268
PARTISAN REVIEW
All these reflections make me wonder whether there won't come a
time when Jews might even be a little nostalgic for just a small helping of
anti-Se"mitism. Just enough to remind themselves that they have to close
ranks and preserve their existence, when all the other more positive and
venerable reasons for being a Jew may tend to fade. A religious Jew would
say that he draws his
raison d'etre
fromJudaism as a religion; then there were
the secular modern ideologies ofJewish nationalism and Jewish socialism.
But because anti-Semitism was so persistent and so strong, their external
oppression knit the Jews into a cohesive group as much as did their posi–
tive beliefs. One of the points I am making is that the longer this
open-ended tolerance goes on and we can live in a pluralistic society, the
more problematic Jewish group existence and survival may become-at
least outside of Israel and the enclaves of orthodox Jewry. This leads me to
one final heretical thought. It is as if the Gentiles are now belatedly killing
us with the milk of human kindness. Is this the new Jewish question?
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you, Robert. This is a question we'll have to
ponder over dinner.
SESSION
IV:
ART AND LITERATURE
Igor Webb:
Today, we'll start by hearing from Denis Donoghue. He is
University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American
Letters at New York University. He will be speaking on "The Tragic
Generation."
Denis Donoghue:
People do not always see themselves in a dramatic
light. There are periods during which most people are content to coincide
with their time and to live by that coincidence. But there are certain peri–
ods, and sometimes certain decades, in which the most sensitive people feel
that their lives are fateful or otherwise exemplary; they feel that they have
been born to attend upon a catastrophe, an apocalypse, or at least a transi–
tion to such an event. They live in that expectation and among certain
consequential emotions, whether of dread, exhilaration, insistent gaiety, or
bad nerves. The thirties are a case in point, Auden's decade: everybody
knew that it would end in war. The nineties, too: fin de siecle and maybe
fin du globe. But it is not clear what these phrases mean. They may mean
that those who lived through the decade thought of themselves as wit–
nessing a crisis; but Frank Kermode has argued, in
The Sellse
if
an Ending,
that "crisis is a way of thinking about one's moment, and not inherent in
the moment itself." Transition "is merely that aspect of successiveness to
