In pursuit of anti-semitism

National Review, March 16, 1992 by William F. Buckley, Jr., Joseph Sobran, Ronald R. Stockton, Norman Podhoretz, William Pfaff, Irving Kristol, James M. Wall, A.M. Rosenthal, Alan M. Dershowitz, David Frum, Robert D. Novak, Hugh Kenner, Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., Murray Reswick, Eliot A. Cohen, Manfred Weidhorn, Murray Rothbard

We have given first priority to persons specifically named in the essay. Joe Sobran comes in with a vigorous essay taking vigorous exception to my own. I comment, in turn, on his, which appears in full. Patrick Buchanan was invited to respond, but pleaded the burden of his political engagements. President James Freedman of Dartmouth, heavily criticized in the essay, has not written, nor has Gore Vidal, to defend his essay in The Nation, a magazine also criticized.

Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, figures prominently in the essay. He published a six-page "Open Letter to William F. Buckley Jr." in the February issue of his magazine, and it is substantially reproduced here. Irving Kristol, heavily quoted in the essay, addressed a letter to us which is important if only because he wrote it. William Pfaff, the syndicated columnist, who writes from Paris, undertakes to clear up a misunderstanding in the essay which he attributes to Mr. Podhoretz. So do columnists Edwin Yoder and Robert Novak. A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times gave his opinions in his column and in a supplementary letter. Alan Dershowitz is the author and professor of law at Harvard; David Frum is an assistant editor on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Eliot Cohen is Director of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, he is a strategist whose name appears on the mastheads of both The New Republic and NATIONAL REVIEW. Manfred Weidhorn is a professor of English literature. Professor Hugh Kenner's views were solicited. Henry Hyde, the prominent conservative representative from Illinois, has also written for NR. John Roche's syndicated column appeared in NATIONAL REVIEW for several years, until he discontinued it; he is a prominent author and political scientist, and was a sometime aide to President Lyndon Johnson. Jeff Nelligan was an associate at NATIONAL REVIEW; currently, he is a speechwriter at the Agency for International Development. Eric Alterman is Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute. Professor Christopher Ricks of Oxford is currently teaching literature at Harvard; he is the author of T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. We are grateful to other writers we have quoted, and of course to all those who wrote (well, practically all those who wrote).

I most deeply regret that there simply isn't time to answer the letters that flowed in, and stormed in.

1. An Essay by Joseph Sobran

WHEN A MAN shouts "Wolf!" it's not really necessary to remind us that the wolf is a dangerous animal, or to inform us that is Latin name is Canis lupus, or to discourse on its breeding and migratory patterns. We just want to know if there's really a wolf there. And if we can find no trace of a wolf, it may be helpful to know whether the man doing all the yelling uses the word "wolf" to include, say, terriers and spaniels.

The unintiated reader, seeing the title of Bill Buckley's essay, "In Search of Anti-Semitism," might assume he was going to read about what most people mean by anti-Semitism: anti-Jewish mythologies, racial theories, vandalism, legal discrimination, cross-burnings, riots, mass expulsions, expropriations, persecutions, lynchings, massacres, and genocide--or, at the very least, the snobbish exclusion of Jews from polite society.