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PARTISAN REVIEW
Martin Peretz:
Gene Genovese is the creator of imaginative, sometimes
puzzling, intellectual configurations. We've just heard him announce the
formation of a group call ed "Marxists for Pat Buchanan."
I was a little baffled last night and again this morning when people
were pressing Saul Bellow for his most up-to-date views on our current
predicament, and may I suggest, to those who have not read them, and
even to those who have: let's reread
The Deall's December
and
Mr .
Sammler's Planet.
Historically, there have been many kinds of anti-Semitism in the
United States. There's religious anti-Semitism, social anti-Semitism, polit–
ical anti-Semitism, intellectual anti-Semitism, economic anti-Semitism,
and, of course, there's also Jewish anti-Semitism. Each of these are at
different points in the trajectory of ascendancy or decline, but for most
of them, I have to say, the trajectory is one of decline. Anti-Semitism is
of less valence, publicly, than at any time in my lifetime. And on any in–
dex of concrete experience, these manifestations of Jew-hatred do less
damage to Jews than, again, at any time in my experience. There are not
many recent experiences that any of us could muster, I suspect, of actu–
ally being touched, individually or as a group, by Jew-hatred. Perhaps
this is unique to America: with Norman Podhoretz, I have faith in
American exceptionalism. But all these rubrics and categories of anti–
Semitism are not static states, and they are not always insulated from one
another. What is true today, it is possible, may not be true tomorrow.
And what is true today may not have been true yesterday or the day
before yesterday. For example, in the Bush administration there emerged
an insidious combination of elite social anti-Semitism by people who
seemed not to hate J ews but were simply, let's say, all ergic to Jews; and
political anti-Semitism disguised, as Cynthia Ozick rightly pointed out, as
sheer or mere opposition to some of the policies of Israel. This combi–
nation invoked old anti-Semitic stereotypes whi ch did palpable harm to
Israel and legitimated a debauch stretching from Gore Vidal and
Alexander Cockburn to Gene's friend Pat Buchanan. When the President
of the United States, whose administration probably had fewer Jews than
any U.S. administration since Herbert Hoover, talked about those thou–
sand lobbyists converging on Capitol Hill, he was evoking the Jews as, in
fact, a political virus.
Of course, a lot of these people are still peddling their wares. But
the pressure on Israel which they created, and the discomfort which it
created among us, are no longer facts of our political life. The pressure
they placed on Israel no longer has much resonance. It certainly doesn't
resonate in Clinton's Washington, if on ly, perhaps, because the govern-
