I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read ‘Down with Israel.’ I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?’ I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible….why is this country the most terrible? Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya’ and leave Israel alone.
Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)
While reading Alvin Rosenfeld’s formidable, encyclopedic, and terrifying collection of essays entitled Deciphering the New Antisemitism, I kept wondering what Hannah Arendt would make of it. Her classic study of the subject, called simply Antisemitism, was written in the late forties and published in 1951 as the first volume of her three-volume Origins of Totalitarianism. She ended Antisemitism with this remarkable statement:
Thus closes the only episode in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result [of the Dreyfus Affair] was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.
Were Hannah Arendt to publish this statement today, she would immediately disqualify herself for employment in most American or European universities. Can one imagine Vassar College, in which even the Jewish Studies faculty is knee-deep in the muck of Israel-hatred, hiring the Arendt of 1951 to teach about Zionism, or even to give a lecture on campus? Would she be allowed to set foot on the grounds of Brandeis University? And what about Rutgers, which long ago established a Hannah Arendt Professorship of Sociology and Political Science but now hires semi-literate crackpots like Jasbir Puar, who travels about the country lecturing at elite colleges on how Israelis “shrink” Arab children and steal organs from dead Palestinians in order to carry out their bloodthirsty program of “weaponized epigenetics.”
When Arendt wrote Antisemitism—a book whose effect on him Norman Podhoretz (in Ex-Friends) likened to that of a great poem or novel—her vision was as yet unclouded by the haughtiness towards established Jewish institutions and “those coarse Israelis” which her research assistant at Schocken in 1947 (a young literary critic and socialist named Irving Howe) had already noticed when he worked for her. Neither had it been distorted by what a German-born Israeli named Gershom Scholem called the “heartlessness” that permeated her Eichmann book of a decade later, in which she accused Jewish leaders of collaboration with the Nazis.
She would not have been surprised to learn that the “new antisemitism” is largely a left-wing enterprise, or that it flourishes openly on university campuses in student organizations (Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, BDS) and in those academic departments and programs, based on nothing more than the revolution du jour, which threaten to turn many colleges and universities into Goshens of mediocrity. Neither would she have been shocked to learn that “progressive” Jews (examined in Doron Ben-Atar’s essay in this book) play a huge role, as modern “apostates,” in “kosherizing antisemitism.” But she would have been surprised to learn that, in an anachronistic reversal of cause and effect that now permeates progressive thought, the single movement in which Jews took antisemitism seriously is held to be the sole cause of “worldwide hostility” against them, of Middle Eastern chaos, and indeed, in such bogus (if not demented) academic enterprises as “intersectionality,” the cause of every evil on the planet, ranging from race riots in Missouri or underpaid teaching assistants in Manhattan, to man-made global warming and avian flu. This is especially the case in Middle East Studies, where, as Martin Kramer long ago pointed out, if you expect to acquire wisdom from the majority of its professors, you should also try warming yourself by the light of the moon.
