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.

And then another memory. As the editor of the daily newspaper at Yale, I would spend one hour every week (it was a tradition) with the president, in those days a relatively inaccessible figure. Charles Seymour, historian and curator of the Colonel House collection, was an urbane New Englander, and one day he was reflecting, during our weekly colloquy, on the effort being made by the legislature at Hartford (this was 1949) to enact a Fair Educational Practices Act that would require all colleges in the state to strip from questionnaires sent to applicants any question as to their religion, and to stop asking applicants for photographs. President Seymour was greatly irked by this statist imposition. The legislators do not realize, he said to me, that among the functions of a university is to act as a collector of materials. "We are in the business of amassing data, and what the religious affiliation of a student is we have legitimate reasons for wanting to know."

I remember taking it for granted that Mr. Seymour was not being disingenuous, though the Catholic chaplain of the university winked at me when I told him about it and divulged that each year a virtually identical percentage of Jews and of Catholics was admitted to the freshman class. A book on the general subject has been published (Joining the Club, by Dan A. Oren), and it is certainly true that, at Yale as elsewhere, there was an unspoken racial-religious quota system.

But in that same conversation Charles Seymour went on to say that there were certain taboos that had crystallized in the last generation, among them that one could no longer speak of the Jews as having any "group characteristics." Of course that is nonsense, he said. They do have group characteristics. "So do we Protestants. So do you Catholics. But you aren't supposed to say it." Many years later I repeated this conversation to an urbane Jewish friend, a journalist and author, who said that it was true that you can't ascribe group characteristics to Jews. But a little while later he was telling me that, as a Jew, he was proud of two traits common among Jews, the first a true thirst for justice, the second a "sense of the book," by which he meant a desire to learn; conversely, he disliked what he saw as a tendency to self-imposed tribalism and a tendency of some to violate their ethical precepts by a vulnerability to greed.

This exercise is not for the purpose of attempting a social profile of the American Jew; the intention is much more modest, namely to build some context within which it becomes possible to evaluate what can defensibly be thought of as anti-Semitism and, at the same time, what is wrongfully thought of as anti-Semitic. If it is anti-Semitic to believe that there are group characteristics among Jews, then anti-Semitism indeed lingers.

What about Joe Sobran?

JOE SOBRAN was born in 1946 in Detroit, and I came across him when he was doing graduate work in English at Eastern Michigan University. My host showed me a letter Joe had written to a professor who had volubly objected, in the student newspaper, to my having been invited to speak in the first place. I spotted in that letter an extraordinary polemical skill, as also a capacity to arrange thought with lucidity and wit. I approached him. Soon after, he began flying to New York from Detroit every fortnight to do editorials for NATIONAL REVIEW. A year or so later he emigrated to New York to work full time for the magazine; in due course he went to Washington, reducing his commitments to regular editorials and criticism, and coming in to New York once every month.