helping or hurting?

Poor tortured Philip Weiss is trying to figure out if the attacks on the “Lobby” and pro-Israel Jews and Jewish neocons that he peddles on his blog are good for the Jews or bad for the Jews [e.a.]:

It’s true there are a lot of antisemites on my side of the fence, I can’t deny that. They show up in my comment section, and Richard Witty has told me that David Duke posts some of my posts.

Two years ago Tony Kushner said it gave him angst to speak out on the Israel/Palestinian issue in the noble way that he has for two reasons, because a lot of Jews were screaming at him that he was a terrible person, and of course you don’t always know who’s right; and also, because he didn’t want to be giving comfort to antisemites [an admirable sentiment, no? --ed.]

I don’t know what to do about it and frankly I don’t know how much to care.

Well, at least he’s honest about it …for a moment. He doesn’t actually care about the impact of his writings. And then he rationalizes his obsessive anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist screeds as a professional interest:

The chief issue here is journalistic. What is true and new and important? That’s your charge as a journalist.

Okay, dude—and what about your charge as, you know, a human being? one who attracts nasty, unapologetic anti-Semites to your site?

Weiss is still trying to work it out. While he works his head further up his ass, convinced that American Jews hold too much power, you may be interested to hear the opinion of a German journalist, Henryk Broder, who addressed the problem recently in a colloquium on anti-Semitism that took place in Germany, where they know a thing or two about the phenomenon.

And Broder suggests that we stop thinking in terms of the past and thing about the present—and the future [e.a.]:

[A]nti-Semitism is not a matter of a prejudice, but rather of a sort of resentment. …The distinction between a prejudice and a resentment is as follows: a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-Semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders. Smart Jews are arrogant and dumb Jews — and, yes, there are also dumb Jews — are a disgrace to Jewry. The anti-Semite blames Jews in principle for everything and its opposite. That is why there is no point in trying to debate anti-Semites or in wanting to convince them of the absurdity of their views. One has to marginalize anti-Semites: to isolate them in a sort of social quarantine. Society must make clear that it disdains both anti-Semitism and anti-Semites: just as it disdains parents beating their children and rape — including spousal rape — even though it well knows that it cannot monitor everything that transpires behind closed doors.

Well, Philip Weiss certainly doesn’t disdain intolerant, blinkered anti-Semites. He bends over backward to understand them:

Giraldi probably brings a little ethnic resentment to it, I read that in some of the lines that Pollak quotes. Not good, not very spiritually evolved. But is ethnic resentment in and of itself criminal or does it constitute hate speech?

Neither. It is a priori resentment, and nurturing it does not promote understanding between people or progress on social issues.

Broder has much to say on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, too, and you should read his whole address. But I’ll close with the kicker:

The modern anti-Semite pays tribute to Jews who have been dead for 60 years, but he resents it when living Jews take measures to defend themselves.

David Mamet, who has a place of honor on my blog, wrote this in the Forward (no longer available in the archives but still available here) long ago [e.a.]:

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don’t like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in “Exodus.” These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at “Sophie’s Choice,” sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at “The Diary of Anne Frank” ? we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any “Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism” but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself “why?” That is your debt to the Jews.