Just about everybody who has ever written about Miller’s life and work has felt it necessary to wrestle with the complexities of his feelings about Jews. The most recent example is Evan Hughes’ account in Literary Brooklyn, which dutifully describes the “obvious, if increasingly complicated, anti-Semitism” of Miller in his teen years; the anti-Jewish fervor of his early novel Moloch; and the “suspect pro-Semitism” of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. As the Brooklyn-born son of first-generation German-American Catholics, Miller grew up in a time and place where resentment of the Jews who were overrunning the borough was typical if not ubiquitous. In his career as a writer and in his letters to friends and colleagues, Miller committed to paper plenty of awful anti-Semitic slurs. But he also doted on his Jewish wife (whom he referred to, at times, as “the Jewish cunt”), had dozens of Jewish friends (some of whom he loathed), fantasized about having unknown Jewish ancestors, and adored Yiddish literature—not only the lionized Isaac Bashevis Singer but also figures much less widely known in English, like the humorist Moyshe Nadir.

More than enough ink has been spilled, then, on the vexed question of how Miller felt about Jews, both in general and specifically—not least by the man himself, who addressed the canard of his anti-Semitism regularly not only in books but also in his correspondence. (“The big point, after my death,” he remarked to one colleague in 1971, “will be—how to explain my extraordinary predilection for the Jews!” And an assurance to Erica Jong in 1974: “You must know I am not” anti-Semitic. She affirmed as much in her meditation on Miller as an influence and friend, The Devil at Large.)

Perhaps a better way to commemorate the anniversary of Cancer’s paperback release would be to consider the less-frequently treated question of what American Jews have thought of Miller. Especially because, as it turns out, if you happen to have a battered paperback of Cancer on your bookshelf—and you do, right?—there’s a better than even chance it was one Jew or another who made that possible.

The 1961 Grove publication of Miller’s previously banned novel—in paperback, no less, a format in which it would be expected to sell in pharmacies and grocery stores, in racks in bus stations, and anywhere else cheap books could be found—was probably the single ballsiest move in modern American publishing. The law wasn’t dead-set against “dirty books” by then; Grove’s publication, led by owner Barney Rosset, of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been vindicated by the courts only a year or so earlier. But nobody knew how the law of obscenity would react to Cancer, which went far beyond Lawrence’s explicit love-making to exuberant, filthy pensées on art, death, and the distinguishing features of Parisian prostitutes.

At its outset, the book devotes a famous passage to describing what Miller’s narrator wants to do to a woman he calls Tania (based on Bertha Schrank) and whom he has already described, on the book’s third page, as “the loveliest Jew.” “O Tania,” he cries, “where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed.”

It was that sort of thing that set U.S. law enforcement into motion upon Grove’s publication of Cancer. In many U.S. cities, the paperback never made it onto shelves. The attorney general of Rhode Island told local wholesalers to return shipments to the publisher, and they all did; the same thing happened in towns like Amarillo, Texas, and Norfolk, Va. In suburban Chicago, a police chief decided he didn’t want stores in his town, Mount Prospect, to sell Miller’s book, and he got nearby suburbs—Des Plaines, Arlington Heights, Lincolnwood, Niles, Skokie—to pull all the copies from the shelves, too. The lawsuits began.

Grove had promised financial and legal support to anyone arrested for selling or distributing Cancer, and the ACLU—defending an alleged dirty book for the first time in its history—helped out, too. In the ensuing months the book was the subject of more than 60 individual trials across the country. Judges weighed in on the question of whether the First Amendment protected Miller’s writing.

Many Jews spoke up in Miller’s defense, putting their careers on the line in supporting the book.

In Chicago, for instance, the Tropic of Cancer case was heard by Judge Samuel B. Epstein. A friend of notorious Mayor Richard J. Daley, Epstein was part of a family that perfectly symbolized the career trajectories of American Jews in successive generations. His father, Ephraim, had been educated at the Slobodka yeshiva and immigrated to Chicago to lead the Orthodox Congregation Anshei Kneseth; one of the judge’s sons, David, was a screenwriter blacklisted during the McCarthy purges.

Epstein might have been thinking of David, or he might have been thinking of his father’s landsleit who had not escaped Europe—Eichmann’s trial had been broadcast here just half a year earlier—when he noted in his decision that “recent history has proven the evil of an attempt at controlling the utterances and thoughts of our population.” Whatever his inspiration, Epstein ruled in favor of Americans’ right to buy and read Miller’s novel. The First Amendment lawyer Edward De Grazia has called Epstein’s decision “one of the best examples” of how some lawyers and judges transformed a few statements from a 1957 Supreme Court obscenity decision, Roth v. United States, into a sturdy First Amendment defense of dirty books that would protect not only Lawrence and Miller but also William Burroughs, the pornographic classic Fanny Hill, and eventually books like Portnoy’s Complaint, too.

Lots of other Jews had spoken up in favor of Miller’s novel: Richard Ellman and Harry Levin were among the literary scholars who testified to Cancer’s merits, and a number of the high-profile lawyers who tried the cases were Jewish ACLU members and stalwart free-speech advocates, including Elmer Gertz and Ephraim London. Grove’s chief counsel, who coordinated all the lawyers’ activities and tried a few of the appeals himself, was Norman Mailer’s cousin and literary agent, Charles “Cy” Rembar (né Zaremba), who would detail the controversies in his own popular book The End of Obscenity. Rosset, who had started the whole mess, funded Grove with money inherited from his father, a Jewish financier, and his edition of Cancer included a preface—referring to Miller as “the greatest living writer”—by Karl Shapiro, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who just a few years earlier had published a rather unsubtly titled collection of verse, Poems of a Jew.

Bradley R. Smith, a Hollywood Boulevard bookseller who was arrested for selling Cancer (and who would go on to a career as a prominent Holocaust denier) went so far as to say that he received support, after his arrest, from “Jews from every walk of life.” Smith was defended by the great Los Angeles First Amendment advocate Stanley Fleishman, true, but his generalization is misleading—in the way anti-Semites’ generalizations tend to be. At Smith’s trial, one of the most celebrated and recognized Jews in America, Leon Uris, testified against Tropic of Cancer. “I don’t think [Miller] is a writer, and I don’t think this is a book,” the author of Exodus said on the stand. “I think it is the ramblings of a pervert. … We have a right to defend ourselves against this type of garbage the same way we would any other ordinary criminal or any pervert walking the streets of Los Angeles.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Uris, who insisted on a vision of Jews as manly conquerors and paragons of Judeo-Christian virtue, would object to Miller, who represents Jews—like everybody else—as carnal, dishonest, and debased, if also, like everyone else, possessing the potential for transcendence. The widespread support of Miller’s novel suggests, encouragingly, that at least among Jews in the literary and legal professions, it was not Uris’ but Miller’s perspective—which understood Jews to be human, fallible, neither better or worse than anybody else—that was the majority view.

With nearly half a century of fully legal Miller behind us, not everyone would agree with Shapiro that Miller was a modern “prophet.” But he was unquestionably prescient at least in knowing to whom he could appeal for sympathy. He remarked in Cancer itself, decades before any of his American trials would prove him right, that “the first people to turn to when you’re down and out are the Jews.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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