Essays struggle with intellectuals' anti-Semitism

by Gil Troy

The Montreal Gazette, June 5, 2004. pg. H.6

"Naively, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that the cannibal hatred, once quenched, would not soon wake again," novelist Cynthia Ozick writes. Capturing this new anti- Semitism's two faces, she notes: "Lies shoot up from the rioters in Gaza and Ramallah. Insinuations ripple out of the high tables of Oxbridge."

Predictably, this haunting collection of 50 essays struggles more with today's intellectual anti-Semitism than with its lethal Islamist variety. The evil marriage of Islamic fundamentalist hatred for Western civilization with traditional European Jew-hatred has produced shrill, ugly, obvious rhetoric. Princeton historian Bernard Lewis dispatches the rationale for such bigotry: "There have indeed been many ... occupations and conflicts ... on a vastly greater scale than in the Middle East. None of them ... has produced this kind of vicious racist campaign."

So, it is the anti-Semitism of the salons that mystifies these writers, not that of the street. Repeatedly, Jewish leftists and rightists, atheists and activists, feel betrayed by their encounters with what historian Robert Wistrich calls "the longest hatred."

Harvard president Lawrence Summers at Memorial Church, Jonathan Rosen in the New York Times Magazine, David Brooks in the conservative Weekly Standard, repeat the same mantra: I grew up without anti-Semitism; I thought it was eradicated; I am reluctantly, surprisingly, angrily, denouncing it, even when it masquerades as "only" criticizing Israel.

Noting that this wave of anti-Semitism began with Yasser Arafat's turn back toward terror in September 2000, but not allowing the Middle East conflict to excuse Jew-hatred, this collection develops a chronology of wakeup calls. For some, it began when they noticed the anti-Jewish incitement by Palestinians that accompanied the terrorism - and its echoes worldwide. For others, it was the August 2001 Durban debacle, where the World Conference Against Racism degenerated into a verbal lynching of the Jewish people. Still others mention Sept. 11, 2001 - and how too many Europeans and Arabs blamed "the Jews" rather than the 19 middle-class murderers who were Muslims; the kidnapping and beheading that fall of Daniel Pearl; the Jenin calumny of spring 2002; and the bigotry underlying the Iraq war debate in 2003, when critics acted as if the biggest hawks were Jewish, as opposed to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Many of the essayists criticize Israel and easily distinguish between debating Israeli policy and demonizing Jews. Philosopher Berel Lang analyzes the grammar of bigotry: talk about "The Jews" rather than Jews; others note that there is talk of the black "community" but the Jewish "lobby." Harold Evans, former editor of the London Sunday Times, says while it is not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, "It is anti-Semitic to vilify the state of Israel as a diabolical abstraction, reserving tolerance for the individual Jew but not the collective Jew; it is anti-Semitic to invent malignant outrages; it is anti-Semitic to consistently condemn in Israel what you ignore or condone elsewhere."

These essays catalogue many of the slurs from intellectuals and the left. Paul Berman, a New York radical, condemns the spring 2002 anti-globalization protesters who chanted "Martyrs, not murderers": The streets of Washington have not "seen such an obscene public spectacle" - celebrating mass murder - "since the days of public slave auctions." Reporter Tom Gross dissects how lies by Palestinians, journalistic sloppiness and intellectual malice created the Jenin massacre myth, a modern blood libel. The book's editor, Ron Rosenbaum, describes how Holocaust denial, critics' rhetorical Nazification of Zionism, their tendency to "blame the victim" when Israel retaliated and the anti-Jewish riots on some campuses, made him fear a "second Holocaust."

Harvard's Ruth Wisse explains Liberal anti-Semitism as a deflection, better to blame Israel and rationalize Islamist fanaticism than confront the Arab world or the failure of reason. University of Waterloo Professor Robert Jan Van Pelt blames academic "relativism" for rejecting Western notions of objective truth and validating any narrative, and many lies. Columbia's Simon Schama faults European ghosts festering on unmediated modern Web sites.

Still, this volume is better at spotlighting the problem than explaining it or suggesting how to solve it.

Those Who Forget the Past reflects a grudging fear that something ugly has returned. Too many modern intellectuals justify terrorism directed against Jews or simply berate "the Jews." Others ignore real Jewish fears while being hypersensitive to other minorities. Tom Gross recalls George Orwell's reply to a communist: "You must be an intellectual," Orwell said. "Only an intellectual could say something so stupid."

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University.

Those Who Forget the Past:
The Question of Anti-Semitism
Edited by Ron Rosenbaum
Random House, 720 pages, $24.95