Those Who Forget the Past Read online

  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 utteranc
es 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

  PART ONE

  AWAKENINGS

  JONATHAN ROSEN

  The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism

  WHEN I WAS G ROWI NG UP, my father would go to bed with a transistor radio set to an all-news station. Even without a radio, my father was attuned to the menace of history. A Jew born in Vienna in 1924, he fled his homeland in 1938; his parents were killed in the Holocaust. I sometimes imagined my father was listening for some repetition of past evils so that he could rectify old responses, but he may just have been expecting more bad news. In any event, the grumbling static from the bedroom depressed me, and I vowed to replace it with music more cheerfully in tune with America. These days, however, I find myself on my father’s frequency. I have awakened to anti-Semitism.

  I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ killer, I do not feel that prejudicial hiring practices will keep me out of a job, and I am not afraid that the police will come and take away my family. I am, in fact, more grateful than ever that my father found refuge in this country. But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

  I was born in 1963, a generation removed and an ocean away from the destruction of European Jewry. My mother was born here, so there was always half the family that breathed in the easy air of postwar America. You don’t have to read a lot of 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. My own private balancing act has involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered grandparents and trying to live a modern American life. I studied English literature in college and in graduate school, where I toyed with a dissertation on Milton, a Christian concerned with justifying the ways of God to man. I dropped out of graduate school to become a writer, but I always felt about my life in America what Milton says of Adam and Eve entering exile—the world was all before me.

  Living in New York, pursuing my writing life, I had the world forever all before me. I chose within it—I married and had a child. For ten years I worked at a Jewish newspaper. But my sense of endless American possibility never left me—even working at a Jewish newspaper seemed a paradoxical assertion of American comfort. My father’s refugee sense of the world was something that both informed me and that I worked to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to recognize that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience alien to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn’t want ancient European anti-Semitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil.

  Recently, I read an interview with Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha—who was not only the representative in the United States of the prominent Cairo Center of Islamic Learning, al-Azhar University, but also imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City. The sheik, who until recently lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, explained that “only the Jews” were capable of destroying the World Trade Center and added that “if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.” This sentiment will be familiar to anyone who has been watching the news or reading the papers. In Kuwait, there were reports that New York rabbis told their followers to take their money out of the stock market before September 11; in Egypt, the Mossad was blamed for the attack. It is easy talk to dismiss as madness, I suppose, but because so many millions of Muslims seem to believe it, and because airplanes actually did crash into the World Trade Center, words have a different weight and menace than they had before.

  So does history, or rather the forces that shape history— particularly the history of the Jews. It would be wrong to say that everything changed on the eleventh of September for me. Like the man in the Hemingway novel who went bankrupt two ways—gradually and then suddenly—my awareness of things had also been growing slowly. My father’s sister escaped in the 1930s from Vienna to Palestine—now, of course, called Israel— and I have a lot of family there. I grew up knowing that Israel, for all its vitality, was ringed with enemies; I knew how perilous and bleak life had become after the collapse of the Oslo peace process a year ago and how perilous and bleak it could be before that.

  I knew, too, that works like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the Russian forgery about demonic Jewish power, have been imported into Arab society, like obsolete
but deadly Soviet weapons. By grafting ancient Christian calumnies onto modern political grievances, Arab governments have transformed Israel into an outpost of malevolent world Jewry, viewing Israelis and Jews as interchangeable emblems of cosmic evil. So when the Syrian defense minister recently told a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies that the destruction of the World Trade Center was part of a Jewish conspiracy, I wasn’t really surprised.

  I’d gotten a whiff of this back in early September, while following the United Nations conference on racism and discrimination in Durban, South Africa, where the Arab Lawyers Union distributed booklets at the conference containing anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews with fangs dripping blood—a mere sideshow to the isolation of Israel and the equating of Zionism with racism that ultimately led to the United States’ withdrawal. Singling out Israel made of a modern nation an archetypal villain—Jews were the problem and the countries of the world were figuring out the solution. This was hardly new in the history of the United Nations, but there was something so naked about the resurrected Nazi propaganda and the antiSemitism fueling the political denunciations that I felt kidnapped by history. The past had come calling.

  I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.” The cartoon manages to demonize Jews and trivialize the Holocaust simultaneously. Tom Gross, an Israel-based journalist, recently pointed out to me that a BBC correspondent, Hilary Andersson, declared that to describe adequately the outrage of Israel’s murder of Palestinian children one would have to reach back to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents—alluding to Herod’s attempt to kill Christ in the cradle by massacring Jewish babies. After leading an editor from The Guardian on a tour of the occupied territories, Gross was astonished at the resulting front-page editorial in that highly influential British paper declaring that the establishment of Israel has exacted such a high moral price that “the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely.”