THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM

                 
                 "Surely Jews understand that in identifying an anti-Semite one
                  must use a sum-of-all-its-parts test. If it is yellow, has a four-foot neck, spots,
                  and little horns, it is a giraffe." 

                             -- Jewish comedian Jackie Mason and Jewish lawyer Raul

                                Felder, 9-2000, p. 57

                "If you want to understand anti-Semitism, read the Old

                Testament."    -- George Orwell

               "So long as there is a single anti-Semite in the world, I shall

                declare with pride that I am a Jew."  -- Ilya Ehrenburg, Jewish

                                    Russian author, (in DERSHOWITZ, p. 14]

                "Fighting anti-Semitism seems to be for some Jews more

                 important than any other expression of Jewishness ... The

                 danger appears when one becomes dependent upon them for

                 one's identity, so that one begins to need anti-Semitism."

                                             Stanislaw Krajewski,

                                             (Polish Jew)

                "For some Jews and perhaps some of the Jewish leadership, the

                 fear is that if anti-Semitism completely disappears then the

                 Jewish community might erode or dissolve."  Stanley Rothman,

                   (in STALLSWORTH, p. 67)

               "And if real peace does come to Israel, the question will be

                asked:  Can we, and how do we, survive without an external

                enemy?"   Avraham Burg, head of the Jewish Agency,

                [HARTUNG, J., 1995]

              "The assumption of an eternal anti-Semitism ... has been adapted

               by a great many unbiased historians and by even a greater

               number of Jews. It is this odd coincidence which makes the

               theory so very dangerous and confusing. Its escapist basis is

               in both instances the same; just as anti-Semites understandably

               desire to escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked

               and on the defensive, even more understandably, do not wish to

               under any circumstances discuss their share of responsibility."

                                                               Hannah Arendt, Origins, p. 7

                                                               (Jewish historian)

              "The discounting of anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic."
                                            Evelyn Torton Beck, 1982, p. xxii

         "[Jewish psychologist Jules] Nydes argues that such individuals
          [representing the "paranoid masochistic character"] tend to see
          themselves and groups within which they identify as victims who are
          being persecuted. This sense of persecution derives partly from
          unconscious feelings of guilt. The paranoid masochistic person
          engages in aggression against others because he or she expects
          to be attacked. His aggression, which is accompanied by feelings
          of self-righteousness, is rarely satisfying. Indeed, he can often
          achieve gratification only when he is punished, and the punishment
          is interpreted as confirming his preconceived sense of
          persecution ... The typology is suggestive. [Jewish psychoanalyst]
          Theodore Reik, who was Nyde's teacher, suggested that a 'paranoid
          masochistic' personality structure is modal among Jews."
          -- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
           1982, p. 133

             "I felt that the bigotry always blamed on those who said anything

              negative about Jews was equally visible on the other [Jewish]

              side of the fence."         Evelyn Kaye, (Jewish author, p. 114)

              "Privilege does not relieve the vulnerability to prejudice."
                    Michael Paul Sacks, concluding his article
                    about the "privileged" Jewish occupational
                    elite in modern Russia, and non-Jewish hostility to it,
                    1998, p. 266


    "For all my life, I have never felt any substantial anti-Semitism, and
     was rather indifferent to the Jewish community. Then something clicked,
     and I thought, Well, I am over 40, I have made a successful career,
     I have made a forturne. But what will tell my children when I am 70?"
        -- millionaire Leonard Nevzlin, upon becoming president of the
            Russian Jewish Congress [GORODETSKY, L, 5-23-01]

              "We should be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their

              virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group

              without being called an anti-Semite. Frankness does not feed

              anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does."   Kevin Meyers,

                                                                      (British journalist), p. 26

              "Telling the truth is not anti-Semitic. Am I right?"

                                                           Joe Wood, (African-American)

                                                            p. 112

              "It seems that [poet Allen] Ginsberg had traced an obscenity in

               the dust of a dormitory window; the words were too shocking

               for the Dean of Students to speak, so he had written them on a

               piece of paper which he had pushed across the desk to my

               husband: 'Fuck the Jews.' ... 'He's a Jew himself,' said the Dean.

               'Can you understand his writing a thing like that?' Yes, Lionel

               could understand; but he couldn't explain it to the Dean." 

                      Dianna Trilling, (Jewish author) in BLOOM, p. 302

     The foundation of modern Jewish identity is an ideological subscription to a presumed irrevocable omnipresence of irrational "anti-Semitism." Jewish defense to this threat is the common denominator that creates cohesion among even the most disparate peoples of worldwide Jewry. "Being Jewish"  -- above all else, as archaic religious convictions have fallen to the wayside -- is still conceived to be the noble bearing of special, continuous persecution at the hands of the rest of the world. This conviction -- traditionally understood by Jews to be borne as punishment by God for transgressions against covenantal law -- has been the core of Jewish religious belief in their diaspora. Non-Jews are an important part of this world view. To the traditional Jewish perspective, says Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog:

      "the goyim represent, quite literally, an act of God. When they are

       persecutors they are also instruments of justice, punishing the Jews

       for transgressing the Law, and in any case they do not know better."

       [ZBOROWSKI, p. 154]

     The Jew, noted Israel Zangwill in 1893, "looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid instrument of an all-wise Providence." [ZANGWILL, I.,1998, p. 62]

       The notion that Jews, scattered throughout the world, are collectively victims at the hands of all others [i.e., today categorized as "anti-Semitism"), is a conceptual framework, originally religiously based, that actually precedes authentic history and is self-fulfilling. The foundation to understand the Jewish victim complex can be found in their Torah (the Old Testament), for example in Deuteronomy 28. What is today called anti-Semitism was originally conceived as God's punishment of the Jewish people:

     "And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people from one end of

     the earth unto the other ... And among these nations shalt thou find

     no ease, neither shall the sole of they foot have rest: But the Lord

     shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow

     of mind. And they life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt

     fear day and night and have none assurance of thy life ... and thou

     shalt be only oppressed and crushed always."

     It is clear that the Jewish conception of being continuously "persecuted" originates in religious conviction. As Jewish psycholanalyst Theodore Reik notes:

     "The masochistic attitude of ancient Israel was recognized at least in their
      in their relationship with God, whose punishment they took as deserved
     without complaint. They considered also the cruelty with which they were
     treated by their powerful neighbors as punishment for their sins, especially for
     deserting their God. The paranoid attitude in the form of an idea of grandeur
     is obvious in the Jewish claim of being the 'chosen people.' There is even
     even a subterranean tie between the masochistic and the paranoid attitude in
     the idea that God chastises those whom He loves. Such an exceptional
     position has been claimed by the Jewish people since ancient time."
     [REIK, T., 1962, p. 230-231]

      When emptied of purely religious content in modern times, the grand idea of "Jewish punishment by God" is reduced to its areligious backbone: "Jewish persecution by non-Jews." The deep belief of the omnipresence of this is held by even secular Jews with as much conviction as any religion. And for most modern Jews this secular worldview still subliminally clings to the original Judaic paradigm: among other things, Jewish insistence upon a moral superiority above others. Throughout history, hostility for Jews, noted Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, reinforced "their ethnocentric image as a 'chosen people' -- the special animus of non-Jews towards Jews demonstrate [d] the truth of the Jewish claim that they were different, privy to a special status in divine creation -- in short, superior to Gentiles." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p., 36] In Jewish eyes, the evidence for such a self-congratulatory perch is (aside from Old Testament referral) to be found most recently in the Holocaust -- the terrible fruition of traditional canon, the proclaimed "most unique" of human-inflicted atrocities for which all non-Jews are held to be, in abstract, guilty. And all Jews, innocent.

      The combined post-Holocaust Jewish emotions of shame, guilt, fear, and anger have reconstituted a renewed and roiled Jewish identity that reaffirms and pledges its conceptual distance from the rest of the world. Yet Jewish canon, both religious and secular, now militantly demands the pseudo-religious interpretation of the Jewish Holocaust to be sacred, for everyone; the Jews who were murdered in the context of World War II (and not non-Jews) are likewise hallowed. The sheer gravity and allegedly incomparable scope of the mass killings of Jews is also proclaimed to render today's Jews -- genetic inheritors of the Tragedy of tragedies -- beyond moral reproach. Jews are held blameless, irresponsible. Then, now, and across history.

      The framework for this Jewish moral dialectic against the non-Jewish Other rests upon "anti-Semitism," the age-old vehicle for Jewish punishment by God, still conceived as a metaphysical residue of hatred attested to by even secular Jews (post-Holocaust) in the ruins of an otherwise rejected Jewish religion. Underscoring the idea that it is the concept of Gentile hostility that most effectively binds Jews so tightly together, "When there is no anti-Semitism," candidly admits Menachem Revivi, director general of an Israeli support office, "it's much harder to maintain your Judaism." [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 85] "[Jewish mythology declares that] anti-Semitism is a mystifying disease," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "one with perhaps many permutations and with diverse origins, but at root one that is fundamentally irrational. This irrationalism only compounds the innocence of the Jewish victim." These two authors, both Jewish, then feel obliged to add: "It is not our intention to challenge the truth of these myths, we subscribe in good part to most of them." [LIEBMAN/COHEN p. 33] "And who are the anti-Semites?" asked Milton Steinberg, "The mentally sick, the embittered, the frustrated, the sadists. And if they are not sick, then they are worse, they are unprincipled and conscienceless." [STEINBERG, M., 1951, p. 122]

      In the political context of the modern nation of Israel, even its areligious state ideology -- Zionism -- includes Orthodox Judaism's old conviction of an omnipresent 'anti-Semitism" in all non-Jews to be central to its identity dogma. "Like the Nazi ideologues," wrote Jewish anti-Zionist William Zukerman in 1960, "the Zionists take it for granted the Jews are a foreign and inassimilable element in the body of all non-Jewish people ... [and] that hatred for the Jews is something instinctive and mystical, forever engrained in the subconscious of every non-Jew, which can never be eradicated or cured." [ZUKERMAN, p. 63]

      "It is impossible to comprehend the largely irrational nature of [anti-Semitism], says popular Jewish polemicist Alan Dershowitz,  "...The important point is that Jews are not to blame for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is the problem of the bigots who feel, express, and practice it. Nothing we do can profoundly affect the twisted minds of the anti-Semites." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 102, 101]  In a 1995 book about anti-Semitism in Japan, scholar David Goodman noted that "since anti-Semitism as we are defining it has nothing to do with Jews, much less 'Semites,' we will neither hyphenate nor capitalize the term." [GOODMAN, p. 11] Another Jewish scholar, Daniel Pipes, in a book dismissing as nonsense a variety of conspiracy theories, outlined his own personal lens to understand the world, saying, "I spell [antisemitism] in lower case, without a hyphen (not anti-Semitism), to signal that it refers to an ideology and to imply that the phenomenon has almost nothing to do with the actions of Jews." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 27]

     "The term Jew has been used as a term of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries," says Irene Bloomfield, a Jewish psychotherapist, "It expresses the anti-Semite’s virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecution, and death ... The Jews had thus been an archetypical bad object and universal enemy from time immemorial." [BLOOMFIELD, p. 26]  "Among most anti-Semites," adds another Jewish psychotherapist, Mortimer Ostrow, "we found that their irrational hatred was the expression of primary process thinking, that is, thought that is driven by feeling and not subjected to the discipline of reason, logic, and reality testing." [OSTROW, p. 176]  Early, and prominent, Zionist Max Nordau declared that "the anti-Semitic accusations are valueless, because they are not based on a criticism of real facts, but are merely due to the psychological law according to which children, savages, and malevolent fools make persons and things against which they have an aversion responsible for their sufferings. Pretexts change, but the hatred remains. The Jews are not hated because they have evil qualities; evil qualities are sought for in them because they are hated." [HERTZ, J., 1954]

       "Anti-Semitism," says prominent (Jewish) historian Barbara Tuchman, "is independent of its object. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] "We all know that anti-Semitism really has nothing to do with Jews," says scholar Susannah Herschel, "It can flourish even in places where no Jews live."  "The psychic needs of the Christians -- and not the actual characteristics of Jewish life," asserts Todd Endelman, "give anti-Semitism its power and appeal." "Jewish hatred is one-sided," adds Ruth Wisse, "... and functions independent of its object."  "Anti-Semitism is oblivious to Jewish conduct," declared the Jerusalem Post in 1990, "it is independent of the very presence of Jews." [all: LINDEMANN, 1997, p. xvii]  

     "The existence of anti-Semitism and the content of anti-Semitic charges...," wrote Daniel Goldhagen in his best-selling 1996 book about Germany and the Jews, "are fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish actions ... anti-Semitism draws on cultural sources that are independent of the Jews' nature and actions." [Goldhagen's emphases; FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 11] "Let's face it," wrote Harry Golden, ""anti-Semitism can't possibly be explained; it can merely be recounted." "Understand and explain the problem [of anti-Semitism] as much as you may," said Lewis Naimier, "there remains a hard, insoluble core, incomprehensible and inexplicable." [LINDEMANN, p. 11]

      In Jewish folklore, even intra-community jokes reflect the same theme of Jewish categorical innocence as the cause of anti-Semitism. In the following case, it is a Jewish-created defamation of Poles and Poland: a "Pollock" joke:

        "A few months after the end of World War I, the premier of Poland

     had a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. 'If you don't meet

     our nation's demands at the peace conference,' warned the premier,

     'I foresee great troubles ahead. The Polish people will be very

     angry, and they'll go out and massacre the Jews.'

         'And if your demands are met?' asked Wilson.

         'In that case,' responded the premier, 'my people will be delighted.

     They'll go out in the streets and get drunk -- and then they'll massacre

     the Jews.'" [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 60]

     "When it comes to the millions of Jews who faced liquidation in Hitler's Europe," says Jewish author Michael Medved,

    "historians make little effort to figure out what, precisely, the victims had done     
    to make Der Fuehrer so terribly angry. With racial and religious antagonisms,
    we understand that rage can flourish with no basis in reality." [MEDVED, M.
    11-12-01]

      "Jews don't cause anti-Semitism," declares Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "nothing provokes it, it's always there ... The object of gentile racists and nationalist hate, chameleon-like, takes on the shape of that moment's Jew." [ROIPHE, A., 1992, p. 40] "The notion that anti-Semitism can be, in the slightest degree, the fault of the Jews," proclaims well-known Jewish author Cynthia Ozick, "is in itself -- even when it crops up, as it frequently does among Jews -- a species of anti-Semitism." [CUDDIHY, p. 24] 

     Eventual New York Times Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal and reporter Arthur Gelb put the standard Jewish theme this way:

     "The circumstantial evidence is that anti-Semitism is a mental disorder, because
     the anti-Semite sees certain human beings not as human beings but as objects. They
     are reflections of his own needs and passions and his inability to recognize them for
     what they are is such a severe form of irrationalism as to be a symptom of
     mental malfunction. The anti-Semite suffers from a fear of demons, but since he
     is not aware of his fear is convinced of the reality of demons -- a clinical example
     of paranoia." [ROSENTHAL/ GELB, 1967, p. 65]

     "Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," notes a non-Jewish scholar, John Michael Cuddihy, with incredulity and exasperation, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

     Such widespread Jewish Orwellian doublethink loops of logic to fend off blame and responsibility for their historical deeds stems from the old Chosen People syndrome itself, popularly secularized as an impenetrable fortress of denial against all non-Jewish (or Jewish) critical attack, an intellectual ghetto with locked gates: by self-edict declared separate, blameless, unaccountable, and completely untouchable. "This reductio ad absurdum," observes Cuddihy, "has stunning implications. It means that Jews have not been causal agents in their own history ... They did not act and interact causally and historically with other groups in history. Morally blameless, the Jews ... were outside of history, aspiring to ... 'angelism.'" [CUDDIHY, p. 24]

     This outrageously ahistorical perspective is reflected in a comment by Elie Wiesel about the defining Jewish event of the 20th century: "The Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 76]

     In the modern Jewish community post-World War II, notes Jewish critic William Zukerman, "criticism and self-criticism which