Thanks Ezra, I have the Bernstein book, but I will look up your essay.

The NY Times behavior during the Shoah was disgraceful and I am surprised that the paper survived that scandal intact.

It still makes my blood boil when I think about it.

Thank you. For some other references of things you mentioned in your earlier post.

On Hannah Arendt, you may find Richard Bernstein’s book, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Polity Press, 1996) an interesting read. If the debate surrounding the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy is of specific interest, then I will plug my own essay,The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics,” Democratiya No. 9 (Summer, 2007)pp. 141-165.

On the New York Times and the Holocaust, there is some information in Alexander and Bogdanor’s book that I have previously referred you to, but I would also suggest Max Frankel’s article, “Turning Away from the Holocasut,” New York Times, November 14, 2001. I also suggest Laurel Leff, “When the Facts Didn’t Speak for Themselves: The Holocaust in the New York Times, 1939-1945,” The Harvard International Journal of Press Politics Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000)pp.52-72. Below is a short extract:

in 2,077 days of war in Europe, what was happening to the Jews was never the lead story in the New York Times, even when American troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. The story of the Holocaust–meaning articles that focused on the discrimination, the deportation, and ultimately the destruction of the Jews–made the Times front page only twenty-four times, or about once every three months, and never did front-page stories appear back to back or did one follow another over a span of a few days. Even when the Holocaust made the Times front page, the stories obscured the fact that most of the victims were Jews. So newspaper-reading Americans may have been aware that millions of civilians had been murdered during the war without connecting those deaths to the distinctly Jewish Holocaust. In addition, the Times only intermittently and timidly editorialized about the extermination of the Jews, and the paper rarely highlighted it in either the Week in Review or the magazine section. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Holocaust did not penetrate Americans’ wartime consciousness.

You can in fact read the whole article (excluding some of the end notes) for free on line in Google Books as it is available for preview commencing on page 51 of Robert Shapiro’s edited book, Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American & International Journalism during the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

I hope this has been on some help.

I will take a look at it.

Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor Eds,The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Transaction Publishers, 2006)

Away from Butler, there are some great chapters on Chomsky and Finkelstein as well as many others. The book is both informative and entertaining whilst written in a scholarly fashion and I highly recommend it being read.

Are intelligent people in the US who take an interest in such matters generally unaware that there have always been Jews that opposed Jewish nationhood?

On the contrary, the majority seems to believe that those are the only legitimate Jews and that Jews who support Jewish existence in the Middle East are a recent novelty of the extreme right wing.

is there widespread confusion in the United States of the terms “Jew” and “Zionist”?

Yes, to the same extent that there is confusion between “welfare recipient” and “Nigger”, and between “illegal immigrant” and “Latino”. People clearly use one word to mean the other, but they will use the correct word if you try to pin them down through a manufactured test like the one you suggest. People also routinely use “neocon” to mean “Jew”.

Caveat: I see almost all of this activity online. The people I know offline don’t take an interest in politics of any kind.

On the contrary Eamonn, the fact Arendt was critical of Zionism is common knowledge. What isn’t common knowledge is that Arendt was an early supported of Zionism in the 30’s. When she came to the US she became more critical, probably because she wanted to be among the intellectual in crowd.

However, during the 1973 war when she thought Israel would be destroyed she made monetary donations to the extremist organization the Jewish Defense League (not some centrist Zionist organization). Arendt was extremely inconsistent on this issue.

I don’t think AIPAC even notices scholars who are anti-Zionists much less condemn them.

In general, before world war two and the Holocaust there were many anti-Zionist scholars and intellectuals in Europe. Most of them, though, were killed by the Nazis.

Here in the US the publisher of the New York Times was famously and anti-Zionist who wouldn’t allow his paper to print articles about the Holocaust while it was in progress in Europe. (He worked tirelessly to get his own family out of Germany but help doom many other Jews.)

This isn’t much talked about either.

Judith Butler, I didn’t even know she was Jewish till she started attacking Israel and called herself a Jew, views are not new and they are as wrong today as they were when they articulated in Europe and in the US by many intellectuals most of whom opted for assimilation an didn’t even consider themselves Jews.