444
PAH.TISAN REVIEW
as Jews to attacks on us as Jews, I just want to underscore an additional
point that I was trying to make. Part of my anger about anti- Semitism
has more to do with my feeling that nobody is going
to
come between
me and my right to be an American. It may have happened to the Jews
in Berlin in the thirties, but what gets my blood up, and what makes me
want to annihi late anti- Semites, is the idea that they would want to
come between me and my right and my ability to participate in this
American experiment.
Martin Peretz:
But who's trying to do that, Jim?
James Sleeper: I
think that the essence of identity politics and multicul–
turalism is
to
undermine the bases for the kinds of things that some of us
are trying
to
pursue. It's not so much in the hurling of anti-Semitic epi–
thets as such, but in that larger corrosion of the notion of any kind of
American exceptionalism. It's part of a longer discussion, but it's a point
I felt compelled to underscore.
Stanley Crouch:
What you've said is very important. Last night I was
thinking I would try to write something like, "Well , who is the Jew, fi–
nally?" Is the Jew Hank Greenberg or is the J ew Woody Allen? Is the
Jew Meyer Lansky or is the J ew Saul Bellow? Is the Jew Susan Sontag,
who writes as though the United States never existed? Is it Cynthia
Ozick? And I kept thinking, and the list kept getting longer and longer,
of all these people: the Russian-Jewish composers who went to
Hollywood and wrote Russian scores for Western movies, so people
ended up walking around humming Russian themes while thinking of
horses ga ll oping down from the hills - I mean, who are they , finally?
And it came to me quite seriously that there is something about the
United States that has changed Jews into Jewish-Americans, and that
J ews have changed America into something that resonates with certain
elements of the Jewish sensibility. It has much to do with what I called
at one time the democratization of the matinee idol. By the time you
got to the point ten or fifteen years ago when all these American
women said they thought Woody Allen was the sexiest guy in the
movies, I mean, hey, something's going on! Something's going on.
I'm not at all trying to downplay, by any means, the seriousness of
prejudice and the ill effects it can have on everybody from the young to
the old, but I do think that we have to remember that all of us have
made this country something very, very special. All of our rhythms, the
best of us and some of the worst of us, pulsate through the spiritual
bloodstream of this civilization, and everybody who gets off a boat and
comes here knows that. People like the drummer Mel Lewis, who is a
