To the Editor:
Natan Sharansky’s eloquent and insightful article [“On Hating the Jews,” November 2003] is especially welcome at a time when the hydra of anti-Semitism is once more raising its ugly head. I would like to extend his analysis with two points.
First, as the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad recently reminded us, one does not need to be an Arab Muslim to believe in a “soft” version of the global Jewish conspiracy; nor does one have to be a fanatical jihadist to embrace the anti-Jewish ideology that has become so pervasive in the Islamic world. On the contrary, one can be an enlightened “moderate” like Mahathir, committed to the advancement of education, improving the economy, and encouraging competent administration, while still believing that “Jews rule this world by proxy.”
Mahathir’s case should make us realize that the “Islamicization” of anti-Semitism is by far the most serious contemporary manifestation of the “longest hatred.” It is the Islamists who currently present the most lethal and potentially genocidal threat. This can hardly be repeated often enough. In its attitude toward Jews and Israel, the Muslim world today has attained a level of dehumanizing rhetoric that can be compared only with Nazi Germany in its heyday. Mahathir’s “civilized” veneer was chilling enough.
Second, Mr. Sharansky rightly notes that anti-Americanism bears an “uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism,” but this needs to be fleshed out a bit more. America, the Jews, and Israel have become metaphors, in the Muslim world as in Europe, for the dark side of modernity and are perceived as rapaciously aggressive and expansionist. They are in effect being burdened with everything unacceptable or criminal in the history of their accusers—surely a classic case of projection. Thus America and Israel—not totalitarian Islam—are relentlessly vilified as dangers to peace on earth, the source of all violence, the cause of terrorism, the incarnation of fascism, and not least as serial violators of human rights.
Muslim and European anti-Semites have also had a field-day with the notion of a “Jewish cabal” running America, thereby fusing their fear of the United States and “Jewish power” into a more coherent fantasy of victimization. Most normal people in America refuse to accept that such highly irrational myths can be taken seriously by millions. Unfortunately, they are very much mistaken.
Robert S. Wistrich
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
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To the Editor:
In the very thought-provoking article by Natan Sharansky, his linking of hatred of Jews with hatred of America was very apt. What I would add in both cases is hatred of achievement. Years ago, when I was reading a book of Churchill’s speeches, I came across a remark of his back in 1939 that the Jews in Palestine had “made the desert bloom.” My immediate response was that this was why there was no peace in the Middle East. I am convinced that if the Jews had been as poor and backward as the Arabs, some kind of mutual accommodation would have been worked out by now.
Mr. Sharansky puts more weight than I would on Jews being a separate or rejectionist group. Separate and rejectionist groups who are not high achievers seem to be tolerated much better. Who is more separate and rejectionist today than people living on Indian reservations? And yet who hates them? They are no threat to anyone’s ego, and that is the key point. Even envy is overrated. Who in the ghetto hates the Rockefellers? But the Korean merchant who came here with practically nothing, barely able to speak English, and who has achieved a modest prosperity by his own efforts, is like a slap across the face to those who stagnated while he advanced. He is resented, which is much worse than being envied.
Wealth from whatever source may be envied, but it is achievement that is resented. Had Jews been a hereditary nobility, able to live idly on vast amounts of inherited wealth, there would probably be far less anti-Semitism. Once, when an official of a Jewish organization asked me what Jews themselves could do to reduce other groups’ hostility to them, the only suggestion I could give him was one word: fail.
While this may be a sad commentary on human nature, it seems to me to apply well beyond ethnic issues. Those Americans who ask what we have done to cause such hatred and terrorist attacks against us should be answered: we have achieved. In many times and places, that has been more than enough to provoke hostility. In the case of Middle East terrorists, we have achieved what they cannot hope to achieve in another hundred years. Lashing out at America is all that they have as an alternative to unbearable insignificance in the world for a civilization that was once in the forefront of progress. Anyone who knows how to stir up resentments has an army at his disposal.
Thomas Sowell
Hoover Institution
Stanford, California
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To the Editor:
Natan Sharansky is right to trace the lineage of anti-Semitism to actual differences in belief rather than to simple intolerance for the “other.” It is important to keep in mind, however, that theological differences have been powerfully augmented by jealousy arising from the emergence of Jews as successful “pariah capitalists” throughout the world. Barred from the professions but not from charging interest, Jews became magnates of junk, outsider merchants, and financiers.
Unlike what might be called theological anti-Semitism, jealousy of this sort is hardly confined to Jews, as the tragedies that have befallen non-resident Indians in Africa or overseas Chinese in Indonesia powerfully attest. Indeed, Mahathir Mohamad’s recent anti-Jewish diatribe might well be viewed as a denunciation of pariah capitalists. It is important to recall, in this regard, Malaysia’s 1965 separation from Singapore, with its majority population of Chinese, many of whom were leading entrepreneurs.
Amelioration of anti-Semitism requires not just theological rapprochement but gradual acceptance of the need to spread the benefits of trade and capitalism beyond those whose names are on shop signs. It is one of the roles of Jews to stand up for such principles.
Howard Husock
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
“On Hating the Jews” is as compelling as it is disturbing. Natan Sharansky’s survey of the background and current status of anti-Semitism should serve as a warning against abstracting—what he calls “universalizing”—the Holocaust and its aftermath from the specific belief system that has sustained the Jewish people through the centuries. Locating the key source of hatred of the Jews in the inability of ideological, cultural, and theological rivals to destroy the core of Jewish belief, Mr. Sharansky serves notice that the squalor of this animus is matched by the grandeur of Judaism.
I wonder, though, if the brush-strokes of his piece are not slightly too broad. Several distinctions are lost in Mr. Sharansky’s compelling narrative. First, does he believe that Arab-Muslim responses to Jewish survival are in the same class as European-Christian responses? Second, is it not the case that just as a “European” body of opinion in the United States has inverted reality in the name of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, so too a still larger body of opinion in Europe holds firm to democratic values? I would suggest that there is a qualitative difference between post-Nazi, post-Communist Europe and the unrelenting armed struggle bent on the destruction of the Jewish people that one finds in the Middle East.
In the final analysis, the political world may be defined less by the friends and enemies of the Jewish people and Israel than by the quiet complicity in a subdued anti-Semitism of those in Europe and America who hope that the appetites of Middle East tyrants will be satisfied by offering up the Jewish people. A democratic culture, a competitive polity, and a vibrant market remain the triptych best able to make it possible for Jews to outlast their implacable foes. Having Mr. Sharansky’s remarkable analysis to guide us should help.
Irving Louis Horowitz
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
In his interesting analysis of anti-Semitism, Natan Sharansky does not place enough emphasis on the charge that Jews killed Jesus and rejected him as the messiah and son of God. This, more than anything else, accounts for the unremitting degradation, murder, and pillage of Jews since Constantine. Every libel against the Jews now preached by the most bloodthirsty mullah can be found in the teachings of the Christian church, which laid down such a deep stratum of revulsion that the literature of Europe is replete with the most horrendous images of nefarious Jews, of which Shylock and Fagin are only the most notorious examples. Even agnostics and atheists imbibe these images, and grow up hating or, more genteelly, disliking Jews without even knowing why.
It is true that the decades since the Holocaust have witnessed many attempts by the Catholic Church and other churches to come to grips with their responsibility in fomenting the anti-Semitism that culminated in the destruction of European Jewry. Those attempts, however, have met not only with the calculated hostility of some church leaders, but with self-serving obfuscations, omissions, and justifications of the unjustifiable. More to the point, the charge of deicide is still a staple of Christian teaching, enshrined in the New Testament.
So long as this despicable dogma continues to be impressed on young minds, it is doubtful that anti-Semitism can ever be eliminated. It is time that Jews, certainly leaders as redoubtable as Mr. Sharansky, have the courage to face this most unpleasant fact.
Henry Sherman
New York City
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To the Editor:
Natan Sharansky is right that the threat to Jews today is far graver and more complex than it was either in ancient times or in the 1930’s; that hatred of the Jews has now reached surreal levels in the Arab and Islamic world; that it has become politically correct among anti-colonialist, progressive intellectuals who have one standard for Israel and a much lower one for every other country in which tyranny, torture, honor killings, genocide, and other human-rights abuses go unchallenged; that anti-Semitism flourishes under both totalitarian and democratic regimes; that Israel has become the Jew of the world and a scapegoat for America; and that the classical explanations for hatred of the Jews are no longer sufficient to explain why it has reached epidemic proportions.
But what Mr. Sharansky does not understand—and what I describe in my book The New Anti-Semitism (2003)—is the intellectual force in the U.S. of victimology. In today’s academy, victimology fills the role once played by Marx’s dialectical materialism. In this view, all “victims”—the poor, the racially despised, the formerly colonized, women—are noble and pow erless; all “oppressors” are evil, corrupt, and all-powerful. Thus, many Western intellectuals, including Jews, have placed themselves squarely in the service of the most oppressed “victims” of all: the Palestinian suicide bomber, the billionaire Osama bin Laden, the mass murderer Yasir Arafat, the tyrant Saddam Hussein. And they have opposed with scorn, sarcasm, rage, and blacklisting their designated oppressor, the Israelis, whom they have dubbed “worse than Nazis.”
Phyllis Chesler
New York City
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To the Editor:
According to Natan Sharansky, Jews are hated because they uphold the good. But after 2,500 years of Jews being blamed for every imaginable idea and then for its opposite, I believe that anti-Semitism is just a culturally habitual paranoia. Put simply, anti-Semitism persists because it persists; it has accumulated more than enough mass and momentum over the millennia to keep rolling along.
I do not deny that Jews often espouse things that the world would do well to embrace. But there are also stupid and disreputable and even evil Jews, who drive the same anti-Semites up the wall not because they are stupid or disreputable or evil, but because they are Jews. Jews are thus both essential and irrelevant to anti-Semites, who stalk them on every conceivable pretext and will no more cease hallucinating about them than an addict will let go of a needle.
Jews, therefore, ought not waste time worrying whether their conduct will exacerbate anti-Semitism. It is much more important to demonstrate that the price of hating the Jews is at least as high as the price of being Jewish.
Seth A. Halpern
Scarsdale, New York
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To the Editor:
In “On Hating the Jews,” Natan Sharansky searches for a single explanation for the astonishing persistence of anti-Semitism. For most of my life, I have asked the same question. German-born and raised—I was five when Hitler took over and seventeen when he passed me on to Stalin—I received my real education in democracy, freedom, and tolerance in the American sector of postwar West Berlin.
As a teenager, I had been exposed, of course, to the daily Hitler/Goebbels dosage of anti-Semitism. The Jews were responsible for despicable plutocratic capitalism, I was taught, and they were also to be blamed for Communism and Bolshevism. I was confused: how could any one group of people be responsible for such opposing political viewpoints?
So why is there still anti-Semitism? It may be envy of Jewish success, jealousy, or avarice. It may be an instinctive distrust of isolated strangers, of people who act differently, who are different, and who choose to stay separate.
Still, in seeing an “uncanny resemblance” between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, Mr. Sharansky may have introduced a bit of wishful thinking. I have never met an American who considered himself “chosen” or thought that America was “a light unto the nations.” Unlike Israel, America is composed of a multitude of ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds. It would be impossible to hate Jews here for being strange immigrants. We all are.
Gunther Greulich
Lynnfield, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Natan Sharansky suggests that the enmity directed against Israel and the United States arises from similarities in the origin and ethos of both nations. But drawing too close a parallel between Israel and the United States on the grounds that they are similarly perceived by their common enemies may lead to the romanticized conclusion that both countries are fighting the same war, for the same reasons, with similar goals. If only this were so.
Mr. Sharansky’s mindset is reminiscent of that of the American and English Jews in the 1940’s who saw World War II through the prism of both their patriotic duty to support the Allies and their concern for the Jewish people. For the United States and England, however, the survival of the Jews was an irrelevancy, and the establishment of a Jewish state an impediment to projecting their power in the postwar world.
In 2004, perhaps it is a mistake to assume that, in the “war on terror,” the survival of Israel will take precedence over the West’s fear of, and economic dependence on, Arab tyrannies.
Michael G. Moskow
Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
Kudos to Natan Sharansky for examining hatred of the Jews in its historic context and for placing it at the core of the community’s concerns. But I would have welcomed a more detailed discussion of how Jews should respond to this hatred, since it is only by our reaction to anti-Semitism that we can discourage its lethal aggression.
Mr. Sharansky demonstrates that “conforming to the template of the world’s moralizers,” especially by remaining committed to the so-called “peace process,” has led to ever greater attacks on Israel and world Jewry. He might have drawn the lesson that the obligatory response to aggression is principled resistance, while the greatest incitement to aggression is accommodation.
Lynn Field
Morristown, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
Is it possible that any reader of COMMENTARY is not already aware of the extent and danger of anti-Semitism? Our need is for specific, realistic approaches for combating it. Jews are expert in lamenting past and present ills, less expert in figuring out how to prevent and curtail them.
Ruth Block
Los Angeles, California
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To the Editor:
Natan Sharansky contends that “the always specious line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has now become completely blurred.” While anti-Zionism is no doubt a convenient way for many to mask their anti-Semitism, there are some, including myself, who criticize the state of Israel while also abhorring anti-Semitism. Is it not possible that Israel, unquestionably the most democratic country in the Middle East, has committed and continues to commit some actions that are cause for legitimate criticism? Is it not possible for a critic of Israel to be free of anti-Semitism just as a critic of Zimbabwe’s radical land reform might not necessarily be a racist?
Matthew De Zoete
Hamilton, Canada
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Natan Sharansky writes:
Years of exposure to Israel’s contentious public discourse have left me ill-prepared for these kind remarks. I would like to thank my correspondents very much for their civil and generous words.
Let me begin with a general observation. My purpose in writing “On Hating the Jews” was to draw attention to what I see as a bright thread running through the broad and intricate tapestry of anti-Semitism. This search for a common denominator precluded any in-depth analysis of all the complex facets of the phenomenon. No doubt, in focusing on roots, I did not give sufficient consideration to branches. Like many readers, I too think that this subject can be better fleshed out.
There are a few points, however, that warrant specific reply. The argument of Thomas Sowell and Howard HUSOCK—that economic achievement is often resented—seems to me sound. But I still think that Jewish success, while undoubtedly magnifying anti-Semitic sentiment, does not breed it. In Europe, the poor and provincial Jews of the shtetl were hated alongside their wealthy and urbane co-religionists. For that matter, anti-Semitism in America, by most accounts, was greater at the beginning of the 20th century, when Jewish immigrants were poor, than at its end, when Jews had attained a high level of prosperity.
The anti-Semitic pogroms that plagued Russia at the end of the 19th century would seem to offer still further evidence that hatred of Jews as Jews is stronger than hatred of achievers. It is well known that the czar regarded these pogroms as an effective means of diverting popular discontent from his regime. Perhaps less well known is that the 19th-century revolutionary movements, which sought to unite the masses in a class struggle against that regime and the Russian nobility, likewise saw the pogroms as contributing to their aims. Desperate to find the “spark that would turn into a flame,” the revolutionaries quickly realized that, for Russians, anti-Semitism was a more incendiary agent than resentment of the upper classes.
As for other ethnic exemplars of achievement, Korean merchants and Chinese expatriates may indeed be hated in some quarters, but I have yet to hear anyone suggest that Koreans are plotting to rule the world, or that the Chinese were behind 9/11.
It seems, then, that hatred of Jews is fundamentally different. Seth A. Halpern is right to point out that this hatred “has accumulated more than enough mass over the millennia to keep rolling along,” and Henry Sherman is right to assert that the Catholic Church has contributed greatly to building it. Mr. Sherman is also on the mark in stressing the need for the Church to go much further in ending Church-sponsored anti-Semitism. Yet, as I wrote in my essay, though the Church may be a big part of the story, it is not the whole story. Historically, major waves of anti-Semitism have been triggered by a perceived clash of values between the Jews and their enemies—enemies that have included but have not been limited to the Church.
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In “On Hating the Jews” I also contended that a clash of values is at the root of anti-Americanism. I was sure my thoughts on this matter would not be acceptable to everyone, but the refutations offered by a number of my correspondents have surprised me.
Thus, Gunther Greulich writes that he has never met an American who considered himself “chosen” or who thought that America was “a light unto the nations.” For my own part, I have met few Americans who have not seen their country and themselves in these terms. The idea of the United States as the “last best hope on earth,” as a country with a unique role to play in the world, has long been embraced by American leaders, and the American people appear genuinely to believe that their system of government and way of life are superior to those of any other nation. Foreigners often see America in a similar light. As was true a generation ago, many of today’s dissidents, sitting in jail cells in Cuba, Egypt, China, and elsewhere, draw inspiration from America in their efforts to bring freedom and opportunity to their native lands.
Phyllis Chesler also appears to know a different America from the one familiar to me. To be sure, she is undoubtedly correct about the central role played by “victimology” on today’s campuses, as a recent tour of American universities convinced me. But proving that something is a force among intellectuals is not the same as proving that it is an intellectual force. Just as Marxism, for all its vogue elsewhere, has remained on the margins of American public debate, “victimology” appears to have a much smaller impact on Main Street than on the campus. Let us hope things remain that way.
Michael G. Moskow draws on the lessons of World War II to urge caution in assuming that America and Israel are “fighting the same war, for the same reasons, with similar goals.” But the real lesson of World War II is not that America and the Jews had different enemies, but that the Jews were powerless to defend themselves. That is thankfully no longer the case.
On the issue of who is the enemy, both Robert S. Wistrich and Irving Louis Horowitz point specifically to the threat posed by Islamist anti-Semitism. There can be no question that this genocidal force, which utilizes modern mass media to broadcast ancient libels into the homes and minds of tens of millions of people, has helped to trigger a global wave of anti-Semitism unseen since the days of Hitler. But the anti-Semitism of “post-Nazi, post-Communist” Europe, though more tepid, is also more insidious. For, unlike the vulgar, raw anti-Semitism that emanates from the Middle East, European anti-Semitism is masked by a veneer of political correctness and advances under the banner of human rights. The threat it poses can appear less grave, but in the end we may find it easier to resist the evil that shows its true face than to resist—or even expose—the evil that masquerades as good.
Matthew de Zoete helps to clarify this point by asking whether “it is possible for a critic of Israel to be free of anti-Semitism.” It goes without saying that criticizing the policy of an Israeli government does not mean that one is an anti-Semite. But neither does criticizing a policy of the Israeli government absolve one of the charge of anti-Semitism. Whether the label is appropriate depends on two further questions.
First, has the criticism been applied selectively? In other words, do similar policies by other governments engender the same criticism, or is there a double standard at work? It is anti-Semitism, for instance, when Israel is singled out for human-rights abuses while tried and true abusers like China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria are ignored. Similarly, it is anti-Semitism when Israel’s anti-terror actions are condemned while similar actions undertaken by another country are condoned or passed over in silence.
Second, how is the criticism expressed? Are Israeli actions being blown out of all sensible proportion? Are Jews being demonized? When attempts to stop Palestinian suicide bombers are regarded as morally equivalent to suicide bombings themselves, the comparison can only be called anti-Semitic. The same can be said of any attempt to draw an analogy between Israelis and Nazis.
While criticism of an Israeli policy may not be anti-Semitic, the denial of Israel’s right to exist—i.e., anti-Zionism—is always anti-Semitic. If nations have a “right” to live securely in their homeland, then the Jews have a “right” to live securely in their homeland.
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A number of correspondents ask what should be the response, including the Jewish response, to anti-Semitism. While this was not part of my purpose in writing “On Hating the Jews,” I agree with Lynn Field that “the greatest incitement to aggression is accommodation.” In any case, since the only way Israel can accommodate today’s anti-Semites is to commit suicide, “principled resistance” is indeed the only option.
If Ruth Block is right that Jews are “expert in lamenting past and present ills, less expert in figuring out how to prevent and curtail them,” that may be because, for 2,000 years, they lacked the power either to prevent or to cure many of those ills. Without for a moment minimizing the duty of all decent souls everywhere to oppose and rebuff the insidious malignancy of today’s anti-Semitism, it is certainly the prime responsibility of the sovereign and empowered Jewish people to combat its enemies with every resource at its disposal.
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