Cloaked in Anti-Zionism

...They deftly embrace Protestant fundamentalists, whose support for Israel is grounded in the belief that the Jews will eventually be converted: "If the Messiah comes, on that very day we'll consider our options...

...With droll indignation, they offer anecdotes that contribute to the boundless chronicle of human absurdity...

...For even where executives do not personally harbor anti-Semitic feelings, business imperatives often dictate a need for petrodollars and produce newly-discovered sympathies for Arab perspectives...

...Its origins date back to the 1940s, when half of European Jewry was destroyed...

...Yet far from providing certain refuge, Israel itself has been forced to live under the constant threat of being driven "into the sea" by its neighbors...

...The more ominous challenge to Jewish interests today, the authors contend, comes from elsewhere, and the chief merit of their book is to identify the new foe: anti-Semitism cloaked in anti-Zionism...

...Truman was an invaluable supporter of Israel, and Acheson was no anti-Semite...

...This is why the Anti-Defamation League still spends more money on educational programs than on monitoring organizations like the Klan...

...We need not doubt the authenticity of the memory of Adolf Hitler's "final solution" for many American Jews...

...Similarly, they underscore the anti-Zionism of the New Left in the 1960s and its residue in the current "liberation theology" of some Roman Catholics...

...The expressed intention of this book, though, is to provoke "reasoned discussion...

...The Perlmutters' argument is generally plausible, and hardly weakened by numerous savvy insights as well as a pungent style...

...A touchier subject is the authors' use of the Holocaust, a specter that haunts The Real Anti-Semitism in America virtually from the opening page...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Associate Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University A decade ago, when anti-Semitism in America had subsided to an unprecedented low, Nathan Perlmutter confessed to feeling "emotionally unemployed...

...As the authors point out, however, so many Gentiles have chosen mates from among the Chosen People that????at present rates????the pool of American Jews may become too depleted for anyone to hope for marriage within it...

...That mellowness has now been torpedoed...

...Meanwhile, let's praise the Lord and pass the ammunition...

...Business lobbying for the awacs sale is an obvious illustration...

...Its reverberation partially accounts for the present vigor of Jewish leadership in this country...

...The political impact of such pathology has been inconsequential, and the authors suggest that the local constabulary is adequate to apprehend vandals...

...Soon afterward the third Jewish Commonwealth emerged in Palestine to ensure, among other things, that the designated victims of any future anti-Semitic outburst would never again be homeless...

...Indeed, it imparts an emotional charge to the articulation of Jewish concerns that is unnecessary in a domestic context, and is scarcely likely to assuage the pain...

...This is relevant to another problem the authors raise, despite the title of their book: the impact of philo-Semi-tism...

...Moreover, despite the formidable eleemosynary energies of Diaspora Jewry, they can not match Israel's need for exorbitantly expensive weaponry that only the American military-industrial complex can provide...

...Judeophobia is so ancient, for example, that theearliest definition of "to conspire" in the Oxford English Dictionary alludes to the Jews...

...The reference here is not to the recent upsurge in the desecration of synagogues and cemeteries and the racist demago-guery of the Ku Klux Klan...

...Her blue-collar husband is equally likely to admire the brio of the Israeli military, and to resent the imposition of racial quotas that most Jewish organizations also oppose...

...In accounting for the centrality of Israel in the American Jewish consciousness, and demonstrating that institutional threats to the tiny state's welfare now constitute a more virulent form of anti-Semitism than traditional religious prejudice, the Perlmutters seek to accelerate the reorientation of Jewish politics in theUnited States...

...The Perlmutters recognize the peril, but they are keener at targeting the adversaries of Jewish interests than at handling social and cultural issues at least as pertinent to ethnic survival...

...In collaboration with his wife, Ruth Ann, the national director of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League argues that a sequel to the old anti-Semitism menaces the seemingly comfortable condition of American Jewry...

...All Jews should have had such problems...

...Such corporate pragmatism can be more sinister than the ideological anti-Zionism that has disgraced the Left...

...The Perlmutters have probed the implications of that paradox more thoughtfully than anyone else...

...The chapter dealing with the United Nations is particularly valuable, richly documenting the subversion of the World Organization's original aims as expressed in its Charter...

...They note that the civil rights movement once attracted Jews as well as blacks, yet neither this nor the fact that the House of Saud did not legally abolish slavery until 1962 has deterred American blacks????especially the young and better-educated among them????from espousing Third World solidarity to the detriment of Israel...

...Neither do they endorse the old assimi-lationist dream that would have the Jews formally vanish so that anti-Semitism could at last expire...

...his charming volume of autobiographical pensees, A Bias of Reflections, recorded the perplexity of a "human relations" paladin deprived of conspicuous bigots to oppose...

...It should not be met merely with nodding assent...

...The Perl-mutters express no optimism about the ultimate disappearance of conventional anti-Semitism????that mechanical hare which no hound has been able to catch...

...They inspire further confidence by not letting their fervor deprive them of proportion, or of a sense of humor...

...An unremitting emphasis on the concentration camp risks distorting Jewish life in the United States...

...Jewish involvement with the Left no longer reflects a dedication to social justice, they maintain, only self-destructive folly...

...Consequently, in a world where more nations havegranted diplomatic recognition to the Palestine Liberation Organization than to sovereign, democratic Israel, the political leverage American Jews might mount in Washington has become pivotal to their brethren everywhere...

...before the War, fear of arousing dormant hostility frequently resulted in so low a community profile that radar could not have picked it up...

...Without openly committing themselves, the Perlmutters clearly lean toward American withdrawal...

...The authors' skill here is a throwback to Al Smith, who, an aide once said, "could make statistics sit up, beg, roll over and bark...

...By contrast, the authors have developed a sweet tooth for Middle America...

...The new nation's strongest opponent within Harry Truman's Administration was Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had clerked for and revered Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and considered Justice Felix Frankfurter "my intimate friend...

...His employer, on the other hand (if he still has a job), may be the biggest threat to Jewish interests...

...This objection notwithstanding, Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter have addressed the antinomy facing American Jews realistically, and with little recourse to sentimental liberal pieties...

...Curiously, traditional anti-Semitism declined most dramatically in the 20 years following World War II, when no memorials, Presidential commissions or television specials made the rites of mourning a topic of public discourse...

...Still, American Jewry was spared, and in recent decades has experienced opportunity and affluence more directly than prejudice...

...That proverbial Dayton, Ohio housewife may still retain some unsavory subliminal stereotypes, but she probably blames the Arabs for her high fuel bill and, if she is especially religious, prefers Jewish to Moslem control of the Holy Land...

...In 1948 the birth of Israel was promoted by a President whose wife, back in Independence, Missouri, did not entertain Jews socially...

...Having devoted his career to Jewish defense work, he could tabulate the victories...

...Yet the Perlmutters do not make much of an affirmative case for the preservation of differences, for upholding the values and sancta that might sustain contemporary Jewry's pro-Israel consensus...

...It is also why the Perlmutters????unlike the Vichy police captain in Casablanca????are not content with rounding up the usual suspects...

...The chapter on Gentile attitudes toward Jews is something of a model in its integration of survey data?occasionally taken with a stalactite of salt????and interpretive prose...