This week’s winner is “David Sucher,” who complained, apropos Bethlehem Shoals’s column on the (non-)Jewishness of Jeff Van Gundy, “I love Tablet but the Jewish thing gets a little tiresome. No?”

Well, yes, but it’s what we do, and maybe it’s not so bad. You get Ruth Wisse’s Jews and Power, because maybe there should be even more of “the Jewish thing,” if you can imagine that.

Court Jew
Jews and Power [Nextbook Press]

This week’s winner is Steve Stein, who remarked, of Rush Limbaugh’s comment that Tablet Magazine is a “radical left-wing operation,” “He probably would have said that about the original 2 Tablets as well.” BURN!

Steve Stein will receive Ruth R. Wisse’s Jews and Power, because Tablet published three excellent articles by her this week, and I doubt that any actual “radical left-wing operation” would have published any of them.

Jews and Power [Nextbook Press]
Earlier: Limbaugh Labels Tablet ‘Radical Left-Wing’

• The six best Jewish cookbooks. [Saveur]

• Ruth Franklin weighs what it means to consider Anne Frank’s story a universal one, as opposed to a particularly Jewish one. [TNR]

• At a memorial for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—the first Likud PM—Benjamin Netanyahu chastised West Bank settlers that harass Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• The latest This American Life, whose theme is gifts, has much of interest to Tablet Magazine readers, from the reading of an Etgar Keret short story to a tale of an Israeli marijuana sting. [TAL]

• Thirty Jewish Studies faculty members in the University of California system urged the Orange County prosecutor to drop charges against 11 Muslim students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Irvine last year. [JTA]

It occurred to me that two of the three Jewish intellectuals contributing editor Ruth R. Wisse wrote about this week are also two of the three Jewish intellectuals in Zelig’s opening.

The Pugilist

There followed a second message, this one from Janis Bellow, explaining that Saul had insisted on phoning us that morning. He was feeling a little better, as we could judge for ourselves if we wanted to come over to pay them a visit. When Len, my husband, and I stopped by later that week, we found Saul uncommonly serene. He sat in the hospital bed that had been set up for him, stroking Moosie the family cat and letting the conversation flow around him rather than through him (as had always been the case before). He was slow to respond when Len tried to engage him on familiar topics, like their native Montreal and family members whom we knew in common. As his message had signaled, Saul was now hors de combat. I realized that Janis was about to lose a husband, their daughter a father, and I—with humble respect for the differences—a comrade-in-arms.

Though Saul was disoriented during those last weeks of his life, his telephone message followed logically from conversations we had been having as long as we had known each other. Like most people, I had first gotten to know him as a reader, but thanks to his extended family in Montreal, he came often to the city where I grew up, and the brief contacts I had with him over the years allowed me to feel I knew him far better than I did. He was my favorite novelist, which meant that I occasionally sparred with him mentally the way his character Moses Herzog does in the letters he writes to Nietzsche and Heidegger. The sparring continued when we became friends, but by that time we were on the same side of every struggle that mattered. It was not surprising that he should have called to tell me he was about to exit the field of battle.

***

At the start of our friendship, I challenged Saul’s soldierly commitment. The first time was during a spectacular weekend in the spring of 1984 that was orchestrated by Guy Descary, the mayor of Lachine, a small city near Montreal, who had happened upon “Lachine” in a roster of Nobel Prize winners, and decided to name the new library of his suburb after its most famous native son. In a bid to attract full press coverage—he was considering a run for the Montreal mayoralty—Descary arranged a formal dedication of the Saul Bellow Library, to be followed by a celebratory luncheon at the Lachine waterfront. Montreal and its suburbs remain divided into fairly separate ethnic blocs, so that a special excitement accompanies events that draw its various communities together. Here was a French mayor honoring an English writer who made a point of staying in touch with his local Jewish family. Saul invoked Yiddish, English, and French during the ceremonies, demonstrating the mayor’s contention that “Saul Bellow never forgot his roots.”

I was one of many speakers at the luncheon in Saul’s honor, of which I best remember Elizabeth Spencer’s reminiscences about the time she met Saul in Paris in 1949, when he was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The breezy young man she described was still recognizably there as the guest of honor, enjoying the array of local notables, literati, and members of family paying tribute to his talent and charm. More than on the talks, however, my mind was fixed anxiously on the note I had slipped to Saul before we sat down to the meal, whose contents were quite at odds with the reverential tone of my public remarks. Although I knew he did not take kindly to criticism and feared that I might blow my chance of ever getting to know him better, I had felt compelled to share with him my disappointment about something he had recently done—or rather, undone.

My remonstrance had to do with his resignation from the Committee for the Free World—an organization Midge Decter had founded several years earlier “to conduct a battle of ideas in defense of Western values and institutions” by taking public positions for American victory against Soviet influence in the Cold War. To this end, she drew together thinkers from Europe and North America who recognized the danger of Communism, some because they had once been forcibly subject to Communist rule and others because they had at one time “said the blessing over poison”—the Canadian poet A. M. Klein’s description of those who had voluntarily joined the Party. Midge deemed that no less threatening to our democratic societies than Soviet missiles or OPEC cartels were the compatriots among our academic and cultural elites who “blamed America first,” to use the phrase made famous by Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention. The Committee’s monthly bulletin Contentions drew a bead on writers and columnists who argued that our political system was founded on oppression, that its freedoms were a sham, and that our prosperity depended on the exploitation of poorer nations. Saul Bellow was a charter member of the Committee’s international board, which also included Raymond Aron, William Barrett, Paul Johnson, Leszek Kolakowski, Tom Stoppard, and George Will.

Rather, Saul had been a member. I had just heard that he resigned from the board in protest against an issue of Contentions criticizing certain of that year’s literary prizes for honoring the political rather than literary merits of the winners—two of whom were Bellow’s friends. Contentions called their work “snooty, mindless, and altogether conventional attitudinizing” (Gore Vidal) and evidence of the “exhaustion of serious fiction as a vehicle for significant comment about human affairs” (Stanley Elkin). As we now know from his published letters, Saul asked that his name be removed from the masthead not because he disagreed with these judgments but because the “reviews were in such bad taste that it depressed me to be associated with them.” He continued:

I have for some time been struggling with the growing realization that a problem exists: About Nicaragua we can agree well enough but as soon as you begin to speak of culture you give me the willies…. [Where] there are politics there are bedfellows, and where there are bedfellows there are likely to be fleas, so I scratched my bites in silence. Your Special Issue, however, is different. I can’t allow the editors of Confrontations (sic) to speak in my name, or with my tacit consent as board-member, about writers and literature. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language. Le mauvais gout mène aux crimes, said Stendhal, who was right of course but who didn’t realize how many criminals history was about to turn loose.

Had I seen the letter, its wit would not have charmed me. So he had “scratched his bites in silence” instead of appreciating the political energy Midge was organizing on our behalf! Weren’t those many criminals that history was about to turn loose reason enough to support the Committee’s work? Given that he understood what was at stake in the Cold War, I was dismayed that he quit the battlefield for what I considered a slight to his vanity.

***

If you are amused by this account of internecine conflict among intellectuals determined to bring down the Soviet Empire, don’t expect a self-mocking disclaimer from me in this quarrel long since resolved. Since I don’t write for The New Yorker, I don’t feel obliged to be ironic when speaking of the free world. Which is not to say that I fail to appreciate some ironies of this little episode: Saul was valuable to the Committee precisely because he insisted on the preeminence of the writer over the warrior. His idealization of the writer’s task was the bedrock of his literary ambition, and that ambition, fully realized in his work, made him far more precious to the Committee than lesser writers (like me) who soldiered better. Those most valuable to a cause may be least willing to submit to its discipline. On the other hand, Contentions had set out to depoliticize literature by highlighting political considerations that had determined literary awards. If the editors were right, Saul would have forfeited his chance of ever winning one of those prizes had he remained on the Contentions masthead. Thus, his political calculations may have run up against their commitment to purer aesthetic and literary judgment. Irony indeed.

Saul and I never did thrash this out. When Len and I joined him for dinner the following evening with the poet Louis Dudek, we talked for hours without mentioning my note. I sensed that Saul did not want to discuss it, and that our acquaintanceship would flourish on his terms or not at all. In agreeing to subordinate public to private objectives, I was making the same kind of calculation of which I was accusing him in quitting the Committee, but I hoped that it would someday allow me to take up the subject with him again.

There was only intermittent contact between Saul and me in the years that followed. That changed when he married Janis Freedman in 1989 and when they moved to Boston soon after Len and I did, in 1993. Their marriage, which was treated as a May-December curiosity—31-year-old student-assistant marries famous novelist-professor—seemed instead to be something entirely different to me: Saul’s homecoming, after a lifetime of search. To be sure, he had found in Janis a lovely young wife, but she also gave him the unconditional love of the mother he had never ceased to mourn. A fellow Canadian, Janis shared his passion for literature, his comfort in being Jewish, and his concern for Israel at a time when that was becoming more important to him. For these and many other reasons there was no couple in Boston with whom Len and I felt more at home. Often Saul and I slipped into Yiddish, which he could no longer speak with his brothers, by then deceased. We were all landsleit, a term I had always associated with immigrants from Europe, but one equally suited to the reunion of us Canadian Jews on American soil.

One of the few subjects Saul and I continued to disagree on was anti-Semitism. As a teenager in Chicago he had heard the anti-Jewish diatribes of Father Coughlan, also a former Canadian, and Saul was convinced that the same hostility still festered in America under a civil surface. I was confident that American democracy was by now too substantial to allow any politician to win office on a platform of anti-Semitism—which was my criterion for code red. My apprehension was trained wholly on the threat from Arab and Muslim aggressors and secondarily on their deputies among our academic elites. In worrying about America, I thought, Saul was mistaking prejudice, which was nasty but not necessarily lethal, for the murderous politics of Jew-blame that leaders used to manipulate restive populations. He, in turn, thought me naïve to discount the potential of plain old Jew-hatred in our midst.

Saul’s political hard-headedness on these issues made me wonder how, during World War II and into the 1950s, he could have ignored the Jewish struggle for survival in Europe and Palestine. When I put the question to him in 1991, he said, “America was not a country to us. It was the world.” I took this to mean that while he and his friends were being drafted into the army, becoming writers, getting married, and trying to earn a living in the throes of the Depression, they were fully absorbed with the challenges of their lives, not with the lives and deaths of co-religionists overseas. I could not imagine this kind of detachment until it occurred to me that his Jewish counterparts in pre-war Europe—say, at the Lublin Yeshiva (founded in 1930) or Vilna’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (founded in 1929)—likewise felt that “Poland is not a country to us. It is the world.” And Jewish Trotskyists, of whom he had been one, were probably equally delusional on both continents.

Ruth Wisse with Saul Bellow at Bellow’s home, 2001.

Janis Bellow

But why belabor this? By the time he moved to Boston Saul had long since made up for the lapses of his youth. He grasped political realities as clearly as anyone I knew, even as he did not care to be a political player. Blessed with genius that came from beyond the summons of the will, he trusted the realm of the spirit more than us plodders who make do with what wisdom and knowledge we wring from mere experience. I once told him that he was the only adult I knew who spoke seriously about the “soul.” This seemed to surprise him coming from someone who kept a kosher home and blessed the Sabbath, but it is possible to obey God and thank God without hankering for the afterlife—as Saul did—and without leaving politics to an unseen agency. I think that Saul held with his eponymous Mr. Sammler that a good man meets the terms of his contract, “terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” I happen to love that homespun kaddish at the conclusion of one of my favorite novels, but its sentiment is not mine. My view is rather that in their hearts most people don’t know, and because we don’t know, the Torah was given, reportedly, through Moses at Sinai, so that we may learn good from evil from a legal tradition scrupulously studied and painstakingly transmitted.

***

Though I am tracking here only the part of our friendship that prompted Saul’s parting message to me, I can’t leave out the joy of most of our time together. Every time I taught his work, I invited him to be a guest of the class, and he always came—even when he eventually needed an aide to help him into the building. The students were curious and deferential. He flinched only from questions that pried into the mysteries of composition, but otherwise enjoyed telling about himself, people he knew, and books he liked. He loved to recall his childhood in Lachine, where the kids spoke French, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and the English they were beginning to pick up in the street. His protestations about being called an American Jewish writer seemed irrelevant when he described putting on the ritual fringes that were part of his childhood morning routine or studying parts of Genesis he learned in cheder. “What else but a Jew could I be?” he would say to students who asked about being a Jewish writer. It was the impulse to classify rather than the label itself that bothered him. He didn’t fit any classification.

I had no trouble imagining the fun he and Isaac Rosenfeld had in their teens doing translations of T.S. Eliot and Milton, singing macaronic Yiddish and English songs, and playing verbal chess. Sometimes at the dinner table he would ask Janis to join him in a raunchy Yiddish ditty he had taught her. In Saul’s rendition of “Der Rebbe Elimelekh” (itself the Yiddish adaptation of “Old King Cole”), the merry rabbi at the conclusion of the Sabbath sends not for the fiddlers and drummers with whom he fiddles and drums, but for the shikselekh with whom he shiksels. He had the rabbi frolicking with gentile girls in a verbal construction of his own making. When he’d finish the song, Saul would throw back his head and have us all laughing with him.

Ruth R. Wisse, the author of the Nextbook Press book Jews and Power, is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Harvard.

“16 mm Postcards,” a new exhibition produced by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Yeshiva University Museum, at the Center for Jewish History, demonstrates how different things were in the early 20th century, when the ancestors of most American Jews came here from Eastern Europe. This extraordinary show consists of home movies—all silent, mostly fragmentary—taken by American Jews who visited their relatives in Poland in the 1930s. (Many of the films can be seen at the exhibition’s website.) What makes these films so powerful is their extreme rarity: It was only a small handful of Jews who had the wherewithal, and the desire, to go back to the villages they had left behind decades earlier. And the encounters they document show how drastically the fates of American and Polish Jewry had diverged by the 1930s. In many films, we see the American cousin, prosperous and dressed in a Western suit, standing next to his poor, bearded, caftanned relatives; and it is impossible not to wonder what must have been going on in their minds and hearts.

Did the American cousin, clutching his camera like a badge of modernity, give thanks that he had been rescued from ancestral poverty and anti-Semitism—or did he feel nostalgia for the Jewish world from which he was cut off? Did the Polish cousin envy his American relative, or resent his intrusion, or long for his help? The pathos is infinitely greater, of course, because the viewer knows that all these Polish Jews—old and young, men and women and children—are just a few years away from the Holocaust. Virtually none of the people we see in these home movies was alive 10 years later. Because of the Holocaust, the natural growing-apart of the Old Country and the New World became an irreparable break, and a source of permanent guilt. Jews who came to America lived and flourished, while those who remained behind suffered and died: How can such a gulf ever be crossed?

The questions that “16 mm Postcards” raises, silently and by implication, are addressed head-on in a new book that might serve as a companion to the exhibition: The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale University Press). This is the title given by the volume’s editor, Ruth Wisse, to two novellas published by the great Yiddish writer Jacob Glatstein in the late 1930s, based on his own pilgrimage to the Alte Heym. Glatstein was born in Lublin in 1896 and came to New York in 1914. After working for a time in sweatshops, he established himself as a Yiddish journalist, while writing poetry that brought the influence of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound to bear on Yiddish literature. “The term experimentation,” Wisse writes in her introduction, “hardly suffices to describe the many subjects that Glatstein addresses, the poses he adopts, and the poetic variations he attempts.”

In 1934, Glatstein received word that his mother was dying in Poland and booked passage across the Atlantic to see her one last time. This journey provided the subject matter for two books that he published after his return to New York. The first, whose Yiddish title literally means “When Yash set out” (Yash is a nickname for Yankev, or Jacob), is rendered here as Homeward Bound; the second, “When Yash arrived,” is made into Homecoming at Twilight. A third volume was announced, but never written: “the ‘Yash’ scheme was conceived as filial homage to Polish Jews,” Wisse writes, “and did not survive their destruction.”

In fact, as the word “twilight” in the English title suggests, Glatstein was very conscious of writing about a Jewish community in decline. Homeward Bound opens on board the ship taking Yash and a motley group of fellow-passengers to France, and the first sentence speaks of the narrator’s sense of liberation: “No sooner did the ship pull away from the dock than I instantly felt myself subject to maritime law.” Yet it is clear that this freedom is only a temporary escape from the crises and factionalism of Jewish life: “But these past few years my mind is mired in the bloodstained world of politics. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is no longer enough. Am what? One must legitimate oneself by announcing a political creed: I am a liberal, a Fascist, a Social-Fascist, or a Communist, a Trotstkyite, a Lovestonite, a Zionist.”

In fact, politics quickly intrudes on the floating world of the ship, when the narrator reads in “the ship’s newspaper that Hitler had done away with his closest associates in the so-called Night of Long Knives.” (This infamous purge of the Nazi Party took place on June 30, 1934, allowing the story to be precisely dated.) The news reveals a fault line among the ship’s passengers, Glatstein observes. To the non-Jews, it is merely another news item, to be casually regretted or dismissed (“Hitler’s a damn fool!”). To the Jews, on the other hand, it is a terrible portent, and it drives Glatstein to seek the company of people who will understand his own sense of dread: “The casual reaction of my Gentile fellow passengers to the Hitler news was the first slap in the face I had received as a Jew on this floating international paradise.”

Cannily, Glatstein uses this minor episode to suggest the organizing principle of Homeward Bound. There is almost no plot, simply a series of encounters with his fellow passengers, in which he allows them to hold forth about their experiences and ideas; and in the course of these interviews (in this story, Glatstein the journalist dominates), we are given a panorama of Jewish existence at a historical turning point. We meet an assimilated Dutch Jew, who goes on and on about how he is a Dutchman first, a Jew second, and complains about the bad image of poor Jewish immigrants in Amsterdam. (“I swear, I turn red in the face whenever I see a Polish Jew. Why must they always attract attention to themselves …?”)

Then there is a hard-living Jew from Bogota, who complains about the difficulty of finding a Jewish wife there, even as he brags about his beautiful Colombian mistress. (Here, as throughout The Glatstein Chronicles, the sexual frankness is surprising: “The truth is that these gorgeous women are useless in bed, cold as icebergs. They just lie there, like royalty.”) And there is a Soviet Jewish engineer, who is embarrassed when Glatstein compliments him on his “Yevreskaya golova, a Jewish head!”: This kind of ethnocentrism is taboo in the worker’s motherland. Ironically, the Soviet Jew’s socialist universalism makes him a mirror image of the Dutchman who shuns his Jewishness. “Aboard ship it’s easier to appreciate the individual’s worth,” Glatstein writes, and he creates a wonderfully vivid gallery of eccentric portraits. Taken together, however, they show the inescapability of “the Jewish question,” the way it turns individual Jews, even against their wills, into a collective.

Homeward Bound ends with Yash’s train arriving in his hometown, as the conductor cries, “Lu-u-blin!” But when Homecoming at Twilight begins, we are surprised to find that the key event—the deathbed reunion with his mother, the whole reason for the trip—has been skipped over. Such a disorienting elision signals that, in the second novella, Glatstein the modernist will preside: The straightforward interviews of the first story give way to a collage of dreams, memories, and parables. The setting this time is a resort hotel, where sick and exhausted Jews (including a few mental patients) come to recuperate. It is, as Wisse points out, a parody of the Alpine sanitarium in The Magic Mountain (which was translated into Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer); and there are so many echoes of The Castle that it seems Glatstein must have been reading Kafka as well.

Once again, Glatstein’s subject is the state of Jewry, as seen through conversations with different types of Jews. But this time his focus is strictly on Poland, and the people he meets seem like archetypes of Polish Jewish experience. There is the dying Steinman, a charismatic Zionist who knew Herzl: “I burst into tears when I was face to face with him. I’m not ashamed to admit that I kissed his hand.” There is the brilliant young son of a Hasidic rebbe, who seems destined to become a new Nachman of Bratslav: “Some day I’ll read you some of my new ideas, and you’ll see for yourself that they are simply extraordinary,” he says.

But in a montage-like series of interviews with Polish Jews, all asking Glatstein to carry messages home to their American relatives, we are shown how the whole Jewish community is caught in an insoluble tangle of poverty, anti-Semitism, and sheer despair. And America, now mired in the Depression and closed to new immigrants, can no longer offer them hope. All the supplicants are in the same position as the unemployed rabbi who shows Glatstein a yellowed letter he once received from Herbert Hoover, which he imagines will help him get to America. In fact, Glatstein and the reader realize, it is merely a meaningless form letter; the old promise of the New World can no longer be claimed.

By the time old Steinman dies, in a moving scene at the end of the book, he seems to foreshadow the death, spiritual or even physical, of Polish Jewry itself. “It seemed to me now, in the twilight, that I had reached the autumn of my life,” Glatstein reflects. “Even my mother’s death seemed to coincide oddly with the downward movement of my own life, and all this was in step with Jewish life as a whole, maybe even with the twilight now settling down over the whole world.” The Glatstein Chronicles is a remarkable portrait of that twilight moment—not just an invaluable historical document, but a literary work of great subtlety and power.

• Our most favorite, of course, is the rave that esteemed intellectual Robert Alter gives to Hillel Halkin’s biography of Yehuda Halevi, published by Nextbook Press. “His biography,” says Alter, “with the translations it incorporates”—and Alter knows a thing or two about translating!—“gives us a vivid and persuasive sense of Yehuda Halevi that should make him more real and more understandable than he has been until now.” [“All the Good Things of Spain”]

• Ruth Wisse, author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power, remembers the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and the great Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich. [“The Poet from Vilna”]

• Walter Russell Mead explores Christian Zionism. [“Friends of Zion”]

• Anne Trubek reviews Allegra Goodman’s forthcoming novel, which was inspired by Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. [“Going Public”]

• Martin Kavka reviews Judith Shulevitz’s book on the Sabbath (which we podcast’d). [“Old-New Sabbath”]

• Ben Birnbaum slams Milton Steinberg’s posthumous novel, which staff writer Marissa Brostoff reported on. [“The Prophet’s Wife”]

I’ll defer to J.J. Goldberg for a summary of the findings:

Don’t count on those American Jewish blockheads to stand up for Israel: 11.
Well, they’d better / Hey, they just might: 7.
I’m hoping Obama will see the light and we won’t have to choose sides: 7.
Obama isn’t Israel’s enemy / This symposium is a right-wing set-up: 4.
Miscellaneous (Both sides are nuts / We haven’t properly taught Israel to our young’uns): 2.

Meanwhile, from the other half of Dysentery, Dissent posts an essay co-written by founding editor Irving Howe in the aftermath of the Six Day War. “Israelis should take a constructive and humane attitude toward the problem of the Arab refugees,” the 1967 essay argues, “who, even if exploited by the Arab governments, are suffering human beings and deserve more sympathy and active help than they have gotten from a nation itself comprised of refugees.”

Obama, Israel, and American Jews: The Challenge—A Symposium [Commentary]
‘Commentary’ Polls the Experts [J.J. Goldberg]
From the Archives: Irving Howe and Stanley Plastrik, ‘After the Mideast War’ [Arguing the World]

Speaking to the college grads, she recalled her own doctoral dissertation, titled, “The Schlemiel as Modern Hero.” The schlemiel—the quintessential bumbling Yiddish everyman (who, as Marissa Brostoff observed, continues to find new incarnations)—is, Wisse notes, “a man so naïve that he doesn’t understand the premise of the fight into which he has been conscripted.”

Hence the following joke: During World War I, an officer announces to his troops, “The moment has come! We’re going to charge the enemy. It’ll be man against man in hand-to-hand combat.”

A Jewish solider responds: “Please, sir. Show me my man! Maybe I can come to an understanding with him.”

“We now know,” Wisse continues,

what happened to the people who created those jokes. They were slaughtered in the millions. What we call the Holocaust targeted precisely the population that created schlemiel comedy. We learned from that episode that sweetness was no laughing matter and that joking—which momentarily releases tension—offered no defense against real belligerents. The schlemiel who initially made us laugh also taught us to raise our guard.

Her point? “In this season of convocation, we your relatives, friends, and well-wishers honor you who have trained for the armed forces, acting on the knowledge that radical innocence is no match for radical evil.”

War Is No Joke [The Weekly Standard]
Related: Jews and Power [Nextbook Press]
Look Out! [Tablet Magazine]

Grade was a highly educated woman who wrote poetry and spoke several languages, but she was mostly known for her intense protectiveness of her husband, his work, and his legacy, which led her into battle with many Yiddish literary figures. Since his death in 1982, she blocked many from publishing or translating the work he left behind—and now that she is gone, speculation over the fate of his literary estate has begun.

Inna Grade’s most public battle began in 1978, when Isaac Bashevis Singer became the first (and only) Yiddish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of his peers, including, reportedly, Chaim Grade, greeted the news with despair: Singer, who was by far the most successful Yiddish writer in America, was also criticized as presenting a patronizing fairy-tale version of Eastern Europe. What Inna Grade saw as a slight against her more-deserving husband became the central fight of her lifetime. In 2004, the centennial of Singer’s birth, she was interviewed in the New York Times. ”I despise [Singer] especially because he is dragging the Jewish literature, Judaism, American literature, American culture back to the land of Moab,” she told Alana Newhouse, now Tablet Magazine’s editor-in-chief, referring to the biblical region where Lot and his daughters began an incestuous affair. ”I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread into which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated.”

But Singer was only the first on Grade’s list of enemies, which was long even by the standards of the often-acrimonious Yiddish world. “She really had hatred for the entire Yiddish establishment,” said Allan Nadler, a professor of religion at Drew University who studied with Chaim Grade as a graduate student at Harvard. And in turn, he said, “she was hated in the Yiddish literary establishment.” According to Nadler, Inna Grade first alienated her husband’s friends and students during his lifetime and continued to stand between the writer and his admirers after his death. “She would not let anyone near his literary bequest,” Nadler said. “The more you loved him, the more impossible she became.”

One person who encountered Inna Grade’s wrath—and her litigiousness—was David Brandes, a producer and screenwriter who adapted Chaim Grade’s short story “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner” into the 1991 feature film The Quarrel. According to Brandes, Grade had signed a contract and production was underway when she became suspicious of the filmmaker’s motives; she later threatened him with lawsuits and made harassing phone calls to his home. “She made my life just miserable, and for no reason at all,” Brandes said.

According to observers, what most outraged people in the Yiddish world about Grade is that many of them loved her late husband’s work and wanted as much as she did for it to reach a wider audience. But her strategy was different from theirs. Grade was apparently more afraid of poor translations and bad adaptations (which she thought had already diminished her husband’s reputation) than she was of no translations or adaptations at all. One of the few people she trusted at the end of her life, a Bronx psychiatrist named Ralph Speken, said, “In order to translate Chaim Grade you have to be at his level, and only Inna was.” Grade translated two of her husband’s books on her own, but Speken and others believe that an untold number of untranslated manuscripts are likely sitting in her apartment.

News of Grade’s death, then, has resulted in barely suppressed expressions of glee from Yiddish scholars dying to get their hands on those manuscripts. “‘My first thought was, ‘Now that she’s dead, someone will be able to get into that damn apartment in the Bronx,’ ” Nadler admitted. “Unless she put it to flames.” Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, put it more gently. “Now that Grade’s wife has passed away,” she said in an email, “students may have access to his papers, potential translators and publishers to his works.”

Inna Grade, born Inna Hecker, grew up in Russia in a sophisticated family and married Chaim Grade—whose first wife had died in the Holocaust—while still a teenager. According to Speken, Grade had told him that her father, whom he believed was not Jewish, was a physician who ran a field hospital for the Soviet Army during World War II and was executed by the Nazis. In the late 1940s, Grade and her husband immigrated to New York; she told Speken that she later studied literature with the critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia and had two Master’s degrees from that university.

Grade’s mother, also a physician, apparently made it to New York as well—though Grade’s funeral guests reported discovering this only last week as they buried their friend and found the gravestone of Marie Heifetz-Hecker—Grade’s mother—next to her own. This seemingly solves another mystery as well: One rumor long circulated by her detractors was that she was not Jewish. But Heifetz-Hecker’s gravestone, Speken and other guests said, included her name, and her own mother’s name, in Yiddish. Chaim and Inna Grade had no children, and Inna has no known living relatives.

One of Grade’s unforgivable sins, according to her detractors, was her decision to bury her husband in a private ceremony, closed to them, when he died in 1982. Her own funeral last Friday was not much larger. Grade died penniless, apparently without a will, and her funeral costs were paid by the Public Administrator of Bronx County—which also now has authority over the much-desired papers in her apartment. The public administrator tapped Noach Valley, a local rabbi who had never met Grade (but had, as it happened, once presented a plaque to Singer honoring him on behalf of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America) to officiate.

One of the four people in attendance was Brad Silver, a longtime neighbor of Grade’s and the executive vice president of the Bronx Jewish Community Council, which took care of Grade as she became increasingly unable to pay her bills. This week, Silver said, he has been fielding the phone calls from Wisse and from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research wondering about the plans for Grade’s papers. Last year, when Grade was threatened with eviction, Speken was appointed her psychiatrist under the county’s Adult Protective Services program. The two bonded over their shared interests in Maimonides and Jung.

As her health deteriorated, Speken said, Grade became increasingly concerned about what would become of her husband’s papers. Grade and Speken discussed sending them to the University of Krakow, where Grade had contacts, or to an adult education institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem named for Martin Buber (Grade felt an affinity with the philosopher). About a week before she died, Speken added, Grade related an epiphany that seemed to suggest she had reached a private understanding with her life’s leading antagonist.

“Ralph, my work is done. I was wrong,” Speken said Grade told him. “Singer was not trying to take us back to the land of Moab. The fact is, we never left. All he did was to capitalize on it.”

• The Israeli government launched a new P.R. campaign designed to empower Israel’s fans around the world to win converts to the country’s cause. The campaign’s (Hebrew-language) Website generally puts a conservative gloss on political issues. [NYT]

• Ruth R. Wisse—author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power–celebrates the English language’s debt to Yiddish and worries about Yiddish’s future in the academy. [Minding the Campus]

• Martin Grossman, the convicted murderer whose death sentence was protested by many ultra-Orthodox groups around the world, was put to death yesterday in Florida. [Arutz Sheva]

• A former AIPAC official argues that, contra what some on the right say, President Obama has actually been more of an AIPAC president than a J Street one; and this is so, the official adds, because of domestic politics. [Foreign Policy]

• How they remember the six million in Texas. Or how The Onion imagines they do, anyway. [The Onion]

In Tablet Magazine, Zackary Sholem Berger celebrated Sutzkever’s ability to continue evolving:

While other writers perseverated on the world that was lost—which for many led to artistic stasis—Sutzkever built new worlds in lyric self-expression. Yes, he wrote about ghetto existence, and about life in hiding while the Nazis raged, but those were his Holocaust-era works, not signposts to an unchanging style. Historical moments were for him the raw material for his own poetic vision, not excuses for occasional verse.

At Jewish Ideas Daily, Ruth R. Wisse—author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power—testifies that Sutzkever inspired her to become a professor of Yiddish literature: “Sutzkever is a master of precisely the kind of wordplay that defies translation, and of a wit that exploits the singularity of a language whose elements are ingeniously fused.”

And in The New Republic’s excellent new online supplement, The Book, Tablet Magazine contributor Jeremy Dauber finds Sutzkever a premier poet of catastrophe:

Sutzkever’s simple descriptions of enormous horrors—perhaps most famously the couplet “Did you ever see in fields of snow/Frozen Jews, in row upon row?”—split the difference, reducing the traces of mass human homicide to a childlike, wondering response at what seems to have become the new natural landscape.

Golden Link [Tablet Magazine]
Abraham Sutzkever: In Memoriam [Jewish Ideas Daily]
The Elegist [The Book]
Abraham Sutzkever, 96, Jewish Poet and Partisan, Dies [NYT]

Related: Jews and Power [Nextbook Press]

Ruth R. Wisse: Seventeen years ago I published If I Am Not For Myself, a book on the “liberal betrayal of the Jews,” which addresses Norman Podhoretz’s question, arriving at similar conclusions by a different route. It is often assumed that Jews are “liberal” out of compassion for the poor, sympathy for the downtrodden, and other generous impulses rooted in the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, or, repairing the world. I have never accepted this self-congratulatory idea. In my experience, when Jews interpret their Judaism as liberalism it is because, to paraphrase Sholem Aleichem, “It is harder to be a Jew.” Those who substitute “liberal” for “Jew” as the basis of self-definition often fail to protect the rights of their own people, or worse, condone the aggression of their adversaries in the name of promoting peace.

To be sure, as Podhoretz amply illustrates, there are strong liberal features within Jewish tradition that define and sustain the Jewish way of life. These include a politics of self-accountability, respect for the individual and rule of law, and toleration of other religions and cultures. Herzl’s Zionism was at once a plan to create a liberal Jewish society and to save European liberalism from anti-Semitism. But paradoxically, the liberalizing elements in Judaism have contributed to making Jews an irresistible target of anti-liberals. This often forces a choice between Jewishness, which is liberal, and liberalism, which sacrifices the Jews to its vision of universal brotherhood.

The demographer Sergio Della Pergola estimates that were it not for the destruction of European Jewry, there could now be as many as 32 million Jews in the world rather than the several million fewer than there were in 1939. A demographically stronger people would discourage aggression and make Jews a less attractive political foil. Can one count on liberals to take the lead in strengthening, defending, and celebrating the Jewish people and its homeland? I don’t think so. May they prove me wrong.

Ruth R. Wisse is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her latest book, Jews and Power was published by Nextbook Press.

Morris Dickstein: As immigrant groups gain success in America, as their children and grandchildren climb the economic ladder, their politics usually follows their pocketbooks. With some exceptions, Jews have not kept to this pattern, confounding the received wisdom of sociologists and the fervent hopes of neoconservatives, who have repeatedly promised to deliver the Jewish vote to an ever more conservative Republican Party. Why?

Most Jews have remained liberals because they are, well, Jews. Their social conscience dates back to the laws of Moses and the moral injunctions of the Hebrew prophets. Their word for charity, tsedakah, is virtually the same as their word justice, tsedek, and their word for a righteous man, tsadik. Their fathers and grandfathers grew up poor. Strangely, they remember where they came from, and even more strangely, they empathize with others who are still struggling. Their subliminal memories go back not only to the ghetto and the tenement but to the condition of being despised outsiders, humiliated, persecuted, even killed.

This memory of oppression is built into their DNA, like the adjuration in the Torah and the Haggadah never to forget that they were once slaves in Egypt. But there are real memories as well. As a child in the Ukraine, my mother recalled being hidden under piles of hay when local pogroms broke out, and she remembered hearing bloodcurdling stories of much larger pogroms that took place hundreds of years earlier. The Holocaust renewed such memories, if they needed renewing. They enabled American Jews, living in moderate comfort, to identify with the plight of poor blacks, as they still encourage liberal Israelis to sympathize with the condition of Palestinians, so long as they are not actively killing Jews.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jewish nationalists have a different reading of this history of persecution. They turn inward, circling the wagons. But this same history transformed most secular Jews into ethical universalists. Imperfectly, since they are human beings, they learned to live by Kant’s categorical imperative, essentially a version of the Golden Rule. My teacher, Sidney Morgenbesser, following Hillel, once formulated this as “Do not unto others as you would not have others do unto you.”

In short, Jews bought into the historical forces that liberated them: the Enlightenment, with its faith in universal human rights, and the French Revolution, with its insistence on equality, a career open to talents. Without these developments, Western Jews would still be locked in ghettos, deprived of all economic and political rights. The United States, with its unparalleled freedoms, would simply never have happened. Many Jews also invested their hopes in socialism, as a fulfillment of this egalitarian vision, and especially in labor unions as its concrete realization. The New Deal was their charter of economic freedom, their coming of age. In remarkable numbers they sought higher education for their children, which liberalized them further by enlarging their sense of history.

Even when this romance with the left disappointed them, when the movement seemed to betray its original ideals, those values themselves have kept their hold on ordinary Jews, including those living privileged lives in circumstances freer than any that Jews have ever enjoyed. This is a minor miracle, one still to be celebrated.

Morris Dickstein’s new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, has just been published by W. W. Norton.

Jonah Goldberg: Why are Jews liberal? In all its various forms, there is probably no question I get asked more. I have not yet had the pleasure of being edified by Norman Podhoretz’s take, which I’m told is a great read, so let me offer a sliver of my own answer to the question.

The liberalism of American Jews is, I believe, what social scientists would call an over-determined phenomenon. Some of it has to do with broader social trends that Jews are not immune to. The over-educated often drift toward liberalism out of the arrogance that they’re smart enough to have all the answers. The wealthy, contrary to much liberal propaganda, are trending more liberal every day, particularly among “idea worker” types. Secularism is one of the most reliable indices of liberalism and many Jews seem to think that secularism is a religious imperative.

Then there are the various and sundry factors derived from the unique history of the Jews. In Old Europe, Jews were often a special class who looked to the throne for protection from the anti-Semitic rabble and the pogroms (“If only the Czar knew!”). This gives Jews a long heritage of viewing statism as a survival strategy. The big wave of Jews who came to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century brought the thriving fad of socialism with them and they saw an America that seemed to confirm the need for leftwing reform.

Anti-Semitism was long associated with institutions that seemed more Republican and conservative (the reverse is closer to the truth today). Harry Truman was a midwife to Israel’s birth.

And that introduces the Holocaust. The impact of the Holocaust cuts deep and long. But one result has been a tendency among American Jews to think that fighting for a progressive, statist, vision of “social justice” is a moral, even definitional, imperative for Jews today.

There’s also the simple fact that people tend to share the views of their parents. Contrary to the cultural mythology of children rebelling from their parents, the vast majority of people inherit their politics, just like their eye color, from their Mom and Dad. Perhaps, because Jews mix politics and religion so thoroughly, this tendency is even stronger among members of the tribe.

The knot of Jewish liberalism is large, old and has many strands. It will take a long time to untie it.

Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

Todd Gitlin: Among all ethnicities, Jews voted for Barack Obama in proportions second only to African-Americans. A population who do not strictly vote their pocketbooks! This sounds like some kind of scandal, if not an act of unaccountable blindness or even self-hatred. But if there is a scandal, it is one with a lineage. The liberalism of American Jews is not a new story.

Or could it be that Jews are not violating their self-interest at all? That they’re actually so smart as to realize that it’s in their class interest to elect Democrats because, whatever their rhetoric of equal rights, Democrats are in practice kinder to citizens who make their money the way Jews make their money—from the professions, disproportionately? I suppose someone could crunch the numbers and confirm or deny that Jews are secret, or unconscious, self-seekers after all. But I suspect that, in the end, it would turn out that Jews benefited materially from Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s picnics-for-the-prosperous more than they have under Democratic presidents. The anomaly of the Jews’ political counterintuitive allegiance would remain.

It might be supposed, then, that Judaism itself—something about its doctrines and observances—accounts for the violation of material self-interest. After all, while its doctrinal history is tangled and frequently self-contradictory, Judaism speaks of justice. It doesn’t speak only of justice, but it speaks of moral obligations both to members and strangers.

But there are strong justice motifs in other religions as well, and Jews who do not practice Judaism are no less liberal than those who do. Are we talking, then, about a different relation to the religion one professes? Are American Jews more devout—more sincere, in some sense—than other Americans? I do not know just what would constitute evidence for a yes.

Is it that Democratic presidents have satisfied Jews’ feelings for Israel better than Republicans? That seems implausible.

I know no better hypothesis that the following: Jews pride themselves on defying self-interest. They rejoice in the anomaly. This is in no small part because the theological foundation of Judaism is the belief that one’s people were chosen to carry out a unique relation to divine purpose. Jews may not be more devout than others, but somehow—and I do not understand quite how—we relish the opportunity to answer the question, “If I am for myself alone, what do I amount to?” with liberalism’s great appeal, which is to self-transcendence.

Todd Gitlin, a onetime president of Students for a Democratic Society who teaches at Columbia University, is the author of 12 books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

Ron Radosh: To understand why Jews in America today are overwhelmingly liberal, one has to start with their history in this country, beginning with their mass immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia from the 1880’s through the 1920’s. This group of first generation immigrants were escaping from oppressive anti-Semitism, which limited their horizons in every conceivable way, to a society that held out the promise of a life lived in freedom. And when they got here it was the Democrats, organized in the big city machines, who more or less welcomed them and who became familiar figures.

By the 1930s, many of those who were first attracted to union militancy and socialism left the ranks of these movements, and aligned with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, whose programs gave them union recognition (through the Wagner Act) which meant an entrée into the middle class. The New Deal also gave them Social Security. Most American Jews revered F.D.R. and loyalty to the New Deal and the Democratic Party became a matter of faith.

Some Zionist leaders around the time of Israel’s founding, especially Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, argued that Jews should not be beholden to one political party and sought bi-partisan support for the creation of a Jewish State. But despite the crucial support of many Republicans, Silver’s pleas fell on deaf ears among most of his brethren who continued to be loyal Democrats.

Today’s Jews are in a far different position than their ancestors. They no longer face what was once rampant anti-Semitism. They hold leading positions in all walks of life. Their children no longer face a Jewish quota in the elite colleges and universities. Yet, despite the reality of their situation, they still hold to the liberalism that has become a sine qua non of what it means to be Jewish. They act as if God would strike them dead should they pull the lever on Election Day for a Republican candidate.

Then there is the matter of religion. As they assimilated, many Jews became secular. For a time, Israel became a substitute for organized Judaism and the synagogue. But as time moved on, the identification with Israel subsided, leaving many Jews either hyper-critical of Israel, removed from identifying with the Jewish State, or as Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Commentary forum on this question, “secular and universalist.” Their liberalism is symbolized in a most extreme form by the “Judaism” advocated by Rabbi Michael Lerner, who preaches in his “Tikkun community” and journal, Tikkun, that to be Jewish means to favor a left-wing agenda at home and an emphasis on being critical of Israel while apologizing for Palestinian intransigence. This, he argues, is what flows from the ethics of the Torah and the teachings of Judaism.

The election of Barack Obama has served to reinforce the tendency of American Jews to remain liberal. One can argue till one is blue in the face that Obama’s policies are harmful to both Jews at home and Israel abroad, that his so-called outreach to the Muslim world is dangerous, and that his decision to avoid dealing with the threat of a nuclear Iran is likely to destabilize the entire Middle East. It will be to no avail. Jews were actively involved in the first phase of the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s, and as the playwright Carol Gould writes, “the ascension of Barack Obama symbolizes a dream fulfilled to a generation of Jewish Americans who were at the forefront of black liberation and to younger voters who saw him as a symbol of total change.” Were her activist parents still alive, she says, they would be “kvelling over the election of Obama.”

Ron Radosh is the co-author of A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.

It may seem that there are two Ruth Wisses. One, the eminent Harvard professor of Yiddish and comparative literature, is the author of The Shlemiel as a Modern Hero, and the editor of some half-dozen anthologies of Yiddish prose and poetry, much of which she has translated herself. The other, a political firebrand, is the author of If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, a frequent contributor to Commentary and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page, and staunch public defender of politically incorrect positions. (She blamed “feminist dogma” for the ouster of Harvard president Larry Summers, comparing his very public downfall to a “Soviet show trial.”)

There is just one Ruth Wisse, of course, and for her there is no disconnect between these two aspects of her career. Her deep study of Yiddish literature, she says, taught her about “the corrupting potential of powerlessness”—a notion she elaborates in Jews and Power, the eighth book in the Jewish Encounters series from Schocken and Nextbook. Not only does the book examine the history of the Jews’ complex and unique relationship with political power, it also argues forcefully that the very survival of Israel and world Jewry may depend on a deeper understanding of the topic.

Your book is meant to be, among other things, a corrective to the notion that the political experience of the Jews has been largely ignored in favor of their religious and cultural significance. Why is this an important endeavor?

The book could have been called Jews and Anti-Jews, because it is ultimately about the way in which the Jewish relationship to power is quite opposite to that of many other nations. This dichotomy has created political tensions that have so far largely been ignored.

What makes the Jewish relationship to power so unusual?

In the Diaspora, Jews developed what I would call a politics of accommodation. I mean accommodation not in any pejorative sense, but as a strategy, a means of survival. Jews wanted to maintain their way of life but couldn’t do it in their own land. So they went about trying to prove themselves useful to rulers in return for protection. Most other nations judge themselves according to how much land they can acquire, how much power they can exert, etcetera. So the coming together of these two very different political outlooks throughout the history of the Jews has had its own consequences.

That bargain—usefulness in exchange for protection—never seemed to last.

Right. Sometimes the arrangement worked for hundreds of years. But inevitably there came a time when the protection was withdrawn. At that point the Jews were extraordinarily vulnerable because they had no independent means of self-protection.

You write that Jews sometimes have a tendency to romanticize that kind of powerlessness.

Well, here is how it happens. Jews decide to live a certain way because of their covenant and relationship with the Almighty. Sometimes the consequences of that were weakness and poverty. I think it’s reasonable to say to yourself, “I will accept the consequences of poverty if I must because they are unfortunately the price I have to pay for remaining a Jew.” But when Jews then take that a step further and say that to be a Jew is to be weak and powerless—this is the romanticization, because Jews never wanted to be weak or poor. And until recently they certainly never made a virtue of it. But there’s a lingering temptation to take the negative consequence and turn that into a positive value.

Among other things I would like to draw attention to with this book is that the corruptions of powerlessness are no less a danger than the corruptions of power. Yiddish literature is one of the things that has made me acutely aware of this this tendency to turn poverty and weakness into virtues. Many Yiddish writers, people like Sholem Aleichem and I.L.Peretz, when they were looking for Jewish heroes, found Jewish heroism in people who were able to overcome the debilitating effects of powerlessness. But others went further: they assumed that power was evil in and of itself, and ascribed moral heroism to powerlessness because it lacked power, not necessarily because it performed any good.

Still, you point out that the “politics of accommodation” has also been a source of great strength for Jews.

Yes. It turns out to have been a brilliant political experiment because what Jews perfected along the way was the power to adapt. And more so today than ever before, nothing is more valuable than that kind of elasticity.

Adaptability is often thought to be an especially effective tool in modern times and under liberal, democratic political regimes. Yet, the so-called period of Emancipation, when modern democracies were born and Jews were for the first time being granted civic rights in places like France and Germany, proved to be a particularly difficult time. Why?

When Emancipation came, modern Jews felt that this would so much work to their benefit—that once you no longer had tyrannical leaders and instead had a democratic culture under which everyone was considered equal, surely that would mean an end to discrimination.

It turned out quite differently. The shift to democracy was accompanied by tremendous social, economic, and cultural upheavals. Those upheavals had to be explained. Politicians had to win over the population by persuasion. So demagogues found in the Jews the perfect explanation and an ideal target for “negative campaigning.” You’re unemployed? The Jews are taking your jobs. You’re poor? The Rothschilds are taking your money. Anti-Semites cast liberal democracy as a Jewish plot to take over the country from within. The 1879 pamphlet that officially launched modern anti-Semitism, called The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, says just that: that the Jews have already won a victory over us. It says, in effect, “You think that democracy is this wonderful thing? You think that your democracy is going to give you greater freedom? Oh, no—that’s not what happens. It’s the Jew who is using that argument in order to take advantage of our nation.”

Are you suggesting that anti-Semitism is endemic to democracy?

Yes and no. Anti-Semitism is available to every kind of government. But I think there’s a difference between formal democracy, meaning universal suffrage, and “constitutional culture”—democracy that is not just skin deep, democracy where the population has internalized democratic culture such as you see in the United States. In the U.S. people have come to understand that the entire population is in it together and has to solve its problems collectively. So the politics of blame don’t work against an alien entity. Instead, Democrats accuse Republicans and Republicans accuse Democrats, but it is always understood that “they” is a different segment of the same polity. That’s why scapegoating the Jews has not worked very successfully in the American political system. But it assuredly can and does work wherever demagogues can convince people that “others” are responsible for their distress.

That notion helps explain why pockets of anti-Semitism pop up. It tends to rear its head in cultures that don’t feel, for example, that the rule of law is being uniformly applied.

Or where they do not have a culture of self-accountability. There are minorities that blame others for their weaknesses and there are majorities that blame others for their weakness. It’s not one kind of group or another. Demagogues can arise and sometimes they can channel this kind of negative energy to their own advantage. And if a population is vulnerable at a given point, they fall for it. Blaming others is extremely dangerous because it’s a deflection of the problems. It’s a misidentification of the problems. And so it exacerbates the problem. Any population that begins to rely on anti-Semitism becomes deformed. It is putting off for a longer and longer period of time the real solution to these problems, which will have to come from within itself.

That’s why anti-Semitism should not be tolerated. Jews often make the point on moral grounds: “Look, it isn’t fair to target the Jews; it’s an act of discrimination.” And all of this is true. But I think one should make the political argument, which is much more powerful and much more objectively provable—namely, that a society that resorts to anti-Semitism will destroy itself.

Exactly. The Zionist movement attributed the problem of anti-Semitism to the fact that Jews did not have a land. The idea was that you would make the Jews unexceptional by reclaiming the land, a reasonable hypothesis at a time of emerging nation-states. No one understood that by then anti-Semitism had become such a potent political instrument that it could be used whether or not Jews had a land. In fact, no sooner had Hitler been defeated than the Arab League formed around opposition to Israel. Arabs began to use the politics of blame much more vigorously than Europeans ever did. Anti-Semitism is even more important to Arab societies and to some Muslim societies than it was for European societies, because they feel they are starting from so much farther behind the West in the process of modernization. They feel so much more threatened by modernity and the concept of equal rights.

Anti-Semitism is treated as merely a form of discrimination. It gets a cluck-cluck of the tongue and then everyone says, “Oh, isn’t that horrible. They hate the Jews. They shouldn’t hate the Jews.” There is no sustained analysis of why these countries need it so profoundly—of what role it is playing in their political culture and in their political institutions and actions.

Is that what compelled you to write this book?

Absolutely. We have an old-fashioned approach to this. The time has really come when political science has to take much more seriously that anti-Semitism is a political phenomenon, the most successful ideology of modern times. It is the only ideology that made its way from Europe to the Middle East, and played a central role among so many different peoples. Jews have to become much more comfortable with analyzing the political aspects of their existence. Yes, they are a religious civilization. Yes, they have a rich culture. But their political existence is what has become most problematic. The politics of blame ultimately kills more people than AIDS, for example, because it foments aggression which, ultimately, the Jews are too small to contain.

So, anti-Semitism is not just a Jewish problem?

It is not. Politics organizes against the Jews because they are a convenient target. It’s safer to foment aggression against the tiny Jewish people than against Britain or America. But as we see in retrospect, Hitler’s war against the Jews was a generative force for the war against all that the Jews represented, and the same now holds true for the Arab war against Israel. Bush and Blair have come in on the side of the Jews against terror for the same reason that Roosevelt and Churchill had to come in on the side of the Jews of Europe, because the enmity against the Jews is directed, ultimately, against them.

In the book you describe a recurring figure that one sees throughout Jewish culture and history: the Jewish traitor—someone who left the community and in some way betrayed it.

The level of hostility against the Jewish minority is sometimes so great that inevitably a percentage of people will want to escape. Now, those who simply assimilate, or change their religion, fine—goodbye. But others take a more complicated route. You have this phenomenon in Jewish history of people taking pride in the fact that they’ve turned against the Jews for the sake of some higher, more universal idea. This happened at the time of the Roman assault when Christianity defined itself as a higher form of Judaism, and closer to our time, when Jewish Communists said that they were a higher order of egalitarians. From their perspective, these people may feel they have the greater interests of humanity at heart. But when this “transcendence” occurs at a time of hostility against the Jews, it frequently involves blaming the Jews for causing that hostility. In the book, I describe the case of anti-Jewish converts in Christian Spain, but I’m also interested in the ferocity with which Jewish Communists went about denouncing Jewish religion, Jewish nationalism, and Hebrew.

Accusing Jews of betraying Jews is a complicated business, though, wouldn’t you say?

The line between reformers and betrayers is very thin. And it has happened that you have reformers and suddenly they will understand that in their zeal of reforming, they have actually given the enemy ammunition. Some stop short and completely re-evaluate what they have been doing. But many boast of their loftier sympathies for the oppressed.

It sounds like you’re saying it’s not okay to criticize the state of Israel?

Of course it is. I am very critical of the state of Israel for various things it does. Why shouldn’t one be? But often what’s being directed against Israel is not criticism. It is a politics of blame. The fact is if you join in the context of blame and hold Jews responsible for what befell Palestinians or hold Jews responsible for the problems of the Arab world—that’s a politics of blame. That’s not criticism. The Arab countries caused the Palestinian plight. They are the ones who did not accept partition. They opposed the Palestinian entity, preferring to keep the Palestinians homeless as evidence of Jewish iniquity.

This kind of argument has made you a controversial figure in the academic world and at Harvard. Is it a role you seek?

It never occurs to me to be controversial. I much prefer consensus and I long for agreement. But I can’t accept what seems to me the cowardice of people who will not face unpleasant facts. Many people give me advice: “Huddle as close as you can to the center because then we’ll get everybody on board.” But my feeling is that public debate resembles a tug-of-war. Your task is to state your case as forcefully and persuasively as you possibly can. If you can afford to be the outside person and pull the hardest, then you let other people huddle at the center and pull the center towards you more strongly. So few people are prepared to be that outside person and to pull as hard as they can, as effectively as they can.

Were you trying to do that with this book—pull the center towards you from the outside?

All I mean to do is to write the obvious. Sometimes I am appalled at the fact that people don’t find it obvious. In Hebrew one would say muvan meelav, it’s self-explanatory, axiomatic. But if others don’t yet find it obvious, then your job is to set it out as compellingly as you possibly can.