Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

The Two Views of Anti-Semitism
Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Stanley Fish has been musing about modern anti-Semitism over at the NYT blogs page. (You have to be a subscriber to read.) He addresses a fundamental disconnect: Jews are doing better than ever but haven't given up their underlying sense of fear.

By all the available evidence, formal and informal, precariousness does not mark the situation of the Jewish community today, at least not in this country. Whether the measure is education, wealth, ownership of property, influence in the corridors of power, prominence in the professions, or accomplishments in the arts, Jews in the United States are visible and successful to a degree that is remarkable given their relatively small numbers (around 2 percent of the population). Yet as Professor Charles Small of Yale University reports, “Increasingly, Jewish communities around the world feel under threat,” and there are some Jews in this country who share this feeling, not because they are themselves threatened (although that does occasionally happen), but because they fear – in the spirit of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” or Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” – that what is happening elsewhere may soon happen here.

Why should they think that? Part of the answer is to be found in the relationship between three words – Israel, Iraq and anti-Semitism. Much of the world has been opposed to the Iraq war from its beginning, and now after four years 70 percent of Americans share the world’s opinion. Some who deplore the war believe that those who got us into it and cheered it on did so, at least in part, out of a desire to improve Israel’s position in the Middle East. Those who hold this view (and of course there are other analyses of the war’s origins) fear that the same people – with names like Wolfowitz, Pearle, Feith, Abrams, Kristol, Kagan, Krauthammer, Wurmser, Libby and Lieberman – are pushing for a strike against Iran, arguably a greater threat to Israel than Iraq ever was. Why, they ask, should our foreign policy be held hostage to the interests of a small country that is perfectly capable of defending itself and is guilty of treating the Palestinians, whose land it appropriated, in ways that are undemocratic and even, in the opinion of many, criminal?

After reviewing the other view of anti-Semitism, he concludes his summary:

So there you have two stories: anti-Semitism is on the rise and it’s time to get out those “Never Again” signs. Or, it’s not anti-Semitism in the old virulent sense, but a rational, if problematic, response by Middle East actors and their supporters in the West to what they see as “an oppressive occupying force”; don’t take it personally. I understand this second story, and appreciate its nuance, but I can’t bring myself to accept it, if only because I believe that the viral version of anti-Semitism is always capable of regaining its full and deadly form even when it is apparently dormant or weakened. All it needs is a pretext, and any pretext will do. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t exist, it would attach itself to something else; but it does exist, and anti-Semitism couldn’t be happier.

I have to say that I'm more sympathetic to the second approach than Stanley Fish is.

Labels: Judaism

Posted by B Feiler at 8:03 AM
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