Notes On The New Anti-Semitism
Fein, Leonard
NOTES ON THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM LEONARD FEIN The off-key counterpoint to the American Jewish success story has been a modest level of anti-Semitism, distressing more as a reminder of past disaster...
...The old anti-Semitism was familiar, and containable...
...It did not start with the Presidents, nor did it stop with them...
...Is it the New Right or the Old Left...
...it was a threat...
...Today, I no longer quarrel with those who insist that we face no more serious problem than anti-Semitism in America...
...Underneath their blow-dried hair, they are what they have always been...
...Falwell, there are those who work very hard to separate us, but we are not going to be separated...
...That is the legacy of the AW ACS battle...
...They feared the consequence of its rejection for both Israel and American Jewry...
...The door is not yet closed, the die not cast...
...to the contrary, it seems to have become legitimate...
...Jews and others argued eloquently that the sale was antithetical to this nation's interests...
...NOTES ON THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM LEONARD FEIN The off-key counterpoint to the American Jewish success story has been a modest level of anti-Semitism, distressing more as a reminder of past disaster than as a harbinger of present danger...
...I am indebted to Wolf Blitzer, the Washington correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, for calling this instructive fact to my attention...
...But America, we knew, was not Clockwork Orange...
...disturbed teen-agers did not set the tone for this nation...
...Hollings knew almost as soon as he had spoken the words that he had overstepped, and he immediately apologized, but it is reasonable to suppose that three months ago, he would have caught himself before, not after, the words were spoken...
...For some time now, Jews have felt ambivalence in their response to the New Right and to the Moral Majority and its ilk...
...The inherited bigotry of yesteryear has yet to become a modern doctrine, but it has quickened, and its expression is no longer restricted to the golf course...
...Those same surveys told us what we long suspected, that anti-Semitism is especially the sickness of the uneducated, of the poor, of the know-nothings...
...the stinking gases have begun to poison the air...
...Nor is the case we must make tenuous at all: Anti-Semitism affects not only Jews, as if that were not enough...
...Posing, as he so often has, as a friend of the Jews, those same Jews he maligns in his now-public tapes, Nixon couched his pro-AWACS statement as a warning: desist, he urged, from your opposition, lest you suffer the blame...
...It has kept us out of certain jobs and certain clubs, but that was about the limit of the thing...
...Hardly noticeable, unless you have a nose for these things, and not yet irrevocable...
...Their vulgar actings-out were isolated, infecting none of the centers of American life...
...In the corners of our minds, we have long known that the obvious anti-Semitism of the barroom is mirrored by the elusive anti-Semitism of the boardroom...
...And we remember, or should, where those forces are most likely to be found...
...On the eve of the vote, there were those in the Jewish community who quietly hoped that the sale would be approved...
...So: The old coalition, despite its disarray, held together on this, the most signal vote of recent years...
...It no longer feeds only off of folk memory...
...How indeed...
...The cri^p, no-nonsense anti-Semitism of the refined makes common cause with the seamy anti-Semitism of the unwashed...
...Yet Reverend Falwell and at least some of his colleagues have professed true friendship for Israel...
...It is a disease, a poison whose infecting bacilli are indiscriminate...
...I am not sure that what happens in the streets is worse—that is, more dangerous—than what happens in the halls of government...
...It started, of course, with Mobil and Bechtel and the others, with those smug corporate executives who over and over again have placed corporate profits ahead of the national interest...
...For we seem to have inherited the worst of both worlds...
...it is not the Jack Kemps, but the Jesse Helms and the Jeremiah Dentons who set their course...
...It was Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker who observed after the Hollings comment, "If a bunch of educated men can get in a pissin' match on the floor of the Senate, what do you think happens in the streets...
...Lest there be doubt as to what President Reagan intended, his implication was made explicit by President Nixon...
...All that it depends upon is the continuing ability of the boardroom bigots to dial up their siblings in the corridors of governmental power, to pass the word to willing Presidents and counsellors and congressmen and such...
...No plan, no protocol is required...
...Is it Helms or Biden, Denton or Sarbanes...
...There are some who would argue with that reading, who would, say that it always starts this modest way, anti-Semitism first as irritant, only then as clamity...
...This we must do in order to draw to our side as broad an alliance of support as we can, thus to shame the haters and the baiters into silence...
...We remember not only how grim things can get, but also how powerful the forces of decency can be...
...We have known about it, but not been much worried by it, for corporate anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism of the care-nothings, has had no place to go...
...I have believed that the enemy without is less a threat than the erosion within, and, more still, that it is because we are reluctant to confront the internal erosion that we have exaggerated the importance of anti-Semitism in the United States...
...In context, Nixon's warning was no warning...
...As behavior, the old anti-Semitism has meant defaced synagogues and other essentially trivial acts of vandalism, principally the misdemeanor of troubled teenagers...
...We need each other...
...it is now nourished by corporate avarice, it is sustained by self-interest...
...It is a small step from what they said and what they implied to Senator Holl-ings' reference, in the course of a debate on prayer in the public schools, to Howard Metzenbaum as "the Senator from B'nai Brith...
...On the one hand, we have recognized that on virtually every social issue, these forces differ sharply from our own traditional consensus...
...Where, then, shall we place out bets, in which coalition shall we invest...
...On an issue of major national importance, an issue that involved very much more than Israel's security, an issue where the strictly American reasons for opposition were powerful, the proponents seized hold of every argument they could, every argument they thought might win them votes...
...No President had the nerve to speak the obvious, the blatant: Mobil and the others care not a fig for American security, not when it interrupts the flow of profits...
...In the event, however, the unfolding was still worse...
...For as long as I have been thinking about these things, I have believed—and so written, so spoken—that our preoccupation with anti-Semitism diverts us from more urgent items on our collective agenda...
...This latter anti-Semitism is less likely to show up in opinion surveys...
...Suddenly, the atavism has acquired political relevance...
...But President Reagan's denunciation of foreign intervention in the debate was correctly understood by all who heard it, no matter his subsequent ingenuous denials: Israel was behaving improperly, and it was, of course, America's Jews who were the agents of the impropriety...
...Anti-Semitic innuendo, it turns out, is such an argument...
...For openers then, let us let our memories work for us...
...it was refined...
...Look around, and nothing much has changed...
...Recognizing that Israel cannot afford to spurn its friends, we have been disarmed...
...It has come to that...
...For in the case of Falwell, though he opposed the AW ACS sale, it was common knowledge in Washington throughout the course of the debate that he was an inert opponent, signing a petition here or there but refraining from calling any of those Senators or Representatives to whom his call might have mattered...
...they are a threat to the entire body politic...
...In crafting the requisite alliance, we would do well to bear in mind yet another lesson of the AW ACS debate...
...We know the names of those who are responsible for its legitimacy...
...Until now...
...the new coalition proved a fiction...
...Perhaps we were mistaken, for reasonable men, as they say, may differ in their assessment of the AW ACS matter...
...That is the cruel irony of the AW ACS debate...
...How could we condemn a Falwell who, after meeting with Menachem Begin just this last September, announced that Mr...
...But there is a new anti-Semitism abroad today, a very different anti-Semitism, and its early emergence must be seen as a clear and present danger not only to Jewish safety, but to this nation...
...And if Falwell himself be thought an extreme case, from which generalization is dangerous, consider this: Of the 28 Senators generally regarded as the New Right bloc, 26 voted in favor of the sale...
...The Jews...
...Withal, we were accused of dual loyalty...
...this marriage of reckless convenience between the barroom and the boardroom need not be recognized to be effective...
...On the other hand, the acrimony towards both Israel and American Jewry that was expressed as the debate raged on has not dissipated...
...The corporations, arguing not from conviction but from cupidity, took full page ads promoting appeasement, and were never accused, never indicted...
...Without their cooperation, the innuendos and the accusations which issued from the corporate headquarters would have been quarantined...
...It is when, in whatever form, anti-Semitism is happening in both, with the smug encouragement of the corporate elite, that we must begin to worry...
...Begin had said to him, "Mr...
...Knowing in advance that we will be dismissed as paranoiacs, we must nonetheless speak our fears out loud...
...But we argued out of clear conviction, and our arguments were thought compelling, if not convincing, even by those who stood on the other side...
...it was an atavistic attitude rather than an actious conviction...
...Its slurs were reserved for the golf course, where they could not be overheard...
...Given the ugliness of the debate, their fears were not implausible...
...How, after all, could we take it on ourselves to criticize a Falwell who was just a year ago awarded the Jabotinsky Medal for "services rendered to the State of Israel and to the Jewish people...
...So much for our winsome perception that Israel was well-secured in the embrace of the New Right, so much for our dalliance with this neanderthal bloc...
...There are even some who propose that our situation here is not so very different from that of the German Jews half a century ago...
...As an attitude, we measured it and monitored it at regular intervals, and we were reassured that its scope and intensity were declining year by year...
...And so the dark fantasy we have nurtured has become a plausible scenario...
...What to do...
...Their names are Reagan, Nixon, Ford...
...And jovial President Ford, that same President Ford who collects large fees for speaking at Israel Bond dinners, is reliably reported to have argued, as he lobbied for the sale, that "we can't let the Jews win this one...
...But not to be denied...
...All that has happened so far is that the bottle has been uncorked...
...The sale was, in fact, approved, but it is hard to imagine that things would be much worse had it been rejected...
...Who is more likely to work with us to beat back the threat, to recork the bottle...
...Each new incident, each new episode, confirms their forebodings, reinforces their conviction that the rest of us are ostriches...
...And note: Of the 17 black members of the House of Representatives, 16 voted against the sale, as did all five Hispanic congressmen...
...It had no echo in American politics, no voice in civil discourse...
...It had no ties to the anti-Semitism of the spray-painting galoots...
...The underclass, shaken by continuing economic distress, becomes available for mobilization by an avaricious elite looking to deflect legitimate criticism from its own incompetence and subversion, looking, that is, for a scapegoat...
...The most recent surveys informed us that some 25 percent of all Americans still harbored anti-Semitic attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and while that is a disturbing number, it is smaller than it used to be...
...On the one hand, we—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United States—now face all those dangers we so energetically identified in the course of the debate...
...its expression has been both more private and more subtle than the bigotry of the unwashed...
Vol. 1 • December 1981 • No. 7
