In search of anti-semitism: what Christians provoke what Jews? Why? By doing what? - And vice versa

National Review, Dec 30, 1991 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

My impression is that these are tabloidized findings, influenced in part by the national resentment over the (deserved) ostracism of President Kurt Waldheim, and that some of the questions were on the order of, "Do you believe that the experience of slavery benefited the Negro race?" to which question 21 per cent of Americans might answer Yes--reasoning, with Booker T. Washington, that slavery en route to emancipation was preferable to a continuation of the kind of life common in Africa during the eighteenth century.

Apprehensive Jews react in two different ways. On the one hand there is the Jew who, reacting to a remark unfriendly to his cause or his religion, deduces from it a potential to revive the spirit of the Holocaust. There is another reaction, opportunistic in character. There are Americans out there, I think, who would resist a Holocaust as fiercely as Elie Wiesel, who are nevertheless whispered about as anti-Israel and derivatively anti-Semitic, never mind that what they want to talk about or to urge on public policy has nothing to do with approval of anti-Semitism, let alone genocide; which leaves us with some people who don't talk about what they want to talk about for fear of being branded as anti-Semitic.

My father and his generation lived in an age in which anti-Semitism was very widespread. I suppose there is no harm in revealing that it was McGeorge Bundy, former dean of Harvard, former national-security assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, former president of the Ford Foundation, who told me one day at lunch, A propos of I forget what, that if he were to hear spoken today the kind of thing that was "routinely spoken at [his father's] lunch table," he would leave the room in protest.

I knew exactly what he meant, because at my father's lunch table one heard (I must suppose) the same kind of thing. Interestingly enough, the bias never engaged the enthusiastic attention of any of my father's ten children (any more than of Mr. Bundy's four), except in the attenuated sense that we felt instinctive loyalty to any of Father's opinions, whether about Jews or about tariffs or about Pancho Villa. Seven or eight children in Sharon, Connecticut, among them four of my brothers and sisters, thought it would be a great lark one night in 1937 to burn a cross outside a Jewish resort nearby. That story has been told, and my biographer (John Judis) points out that I was not among that wretched little band. He fails to point out that I wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings to go out on that adventure, on the grounds that (at age 11) I was considered too young. Suffice it to say that children as old as 15 or 16 who wouldn't intentionally threaten anyone could, in 1937, do that kind of thing lightheartedly. Thoughtless, yes, but motivated only by the desire to have the fun of scaring adults! It was the kind of thing we didn't distinguish from a Halloween prank. None of us gave any thought to Kristallnacht, even when it happened (November 9, 1938-I was 12, in a boarding school in England), and certainly not to its implications. But then this is a legitimate grievance of the Jew: Kristallnacht was not held up in the critical media as an international event of the first magnitude, comparable to the initial (1948) laws heralding the formal beginning of apartheid or the triggering episodes of the religious wars of the seventeenth century.