1http://www.sicmuse.com/weblog/
2 Just as this book was going to press, I had an interesting discussion with Jonathan Alter, the Newsweek and Washington Monthly writer. He suggested there are two types of anti-Semitic utterances: those that come from an almost unconscious resort to a preexisting external “template,” one such as the Protocols, and those that come from within, where they are embedded in the consciousness of the utterer like a “virus” (his word), or meme. It’s important to remember: just as not all Jews are alike, neither are all anti-Semites.
3 That was what I found so fascinating in Dr. David Zangen’s account. He was someone who was an eyewitness in Jenin, now witnessing the unveiling of a film that would perpetrate the lie about Jenin: a slick, deceptive propaganda “documentary” that would soon be shown throughout the world. It was as if he were there to watch the composition of the Protocols. He seeks to speak the truth, knowing it may be too late, and is shouted down. Jenin is one of a number of moments that you will find described from various perspectives by various authors herein, such as the incident at San Francisco State University and the Egyptian TV dramatization of the Protocols. I don’t consider these recurrences repetitious; I’d call them cumulative testimony to the iconic status these events attained, and the grim reality they represented.
4 There are similar arguments over whether “Holocaust” is the preferable term, as opposed to “Shoah” (Hebrew for “destruction”), “Final Solution,” or just plain “genocide.” I have some reservations about the sacralizing origin of “Holocaust” (Greek for “burnt offering in a religious ritual”) but have gone with it because it has become the most familiar, and now historically specific, usage for Hitler’s crime.
5 I suspect this is why Robert Jan van Pelt, historian of Auschwitz, prefers the term “negationism” to “Holocaust denial.” Negationism is a cynical, knowing attempt to erase something that happened, while “denial” pretends to believe it never happened at all.
7 As Christopher Caldwell put it recently, “Land once ceded is hard to reclaim; peace can be revoked by merely changing one’s mind.”
8 News report, November 21, 2003: “Israeli Deputy Chief of Staff Ashkenazi warns: ‘Iranian nuclear threat to Israel is a matter of time.’ ”
9 It has been said that the Arab states can lose a thousand wars and still survive; Israel will not survive if it loses one.
10 Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945. See also The Terrible Secret: The Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s Holocaust, by Walter Laqueur, as well as Wyman and Medoff ’s A Race Against Death. In his new book, The Return of Anti-Semitism, Gabriel Schoenfeld calls the phenomenon “anti-Semitism denial.”
11 Daniel Gordis’s piece captures the emotional reality of those living under this threat.
12 See Hitler’s “Table Talk,” October 24, 1941.
13 See Yehuda Bauer’s important challenge to the “mystifiers” in “Is the Holocaust Explicable?,” originally published in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and reprinted in Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001.
14 In an important British anthology called A New Anti-Semitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain (ed. by Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin), the source of Jonathan Freedland’s essay.
15 In November 2003 the U.K. Political Cartoon Society gave its annual first prize to a depiction (in The Independent) of a bloodthirsty Ariel Sharon biting off the bloody head of a Palestinian child. “Mere” anti-Zionism or repulsive anti-Semitism?
16 I had sought to reprint herein the whole text of Ms. Klein’s important caution to the Left, about “all the recent events I’ve gone to where anti-Muslim violence was rightly condemned, but no mention made about attacks on Jewish synagogues, cemeteries and community centers,” but permission was not granted.
17 This enrages certain figures on the Left, whose most fervent political belief seems to be that they’ve always been right, ever since, as undergraduates, they accepted Marxism as a “science of history,” and see no need to reexamine this premise as more genocidal history emerges. There are some, however, such as Tony Judt, who will concede that such history is “the demon in the family closet of the Left.” It’s no accident that Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes call their account of the response of Left academics to Marxist genocide In Denial. They could have called it It Wasn’t Important .
18 Could it be, as one of Roth’s characters suggests in Operation Shylock, that a better model for anti-Semitism than template or virus might be alcoholism, which has components of organic disease and psychological syndrome? (You can see it in the way some anti-Semites literally seem to get drunk on their hatred.) Roth offers (apparently) in jest one character’s notion that the only way anti-Semitism can be cured is by a quintessentially modern self-help solution: the twelve-step program. And he gives us, in the novel, the steps he suggests for “Anti-Semites Anonymous.” Step One: “We admit that we are haters and that hatred has ruined our lives.” If only.
19 And Wieseltier’s dissection (in the October 27, 2003, issue of The New Republic) of Tony Judt’s proposal, in The New York Review of Books, to dismantle the Jewish state was Wieseltier at his best.
20 The single most pessimistic remark on this subject may be the one uttered by the Max von Sydow character in Hannah and Her Sisters. Denouncing Holocaust documentaries on TV, he says, “Given what people are, the question is: Why doesn’t it happen more often? Of course it does, in subtler forms.”
21 The whole text will appear in a forthcoming MEMRI anthology.
22 Well-tempered optimism, alas. The morning I first reviewed this draft, a report appeared in The New York Sun, which described the dramatic depiction of the ritual-murder “blood libel” on Hizbollah TV, based in Lebanon, broadcast throughout the Arab world. The drama depicted “the murder of a 12-year-old Christian boy to make the unleavened bread” for a Jewish ritual.
23 Senator Jadwiga Stolarska, in the Polish Senate, September 13, 2001. Cited in Anna Bikont, “Seen from Jedwabne,” Yad Vashem Studies XXX, 2002, p. 8.
24 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); reviewed by Tony Judt, The New Republic, October 27, 1997.
25 Translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, available at www. memri.org.
26 Typical is the initiative at Princeton; see www.princetondivest.org/faculty.htm.
27 In a December 2001 lecture delivered in Beirut, Lebanon, Finkelstein likened Israeli actions to “Nazi practices” during World War II, albeit with some added “novelties to the Nazi experiments.”
28 Had the Observer’s narrow columns permitted, and had I had input into the original headline, it would have read: “Second Holocaust”? Roth’s Phrase Isn’t Necessarily Novelistic Fantasy Anymore.”
29 [ellipsis in original]
30 In his “Hitler Is Dead” piece, Leon Wieseltier omits the words before the asterisk in this sentence. Just thought you’d like to know.
31 The evidence has been abundantly documented. In Commentary, see, for example, Hillel Halkin, “The Return of Anti-Semitism” (February 2002); Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Israel and the Anti-Semites” (June 2002); and Michel Gurfinkiel, “France’s Jewish Problem” (July–August 2002).
32 Gahr subsequently sent an e-mail to David Horowitz (who has denied the attack on Weyrich was the reason Gahr is gone from FrontPage), in which Gahr states: “I know full well that Weyrich has never advocated, suggested or implied that anybody should harm Jews.”
33 This subtitle is my addition for this excerpt; it was not in van Pelt’s original.
34 [Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss—ed.]
35 Torah-based commentary on current events criticizing Israel, by a rabbinical student, Jill]
36 As I write, fresh news arrives—evidence of the fulfillment of one martyr’s hope. An Israeli doctor and his twenty-year-old daughter have this day been blown up together in a café, where they had gone for a father-daughter talk on the eve of the young woman’s marriage. She had been devoting her year of national service to the care of children with cancer; her ambition was to study medicine for the sake of such children. Her father was an eminent and remarkable physician, the tireless head of a hospital emergency room which tends the victims of terror attacks. He had just returned from the United States, where he was instructing American doctors in the life-saving emergency techniques he had pioneered. Father and daughter were buried on what was to have been the daughter’s wedding day.