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.)

So I understand if some might approach a collection of essays about anti-Semitism—more suffering! more despair! many Holocaust references!—with a certain reluctance or weariness. A reluctance or weariness probably equaled or exceeded by my own when I approached this project—and now, as I’m writing this, as I approach its conclusion.

Finishing the Hitler book had left me in a black hole of despair: the historical record was too fragmentary to offer any certainty, the mysteries were unresolvable, the images unshakable. It was a hole I’d begun to crawl out of by beginning a book about Shakespearean scholars and directors.

By early 2003 I had handed in half that book; as a writer I was having the time of my life, exploring challenging questions with brilliant Shakespeareans. I felt I’d earned these pleasures.

But something happened. As Paul Berman put it, “something’s changed.” It was all the more shocking, coming at a moment, a brief, now lost moment at the end of the twentieth century when the signs seemed to point to normalization. In America a Jew had been nominated for the vice presidency with almost negligible backlash. That same summer, at Camp David, Israelis and Palestinians seemed close to a dramatic breakthrough to a two-state compromise that would allow both peoples, both in their own ways victims of history, to live in peace.

Then everything began to unravel: the peace talks broke down, the Second Intifada with its terror tactic of “suicide bombings” began, European demonstrators, and increasingly many in the United States, began to turn against the Jewish state, denouncing its efforts at self-defense while “explaining” the acts of those who murdered its children.

For a time I tried to ignore it and to look away, and then that became impossible. For me I guess it culminated with the March 27, 2002, Passover massacre in Netanya when twenty-nine worshippers were blown apart by a so-called suicide bomber (a misleading term; I’m not fond of the alternative “homicide bomber,” because of its redundancy. I prefer the simple term “mass murderer”).

What made this mass murder different from other mass murders? The astonishing leap by much of the world to demonize the response, blame the victims. When the Israeli Army rolled into Jenin, in early April 2002, to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure responsible for the mass murder at Netanya, the world seemed to me shockingly eager to believe fraudulent claims of a “massacre” committed by Israelis while all too often ignoring the original massacre that prompted the self-defense measures.

The obvious and unashamed longing to be able to accuse Israelis of “Nazi-like” crimes, of creating “an Auschwitz” in Jenin, was disturbing to me and many others. It was a phenomenon I have heard described before: “Europe killed the Jews and would never forgive them for it,” someone once observed bleakly. The Holocaust had become a kind of defining shame for European civilization that was intolerable to bear without some form of displacement, of “balancing” the scales: “See, the Jews commit mass murder too.” It was just too much, especially as objective inquiries soon discredited the “Jenin massacre” reports. And yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Jenin remained, in the rhetoric of many “anti-Zionists,” their analogue for Auschwitz. It was like witnessing the very birth of a classic anti-Semitic myth with—who knows?—the potential destructive power of the Protocols.³

About that time, I began to write about the subject, reluctantly at first. I’d written and spoken on Hitler questions for several years, but I’d always felt I was speaking about something safely in the past. This new rage of the world against the idea of Jews defending their children was something I was reluctant to engage; it was just so inhuman, so far beyond the pale, so to speak, that it made you want to look away or wish it away. But it kept getting worse. How much worse might it become? It was in asking that question that I touched off a debate about the potential for a “second Holocaust.”

That moment, spring 2002, now seems like a turning point in many ways. Not just the resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the awareness of it, but the debate over how much to be concerned about it. Some chose to speak out; some chose to tell those who spoke out they were alarmists, panicky.

LET ME SEEK to put that moment in the perspective of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism—the nearly sixty years since Hitler’s death camps were shut down. Chronological divisions, like just about every other aspect of anti-Semitism, are a subject of contention (including how one spells it. There is a school of thought that believes the compound word “anti-Semitism” is unsatisfactory to one degree or another because it was a term invented by an anti-Semite, the nineteenth-century German “racial theorist” Wilhelm Marr. Some argue for other terms, such as “Judeophobia” or just plain “Jew-hatred,” because it’s not about all Semitic people (Arabs, for instance) but about all Jews. Even the hyphenation of the word “anti-Semitism” is argued over, with some believing that a hyphen and a capital S mimic Wilhelm Marr too closely and that “antisemitism” is to be preferred. The Random House style has long been to spell it “anti-Semitism,” and “antisemitism” doesn’t entirely escape the shadow of Marr, so I’ve gone with the more familiar form.⁴

In any case, one of the key contentions involves chronology. I’d suggest there is not just one new anti-Semitism in the post-Holocaust period, but that there are two. The Israeli scholar Yehuda Bauer makes a case for four postwar waves, and no doubt his typology offers greater specificity, but I’d suggest that there are roughly two qualitatively different periods: the post-Holocaust period and the post–9/11 period.

The passage of nearly six decades since 1945 makes post-Holocaust anti-Semitism not exactly new but new in the scale of centuries. One minor but telling way in which post-Holocaust anti-Semitism differs from the pre–1939 variety is the way the fact of the Holocaust shadows and stains what might have been, before World War II, “casual” anti-Semitic remarks, slurs, jokes. All of which now, alas, must be construed as part of the culture of prejudice and persecution that permitted the execution of the Final Solution—and the world’s indifference to it.

After such knowledge, for one thing, “casual” is not casual anymore. What do I mean by “casual anti-Semitism”? Well, there was the phrase that the president of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used in July 2003 when he reacted to disclosures of anti-Jewish comments in Harry Truman’s private diary. He called them “the typical sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at the time.”

That’s something of a stretch, since Truman was writing in 1947—I think he meant “common at the time Truman was growing up.” But the phrase “the typical sort of cultural anti-Semitism” is useful when distinguishing pre-Holocaust country-club anti-Semitism from what I’d call “post-Holocaust anti-Semitism of the first type.” The events of 1939–1945 can’t help but give a different gravity to what had once been casual.

Here’s a relatively trivial but, I think, useful example of the change, which I experienced myself at an upscale Upper East Side book party in the mid-1990s. In the crush of conviviality I was approached by a colleague who had suffered some criticism for what some had seen as anti-Semitic stereotypes in his fiction. He was a writer who specialized in preening rants against “New Money” types—preening in the sense that he customarily implied that people from his circle of exquisitely well-bred Old Money types would not be guilty of the supposedly vulgar and unscrupulous practices of New Money.

If many of his New Money characters were Jews, he’d insist his animus was not that they were Jews, but that they were new. The most charitable interpretation of his attitude was not prejudice but condescension: he looked down at people who hadn’t the time to attain the stainless ethical gentility of those in his circle.

There is a vast historical naïveté and double standard in this view—the idea that Old Money in America was somehow cleaner, when in fact many Old Money fortunes came from plunder and murder (of Native Americans), from enslavement and murder (of black people), and from the merciless exploitation of generations of wage slaves of all colors, who in effect paid with their immiseration for the self-congratulatory gentility that allowed certain Old Money types to sneer at the New and the Jew.

Still, I had always felt this fellow was basically a good-natured sort, not a hater. Despite what was, to me, his irritating, almost willfully ahistorical ingenuousness about the superior moral status of Old Money, I’d been willing to accept his word that when he portrayed a stereotyped Jew behaving badly, he didn’t necessarily believe “the Jews” were to be despised as a people. It’s an important distinction, as Berel Lang argues herein. Jews, like others, needless to say, are capable of all manner of wrongdoing. One definition of an anti-Semite is someone who insists that when Jews do wrong, it’s because they are Jews, not because they are human.

But I’ll never forget the moment he approached me at this book party with a glow in his cheeks, a glass in his hand, and, if not a slur in his voice, a slur in a joke. He proceeded to single me out, with no preliminaries, for a hugely self-entertaining rendition of a joke in his idea of a Yiddish accent. It was about two small-time Jewish businessmen, I forget the names, something like Abie and Mendy, and basically it was about how they wanted to cheat their creditors out of what they owed.

“I found the solution to our problems,” Abie tells Mendy, or Mendy tells Abie, in this joke. “It’s in da Bible.”

“In da Bible? Vut in da Bible?”

“Chapter Eleven! ”

As the Old Money writer brayed in my ear at his own joke, I felt I was being somehow challenged to show I could rise above harmless ethnic humor and join him in a laugh. But I must admit I couldn’t find this brilliant joke funny. Jews chortling about the Bible and bankruptcy to cheat people out of money: I couldn’t help thinking how easily it could have been a comic strip from Julius Streicher’s odious Der Stürmer, circa 1934.

It was about as funny as if he had donned blackface and told an Uncle Remus story to one of the black writers in the room. Ah yes, the exquisite manners of Old Money. I’ve never felt the same about him again.

Still there was a sense, before September 11, that post-Holocaust anti-Semitism—because of the revulsion that this kind of heedlessness usually has attached to it—was, more than anything, a bad joke, a halitosis of the soul, a breach of decorum, but essentially harmless. It seemed to lack consequence— Jews in America were never more secure (witness the Lieberman nomination). Even Jews in Israel had the illusion that a “peace process” offered the promise of security in the future. And Jews in Europe were, well, just Jews in Europe, not yet victims of violence again—there didn’t seem to be a threat of consequence; there wasn’t a threatening context . So, in most cases—when they did not involve murder, as in the case of Alan Berg, the outspoken talk show host murdered by neo-Nazis, or Yankel Rosenbaum (no relation), murdered by a Brooklyn mob that chanted, “Kill the Jew!”—most expressions of anti-Semitism could be regarded as exceptions that proved a rule.

Let us conjecture, then, that one thing that distinguished post-Holocaust anti-Semitism of the first kind from post-Holocaust anti-Semitism of the post–9/11, or post-millennial, kind is the return of a threatening context for anti-Semitism: the return to what Yehuda Bauer, who served as head of Yad Vashem Holocaust Center in Jerusalem, has called a “genocidal” threat, to the five million Jews of the State of Israel. Indeed, one thing I’ve noted in reading the post–9/11 literature about Jews and Israel and anti-Semitism is the recurrence of a phrase, rarely seen before: “existential threat.”

In a way it’s a euphemism. The more commonly used sense of “existential” is, of course, as shorthand for a French philosophic tendency, and it’s hard, when one hears “existential threat,” to avoid conjuring up the image of Sartre and de Beauvoir shaking puny fists at the universe.

But “existential threat” as it is used these days, alas, goes back to a more primal meaning of the word: an existential threat means a threat to a state’s, or a people’s, very existence. And so when people speak of an “existential threat” to the Jewish state or the people of Israel, they are speaking of nothing less than annihilation.

The existential threat was given shocking immediacy by the September 11 radical Islamist attacks on the United States, by the escalating suicide attacks on Israeli citizens, a proliferation of exterminationist, often Hitler-worshipping rhetoric in the media of the Middle East, and the procurement of nuclear capability and delivery systems by Islamic states surrounding Israel. A capability easily transferrable to terrorist groups.

There could be little doubt that those capable of committing mass murder by suicide in the United States would not hesitate, given the chance, to carry out an attack on an even larger scale on their other declared enemy, the Jewish state— and that it would be far easier to essentially end the existence of the Jewish state than it would be to do such profound damage to the far vaster realm of the United States.

What September 11 demonstrated also was that Israel’s possession of a nuclear deterrent—like that of the United States—while it might still deter other states, would no longer protect it from a suicidal terrorist cell in possession of a suitcase nuclear weapon, or a nuclear-tipped missile launched from the Bekaa Valley. In August 2002, when the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces explicitly used the phrase, conceded the presence of an “existential threat” to the State of Israel, it was the realism of an experienced military man speaking.

Indeed, the terrorist forces behind individual “suicide bombers” in Israel and their supporters among radical Islamists in the Arab world spoke openly of their desire to eliminate the State of Israel and, increasingly, its people as well.

The sense of a new dimension to the existential threat is what makes post–September 11 anti-Semitism a phenomenon of a different order of magnitude from what came before. And yet there is one distinctive invention of post–1945 antiSemitism that persists in curious ways in the post–September 11 period, one that has mutated just as anti-Semitism itself has mutated in that period: Holocaust denial. Old-fashioned Holocaust denial certainly persists, but one could almost say there is a denial of a new type: the one that takes the form of equanimity. It is not technically Holocaust denial; it is the denial of Holocaust consequences. Let me explain.

2) AGAINST EQUANIMITY

I wish I could regard Holocaust denial as merely a bad joke, a parody of an anti-Semitic theory. One of the most interesting discussions I had on this question was with the philosopher Berel Lang, author of an extremely thoughtful consideration of the nature of Nazi evil, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In the course of interviewing him for Explaining Hitler I brought up the question of whether one could posit an evolution of evil. Professor Lang had recently published a journal article on that question in which he proposed the notion that human evil, like other aspects of human culture, may have undergone a kind of evolution, or at least a changing history, from a theoretical first murder to mass murder. Should we consider Hitler’s genocidal Final Solution the final step on a ladder down into the abyss, or just the latest step? And if the latter, what might the next step be?

I had posited to Lang that Holocaust denial was the next step, because of what you might call its demonic ingenuity, the cruel sophistry of those who propagate it. For the most part, they know it happened (the testimony of apostate neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers confirms this); they’re glad it happened; they take sick satisfaction in denying it happened only because it offers a novel way to add insult to injury: to murder not just the body but the soul, the memory, of the dead. To become, in effect, accessories after the fact, by the very act of denying the fact.⁵

But Lang countered with another, more subtle and persuasive argument about the next step in post-Holocaust evil: the evil of equanimity. He cited a monograph he was researching on the postwar writings of Martin Heidegger, the preeminent German philosopher of the twentieth century (subsequently published as Heidegger’s Silence).

Essentially, Lang said, the Holocaust didn’t exist for Heidegger. He didn’t deny it, but he might as well have: it wasn’t a factor in his thought; it did not affect his view of history and human nature, despite the Hitler-friendly spin he gave to his philosophy in order to advance his academic career in the 1930s. After the war, Heidegger was more outspoken about the depredations of mechanized agriculture than he was about the mechanized mass murder that had happened under his nose. It was this . . . knowing equanimity that incensed the ordinarily mild-mannered Lang.

“Heidegger knew it happened and he didn’t care,” Lang said. “His silence—it wasn’t even denial. For him, it wasn’t important!

“It wasn’t important,” Lang repeated. And then again, “It wasn’t important.”

His silence wasn’t even denial. . . . Already, even in the pre– September 11 period, one could sense a curious kind of backlash, one might call it, against speaking of the Holocaust. It took various forms. While hard-core Holocaust denial was itself off the grid for most minimally educated people, it was clear that there were some who were tired of being reminded it had happened, some who resented references to it. Some consigned all memorializing to the derisive phrase “Holocaust industry” to deny there could be any good-faith reason for seeking to remember the Holocaust: It was all part of the Zionist agenda to exploit Hitler’s crime for the supposedly Nazi-like crimes of the State of Israel.

But even among those who didn’t use that particular noxious phrase “Holocaust industry” (with a not-so-subtle anti-Semitic stereotype of “mercenary Jews” embedded in it) there had evolved a new, more sophisticated way of seeking to banish the Holocaust from contemporary discourse or relevance: the attempt to delegitimize and silence any attempt to assert that there are historical consequences to the Final Solution. Consequences the Jewish state should take into account in assessing the dangers it faces today. The past indifference—if not complicity—of much of the world to Hitler’s genocide might for instance be a factor in assessing how much to rely on “international guarantees” of the Jewish state’s safety as opposed to its reliance on active self-defense.

Cynthia Ozick singles out an instance of what you might call “inconsequentialism” when she cites a writer who took Menachem Begin to task for invoking the memory of the million children murdered during the Holocaust when Begin defended the 1981 Israeli destruction of Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor. A facility clearly intended to produce weaponizable nuclear material for a tyrant who would later threaten to “burn half of Israel.” Saddam made that threat during the first Gulf War, and who’s to say that if Begin hadn’t acted in defiance of world opinion, one of Saddam’s Scuds, the ones he fired at Tel Aviv (as well as at American forces in Kuwait), would not have carried nuclear explosives. Should the fact that a previous genocidal threat (Hitler’s) was in fact carried out have no consequences, deserve no mention from decision-makers?

Should Begin be shamed posthumously for telling the world one of his motives was, in effect, to save his people and their children from a second Holocaust, for seeking to avoid giving Hitler a posthumous victory?

This is not denial in the usual sense. It doesn’t assert the event didn’t happen. It just denies that it should have an effect on how one thinks about history and human nature in general, the fate of the Jewish state and its attempts to defend itself in particular. It is Heidegger’s equanimity: It happened but . . . “It wasn’t important. It wasn’t important.”

3) LOOKING AWAY

I’d argue that another distinctive feature of post–9/11 antiSemitism, in addition to the existential threat, is the recurrence of emblematic moments of Looking—and Looking Away. I know I’ve been guilty of looking away.

When asked to speak at Jewish institutions such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, at colleges, synagogues, and shuls on the nature of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, I did not focus much on contemporary anti-Semitism. With one exception—Holocaust denial—it seemed incommensurable with Hitler’s crime. After all, Hitler was history, Hitler was past, Hitler was dead.

And yet some ugly truths were hard to avoid. And writing about the culture of anti-Semitism that helped give license to Hitler clearly sensitized me to the situation in the Middle East. My reaction to one controversy in particular—Netanyahu and “incitement”—was a sign of that change.

Back in 1996, you’ll recall, Benjamin Netanyahu, then newly elected Israeli prime minister, came under attack from just about everyone here in America (and on the left in Israel) for his alleged stubbornness in not “moving forward with the peace process.” His particular stubbornness was said to consist in his demanding that the Palestinian side live up to its commitment in the Oslo accords to remove references from Palestinian textbooks which incited hatred of Jews and Israel. Everyone, it seemed, wanted Netanyahu to move on—to move forward to the next step in “the process,” to give up another chunk of West Bank land to the Palestinian Authority as part of the “land-for-peace” peace process—and ignore the incitement issue, and the Palestinians’ failure to address it.

Up till then, I had been a hopeful believer that the Oslo peace process would bring about two states—and peace. But Netanyahu was being portrayed in terms that bordered on ancient Christian anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Jews, in the New Testament, are a stubborn people for not bowing to Jesus as Messiah; Netanyahu was being stubborn for making a fuss over incitement, over the Palestinians’ failure to live up to the other, less tangible, side of the “land-for-peace” agreement: peacefulness. He was portrayed as ignoring the Big Picture in favor of—again the shadow of the stereotype was there—Semitic pettifogging.

I found myself surprised to be in agreement with the position of the supposedly stubborn Netanyahu. Anti-Semitic incitement was no minor issue, no window dressing. Incitement to hatred was the Big Picture. Anyone who has studied the history of the twentieth century knows that “incitement” is the heart of the matter, the source of the hatred that spills over into mass murder. And incitement of children to hate is even more lasting in its damage. But instead, everyone was telling Netanyahu, essentially: Ignore the incitement, get on with “the process.” Look away. We are now witnessing the consequences of ignoring a generation of incitement.

AND THEN THERE WAS the matter of two televisuals: the lynching of two Israeli Jews in Ramallah and the videotaped throat-slitting murder of American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. To look, or look away?

In the fall of 2000 I was watching CNN when the footage of the lynching at Ramallah was broadcast. Do you recall? Two Israeli reservists heading home from duty took a wrong turn near that West Bank town. They were seized and taken to the town’s Palestinian police headquarters, which was soon surrounded by an angry mob demanding their death. They were slaughtered in an upper room, under the eyes, if not by the hands, of the Palestinian Authority, and then their bodies thrown to the cheering crowd below. Following which their murderers appeared in the upper windows of the killing room and brandished their bloody hands to further cheers.

In some ways I had no choice whether or not to watch the lynching in Ramallah. I would have actively had to switch away from CNN. That was not the case with the Daniel Pearl video. The actual sequence of events in that video is somewhat unclear, but at one point one can see Daniel Pearl telling his captors and their camera: My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish. Following which the video presents his throat being slit, his head being severed, the severed head held up by the gloating killer.

When the video subsequently became available on certain websites in the United States, a debate broke out over whether one should watch. Daniel Pearl’s wife and parents argued that to watch it was to serve the terrorists’ purposes, to become accessories after the fact to murderous terrorist propaganda. On the other hand, many respected figures argued that one must not avoid watching: one has to face the truth of the nature of this hatred. “Truth is more important than taste,” The New Republic argued in an editorial entitled “The Face of Evil.”

“Don’t Look Away,” Samuel G. Freedman entitled his essay. And while I see his argument, while I tend to agree with his argument in the abstract, I have yet to bring myself to watch the video. There is a line in Jonathan Rosen’s piece about the “private balancing act” one has to engage in, in this as in all grim realities: “You don’t have to read much Freud to discover that the key to a healthy life is the ability to fend off reality to a certain extent. Deny reality too much, of course, and you’re crazy; too little and you’re merely miserable.”

And thus in my private balancing act, I guess, I have looked away from the horrid spectacle of Daniel Pearl’s death and dismemberment. In part perhaps because I’ve spoken on the phone about this question with Daniel Pearl’s father, Judea Pearl. Dr. Pearl is a man of extraordinary strength in the face of extraordinary pain, and I felt somehow that to watch his son being slaughtered would be a kind of personal betrayal. But I won’t say that’s the only reason. The philosopher Berel Lang argues in his book Holocaust Representation that there are some aspects of the death camp process that, by an almost universal human consensus, should just not be represented. Or, if they are, not watched. But I’ll admit my reluctance is not entirely philosophical; it’s part of my “private balancing act.”

You’ll recall that in the classical myth, those who gazed on the Medusa’s head turned to stone. In some respects I think of the savagely severed head of Daniel Pearl as something like the Medusa’s head of contemporary anti-Semitism.

So, I understand the reluctance of some to gaze too deeply into such acts of darkness. I’ve felt it. I just don’t think it should become a principle, a general rule.

Looking and looking away. How much does one want— need—to know? I had a curious experience, one I’ve come to think of as inadvertently emblematic of this dichotomy, in compiling this anthology.

One of the most important and influential, if dispiriting, examples of reporting I read in the months after September 11 was Jeffrey Goldberg’s “Behind Mubarak” in The New Yorker. It was a courageous piece of reporting in which Goldberg, who did not disguise his Jewishness, walked into mosques, madrasas, and media centers in Cairo and asked mullahs and newspaper columnists to talk about 9/11, America, and the Jews. It was about this time that an influential mullah in Cairo (who was also head of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City) advanced the claim that the World Trade Center attack was the work of Jews and added, “If it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did.” He did not make this sound like an unattractive prospect to him.

It was the first instance I’d come across of what began to blossom into a kind of subgenre of radical Islamist rhetorical appeals and encomiums to Hitler. These began to surface in English through the important efforts of the Middle East Media Research Institute. It was an organization founded to promote understanding by translating Arabic media into English. But one of the less savory themes MEMRI⁶ brought to light was a disturbing tendency one could find in Islamist rhetoric: the apostrophe to Hitler.

Goldberg cites one example, a tribute to Hitler written by a columnist in a self-described “very moderate publication” in Cairo: “Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance, against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth. . . .”

“Revenge in advance”: retrospectively “justified” genocide. But he doesn’t stop there. He feels Hitler did not do enough: “[W]e do have a complaint against him [Hitler], for his revenge was not enough. . . .” In other words, he failed to kill every single Jew. This, again, in a “moderate” Egyptian newspaper.

This was exceeded in vile ingenuity by another quote from the Egyptian media, courtesy of MEMRI’s translation. Another kind of complaint against Hitler: “French studies have proven that [the Holocaust] is no more than a fabrication. . . . But I . . . complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart: ‘if only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened . . . so the world could sigh in relief.’ ”

“Sigh in relief,” knowing all the Jews were dead. A unique and groundbreaking fusion of Holocaust denial and Holocaust craving. Even “mainstream” Holocaust deniers at least publicly imply that the mass murder of Jews would have been a bad thing (otherwise why bother to defend Hitler from the charge?).

But the laments about Hitler’s failure to be ruthless enough were not the most disturbing aspect of Goldberg’s piece. That honor goes to Mustafa Bakri’s dream. Bakri is the editor of another Cairo newspaper, and Goldberg says he had “wanted to meet him for some time, ever since I read a translation of a column in which he described a dream. The dream began with his appointment as one of Ariel Sharon’s bodyguards, assigned to protect the Israeli Prime Minister at Cairo’s airport [during a state visit], and in the column . . . he wrote:

The pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland’s soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything . . . and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig’s head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed. . . . The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. . . . I stepped on the pig’s head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost.”

A columnist for an Islamist newspaper in a nation with which Israel is ostensibly at peace. A culture in which such a murderous excrescence is celebrated rather than despised. In which such a “dream” was—it was fairly clear—thinly disguised incitement to real Egyptian bodyguards to “realize the meaning of virility” and carry out the assassination Bakri “dreamed.”

What made it more disturbing was its metaphoric import: the Jewish state was in effect being asked by the international community to put its trust in the good faith, put its very fate in the hands of “bodyguards” such as this. By “trading land for peace,” as they were incessantly being urged to do, they’d be trading defensible borders and, in effect, giving themselves over to “bodyguards” who had not given up dreams like that. Making themselves, making their children’s lives, hostage to the “bodyguard” of purported Islamist goodwill.⁷

Again, Egypt was a land officially “at peace” with Israel. That’s why the bodyguard murder-fantasy, that one paragraph in a six-thousand-word New Yorker report, touched such a nerve in those of us who had wanted to believe there was a simple, attainable, trustable, reasonable solution to the Middle East crisis. That’s why it gave one—gave me—such a sense of hopelessness, a profound historical pessimism about the possibility of peace.

But as I said, something curious happened to Bakri’s dream, to that single paragraph in its transmission to the world.

In preparing this volume I’d asked a researcher to fax me a copy of Goldberg’s New Yorker article she had downloaded from the LexisNexis database, the source that most commentators, journalists, and essayists consult, the one that— in practical effect—defines, describes the contours of the public debate on any given issue, internationally.

As I read over the LexisNexis version of the Goldberg piece for the first time since it came out in The New Yorker of October 8, 2001, and came to the portion where Bakri’s ugly dream is recounted, I was stunned. It wasn’t there anymore. The text came to the place where Goldberg quoted from the dream— “in the column . . . he [Bakri] wrote:”—and after the colon, there was a space break and the text picked up: “Bakri offered me an orange soda. . . .” The existence of the murderous dream from beginning (“The pig landed”) to end (“I stepped on the pig’s head . . .”) was erased.

I called both Goldberg and LexisNexis: neither was aware of the omission. The man at LexisNexis investigated and reported back that it appeared to be a technological glitch, not a deliberate political or ideological erasure. The dream passage was preserved on one New Yorker website version of the piece (not the “printer-friendly” one) but not on LexisNexis. The LexisNexis man said he believed that because the dream was printed in smaller type in The New Yorker, it may have dropped out in the scan that transferred it to the LexisNexis database. So it appears to be an inadvertent omission. Inadvertent, but emblematic of the way that dream of slaughter—and the widespread sentiment it spoke for—had dropped off the scan of discourse on the question.

When I wrote the first draft of this introduction, it had not been restored. Which allowed anyone reading the piece to avoid facing an unsavory truth. Now it’s back again on LexisNexis; the murderous dream has been restored, although of course in reality it was never gone.

But the two versions of the Goldberg story, the one with and the one without the dream, represented two versions of the world—two ways of looking at the world, and looking away.

4) SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

Those two ways of looking at the world: I suppose that’s what I evoked—even if it wasn’t what I set out to do—when I touched off a controversy by putting into print a phrase that some found transgressive, disturbing, and virtually taboo: “a second Holocaust.”

I had set out to write something about the revival of European anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. The kind of anti-Semitism that could feature a child wearing a mock “suicide-bomber” explosive bandolier in a “peace” march. And the emerging phenomenon of “Holocaust inversion,” as Melanie Phillips called it, the pernicious rhetorical device in which Nazi imagery is used to depict Jews. There was Tom Paulin’s famous formulation “the Zionist SS”—merely the most egregious. Holocaust inversion took Holocaust denial one step further: the Jews were not victims, not even “fake” victims, as the deniers contended; the Jews were now portrayed as the perpetrators of the kinds of crimes that had been committed against them.

In any case, the fact that I uttered the phrase “second Holocaust” was, in truth, inadvertent, a Web-surfing happenstance. Safe in America, yet suffering with each new report of a “suicide bombing” in Israel, one morning I followed a link from the popular “InstaPundit” website to a site I’d never visited before, one operated by a Canadian political commentator, David Artemiw.

On that day, he happened to quote a deliberately shocking passage from a Philip Roth novel, the 1993 work called OperationShylock. It’s a novel that is set mainly in Israel, in 1988, during the first Intifada, and begins with a comic doppelgänger premise that turns—lurches at times—into moments of terrifying seriousness. (And ends in, of all places, the back room of Barney Greengrass.) I don’t want to anticipate the excerpt published herein. But in sum, the “real” Philip Roth hears that an impostor calling himself “Philip Roth” is ensconced in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem giving talks about an ideology he calls Diasporism.

This is the belief that exile, Diaspora, the historic dispersion of the Jews, had by that year become a better solution to the problem of Jewish survival than their dangerous “concentration,” so to speak, in the State of Israel. “The Diasporist” argues that the in-gathering to Israel, while it served a purpose in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, now threatens to lead to an unthinkable catastrophe. Unthinkable but not unspeakable. He speaks it. He calls the dread possibility “a second Holocaust.”

The phrase comes in the context of an argument he gets into with the “real” Philip Roth about the danger posed to the Jewish state, not merely from stone-throwing Palestinians but from powerful Islamic states that will someday—a day not too distant—have nuclear weapons. Indeed, Pakistan would soon have the first “Islamic bomb”; Iran was developing missiles with the range to deliver such bombs or hand them off to terrorists.

In fact, when I reread the “second-Holocaust” passage, which Roth wrote in 1992, it was hard not to think of the Iranian leader who (some ten years after Roth wrote the passage) was thinking about the same arithmetic as the Diasporist. In December 2001, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former president of Iran, gave us an insight into the calculations of mass murder that were going on in certain quarters of the world. He gave a speech in which he estimated that in a nuclear exchange with the State of Israel, Iran might lose fifteen million people, but that would be a sacrifice of fifteen million out of a billion Muslims worldwide. And in return, the five million Jews of Israel would be no more. He seemed pleased with the possibility of such a trade-off (regardless of the cost to Palestinian and Israeli Arabs). Perhaps it was just bluster, but less than a year after that speech, Iran announced that it had missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.⁸

Perhaps that was just bluster as well; nonetheless, Rafsanjani was speaking casually of the elimination of the Jewish state and up to five million Jews. The language of extermination— of a second Holocaust—was not entirely new. Indeed, after I’d read and quoted the “second-Holocaust” passage, I recalled a conversation I’d had ten years ago in Jerusalem about the run-up to the Six-Day War with Emil Fackenheim, the late much-admired “theologian of the Holocaust.” Fackenheim was describing the apprehension of an existential threat he’d felt at the time of Purim, in April 1967, two months before the outbreak of the war. Purim is a holiday celebrating Jewish deliverance from slaughter, but (as I’d described it in Explaining Hitler) with “Nasser about to blockade Israel’s ports, a growing threat of a three-front attack to come, with the world indifferent if not hostile, it looked to Fackenheim as if a second Holocaust was in the works.”

“That was the crisis,” Fackenheim told me, “where I first put forward the 614th commandment,” as it has come to be known (an addition to the 613 rules of Jewish orthodoxy): “Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.” (In a sense, every postwar act of anti-Semitic violence or incitement—or indifference to them—can be considered a posthumous victory for Hitler.)

It was that crisis that prompted Fackenheim, an escapee from Hitler’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp, to take an action quite the opposite from Roth’s “Diasporist”: he left Canada, where he’d been living and teaching since the end of World War II, and went to live in imperiled Jerusalem. Nonetheless, what Fackenheim and the Diasporist (who advocated a reverse migration—the return of European Jews in Israel to their homelands) had in common was a willingness to face the possibility, to think about the unbearable and speak the unspeakable. Here’s what Roth’s Diasporist said—these are the lines from the novel which I found on David Artemiw’s website and quoted in my New York Observer column:

The meanings of the Holocaust are for us to determine, but one thing is sure—its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven [Israel] should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. . . . But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will—it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago.

“Much less farfetched.” Say what you will about the Diasporist’s outrageous “solution” to this prospect. Is it in fact utterly “farfetched” now to say that a second Holocaust is possible? Not if you listen to the rhetoric in the mosques and media of the Middle East these days.

Reports of Hitler’s Final Solution were, of course, considered “farfetched” at the time. Anyone who reads David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff’s heartbreaking book A Race Against Death, about the efforts of a small group of Jews to alert the American government to the mass murder being planned and executed in Europe—and the incredulity, obstinacy, and yes, equanimity they found in response—will come to understand that the prospect of a genocide, even as it was happening and as escapees from the death camps were testifying to it, was dismissed as “farfetched,” as “atrocity stories,” as self-interested propaganda, ethnic special pleading.

As Bill Keller pointed out in a piece in The New York Times Magazine (May 26, 2002) about the possibility of terrorist use of nuclear weapons, “The best reason for thinking it won’t happen is that it hasn’t happened yet, and that is terrible logic.” But when something has already happened once, in secrecy, and is now advocated openly, gleefully, it is less improbable that it will happen again. To let the words “second Holocaust” frighten away consideration of a worst-case scenario seems foolish, “terrible logic.” The best way to avoid the “worst case” is not to deny it but to study how to prevent it.

Yet the words seemed to be at the heart of the controversy. There were three kinds of reactions to my essay quoting Roth’s “Diasporist.” Some found merit in my argument that one hidden source of resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe is the burden of guilt Europeans feel about their culture’s widespread complicity with the Final Solution.

Another reaction, especially important to me, came from certain Holocaust survivors. Some wrote or called to express relief that someone had raised the issue. Somehow, having faced the abyss once, they tended to be the ones who were unafraid—or perhaps unsurprised—to face the possibility again. They would not look away.

But a more curious reaction was the purported shock and horror at uttering the words “second Holocaust” at all. Obviously I was not the first; nor, it turns out, was Roth. In Michael Oren’s important book Six Days of War, he speaks, in a postscript interview, of his parents believing back in 1967 that “a second Holocaust was about to occur.” Every all-out war poses this threat to the people of Israel.⁹ An existential threat, a “genocidal” threat (Yehuda Bauer’s term), a “worst-case scenario”—again, the words are less important than the possibility they describe.

In some respects, I could understand the resistance to the phrase: it was akin to my reaction to the video of Daniel Pearl’s murder. I didn’t want to watch it. I suspect at some level I was angry not just at those who made it but at those here who made it available: it represented an ugly truth I preferred not to have to gaze at directly. In addition, peremptory rejection of a worst-case scenario gave those who did so the excuse of not having to consider the many less-than-worst-case scenarios— however horrific—and permitted a return to equanimity. (Another evasion was the false identification of Palestinian “suicide bombers,” rather than, say, Iranian and Pakistani nukes, as the source of the worst-case threat.)

“Second Holocaust.” It was almost as if some numinous taboo had been broken; it was as if it evoked a superstitious dread—that to speak of it was to bring it closer. (Of course silence hadn’t done much good for the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust.) It violated a comforting precept: that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It suggests instead: first time tragedy, second time even worse tragedy. Or perhaps it was an aspect of the mystification of the Holocaust that removes it from history.

So unwillingness to contemplate an unbearable possibility was understandable, even if it led some to project that fear upon those who spoke of it. Whatever the cause, many found unusual versions of denial when reacting to it. While I have no wish to watch the dismemberment of Daniel Pearl’s body, I don’t try to deny that it happened to Daniel Pearl—or that it’s possible something like it could happen again.

It is perhaps an interesting problem in scholastic or Talmudic logic: whether a second Holocaust would in any way be “worse” than Hitler’s because of (for want of a better word) its secondness. It wouldn’t make a difference to the victims of either one. But it might say something even more unspeakable than we knew, or were willing to admit, about human nature, just as we learned more than we wanted to know from the first one.

Interesting questions, but these weren’t the questions raised. Still, I was surprised about the ways in which some chose to avoid the question entirely.

There was what I came to think of as the “displacement syndrome,” for instance. Some sought to avoid considering whether it could happen in the one place it was most likely to happen.

Clearly, in my Observer essay, I’d been speaking of the possible consequences of a nuclear exchange, or a nuclear terrorist attack, in the Middle East—on the State of Israel. But when asked to discuss the question on a talk show, I found myself assailed by a leftist critic of the Jewish state, who said I was mistaken to suggest the possibility of a second Holocaust in Europe. (After I corrected that rather disingenuous geographical displacement, he later proceeded to astonish me further by claiming that Europeans felt no guilt about complicity in the Holocaust. When I challenged him on that assertion, he replied that, well, some European nations, like Portugal, were not complicit. Thank God for the Portuguese!)

So that was the European displacement of the worst-case scenario. Then there was the American displacement. There was, for instance, the implication by a columnist at a New York paper that I was concerned that a second Holocaust might take place in America. In July 2002 he wrote a column calling essentially for more equanimity among American Jews. He cited some recent survey which showed that the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the past year in America had been relatively small. He cited Leon Wieseltier’s May 27, 2002, New Republic essay “Against Ethnic Panic: Hitler Is Dead.” So American Jews should stop fretting, the columnist lectured us, and not get all concerned, like that fellow in the Observer who, he left the impression, believed that we were in danger of a second Holocaust in America.

It was a variation on the displacement syndrome: displacing the locus of concern about a second Holocaust from Israel, where it might actually happen, to America, where there was no suggestion (not from me) that it would.

All of which allowed him to preserve his equanimity— which, stunningly, seemed to extend to the denial that the nuclear extermination of five million Jews would even be a Holocaust. I’m not making this up. After I read his column I called him up, since I’d had lunch with him once, in Jerusalem in fact. It turned out to be a strange conversation, one that revealed an even more desperate desire for equanimity than I could have inferred from his column. It was Holocaust displacement by means of redefinition.

When I questioned him about his characterization of my “second Holocaust” column and went over key passages, he conceded I wasn’t suggesting the possibility of a mass murder in America, but in the Middle East, in Israel. But, he added, even if a nuclear weapon was detonated in Tel Aviv, wiping out most of Israel’s five million Jews, it would be inaccurate to call this “a Holocaust.”

Huh?

That’s right, a true Holocaust involved “rounding up people,” he maintained, the way the Germans did, before killing them. That was the key, he explained to me, the “rounding up.” A missile strike or terrorist-nuke scenario would not involve rounding up and therefore could not be called a “Holocaust” no matter how many million Jews it killed. He seemed almost touchingly fixated in an ingenuous way on the notion that the essence of a Holocaust was to be found in the “rounding-up” process, not the mass murder to follow. No rounding up, no Holocaust, apparently, no matter how many millions were deliberately murdered.

But isn’t the point of a missile strike to kill the maximum number of people without the inconvenience of rounding them up? I asked him, a bit incredulous that he would be advancing this as somehow a consequential distinction.

No, he insisted, a missile strike that wiped out the Jews of Israel wouldn’t be a Holocaust; it would be “an act of war.” How could he know? A handoff of a nuke to a terrorist group and its detonation wouldn’t necessarily be an act of war. It would be an act of terrorism, of deliberate extermination. “Act of war” implies a response, at the very least mutual combat. But he was insisting that a nuclear strike on Israel could result only from “an act of war”—implying the mutual tragedy of combat. It was the moral relativism of those who use the phrase “cycle of violence.” He was in effect displacing the blame—or at least half of it—to the victims. In any case, it appeared he was more comfortable thinking of the death of five million Jews as coming from an “act of war” than from one of those old-fashioned “rounding-up” Holocausts. Equanimity at all costs—even at the cost of intelligibility.

Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how frightening the very phrase “second Holocaust” could be. I’m tempted to say superstitious fear of these words was the real “ethnic panic.” I dwell on this because it occurred to me that this desperation to avoid conceding that another Holocaust, by any definition, was ever possible, even in Israel, was akin to pre–World War II equanimity and denial. The voice of those Jews who urged other Jews to be quiet about reports of death camps in Europe for fear of arousing anti-Semitism here. The mind-set that buried the reports from the death camps on page 12, as Deborah Lipstadt¹⁰ has demonstrated. Don’t be too “ethnic,” too ethnically conspicuous. Was the fear of ethnic panic really panic over ethnicity?

Perhaps accusing Jews of ethnic panic may have made the columnist feel more tough-minded, more steady-nerved than all those allegedly panicky Jews whose concerns he dismissed. But I was hearing echoes of the past: the voice of those Jews who were somewhat embarrassed about other Jews’ speaking up on behalf of fellow Jews. The journalist Ben Hecht (co-author of The Front Page), who worked with Peter Bergson in the early forties to bring Hitler’s Holocaust to the attention of the world, wrote bitterly about such behavior. The New York Times, to its credit, apologized for not following up on the ominous reports.

Most cruelly—and wrongly—however, this “rounding-up” columnist made those who raised a voice of concern sound as if they were afraid for themselves here in America rather than concerned for families in Israel who had to worry when they saw their children go out for a pizza that they might not come back. (Was that ethnic panic?)¹¹ His column implied that since American Jews had nothing to fear for themselves at this point, why should they get all upset on behalf of the fate of fellow Jews half a world away? (I’m alright, Jack.)

This was one of the earliest manifestations of a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as “Holocaust shame.” It begins with Holocaust inconsequentialism—one shouldn’t mention the far, far distant past, in which Hitler murdered six million, in discussing the fate of the five million Jews of Israel. But the columnist— and others who take this line—goes on to try to shame those who do refer to the Holocaust for having done so.

Often, the word “shame” in one of its forms is used: as Tony Judt did in an October 23, 2003, New York Review of Books piece calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state. American Zionists, Mr. Judt wrote, have “shamefully” exploited the Holocaust in arguing that Israel should be a refuge for Jews.

Leon Wieseltier didn’t use the word “shame” in his “Ethnic Panic” essay, but using the word “panic” (and the phrase “the fright of American Jewry” as well) was a similar attempt to shame those who believed the past should have admonitory consequences for the present.

I will let readers consider for themselves the differences between me and Wieseltier and between Wieseltier and Ruth R. Wisse on these questions. (I have refrained, out of fairness, from reprinting herein my own June 10, 2002, response to the Wieseltier essay, but those interested can find it on the Observer website, at http://observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=5949.)

Nonetheless, I’ve come to feel that “the second-Holocaust debate,” as it’s been called, raised an important question: how much weight should be given to the Holocaust in influencing the policy of the Jewish state—and the world’s opinion of that policy?

To some, no Hitler and Holocaust comparisons are allowed. It happened, but it shouldn’t have any policy implications. Arab media could laud Hitler and the Holocaust (when they weren’t trying to deny it happened), but Jews in Israel should not take it into account when deciding on measures of self-preservation.

And was it true that “Hitler is dead”? Not in Islamist media. Was the re-legitimization of Hitler by prominent voices in the Middle East something to be dismissed as merely trivial, then? Ruth Wisse makes the point that in certain crucial ways the hatred in the Middle East for Israel, for Jews, for the Jewish state, is far worse than the hatred that preceded and made possible Hitler’s genocide.

For one thing, Hitler never advertised, never boasted about, and never celebrated his mass murder of Jews. He broadcast his hatred, but he did not broadcast the ongoing extermination process. In fact he took pains to distance himself from the death camps. To carry on the killing process in great secrecy and official denial. Hitler was, as I pointed out in my book, the first Holocaust denier.¹²

But today in the Middle East, Hitler’s mass murder of Jews is publicly celebrated by some, and a second mass murder openly sought by others. Today in the Middle East the murder of Jews by a “suicide bomber” is marked by parties for the families who receive blood-money bonuses for their child’s hideous act. It is not just an individual act of fanaticism spurred by the false promise of paradise, it is a practice backed by an entire culture.

How much should the Holocaust be used as a rationale for a Jewish state’s existence, for its attempts at self-defense? It would seem that self-defense by any people is a legitimate goal, whether they’ve had a Holocaust in the past or not.

But to ignore that particular past is, to say the least, difficult. Of course it is possible to make too much of the Holocaust in the sense of sacralizing and mystifying it. Making it an event beyond all comparison, Jonathan Rosen has suggested, removes it from history almost as effectively as the Holocaust deniers.¹³ This may be the source of the misconception of those who believe no Hitler comparisons should be allowed; Hitler is dead, there will never come another one in the same category of evil as Hitler, and therefore we can learn no lessons, make no contemporary comparisons to Hitler and his Holocaust— they must inevitably be disproportionate with the graven image of evil some turn Hitler into. A mystifying inversion of worship.

But there are lessons to be learned from Hitler and the Holocaust. Some of them are just common sense. In the Observeressay that initiated the controversy, I cited the old proverb “Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice, my fault.” In other words, Jews had been told to remain calm once before—not to “panic,” not to escape Germany, say, because Hitler was nothing new; Jews had lived through anti-Semitic regimes before. Jews in America were told by some of their fellow Jews not to make too much fuss about Jews in Europe in the years before (and during) the Final Solution. Not to make themselves conspicuously “ethnic” by expressing alarm. This turned out to be terribly wrong. (Fool me once, your fault.)

Today Jews are being told not to get alarmed, because “ethnic panic” will “undermine a political solution,” undermine the trust they are asked to place in the benign intent of regimes and societies that promote the spread of Hitlerian rhetoric and celebrate the massacre of Jewish children.

They’re being told they must trust, otherwise they’ll be called “unreasonable.” They’re being asked (after making unprecedented negotiating concessions) to ignore subsequent years of mass murder of their children and look to the good faith of their “negotiating partners” to shift from subsidizing suicide killers of Jews to ensuring the safety of Jews. (Fool me twice, my fault.)

5) INTENT AND EFFECT

To return to the question of the weight of the Holocaust, I’d argue that in fact it has not been overemphasized. It may have been over-mystified, perhaps over-museumized, but its significance to our estimation of the dark potential of human nature and the merciless, unredemptive processes of history has only begun to be taken into account. As George Steiner put it in an interview for my Hitler book, the Holocaust “removed the reinsurance on human hope.” Tore away the safety net beneath which our estimates of human nature’s lowest depths had not previously plunged.

I think this helps explain something else relatively new in what has been called the new anti-Semitism: the recent shift of anti-Semitism from Right to Left. The Left, for one thing, may have put its faith too blindly in an optimistic view of the power of Reason in human nature, one that looks away from those depths.

This shift was the not-so-buried implication of the warning that Lawrence Summers delivered in September 2002 to the Harvard community in now-famous remarks he made at Memorial Chapel.

Summers was reacting to an accumulation of incidents in the year since 9/11. Not just synagogue burnings in Europe or the “suicide bombings” in Israel but disturbing developments in some left-wing rhetoric here in America. Chiefly on campuses, in the “Israel divestiture” movement, for instance, which seeks to delegitimize (as well as disinvest from) Israel. It was there as well in the “anti-globalist” and “peace” demonstrations that, after 9/11, prominently featured anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery.

What Summers focused on was not just that a point had been reached at which anti-Zionism tipped over into antiSemitism, but that it came from an unexpected place. He defined himself as not an alarmist, not a victim of “ethnic panic,” so to speak, described himself as not the kind of person who hears “the sound of breaking glass,” of Kristallnacht, in every insult or slight to Jews.

Nonetheless, he said, he felt compelled to sound an alarm:

“[W]here anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israel have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populaces, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not intent.” The perception of a new anti-Semitism, he continued, is “less alarmist in the world of today than [in the world of a] year ago.”

It is that phrase—anti-Semitic in “effect if not intent”— that may have been even more provocative than his description of the shift from Right to Left in the debate that followed. It spoke to the question of when anti-Zionism became antiSemitism.

“Effect if not intent . . .” I believe it’s clear what Summers was trying to say. The effect/intent relationship was elucidated this way by the British historian Peter Pulzer:¹⁴ Some anti-Zionists deny their intent is anti-Semitic, and are thus heedless of the effect of their double standard in singling out the Jewish state for human rights opprobrium ignored elsewhere. “Effect simply consists,” Pulzer wrote, “ultimately of the resurfacing of the underground repertoire of anti-Jewish stereotypes, instinctively understood by both the utterer and their recipient.” Effect was evident in indisputably anti-Semitic incidents growing out of “anti-Zionist” activism on American campuses such as those reported on by eyewitnesses such as Dr. Laurie Zoloth at San Francisco State and Eli Muller at Yale.

I’d tend to agree with Pulzer. Purportedly “anti-Zionist” criticism of Israel increasingly couched in the rhetoric of ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes—“grasping” Jews, hook-nosed caricatures of money-grubbing Jews—is not mere anti-Zionism. Consider the cartoon that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 2003 that featured Ariel Sharon crossing a bridge labeled “peace” only because the bridge had been “baited,” so to speak, with dollar signs (symbolizing U.S. subsidies). That would surely persuade the stiff-necked but money-grubbing Jew Sharon (drawn with an exaggeratedly hooklike beak for a nose) to be reasonable! I think one can safely say this is no longer simple anti-Zionism. Whatever the “intent,” the effect is anti-Semitic.¹⁵ It is here that one finds special relevance in Berel Lang’s reflections on the very popular defense that denying one is anti-Semitic proves that one can’t be anti-Semitic.

But to return to the question of the shift in the locus of antiSemitism from Right to Left, I don’t mean to imply that more traditional right-wing anti-Semitism has evaporated. There are of course old-fashioned white racists and neo-Nazis scattered throughout the Western world. As Andrew Sullivan put it, “It’s important to realize that old far-Right anti-Semitism has not been replaced by the new far-Left variety. Just supplemented.” One can find it among some “paleoconservatives,” as they’re called. And while there is some reason to welcome the apparent philo-Semitism of the fundamentalist movement in America, there is also some reason for concern about the doctrine beneath some of the philo-Semitism: the belief in the ultimate conversion, or self-erasure, of the Jews in the eschatology of the Last Days.

But the appearance of anti-Semitism on the Left is, at least on the surface, paradoxical. The Left is, or was supposed to be, about Tolerance, against prejudice, the friend of the Jews (or, as the more cynical have said, on the side of the Jews as long as they were victims). Many Jews, including to some extent myself, saw democratic socialism as embodying some of the ethical spirit of Judaism’s prophets and sages.

But there is another side to the Left’s relationship to Judaism. Something that became apparent in that year 2002 when some icons of the Left, such as Naomi Klein and Todd Gitlin, felt compelled to speak out about it, sought to separate the Left from “the socialism of fools,” as anti-Semitism has been called.¹⁶

There were those who argued that in some ways anti-Semitism found a natural home on the Left. At the heart of that argument was the notion of Reason. The Left’s Enlightenment faith in human perfectibility had replaced God with an almost religious faith in Reason. And (as the writer David Samuels suggested to me) for the first Enlightenment philosophers, such as the notoriously anti-Semitic Voltaire, religion represented unReason, and Jewishness was the fount of all religion and thus of all un-Reason.

Paul Berman put the Left’s devotion to Reason at the heart of his analysis of the double standard the Left applied to the “suicide bombings” in Israel. Deploring them, of course (with some exceptions), but always with a “but”: but they are understandable in some way. They must be. And to understand all is to forgive all, we’re told by Enlightenment philosophes.

What Berman argued was that, confronted with a “suicide bomber” blowing himself and dozens of men, women, and children to bits, the Left in effect could not look directly at the act, because it’s so unbearable, because to take it all in might lead to admitting that some things can’t be contained or explained within the framework of Reason—especially murderous religious fanaticism. That not all problems are soluble. That some, history suggests, are ineluctably tragic. Left theories of history, from Whig Progressivism to Marxist dialectical materialism, tend to lack a tragic sense of life—and of history.

And so one saw variations on “looking away” again— explaining it, distancing it, “contextualizing” it with “reasons.” This accomplished two goals: first, it removed the element of unreason from the “suicide bomber’s” act itself. Made it “understandable” in both senses of the word. And second, it allowed a shift of blame to the victims of the blast. Made them part of the oppressive hegemony that in some abstract—horribly abstract—way “deserved it.” Thus, there was Reason behind their death. Thus, there was a measure of justice to it. As there was to those who responded to the attacks of September 11 by saying, in one way or another, “Sorry about the three thousand dead, but America had it coming,” or, alternately, “America needed the lesson.”

Another, deeper connection of the Left to anti-Semitism is to be found in Marxism itself. I’m not the first to point out that much Marxist imagery is a kind of universalized version of anti-Semitic imagery. The greedy capitalist is substituted for the greedy Jew, the suffering proletariat for the suffering Jesus scourged by Jews. The promised Marxist future dissolution of the state and universal peace, once the exploiter (read, Jewish) class is eliminated, is substituted for the promise of Heaven for the Elect.

In fact I’d suggest there is a darker element in some of the Left’s willingness to demonize Israel. It has to do with a different kind of denial, not the neo-Nazi Holocaust denial but the denial of—and then the equanimity about—the Marxistholocausts of the twentieth century. The reaction—or lack of reaction—to the emerging evidence for mass murders in the millions in Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China, in somewhat lesser numbers (but greater percentage of the population) in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. None of which has resulted in many on the Left questioning whether there might be some connection between Marxist ideology and the frequency of mass murder in Marxist regimes. Well, they’re not really Marxist regimes—they weren’t doing Marxism right, some will say. Or even if there were mass murders, they came from good intentions, utopian aspirations that somehow seemed to go awry—so it’s not like Hitler’s mass murder at all.

Well, there are certainly differences. But the Heideggerian equanimity, the deafening silence, the lack of outrage of much of the Left about the mass murders and the gulags in Marxist regimes—during and after—has its most practical and disheartening effect in the way it has not succeeded in altering the longstanding corollary perception on the Left that the locus of greatest evil in recent history is the United States. Only by ignoring Marxist genocides can one come to this conclusion.¹⁷

U.S. allies, such as Israel, thus tend to be judged by the same a priori prejudice, as agents of intrinsically evil American imperialism. So anti-Zionism, along with the anti-Semitism it encourages or shades into, is, in some instances, a derivative of a kind of ahistorical, knee-jerk Left anti-Americanism which ignores Marxist genocides and still views the United States as the evil empire—and lacks the willingness to question judgments that proceed from that. Such as the Left judgment on Israel.

I was particularly impressed by the analysis of the antiSemitism of the Left by Melanie Phillips in London’s Spectator. She suggests an even deeper, more provocative source of Left anti-Semitism, one elucidated by a Polish intellectual at a Jerusalem conference who argued: “The Left could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy . . . founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view.”

Whether you agree or not with this take on the subject, it has become apparent to me that Reason, reasonableness, unreasonableness, and how they’re defined are central to the argument over what is mere anti-Zionism and what is antiSemitism. To many anti-Zionists, there can be no reasonable explanation for Israelis’ “unreasonableness”—their unwilling ness to trust the 300 million Muslims surrounding them— except for some unreasonable stiff-necked character apparently intrinsic to Jewish nature. Or a malign Jewish disposition to torment those who share their land. Thus anti-Zionism elides into anti-Semitism. To me the most pernicious implication of some anti-Zionists, the heart of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, is in the implication that, somehow, malevolent Jews enjoy imposing an occupation with its attendant restrictions and suffering on Palestinians. Jews want to live in peace, but three wars in which Arab states tried to drive them into the sea, and a terror campaign by Palestinians who reject the idea of a Jewish state, have left Israelis with the tragic choice between self-defense and self-destruction. The root cause of Palestinian suffering has been the rejection by Arab and Palestinian leadership of the Jewish state’s right to exist at all.

To many Israelis and many Jews, their people are asked to be “reasonable” under a definition of “reasonableness” that once again puts the existence of their state, of their people, in peril. This is why Amos Oz’s essay is so important. Important because, however brief, it appeared in a Left publication such as The Nation.

It is, in fact, the shortest piece in this collection, but it says something very significant, from a very significant standpoint. Oz, the celebrated Israeli novelist, has been well known as a founder of Peace Now. And while he still supports the Palestinian right to statehood and has opposed the occupation and the Jewish settlements in the disputed territories, he recognizes that things have changed. That one can’t just look narrowly at Israel, Palestine, and the lovely vision of a two-state solution in isolation.

Rather, Oz writes that one must take into account the war “waged by fanatical Islam from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land.”

He then asks the difficult question that goes to the heart of the “reasonableness” issue, the issue that is itself at the heart of the mutation of anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. This is Amos Oz’s question: “[W]ould an end to occupation [of the West Bank] terminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?”

His answer: “This is hard to predict. If jihad comes to an end, both sides would be able to sit down and negotiate peace. If it does not, we would have to seal and fortify Israel’s logical border, the demographic border, and keep fighting for our lives against fanatical Islam.” (This is why the discussion of the origin and reformability of Muslim anti-Semitism, engaged in here by Bernard Lewis and Tariq Ramadan, is so important: is jihad against unbelievers intrinsic to Islam?)

Here are Amos Oz’s final words: “If, despite simplistic visions, the end of occupation will not result in peace, at least we will have one war to fight rather than two. Not a war for our full occupancy of the holy land, but a war for our right to live in a free and sovereign Jewish state in part of that land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win. Like any people who were ever forced to fight for their very homes and freedom and lives.”

I wish I could share his optimistic certainty about the outcome of such a war. But what is most important is that Oz doesn’t look away from the harsh reality shadowing the easy talk of a reasonable “two-state” solution: the holy war against Jews.

AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES of reading the literature of antiSemitism—both the thing itself and the analysis of the thing itself—I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation for its persistence. Not a single-pointed answer, anyway. In Explaining HitlerI explored theological anti-Semitism with Hyam Maccoby, who believes it is not so much the Christ-killing accusation that kept the flame of Christian anti-Semitism burning— although it certainly has been a factor—but the more insidious Judas story, the Jew as betrayer and backstabber. (Hitler rode to power on the fraudulent “stab-in-the-back” myth, the one that had the supposedly near-victorious German armies in World War I stabbed in the back by Jewish Marxist Judases on the home front.)

I’ve explored Daniel Goldhagen’s belief in the primacy of what he calls “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, the racially rather than religiously based anti-Semitism that arose in nineteenth-century Germany and helped mold Hitler. There’s truth there as well. As there is in Saul Friedlander’s contention that Wagner’s fusion of religious and racial anti-Semitism was crucial in shaping Hitler’s psyche.

But why the always ready market for anti-Semitism, religious and racial, medieval and modern, and now postmodern?¹⁸ I gave respectful if skeptical attention to George Steiner’s view that the world continues to hate the Jews for their “invention of conscience”—for what Steiner calls the Jews’ threefold “blackmail of transcendence.” Which is how Steiner characterizes Moses’s demand for perfect obedience, Jesus’s demand for perfect love, and Marx’s demand for perfect justice. Three demands for perfection made by Jews that are unfulfillable by fallible human beings—and thus, Steiner believes, the source of bitter and recurrent resentment toward the people who dreamed up these impossible demands. As I suggested, this can, even if it’s not intended to, devolve into a blame-the-victims argument.

Others say it’s because Jews have long chosen to be “a people apart,” with an unwillingess to assimilate or submerge their identity in modernity’s universalism. Others maintain it was the Jews’ invention of modernity. The explanations multiply and contradict one another.

And perhaps—and this might sound at first like a radical suggestion—it doesn’t matter anymore. The reasons, the origins, no longer matter. At this point anti-Semitism has become so embedded in history, or in sub-history, the subterranean history and mythology of hatred, that it will always be there, a template for whatever hurts need to find an easy answer, a simple-minded balm: the Jews are responsible. The explanation of renewed anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism: its ineradicable pre-existing history—and its efficacy. It has become its own origin.

What is to be done? One answer was suggested by Leon Wieseltier at a conference he helped organize under the auspices of YIVO, the New York–based Jewish cultural institution, in May 2003. The conference was called “Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West,” so apparently it was now no longer panicky to speak of such matters. And it brought together an impressive group of speakers.

In any case, although out of town at that time I was impressed by the tape I later heard of the opening address by Wieseltier. He said a number of very important things, I thought. Some had been said before by others, but he said them especially well.

One important thing he said is that those who consider that anti-Semitism is a problem only for Jews ought to reconsider: “If anti-Semitism is to vanish from the earth it will be from the transformation of non-Jewish rather than Jewish [ peoples]. . . . In this sense it is not a Jewish problem at all . . . it is a prejudice whose object is not its cause . . . if you wish to study racism, study whites, not blacks.” But he also said that the struggle against anti-Semitism is “a requirement of self-interest and of dignity” for Jews.

I’m pleased to cede virtually the last word in this essay to the “Ethnic Panic” author, because it seemed to me he had learned much from the events of the year that followed his “Ethnic Panic” polemic—and perhaps from Ruth Wisse’s critique of it.¹⁹

But I wouldn’t say all non-Jews have abandoned that responsibility Leon Wieseltier spoke of, for anti-Semitism in our culture. I have been impressed by the seriousness with which some Christians and Muslims have addressed the question. Andrew Sullivan’s “Anti-Semitism Watch” on his weblog has been invaluable in spotlighting shameful incidents. As has Glenn Reynolds’s “InstaPundit” website and Jeff Jarvis’s “buzz-machine.” So have George Will’s columns and commentaries, and those of Stanley Crouch and Christopher Caldwell. Harold Evans and Oriana Fallaci were early and important voices. I’m sure there are more Christians on the Left who have spoken out, even if for some reason none come instantly to mind. (Unless you count Christopher Hitchens, who, while half Jewish—and only half Leftist now according to the more rigid ideologues—deserves credit for popularizing a brilliantly compressed polemical coinage for Jew-hating Middle Eastern terrorists: “Islamo-fascists.” As in, isn’t the Left supposed to oppose fascism?)

But to return to the question of optimism I first raised in regard to Amos Oz. I wish I could find an upbeat way of concluding this essay. As I write this draft, two Turkish synagogues and a Jewish school in France have just been bombed. The world is discussing whether the pronouncements of the retiring Malaysian prime minister that Jews rule the world is more than “merely anti-Semitic” but somehow a voice for reform in the Islamic world.

And a new cinematic version of the Passion Play, the depiction of the Gospel story of the death of Jesus, is upon us. By an auteur who claims he is not making a movie so much as presenting “history.” Perhaps it is history, perhaps not; there seems a certain amount of disagreement even among Christians, even among the Gospels, as to what is or what isn’t “history.” But Mel Gibson thinks he knows.

But still, I was surprised by the savagery of his attack on Frank Rich for raising questions about the project. “I want to kill him,” taken alone, might be angry hyperbole, but the primitive specificity of “I want his intestines on a stake,” particularly in this context, could not help but recall the New Testament image of the death of Judas, who, in one Gospel at least, is depicted, after betraying Jesus, as taking a violent fall and literally spilling his intestines in what is later called a “field of blood.” The wish to see Rich’s “intestines on a stake” sounds to me like more than an accidental coincidence of imagery.

Rich’s response was both deft and dignified, but why the lack of outrage from others? A death threat, however rhetorical, because a Jew raised questions about a movie about the death of Jesus? Has the rhetorical bar been lowered that far?

History. One thing that is history—undeniable, documented, bloodstained history—is the effect if not the intent of the Passion Play in the past. For those unfamiliar with these effects, I recommend the scholar James Shapiro’s book Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play. The deicide—or “Christ-killer—accusation lives to incite anew, in effect if not intent.

Once, I actually attended a Passion Play, the surprisingly elaborately mounted “Passion Play of the Ozarks” presented by the Christ of the Ozarks theme park in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. In addition to boasting it had the tallest statue of Jesus in the Northern Hemisphere, the theme park featured many miniature Shetland ponies that were the favorite of Gerald L. K. Smith, the anti-Semitic demagogue who founded the Christ of the Ozarks project and peddled his anti-Jewish propaganda through its gift store.

Smith had enjoyed some success as a “populist” acolyte of Huey Long after Long died. Populism turned to anti-Semitism, and watching the Passion Play, one could understand his enthusiasm for it.

For those wondering what I was doing there, it was the early 1980s and I had an idea for a novel (which I never wrote) in which the Passion Play of the Ozarks would be a setting. So it was “material” in a sense, and perhaps it’s changed since then, but I found it discomfiting to watch the Passion Play, with its black-bearded Jewish caricatures in villainous makeup and sinister black robes scheming with Judas to get Christ killed through betrayal. It wasn’t presented as “history” so much as the Gospel Truth.

I’m sorry for the digression. The question I was addressing —or avoiding—was optimism. As in: any hope for it? I’ll admit I’m not constitutionally predisposed to optimism. The study of modern history is not a source of optimism.²⁰ At the very least, though, I’m the sort of pessimist who seeks out sources of hope. This is something I did when I was preparing to give a talk on contemporary anti-Semitism—that fill-in talk for Jonathan Rosen in fact (to bring things full circle). I e-mailed Ruth Wisse at Harvard, where she is a professor of literature, and asked her if she saw any basis for hope for the situation in Israel. She replied that a distinction must be made between false hope and real hope. That false hope means trusting sworn enemies for your security. That for true hope, one has to draw faith from the continued survival of the Jewish people for three millennia despite anti-Semitism. From their continuing determination to fight for their survival, and not hide their faces from the truth.

I do not suggest that the truth will set us free from antiSemitism; perhaps nothing will. But there are a couple of glimmers of hope, even to this pessimist. First is the fact that people are no longer denying there’s cause for concern. In addition to Leon Wieseltier’s YIVO conference, there was the turnabout of New York magazine, which, in that spring of 2002, when some people were speaking out, published a piece by Amy Wilentz that looked down its nose at those who did. A year and a half later, the same magazine published a cover story, “The New Face of Anti-Semitism,” which was subtitled “In much of the world, hating the Jews has become politically correct. How did this happen?” In addition, there were books by Phyllis Chesler, Alan Dershowitz, Abraham Foxman, Kenneth Timmerman, and Gabriel Schoenfeld which sounded an alarm. (Readers are entitled to ask why is this book different from all those other books, and I’d suggest that, while I certainly have a point of view, I wanted to include a multiplicity of perspectives, some of them clashing, on the questions within the question of antiSemitism. That and also the presence of Cynthia Ozick, who writes on this subject with the incandescent clarity of a biblical prophet.)

But perhaps the most surprising suggestion of an optimistic development in the situation itself (as opposed to the kind of attention paid to it) could be found in a May 7, 2003, article by Yigal Carmon, the founder of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, in Washington. It’s a report entitled “Harbingers of Change in the Anti-Semitic Discourse of the Arab World.”

It’s a startling document²¹ because it suggests that the light MEMRI has thrown on the dark utterances of the most extreme Islamist anti-Semites is actually having some effect: causing some of the more responsible intellectuals, commentators, and political figures in the Arab Middle East to condemn the worst excrescences of such rhetoric as embarrassments to the image of Islam in the civilized world.

Carmon cites the following four developments:

“Calls to Cancel the Beirut Holocaust Deniers’ Conference”: The conference “is, in effect, a conference against the truth,” a columnist in Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic language paper, said scornfully. “This is a conference against consciousness.”

“Saudi Editor Apologizes for Publishing Blood Libel”: The editor of the Saudi government paper Al-Riyadh apologized for publishing “an idiotic and false news item regarding the use of human blood” in Jewish religious rituals, a practice that “does not exist in the world at all.”

“Criticism of Anti-Semitic Series [on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion] on Egyptian Television”: The secretary-general of the Palestinian Ministry called the Protocols “a stupid pamphlet full of nonsense,” and important Egyptian government officials called the Protocols “a fabrication,” “an example of racist literature and hate literature.”

“A New Recommendation by Al-Azhar [University Institute for Islamic Research]: Stop Calling Jews ‘Apes and Pigs.’ ”

“It appears,” Carmon writes, “that the increase in anti-Semitic propaganda in the Arab media since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada . . . has led some Arab intellectuals to rethink the matter and reject anti-Semitic statements.”

While some of this may stem from opportunistic concerns about image, even such concern is a cause for some tempered optimism.²² Calling attention to this kind of incitement—facing rather than denying it—might help forestall it. It’s too early to hope such a process might work, considering the crude and savage incitement of radical Islamist anti-Semitism. But the MEMRI report suggests that memory—not dismissing the phenomenon, not looking away out of some exaggerated panic over “panic”—might be at least a source of some hopeful change.

So any optimism I can muster comes from those who do face the facts and fight the good fight: the translators at MEMRI; those dedicated souls at the Anti-Defamation League, at CAMERA, and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, who deal with the depressing day-to-day reality of antiSemitism; intrepid reporters such as Jeffrey Goldberg; weblist media critics like Tom Gross; brave local cops like the one in the Paris banlieue s that Marie Brenner chronicles; “bloggers” like Meryl Yourish, Jeff Jarvis, and Roger Simon, to name a few; the “Exposing the Exposer” website guys Zachary and Mo; non-Jews such as Oriana Fallaci and Harold Evans who speak out because they understand that anti-Semitism is a problem of and for non-Jews as well. All people who refuse to look away. All people who believe that facing the threat directly will make a difference. I hope they’re right.

As Lawrence Summers put it: “I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy—a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But that depends on all of us.”

No more posthumous victories for Hitler.

January 5, 2004