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Anti-Semitism Without Anti-Semites
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David Klinghoffer
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Copyright (c) 1998 First Things 82 (April 1998): 10-13.
In a Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River, a young
woman I know lies awake at 5 a.m., wondering if the sun will
rise. That fear has gripped her on more than one occasion
recently. This is what happens. She is awakened by the sound
of her children crying. Once she has quieted them down, she
gets back into bed and looks out the window and thinks, What
if the sun doesn't come up this morning? She is entirely
sane, I assure you, but the idea terrifies her until the sun
actually does rise through her window, and she can fall
asleep again beside her husband.
The other day she happened to mention this to me. I felt
that I should console her, even half-playfully. But how?
While giving all due respect to her anxieties, I tried to
present a cool, rational view. On the one hand, I said, it
has to be admitted that nature is in God's hands. The
meaning of the phrase used in insurance contracts, "Act of
God," is precisely that nature does not always follow
predictable rules. The blessing we Jews say before
recitation of the Sh'ma each morning acknowledges that the
Lord m'chadesh b'chal yom tamid ma'aseh bereishit: God
renews the work of creation every day, continually.
Theoretically, it's possible that God might choose to
withhold the sun from us tomorrow morning. In the past, on
at least one occasion, He has indeed halted the course of
the heavenly bodies (see Joshua 10:13). In short, anything
could happen.
On the other hand, I told her, clearly there is nothing to
worry about. I could show you photographs going back decades
of the sun rising over the East River each and every
morning. It has never failed to do so. Forget about it.
I thought afterward, however, that I had taken the wrong
approach. When someone is irrationally afraid of something,
it makes no sense merely to reassure him that he has nothing
to worry about. Usually, the smart thing to do is help him
step back from his fears and view them at a distance. Let
him ask himself: Why is it that I worry about a problem that
isn't there? What is the subterranean meaning of my fear?
When a rational person suffers from an irrational terror,
the terror serves some purpose, probably an unhealthy one,
in the dark attic of his soul.
I thought of the young woman who was afraid the sun wouldn't
rise when I came across an item recently in the New York
Times. Bear with me. It won't be immediately apparent what
she has to do with ultra-Orthodox hasidic Jews in New
Square, New York.
The Times reported that some hasidim up in Rockland County
had been indicted on the charge that they had defrauded the
federal and state governments in a multimillion-dollar
scheme involving student loans and housing subsidies.
Subpoenas had been served at 6 a.m. to ensure that the
subpoenaed individuals would be on hand to receive the
documents personally. Getting woken up at such an early
hour scared the children, the Jews claimed, and was
"remindful of the Holocaust that many in this community
endured decades ago."
For many of us Jews lately, everything and anything is
"remindful of the Holocaust." The truth is that anti-
Semitism has become an obsession with us. You've heard the
phrase "anti-Semitism without Jews," to describe the
hostility to Jews felt in countries like Poland that don't
have any Jews. In the American Jewish community we've got
anti-Semitism without anti-Semites. Or almost without anti-
Semites. In a country as big as America you are inevitably
going to find nuts and cranks, haters and despisers, of
every description-if you look hard enough.
It seems every month the Anti-Defamation League denounces
some piddling Army bureaucrat who said "Jew" out of the
wrong side of his mouth or some evangelical religious group
that had the temerity to hire one man and a secretary to
undertake the quixotic task of converting every Jew in
America to Southern Baptist Christianity. We follow these
developments with eyes opened wide in horror. I regularly
receive a big black fundraising envelope from the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, with promises of dark tidings for the
future of the Jewish people: "Outbreaks of a virulent new
strain of anti-Semitism around the world confront you with a
choice. Urgent: Early reply requested." Or I receive a business-
size, fund-raising envelope from the ADL-or is it the World
Jewish Congress?-with a photo of two mangy-looking teenage
skinheads with a Nazi flag in the background and the caption
"We protect your kids from these kids." In reality, of
course, American Jewish children are in far greater danger
of getting run over by drunk drivers, or electrocuting
themselves by dropping a plugged-in radio in the water when
they're taking a bath, than they are of getting so much as a
hair on their heads plucked out by a neo-Nazi.
Our preoccupation with the ultimate symbol of anti-Semitism,
the Holocaust, has become notorious. There is no end in
sight to the Holocaust history books, Holocaust novels,
Holocaust television shows, Holocaust magazine and newspaper
articles, chairs in Holocaust studies at universities,
Holocaust museums, Holocaust poems, Holocaust paintings,
Holocaust sculptures. In fact the flow seems to be picking
up speed. Every self-respecting synagogue and Jewish
Community Center must now have its Holocaust memorial, the
more elaborately grotesque the better. I was driving in a
leafy suburb of Seattle recently and passed some sort of
public building with a huge, eerie, black concrete cylinder
out front, with what looked like devils' faces on it. Who
had erected this sinister totem? Yes, of course, it was the
neighborhood JCC proudly displaying its Holocaust memorial.
Whenever something unpleasant happens to us, whenever we are
criticized or judged, whether fairly or unfairly, we tend,
as a community, to view our discomfort from the perspective
of the Holocaust. We operate under the assumption that anti-
Semitism is forever threatening to boil up under the surface
of American life and bring another trial like that one on
us. Otherwise, what would be the point of remembering and
remembering, and accusing and accusing, as we do? Like the
woman who is concerned the sun won 't rise, we are afraid
without a rational reason to be afraid.
If I had the opportunity to console the Jews who fear that
another Holocast, or any lesser trial, may be around the
corner, I could say: I understand your fears of anti-
Semitism. After all, there was indeed a Holocaust fifty
years ago. Yes, it could happen here. Theoretically,
anything could happen to anyone anywhere.
On the other hand, as Professor Leonard Dinnerstein wrote in
his 1994 book Anti-Semitism in America, "Today anti-Semitism
in the United States is neither virulent nor growing. It is
not a powerful social or political force. . . . The obvious
conclusion is that it has declined in potency and will
continue to do so for the foreseeable future." I would add
that in America today there is probably less hostility to
Jews than in any country anywhere, including the State of
Israel, at any time in history.
I could stop right there and say nothing more.
It would be better, though, if I tried to do what I should
have done for my anxious friend. I could say, I am not going
to address the content of your anxiety. Rather, I will offer
a hypothesis, a proposed explanation of it. You could call
it a meta-analysis. I want to know what it is in Jewish
culture that accounts for our obsession with anti-Semitism.
Is it, in fact, another Holocaust that we fear? When we
scour the printed and broadcast statements of our non-Jewish
fellow citizens for the slightest hint of hostility to us,
is it omens of a Nazified America we are really searching
for? That would be the conventional answer. And as soon as
the Holocaust is invoked, all discussion of an impious,
questioning kind is expected to cease immediately. That
answer, however, is an insult to American Jews. It suggests
we are too dim-witted to tell the difference between Europe
in 1938 and America in 1998. Instead, I offer you the
hypothesis that, when we indulge our obsession with phantom
anti-Semitism, we do something deeply related to what is
unique about our Jewish souls.
When we want to understand the Jewish soul, religious and
secular Jews alike can agree that there is no better way
to do so than to read the Hebrew Bible. Some Jews,
including me, believe that the Bible comes to us from God
and His prophets. So it is obvious why that book can tell
us more about ourselves than any other source, even the
New York Times.
Jews who don't believe in the Bible, who think it is a mere
pastiche of ancient propaganda tracts culled together by
rather unskilled editors called redactors, can still agree
that it embodies the essence of what Jews are. After all, it
is our national literature. We wrote it, and we have
embraced it, however fraudulently, as God's own word for
more than three thousand years. It defines us, and always
has. What, then, does the Bible tell us about anti-Semitism?
The answer is nothing, and everything.
For, to put it simply, the Bible has never heard of such a
thing as anti-Semitism. Naturally it records stupendous
disasters that have befallen our people: none greater than
the destruction of the First Temple by Babylonian invaders,
when Jewish mothers were compelled to cook and eat their
children in the streets of Jerusalem, as the Book of
Lamentations so appallingly records.
But in Lamentations, and throughout the Bible, there is a
striking difference between the way biblical Jews understood
the hostility of non-Jews and the way we understand it. When
the Jewish people suffer in the Bible, it is almost
exclusively at the hands of non-Jews. Occasionally God will
send a plague, but, for His own reasons, he prefers to work
through Gentile aggressors. The difference between us and
the Jews of the Bible, and indeed the Jews of every
generation until a century or two ago, is this: They
understood Gentile hostility to be an expression of God's
displeasure with us as a community. We understand it to be
essentially meaningless.
What's more, however difficult it is for us to square this
mystery with our modern assumptions, they understood that
God punishes the People Israel as a community. They believed
in collective responsibility. That means that when
individual Jews do wrong and bring punishment down from
Heaven, innocent Jews may get caught up in the maelstrom. In
fact, the guilty may escape punishment in this world
altogether, while the innocent die and must wait for their
reward in the world to come.
Take that time, recorded in the Book of Joshua, when God
stopped the sun in its course. That happened during the
conquest of Canaan, when the Israelites emerged from the
desert after their wanderings. Shortly before that, we find
a typical incident that reflects the authentic Jewish view
of collective responsibility. When the Jews besieged
Jericho, God instructed them to refrain from looting the
ruined city. One man disobeyed. His name was Achan. As a
result, when the Jews went out to make war on their next
target, a modest little Canaanite city called Ai, they got
chased away and lost thirty-six apparently innocent men in
the battle. But Achan was not killed. It was only after
Joshua had punished Achan that the Israelites could resume
their campaign undeterred.
There is perhaps no better example of this dynamic than the
Holocaust. It would be a presumption to assert that God
caused the Holocaust, or allowed it to happen, in order to
punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread
devotion to secularism. In any given historical event, we
can never know God's true intention. But it would also be a
presumption, and a worse one, to assert that such a
punishment was not what He had in mind. It is that latter
presumption of which most Jews, including many religiously
observant ones, are guilty today. Anyway, if He did intend
that event as a punishment, a warning, or a lesson, it
would fit the Bible's pattern neatly. The Jews liquidated
by Nazi Germany were not only, or even mostly, Reformers
and secularists. Many deeply pious Jews perished as well,
for they were often the last to seek escape from rising
Nazi power. Which makes sense. God views the People Israel
as an eternal community, not merely as disconnected
individuals. All are responsible for all. And as the story
of Achan and his friends demonstrates, maybe to emphasize
our deep interconnectedness, the Lord does not practice
precision bombing.
We modern Jews have entirely lost the consciousness of
collective responsibility. A Conservative rabbi called
Harold Kushner has crystalized our thinking in a series of
bestselling books of contemporary "spirituality." He asserts
that God can do nothing to prevent our suffering, whether it
is caused by Gentile aggressors or raging cancer cells. Like
President Clinton, the Lord of the Universe feels our pain.
Otherwise, Rabbi Kushner pictures Him impotent, weeping
quietly in some corner of Heaven, plucking tissues out of a
Kleenex box the size of Jupiter.
We are ready now to put the modern Jewish cult of victimhood
on the couch. Let's psychoanalyze ourselves. We agreed
earlier that when a person fears something that he has no
reason to fear, he would be wise to ask himself, as any good
psychologist would do, what subterranean need he is
fulfilling through his fear. What is it that we Jews gain,
today, by obsessing over phantom anti-Semitism?
The key can be found in another classic statement of the
authentic Jewish view of anti-Jewish persecution. It is in
the Torah, in parshat B'chukotai. Here, in the Book of
Leviticus, God explains to the Jews the ways He will reward
us if we guard His commandments, and punish us if we do not.
All of us, together. Among the punishments, there is an
interesting line that describes the condition of modern
American Jews perfectly: "the sound of a driven leaf shall
chase them; and they shall flee, as one flees from the
sword; and they shall flee when none pursues."
It is hard to think of a Jewish community in history that
has been in much worse spiritual shape than our own. The
universally lamented 50-plus percent intermarriage rate is
only a symptom. The failure is not of the children who marry
Gentiles, but of the parents, the grandparents, even the great-
grandparents. We have quit teaching our children that God
lives, that He loves us, that He wants a relationship with
us-but that He wants something from us in return. That is
not merely to be nice people, as some liberal rabbis would
have us believe, but to observe the entirety of His Torah as
almost all Jews did until about two hundred years ago.
We American Jews are not as ignorant as we seem. We know, in
our souls, that we have gone astray; but, to borrow a
hackneyed phrase of psychological jargon, we are in denial.
We have a guilty conscience. We are unhappy about that. What
can we do, what defensive strategy can we adopt, to lift the
weight of guilt?
Fortunately for us, in the 1960s the Cult of Victimhood made
its appearance. Black Americans were the first to embrace
it. Its premise was that any ethnic or racial group that has
suffered persecution is, by virtue of its victimhood, lifted
to a state of moral superiority over everyone who has not
incredibly enough, some Asian Americans have sought to
compete for the honor of being named certified victims of
America. I was intrigued recently by a subway advertisement
for a gay cultural event that memorialized AIDS victims. The
ad bore an image of a winged being in a white robe and halo,
with the slogan underneath: "Another angel has gone to
Heaven." In other words, anyone who suffers from AIDS can be
considered, merely because he carries the disease, morally
superior even to a supernatural extent: an angel. Victimhood
used to be considered something about which a normal person
would feel ashamed. No longer. Amid the clamoring of would-
be victims we find-ourselves, American Jews.
The Cult of Victimhood performs two valuable services for
us Jews with our guilty consciences. First, as it does
for everyone else, it assures us that, whatever we know
we are doing wrong, we are really angels. Our moral
failures are turned into a guarantee of moral perfection.
That's quite a relief.
But it does something else for us, which it may not do for
other groups. We believe that any hostility we can detect on
the part of non-Jews is entirely unmerited. We have done
nothing to deserve it. God isn't angry with us. And even if
He were, He couldn't send dangerous Gentiles against us. Our
God is the impotent Harold Kushner God, if we choose to
acknowledge a God at all.
The function of our obsession with anti-Semitism is to
remind us, on a daily basis, that that is the God we sort
of, kind of, barely believe in. Every ADL newsletter; every
big black fundraising envelope from the Simon Wiesenthal
Center; every obsessive discussion of what Pat Buchanan or
Pat Robertson may have said about Jews fifteen years ago or
through some hack ghostwriter; every Holocaust book, film,
poem, and painting; every monstrous Holocaust memorial in
the parking lot of a JCC-they all declare, to our great
relief, that anti-Semitism is meaningless. They declare this
by failing to name God in any discussion of anti-Jewish
persecution. They say that anti-Semitism is demonic. It
doesn't come from God. God, if He exists, is in Heaven,
weeping on His pillow.
We don't live like Jews, but that's alright. God doesn't
mind. He isn't going to punish us for our disobedience. Our
fear of Gentiles who don't like us, our made-up,
manufactured fear, is the greatest comfort we can give
ourselves.
The impulse to see anti-Semitism where it isn't is so
powerful it infects Jewish culture at every level, among
religious and secular Jews alike. Even New Square hasidim
have absorbed this secular ethos from the Jewish society
around them. If God, the true God, were to put us on the
couch, I think that is what He would tell us. He would tell
us there is no such thing as anti-Semitism, at least not the
way we understand it. We American Jews aren' t suffering at
all right now. For us, life couldn't be better.
But anything can happen. And it just might.
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David Klinghoffer is Literary Editor of National Review.