IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM?
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ment of Israel is now doing on its own initiative much of which James
Baker wanted to twist its arm into doing.
On other indices, the changes have been relatively recent, but quite
dramatic and transformative.
In
a very interesting observation last night,
John Gross talked about how the Robert Maxwell story did not create
an anti-Semitic environment. And which of us Americans didn't think
about 1985 and 1986, years when, day after day, Jewish Wall Streeters
were being exposed for having been involved in financial scandals of
considerable weight and enormous amounts of money? We read their
names without fearing that we were about to be swallowed up by some
Weimarian deluge of anti-Semitism. My friend James B. Stewart, the
author of
Den of Thieves,
once remarked to me, "You know, I didn't
know all these people were Jewish until you told me."
I teach at Harvard, and when I went there in 1959, there was a mere
handful of tenured Jews - or perhaps two mere handfuls, if you count
those who didn't count themselves. At that time, there was no way you
could have described Columbia University as "Columbia Jewniversity."
But today, how many presidents of
Ivy
League colleges are Jewish? My
wife descends from three Princeton University presidents, and at the
inauguration of Harold Shapiro as Princeton's new president, she said,
"Certainly all three of them are stirring angrily in their graves." Jews
have joined Fortune 500 companies, the professions, in popular culture,
even the clubs to which, God knows why, some Jews want to belong: I
don't mean to be panglossian, it is not in my temperament to be a
"tout va bienevich," but it seems to me that whatever anti-Semitism of
valence there is in the United States is now lodged - not wholly, to be
sure, but mainly - in those segments of society whose collective future
history is not at all very promising, that is, among the most marginalized
of the marginal groups in society.
Now one small factor here, and I do think it's a small factor, is the
immigrant element. We saw it around the World Trade Center bomb–
ing. We saw it with the young man who shot at the Lubavitcher boys
on the Brooklyn Bridge, and I think it bears watching. But it does not
bear hysteria or panic. Arab and Muslim immigrants used to come to this
country as our ancestors used to come to this country. They came here
with a psychological one-way ticket. They were coming to the New
World and leaving the passions and rancors of the old world behind. We
now have the paradox, crystallized in the figure of Sheik Omar Abdel
Rahman, of someone who comes with all his rancors and passions, in–
flamed and intact, to America because he feels that he can practice Islam
more freely in America than he can practice it in Egypt. But he also
carries with him his rancors, not only against the Jews, not only against
