416
PARTISAN REVIEW
overwhelmingly anti-Semitic. Jews to them were the biggest joke in the
world. Since this whole problem is deep-rooted and goes way back, the
most important and virulent part being irrational, is there any possibility
that we might gain something, in terms of equa li zing the playing field, if
we used irrational attack methods as a way of partly dealing with the
problem?
Robert Wistrich: I
don't know about irrational methods, I certainly
wouldn't advise anybody to look to that as a solution. But I would say
that I believe the only collective political solution the Jews as a people
have found to anti-Jewish violence was the creation of the State of
Israel. That did not definitively solve the issue of anti-Semitism, as we all
know, and in fact it even helped to create some new forms of it, but it
has nevertheless fundamentally changed the contours of the problem and
made it something that Jews can face with greater frankness and with a
greater sense of self- confidence. I believe that it is not a final answer, but
the establishment of Israel made a bigger difference than all the things
ever done before that.
Stanley Crouch: I
just want to say that I think that the problem of
black anti -Semitism is nowhere near as large as people think it is. I want
to say very clearly that I don't think you can evaluate the nature of a
particular community by how particular professors relate to their students
in what have been called "victims' studies courses," because as often as
not, those professors are there on the basis of very specious ideas held by
the institutions themselves. And they often maintain their positions pri–
marily because "victims' studies" on campus is about the ransoming of
campus order. So what coll ege campuses do is, they say, "Well, how
much money will it cost us to keep the black students' feet off the presi–
dent's desk this year? Oh, two or three hundred thousand? Give it to
them. How much to keep the homosexuals' feet off? Two hundred
thousand? Give it to them. How much
to
keep the women out? Three
hundred thousand? Give it to them." That's how it actually works.
Now what happens is oftentimes you'll end up with charlatans like
Leonard Jeffries, who was replaced by a black professor who discovered
that for twenty years Jeffries had done no research, he had written
nothing, nor had anybody else in his department. But when Jeffries went
to court, he had letters from the white man saying, "Yeah, you're doing
a good job, man. Doing a good job, man." Now as far as I'm con–
cerned he should have won forty million dollars from them. They should
have been made homeless; the entire administration that made the deci–
sion should have been put on videotape and those videotapes should
have been sent to every American university, and it should have said to
