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

William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE LETTER from Mr. Horan (a stranger) of Fort Smith, Arkansas, came in to the office in june 1991, soon after we had published an article by Joe Sobran to the effect that it was the Earl of Oxford who had written the plays universally attributed to Shakespeare. The writer caught what humor is to be found In Re Sobran and The Problem, and touches, however inadvertently, on some of the questions I intend to explore.

Dear Mr. Buckley:

Look, I love the hell out of Joseph Sobran, but I think that he's getting a little kooky. In fact, I think that he's getting a lot kooky. I'd like to think that he inhaled a little too much sidestream smoke when he took his boy to see the Rolling Stones, but that was two years ago. If Mr. Sobran is not peddling variants on the Blood Libel, he's schmoozing with the Liberty Lobby, or running on (and on) about the Earl of Oxford, or moaning about how we're gonna get whupped in the Desert ...

The boy needs a rest.

Mr. Sobran is the best "Aginner" I have ever seen. Down my part of the country, an Aginner is a feller who is "against" most everything in general. By and by, these folks have to tell you what they are for, as a way of 'splaining why they are agin something that is going on as they speak. The world has done mostly turned Joe's way in the past three years. Hell, even the universities are getting sick of PC. In five years, Mr. Sobran is going to have nothing which he can legitimately be agin ! Well, who would've thunk and Hallelujah. But there's the rub. Aginners would rather have a silly argument than a nice juicy steak and a roll in the hay with a Genuine Hollywood Star. So now Mr. Sobran is having to go find things to ruckus about, and he has picked up a bunch of sure-fire hellraisers: Jews and Shakespeare. Down here in the South, us dum ole dirteaters would say: "Those is issues that deserve a good lettin' alone."

Please impart that little bit of folk wisdom to my Good Buddy. And tell Mr. Sobran that "You should never try to teach a pig to sing: it can't be done, and it annoys the pig." Robertson v. White, 633 F. Supp. 954, 959 (WD. Ark. 1986). After all, it's The Law.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Horan

We'll let Shakespeare go, while making the point in passing that Mr. Horan is mistaken in suggesting that Joe is always caught up by something or another. Our association goes back twenty years, and though it is true that he has a high capacity for sustained indignation, it is only Israel and The Jews that seem to have him semi-permanently obsessed; yes, the right word, I think. I propose to inquire into the question by analyzing Joe Sobran (a close friend) to the extent necessary to explore contemporary anti-Semitism. This is not a history of anti-Semitism or of its causes. It is rather a look at it as revealed by the practices of a few journalists and intellectuals, and by the arguments they use. There is a great deal to be learned from the experience of Joe Sobran.

Types of Anti-Semitism

I HAVE some credentials in the area, among them my own father's anti-Semitism. It is probably never too early to distinguish the kinds of anti-Semitism we run into in the world. The apocalyptic kind was, of course: The Holocaust; and I'll be asking whether the shadow of the Holocaust is being made to stretch too far in contemporary polemics. This is different from denying that the Holocaust is, and will always be, one of the great historical ventures in denatured human barbarism. There are Jews who continue to fear that the fires that lit the Holocaust might one day be rekindled. But there are also Jews who, comfortable with the protocols built up around Auschwitz, are disposed, so to speak, to prolong the period of de-Nazification indefinitely. And fierce anti-Semitism of a threatening kind continues, for instance among the Palestinians. Probably a higher percentage of them hate the Jews than ever Germans hated the Jews in the Thirties, and the Holocaust is eloquent testimony to what a very few, moved by intense clinical passions, can accomplish. And then too, every now and again one comes across such as Amos Elon, writing in The New Yorker (May 13, 1991):

Anyone with more than a fleeting acquaintance with Vienna knows that for every Viennese hatemonger you read about there are many Viennese who are liberal-minded. And yet in a 1980 poll, 20 per cent of the Austrians who responded said they were in favor of legally prohibiting Jews from owning real estate and capital in Austria. A poll taken in 1984 by Vienna University social scientists showed that only 14 per cent of the population was "largely free of prejudice" against Jews. Sixty-four per cent said that Jews were "too powerful" politically and economically. Thirty-four per cent believed that "honest competition" with Jews was impossible. Fifty-seven per cent said that they shouldn't have to be reminded so often of the murder of millions of Jews in the extermination camps. Twenty-one per cent said that the removal of the Jews from our country [under the Nazis] has also produced positive results." In a more recent poll, 23 per cent said that "Jews should not occupy influential positions in our country," and 6 per cent confessed that they would be physically repelled if they had to shake a Jew's hand.

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.

When, a few years before the cross-burning near Sharon, Connecticut, a Jewish student was elected to a fraternity at Yale University, a pig was burned outside its doors that night. Those were the years when Daniel Bell, freshly graduated from CCNY (the City College of New York), decided to go to Japan to become a Sinologist.

Why? Because he told me there was no wa in which he could achieve a tenured chair at Columbia (his burning ambition) as a mere social scientist: "They just didn't give professorships to Jews," he explained. So his stratagem was to become a Sinologist, who were in such short supply as to permit him the leverage of the seller's market. A world war spared him the effort, and of course he has just retired from a tenured chair at Harvard. But the professor who taught me philosophy was the first Jew to be given tenure at Yale.*

Suffice it to say that anti-Semitism of the kind experienced by such as the above was pervasive in America and that what happened in Germany, Austria, and Poland during the Forties is, in the judgment of many Jews, the hideous result, if not exactly of animus expressed casually at the dining tables of New England and Paris, then of international indifference to such animus.

It is not easy to pin down. There are flashes of memory. I think of the Spanish guide who led us by the great painting in the Prado of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, shown hurling the crucifix at the feet of Ferdinand and Isabella. She explained the drama to us: "Torquemada was demanding that the Jews in Spain who continued to deny Christ be expelled--otherwise, said Torquemada, throwing a crucifix down on the floor at the feet of his sovereigns, Crucifiquenlo de nuevo!' (Crucify him yet again!)" Their sovereign majesties signed the expulsion order, and the Inquisition began.

Yes, 1492. The Jews were formally readmitted to Spain (easy to remember the date, which requires only a simple digital inversion) in 1942. Much can be written about the cultural and ethical meaning of those five hundred years of expulsion, but most Catholics would reasonably consider it a quirk of anti-Catholicism to link any present-day Catholic practice to the Inquisition. Anyone who preached that to yield to current Catholic political doctrine on, say, abortion would catapult us back onto the road to the Inquisition would be smiled at, or should be; raising the question whether certain kinds of statements about American Jews, or about Israel, are responsibly interpreted as early-bird signs of a remobilization toward Auschwitz.

And then too, in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, a number of fragile formulations became modish and, in the general piety brought on by the Holocaust, were inadequately explored. I remember Gregory Peck in the movie Gentlemen's Agreement. He fought bravely for the right of Jews to buy property in a suburban area previously restricted, informing the judge (jury? newspaperman? congregation?--I forget) that there was no such thing as a Jewish "race," there was only a Jewish religion. A valid taxonomic point which, however, should not be used to strip probably the majority of American Jews, who (like their Protestant counterparts) are not actively religious, of their ethnic pedigrees. The famous answer to the question, Who is a Jew? is of course, "Anyone who says he is a Jew." Jewish Orthodoxy has a more formal answer to that question, but we are not talking about doctrinal definitions. A Catholic who does not do his Easter Duty has committed a mortal sin, and until relieved through confession is a spiritual expatriate, but is nevertheless thought by his neighbors, who in any case tend not to notice Sunday parietals, to be "a Catholic," and the census takers formally put him down as one. Many Americans who consider themselves Jewish rest their claims on ethnic origins rather than on religious credenda.

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.

Meanwhile, he had begun publishing a syndicated column.

Early in 1986 I scheduled a private dinner with him at which I told him that I thought he should know that in his syndicated column he was gradually giving his readers the impression that he was obsessed on the subject of Israel. More, I told him that unlike obsessions with, say, Nicaragua or China or even Russia, an obsession with Israel at the expense of Israel gives rise to suspicions of an awakening anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism, I told him, is a mortal disease in his profession. I even joked about it a little. William Scranton (I remember saying) had for a generation been among the two or three most influential Republicans in the country. Then President-elect Nixon sent him to the Middle East to survey the scene. He returned to say he thought the Nixon Administration should be "more evenhanded" in managing the problems of the Middle East, and he has never been heard from since!" We both laughed. One does laugh when acknowledging inordinate power, even as one deplores it. It would not have occurred to me, that evening, to suggest to Joe that he avoid anti-Semitism. Because to do so would have sounded as patronizing and unnecessary as to warn him against contracting syphilis.

But six months later I judged it to be crisis time. I called the senior staff of NATIONAL REVIEW together. We met three times, twice with Joe. What led to those meetings, and what issued from them, is compactly explained in the editorial note I published in the issue of July 4, 1986:

IN RE JOE SOBRAN AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Complaints have reached us concerning a series of columns written by my colleague Joseph Sobran under the aegis of his newspaper syndicate. It is charged that these columns constitute anti-Semitism. In the columns, Mr. Sobran, among other things, has declared that Israel is not an ally to be trusted; surmised that the New York Times endorsed the military strike against Libya only because it served its Zionist editorial line; and ruminated that the visit of the Pope to a synagogue had the effect of muting historical persecutions of Christians by Jews. In that last column, Mr. Sobran, exasperated, wrote, "But it has become customary recently to ascribe all Jewish-Christian friction to Christians. If a Jew complains about Christians, Christians must be persecuting him. If a Christian complains about Jews, he is doing the persecuting--in the very act of complaining. It simply isn't fair." And in his most recent column on the theme, Joe Sobran complains that he is criticized for being anti-Semitic unwarrantedly: "I find that the more I say what I really think, the more I'm accused of thinking something else." Again he says that "the word 'anti-Semite' is more potent than most of the charges of bigotry that are flung around these days. It carries the whiff of Nazism and mass murder. It means,' as a friend of mine puts it, 'that you ultimately approve of the gas chambers."'

It is appropriate, on my own behalf and on that of my other senior colleagues, to comment on what is becoming a public quarrel involving Joe Sobran and those who impute anti-Semitism to him.

What needs to be said first is that those who know him know that Sobran is not anti-Semitic. Neither is he begin counting) a) anti-black, b) anti-Italian, c) anti-women, nor even d) anti-gay, to list some of the controversies he has got into that have resulted in such allegations. He is against a) some things done by blacks, b) some things done by ItalianAmericans, c) some things done by the women's liberation movement, and d) some things done by gays. With learning and eloquence, his acute eye roams the universe day and night in search of paradox and irony. In doing so he finds his quarries; but sometimes, in exposing them, he expresses himself with excessive liberty from accepted conventions.

Now ethnic sensitivities vary. It doesn't much matter what John Cheever or John O'Hara or John Updike or anybody else writes about them--you cannot really succeed, in America, in riling the WASPS. Their sense of security is as solid as Plymouth Rock, and incidentally as insensate. Blacks, yes, are sensitive, but black lobbies are not powerful enough to punish non-political transgressors against such taboos. (A black book-buyers' boycott against a novelist would not impoverish.) If the spoken or written offense is egregious enough, as in the case of the joke told [in 1975] to John Dean by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, a Cabinet officer gets fired. If a district attorney is named to a federal judgeship and it is revealed that he once made a pot-valiantly genial reference to the Ku Kaux Klan, he can be defeated on the floor of the Senate. And no one running for office in a state in which the black population is significant would consider, post 1965, violating the taboo. On the other hand, there is discussion of such questions as relative black intelligence, sexual promiscuity, and upward mobility that still gets a sober hearing in sober surroundings. About the American Indians one can say most things with impunity; about gays, progressively less as, emerging from the closet, they consolidate and give strength to their retaliatory powers.

In respect of American Jews, the sensitivity is of an extremely high order, and for the best of reasons. The toniest "liberal" universities in America would not, until about the time Joe Sobran was born, give tenure to Jewish professors. To elect a Jewish student to most social fraternities was quite simply unthinkable a generation ago. The designation of Jews as mortal enemies of civilization by the same European power that had given us Bach and Goethe, Kant and Einstein, reminded the Jews (those Jews who survived) that no society, however civilized its pedigree, can complacently be trusted to desist from the most ferocious human activity: genocide.

It is a far cry from Auschwitz to the suggestion (Joe Sobran's) that the Israelis are "frequently duplicitous" in their behavior toward America: but it ought not to surprise Sobran that such charges tend to alarm American Jews. And given Sobran's high intellectual acumen, one wonders that he should, on the one hand, quote with evident concurrence an anonymous friend's warning that the word "anti-Semitic" "... means that you ultimately approve of the gas chambers," and yet be surprised-indeed, be deeply hurt--by the intensity of the criticism he has experienced. When, 35 years ago, I wrote that an anti-conservative, anti-Christian consensus prevailed in the Yale faculty, I would not have been justified in registering surprise when conservative Christian scholars at Yale failed to achieve tenure.

My own evaluation of the public question in which Joe Sobran is involved--and here I speak also for the other senior editors--is this:

1. The structure of prevailing taboos respecting Israel and the Jews is welcome. The age calls for hypersensitivity to anti-Semitism, over against a lackadaisical return to the blase conventions of the pre-war generation, which in one country led to genocidal catastrophe. Needless to say, this is hardly to dignify the preposterous charges of anti-Semitism occasionally leveled, ignorantly and sometimes maliciously, at anyone who takes a position contrary to that of organized Jewish opinion, whether in Israel or elsewhere.

2. Any person who, given the knowledge of the reigning protocols, read and agonized over the half-dozen columns by Joe Sobran might reasonably conclude that those columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism. A savage entering a Catholic church who absentmindedly chewed on consecrated wafers would not be thought blasphemous. The non-savage, doing the same thing, would. Naifs cannot commit a black mass; cosmopolitans can, and do.

3. Those who know Joe Sobran know not only that he does not harbor ethnic prejudices, but that he regards such prejudice as sinful, despised by God, and therefore despised by man. But the personal integrity of a private man is a matter adjudicated between him, his family, and his conscience. The integrity of a public figure is public business. If the public establishes a consensus that during the playing of the National Anthem hands should not be placed in one's pants pockets, then to do so from the dais is an affront on the assembly, never mind that the clinical argument can be made that hands in pockets are not intrinsically an act of disrespect. [I once passed by Lenin in his tomb, hands in pockets, and was told to remove them. I did so, understanding.]

4. In the last fifteen or twenty years, under the leadership of the Soviet Union, it became plain that institutional anti-Semitism was consolidating around the political Left, where, ideologically, class hatreds belong. A scholar, recently commenting on the drift away from Communism by the American Left, acutely observed that their disillusion with Communism was rather a reaction against Communism's "ungainly" cultural performance in literature and the arts, than against human depravity. In England, anti-Semitism (disguised as anti-Zionism) is the property of the political Left. So does the animus move in the United States, where The Nation magazine exhibits the same kind of toleration toward anti-Semitism (witness the recent essay there by Gore Vidal, in which neoconservatives are dismissed as Zionist imperialists) that it shows to Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and Alger Hiss. The movement of anti-Semitism from unexamined prejudice of the political Right to inchoate agenda of the political Left is of epochal significance. The call, on the Right, fully to excrete its old prejudices is, accordingly, of first strategic and tactical importance.

5. NATIONAL REVIEW has, since its inception, declined association with anti-Semites, and indeed on one occasion went a generic step further. When it became clear, in 1957, that the direction The American Mercury was headed was anti-Semitic, I ruled, with the enthusiastic approval of my colleagues, that no writer appearing on the Mercury's masthead, notwithstanding his own innocence on the subject, could also appear on NATIONAL REVIEW'S.

The relationship of this journal toward our highly esteemed and beloved colleague, Joe Sobran, is one that will ultimately reflect a mature and civilized resolution of our commitment to these positions. We know him not to be what he is thought by some to have become; but what they suspect is not, under the circumstances, unreasonable. Accordingly, I here dissociate myself and my colleagues from what we view as the obstinate tendentiousness of Joe Sobran's recent columns. We are confident that in the weeks and months to come, he will charitably and rationally acknowledge the right reason behind the crystallization of the present structure of taboos, and that he will accordingly argue his positions in such fashion as to avoid affronting our natural allies.

How They Reacted

MY HANDLING of the Sobran crisis, as it turned out, didn't satisfy all our readers, didn't satisfy all our critics, and didn't satisfy Joe Sobran. He and I arrived at a private covenant: Whenever Joe set out to write about the Mideast, he would call and read me his column in draft form. The assumption here was that I was by experience better equipped than he to detect the formulation that was unwarrantedly provocative. Joe abided for a while by that covenant and read me two columns in the ensuing two or three months. He then stopped doing so, writing infrequently about the Mideast. But in the spring of 1990 he went back to the subject with, well, a vengeance. Meanwhile he had written me a long letter.

Back in February of 1987 I had from my colleague Jeffrey Hart--a senior editor Of NATIONAL REVIEW, a professor of English at Dartmouth, a syndicated columnist, and an occasional contributor to Commentary--a letter in which he relayed detailed complaints from Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz is, of course, the editor of Commentary, and a principal figure in the neoconservative movement. Beginning twenty years ago he took Commentary from a position of highbrow flatulence on the problem of Soviet imperialism and turned it into one of the most sophisticated and formidable weapons of the West in the cold war. Commentary is, officially, a publication of the American Jewish Committee, which body, however, has never interfered with Podhoretz's authority, any more than it had with that of the magazine's distinguished founder, Elliot Cohen.

Podhoretz now wrote to Hart about an article appearing in NATIONAL REVIEW by Sobran criticizing NR's editorial policy on the Mideast.

Mr. Podhoretz reasonably assumed that Jeff Hart would pass the letter on to me, and accordingly I replied to him directly:

You wrote that you were "surprised and dismayed by the fact that NATIONAL REVIEW published such a piece" as Joe Sobran had written, and that my doing so "does damage ... lending credence to all those like Marty Peretz [the editor-in-chief of The New Republic] who have attacked me [Podhoretz] for being too easy on Buckley." The time is clearly overdue for a recapitulation of the relevant data.

1. I deemed Joe Sobran's six columns contextually anti-Semitic. By this I mean that if he bad been talking, let us say, about the lobbying interests of the Arabs or of the Chinese, he would not have raised eyebrows as an anti-Arab or an anti-Chinese.

2. I took the initiative in disavowing those columns and in pointing out the contextual danger of such language. In doing so, I proffered my own opinion, which is expert, on the question whether Sobran was in fact anti-Semitic.

3. I advised Joe that if he continued to write such columns, we would need to dissociate ourselves not only from the columns, but from him, on the grounds that he was invincibly ignorant of an ethical-cultural point which I deem critically important in modern discourse.

4. It would appear to me, based on your reaction to my publishing his essay, that you are under the impression that I should have shorn him of his privileges as a senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW. There is no compelling reason for you to be acquainted with the protocols of this magazine, but for thirty years I have given to any senior editor the privilege of disagreeing with the policy of the magazine through the device of the so-called "Open Question."

5. So convinced is Sobran that the charges of anti-Semitism leveled against him are intellectually and objectively unfair that he asked for space in which to give the reasons why. I did not rescind NATIONAL REVIEW'S policies when I agreed to give him that space, which by organic arrangements he was entitled to. But I did, as an amateur diplomatist, urge him to recast his essay, when I saw the first draft of it, which, had I published it in the form presented, would in turn have required me to reiterate my livid objections to his six columns. He understood my point, substantially reconstructed his essay, and came up with 1,500 words to only a few sentences of which I have any objection whatever. . . . Moreover, you are strangely insensitive to the point that his essay is much more damaging to me than it is to you, for reasons I shan't patronize you by elucidating. [By this I meant that Joe's scorn for the reasoning by which I and my colleagues were guided was very painful to read from a colleague, published in my magazine.]

6. Your letter to Jeff arrives at the strangest moment, when you profess yourself embarrassed by insufficient docility to Marty Peretz, whose criticisms of NATIONAL REVIEW you [evidently] now feel you must pay more solemn attention to. This notwithstanding an editorial paragraph by Peretz published in the contemporary issue [of The New Republic] which is as indefensible as anything ever done by Sobran. [Peretz, reacting to my defense of Cardinal O'Connor when he visited Israel, had written, ". . . his abundant ignorance of the Middle East cannot suffice as explanation. The old Catholic Right has always had trouble with the Jewish problem. This explains why Buckley has made things so cozy for an unabashed bigot like columnist Joseph Sobran."] Jeff Hart's covering letter [to me] touches on several subjects, one of them Peretz's attack. "Marty Peretz's remarks in TNR are outrageous. Maybe you should take them on in a column-except that it is so disagreeable to get into the ring with someone who can write in the terms Peretz employed." I note that you say that in the next issue of Commentary you will apologize for your treatment of me--who took the initiative in respect of Sobran--rather than for Peretz, whose frenzy causes me only to be grateful that he is not a representative of Catholic orthodoxy; he is your problem, not mine. I despise the low level of his polemics, even as I contemplate with genuine pride the invitation I received today to accept the annual award of the Anti-Defamat/ion League.

Norman--of course--replied.

1. For the record, I deemed Joe Sobran's columns anti-Semitic in themselves, and not merely "contextually." On that issue, it seems we disagree.

2. As to whether Sobran himself--as opposed to what he has written--is anti-Semitic, I leave that judgment to God. Your own "expert" opinion carries enormous authority with me, of course. But shouldn't you be entertaining a doubt or two in light of what you say in point 5? [That his original draft had crossed the bearable line.]

3. Might not point 5 also have a bearing here?

4. I do not presume to advise you, or any other editor, on internal procedures. But the rubric under which Sobran's article was published does not absolve the magazine of responsibility for publishing it. [A serious point, worth pondering. Should an editor who traditionally cedes to a dissenting senior editor the space in which to register the reasons for his dissent suspend the convention rather than publish in it material he deems indefensible?]

5. In addition to the comments I have already made on this point, I have to say that I found Sobran's article (as I wrote ... ) "simultaneously disingenuous and unrepentant." Surely you can't disagree with that characterization.

6. What can you mean by saying that Marty Peretz is my problem? That he and I are both Jewish? Why on earth should I apologize for him? He neither works for me nor speaks for me. Indeed, as it happens, I was so outraged by his editorial that I hung up on him when he too remained unrepentant in response to my call of protest. [A resourceful defense. Co-warriors in pro-Israelism don't in fact have to defend, or denounce, one another's tactics. But normally they exercise the right to do so, even if they are not thereby discharging a formal responsibility.]

So that Joe Sobran: Chapter 1 left the concerned public confused. Since anti-Semitism is essentially a moral question, it pays to labor to dissipate at least such confusion as yields to reason.

1. Norman Podhoretz was clearly correct that Joe Sobran was unrepentant.

2. Commentary's editor thought NATIONAL REVIEW'S editor wrong to publish Sobran's defense of himself, on the grounds that it was, inherently, yet another anti-Semitic exercise.

3. Yet another editor (Peretz of The New Republic) goes on record as suggesting that Buckley, as a member of the "old Catholic Right," has a "problem" with Jewish questions, which is why he extends hospitality to an unabashed bigot" like Sobran.

4. Buckley et al., alarmed by Sobran's columns, had dissociated themselves from the sentiments expressed and language used, but were not prepared to sever their links with Sobran.

5. Podhoretz et al. are terminally displeased with Sobran, but only disappointed with Buckley.

6. Peretz is terminally displeased with Sobran and enough displeased with Buckley to denounce him in language that provokes a fellow editor, who is also Jewish, to hang up the telephone on him, while maintaining

7. that although a Jewish editor has no moral mandate publicly to dissociate himself from editorial outlawry committed by a fellow editor who is himself Jewish and is addressing the same questions, a Christian editor who exercises direct editorial control over his own journal should not permit the appearance in it under any dispensation of material deemed indefensible.

Today's Anti-Semitism

IN SEARCHING out the meaning of contemporary anti-Semitism, it is useful to ask whether in order to qualify as a contemporary anti-Semite one needs to be anti-Israel. The anti-Semitism of days gone by obviously manifested itself in other ways, ranging (with Hitler's awful exception) from exclusion from certain country clubs to immigration barriers. I suppose there are people around who go berserk at the presence of a Jew, as the Vienna poll above suggests, but they cannot be numerous (I have never met one).

In any event, no one is saying that kind of thing about Sobran. "People who call me anti-Semitic haven't the least idea what I'm about," he wrote me. It isn't only that the mere suggestion of such an ethnic allergy surprises him. "The fact is that I get bored in most places where there aren't a certain number of Jews, because there are so many really original thinkers among them [group characteristics?]. I need them. Even when I disagree with them I need their challenge."

But Sobran quickly qualifies this, turning it right around. What he calls philo-semitism, he says, makes inordinate demands on intelligent people with live analytical minds. The people he criticizes, he says, [feel] victimized even when they have considerable power and aren't using it very creditably." Once again he alights on what Mr. Seymour would have called a group characteristic:

It's hard to generalize about them, and yet they do have a discernible if not exactly definable character. . . . PhiloSemitism can overgeneralize as preposterously as anti-Semitism. The fact that the one has replaced the other only means that the Jews' corporate fortunes have improved, not that people really appreciate them as they deserve to be appreciated. Real appreciation includes a certain amount of criticism, but even that has to rest on the assumption that they have the same rights as other people . . . But in our time, any criticism that doesn't sound like an after-dinner toast shocks the easy philo-semitism of people who just don't want any trouble.

Joe then turns (these quotes are from the long personal letter addressed to me) to his reading of history.

The ancient pagan charge against the Jews was that they were "misanthropes." At any rate, however the Jews now may differ from the Jews then, they've always been aloof debunkers of what they took to be the idolatries of people around them, including Christianity. This naturally irritates the natives-or maybe I should say the nativists. At times it irritates me. But you have to learn to respect that.

Joe was writing during a period when he was so fiercely at odds with Desert Storm that he was attracted to anyone, Left or Right, who opposed the military intervention in Iraq.

I had to learn that [Noam] Chomsky is as much a native of this country as I am, and that it was silly to call him "anti-American." His integrity and courage show in his willingness to live with that sort of dismissal. He's also been as unsparing of Israel as he has been of the U.S., when he could have made his life a lot easier among the intellectuals by being discreetly selective in his criticism. To my mind he represents something deeper and more honorable in the Jewish character than the Jewish chauvinists do. He's a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile.

Joe Sobran is convinced that it is only the policies of the State of Israel that attract his critical attention, and plague him. Whether it is policies that are distinctively, even uniquely, Israeli that upset him, or whether an anti-Israeli-anti-Semitic?-tropism manipulates his thought, it is an object of this essay to explore.

His criticisms of Israeli policy are adamant, and incessant.

When I talk to a Palestinian for an hour or two, I'm struck at how absolutely bizarre it is that an editor of The New Republic or Commentary can, any time he wishes, buy a plane ticket and, upon landing at Tel Aviv, assume a whole range of "rights" that are denied to the native Arab.... Zionism is actually the assertion of some very unusual prerogatives. [Sobran doesn't distinguish here, though he should, between Arabs in the conquered territories, who enjoy virtually no rights, and Arabs within Israel, who have equal rights except that those who do not serve in the military (Jews are required to do so) forfeit some rights, e.g., to government jobs.] "Anti-Semitism" only seems to show up nowadays in the context of discussion of Israel. Jews aren't beaten in the streets, snubbed, denied entry to Harvard, etc. By every other index, anti-Semitism is defunct. Yet the Zionist Apparat wants to convince us it's raging, just beneath the surface." It talks about "polite" and "sophisticated" and "thinly veiled" anti-Semitism. For some reason the stuff never gets overt. It always has to be exposed by interpretation. These ostensible qualifiers don't really qualify, either: when you're accused of "polite" anti-Semitism, your accuser is not saying: "Well, he may be an anti-Semite, but at least he's polite." He's saying: "This guy's politeness is phony. Strip away the fake good manners, and he's just another Hitler."

The jury reasonably asks: Is the critic of Israel so possessed to indict as to disfigure what actually goes on in Israel? Is he vulnerable to the charge that selective indignation betrays him? Isn't it fair to point out an historical indifference to the policies of other countries with analogous domestic policies? (Joe Sobran never spent a lot of time blasting apartheid.)

The column most frequently cited by critics of Sobran as dispositive on the matter of whether he is an anti-Semite is the one in which he "praised" the magazine Instauration, a wild racist-nativist publication whose deranged editor has a certain aptitude for wit and trenchancy, skills not denied to exhibitionists, as students of Gore Vidal will acknowledge. What Sobran wrote in this column (May 8, 1986) was, "I know of only one magazine in America that faces the harder facts about race: a little magazine called Instauration. Its articles are unsigned, and the name of its editor, Wilmot Robertson, is apparently fictitious .... Instauration is an often brilliant magazine, covering a beat nobody else will touch, and doing so with intelligence, wide-ranging observation, and bitter wit." Now note this carefully: "It is openly and almost unremittingly hostile to blacks, Jews, and Mexican and Oriental immigrants. It is also hostile to Nazism, which makes things confusing. Furthermore, it is hostile to Christianity."

It is characteristic of the critic on the chase that, yelping with glee over the discovery of Sobran on Instauration, he is indifferent to the qualifications Sobran entered. That Instauration is "hostile to blacks, ... Mexican and Oriental immigrants ...[and] Christianity" becomes simply unnoticeable. But even allowing for the qualification, there was no excusing what Sobran said. (The patron wisecrack highlighting the technique of the irrelevant excuse was that of Fr. George Tyrrell, who said of his fellow Jesuits at the turn of the century, "Accuse them of murdering three men and a dog, and they will triumphantly produce the dog alive.") It becomes so-what time that the magazine also hates everybody else. Instauration demands of a morally sensible reader simply: denunciation. It assumes," Joe continued, "a world of Hobbesian conflict at the racial level: every race against every race. Knowing racial harmony is hard, Instauration takes a fatal step further and gives up on it." One sees here intellectual curiosity disinterestedly at work, a psychoanalyst probing inquisitively the character of Jack the Ripper. But now Joe Sobran, Explorer, tells us that usually there are grounds for interracial tension. "The liberal bromide tells us that prejudice is the product of ignorance, [but] the truth is that racial antagonism usually comes from personal experience. And yet that same experience produces personal affections for individuals of other races, affections that rule out, for most of us, total racial hostility." This finding is very possibly true, and in any event not uniquely invidious in respect of any particular race or creed.

Sobran, in the end, was respectful enough of public opinion to recognize his mistake. He was writing, after all, as a syndicated columnist, not as a psychologist for the Parapsychology Review, in which role he would be as unconcerned for taboos as a computer. "My column," he wrote a few weeks later, "should have denounced Instauration more vigorously, and anyone else is certainly welcome to do so. I have since learned, for instance, that it favors abortion as a way of controlling the black population. There you have two ugly positions rolled into one, and I should have had the sense to deduce this from the magazine's general premises. Its racism is serious. What I called its bitter wit' is more often cruel sarcasm, compulsively cruel even when it can't be funny."

In conclusion: Sobran made a serious mistake in applauding Instauration, whatever the stated qualifications. It is, however, a matter of record, first, that he entered these qualifications, and, second, that he withdrew his praise and publicly regretted having given it. He was nowhere (that I have seen) credited for this act of contrition, any more than for the earlier qualifications.

One Idea at a Time?

THE LESSON HERE is important. An editorialist isn't expected to weigh all the pros and cons of an argument or an article or indeed a book that contains outrageous thought or language, nor is he permitted to do so. I suppose an analogue would be the columnist who wrote one sentence praising any aspect of Hitler's character. Whatever else he went on to write, he would run the risk, in hostile circles, of being the man who praised Hitler, even as Joe Sobran became the man who praised Instauration (as I remain, in some quarters, the man who praised Joe McCarthy). A very strong case can be made, has been made, for evaluating the oeuvre of Ezra Pound without the compunction to critical immobilization upon encountering the anti-Semitic line. Ironically, Pound himself wrote that everyone's ideas should be judged one at a time. A columnist can't reasonably expect such treatment. Politicians, many of whom outlast critical writers, sometimes outpace the black little cloud over their heads. Many Southern segregationists got by, most conspicuously George Wallace, as the passage of time washed away their earlier positions. Churchill had a line or two praising the early Hitler, and Truman said, "I like old Joe Stalin." But they went on to spend most of their public lives fighting totalitarianism, even as columnist James Jackson Kilpatrick, who early on defied the civil-rights laws and their implications, has spent 25 years arguing the contrary position. Joe Sobran hasn't the equivalent opportunity. Having concluded (correctly, 1 like to think) that anti-Semitism in America is not threatening to American Jews in its shabby old uniform, he is not likely to have the opportunity to do spectacular service for the cause of Judaeo-Christian comity, by emerging as a fighter against a prejudice that no longer threatens. He isn't likely to have any dramatic opportunity to compensate for his isolatable enthusiasm (a single column) for a thoroughly racist screed. I expect it would be quoted against him if he perished on the Golan Heights, planting there the flag of Israel, in the manner of the great tableau on Iwo Jima. The question naturally then arises whether the gestating anti-Semite has gradually become fixated on the subject of Israel, whose every act at the bargaining table, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, advances the fetal little monster toward untethered life. Sobran has a very difficult time of it. It is a common casualty of the world of polemics that critics don't always have the time, or take it if they do, for patient, detailed inquiry. Such inattentions to detail breed licentiousness. Sobran has written that "Israel is a deeply anti-Christian country; it has even eliminated the plus sign from math textbooks because the plus sign (yes, this: ) looks like a cross! Yet Israel depends on American Christians for tax money and tourism, so it has to mute this theme for foreign consumption." It is true that some hyper-orthodox Jewish sects oppose the use of the plus sign. But the taboo is not generally exercised in Israel. Besides which, there is the undistributed middle in the syllogistic sequence. American taxpayers who give money to Israel give money for a Jewish homeland where it ought not to be expected that Orthodox Jews should respect the cross. For them the identifying profanation is, inevitably, the cross. American Christians who visit Israel do so for the most part as pilgrims going to the Holy Land. Jewish custodians of the Holy Land sites have never interfered with Christians who go to venerate. The distinctions are lost in Sobran's analysis. Israel's "prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, is the former head of the Stern Gang, an assassin himself, it's rather as if Jimmy Hoffa had been elected President of the United States." The analogy is a Trojan horse, demolishing Joe's point. Hoffa led a movement designed to give him autocratic control of a labor union. Shamir participated in a paramilitary movement, often bloody, designed to realize a great ethnic-religious-historical dream. That they both used guns no more fuses them morally than the Green Berets and John Dillinger become one because both used guns.

In another column, Sobran wrote that Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas Friedman of the New York Times had been suppressed by the editors when he "wrote a path-breaking story describing the massive Israeli bombing of Beirut as 'indiscriminate."' I found this difficult to believe when I read the column, and called Friedman, who told me hastily (he could not stay long on the telephone, because Rosh Hashanah was closing in) that the allegation was in all important respects incorrect, as recorded in an article he had written for the Columbia Journalism Review. He would be glad, he said, to give the whole story to anyone I designated. I wrote to Joe advising him of Friedman's correction and relaying Friedman's invitation. It was a long time before Joe referred to this letter. When you impugn my factual accuracy,' you hit a sore spot. I got my version of Friedman from a couple of conversations, and lazily didn't track the facts down to make sure. I take your word for it; and I'd have called on Friedman if I just hadn't been so damned overwhelmed at the time. Mea culpa." Let's face it, a juror could reasonably conclude that Joe is not industriously curious to uncover refutations of his burgeoning case against Israel.

A week or so earlier, Sobran had cited a book, By Way of Deception: A Devastating Insider's Portrait of the Mossad, by Victor Ostrovsky (the book, it transpired within a matter of months, is of dubious reliability), that alleged that Israeli intelligence had discovered before the fateful act that Syrian terrorists were planning to stage the attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983. Shamir, he wrote a few months later, is an "unreconstructed thug." There are more illuminating ways to communicate what one wants to communicate about Shamir, however negative. "The Israeli state does not recognize intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews as valid, which means that Israel's Jews as well as its Arabs are denied some of the rights we take for granted here." That isn't exactly correct. Israel, as a Jewish state, will not issue a license to a Jew to marry a non-Jew. But an intermarriage transacted abroad (e.g., in Cyprus or Rhodes) yields equal rights to the couple on their return to Israel. "Though Israel doesn't have a formal constitution, it does have what it calls its Basic Law, under which Jews are more equal than others. Israel's High Court has ruled that the Basic Law actually precludes equal rights for non-Jews. 'It is necessary,' the court says, 'to prevent a Jew or Arab who calls for equality of rights for Arabs from sitting in the Ynesset or being elected to it.' And even if a Jewish majority passed a law extending full rights to non-Jews, such a law would be invalid." It is difficult to comment on this because although laws passed by the Knesset are binding, it is true that laws defying the Torah are unlikely to get passed. What results, in a Jewish state with secular interests, is a congeries of paradoxes, like that of the mixed marriage contracted abroad. Another is the right of return of the Jew-and his non-Jewish relatives. An estimated 30 per cent of the Russian immigrants are related to Jews, but not themselves Jewish. They will enjoy identical rights.

In another column, Sobran writes, "John Kifner of the New York Times sums up his [Kahane's] position shrewdly: Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Kahane contended, was never based on Western democratic principles, but on Jewish ritual law, which he said forbade close contact with non-Jews."' Kahane was a fanatic, Sobran explained. "At the same time, he had enough empathy (he called it 'respect,' though that was stretching a point) for the Palestinians to understand that they would never be content to be semi-citizens of a Jewish state. In that sense [Kahane] was neither a fool nor a hater-just a keen-witted fanatic. His blunt conclusion formed the title of one of his books: They Must Go. He even hinted that violence against liberal Jews would be a mitzvah,' or good deed; they called him a Nazi, but in his own eyes he was being truer to authentic Judaism than they were."

It is simply unrealistic to conclude that Joe is here suggesting anything other than that Kahane may have the truer insight into authentic Jewish theology-which position might be defended by here and there a Jewish theologian, but as applied to contemporary Judaic practice is self-evidently irrelevant, even as the suggestion that the late, excommunicate Father Leonard Feeney of Boston (who preached the necessary damnation of unbelievers) was in fact the most authentic spokesman of the true Catholic faith is self-evidently false. Kahane's position was seen by the overwhelming majority of Jews as a narrow and extreme projection of Jewish law, and there is no serious movement to press his demand that the Israeli Arabs be expelled.

The Great Bifurcation

IF WE WERE searching out theological genes that sired current tensions within Judaeo-Christianity, it is obvious that the great bifurcation came with the advent of Jesus, who is called a prophet by Jews but also, in the nature of the situation as viewed by Jewish orthodoxy, an impostor; while the Christian venerates Jesus as the Incarnation. The Roman church, which is senior in respect of religious taxonomy in the Western world, does not regard Judaism merely as schismatic, like the Eastern Orthodox Church, nor even, like the Protestant denominations, as heretical. The Jews-never having been Christians-are removed one step further: on the negative side, they are "invincibly ignorant," refusing to acknowledge the truths of the Christian Gospel. On the positive side, they are the people of the First Covenant, presaging the Second. And if Jesus built his Church upon a Rock, that Rock sat solidly on the ground of Judaism. Joe Sobran is suggesting that there is something to be said for Rabbi Kahane's reading of the necessary derivative relationship between Christian and Jew. If he is right, then of course Kahane's anti-Christianity postulates a complementary anti-Judaism.

In April 1986 Joe's column read, "Although the great Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides insisted that it was as wrong to kill a gentile as a Jew, it seems strange that this should ever have been a matter of controversy, and Maimonides was in some quarters regarded as a heretic. The Yiddish word for gentile, 'goy,' is contemptuous; 'goyishkopf'-literally, 'gentile-headed'-means 'stupid."' This is breakaway definitional polemicism, inasmuch as "goy" means, simply, "Gentile" and, to the extent that, historically, it has been used to denote those-who-are-not-of-the-true-faith, is no more invidious than any other interreligious sequestration. It is as fair to say that "goy" is inherently invidious as it is to say that "Jew" is invidious.

Joe dwelled often on the American, Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel. He acknowledged that the government of Israel insisted that the spying in America had been done outside its knowledge; Joe dismissed this denial as perfunctory and implausible, and belabored the Israeli government, denouncing it as a fickle friend of the United States.

Friendly nations do not spy on one another is the-problematical-premise here. I myself hope the United States has spies in every country whose policies are of vital concern to us, whatever the temperature of our fraternal diplomatic relations with one another. I hope we have a spy or two operating in Israel, given our intimate concern to know everything that can be known about Israel's strategy. It would be something entirely different if Israel had turned U.S. secrets over to the Soviet Union. Joe did not make that charge. Seymour Hersh subsequently did, relying in his book The Samson Option on testimony given by someone widely thought to be a confidence man.

Does Anyone Agree?

WHEN I announced, with the backing of my colleagues, NATIONAL REVIEW'S dissociation from Joe Sobran's columns, the reactions were varied enough themselves to motivate an inquiry into the current understanding of anti-Semitism. Listen, at one end, to Richard Cohen. He wrote in his column for the Washington Post:

Buckley, in an extraordinary move, has dissociated himself in the NATIONAL REVIEW from Sobran's writings but not-note-from Sobran himself. He remains one of the Review's three senior editors.

What Buckley does is important. As the founding editor of the nation's most influential conservative journal and as both the friend and ideological mentor of President Reagan, Buckley is a figure conservatives look to for cues. Anti-Semitism is infecting attitudes toward the Middle East, and Buckley is in a position to say what is and what is not permitted ... from his friend and colleague. His is a painful task. But one can fairly ask how the Joe Sobran-bill Buckley relationship is, in essence, different from the one Jesse Jackson had with the Rev. Louis Farrakhan. Jackson initially went the Buckley route and dissociated himself from Farrakhan's statements. Finally, when others pointed out that those statements reflected the man, he severed the relationship entirely. [Comment: Jesse Jackson was running for President. The criteria that govern personal conduct are dominated by that consideration. Dwight Eisenhower deserted George Marshall in order to enhance his prospects of winning the White House. Editors are under stresses of a more reflective nature.]

. .Buckley himself rejects particular Sobran writings, but embraces the whole man. But anti-Semitism can be deduced from the way a person conducts himself. In Sobran's case, the conduct in question is his writings, and those put his anti-Semitism beyond doubt....

As Buckley notes, American conservatism has come a long way since it was polluted by anti-Semitism-and some of the credit is his. But the continued presence of Sobran on the masthead of America's most influential conservative magazine is a step backward. Sobran is no martyr to the hair-trigger sensitivities of Jews but a victim of his own poison pen. Reconsider, Bill Buckley, before Sobran's ink stains your own cause.

Occupying the middle ground was, for example, Professor Paul Gottfried (himself Jewish), who wrote to The New Republic: ". . . some neoconservatives reacted hysterically-even opportunistically-to Joe Sobran's observations about American Jews. But I do not believe that Sobran is blameless in this particular matter. His remarks on the Jewish persecution of Christians [not here reproduced] reflect a woeful ignorance of history, and his praise of the neo-Nazi Instauration was inexcusably offensive."

At the what's-going-on-here? end was, for instance, Manuel Tellechea of the New York City Tribune, who predicted that Sobran would resign from NATIONAL REVIEW rather than accept the rebuke of his colleagues. More, "If Buckley truly believes Joseph Sobran not to be an anti-Semite, he should dismiss as either malicious or misinformed anyone who would so slander him, Jew or gentile. It is a debt he owes to friendship and to justice." Mr. Tellechea has an explanation for my misbehavior. "Buckley is a national icon. In fact, not a few liberals have had a sort of crush on him for years. He is a fascist, of course, but what a wonderful writer."'

Therein the explanation! "Buckley is [would be?] a man of iron not to have succumbed to such entreaties. But because he is so accustomed to adoration and so above the fray, he does not understand that the criticism he weathers so easily, when directed at one such as Sobran, who is not a national icon and not particularly lovable, can wreck a man's career and leave his reputation in tatters. He shouldn't recommend to Sobran that he ignore his enemies, nor should Buckley ignore them. And, of course, he shouldn't give Sobran's adversaries even an inch of rope with which to hang him. Buckley, after all, believes in Sobran's innocence, doesn't he?"

The instinctive feel of the majority of the eighty-odd readers Of NATIONAL REVIEW who wrote in was to wonder whether I had knuckled under to trendy pressures. I replied (perforce) by form letter, immediately acknowledging that this was the device I was necessarily driven to. My letter included the following sentences:

I have read your letters, many of them surpassingly sensitive and intelligent, with great care. The general positions I adopted ... reflect our considered judgment of the issues involved. Beyond reiterating this-we are bound, in the last analysis, to act with right reason, according to the dictates of conscience-there isn't anything I can usefully add.... I do hope that those of you most vexed will consider the possibility that you misread the editorial I wrote, and will do me the favor of rereading it.

A month or so later a letter from a rabbi. Daniel E. Lapin wrote from the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice, California:

Mr. Buckley, I am not sure that I fully understand the fuss about Sobran. The writing of Richard Cohen et al. strikes me as disingenuous. Sobran's "Pensees" in NR, December 31, 1985, on the other hand, laid the foundations of a dozen sermons in my synagogue. As you may remember from our brief meeting when you spoke for Brandeis Bardin Institute in Los Angeles, my rabbinic credentials are adequate.... If there is any way I can be useful to you, Mr. Sobran, or NATIONAL REVIEW, I would be honored. Insofar as there is something called anti-Semitism (as opposed to anti-Godism), I just don't believe Mr. Sobran is one. The range of opinion on NATIONAL REVIEW and Joe Sobran ran, thus, the gamut.

Partial Resolution

FOUR YEARS later, in September 1990, after reading two pieces by him which I judged indefensible, I resolved wearily and sadly to dismiss Joe from the board of senior editors OF NATIONAL REVIEW. I wrote out a personal letter:

I read your column (9/20/90) last night, and this morning reread the piece you submitted to NATIONAL REVIEW ("Why NATIONAL REVIEW Is Wrong").

I can only conclude that you can't stay on as a senior editor Of NATIONAL REVIEW. You have made it plain that you are embarrassed by the positions we are taking [about the Iraq war and the need to move against Saddam Hussein by military force, positions motivated, Joe had said, primarily by the desire to help Israell. I don't want to have to make plain how greatly embarrassed I am by the positions you are taking, but I am. Why don't you send in a letter of resignation as senior editor. Stay on as a contributor, if you wish. You know what I think of your talent, and I have to hope you have some idea of the sadness I feel about the turn of events.

As ever affectionately ...

I didn't send the letter. It was suddenly the season in which Pat Buchanan and Abe Rosenthal were locking horns on the subject of anti-Semitism and became the center of journalistic attention. I was persuaded by my colleagues that it would be a mistake to proceed against Joe on the eve of my resignation as editor-in-chief, distracting attention from NR's 35th anniversary and its special edition, the subject of a thousand hours of labor.

Three months later-by which time Joe had become, for all intents and purposes, a member of the American pacifist movement-Joe agreed, most agreeably, to step down as senior editor, to occupy instead the position of critic-at-large, in which position he has no responsibility for editorial policy. And as such he writes for us, week after week, anthologizable copy about everything in the world west, south, north, and east of Tel Aviv.

The basic question-when does it become necessary formally to dissociate a journal from an editor's views that are not congruent-had been dealt with empirically. But not, to my satisfaction, the moral-sociological question that animates this inquiry:

What is anti-Semitism these days?

Part 2

PAT BUCHANAN

HERE IS WHAT Pat Buchanan actually said and did, or at least what he said and did that were the proximate causes of the explosion. On television (the McLaughlin program), he said: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East--the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

Later in the program he was more explicit, his purpose obviously being to emphasize the singular interest the Israelis and their friends had in stopping Saddam Hussein. "The Israelis want this war desperately because they want the United States to destroy the Iraqi war machine. They want us to finish them off. They don't care about our relations with the Arab world."

At this point nothing had been said that was anti-Semitic, let alone arrantly so. Any threatened nation is concerned for its own interests, over against which others' interests are understandably subordinate. What had been done, however, was to pronounce a massive inaccuracy, namely that "only" two specified groups favored military action against Hussein.

Any government will "beat the drums" to arouse opposition to its enemy, and therefore the Israeli government, in doing so, was engaged in conventional national activity. So unless Mr. Buchanan was prepared to define the "amen corner" of Israel as comprising approximately 75 per cent of the American people-that was the number the polls then told us were supporting Administration policies--he was deluding himself, or his listeners, or both. On the other hand, if he had quoted the extent of the public's support, he would have been suggesting that the Israelis manipulate 75 per cent of American public support even for causes that are strategically anti-American ("They don't care about our relations with the Arab world"). Inevitably, when an intelligent person makes an assertion that is manifestly absurd, he arouses suspicions.

Why Did He Do It?

WHY HE did it, some people concluded, was that he wished to draw attention to the exorbitant influence of the pro-Israel Jewish American community on foreign policy. If in fact there is huge sentiment out there to resist Saddam Hussein by the use of U.S. military force, then surely-it is his tacit premise-that sentiment was generated not by rational thought about containing aggressors in areas critical to Western commerce, but by the lobbying power of Israel. The listener will then find himself wondering whether it is right that so few should govern the emotions of so many. Curiosity of that kind can lead to resentment; and resentment can lead to hostility, informed or uninformed, to those who exercise such inordinate influence on U.S. public policy.

But Pat was on a roll. Again on television, he came in with the wisecrack that Congress was Israeli-occupied" territory. Urbane newswatchers can't have objected to this hyperbole as uniquely invidious, given that such excesses are so often the idiom of polemics. A generation ago the Majority Leader of the Senate, William Knowland, was dubbed somewhere by someone as "the Senator from Formosa." This was thought to be amusing (actually, it was), reflecting as it did the bellicose identification with a free Formosa (Taiwan) by Senator Knowland, a principal figure in a large public movement whose principal PAC was "The Committee of One Million against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations." No historian would credit Israel with having less influence in Congress today than Formosa had in 1953.

Still, it was all beginning to add up. Even as those who taunted Senator Knowland during the Fifties did so intending to generate sentiment against the government of Chiang Kai-Shek, so any reference to Congress as "Israeli-occupied" territory can be taken as encouraging resentment against the Israeli lobby and its backers. Breeding hostility, etc.

Buchanan did not at that point wade back into shallower water; on the contrary. Coincidentally with his reference to the amen corner, he pronounced the names of four important men who influence public policy, whom he identified with the hyper-bellicose wing of the anti-Saddam forces. They were: A. M. Rosenthal, the columnist and former executive editor of the New York Times; Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense and a leader of the hawkish legions during the cold war; columnist Charles Krauthammer, an influential moral-political strategist, with Wilsonian internationalist inclinations; and Henry Kissinger. They have in common many things. But in the context of the polemical offensive by Buchanan, the most conspicuous of these is that they are all Jewish. This common denominator assaults the analytical mind in a way it wouldn't if the four strategists had been uniquely identifiable as advocates of a tough line against Saddam Hussein. But A. M. Rosenthal, columnist, was no more belligerent on the Hussein issue than James Jackson Kilpatrick, also a columnist; Richard Perle no more than Frank Gaffney, his former colleague; Charles Krauthammer no more than George Will; and Henry Kissinger no more than one of his successors as secretary of state, Alexander Haig. Four Christians.

The evidence that the Jewish factor was engrossing Buchanan mounted. And then whatever coincidence might in desperation have been pleaded for this aggregation of all-Jewish anti-Hussein activists, its usefulness expired when Pat Buchanan went on to write that if we went to war, the fighting would be done by kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown." There is no way to read that sentence without concluding that Pat Buchanan was suggesting that American Jews manage to avoid personal military exposure even while advancing military policies they (uniquely?) engender.

I see no other explanation for it. Perhaps it was done impulsively. The iconoclastic daemon having a night out on the town? In that case it is a pity that, after Abe Rosenthal exploded and the quarrel between them became a national engagement, Buchanan told a reporter from Time magazine, "I don't retract a single word."

Rosenthal Strikes Back

WHAT HAPPENED three weeks later-and the three-week interval became something of a side-issue, having to do with the organization of the Jewish lobby-was the column by A. M. Rosenthal. It was extreme in its conclusions, and the moment is appropriate in this essay to look at what I wrote about the controversy on September 17, 1990, three days after the Rosenthal column appeared. I will repeat here that much of the column as is relevant to this narrative:

The hot talk . . . is of Abe Rosenthal's column in the New York Times (September 14) in which he, well, reads Pat Buchanan out of civilized society. What he says, flatly, is that Buchanan's statements about the U.S. intervention in Saudi Arabia, combined with other positions he has taken dating back to his defense of President Reagan's visit to Bitburg, are the work of an anti-Semitic mind. He goes so far as to suggest that the kind of thing Mr. Buchanan says can lead to Auschwitz, and that he, Rosenthal, isn't going to let him get away with it, because he is guided by a famous moral injunction, delivered by Jesus on the Cross, on which Mr. Rosenthal improvises exactly to reverse its meaning, which becomes now, "Forgive them not, Father, for they know what they did."

.. I write as a friend of both, though I have experienced A. M. Rosenthal, as it happens, ten times as frequently as Pat Buchanan, notwithstanding that Mr. Buchanan and I have occupied the same ideological foxhole since he became old enough to bear arms. I need to say this about the two gentlemen. About Mr. Rosenthal, that he has always walked about in rooms in which customized trip-wires wait confidently to ignite his footloose emotional gyrations: and when he comes upon them, the resulting explosion knows no conventional limits. I deem his attack on Pat Buchanan to be an example of-. Rosenthal, gone ballistic.

And I deem Pat Buchanan to be insensitive to those fine lines that tend publicly to define racially or ethnically offensive analysis or rhetoric. This is best described by illustration. If Scholar A, spending a lifetime in psychometric anthropology, concludes that black Americans weigh in 15 points behind white Americans in conventional IQ tests, he runs a certain risk in publicizing his findings, though only the Know Nothings will denounce him as a racist for [doing sol. If, however, having done so he accepts an invitation to speak at a rally advocating an end to forced busing on the grounds that he is impelled by his findings to oppose the dilution of educational quality, sensitive moral calibrators are likely to suspect, even if they cannot successfully reason to that conclusion, that Scholar A is actively engaged in advocating invidious racial policies.

Every one of Pat Buchanan's positions touching on Israel, weighed discretely, [is defensiblel-until his most recent one. It is unquestionably the case that Israel's political influence is out of proportion to Israel's strategic importance to the United States. It is certainly arguable that Mr. Reagan's decision to visit Bitburg was in the circumstances prudent. And it is conceivable that the defendant Demjanjuk, recently tried in Israel as a war criminal, is actually the wrong man. But these antecedent positions, joined now with Buchanan's statement, "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East-the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States," invite a cumulative judgment. One is that Buchanan reveals himself as an arrant anti-Semite-Rosenthal's verdict; the second (the overwhelming favorite), that Pat Buchanan is attracted to mischievous generalizations.

It is simply a fact that independent analysts, who are neither Jewish nor Israel-bonded, enthusiastically endorse Mr. Bush's policies. The same day that Rosenthal wrote, Buchanan also wrote-a column in which he recorded that "Among those cheering loudest the new international order' is the conservative NATIONAL REVIEW, our old friends and new critics, who dismiss us now as Bug Out, America' types, for resisting their call for air strikes and pre-emptive war against Iraq."

I concluded my column with a paragraph that can only be characterized, and perhaps excused, as a Moral Peroration. My uneasiness with the points it leaves unexplored prompted this further investigation. I concluded:

The Buchanans need to understand the nature of sensibilities in an age that coexisted with Auschwitz. And the Rosenthals need to understand that clumsy forensic manners are less than a genocidal offense, and that when Christ pleaded for forgiveness for his executioners, He asked it on behalf of those who were blinded into doing the wrong thing. No one asked for that kind of forgiveness for the Nazis, and Pat Buchanan's trespasses are miles this side of the awful genocidal line in the sand.

What seemed like everybody then got into the act.

The Anti-Buchanan Case

CRITICS OF BUCHANAN seemed eager to document that in laying special emphasis on the political motives of Mr. Bush's anti-Saddam policies, Buchanan was merely reiterating an ancient complaint against the power of the Israeli lobby. In recent years and months Buchanan seemed to have been attracted one after another to positions in which Jews had a special interest, almost always taking the contrary position. A summary of these was done by Joshua Muravchik, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. It was published in Commentary in January 1991, in an article entitled, "Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews." His article was attacked vigorously and at substantial length in the letters column in an ensuing issue of Commentary, but Muravchik's subsequent defenses were mostly persuasive.

It is a lengthy article (about nine thousand words), 1) describing every position taken by Buchanan over the recent past that has attracted the attention of the anti-anti-Semites, and 2) analyzing the reasons Buchanan has given, when he has given any, for taking such positions. Muravchik closed his long essay by making a point that can't be ignored in an inquiry seeking to explore personal motivations. He cites Buchanan's complaint that "'decent and honorable men, Left as well as Right, [have] had careers damaged and reputations smeared' by the accusation of anti-Semitism. Buchanan," Muravchik comments, "has not replied to my letters asking whom on the Left he had in mind, but in recent times public charges of anti-Semitism have been made in a sustained way against only two figures on the Left, Jesse Jackson and Gore Vidal. What can move Buchanan to such tenderness toward the likes of these two who, the Jewish question aside, represent everything he despises?"

Now Mr. Muravchik's point is in one way perplexing. If he is saying that Buchanan is dismayed by unfair attacks even on figures on the Left whom he dislikes or disapproves of, then he is paying Mr. Buchanan a compliment for deploring undeserved inferences even when at the expense of leftist victims, but clearly Muravchik was not intending to do so. If he is suggesting that the Right, rather than the Left, is more greatly disposed nowadays to anti-Semitic thought, I think he is wrong. Most probably, he is merely challenging Buchanan's bona fides.

In analyzing Buchanan's defenses, he brought up the singling out of four prominent Jewish geostrategists as distinctive in their support of George Bush's anti-Saddam Hussein program:

Buchanan tried to argue that his litany of those seeking war in the Gulf consisted of Jewish names merely because his debate was with the neoconservatives," many of whom are Jewish. But why is Buchanan spoiling for a fight with the neoconservatives? The alliance between them and traditional conservatives like him has been based largely on foreign policy, which he himself says is the most important of all issues. And although the collapse of Soviet power heralds a new era in foreign policy, Buchanan remains at one with many neoconservatives in believing that Communism--their common foe-is not yet finished. Is Buchanan attacking Jews, then, because they happen to be neoconservatives, or is he attacking neoconservatives because they happen to be Jews?

This is not an easy question for defenders of Pat Buchanan to handle, though he is hardly the only conservative who bitterly attacks neoconservatives without making it exactly clear why. And Muravchik is unanswerable on the particular point, namely that to the extent that one's interest is anti-communist foreign policy, the neoconservatives have been indispensable allies. But on to the closing paragraph in Muravchik's attack:

Both the New York Post editorialist and Jacob Weisberg in his article in The New Republic said that they did not want to get into a "semantic" squabble over "anti-Semitism," indeed there may be no authoritative definition of the term. [Correct: there is not, there never can be: but attempts at periodic clarification are not a wasted effort.] But when a man falsely maintains that he is the victim of a "pre-planned orchestrated smear campaign" by the Anti-Defamation League [see below: 1) not pre-planned, 2) not self-evidently a smear; on the other hand, 3) very definitely orchestrated]; when he is hostile to Israel; when he embraces the PLO despite being at adamant odds with its political philosophy; when he implies that Jews are trying to drag America into war for the sake of Israel [alone]; when he sprinkles his columns with taunting remarks about things Jewish; when he stirs the pot of intercommunal hostility; when he rallies to the defense of Nazi war criminals, not only those who protest their innocence but also those who confess their guilt; when he implies that the generally accepted interpretation of the Holocaust might be a serious exaggeration-when a man does all these things, surely it is reasonable to conclude that his actions make a fairly good match for [conventional anti-Semitism].

The Pro-Buchanan Case

THE DEFENDERS of Pat Buchanan were in one respect unanimous: without any exception that have seen, everyone who has known and worked with him dismisses the charge that in his personal behavior Buchanan has ever shown any animosity whatever to Jews. On this point, Muravchik commented, "They [defenders of Buchanan] do not understand that anti-Semitism comes in a variety of forms. One variant, what we might call country club prejudice, consists in an aversion to associating with Jews, but may entail no particular political content. On the other side, political anti-Semitism holds 'the Jews' culpable of miscreancy, but may entail no dislike for this or that individual Jew. The latter type is infinitely more dangerous."

Robert Novak, answering the vigorous anti-Buchanan article in The American Spectator by David Frum of the Wall Street Journal, put it this way: [Frum's] is a wicked caricature that bears no resemblance to the Pat Buchanan I have known for over twenty years as a news source, a colleague, and a friend. Personally, he is a man of unfailing good manners and discretion who does not faintly resemble Frum's ruffian. Professionally, his self-discipline enabled him to perform with strict restraint in two hitches as a White House aide and with unvarying fairness as a moderator on CNN'S Capital Gang.... Buchanan is no anti-Semite, as anybody who knows him well will avow."

Buchanan's defenders can be seen to be reasoning roughly as follows: a) Anti-Semitism is a disgraceful mindset. b) Pat Buchanan, given his exemplary character, has no disgraceful mindsets. Therefore, c) it has to be wrong to say of him that he is anti-Semitic.

This is to reason a priori, and there has seldom in modern controversy been a clearer case of a collision course between the two structures of logical thought. A posteriori reasoning would take what was said or written and reason to the mindset of the person who wrote those words, in this case excluding any possibility other than that they were motivated either a) by ignorance or b) by the desire to taunt or to express hostility. Time magazine's reviewer tended toward the second alternative-"what set them off," wrote William A. Henry III of Rosenthal et al., "was a typical Buchanan crack, which wrapped a core of fact in a coating of hyperbole." But Henry would go no further on the central question than to say that "for years Buchanan has appeared to go out of his way to rile Jewish sensitivities." David Frum, replying to Robert Novak, did so with some exasperation: "It is simply bizarre to suggest-as Robert Novak seems to-that it is unfair to judge a writer by his writings. Patrick Buchanan has put millions of words into print; if the essence of the man is to be found anywhere it is there, and not in his friends' polite comments about what an affable chap he is."

But if it is indeed anti-Semitism, or iconoclasm, is it obsessive, or merely passing misfancy? Novak had made a vulnerable point when he wrote that Buchanan has after all written millions of words that do not even touch on Jewish questions (the classic antecedent of this form of casuistry is the legendary Irishman being tried for murder who volunteers to bring in thirty people who did not see him commit the crime). As might have been expected, defenders of Buchanan made much of the excesses of Abe Rosenthal, Novak going so far as to blame him directly for the general onslaught "Abe Rosenthal's infamous New York Times column triggered the campaign suddenly defaming Buchanan as anti-Semitic").

This charge-that Rosenthal triggered the general reaction-was, up to a point (one or two other critics had here and there gone after Buchanan on similar grounds), chronologically correct, but ultimately irrelevant. You can accuse someone of doing more than he actually did and still take credit for being the first to point out an iniquity. What troubled so many-perhaps most of the critical community who feel that they have an intellectual and moral stake in the questions posed-was the failure to resolve the relevant questions raised. This is clearly seen merely by examining the letters section of Commentary cited above (May 1991), after the attack by Muravchik, or of The American Spectator (September 1991), after the attack by David Frum. Although most of those who wrote in were violent partisans either of Buchanan or of his critics, what happened in those letters pages was not an example of thesis and antithesis producing resolution. Instead, one walked away from a reading of the collection with a heavy heart over the moral confusion: Just what are we dealing with here?

Was Buchanan a Corporate Target?

IT CAME AS something of a shock to the Buchanan camp when the New York Post (which prominently runs Buchanan's columns) defended Rosenthal. "When it comes to Jews as a group-not Israel, not U.S.-Israeli relations, not individual Jews-Buchanan betrays an all-too-familiar hostility. [Correction: It was not "all too familiar." That Buchanan had over the years taken positions opposed to those of organized Jewry surprised most people.] A. M. Rosenthal did not produce a 'contract hit.' [It wasn't strictly a "contract hit," but as we shall see, it transpired that he had received a docket of sorts on Buchanan.] He [Rosenthal] faced some painful facts."

The question whether Rosenthal's attack triggered the ensuing general attack is in any event irrelevant (except to the question of how organized are the anti-anti-Semitic forces). Rosenthal's having called attention to a transgression does not make him responsible for a transgression of his own except insofar as he went beyond whistle-blowing to make charges that were themselves indefensible. On the matter of why did Rosenthal blow the whistle, the Washington Times's Ralph Hallow asked the question most directly-why had no other columnist or commentator gone after Mr. Buchanan as an anti-Semite? [Rosenthal] responded that he has been receiving many calls from `people in our business who said they agree with me and that what I did was courageous.' He said these same people told him they had been afraid to attack Mr. Buchanan because he is widely published, appears on television, is written about abroad, and has lots of friends who defend him. [This is not inherently believable. It isn't dangerous, so far as one can see, to attack someone as an anti-Semite if the case against him is at least plausible.] [Rosenthal concluded], I didn't attack him because of what he said about Israel or Iraq but because he put it in anti-Semitic language.",

The question quickly-and logically-arose, and was widely asked: Just how long had this kind of thing been going on in Pat Buchanan's forum? Heritage, a weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, ran an editorial referring to Buchanan as the "glib-tongued anti-Semite who was denounced by New York Times writer A. M. Rosenthal, for his nastiness and ugliness." Such language suggests that Buchanan's anti-Semitism had been as much a part of the forensic landscape as, say, Martin Peretz's philo-semitism. The New Republic editorialized (September 15): "Buchanan-watchers, students of prejudice in America, and political teratologists have known of Buchanan's anti-Semitism for years." And added, preemptively, a defense against a point that would be raised widely in the days ahead by Buchanan's defenders: "No, he is not like Hitler. Hitler, however, cannot be allowed to set the standard. Lesser bigots cannot be protected from criticism by the magnitude of Hitler's achievements in bigotry."

The point is well taken. One need not, in order to qualify as an anti-Semite, defend the Holocaust or cry out for another one. David Harris, the director of the American Jewish Committee's Office of Government and International Affairs, wrote that "Buchanan's venomous streak, which knows no bounds, cannot be ignored," which of course begs the question why it was for the most part ignored until Rosenthal struck. Jack Newfield, writing for the New York Observer, said that "Mr. Buchanan's pathological hostility to Jews has been obvious to Jews like myself for many years. I have written about it in The Village Voice and the Daily News." One can only assume that these attacks on Buchanan, Anti-Semite, hadn't been read by anybody who took them seriously. Newfield went on, "Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran are way over the line when it comes to religious, racial, ethnic, and sexual bigotry. They are hatemongers."

The New Republic's Fred Barnes tried to clarify the simple point: Is Buchanan, based on his writings, an anti-Semite? "If your definition is someone who is personally bigoted against Jews, doesn't want them in the country club, I don't think Pat is that. If your definition is someone who thinks Israel and its supporters are playing a bad role in the world, Pat may qualify."

The Special Role of Israel

AGAIN AND AGAIN the issue of attachment-toIsrael as the litmus test arises. Elie Wiesel said to the Washington Post, "Although I very rarely use the word' anti-Semite,' I must say [Pat Buchanan] comes very close to fitting that category." Wiesel goes on to list the now-familiar compilation of Buchanan's presumptively anti-Jewish positions, and includes "a man who is constantly criticizing Israel."

Allan Brownfeld, a syndicated columnist who is himself Jewish, wrote on the question in the January 1991 Chronicles, reaching very different conclusions from the critics, some of them highly provocative. On the matter of Israel fixation he is emphatic:

Today, anti-Semitism in America has been redefined as anything that opposes the politics and interests of the state of Israel. One cannot be critical of the Israeli prime minister, concerned about the question of the Palestinians, or dubious about the value of massive infusions of American aid to Israel without subjecting oneself to the possibility of being called "anti-Semitic."

Brownfeld cites the book The New Anti-Semitism, by Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League, and says:

The new definition includes "a callous indifference to Jewish concerns expressed by respectable institutions and persons . . . who would be shocked to think of themselves as anti-Semites." [Here is a classic example of circular reasoning: Henceforth, anyone who takes position A shall eo ipso be deemed an anti-Semite. X has just now taken position A. X is therefore now an anti-Semite.]

Thus, the nature of the "new" anti-Semitism, according to Forster and Epstein, is not necessarily hostility to Jews as Jews or toward Judaism--which all men and women of good will deplore-but, instead, criticism of Israel and its policies.

In a June 5, 1983, Washington Post article entitled Anti-Semitism Has Changed," [the late] Nathan Perlmutter, then national chairman of the ADL, expanded upon this thesis. He noted that the search for peace in the Middle East is "littered with minefields that endanger Jewish interests" and declared that the "fevered language" used by the media in describing Israeli actions during the invasion of Lebanon illustrated "how decent yearnings for peace' in an alchemy of historical ignorance, and hyperbole, stir anti-Semitic imagery."

One of those who [have] freely used the charge of anti-Semitism to silence critics of Israel is Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. In an article entitled J'Accuse" [Commentary, September 1982], he charged America's leading journalists, newspapers, and television networks with anti-Semitism because of their reporting of the war of Lebanon and their criticism of Israel's conduct. Among those so accused were Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, Nicholas von Hoffman, . . . Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, Richard Cohen, and Alfred Friendly of the Washington Post, and a host of others. Of the criticism of Israel by these journalists, many of whom were Jewish themselves, Podhoretz declared: We are dealing here with an eruption of anti-Semitism."

The episode to which Brownfeld refers is well remembered by readers of Commentary. It was the general judgment of the concerned community (I was among the critics, devoting a column to the subject) that Podghoretz's ears and condemnations were exaggerated, but in that respect he was hardly exceptional-the Israeli military offensive aroused high passions. Mr. Podhoretz on this occasion classified as anti-Semitic anyone who ascribes to Jews characteristics uniquely Jewish or, correlatively, denies to Jews rights acknowledged in others. His particular point being that Israel's attack on Lebanon was justified by the conventional rights that inure to beleaguered countries, and that therefore to have singled Israel out for criticism, when others in similar circumstances would escape criticism, was anti-Semitic.

The point is logically sound, but even so doesn't answer the broader question whether anti-Semitism was the presumptive prime mover in those who criticized Israeli practices. Brownfeld is justified in his exploration. He goes on to search out Israeli anti-Semitism:

Norman Podhoretz was also willing to attack Israeli critics of Israel's policy in Lebanon, and did so publicly at the March 1986 International Colloquium of Jewish Journalists. The Jerusalem meeting focused on whether Jewish journalists in general and Israeli journalists in particular have a special obligation of restraint in reporting controversial aspects of Israeli life. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, columnist Moshe Kohn reported: "The debate was led off by Norman Podhoretz

. . He opened by laying down the axiom' that 'the preservation of the Jewish people involves above all else ensuring the survival of Israel.' From this, he said, follows a second axiom: It is in Diaspora Jewry's own self-interest to man the ramparts in the relentless ideological war being waged against Israel,' which, he said, 'I take to be a war against the Jewish people as a whole.' So 'the role of Jews who write in both the Jewish and general press is to defend Israel, and not to join in the attack on Israel."'

According to Brownfeld, Podhoretz was grilled on the spot. Mr. Podhoretz admitted that Jews have a right to criticize. However, when asked if he could think of an Israeli action of which be might [i assume he meant, publicly] disapprove, he declared, "The only decision by Israel that I know I'd criticize publicly would be one to join a Communist alliance."

The point to ponder here isn't whether some of Israel's friends are uncritical to the point of losing their usefulness even to Israel. (My country right or wrong, but right or wrong my country is emotionally understandable when the fatherland is threatened, but less often sound advice for a patriot.) Our inquiry is into the organic composition of anti-Semitism. Having written in 1991 about a Podhoretz excess in 1982, Mr. Brownfeld would, one would assume, feel the responsibility to cite examples of Podhoretz's irrationality in leveling the charge of anti-Semitism with reference to the new criterion. But in his article for Chronicles he doesn't do this. Evidently he deems sufficient his citation of Norman Podhoretz's 1982 article. Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the deportment of its army posed complicated questions and in 1982 generated much criticism of Israel's government. We are better off ignoring that divisive episode to concentrate on the implications of the later Podhoretz speech as judged by his own conduct. Does he in fact proceed as if any critic of Israeli policy, Jewish or Gentile, is eo ipso anti-Semitic? Logically we begin by asking, How did he react to the BuchananRosenthal exchange?

Podhoretz reacted by publishing the long piece by Muravchik, described above. Nowhere in that lengthy essay is any demand made of Buchanan (or of anyone else) that is manifestly irrational. That is to say, it is nowhere assumed that mere opposition to an Israeli policy constitutes anti-Semitism. Since Mr. Podhoretz, in the nine years since 1982, hasn't left a trail of imputations of anti-Semitism against everyone who criticizes Israeli policy, we should assume that Podhoretz's speech in Israel, coming to us third hand, contained qualifications, either made explicitly and not recorded or else left implicit, that Mr. Brownfeld either is not aware of or else is disinclined to quote.

Even so, the point survives: Is criticism of Israel's policies a symptom of anti-Semitism, active or latent? It is almost universally agreed that this isn't so, and it is hard to maintain otherwise, if only because of the heated opposition within Israel itself to many Israeli public policies. But it is less clear whether the formal, organized American Jewish lobby stops short of assailing as anti-Semitic those whose only offense is opposition to this or that policy of Israel's.

What about the Jewish Lobby?

IT IS RELEVANT to inquire into the power of what one might just as well call the Jewish lobby. How much power does it have? If (arguendo) it were omnipotent, then it would be (should be) feared, if only for that reason: one doesn't want omnipotent lobbies arguing in behalf of anything, not even the Bill of Rights. Is it omnipotent? Nearly omnipotent? Dangerously potent?

It is almost everywhere implicit, and here and there explicit, that such lobbies are at work and, in the case of Pat Buchanan, that they have been at work hoping--well, hoping to silence him. To inquire whether they are so engaged is not to pass judgment on whether they are justified in being so engaged. There are those, J. S. Mill most prominent among them, who believe that so long as a single person clings to a belief, the question whether that belief might be correct should not be treated as closed. I think of that as the acme of epistemological pessimism, the seedling from which, among other things, that notion of academic freedom prospered which holds that all ideas should, in a famous phrase, "start out even in the race." By that protocol, a college teacher should not indicate to a student reading the Communist Manifesto alongside the United States Constitution which of the two documents better harmonizes with democratic ideals.)

But forgetting for the moment those who believe that every point of view should be evenhandedly ventilated, the question to ask here is: In a civilized culture, should someone who is, in the opinion of the reasonable community, an anti-Semite be removed from public forums? This, obviously, not by the hand of the law, but by the exercise of a citizenry determined to discourage uncivilized and potentially dangerous thought. And if the answer to that question is, Indeed, such folk should not be given forums from which to preach their bigotries!-then who are the logical spokesmen for the public in urging their removal?

Where will the pressures originate? Not from legislatures, not while there is still a Bill of Rights. Whence, then?

Who? In response to pressures from whom? From the Israeli lobby? From watchdogs, like the Anti-defamation League, that monitor racial slurs?

On whom should they put pressure? Editors and station managers and publishers? Book-sellers?

And what are the appropriate pressures, in the 1990s?

In 1945, superintending arrangements in West Germany, the victorious allies forthrightly and without apology forbade any pro-Nazi literature in the schools. As mentioned above in passing, we at NATIONAL REVIEW faced the problem in embryo in the Fifties. Ours was the nascent voice of responsible conservative thought. I had brought together men of immense learning and moral prestige, for instance John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer, Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, James Burnham. For a few months after leaving the CIA I had worked for The American Mercury, whose editor and publisher was William Bradford Huie, a bright and enterprising editor and novelist (The Revolt of Mamie Stover), one of whose causes became equality for Negroes, as they were then called. He lost control of the Mercury, and I left it. It was sold to Russell Maguire, a wealthy munitions maker who was, well, anti-Semitic. For two or three years he left the Mercury, untouched by his prejudices, in the hands of a Hearst lieutenant, but after a while the weeds began to creep up.

I faced the problem that a half-dozen respectable names from the conservative movement were still associated with the Mercury, as "consultants" or "contributing editors," and that some of those names appeared also on the masthead of NATIONAL REVIEW. After reading a particularly blatant issue of the Mercury (this was about 1958), I thought the time had come to act decisively, and accordingly addressed a note to the writers on the masthead Of NATIONAL REVIEW and told them that those of them who were also on the masthead of the Mercury would need to choose from which masthead to retire. In almost all cases (there was only one exception), they stayed with us.

Two or three years later, the Mercury was mortally stricken with advanced nativism. For a while, the wild General Edwin Walker, who had been dismissed from his command in Europe for verbal irresponsibility, was made its editor. General Walker was supremely illiterate, which under the circumstances was a blessing. Some will remember that Lee Harvey Oswald, practicing for his big day on Dealey Plaza, aimed his rifle at General Walker one night, firing through a windowpane. (On that occasion, ironically, he missed.)

How Does One Block Anti-Semitism?

FORTY-FIVE YEARS after the death of Hitler, the penal code of Germany still forbids the advocacy of Nazi ideas, but not the distribution of Nazi literature, which presumably survives in Germany in the same sense that toxic cultures survive in laboratories. My understanding is that no serious observer of the German scene believes there is anything like a clear or remote danger of any serious rebirth of a Nazi movement, though there is concern, in my judgment primarily moral rather than political, over suppurations here and there of neo-Nazism. Probably (this is my guess, at any rate) the incidental wigwam of a Nazi witch doctor would be ignored by the German government, rather than being destroyed and its owner prosecuted. If so, this is defensible civic conduct, taken by responsible men and women who while aware of the hideousness of what happened yesterday-more accurately, the day before yesterday-are confident that there is no prospect of its happening again; or else that the threat of any such thing is so remote as to fail to justify the kind of proscriptive vigilance thought to be appropriate in 1945.

On the question whether an anti-Semite should be given a forum in respectable company, David Frum has highly developed opinions, which he ventilated in that American Spectator article (July 1991). About Pat Buchanan he summarizes: "His real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting and his not-so-sly queerbashing, from his old record as a segregationist and his current maunderings about immigrants and the Japanese. And it's not a message that can be accommodated in any conservatism-big Government or Small-that seriously hopes to govern a great and diverse country; in fact, it's exactly the kind of message that William F. Buckley thought he had purged from American conservatism back in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he chased Gerald L. K. Smith and the John Birchers away from NATIONAL REVIEW."

Very well, then, if the objective is ostracism, how is this operation managed? Is it primarily the responsibility of the Jewish, or anti-anti-Semitic, lobby?

During the controversy, Buchanan had asked out loud, Why was it that Rosenthal waited three whole weeks before firing back at him for the remarks he made on the McLaughlin show? Rosenthal talked vaguely, as, we have seen, about friends who had brought the Buchanan material to his attention. In fact, as the story developed, it was rather more formal than that. "Rosenthal based his attack upon Buchanan on material provided to him-and other journalists around the country-by the Anti-defamation League of B'nai B'rith," Allan Brownfeld was able to document. "Abraham Foxman, National Director of the ADL, acknowledges that the ADL issued a statement critical of Pat Buchanan. I'm sure that Abe Rosenthal saw it,' Foxman says. It wasn't a secret. He then did what he did."' (Foxman subsequently denied that his organization had "called a single editor to request removal of Buchanan's column, nor would we.")

Brownfeld went on: "The ADL is part of a larger coalition of groups, some of which have assumed for themselves the role of attempting to silence those advocating ideas with which these groups disagree. The house organ of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Near East Report, urged its readers to exert pressure on local newspapers around the country to replace Pat Buchanan's column with that of another conservative columnist, such as George Will. Even Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, ordinarily an outspoken advocate of the First Amendment, declared that Buchanan should be removed from the national media. "CNN should take him off the air and major American newspapers should stop running him,' Dershowitz told the Washington Jewish Week."

Brownfeld tells us that on the other hand there was "widespread defense" of Buchanan. Now that can be thought to be good news abstractly, insofar as it is testimony to the liveliness of civil liberties and pluralism, but not-so-good news insofar as it suggests the toleration of bigotry or indifference to it. But an indifference to bigotry can't easily be thought to have motivated those specifically cited by Brownfeld, especially the "prominent Jewish Americans"-including Paul Gottfried, Leon Hadar, Ronald Hamowy, Sheldon Richman, Murray Rothbard, and Murray Sabrin-who were among the signers of a pro-buchanan advertisement in the New York Times in October 1990. Inevitably it will be surmised by many Jewish critics of Buchanan that his "Jewish defenders" are perhaps professional apostates, on the order of Alfred Lilienthal, whose principal occupation over the years has been criticism of Israel. But that charge cannot be sustained against persons of this intellectual quality.

Where Israel Is Concerned ...

IT IS the moment to note and ponder comments by Eric Alterman, a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute. Writing in The Nation (November 5, 1990), he took issue with Rosenthal-because he thought it wrong for him to assume that all American Jews were affronted by the criticisms made by Buchanan of our Middle East policy. To Rosenthal, Buchanan's indictment implicates all Jews, including, I imagine, my 11-month-old nephew. To anyone with the slightest degree of political sophistication, however, the quote [Buchanan's "amen corner"] implies "some Jews," or even "those few people, who happen to be Jewish, along with some non-Jews like Alfonse D'Amato." Interpreting criticism of particular Jews to embrace all Jews is itself a kind of anti-Semitism. Thus "the Jews," not Ivan Boesky or Dennis Levine, are behind the insider-trading scandal. "The Jews," not Karl Marx. . . , wrote the Communist Manifesto. "The Jews," not Abe Rosenthal, are responsible for the literary crimes that grace the New York Times op-ed page twice a week.

On this point Michael Kinsley of The New Republic was in agreement. Daniel Lazare quotes him in the New York Observer (October 1, 1990): Something that sounds like anti-Semitism may not be. Mr. Finsley, for instance, pointed out that Mr. Rosenthal's column was devoid of evidence to back up his assertion that Israel's "amen corner in the United States" was an anti-Semitic codeword: "All the column said was, `J'accuse-I have refrained from saying it, but I can refrain no longer. I hereby say it. There, I've said it.' That was the essence of the column. It didn't have either evidence or argument. I'm not saying there is no evidence or argument to be mustered, but he simply didn't do it." Confronted with this objection, Rosenthal was simply impatient, as already cited: "I didn't attack him because of what he said about Israel or Iraq but because he put it in anti-Semitic language." Raising the question of how to avoid anti-Semitic formulations when criticizing Israeli policy.

The diversity of opinion on Mideast policy among learned Jews comes through briefly but forcefully in a fundraising letter from the editor of Tikkun ("A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Polities, Culture, & Society"), which once described itself as a "Ieft-wing Commentary." Michael Lerner ("Ph.D.") writes to his supporters,

Iraqi aggression in Kuwait has further complicated the task of the Israeli peace movement-particularly given the foolish action of many Palestinians in supporting Saddam Hussein. My editorial in the September issue attempts to explain their support for Hussein in terms of the continuing frustration they've faced with an Israel that repeatedly asserts its unwillingness to negotiate land for peace. But while I think Palestinian support for Iraq does not provide good grounds to discount their struggle for national self-determination, I must say that personally I find it discouraging that many of them identify with such a destructive and vicious person as Saddam Hussein. I understand why so many Israelis are scared-both by Iraq and by Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein. And it certainly makes things much more difficult for us in the peace camp: we must oppose Saddam Hussein and yet not allow Iraq to become the newest excuse for continuing to deny Palestinians the rights they deserve. In this process, we must also stress our solid commitment to Israeli security and survival. That statement could have been signed by Joe Sobran or Pat Buchanan, but passes unnoticed written by a Jew, addressed to other Jews, in language studiedly sober.

Back to Eric Alterman in The Nation:

"Jewish pressure" is thrown around all the time in Washington and it is done so proudly. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the "pro-Israel" lobby in Washington, has spent the past ten years purposefully building and enhancing its reputation for deploying its "Jewish pressure" on matters it deems to be of Jewish concern, from Egypt to El Salvador. In that regard, anyway, it has done a pretty fair job. Just what did Rosenthal think Aipac director Thomas Dine had in mind back in 1984 when he announced, after the defeat of Senator Charles Percy (who supported the establishment of a Palestinian entity), that "all the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians--those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire--got the message"? Goyish pressure?

Alterman goes on, nudging up against a critical point everywhere acknowledged abstractly, but with which some anti-anti-Semites have practical difficulties.

The equation of anti-Semitism with opposition to Israel's government and with the "pressure" its supporters and operatives exert on the American political process demeans the lives of those who have suffered under true anti-Semitism-and there is no shortage of those--and silences legitimate debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East. A recent fundraising letter sent out by the American Jewish Congress and signed by its executive director, Henry Siegman, veered uncomfortably close to this territory as well. The letter accuses James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, of being a proponent of "the new anti-Semitism" and appears to link him with neo-Nazi David Duke, as well as with the proudly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan, on the basis of Zogby's campaign to limit the influence of pro-Israel PACs in American elections. The AJC's objection, according to the letter, is that Zogby insists that five U.S. senators who received a great deal of pro-Israel PAC money are "not operating in the interests of the people who elected them."

Is this action by AIPAC discriminatory in the objectionable sense?

No, not really. Alterman cannot here be denied:

A pro-Israel PAC would have to be stupid to raise money for people whom it did not expect to behave in its interest. Aipac and its related PACs have been accused of a great many things, but stupidity--particularly in the raising and spending of campaign contributions--is not one of them.

Alterman is amused, or rather not amused, by AIPAC's gyrations on the matter of freedom of expression:

Following on Rosenthal's column, Aipac sent an advisory to its 50,000 members, encouraging them to meet with newspaper editors in order to "ask them if they believe the Buchanans are presenting information their readers want." Aipac suggests that its members offer the names of Norman Podhoretz and other far-right-wing Shamir government cheerleaders as alternatives, or such "liberals" as (I kid you not) Alan Dershowitz, Charles Krauthammer, and one A. M. Rosenthal. "No one is saying the Buchanans should have no right to express their views." Who-Aipac? Of course not. But just the same, Aipac would like to see Buchanan silenced and replaced with pundits who are "fair-minded when it comes to the Middle East."

Buchanan is perhaps being a bit paranoid when he suspects a "pre-planned, orchestrated smear campaign" designed to deprive him of his readership. But with Aipac and Rosenthal after him, need we remind ourselves that even paranoids have real enemies?

We are left here with an American Jew who opposes Israeli policies 1) calling attention to the anomaly that any non-Jew who also opposes those policies runs the risk of being called anti-Semitic; and 2) defending an "Israeli" line as defined by Israeli lobbies, while raising the question whether defiance of that line warrants the anti-Israel tag, in particular to the extent that "anti-Israel" evolves into "anti-Semitic." And we are left with the question of how to train the moral faculties to distinguish between those whose anti-Israel positions evolve (whether or not they know it) from anti-Semitic impulses, and those anti-Israelis unaffected by the Jewishness of the Israeli nation. I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.

So then, if such anti-Semitic impulses exist, do they usually also overwhelm rational faculties? Become obsessive? We know of historical examples in which this has in fact happened. ("I had a letter yesterday from Peg," Murray Kempton told me years ago, driving back from Westbrook Pegler's funeral. "I knew he was sick. He wrote seven pages and didn't once mention David Ben Gurion.")

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