In the last few years some of us—often to our own surprise and usually against our own will but at the ultimately irresistible command of instinct and judgment—have begun to feel a certain anxiety about the Jewish position in America. But is it indeed a sound instinct and a sober judgment which have coerced us into so sorry a state of discomfort and of unease? Are we, in short, right to worry, or are we wrong? Are we responding like healthy animals to danger, or are we being—as Jews are so often accused of being—paranoid, sniffing (in the words of an eminent social scientist who, I need hardly say, is Jewish himself) “an anti-Semite under every rock”? Instead of trying to answer that question in the abstract I want to approach it by looking briefly at the two traumatic events which actually led those of us who are now worried about the position of the Jews in America to feel the way we do.

The first of these events was, of course, the Six-Day War, not so much the war itself—which was a triumphal event and not a traumatic one—as the period leading up to the war and the period following its conclusion. Between the time the Egyptians closed the Straits of Tiran and the start of actual hostilities—two weeks I think it was—something happened to the Jews of America, and apparently also to the Jews of Eastern Europe, and even it seems to the Jews of Soviet Russia; something happened to Jews everywhere whose spiritual influence will never, I believe, be exhausted while those who were living then remain alive to remember. For the second time in this century, indeed for the second time in a quarter of a century, a major community of Jews was being threatened with annihilation, actual annihilation, while the world, as it seemed, stood complacently by. Certainly this posed no direct physical danger to the Jews of America. And yet the Jews of America felt as though it did and acted as though it did. Their response to the crisis was not the response of a man who is doing something in a philanthropic spirit for others; it was the response of a man who is doing something in a spirit of desperation for himself. It was as if the Jews of America had viscerally come to the conviction, severally each one and collectively all together, that they themselves could not long survive the destruction of Israel, that if Israel were destroyed and its Jewish inhabitants pushed, as the Arabs were so vociferously promising, into the sea, the Jews of America would be next, somehow and in some way the Jews of America would be next. For if there should be a second Holocaust, would it not prove that there was indeed a malevolent will at work on the face of the earth to wipe every Jew, wherever he might be, off the face of the earth, to make the entire world Judenrein? And if such a will existed, with Hitler as its servant in Europe, and with the Arabs and the Russians as its servants now in the Middle East, would it not find suitable and equally surprising servants to carry the work still further even in the old goldene medineh of the East European immigrants, even in the “golden land,” even in America itself?

I do not suggest that every American Jew said such mystically outlandish things to himself in the period leading up to the Six-Day War. I do suggest, however, that in those two traumatic weeks most American Jews experienced a passion of solidarity with the Jews of Israel that was new and shocking and powerful, that went far deeper and much further than their commitment, such as it was, to Zionism or to Jewish survivalism in the sense of a belief in the special value and worth of Jewishness or of Judaism or of the Jewish group. The feeling was one of literal identification, a literal embodiment of the idea that kol yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh, every Jew is a part of every other. Here, if we wish to use the language of mysticism, were words that were truly made flesh, and the American flesh into which they were transmuted experienced along with them—in many cases for the very first time—an ineradicable and inexpungible sense of Jewish vulnerability.

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One might have expected that the spectacular triumph of Israeli arms in the war itself would lessen this new sense of Jewish vulnerability. It did not. What the victory did do for some of us, and perhaps for most American Jews, was to reinforce a thousandfold a new determination we had already tasted as a saving sweetener to the bitter sensations of isolation and vulnerability. It was a determination to resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm, any who would diminish us or destroy us, any who would challenge our right and our duty to look after ourselves and our families, any who would deny us the right to pursue our own interests or frustrate us in our duty to do so. We would from now on stand our ground, wherever that ground might be, and anyone who wished to harm us might succeed, but in succeeding would get no help from us, no help of any kind. I have argued elsewhere¹ that Hannah Arendt was wrong, heartlessly wrong, in claiming that many Jewish lives would have been saved if the Jews of Europe had resisted the Nazis more actively and more vigorously than they found themselves able to do. But there can be no question that the Nazis did seek, and did manage to get, a considerable measure of Jewish cooperation in carrying out the wholesale deportation and slaughter of the Jews. It would be a piece of blasphemous theodicy to see the Six-Day War as a redemption of the Holocaust; the Holocaust can have no redemption. But the Six-Day War can, I believe, be understood to have represented the recovery, after a long and uncertain convalescence, of the Jewish remnant from the grievous and so nearly fatal psychic and spiritual wounds it suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The Jews, who had so often and so recently chosen submission, now chose resistance. The Jews, who had so often violated the commandment to choose life, now obeyed that commandment and chose life. It was a thing to celebrate.

Jews celebrated it and will, I hope, go on celebrating it, forever and ever. But others, we soon found, did not celebrate it at all. The nations of the world, many of them, denounced it and reproved it; the churches of the world, most of them, lamented it with an unction whose oily odor lingers in the air and still has the power to sicken any healthy stomach; and the intellectuals of the world—to come to my own particular province, the piece of ground on which it has been given to me to make my own peculiarly Jewish stand—the intellectuals of the world were a story unto themselves. The tale is told of one very famous French intellectual who had signed a statement in the pre-war period urging that Israel be saved, and who then after the war angrily turned on the Jewish friend who had persuaded him to sign. “But you told me,” he said, “that Israel would be beaten and the Jews massacred! You never told me they might win!” The anecdote is so good that it must be apocryphal. Jews, you see, are supposed to be beaten; they are not supposed to win. Jews are supposed to be massacred; they are not supposed to live, and if they do presume to live, they are certainly not supposed to presume to prevail.

And so a wave of what pleased to call itself “anti-Zionism” swept through the intellectual communities of the world, including the intellectual community of America, despite the fact—but of course in some sense also because of the fact—that so many members of that community in America are Jews. I would not for a moment wish to suggest that this wave of so-called anti-Zionist feeling, this outbreak of hostility to Israel, was motivated solely by the distaste of the intellectuals for the idea of the Jew as victor. There were other causes and other reasons. The hostility to Israel was part of a larger hostility among intellectuals to America, to middle-class values, to industrialism, to technology, and even to democracy—though the hatred of democracy was rarely expressed with the same candor as the allied detestations of America, of middle-class values, of industrialism, and of technology. Nor do I wish for a moment to suggest that all intellectuals everywhere shared in these related enmities. Many who were Jewish had, often to their own amazement, experienced the same sense of identification with Jewish destiny that had overtaken most other Jews in the period leading up to the Six-Day War, and these intellectuals could not be won over to any sentiments of hostility toward Israel no matter how seductively packaged or hypocritically framed in friendly or sympathetic terms. All over the world, too, intellectuals of the social-democratic persuasion, like Günter Grass in Germany or Michael Harrington here, remained friendly to Israel. But in other intellectual circles, especially those within the ambiance of what is loosely called the New Left, “anti-Zionism”’ was the order of the day.

Now it is perfectly true that anti-Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitism. But it is also true, I fear, that the distinction between the two is often invisible to the naked Jewish eye, and that anti-Zionism has served to legitimate the open expression of a good deal of anti-Semitism which might otherwise have remained subject to the taboo against anti-Semitism that prevailed in American public life from the time of Hitler until, roughly, the Six-Day War. And it is more than anything else the breaking of that taboo, the taboo against the open expression of hostility to Jews, which has caused some of us to feel a certain anxiety about the Jewish position in America. It is so long since overt hostility to Jews has been regarded as a permissible attitude in America that we simply cannot say what consequences, if any, might follow from the weakening of this inhibition. No one can say for certain, for example, what harm may follow to Jews as a result of the grumbling in the American literary world over the prominence of Jews in the national culture—a grumbling which has grown louder and louder, more and more brazen, less and less ashamed of itself in the last three or four years, and which so ominously resembles the bitter complaint against Jewish cultural “dominance” in Berlin and Vienna in the 1920’s. Perhaps no harm will come of this in America, perhaps much. I do not know, nor does any social scientist, nor does any pollster. But I worry and I do not think my worry is paranoid.

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But of course it was not only in connection with Israel and not only among intellectuals and literary people that the taboo against the open expression of anti-Semitism was broken in America in the declining years of the 60’s. It was also broken in connection with the black revolution and among those forces, both black and white, who have seen the best hope for blacks in the militant separatism which used to go by the name of Black Power and which mainly manifests itself today at the extreme edges of the movement for community control. And this brings me to the second of the two traumatic events which have led those of us who are worried about the Jewish position in America to feel the way we do—the New York teachers’ strike of 1968.

This strike was a long and complicated affair, and I do not propose to go into it here in detail. There are, however, two points that have to be made about it in the context of this discussion: first, that it brought black anti-Semitism into widespread public view; and second, that it exposed in certain elements of what blacks themselves like to call the white power structure an apparent readiness to purchase civil peace in the United States—I do not say social justice—at the direct expense of the Jews.

As to black anti-Semitism, there is this to be said: it is anti-Semitism. Surveys have been made which purport to show that there is less anti-Semitism among blacks than exists among whites, or at any rate that there is no more. This may very well be true, I think it probably is true, but it does not mean that the anti-Semitism which does exist among blacks is anything other than anti-Semitism, or that it is any the less odious, or any the less a potential threat to Jews than the anti-Semitism which exists among whites. Those who tolerate black anti-Semitism are tolerating anti-Semitism. Those who apologize for black anti-Semitism are apologizing for anti-Semitism. Those who explain black anti-Semitism with reference to the behavior of Jews—who attribute it to Jewish merchants or Jewish landlords or Jewish teachers or Jewish school principals—are simply practicing the age-old technique of blaming the victim of bigotry for bringing bigotry down upon his head; and this is in itself an anti-Semitic tradition. Yet the anti-Semitism which surfaced among blacks during the New York teachers’ strike was in fact more often tolerated, was more often explained, was more often “understood,” and was more often blamed on the Jews themselves than it was ever forth-rightly and straightforwardly condemned. And this too caused some of us to worry. Were we being paranoid?

And some of us began to worry even more as we inquired into the causes of the teachers’ strike and as we looked more deeply into the role played in the entire dispute by the Mayor of New York and by the Ford Foundation. In the support given by the Mayor’s office and by the Ford Foundation to the forces struggling against the union and on behalf of community control, we began to wonder whether we might not be witnessing the formation of a new alliance between the patriciate and the underclass against the liberal center. George Orwell, whose name was so much on all our minds in the darkest days of the 60’s, had once said that the greatest danger to liberal democracy would come from “An army of unemployed led by millionaires preaching the Sermon on the Mount.” How had he, we wryly asked ourselves, foreseen so much? Now if such an alliance between the patriciate and the underclass was really in formation, it posed a very great threat indeed to the security of Jews, for its immediate objective would obviously be—and in fact already was—the destruction of just those social mechanisms and processes under whose aegis the Jews had been able to escape the grosser discriminations which had been directed against them in an earlier day—specifically the merit system in civil-service employment and in university admissions. The merit system had neither been invented by Jews, nor had it come into being for the sake of Jews. Yet Jews had prospered under an arrangement which, at least in principle, treated all persons on the basis of their merits as individuals regardless of “race, color, creed, or place of national origin,” in the familiar phrase that has now acquired so quaintly archaic a ring. Daniel P. Moynihan had warned years earlier that if the merit system were to be replaced by a system of proportional representation according to race or ethnic origin, the Jews, constituting a mere 3 per cent of the population, would be driven out. Yet such a replacement was precisely what one heard—and what one still hears—being advocated on every side and in circles which regarded themselves then, and continue to regard themselves now, as impeccably liberal in outlook. To put the matter brutally, but with no touch whatever of distortion or exaggeration, in the name of justice to blacks, discriminatory measures were to be instituted once more against the Jews. With all due reluctance, of course. With a heavy heart, of course. But never mind: the Jews would be all right. The Jews were always all right. The Jews could always be trusted to make their way.

Were those of us who worried about the growing influence of this line of thought paranoid to worry? I cannot believe that we were, and I cannot believe that any rational person could disinterestedly believe that we were.

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But granted that those of us who have been worried about the hostility to Israel among the intellectuals, feeling with our new sense of literal implication in the destiny of Israel and our concomitant sense of Jewish vulnerability, that we ourselves are somehow implicated, arevim, in that hostility to Israel as participating victims; granted that those of us who have been worried about the weakening of the taboo against the open expression of anti-Semitism both among literary people and among blacks; granted that those of us who have been worried about the readiness in so many quarters, many of them powerful and friendly once to Jews, to accept the reinstitution of discriminatory measures against the Jews as necessary to the establishment of social justice in America; granted that those of us who have been worried about all this have been worried about something real, something which to be sure mainly exists in the realm of ideas and attitudes and has hardly yet begun to make itself felt in the realm of practice and policy. . . . Granted, then, that we are not paranoid. Are we perhaps something worse?

For we have also been accused of worse. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once wrote to a fellow Jew as follows: “Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows? I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims in Putamayo, the Negroes in Africa. . . . The ‘lofty silence of the eternal’ in which so many cries have echoed away unheard resounds so strongly within me that I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” That was 1917. Lately, in 1971, some of us have been chided in amazingly similar terms. We have been chided not only by radicals of the New Left persuasion and by revolutionaries who, like Rosa Luxemburg before them, are frank to disavow any special concern for their fellow Jews, but also by people who presume to speak in the name of Judaism and of the Jewish people: Rabbis and Preachers and Teachers in Israel. For expressing our anxieties about the Jewish position in America, we have been accused by such people of a selfish and mean-spirited parochialism. For coming to them with our “special Jewish sorrows” we have been accused of urging Jews to withdraw into some ethnocentric enclave where, presumably, no “clouds and birds and human tears” are to be found. We have been insultingly treated to Theology-I lectures on the virtues of universalism, lectures drawn from a debased and discredited tradition of 19th-century Jewish thought. We have been instructed by some that Judaism commands the Jews to campaign against Richard Nixon, and by others that Judaism commands the Jews to send CARE packages to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers—the shofet Eldridge Cleaver, as he is ludicrously called in a prime document of this school of thought.

Is there any truth in these accusations of parochialism and withdrawal? There is none. Our concern for “special Jewish sorrows,” far from leading us into an advocacy of Jewish withdrawal, has been one of the dynamically impelling forces behind the newly aggressive affirmation we have been making of the values of the liberal democratic order, and the newly militant defense of that order which we have mounted against the ideas of those, especially on the radical Left, who have devoted their energies either ignorantly or innocently or in full nihilistic awareness to damaging or destroying the liberal democratic order in America.

For in thinking about the Jewish position in America and in trying to understand why it is that this position is threatened, and by whom it is threatened, we have come to the conclusion that it is threatened most directly by the same forces which have mounted so abandoned an assault on the values and institutions of the liberal democratic order in recent years: the forces, that is, of the radical Left.

Now once upon a time the worst enemies of the Jews were to be found on the ideological Right, and the time may very well come when this will be true again. But it is simply not true today. The main source of anti-Semitic propaganda in the world today is not a fascist country like Nazi Germany but a socialist one, so-called: the Soviet Union. In the Middle East the most intransigent enemies of Israel are not Arab conservatives like King Hussein but Arabs of the revolutionary Left, and the more ardently revolutionary they are, the more violent is their hatred of Israel and the more determined they are to destroy both the State and its Jewish population. In Europe, it is the radical Left and not the Right which chants such slogans as this lovely bit from the SDS in Germany:

Macht den Nahen Osten rot,
Schlagt die Zionisten tot.
 (Make the Middle East red,
Beat the Zionists to death.)

And in America—in America we find publications of the ideological Right like Alternative warning against and deploring the growth of anti-Semitism, while publications of the Left like the Village Voice blithely go on expressing or apologizing for anti-Semitic sentiments and ideas.

Thus whatever the case may have been yesterday, and whatever the case may be tomorrow, the case today is that the most active enemies of the Jews are located not in the precincts of the ideological Right but in the ideological precincts of the radical Left. This does not mean that the Jews of America ought to join the ideological Right, not that there is any danger that a people so overwhelmingly liberal in its political views will ever really move to the Right. It does mean, however, that Jews should recognize the ideology of the radical Left for what it is: an enemy of liberal values and a threat to the Jewish position.

Those of us who have been fighting the ideas of the radical Left have been fighting them precisely in the name of liberal values, not in the name of Judaism. In carrying on this fight, we do not flatter ourselves that we are also carrying out the commandments of the Torah. It is shallow and vulgar, if not blasphemously presumptuous, to think that Judaism gives its blessings or its warrant to a particular political position, unless of course that position be theocratic monarchism. But in fighting the ideological opposition to liberal values on the radical Left, we do know ourselves to be fighting the fight for Jewish security in America as well. It is, we think, a fight worth fighting and we mean to go on fighting it, for as long as may be necessary, and no matter how roundly we are abused as reactionary, or paranoid, or parochial.

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¹ “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann,” COMMENTARY, September 1963.