BEYOND THE EXTREMIST

Dear Deborah:

Thanks so much for that explanation and description. I used to think of extremists as those who wore KKK robes or skinhead paraphernalia. Obviously, the problem is far broader and subtler than that. Do you think that the reason some of my friends think contemporary concerns about antisemitism, especially among Jews, are really not credible is that the individuals and groups who are active today don’t present as extremists? I think they would agree that what we saw at Charlottesville was antisemitic, because, despite the anodyne way the protesters were dressed, their other manifestations of antisemitism were so blatant. I’m not sure that they would recognize the less openly threatening manifestations of antisemitism that you warn about.

Joe

Dear Joe and Abigail:

Joe, you are so right. We recognize and abhor the extremists. There is no ambiguity about who they are and what they believe. Most people (with an emphasis on the word “most”) respond to them with visceral disgust. But our focus on them can sometimes distort the landscape because they’re not the only ones poised to do harm. In the wake of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler has become the template for the archetypal antisemite. When someone does not present as an out-and-out Nazi, observers often fail to recognize him or her as an antisemite. But to be an antisemite one need not be a Hitler or Nazi equivalent. You need not even be prone to violence. There are many antisemites who would never dream of even using offensive rhetoric. Audiences saw prime examples of this type of person in Gentleman’s Agreement, a novel by Laura Z. Hobson that, in 1947, became an Academy Award–winning film starring Gregory Peck (playing a non-Jewish journalist named David Green who is passing as a Jew to research an article on antisemitism) and Dorothy McGuire (playing his very proper and wealthy WASP girlfriend). When Green’s young son comes home from school one day crying because some kids called him a “dirty Jew and a stinking kike,” McGuire’s character impulsively gathers him up in her arms and says, “Darling, it’s not true! You’re no more Jewish than I am. It’s just a horrible mistake.”

She’s not a Nazi, of course. And she bears no resemblance to a Hitler or a David Duke. But by telling the boy that he need not worry because he is in fact not a Jew, she reinforces both degrading and hateful conceptions of Jews and the notion that there is something inherently wrong with being a Jew. And so—as she herself acknowledges at the end of the film—she is antisemitic. As we’ll explore further, there is more than one prototypical antisemite. There are many subgroups in this category.

Yours,

DEL