OPINION:
ANTISEMITISM: HERE AND NOW
By Deborah E. Lipstadt
Schocken, $25.95, 288 pages
Only the self-deluded think they are completely free of prejudice. We all have things or people, teams or regions, tastes or smells, parties or personalities — even breeds of dog — that we like less than others or do not like at all. Sometimes it is simply a matter of taste.
To cite a personal example, years after serving as his director of speechwriting, and having had ample opportunity to observe his warm good nature and tolerance at close quarters, I was horrified to discover that there was something Ronald Reagan really hated. The guy couldn’t stand tomatoes. I don’t know why, but the 40th president of the United States was a raging tomatophobe. However, since he only indulged his tomatophobia by not eating the things himself, and never tried to impose his prejudice on anybody else, I think he was within his rights, even though I’m rather fond of tomatoes myself.
Prejudice is like that. When kept under control in a civilized society, it is simply a negative manifestation of positive preference: Gentlemen prefer blonds, ergo gentlemen are prejudiced against brunettes. No harm done. But once civility is destroyed in a society, prejudice becomes dangerous, even lethal. When “Aryan” blonds are given privileged legal status and “Non-Aryan” brunettes are denied their rights and their humanity, prejudice as preference metastasizes into prejudice as codified hatred, in extreme cases, even codified genocide.
In “Antisemitism: Here and Now,” Emory University Professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, a noted chronicler of historic antisemitism, shifts gears from past to present. “Is today’s antisemitism the same or different from what we have seen before?” she asks. “Where is it coming from: the right or the left? Is it, as some would contend, all about Israel? Are we seeing antisemitism where it is not? Are others refusing to see antisemitism where it clearly is?”
The short — but not very helpful — answer to all of the above is yes and no. Anti-Semitism is a hydra-headed hatred that means different things to different people in different settings. While a disreputable handful of white (trash) supremacists may make headlines holding sparsely-attended mini-rallies, they do not reflect the feelings of most white American conservatives, much less most white Americans in general. There is certainly no anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli bloc among congressional Republicans. There is, however, an increasingly vocal and highly visible “anti-Zionist” bloc on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Many of its members are fairly recent graduates of a higher education system where left-wing political correctness has led to the wholesale demonization of anyone who doesn’t toe the “progressive” Marxist line. White America is imperialist. So, according to this warped school of thought, is the overwhelming majority of Jewish-Americans who support Israel. And, of course, such people and their views must be suppressed and denied freedom of speech, especially on campus.
To examine the phenomenon of present-day anti-Semitism, Ms. Lipstadt resorts to a rather old-fashioned literary device popularized by 18th century authors, the so-called epistolary novel, in which a story is told through a succession of letters between two or more characters. In this case, the book is not a novel, but two of the three correspondents, “Abigail” (a liberal Jewish student) and “Joe” (a liberal Jewish colleague) are fictitious composites.
The third correspondent is the author herself. Obviously, in a case like this, the deck is stacked in favor of the author since she is scripting and editing all sides of the discussion. It does, however, help to keep the narrative focused and flowing. Unfortunately, there are moments when it all seems a bit contrived, the intellectual equivalent of an agony columnist fabricating the letters she then proceeds to answer.
On the whole, though, Ms. Lipstadt makes a good faith effort to see all angles of the issue. She recalls that “during the 2000 American presidential campaign many Jews predicted that Al Gore’s selection of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate would precipitate a rise in antisemitism. It didn’t happen. Some pundits then opined that perhaps antisemitism was dead. They looked at the American social landscape and saw Jewish presidents presiding over universities that once had strict quotas. They saw Jews sitting on the boards of major corporations and being elected to public office in regions without a significant Jewish population.”
Even the skyrocketing rate of intermarriage, “a source of angst within the Jewish community,” could be viewed positively. “If so many non-Jews are so willing to have Jews in their families, how prevalent could antisemitism be? But today, antisemitism is ’back.’” And, she adds, she “is not sure it ever really went away.”
Prejudice never has gone away and probably never will. There is no known cure. But a society that protects the individual rights of all of its citizens and recognizes their common humanity provides a “safe space” for all civil people who embrace civilized rules.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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