewish Studies Program at San Francisco State University when she wrote this e-mail. She now teaches at Northwestern University.

TODD GITLIN
is a professor of journalism, culture, and sociology at New York University and the author of many books on media and society, including
Media Unlimited
.

ELI MULLER
was a senior at Yale University when he wrote this column.

MARK STRAUSS
is a senior editor at
Foreign Policy
.

BARRY ORINGER
is a screen and television writer whose best-known works include
Ben Casey, I Spy,
and
The Fugitive
.

FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN is the Jerusalem correspondent for the leading Italian newspaper
La Stampa
as well as for the Italian magazine
Panorama
. Her work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including
Commentary
and
The New York Sun
. An author of several books about the Arab-Israeli conflict, she teaches history of the Middle East at the LUISS University in Rome, as a visiting professor. This article, which was posted on the Jewish World Review website, was first delivered as a speech at the YIVO Institute conference “Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West,” May 11–14, 2003.

PART SEVEN: THE DEICIDE ACCUSATION

NAT HENTOFF
is a columnist for
The Village Voice
and
The Progressive
and the author most recently of
The War Against the Bill of
Rights,
among many other books. His work also appears in
Editor
and
Publisher
and the United Media Newspaper syndicate.

PETER J. BOYER
has been a staff writer at
The New Yorker
since 1992. His stories have been included in the anthologies
Best AmericanCrime Writing
and
Best American Science Writing
. As correspondent for the PBS documentary series
Frontline,
he has earned a Peabody Award and an Emmy. Boyer is currently at work on a nonfiction book for Random House.

FRANK RICH
is a columnist at
The New York Times
and the author of the memoir
Ghost Light
.

PART EIGHT: SOME NEW FORMS OF ANTI-SEMITISM

SIMON SCHAMA
, professor of art history at Columbia University, is the author of
Citizens, A History of Britain, Landscape and Memory, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culturein the Golden Age,
and, most recently,
Rembrandt's Eyes
.

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of
Heaven on Earth: The Rise
and Fall of Socialism.

ROBERT JAN VAN PELT
is a professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In addition to
The Case for Auschwitz:
Evidence from the Irving Trial,
he is the co-author, with Debórah Dwork, of
Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present
.

JUDITH SHULEVITZ
was editor of
Lingua Franca
and has been a columnist for
Slate
and
The New York Times Book Review
.

PART NINE: ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

JEFFREY TOOBIN
is a staff writer at
The New
Yorker
and the legal analyst for CNN. His books include
Too Close to Call: The 36-Day
Battle to Decide the 2000 Election; A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story
of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President;
and
The
Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson.

MARTIN PERETZ
is the editor-in-chief of
The New Republic,
and teaches at Harvard.

JONATHAN FREEDLAND
has been a columnist at
The Guardian
(U.K.) since 1997, having served for four years as the paper's Washington correspondent. In 2002 he was named Columnist of the Year in the What the Papers Say Awards. Freedland is also the presenter of BBC Radio 4's history series
The Long View
and BBC 4's
The Talk Show
. He has written extensively on Israeli and Middle Eastern affairs. He also writes a monthly column for
The
Jewish Chronicle
and is now at work on a book about identity, Jewishness, and the Middle East.

JUDITH BUTLER
is Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book
Precarious Life
will be published by Verso in the spring of 2004.

PART TEN: ISRAEL

DAVID MAMET
is one of America's leading playwrights and screen-writers and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, among many others.

PHILIP GREENSPUN
teaches at MIT, has authored textbooks on software and Web applications, and maintains a website on politics and economics at http://
philip.greenspun.com
/.

SHALOM LAPPIN
is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at King's College London and a longtime supporter of the Israeli peace movement.

EDWARD SAID
was a scholar and author who taught at Columbia University and wrote the influential study
Orientalism
. In addition, he was a leading advocate of the Palestinian cause. He died of leukemia in September 2003.

DANIEL GORDIS
(
www.danielgordis.org
) is director of the Mandel Jerusalem Fellows and the author, most recently, of
If a Place Can
Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State
(Crown).

PART ELEVEN: MUSLIMS

JEFFREY GOLDBERG
is a staff writer and Middle East correspondent of
The New Yorker
. Before joining
The New Yorker,
he was a contributing writer to
The New York Times Magazine,
and also served as the New York bureau chief of
The Forward
and as a columnist for
The Jerusalem Post
. He began his career as a crime reporter for
The Washington Post
. Goldberg is the recipient of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting and the National Magazine Award for Reporting, for his coverage of terrorism.

BERNARD LEWIS
is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years,
a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist;
The Emergence of Modern
Turkey; The Arabs in History;
and
What Went Wrong?: Western Impact
and Middle Eastern Response,
among other books. Lewis is internationally recognized as one of our era's greatest historians of the Middle East.

TARIQ RAMADAN
is a Geneva-based scholar and lecturer and the author of
Western Muslims and the Future of Islam
(Oxford University Press).

AMOS OZ
is the internationally acclaimed author of numerous novels and essays, which have been translated into over thirty languages. He is also one of the founders of Peace Now, and lives in Arad, Israel.

AFTERWORD

CYNTHIA OZICK
is one of America's most admired novelists, essayists, and short story writers. Her most recent collection of essays,
Quarrel & Quandary,
won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her new novel will appear in the fall of 2004.