IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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ever names they called us were secondary to what they'd already done to
us."
Yet even these explanations of anti-Semitism revolving on black im–
potence and implacable non-Jewish racism take us only so far. Another
problem is Jewish liberalism itself, which has reinforced black impotence
through its own oversolicitude by sending the patronizing, even racist
message that blacks cannot be held to the same standards as whites. That
is a betrayal on our part of the American and Enlightenment dimensions
of our heritage, as much as of the Jewish dimension.
It
reflects our unac–
knowledged and perhaps growing ambivalence about such quintessential
Enlightenment and American values as rational analysis, individual rights,
and color-blind meritocracy.
Critical race theorists and Afrocentrists argue - and this , I think, is
their most tragic mistake - that because those nostrums have often been
used as fig leaves for racist abuse, they are inherently racist. That there
have been monstrous abuses, no one can question. But that the values I
have mentioned represent historic human gains, perhaps especially in
America, is also beyond dispute to everyone except some black leaders
and youths. These values were as vital as oxygen to our parents and to
us, and they are equally vital to many immigrants of color, who come to
America precisely to escape ancient homeland feuds and the cobwebs of
tradition. That is the intellectual basis, if you will, for the political al–
liance against black demagoguery I mentioned above.
Jews, who have seldom been able to resort to strength in numbers
and even cruder instrumentalities of power, have had to stake their suc–
cess - functionally, not just theoretically - on their faith in reason, indi–
vidual rights and meritocracy. Truth to tell, we sometimes have put
ourselves through extraordinary, Herzogian contortions to be worthy
exemplars of the Enlightenment, perhaps in the context of an American
exceptionalislll that we hoped would be worthy of it, too. Saul
Bellow's
Herzog
is indeed one of the most compelling testaments of that
struggle.
Of course, even as most whites, Jews included, have preached a
color-blind meritocracy, we have tended to provide for ourselves along
carefully patrolled ethnic lines. The retaliatory parochialism of Black
Power has forced us to acknowledge and sometimes even tout our own
hyphenated Americanism. But, paradoxically, no one is more vulnerable
to black attacks on the Enlightenment than those secular Jews who tried
so very hard to shed their hyphens and to live in a world where, as
George Steiner put it, "Only trees have roots. Men have legs, and are
each other's guests." We who aspired to that cosmopolitan ideal have
forfeited the ethnic and religious referents which might have permitted us
