A note to our readers.

WILLIAM BUCKLEY is no fool, but as so often before, he is strolling in where angels fear to tread. In the essay beginning on page 20 he tackles the topic of anti-Semitism at its most combustible. His essay is not a history of anti-Semitism, nor a social-psychological definition of anti-Semitism, nor a survey of anti-Semitism in the world today (although he reflects on some of these matters in a final chapter). An entire language has been invented by social science so that such questions can be discussed in the most obscure possible manner. Instead he examines how anti-Semitism is treated when it appears, or is alleged to appear, in the limited but influential milieu in which he happens to live-opinion magazines, op-ed pages, syndicated columns, television talk shows. And because Mr. Buckley is incapable of being dull, he has written an essay that treats a recalcitrant subject with some wit as well as perception.

When I saw the first draft, my immediate reaction was that it was a great read." But it was also about ten times as long as the average cover story in NATIONAL REVIEW. While I reread it to select the best passages for publication, I sent it to my senior colleagues for their comments. We reached the same conclusion: It was not an easy book to excerpt. Either one cut whole chapters and incidents, inviting charges of selective coverage and partiality;

or one cut evenly throughout-which would risk distorting what are often finely balanced conclusions and a complicated message. The upshot was that the senior editors and the publisher unanimously agreed to publish the entire essay in a special issue of the magazine, and later to republish it-along with responses from those mentioned in the text--as a NATIONAL REVIEW book.

There was also a more public-spirited motive at work. On a number of occasions since its foundation, NATIONAL REVIEW has quietly played the role of conscience of the Right. As Mr. Buckley parenthetically records, this magazine pushed both the cranks of the John Birch Society and the anti-Semites associated with The American Mercury (in its decline) from the ranks of respectable conservatism. At the time I received Mr. Buckley's manuscript, however, we had not dealt in anything like detail with the recent and highly publicized allegations of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism often inspires both hasty judgments and harsh condemnations, and therefore entails the possibility of injustice to individuals. Before pronouncing, we wanted to be sure on two counts. Was there something real and substantial beneath the allegations? And if there was, was it a serious sin deserving ex-communication, an error inviting a paternal reproof, or something of both?

Mr. Buckley seeks to answer these questions in his essay. And since much of his criticism is devoted to writers who appear in our pages or who are associated with conservative causes dear to the magazine's heart, some personal interest is added to the innate fascination of the subject matter. One might stretch a simile and say that it is rather like recognizing your next-door neighbors in a pornographic film.

But one oddity strikes the reader very soon into the argument. Except for the episode of Gore Vidal and The Nation, all the instances of alleged anti-Semitism examined here--and the adjective alleged" should be understood to accompany the noun "anti-Semitism" for the rest of this editorial note-are cases of anti-Semitism among conservatives. The suspects are Joseph Sobran, Patrick J. Buchanan, and The Dartmouth Review. And this is not because Mr. Buckley has unreasonably decided to concentrate on conservative sins and charitably minimize liberal vices. The controversies he examines, in effect, selected themselves. These are the four cases that aroused a general brouhaha in the world of intellectual debate. Other expressions of anti-Semitism might have done so; these actually did.

MY REASON for calling this an oddity is that the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is now found only rarely on the respectable Right. Indeed, those conservative groups in the United States traditionally suspected of harboring anti-Semitic opinions (e.g., rural fundamentalists) have consciously abandoned such prejudice and embraced a thoroughgoing philo-Semitism, based in some cases on Biblical prophecies about Israel's role in Armageddon and in others on repentance for what is seen as Christian complicity in the Holocaust. It is remarkable that two of the strongest supporters of Israel in America today are the Reverend Jerry Falwell, for mainly religious reasons, and Senator Jesse Helms, for mainly strategic ones. Their forebears, both ideological and genetic, in the 1930s and before would very likely have been suspicious or even hostile toward the Jews they seldom if ever actually met.

When anti-Semitism appears today outside the restricted confines of the country club (which is seen as right wing by the Left and as "establishment" by the Right), it is almost invariably a left-wing phenomenon. Mr. Buckley's chapter on The Nation and Gore Vidal deals with one variant of this. But there is also the anti-Semitism of radical black consciousness as exhibited by Professor Leonard Jeffries and the Reverend Al Sharpton; the anti-Semitism of radical Arab or Palestinian nationalism (yes, I realize that the Arabs are themselves Semites); and the anti-Semitism which blends the two in a rainbow coalition of radical leftism and Third Worldery as exhibited by the Reverend Louis Farrakhan and, on occasion, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

What is disturbing about these varieties of anti-Semitism is the spread of their appeal. They enjoy the complicity of tenured opinion in the university, the nervous tolerance of big-city politicians, the collusion of respectable black organizations, and the willingness of the establishment media to report such matters in a context of social excuses (the tabloids are significantly more critical). At the same time they arouse the enthusiasm of thugs in the street and help to recruit young people for terrorist training camps. Today it is the anti-Semitism of the Left that, in its extreme and revolutionary forms, actually leads to the killing of Jews, whether in Jerusalem, Paris, or Crown Heights.

Yet it receives much less criticism from the surrounding culture than do expressions of anti-Semitism from conservatives. And when it does arouse indignation, that indignation is very easily appeased. For instance, it was considered poor form to remind voters in New York's last presidential primary that Jesse Jackson had once referred to the city as "Hymietown." Mayor Koch was himself criticized for being "divisive" when he did so.

One of the most striking illustrations of this public mood is that, until very recently, the institutions of organized anti-anti-Semitism have been somewhat diffident in tackling black or left-wing anti-Semitism. This is humanly understandable. Older leaders of such organizations remember only too well when anti-Semitism of the most horrifying kind was overwhelmingly a crime of the Right. The organizations are themselves part of a society which, until the collapse of Communism, was generally inclined to interpret the Left's sins in the light of its professed humanitarianism, and the sins of racial minorities in the light of past injustices done to them. Finally, the leaders of such organizations have generally emerged, or not emerged, from the Left, misdirected there (as it seems to me) by the liberal Jewish conscience. And we are all inclined to be tender to the lapses of our friends-well, not all perhaps, as Mr. Buckley's dispassionate examination of Mr. Sobran's and Mr. Buchanan's lapses will demonstrate.

IF IT IS humanly understandable that critics of anti-Semitism should be harder on the Right than on the Left, however, it is no less understandable that conservatives so criticized should feel themselves unfairly treated. And one thing that indisputably emerges from Mr. Buckley's careful account is the genuine sense of outrage that Mr. Sobran and Mr. Buchanan feel toward the charges leveled against them. (The case of The Dartmouth Review raises quite different questions since the newspaper's editor and staffers convincingly deny not that a Hitler quote was anti-Semitic, but that they put it in the newspaper in the first place.) Moreover, their friends-some of them Jewish--share this sense of outrage. Robert Novak, for instance, wrote in reply to David Frum's attack in The American Spectator that "Buchanan is no anti-Semite, as anybody who knows him well will avow."

It would be pleasant for conservatives if we could at his point conclude that the attacks on Messrs. Sobran and Buchanan were simply a case of liberal opinion and organized antianti-Semitism overreacting to a mere suspicion of conservative prejudice in order to balance their criticism of the much more blatant anti-Semitism on the other side of the spectrum-and leave it there. But that option is not available to us. Mr. Buckley establishes that, in a few instances of their writings, there is at least a case to answer.

I will not here anticipate the verdicts he reaches. That would risk both oversimplifying a subtle argument and spoiling the reader's suspense. But without prejudice to the cases under discussion, as the lawyers say, it is worth asking how we should weigh a few instances of suspected anti-Semitism in a writer's large output. What if he can point also to philoSemitic writings? Or what if he can cite the testimony of friends as to his personal decency in the matter? What, in particular, if those friends are Jewish? The claim "Some of my best friends are Jews" is often derided as the classic excuse of the social anti-Semite. But that is apt only if the excuse is manifestly insincere. If his best friends really are Jews, then either his Jewish friends are extremely odd or he is not an anti-Semite.

Norman Podhoretz is quoted later in these pages as saying, in effect, that only God can know the secrets of the human heart. That is so, but we may reasonably speculate all the same. There are several possible reasons why a man might give vent to anti-Semitic remarks. He might, of course, be an anti-Semite. One should never neglect the obvious. Or he might make anti-Semitic remarks in the heat of an argument in order to deliberately wound a Jewish adversary. That would show an unpleasant character; it would demonstrate his grasp of the anti-Semitic vocabulary; and, other things being equal, it would create a reasonable supposition of anti-Semitism. But it would not in the end convict him of a general anti-Semitism, any more than the arguments of most wives in domestic rows would convict them of a general hostility to husbands. A third possibility is that because of the exaggerations of a polemical writing style, he might take criticism of Israel, or of American supporters of Israel, over that invisible line separating legitimate anti-Zionism from culpable anti-Semitism. (In that case, he would be the more vulnerable to misunderstanding because much anti-Zionism is in fact a disguised form of anti-Semitism.)

This third possibility is my own explanation of how both Mr. Sobran and Mr. Buchanan first began to be suspected of harboring anti-Semitic feelings. In effect, both men were denounced in severe terms for first or uncertain offenses. They then reacted characteristically. Mr. Sobran, unable to believe that anyone could sincerely think him seriously ill-natured, declared himself the victim of political persecution and froze in a posture of heroic defiance. Since the defiance is of Jewish pressure, it produces effects that are sometimes hard to distinguish from anti-Semitism, as Mr. Buckley reluctantly documents. Mr. Buchanan, displaying that instinctive pugnacity he has put to excellent use on a thousand other occasions, delivered a column straight to the jaw of his first major critic, A. M. Rosenthal, and "moved on" unapologetically, refusing to reply to later attacks.

Their divorce from old friends and allies is the more bitter because although at least some of the charges against them have at least some substance, others are simply false. For instance, Mr. Buchanan's defense of John Demjanjuk against the charge of being the concentration-camp guard "Ivan the Terrible" was courageous and looks as if it may be vindicated. It is his critics who, having detected in this defense a wish to downplay the Holocaust, may now find themselves in the morally uncomfortable position of having endorsed a show trial. If so, one of the props of the case against Mr. Buchanan will have fallen, and he is bound to feel, humanly if not wholly logically, that this undermines the entire edifice.

It cannot be in anyone's interest to drive people into anti-Semitism by accusing them of it peremptorily. A recognition that there are faults on both sides might facilitate a truce if the two men and their critics still kept up diplomatic contacts. But it is my impression that they face each other across a deep canyon of silence over which all the bridges have been cut on both banks. This mutual alienation grows deeper every day it is not healed. And Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Sobran become natural prey to the overtures of dubious friends peddling dubious comforts. That is where matters rest at the beginning of Mr. Buckley's essay.

From all this I draw the general conclusion that if the venial sins of the Right are, first, equated with serious left-wing offenses and, then, punished even more severely, they are likely to become mortal. Mortal sins, mortal wounds, perhaps both. If so, the result will be needless bitterness, broken friendships, a harsher tone in conservative debate, and the waste of some remarkable talents.

To avoid these evils, a simple effort of imagination and charity is required. Mr. Sobran, Mr. Buchanan, and their critics, particularly their conservative critics, need to see themselves as others see them. They need, in other words, to read Mr. Buckley's essay--and then to dial some telephone numbers that they have not dialed for some time.

For our society, the wider issue is to lift the standards of public debate so that certain habits of mind and discussion can have no place on either Left or Right. We need a greater sensitivity--not in the corrupt sense of the word that justifies censorship and thought control, but precisely to allow honest discussion of the most delicate topics.

For conservatives in particular--as Mr. Buckley argues, citing Irving Kristol--the issue may be to remind us all of the nurturing power of religion in our lives at a time when it is increasingly under pressure from the secular Left. And that is an issue on which Jews and Christians are the most natural of allies.

JOHN O'SULLIVAN