Old Demons and New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West (review)

Reviewed by: Old Demons and New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West Peter Kenez Old Demons and New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West, edited by David I. Kertzer. Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 2005. 219 pp. $15.00. The essays which make up this slim volume were presented at a conference organized by the YIVO institute in 2003. The participants were among some of the best scholars of the topic, and, consequently, the papers published in this book are very much worth reading. It is, however, a difficult task to review this book because the articles differ in length, ambition, tone, and subject matter. It is hard to find a single, overriding theme, with the not so surprising exception that the continued existence of antisemitism in the Western world is a worrisome fact. Antisemitism, of course, is a complex phenomenon that should be regarded not as a simple prejudice, but as a broad spectrum of views. There is a substantial difference between negative stereotyping, such as regarding Jews as money-grubbing and condescending on the one hand, and on the other, the paranoid fantasies such as described in the Protocols of Zion, according to which Jews control the world. Reading these articles one realizes that under the heading "antisemitism" there are enormous differences. To be sure, antisemites share common features, such as making unsustainable generalizations, exhibiting prejudice, etc., yet what separates one antisemite from another must not be overlooked. Surely the genteel antisemitism of Virginia Woolf mentioned in his essay by Leon Wieseltier, however unattractive, has little in common with the mad whitewashing of Nazis by David Irving, as Deborah Lipstadt describes it in her interesting essay. The mentality of Western intellectuals who [End Page 188] disapprove of Israeli and U.S. policies in the Middle East and blame not only a "Jewish lobby" but Jews in general must be distinguished from the views of Arabs who almost uniformly feel a burning hatred for Jews and are willing to revive all myths from the capacious repertoire of centuries-old antisemitism. However reprehensible and shameful the behavior of English intellectuals who call for a boycott of Israeli scholars, who by no stretch of imagination could be held responsible for Israeli policies, the views and motivation of these people are of course different from those who hate Jews so much as to be willing to kill themselves in order to take a few objects of their passionate hatred with them. With two exceptions the authors are pessimistic concerning the existence of antisemitism in the Western world. One of the exceptions is the United States. In his article Nathan Glazer assures us that there is no fertile soil in the United States for antisemitism. He could have extended his analysis to most of the English-speaking world, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is particularly interesting that the Polish journalist and activist, Konstanty Gebert, sees hopeful signs of amelioration of anti-Jewish prejudice in his home country and implies that we must not continue to look on Poles as congenitally antisemitic. I found the abstract essay by Mark Lilla the most interesting. He connects anti-Zionism and through it antisemitism in Europe to the decline of the concept of national sovereignty and the very idea of the nation state. Lilla sees a paradox: Jews who had been mocked in the past for not having a nation state now are criticized for having one. He argues that the creation of any nation state in the past was a morally ambiguous affair, and the creation of Israel was no different. European intellectuals who after the Second World War grew up with hostility to the idea of militarism and even the nation state find the existence of Israel, which behaves very much like a nation state of the Jews, an embarrassment. Instead of envisioning the creation of a law-abiding, legitimate democratic states living in peace with one another, they speak of an illusionary post-political order in which Jews and Arabs will live together. Given their own intellectual background they lack an understanding of the problems of the Jewish state, and that makes them assume anti-Israeli positions. Peter Kenez University...

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