Kesher Talk

The New Anti-Semitism: An article in Foreign Policy lists a number of reasons that might explain why anti-Semitism is resurging again now, so soon after it seemed finally to be dying. Author Mark Strauss suggests that in part it's because Jew-hatred is often cyclic, tied to the boom-and-bust of the business cycle. He quotes French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman as talking about the new, unholy brown-green-red alliance, with nouveau brownshirts, Green Party anti-globalists, and forlorn communists converging at some anti-Semitic crossroad and goosestepping on together.

The question of anti-Semitism was also addressed on Monday night, in the grim gray dankness of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (and what a disappointment that was! The huge dungeon-like space ate sound and spit out echoes; it dulled and vulgarized color; it dwarfed what was really a fairly large audience into pathetic inadequacy), a panel debated the disease. Among the speakers (as if he could ever be "among the speakers" — rather, dominating the speakers) was Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg.

Hertzberg said -- and in his new book, The Fate of Zionism — A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine," he writes — that the world was far more comfortable with Jews when Jews were victims. We are victims no longer, he roared. "Now, we have power, and I am not ashamed of that. I am proud that we are a power in the world."

The left, and liberals, Hertzberg thundered — so clearly and so loudly that even the echoes of that word-eating space stilled themselves — particularly European leftists and liberals, and even some Jewish leftists and liberals, are still ashamed of their silence during the Holocaust. Until they find some way of expiating that guilt — of making teshuva — they will continue to feel it. Once they can equate Israelis with Nazis, then of course their guilt is quickly eased, and they can resume the feeling of moral superiority with which they are so familiar and so comfortable. As they indulge in this new round of anti-Semitism they are playing out their own psychodrama, disastrously.

Of course, Hertzberg said, he always has been a leftist, a Roosevelt leftist, and he is one still. At other times and in other places he has rejected labels entirely, or said that he has become a wary centrist. In truth, he is sui generis.

posted by Joanne @ 11/27/2003 10:15:00 PM