To the Editor:
Hillel Halkin has performed a valuable service in exploring new realities in “The Return of Anti-Semitism” [February]. Clearly, as Mr. Halkin cogently and indeed movingly demonstrates, 2002 is not 1952—or 1972 or even 1992. In his zeal to promote his grand thesis, however, Mr. Halkin suggests that in my own analyses of anti-Semitism in the United States I was “begging the question” on one small but important point: the nature of the relationship between anti-Israel and anti-Semitic attitudes.
A bit of contextualization is in order. First, the analysis referred to by Mr. Halkin was of data collected in 1990 by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in its general social survey of 58 ethnic groups. These data were then “massaged” to elicit findings on anti-Semitism. It turned out that one of the more intriguing NORC findings concerned the relationship of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic attitudes. It has long been known that such attitudes are linked, and the nature of the linkage is immediately obvious to a sixth-grader: anti-Semitic attitudes are more common among those with negative attitudes toward Israel, and anti-Israel attitudes are stronger among those with anti-Semitic beliefs. According to NORC, however, at the end of the 1980’s this linkage was not especially strong. My own sense is that, at that time, negative attitudes toward Israel on the part of Americans could very well have been related to causes other than anti-Semitism—a particular worldview, oil, views of Arabs and Muslims in general, and so forth.
In any case, the world has turned over many times since 1990. The question at this point is what the data show now, two years into the 21st century and under a new set of realities: the failed Oslo accords, the intifada, a range of unresolved international conflicts, terrorism, and the complete collapse of the peace process.
Jerome Chanes
Barnard College
New York City
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Hillel Halkin writes:
I thank Jerome Chanes for his “contextualization.” But even if negative attitudes toward Israel in the late 1980’s resulted, as he says, from such things as “a particular worldview, oil, views of Arabs and Muslims in general, and so forth,” a distinction still has to be made between negative attitudes toward specific Israeli policies, which need not have been anti-Semitic, and negative attitudes toward the existence of Israel, which were then, too—whatever the pretext for them—necessarily anti-Semitic. It would be interesting to know whether NORC’s questionnaires polled for this.
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