Antisemitism Saturday

Antisemitism is never a great subject to discuss, but there are two good reasons for posting on it today.  One is that the entire internet has been aflame with the feud between Andrew Sullivan and his longtime mentor Leon Wieseltier, and the question of whether Sullivan is an antisemite has gotten half the country’s bloggers engaged.  (Look here for Heather Horn’s summary of who says what.)  The other is that February 13 is the anniversary of the death of one of the greatest antisemites of all time, German composer Richard Wagner.

I don’t have a copy of Mein Kampf handy this morning, but I believe that it is somewhere in it that Adolf Hitler talks about his conversion to antisemitism.  He had just come from a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Viennese Opera and, his soul still aflame with the exalted ideas and glorious sounds of the opera, he saw a Jew walking down the streets of Vienna.  Not a western, professional Jew like the young Dr. Sigmund Freud who Hitler probably did pass on the street at some point during the years both men lived in the Austrian capital, but an eastern Jew: wearing traditional dress, bearded and strange in appearance, and probably, like many poor people in the Viennese slums of the day, not particularly well washed.  The young aesthete Adolf was horrified by the sheer ugliness of this horrid specter on the civilized Viennese street; the contrast between the sublime Wagnerian glory of the opera and the dirty reality of this hideous street Jew was, Hitler later wrote, such a shock that from that moment on he was an antisemite.

Perhaps.  Not only was Hitler often less than truthful, antisemitism was deeply embedded in both the traditional Catholic Austrian culture in which Hitler was raised and in the Viennese political climate that he encountered as an unsuccessful young artist eking out a sub-Bohemian existence in the great cosmopolitan capital that Hitler, like most people of his time, was predisposed to antisemitism long before he recognized that fact.  He drank it in with his mother’s milk, so to speak, and had been breathing in an antisemitic atmosphere all his life. He brought a set of stereotypes and ideas to that encounter with the Viennese Jew; his ‘conversion’ was less a change of mind than a startled recognition of ‘truths’ in which at some level he had always believed.

This would have pleased Wagner.  His magnificent operas are filled with horrible figures clearly and at times consciously reminiscent of European antisemitic stereotypes — just as in a considerably less impressive way George Lucas’ Star Wars movies resurrect antisemitic, anti-Chinese and anti-black stereotypes, populating interstellar space with the nasty contents of the cultural subconscious.  And in Wagner’s case at least, there is malice aforethought: he wanted his audience to perceive exactly the kind of contrast that transfixed young Adolf on the cobblestones that night.

But this is not a post about Wagner, Hitler, Sullivan or Wieseltier. It’s a post about why antisemitism is such a hard subject to discuss in the contemporary United States.

Antisemitism is hard for us to talk about today because the word (and even the thing) have changed so much over the years.  If you told Wagner that he was an antisemite it would be an observation, not an accusation.  In those days, a strong aversion to Jews combined with a desire to exclude them as far as possible from political, cultural and economic life was a socially respectable point of view among European and American gentiles.  The more liberal and genteel looked down their noses at vulgar and violent antisemites; I wrote once that Victorian Britain believed in blackballing Jews from clubs, not hunting them down in the streets.  And there were exceptions: unusually rich, talented and/or socially adept Jews to whom the usual rules somehow didn’t much apply.  Most antisemites at that time (which is to say, most people) weren’t programmatic, ideological antisemites of the kind Hitler finally became; antisemitism was more a sentiment than a set of conscious and interconnected ideas.

In any case, there was no point in denying that you were an antisemite; there was little or no shame in it for most people and it was as ordinary as having brown eyes.

These days, it’s very different.  To self-identify as an antisemite would marginalize you and drive you from public life.  And if a lot of people conclude you are an antisemite despite your protestations, you will be permanently diminished.

This isn’t, I hasten to add, because Jews dominate American public discourse.  It is because the gentiles who dominate American politics and culture overwhelmingly find antisemitism disgusting and repugnant. Traces of 2000 years of Christian antisemitism linger in American culture in various ways; how could prejudices so deeply engrained, so closely tied to core ideas and structures of our civilization disappear in a single generation?  However, the diminishing power of racial and religious prejudice combined with revulsion at the Holocaust and American gentile admiration for Israel’s accomplishments have changed the way American gentiles think about Jews and antisemitism.  An acknowledged or even widely suspected antisemite simply cannot play a serious role in American life today.

To call somebody an antisemite today is to make a career destroying accusation if the world accepts the charge as broadly true.  However, it is harder than it used to be to make the charge stick.  Even conscious antisemites who operate in the mainstream will do their best to conceal their beliefs.  You then find yourself arguing with someone about what they “really mean” when they write or say something.  These arguments are almost impossible to win: the other person always has much more information about their state of mind and intentions than you do and since we consider antisemitism to be such a serious offense people are unwilling to accept this charge except on the strongest of evidence. Also, once you charge someone with antisemitism, nobody is interested in anything else going on.  If you say “Andrew Sullivan has idiotic and destructive ideas about Israel,” you start a debate about Israel which, possibly, you could win.  If you say “Andrew Sullivan’s idiotic statements about Israel prove he’s an antisemite” you start an argument about Andrew Sullivan which, as I think Mr. Wieseltier is now discovering, you will almost surely lose.

Adding to this difficulty is the imprecision of the term.  What exactly does it take to be an antisemite?  Most of us go with a pretty broad set of criteria.  You are an antisemite if you try to keep Jews out of your neighborhood or your country club.  You are an antisemite if you believe that Jews are secretly ruling the world or that they control the media, finance and/or Hollywood.  But are you an antisemite if you think that the Jews have no right to a ‘national home’ in the Middle East or anywhere else?  Is it antisemitic to hold Israel to a higher moral standard than its neighbors and adversaries?  Is excessive and disproportionate indignation about Israeli actions evidence of antisemitic attitudes?  Is it antisemitic to wish that Jewish songwriters would ‘leave Christmas alone’ and stop writing secular lyrics for seasonal Christmas songs? And what’s the dividing line between thinking that Jews are powerful in Hollywood (duh) and that the Jews of Hollywood exercise some kind of excessive control over world politics from their citadels in Brentwood?  There clearly is one, but not everyone would agree on where to draw the line.

Myself, I tend to take a pretty broad view of what antisemitism is and how widespread it still is.  But not everybody does; the social consensus on what antisemitism is turns out to be much less strong than the social consensus that antisemitism is bad.  These differences in, for example, what Wieseltier thinks constitutes hard core antisemitism and how others define it make it virtually impossible to have a serious and thoughtful discussion about antisemitism in an individual context.  It’s much better to try to get people to think about antisemitism without linking it to allegations about living people.

In a perverse and irritating way, this means that our strong social consensus against antisemitism makes life easier for the actual antisemites among us.  As long as they deny that they are antisemites they can say or do almost anything they like and enjoy a general public presumption of innocence.  I think there are people who deliberately and consciously use this freedom to indulge their antisemitic impulses without being called on it — but I’d rather live in a society in which antisemites are forced to be disingenuous hypocrites than one in which they can openly flaunt their views without penalty.