When I was about ten years old I told a neighbor, who was a teacher at my Jonesboro, Arkansas elementary school, that I was a Methodist. She replied: "I thought your family was Jewish." She misinterpreted my confusion as alarm, and quickly announced that she was joking. I think her joke was largely innocent, but I didn't get it for the simple reason that I didn't know what a Jew was. Arkansas was famous for its resistance to the civil rights movement-a beloved great uncle of mine was a fervent supporter of Orval Faubus, who called out the national guard to defend Little Rock High School against a handful of Black teenagers. I later learned that one of my high school buddies and his dad were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Some fraternities and sororities at Arkansas State University, I have read, once had restrictions on Jewish membership; but they also had Jewish members, a sure sign that no one was checking. In fact anti-semitism was so far below the radar screen as to be less visible than the incredible shrinking Invisible Empire of the Klan.
Contemporary American antisemitism is more visible on the left than on the right. This is due, I think, less to any inherited prejudice than to the historical accident of the State of Israel. The left, along with communist regimes like the Soviet Union, were originally strong supporters of the state of Israel. But the left eventually switched sides, favoring the Palestinians who fit better with the anti-colonial paradigm. The right, and especially the religious, has moved to favor Israel. The Jews are more recognizable to Pat Robertson as a Biblical people and he probably prefers to have them remain in custody of Jerusalem. This is not to mention prophetic interpretations of recent history. It is also worth noting that many of the guiding lights in the conservative movement, including my own teacher Harry Jaffa, and his teacher, Leo Strauss, were Jews.
Master Heppler post below on the comments of James Abourezk, former U.S. Senator from South Dakota. Abourezk's interview may be found at Democracy Rising, a vehemently left wing anti-war site. He gives full support to the ridiculous idea that Israel's occupation of the disputed territories is the cause of terrorism. So whose fault is it when terrorist blow up innocent people? Its the Jew's fault of course. Abourezk also supports the idea of a domestic Jewish conspiracy that maintains support for Israel in the U.S. Congress.
The latter idea has also be expressed in a famous, and now infamous, paper by Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. In "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," they warn us about the influence of the one on the other.
This paper is not research in any serious sense, although its academic paraphernalia--211 scholia, most with more than one reference--are intended to lend it an undeserved seriousness. But the apparatus deployed in this tendentious work is the labor of obsessives with dark and conspiratorial minds. Have you ever received a letter from a crackpot in which every stray fact fits together in a coherent whole? Sometimes the academy produces genuine theories-of-everything, such as those of Spengler and Sorel, Sorokin and B.F. Skinner, men of immense learning. Ingenuous and suggestive, yes. Still, even these serious men were touched by maniacal fantasies.
Mearsheimer and Walt, despite their standing as exemplars of the realist school of international politics, know ironically little about reality. They are abstractionists, constructing imaginary solutions to real conflict. Mearsheimer, for instance, has argued that nuclear proliferation is the best guarantee of peace. Germany should have the bomb--also Japan and Ukraine. This, he maintains, is not simply manageable, but preferable. What's so dangerous if Iraq and Iran have it, too?
Of course there is a pro-Israel lobby, just as there is a pro-Palestinian lobby, and lobbyists for every conceivable foreign interest. But apparently this is only sinister when it involves Jews controlling the U.S. government. Josef Joffe, also writing in the New Republic, argues that the essay is not so much antisemetic as anti-American:
The gravest indictment is that the screed is anti-American. For campaigning on behalf of this or that U.S. foreign policy is as American as apple pie. It started during the Revolution when pro-British "Tories" fought their colonial brethren over independence. A few decades later, sectional interests slugged it out over the War of 1812. During the Civil War, both sides sought help from various European powers. Thirty years later, another "lobby," the Hearst press, whipped the country into war against Spain, which left the United States with a tidy little empire in Cuba and in the Philippines.
There is nothing wrong with the left expressing concern for the plight of Muslims in general or Palestinians in particular. That is what is supposed to happen when a Republic does foreign policy. But as the old saying goes, when there is an enemy behind every tree, one must be careful in his choice of friends. Bold antisemitism is deep and pervasive among the enemies of Israel. If the left wishes to avoid association with the worst political currents of the last century, it must be very careful in the arguments it makes. Abourezk, Walt, and Mearsheimer are oblivious when it comes to this problem.
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