On the main Z Word site this month, something very special: an interview with Paul Berman by Michelle Sieff. In a wide-ranging conversation, Berman talks about the recent conflict between Hamas and Gaza, western perceptions of Hamas, the outlook for Middle East policy under the Obama Administration and the persistence of antisemitism in our own time.
Much as I anticipate and expect that you will read the interview in its entirety, I want to quote Berman here on the subject of antisemitism. Some scholars of antisemitism argue that we are more precisely dealing with antisemitisms, since the notion of an age-old hatred which simply mutates is overly simplistic. On the face of it, this is a reasonable objection; for precisely that reason, Berman’s parsing of the history of antisemitism deserves particular attention:
The unstated assumption is always the same. To wit: the universal system for man’s happiness has already arrived (namely, Christianity, or else Enlightenment anti-Christianity; the Westphalian state system, or else the post-modern system of international institutions; racial theory, or else the anti-racist doctrine in a certain interpretation). And the universal system for man’s happiness would right now have achieved perfection - were it not for the Jews. The Jews are always standing in the way. The higher one’s opinion of oneself, the more one detests the Jews.
It is a point worth absorbing. Too many of us regard antisemitism as belonging to the realm of the uncouth, the intoxicant of the beer hall, perhaps, but not the bistro. Its true home, as Berman says, is in the loftiest thoughts. Therein lies its danger.
“Too many of us regard antisemitism as belonging to the realm of the uncouth, the intoxicant of the beer hall, perhaps, but not the bistro. Its true home, as Berman says, is in the loftiest thoughts. Therein lies its danger.”
Even a cursory knowledge of antisemitism in Europe and sometimes even in the US would reveal that antisemitism has often been the pastime of intellectuals and members of the upper classes.
In 1894 Bernard Lazare published “L’Antisémitisme, son histoire est ses cause” which was an attack on French upper class and intellectual antisemitism during the Dreyfus affair. In the US even well regarded poets like William Carlos Williams, in his letters and E E Cummings are known to have written antisemitic declarations. The cases of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are too well known to mention here.
Some of this is probably well known. What is less well known is the anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by demoralized Jewish intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and others. Trilling in an introduction to the stories of Tess Shlesinger (the book is out of print) admitted that during the Hebron riot of the late 20’s he among other American Jews supported the Arabs.
Zionism has always been a challenge to the national identity of many Jewish intellectuals in the Western world.
Here is an example of what Paul Berman is talking about.
In this issue of the NY Review of book there are a number of letters on Iran in which the writers take it for granted that Israel is the real problem.
‘How to Deal with Iran’: Two Exchanges:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22410
To Victor Gilinsky the Former Commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Israel’s “intransigence” is as much the problem as is Iran nuclear ambitions; as if Israel had threatened Iran the way said that it wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.”
In another letter by Nikki Keddie the Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Iranian History at UCLA it is the US and the “Zionists” (he doesn’t even bother to mention Israel by name) that is the problem: “Congressional resolutions supporting and giving aid to Iranian oppositional activities have predictably backfired and opened reformers to the charge of being US and Zionist agents.”
It’s this taken for granted attitude that Israel is somehow the real problem in the world by many intellectuals’ magazines and journals that is the driving force of today’s antisemitism.
This is true no less in the US than in Europe and Latin America.
They need to be called to account.
Correction:
I said above that “Some of this is probably well known. What is less well known is the anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by demoralized Jewish intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and others. Trilling in an introduction to the stories of Tess Shlesinger (the book is out of print) admitted that during the Hebron riot of the late 20’s he among other American Jews supported the Arabs.”
Trilling did indeed say that he supported the Arabs at the time, but he made the comment in an essay published as an afterward to a novel by Tess Shlessinger (The Unpossessed) and not as an introduction to her short stories.
The essay was reprinted as “A Novel of the Thirties” in “The last Decade: Essays and Reviews 1965-1975″ by Lionel Trilling.
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Decade-Essays-Reviews-1965-1975/dp/0156488922/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236112198&sr=1-2
To understand why a number of Jewish intellectuals take a decidedly anti Israel point of view it’s important to go back to their stance a few decades or even before there was a Jewish State in order to see the kinds of anxieties Zionism brought out in their view about their national identity.