-Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal at Davos (h/t Journal of a Journalist).

This month, Temple B’nai Israel was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a cultural and architecturally significant site and cited as a “highly intact example of an early twentieth-century synagogue in a small city.” Jewish communities in small cities rarely get the attention they deserve, overshadowed by their more prevalent and visible urban compatriots, so this honor is particularly welcome.

My grandfather, Abraham Solomon, was not one of the men who carried the Torah that day in 1929. He and my grandmother arrived in Olean a few years later. They emigrated from Russia to New York City in the early years of the century and later trekked west to find a better place to make a living. Many Jewish communities were populated by similar pioneers who added transcontinental journeys to their earlier transoceanic voyages. My grandparents—who by then had grown children—got as far as Joliet, Ill. Disappointed with the Midwest, they headed back east, found a vacant store in Olean, and opened a non-kosher meat market. There clearly weren’t enough Jews there to support a kosher establishment, but my grandparents must have been reassured by the presence of that big synagogue.

My father, then a struggling young lawyer in Albany, brought his wife and me, then 4 months old, to Olean in 1935 to help his father in the store. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but in Olean my tall, good-looking father grew into his nickname—King Solomon—and none of them ever left. And so I spent my early childhood in Temple B’nai Israel.

When I was ready for school, my parents, grandparents, and I moved out of Olean to Portville, a tiny village several miles closer to Pennsylvania. Actually we didn’t live in Portville; we lived on the road to Portville. My family ran the Highway Market next to our house. In back were a slaughterhouse and barn—both frequently used. There were no boundaries between our struggling business and our squabbling multi-generational family.

School should have been a haven. But as soon as I began kindergarten in Portville, I realized that I was different from all the other children—the only Jew ever to attend the school. One day I realized that my classmates’ parents had told them to stay away from me; as some of the more candid children explained, Jews killed Christ and were forever damned. I told my parents about my isolation, but they never complained to teachers or the principal. It seems clear now that they likely feared making trouble would hurt business—and perhaps they were right. So, I sat quietly in the back of the room on Wednesdays as my classmates lined up for released time for religious education—Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, a few Catholics. The room grew larger and I grew smaller in it as I waited for the end of the school day.

As the years passed, outright slurs decreased and my classmates and I reached an unspoken agreement. We shared classes and enjoyed school activities but not social events or holidays—which was just fine with my mother, who discouraged fraternization. And I soon realized, as our congregation welcomed several refugee families from World War II, that the anti-Semitism I experienced was trivial compared to what was happening to Jews in Europe. I absorbed their stories of persecution and losses just as earlier I had listened to my grandmother’s tales of pogroms.

Although I did not fully belong in Portville, at Temple I was a favored child, Queen Esther every day of the year. In Portville I stood out not just for being Jewish but for being smart. In Temple I was expected to be smart. The Temple was a place of worship, nominally Conservative but including Orthodox and Reform factions. More important to me, it was a community center. The small number of other Jewish kids went to school in Olean, so I saw them only at Temple services and holiday celebrations.

At one event I recall declaiming Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus.” I raised my arm dramatically as I recited, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door” to the cheers and sobs of the old men and women who had been there and seen that. Later, when I was in college, I went to a New Year’s Eve Temple dance on a blind date with a young man visiting from New York. Eighteen months later, we were married in the Temple sanctuary. I left Olean to learn to become a New Yorker.

When my father died, the road leading to the Highway Market (now Portville village offices) was renamed King Solomon Way. And there are other traces of the past: A street in Olean was renamed Leo Moss Drive, to honor a respected refugee physician. The late Sonja van der Horst, a Holocaust survivor, donated her Olean home to the Temple and used the reparations she received from Germany to establish a professorship in Jewish history and culture at the University of North Carolina. And, of course, now Temple B’nai Israel has been recognized as a culturally significant site. For me, it always was.

Correction, Jan. 20: This article originally stated that Sonja van der Horst established a professorship at Duke. It is at the University of North Carolina.

• Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, dominant in recent parliamentary elections, seems willing to go along to get along: it will defer to the military rulers for six months and, it claims, not ally with more radical parties. [NYT]

• The IDF apparently stopped a terrorist attack, arresting four men with weapons and pipe bombs trying to enter Israel from the West Bank. [Haaretz]

• Dennis Ross has several proposals for how to kickstart the peace process, and they all amount to giving concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to strengthen it. [WP]

• “You know how to make the Jew jealous?” the pop megastar Katy Perry’s father reportedly preached at his Ohio church. “Have some money, honey.” [JTA]

• A vigil was held in Tucson, Arizona, to mark the first anniversary of the terrible shooting that killed six. Both amazingly and naturally, it was led by the shooting’s main target, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. [NYT]

Yesterday, CNN’s Gloria Borger tried to pin him down, and he got angry and walked away. Watch:

What strikes me as notable about this encounter isn’t Paul’s continued refusal to truly address these allegations. And, tempting as it is, I’m not going to read too much into Paul’s anti-media dismissal that issues like this are incendiary “because,” he told Borger, “of people like you” (yes, of course she’s Jewish). What is most consequential is the body language: he seems defensive; he seems artificial; he seems like a politician. Paul’s great gift has been that he is outside the mainstream of politics: advocating things like drug legalization, opposing things like the Patriot Act, taking a host of positions regularly (and frequently fairly) deemed wacky—and never apologizing. Today, though, Ron Paul seems like just another politician. That’s not why his political career deserves to die, but that’s what is going to kill it.

Related: Angry White Man [TNR]
New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters [NYT]
Earlier: Ron Paul’s Ugly Past

• Prominent progressive rabbi Michael Lerner had his home vandalized—for the fourth time this year. “Palestine Is an Arab Fantasy,” wrote one culprit, apparently channeling Newt Gingrich (seriously). [JTA]

• The story of the “Iranian Schindler,” who saved Persian Jews who had been in Paris. [BBC]

• All the preppiest clothiers (except for Brooks Brothers) were started by Jews. Who knew the “J” in J. Press stood for Jacobi? [Ivy Style]

• David Foster Wallace knew the meaning of “pareve.” [NY Daily News Page Views]

• Apparently Ryan Gosling-themed Tumblrs are a Thing, and so here is the Jewish one. [Hey Girls Shabbat Shalom]

Who needs anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue out in Hackensack?

Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.

I read this and thought it fairly remarkable. Was he saying Ron Paul was preferable to the rest of the Republican field? And that “yet again” was even more bizarre. I wanted to press Klein and ask him if he meant what he seemed to be saying: not only that an attack on Iran would be fought “for Israel’s national security” but that this would not be the first time—presumably, that Iraq was the same thing. The notion that Iraq was invaded for Israel’s sake, I personally believe, feeds into some of the weirdest and least accurate theories of Jewish neoconservatives pushing George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld into an ill-advised war.

Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeff Goldberg noticed the same thing and had also emailed Klein, and our emails prompted Klein to respond. As in an email to me, he said that we were misunderstanding his “yet again” (“Jeff had jumped to a silly conclusion,” he wrote; I think the notion that it’s a silly conclusion is itself silly). He then expanded on his beliefs, arguing that while there were Jewish neocons pushing for the Iraq war, they were not actually responsible for it (he fingers Cheney, as would I). All in all, I think Klein’s original post was sloppy at best and likely pretty intemperate; and while his follow-up is helpful, language like “Israel First/Likudnik bloviators,” specifically in reference to people who aren’t actually Israeli or actually members or primary supporters of Israel’s Likud Party, makes me uncomfortable, conjuring as it does charges of dual loyalty that Jews really shouldn’t have to hear anymore.

But I know why Klein feels, as it seems he does, like his back is against the wall, and why he would be frustrated by “the crazed intolerance of many right-wing Jewish commentators.” I brought up in my email with him the fact that no less than Michael Oren had responded to Thomas Friedman’s column last week, with its already-notorious “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” line. [UPDATE: Friedman clarified the line today.] “This allegation is profoundly disturbing,” Oren said. Whether or not he’s right, Oren is not an intellectual-without-portfolio (anymore). He is Israel’s official envoy to the United States. If criticism of Israeli policy—even when, as in Friedman’s case (or Douglas David J. Rothkopf’s, or Joe Klein’s), it is sloppy, or intemperate, or even worse—garners you an official condemnation from the Israeli government as well as the wrath of ostensibly nonpartisan PACs as well as accusations of anti-Semitism, then we are looking at a stifling of debate that isn’t in the interests of anyone except the Jewish right, which is attempting to turn Israel into a wedge issue in the American Jewish community.

I’m not sure Elliott Abrams warrants the label “sometimes, a feckless shmuck,” which is what Klein called him after this post. But I do wish Abrams had restricted himself to disagreeing with Klein and Friedman on the policies rather than bringing up the blood libel; and what I really wish is that he had urged his readers to, you know, disagree with Klein and agree with him rather than urged various Jewish institutions to rescind their awards and generally cut Friedman and Klein off.

We have a long election year ahead of us, and it could be a useful occasion of hashing out differences on the Mideast. Who knows, if it’s done right, a new consensus—more to the right or to the left of the current one—may actually emerge. But poorly chosen, sloppy, and just plain clownish accusations (and then defenses that are predicated on comma placement) as well as responses that head straight for anti-Semitism and call for communal shunning are not going to get it done.

(By the way, I tried to find a clip of Samuel L. Jackson telling everyone in Do The Right Thing to cool that shit out, but none are embeddable. But the line is “Y’all need to chill that shit out! And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.”)

15 Days Til Iowa: Travel Day [Time Swampland]
Clarification: Israel’s National Security [Time Swampland]
Israeli Officials Escalate War of Words With N.Y. Times [JTA]
Blaming the Jews—Again [Weekly Standard Blog]
Earlier: Ron Paul Moves Into Iowa Lead

Eric Molinsky worked in the animation industry, and has long wondered not only if the claims of Disney’s anti-Semitism are true but also why they remain a point of fascination and ridicule among cartoonists and others nearly a half-century after his death. For this week’s Vox Tablet, Molinsky, now a radio producer, spoke to an animation historian, a Disney-obsessed playwright, and a fairy-tale scholar in an effort to understand if Disney the man, or Disney’s world view, was truly bad for the Jews. [Running time: 10:37.]

We are young, liberal Egyptian activists who have dedicated our lives to bettering our country. But from the moment in January the crowds took over Tahrir Square calling for President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, we urged observers, particularly Western idealists already hailing the triumph of the new Egypt, to be cautious. We reminded them of Edmund Burke’s truism: Bringing down a tyrant is far, far easier than forming a free government.

It would be difficult to form such a government, we reasoned, in a society where the elite, with near unanimity, had just explained a series shark attacks in the Sinai as part of a Mossad-coordinated ploy to damage tourism. A free government must be based on universal rights, not least the right to freedom of conscience for all its citizens, and yet a Pew poll from December 2010 showed that 84 percent of the sampled Egyptian Muslims endorsed the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for Muslim apostates. For an entire country to change in one month, we argued throughout February, you need nothing short of magic.

Pessimists, naysayers, wet blankets, Mubarak cronies, apologists for the regime—we were called all these names, despite the fact that we’ve spent our adult lives within the opposition. Here was a new generation armed with iPhones and Twitter accounts that would ensure the success of liberal democracy in the region’s largest state, the enthusiasts promised. When Mubarak finally bowed to the pressure of the protesters in the streets, commentators wrote fairy-tale endings to the Egypt story, rushing off to cover the next blossoming flower of the Arab Spring. In the months that followed, no matter how far the Egyptian economy plummeted, how badly the security situation on the border with Israel deteriorated, or how many were killed in criminal, sectarian, or political violence, the narrative was maintained: Though painful, these were the necessary labor pangs of democracy.

Last week, the moment of truth finally came—or so we hope—with the results of the first phase of parliamentary elections. The Islamist parties won big: 40 percent of the electorate voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, and another 25 percent went for the Salafists, hard-line Islamists. Though forced by law to nominate at least one woman on their party lists, the Salafists had the photos of their female candidates replaced by a pictures of flowers in campaign ads, because they believe a woman’s face should not be shown publicly. The closest runner-up was the self-styled “liberal” Egyptian Bloc, which got 15 percent of the vote only because it secured the support of the Coptic minority. (The bloc’s founder is a famous Christian businessman.) The Islamist parties will likely win even bigger in the next two phases of the election, scheduled to take place in the coming few weeks, because these votes will be held almost entirely in the countryside, where political Islam dominates. (The first phase also included urban districts, where non-Islamists perform better.)

***

For us, nothing is more painful than being correct. Our vindication comes at the price of our country’s potential collapse into Islamist totalitarianism, or, even worse, total chaos. We desperately need a combination of sobriety, urgency, and prudence to prevent that from happening.

We must begin by deconstructing the Tahrir mythology. Namely: The Mubarak regime was pure evil; that it was brought down by “liberal” nonviolent activists; and that the Islamists had nothing to do with the revolution and emerged—suddenly—only to hijack it.

The Mubarak regime was no liberal democracy, but it also wasn’t the Gulag. It was an aging authoritarian regime that had opted for a path of economic reform when Ahmed Nazif took over as prime minister in 2004, but miserably failed to cope with the changes economic reform had on the political level. Moderately freer markets meant more media, which meant that while the political repression and corruption of the regime were less heinous than in the past, they were getting more exposure than ever. This, along with Mubarak’s senility and nepotism, created an ever-increasing sense of outrage among Egypt’s growing middle class.

While living standards were improving substantially, Egyptians not only had higher expectations of the government, but they also were falling prey to an obsessed belief that corruption is the root of all evil. Corruption has always been present in the modern Egyptian state, as anyone who has read Tawfik El Hakim’s 1932 novel The Diary of a Prosecutor Among Peasants knows. But with the help of many of the country’s journalists, this obsession was translated into outright hostility to free-market policies. Terms like “businessman” or “privatization” became almost libelous. This marked the rise of a Jacobin discourse on “social justice” (adala Igtima’iya), creating a lot of buzz around labor movements and Occupy Wall Street-type leftist groups. It escaped Western observers that in a country with the lowest price of bread in the world—the result of enormous government subsidies—the loudest chant in Tahrir Square was “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.”

The early Tahrir Square crowd was comprised of leftists and various other groups that were in it for different reasons. Consider, for example, the fanatic soccer fans known as the Ultras. Known for engaging in fights with security forces after every Egyptian soccer game, the Ultras would not waste a chance to get back at the police in a much less controlled environment than the Stadium. At Tahrir, they had a major role in attacking the police and destroying the police stations. In the revolution’s aftermath, the Ultras led the mob in the rampage of the Israeli Embassy.

Other than the fact that a few dozen human-rights activists were present in Tahrir, there was nothing remotely liberal about the uprising. But that didn’t stop Western journalists from applying the term: Every Egyptian male without a beard was a John Stuart Mill, every female without a veil a Mary Wollstonecraft. Suddenly, Trotskyites were liberals, and hooligans nonviolent protesters.

The idea that there were no Islamists involved in the revolution is pure nonsense. The Muslim Brotherhood officially declared its decision to join the protests on Jan. 23, and its members were instrumental in the success of the revolution in the subsequent days and weeks. What’s more, over the past decade Islamist groups, particularly the Salafists, have been taking advantage of Egypt’s increasing media and Internet freedom to further influence the political discussion. Wondering where the all these Salafists came from? Go to YouTube, type in any possible Arabic term, from financial investment to marriage counseling, and see the sheer number of results that show a Salafist leader preaching, most often in a clip from the religious satellite channel. The message is always the same: A return to a purer form of Islam guarantees salvation in this life and the next.

These two tendencies—the Jacobin and the Islamist—are not mutually exclusive in Egypt. The average Egyptian easily bought into both arguments, believing that the reason for all their ills was the Mubarak regime’s economic program, and that the only solution was a return to the golden age of Islam. Though institutionally immunized against Islamism through a strict system of surveillance, the military completely internalized the popular anti-capitalist discourse, hence its ultimate decision to offer its services to the revolutionaries, abandoning Mubarak in his time of need.

Into that mix comes anti-Semitism. Egyptian anti-Semitism is not simply a form of bigotry: It is the glue binding the otherwise incoherent ideological blend, the common denominator among disparate parties. The Zionist conspiracy theory was not merely a diversion applied by the Mubarak regime, as some suggest. It is a well-established social belief in Egypt, even among self-proclaimed liberals. Consider, for example, Yehya El-Gamal, a leading expert on constitutional law and chairman of the Democratic Front Party who was appointed deputy prime minister after the revolution. Though a staunch opponent of the Islamists, El-Gamal told Al-Ahram, the leading state-owned newspaper, that “Israel and the U.S. are behind flaming the sectarian conflict in Egypt” in the wake of the deadly clashes between Coptic demonstrators and military forces last October.

***

These facts, though hard to swallow, were clear well before the revolution. This is why, when we joined the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth in 2009, we decided to focus our energy on a long-term program to build a genuine liberal movement from scratch. We realized early on that activism without serious, concrete ideas capable of winning the hearts and minds of our fellow Egyptians would be meaningless. Thus, we designed a platform of legal, economic, and social programs tackling all aspects of life in Egypt, from taxes to anti-Semitism. Our plan comprises research, lobbying, campaigning, and an effort to translate the great books of Western classical liberalism into Arabic. If Egypt was going to have any hope of becoming a liberal democracy, we had to face—and battle—the destructive totalitarian ideals that have taken hold of Egyptian society.

To begin a serious discussion on what can be done in our country, Egyptians must acknowledge that the Tahrir uprising was no liberal revolution. Western observers must realize that this is not a stark morality play, but political decision-making between alternatives that are all bad. As the government borders on bankruptcy and the security situation deteriorates (the natural-gas pipe line to Israel and Jordan was bombed nine times since February), the first priority should be defending the very existence of the Egyptian state, now solely represented by the military. This is certainly an awkward position for advocates of limited government, as we are. But if the military falls, nothing will stand between the Egyptians and absolute anarchy.

Western policy-makers and Egyptians who care about the country’s future should not push too hard for a total face-off between the military and the Islamists, which may develop into a civil war, nor should they seek to weaken the military to the extent that it is totally subdued by the Islamists. Finally, as the Islamists try to transform the legal and economic infrastructure of the country to their benefit, true liberals must be prepared to tackle them on every move, with detailed and convincing programs, not merely rhetorical speeches and empty polemics on talk shows. Islamism offers a coherent worldview; if liberalism cannot rise up to the same level, it will always be doomed to fail.

The gravest danger is for us to fall prey to complacency and believe that an Islamist government will either moderate or fail to deliver, and that the Egyptians will vote for someone else in the next elections. The very possibility of next elections is dependent on our capacity to avoid the total anarchy scenario. And the Islamists are not going to moderate. No matter how pragmatic the Muslim Brotherhood is, they will face a constant challenge by Salafists from the right to adhere a strict standard of religious purity. If the Islamists, now hugely popular, do fail to deliver, genuine liberals must be at the ready to offer voters a clear alternative. The Mubarak regime was remarkably successful in steering the economy in its latter years, but its inability to justify its existence politically led to its demise. There is no reason why the exact opposite—a failing economy but successful politics—cannot come to the service of the Islamists.

At 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, Avi Reiss, owner of Trio Gifts, a Judaica shop on Raritan Avenue in Highland Park received a phone call from the police saying a window of his shop had been broken. Someone launched a piece of pavement through the store’s large front window, shattering it entirely, Reiss—who had been manning the store since that early-morning call—explained over the phone as the wind tore through the gaping hole.

Rabbi Ed Prince, the mashgaich responsible for overseeing the kosher cooking at Jerusalem Pizza, arrived at the Raritan Avenue pizzeria at 7:30 a.m to a broken window, and noticed several other damaged storefronts over a five-block commercial stretch. Also hit was kosher restaurant Park Place and Judaica Gallery. Jack’s Hardware, which is Jewish-owned, sustained a broken window. Other visibly Jewish establishments, such as a kosher Chinese restaurant, kosher butcher, and jewelry store, were not damaged.

The Wednesday morning attacks occurred only days after a brick was thrown through the window of the nearby Rutgers Hillel Saturday night, which Hillel executive director Andrew Getraer—who lives in Highland Park—said broke a computer and shattered glass across the office, and which is being investigated by the police. Further troubling for Getraer, who saw the Raritan Avenue damage on his way to work Wednesday, a Rutgers student active in the Jewish student community, who wears a yarmulke, was allegedly confronted in Highland Park’s kosher Dunkin’ Donuts Tuesday night by a man who identified himself as a neo-Nazi and referenced Kristallnacht—the night the Nazis destroyed Jewish-owned shops—while being thrown out by employees. The incident was reported to the police, as well as the university and the Anti-Defamation League.

The Highland Park Police Department issued a statement about the Raritan Avenue attacks, saying, “Detectives are actively investigating these incidents and are in contact with and coordinating efforts with other law enforcement agencies that may be able to expedite the investigation.”

The Police Department of Highland Park, a close-knit community with an active Jewish population, acknowledged the troubling nature of the damaged storefronts, if inconclusively: “We would also like to briefly address the fear that these are acts motivated by anti-Semitism or that these are bias crimes. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office has been notified, but it is too soon to reach a conclusion.”

“We are appalled by the targeting of Jewish stores and Jewish campus institutions at Rutgers,” said an ADL regional leader. “These shocking crimes target the entire Jewish community as these locations appear to have been selected because of their Jewishness.

Highland Park, which Rabbi Prince called a “one-horse town,” has a population of just below 14,000 people, with nearly 10 synagogues, two Jewish day schools, a Yeshiva high school, and a girls’ school serving the town’s predominantly Orthodox Jewish residents, one of which is Highland Park mayor, Gary Minkoff. Trio Gifts was open for business Wednesday, as were the other businesses. “You can’t keep a good shop down,” Reiss explained. “The plan is to fix the window and move on.”

If he were to turn into what was later to become Rue Sauton but was then still Rue d’Amboise, about halfway along the street, between a brothel masquerading as a brasserie and a tavern that served dinner with foul wine for two sous (cheap even then, but all that was affordable to students from the nearby Sorbonne), he would have found an impasse, or blind alley, which by that time was called Impasse Maubert, but up to 1865 had been called Cul-de-sac d’Amboise, and years earlier had housed a tapis-franc (in underworld slang, a tavern, a hostelry of ill fame, usually run by an ex-convict, and the haunt of felons just released from jail), and was also notorious because in the 18th century there had stood here the laboratory of three celebrated women poisoners, found one day asphyxiated by the deadly substances they were distilling on their stoves.

At the end of that alleyway, quite inconspicuous, was the window of a junk shop that a faded sign extolled as Brocantage de Qualité—a window whose glass was covered by such a thick layer of dust that it was hard to see the goods on display or the interior, each pane being little more than 20 centimeters square, all held together by a wooden frame. Beside the window he would have seen a door, always shut, and a notice beside the bell pull announcing that the proprietor was temporarily absent.

But if, as rarely happened, the door was open, anyone entering would have been able to make out, in the half-light illuminating that dingy hovel, arranged on a few precarious shelves and several equally unsteady tables, a jumble of objects that, though attractive at first sight, would on closer inspection have turned out to be totally unsuitable for any honest commercial trade, even if they were to be offered at knock-down prices. They included a pair of fire dogs that would have disgraced any hearth, a pendulum clock in flaking blue enamel, cushions once perhaps embroidered in bright colors, vase stands with chipped ceramic putti, small wobbly tables of indeterminate style, a rusty iron visiting-card holder, indefinable pokerwork boxes, hideous mother-of-pearl fans decorated with Chinese designs, a necklace that might have been amber, two white felt slippers with buckles encrusted with Irish diamantes, a chipped bust of Napoleon, butterflies under crazed glass, multicolored marble fruit under a once transparent bell, coconut shells, old albums with mediocre watercolors of flowers, a framed daguerreotype (which even then hardly seemed old)—so if someone, taking a perverse fancy to one of those shameful remnants of past distraints on the possessions of destitute families, and finding himself in front of the highly suspicious proprietor, had asked the price, he would have heard a figure that would have deterred even the most eccentric collector of antiquarian teratology.

And if the visitor, by virtue of some special permission, had continued on through a second door, separating the inside of the shop from the upper floors of the building, and had climbed one of those rickety spiral staircases typical of those Parisian houses whose frontages are as wide as their entrance doors (cramped together sidelong, one against the next), he would have entered a spacious room that, unlike the ground-floor collection of bric-a-brac, appeared to be furnished with objects of quite a different quality: a small three-legged Empire table decorated with eagle heads, a console table supported by a winged sphinx, a 17th-century wardrobe, a mahogany bookcase displaying a hundred or so books well bound in morocco, an American-style desk with a roll top and plenty of small drawers like a secrétaire. And if he had passed into the adjoining room, he would have found a luxurious four-poster bed, a rustic étagère laden with Sèvres porcelain, a Turkish hookah, a large alabaster cup and a crystal vase; on the far wall, panels painted with mythological scenes, two large canvases representing the Muses of History and Comedy and, hung variously upon the walls, Arab barracans, other oriental cashmere robes and an ancient pilgrim’s flask; and a washstand with a shelf filled with toiletry articles of the finest quality—in short, a bizarre collection of costly and curious objects that perhaps indicated not so much a consistency and refinement of taste as a desire for ostentatious opulence.

Excerpted from The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. Copyright © 2010 RCS Libri S.p.A. English translation copyright ©2010 by Richard Dixon. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

To say that Eco is as much a historian of ideas as a novelist isn’t a cute way of denigrating the literary quality of his novels, which sometimes sparkle with genius. Rather, it is a way of underlining the scholarly impulse that so frequently animates his compulsive need to entertain. The Name of the Rose was one of the better mysteries of the past 50 years, but it could also profitably be used—and has been used—as a textbook on the scholastic method and medieval hermeneutics. Conversely, the clever meta-fictional devices that Eco enjoys are married to a 19th-century novelist’s open delight in grand flourishes—poisoned books, exploding sewers, and other comic-book-like narrative devices that return the often-tiresome suspension of disbelief fiction requires to the realm of pure childhood pleasure.

Nowhere are Eco’s deep scholarly seriousness and his childlike sense of play more in evidence than in The Prague Cemetery, his sixth novel. A global best-seller that was published in Italian in October 2010 and is now being published in English, it is a weird combination of elements that make sense together only in the universe of Eco: It is a deeply serious narrative argument about the origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the birth of modern anti-Semitism interspersed with lavish recipes and menus from the best restaurants in 19th-century Paris (he met with a smile my suggestion that he spin off an anti-Semites cookbook), and it is also a perverse and entertaining attempt to write a 21st-century version of a 19th-century French novel along the lines of Alexandre Dumas Père’s Joseph Balsamo, which Eco believes inadvertently provided the literary model for the Protocols forgery.

I met Umberto Eco at Peacock Alley, a wildly expensive restaurant in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. With its high vaulted ceilings, the lobby of the Waldorf looks like a train station and has similarly bad acoustics. Eco was tired and suffering from a slight cold, on the 11th day of a 14-day book tour that had him in a different city almost every night. Still, he was gracious and warm, looking askance at me only once, when he ordered a gin and tonic before lunch and I ordered orange juice.

The Prague Cemetery explores the trial of fictions and forgeries that gave birth to the Protocols through the fictional character of Simone Simonini, a forger and police spy, and his father, Capt. Simonini, who in the book writes the notorious Simonini letter, the first published sketch of the theory of a global Jewish conspiracy. While Capt. Simonini may or may not have been an invention of a 19th-century forger, the Simonini letter is real—as is, Eco assured me, every major character in the book, aside from the two Simoninis. When I told him that he had created the single most repulsive anti-Semite in the history of the novel, he bowed his head with a craftsman’s pride, while also noting that his main character is an equal-opportunity misanthrope, who hates Jews to the extent that he despises all of humankind.

Talk about anti-Semitism as a plot. You’re a novelist, a maker of plots. And then you have this other kind of plot, this ersatz, false, forged, conspiratorial plot.

It’s the paranoia of the universal plot. This is not strictly linked to anti-Semitism. Karl Popper, the philosopher, has written a beautiful essay on the plot-paranoia syndrome. He said it starts with Homer. Everything that happens at Troy is decided the day before on Olympus with the gods. So, he says, every society in a way elaborates the paranoia of somebody on their shoulders, deciding their fates. First, it’s a way to escape responsibility. It’s not me, it’s not my fault. Second, it’s very useful, especially for dictatorships. All my youth, until the age of 10, I was educated under the fascist dictatorship. And they said there was the demo-pluto-judo-cratic plot—democracies, plutocracies, and the Jews. It was a general plot in the world to humiliate Italy. And until yesterday Berlusconi continued his campaign about the communist plot against Italy. We have no more communists! Not even with a candle can you find them.

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered. There was a conspiracy to kill Julius Caesar—the Ides of March. We discovered it. The universal conspiracy is more efficient for paranoia because you have no target. It’s a general presence in the world. And so you can always make records of the universal conspiracy without being proven false.

Continue reading: ‘Every forger wants to be taken seriously’

During a hearing of the Joint Legislative Committee on Windstorm Insurance this afternoon, Chairman Larry Taylor was discussing delivery of quick and fair payments for windstorm victims. Unfortunately, to make his point he said, “Don’t nitpick, don’t try to Jew them down.”

Without pausing he added, “That’s probably a bad term” and then resumed his remarks.

A shockingly vague understatement coming from the articulate chairman, who soon issued a statement apologizing and adding a touch more specificity: “At a legislative oversight committee hearing today, I inadvertently used a phrase that many people find offensive.”

It’s difficult to overlook his unfortunate verb choice, particularly in the context, of Texas politics where anti-Jewish sentiments are not exactly new. Last year Michelle Goldberg examined the motives behind anti-Semitic attacks on Joe Straus, the Republican speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, leading up to the January election (which he won). While she found the attacks to be rooted more in Tea Party cultural ideologies, the underlying anti-Jewish tones remain troubling. Goldberg concluded:

What is clear is this: Texas tea party activists are targeting Straus, a fiscal conservative, as somehow culturally and ideologically alien, and at least some of his enemies are using religion against him. He’s still favored to win the election for House Speaker on January 11 and remains popular with his caucus. But the anti-Straus campaign, which is beginning to draw national attention, is the latest piece of evidence that the Tea Party is simply the Christian right by another name. Straus isn’t under attack because of his position on taxes or deficits. This is about culture war, and it’s a microcosm of current Republican politics, in which populist activists abhor any hint of moderation.

Texas Legislator: “Don’t Try to Jew Them Down” [Mother Jones]
Related: Texas Tea [Tablet Magazine]

To put it a different way: anyone can find isolated anti-Semites at these occupations. And, as Michelle Goldberg and I have both written, Occupy Wall Street’s constitutional inability to condemn anti-Semitism is a limitation, though it is no more able to condemn practically anything else.

But, look, it’s really not. If you don’t believe me, consult this handy list of statements from both the usual liberal suspects as well as the Anti-Defamation League and even the Emergency Committee for Israel’s Noah Pollak, all denying that the movement is fundamentally anti-Semitic. And consult, too, this Statement Against Smears signed by J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami, Eliot Spitzer, American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, and others. “It’s an old, discredited tactic: find a couple of unrepresentative people in a large movement and then conflate the oddity with the cause. One black swan means that all swans are black,” they declare. “It is disingenuous to raise the canard about Jews and Wall Street in order to denounce it.” At this late date, for a Weekly Standard blogger to write, under a video of a couple of Jew-hating assholes who appeared at an occupation, “This is a protest aimed at bankers with a certain element who perversely want to blame the Jews for all of this country’s problems,” is incredibly irresponsible and dishonest. Just, stop.

Jewish Leaders Denounce Right-Wing Smears of Occupy Wall Street [Occupy Judaism]
Putting the ‘OWS Is Anti-Semitic’ Meme to Rest [Occupy Judaism]
Related: One Percent [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Is Occupy Wall Street Anti-Semitic?
Who By Fire, Who By Drum Circle?

• Daniel Schechtman, a newly crowned Nobel laureate (for chemistry), has invited Gilad Shalit to join him at the ceremony in Oslo. [Jewish Chronicle]

• The late Juliano Mer-Khamis‘ Freedom Theatre takes its talents to New York City. [NYT]

• Marine Le Pen and Ron Paul, two peas in a pod. Hrmm. [Ben Smith]

• A profile of Gershom Baskin, the man behind the man behind the negotiations, by Tablet Magazine contributor Daniel Estrin. [PRI’s The World]

• At a film industry gathering, Robert Downey, Jr., asked everyone to forgive Mel Gibson. I hope he was booed. [JTA]

• Our art critic Robin Cembalest will be speaking this Saturday at the D.C. JCC. [D.C. JCC]

Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters actively dislike the anti-Semities associating themselves with the movement. Repeat after me: “This asshole does not represent us.”

Whenever I see the old soldier, in memory of his sufferings and as a mark of respect, I raise a hand to my forehead and call out—much to the embarrassment of my children, who pass this park every day on their way to school—“Je vous salue, Capitaine Dreyfus.”

The oddity of the statue is exaggerated by the fact that it doesn’t seem to belong here. The Square Pierre Lafue, named after a Parisian journalist, is really little more than a traffic circle planted with banks of shrubbery and a few trees. It floats like a green island at the intersection of two narrow streets, Rue Stanislas and Rue Notre-Dame des Champs, while facing the wider Boulevard Raspail. The statue looming over this small square is a caricature of military honor, a three-dimensional scribble. The work was designed by the political cartoonist Louis Mitelberg, who signed his work—inverting the first letters of his last name—TIM. Dreyfus is saluting because that’s what soldiers do. They follow orders, no matter how criminal or stupid these may be.

While trying to figure out why Dreyfus was here, I learned that his presence is a historical accident. Mitelberg had been commissioned to design a sculpture for the courtyard of the École Militaire, where Dreyfus had been degraded. If Hommage au Capitaine Dreyfus had been installed in its rightful place, Dreyfus would be saluting his fellow officers and the army that tortured him. But the army was on to Mitelberg and his subversive sense of humor. They wanted no cartoons of soldiers holding broken swords. They vetoed the placement of TIM’s statue at the École Militaire, and, after that, Dreyfus was sent wandering around Paris, looking for a home. Anyone who sees Dreyfus standing on this leafy traffic island can sense that the Jew is still wandering and that the memory of his famous affair still divides France.

***

Down the street from Mitelberg’s statue, at the corner of Raspail and Rue du Cherche-Midi, is the site of the military prison where Dreyfus was incarcerated after his arrest. A plaque on the lawn announces that the Prison Militaire du Cherche-Midi stood here from 1853 to 1964. Modeled on the prison in Auburn, N.Y., which was among the first to experiment with solitary confinement, Cherche-Midi held other famous inhabitants, including Resistance fighters during World War II. Many were tortured and killed here, and then later their cells were occupied by members of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, whose headquarters was located across the street in what is now the Hotel Lutetia.

The prison was torn down to make way for the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, a think-tank for French historians and other scholars. The building was condemned recently for asbestos contamination. A homeless Russian and his German shepherd have taken up residence on an open porch, where they sleep at night in cardboard boxes. The lawns are overgrown with weeds, out of which rises a grim memorial to Dreyfus and the other prisoners held unjustly at Cherche-Midi. Meant to resemble the dolmans and menhirs of Celtic burial sites, seven blocks of black granite lie scattered on the ground, with five more blocks of granite standing upright beside them.

For a dozen years, from his arrest in 1894 until his rehabilitation into the army in 1906, Dreyfus and his affair rocked France to its revolutionary root. Partisans lined up on either side, fighting duels, rioting in the streets, and bringing down one government after another. Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne proclaimed his guilt. Pissaro, Cassatt, and Monet defended his innocence. The affair began in September 1894, when Marie-Claude Bastian, an Alsatian cleaning woman, who was actually a French intelligence agent working at the German embassy in Paris, brought to Col. Jean Sandherr, head of the Section Statistique, the anodyne name for French counter-intelligence, a note, written on onionskin paper, that she had fished from the wastepaper basket of German military attaché Lt. Col. Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen. Torn into six pieces, but easily reassembled, the note, henceforth known as the “bordereau,” or receipt, offered for sale to the Germans technical manuals and other information about France’s 120 mm Baquet howitzers. We now know that the information in the bordereau was fluff of little value, much of it already known, about a weapon that France would soon be retiring. In fact, this breach of security may actually have been a ruse, a piece of disinformation intentionally planted in von Schwartzkoppen’s inbox. Sandherr alerted the French minister of war that the army had a traitor in its midst, and the search was on.

This has been a theme of right-wing critiques of the rapidly spreading protest movement. Noting that the protesters identify themselves as part of the “99 percent,” Rush Limbaugh said: “Now, 99 percent, that leaves one percent, roughly the percentage of Jews in the population, too. And Wall Street and bankers have been anti-Semitic code for Jews in this country going back quite a while.” (Jews are actually more like 2 percent of the population, but never mind.) Conservatives have delighted in pointing out that Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that first put out the call to occupy Wall Street, ran an inflammatory 2004 article about neoconservatives headlined, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”

The charge that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism is dishonest and deceptive. But it’s built around a kernel of truth. There are a few Jew-baiters at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, though they are marginal, particularly compared to the large numbers of Jewish activists taking part. Yet the leaderless, diffuse nature of the movement, in some ways its greatest strength, also makes it hard to police bigots, bullies, and cranks. This isn’t just about Jews—Occupy Wall Street’s ability to find some measure of unity and discipline amid a commitment to anarchy will determine whether it is able to grow beyond demonstrating widespread disaffection with the status quo.

Occupy Wall Street, as you’ve surely learned by now, is organized, for lack of a better word, around non-hierarchical principles derived from anarchist thought. Decisions are made by consensus during interminable general assembly meetings, in which anyone can participate. So far, this model has fostered, for the most part, a spirit of volunteerism and cooperation. The occupied site itself, full of grimy tarps and sleeping bags and people who’ve been braving the elements for weeks, looks bedraggled, but it’s actually pretty efficient. Free food is prepared and served, donated blankets and clothes are given away to all who need them, and a first-aid station deals with minor medical issues. When the private company that owns the park threatened to evict the occupation to conduct a cleanup, the ad-hoc community mobilized to clean it themselves, depriving authorities of a pretext to get rid of them.

This do-it-yourself ethos has been a boon to Jewish activists, among others. One of the most iconic moments of the occupation came when as many as a thousand Jews gathered at the park on October 7 for an open-air Kol Nidre service, organized by Daniel Sieradski, the founder of the progressive blog Jewschool.com and a self-described “rabble rouser in the Jewish community.” “The whole thing is an anarchistic affair, so any affinity group that has an action is welcome to come and do their action,” he said. Sieradski went on to erect a pop-up sukkah at Zuccotti Park and found that the police who usually enforce a ban on erecting structures there were reluctant to interfere once they heard it was part of a Jewish religious observance. “I established a precedent for people here,” he said, obviously delighted. “We’ve given people a way of creating shelters for themselves here in the park for the week of Sukkot. One guy tried it, and the cops came and tried to take it down. Two hundred people came and shouted at the cops and made them go away.”

The anarchist nature of the protests has meant that some of the usual suspects on the radical left, people whose vociferous anti-Zionism can shade into anti-Semitism, haven’t gotten much of a foothold.

One of the curses of left-wing politics is the perennial presence of International ANSWER, a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party, a tiny political sect with a perverse attraction to the world’s worst people. The party formed in the 1950s, after splitting off from the Socialist Workers Party over a disagreement about the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which the Workers World supported. Since then, the Workers World Party has thrown itself behind Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-il; it backed the Chinese crackdown on the “counter-revolutionary rebellion” in Tiananmen Square. The Workers World Party is not just pro-Palestinian; it is pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah, devoted to the destruction of Israel. It’s fringe views would hardly be worth noticing if not for its members’ organizing skills. For example, by securing protest permits on significant dates far in advance, it was able to take a leading role in the early marches against the Iraq war, even though many progressives were mortified by its involvement. It has often made things uncomfortable for Jews, even those deeply opposed to the Israeli occupation.

“Clearly there’s been tension for the last couple of decades between Jews who identify as supporters of Israel and the radical left that views Zionism as an extension of American imperialism,” said Sieradski. But groups like ANSWER aren’t running things at Occupy Wall Street—no one is. For progressive Jews, that’s opened up new room for involvement. Thus Sieradski, who has been alienated from much of Jewish communal life, suddenly feels “on fire again” about the possibility of specifically Jewish activism. “After the service, I had a line of 100 people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you, that was the most meaningful Jewish experience of my entire life,’ ” he said.

The conservative Jewish magazine Commentary has noticed the ecstatic Jewish involvement in Occupy Wall Street. “The turnout the event generated, as well as the discussion it has so far provoked, are deeply troubling trends that all who care about the Jewish future would do well to take seriously,” Matthew Ackerman wrote on the magazine’s blog. Rarely, he wrote, “has a movement so radical in its aims been tied so explicitly to a religious tradition as was the case with this past Friday’s service.”

In some ways, it’s contradictory for Commentary to bemoan enthusiastic Jewish participation in the protests one moment and accuse them of anti-Semitism the next. But it’s also true that the extreme openness that allowed Sieradski to organize his Kol Nidre service is not always benign. Occupy Wall Street lacks tools for enforcing any sort of discipline, or ostracizing troublemakers. When someone at a Tea Party rally holds a particularly offensive sign, as many have, the movement can denounce them. But there is no one at Occupy Wall Street to do the denouncing.

The occasional appearance of anti-Semites is probably the biggest sign of this problem so far, though it’s not the only one. There are small but telling tensions and conflicts around the edges of the encampment. The constant pounding of a drum circle, for example, located near the sleeping area, is driving both protesters and people in the neighborhood crazy, but efforts to quiet them even occasionally have had mixed results. The drummers have agreed to stop playing during the nightly general assembly meeting, but Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s attempts to get them to limit their drumming to two hours a day have gone nowhere. Last Friday morning, the de facto leader of the drummers, a man with greasy gray hair starting to dread and a wild look in his eyes, reacted with fury to suggestions that some people would appreciate a respite from all the banging. “This is a revolution!” he shouted. “It’s not about working with the same community we are protesting against.” When other protesters tried to argue, the drummers played harder to drown them out.

This inability to enforce some kind of order, or to even recognize a mechanism for doing so, could cause problems for Occupy Wall Street. Such issues have bedeviled left-wing movements before. In the early 1970s, Jo Freeman wrote an important essay about the self-sabotaging distrust of organization in the women’s movement, titled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” “Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done,” she wrote. “It is when people get tired of ‘just talking’ and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation.” Such movements, she argued, awaken people’s energy without channeling it. “Some women just ‘do their own thing.’ This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort.”

There are lessons here for Occupy Wall Street. The movement has been enormously successful at capturing people’s imaginations and giving them a place to gather, air deep and legitimate grievances, and be invigorated by the power of group solidarity. But coming together and creating a counterculture is ultimately not enough to effect real and lasting change. For that, leadership and structure are ultimately needed. Occupy Wall Street is not anti-Semitic, and the presence of a few odd Jew-haters is not the movement’s fault. Its inability to quickly shut them up, though, may augur problems for its future.

Yet the very fact that I felt a certain relief at the omission of Jews from the list, as well as a certain disappointment, forces me to acknowledge that things are not that simple when it comes to Jews and Sept. 11. We insist on separating the two terms so strictly, perhaps, because so many enemies of the Jews have insisted on linking them in false and dangerous ways. For instance, there is the notorious lie that no Jews died in the World Trade Center, because the 4,000 Jews—or, depending on how the rumor is phrased, 4,000 Israelis—who worked there were warned to stay home. (The origin of this rumor, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, seems to be a Jerusalem Post article that reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had received inquiries from the relatives of 4,000 Israelis believed to be in New York City on Sept. 11.) After the attacks, this idea gained traction on the far right and far left, with everyone from David Duke to Amiri Baraka, and it remains disturbingly current in the Muslim world. Eventually the U.S. State Department had to issue a rebuttal pointing out that, in fact, somewhere between 200 to 400 of the ground zero victims were Jewish, in keeping with the proportion of Jews in the local population.

On the one hand, this anti-Semitic rumor is meant to deny Jews a part in the national mourning over Sept. 11, to suggest that they had not suffered their share. In this sense, it is like the (false) allegations of German anti-Semites that Jews had not served in the army in World War I. On the other hand, of course, the accusation of Jewish absence is really supposed to be a proof of Jewish presence: If Jews stayed home on Sept. 11, it must be because other Jews knew what was coming and warned them.

Thus, anti-Semitic rumors suggest that the Mossad brought down the twin towers, either because the real hijackers could not have possessed the technical ability to do so, or because Israel was the real beneficiary of the War on Terror. (A strange kind of benefit, one might think, looking at the history of Israel over the last 10 years.) The power of the slander lies not in its plausibility but in the diabolical way it confounds rebuttal. If Jews are accused of staying home on Sept. 11, they can point to the State Department for a defense; but then the anti-Semite’s question becomes, why is the American government so solicitous of Jewish honor? Is it not because, in the words of one fringe anti-Semite quoted in the ADL report, “our government has for decades been used to further the interests of Israel at the expense of the interests of the American people”?

Some lowlife rabble-rouser said that, but in the years since Sept. 11, an increasing number of respectable people have been saying things close enough to it. Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair. Think of how common it was, five or six years ago, to hear opponents of the Iraq War reel off the names of the so-called neoconservatives whose fault it allegedly was—always Jewish names like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Remember the bizarre ingenuity that traced the invasion of Iraq to the teachings of a long-dead Jewish mastermind, Leo Strauss.

In this way, the anti-neoconservative rhetoric of the post-Sept. 11 left managed to do for Osama Bin Laden what he could never have achieved on his own. It gave currency and respectability to his belief that events in general, and American policy in particular, can be explained only by reference to Jewish power. This idea is pervasive in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, a book that is necessary to read in the same way that Mein Kampf was once necessary.

Take, for instance, Bin Laden’s statement of Oct. 6, 2002, titled “To the Americans.” “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” he begins, and the first of dozens of enumerated reasons is “You attacked us in Palestine.” In this “you,” the distinction between America, Israel, and the Jews ceases to exist, a point that becomes explicit later on: “[T]he creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.” Later, in the course of explaining why America is “the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind,” Bin Laden explains that “the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.”

The only proper response to this kind of evil fantasy is to ignore it; yet for American Jews, it was hard to ignore. For the insidious power of this discourse was the way it made American Jews self-conscious about something that should, by rights, have been a source of pride: the identity of American and Jewish interests and values in the post-Sept. 11 age (which is not the same thing as the identity of American and Israeli policies). One reaction, perhaps the first reaction, to hearing Bin Laden’s rhetoric—or its echoes in the words of Walt and Mearsheimer, or Helen Thomas—is to deny its poisonous premise that “the Jews” are running America or America is serving “the Jews.” That denial is true, of course. But it leaves those who insist on it looking, and feeling, scared. It places American Jews in the paradoxical position of denying their own patriotism and belittling their own power.

***

A better response emerges in one of the defining books of the post-Sept. 11 period, Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. What Berman shows, in his analysis of the intellectual genealogy of al-Qaida, is that there’s a good reason why the Jews should occupy a central position in the fight between America and what he called Islamism or Muslim totalitarianism—and not because this is a fight about or against Jewish power. Rather, as in Europe in the 1930s, the fate of the Jews is a bellwether for the fate of liberalism—a social order founded on individual rights, secularism, private property, and the rule of law. Since the first, partial emancipation of European Jews in the French Revolution, Jews have thrived in liberal societies and suffered in illiberal ones. This makes perfect sense when you consider that the Jews, as a tiny and historically persecuted minority in the Christian world, could succeed only to the extent that they were allowed to live as free individuals, in a free society.

Historically, then, the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of liberalism; and after Sept. 11, Berman showed, the greatest threat to liberal values came from Islamic fundamentalists, who spoke about Jews in terms borrowed from European fascists. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, blamed Islam’s problems on Marx and Freud: “[T]he atheistic, materialistic doctrine in our world was advocated by a Jew, and the permissive doctrine which is sometimes called ‘the sexual revolution’ was advocated by a Jew. Indeed, most evil theories which try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind are advocated by Jews.” This, as Berman points out, is not theological anti-Judaism (though Qutb voiced that variety as well) but the kind of anti-modern anti-Semitism that identifies the Jew with social dissolution and rootless individualism. But these are the very same things that, when considered as values rather than vices, we think of as essentially American: freedom of the individual, free thought, pluralism.

Considering the grossly caricatured David Silbermann, the main character in Jacques de Lacretelle’s novel, Silbermann, it’s difficult to belief that the book was positively received by Jewish readers upon its 1922 publication. Yet, as Paul La Farge pointed out in 2005, the fictional account of a Protestant boy befriending the bewitchingly smart Silbermann in high school, written by a Protestant in post-Dreyfus France, was striking enough to earn widespread, laudatory attention from the Jewish community.

Almost a century later, we are able to view Lacretelle’s crude characterization with more scrutiny. “Little is missing from this description of the Wandering Jew,” La Farge wrote, “except, perhaps, beady eyes, or a patched coat, or a sack of gold.” Given the opportunity to reflect on the character several decades after the novel’s publication, Lacretelle himself noted, “Is it overdone, this portrait of a young Jew, animated by intellectual ambition? Did I carve his features too deeply, shade his scenes too dark? Assuredly yes. But you must understand why. When one sets out to create a type, one has to make him larger than life.”

For this narrative misstep, the flattening of an admittedly brilliant, evolved young man into a symbol of the Jew as outsider, Lacretelle earns La Farge’s ire; for setting himself apart from a character whose intellectual proclivities so closely resemble his own, Lacretelle commits what La Farge deems a fundamental, ethnocentric error: “he forgets that we are, in large part, them.”

Read School Ties, by Paul La Farge

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

When I first heard in the mid-1990s about the dreams of some jihadis and Islamists to have the green flag of Islam waving over the White House and the queen of England wearing a burka, I, like so many other Western liberals, thought that these were ludicrous fantasies. But as a student of apocalyptic millennialism, I understood that however silly such beliefs might sound to outsiders, they can have devastating consequences.

Millennialists, from stone-age cargo cults to the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution in Egypt around 1350 BCE to modern secular movements including the French Revolution, Marxism, Communism, and Nazism, all imagine that in the future the world will transform from a society in which evil, corruption, and oppression flourish and the good suffer into a world without suffering and pain. The term “apocalyptic” refers to the experiences and behavior of those who believe that this millennial transformation is imminent. In my new book, Heaven on Earth, I focus on two major developments in apocalyptic movements: The first concerns those rare moments when a previously low-volume apocalyptic discourse successfully enters the public sphere and, despite its outlandish claims, wins zealous, open, converts, and the second concerns the inevitable disappointment that greets all such movements, including those that succeed in taking power and implementing their plans for perfecting the world. Of the most dangerous such movements to jell are those I call “active cataclysmic” ones that believe that only vast destruction can pave the way to the new world, and that they are the agents of that violence. Such movements have killed tens of millions of people (often their own people) before their raging fires burned out.

Two key laws of apocalyptic dynamics became relevant in assessing Muslim apocalyptic expectations, even the most curious ones attached to the advent of the year 2000: First, one person’s messiah is another’s antichrist; and, second, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Muslims observing messianic Christians and Jews who wanted to rebuild the Temple where the Dome of the Rock stands in the year 2000 predicted the Dajjal, the Muslim version of the antichrist, for that year. And given the active cataclysmic fantasy involved—“We, Allah’s agents, must destroy much of the word to save it”—I understood how devastating it might be if this movement spread, no matter how wrong it might seem to secular people in the West.

When I first began to familiarize myself with this phenomenon, I was primarily worried that organizations like al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other jihadi and mujahedin movements might gain support in the Muslim world and cause damage both to fellow Muslims and to “infidels” around the world. But I did not for a moment imagine that these hateful and paranoid apocalyptic tropes—the very opposite of the notions of peace, equality, openness, and tolerance that Western progressives prized—would win supporters and allies among even the most progressive elements of the Western public sphere. Neither I nor, I suspect, the men who wrote Hamas’ genocidal charter in 1988 expected Western infidels to march in European capitals with Hamas’ flag, shouting “We are Hamas,” as protesters did in London, Athens, Paris, and Madrid in 2009.

In the course of the last decade, the Western public sphere has seen two major developments that systematically increased the strength of global jihad: on the one hand the adoption of some of the most vicious jihadi discourse—in particular the new anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism—and on the other, the equally strident attacks, often by non-Muslims, on those who try to identify the Islamic sources of the problem as hate-mongering Islamophobes. The result has been an undreamed-of success for jihadis over the past decade in a cognitive war that Westerners scarcely recognize.

***

Most Westerners greet the news of a global jihad against the West with derision. The vast asymmetry between Muslim and Western military forces makes any such ambition seem like a bad joke. Thus when Osama Bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998, the Western news media scarcely mentioned it, and few even noticed. And if we outsiders ignored the battlefield jihad, we also failed to note that the jihadis were aware of their disadvantage on the battlefield and had chosen to conduct their major campaign against the West in a very different theater of war.

Cognitive warfare aims to paralyze the will of the enemy to resist attack, to maneuver that enemy into adopting vulnerable positions, and eventually to get him to give up in a conflict. In cognitive warfare, real violence (such as terror attacks) are adjuncts to the mental conflict, and the targets of such warfare are large audiences both among populations at home (recruitment and mobilization) and, still more significantly, among the enemy (paralysis). The advent of television, for example, with its highly emotive power, played a key role in the cognitive war the Vietcong successfully conducted against the United States in Vietnam.

Of course, such a line of action seems almost as unlikely to succeed as the military option. Jihadi Islam embraces values that by the normal standards of the Western public sphere are simply grotesque—misogyny, oppressive theocracy, homophobia, hate-mongering, and genocide. Yet as a collection of civil polities that prize peaceful conditions and positive-sum relations, in which public opinion has a great deal of influence on political decisions, the West is particularly vulnerable to a campaign based on appealing to our commitment to human rights, justice, and peace and against prejudice, racism, and intolerance. If jihadis can convince us—their target population—that by our standards we are in the wrong, that to think ill of them is a form or racism, or Islamophobia, then they can drain us of the will to resist and the awareness that we need to resist something.

One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, to behave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon—one whose violation immediately removes any protection from harm from the head of the blasphemer—is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet. Thus, a major battlefield of the cognitive war between jihadis and the West concerns tolerance for criticism of the other. Here, as elsewhere, the jihadis strive for asymmetry: Even as they criticize us virulently, how dare we criticize them?

Normally, the West would have won this fight hands down. Tolerance applies to all, and for freedom of expression and public criticism to exist one must develop a thick skin and renounce honor violence—shedding someone’s blood for the sake of saving face.

Continue reading: the case of Muhammad al Durah and anti-Semitism via anti-Zionism. Or view as a single page.

That’s not going to fly following revelations in a new book that Chanel’s Nazi sympathies, and more specifically her anti-Semitism, were as ingrained as her love for the little black dress. The new book apparently reports that Chanel was “fiercely anti-Semitic long before it became a question of pleasing the Germans. She became rich by catering to the very rich, and shared their dislike of Jews.” After the war, of course, France prosecuted her for directly participating in German spy operations did nothing about the fact that she was a German operative during the occupation.

Writing on the occasion of John Galliano’s recent Jewish problems, contributing editor Rachel Shukert hypothesized that high-end fashion intrinsically lends itself to anti-Semtism:

its integral philosophy is based on a principle of exclusivity. Fashionistas may indeed have a keen eye for beauty, but for many (and I shamefully include myself in this number) the true frisson comes less from an appreciation for innovative design or admiration for glorious craftsmanship than from the mean, malignant, but deeply satisfying sense of superiority in having a handbag that costs as much as an emergency appendectomy or being able to wriggle neatly into a sleek size 2 (or, more elusively, an Italian 38, since everyone knows how American designers are bullied into cutting generously for their vain customers). You are rich (or look like you are, which is almost as good); you are thin, and those are the two things that legendary fashion icon and notorious Nazi-sympathizer Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, said you can never be too much of, and therefore you are better, fancier, more deserving than the lumpen undesirables relegated to the downstairs cosmetics counter in the metaphorical department store of life.

New Book Says Coco Chanel Was ‘Fiercely’ Anti-Semitic [JPost]
Related: Fashion’s Fascists [Tablet Magazine]

Traveling by train to Budapest, Hungary, from Vienna in the summer of 1980, Pfeifer was questioned by a female customs official who entered his compartment and asked him politely if he had anything to declare. Pfeifer replied that he did not, but the official looked inside his bag, where she found several dozen photocopies of a review of the memoir Seven Thousand Days in Siberia by Karlo Stajner, published in a Hungarian-language Yugoslavian newspaper. An Austrian-born, Croatian Communist, Stajner had traveled to Moscow in 1932 with dreams of building the international socialist revolution. But like so many others, he became a victim of the cold realities of Stalinist paranoia and was condemned to the gulag.

“I’m going to take away this dirt,” the border official told Pfeifer.

“I draw your attention to the fact that this is not dirt,” Pfeifer calmly replied in Hungarian, a language he’d had learned while living in Budapest from 1938 until fleeing for Palestine in 1943. “This comes from the official paper of the Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia,” he said, in which bristling critiques of the Soviet system were not uncommon.

Thus began Pfeifer’s troubles with the Hungarian Communist regime. (He would later discover from Austrian diplomats briefed about the circumstances that it was his use of the phrase “I draw your attention” and not “I beg to draw your attention” that drew the customs officer’s ire.) Pfeifer was taken off the train and brought to the customs station, where a higher-ranking officer informed him that he had “provoked” the official and would be deported back to Austria. Told that the Hungarian government would pay for his return ticket, he replied: “Finally, at 51 years of age, the Hungarian state pays something for me? Very good.”

Until his final deportation from the country in 1987, Pfeifer acted as a courier between Hungary’s dissidents and the West. “Through Karl Pfeifer we obtained real, normal contact with the democratic, liberal, outside world,” Attila Ara-Kovacs, a Hungarian dissident, said in a 2008 interview for an Austrian documentary about Pfeifer’s life, Somehow in Between. “This contact was very important for us. It naturally changed our lives.”

Pfeifer’s courier work started in May 1979, when a friend in Vienna asked him to deliver medicines to acquaintances in Budapest. Meeting those Budapest acquaintances, a group of sociologists, Pfeifer remarked that Hungary, then practicing a form of “goulash communism”—which allowed for a small degree of private enterprise, greater personal liberties, and easier travel to the West—was “quite free for a communist country.” Afterward, one of the sociologists, Tamás Földvári, took Pfeifer outside and said that his impression of Hungary was false. For instance, he said, workers in rural areas who complained about conditions were targeted for physical violence by the secret police.

Back in Vienna, Pfeifer got in touch with the editor of the social democratic newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung, or Worker’s News, who expressed interest in having Pfeifer publish dispatches from Hungary. Writing under the pseudonym Peter Koroly, Pfeifer began traveling back and forth to Budapest, banging out stories on his Hermes Baby typewriter about everything from the country’s periodic economic crises to the tide of young men refusing military service.

In 1982, two years after that first deportation from the Hungarian train, Pfeifer became editor of Die Gemeinde, or The Community, Vienna’s Jewish newspaper. Pfeifer, whose youthful energy belies his 83 years, told me recently at a Vienna café that this assignment changed his situation, “insofar as for the Austrians it was very uncomfortable” that he be denied entry to a neighboring country. Pfeifer sent a letter of protest to Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, an assimilated Jew who nonetheless had former Nazis in his Cabinet. “I said, ‘Look, Waffen SS men, Arrow Cross men”—from the far right Hungarian party—“can go to Hungary. They get a visa, and I have family that are survivors and I cannot get in. It’s against human rights.’ ” Soon after sending the letter, Pfeifer got his visa.

Because the Hungarian regime of János Kádár was trying to present itself as practicing a more reformed version of communism, it tolerated Pfeifer entering the country. But that didn’t stop authorities from deporting him three more times over the ensuing years. “The more they did it, the more I hated their guts,” he told me. The last straw was a 1987 meeting in Budapest with a high-ranking official from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, who informed Pfeifer that the Hungarian government would no longer allow him to meet with any members of the opposition. Pfeifer responded that, as “a modest Austrian journalist and not a Hungarian policeman,” he did not know whether the Hungarians he interviewed were members of the opposition. “Would you be so kind as to give me a written list and I promise you I won’t meet anybody on the list?” he asked. This sly retort led to Pfeifer’s last expulsion. When Hungary opened the archives of its Communist-era secret police following the democratic transition in 1991, Pfeifer discovered that he had a 100-page file in which regime agents accused him of “ideological subversion,” an allegation that today makes him “incredibly proud,” he told me.

Anti-Semitism was not, at least initially, a major concern for Pfeifer in his early journalism about Hungary. “I was of the opinion that this problem had more or less solved itself in the people’s republics,” he recounts in the documentary. “Whereby I was terribly wrong.” In 1982, he decided to report on the 100th anniversary of the “Tiszaeszlár Affair,” an incident involving the disappearance of a young Christian girl in a northern Hungarian village that had led to a Jewish blood libel, pogroms, and the formation of a political faction called the National Anti-Semitic Party. Meeting with a high-level official in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, Pfeifer was told, “We won’t allow you to import anti-Semitism from Austria to Hungary. We have solved this problem once and for all in 1945.”

Living under regimes that denied the particularly Jewish aspects of the Holocaust and the continuing evils of anti-Semitism within their own societies, the people of the Eastern Bloc did not experience, in the same way Western Europeans did, the decades-long, postwar process of atonement and recognition for the crimes committed against their Jewish populations. This is the battle for historical truth that Pfeifer has fought for decades.

***

Born in the Austrian spa town of Baden bei Wien to Hungarian parents in 1928, Karl Pfiefer fled with his family to Hungary following the Nazi Anschluss of 1938. In Budapest, Pfeifer was recruited into the Hashomir Hatzair socialist Zionist youth movement. Paradoxically, he believes that the anti-Semitism he experienced as a young boy saved him from a far worse fate. “Somehow, one has to be thankful for Austrian anti-Semitism,” Pfeifer says with a chuckle in Somehow in Between. “Of the 180,000 [Austrian] Jews, 120,000 fled thanks to Austrian anti-Semitism.”

Things were not much better in Budapest. “In Hungary, people had illusions,” he says in the film. Every morning, students in his Jewish school rose to recite a nationalistic poem, which went something along the lines of, “I believe in one homeland. I believe in one God. I believe in a divine justice. I believe in the resurrection of Hungary.” That “resurrection” was a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the post-World War I agreement that broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and left about a third of ethnic Hungarians living outside the Hungarian successor state and that remains a curse word among latter-day Hungarian nationalists. “I always said it the other way round,” Pfeifer recalls in Somehow in Between. “I do not believe in one God. I do not believe in divine justice. And I certainly do not believe in the resurrection of Hungary.” Pfeifer’s ardent Zionism and disavowal of Hungarian identity led to fierce fights with his father, who beat him repeatedly.

Continue reading: “Nazi tones,” a controversial suicide, and the new Hungarian right. Or view as a single page.

Breivik is far from alone in making this transition. The English Defence League— which is praised in Breivik’s document and with which he may have been in contact—strongly supports Israel as a bastion of western civilization facing the “totalitarian threat” of Islamic fundamentalism. Israeli flags are now waved routinely at demonstrations mounted by the EDL in places of high Muslim concentration. Right-wing parties, such as the National Front in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the Austrian Freedom Party are now forming links with the governing Israeli Likud (led by premier Bibi Netanyahu) and its coalition partner Yisrael Beiteinu (led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman).

As Ayoob Kara, a deputy Israeli minister for development who is actively promoting these contacts, told the Israeli daily Maariv in June, “I am looking for ways to lessen the Islamic influence in the world. I believe that is the true Nazism in this world. I am the partner of everyone who believes in the existence of this war.” His sentiments are echoed by Eliezer Cohen, a former member of the Knesset with Yisrael Beiteinu in a recent interview with Spiegel Online: “Right-wing politicians in Europe are more sensitive to the dangers facing Israel. They are talking exactly the same language as Likud and others on the Israeli right.”

I argued that a close look at these parties’ Zionism reveals a disdain for many Jews and the same DNA that led past European reactionaries to advocate the destruction of world Jewry.

Ruthven goes on to make a fascinating point concerning the fact that, if contemporary Islamophobia and earlier anti-Semitism share much, they nonetheless are not simply different variations on the same theme. And the chief difference is that today’s Muslims are poisoned by putrid Islamism from governments and communities outside of Europe who have neither Europe’s nor European Muslims’ best interests at heart. “Before the recent atrocity,” Ruthven recounts,

a group of Muslims residing in a major Norwegian city sought permission to build a mosque. They explained that the biggest part of their funding—around $3 million—would come from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. The municipal authorities—backed by the Norwegian government—turned them down.

This was not Islamophobia, but a wise decision that should be emulated throughout the West. The construction of mosques, which serve as community centers as well as places of worship, is to be welcomed when the funding comes from sources that are accountable to communities that use them. When that funding comes from the state that produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists (and whose intelligence services may even have been implicated in the attack), or from other religious sources that preach hatred or disdain for “infidels,” the authorities have every right to refuse.

The New European Far-Right [NYRB]
Related: The New Anti-Semitism [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: What to Make of the Oslo Attacker’s Zionism

Last month, James Kirchick reported in Tablet Magazine on the fallout former director Charles Small faced after his “Global Anti-Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity” conference last August. His program was shuttered in June, following high-profile complaints from Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s ambassador to Washington, among others.

Ultimately, plans for the new program seem to emphasize scholarly exploration, with the likely goal of quieting former claims that the institute wasn’t academic enough. (In June, Deborah Lipstadt, author of Nextbook Press’ The Eichmann Trial, suggested that a shift toward advocacy and away from scholarship had cost the institute supporters.) “Our goal is not to affect policy,” Samuels said, “but if scholarship can produce an understanding that advocates and politicians can use to oppose anti-Semitism, I think that’s totally valid.”

Yale Gives Anti-Semitic Studies a Second Try [Haaretz]
Related: No Haven
Earlier: What Really Happened at Yale

One of those provocations was in the title he and Hazan chose for their small book. In 60 pages, they argued that the only place anti-Semitism is partout, everywhere, in France is in the feverish imaginations of a coterie of mostly Jewish intellectuals ranging from Bernard-Henri Lévy to Alain Finkielkraut. The traditional anti-Semitism that pulsed through French politics and literature prior to World War II, they noted, was now little more than a “ghostly residue.”

As for the much-discussed rise in anti-Semitic activity among French Arab youths, Badiou and Hazan were equally dismissive. They allowed that since 2001 hate crimes aimed at French Jews have increased. Moreover, they acknowledged that the criminals were frequently beurs—the slang term for French youths of North African origin. But, the writers warned, the media, influenced by a loose association of Jewish intellectuals, have dramatically distorted the numbers and nature of these acts. This “opération de stigmatisation” aimed at young French Muslims, the authors argued, was at the heart of a massive public relations campaign led by these intellectuals. Whether the Arabs live in the decaying suburbs of Paris or the devastated villages of the West Bank, Badiou and Hazan claimed, they have all been transformed by these Jewish intellectuals into a single barbarian horde, against which the West is pitted.

The small book lit up the blogosphere and led to a widely watched televised debate in March among Badiou, Hazan, and Finkielkraut on the popular television show Ce Soir ou Jamais (Tonight or Never). Within minutes, however, it became clear that a calm and candid conversation was not to be. The participants quickly fell to finger-jabbing accusations and insults—all of it in impeccable French sprinkled with literary and philosophical references. It was as if Jerry Springer had choreographed a session of the Académie Française. While the guests did not leap for one another’s throats, the evening nevertheless ended as it started: with each side persuaded that the other simply refused to listen to reason.

It was a watershed moment. More than a century after French Jews, in the crucible of the Dreyfus Affair, had forged the concept of the public intellectual, which had inspired intellectuals all over the world and helped shape some of the 20th century’s most sweeping ideas, French Jewish thinkers, through their quibbling about Islam and Israel, were now destroying that very cultural tradition. If the intellectual, as a cultural figure, becomes an artifact of the past, intellectuals, many of them Jewish, will have only themselves to blame.

***

Providing the kindling that helped inflame the battle raging over L’Antisemitisme Partout are several slow but dramatic changes in the French political climate. Once a nation whose language was the lingua franca of diplomats and artists, whose cultural heritage and revolutionary history belonged to the world, France is now besieged by the economic and demographic forces of globalization. Particularly dramatic has been the growth of its Muslim population. While estimates of size vary from 5 to 6 million, France’s Muslim population is by far the largest within the European Union.

The sheer size of its Muslim population coupled with the erosion of its borders has made France’s national identity the subject of much debate. Oddly, it’s a debate in which Jews figure prominently. Speaking in 1789, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre famously declared the after the French Revolution, “Jews should be granted everything as individuals and denied everything as a nation.” This led to an understanding of French republicanism as a tradition that safeguarded individual rights so long as citizens uphold its values and endorse its emblems. But where does the recent legislation prohibiting Muslim immigrants from wearing traditional religious garbs that cover the face, for example, fall under this logic? Should the republic punish those who refuse to adhere to its symbols? Or tolerate those who, in the name of freedom, reject some of the republic’s central tenets? These are huge questions; the answers may mold not only France but Europe as well, as every nation on the continent is currently struggling with similar conundrums.

These are not new questions. They’ve been asked, mainly by intellectuals, for a very long time, shaping what scholars call les guerres franco-françaises, the series of internecine political and ideological battles in France that first burst into flames in the late 18th century and whose embers glow even today. The war has pitted two ideological camps against one another: the forces of the Enlightenment, committed to the rational, secular and universal ideals of the French Revolution, versus those of the Counter-Enlightenment, wedded to an instinctual, religious, and particularist conception of France.

The Revolution made an offer to French Jews that they could hardly refuse: liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the eyes of many, it was as if God, in collaboration with the French Republic, had slipped them a world-historical trifecta. From scorned and shamed scapegoats, the Jews were transformed, literally overnight, into patriots blessed with all the rights and duties of citizenship. With the passage into law of Jewish emancipation in 1791, how could one not conclude that the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the Revolution were one and the same? France had become our Palestine, declared one Jewish witness, and France’s mountains now our Mount Zion.

But it was no less a defining moment for enemies of the Revolution, who emphasized an organic and historical conception of the nation against the prevailing rational and universal claims on the nation’s behalf. Perhaps inevitably, Jews found themselves in the middle of these furious claims and counterclaims over France’s true vocation. For the conservative thinker Maurice Barrès, the Jew and the intellectual, given their rationalist and cosmopolitan character, were equally alien—indeed, they were, in his phrase, “uprooted” and foreign to the “soil and dead” that constitute the true France. When other reactionary thinkers, like Charles Maurras, Louis Ferdinand Céline, and Robert Brasillach, attacked the Republic, they also attacked the place French Jewry had within it. While these intellectuals did not share the same political or aesthetic ideals, they all agreed that the Jew would always remain a Jew—the embodiment, in Maurras’ notorious phrase, of “l’anti-France”—and thus serve as the foil against which the true France could be defined.

These anti-Republican—and anti-Jewish—voices were gaining ground, but in 1927 republican intellectuals struck back. That year the French (and Jewish) intellectual Julien Benda published La Trahison des Clercs. The pamphlet, usually translated as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, was a rappel à l’ordre for the band of intellectuals. A veteran of the Dreyfus Affair, Benda reminded his peers that truth is the one and only ideal of their vocation. Not the sloppy and sentimental truths of tenderhearted souls, but the austere and universal truths of scientists.

Benda insisted he was not a moralist but instead a rationalist for whom the accusations leveled against Dreyfus were toxic not because they endangered a Jew but because they endangered truth. Zola had already trumpeted this credo in J’Accuse, the article that turned une affaire into l’Affaire. The anti-Semitism that helped send Dreyfus to Devil’s Island scarcely crops up in Zola’s accusation; at most it is a sideshow to the sorry affair. What is at center stage, instead, is the assault on truth. But with the confidence of a rationalist rather than the fervor of a moralist, Zola declares that “truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.”

Continue reading: Vichy and its legacy. Or view as a single page.

Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin has an excellent post defending them. “While Wagner’s anti-Semitic screeds are today read only by scholars, his life-affirming music dramas continue to be enjoyed by audiences around the world who know little or nothing of his politics,” he argues. “Those who seek to project the composer’s racial and political opinions onto the broad canvas of his myth-based theater works are inevitably reduced to strained analogies and symbolism that never holds up to scrutiny.” Besides, if Israelis playing Wagner in Bayreuth isn’t a wonderful f-you, then what is? “Wagner and his Nazi relatives must be spinning in their graves at the mere thought of it!” Tobin remarks correctly (it sure beats just eating smoked fish). As the orchestra’s director put it, “Every one of us has some relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. But to be here in Bayreuth is a victory for us.”

As for the choice of piece? Wagner wrote the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday present for his wife. It’s really quite lovely. It’s even been featured in popular culture recently. Can I resist? Can I resist posting the following? No, I don’t think I can.

Israeli Orchestra Breaks Taboo, Performs Wagner in Germany [AP/Haaretz]
Breaking the Taboo on Wagner [Commentary]
Earlier: Our Revenge on Wagner

Everybody has flowers in their front yard in Sunnyside Gardens, but Otto’s flower arrangements stand out: His garden’s neat choreography rivals that of a North Korean mass performance. Trying to reach the ultimate perfection, Otto, in his mid-70s, is always sweeping, digging, raking, pruning, and polishing things. On hot summer nights he sits on his stoop listening to German folk music on an old cassette recorder, while his Puerto Rican wife, whom I’ll call Maria, watches baseball games in the living room.

Otto never misses an opportunity to tell me how much he aches for Germany. Born and raised in the western state of Nordrhein-Westfalen during the Third Reich, Otto immigrated to the United States in the 1950s because his company relocated. He thought he’d eventually go back, but he met Maria and the couple married. In 1982, they bought a house in Queens.

Our block is perhaps the most diverse one in the world. I am a Protestant born and raised in Germany; my husband is Catholic, from Mexico. We met in 2004, in New York City, and married in 2006. Our neighbors are from Pakistan, India, Great Britain, Peru, Ecuador, Australia, China, Turkey, and Ireland. We are white, pink, beige, brown, and black. Our neighbors are Protestants, Jews, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and Muslims. Most recently, an Orthodox rabbi with his wife and four children moved from Israel to a house on our block to take the pulpit at the Young Israel of Sunnyside congregation, which had been without a rabbi for several years. The synagogue celebrated his arrival with a little parade down our block. Neighbors of all shades and creeds sat on their stoops in the sun; some took pictures and waved at the float that carried the rabbi’s neatly dressed children. In Sunnyside Gardens my husband and I felt at home for the first time in decades. It seemed like a safe and welcoming place.

***

Aside from our nationality, Otto and I have little in common. We both married Latinos, as he once noted, but in addition to an age gap of nearly four decades, we have different tastes in music, clothes, literature, and garden decor. Until recently, Otto left German tabloid magazines on my front porch for me to read, and not wanting to hurt his feelings, I never told him that they went right into the recycling bin. But despite our differences, when Otto asked me to check in on Maria while he traveled to Germany for a trip, I agreed. This may be his last trip home, he said.

Taking care of Maria was far more demanding than I had imagined. I was supposed to drop by once a day and make sure that Maria hadn’t suddenly fallen ill or down the stairs.

“My head is spinning,” she told me on the first morning. “It feels like I have one head on top of the other.” I looked at Maria’s head. I saw nothing wrong. I offered to take her to the doctor, but Maria waved off my offer. “I’ve felt like this for years,” she said.

The next day Maria complained about back pain. “Damn Otto!” she said. “He screwed up my back.” When I asked what happened, she said, “He had a heart attack and fell on top of me.”

Each day Maria complained about something else. She hated hospitals because of the black nurses, and Jews because her sister was married to an allegedly lazy one. She hated the envelope I bought for the “Home Sweet Home” calendar she wanted to send to her sister (presumably the one who married the “lazy Jew”). Maria also hated the milk and the potatoes her Puerto Rican neighbor got her. She even hated Sunnyside. (“Too many trees,” she said.) I was sure that Maria hated me too.

The last few days of Otto’s absence, Maria played possum. I rang the bell but no one opened. Just to make sure everything was OK, I walked past her house at night to check whether the lights came on. They did.

When Otto returned from his vacation, he stopped by my house. “I’m sorry about my wife,” he said. “I think she’s faking it.” There was no way of denying that something was wrong with Maria, so I didn’t.

But what was wrong with Otto that he would be married to Maria? He didn’t strike me as a hater. He, too, had mentioned his lazy Jewish brother-in-law, but added apologetically, “You know there are good Jews and bad Jews.” At least he’s trying to make a distinction, I thought. I decided to let it slide.

***

All of the above? Yeah, that was January. Just January.

Since then, in the Territories, Hamas and the P.A. cracked down fiercely on popular protests in favor of unity. Then, suddenly, they agreed to unity, even though it was always doubtful it would actually work. But they stayed together long enough to mount the most threatening Nakba Day protests in years if not decades, and to threaten even worse come September—if they seek unilateral statehood.

Substantively, the most consequential thing President Obama did vis-à-vis Israel was veto a Security Council resolution condemning settlements. In a speech in May, Obama pledged similar opposition to the statehood gambit, condemned Hamas and the P.A.’s deal with it, sharply criticized Iran, and committed the U.S. to totally standing up for Israel’s security and right to exist. And he mentioned what the previous two presidents had assumed: That a two-state solution depended on land-swaps based on the ’67 borders. So, naturally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, creating a huge diplomatic mess that has yet to be fully untangled, and which could have implications on the 2012 U.S. presidential contest.

The Fogel massacre. The Hamas rocket attacks. The Jerusalem bus stop explosion. Israeli responses claimed lives, including of innocents.

On the Iranian front, first we were given ample reason to believe that its purported nuclear program was substantially delayed. But then we learned that Stuxnet, while helpful, was no panacea. And then we learned that Iran has made significant progress on weaponization technology.

Egypt continues to move tentatively toward democracy.

In Lebanon, the sealed U.N. indictment for the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister (and father of the also-former prime minister, who had to resign when Hezbollah pulled its support) was only last week partially unsealed; expect things to continue to get hotter there.

It was weird that the Syrian regime was brutally cracking down on internal dissent, and barely anyone was saying anything. And that was half-a-half-a-year ago.

Former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who once harbored dreams of being the first Jewish Speaker of the House, instead decided to run for mayor of Chicago; was briefly declared ineligible, then not; then won.

We were there as Rabbi Gershom Sizoumu ran for and lost a seat in Uganda’s parliament. We observed the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Ellen Weiss, an NPR honcho and wife of the enormously influential Rabbi David Saperstein, was forced to resign. Rep. Peter King held hearings on the American Muslim community, attracting the opposition of the American Jewish community. The Reform movement picked a new head.

Jimmy Carter was sued by people who bought and hated his book. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder sued Washington City Paper, and even got the Simon Wiesenthal Center to endorse his ludicrous accusation of anti-Semitism—maybe his buddy Tom Cruise helped? Jon Demjanjuk was convicted of helping carry out the Holocaust, and then set free.

Quote of the Half-Year (paraphrased): “Oops!” — Richard Goldstone.

Western countries invaded Libya, possibly out of Holocaust guilt. A crazy guy tried to blow up a Santa Monica Chabad house. Benjamin Netanyahu and Justin Bieber were plausibly mentioned in the same sentence. A glass ceiling was shattered when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was picked to be the first woman to run either the Democratic or Republican National Committee. The Prince of Wales had the least Jewish wedding ever. Controversy swirled about playwright Tony Kushner. Jill Abramson was named the first woman editor of the New York Times. Dolph Schayes rooted for the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA championship, and lo, it came to pass.

Eva Braun in blackface. Eva Braun speaking to the Tenafly JCC.

On the home front, Nextbook Press author Hillel Halkin was honored, and Rush Limbaugh said we were a “radical left-wing” outfit. We rolled out a welcome mat for Goldblog. And the American Society of Magazine Editors confirmed that it enjoys The Scroll.

We said several goodbyes, most of them sad: Elizabeth Taylor; Chris Hondros (whose photograph adorns the top of this post); Juliano Mer-Khamis; and Debbie Friedman, whose death I managed to turn into a controversy, though I swear I mourn for her as well. I don’t, however, mourn for one of the most important U.S. neo-Nazis, who was killed by his own son. There were many other sad goodbyes. Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph Lieberman announced he would retire after four terms. John Galliano’s career ended, or at least lulled, on less favorable terms. So did Rep. Anthony Weiner’s. Oh, and a final goodbye: Enjoy your virgins, Osama. Hamas will enjoy them with you. (Fortunately or not, Noam Chomsky’s religion does not conceive of an afterlife.)

Where do we stand now? Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape, which is looking more questionable by the day; Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer was barred from replacing him as head of the International Monetary Fund. The most Jewish state got gay marriage thanks in part to a handful of Jewish Republicans. Israeli-American law student Ilan Grapel is still being detained by Egyptian authorities under dubious espionage accusations. Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest domestic rival may well be retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan. The Gaza flotilla remains docked.

How should you deal with all this? We suggest going the f**k to shul.

“Ma,” he replied. “This is the beginning of the end.”

Whether the August conference was the cause, Small’s prescience was confirmed last month, when news of the program’s demise was leaked to the New York Post. On June 6, the Post’s Abby Wisse Schachter reported that a four-member Yale faculty review committee had decided to close the program just several days earlier and then laid out a narrative that took hold among YIISA’s supporters: that the university had caved into pressure from a cadre of academic leftists and malign foreign influences, both of whom were made uncomfortable by a program they portrayed as a stalking horse for extreme right-wing supporters of Israel. As evidence, Schachter pointed to a letter written in the immediate aftermath of the August conference by Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s ambassador to Washington, to Yale President Richard Levin, in which the PLO representative said it was “shocking that a respected institution like Yale would give a platform to these right-wing extremists and their odious views” and “deeply ironic that a conference on anti-Semitism that is ostensibly intended to combat hatred and discrimination against Semites would demonize Arabs—who are Semites themselves.” Schachter also cited an op-ed in the Yale Daily News by a Syrian-American Yale Law student, who, in reaction to the conference, wrote that “the university cannot preach tolerance and inclusion while simultaneously also providing a haven for bigoted ideas about Muslims and Arabs that often form the basis for Islamophobic sentiment in this country.” After five years running the institute, Small’s time at Yale had come to an end: YIISA would shut its doors on July 31. Small was given three months’ severance, the minimum required under Connecticut law.

In the aftermath of the “Crisis of Modernity” conference and the controversy that ensued, Yale took a series of measures to reform YIISA, but to Small’s mind the die was cast: He had treaded on a subject—anti-Semitism in the Muslim world—that was simply too controversial for the university. Though he had hosted talks by academics on this topic from the very start of the program (in addition to lectures on a wide variety of subjects from “Legitimating Nazism: American Universities and the Third Reich” to “Memetics and the Viral Spread of Antisemitism Through ‘Coded Images’ in Political Cartoons”), the “Crisis of Modernity” conference thrust the phenomenon onto the international academic agenda in an unprecedentedly high-profile way. Anything that had even the faintest whiff of “Islamophobia” touches the third rail of the American academy, and, for Small, there was no way Yale was going to let the program continue.

Yale offered a different set of reasons for discontinuing the program, beginning with the explanation that it fell short of the Ivy League university’s exacting academic benchmarks. “YIISA suffered the same fate as other initially promising programs … that were eventually terminated at ISPS because they failed to meet high standards for research and instruction,” Donald Green, a professor of political science and director of the university’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which oversaw YIISA, told the Yale Daily News. Jewish bloggers placed the decision to close YIISA within a broader context of a politically correct university succumbing to the demands of shadowy outside Muslim forces. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee issued statements of concern about YIISA’s closure, and the controversy was further fueled by academics from around the world who had participated in YIISA over the years, like Walter Reich, a George Washington University professor and former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who charged in the Washington Post that YIISA was closed because it was “accused of being too critical of the Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism and of being racist and right-wing.”

Yale then announced, in a move that would receive mixed reactions from YIISA’s supporters, that this was not to be the end of the university’s pioneering work in the study of anti-Semitism after all. On June 17, two weeks after the announcement that YIISA would be discontinued, the school’s Jewish chaplain, Jim Ponet, sent a mass email to Yale alumni (I am one) acknowledging the “loud outpouring of reaction on the part of students, faculty and alumni around the world.” In response, Ponet wrote, “I think that within a few days Yale will announce that a reconceived YIISA, under new faculty leadership, has been established.” Three days later, Yale Provost Peter Salovey wrote an open letter announcing the creation of the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism, to be headed by Maurice Samuels, a professor of 19th-century French literature. YPSA, Salovey wrote, “will encourage serious scholarly discourse and collaborative research focused on anti-Semitism, one of the world’s oldest and most enduring prejudices, in all of its forms.”

But the creation of YPSA did not quell the impression that Yale was timorous about discussing contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism; indeed, its decision to name a professor of 19th-century French literature as the new program’s head only reinforced that conception. A boast in Salovey’s letter—that YPSA would be able to utilize “the Fortunoff Video Archives of Holocaust Testimonies and the 95,000 volume Judaica collection,” held within the Yale library—was proof positive, critics said, of the new program’s intention to focus on anti-Semitism of the historical rather than contemporary variety. “The sad truth is that dead Jews—victims of crusades, pogroms, the Shoah—are safe terrain for academia,” Ben Cohen, a former associate director of communications for the American Jewish Committee, wrote in the Forward. “Live Jews, however, are a much more daunting proposition.”

Due to the nature of its subject matter, YIISA was bound to be contentious. “I’m probably not shocking you to say that if it’s a Jewish organization, everybody’s fighting all the time,” jokes Steven Smith, a Jewish professor of political theory and the author of a book on Baruch Spinoza, who last year was appointed to co-chair an oversight committee created in the aftermath of the August conference. While the university publicly claims that politics played no role in YIISA’s dissolution, both supporters and detractors tell a story of the program’s demise that is more complicated than either side is willing to admit. It is one in which the endlessly contentious realms of academic politics, Jewish communal life, anti-Semitism, and the Middle East inevitably collided.

***

The story of YIISA begins in 2004, when Small created the Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Policy. Disturbed by the global rise of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Second Intifada and the Sept. 11 attacks, Small, then working as director of urban studies at Southern Connecticut State University, decided that the world’s oldest hatred was deserving of serious academic inquiry. Eying nearby Yale, he brought the idea to Salovey, then dean of Yale College. “I had a PowerPoint presentation,” Small recalled. “I met with him and was very nervous. He loved the idea. He gave me chores to do, and when I’d go off and do them and I’d come meet him, he would give me other things to do, get faculty support, raise money. He was very helpful, very honest.”

YIISA got off to an auspicious start; unlike most academic centers, its very founding earned headlines. The institute’s international board of academic advisers was a who’s who of Jewish academic heavyweights: former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, historian Benny Morris, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, future Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, and Robert Wistrich, author of a recent 1,000-page book on the history of anti-Semitism. In addition to a regular seminar series, the program also published a small number of working papers and hosted a variety of visiting faculty and post-doctoral fellows.

Continue reading: Ahmadinejad, “Crisis of Modernity,” and a $20 million donation. Or view as a single page.

Meanwhile, Barneys fashion director Simon Doonan, proud husband of a Jewish man (he doesn’t mention who, but it is Jonathan Adler; anyone who has spent time strolling the West Village knows they have an adorable dog), pens a paean to the Jews who have made his career in the fashion industry. On the one hand, it smacks of the sort of philo-Semitism that Adam Kirsch rightly viewed skeptically; also, Doonan’s line, “The difference between a pink triangle and a yellow star is, after all, only three more points,” is, um, not true. But Doonan is also perceptive in remarking, “I suspect that John Galliano could, were he thus inclined, tell a story very similar to mine,” and in observing that a fashion professional who hates on Jews is biting several different hands that feed him.

But follow the live-tweeting for the next few hours—should be fun. And remember that Galliano’s alleged crime—he faces charges of “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity,” which could end up costing him up to $38,000 in fines and up to six months in jail—is not illegal in the United States.

@GQfashion
Designer Galliano Goes on Trial for Anti-Semitic Remarks [JTA]
Galliano’s Trial to Open in France [NYT]
What Was Galliano Thinking? [Slate]
Related: Frenemies [Tablet Magazine]

• “I don’t know if the U.S. has another option,” President Abbas said, “but if it does, we will not go to the U.N.” Something tells me the U.S. will find another option. [Ynet]

• Syria’s President Assad gave his first address in two months, offering “national dialogue.” [NYT]

• According to Egyptian reports, the investigation into Ilan Grapel’s alleged espionage continues. [JPost]

• The Holocaust memorial in Salonika, Greece—once home to a gigantic Jewish population—was vandalized with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti. [JTA]

• Dylan plays Tel Aviv. And apparently not everyone had received the memo about how he totally, utterly lost his voice. [Haaretz]

That’ll show him!

The Lonely Gods [NYRB]

This week’s winner is “Jim,” who wondered, in reference to the eponymous hero of the anti-circumcision (and anti-Semitic) comic strip Foreskin Man, “Shouldn’t Foreskin Man be wearing a turtleneck?” (He made this comment before Russell Crowe decided to wage war against circumcision in similar terms.)

Jim gets a copy of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body, since he seems to know so much about the non-Jewish one.

The Jewish Body [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: When Anti-Circumcision Turns Anti-Semitic

If only as a change of pace, then, a book called Philosemitism in History (Cambridge University Press) should be cause for celebration. Never mind that it is a mere 350 pages, and not a continuous history but a collection of academic papers on fairly narrow subjects, from the Christian Hebraists of the 17th century to documentaries on West German TV. At least it promises a chance to hear about Gentiles who admired and praised Jews, instead of hating and killing them. There must have been some, right?

Well, yes and no. As every contributor to Philosemitism in History acknowledges, Jews have never been entirely happy about the idea of philo-Semitism. The volume’s introduction, by editors Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, begins with a Jewish joke: “Q: Which is preferable—the antisemite or the philosemite? A: The antisemite—at least he isn’t lying.” This may be too cynical; closer to the bone is the saying that “a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.” That formulation helps to capture the sense that philo- and anti- share an unhealthy interest in Jews and an unreal notion of who and what Jews are. Both deal not with Jewishness but with “Semitism,” as if being a Jew were the same as embracing a political ideology such as communism or conservatism—rather than what it really is, a religious and historical identity that cuts across political and economic lines.

This Jewish mistrust of philo-Semitism finds ample support in the history of the word offered by Lars Fischer in his contribution to the book. Fischer’s essay focuses rather narrowly on debates within the socialist movement in Germany in the late 19th century. But since this was exactly the time and place that the words “anti-Semitism” and “philo-Semitism” were coined, Fischer’s discussion of the political valences of the terms is highly revealing. From the beginning, when the word was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, “anti-Semitic” was a label proudly claimed by enemies of the Jews. In Austria and Germany, there were political parties, trade unions, and newspapers that called themselves “anti-Semitic,” even when their political programs went beyond hostility to Jews.

Philo-Semitism sounds like it would have been the rallying-cry of the opponents of anti-Semitism, a movement with its own political program. But Fischer explains that this was not the case. In fact, “philo-Semitism” was invented as a term of abuse, applied by anti-Semites to those who opposed them. Though Fischer does not draw the parallel, he makes clear that “philo-Semite” was the equivalent of a word like “nigger-lover” in the United States, meant to suggest that anyone who took the part of a despised minority was odious and perverse. “Its obvious implication was that anybody who could be bothered to oppose anti-Semitism actively must be in cahoots with ‘the Jews,’ ” in thrall to the very Jewish money and power that anti-Semitism attacked.

What this meant was that, in Wilhelmine Germany, those who fought anti-Semitism—above all, Germany’s Social Democratic Party, whose leadership included many Jews—had to be careful to deny that they were philo-Semites. In 1891, for instance, the New York Jewish socialist Abraham Cahan, later to be famous as a novelist and the editor of the Forward, attended the International Socialist Congress at Brussels, in order to propose a motion condemning anti-Semitism. Victor Adler and Paul Singer, the leaders of Socialist parties in Germany and Austria—and both Jews—fought against Cahan’s motion, afraid that condemning anti-Semitism would only heighten the public perception of socialism as a Jewish movement. Finally, the motion passed, after it was amended to attack anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in equal measure.

No one, it seems, wanted to be a philo-Semite; and for a long time, on the evidence of Philosemitism in History, almost no one was. Certainly, it takes pathetically little good will toward Jews to qualify for a place in the book. Robert Chazan, looking for “Philosemitic Tendencies in Western Christendom,” finds one in Saint Bernard’s warning to the Second Crusade not to repeat the anti-Jewish violence of the First. “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world, so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption.”

In this context, philo-Semitism means persecuting Jews to the brink of killing them, but no further. (Paula Frederiksen wrestled with this ambiguous Christian legacy in her excellent book Augustine and the Jews.) Likewise, Chazan shows, the medieval princes who invited Jews to settle in their lands did so not out of any love for Jewish people, but in order to create a taxable commercial class—and they often ended up killing the goose that laid so many golden eggs.

As early as the 11th century, then, we can see the ambivalence that continues to mark Christian philo-Semitism down to the present. Jews are valued, but only as long as they play the role assigned them in a Christian project or worldview. If Jews step out of that role, they are bitterly criticized. During the Renaissance, for example, a desire to read the Bible in its original language drove many leading humanists to study Hebrew. These Christian Hebraists engaged with Jewish traditions more deeply than any Gentiles had done before, even studying the Mishnah and Gemara for clues about historic Jewish practices. As Eric Nelson showed in his recent book The Hebrew Republic, the Israelite commonwealth became a major inspiration to English political theorists in the 17th century.

Three essays in Philosemitism in History focus on the Christian Hebraist movement. Yet as Abraham Melamed writes in “The Revival of Christian Hebraism,” “the big question … is whether the emergence and influence of Christian Hebraism in early modern Europe led to a more tolerant attitude toward the Jews, and additionally to any kind of philosemitism.” Reading Hebrew and admiring the Israelites were all well and good, but did they lead scholars like Johann Reuchlin and William Whiston to have any sympathy with the actual, living Jews of their time? “This is not necessarily the case,” Melamed answers. The English scholar John Selden was referred to, jokingly, as England’s “Chief Rabbi,” for his mastery of Jewish texts, but he seems not to have known any Jews, and he publicly endorsed the blood libel, citing Jews’ “devilish malice to Christ and Christians.”

A more complicated case of Christian philo-Semitism is the subject of Yaakov Ariel’s essay “It’s All in the Bible,” which explores the strong support of Israel by contemporary American Evangelicals. For centuries, but especially after 1967, evangelical Christians have been staunch Zionists, and their friendship has been welcomed by the Israeli government. Yet the premise of that friendship is a millenarian theology, based on a reading of the Book of Revelation, which holds that the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land is a precondition to the Second Coming of Christ. On the road to the redemption, Christian Zionists believe, the majority of Jews will be wiped out in apocalyptic wars, and the remainder will convert to Christianity.

This philo-Semitism is, at its heart, deeply anti-Jewish, and the attempts of Israeli politicians to court evangelical support have been awkward, to say the least. In 1996, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, he supported a bill, urged by Orthodox members of the Knesset, to ban Christian missionary activity in Israel. When he realized that this would profoundly offend the American Christian Right, Netanyahu changed his mind and thwarted the bill. Here we have the Jewish leader of a Jewish state permitting Christians to try to convert Jews, as the price for Christian political support.

Does this count as “philo-Semitism”? And what about the painfully earnest documentaries aired on West German TV in the 1970s, discussed by Wulf Kansteiner, in which “self-pity and appropriation of Jewish culture went hand in hand with awkward silences”? Or the Jewish kitsch on sale in many Eastern European cities, which Ruth Ellen Gruber writes about? Lodz, in Poland, was once a great Jewish metropolis, and then one of the most lethal Nazi ghettoes. Today it is home to a restaurant called Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof, where you can be served matzoh by a “waiter dressed up in Hasidic costume, including a black hat and ritual fringes.” Gruber is rather indulgent toward this kind of thing, seeing it as a byproduct or precursor of a genuine rebirth of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Seen in a colder light, this Jewish kitsch, like many of the phenomena on display in Philosemitism in History, might seem to call for a paraphrase of Oscar Wilde: Not “each man kills the thing he loves,” but each man loves the thing he killed.

But this is too bitter. There may be little to love about philo-Semitism, and little to be grateful for in its history; but that is because genuine esteem between Christians and Jews, like real affection of all kinds, cannot be grasped as an “-ism.” Ideologies deal in abstractions, and to turn a group of people into an abstraction, even a “positive” one, is already to do violence to them. That kind of violence is what historians tend to record, but most of the time, it is not the way real people think and live.

For instance, one of the most heartening stories in Philosemitism in History comes from 14th-century Marseilles, where a Jewish moneylender named Bondavid was tried for fraud. The trial record still exists, Chazan writes, and it shows that Bondavid called a number of Christians as character witnesses. A priest, Guillelmus Gasqueti, testified that “actually [Bondavid is] more righteous than anybody he ever met in his life. … For, if one may say so, he never met or saw a Christian more righteous than he.” This kind of genuine, personal esteem between Christians and Jews was “unusual,” Chazan writes, “but surely not unique.” And it is the proliferation of such face-to-face friendships in modern America that has made this country, not the most “philo-Semitic” in history, but the one where individual Jews and Christians have actually liked each other most.

III.

Israel Shamir is reported to have a handful of names. The Guardian noted that Magnus Ljunggren, a retired professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, claims that Shamir has at least six names: Shamir’s birth name was Izrail Schmerler; in 1992 he became a Swedish citizen and went by Jöran Jermas; and then after he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem he took the name Adam Ermash.

I know one of your names is Jöran Jermas, right?

Yeah, well, I have so many names.

Where does that name come from? Because that’s on your Swedish passport, right?

Ah, eh, you know when people started to attack me I started to be worried about my freedom of movement. One wants to be able to move, so as not being stalked.

So, which is your real name?

Israel Shamir.

What about Izrail Schmerler?

What’s that?

Well, people said that’s your birth name.

That’s something that I really can’t say anything about.

Shamir is a chameleon. As we sat in Moscow last winter, and as he told me how he loved the snow and ice and liked to ice skate in Red Square, he looked Russian. In the picture on his website, where he appears to have a little darker skin and is wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh around his neck, he looks more Palestinian. And I am sure, if he were wearing a kippah while reciting verses from the Talmud in Hebrew that day, I’d think he was Jewish. It is hard to pin down the truth, but Shamir said he was born in Siberia to Jewish parents, moved to Israel in the 1960s, fought in the ’73 war as a paratrooper, and then became a journalist, living in London and working for the BBC. After that, he lived in Japan for a while and then returned to Israel to work for Haartez.

Shamir gave a speech at Tufts University in April 2001 about Arab-Israeli relations. The Tufts student newspaper reported that Shamir said: “Israeli people represent a virus form of a human being because they can live anywhere.” Shortly after, Palestinian rights groups, and two men in particular, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish, sent out a mass email warning about Shamir’s anti-Semitic views disguised as leftist pro-Palestinian activism.

You once described Jews as a virus in human form.

I never did; no, that’s an invention of Jerusalem Post. Yes, I remember when they did it. That’s absolutely a silly thing. And then they quoted it so many times; I did not say that. People accuse me of everything, you know, so I’m used to it.

This goes back to the smear jobs. Why do you think you’re a target?

Well, you know, first of all some things that I say is complicated. And it’s easy for people to make misrepresentations. Maybe because people are unhappy with what I say and they want to smear me so I will look more awful. Why not to say truth, you know? I say things just how they are, you know?

In 2001, Shamir and Norman Finkelstein spoke at Columbia University. After the speech a Jewish man came up to Shamir and asked, “Are you Jewish?” Shamir told me that he was silent. He could not answer the question because he was in a transition from Judaism to Christianity. I asked him if he is Jewish, and he said quickly and assertively, “Now I am surely not.” I asked how he could not be Jewish if his mother and father were both Jews. He said, “It is a question of choice. I believe it is a question of choice.”

Being published on David Duke’s site, and having a regular gig writing for Russia’s anti-Semitic newspaper Zavtra, one would think Shamir wouldn’t have much Jew-loving company. He leaned back, itched his mustache, and said, “I met many people who are described as anti-Semites but I didn’t meet more than one who would be in real terms hating real human beings. They could hate the concept or hate an idea, but to hate Jews on a personal level, I never came across such thing.”

In Shamir’s eyes, being an anti-Semite is a good thing. If you are never called an anti-Semite, then it means that you support warmongering, brainwashing, and the subjugation of native people, in the name of Israel.

What if someone said: “I hate Jews and I wish Hitler killed all of them.”

People say such things.

Would that be labeled anti-Semitic?

Well, you know I’ve heard it very often from Sephardic Jews in Israel. I heard it quite a few times actually. [Laughs.] “Pity you didn’t burn in Auschwitz, a pity all of you didn’t burn in Auschwitz.” I heard it many times.

That’s awful.

Well, yeah. I don’t think that much about it.

Shamir had the poker player’s gift of never letting his guard down. He never committed to a concrete statement, no matter what the topic was. Once the questions got more controversial, he smoked contemplatively and stared out the window to the gray wall. At some point, though, he brought up Auschwitz, and I felt as though someone had just given me an ice pick. I chopped away.

That’s interesting you said “burn in Auschwitz” because your definition of Auschwitz is that it was a Red Cross internment camp. What is your definition of Auschwitz?

I’m not even interested in Auschwitz, you know? I have no interest in it. What I said there is something different. What I said there was that it was perceived as—internment camp.

By who?

By everybody. By Jews in Palestine, by Europeans, by English, by Russians, by Americans. You know when the rumors of mass annihilation came to Palestine they were strongly refuted by the Jewish authorities. It was reported by many publications that life was so awful. Things are so bad as it is and people come and bring such horrible stories … that was published in many newspapers in Israel in those times. The Jewish authorities were very strongly against this sort of rumor. And it was universally thought—yes, it was a deportation camp, nothing especially wonderful about it, nobody thought it was a resort, nobody did. People thought it was a deportation camp, quite awful place.

So, it was a concentration camp?

Yeah, but when I say concentration camp is a word that was used a long time before during the Boer War, when the English fought against the Boers in South Africa. There they built concentration camps; that’s how the word became coined.

This definition of concentration camp didn’t help Shamir’s point, for more than 26,000 women and children died in the South African camps from hard labor and starvation. Shamir stubbed his cigarette out as if tapping out an aggressive form of Morse Code, smashing the butt again and again. I put my butt in the ashtray and he stubbed it out, too, as if I hadn’t done a good enough job.

So, Auschwitz as being a place to exterminate Jews …

This idea came to existence only after the war.

So, it’s a rumor?

No, no, no. I don’t say that at all. No.

But you said, “the rumor of mass annihilation.”

I can repeat more clear. I am not all that interested in what was in reality. I am interested in perceptions. Something I am dealing with is perceptions. So, perceptions during the war was that it was quite awful deportation camp, where people were deported and kept, worked hard labor, this sort of thing. That’s how it was perceived. Only after the war, different perception came. And that was a perception of mass annihilation, and mass murder, and all that.

So, it’s not a fact that there was mass annihilation?

Shamir lost his relaxed demeanor, shifted in his seat, and contracted his shoulders. He covered half his face with his tanned, wrinkled hand and continued, trying to keep it together.

That’s, not, I did not say that at all. I didn’t even say that, I didn’t even intend to say this or other way. What I say is that there was no such perception during the war. This perception came after the war.

But so which one is true?

I am not even interested in this kind of question. That is something that is very much outside of my interest.

But can you comment about if these concentration camps were for mass murder?

Ah, I have really no knowledge about it at all. I was not interested in it because I reject the idea that it is important, you see?

IV.

The waiter arrived and placed a cappuccino in front of Shamir. He politely thanked him in Russian. Shamir added no sugar, sipped from his cup, and then quickly popped a sugar cube in his mouth. I could hear his tobacco-stained teeth crush it with quick staccato crunches.

How far along are we with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Meaning?

Well, that the Jews have a goal of world domination.

Ah, well, well, well. That is kind of a very good and very complicated question. Basically the Protocols describe in this or another way some idea of creating impoverished world. A world where there is no spirit.

Do you think that is real? And that’s what’s happening?

Well, I do think that this process takes place. It’s the process of impoverishing the spiritual component of the world. This process surely goes on.

But are the Jews behind it?

Well, in total, I don’t think so.

So, you don’t think the Jews are behind that?

Not that much, not that much.

But a little bit?

Well, let’s say that it could fit some Jewish ideas. It could be explained by some Jewish ideas. For instance, the idea that there should be no religion, that the Gentiles should not have a religion: That is kind of an important Jewish concept. We should try to understand why people thought it is connected with Jews. That this kind of Kali Yuga process, the process of impoverishing the world. How come? Why people thought it is connected with Jews? Anyway that’s an interesting question. That’s what I say the possible explanation is that it is connected with the Jewish concept that non-Jews do not have direct access to God.

So, you write about how especially American goyim are brainwashed by Jewish media lords. Can you explain that a bit? How far are we? Do you think I am a brainwashed goy?

Well, first of all I don’t know. How would I know? That’s something I don’t know. It is very much impossible to know. There is a huge part of brainwash, for sure. That is what goes on a daily basis.

And what do they try to brainwash? What do the Mammonites—and what you say are quote-unquote the Jewish media lords—what are they trying to brainwash?

Well, they try to induce you with the feeling that Jews are very, very wonderfully special.

Are they not?

No.

They same as everyone, or worse?

The same, absolutely same. They try to induce with concept that whatever happens to Jews has some kind of special meaning for the world.

So, what are you trying to say? That Gentiles and Jews are the same?

Well, what I say is a little more complicated than that.

It was nearing the end of our interview. My smokes were dwindling quickly, and Shamir had already started on his second red-and-silver pack of Dunhills. I asked him: “And what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear ‘Jews.’ ” His chin was in his right hand as his eyes looked toward the bar. He was silent for nine seconds. “Not again,” he said, punctuating his curt sentence with a long laugh. “Not again? What do you mean by that?” I asked. With no hesitation he replied, “That I am very tired of hearing this word.” He laughed heartily.

V.

On Tuesday, I sat staring out the window, watching the frozen trees and the frozen pond across the street. Every now and then large chunks of ice fell from the 12-story roof and smacked the street, or got buried in a pile of snow. This was my second-to-last day in Moscow, and I had a feeling the day before was the last time I would ever get to see my man. I called Shamir, but he didn’t pick up. I called two more times within a half hour, but no one answered. I reread certain sections of his work and tried to make sense of the man I’d been studying and the man I met. There were two different Shamirs, if not more: the anti-Semitic writer who unabashedly admits that Jews have used the Holocaust to benefit themselves and who believes that “Jewish Media Lords” have hijacked the newspapers and TV to brainwash readers into thinking that Israel is always right and Jews are the chosen people. Then there was the person I met: a gentle, polite man, who was not easily provoked and was frozen solid.

Then I received an email from Shamir. It said, “I am leaving Moscow for a stay in a monastery and will be unable to see you. I explicitly request you: Do not publish a single word without me checking the text first.” I realized that this man was afraid of what others said about him. He was discreet and controlling. He had different names for a reason. He had something to hide: a certain fear, a certain darkness, that had consumed him. Who knows what the origins of his fear are? “This time of certainty is over,” Shamir writes. He insists that Gentiles need to stand up to the elite Jews in government, the media, and anywhere else they’re hiding, or risk, he says, falling “into a New Dark Age, into a bleak anti-Utopia, and our children will not forgive us for our passivity. Or we still can pull and push, and hope for the best.” His hope is to transform his private darkness into a light that others will follow. In the meantime, he hides himself.

Two weeks later I received a Facebook message from Paul Bennett, Shamir’s editor and fellow writer on Counterpunch, a biweekly newsletter that describes what it does as “muckraking with a radical attitude.” The email started to outline how smart and misunderstood the “underdog” is and how we can learn a lot from a man with Shamir’s intelligence. But then it became a little bit threatening. “I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to understand why it would pay better to attack Shamir than to support him, but I think you may be young enough and still idealistic enough to appreciate his fine points,” wrote Bennett, a U.S. citizen, a proclaimed fan of Shamir’s, and the editor of the English versions of Shamir’s books.

Maybe he doesn’t mean it. Maybe he just wants to make a splash. But after five months following the man, I don’t think that is the case. Shamir has disguised his prejudice against Jews in the guise of a moral dilemma—to be or not to be a Jew­—and by making the right decision for other humans to follow. Reading Shamir’s work is like looking at a map of Moscow’s metro. The city and its metro system are built in circles: The innermost circle is Red Square and the Kremlin, and the outermost circle is the outskirts of the city, but they are all connected. From the center, you can easily go out to the edge. Shamir leads you to believe that you, as a reader, are getting to the epicenter of morality by admitting that elite Jews in power are evil Mammonites whose main goal is to make Jerusalem the spiritual capital of the world and to enslave the Gentiles. But the more you read, the more you try to analyze, the further away from morality you actually become.

In his Facebook message, Bennett continued to explain why as “a budding journalist” it would pay not to smear “our friend.” “When we speak to him we must realize that we are one degree away from global movers and shakers like Julian Assange,” he wrote. In the early 2000s, Shamir was nothing but a marginal anti-Semite and a prolific writer. But at that time one could write him off as a lunatic, or a self-loathing-Jew, or just a weirdo. But now, with Assange’s backing, Shamir has become a legitimate source of news and facts with a legitimate platform that is hard to ignore. His ideas may be heretical, mad, coming too fast to digest, but the Age of Assange has made Shamir less eccentric, more central—a dangerous man.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

Greenberg made his major league mark in the 1930s and ’40s, playing primarily for the Detroit Tigers. He was a first-baseman and a phenomenal batter. In 1938, in a single season, he hit 58 home runs. He made the All Star team five times, was twice named American League MVP, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and still holds the American League record for runs batted in by a right-handed batter in a single season: 183 in 1937. Over this entire career, he had a whopping 1,276 RBIs.

Like Koufax, Greenberg sat out a game that fell on Yom Kippur; in Greenberg’s case it was during the 1934 pennant race. It sealed his fate as Jewish hero in an era that was virulently anti-Semitic at home and abroad. Greenberg accepted this role graciously but with some discomfort. Writer Mark Kurlansky has a new biography out about the star. It’s called Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One. Kurlansky speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Greenberg’s improbable status as a Jewish icon (he was far from observant), the challenges he faced as arguably the highest profile Jewish sportsman in the mid-1930s, and why he is not better remembered by baseball fans today. [Running time: 15:41.]

Outside my window in Moscow everything is frozen, the thick ice-coated ground, the wind whining through alleys between the gray apartment buildings that stick out from 5-foot bases of hard snow, the orange dump trucks full of snow chugging along the street. Seven floors down, men in blue and orange overalls and black snowcaps are smashing the 3-inch-thick layers of ice coating the sidewalks with wooden-handled-and-metal-ended ice picks. Then there’s me, waiting in my thermals for the supposed Russian representative of WikiLeaks, a man who says his name is Israel Shamir, but who is also known as Jöran Jermas, and Adam Ermash, and who spends his time between Sweden, Israel, and Russia.

I have spent too much time in the paranoid corners where Shamir’s articles appear, on websites that claim the Jews planned the attacks of Sept. 11, Jews convinced the George W. Bush Administration to go to war in the Middle East, Jews have nuclear weapons not to just destroy Lebanon and Iraq and Syria, but Europe, too. Shamir says he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1947 to Jewish parents but in 2004 was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. While he claims to be a Palestinian activist, a believer in the “One State Solution,” his work reads more like right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. He writes and speaks about the existence of “Jewish Media Lords” who have hijacked newspapers and TV to brainwash Americans into carrying out “Judaic goals,” which include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he writes in one of his books, Cabbala of Power, “The Jewish ‘plan’ is no secret; there is no need to re-read The Protocols or to ask Jews what they want.” In addition to having accused Israel of all manner of crimes, he has also been labeled a Holocaust-denier by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Shamir and I first corresponded via email four months ago. After he canceled a planned interview in February, we began talking on the phone every week, but he still refused to schedule an interview. The most he would promise me is that if I come to Moscow and called him, he might meet me, but then again he might not. “Things are getting very complicated,” he explained. “All I might have is an hour.”

The day before I left New York for Moscow, I bumped into Norman Finkelstein, a scholar and Holocaust-doubter who was denied tenure at DePaul University because of his published work, The Holocaust Industry, which claims the factual account of mass-extermination has been exploited so Jews can “gain immunity to criticism.” I had emailed Finkelstein early in February, after Shamir told me they were friends. Finkelstein wrote back, “I want nothing to do with this article. [Shamir] is a maniac.” So, when on another day on Gravesend Neck Road in Brooklyn outside of a closed-down Russian Apteka, I saw a tall man with gray thin hair wearing a brown corduroy blazer with a Palestinian flag pin on his lapel, I recognized him as Finkelstein and approached. As two young boys ran past us wearing kippas, he elaborated on his email: “He’s sleazy—Shamir said we were friends because he’s sleazy, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he stated while his nose ran in the February wind. “He has invented his entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true. And you won’t get this article published anywhere.”

One night before my trip, I realized that I started to believe this dark character who crawled out from the perverse nooks of the Internet to save my goy soul from the people he called “Jewish Media Lords.” I was sitting up on my couch at 4 a.m. reading a Shamir article about IDF soldiers who steal Palestinian organs and sell them on the black market. Then I read an article that called Jews “Christ-Killers” and another that said “a Jewish media lord—and one of the nastiest: Arthur Sulzberger Jr.” owns the New York Times. Hardly convincing, but then why was I starting to doubt the Times? I realized I had better get some sleep.

When the sun came up that first morning in Moscow, I called Shamir and told him I was in town. He told me that it’s “too hard to tell” if he would be able to meet. He suggested that if I called him at 2 p.m., he might have a better idea. If we met it would be at the Dom Zhurnalista, the Journalist’s House, off Arbatskaya metro station. While I waited and smoked, I re-read Shamir’s Cabbala of Power. Jews as a group, he argues, don’t know what they want, but at the very least they want war. Shamir quotes the Bible to explain, “‘The locusts have no king, yet they attack in formation …’ (Proverbs 30:27) and devastate whole countries as if by plan.” In Masters of Discourse Shamir writes, “There are no important media outlets in the US that are not owned or controlled by Jews.”

I was drifting in the silver smoke sitting near Red Square. I was there to meet a marginal weirdo and a notorious Holocaust-doubter. But I was also meeting a man who has real power in the newest form of journalism. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, had given Shamir access to cables and made him the organization’s representative in Moscow. Is Shamir crazy, or not? The question seemed important.

On March 1, 2011, the New York Times published an article about a report about a phone conversation that was never recorded. According to this article, Julian Assange told the British magazine the Private Eye that there is a Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks led by British journalists, including editors of the Guardian. The report, written by the publication’s editor, Ian Hislop, was based on a phone conversation Hislop had with Assange on Feb. 16, 2011. During the conversation, Hislop claimed that Assange stated the Jewish conspiracy to smear WikiLeaks was spearheaded by the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, investigations editor David Leigh, and by Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner. Although Rusbridger is not a Jew, Assange stressed that he is “sort of Jewish,” because he and David Leigh, a Jew, are brothers-in-law. But what really bothered Assange was a different article by the same publication titled, “Man in the Eye: Israel Shamir,” which claims Shamir is a Holocaust denier. Assange said that the article was “crap”—one more example of the Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks.

At 2 p.m., I called Shamir. He said he would meet me in one hour. I pulled it together, drank one more cup of coffee, and jumped on the subway. I was close.

II.

I first became curious about Shamir when the original reports came out in December in Russian and Swedish newspapers, and then in Reason and on the blog of New York Magazine, which claimed that he was the Russian “content aggregator” for WikiLeaks, as well as a “Holocaust denier.” I became more curious when I read an excerpt of the aformentioned Private Eye article about Shamir’s alleged anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying beliefs and his direct relationship with Assange. And I became very interested when I read WikiLeaks’ statement on its website: “Israel Shamir has never worked or volunteered for WikiLeaks, in any manner, whatsoever. He has never written for WikiLeaks or any associated organization, under any name and we have no plan that he do so. He is not an ‘agent’ of WikiLeaks.”

A spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, confirmed this when I called to ask if Shamir was directly connected to the organization. “No, he is not,” said Hrafnsson. “He only worked on the Cable Gate release, like hundreds of other journalists.” Then the line went dead.

In Moscow, on my way to meet the man, I exited Arbatskaya Station and walked underneath the busy bul’var. I came out to see snow, ice, and a big black iron gate, behind which lay a courtyard and the Journalists’ House. In front of the big beige building was a set of stairs, which led down to a café. Through the window, I could see Shamir sitting at a table.

We said hello. Shook hands. “How do you like Moscow?” he asked me in fluent English, but with a Russian accent tinged with a Hebrew one, or possibly the other way around. I reached for my cigarette. He did the same. Shamir had recognizable human qualities, like a strong handshake and a fine smile. It felt nice to talk with someone, because I had been alone during my days of wandering and waiting around Moscow. Then I remembered that I was dining with a man who dedicated his life’s work to writing about why it’s wrong to be a Jew. And I knew from my reading of his work that there was something in his ice-hard anti-Semitic soul—be it anger, prejudice, or a reincarnation of an ancient darkness into modern anti-Israel sentiment—that genuinely scared me. I thought about an excerpt from Cabbala of Power: “In order to save the world from possible spiritual devastation, the Jewish state must be dismantled. … It can be done softly, without bloodshed, by creating a democratic state for all residents of Palestine, native and adoptive Palestinians. It won’t be a Jewish state, but Israeli Jews will eventually be absorbed by Palestinians, as the Jews of old were absorbed by Palestinians during the 2nd to 7th centuries.”

To me, it read like soft-core ethnic cleansing. But it was too late to analyze, as I was already studying his tan, wrinkled face and his thick, bristly mustache. Israel Shamir was a short man, neither fat nor skinny. His gray-and-black loose curls puffed around his cranium, and he sat with his elbows on the table after he fumbled to get his voice recorder to work. His hands touched, rubbed, and pressed his mustache, forehead, and temples incessantly throughout our conversation. He ordered the salad with sliced radish on top, and I ordered the borscht.

We talked about Julian Assange, of whom he said, “My acquaintance with him is so superficial. I have this very superficial view of the man.” He scratched the base of his nose above his lip. He turned his head and looked at the gray painted brick wall of the stairway out the window.

I know that when Assange was in Ellingham Hall in the Norfolk County that you went to visit him. He introduced you as “Adam.” I know you have a couple different names. Why were you introduced as Adam?

Well, Adam is my real name as well, Christian name as well. I actually use it quite often.

Yes, Adam Ermash, right?

Just Adam. Usually in many books I have it “Israel Adam Shamir.”

It was also reported that at Ellingham Hall, with Julian Assange and you were introduced as Adam, that you asked for cables about the Jews. Why did you ask for cables about the Jews and did you get any?

Oh, yeah, I have a lot of cables about the Jews. [He grins.] I have thousands of cables about the Jews.

And what do the cables say about the Jews?

Oh, it’s a very entertaining thing. I want to write about it, but I haven’t had time yet. But I think it is a very entertaining subject. A lot of cables about Jews.

Give me one example, what does a cable say?

One of them for instance that was published by me in a Russian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, there was a piece by the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow saying that Russia has no anti-Semitism.

And does Moscow have anti-Semitism?

No, surely not.

He finished his salad and put his napkin on his lap and pulled out one of the two packs of Dunhills he brought. He smoked cigarettes constantly, and he smoked with heart and vigor; he truly seemed to enjoy the act of smoking. The waiter stopped by, and Shamir ordered a cappuccino politely and nonchalantly. Our pasta did not look appetizing—noodles with chucks of tough meat in a brown oily sauce.

What is hatred?

That’s something I don’t, I’ve never experienced.

You’ve never experienced hatred?

Nuh-uh.

He was silent for 10 seconds until I asked the next question.

Well, on your site you say you’re a lightening rod for smear jobs. Do you think people hate you?

Well, they have a practical meaning also. I don’t think someone smears me because somebody hates me personally all that much. That would be very odd. I mean, provided I don’t feel hatred for others, would be strange to think someone hates me all that much.

Do you think you could be provoked to hate? What if you saw a murder?

Yaaaa …

As I understand you’ve seen terrible things that murderous Jews have done. When you were in the settlements you saw the hilltop youths—

One gets annoyed, you know. One gets annoyed. Ah, one gets annoyed. But I kind of personally don’t think I have ever felt such strong, passion as hatred. Hatred is very strong passion. I don’t think I’ve ever came close to it.

When you write about the IDF as SS soldiers in Gaza?

No, that’s not out of anger. That’s not even out of very strong anger. Or any way, that’s what I try, not to write … angrily. First of all, if one writes angrily, people do not read it. [Laughs.]

It would take days for the Moscovite ice pickers to chop through his ice. But every now and then, Shamir gets tired of smiling and laughing things off.

When I was in the West Bank there was definitely hostile feelings towards the Palestinians.

Yes. [Laughs.] Yes. Very silly, very silly. My mother lives in a settlement, called Eli.

Eli? I’ve been there.

Yeah, oh, you know. And she’s very much a settler. Very ideological. Very keen on all this stuff. She can speak forever about how awful everybody else is to them. I’ve tried many times to tell her why not kind of look at it differently, why not to see that people can live together? Basically to try to live together peacefully. That would be good enough. But kind of she didn’t really like it.

It must be hard for her to read your stuff.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes …

What does she say about your books?

Well, she doesn’t like it. [Laughs.] She doesn’t like it.

I think about how he described the Hilltop Youth once in his book Flowers of Galilee. “They seemed like nothing you ever saw. To their shaven heads, black boxes were strapped by narrow black belts; black belts crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries … for a morning prayer, but on these young men they looked like the amulets of a warlike tribe. They wore dark trousers and dark tee shirts; white shawls with black stripes flew behind their backs. Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed by some strange demon.”

Shamir continued talking about his Jewish settler mother. “Well, that’s the way with mothers. So we don’t have to worry about it all that much. We don’t have obligations of this sort towards our mothers,” he said casually. He rested his left arm on the table and held his chin in the cup of his right hand. It was getting dark outside, but our interview was far from over.

For the second installment of this article, click here.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

The op-ed does not mention the anti-Semitism charge, which is predicated on this image’s allegedly being “associated,” in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s words, “with virulent anti-Semitism going back to the Middle Ages, deployed by the genocidal Nazi regime, by Soviet propagandists, and even in 2011 by those who still seek to demonize Jews.” However, I have nowhere read the Center retract that utterly absurd allegation (the image clearly depicts a picture of Snyder defaced, in scribbles, by a “cranky Redskins fan” rather than the argument that Jews are Satanic). I left a message with the Center requesting further clarification yesterday, although, as was Tablet Magazine, it was closed for the final two days of Passover.

I will say this: I am glad that Snyder chose an offseason week to do this, when there is nothing football-related that should be demanding his attention instead. You know, other than tomorrow’s draft. SELL THE TEAM.

Why I Am Suing Washington City Paper [WP]
Related: The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Dan Snyder [WCP]
Earlier: Wiesenthal Center Out-of-Bounds on Snyder
Snyder Not a Wiesenthal Donor

Feeling a bit flummoxed at the request that I pare a couple of years of research and a complex legal proceeding down to something akin to a sound bite, I found myself momentarily and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Did my interlocutor think that everything—including scholarship—could be reduced to an answer that would fit in a Twitter post?

As I tried to formulate a short but nonetheless nuanced answer, my friend popped up with another question: “And how does the Eichmann trial relate to all those years you have spent studying and fighting Holocaust denial?”

When he asked his second question, I knew the answer to the first.

***

First, some background. When I began my research on the Eichmann trial I told my colleagues and friends that I felt relieved to be dealing with something other than Holocaust denial. First of all, it was nice—if one can use that term in relation to anything associated with the Holocaust—to move on to another topic. When I first wrote Denying the Holocaust, published in 1993, I never imagined that I would become enmeshed in the topic in not just a scholarly way but also in a legal and personal context.

But having a new topic to investigate was not the only reason for my relief. Writing about the Holocaust is always a difficult proposition. One must analyze horrific events and information while maintaining a requisite scholarly distance. Allowing emotions to intrude only distorts one’s scholarship. It is neither easy nor pleasant. Yet when writing about Holocaust denial I was presented with an added discomforting element: I was not just studying a terrifying historical event. My subject was a movement that was alive, kicking, and working vigorously to distort history and inculcate anti-Semitism. There was immediacy to this issue that was not present when I dealt with events that happened seven decades earlier.

I encountered yet one additional challenge in my study of Holocaust denial. Many people consider deniers “nutters,” as the British would say. They dismiss them as the historical equivalents of flat earthers. These same people told me that I was making a mistake in taking deniers seriously. As I began my work many of my colleagues in the field of Holocaust studies told me that this topic was not worth my time. They said quite bluntly: “You are writing about crackpots, Deborah. Why bother?” In response I explained, generally to no avail, that, while I did not think deniers a clear and present danger, I did think that they were a potential future danger and that therefore it was important that we understand their modus operandi. Furthermore, I thought it crucial that the world recognize the inherent anti-Semitism girding their entire enterprise. Some of them may be nutters, but they are Jew-hating ones. As survivors die and the option of hearing about the Final Solution in the first person singular fades, deniers, I feared, would only find it easier to spread their pseudo-intellectual wares. It was important to expose them, their lies, and their tactics.

I encountered the same skepticism a number of years later when I was sued for libel by David Irving. Many people, among them leading scholars, counseled me to ignore the matter. “You should not take his threat seriously,” I was repeatedly told. I chose to ignore their advice. If I did not fight he would have won by default because British libel law puts the burden of proof on the defendant. Once again my explanations were to no avail. “So what if he wins by default?” I was told. “No one takes him seriously, anyway.” (With no sense of irony, some of the same people subsequently congratulated me on my “great victory” against this man and told me that what I did was very important.)

We convinced the court that the “proof” Irving claimed to have to validate his assertions regarding the Holocaust did not prove his claims at all. His arguments were, we demonstrated, a tissue of lies. What then does all this have to do with my work on the Eichmann trial?

***

Thinking about the anti-Semitism, which is the foundation stone of denial and the refusal—denial?—of so many people to take the topic seriously, made the “bottom line” of the Eichmann trial and, by extension, the Holocaust patently clear. It is quite simple and straightforward. Had the world taken Nazi anti-Semitism more seriously from the outset of the rise of the Third Reich the subsequent tragedy might have been quite different.

In the 1930s and 1940s, of course, observers—and the potential victims—could not fathom where Hitler and his cohort’s anti-Semitism might lead. They could, in retrospect, legitimately claim ignorance. Today we do not have that luxury. When anti-Semites speak of their hatred of Jews and their desire to do them harm, we should accept their threats at face value. That does not mean we should panic or declare that the sky is falling at every expression of anti-Semitism. It does not mean that every anti-Semite poses the same potential danger. It does mean that we should not reflexively dismiss anti-Semites as crackpots or the equivalent of flat earthers.

Most of all, the actions of not just Adolf Eichmann but all those who played a role in the Final Solution remind us that we should pay particular heed to threats that emanate from those who have the ability to do real harm. During the past five years we have heard a stream of Holocaust denial, overt anti-Semitism, and threats against Israel emanate from the mouth of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Many people have dismissed him as a deranged person whose crazy comments are best ignored. Some scholars have gone to great efforts to explain away his threats against Israel. That is to engage in a form of self-delusion, if not denial. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial is linked directly to his animus toward Israel. In 2009, after questioning the existence of the Holocaust, he declared it a ploy used by the Jews to get the West to accede to the creation of Israel. This, of course, comes on top of his infamous Holocaust denial conference in 2006. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, which was an official host of the gathering, made common ground with some of the world’s most infamous deniers and anti-Semites. It offered them a chance to express their animus toward both Israel and the Jews. The conference constituted a virtual Who’s Who of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, including Robert Faurisson, one of the leading “theorists” of the movement who lives in Vichy France; Australian Fred Tobin, whose Adelaide Institute is a bastion of denial activities; former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; and Bradley Smith, founder of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust, which was responsible for placing a series of ads in college and university newspapers denying the Holocaust. The conference itself followed the Iranian contest on Holocaust-denial cartoons, which had the official imprimatur of Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad did not, of course, introduce Holocaust denial to the Middle East and the Arab/Muslim world. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser spoke of the “lie of the 6 million Jews.” Mahmoud Abbas, as a young student, wrote a dissertation that was pure denial, though he subsequently repudiated this view, and while I fully believe his repudiation, the fact that as a young man he could have been seduced by this falsehood is telling. Spokesmen for Hamas have also engaged in Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial themes can be found in newspapers in many parts of the Arab world, including in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon.

In virtually every other part of the world where Holocaust denial can be found it is relegated to the extreme political fringe. Only in the Middle East can it be found in more legitimate circles. There is no counternarrative to challenge these claims. Young people are growing up convinced that the Holocaust is a myth produced to justify the existence of their enemy, Israel. In Iran, Ahmadinejad’s denial and hatred of Israel are particularly frightening because Iran is close, we are told, to having nuclear weapons. It would be a form of denial—that is, willful blindness—not to recognize the nexus of Iranian leaders’ overt Holocaust denial, threats to destroy Israel, unquestionable anti-Semitism, and possession of nuclear weapons. They are not separate and unrelated phenomena.

Seventy years ago people had an acceptable reason to say, “We could never fathom that Hitler meant what he said.” Today we no longer have that luxury. At the very least it behooves us to take Ahmadinejad and those among his fellow Muslim leaders and opinion-makers seriously. Their Holocaust denial is part of their contemporary political agenda.

Among many other things, that is one of the lessons that both The State of Israel v. Adolf Eichmann and David Irving v. Penguin UK and Deborah Lipstadt taught me. It is what I now know in my gut that I may not have really known before.

Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Nextbook Press’ The Eichmann Trial, is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

These and other issues form the basis of The Eichmann Trial, a new book by Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt from Nextbook Press. Lipstadt is no stranger to the courtroom or to the perils of anti-Semitism. In 1996, she was sued by David Irving, who’d accused her of libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won her case at trial in 2000. She joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the importance of survivor testimony, about the controversy surrounding the 1961 trial, and about how her courtroom experience changed the way she thinks of Eichmann’s. [Running time: 21:26.]

Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified.

Anti-Islamic Groups Go Mainstream [Politico]
Related: The New Anti-Semitism [Tablet Magazine]

The condemnation has been swift and for the most part unequivocal, with a few notable exceptions. (I’m sure Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani had only the most noble of Enlightenment principles in mind when she accused the maker of the video of cashing in for their “30 pieces of silver.”) Christian Dior swiftly suspended and ultimately fired Galliano from his position as head designer; CEO Sidney Toledano called Galliano’s remarks “odious” and proclaimed the company’s “zero-tolerance towards any anti-Semitic or racist words or behavior.” And Natalie Portman, the face of Dior Cherie perfume, denounced Galliano, saying she was “deeply shocked and disgusted.”

Much as it pains me, I must beg to differ with my divinely anointed sovereign, the Holy Empress of All Jewesses. I’m disgusted, sure, but I’m not deeply shocked. I’m not even a little shocked. In fact, I’ve realized that I’ve been subconsciously expecting something like this to come out of the fashion world for some time.

I love fashion. I’ve always loved fashion. I was reading Vogue and W before I finished grade school. My happiest childhood memories involve standing in front of three-way mirrors in dressing rooms with my grandmother, analyzing the line, fit, and fabrication of whatever egregiously overpriced ribbon-festooned ’80s monstrosity I had set my heart on. Even today, if it wasn’t for the Barneys website I would have—well, let’s just say I would have finished this piece before I’d already spent all the money I earned writing it.

This is all harmless enough (except to my bank account, which isn’t your problem), but the fashion world has its dark side. I’m not talking about its well-documented failings—the rampant drug use and eating disorders, the abuse (or at least neglect) of bewildered underage models—but the fact that its integral philosophy is based on a principle of exclusivity. Fashionistas may indeed have a keen eye for beauty, but for many (and I shamefully include myself in this number) the true frisson comes less from an appreciation for innovative design or admiration for glorious craftsmanship than from the mean, malignant, but deeply satisfying sense of superiority in having a handbag that costs as much as an emergency appendectomy or being able to wriggle neatly into a sleek size 2 (or, more elusively, an Italian 38, since everyone knows how American designers are bullied into cutting generously for their vain customers). You are rich (or look like you are, which is almost as good); you are thin, and those are the two things that legendary fashion icon and notorious Nazi-sympathizer Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, said you can never be too much of, and therefore you are better, fancier, more deserving than the lumpen undesirables relegated to the downstairs cosmetics counter in the metaphorical department store of life.

Walk into a Chanel boutique and ask to try something on. Unless you look like a billionaire or Blake Lively or a member of the harem of the Sultan of Brunei, you’ll feel like a character from Schindler’s List desperately trying to convince an impassive Gestapo clerk of your worth as an essential worker. “Please, I beg you! I’m not a violinist, I’m a steel welder! And a French size 36! I swear!”

Obviously, a sane, rational human being with a secure sense of self wouldn’t buy into any of this nonsense, but if millennia of religious war, oppression, totalitarianism, and genocide have taught us anything, it’s that sane, rational human beings have historically been pretty thin on the ground.

I’m not saying that fashion people are all fascists-in-waiting. Fashion, like many other creative professions, has long been a haven for all varietals of misfits and non-conformists in need of a place to turn their eccentricities into strengths, and how can I ignore the enormous contribution of my co-religionists Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Zac Posen, Isaac Mizrahi, and Sonia Rykiel to the schmatte business (although it’s interesting that their clothes are often lauded with adjectives like “wearable,” “form-flattering,” and “democratic”—go figure)?

But plenty of iconic European fashion figures don’t hold up so well under scrutiny. Louis Vuitton collaborated enthusiastically with the Vichy government. Christian Dior himself was able to bounce back so quickly with his postwar “New Look” in large part because of the nice little nest egg he’d amassed enthusiastically dressing the wives of Nazi officers. Coco Chanel passed diplomatic secrets to the Germans, attempted to use the Aryan laws to unfairly wrest control of her perfume business from the Jewish Wertheimer family, and narrowly escaped having her head publicly shaved as une collaboratrice horizontale after living openly with her Nazi lover at the Ritz in Occupied Paris.

The ignominious wartime history of such members of the fashion world might be less a question of immorality than amorality. When questioned about sleeping with the enemy, Chanel responded reasonably: “Really, sir, a woman at my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance for a lover.” (Aesthetics, or rather vanity, above all.) And even if Galliano’s expressed love for Hitler (in what I’m still not sure isn’t an outtake from Bruno) is less a function of a shared murderous ideology than admiration for a fellow uncompromising stylist who would never allow so much as a sprig of freesia in his hotel room, it’s easy to understand how they, or he, got there.

Exclusionary prejudice begets exclusionary prejudice. It’s not hard to see how someone like John Galliano, who has staked his entire career, his entire empire, if you will, on the deep-seated belief that some people (rich, thin, fabulous) are inherently superior could spill over into murkier, scarier, more atavistic realms. Taken to its logical extreme, there’s no telling to what kind of depths that psychological darkness can wander. Once you start dehumanizing others for being poor, fat, ugly, tacky, whatever, all bets are off.

Or maybe he just hates us because we won’t buy retail.

But does it matter if a celebrity gets drunk and utters something offensive? Might it be counterproductive to call attention to every stupid remark? Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry asked Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman, Atlantic national correspondent and blogger Jeffrey Goldberg, New York magazine cultural critic Emily Nussbaum, and public-relations guru Matthew Hiltzik. [Running time: 16:05.]

On a cool October morning, actress Natalie Portman is wearing a jean jacket and dangling beaded earrings, sipping tea in Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She talks about the difference between Jews in Israel and Jews in Long Island. “I definitely know what being Jewish in Israel means and what being Jewish in America means,” says this 24-year-old, who was born in Israel to an Israeli father, fertility specialist Dr. Avner Hershlag, and an American mother, artist Shelley Hershlag.

They moved to the United States when she was 3, and they return to Israel every year to visit family. Portman, who uses her grandmother’s maiden name professionally, attended Jewish day schools until eighth grade—mostly, she says, because her parents wanted her to keep up her Hebrew. But the Hershlags were not a religious family, nor involved in the local synagogue. “I grew up in the classic American Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.”

I ask her to elaborate. “The people I grew up with on Long Island are wonderful people. But I have friends who grew up in $5 million homes, they all drive BMWs, and the only places they’ve been to outside the United States are the islands in the Caribbean. Which is fine, it’s a choice, and I don’t want to be critical of that. But I am. I think it can definitely be a problem, especially since American Jews are the ones who are in a position—politically and financially—to help other Jews around the world who are facing problems that we can’t conceive of.”

Portman explains why she never felt a pull to be a part of Jewish life in her Syosset neighborhood. “I never liked going to temple on Long Island because it just had that aura of someone’s fake party to me, which always made me uncomfortable. So I never went to temple at home, I never got bat mitzvahed, I just sort of rejected that whole thing; it seemed so tied up with values that I hated. But on the other hand, when I go to Israel, I always want to go to temple on the High Holy Days even if no one in my family is going with me. I’ll fast. One year in Israel, my family went to Jaffa to get pizza on Pesach and I would not do that. You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I like the way that religion is done there.”

As she describes some of her Long Island girlfriends, the slur “JAP” pops into my head and I ask how she feels when someone uses the word. “I mean, I grew up in a Long Island public school that was 60 to 70 percent Jewish and I know what a JAP is,” she says, sipping her tea. “But obviously the word shouldn’t be misused. I wouldn’t want to have stereotypes used in derogatory ways by people outside the Jewish community, but I think it is something from within the community that we need to examine and be self-critical about, because it’s how we’re raising our young people.”

“I had a fashion designer tell me that when I wear a dress of his, it sells out across the country because Jewish girls ‘look to me,’ and Jewish girls are the ones that buy expensive dresses. It made me sort of sad, because I want to be an influence in ways other than by a pretty dress.”

I ask if she’s felt pressure to use her celebrity on behalf of Israeli causes. “I’m very comfortable with that,” she says, “and I’m currently exploring ways to help because I love the country.” She’s recently become more protective of Israel, in part because people around her have become more impatient with it. “I have a very close friend who lately has this European, anti-Israel way of thinking, and it’s very hard for me to have conversations with him. He says, ‘Can’t you be self-critical?’ But it’s hard to be publicly critical. It has to be done in a very delicate, well-thought-out manner. These issues come up at parties and dinners with people who don’t know a lot, and as someone who was born in Israel, you’re put in a position of defending Israel because you know how much is at stake. It’s become a much bigger part of my identity in recent years because it’s become an issue of survival.”

I turn the conversation to her career, asking if she feels some Jewish pride in being considered a Hollywood beauty. “Yeah,” she replies. “The hard thing is that people often don’t associate me with being Jewish. I’m not someone who you look at and say, ‘You’re Jewish.’ People ask me if I’m Spanish, Italian, or even WASPy. So I don’t think I can be representative. But in another way, I think I look very Jewish because all the Jewish girls I grew up with, we all look the same: small, short, skinny, dark hair, dark eyes. Little noses.” She laughs. “So maybe it is time for a new type. I’d like it if people thought I was Jewish-looking.”

She did play an iconic Jew, Anne Frank, on Broadway at the age of 16, and I wonder how personally Portman connected to the character. “Very personally,” she says. “Because my grandparents didn’t talk about those years much, especially my grandfather. His younger brother, who was 14 at the time, was in hiding from the Nazis and couldn’t take it one more day and ran out and was shot in the streets. And his parents were killed at Auschwitz. He was the one I’d always related to in the family. He was sort of the quiet, brilliant man who led Pesach and I would always imagine him or his father in these horrifying humiliating conditions. The humiliation is almost harder for me to imagine than the physical pain.”

When it comes to Portman’s own romantic life, it has obviously been a staple of gossip columns, but she says she’s not necessarily looking for a Jewish husband. “A priority for me is definitely that I’d like to raise my kids Jewish, but the ultimate thing is just to have someone who is a good person and who is a partner.” She says her parents don’t push her one way or another. “My dad always makes this stupid joke with my new boyfriend, who is not Jewish. He says, ‘It’s just a simple operation.’” She laughs. “They’ve always said to me that they mainly want me to be happy and that’s the most important thing, but they’ve also said that if you marry someone with the same religion, it’s one less thing to fight about. But according to that argument, I might as well only date vegetarian guys.”

She doesn’t think it necessarily takes two Jews to maintain Jewish continuity in a family. “I feel the strength to carry that on myself. It’s obviously easier when both parents are in it together, but I don’t necessarily think it has to be.”

Portman says she resists any kind of blind tribalism. “I don’t believe in going along with anything without questioning. I think that’s the basis of Judaism: questioning and skepticism.” She says that for her, basic humanity comes before faith. “To me, the most important concept in Judaism is that you can break any law of Judaism to save a human life. I think that’s the most important thing. Which means to me that humans are more important than Jews are to me. Or than being Jewish is to me.”

Excerpted from Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish by Abigail Pogrebin. Copyright 2005 by Abigail Pogrebin. Used by permission of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

My wife is a Jew. My son is a Jew. I am not. Nearly all of my closest friends live in various states of mixed marriages, and if you know any Jews—any urban-dwelling non-Orthodox Jews, that is—it’s nearly impossible that you don’t know at least a few mixed couples. My mother-in-law can recall going to classes in her small-town Ontario synagogue in the 1950s where “Intermarriage is the Second Holocaust” was written on the chalkboard. The attempt to prevent Jewish intermarriage may be the most epically failed social-engineering experiment of all time. The most recent National Jewish Population Survey set the mixed-marriage rate for Jewish newlyweds in North America at 47 percent, but that was 2002, and the rate was accelerating. It is likely that more than half of Jewish newlyweds in North America today are marrying non-Jews. The response from institutional Judaism varies from outright horror to sighing acceptance, but the sighs and the horror don’t matter. Fearing intermarriage is like fearing weather, equally pointless and silly. It is much better to prepare. We are seeing the emergence of a category of gentile that is historically unique: millions of non-Jews who are attached to Jews but not affiliated with Jews. The emergence of a large group of these attached goys (goyim, to be precise) is a highly significant social development, an unprecedented development even, and it raises obvious questions: Who are the goys? What do we mean? And, of course, are we good for the Jews?

I am not going to pretend that I can give a precise definition of a goy. In biblical Hebrew, the word means “nation,” and in Yiddish it is simply “gentile.” Even if the term does have a faint pejorative sense, we don’t have to go very far to reclaim “goy.” It’s a word that Jews use to describe non-Jews, and that’s the sense I mean: non-Jews in a Jewish context. Converts don’t count, obviously. I have resisted conversion because I cannot say that I believe in God, but several atheistic friends have converted without this quibble of mine, spurred by the robust atheism of many Jews who dutifully attend synagogue. A rabbi I once knew told me that Catholics make the best converts to Judaism: They are already used to lighting candles for reasons they only dimly understand. But the converts have put their money where their mouths are, and who am I to doubt their full inclusion among the Chosen People?

Goyishness may at first seem like a variety of philo-Semitism, but it isn’t really. You occasionally meet goys who fall in love with everything Jewish, particularly early in their relationships with Jews. I myself definitely fell into this category, reading Rashi and Pirkei Avot, going to klezmer concerts, and so on. But it soon passed. A certain brand of clichéd philo-Semitism is well-established in North America, of course: Woody Allen and matzo-ball soup and mother-in-law jokes and the rest of it. Pop culture revels in these stereotypes. Political and religious leaders indulge them. Among literary types, they’re commonplace. The clichés are mostly harmless, if sometimes strikingly inaccurate. (Anyone with a Jamaican, Chinese, WASP, or Italian mother can attest that Jewish mothers have no monopoly on the deployment of guilt, for example.) But philo-Semitism can be dangerous, too, particularly in Europeans. Philo-Semites tend to believe that Jews, because of their unique history, are better or should be better than other people, which is a hideous idea; it explains why Israel is held to a completely different standard of conduct than any other country in the world. (Even as a write this, I realize how much it reveals the peculiar position I am in as a goy: I consider myself so intertwined with the Jews, though I am not in any way Jewish, that I distrust Jew-lovers.)

Goyishness is a kind of belonging, with separation—actually a rather pleasant position to be in. Goys are a hyphenated identity in a world of hyphenated identities, pioneers of epiphyte culture. In my son’s kindergarten at a good public school in a nice area of Toronto, almost every kid is half-something; if his class is anything to go by, the world is filling up with black girls with green eyes and blonde hair and rambunctious half-Korean, half-Italian boys. Jews are at the forefront of this hyphenation. There’s a tendency, in the wider discussion of intermarriage, to assume that the phenomenon is something that has happened or is happening to Judaism, an outside force requiring evasive maneuvers. The truth is that the rise of goys in Jewish life over the past 50 years has emerged out of realities within Judaism and not outside them. Partly, the Jewish tendency to exogamy has emerged naturally from the cosmopolitanism of people who have made their homes in the biggest, and most mixed, cities of the late 20th and early 21st century. The institutional incoherency of Judaism has also done its bit. Goys fall between the cracks, and Judaism is full of cracks (“that’s how the light gets in,” according to Leonard Cohen). In Rome, in the year 1555, Pope Paul IV decreed that the Jews of the city could have only one synagogue. Instead of banding together under the impetus of the political nightmare and coming to a theological compromise, the Jews of Rome set up six different spaces for worship within the same synagogue. That magnificent fractiousness means that the disapproval of any given rabbi is more or less irrelevant; if you want a rabbi who approves, just walk a little farther down the counter. When my mother-in-law heard “Intermarriage is the Second Holocaust,” the message failed to sink in, at least in part, because the rabbi who wrote it down was not an authority the way, say, a Catholic priest is a conduit to God.

My experience of rabbis has been like my experience of priests of all types and kinds: I find their presumption of spiritual and moral authority hilarious and somewhat grotesque. Most rabbis—not all—have tended to look at me, when we’re introduced, rather the way a vegetarian looks at a fat man eating a bacon double-cheeseburger—with a mixture of beleaguered tolerance and suppressed abjection. There have been several who have spoken to my wife and not to me. But who cares? Where intermarriage is concerned, they don’t matter anyway. If they mattered, would the majority of Jews be marrying non-Jews? No. For day-to-day affairs, Jewish society is run by the bubbes. And while the rabbis disapprove of intermarriage, for the most part the bubbes have made peace with it. And they are who matter.

The lack of institutional structure—the cracks in the system that have allowed intermarriage to blossom—have another consequence for the lives of goys; our households necessarily work idiosyncratically. This may seem like a minor point, but its consequences are vast. In general the idiosyncrasy of the contemporary marriage is one of the least understood and most powerful forces shaping the future. The fact that your family doesn’t have to be like other people’s families, that in a sense you can’t be like other people, is transforming private life, and for everybody, not just those of us in mixed marriages. The plethora of magazine and newspaper articles about trends in family life doesn’t establish any pattern other than the constant shifting of the patterns—family life has become an always-turning kaleidoscope. The mixed Jewish family is at the center of that transformation: We are among the clearest examples of how identity has become a choice, rather than an irreducible substance.

When my son’s Sunday school classes are finished, we go out and eat bacon for lunch—my son and I but not my wife. When my wife and son go out for Yom Kippur services, I stay home to bake the lasagnas for the break fast. (This is a side benefit to having a goy around.) We have decided, for reasons that are more or less unrelated to Judaism, to have a digital Shabbat in our house—no screens of any kind for one day a week. And when we decided to take this step we chose to block off Friday night to Saturday night for the holiday, without giving it much thought. We even do 25 hours, not 24, following the principle of building a fence around the law. We build a fence around the law, which we violate simply by the existence of our family.

I know that some will find these choices distasteful—shallow playacting, reducing religious matters to mere lifestyle questions. Perhaps so. My point is that when I look around the mixed households that I know, I am amazed not by the evidence of the dissolution of Judaism but by the way Jewish practices continue to exert themselves in the lives of people whom they should properly exclude. Goys necessarily have a fluid relationship to ethnic identity. Like Barack Obama, they are going to choose who they are, whom they belong to, and who belongs to them. One consequence of the destabilization of ethnic identity is that some Jews will decide to have nothing to do with Judaism. Another consequence is that some non-Jews will decide to act like Jews. The bris for my son was the most moving event of my life. Because the man who holds the baby for the ceremony has to be a Jew, my dad couldn’t do it, so we got my wife’s grandfather’s friend, a Holocaust survivor. The ceremony combined the nonsensical with the eminently reasonable: The circumcision itself a relic from Middle Eastern shepherds dead for 5,000 years contained within a small party eight days after the birth to recognize and to celebrate the existence of a new human being. I was just happy my son was alive and that there were people around who cared.

The traditional way of viewing mixed marriage is as a threat to Jewish life, akin to the explosion of ultra-Orthodox births or the continued existential crisis of Israel. I’m not sure this view is altogether healthy. Some of us are good friends to have. Chelsea Clinton’s a goy. Mark Kelly’s one. In my experience, and I admit my evidence is entirely anecdotal, goys are much more hawkish than their partners on the question of Israel. I remember returning home from a summer job working at a children’s camp one year, and an ancient relative asked me, entirely unselfconsciously, “So, I heard last summer you were working for Jews.” Every time Israel comes on the news I hear again that tone of casual anti-Semitism she assumed we shared. Even in multicultural, boring, agreeable Toronto, the Hebrew school has security guards and computerized entry passes. Somebody wants to blow the children up. Goys know that this is not normal.

Goys, it seems obvious to me, are potentially an immense strength. They are exactly the kind of people you want for friends. God agrees with me, or at least the Torah does. It’s always Ruth who gets the attention in the wedding ceremonies between Jews and non-Jews; “Your God will be my God, your people my people” is the Corinthians 1:13 of mixed marriages. Moses’ wife, Zipporah, a goy, never gets her due. She saves his life when, in a confusing twist, God briefly decides to kill him on his way home to Egypt out of Midian; she saves him by circumcising their sons Gershom and Eliezer and placing the foreskins at his feet. Later when Aaron and Miriam complain that Moses has married a non-Jew, God punishes them by giving Miriam leprosy. Why shouldn’t contemporary goys, as invested as Zipporah, not be just as useful?

Recently, my wife and I were toying with the idea of having another baby, contemplating different kids’ names. For a boy, I suggested Simcha, which I absolutely love; it means “joy.” “A kid deserves a name his father can pronounce,” my wife countered. After Sunday school the other day, my son described the rules of building a sukkah to me. “You have to be able to see three stars through the roof,” he said. I had that feeling I so often have when new facts about Judaism are communicated to me: That is crazy and beautiful.

When my son started attending Sunday school, at first I didn’t want to go to the parent meetings and school holiday celebrations. I didn’t want that goy-meets-a-rabbi feeling. But one day, around Hanukkah, I went to pick him up and saw my folly. I realized instantly, looking over the classroom, that there’s not much difference between his Jewish class and his regular kindergarten class. My son’s best friend there is a kid whose dad is a 6-foot-6 Indonesian engineer. Another dad is a professional DJ with shoulder-length dreads. My son’s experience of learning about Judaism will not be homogenous. This is the future: a kid with ice-blue eyes and blonde hair makes friends with a couple of black sisters, and they’re all Jews.

I had another reaction, too, looking over that room of the mixed and the mixed-up. These are my people, I thought. It’s like what Bernard Malamud said at the end of “Angel Levine:” “There are Jews everywhere.” There are goys everywhere, too.

Stephen Marche is a novelist and a columnist for Esquire. His latest book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, will be published this spring. Follow him on Twitter @StephenMarche.

This week I’ll argue the other side—not just that Israel will be fine but rather that it is the rest of the Middle East that is in big trouble. Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

Europe’s war, and the mass slaughter of its Jews, revealed that the continent’s great cathedrals were built upon a bedrock of pagan barbarism celebrated in different ways by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. It was left to the United States to pick up the banner of Western civilization and lead the West to victory during the Cold War after the Europeans had trashed it.

Unlike their European cousins, contemporary Americans still read the Bible and understand that the Jewish nation is a historical reality connected to a living narrative that shapes the present in a constructive and desirable way. Americans abandoned replacement theology (or the notion that Jesus’ resurrection superseded God’s covenant with the Jews) after the Holocaust in order to embrace their elder brothers—as did Pope John Paul II, who lent his moral authority to President Ronald Reagan’s conviction that America’s victory in the Cold War was a historical necessity.

That is to say, pro-Israel Americans have also tended to misunderstand Israel’s place in the world. Yes, the point of Jewish self-determination is that the Jews can protect themselves. Yet the West needs Israel to succeed, because its success is a marker of our ability and determination to defend our values and our interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And the truth is that Israel has been doing a remarkably good job of it, especially in the past 20 years. Israel is an IT powerhouse with more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country except the United States, and its scientists have produced more tech patents than all of Asia. Last year Israel ranked 17th out of 58 of the world’s most economically developed nations, while the country’s economy was rated the most durable in the face of crises and rated first in investments in research and development centers. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning.

Contrasting Israel’s performance with that of its neighbors, most of whom still abide by the half-century-long Arab boycott of the Jewish state, throws Israel’s achievements into even sharper relief. Consider Egypt, with a literacy rate anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, and considerably lower among women. The country’s unemployment rate is believed to be twice the official level of 10 percent, and 40 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. While the Syrian regime proudly supports the resistance, thousands of its own people are suffering with a drought in the eastern part of the country that has ravaged crops and livestock. Iran’s nuclear program and full-throated opposition to the United States and the Zionist entity may make it the envy of some fans of resistance in the region, but the fact is that an Iranian bomb is the Hail Mary pass of a dying society where there’s been no economic development for 30 years.

If you follow these two trend lines, it is easy to project what the fate of these two different civilizations is likely to be. Israel will enjoy the ups and navigate the downs of the global economy and, if the last two years are any indication, will weather those setbacks better than most. For the Arabs things are only going to get worse.

The college graduates who took to the streets in Cairo to protest their lack of opportunity are going to have to keep coming back because the problem was not simply the corruption of the Mubarak regime. Rather, the issue is that the Egyptian people themselves are deluded if they think bogus business degrees are going to earn them a place in a globalized economy. By and large, the Arabs are simply not prepared to compete with the rest of the world. When the oil runs out, it will crush not only the energy-exporting nations but all of the Arab countries whose economies, like Egypt’s, depend heavily on guest-worker receipts from the Arab Gulf states. As such, every weapon purchased by an Arab regime is effectively a down payment on a forthcoming Mad Max vision of the Middle East—including a series of civil wars like the one now under way in Libya.

The only way for the Arabs to avoid that scenario is for them to become more like Israel. Because Israel is the West, it is essential for Arab political, social, and economic development that the people of the region break with the past and embrace the Israelification of their societies. If not, the current popular demonstrations will end in yet another round of benighted dictatorships, as has repeatedly happened in the region, starting with the era of Arab independence in the 1940s.

The other choice—the typical choice—is to fight Israel, which is in the end little but a token of Arab despair. As the Arab uprisings have shown, the problems of Middle Eastern societies have little to do with Israel. So even if the dreams of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the other guardians of the resistance were fully realized and they were able to destroy Israel tomorrow, corruption, repression, and obscurantism would still be rotting away Middle Eastern societies.

The West and its values—what Israel stands for—will survive, no matter how many suicide bombers the Islamic resistance throws at it. That tactic, even if tied to religious concepts like jihad, has a built-in limit to its effectiveness in the face of people who are determined to defend themselves. Hassan Nasrallah mocks those who love life and boasts that the resistance loves death. But in the end, it will make little difference if Egypt eventually joins its army to the forces of the resistance bloc, adding tanks and planes to Hezbollah and Hamas’ rockets, Syria’s missiles, and Iran’s forthcoming bomb. The reality is that the party of life will fight to preserve it, while the party that cherishes death will reap what it desires in abundance.

Nonetheless, I do believe that, as I argued last week, events over the last few years have presented serious threats to the Jewish state—not least of which is a delegitimization campaign waged not in the region itself but from the capitals of Europe. It is a peculiar moment in history, to see Europe tottering on the precipice of resentment and obscurantism while the uprisings in the Middle East over the last two months have shown that the Arabs are perhaps on the verge of something new. Maybe the protests reveal not a revolution as such but a recognition.

Up until now, one of the more bizarre and widespread beliefs in the region is that Israel wants to be the only democracy in the Middle East—as if democracy were a limited resource it needed to hoard, like oil. The uprisings suggest that the Arabs may have come to recognize that, to paraphrase the late Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, liberty is free to everyone, like air and water.

I certainly hope so, for Israel is doing fine and the conclusion of my brief dialectic is that it will continue to thrive. The real concern is for the fate of the Arabs. The longer they continue to make Israel the focus of rejectionism and hatred, the more impossible it will become for them to join the West and arrest the death-spiral of their societies and economies. The inability of Western observers who claim to care about the fate of these societies and their people to make this point clearly and repeatedly has only damaged the cause of Arab social and political development. Now, in the midst of all the excitement following the Arab uprisings, is a moment that calls for such clarity.

Since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, supporters like Winston Churchill have argued that the Jews of Israel would have a positive influence on their neighbors—that their industry and their values would rub off on the Arabs. Outside of Israel’s own Arab community, that hasn’t yet been the case. Either that will change now or it won’t. But whether the Arabs embrace Israel and the West, or decline into total economic, cultural, and military irrelevance within the next generation, Israel will survive and prosper.

Alright, I guess you can have him, too. Sigh.

Signed,
Alana

Film of John Galliano’s Racist Rant In Bar [The Sun]
Earlier: A Plea on Behalf of John Galliano

I’ll give up Sheen and Gibson, but can I keep Galliano? Pretty please? He didn’t mean it, I swear. He’s just … British.

Signed,
Alana

Dior’s John Galliano Suspended for Alleged comments [On the Runway]

The cable’s release may represent pithy timing on WikiLeaks’s part, given that this week also brought a report from a judge’s assistant that the criminal charges and eight-year prison sentence against Russian Jewish oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky were politically (though not, explicitly, ethnically) motivated.

Speaking of pithy! Commentators have noted that WikiLeaks has taught us that some of our top diplomats possess literary touches you would not expect; and Beyrle, a George W. Bush appointee who has served in Moscow for nearly three years, is no exception. “From ‘Oy, Vey’ to OK” is how he headlines one section, where he traces the history of Russian anti-Semitism. Another section is titled, “Some of [Russia]’s best friends are Jews.” And he provides a compelling portrait of Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar, who comes off as something of an operator, paying obeisance to the Kremlin and receiving funds from prominent but more docile Jewish oligarchs like Lev Leviev, Roman Abramovich, and Boris Berezovsky. Ambassador Beyrle: When you retire, we hope you’ll consider contributing to Tablet Magazine!

More to the point, Beyrle is judicious on the fact that Russia’s progress is fragile—“the [economic] crisis could easily exacerbate latent anti-Semitism,” he notes (this was in December 2009)—and that claims such as Lazar’s assertion that there is more anti-Semitism in Europe than in Russia must be “taken with a grain of salt.” “Anti-Semitism has been a part of Russian culture for such a long time,” he argues, “that it would be unrealistic to expect it to disappear overnight.” But he is persuasive that life for Russia’s Jewish community—which, a little oddly, he seems to peg at one million, when it’s more like 200,000—is better than it has been in a very long time. His credibility is aided, of course, by our knowledge that he didn’t expect us to be reading this.

I asked Gal Beckerman, author of the award-winning history of Soviet Jewry, When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone, about the Jackson-Vanik comment at the conclusion. “Amazingly, it’s still on the books and annoys the hell out of the Russians,” he told me of the law, whose repeal is supported by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. “It means they can’t get Most Favored Nation trading status, which they need in order to be admitted to the World Trade Organization, something they very much want. Getting rid of J-V is also on the Obama administration’s list of to-dos in their attempt to ‘reset’ the American-Russian relationship.” He added, “Whatever other problems Russia has with democracy and human rights, free emigration is not one of them. Since this was the initial intent of the bill, it should have been repealed a long time ago.”

Anti-Semitism on the Wane in Russia [WikiLeaks]
Related: Russian Tycoon’s Trial Was Rigged, Assistant Says [NYT]

Unless Collins is saying something different, and worse. A friend emails in, about Collins’s column, “How many buried anti-Semitic clichés can you find here? I found four.” Collins’ assertion that Lieberman is looking to cash out, her emphasis on his “exceptionalism” and lack of “humility,” and her capital-letter reference to the Old Testament are all bothersome, my friend argues, concluding, “I agree it is not a deliberately anti-Semitic piece—New York Times Op-Ed columnists are too enlightened for that—but it is a lazy piece of writing that ultimately falls back on a set of code words and unexamined beliefs that seem right to her because they are framed against a background of old-school prejudice.”

I find it fascinating how Lieberman—indisputably the highest-profile Jewish politician in American history—is looked on by his co-religionists. During the health care debate, for example, contributing editor Victor Navasky accused him of “the betrayal of his Jewish heritage.” Today, my friend sees unconscious anti-Semitism in Collins’s column, which strikes me merely as lazy, knee-jerk condemnation (whose substance I agree with—Lieberman is an unusually opportunistic hack, even by the standards of politicians). Lieberman is further proof that, if Jews love to argue about everything, we love to argue about nothing more than ourselves.

See after the jump for my friend’s full argument.

1. COLLINS: “He got two years of his term left, during which he will be looking for ‘new opportunities that will allow me to serve my country.’ Do you think that means something involving a large salary and a chance to make multitudinous TV appearances, or a Peace Corps stint in Burkina Faso? Let me see hands.”
—Joe Lieberman may be viscerally annoying and wrong about everything, but here’s one thing he is not and has never been: Interested in money. In fact, part of the reason he’s such a prick is that he is so utterly convinced of his own rectitude. So why is his goal suddenly financial here? Oh yeah. Because he’s Jewish. They LOVE money.

2. COLLINS: “When he won running as an independent, it cemented his sense of exceptionalism.”
—One of five times that Gail Collins keeps harping (she’s Irish, right?) on exceptionalism, not being part of the group, thinking he’s better than everyone else, etc.—traits which historically have tended to define every member of the U.S. Senate, yet which she wishes to pin exclusively on Lieberman, because, you know, it fits him better! Because he’s Jewish.

3. COLLINS (quoting another Irish person): “It wasn’t a personal rejection, but I never saw anybody take anything so personally.”
—My paraphrase: They always take it so personally! All I said is that they think they are so special and love money!

4. COLLINS (and this is the key to her subconscious right here): “Lieberman assured everyone that he was not stepping down because the odds of his losing the next race were astronomically high but rather because he had been reading the Old Testament.”
—Of course Lieberman didn’t say he was reading the “Old Testament” in his statement. That’s her language, not his. What he said, sounding, as usual, like Uriah Heep, was: “The reason I have decided not to run for re-election in 2012 is best expressed in the wise words from Ecclesiastes: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven.’ So why change Lieberman’s wording from “Ecclesiastes”—which Christians also read—to “the Old Testament”? The answer is that the Old/New Testament distinction is exactly the one that Collins wants to make. Joe Lieberman is a jerk because he is an annoying, self-righteous, exceptionalist, money-grubbing Jew. If he only spent more time reading the New Testament, he might learn some precious Christian humility.

What gets me going here—besides #1 and #4, which are pretty blatant, as well as the fact that someone has apparently spiked my coffee—is that Joe Lieberman, while being a huge prick even for a U.S. senator, also did a lot of good in a very long career, most recently pushing through Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Plus, he broke the glass ceiling that prevented Jews from running for high office in America. And yet, Gail Collins sees fit to piss all over him in unusually loaded language without a single hat-tip or moment of recognition—even her mention of DADT comes in a compliment so backhanded it’s no compliment at all. She refuses to acknowledge that he might have done SOME good in addition to bugging the crap out of her and me both for the last eight years or longer. I can’t imagine her writing this piece about Gloria Steinem or even Jesse Jackson or any other group’s “trailblazer” or “pioneer,” as the Times usually likes to call them.

You can say that Joe Lieberman is a pompous jerk who looks in the mirror and sees a combination of Winston Churchill and the Prophet Elijah and likes to listen to the sound of his voice all day long and really, who would object? It’s true. But Lieberman—who was Connecticut’s most tight-ass attorney general ever—is the opposite of the person who is out to make a lot of money from politics. He’s something worse—a self-infatuated, self-righteous prick. And so, to apply that specific cliché of being greedy for money to him by referencing the Old Testament goes beyond mere laziness. It’s laziness so extreme as to suggest that there is another reason why Collins thinks that the shoe fits so well.

Goodbye to a Guy Named Joe [NYT]
Related: Lieberman’s Betrayal [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Lieberman Will Retire

Aux Armes