Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
POSTSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE - AWAKENINGS
JONATHAN ROSEN - The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism
PAUL BERMAN - Something’s Changed Bigotry in Print. Crowds Chant Murder
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
DAVID BROOKS - It’s Back
BARBARA AMIEL - Islamists Overplay Their Hand
HAROLD EVANS - The View from Ground Zero
THE TIDAL WAVE OF ANTI-SEMITISM
HOLOCAUST
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
LAWRENCE SUMMERS - Address at Morning Prayers
PART TWO - SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
BEREL LANG - On the “the” in “the Jews”
ROBERT S. WISTRICH - The Old-New Anti-Semitism
THE EUROPEAN LEGACY
THE NAZI-ARAB NEXUS
ANTI-SEMITISM TODAY
THE SOVIET LEGACY
PAN-ARABIST AND ISLAMIST VERSIONS
BEREL LANG - Self-Description and the Anti-Semite: Denying Privileged Access
GABRIEL SCHOENFELD - Israel and the Anti-Semites
PART THREE - ONE DEATH, ONE LIE
JUDEA PEARL - This Tide of Madness
THANE ROSENBAUM - Danny Pearl
SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN - Don’t Look Away
TOM GROSS - Jeningrad
LEFT AND RIGHT UNITE AGAINST ISRAEL
STAINING THE STAR OF DAVID WITH BLOOD
ONLY ONE WITNESS?
ONLY AN INTELLECTUAL COULD BE SO STUPID
DR. DAVID ZANGEN - Seven Lies About Jenin
TOM GROSS - The Massacre That Never Was
PART FOUR - THE ULTIMATE STAKES: THE SECOND-HOLOCAUST DEBATE
PHILIP ROTH - Excerpt from Operation Shylock
RON ROSENBAUM - “Second Holocaust,” Roth’s Invention, Isn’t Novelistic
LEON WIESELTIER - Against Ethnic Panic
RUTH R. WISSE - On Ignoring Anti-Semitism
PART FIVE - THE FACTS ON THE GROUND IN FRANCE
MARIE BRENNER - France’s Scarlet Letter
PART SIX - THE SHIFT FROM RIGHT TO LEFT
MELANIE PHILLIPS - The New Anti-Semitism
DR. LAURIE ZOLOTH - Fear and Loathing at San Francisco State
SHOVED AGAINST THE WALL
DOUBLE STANDARD
TODD GITLIN - The Rough Beast Returns
ELI MULLER - Necessary Evils
MARK STRAUSS - Antiglobalism’s Jewish Problem
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE WTO
ANTI-GLOBALIZIONISM
IS ANOTHER WORLD POSSIBLE?
BARRY ORINGER - Terrorism Chic
FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN - How I Became an “Unconscious Fascist”
PART SEVEN - THE DEICIDE ACCUSATION
NAT HENTOFF - Who Did Kill Christ?
PETER J. BOYER - The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession
FRANK RICH - The Greatest Story Ever Sold
PART EIGHT - SOME NEW FORMS OF ANTI-SEMITISM
SIMON SCHAMA - Virtual Annihilation
JOSHUA MURAVCHIK - The Neoconservative Cabal
ROBERT JAN VAN PELT - Excerpt from The Case for Auschwitz
JUDITH SHULEVITZ - Evolutionary Psychology’s Anti-Semite
PART NINE - ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
JEFFREY TOOBIN - Speechless: Free Expression and Civility Clash at Harvard
MARTIN PERETZ - The Poet and the Murderer
JONATHAN FREEDLAND - Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?
JUDITH BUTLER - The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique
PART TEN - ISRAEL
DAVID MAMET - “If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem”: The Power of Blunt Nostalgia
PHILIP GREENSPUN - Israel
WHY DOES THE UNITED STATES SUPPORT THE STATE OF ISRAEL?
WHY DO ARABS REJECT THE STATE OF ISRAEL?
WHY DO MUSLIMS HATE JEWS?
WHY DO MUSLIMS HATE THE UNITED STATES?
WHY ARE THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST SO UNSTABLE?
WHY ARE THE PALESTINIANS SO VIOLENT?
HOW HAVE THE ISRAELIS SURVIVED FOR SO LONG?
CONCLUSION
IS THERE REALLY A CRISIS? (PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS)
WHAT CAN WE, AS AVERAGE AMERICAN CITIZENS, DO?
SHALOM LAPPIN - Israel and the New Anti-Semitism
ISRAEL AS A JEWISH POLITY
MESSIANISM AND REPLACEMENT THEOLOGY
SECULAR MESSIANISM AND THE EUROPEAN LEFT
EDWARD SAID - A Desolation, and They Called It Peace
DANIEL GORDIS - Take Off That Mask
PART ELEVEN - MUSLIMS
JEFFREY GOLDBERG - Behind Mubarak
BERNARD LEWIS - Muslim Anti-Semitism
EUROPEAN INFLUENCE
ARAB OPPOSITION
REWRITING HISTORY
SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT
An Exchange Between BERNARD LEWIS and ABDELALEEM EL-ABYAD
TARIQ RAMADAN - Interreligious Dialogue
THE ISLAMIC TRADITION AND INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE
NECESSARY DIVERSITY
GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF DIALOGUE
VERSES INTERPRETED VARIOUSLY
TOWARD EXACTING AND CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUE
SHARED INVOLVEMENT
AMOS OZ - Two Middle East Wars
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
SOURCE LIST
PERMISSION CREDITS
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
ALSO BY RON ROSENBAUM
Copyright Page
FOR
DANIEL PEARL
AND HIS FAMILY
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
RON ROSENBAUM
Afterword by Cynthia Ozick
POSTSCRIPT
I can’t resist making note of a remarkable essay that appeared after the bound galleys of this book went to press: one by Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, in the February 2, 2004, issue of The New Republic. It was a review of Hitler’s so-called second book, the one he wrote after Mein Kampf but decided not to publish. Bartov’s review was entitled “He [Hitler] Meant What He Said.” And speaking of contemporary Jew-haters, Bartov added, “These are people who mean what they say.” In other words, when terrorist groups use exterminationist rhetoric, we must face the possibility that they are not just making idle threats. As Bartov says, “There are precedents for this.” On the cover of The New Republic, the Bartov essay was billed as “Hitler Is Dead, Hitlerism Lives On.” My point exactly. Those who forget the past . . .
February 5, 2004
INTRODUCTION
RON ROSENBAUM
Kidnapped by History
1) A BAD JOKE, OR HALITOSIS OF THE SOUL
It is a mystery whose magnitude calls for humility—why antiSemitism, why the persistence, the recurrence, of this particular hatred? “The longest hatred,” Robert Wistrich, one of the foremost analysts of that long history, called it.
I feel an even greater humility now, writing this final draft of an introduction, than when I began the first draft several months ago. Back then I had only just begun the process of assembling the pieces in this book, one of the most difficult challenges I’ve faced. There was so much to include, so much that space constraints forced me to leave out.
I wouldn’t claim this collection is exhaustive, but the level of thought, of argumentation, the number of challenging perspectives in the essays herein, cumulatively exceeded my expectations. And left me feeling, when looking at my original introduction, that it didn’t do
justice to the scope and complexity of the work within. It still doesn’t. So it won’t hurt my feelings if you stop reading this now and skip to Jonathan Rosen’s essay and all that follow.
I mention Jonathan’s essay not merely because it opens the book but because rereading it, fifteen months after it was first published, gave me the idea for this book.
I had met Jonathan when he was cultural editor of The Forward, had been deeply impressed by his book-length essay/ memoir The Talmud and the Internet. We had served on a panel discussion about Shadows on the Hudson, I. B. Singer’s post-Holocaust novel, and I had taken to having occasional lunches with him at that temple of secular Jewish culture on New York’s Upper West Side, Barney Greengrass (“The Sturgeon King”).
It was at one of those lunches early in 2003 that Jonathan asked me if I could fill in for him at a speaking engagement at a Connecticut temple, because his wife was about to give birth, and I asked him for a copy of the piece he had written for the November 4, 2001, issue of The New York Times Magazine.
I’d wanted to refer to it in my substitute talk, and I was stunned at how prescient it seemed, reading it this time. Less than two months after 9/11 he’d seen the shape of things to come with remarkable acuity: the eruption of violence, physical and rhetorical, against Jews in the Middle East and Europe, that would soon become endemic. And I was struck by the precision with which he expressed feelings I’d begun to have on what he called “The Uncomfortable Question of AntiSemitism.”
Although his family experience was tragic in a way mine wasn’t—his father had escaped Hitler’s Vienna on one of the Kindertransports that rescued Jewish children, most of whose families, like Jonathan’s father’s family, were later murdered— the feeling he described, in 2001, of being “kidnapped by history,” spoke to me and many people I knew.
He wrote at one point of having been born in 1963, part of the first generation or two of Jews to live, in America at least, without anti-Semitism as a significant fact of life, and now suddenly having Jews—as Jonathan put it—“being turned into a question mark once again.” If not here, then in much of the rest of the world.
A question mark again . . . a chilling phrase. The Question of Anti-Semitism contains within it several questions. Among them: What, if anything, is new about the so-called “new antiSemitism”? Why does anti-Semitism seem to have migrated from Right to Left? How does one define the difference, when there is one, between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism?
By that time, there had appeared a significant number of essays, polemics, and exemplary reports on these questions, and it occurred to me that it would be worthwhile to attempt to collect them—to document both the phenomenon of contemporary anti-Semitism and the responses to it, in a book such as this. Now that you know how this endeavor began, go, begin if you’d like. Go read Jonathan Rosen or Jonathan Freedland or Berel Lang or Ruth R. Wisse or David Mamet, or skip to the fiery Afterword that Cynthia Ozick was gracious enough to write for this book. I won’t complain. I won’t be taking attendance. And no penalties for not reading consecutively: yes, there’s a logic behind the ordering of the sections, and some of the opposing polemics are paired off, but nothing prohibits your skipping around in the book.
Meanwhile I’ll just press forward here, for those who remain and those who return, with some observations, some contentions, some conjectures, some controversy.
I’d like to begin by talking about a little-known site on the Web I’d become fascinated with—and its metaphoric resonance. It’s called “Exposing the Exposer.”1 It’s a site run by two guys named Zachary and Mo and is entirely devoted to exposing another website, run by a guy they call “Mickey.” It seems that Mickey (real first name Michael) began his website by promoting post–9/11 conspiracy theories about Jews masterminding the World Trade Center attacks—remember the spectral “4,000 Jews” (or Israelis) who were supposedly told to stay home that day by that secret cabal behind it all, the Elders of Zion?
Post–9 /11 anti-Semitic conspiracy theories soon became a portal for Mickey to enter the underworld of pre–9/11 anti-Semitic theories. So his website lurched from the false announcement “NPR NEWSCASTER: ISRAEL HAD ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE OF SEPT. 11” to a defense of the ancient “blood libel” charges that Jewish ritual called for using the blood of murdered Christian children to make pastry for religious feasts. New anti-Semitism, old anti-Semitism: it was one-stop shopping for the Web-surfing Jew-hater or credulous recruit at Mickey’s site.
But Zachary and Mo weren’t having it; they weren’t letting him get away with it so easily. On their website, “Exposing the Exposer,” they ceaselessly do just that: expose every myth, every poisonous slur Mickey posts, however many times it has been exposed before. They just won’t let the sad, silly fellow (Mickey’s other cause, aside from slandering Jews, is public nudity—thus, perhaps, the added resonance of their nickname for him: “The Exposer”) have a free ride on the information superhighway. Not without their cleansing ridicule.
There’s something appealing about the spirit of their mission. As Simon Schama recently pointed out in a talk at a YIVO Institute conference, the Web can be a “verification-free” environment, and trying to fight the tide of Internet anti-Semitism is a Canute-like task. And yet Zachary and Mo, the two guys who run the “Exposing the Exposer” website, take a zestfully comic approach to pulling the rug out from under the crude and stupid slurs that “Mickey” propagates. Somehow by using the diminutive “Mickey” they not only invoke the cartoon mouse, but make it seem as if the guy they’re addressing is not a bad sort, just a bit mentally challenged—like the slow one in Of Mice and Men: “Tell me about the rabbits, George.” For poor “Mickey,” the Jews are like “the rabbits”—an illusion that makes sense of a world confusing to his undernourished (let’s say) intellect. “Tell me about the rabbis, George.”
At first I wondered, indeed you might wonder: why pay attention to this obscure website that exposes another website? There are worthy organizations that take on the Big Lies and the Big Distortions, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. On the Internet there’s the indispensable Tom Gross, former Middle East reporter for the U.K. Telegraph (and son of the London literary couple John and Miriam Gross), who is a one-man army when it comes to exposing the hypocrisies and prejudices of the mainstream press for his media-centric weblist. There’s the remarkable MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, which has devoted itself to translating what’s being said about Jews in Arabic and Islamist media. There are webloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Jeff Jarvis, and Meryl Yourish, who keep close track of American developments. The Web is the New Frontier of the new antiSemitism, the realm where the future of the struggle of truth against fiction may be won or lost in a universe of ever-proliferating linked sites such as those of Mickey and his ex-posers.
Maybe it’s futile, maybe lies will always outrun the truth. But I came to admire the guys for trying to keep up. The mistake of underestimating the power of lies and incitement has already been made once. They exist like a subterranean river of poison that occasionally breaks to the surface. And reading “Exposing the Exposer” gives one a chance to put the mind behind the very model of a modern anti-Semitic Internet site under the microscope. You can sense that Zachary and Mo, in addition to being jocularly contemptuous of Mickey, are fascinated by him. Cancer researchers do not like cancer, but they’re deeply intrigued by the way tumors work. So it is with the study of anti-Semitism.
One of the things that can be gained, for instance, from the study of Mickey’s site is a reminder of the continuing malign power of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that czarist fraud that purportedly exposed a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.
It is, alas, one of those lies that have become immune to disproof, a template always awaiting some traumatic public or personal tragedy with the appeal of a “knowing insider’s” insight.2 And so for Mickey there was a ready-to-hand way of explaining 9/11: it was all the
work of a secret cabal of Jews— here, the Mossad, Israeli intelligence—manipulating things from behind the scenes, in this case engineering the hijacking of the jetliners, the murder of thousands, in order to blame it on “innocent” Islamist terrorists.
The Protocols and their updated version, distributed by Henry Ford as The International Jew, became (in German translation) a basis for Hitler’s vision of “Jewry” and the Jewish conspiracy as well: Jewish capitalists were secretly in league with the Jewish Marxist anti-capitalists to make puppets of everyone else. The Protocols is not just a silly conspiracy theory: in Hitler’s hands it became what the historian Norman Cohn called “a Warrant for Genocide.”
And now the Protocols are back with us, not just in Western Web media, not just in disguised form in 9/11 conspiracy theories, but in widespread Arabic translation of the original Russian version and, of course, in a forty-one-part TV series broadcast on Egyptian television in 2002.
The study of this sort of phenomenon is important, yes, but still, it’s demoralizing; especially if, like me, you’re Jewish and you spent a decade or so working on a book about Hitler and you thought you’d left the whole hideous subject behind and then you find yourself spending months immersed in the recent literature on anti-Semitism.
When I was working on the book that eventually became Explaining Hitler, a kind of intellectual history of postwar theories about the origin and nature of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, friends would ask me, “Isn’t it depressing spending so much time on the subject?” Of course it was, I’d say, trying to put a brave face on it, but the debates about the source of evil, the theodicy of the Holocaust, the modes of explaining the particular virulence of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the question of degrees of evil— these weren’t depressing, they were intellectually stimulating arguments. Here were some of the best minds of the century in deep disagreement about some of the most important issues of history and human nature.
Anyway, that’s what I’d say for the first five years. For the next five years until publication in 1998 the intellectual stimulation was outweighed by the emotional drain. I lost some of the zest for the task that the “Exposing the Exposer” website guys still display. (I hope they don’t get tired.)
Those Who Forget the Past Page 1