IS THElli A CUlli FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
391
the results in the prominent position and the influence achieved among
middle-class blacks by an openly anti-Semitic black leader like Louis
Farrakhan - though of course he too denies being anti-Semitic - and his
follower Khalid Muhammad, not to mention countless others, many of
them professors at leading colleges and universities. (A particularly
disgusting example is Professor Tony Martin of Wellesley College.) No
wonder that all studies show a much higher level of anti-Semitism
among blacks than among whites - notwithstanding the bitter fact that
Jews stubbornly continue to be the white group most sympathetic
to
black concerns and interests.
But it was not only among black radicals that the taboo against the
open expression of anti-Semitism was broken in 1967. Something similar
occurred on the left in general. Mostly it appeared in the guise of a hos–
tility to Israel that was hard
to
distinguish from o ld-fashioned anti –
Semitism. This new anti-Zionism, as it called itself, simply took many of
the classical anti-Semitic canards about Jews living in the Diaspora and
applied them, suitably transposed, to the Jewish State .
Here, too, there was resistance, but again not enough to prevent this
new updated species of anti-Semitism from spreading. Fifteen years later,
when Israel invaded Lebanon, the attacks more often than not went be–
yond simple criticism or even political opposition to Zionism and
crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism.
This part of the story has its own Farrakhan, in the person of Gore
Vidal. In 1986 Vidal wrote a piece for the one hundred-twentieth an–
niversary issue of
The
Natiol1
that impressed me as the most blatantly anti–
Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical
since the end of World War
II.
Because I myself was one of Vidal's tar–
gets, my response to this piece was widely treated as merely personal,
part of an ongoing literary feud. Still, a number of people, including
many who, to put it mildly, had no love for me, agreed with my
assessment of Vidal's piece and registered protests. Yet in spite of these
protests, Vidal, who naturally denied that his piece was anti-Semitic, was
not discredited or shunned, as he most certainly would have been twenty
years earlier. On the contrary, he continued to be sought out and
lionized by the media, and a collection of his essays which included the
infamous anti-Semitic diatribe - not altered in the slightest, incidentally;
it was the unexpurgated, unbowdlcrized version - was not considered to
have been disfigured by it. The book was praised to the skies by the
reviewers and awarded a major literary prize.
It was developments like these that persuaded me that anti-Semitism
was now finding a more hospitable reception on the left than on the
right. In fact, for a while it looked to me as though anti -Semitism
