To the Editor:

The invaluable Ruth R. Wisse has produced another invaluable essay in “On Ignoring Anti-Semitism” [October 2002]. But, with the deepest respect, I question her focus on artifacts like an article by Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic and on attitudes of liberal academics like Tony Judt and liberal media like the New York Times. This seems to me to have the unintended effect of portraying the problem more as an aspect of the culture wars than as a matter of great political, diplomatic, and even military import.

Surely the most striking fact that belongs under the heading of “ignoring anti-Semitism” is the utter failure of either the Bush administration or its loyal opposition to acknowledge, much less to confront, the fact that anti-Semitism is the fuel that turns the engine of the “evil ones,” the people who committed the outrages of 9/11, who killed Daniel Pearl, who threaten jihad, and who murder Israeli children. Anti-Semitism is the ideological glue that holds together the otherwise much-conflicted factions of the terrorist front.

In light of this, where is the speech by President Bush demanding that Arab states abandon their relentless incitement to hatred of Jews, and that “moderate” Muslims repudiate the anti-Semitic speeches emanating from their state-sanctioned religious establishments—a presidential speech making the case that, as Ruth Wisse rightly points out, anti-Semitism is not only wrong in itself but an attack on the whole Western value system? Where is Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s announcement that anti-Semitism gives aid and comfort to our military enemies? Where is Condoleezza Rice’s public statement of our government’s strategic aversion to regimes that keep themselves in power by encouraging and rewarding anti-Semitism and fanning vain hopes that Israel will vanish from the map? In short, why isn’t a “war on anti-Semitism” part of our “war on terrorism”? And how serious is our war on terrorism as long as it is not?

The failure to make this case, and not merely disagreements among members of the chattering class, seems to me the most worrisome instance of “ignoring anti-Semitism.”

Michael W. Schwartz
New York City

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To the Editor:

Ruth R. Wisse correctly explains that violence against Jews in the last century proved to be “just a warm-up act to farther-reaching political ambitions,” with catastrophic consequences in the cases of Germany and the USSR. Now we are seeing much the same thing with Arab terrorism.

But she misidentifies the root cause of the war waged by murderous totalitarian regimes against the Jews. While it is true that for anti-Semites the Jews personify modern freedoms and liberal-democratic culture, these are but modern manifestations of the most ancient Jewish principles: that this universe has a Master, an Eternal Judge who defines good and evil and who created man in His image, thus endowing him with inalienable rights. The Hitlers, Stalins, and Arafats of this world find intolerable this abstract reality that the Jews genuinely and proudly represent.

Einat Gotlieb
Jerusalem, Israel

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To the Editor:

I thank Ruth R. Wisse for her clarity. We will all deeply regret it if her article is not taken very seriously.

The condemnation of Israeli behavior by many Christians can be understood, I think, as a cover-up for the deep-seated and ongoing Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism. I am forced to wonder if there is a connection between the Arab war against the Jews and the Christian teaching on the need for Jews to convert. There is a difference, of course, between extermination and conversion, but the result is the same—no Jews.

Rev. Walter L. Michel
Lutheran School of Theology
Chicago, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Is Ruth R. Wisse correct that the anti-Semitism currently promulgated and supported by the Arab world is at least as dangerous as Nazi anti-Semitism of the 1930’s? Or is Leon Wieseltier correct that American Jews are engaged in groundless “ethnic panic”? The answer is critical, but there is a key difference between the two views.

If Ruth Wisse is wrong, then she and others are guilty, as she says in summarizing Wieseltier’s view, of “stoking unwarranted and apocalyptic fears,” but the Jews will survive. If Wieseltier is wrong, and we act on his advice, the Jewish future is in question. Jewish survival demands that we do exactly what Wieseltier, Tony Judt, and others warn against: we must “indulge” ourselves in “existential angst.”

Ian Schorr
Dover, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

Ruth R. Wisse squarely counters the liberal bias that not only views the fear of a “new anti-Semitism” as hysteria and overreaction but that scapegoats Israel for the blight and repression of the Arab world. One is accustomed to such highly personal and hyperbolic arguments from Leon Wieseltier. But how to excuse the ever-discerning Tony Judt for making such slapdash equivalences, as when he attempts to put Arab terrorism into perspective by asserting that “Jewish terrorists were among the founders of the state of Israel”? Having followed and admired Judt’s writings, I long ago concluded that what he omits of European history is probably not worth knowing. What he omits of the Middle East conflict, however, is the very nub of the matter.

Jeffrey M. Duban
New York City

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To the Editor:

In her fine essay, Ruth R. Wisse writes that the “Ochs-Sulzberger families have since apologized for the ‘meager coverage’ the [New York] Times gave to the Holocaust as it was unfolding.” When? Where? What explanation was given?

As a Jewish child on the Brooklyn waterfront during the 1930’s, and as a veteran of World War II, I should have known that news of the Holocaust was being withheld. But if those horrible rumors were not reported in the Times, I thought, how true could they be?

J. Inchardi
Brunswick, Maine

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To the Editor:

Ruth R. Wisse’s larger point about the New York Times cannot be debated, but it seems a little unfair to besmirch the brave efforts of Otto Tolischus, the Times‘s man in Berlin, and G.E.R. Gedye, the paper’s Vienna correspondent, with the brush rightly used to tar its owner and publisher.

Tolischus and Gedye were personae very non gratae in Germany and Austria, and they reported what they reported, including about the Nazis’ racial policy, at no small risk to themselves. Of course, they did not write editorials, but they did write feature articles that were not (contrary to researchers like David S. Wyman) hidden in small print on the back pages. Even today their efforts are more instructive than many books churned out by scholars afraid to antagonize the families or firms that endow their chairs.

In any event, all I wish to suggest is that not everyone at the Times was quite so deficient in courage and moral insight as Arthur Hays Sulzberger and his city editor. At least before the Nazi wartime implementation of the Holocaust, the gray lady’s black vices were occasionally relieved by patches of virtue.

J.P. Hannon
New York City

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Ruth R. Wisse writes:

Before addressing these letters, I note that there were none from those who were implicated in my article. I would like to conclude from their silence that they regret having depreciated the nature and consequences of Arab anti-Semitism. If so, they have their work cut out for them. Writers like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler once turned their political blunders to great literary advantage by exposing the intellectual and psychological roots of their error. The promoters of Oslo might reach for those heights with a collection of essays called The Peace that Failed.

I am in general sympathy with my correspondents. Like Michael W. Schwartz, I wish that the Bush administration would make the connection between Arab opposition to Israel and the opposition to democracy and the United States with the same confidence with which the President originally defined the interrelated targets of the war on terror. America would be stronger if it spelled out the implications of the Arab strategy of attacking American democracy by proxy, and if it acknowledged how Israel became America’s fighting front line by virtue of fighting for its own life. I focused on those who shape public opinion because they help to determine the will of the governed. At present, the administration, for all its hesitancy, is telling more of the truth than are many professionals dedicated to ferreting it out.

No doubt the role of the Jews in political history was formed by the Jewish idea of God (Einat Gotlieb), and has been prejudicially disfigured by Christian teachings (Rev. Walter L. Michel). But modern anti-Semitism is at least as much a function of the rise of liberal democracy, or rather of the opposition to it. Incitement against the Jews in the Arab world—which, again, forms a major front in the opposition to liberal democracy—certainly warrants strenuous resistance (Ian Schorr).

That is why I fully share Jeffrey M. Duban’s disappointment in a scholar who ought to have learned from his subject, and J. Inchardi’s anger at the publisher-owners of the New York Times. A muted apology was offered by the Times in a 1996 exhibition commemorating the newspaper’s centennial, but, as I pointed out in my article, this acknowledgement of oversight was not accompanied by any explanation, or by any subsequent adjustment in editorial policy. When the Jews were stateless, the Times ignored the aggression against them, and once the Jews had a state, the Times blamed Israel for inviting the aggression against them.

I am especially grateful to J.P. Hannon for reminding us that individual Times correspondents proved exceptions to this policy, just as some reporters occasionally continue to do within today’s culture at the paper. In addition to injuring the Jews, the refusal to acknowledge the political realities of anti-Semitism corrupts the coverage of world news, betrays the ethics of journalism, and undermines the security of the United States. By contrast, those who stubbornly report the facts, at whatever risk, deserve our gratitude and esteem.

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