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PARTISAN REVIEW
not been successful, and discuss how to expunge or expel the demons
among us whenever they arise. That's what I think we've got
to
do.
And we can't pretend that we're not inextricably connected to the
Christian majority of the United States. But they don 't have
to
act in an
anti-Semitic £:1shion because they are Christians.
Robert Wistrich:
I just want to take up the last point with regard
to
the Holocaust and its impact. It seems to me that there is yet another
dimension to this which needs examination in looking at the tensions in
black-Jewish relations. This is the problem of victimology and of marty–
rology and the way memory works, collective memory.
It seems
to
me that one feature of some of the more anti-Jewish
statements, particularly from a number of black university professors, is
that there is a competition going on of a particularly distressing kind, I
would say, whereby the claims that a particular group can make on a
national conscience, or the ways it reinforces the sense of unity and
solidarity in its own constituency, are built on demonstrating victim
status; and not just victim status, but being the preeminent victim. So on
the Jewish side, the Holocaust is an overwhelming experience, a very real
one, which becomes a central component of identity. And on the black
side, the experience of suffering, of the slave trade and everything since,
becomes a central component of black identity. And the two groups see
themselves in the wider context of American society as justifying or argu–
ing their own special claims.
Then it becomes more understandable, but very distressing, that some
blacks would see the Jewish experience of the Holocaust not in the em–
pathetic way that you've outlined, which I think is the way it should be
seen, but rather as an obstacle that in some way has to be removed - in
order that the black cry of rage and of nonrecognition by the wider so–
ciety can be heard. It seems to me that some of the anti-Semitism actu–
ally is generated by this kind of distorted perception of memory.
Question:
Martin Peretz raised some doubts about the Jewishness of the
civil rights workers, and granted that perhaps many were assimilated Jews.
But can't we argue that they used Jewish values, as we find in the
Tanach and the Talmud, albeit in a secularized form , in much the same
way that Theodor Herzl, who was a very assimilated Jew, used Jewish
values to create a very successful movement?
Martin Peretz:
I think you could argue that, and it may even be so.
was active in the civil rights movement: I was an SNCC militant in
Cambridge from
1961
to
1966.
Dan Rose is quite right, a lot of the
