ostriches

In a November 2001 New York Times Magazine essay titled “The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism” (a free copy of which you can find here), Jonathan Rosen examined his multilayered feelings and reactions to 9/11, some of which he traced to his family background:

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 [in the Holocaust] grandparents and trying to live a modern American life. …

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. …

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.

Rosen, for whom it was second nature to compartmentalize his having grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust from his feelings as a “modern American,” went on to say that he was shaken out of this carefully calibrated “balancing act” by events and trends he observed even before 9/11.

I’d gotten a whiff of this back in early September [2001], 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.

Rosen was one of the first to write about a post-9/11 Jewish malaise, and also about the uneasy status of the world’s 13 milion Jews after this event. Within a couple of years, there would be an entire body of literature about the subject (Ron Rosenbaum’s 2004 anthology Those Who Forget the Past is an excellent place to start your reading).

Nevertheless, despite the copious attention that the troubling subject of a newly resurgent worldwide anti-Semitism has received during the past five years in the popular press (not to mention the blogosphere), James Traub, in today’s New York Times Magazine, writes about it as if it were some kind of exotica that he is introducing into the American national discourse for the first time.

What’s more, he’s got Abe Foxman of the ADL playing the role of Chicken Little.

[I]n the world of Jewish leaders, one man stands alone in the annals of gevalthood — Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League and scourge of anti-Semites of high estate and low, in Hollywood and Tehran, on campus and in the tabloids. …
“I haven’t done gevalt for 30 years,” Foxman said, though some might argue otherwise. “But never before has there been such a threat to Israel and to the Jewish people from a geopolitical conglomerate — the Arab world, with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with its position that it will not recognize Israel. The vise is closing.”

The United States, Foxman added, is “the only — the only — country in the world that is consistently willing to stand up to hypocrisy, to double standards, to triple standards, which always has the guts to say no.” And now he sees this great bulwark crumbling. …
But what really makes Abe Foxman shray (cry) gevalt is the claim that an “Israel lobby” or a “Jewish lobby” — Aipac and the A.D.L. and a few others — has effectively gained control over U.S. policy toward the Middle East and suppressed voices calling for alternative policies.

Though he loathes Foxman’s style, Traub is even more dismissive of Foxman’s primary targets—Walt and Mearsheimer—and he delivers devastating criticisms of their arguments:

At times, Mearsheimer and Walt come very close to describing the Israel lobby as something like a fifth column. …Throwing aside all the circumlocutions with which the subject is usually addressed, as well as most of the ethical and historical premises, Mearsheimer and Walt insisted that Israel had neither a strategic nor a moral claim on American sympathies. Israel was not an asset but a “liability” in the war on terror; indeed, “the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel.” And while “there is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence,” the country’s “past and present conduct” brutal mistreatment of Palestinians, refusing serious peace offers, even spying on the United States “offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.”

How, then, to explain so one-sided a policy? “The unmatched power,” they argue, “of the Israel lobby.” …

The article loosed a flood of fevered editorials, labored rebuttals and bare-knuckle debates. …

The most trenchant criticism was also the most simple: Even if the authors didn’t believe that Israel has legitimate moral claims, the American people do, and it was this widespread support, more than any unholy machinations, that explained the continuing support of Israel even in the face of the terrorist threat.

Traub is so incisive about this major flaw in the Walt and Mearsheimer paper (a point I made long ago, when I wrote that it’s notable that an “academic” paper that’s supposed to reflect a “Realist” international relations point of view leans so heavily on moral considerations) that I wish he’d offer equally incisive suggestions about how best to communicate the dangers of anti-Semitism to an oblivious and/or complacent populace.

Instead, Traub goes on the attack against Foxman for his…irrelevance.

Foxman is an anachronism. The demographic of which he is a member — Holocaust survivor — is rapidly disappearing. Younger people don’t know quite what to make of him.

And he claims that Foxman isn’t interested in learning to talk to a new generation of confident, “less affiliated” Jews.

“It’s not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not,” Foxman snapped when I raised the subject. “I do feel. And I’ve got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this.”

Unfortunately, I believe Foxman is right: a pernicious anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide. But we do need to learn to address it in an effective way.

More about this another time.