Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 19:31:55 EST
Subject: Anti-Semitism
To: Maxine57-AT-earthlink.net, Sharrl-AT-aol.com, rprale-AT-msn.com, RETLL-AT-aol.com


New York Times.......Sat.Nov.10



November 4, 2001


The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism


By JONATHAN ROSEN

hen I was growing 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 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 l
iterature 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 10 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 Sept. 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 
11th 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 1930's 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 anti-Semitism 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.'' 
I understood that the editorial, speaking of the cost of the establishment of 
Israel -- not of any particular policies -- implied that Israel's very right 
to exist is somehow still at issue. (One cannot imagine something similar 
being formulated about, say, Russia, in response to its battle with Chechen 
rebels, however much The Guardian might have disagreed with that country's 
policies.) And this reminded me inevitably of the situation of the Jews in 
1940's Europe, where simply to be was an unpardonable crime. 
I had somehow believed that the Jewish Question, which so obsessed both Jews 
and anti-Semites in the 19th and 20th centuries, had been solved -- most 
horribly by Hitler's ''final solution,'' most hopefully by Zionism. But more 
and more I feel Jews being turned into a question mark once again. How is it, 
the world still asks -- about Israel, about Jews, about me -- that you are 
still here? I have always known that much of the world wanted Jews simply to 
disappear, but there are degrees of knowledge, and after Sept. 11 my 
imagination seems more terribly able to imagine a world of rhetoric 
fulfilled. 
There are five million Jews in Israel and eight million more Jews in the rest 
of the world. There are one billion Muslims. How has it happened that Israel 
and ''world Jewry,'' along with the United States, is the enemy of so many of 
them? To be singled out inside a singled-out country is doubly disconcerting. 
There are a lot of reasons why modernizing, secularizing, globalizing 
America, whose every decision has universal impact, would disturb large 
swaths of the world; we are, after all, a superpower. Surely it is stranger 
that Jews, by their mere presence in the world, would unleash such hysteria. 
And yet what I kept hearing in those first days in the aftermath of the 
attack on the World Trade Center is that it was our support of Israel that 
had somehow brought this devastation down on us. It was a kind of respectable 
variant of the belief that the Mossad had literally blown up the World Trade 
Center. It could of course be parried -- after all, the turning point in 
Osama bin Laden's hatred of the United States came during the gulf war, when 
American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. But it had a lingering 
effect; it was hard to avoid a certain feeling that there was something 
almost magical about Israel that made it toxic for friends and foes alike. 
This feeling will not go away, if only because our support of that nation 
makes it harder to maintain our coalition. Israel has somehow become an 
obstacle to war and an obstacle to peace simultaneously. 
Lately, of course, bin Laden has added treatment of Palestinians to his list 
of grievances, and this may revive the sense that Israel bears some measure 
of responsibility. Large lies can be constructed out of smaller truths. The 
occupation of the West Bank by Israel, though it grew out of a war Israel did 
not want, has been a nightmare for the Palestinians and a disaster for Israel 
morally, politically and spiritually. It is a peculiar misery to feel this 
way and to feel, at the same time, that the situation has become a weapon in 
the war against Israel. Bin Laden would not want a Palestinian state on the 
West Bank, because he could not abide a Jewish state alongside it. 
Neither could many of our allies in the Muslim world, who keep 
euphemistically suggesting that if only the ''Mideast crisis'' were resolved, 
terrorism would diminish. It has a plausible veneer -- and indeed, it would 
be an extraordinary achievement if the Palestinians got a homeland and Israel 
got safe borders. But since most of the players in the Middle East do not 
accept the existence of Israel, since ''solving the Mideast crisis'' would 
for them entail a modern version of Hitler's final solution, the phrase takes 
on weird and even sinister overtones when it is blandly employed by 
well-intentioned governments calling for a speedy solution. And this 
Orwellian transformation of language is one of the most exasperating and 
disorienting aspects of the campaign against Israel. It has turned the word 
''peace'' into a euphemism for war. 
grew up in a post-Holocaust world. For all the grim weight of that burden, 
and for all its echoing emptiness, there was a weird sort of safety in it 
too. After all, the worst thing had already happened -- everything else was 
aftermath. In the wake of the Holocaust, American anti-Semitism dissipated, 
the church expunged old calumnies. The horror had been sufficient to shock 
even countries like the Soviet Union into supporting a newly declared Jewish 
state. Israel after 1967 was a powerful nation -- besieged, but secure. 
American Jews were safe as houses. 
I am not writing this essay to predict some inevitable calamity but to 
identify a change of mood. To say aloud that European anti-Semitism, which 
made the Holocaust possible, is still shaping the way Jews are perceived; 
Arab anti-Israel propaganda has joined hands with it and found a home in the 
embattled Muslim world. Something terrible has been born. What happened on 
Sept. 11 is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil intend 
evil. This comes with the dawning awareness that weapons of mass destruction 
did not vanish with the Soviet Union; the knowledge that in fact they may 
pose a greater threat of actually being used in this century, if only in a 
limited fashion, is sinking in only now. 
That a solution to one century's Jewish problem has become another century's 
Jewish problem is a cruel paradox. This tragedy has intensified to such a 
degree that friends, supporters of Israel, have wondered aloud to me if the 
time has come to acknowledge that the Israeli experiment has failed, that 
there is something in the enterprise itself that doomed it. This is the 
thinking of despair. I suppose one could wonder as much about America in the 
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, since many American values will now be 
challenged and since, in fighting a war, you always become a little like your 
enemy, if only in accepting the need to kill. I grew up at a time when sex 
education was considered essential but what might be called war education, 
what a country must do to survive, was looked upon with a kind of prudish 
horror. I suppose that will now change. In any event, Israel has been at war 
for 50 years. Without that context, clear judgment is impossible, especially 
by those accustomed to the Holocaust notion that Jews in war are nothing but 
helpless victims -- a standard that can make images to the contrary seem 
aberrant. 
I have a different way of looking at the Israeli experiment than my friends 
who wonder about its failure. It is connected to how I look at the fate of 
European Jewry. When the Jews of Europe were murdered in the Holocaust, one 
might have concluded that European Judaism failed -- to defend itself, to 
anticipate evil, to make itself acceptable to the world around it, to pack up 
and leave. But one could also conclude in a deeper way that Christian Europe 
failed -- to accept the existence of Jews in their midst, and it has been 
marked ever since, and will be for all time, with this blot on its culture. 
Israel is a test of its neighbors as much as its neighbors are a test for 
Israel. If the Israeli experiment fails, then Islam will have failed, and so 
will the Christian culture that plays a shaping role in that part of the 
region. 
I am fearful of sounding as though I believe that the Holocaust is going to 
replay itself in some simplified fashion -- that my childhood fantasy for my 
father is true for me, and it is I who am straining to hear Hitler's voice 
break over the radio. I do not. Israel has a potent, modern army. But so does 
the United States, and it has proved vulnerable to attack, raising other 
fears. The United States spans a continent, and its survival is not in doubt. 
But experts who warn us about American vulnerability refer to areas the size 
of entire states that will become contaminated if a nuclear reactor is struck 
by a plane. Israel is smaller than New Jersey. 
I am aware that an obsession with the Holocaust is seen as somehow unbecoming 
and, when speaking of modern politics, viewed almost as a matter of bad taste 
if not bad history. I do not wish to elide Israel's political flaws by 
invoking the Holocaust. But that very reluctance has been exploited and 
perverted in a way that makes me disregard it. ''Six million Jews died?'' the 
mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian Authority appointee, remarked last year. 
''Let us desist from this fairy tale exploited by Israel to buy international 
solidarity.'' (The utterance is particularly egregious because the mufti's 
predecessor paid an admiring visit to Hitler in 1941.) The demonizing la
nguage that is used about Israel in some of the European press, and about 
Jews in the Arab press, is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930's. I grew up 
thinking I was living in the post-Holocaust world and find it sounds more and 
more like a pre-Holocaust world as well. 
en years ago, I interviewed Saul Bellow in Chicago and in the course of the 
interview asked him if there was anything he regretted. He told me that he 
now felt, looking back on his career, that he had not been sufficiently 
mindful of the Holocaust. This surprised me because one of his novels, ''Mr. 
Sammler's Planet,'' is actually about a Holocaust survivor. But Bellow 
recalled writing ''The Adventures of Augie March'' -- the grand freewheeling 
novel that made his reputation -- in Paris in the late 1940's. Holocaust 
survivors were everywhere, Bellow told me, and, as a Yiddish speaker, he had 
access to the terrible truths they harbored. But, as Bellow put it, he was 
not in the mood to listen. ''I wanted my American seven-layer cake,'' he told 
me. He did not wish to burden his writing at that early moment in his career 
with the encumbering weight of Jewish history. ''Augie March'' begins, 
exuberantly, ''I am an American.'' 
I, too, want my American seven-layer cake, even if the cake has collapsed a 
little in recent weeks. There is no pleasure in feeling reclaimed by the 
awfulness of history and in feeling myself at odds with the large 
universalist temper of our society. Thinking about it makes me feel old, 
exhausted and angry. 
In the Second World War, American Jews muted their separate Jewish concerns 
for the good of the larger struggle to liberate Europe. I understand the 
psychological urge to feel in sync with American aims. But Israel sticks out 
in this crisis as European Jewry stuck out in World War II, forcing a 
secondary level of Jewish consciousness, particularly because the 
anti-Zionism of the Arab world has adopted the generalized anti-Semitism of 
the European world. 
The danger to America, which has already befallen us, and the danger to Isra
el, which so far remains primarily rhetorical, are, of course, connected. And 
though it is false to imagine that if Israel did not exist America would not 
have its enemies, people making the link are intuiting something beyond the 
simple fact that both are Western democracies. 
In ''Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Age of 
Discovery,'' Bernard Lewis points out that after Christians reconquered Spain 
from the Muslims in the 15th century, they decided to expel the Jews before 
the Muslims. The reason for this, Lewis explains, is that although the Jews 
had no army and posed far less of a political threat than the Muslims, they 
posed a far greater theological challenge. This is because Jews believed that 
adherents of other faiths could find their own path to God. Christianity and 
Islam, which cast unbelievers as infidels, did not share this essential 
religious relativism. The rabbinic interpretation of monotheism, which in 
seeing all human beings as created in God's image recognized their inherent 
equality, may well contain the seeds of the very democratic principles that 
the terrorists of Sept. 11 found so intolerable. 
Is it any wonder that in the minds of the terrorists and their fundamentalist 
defenders, Americans and Jews have an unholy alliance? Expressing my separate 
Jewish concerns does not put me at odds with our pluralistic society -- it 
puts me in tune with it, since it is here of all places that I am free to 
express all my identities -- American, Jewish, Zionist. And if Jews kicked 
out of Spain clung, at peril of death, to a religion with such an ultimately 
inclusive faith in the redeemable nature of humanity, who I am to reject that 
view? Perhaps the optimistic American half of my inheritance isn't at odds 
with the darker Jewish component after all. In this regard, the double 
consciousness that has burdened my response to our new war need not feel like 
a division. On the contrary, it redoubles my patriotism and steels me for the 
struggle ahead. 
Jonathan Rosen's most recent book, ''The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey 
Between Worlds,'' has just been published in paperback.




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