Dear Editor
Dear Editor Anti'Semitism Having long been an admirer of Richard J. Margolis' "States of the Union" column, I read his piece on "The Big Lie in Iowa" (NL, August 6) with great dismay, even...
...Margolis' farmer is not a Hitler and probably not a potential Hitler...
...He evidently wants us to accept it: "we can forgive" the farmer who complained that Jewish landlords caused this country's troubles in Central America, he writes, since the forces that grind down the multitude "must be named and understood before they can be deflected...
...And with good reason...
...That might more quickly bring about the "common language" Margolis yearns for...
...Perhaps the neoconservatives and their opposite cousins, the radical Leftists, are right in their insistence that the old liberals are out of contact with the times...
...Its absurdity may be somewhat less apparent, but it is not less extreme...
...Hong Kong William McCord is right when he says that the prospect of reabsorbing Hong Kong in 1997 has already liberalized the mainland ("China's Hong Kong Experiment," NL, August 6...
...So what...
...Neither, so far as I know, is Jesse Jackson...
...New York City Robert Persky Richard J. Margolis admits that populist anti-Semitism is a problem "confronting liberals with a major dilemma...
...These may have been weak instruments, but they strike me as superior to the self-righteous posturings recommended by the letter-writers...
...Phoenix Donald Templeton...
...Freer enterprise, however, has not been accompanied by democracy...
...At bottom, they tell us that we need not bother to think hard about American anti-Semitism, its social roots or its political consequences...
...Instead, each of us announced his own identity and then took characteristic consolation in selective aspects of the other's...
...I invoked our intellectual history (Hofstadter...
...But he never identifies our choices very clearly, no doubt because he is embarrassed to make them explicit...
...Dear Editor Anti'Semitism Having long been an admirer of Richard J. Margolis' "States of the Union" column, I read his piece on "The Big Lie in Iowa" (NL, August 6) with great dismay, even disbelief...
...I would remind our three angry correspondents that we are dealing here with an actual event, not a rhetorical daydream, about two strangers with little in common trying to set each other straight...
...In other words, the farmer is correct in regarding himself as oppressed and should not be condemned for failing to identify the true sources of oppression...
...Now, I think it is pretty clear that Margolis would not attempt to rationalize conservative Jew-baiting...
...In the 1980s, one would have thought such slander would be met head on...
...Of course, Hong Kong's freedoms haven't been buttressed by majority rule, either...
...Populist anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism in its most common and deadly form...
...The hypocrisy of this position is too obvious for comment...
...Much more widespread, much more significant in its consequences, is the kind of anti-Semitism August Bebel called "the socialism of fools...
...Perhaps Richard Hofstadter was right when he claimed that "Populist anti-Semitism was entirely verbal...
...I do not protest...
...In Carbon, Iowa, to be a Swede is probably within striking distance of redemption, and certainly to be innocent of any connection with the Eastern Jewish Imperialist Conspiracy...
...It's a peace offering of sorts," he writes unashamedly...
...In such a climate, who needs censorship...
...It might have been a more satisfying tale if I had punched the farmer in the nose or delivered an Odetsian speech while standing atop the bar (jacket shed, tie askew), but that is not what happened at the J&H Corral...
...If they were, its rulers would never abandon the island to an outright dictatorship...
...How else explain Margolis' attempt to rationalize— or worse, apologize for—the know-nothing anti-Semitism of the Iowa farmer he happened upon last year in the J&H Corral bar...
...New York City Eliot Ringelheim Richard J. Margolis replies: What my essay attempts to say is not all that shocking: For the powerful, anti-Semitism may be an indispensable virus in American politics because it disarms and divides the weak...
...Before there was a Hitler there were other, possibly less vicious anti-Semites who helped create the mentality that led to the Final Solution by denouncing Jews as "the invisible hands that have made the villagers dance to urban tunes...
...And isn't it nice that Margolis' bigoted farmer thought him to be Swedish...
...That mentality not only polluted American Populism, as Margolis himself admits, but was also embodied by most anti-Semitic movements of the present century—including, and especially, National Socialism...
...Another category of people prepared the way for Hitler, too: those who called on the Jews to ignore their own survival in the name of a higher, socialist good...
...What nonsense...
...Call the Iowa farmer a fool if you wish, but understand that he is also a case in point, a victim as well as a bigot...
...Mere rage will suffice, as if rage alone could deliver us from so ancient an evil...
...Sympathy with the farmer's overall political outlook, and that alone, inspires him to turn the other cheek...
...Well, I do...
...a mode of expression, a rhetorical style, not a tactic or a program...
...The farmer invoked ethnicity (the Swedes...
...From what Margolis does say, I infer that he rather approves of populism—"a struggle of ordinary people against extraordinary forces"—and thinks we must accept it as we find it, anti-Semitism and all, or reject that struggle entirely...
...Hostility to Jews based solely on social snobbery and religious exclusiveness—for which I would make no excuses either—is relatively unimportant...
...Anyone who ventures beyond the usual condemnations, moreover, risks being accused of resembling those Weimar miscreants who "prepared the way for Hitler...
...Cincinnati David Lewis "In the American body politic," Richard J. Margolis tells us, anti-Semitism "may be an indispensable virus...
...The implicit distinction Margolis draws between populist anti-Semitism (partly excusable, he believes, because it is a form of social protest) and other varieties of the same hateful phenomenon misses the point...
Vol. 67 • September 1984 • No. 16
