One point to which Mark Weber, one of the leading proponents of Holocaust revisionism in the country, often returned is that it’s impossible to know why people believe what they do. Weber seemed almost amused by his own choice of obsessions, as if he knew that his own path has been more random than not. I happen to agree. Maybe, I surmised, if he’d read Tolkien at a young age, he would have been a fantasy fan; maybe if he’d been born 10 years earlier, he would have got involved in the Goldwater campaign and ended up a mainstream conservative. Who knows?

It would be folly to suppose that any single person from one’s past has written the script for everything to come. But it would also be naive to think that being close to a Jew isn’t important in the life of someone who spends decades talking about the lies of Jews. Smith practically went straight from the arms of a Jewish lover to the arms of those who deny the existence of Nazi gas chambers. Weber didn’t gain a Jewish relative until years after he found the Holocaust-denial movement, but this relative has become a dirty rumor, one tossed around by his enemies, a scurrilous allegation that nobody has proved until now.

The Jewish woman Bradley Smith lived with for eight years during the 1970s is Susan Brown, a practicing psychologist in Los Angeles who works principally with autistic children. She has been happily married for 20 years to another man, and she has two grown children, three grown stepchildren, and seven granddaughters. After I had learned her name—from an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Smith’s—and found her phone number, I called her up. She had fond memories of the old Bradley, the one who didn’t think one way or another about gas chambers.

“We met through mutual friends,” Brown told me. “Bradley had been involved in this trial through his bookstore, so he got to know a lot of people through the Los Angeles Free Press, which I was involved with it—I had contributed some money. So that’s how I met him. We were all politically involved with that.”

I asked Brown if she was surprised when she heard about Smith’s new career, which didn’t begin until after their relationship had ended.

“Totally mystified” is how Brown described her reaction, “but I have some theories.

“Whatever else Bradley is, he is in addition a very bright guy, very well read, and he worked assiduously for many years in politics, with the bookstore on Fairfax [Avenue]. He was circulating with all the people I still circulate with. In the years I knew him there wasn’t ever any smidgen of a thought [about Holocaust denial]; I was getting my Ph.D. then, and there was a lot of talking, [but] not one iota of glimmer of this budding thought, nothing at all there.”

Smith was, Brown told me, reluctant to adopt party lines; he was never a West Coast liberal like so many of the Hollywood people—most of them Jews— he ran with. “He was not, not a mindless liberal in that way,” Brown said. “He was very thoughtful about things he would say. He was not ‘one of them’ in the [world of] sixties politics.” Like many libertarians, whether inclined to the left or the right, Smith had a maverick streak, so perhaps the seeds of his ultimate career were always present, if apparently benign.

“But I think the thing that pushed him over,” Brown said, “was that he never could get published.” For an aspiring writer in a city with so many successful writers and artists, this was a failure that could rub a man raw. “It wasn’t like he never got close. He had corresponded with literary journals—The New Yorker, The Atlantic. He wasn’t a total dud. He was sending things back and forth, and he couldn‘t crack it. The people we knew were all interested in the same things, and he couldn’t make it like they could, and it was killing him.

”I think he found a niche to do a 180; he had the skills that were needed for that niche. It can from some happenstance meeting”—Smith met a Holocaust denier at a libertarian convention—“and it was out of great despair that he found a place. And I think it just took over his life. He saw that he could go with it, and he did, and it just took over.”

Despite the odd turn that Smith’s life took, Brown remembered their time together as pleasant, and their parting as amicable. “We lived together all the time I was doing my dissertation,” she said. “He was a wonderful friend to me, he was lovely to my two young children.” He even had an aliyah at her son’s bar mitzvah, reading the prayer for a Torah reading. “I tell you, he was—long after our personal sexual relationship was the core of what kept us together, he was a wonderful friend to me, in terms of my kids, and he understood what was import to me and them.”

I mentioned to Brown that Smith was now married to a Mexican woman.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “It would be too intrusive psychologically to live with someone who asked too many questions of him. He’d have to be with someone as bright as he is, or be with someone with a caretaking relationship, and there would be that comfort. It wouldn’t be a woman who could provoke him. He has taken a position. He knows the other paths, and he doesn’t need to be placed in conflict or turmoil about those things.”

Having talked about her ex-lover’s new life of obsession with Jews, I was moved to asked Brown about her own relationship to Judaism.

“I am more of a practicing Jew now than then,” she told me. “I was in school then. I had my hands full with having young children. I was raised not in an Orthodox home, but I was educated in a yeshiva, and I had a very big background in Jewish studies. And he was always interested in that. ”

***

Although Smith had refused to give me his ex-lover’s name, forcing me to track her down without his help, he had told me about her existence; he was not ashamed to have lived with and loved a Jew. Weber, by contrast, had refused to discuss the truth or falsity of the rumors that he had a Jewish sister. Smith had chosen to love a Jew, a fact that could potentially be much more damaging among his professional colleagues, yet he had volunteered the information, while Weber, who couldn’t be expected to choose his sister’s religious path, seemed worried that I would find her.  And when I did find Terese Weber, Mark’s Jewish sister, thus confirming the rumor that had been spread for years by his enemies in other factions of the anti-Semitic right, she was perfectly happy to talk. “I always thought the day would come when somebody would come fishing for information,” she said, as soon as I told her why I was calling.

“I had an Orthodox conversion,” Terese told me, when I reached her by phone. She now lives in Houston and is a professional harpist, working under the business name Have Harp Will Travel. Her ex-husband, she went on to say, is an Israeli Jew whom she married in 1984 and who took her to Israel in 1987. “I had a Conservative conversion in 1984 at a quite conservative congregation in Tucson, and an Orthodox conversion in Portland before we went [to Israel], and then I had to go before a beit din in Tel Aviv.” Terese, who is now 53, also studied Hebrew at an ulpan in Israel, and she lived there until 1989, by which time her marriage was shaky. “We divorced in 1990, but we’re still on very good terms.” And, Terese added, she still considers herself a Jew.

Terese analyzed her brother with the same compassion, albeit more exasperation, that I had heard from Susan Brown as she’d talked about Bradley Smith. Brown, of course, has been free of Smith for over thirty years, free in a way that a sister is never really free of a brother. Especially when, as Terese sees it, Mark is simply seeking attention from their parents.

“I don’t believe he believes it,” Terese said. “I think he embraced it as a subject because it’s the worst thing he can think of to do. He’s just acting out. My theory is it’s just a gigantic acting-out.

“As far as whether he was into it from an early age: yes. He knew all about it”—Holocaust denial. “Even though he embraced the liberal cause of the Biafrans when he was 18, he has been onto this since he was about 20.”

Terese added that Mark “was raised Catholic,” and she explained that her parents’ Catholicism was open-minded and questioning, not at all reactionary: “It’s an inversion of my parents’ ideals,” she said of her brother. I had already spoken with five of Mark’s classmates from Portland’s Jesuit High School, Class of 1969; they had all described their schooling as rigorous but fairly progressive, especially for a boys’ Catholic school. But all five also agreed that Mark Weber had stood apart from the dominant school culture. He was a bit of a loner—smart, a strong member of the debate team, but not particularly social. None of them could remember if he had siblings; one was expressly certain that Weber had been an only child, and this at a school where many of the Catholic boys had numerous brothers and sisters. In truth, of course, he was one of four children: besides Terese, there are a brother and a sister who still live in Portland. It’s just that he never seemed to talk about them.

Terese suggested other reasons that her brother might be attracted to Holocaust denial: he is smart and curious, has always loved to debate, and has a natural affinity for the underdog, whether the Biafrans or, in an odd inversion of the idea of the underdog, the historical revisionists. But she kept returning to the idea that finally this was Mark’s Oedipal struggle, and she insisted that some for some people that is explanation enough. “Don’t you know anyone,” she asked me, “who chooses not to have a fulfilling life because it would give too much naches to their parents?”

Their parents were not, Terese added, the easiest people. “Neither of my parents had very much example of how to bring up a family,” she said, sounding more sorrowful than angry. And perhaps it was a difficult legacy for all the children. Terese is divorced, her brother Bruce is a drifter with no permanent address, and Mark’s first marriage resulted in a bitter divorce after three years; Mark almost never sees his 11-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. Still, Terese makes no excuses for her brother: “He had every advantage. Catholic grade school, Jesuit high school, the best money could buy. There was money to go to college. I’m sorry he turned out so colorful.”

***

Mark Weber does not concur with his sister’s diagnosis. “I’m rather close to my parents, both of them,” he said, “and to everyone in the family except my sister Terese. I felt secure as a child.” He would not discuss his differences with Terese except to say, “I love her, and I wish her well.”

This may sound strange, but I believe him. In most regards, Weber seems like a fairly normal person, and his feelings for his parents are, like most people’s feelings about their parents, probably mixed. His family psychodrama was not, in any case, unusual enough to explain his chosen profession.

Weber is best understood as a particular kind of history buff. Bradley Smith is basically a provocateur—as he admitted, he’s a Holocaust revisionist who doesn’t read much Holocaust scholarship—but Weber is a relentless accumulator of facts and theories about history. When we were fact-checking this article on the phone, one of his lengthiest corrections involved my description of his library. “It doesn’t just contain books about Jewish history,” he told me. “There’s Russian history, European history….” And in fact his interests have always been broader than Robert Faurisson’s or Arthur Butz’s; both men are single-issue voters, concerned largely with gas chambers. Meanwhile, Willis Carto’s magazine pursues fringe topics like “Indo-Aryan end-time beliefs” and whether the government has secretly spirited the gold away from Fort Knox. Weber keeps his head buried in books about European history and journals about Middle Eastern politics.

But as one professor of mine, who had worked as a public historian, once told me: “Beware the history buff.” The buff—as opposed to the scholar, or the curious peruser, or the dilettante—eats up all this knowledge but can’t properly digest it. He (most buffs seem to be male) cannot keep facts in perspective; he fails at precisely the task the scholar is good at, figuring out which facts matter most, which pieces of evidence to privilege, what to weigh more than what. So a particular truth—that there are a lot of Jewish executives in Hollywood, or that African Americans commit more crimes, per capita, than whites—assumes an outsized importance. With no ability to create proper contexts for facts, the buff is in danger of becoming either a conspiracy theorist or a bigot, or both. This is why there is so much crossover between the communities of, say, 9/11 skeptics and anti-Semites. Conspiracy theorists and bigots are people with faulty judgment casting about for answers; but whereas the conspiracy theorist needlessly increases the complexity of the world, the bigot needlessly simplifies. “The Jews have secret meetings where they plan the world economy,” says the conspiracy theorist; “the Jews are treacherous, bad people,” says the bigot.

However much crossover the two communities may have, and however much a given obsessive personality may veer from one pathology to the other, the conspiracy theorist and the bigot are always in danger of falling out. What looks like common ground—“We all agree that Jews are the problem”—is quickly discovered to be an irreparable schism. For Weber, Smith’s desire to keep looking at diagrams of locking mechanisms on gas-chamber doors starts to look pretty silly, and his explanation that there’s been a massive historical fraud, beginning at the Nuremberg trials, looks like a fairly weak conspiracy theory. For Weber, now, it’s not complicated, it’s simple: Jews are a different kind of people—“an ethnic community with a consciousness fortified by an unusual religion,” as Weber put it, and “[t]here’s no other group in the world like that.”

There were moments in my conversations with Mark Weber when I felt a keen despair, a sadness that actually began keeping me up at night. Partly, I was reacting to his cold and pessimistic analysis of “the Jewish problem”: Jews can be poisonous to the societies in which they live, but Zionism is “an aberration” and Israel is “a failure by its own standards.” So, I had asked him, “What’s the answer for the Jews?” And Weber replied, “It’s a huge problem. Nobody has an easy answer.”

As chilling as this was to hear, there was something clarifying, and tonic, about listening to the mind of Holocaust denier at work. As he spoke, it was patently obvious how his obsessive study, and the accumulation of facts—shorn of actual wisdom—led him to into the comfortable embrace of absurd conclusions.

Wisdom is an obvious cure, but it was by talking with Weber that I came to realize the importance of compassion, too. In college and graduate school, I studied history for many years, and never once did I think that it was important how I felt about my subjects; the proper goal was the ever-elusive objectivity. But talking with Weber made me realize something about objectivity: being objective about a particular set of facts cannot always save one from spending a lifetime railing against the Zionist menace (or the black menace, or the invasion of Latino immigrants). Some measure of interest in—compassion for, even love for—those people, those fellow human beings, is an incentive to look at the whole picture: why many Jews love Israel, why black crime rates are higher, why Latinos break the law to come to America.

Weber thus has two problems that prevent him from being a real historian. Not only can he not put facts in their proper context, he doesn’t really want to. He dislikes Jews, and even if his dislike weren’t further complicated by his deforming need for simple answers, it’s absurd for someone who dislikes Jews to be a historian of the Jews. It’s in the nature of humanity that only someone who likes another person or group of people—likes with skepticism, of course, but still likes—can have the sympathetic imagination to really understand that person or group. At the very least, a good scholar has to seek out the company of his subjects—something that would be easy for Weber, whose Orange County is hardly Judenrein. Weber has a deep admiration for Jews—us powerful, cohesive, brilliant Jews—but it’s an admiration that could never survive actually knowing us. “I’m not friends with many Jews,” Weber admitted to me. Hardly surprising, of course. But for his research he goes to AIPAC conventions, not Sabbath services, not classes at the local JCC. He doesn’t go to coffee shops in Jewish neighborhoods to eavesdrop. He does not, in short, do his research. Like sons of the Confederacy who seem to know everything about the glorious old South but don’t really understand anything, Weber has a lot of facts, and most of them are even right. But by the standards of the true historian, Weber is a lowly fraud.

Once, after hearing Weber lament that Jews would always be an insoluble problem, I said that if he were right, Jews would deserve his compassion. He did not quite see matters that way. “I don’t wish Jews badly,” he said, “but I am less concerned with the future of Jews than I am with humanity, the world.” That Jews are part of humanity, and that we live in his world, seemed an idle technicality at best.

One scholar of Holocaust denial told me, quoting a friend, that Holocaust deniers they “are like the shit you step on in the street—it has no relevance unless you fail to scrape it off before entering your home.” In part, I understand the sentiment: I often felt as if Weber, in particular, had come home with me, invaded my office, even my bedroom. But I don’t share the scatological disgust. Instead, I remember what the theologian Stanley Hauerwas once told me about premillennial dispensationalists, those fundamentalist Christians who extrapolate from the Bible extremely complicated, unbelievably detailed, scenarios about the end times, like those in the Left Behind novels. “They’re very smart,” Hauerwas said. “You can’t be stupid and come up with that. God gave them minds, and they need to use them.” In other words, forbidden by their religion from developing real intellectual curiosity, they turn their brainpower toward half-baked biblical exegesis that makes sense according to its own hermetic logic. Weber and Smith are trapped like that. Holocaust denial is, like more benign species of fundamentalism, a well-furnished playground for immature and sometimes deranged intellects. It isn’t necessarily about Jews, or even about the Holocaust; it’s about finding something to do with one’s mind. These people aren’t stupid or cynical: Smith does seem to have a noble libertarian streak, and Weber is smart and industrious. And if they could scale the walls that they’ve built for themselves, and look around at the world outside the playground, they might even do some good.

Sitting across from Mark Weber, formerly the leading light of American Holocaust revisionism, in his California office, I asked him the unavoidable question: did the gas chambers ever exist? “There may have been gas chambers,” he said. But he wanted to make a larger point about the war and historical memory: “It would be astonishing if a historical chapter as big as the Holocaust weren’t subject to some exaggeration. The same is true of Stalin—how many people did he kill? Estimates vary. Now the idea that the Holocaust is free of this kind of exaggeration is almost impossible.”

From there, Weber segued to the discussion he hopes to have more of, since he now is willing to concede—to use his words—“the immense catastrophe in which millions of European Jews died during World War II.” Today, Weber is much more interested in Jewish-Zionist power, which of course, he says, is what allows that Jewish suffering to be exaggerated.

“I don’t hate Jews,” he said. “I don’t wish ill to anyone because of his ancestry. But I talk about Jewish-Zionist power because it is a real thing and it has consequences, and those consequences are harmful.” For Weber, some of those consequences are how the United States exercises power in the Middle East: unconditional support for Israel, the invasion of Iraq, the death of young American soldiers in unnecessary foreign adventures—all brought about in large part by the unique power of American Jews, with their dual loyalties and preternatural skill for organization.

Of course, the very idea that Jews have too much influence presupposes that there’s an appropriate amount of influence any ethnic or religious group should have; so as much as Weber would like to keep his views on culture separate from his views on foreign affairs and politics, his reasoning ineluctably links the two. I was glad to find, then, that he is refreshingly candid in his views on culture. These views were formed partly during his travels in Europe, during time he took off from college. It was an interregnum during which, according to one person close to Weber, he lived in Germany and was arrested for displaying a swastika—an episode the details of which Weber disputes. (That “is wrong, and I will leave it there,” he told me. “Were you arrested for something else, then?” I asked. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.)

“When I was in Europe,” Weber said, “I was very struck that there are all sorts of different groups: Flemish, Dutch, Bretons, French. I thought it’s a good thing all these groups exist and the world would be worse off if they disappeared.” I pointed out that even if that kind of homogeneity were desirable, the United States has never had it—we’ve always been a country of immigrants. Weber conceded the point, but said that up until the time of World War II we had a common narrative, that we were “this English people that brings other people in to assimilate.”

The loss of that unifying story is in good measure, Weber says, Jews’ fault. Weber believes that even Jews who embraced this mainstream, Christian America often undermined it. “The Jewish role in American culture has served immensely to de-Christianize Christmas, that’s just one example,” he said. “And one of the most popular Christmas songs is ‘White Christmas,’ by Irving Berlin. Jewish songs about Christmas strip it almost of any religious character.” Another time, on the phone, Weber put his concern even more starkly: “Jewish leaders in America push for, work for, an America—it’s a gross generalization, I know—an America with no racial or cultural identity. Not just in this country, but around the world, including in Europe. That’s almost a truism.”

Jews succeed in this deracinating project because of their extraordinary constitution as a people. “It’s an ethnic community with a consciousness fortified by an unusual religion,” Weber told me. “There’s no other group in the world like that…. It’s a collective community narrative, or community sense,” one that holds even for Jews who are secular, ignorant of Torah, married to non-Jews, and never in synagogue. “Every Jew is aware that Jews are a chosen people. They may not understand what that means. But to pretend—I don’t want to say I know lots of Jews or I have lots of Jewish friends—but there’s a Jewish consciousness that says they’re a special people.”

Mark Weber had just described the plaintive, hopeful dream of every rabbi in America. While Jewish rabbis, scholars, and grandmothers across the land fret that Jews have no sense of common purpose, no Jewish learning, and no loyalty to the tribe, Weber was here to announce that Jews were purposive, unified, loyal, and engaged.

Weber’s voice was thick with admiration for Jews—and it was full of derision, or at least pity, for his old friend, gas-chamber skeptic Bradley Smith. “Smith was on Donahue in the ’80s, and he was on TV and radio a lot,” Weber told me. “[But] he’s increasingly obscure. The times are different…. When Bradley first started, that was a startling claim, that the gas chambers didn’t exist…. But Bradley Smith has been marginalized in a way he wasn’t in the ’80s and ’90s.” It was ironic, then, that Smith was getting a dose of new publicity thanks to Weber, whose rather histrionic break with Smith and his kind had made them all interesting again, at least to me.

But the elderly and kindly-looking Smith, when I met him at a California Starbucks, wanted to talk not about the Holocaust but mainly about his short-lived career as a self-published author. He has written a book-length monologue called The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, which includes mysterious koans like this: “Jews were in there too from the beginning with Christians and Nazis and the others working on the bomb. They were good at it too. Einstein, Oppenheimer. Teller. What distinguishes Jews primarily from the others is that there aren’t so many of them.” When I insisted on discussing the work for which he is most famous—a series of advertisements in campus newspapers, beginning in the 1990s, questioning various aspects of the received Holocaust story—Smith began attacking David Sweet, the president of Youngstown State University, in whose campus newspaper Smith had recently placed his advertisement asking for, “with proof, the name of one person who was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.” In a letter to the Youngstown State newspaper in March, just days before I met with Smith, Sweet had quoted John Silber, the former president of Boston University, who in 2000 had called Smith a liar.

It incensed Smith that he had been called a liar—just as it incensed him that more non-Jewish professors at Northwestern didn’t stand up for their colleague Arthur Butz, an engineering professor who has argued the gas chambers did not exist; just as it incensed him that Mark Weber has allowed the Institute for Historical Review, once the premier organization in the world for Holocaust revisionism, to lapse into irrelevance. Back in 1993, Smith sided with Weber and others against Willis Carto, who according to Smith “wanted to change the nature of the Journal of Historical Review,” then the IHR’s major publication. “[The journal] was set up primarily to pursue revisionist arguments with regard to the gas-chamber story and the Holocaust,” Smith clarified for me, by phone, a few weeks after our meeting. But Carto, who was accused of hiding funds bequeathed to the IHR, and now runs a fringe publication called The Barnes Review, grew more interested in “nationalism and the race issues and conspiracy stuff,” Smith said. “I mean, he is interested in the Bilderbergers, and stuff like that, and that simply isn’t what those of us who wanted the journal wanted in it…. It was the center of the revisionist movement internationally, and we wanted it to remain that way. They published good stuff, carefully edited.”

Alas, The Journal of Historical Review has not been a priority of Mark Weber’s for a long time, and hence there was mistrust between Smith and Weber even before Weber’s eccentric turn away from the important stuff—gas-chamber questioning—toward the more abstract project of extreme anti-Zionist paranoia. After all, the journal “failed under Mark Weber,” Smith told me. “He hasn’t published it in 10 or 12 years. He’s not really a businessman, and he’s not an editor. It’s difficult for him to work with writers. Mark has a tendency to rewrite stuff, rather than edit stuff.

“I think he functions much better when he has a boss than when he is the boss,” Smith said. “He is not lazy at all, and he is very smart, and he’s a good speaker, and he’s a good writer, when he writes. He has everything. But he can’t run the business, and he can’t work with writers. He lost everybody.”

Smith and Weber each tried to be charitable about the other. For example, Weber had told me that while he didn’t approve of race-mixing, he’d never held it against Smith that Smith has a Mexican wife and a half-Mexican daughter. And Smith was careful not to traffic in the unsavory rumors spread by Weber’s enemies—for example, that he has a Jewish sister. The rumor “comes across my desk every two to three years,” Smith told me, “and I’ve never thought to ask him about it.”

But the rumor was true. Weber did have a Jewish sister. And Smith, currently married to a Mexican, once shared his life with a Jewish lover. I set out to find these women.

TOMORROW: Part IV of “The Denial Twist”: My Sister, My Lover: The Jewish women in the Holocaust deniers’ lives.

The Newport Beach offices of Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review are located in a rented warehouse space in a bland office park. Weber is a former leader of the American Holocaust-denial movement who has now embraced a more intellectualized anti-Semitism; his chief goal is to expose the long tentacles of Jewish-Zionist power. As he showed me in, he paused to introduce me to a young, female intern, one of two who work for him now. According to tax records, Weber is the only paid employee of the Institute, and in the last year for which the Institute’s tax forms are available his salary was $43,999.

His office, lacking walls but defined by bookshelves all around, seems bereft of personal effects. He refused to talk about his ex-wife or his two children; during the time we spent together, he took one call from his current wife, a Russian immigrant whose name he would not give me, and that was as close as he would let me get to his family. His office life was clearly defined by books: books stacked on rows of metal shelves, to be shipped to people who buy from the IHR’s publishing arm, and books crammed into the tall wooden shelves that hold his research library. Dozens of the books, hundreds even, were about Jews and the Holocaust, many of them books I knew from my own graduate studies, written by Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, David Wyman, and others. There were also volumes of Judaica, including Herzl’s diaries and The Encyclopedia of Zionism. I was reminded of the English novelist Howard Jacobson’s brilliant insight about Holocaust deniers: “You will know them because they know more about the Jewish religion than you do. As soon as you meet one of those, and think, by God they’ve got a lot of quotations, by God they know everything about Jews—then that’s what they are. And what cheers me about all this, is that your true anti-Semite, like your true Holocaust denier, is doomed to a kind of Dante-esque hell of living among Jewish things, Jewish books, Jewish artifacts. You can see them in the library, they’ve got the Talmud up here, and they’re burrowing away to find more and more evidence against the Jews. Few Jews live a more perfect scholarly Jewish life.”

This perfectly describes Mark Weber. During the course of our two conversations in person (I returned the next day for another three hours), and several more on the telephone, Weber spoke knowledgeably about the Hebrew Bible, Jewish holidays, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the founding of the state of Israel, Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and the work of Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman. It became clear that he reads the Jewish press more closely than I do, and I write for the Jewish press. At one point, he and I got into an argument over the proper connotations of the Yiddish word macher—a fight that ended, I must sheepishly admit, when I realized he was right.

Gray-goateed, youthful, brown-eyed, in a crisp short-sleeved dress shirt, Weber sat behind a desk and explained to me the source of his conflict with Bradley Smith and others, men with whom he worked closely since before he became head of the IHR in 1995. Throughout our conversation, he positioned himself as the moderate and a freethinker, exasperated by trying to reason with the crazies. He seemed particularly dismayed by Smith and the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, who are both interested above all in questioning the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. “I find myself—knock on wood—trying to talk dispassionately to both sides,” Weber said. “I think people like Bradley Smith and Faurisson are frustrated that they haven’t been more effective. We all wish things were as we wish them to be. I was disappointed that Bradley Smith would turn his back on years of friendship to say the things he did…. [But] Bradley Smith and Robert Faurisson have their identities tied to Holocaust revisionism in a way that isn’t healthy.”

As Weber sees it, he is interested in a wide variety of questions, while Smith and Faurisson are one-issue obsessives. If Smith and others are too “tied” to Holocaust revisionism, Weber is by contrast a scholar—“the only director of the IHR to have any training as an historian,” as he puts it—and an iconoclastic seeker. It’s true that Weber has authored essays on subjects not strictly about Jews or the Holocaust; one recent paper, posted on his web site, is “The ‘Good War’ Myth of World War II,” an attack on Roosevelt and Churchill that never mentions the Holocaust. But even that paper is ultimately an attempt to draw a moral equivalence between Americans and the Nazis, and most of Weber’s corpus is concerned with either attacks on Jews or the defense of anti-Semites. His papers and pamphlets include “Buchenwald: Legend and Reality” and “Fred Leuchter: Courageous Defender of Historical Truth,” an apologia for a Holocaust denier whom Weber calls, in a macabre turn of phrase, “the foremost American expert on gassing and gas chamber technology.”

Weber’s father, a journalist-turned-lawyer, managed President Kennedy’s Oregon campaign in 1960, and his mother returned to school for a doctorate in biology after her children were grown, but Weber traveled far from his prosaic, middle-class roots. As a teenager he was as an activist for the Biafran refugees, then after college taught secondary school in Ghana, only to become in 1978, after travels in Europe and time living in Germany, a writer for a neo-Nazi newspaper, and later, at the IHR, the premier face of Holocaust denial and revisionism in America. But in his conversations with me, Weber seemed to be arguing that his catholicity of interests, his unusual history, and his broad focus on white supremacy, Holocaust skepticism, and historical revisionism on a range of topics (like the causes of World War II, Stalin’s crimes, and Hiroshima, as well as present-day Middle Eastern politics) showed him to be of higher caliber than those who natter on about gas chambers.

“What’s odd is, as [Smith] himself says, he’s not a scholar, not a historian,” said Weber, who, by contrast, holds a master’s in European history from Indiana University. “He’s a publicist for this idea…. It’s hard to see, increasingly, how he can get traction. His latest thing is to place ads [often in campus newspapers] that say, ‘Name one person who died in a gas chamber.’ And maybe one person will read that and say, ‘Okay, okay, I can’t.’ But it’s a pretty far remove from most people’s concerns.” It was hard to tell, listening to Weber, if he wanted to shift the IHR’s identity away from flat-out Holocaust denial because he had decided that it was wrong, and that the Holocaust did happen, or because it was ineffectual, a school of losers who might be right but had failed to convince anybody, and thus deserved their own ignominy. Was Weber abandoning Smith just because he was a loser? I found myself feeling a strange pity for Smith.

That feeling hardly dissipated when I met Smith in person. An enthusiastic raconteur, Smith told me at length about his days as a bullfighter in Mexico, an activity he enjoyed before his days working at an art gallery in New York and then as a bookseller in Los Angeles. Above all, he rejected Weber’s portrayal of him as a single-issue obsessive. Instead, he argued, he was a passionate libertarian, primarily concerned with protecting the sanctity of the freedom of speech. He offered another piece of his history into evidence: Earlier in his storied life, Smith operated one of the few bookstores in Los Angeles where one could buy “obscene” books, and in 1962 he was convicted of selling Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer; his lawyer on appeal was the renowned First Amendment crusader Stanley Fleishman, the disabled polio victim immortalized in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife. On the website of Smith’s one-man organization, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), Smith praises Jews for coming to his defense at that dark hour: “All my life I have watched Jews lead the struggle to maintain a free press and intellectual freedom in America. In the 1960s, when I was a book dealer on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, I was arrested, jailed, tried and convicted for selling a book then banned by the U.S. Government—Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Jews from every walk of life supported my stand against Government censorship.”

Smith may be romanticizing his past as a free-speech crusader; at his trial, he positioned himself not so much as a martyr for the cause as a simple bookseller caught in a web of legalese. According to a Los Angeles Times article of February 8, 1962, Smith declared in his testimony that “he had not heard of the state obscenity law until two weeks after his arrest.” Nevertheless, Smith did take real risks for the cause, and he now says that the fight against censorship has always been his main concern; according to his professed logic, the possibility for “open debate” about whether or not there were gas chambers is useful as the ultimate test of whether our speech is truly free.

In this regard he differs from both Weber and from Faurisson, who sees debunking the Holocaust as an instrument for undermining the Israeli state. Put simply, if we take these men at their words, Smith sees the gas chambers as a question of free speech; Faurisson, as an underpinning of a fraudulent Jewish state; and Weber, as a distraction from the machinations of Jewish power in America. These distinctions may seem trivial to some, different facets of the same anti-Semitic menace; but for the men struggling for the soul of Holocaust revisionism, these differences are all that there is.

TOMORROW: Part III of “The Denial Twist”: The Smith v. Weber feud gets personal.

In reality, however, that caricature grossly misunderstands this anti-Semitic Holocaust skepticism, which is not a unified movement but a loose confederation of people who often have very little in common. The major American organization known for its theories of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), received just under $250,000 in contributions for the 12 months ending on April 30, 2008, the last year for which figures are available, and that money could have come from only a handful of contributors; the Institute’s publishing arm had sales of $53,269—or, to give a generous estimate, about 5,000 books. The Institute’s Journal of Historical Review was last published in 2002, and the very next year a rival publication, The Revisionist, which had already folded once before, ceased publication. The world of Holocaust denial comprises one-man enterprises, fledgling organizations with tiny budgets and few followers, and amateurish magazines with the lifespans of fruit flies.

These enterprises seem poised to become even more fragile, thanks to an internecine feud that began early this year and threatens to cripple an already lame Holocaust-denial movement. In January, IHR director Mark Weber posted an article on his web site arguing that Holocaust “revisionism” has failed to gain traction in either history departments or with the public at large: “[T]here has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective,” Weber wrote. And, he continued, it was time to leave the Holocaust behind and focus on Jewish malevolence today: “Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.”

Soon after Weber’s statements became public, his onetime friend and colleague, 79-year-old Bradley Smith, was quick to denounce his former fellow traveler. “There are those who feel he has … betrayed the revisionist movement,” Smith told the Forward.

Holocaust deniers are a touchy bunch, prone to infighting, but the war of words between Weber and Smith, two old allies, was something special; a battle had been joined in the heart of the American Holocaust-denial movement.  I was intrigued by Weber, this man who claimed to be leaving Holocaust revisionism behind. It was easy enough to judge him just an anti-Semite at war with other anti-Semites. If anything, Weber’s shift to anti-Zionism only confirmed his anti-Semitism; after all, if he were just a disinterested, objective historian, then having dropped the historical question of the Holocaust he’d begin a study of, say, the British raj or the history of Hawaiian agriculture. That he continued to be obsessed with the alleged lies and machinations of Jews seemed proof of an objective disorder.

But because I believe in redemption, and because Weber’s web site offered a curious mixture of anti-Semitic nonsense and mainstream news articles about Israel, and even articles from the Jewish press, I decided that it was worth trying to talk to Mark Weber. Maybe he was a new man. Or maybe he was trying to become one. And while I was at it, I figured, I might as well also try to talk to Smith.

Between February and May, I met in person and spoke multiple times on the telephone with both Smith, who lives in Mexico and whose cuddliness in person seems to mock his reputation as a dangerous extremist, and Weber, a 57-year-old native Oregonian who seems a good deal smarter than Smith but also a good deal less mirthful. These were men whose friendship was on the outs, and each was eager to emphasize his differences with the other. But they were also similar, in ways I did not expect. For example, both Weber and Smith seem to think of themselves as Enlightenment liberals: Smith fashions himself a free-speech absolutist, whose Holocaust skepticism is merely about usefully breaking taboos, while Weber sees himself as a positivist, sifting evidence to determine what is true and what is not. Each man, too, seems to want to be loved and, I thought, a bit puzzled that it has not worked out that way.  Most surprising, both Weber and Smith loved Jews. They don’t love Jews generally, of course, but each man has a Jewish woman in his past with whom he has had a close relationship. Discovering these contradictions in the lives of Smith and Weber did not arouse in me any sympathy, and of course it doesn’t discredit their ideas, which are wrong on their own merits. But to meet these two men late in their careers in anti-Semitism, and to get to know them as they tangled with each other, helped illuminate what kind of man might choose to cross the borders of respectable opinion, and what inner needs might keep him exiled from his fellow man.

****

After I had secured the Weber interview, Smith, whose home in Mexico is just 100 miles from where Weber lives in Southern California, volunteered to drive across the border and meet me. For one airfare, I could meet two extremists.

Of the two men, Bradley Smith is much closer to the common perception of a classic Holocaust denier, singularly obsessed with disproving the existence of the Nazi machinery of death. But the elderly Smith was kindly enough to endure the traffic jam at the Mexican-American border and meet me at the Starbucks in San Clemente, California, the beach town where Richard Nixon began his exile. Smith had left a message on my mobile phone saying that he would wait for me in the parking lot, and that’s where I found him, snoozing behind the wheel of his pickup truck. I rapped on the window, and the aging radical opened his eyes with a start, remembered where he was, smiled at me, popped open his door, and lumbered out, smiling warmly. In his worn flannel shirt and jeans, a scraggly white beard dressing up his weather-beaten face, Smith looked like an old, sagacious cowhand, the kind of guy whose favorite story is about how he forgave the beloved bull who once got startled and kicked him in the head.

Once we were both seated at the coffee shop, I tried to ask Smith about possible flaws in the works of great Holocaust historians.

“You’ve read all the standard accounts,” I asked, “like Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg?”

“Yeah,” Smith said, “that’s what I started with, I read Hilberg. I didn’t read them very closely. Because I’m not really interested in the history of the period.”

I was a little shocked. “I mean, you read Lucy Dawidowicz’s book on the period? You read David Wyman?”

“Not thoroughly,” Smith said. “Wyman, I didn’t read. He came a bit too late.”

I was astounded. “But that’s kind of amazing, right? Because here are these classic works of Holocaust literature that purport to show it all and you say you haven’t read them closely. So you have read Arthur Butz, who’s a nobody in the field, closely, but you haven’t read the great titans in the field closely?”  “You know what? I’m not interested in the story,” he replied. “Revisionists have written very detailed documents about the holes—”

“So what are you interested in?”

“In a free exchange of ideas.”

“But you aren’t interested in trying to find out which ideas are right?”

“Not particularly. You know what I’m really interested in? Every generation has its taboo, and I happen to be here with this taboo. I happen to be here with this one. And I can see how it’s exploited, and who benefits from the exploitation.”

And so it went for a while. As we got up to leave, Smith said that he had a gift for me. He reached into his bag and produced paperback copies of The Man Who Saw His Own Liver and his self-published memoir, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist. He assured me that they were both good reads.

TOMORROW: Part II of “The Denial Twist”: Meeting Mark Weber.

But acting as if all anti-Semites are basically the same person, just slight variations on a theme, actually underestimates the power of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the power of this pathology lies in its ability to be pressed into service by all kinds of men and women, including people who would never speak to one another. Some anti-Semites are real dangers; others are misguided obsessives; others are just sad sacks. To ignore their diversity is to miss the historical significance of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Since January I have been working on a long investigation for Tablet (to run later this month) of the Holocaust denial movement, of which von Brunn is reported to be a proud member. But as I have seen close-up, it is so riven by internal divisions that it is hardly a “movement” at all. For example, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, is nothing like von Brunn, from what I can tell of news reports describing the alleged D.C. shooter. Weber does not believe in race-mixing, thinks Jews are almost ineluctably disloyal to the countries in which they live, and has worked with some of the worst racists in America. But his temperament is not that of the paranoiac. Rather, he is something of a history buff gone wrong, an obsessive whose deep intelligence collects facts but can’t place them in any kind of context. The Jews fascinate him in an unhealthy way, but he doesn’t attribute to Jews magical powers to plan vast conspiracies and keep them secret. What’s more, in my interviews with him, Weber conceded to me that there may in fact have been gas chambers; he also wrote an article, discussed intelligently in the Forward last January, criticizing several famous Holocaust deniers for being stuck in the past. (Weber would prefer to stop talking about gas chambers and focus instead on the threat of Zionist influence on American foreign policy.) Many of his beliefs are loathsome and wrong, but Weber is not delusional and he is not violent. He is more comfortable with books than with guns.

For many years Weber was closely allied with Bradley Smith, the founder of a one-man shop called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Like Weber, Smith would never encourage violence, and he too sees himself as something of a litterateur. But while Weber has a master’s degree in history and is widely read, Smith is almost gleeful about his anti-intellectualism. Before becoming active in questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers, Smith was active in the libertarian movement, and he was drawn to Holocaust denial because he believed questioning of the Holocaust was a taboo worth smashing. Smith sees himself as a free-speech zealot whose great contribution is to ask a question—were there gas chambers?—that most of us are too afraid to ask. And for what it’s worth, Smith has no problem with race-mixing: he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife.

Smith, in turn, has no use for Willis Carto, who lost control of the Institute for Historical Review in a lawsuit in the early 1990s and went on to found The Barnes Review, perhaps the strangest publication I have ever read. Its purpose seems to be extreme historical revisionism, including Holocaust denial but also the defenses of the indefensible (Charles Lindbergh, Rudolf Hess) and a bizarre white man’s pseudo-populism (“Rediscovering the Forgotten White Ancestors Of Many American Indians”). Carto is where anti-Semitism and racism intersect with a mystical, LaRouche-like detachment from reality.

And then there are the outright Nazi sympathizers or Klansman types, those who may share elements of other, more cerebral forms of anti-Semitism but also have a visceral sense that the Jews are vermin. In the writings of James K. Warner, for example, one sees none of Weber’s almost admiring sense of the Jews as a cohesive people, nor any of Smith’s relish for testing the limits of free expression. In fact, reading Warner’s attack on Weber as a Mossad agent, alongside his theories about Scientologists and the CIA, one sees exactly the kind of undifferentiated, enraged stupidity that I imagine von Brunn possesses. It’s a zealotry far different from what I have found in Bradley Smith or Mark Weber.

It is tempting, of course, to say, “So what?” The world would be better off without any of it—the racial fear-mongering of Weber, the provocations of Smith, the trashy publications of Carto, the deranged bile of Warner—so why bother to waste too much effort in classification? First, we should be more sophisticated in our thinking; let’s do better than those who pervert truth for a living. Second, it’s smart and pragmatic to try to tell the maniacs from the misguided, the merely stupid, and those just seeking attention. It’s good policing, in other words.

Third, while von Brunn sounds mentally ill in a very obvious way, many anti-Semites and bigots have become what they are by exaggerating in themselves certain traits that are in all of us. Oddly, it would be comforting to imagine that von Brunn’s fellow anti-Semites are all like him, homicidal and deranged. At least we would know what we’re dealing with—and, better yet, we don’t have worry that we or anyone we know could ever be like that.

Finally, we need to recognize the multifarious nature of anti-Semitism. It is different from other bigotries—not worse or more harmful, just different, in historically significant ways. People who hate blacks or Hispanics don’t accuse them of plotting world conspiracies or controlling the Federal Reserve; nobody has accused Mormons of plotting to overthrow capitalism. But Jews are conceived as both money-hungry usurers and anti-American communists; as preening materialists and dirty, schnorring paupers; as genetically inferior but able to control the world through secret cabals. As Sartre famously remarked, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. Anti-Semitism is not simple, for if it were, it would not be so useful.

Mark Oppenheimer, a Tablet contributing editor,is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

The Preppy Handbook and Trading Places. Nobody wore belts with little embroidered whales on them or ate crustless cucumber sandwiches. Nevertheless, my prep school had a Protestant, old-money ethos, albeit an attenuated, decayed one, as if it had once been more overtly WASP-y and I could still smell the vapors.

My sense of that nebulous, bygone era came less from a true sense of the school’s history and more from books like The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, and Death Be Not Proud, through which I learned what prep school was supposed to be like, what it had been like before all the quotas had been lifted and the student bodies diversified. There has been a resurgence of prep-school literature lately, but though they’ve updated the genre, books like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual exhibit none of the fetishization of WASP culture, both alluring and baleful, that characterized those earlier novels—and that I loved. Nothing about my actual gentile classmates, many of them close friends and therefore overly familiar to me, was so mesmerizing.

The book that I loved best, precisely for its depiction of this lost world, was Louis Auchincloss’s The Rector of Justin. You probably haven’t heard of Auchincloss—Rector was a major best-seller in the 1960s, but Auchincloss’ generation of fans has mostly died off—but he occupies a very special niche in the literary culture. He may not be the best chronicler of the beauties and hypocrisies of Old Money—he’s vastly inferior to Evan S. Connell or Hortense Calisher—but he’s certainly the most committed. His first book, The Indifferent Children, was published in 1947. His latest, The Friend of Women, was published last spring. For 60 years, he has written about how wealthy Protestants treat one another—and, just as notably, how they treat the Other. His 60-odd books constitute a career of social inspection unparalleled in our generation; for those interested in class and ethnicity in America, Auchincloss—elderly, rich, with declining sales and a very indulgent publisher—should matter.

My appreciation for Auchincloss survives despite—not because of—the fact that he’s a writer more interesting than talented. The Friend of Women, a collection of five stories and a one-act play, is not a good book. The play, The Country Cousin, is dramatically inert; nobody would ever perform it. And of the stories only the first, the title story, about a retired bachelor schoolteacher at a girls’ school who for decades meddles in the lives of his favorite graduates, is satisfying. The product of an author whose powers long ago began to fail, The Friend of Women is notable mainly for making it abundantly clear how unimaginative a writer Auchincloss is. He’s hopelessly derivative of himself, even though there are better writers to steal from. His formula has not changed at least since The Rector of Justin was published in 1964. He writes narratives, mostly in the first person, of WASPs who are well aware of their flaws but, contemptuous of Freud and bred not to probe too deeply, never show much movement from the beginning of the book to the end. The wheels of plot turn, and the stories come to satisfying conclusions: an inheritance crisis is resolved, a stockbroker confesses his misdeeds. But at the end the reader feels compelled to ask: If all the characters are so unwise, could there be any wisdom in the writer? Is he chronicling shallowness and snobbery, and perhaps ridiculing it, or is he practicing it?

The answer is a little of both. And that, I will confess, is why I adore him. If Auchincloss were better, he might be psychologically taxing, like James, and thus a bit more like homework. If he were worse, he would be disposably middlebrow. But as it is, he’s the master practitioner of a kind of WASP pornography. Only I can’t figure out if it’s erotica for WASPs themselves, or for Jews and other ethnics, or for lower-caste Protestants, who enjoy gazing pruriently (or perhaps aspirationally) at a defunct tableau. Who’s indulging in nostalgia here? The writer, or his intended audience, whoever that may include? The scion of an old family that once was great, or his Jewish friend who wants to believe in the lost greatness of his friend’s family?

I don’t think I could have enjoyed this fiction were I contemporaneous with it. I probably would have felt it lacked verisimilitude or, if I had not found it lacking, I still would have found it painful—after all, those would have been my Jewish friends and neighbors being excluded from the Ivy League or the country club. But many decades later, reading Auchincloss is something of an education, skewed but wildly entertaining. Like watching Mad Men to learn about Kennedy-era businessmen, or HBO’s Rome to learn about ancient Rome, the more stereotyped the characters, the better; the payoff is not psychological intricacy but rather a kind of romanticized encounter with the past as other. Only it’s the WASP, not the Jew, who is the Other.

Auchincloss has a toolkit full of stock characters: the cuckolded husband, the bohemian daughter in rebellion, the “bachelor” prep school teacher, the crafty Jew. Again, these characters work in his fiction because of the inadequacy of the characterization. It’s difficult to read the lines of Shakespeare’s Shylock, because he is a person, a recognizable one maybe, and so one wants to look away. But I’m not offended by Auchincloss’ Jews, just as I can’t imagine that a gay man would be offended by his homosexuals, for they aren’t the literary production of a man who really knows Jews or homosexuals (or if he knows them, he seems not to understand them). So why take offense? Let them play their parts in the melodramas, which can be tasty indeed.

The major, lasting impression left by the full Auchincloss corpus comes not from the recycled plot, nor from the same character types reappearing in new clothes, but from his signature tone. It’s a tone that would have a certain wondrous, gelid beauty if it weren’t so campy—and if its lack of development, over time, didn’t prove how little Auchincloss developed as a writer. Consider these three passages:

I do not wish to record my impressions of the school in session before, as I have learned to make allowance for the timid and apprehensive side of my nature which has a way, like a ghostly and mischievous extra brush, quite beyond the painter’s control, of dubbing clouds and rain squalls into the sunniest landscape. If I am ever to be a minister, with God’s help, I must learn joy.

Xenia was a dark, small, silent, rather formidable woman to whom Clyde was ostensibly very devoted, but out of whose presence he seemed sometimes to skip with the bound of a schoolboy leaving his classroom. On the excuse of the lawsuit he lunched frequently with Leslie and took him afterward to private viewings of art shows or to galleries of museums not generally open to the public. He seemed determined to impress the younger man with the full range of his sympathy and wit, and indeed it was a rare performance.

I like to think of myself as l’ami des femmes, although in a longish life—I am now sixty—I have never married, nor even (though I hardly glory in it) had a love affair. . . . Obviously, at least to any devotee of French drama, the name I give myself is taken from the play of Dumas fils in which the protagonist dedicates himself to the task of saving a married woman, trapped in what she has deemed an incompatible union, from taking a lover. He believes, like La Rochefoucauld, that the wife who has taken but one lover in her life is a rare being, and that the first misstep inevitably entails successors.

The first passage—the musings of Brian Aspinwall, the mousy teacher in The Rector of Justin—is from 1964. The next is from The Novelist of Manners, published in 1974. The last is, of course, from the title story in The Friend of Women, published last May. Yet in terms of diction and sensibility, they could all be from 1920, or 1940—some imagined time when sentences had the leisure to amble around, tasting and then regurgitating highbrow references and allusions, not rushing to any forced conclusion. This consistency of tone throughout Auchincloss’ career is a sure marker that he is no artist—for artists do grow, they have to—but it’s also part of Auchincloss’s strange greatness: As in a skin flick, you always know what you’re getting before you get it. Auchincloss fulfills a preconceived fantasy, rather than creating a new one. His characters sound like what WASPs are supposed to sound like, whether or not WASPs ever sounded like that. What’s more, his WASPs still sound like that, in the aughts. Even though feminism and the end of the Jewish quotas have come to the real world, the cadences of an Auchincloss character signify a refusal to accept that anything has changed.

In a very perceptive 1993 essay in The New Republic, Andrew Delbanco parsed the Auchincloss style:

The clearest sign of this bottom-line class solidarity is the very language of his fiction. He populates his novels with blustering men who say “see here” and “I say” and “bully” and “by Jove,” and he writes in a defensively prescriptive style that is never far from schoolmarmishness—full of formal constructions such as “I am become.” . . . “I identify myself,” says one character, “in the plight of Richard Nixon.” This pedantic “in” (the colloquial “with” will just not do) is the stylistic equivalent of an upturned nose.

Delbanco is far more generous than I in praising Auchincloss’ writing, but he seems to take far less pleasure in it. By treating Auchincloss too seriously as an artist, Professor Delbanco misses out on all the fun. This is campy stuff, Herr Doktor, and a lot of it’s quite queeny: boys’ boarding schools, bachelor masters, sexless heterosexual marriages whose husbands sublimate all their aggression into corporate battle. An Auchincloss novel always leaves one’s rugby shirt torn and a little soiled.

In early works such as The Rector of Justin, about the career of a fictional New England headmaster, Jews appear only in absentia, as when the good rector Prescott explains how their numbers must be limited among the student body. In 1997’s “The Atonement,” the title story of a collection by the same name, Sandy Tremain is led to ruin when he becomes a confederate of the immoral stock schemer Lenny Brandt, a Jew. In the story “The Conversion of Fred Coates,” from the new collection, a gentile lawyer shocks his father-in-law by agreeing to represent an old college friend, a Jewish intellectual and leftist who is being persecuted by Senator McCarthy. “What’s got into you, Fred?” his father-in-law asks. “I’ve never seen you worked up like this before. All about some Jewish radical you haven’t seen since college.”

There’s no character in his corpus that can be pointed to as a loathsome stereotype, no evidence that Auchincloss himself is an anti-Semite; there’s nobody like The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim. Rather, Auchincloss just seems to have such painful nostalgia for this world, one in which Jews—along with truly liberated women, proud homosexuals, and laborers of any sort—are best taken in small, colorful doses. One might have had a Jewish friend or a long-forgotten college flirtation with socialism—but neither should make an appearance at the firm’s Christmas party. Intellectually, Auchincloss knows that his heroes, these characters he loves, are morally bad, or at least limited. But he finds them beautiful anyway, and he mourns their passing.

Many of us do, I think. Now that Jews have been admitted to the club, we discover that it’s a rip-off, with bad food and overpriced drinks. There’s a poignant sense that maybe, in another time, it really was glamorous, that once we were being excluded from something worth having. The morality was bad, but the aesthetic was grand. Auchincloss continues to give us the pleasure of the latter without the worries of the former. In his fiction, I can live in the world of Peabody, Saltonstall, Frelinghuysen, and I can do so without having to muck about in the loathsome aspects of their culture. The unthinking anti-Semite of a better author—say, Kazuo Ishiguro’s nobleman in The Remains of the Day—is horrifying, but nothing in Auchincloss is horrifying. His books are fun and competent and evanescent: they have the virtue of all being the same. Soon, there will be no more to come, which would be sad if they had not outlived their world already.

Theodore Bikel, Cloris Leachman, and Ernest Borgnine in The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky (CBS/Photofest)

Here, then, are 10 memorable TV b’nai mitzvah, moving over the years from well-meaning, almost saccharine reverence for ritual to critical, even scathing send-ups.

1. “The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky,” 1962. In this installment of General Electric Theater, Orlovsky, a Russian defector, falls in love with Miriam Raskin, the widowed daughter of a rabbi. Although Orlovsky fell away from religion as a child—fleeing home, serving in the Russian army—he re-connects to his tradition through Miriam, who is preparing to celebrate her son’s bar mitzvah. Orlovsky returns to Judaism and decides to become a bar mitzvah.

2. Car 54, Where Are You?, 1963. Joey Pokrass, about to become a bar mitzvah boy, is afraid no one will attend his big day; his father is a widely loathed landlord, and the Pokrass name is mud in town. So officers Toody and Muldoon bring over prisoners from night court to watch Joey at the bima; others show up, too, persuaded by the cops’ genuine pleadings. Old Man Pokrass is so touched at this outpouring for his son that he mends his ways and begins to fix up his tenants’ apartments. “Yesterday my son was bar mitzvahed,” he says, “but it was me who became a man.”

3. The Dick Van Dyke Show, 1966. Buddy Sorrell, played by Morey Amsterdam, has been acting funny, ducking out of the office for unclear reasons and with odd excuses. Rob and Sally speculate whether he’s having an affair, but it turns out that he’s been meeting with a rabbi: As a young child, he had to work and was unable to become a bar mitzvah, and now he is planning to rectify the omission from his youth.

4. Archie Bunker’s Place, 1981. Stephanie, the young Jewish girl whom Archie and Edith adopted after her mother’s death, wants to celebrate a bat mitzvah on this successor to All in the Family. Stephanie’s biological grandmother gets involved in the planning and insists on a big, lavish affair, but Stephanie will have none of it. After a synagogue service in which she chants in Hebrew alongside a rabbi and a female cantor, Stephanie has her party back at Archie’s house. It’s the one time Archie Bunker wears a yarmulke, and Rob “Meathead” Reiner isn’t even around to see it.

5. Diff’rent Strokes, 1984. Arnold, the young, black adopted son of “Mr. D,” attends a friend’s bar mitzvah and is attracted to a religion that gives a 13-year-old boy cash and premature adult privileges, which, he thinks, include getting into X-rated movies. Arnold consults a rabbi about converting, but when he hears about some of the challenges of Judaism—learning Hebrew, fasting on Yom Kippur—his interest cools. At the end of the episode, he goes to church with his father.

6. The Wonder Years, 1989. Kevin, played by Fred Savage, is jealous of his friend Paul, who is about to become a bar mitzvah. Kevin is moved when, having dinner at Paul’s house, he sees Paul’s grandfather give him, in anticipation of the big day, not a TV or watch but a prayer book that his father had given him. Kevin goes home and asks his parents, “What are we?” His parents fumble about, come up with a few bland European ancestries. Since it happens to fall on his birthday, Kevin, overcome by a jealousy he can’t quite name, refuses to attend Paul’s bar mitzvah. Paul is understandably wounded. In the end, Kevin relents, showing up at the synagogue in time to see Paul read from Torah. The episode ends with the two boys dancing a rousing hora.

7. Seinfeld, 1997. “The Serenity Now” episode features this fine exchange among Elaine, a bar mitzvah boy, and his father:

Elaine: Congratulations, Mr. Lippman.

Lippman: Oh, Elaine. My boy’s a man today. Can you believe it? He’s a man.

Elaine: Oh, congratulations, Adam.

[Adam zealously French-kisses Elaine.]

Adam: I’m a man!

Later, both Mr. Lippman and the rabbi hit on Elaine.

8. Sex and the City, 2000. Publicist Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, is hired to help plan the party of Jenny Brier, a precocious, young New Yorker. “My father has invited over 300 of his most powerful friends to this event,” Jenny tells a skeptical Samantha. “They’re not all coming. The Clintons can’t make it, of course. But like I told Daddy, we’ll be lucky if we can swing this for under a mil. But what do I know? I’m just a kid.”

9. Frasier, 2002. Eager to put in a fine performance at the bar mitzvah of his son (who is being raised by his ex-wife, Lilith), Frasier wants to deliver a brief blessing in Hebrew. When he accidentally infuriates his Hebrew tutor, a Star Trek fan, Frasier is deceived into memorizing the blessing in Klingon. At the big event, Frasier chants, “Pookh lod wih le koo…” then concludes, “Shabbat shalom.”

“Today, I Am a Clown,” The Simpsons

10. The Simpsons, 2003. Krusty the Klown, the prodigal son of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, is moved to celebrate an adult bar mitzvah when he discovers that he cannot get a star on the Jewish Walk of Fame without having passed that milestone. In a nod to reality TV, Krusty’s bar mitzvah becomes a television special, a big spectacle that infuriates his rabbi father, voiced by Jackie Mason. But at the end, to reconcile with his father, Krusty celebrates a low-key affair at the synagogue.

I’ve acted in two hundred and thirty-seven buddy movies and, with that experience, I’ve developed an almost preternatural feel for the beats that any good buddy movie must have. And maybe the most crucial audience-rewarding beat is where one buddy comes to the aid of the other guy to help defeat a villain. Or bully. Or jerk. Someone the audience can really root against. And in Denby I realized excitedly that I had hit the trifecta. How could an audience not be dying for a real Billy Jack moment of reckoning for Denby after he dismisses or diminishes or just plain insults practically everything Stiller had ever worked on? And not letting it rest there, in true bully fashion Denby moves on to take some shots at the way Ben looks and even his Jewishness…

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in Zoolander

The author, of course, is none other than Owen Wilson, the greatest Gentile actor in Hollywood. Not the greatest actor who happens to be a Gentile, but the greatest portrayer of Gentiles, the finest capturer of their widely stereotyped essence. And it is precisely that trait that makes his buddy movies with Ben Stiller—Meet the Parents, Zoolander, Starsky and Hutch, and Meet the Fockers—so delicious.

Denby’s review is quite smart at times. His explanation, for example, of why Bill Murray has emerged a major star and Dan Aykroyd hasn’t is original and dead-on. But in attacking Stiller’s characters, Denby misunderstands what the actor, whose father is Jewish, is trying to accomplish. Perhaps because he has given so much thought to the “Jewish male on the make”—his memoir American Sucker recounts losing his savings day-trading while getting hooked on internet porn—Denby is happy to use that image to unlock the mystery of Stiller’s popularity. But that critical move misses entirely the context in which Stiller works. Stiller is one half of Stiller and Wilson, masters of the smart, hip interethnic rapport, Martin and Lewis for the Tiger Woods age.

The straight man/funny man dynamic is as old as Roman comedy, and the Jewish/Gentile version goes back at least to Dick Van Dyke and Morey Amsterdam—or Burns and Allen. But for Ben Stiller it’s a specialty, one that gets its most obvious workout in Keeping the Faith, directed by Edward Norton. Stiller and Norton play a rabbi and a priest, best friends since childhood, helping each other through the trials of their respective callings. I once heard Stiller on Howard Stern denigrating this movie, which I always thought was underrated and worth seeing again. But, as any good director knows, the straight man makes all the difference. And it must be admitted that, compared with Owen Wilson, Edward Norton is a cut-rate Gentile at best. (For one thing, he reads a bit too Jewish; it’s no surprise that he worked so well in the Woody Allen ensemble comedy Everyone Says I Love You.)

Owen Wilson, on the other hand, is a Pimm’s cup perfectly mixed. First, there’s his voice, a combination of California surfer lilt and Locust Valley lockjaw, an accent that’s relaxed and pompous at the same time; not since James Spader’s sinister baritone in Pretty in Pink has a movie voice so convincingly conveyed class privilege. There is, too, Wilson’s nose: craggy, broken, impossible to miss. Its prominence is, on Wilson, maddeningly perfect, evidence not of his ethnic patrimony but of a boating accident or a lacrosse injury. It’s all so unfair—and the near-boiling resentment that Stiller brings to their interactions shows that he knows it.

Above all, there’s the magnanimity, the egregious sensitivity that the socially secure use when speaking to their inferiors. In Meet the Parents, Stiller’s Greg Focker is forced to spend an afternoon with Wilson’s Kevin Rawley, his fiancée’s ex-boyfriend. Kevin is a wealthy financier by trade, but his avocation is woodworking, and he salvages scrap “from an old seaman’s chapel in Nantucket.” Ever the gracious loser, he has carved—by hand, and from a single piece of wood—his ex and her new beau a wedding canopy; he tells Greg, “It’s an altar—or you might call it a chhhuppah.” Kevin’s effort to pronounce the word correctly is so sincere that Greg cannot think he his being mocked; he can only fume over the one-upmanship.

And that is the humor, and implicit social commentary, that Wilson brings to all his great buddy-movie straight men: Kevin, who returns in Meet the Fockers, Ken Hutchinson in Starsky & Hutch, Hansel McDonald in Zoolander, even, in a way, Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums. They are solicitous, eager to understand the pain of their buddy and to soak up their wisdom while feeling entitled and untroubled, bereft of neurosis, in precisely the way their ethnic counterpart cannot. They are perfectly engineered to make Stiller squirm—not from bigoted condescension, but from too-earnest kindness. When, at the end of Meet the Fockers, we learn that Kevin has spent a year on a kibbutz and is now ready to perform a quasi-Jewish wedding ceremony, it becomes clear that Owen Wilson has created the ultimate film philo-Semite—a character every bit as funny as he is, in another light, unnerving.

Denby’s analysis is, above all, an attempt to explain the amazing popularity of Ben Stiller, who is, he argues, “like a kid acting in a show at summer camp, cutting up for his relatives and friends.” How could a second-rate comic be a first-rate box office draw? The answer is not so difficult; the evidence is right there, in Denby’s short piece. Stiller has had some box office disappointments—Denby mentions Permanent Midnight and The Cable Guy, but kindly ignores bombs like Mystery Men; those are, as a rule, movies without Owen Wilson or another suitable foil. In other words, Stiller is a ham in search of a straight man; being occasionally mismatched is an occupational hazard. Of course, some of his characters are one-dimensional—that’s the nature of the buddy comedy. And Owen Wilson’s combination of cad, lacrosse goalie, and mensch is the best buddy Stiller’s characters could ever want.

Hot shiksas love this shtick—at least I hoped they did when I was in high school—and there’s something wonderfully true about how Seth worked this angle in his relationship with Summer last season. I give OC creator Josh Schwartz credit for mining that vein of humor common to savvy, confident Jewish boys surrounded by non-Jewish women.

What Schwartz and his writers miss is that boys as smart and ironically self-aware as Seth sometimes tend to be more conflicted. Though Judaism is central to his identity, Seth never wonders what it means that his mother is not Jewish. He never wonders if he could marry a non-Jew—or what it means that his father did. He never wonders why he has no Jewish friends, and he never seems to crave any.

Of course, most television adolescents don’t struggle with these questions; David Silver of Beverly Hills 90210 was too busy trying to separate Donna Martin from her virginity to fret about her being Catholic. But David was a narcissistic boob who thought he could be a professional rapper; Seth Cohen is sensitive and humane.

If we’re to suspend disbelief and enter the world of The OC, then we must acknowledge that Seth, given what we know about him, has thoughts about religion that he hasn’t shared with us. We must admit that his Passover seder with Summer, his parents, and his Jewish grandma was more fraught than he let on. And we must demand that Josh Schwartz show us more of the whole Seth in future episodes. His Jewishness is not physiognomy, not religiosity, not a stereotypical, overbearing family; it’s the source of his mildly alienated humor. Being Jewish clearly means something to him. So far, he just hasn’t told us what.

Borovitz’s tale has a picaresque quality, taking us from the Cleveland underworld to prison and finally to the chaplaincy at Beit T’Shuvah, the Los Angeles treatment center lauded by President Bush as faith-based initiative at its best. But what makes the book not just likeable but important is how Borovitz forces his readers to confront the reality of Jewish criminals and junkies—not just in the Meyer Lansky 1930s or the boiler rooms of Wall Street, but in anonymous suburbs. Borovitz was raised by good people. He went to shul. Older brother Neal, in fact, was already a rabbi by the time Mark did his first prison stint.

Jewish law-abidingness was not my only preconception challenged by The Holy Thief. One tends not to associate addiction recovery and Jewish spirituality. Where do Jews go when they get hooked on amphetamines or alcohol? Not to shul, but to places with names like Rolling Hills or Hidden Valley where, of course, most of the residents are surely Christians. What could it mean for Torah to play a role in addiction treatment?

The Holy Thief does not quite get to the heart of this question; the book ends with Mark getting out of prison, finding work at the then-new and experimental Beit T’Shuvah, marrying its founder, and being accepted to study for the rabbinate at the University of Judaism. The final pages are devoted to a schmaltzy testimonial from a rabbi friend given to understated claims like: “In so many ways, Mark is more a prophet than a rabbi.” But there is almost no discussion of what, exactly, Mark and his co-workers do.

To learn more, I visited Beit T’Shuvah, on Venice Boulevard. There, Rabbi Mark and his wife, Harriet Rossetto, the social worker who founded the center, gave me a tour of their small campus. It has dormitories for 100, a cafeteria, and a shul that every Friday draws 350 people: current residents, alumni, and some neighbors who just like Rabbi Mark’s revival-style services. Harriet and the rabbi explained their treatment program for Jewish addicts young and old, some poor, others the children of Hollywood moguls. It’s a combination of worship, Torah study, group therapy, individual psychodynamic therapy, and traditional Twelve Step recovery on the Alcoholics Anonymous model.

Somehow, this melding of Judaism with Twelve-Stepping struck me as even less probable than the notion of Jewish addicts. I think this had something to do with my sense that the Twelve Steps are, like Wicca and est, goyish. AA’s founders were openly Christological; when they enjoined their followers to put faith in a higher power, it was clear whom they meant. “A power greater than ourselves” leaves room for interpretation, and AA’s emphasis on confessional prayer and humiliation before a deity has worked for Jews, Muslims, and even Unitarian-style deists. Still, like other quintessentially American self-help or empowerment formulas, like the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking or Stephen Covey’s Mormon-derived habits of highly effective people, AA is clearly rooted in Christianity.

As we sat in Harriet’s office, I asked the couple, “Am I alone in my perception that the Twelve Steps are, well, Christian?”

Rabbi Mark, tall, burly, and 52, stroked his red-and-white beard, sat forward on the sofa, and explained patiently that I was mistaken. The Twelve Steps, he said, are closer to Judaism than to the Protestantism from which they derive. After all, Protestantism (in its Baptist and Calvinist strains anyway) places ultimate importance in belief; Judaism, we know, wants belief but insists on action. The mitzvot are primarily concerned with what we do, not what we think. And although the Twelve Steps, like the Ten Commandments, begin with a requirement of belief, they move to action: make a list of persons harmed, make amends to them, carry the message to others. The tenth step is to take an inventory of one’s failings, and, the rabbi asked, is that not the essence of Judaism, whose holiest day is set aside for confession and atonement?

While I agreed that Judaism and Twelve Step recovery seemed to have a good deal in common, I was not sure that Rabbi Mark had located the real connection. While Yom Kippur comes once a year, thrice-daily prayers and frequent shul-going are the kinds of habit-forming practices that can keep the monkey off one’s back. They can also prompt theophanies, real spiritual experiences of the kind that recovering users often need.

“I think,” Harriet said, “that the perception that the Twelve Steps are Christian comes from the personal relationship with God, and most Jews don’t have a personal relationship with God. The Orthodox more often find that the steps make sense.”

“Some of them,” Rabbi Mark added.

“Yes, only some of them,” Harriet agreed.

In other words, even many Orthodox Jews practice their religion dutifully but without any sense that they are communing with a real God. They could use a good dose of Beit T’Shuvah, where the people I met believed that their sobriety was truly a gift. And they clearly had formed a culture of support, which is what a Jewish congregation is supposed to be. The rabbis of old did not intend for thousand-family megasynagogues; they settled on minyans of ten, favoring a small, intimate culture of support rather than the large spectacle that the Temple must have been.

While I was sitting in the rabbi’s study, Jeff, a graduate of Beit T’Shuvah, stopped by just to say hello. He is out in the world now, practicing law as he used to, but this was still his family. Rabbi Mark told me that some of Beit T’Shuvah’s residents had never been addicts at all, just lonely or destitute Jews with nowhere else to live. The Beit T’Shuvah residents are nice in a way that the average hardened urbanite can find creepy. The experience of unearned decency, the menschlichkeit of others, is something people long for until it is upon them, when it can upset protective notions of what others are like. So when Lubavitchers (who also have successful addiction treatment programs, by the way) invite us for Shabbos dinner or Pesach, we are a little put off. If you have traveled to Salt Lake City, you will know the experience of having a Mormon offer you a place to stay. What is it these people want? we ask. We aren’t quite sure, so we call their religions cults, and that’s the end of it.

When I asked if the secretary would call me a cab, Rabbi Mark jumped in and said he would find a ride for me. He poked his head into an adjoining room and emerged with Phil, a fortyish man with blue eyes and a deep California tan, now in his ninth month at Beit T’Shuvah. Phil offered to take me back to my hotel, and I gladly accepted.

“It’s a miracle that I am alive,” Phil said, as he pulled onto Pico. “I should be dead or using. But it’s a miracle. The rabbi is a miracle. We’re all miracles.”

Yes, he had the strange sound of a fervent convert. As expressed by Rabbi Mark, Harriet, Phil, and other Twelve Step devotees, that faith, so honest and genuine, sounds hokey, at the very least. At worst, if one doubts its sincerity, such faith seems sinister: how evangelical, how Christian. But Beit T’Shuvah’s brand of homely decency, buttressed by a recovery program first drafted by a couple of Christian alcoholics, is, like alcoholism itself, no stranger to Judaism.