[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Phyllis Chesler
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003
307 pp., $24.95 hc
Abraham H. Foxman
San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2003
305 pp., $24.95 hc
Gabriel Schoenfeld
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004
193 pp., $25.95 hc
Henry Gonshak
English
Montana Tech-UM
There is an old Jewish joke; one Jew sends a telegram to another Jew that reads: "Start worrying. Details to follow." Like most Jewish humor, this is distinctly tragicomic. Indeed, there have been few eras in human history when Jews have not had plenty to worry about--violent bigotry from neighbors, institutionalized oppression from the Church or Crown, persecution by powerful tyrants stretching from Nebuchadnezzar to Torquemada and Adolph Hitler. But when the Allied armies at the end of World War II liberated the concentration camps and discovered the horrors of the Holocaust, many thoughtful people believed one good thing that might arise from the international revulsion over the genocide would be an end to the ancient scourge of anti-Semitism. But as the three books under review document in exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) detail, there are ominous signs that anti-Semitism has not only failed to disappear but may actually be on the rise.
Unfortunately, all three books slip at times from understandable alarm into paranoia. By titling his book Never Again?, Abraham Foxman (national director of the Anti-Defamation League) hints that another Holocaust may be imminent, but nothing in the book itself justifies such apocalyptic fears. As for Phyllis Chesler (a Jewish feminist activist and author), she regularly refers to anti-Jewish activities in Europe and North America as "intifadas," thus linking these incidents with the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza against Israel. It is a dubious, overwrought comparison. The Palestinian intifada has involved suicide bombers who have murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians. In contrast, the anti-Semitic violence that has occurred in Europe and America has included arson in synagogues, the defacement of Jewish cemeteries, physical attacks against individual Jews, threats against Jewish activists, and so on--all worrisome enough, but with few fatalities, and there have been (as yet) no suicide bombings. Moreover, the Palestinian intifada is a specific response to the Israeli occupation. To compare it to Euro-American anti-Semitism, which arises in very different circumstances, muddles both sides of the equation.
In another example of over-kill, the authors have a tendency to damn anything they don't like as anti-Semitic. For example, Garbriel Schoenfeld (a senior editor for the journal Commentary) devotes several pages to lambasting those he labels "Jewish anti-Semites." But those Schoenfeld tars with this abusive term are often simply liberal Jews who disagree with his conservative political views on Israel. For example, he attacks Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing Jewish journal Tikkun, as "one of the most familiar exemplar of this [anti-Semitic] disposition" (136). Certainly, Lerner is no fan of Israel's hawkish prime minister Ariel Sharon and his right-wing Likud Party, and he has strongly criticized the Israeli occupation and supported Palestinian statehood. But the rabbi is no anti-Semite. In fact, during the invasion of Iraq, when Lerner was scheduled to speak at an anti-war rally, Lerner publicly reprimanded the rally's organizers for comparing Israel to the former apartheid regime in South Africa, whereupon he was promptly dropped from the speakers' list. Schoenfeld also labels another leading Jewish liberal, Leon Wieseltier (literary editor of the New Republic) as a "Jewish anti-Semite" for his article "Hitler is Dead," in which Wieseltier argued (in Schoenfeld's paraphrase) that "talk of a resurgent anti-Semitism is...a case of fretfulness run amok" (148). In actuality, the primary target of Wieseltier's censure were American Jews who depict the US as a budding Third Reich while they enjoy unprecedented levels of security and comfort.
Moreover, what both Chesler and Foxman call the "new anti-Semitism"--that is, virulent anti-Semitism that is arisen recently and differs from previous forms--often looks suspiciously like the "old" anti-Semitism. Foxman, for example, devotes two chapters to anti-Semitism in America among White Supremacist groups, such as the National Alliance, and black extremist groups like the Nation of Islam. But such anti-Semitism (which includes Holocaust-denial and the spinning of elaborate conspiracy theories about Jewish global domination) has been evident and well documented for decades.
Still, despite their shrill excesses and dubious arguments, all three books demonstrate that some contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism are indeed new, unprecedented, and deeply troubling. Certainly, the current extent and nature of anti-Semitism in the Arab world is appalling, going far beyond criticism of Israel to include vicious attacks against Jews and Judaism itself, which often revive anti-Semitic myths invoked by the Nazis to justify "The Final Solution." As Foxman notes, "the demonization of Jews was not a traditional component of Islam.... [For centuries] Jews...were permitted to live in Muslim lands as tolerated minorities (dhimmis)" (196). But Arab attitudes toward Jews have changed radically as a result of the establishment of Israel and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Moreover, autocratic Arab regimes frequently encourage anti-Semitic hatred among their peoples, primarily through state-run media, as a way of deflecting the attention of the masses from these regimes' own despotism and corruption.
For example, a column by Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud, an editorial writer for the government daily, Al-Akhbar, in Egypt (a nation officially at peace with Israel), calls Jews "accursed, fundamentally, because they are the plague...and the bacterium of all time" (in Schoenfeld, 12-13). Arabs have also adopted the medieval European anti-Semitic myth of "blood libel"--the belief that Jews kidnap and ritually sacrifice Gentile babies. The leading Saudi newspaper, Al-Riyadh, ran an article describing in lurid detail how "the victims' blood is spilled [using] a needle-studded barrel [which] affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the bloodletting with pleasure and love" (17). Living in closed societies, ordinary Arabs are denied access to information that would refute these toxic lies. (That such information would even be needed to counter such patently outrageous claims is in itself cause for alarm.)
Indeed, anti-Semitic hate in the Middle East is so omnipresent it may doom any chance in the near future for lasting Arab/Israeli peace. Certainly, the Palestinian media is every bit as anti-Semitic as the rest of the Arab world. Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, has espoused neo-Nazi anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial: "Everywhere, the Jews have been the subjects of hatred and disdain because they control most of the economic resources upon which the livelihood of many people are dependent.... The winds began blowing in their favor when the campaign of persecution against them was begun by Hitler.... The truth is that the persecution of the Jews is a deceitful myth which the Jews have labeled the Holocaust and exploited to get sympathy" (in Chesler, 105).
Anti-Semitism has also reemerged in Europe, a continent that remained relatively free of Jew-hatred for a half-century following the Holocaust. Some current European anti-Semitism is perpetrated by far-right political parties with links to Europe's Nazi past, such as Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front Party in France and Joerg Heider's Freedom Party in Austria--both of which have scored successes at the ballot box. But most anti-Semitic incidents in Europe today are committed by Muslim immigrants and their offspring. Indeed, while traditional European anti-Semitism has resurfaced in the Arab world, the process has also worked in reverse, with Arab anti-Semitism being imported into Europe via these growing immigrant communities, who retain access to the Arab media through computers and satellite dishes.
Oil-rich, fundamentalist Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Iran have funded radical mosques and other extremist Islamic centers in Europe that inflame European Muslims with anti-Semitic propaganda (as well as foment terrorism). These Muslims are ripe for brainwashing since this population is beset by illiteracy, poverty, and unemployment; in France, for example, whose current population is 10% Muslim, Schoenfeld reports that "approximately half of unemployed workers are Muslims, a rate more than double the national average" (60). Moreover, Muslims have been hindered from assimilating into the European mainstream both by nativist racism and by Islamist theology that rejects the core principles of Western Europe's liberal democracies. Alienated populations are always fertile ground for hate-mongering demagogues.
Recent events have also sparked European Muslim anti-Semitism. In the first weeks after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, more than 250 anti-Semitic incidents occurred in Europe. And in the months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, anti-Semitic violence in Great Britain, for example, rose by 150%. Why would 9/11 inspire Muslim attacks against European Jews? The reason, little-discussed by Western media but well-known to Europe's Muslims, is that a key motive of the al-Qaeda terrorists was to strike at what the terrorists perceived as the heart of the "global Jewish financial empire" located in the World Trade Center. Thus, European Muslims who attacked Jews or Jewish centers often saw themselves as contributing to the heroic blow leveled by Osama bin Laden against "World Jewry."
Today, European Muslim anti-Semitism, frequently posing as anti-Zionism, often receives support from a European left that had, since the Holocaust, largely eschewed anti-Semitism in all forms. In the second half of my two-part article on the war on terrorism, which appeared in the last issue of this journal, I discussed in depth anti-Semitism on the contemporary Euro-American left. Chesler, a long-time feminist activist, discusses an aspect of this subject my article missed: anti-Semitism in the ranks of international feminists. She shares her experiences, for example, attending the 1980 United Nations World Conference on Women in Copenhagen, which Chesler describes as a "post-modern pogrom...hijacked by the PLO" (53). By her account (54), bands of Arab women led by PLO representatives and backed by European and American feminists roamed the halls of the conference chanting such slogans as "Jews must die! Israel must die! Israel kills babies and tortures women!" During discussion periods at the sessions themselves, moderators generally called only on audience members whom they knew to be pro-Palestinian, while those few speakers who weren't ardent supporters of the PLO were frequently interrupted by cries of "The only good Jew is a dead Jew" and "Zionism is a disease" (54). Apparently, these Arab women and their Western feminist allies deemed it irrelevant that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that enfranchises women, while in the Arab world women are relegated to second-class status. Instead, it seems the fanatical conviction of these women that the Jewish state is a "colonial power" which oppresses Third World peoples trumped all other considerations.
No matter how wide-ranging anti-Semitism is today around the globe and among a variety of populations and ideological groups, there is one respect in which contemporary anti-Semitism differs significantly from its historical predecessors, especially in the West--a difference ignored by all three authors in their zeal to sound the alarm about present threats to Jews. In the past in Europe, anti-Semitism was the status quo of powerful institutions, such as the Church, which demonized Jews as "Christ-killers." In the 20th century, it guided the thinking and policies of dangerous European fascist regimes, especially that of Nazi Germany. Even in America, where anti-Semitism was less potent, loathing of Jews was nonetheless common among the nation's social elite, with Ivy League colleges setting quotas on the number of Jewish students that were admitted, regardless of qualifications, while Jews were excluded from upper-class clubs and hotels, and confronted obstacles to promotion in many businesses. Meanwhile, prominent Americans, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, were virulent anti-Semites. In contrast, both in Europe and America today, anti-Semitism is a distinctly fringe phenomenon, found in the US primarily among White Supremacist and Afro-American extremists, and in Europe located principally in marginalized Muslim populations. Unlike the past, there are no European or American governments or major leaders touting blatant anti-Semitism.
Still, there is no reason to harbor a false sense of security. Anti-Semitism is not absent from elite quarters in the West, especially among politically correct academics and left-wing intellectual journals such as The Nation and The London Review of Books. In these circles, support for the Palestinians is often bolstered by some variety of Marxism which ignores the real-life complexities of the conflict in order to fit the participants into a rigid theoretical model that labels the Israelis the oppressors and the Palestinians the oppressed in a manner so extreme it crosses the line into anti-Semitism.
Moreover, in Europe as well as America, demographic trends indicate that Muslim populations will continue to grow while Jewish ones dwindle. Thus, there is a danger that politicians will be under increasing pressure to placate their numerous Muslim constituents by turning a blind eye to Islamic anti-Semitic incidents. This seems less a concern in America, where Jews are firmly ensconced, and where there has long been bipartisan support for Israel. Europe, however, is another story. Indeed, evidence exists that such political cowardice is already occurring on the continent. In 2002 in France, for example, the government refused to release statistics on anti-Semitic violence, while spokesmen insisted that such violence simply represented a spill-over of Middle Eastern conflicts into the country, rather than indicating anything more indigenous. For his part, French President Jacques Chirac insisted, "There is no anti-Semitism in France." Motivating this inane assertion, according to Foxman, was Chirac's acute awareness that the president "faced elections in which several million Arab votes were at stake" (23).
To sum up, Hitler may be dead, but his anti-Semitic beliefs have not died with him. Start worrying.
[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]