IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM;>
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not try to read the minds of other people or worry about what may be
buried in their hearts. What we should pay attention to is public state–
ment and public action. And if someone like Richard Nixon privately
entertains certain kinds of feelings about Jews - well, in a sense, it's none
of my business unless, in effect, he goes public. I knew Gore Vidal for
twenty-five or thirty years, and I knew that he had certain quirky feelings
about Jews, but it never became a real issue between us; in fact, it was
something we joked about in private. But when he went public with
these ugly sentiments, then it was another matter. I think that's the key.
There is a distinction between the private and the public.
Questioll:
It seems a distinction has got to be made between combating
people like Leonard Jeffries and Tony Martin and Louis Farrakhan , and
dealing with the underlying problem of general feeling of Jew-hatred
among a vast number of blacks. The media had a recent poll showing
that while anti-Semitism in general has been on the decline during the
last ten years, black anti-Semitism has been on the increase, and they gave
various explanations for the results. It seems to me that simply being ag–
gressive and combative is not going to work with the general group of
blacks. Something must be done, and it seems to me that some kind of a
media or publi c relations or advertising campaign ought to be under–
take n in order to persuade these people that they are reacting to a fan–
tasy, not to what Jews are really like.
Norm an Podho retz:
You raise an interesting question. Among blacks
anti-Semitism appears to rise with the level of education, which is the
opposite of the case among whites, or at least it used to be . I don ' t
know if the next generation of whites going through today's universities
will come out less prejudiced, as was the case in the past.
It
used to be
thought that the answer to anti-Semitism was education. But it turns
out th at in the case of blacks at least, education has increased anti–
Semitism, not decreased it. There's a very good reason for this, which is
that a lot of the colleges and universities, particularly the Afro-American
studies departments, have become hotbeds of anti-Semitic demagogues
like Jeffries and Martin and others, so that exposing kids to the influence
of those people is what spreads the problem. In addition, there is the in–
creasing influen ce of demagogues like Farrakhan outside the universities.
As Arch Puddington has pointed out in an article in
Commentary,
it's
hard to think of another public figure in the United States today who
could draw a crowd of about 30,000 for a speech in New York , as
Farrakhan recently did. When Muhammad went to Howard University
he drew a crowd of around two thousand. How many people are here
