In pursuit of anti-semitism.

WHAT FOLLOWS is material provoked by the publication of the essay "In Search of Anti-Semitism: What Christians Provoke What Jews? Why? By Doing What?--And Vice Versa." The essay was in five parts. It attempted, by examining complaints against Joseph Sobran, Patrick Buchanan, The Dartmouth Review, The Nation, and Gore Vidal, to explore the contemporary faces of anti-Semitism and of anti-anti-Semitism. The fifth part attempted to delineate some moral and political perspectives.

What is it that John Doe actually said that gave rise to the charge that he is anti-Semitic? Did it have to do with a single utterance by Mr. Doe, or is it that Mr. Doe appears to be fixated on questions that relate primarily to Jewish interests? In the context in which Mr. Doe spoke, are we enlightened as to his purposes in speaking as he did? Is it possible that in fact Mr. Doe is not anti-Semitic (three dozen people who know him well swear to it that there isn't a bigoted bone in his body) but that those who do not know him as John, but need to make judgments based on what he says and writes as John Doe, plausibly think him to be anti-Semitic? In such a situation, what can Mr. Doe do to efface the impression he has made, which impression he wishes he had not made? Or does he care?

Is one's attitude toward Israel a reliable index of one's attitude toward Jews? Many writers have complained that opposition to Israel is regularly misinterpreted as betraying anti-Semitic sentiment. Some Jewish writers and thinkers will say that to criticize policies of the government of Israel isn't anti-Semitic, but to question the right of Israel to exist may and probably is motivated by hostility to Jews. When such questions arise, the job becomes to scrutinize the way in which hostility to Israel is expressed, in an effort to reason to whether that hostility is probably motivated by generic opposition to any corporate Jewish purpose. Why should the effort be made? Because the reaches of anti-Semitism are an all but contemporary memory.

The essay brought in a great deal of commentary. We received about two hundred letters, and the ratio was 3 to 1 critical of the essay. Many of these criticisms, however, were based on the presidential candidacy of Pat Buchanan (For heaven's sakes, why get in the way of a genuine protest candidate?), not withstanding that we had made it plain that the essay was written before Mr. Buchanan announced his candicacy. Some critics seemed to be saying that because he decided to enter the race, we should therefore have put off publication of an essay in the research and writing of which almost an entire summer was spent. Some readers complained that I had not got around actually to defining anti-Semitism. That is formally correct, I did not: though I thought it pretty plain that a definition crystallized in what I said, and in the language I quoted. Anti-Semitism has different energy levels. One reader wrote that he defined anti-Semitism as a dislike or disapproval a) even of Jews one has never met and b) of any corporate objectives identifiable as of special concern to prominent and vociferous Jews--a pretty good definition, which would account for the casual anti-Semitism of someone who reacts in opposition to whatever organized Jewry is seen to be up to because organized Jewry desires that end. The manifestations are many and varied. They are sometimes signaled in that little exclamation, the single comment direct or oblique, the blurt, the cocked eyebrow, which can be the equivalent of addressing an uppity Negro in the old South as "Snowball."

WHY SHOULD we care? The subject is important for moral as well as intellectual and analytical reasons. The Holocaust is one of the great nightmares of history, and just as the Catholic Church has spent a hundred years agonizing over the Spanish Inquisition, it is inevitable that the poisoned wells that generated Auschwitz should continue under microscopic scrutiny by those who do not understand, but seek to do so, how the anti-Semitism of the Twenties and Thirties, largely social and cultural, metastasized into the Holocaust. Might such lackadaisical anti-Semitism have been the culture impregnated by the "scientific racism" of such as Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, itself an atheistic bastard child of late-nineteenth-century rationalism? The essay declares that Auschwitz has now become, so to speak, a senior citizen: Most present-day Germans were not even alive when the ovens were working. What they and others are left with is a historical memory, even as we have a historical memory of the age of slavery. That memory enjoins careful supervision of undisciplined thought and commentary. On the other hand, if we are intimidated by unreasoned or opportunistic denunciations, useful thought is impossible.

Our critics addressed these and other themes. They were columnists, editorial writers, academicians, clergymen, and of course NATIONAL REVIEW's great body of readers. We reproduce some of this material. A word about what criteria I used in deciding what to publish in space that accommodates less than one-tenth of the volume of commentary the essay generated:

We have given first priority to persons specifically named in the essay. Joe Sobran comes in with a vigorous essay taking vigorous exception to my own. I comment, in turn, on his, which appears in full. Patrick Buchanan was invited to respond, but pleaded the burden of his political engagements. President James Freedman of Dartmouth, heavily criticized in the essay, has not written, nor has Gore Vidal, to defend his essay in The Nation, a magazine also criticized.

Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, figures prominently in the essay. He published a six-page "Open Letter to William F. Buckley Jr." in the February issue of his magazine, and it is substantially reproduced here. Irving Kristol, heavily quoted in the essay, addressed a letter to us which is important if only because he wrote it. William Pfaff, the syndicated columnist, who writes from Paris, undertakes to clear up a misunderstanding in the essay which he attributes to Mr. Podhoretz. So do columnists Edwin Yoder and Robert Novak. A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times gave his opinions in his column and in a supplementary letter. Alan Dershowitz is the author and professor of law at Harvard; David Frum is an assistant editor on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Eliot Cohen is Director of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, he is a strategist whose name appears on the mastheads of both The New Republic and NATIONAL REVIEW. Manfred Weidhorn is a professor of English literature. Professor Hugh Kenner's views were solicited. Henry Hyde, the prominent conservative representative from Illinois, has also written for NR. John Roche's syndicated column appeared in NATIONAL REVIEW for several years, until he discontinued it; he is a prominent author and political scientist, and was a sometime aide to President Lyndon Johnson. Jeff Nelligan was an associate at NATIONAL REVIEW; currently, he is a speechwriter at the Agency for International Development. Eric Alterman is Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute. Professor Christopher Ricks of Oxford is currently teaching literature at Harvard; he is the author of T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. We are grateful to other writers we have quoted, and of course to all those who wrote (well, practically all those who wrote).

I most deeply regret that there simply isn't time to answer the letters that flowed in, and stormed in.

1. An Essay by Joseph Sobran

WHEN A MAN shouts "Wolf!" it's not really necessary to remind us that the wolf is a dangerous animal, or to inform us that is Latin name is Canis lupus, or to discourse on its breeding and migratory patterns. We just want to know if there's really a wolf there. And if we can find no trace of a wolf, it may be helpful to know whether the man doing all the yelling uses the word "wolf" to include, say, terriers and spaniels.

The unintiated reader, seeing the title of Bill Buckley's essay, "In Search of Anti-Semitism," might assume he was going to read about what most people mean by anti-Semitism: anti-Jewish mythologies, racial theories, vandalism, legal discrimination, cross-burnings, riots, mass expulsions, expropriations, persecutions, lynchings, massacres, and genocide--or, at the very least, the snobbish exclusion of Jews from polite society.

That reader might be surprised to find that Bill isn't writing about any of these things, or even their advocacy. He's hardly writing about anti-Semitism at all.

He is actually writing about charges of anti-Semitism--charges leveled against a few journalists, charges made in the context of disagreement over Israel, charges that have the odor of political ideology about them. And though he announces that he will examine both sides ("What Christians Provoke What Jews? . . . An Vice Versa"), the "Vice Versa" never really shows up. He doesn't even provide us with a helpful definition of anti-Semitism for purposes of evaluating the charges.

Bill's whole essay has a curious tone. It's as if a particularly scrupulous judge were presiding at a show trial, without realizing that the verdict had been decided in advance.

Throughout the chapters on Pat Buchanan and me, Bill seems to take for granted the good faith and sanity of our accusers. They are never put on the witness stand for cross-examination. The entire burden of proof seems to be on the accused, even though the accusation remains vague. (John O'Sullivan's attempt to paraphrase the charge is tellingly nebulous: Pat and I are "suspected of harboring anti-Semitic feelings." Suspected of harboring feelings?) Bill doesn't ask whether the accusers have an obvious interest of their own in discrediting critics of Israel whose arguments they can't refute on their own terms.

Worst of all, Bill never suggests any penalty for making false or loose charges of anti-Semitism. This omission makes it hard for me to credit the rest of his argument. If there's no penalty for falsely making serious charges (and all "anti-Semitism" seems to be equally serious), it's open seasonf or slander--as, in fact, I happen to think it is. The graver the crime, the more doesn't even acknowledge this as a problem.

I submit that anyone can see that it's not only a problem in this country today, but a far more pressing problem than anti-Semitism--real anti-Semitism, that is--which has been properly discredited. In a society where Jew-hating was rife, charges of anti-Semitism would have no bite. But what, in the current atmosphere, is to discourage the Rosenthals and Podhoretzes from defaming and trying to ruin anyone who says openly that the U.S.-Israeli alliance is detrimental to this country's best interest? (*1)

The chief polemical project of modern Zionism has been to forge an ideological high redefinition of anti-Semitism that puts criticism of Israel on the same plane with Nazism--as if these were merely different degrees of the same metaphysical evil. And once this bogus continuum is established, even differences of degree don't seem to matter much. The point of the devil-term is not to distinguish, but to conflate. A Buchanan somehow gets no credit for confining his supposed animus to verbal criticism of Israel; there are no venial sins in this department. On the contrary, he is attacked with as much fury as if he'd called for a nuclear first strike on Tel Aviv. Yet we all sense something unreal about the accusations: Buchanan's foes would be as amazed as his fans if he were arrested for actually harming a Jew.

Everyone heatedly denies equating "legitimate' criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but somehow the equation keeps popping up. Everyone makes devout obeisances to free speech on the matter, but somehow critics of Israel keep findijng their careers at stake. Time observed recently that Buchanan had "survived" Rosenthal's attack on him. You don't have to "survive" a debate, a discussion, a difference of opinion. You only "survive" an attempt to destroy you.

Measure Israel by the same yardsticks you apply to other regimes, and you'll get more than an argument. You'll find your reputation and sources of income under attack. This has been not only Pat's and my own experience, but that of many journalists; a number of them--Fred Graham of CBS, Jeremy Levin of CNN (a former hostage in Beirut), columnists Georgie Anne Geyer and Bob Novak--have told me their stories, which usually don't reach the public. The average American has no conception of how the range of opinion about Israel in the media is constricted by backstage pressures. When I began questioning Israel's value to the U.S. as a "reliable ally" and "strategic asset," my employers, editors, and syndicate were all besieged with demands for my dismissal.

I am grateful that most of the people I write for were as firm as they were; I must specially mention the dauntless Lee Salem of Universal Press Syndicate, who politely told Richard Cohen where to get off when Cohen was calling for my head. I have some pity for those who were less firm: it can be unnerving to a civilized man to be suddenly confronted with fanaticism--in the form of people so committed to a cause as to be incapable of detachment or irony about it, unable even to imagine an alternative view of it, and possessed with a powerful urge to punish anyone who disagrees.

Such vindictive zeal is so incommensurate with the ordinary give-and-take of civil society that one hardly knows how to cope with it. Israel, as my sociologist friend Jack Cuddihy, a profound student of Jewish-Christian relations, observes, is "the issue that makes strong men tremble." Everyone in journalism knows you criticize Israel at your own risk.

This is not a two-way street. There is no hyphenated cussword in general use to stigmatize hostility to Christianity. Popes and cardinals come in for abuse when they speak of the rights of Palestinians. Leon Wieseltier can call a cross on a convent at Auschwitz "sickening," and nobody condemns him. Norman Podhoretz doesn't hesitate to publish, in Commentary, long essays by Henryk Grynberg and Hyam Maccoby blaming Christianity for the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews; no uproar ensues, nobody tries to get Podhoretz fired. Israeli soldiers can beat up a priest on the West Bank, then shoot up his church during Mass, and only the Catholic press takes note. (I called attention to the story at an NR editorial conference; nothing came of it.) If Christians had done such a thing to a synagogue, anywhere, it would have been front-page news, everywhere. This is the "Vice Versa" Bill never gets around to discussing. In controversy over Israel, the ad-hominem argument is the norm--for one side. The motives of Israel's critics are always fair game for discussion. No matter how cogent their arguments, their inner lives become the subject of unflattering speculation. (The motives of Israel's partisans, on the other hand, are assumed to be honorable.)

Now it's one thing to reproach a man who makes an anti-Semitic argument, one that arouses or appeals to hostility toward Jews. If he argues against American aid to Israel only on the grounds that it's a Jewish state, he is in the wrong. But if he argues against such aid because he opposes foreign aid in general, or because Israel has dealt ungreatefully with the U.S., or simply because Israel has nothing to offer this country that justifies the costs of supporting it, his argument has to be met on its own grounds, and it's irrelevant, and unfair, to accuse him of ulterior motives. Besides, those who make glib and cynical judgments about the motives of people they disagree with (and whom they have an obvious interest in discrediting) ought to be distrusted. Those who object to anti-Semitism in principle must also object to Israel's injustice to its own minorities.

An "anti-Semite," in actual usage, is less often a man who hates Jews than a man certain Jews hate. The word expresses the emotional explosion that occurs in people who simply can't bear critical discourse about a sacred topic, and who experience criticism as profanation and blasphemy. The term "anti-Semitism" doesn't stand for any intelligible concept. It belongs not to the world of rational discourse, but to the realm of imprecations and maledictions and ritual ostracisms. And woe unto him, even in this modern secular world of ours, upon whom this curse is pronounced.

The word "anti-Semitic"--like its cousins "racist," "sexist," and "homophobic"--has become a monotonous expletive, like the obscenities in action movies. "It's tempting to ask whether the people who constantly resort to it have ever learned how to use a thesaurus. Can't they describe the behavior they object to in vivid nouns and verbs?

No. Not without losing the effect they desire. To say, for example, that Buchanan overstates his case against Israel here and there would be much less dramatic than uttering the formulaic malediction. And in prounouncing the curse, as in performing an exorcism, it's vital to adhere strictly to every syllable of the prescribed formula.

We're not being asked to show merely reasonable respect and consideration for minorities these days. We're being required to internalize their ethnocentrisms, to make ourselves satellites of their indomitable self-absorption--a mentality perfectly expressed by Meyer Lansky, whose notoriety was such that Israel refused to accept him under the Law of Return. "When you're a Jew," Lansky moaned, "the whole world's against you." If Abe Rosenthal and Norman Podhoretz talk in their sleep, this is probably what they say.

ANY reasonable and decent man must reject anti-Semitism, or any other irrational and unfair prejudice, especially when it becomes, or threatens to become, state policy. The whole idea of the rule of law is that the state should treat everyone alike. This is not only my sentiment but my guiding principle, as anyone who knows my work understands.

But if you apply this simple principle consistently, the Orwellian minority lobbies will accuse you of hating minorities. Oppose special government favor to any special interest--the race-quota lobby, Zionists, homosexuals, feminists, "artists"--and you are tagged as racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist, or Jesse Helms.

Replying to Bill's essay in the February issue of Commentary, Podhoretz all but equates opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism. And in his mind, "opposition" to Israel seems to mean rejecting any of its claims and demands against the American taxpayer. In other words, desiring merely normal relations with Israel is anti-Semitic!

But there is no reason why the American taxpayer should be forced to subsidize any foreign regime. He is already overtaxed to pay for his own government's constant pandering to domestic interests.

In the mental prison of his self-absorption, the minoritarian polemicist can only understand criticism of Israeli "democracy" (or of "civil rights," or federal grants to artists) as the expression of a special animus. It never occurs to him that the critics may be speaking out of their own principles, and he senses that he can't afford to subject his own interest to the scrutiny of principle.

So his endeavor is to sow suspicion against the critics. He has no other defense against them except the accusation. If he had to make his case on the presumption that others could disagree in good faith, he would be speechless.

I'll tell the full story of my own encounter with the Israel claque, and answer Bill's observations in detail, (*2) someday soon. For now, this abridged account will have to do.

I HAD been pro-Israel--emotionally pro-Israel, in fact--for some years after the 1967 Six Day War. That changed with the 1982 Lebanon War, when the ruthless bombing of Beirut, and the attendant slaughter of Palestinian refugees, became too much for many of Israel's former admirers. I was disgusted with the trite phrases and revolting excuses that were being made for our "reliable ally." Menachem Begin, moreover, had lied to Ronal Reagan about his intentions in Lebanon. Some friend. We were being implicated in Israel's crimes. What were we getting of this dubious alliance?

My mind really changed when I reread some old columns and editorials by James Burnham in, of all places, NATIONAL REVIEW. By then Jim was no longer with us--a stroke had forced him to retire in 1978--but his writings on the Middle East held up well. He had written that American and Israeli interests were basically divergent; that when push came to shove, the chief American interest in the region was access to Arab oil, which was threatened by American patronage of Israel, a relation that catered to the Israel lobby in America.

The more I reflected on this, the more obvious it seemed. I asked various pro-Israel conservatives for their views, but none of them made nearly as much sense as Burnham.

Taking his logic further, I concluded that it was in the interests of Israel to set the U.S. in opposition to the Arab world. But it was not in our interests. Such an alignment could only please the Soviet Union, which was seeking it for its own purposes. The idea that Israel was our "only reliable ally in the region," when it was alienating friendly Arab nations from use, recalled the old joke illustrating chutzpah; the man who kills his parents, then asks the court of mercy as an orphan.

An alliance is a hard-headed affair; your interests may require an alliance with someone you'd never want for a friend, just because you have a common enemy. Stalin is the notorious example. First you have enemies, then you form alliances. But in the Middle East, it seemed to be the other way around: first we got the "ally"--then we got the enemies.

The claim that Israel was our "strategic asset" died an embarrassing death during the Gulf War, when the Bush Administration had to beg Israel to stay out of the fighting, lest the anti-Iraq coalition fall apart. I never thought the Israelis wanted to fight, when the U.S. could dispatch their chief enemy for them; I predicted, though, that they would later demand American money for what was fulsomely called their "amazing restraint" in letting the U.S. do the fighting. Sure enough, they were soon demanding $10 billion in loan guarantees. And when President Bush stipulated conditions, an Israeli cabinet minister accused him of guess what.

I knew, nearly a decade ago now, that to write in this vein in my syndicated column would be to antogonize various Jewish neoconservatives, such as Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter. I respected the neocons in those days, but I thought of them essentially as New Dealers who were beginning to see the light. I really had no idea how central Israel was to the Podhoretzes' politics. I figured that though we would differ on Israel, we agreed on most other things, so Israel wouldn't matter too much. I was yet to learn that they reasoned the other way around: if we differed on Israel, nothing else mattered.

The neocons could tolerate criticism of Israel from liberals and socialists, whom they dismissed as bleeding hearts. But criticism from a conservative--precisely on the grounds that Israel was neither a "reliable ally" nor a "strategic asset" to the U.S.--undermined the very basis on which they promoted American patronage of Israel.

By the spring of 1986, the Podhoretzes and their set were in full cry. They never argued with me; they accused me, publicly and privately, of "anti-Semitism," and they took their complaints to Bill and other editors, whom I gather they urged to fire or drop me. This is denied all around, but Bill's essay shows at least that their modus operandi is to communicate primarily with the editors and employers of writers who incur their wrath. (*3) (In his reply to Bill's piece, Podhoretz complains that Bill broke his "promise" to prevent me from writing about Israel and Jewish topics in NR. What "promise" is he referring to? This comes as news to me. But whether or not any such promise was in fact made to him, we see here how he does business.)

Bill was very rattled. He published the strange statement he quotes in full in his essay, denying that I was anti-Semitic but saying it was perfectly reasonable to conclude from my columns on Israel that I was, with a pointed digression on the relative retaliatory powers of Jews, blacks, and homesexuals. (The statement appeared, as impish fate would have it, just below an editorial plangently affirming that free speech must never be squellched by pressure groups.)

Naturally, I was upset. But Bill discouraged me from writing a reply, arguing that I'd only be hurting myself; better to let the whole thing blow over. I accepted this unwise advice, assuming that I'd be vindicated by the letters from our readers in my behalf. The mail was pouring in, angry, eloquent, and overwhelmingly on my side. I was moved and gratified by those letters; some of them brought me close to tears. I never felt so proud of NR's readers.

But Bill gave orders that none of those letters were to be published.

The result was that everyone got the false impression that our readers took no interest in the affair. I think I was more disheartened by that than by anything else in the whole episode. It's amusing that Bill now begins his essay by quoting a single letter critical of me. Vox populi . . .

The ultimate target of the silencing campaign, it should be remembered, is not the relatively few writers under attack, but the public. Israel's little helpers want not so much to prevent us from speaking freely as to prevent us from being heard by people who may be listening intently. Israel's subsidies depend on maintaining an illusory monopoly of opinion in the media that will keep American taxpayers uninformed and passive. It's not enough that one side should be heavily over-represented; no other side should even seem to exist.

It pains me to reflect that NATIONAL REVIEW came into being precisely to counteract such lopsidedness and false unanimity in public discussion.

BILL BUCKLEY is lovable, brilliant, funny, generous, and innumerable other endearing things, but he is not always the keenest listener. He can make distinctions that would dizzy Bertrand Russell, but when he's determined not to see your point, a team of logicians armed with red-hot pokers can't make him see it. So when he summarizes my views on Israel, he fatally omits something obvious and central to them. What he calls "my burgeoning case against Israel"--as if I were likening Israel to North Korea or Uganda--is really my burgeoning case against Israel as an ally of the United States.

I don't know how I could have made this plainer than I have over the years. It's not that Israel is such a horrible state, as modern states go; it's a farrago--rather typical of the Middle East--of socialist, ethnic, and religious elements. We have no stake in its feud with its Arab and Moslem neighbors. This is just the sort of quarrel America has successfully avoided at home for two centuries. Why should we plunge into one on the other side of the world?

We live in an age so intent on motive-hunting that it has forgotten how to argue. Before Bill undertakes to grapple with my motives and purposes, I wish he would at least get straight what I've actually said. Anyone who has read as much Burnham as he has shouldn't find my meaning impenetrable. If I were wrong on every detail he has collected against me, my general argument would be unaffected.

For example, he writes: "Joe Sobran never spent a lot of time blasting apartheid." Well, I've never blasted bribery in Mexico, polygamy in the Moslem world, or female circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa either. Deplorable as these things are, they don't affect American global interests.

Bill is right to call Israel's domestic policies "analogous" to South Africa's. But this is hard to square with his fantastic assertion that non-Jews (he says "Arabs," as if there were no other restricted minorities in Israel; Christian Armenians, for example) enjoy virtually "equal rights" with Jews in Israel proper--where Jim Crow laws and quasi-legal arrangements, enforced by the agriculture minister, forbid non-Jewish residence on more than 92 per cent of the land. Bill once sent me a propaganda sheet from the Zionist outfit FLAME (Facts and Logic About the Middle East) to assure me of this supposed equality, apparently not realizing that FLAME is to Israel roughly what Corliss Lamont was to the Soviet Union.

Does he,or anyone else, seriously believe that Arabs can be equal in a polity officially dedicated to Jews, and in which the total expulsion of Arabs is a live topic of discussion? In his book Chutzpah, even Alan Dershowitz admits that Arab equality in Israel is a fiction. The New York Times has recently carried several stories about Arabs being driven from their homes to make way for Jews; such news items ought to catch the eye of champion of private property. They illustrate the warnings of von Mises and Hayek about the malign uses of socialist state power. Socialism is a lousy system for producing wealth, but it's an excellent system for controlling a subject population. Ask any Ukrainian.

The South African analogy fails on several key points.

1. We aren't taxed to support South Africa. We are taxed to support Israel. We're usually free to find fault with that which we are forced to pay for.

2. There is no shortage of critics of apartheid; whereas Israel has not only a powerful lobby in America, but a big claque in the press constantly repeating its propaganda claims.

3. Most pertinent here, no journalist takes a risk to his career by criticizing apartheid. The power of the pro-Israel forces not only siphons off American tax money, but seriously impedes free discussion of Israel in this country.

Bill himself has sometimes noted ruefully that there is more freedom to criticize Israel in the Knesset than in the American press. For some reason, he doesn't address this problem in his essay. Not only is it pertinent; the essay itself is indirect proof of how serious the problem has gotten. Pat Buchanan and I are far from the only journalists whose livelihoods have been threatened because we criticized Israel. Everyone in the business knows you mention Israel's shortcomings at your own risk.

Very well, then; but must I criticize Israel so much? Must I be so . . . "obsessed"? I note that this word is applied exclusively to pundits on the wrong side of the unwritten law. If I were writing frequent columns faulting (say) Mali, when nobody else was even defending Mali, I'd have to say, Yes, it looks as if I'm a little obsessed with Mali.

But take a quick inventory (only the Census Bureau could do the job exhaustively) of the commentators who constantly defend Israel: Podhoretz, Rosenthal, Dershowitz, Martin Peretz, George Will, Mortimer Zuckerman, Morton Kondracke, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Kenneth Adelman, Amos Perlmutter, Eric Breindel, Cal Thomas, Max Lerner, Ben Wattenberg, Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, Fred Barnes . . . Peretz and Zuckerman have bought three major magazines--The New Republic, U.S. News & World Report, and The Atlantic--and turned them into organs of pro-Israel apologetics. The U.S. Government and the news media give enormously disproportionate attention to Israel, which gets the lion's share--more than a quarter--of U.S. aid. (How much goes to Mali, which has twice the population and fifty times the acreage of Israel? Where the hell is Mali?)

Please! I don't put Israel on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. I don't make Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw talk about it. I don't fly Secretaries of State to Jerusalem every few weeks.

THE TRUTH of the matter is that I'm responding to an obsession--a more or less official national obsession with a tiny, faraway socialist ethnocracy, which, I agree, ought to be a very minor concern of American policy-makers, but isn't. The orthodox view that Israel is a "reliable ally" is so brittle that a single maverick can ignite a frenzy. The reason, I repeat, is not that critics of Israel are so numerous, but that even one, as far as Israel's claque is concerned, is one too many. There is the terrible danger that the public may be more interested in what he has to say than in the party line the rest of the chorus is emitting.

I'm also responding to a very loud silence. Obsession is not always overt. It can also take the form of evasion, of a jittery refusal to face a thing that cries out for frank discussion. I find this obsession in people who suspend their professed principles when it comes to Israel: in liberals who damn discrimination everywhere but in Israel, and in conservatives who overlook everything from socialism to espionage when Israel is the perpetrator. I guarantee you, I'll criticize Israel a lot less when other conservatives criticize it a little more.

Or when they feel free--really free, as an American should always feel free--to criticize it at all. It's really the silence that bothers me. Above all, I'm responding to the fear that creates that silence. Anti-Semitism, as the term is used by honest people, is contemptible. But so is the dishonest imputation of it. Not long after the Podhoretz crow'ds attack on me, Midge Decter accused the most venerable of American conservatives, Russell Kirk, of "anti-Semitism" for a perfectly harmless quip: he had remarked that some neoconservatives appear to think the capital of the United States is Tel Aviv. Her smear was neither reported nor rebuked by NATIONAL REVIEW. I think NR finds it easier to stand up to Saddam Hussein than to Midge Decter. It can be witty and sassy on every subject but one.

I very much mind the tens of billions of dollars Israel and its partisans have taken from us. But I mind much more the freedom they have taken from us--the full freedom to discuss our own country's best interests. And I mind that it's a freedom Bill and NATIONAL REVIEW seem indisposed to exercise, or even to lament having lost.

WFB's Commentary

1. I don't understand Joe Sobran's saying that in my essay I never write about the "Vice Versa." In the essay I deplore a) unwarranted imputations of anti-Semitism; b) the intimidating activity of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); c) heavy pressures, some Jewish in origin, by the abuse of the First Amendment, to cultivate an unnatural secularism (the essay even quoted at some length two Jewish critics, Irving Kristol and Michael Kinsley, who deplore this practice). Longtime readers of the magazine will remember that d) back when the Anti-Defamation League was tempted to identify American conservatism with fascism and racism, we regularly gave the organization hell. (We welcomed its reformation at the hands of the late Nathan Perlmutter, who was a contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW.)

2. It is true, and should not surprise anybody, that as often as not there are no penalties imposed on minorities who abuse majorities. Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall referred to President Reagan as the "greatest racist" in the history of the White House and nobody except Reagan seemed to notice (President Reagan invited him over to the White House and they had a nice chat). The head of the NAACP said roughly the same thing about Reagan, more or less repeatedly. Anti-Christian and especially anti-Catholic abuse is everywhere engaged in, notably in Hollywood, and everywhere tolerated. Our own religion editor, Richard John Neuhaus, commented some time ago that in the view of the New York Times "the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic." And it has been suggested that no Catholic or Christian fundamentalist should be heard in public debate on those questions where their opinions derive from their underlying religious philosophy.

But this does not mean that the reputations of fanatics don't suffer. Professor Dershowitz is taken less seriously by serious people since the publication of a rabid book. President Freedman of Dartmouth is in effect disavowed in the Commentary piece quoted below. One must assume that such folk can be "hurt," even if nobody sues them for damages or puts them in the pokey, or in Coventry.

3. It is true that to criticize Israel is often to invite critical biopsies by people a) looking out for Israel and b) looking for anti-Semitism. That there is a hard lobby working for Israel is nowwhere denied; on the contrary, it is stipulated in the essay. There are other lobbies. Is it more dangerous for a congressman to antagonize AIPAC, or the National Rifle Association? A draw, I'd guess. We spend $3 billion per year on Israel. The Grace Commission showed how we might save annual expenditures of $400 billion. To blow one's stack over that relatively small part of the budget that goes to Israel is only absolutely safe to do--if fiscal husbandry is the objective--if one has a whole lot of other stacks lined up to blow, in protest of other federal expenditures. If it isn't the money, but the moral question, indignation over expenditures in countries with unsavory government should be consistent (how much did we invest in the Philippines when Marcos was in charge?). Otherwise the suspicion can and will arise that there is animus behind the objective of trimming the budget at the expense of Israel.

4. It does not occur to Joe to meditate on the exchanges with his colleagues during the period in question: three protracted sessions, two of them lasting over two hours, at which the other Senior Editors, plus the Managing Editor, plus the Publisher, endorsed the analysis that went into the editorial he classifies as "strange," and the action to which that analysis pointed. All five of us joined in warning him that what he was then writing inevitably gave rise to conclusions that what burns up Joe Sobran is the Jewish operation in Israel. Joe does not call attention to his praise of Instauration magazine (later withdrawn), or to some of the language used in his column ("Holocaust Update" for the New York Times). Dammit, people who provoke--and that often includes NATIONAL REVIEW and its Editor-at-Large--have got to face up to the consequences of provocation: people get mad and they fight back. The question here is whether they fight back fairly--in this case, by alleging anti-Semitism. It was precisely the purpose of the essay to probe that question. When Part Buchanan said that only the Israeli Defense Ministry and its "amen corner" were in favor of resisting Saddam Hussein's war of agression he certainly provoked me, by God: I'm neither an Israeli Defense Ministry nor an "amen corner," and I and fellow editors had written several columns and editorials backing Bush's tough response to Iraq. So Joe and Pat should be surprised that some people suspect, others proclaim, that Sobran and Buchanan are bent on provoking friends of Israel? Well, they succeeded in their provocations and have to live with the hounds they unleashed. This is hardly an endorsement of such as A. M. Rosenthal, who indefensibly situated Pat Buchanan alongside David Duke, or of Richard Cohen, who goes so far as to contend that no anti-anti-Semite should consent to appear on the same television program with Buchanan. And of course it is supremely deformed to suggest that Pat Buchanan's campaign in New Hampshire was in any significant way related to the question here being discussed.

5. When the editorial about the disavowal of Joe's columns was published in NR, this was not an invitation to our readers to comment on who was right, who wrong, in the adjudication. In the first place, none of our readers (that we knew of) had studied the scarlet dozen of Joe's columns. They could not have known the hours of thought given to the decisions arrived at by a unanimous senior staff whose responsibility it is to make policy and personnel decisions. I did not elect to embarrass Joe in the editorial I wrote--by reproducing the offensive columns. Nor did I dilate on the number of times I had told him about the minefield he was electing to kick up his heels in. And it is critical to recognize that we are talking about a minefield the editors of NATIONAL REVIEW substantially approve of: alarms that go off when people venture, inadvertently or by design, toward a dark and toxic house, whose identity becomes decipherable only after one has trod too far. There is a graffito there that reads: EZRA POUND SLEPT HERE.

6. I do not understand Joe's extraordinary suggestion that Israel is immune from attention by me or by NATIONAL REVIEW (or, for that matter, by the New York Times, CBS, or Garry Trudeau). We reproduce, on page 9, brief excerpts from published criticisms of Israeli practices which did not provoke charges of anti-Semitism. But any useful commentary on the Israeli phenomenon has got to begin by understanding that an explicitly Jewish state isn't going to be a multicultural state. Much that goes on routinely in Israel, and certainly in the West Bank, would be forbidden under the U.S. Constitution. Accept this, and much else is merely derivative. Christians are not free to proselytize in Israel. Israel isn't a state within which there is civil equality. On this subject I have written, if I may say so, vividly. I have also written (the phrase is reproduced in the excerpts of criticisms of Israeli policies) that our concern for Israel is "one part geopolitical and nine parts moral"; and that was written even before the cold war ended. In 1946 the feeling in America among the morally alert was that something should be done to revive Jewish hope, to help to remoralize a people wounded and humiliated by the Holocaust. That sentiment, so widely held, diminishes today because of the excesses of the Shamir government. But although our help over the years was largely that, a benefaction--even as we exercised charity toward Japan and Germany--Israel was, also, over a particular period, a strategic asset whose government reflected majority opinion. It is absolutely incorrect to suggest, as Joe does, that South Africa's apartheid policies lay outside his interest inasmuch as South Africa was never a strategic asset. On the contrary, it was: the source of minerals not elsewhere procurable, and the Gibraltar of the South Atlantic. The embargo on South Africa, at the time it was imposed, imperiled our strategic interests; which is why NATIONAL REVIEW opposed that embargo even while disapproving of apartheid.

7. NATIONAL REVIEW came into existence to endeavor to speak the truth and to encourage discriminating thought. It continues to be proud of one of its primary achievements, namely to have encourage Joe Sobran to harness up and come on into our tent, where he is much admired, much beloved; and, as should certainly be evidence, much prayed over.

(*1) Since Bill wrote his essay, Abe Rosenthal has upped the ante by likening Pat Buchanan to David Duke, and offering a seven-point plan to stop them.

(*2) One point won't wait: Bill seems to misremember the Thomas Friedman incident. Nobody disputes that Friedman (and his colleague William Branigin of the Washington Post) described the Israeli bombing of Beirut as "indiscriminate," or that the New York Times excised this damning adjective from his report. It remains a cause celebre in American journalism. (Friedman recalls the incident on page 73 of his book From Beirut to Jerusalem.) I had mistakenly ascribed the editorial tampering to Abe Rosenthal; that's all I was apologizing for in the latter Bill Quotes. I hadn't invented the bombing of Beirut.

(*3) The only time I heard from them directly was when Midge wrote me an accusing letter, copies of which were also sent to most of my principal editors. She told a reporter that she had tried to "keep it private," bur circulating the letter among journalists proved an unsuccessful method of keeping it out of the papers.

2. An Interrogatory

From Ronald R. Stockton

ITEM 1. You take Sobran to task for reporting that a Friedman story on "indiscriminate" bombing was modified stateside. You say Thomas Friedman wrote an article in Columbia Journalism Review correcting facts.

Observation: I spoke with Tom Friedman and asked about the "indiscriminate' story. He said he had used the word and it had been cut stateside. He said the story in the Roger Morris article in the CJR (November/December 1982) was an accurate depiction of what happened, that he told you the facts and "Buckley got it wrong." He said he himself had no article in CJR.

Item 2. While Israel does not allow mixed marriages, a marriage contracted overseas "yields equal rights upon return."

Observation: It would take a lawyer to sort this one out, but my understanding is that the children of such marriages are illegitimate (mamzer) under Israeli law.

Also, by way of anecdote, a colleague, Sandy, who is Jewish, married Sue, who is not. When Sandy took his sabbatical in Israel a few years ago, Sue was not allowed to work because they would not give her a spouse work permit for this reason (at least that is what Sandy understood).

Item 3. You discuss the anti-inducement law and observe that "In the absence of protests from the missionary wing of the Christian churches, one assumes either that the law is a dead letter, or else that it is so effective as to eliminate evangelization."

Observation: Arrrrgh! My first thought was that this is the logic whereby Syrian Jews who do not tell TV reporters they are being harassed are not being harassed. My second thought is that you need a better informant. Do you know the problems the Mormons had, getting permission to build in Jerusalem? Or the problems of Jerusalem's Baptist church? It burned down in the early 1980s, waited over an hour for a fire truck to come from a few blocks away, waited most of the decade to get a permit to rebuild, then had to put in expensive soundproofing when neighbors protested against Christian songs. I personally met a "secret missionary" registered as a bookseller. He says that he has a rabbi in this group: the rabbi says if he acknowledged his faith he would be ruined. The missionary fears expulsion. Talk to some Christian Palestinians.

Item 4. Abe's mother is Jewish. Under the Law of Return he has a right to citizenship--unless he renounces his faith.

Observation: Murky is too mild a word, but apparently Abe's descendants have a right to citizenship even if Abe converts. Clause 4Aa guarantees citizenship to "the child and grandchild of a Jew" exempting only the "person" who converted. This looks like citizenship by descent as well as faith. Zucker, Coming Crisis in Israel, discusses some court decisions.

Item 5. Vidal says "a small number of American Jews made common cause with . . . the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus-Christers." You say "I am genuinely at a loss as to what Vidal means here."

Observation: The close relationship between Revisionist Zionism and the Televangelist Right was a bit of a scandal in the 1980s among progressive Jews. Falwell received the Jabotinksy Award in 1981 and was reportedly the second American called by Begin after the bombing of Iraq (after the President). I was told by someone in the Evangelical movement--not involved in Middle Eastern affairs--that the Israelis gave Falwell a private jet. (See my article on Christian Zionism, The Middle East Journal, Spring 1987.)

Item 6. The Pollard case would be different if Israel had given secrets to Russia.

Observation: Did you read the Weinberg brief (sensitive sections were deleted)? It suggests exactly that (although he cannot say so directly). Also see the MacNeil-Lehrer interview with DeGenova the day of sentencing. He came as close as possible to saying it without saying it.

Item 7. You say there is no move to expel "Israeli Arabs."

Observation: Are you aware of the positions of rightist Israeli parties? Check the platforms of Tehiya, Molodet, and Tsomet, and the public statements of their leaders. Remember there are (or were) in the Israeli cabinet.

Item 8. "A fierce anti-Semitism exists among Palestinians. Probably a higher percentage of them hate Jews than did the Germans."

Observation: This may be the oddest statement in the essay. It comes from nowhere, is unconnected to anything before or after, and offers no evidence. On the face of it, it seems part of the Israel-linked rhetoric wars. I have seen Palestinian public-opinion studies, have read official PLO documents, have spoken to Palestinians in Jerusalem, in the territories, in Israel, and in Dearborn, and see no evidence for your conclusion. A few months ago the Bishop of Jerusalem told my class how he had been a 'Sabbath boy' to a beloved neighbor in Haifa in 1948. A Nazareth pastor told me last summer how he invited Jews from Tel Aviv to take refuge in his church until the war ended. And Father Chacour told a Detroit congregation recently of his determination to have peace between Jews and Palestinians. You mentioned a "percentage." Would you share your data?

Comment by WFB

Re Item 1. I regret the confusion. Here is the PS in a letter I sent to Joe Sobran on September 29, 1990: "I called Thomas Friedman. He told me 1) Abe Rosenthal was not on duty when the adjective 'indiscriminate' was excised--Seymour Topping was. 2) Friedman never wrote a piece on the subject for the Columbia Journalism Review, Roger Morris did. 3) Not all the facts in the Morris account are accurate. He would be glad to tell the entire story to anyone at NR who wants to call him." In my essay my memory slipped, but in no important detail: I had forgotten that it was Roger Morris who had written up the story in the Columbia Journalism Review. My memory of what Thomas Friedman said over the telephone is distinct, and the reason I published the story is made clear in the context.

Re Item 8. I don't understand why you find this perplexing. Organized Jewry in Germany was never hostile to Germany. The Palestinians have been fighting the Jews since 1948, fighting directly on five occasions, indirectly on other occasions. They are most definitely hostile to the state of Israel, which they believe began by taking their territory and continues, expansively, to colonize outside the pre-1967 borders. It should not suprise us that there are Palestinians who are friendly and hospitable to individual Jews, and vice versa. It was so in Nazi Germany, between Jews and (yes) even some Nazis.

Mr. Stockton is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

3. An Open Letter to Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

From Norman Podhoretz

I HAVE just read "In Search of Anti-Semitism" and I am quite, frankly, relieved. The reason is that it did not confirm my deepest apprehensions upon first hearing the top-secret rumor that your were writing a very long essay by that title which would take a new look at the charges of anti-Semitism against Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, Gore Vidal, and The Dartmouth Review.

No doubt you are wondering, perhaps a little testily, why this rumor should have made me so apprehensive. Well, our mutual friend George Will once observed that one does not call a conference on "Whither Incest?" in order to reaffirm the prohibition against incest. Just so, it is reasonable to suspect that one does not necessarily go in search of anti-Semitism in order to find it. Anti-Semitism is, after all, easy enough to unearth without a search warrant; conversely, if one needs to search in order to find it, the possibility arises that it may not be there at all.

But I am being a little disingenuous here (though no more than I admit--see below--I have sometimes found you to be on the subject of anti-Semitism). The truth is that, after discussing the issue with you several times over the past ten years--first in connection with the response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983, and then more recently in connection with Sobran and Buchanan--I had come away with the sinking feeling that (forgive me, even though I can hardley forgive myself, for borrowing from the feminists) you just didn't get it.

But, you are fully entitled to ask me, what about your past record not only in spotting anti-Semitism when it appeared in your own immediate environs but also in fighting to expunge it? In your new essay, you remind us of that record, and the pride you take in it shines through. So it should; it is a very honorable record indeed. You begin with a scual shocker: "I have some credentials in the area, among them my own father's anti-Semitism." You also confess that in 1937, at the age of 11, you "wept tears of frustration at being forbidden by senior siblings" to accompany them on an adventure that consisted of burning a cross outside a Jewish resort. But later in life, putting away childish things, and having come to see in the wake of the Holocaust that "The age calls for hypersensitivity to anti-Semitism, over against a lackadaisical return to the blase conventions of the prewar generation, which is one country led to genocidal catastrophe," you set your face most resolutely against anti-Semitism. When you founded NATIONAL REVIEW in 1955 and became its editor, you recall, the magazine

declined association with anti-Semites, and indeed on one occasion went a generic step further. When it became clear, in 1957, that the direction The American Mercury was headed was anti-Semitic, I ruled, with the enthusiastic approval of my colleagues, that no writer appearing on the Mercury's masthead, notwithstanding his own innocence on the subject, could also appear on NATIONAL REVIEW's.

There can be no doubt that this was indeed a "Generic step." Before you took it, the American Right had provided a rather comfortable home for anti-Semitic ideas, attitudes, and fellings, even if many of the Right were themselves, as individuals, "innocent on the subject." Thanks to you, however, a process of purgation, of cleansing, began. It is a process that still remains to be completed, but so far has it already gone that--as your successor to the editorship of NATIONAL REVIEW, John O'Sullivan, puts it in his introduction to your essay--"When anti-Semitism appears today outside the restricted confines of the country club . . ., it is almost invariably a left-wing phenomenon."

Nearly thirty years later came the case of Joe Sobran, which you review at length in the first part of "In Search of Anti-Semitism." The salient points are that in 1986, Sobran, then a Senior Editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, wrote a number of syndicated columns which many people regarded as unambiguously anti-Semitic. Complaints were made both orally and in writing to him, to you, and to some of your colleagues. You responded in due course with an extraordinary editorial in NATIONAL REVIEW denying that Sobran was anti-Semitic but acknowledging that

Any person who, given the knowledge of the reigning protocols, read and agonized over the half-dozen columns by Joe Sobran might reasonably conclude that those columns were written by a writer inclined to anti-Semitism.

Invoking the precedent you had set in connection with The American Mercury in 1957, you concluded by dissociating yourself and your colleagues "from what we view as the obstinate tendentiousness of Joe Sobran's recent columns" (even though those columns had not appeared in NATIONAL REVIEW itself). While you did not go so far as to drop him from your board of Senior Editors (that would come in 1991, over the Gulf War), you did forbid him to write in NATIONAL REVIEW on Jews, Judaism, or Israel.

AS FOR my own role, which you now rehearse in great--perhaps too great--detail, it consisted at first only of being among those whose complaints had led to this outcome. Later I wrote an article for Commentary entitled "The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name" [November 1986], which was mainly about Gore Vidal and The Nation (a case you take up in Part 4 of your essay) but which concluded with a section about Sobran and NATIONAL REVIEW. Later still, you and I had a rather sharp two-round exchange of unpublished letters about a piece by Sobran in defense of himself against me and some of his other critics that you published in NATIONAL REVIEW. "In Search of Anti-Semitism" contains extensive quotes from that exchange (with more space devoted to your letters that to mine--but who's counting?), and you naturally give yourself the last word with seven points in rebuttal.

My guess is that any reader of that section of your essay who is unfamiliar with "The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name" will get the impression that I had been one of those who, you report, were dissatisfied with the way you handled "the Sobran crisis." Curiously enough, in spite of the praise I lavished upon your behavior in "The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name," you seem to lapse at moments into that impression yourself. So let me make things Kristol clear (pun intended, naturally).

I thought then, and I think now, that you acted nobly in confronting a "beloved" (your word) disciple and colleague and trying to set him straight in private on a matter of great delicacy and difficulty. I thought then, and I think now, that going public with your chastisement of him when he remained obdurate was an act of high statesmanship. Had you lacked the courage to perform it, grave damage would have resulted to the reputation of your magazine and of the conservative movement it has done more than any other single force to establish as an influential presence in the mainstream of our political culture. I wondered then, and I wonder now, whether I would have had the stuff to acquit myself so well in an analogous situation.

In short, I have no hesitation in including your handling of Sobran on the list of your accomplishments in fighting anti-Semitism on the Right. (Until, that is, you tarnished that accomplishment by deciding to publish what I called his "unrepentant and disingenous" rebuttal in NATIONAL REVIEW--about which more below.)

Finally, to complete the list of your struggles to cleanse the conservative movement of anti-Semitism, we come to the case of Pat Buchanan. To my mind, the section on him in "In Search of Anti-Semitism" is the best, and politically the most important, news about the essay. Here, to my gratified surprise, you conclude another long and careful review of the record by stating simply and clearly, and without any fancy dancing, that you

find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it . . .

Again, if you are wondering why I should have been surprised, I would refer you to the column you wrote on the subject after Abe Rosenthal, in his column in the New York Times, had (as you put it) "gone ballistic" in charging Buchanan with anti-Semitism. Your own judgment at that time was that Buchanan was merely "insensitive to those fine lines that tend publicly to define racially or ethnically offensive analysis or rhetoric." You also seemed to endorse the view that what others took to be anti-Semitism was in reality an attraction in Buchanan to "mischievous generalizations." Worse yet, you concluded with a peroration which in my opinion came perilously close to falling into the abyss of moral equivalence in its assessment of the debate:

The Buchanans need to understand the nature of sensibilities in an age that co-existed with Auschwitz. And the Rosenthals need to understand that clumsy forensic manners are less than a genocidal offense . . .

You now reveal that you were uneasy with the points left unexplored in this column, and that this is what prompted you to investigate further and eventually to write "In Search of Anti-Semitism." Yet to tell you the truth, I saw little sign of any such uneasiness at the meeting of conservatives you called around that time to discuss Desert Shield. Inevitably, a good part of that meeting was devoted to the Buchanan question, and whereas a number of the non-Jewish participants were willing to say unequivocally that Buchanan's pieces on Desert Shield--along with some of the remarks he had made on television and in other columns dealing with Israel, American Jews, and Nazi war criminals--added up to anti-Semitism, you were conspicuously reluctant to join them. You kept raising questions and introducing distinctions that struck me (see above) as disingenuous and logic-chopping and that served more to darken counsel than to advance understanding.

Hence my gratified surprise when I read the results of your subsequent investigation of and reflections on the case of Buchanan. And I was all the more gratified to discover that Joshua Muravchik's scrupulously documented article in Commentary, "Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews" [January 1991], had helped you resolve some of your earlier doubts and reach your new conclusion.

IN THE cover letter accompaning the advance copy you sent me of "In Search of Anti-Semitism," you wrote: "I have a feeling you will agree with 95 per cent of my own conclusions, nuanced though they are--which means to run special risks . . ." As it happens, 95 per cent may be a little high, since I would have to deduct at least 5 per cent alone for your positively talmudic (or should the word be Jesuitical--as from before the Jesuits went left, of course?) white-wash of Russell Kirk. I acknowledge that he deserves your deepest respect as one of the founding fathers of the contemporary conservative movement. But that does not remove the anti-Semitic stench from his crack that "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States."

Still, I do agree with a great deal of your essay. On your conclusions about Gore Vidal and The Nation, for example, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between us--though that may not be saying much, given that we have long seen eye to eye where the growth of anti-Semitism on the Left is concerned.

On the other hand, it may perhaps strike you as more significant that I am with you all the way in your section exonerating The Dartmouth Review of the charge of anti-Semitism. Some people are always complaining that false charges of anti-Semitism are just as bad as anti-Semitism itself. I doubt it, but even stipulating that in certain circumstances it may be so, it remains the case that for these people, virtually all charges of anti-Semitism are false. The reasoning seems to be that the accusation of anti-Semitism is so damaging that not even those who make blatantly anti-Semitic statements should be subjected to it. (Remember when the press refused to call even outspoken members of the Communist Party Communists?) For some, nothing short of releasing the gas into the showers of Auschwitz constitutes anti-Semitism; and even that may not be enough--assuming (they quickly go on to add) that such a thing ever really happened; or if it did happen, that it resulted in as many deaths as "the Jews" claim it did.

Yet for once, in The Dartmouth Review, we have a genuine example of false charges of anti-Semitism doing damage to innocent victims. I see no good reason to rehash your excellent summary of the particulars of this case here, but there is one crucial point that needs to be extended and stressed.

In dealing with The Dartmouth Review you return to the question you raised earlier in discussing Sobran and Buchanan of whether there is "a nexus between anti-Semitism and opposition to the policies of Israel." But this time--because The Dartmouth Review defended itself against the charge of anti-Semitism by emphasizing that it had always been a supporter of Israel--your raise the question in order "to probe the contra positive assumption, namely that friendship toward Israel exonerates one from any suspicion of anti-Semitism." Your own position is that

this is as a practical matter true, though not conclusively so. It is difficult to imagine someone who is anti-Semitic and pro-Israel. But such could exist, e.g., the (hypothetical) man who wishes Zionism to flower so that Jews in the rest of the world would be attracted to emigrate; so to speak, inaugurating an anti-diasporization.

Now, to be fair, your hypothetical man is not hypothetical at all; in the nineteenth century, the founder of political Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, used this very argument with some success to enlist gentile support. But that was in another country, and those wenches have long since died. Today, I for one would insist, it is impossible "to imagine someone who is anti-Semitic and pro-Israel." But what about Solzhenitsyn, who is thought by many to be anti-Semitic and yet is certainly pro-Israel, possibly for the very reasons that he wants all the Jews of Russia to go there? In an essay on Solzhenitsyn a few years ago, I grappled with this question, and came up with the following answer:

Solzhenitsyn has always defended Israel, even to the point of invidiously comparing the courage of the Israelis in the face of their Arab enemies with the appeasement of the Soviet Union by the Western democracies. To be sure there was a time when it was possible for an anti-Semite to be a Zionist of sorts. . . . But in our own day Israel has become the touchstone of attitudes toward the Jewish people, and anti-Zionism has become the main and most relevant form of anti-Semitism. So much is this the case that almost anything Solzhenitsyn may think about the role of Jews in the past--or even in the post-Communist Russia of his dreams--becomes academic by comparison.

This was published in February 1985, and pausing for a minute to express my awe at the realization in so short a time of Solzhenitsyn's dreams, which then seemed so fat off, I want to call your special attention to the sentence I have now put in italics. For it is here that you and I have our sharpest disagreements, and it is here that I come to the bad news about "In Search of Anti-Semitism."

AS BETWEEN the two of us, the story goes back to "J'Accuse," the article I wrote for Commentary [September 1982] about the response to the Israel invasion of Lebanon, and the two columns you then wrote in response to it.

I recall this old controversy not because I have any desire to awaken sleeping dogs, but because you yourself dig it up in you essay--and in a most peculiar way. Instead of tackling it directly, as you do with the other instances of debate between us which you describe in other parts of "In Search of Anti-Semitism," you drag it in via endless quotations from a piece by one Allan Brownfeld attacking "J'Accuse," as well as a speech I made a few years later at a conference of Jewish journalists in Jerusale. (*1) Brownfeld you identify as "a syndicated columnist who is himself Jewish," which is true as far as it goes but omits the more relevant information that he is violently anti-Zionist (being, in fact, the editor of an American Council for Judaism newsletter) and hence violently anti-Commentary and me.

Be that as it may, in one of the passages you reproduce, Brownfeld repeats the widely circulated lie that in "J'Accuse" I equated any and all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. You then make this comment:

The episode to which Brownfeld refers is well remembered by readers of Commentary. It was the general judgment of the concerned community (I was among the critics, devoting a column to the subject) that Podhoretz's fears and condemnations were exaggerated. . . .

Here either your memor is failing you (if so, welcome to the club) or you are once again slipping into disingenuousness (ditto). Whichever, there are three errors in the second of the two sentences quoted above: 1) The mail on "J'Accuse" showed that the "concerned community" overwhelmingly endorsed my thesis that the coverage of and comment on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon went far beyond unfairness and gave witness to "an eruption of anti-Semitism." 2) You devoted, as I have already indicated, not one but two columns to the subject, in the second of which you answered me and others who had complained to you about the first. 3) Neither you nor the other critics of "J'Accuse" thought that my "fears and condemnations were exaggerated," as you now so blandly phrase it. What you all thought, or at any rate said, was summed up in a letter I sent you on the day your first column appeared. Instead of paraphrasing that letter, I will follow the example you set in "In Search of Anti-Semitism" of quoting from private correspondence when it serves to illuminate. Here, then, are a couple of the

Nearly 15 years ago, I began earning the enemies you congratulate me on having by pointing to the prevalence of anti-Americanism on the American Left. This charge elicited . . . vituperation and evasive action: "Podhoretz smears anyone who criticizes America as anti-American." To this I would reply: "Yes, to be sure, there is such a thing as legitimate criticism of American, but the phenomenon I am pointing to is more properly called 'anti-Americanism.'"

Now you, of all people, come along and make an analogous charge against an analogous argument . . . I was careful to say in "J'Accuse" that not all critics of Israel's incursion into Lebanon are anti-Semitic; I specifically mentioned the New York Times editorial page as an example. Yet like my own critics on the Left . . ., you charge--and the Washington Post delightedly highlights the charge in bold type--that I "label as anti-Semantic the critics of Israel's campaign against the PLO in Lebanon."

Your response to this appeal was to write in your second column about two weeks later that

although Podhoretz did not accuse every opponent of Israel's policies of being anti-Semitic, he was mistaken to the extent that he suggested that any of those he quoted (this side of the fever swamps inhabited by such as Alexander Cockburn) is motivated by anti-Semitism.

But I was never talking about motivation; I was talking about words on paper, and I said that both in the interest of intellectual honesty and for the sake of social hygiene,those words could, indeed must, be characterized as anti-Semitic. About five years later, in arguing with you about Joe Sobran, I again emphasized that the question of whether he was an anti-Semite could be left to those who presume to know the secrets of the human heart; as for me, it was enough to observe that he had written anti-Semitic articles.

TO CLARIFY the distinction further, I will add that any person not motivated by anti-Semitism who wishes to avoid being called anti-Semitic need only refrain from voicing anti-Semitic ideas or sentiments. And might we not expect that such a person would be appalled if shown, through careful documentation and analysis, that he has blundered into anti-Semitism? For example, Nicholas von Hoffman, whose anti-Semitic remarks I cited in "J'Accuse," had the decency to be thus appalled at the sight of what he had said.

Sobran, however, was not only unrepentant, he was defiant. Like Pat Buchanan after him, who would declare, "I don't retract a single word," Sobran stuck by his guns; and, again anticipating Buchanan, he represented himself as an innocent victim of Jewish pressure, a courageous speaker of forbidden truths who, if the Jews had their way, would be censored.

You agreed when I said that Sobran was unrepentant. But you became (in your own word) "peevish" when I expressed my dismay at the fact that, in violation as I saw it of your promise to keep him from writing on Jewish themes, you nevertheless had opened the pages of NATIONAL REVIEW to his counterattack. Although you declared that I was mistaken in viewing this as a violation, what seemed to bother you most was not my public statement [in Commentary's correspondence column, March 1987] that you had thereby "tarnished your previously honorable record on this sorry episode." What really riled you was my private remark (in a letter to your colleague Jeff Hart) that the publication of this counterattack lent "credence to all those like Marty Peretz who have attacked me for being too easy on Buckley."

You felt then, and you evidently still feel, that I had committed a double sin against you here. First, I had shown excessive "docility" toward Peretz's criticisms of NATIONAL REVIEW; but more seriously, I had conspicuously failed to dissociate myself from his statement in a New Republic editorial that 'the old Catholic Right has always had trouble with the Jewish problem. This explains why Buckley has made things so cozy for an unabashed bigot like columnist Joseph Sobran."

We differed then, and we continue to differ, on whether I had a duty to do unto Peretz (who after all neither worked for me nor spoke for me) what you had done unto Sobran. Indeed, you were not even mollified when I informed you in a letter that I was so outraged by the New Republic editorial in question that "I hung up on [Peretz] when he too remained unrepentant in response to my call of protest." All you knew was that I should have made a public diavowal comparable to the one you had made of Sobran's columns.

All right, then, I will make one now--of Peretz's allegations 1) that you were in effect letting Sobran off the hook, and 2) that you have "trouble with the Jewish problem" (a euphemism, I suppose, for a residual degree of anti-Semitism). In my judgment--a judgment richly confirmed by "In Search of Anti-Semitism"--the only trouble you have with the Jewish problem is that it will not let you rest, and that you feel called upon over and over again to struggle with it and think about it and talk about it and write about it. (I have the same trouble myself.)

But this does not mean that I agree with you that Peretz is guilty of "blind intolerance of nuance in any discussion of Israel." For my money he is all too tolerant of such nuance when it comes from his friends on the Left, especially Irving Howe and Michael Walzer. Furthermore--to throw you a nuance of my own of which I trust you will be tolerant--I myself have been upset by the irritable and needling editorials on Israel which have appeared from time to time in NATIONAL REVIEW. This is not because I have regarded them as anti-Semitic. It is because on general conservative principles I would have expected NATIONAL REVIEW to be friendlier to Israel than it seemed to be--as friendly, say, as some other Christians of conservative political bent (Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Bob Tyrrell, George Weigel, and George Will, to name only a few).

Marty Peretz is, of course, Jewish, but I have to tell you that, as I honor the likes of Kirkpatrick, Novak, Tyrrell, Weigel, and Will, I honor Peretz as well for his championship of Israel at a time when it takes real courage in liberal circles to stand up for that besieged and beleaguered country against the relentless ideological assault to which it is being subjected.

I also have to tell you in all candor that I cannot in all conscience disavow Peretz's charge that--to repeat, present company excepted--the old Catholic Right in general "has trouble with the Jewish problem." For in spite of the laudable efforts which have been made by the Church in recent years to eliminate anti-Semitism from Catholic teaching, the Batican still refuses to recognize the state of Israel. If this is not a symptom of trouble with the Jewish problem, what is it?

WHICH BRINGS me back to the role of Israel in anti-Semitism today. "In searching out the meaning of contemporary anti-Semitism," you observe, "it is useful to ask whether in order to qualify as a contemporary anti-Semite one needs to be anti-Israel." The answer is, Not necessarily, but it certainly helps--through I reiterate that I would put it in terms that stress ideas and attitudes rather than motives or conscious intentions.

Here again, instead of paraphrasing myself, I will follow your example and quote freely from what I have written in Commentary on this subject in the past. First, on why and how Israel has become the main focus of anti-Semitism in a post-Holocaust world:

[It] is a testimony to the persisting vitality of anti-Semitism [that], expelled more or less successfully from domestic society in the countries where once it flourished, [it] now reappears, suitably translated into the current language and modalities of international life, to deal with the phenomenon of a Jewish state among other states as it once dealt with Jewish individuals and communities living in states dominated by other religious or ethnic groups ["The Abandonment of Israel," July 1976].

Or, putting the point in another way:

. . . it is perfectly true that anti-Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitism. But it is also true, I fear, that the distinction between the two is often invisible to the naked Jewish eye, and that anti-Zionism has served to legitimate the open expression of a good deal of anti-Semitism which might otherwise have remained subject to the taboo against anti-Semitism that prevailed . . . from the time of Hitler until, roughly, the Six Day War ["A Certain Anxiety," August 1971].

Lastly, on how the process of refocusing works:

Historically anti-Semitism has taken the form of labeling certain vices and failings as specifically Jewish when they are in fact common to all humanity: Jews are greedy, Jew are tricky, Jews are ambitious, Jews are clannish--as though Jews are condemned when they claim or excrcise the right to do things that all other people are accorded an unchallengeable right to do. (*2)

As applied to the Jewish state, this tradition has been transmuted into the double standard by which Israel is invariably judged . . . [All other people are entitled to national self-determination, but when the Jews exercise this right, they are committing the crimes of racism and imperialism. Similarly, all other nations have a right to ensure the security of their borders; when Israel exercises this right, it is committing the crime of aggression. So, too, only Israel of all the states in the world is required to prove that its very existence--not merely its interests or the security of its borders,but its very existence--is in immediate peril before it can justify the resort to force ["J'Accuse," September 1982].

This point you now do get; you even call "logically sound." But even though you now defend me against the canard that in my eyes "mere opposition to an Israeli policy constitutes anti-Semitism," you still seem to resist what logically follows from my "logically sound" point--namely, that criticisms of Israel based on this particular double standard, rooted as it is in the ancient traditions of anti-Semitic propaganda, deserve to be stigmatized as, quite simply, anti-Semitic.

I live in hopes that you will some day get that point as well.

(*1) You refer to this passage no fewer than three times. The first time you astonishingly misinterpret it to mean that I classify "as anti-Semitic anyone who ascribes to Jews characteristics uniquely Jewish." The second time you summarize it accurately. But by the third time, you have forgotten the second and are back to the first ("pace Norman Podhoretz, it ought not to be considered racist to speak of group characteristics.") Is it any wonder, then, that you so often leave me feeling that, where anti-Semitism is concerned, you are uncharacteristically capable of obtuseness?

(*2) I spoke, as I usually do, from notes, but the account of the speech in the Jerusalem Post, on which Brownfeld relied, was reasonably accurate. Which is more than I can say for Brownfeld's interpretation. Though you for some reason see fit to transcribe this piece of disinformation, you do at least assume that my speech, "coming to us third hand, contained qualifications . . . that Mr. Brownfeld either is not aware of or else is disinclined to quote." Indeed it did. Thus, you would not know from Brownfeld that the question I was asked to address was whether the editors of and contributors to local Jewish papers had any special Jewish responsibility. My answer was that they were free to disclaim it, but insofar as they accepted such a responsibility, it was to defend Israel rather than to join in the ideological campaign against the Jewish state--which I took (and take) to be a war against the Jewish people as a whole. What Brownfeld did with this was use it to show that no one, not even "Israeli critics of Israel's policy in Lebanon," was safe from my reckless accusations of anti-Semitism.

4. A Letter from William Pfaff

HIT A glancing blow in the course of Mr. Buckley's article on anti-Semitism, allow me to complain that in writing about me Mr. Buckley addresses what Norman Podhoretz says that I have said, not what I have actually said. My name occurs first in his article in connection with the Gore Vidal-Nation affair. I did comment upon that episode but never said that Vidal was an "innocent 'critic'" of Israel. I said that the controversy between Vidal and the Podheretzes was being conducted with "nailed clubs," and that I "knew the Podhoretzes, and respect[ed] Miss Decter in particular, as a writer of high, if humorless, seriousness." I added that I believed that she and her husband had every right "to give particular support to Israel out of commitment to Judaism or to the Jewish commmunity and cultural tradition . . . without having imputed to them a lack of patriotism . . . or divided loyalties." Mr. Podhoretz--in what Mr. Buckley describes as his "solemn and responsible criticism" of me--did not tell you that.

There are othe things Norman Podhoretz does not tell his readers. My dispute with him derives from a newspaper column critical of Israeli policy written after the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militiamen in Beirut in September 1982, Mr. Podhoretz considered this column anti-Semitic, and attacked it, with selective quotation from it, in the Commentary article he entitled (with characteristic modesty) "J'Accuse." As I did not see this attack until months later, and considered the accusation preposterous, I did not reply.

Some time later Mr. Podhoretz returned to the attack, saying in Commentary that I was (as I recall it; I don't have the piece before me) the only one of the Guilty Men named in "J'Accuse" who had not explained himself to Mr. Podhoretz.

This time I thought an answer necessary. I wrote a letter to the editor of Commentary saying, "There follows the text of a newspaper article of mine which Mr. Podhoretz has described as anti-Semitic. I am content to have the readers of Commentary read it and form their own judgment..." Mr. Podhoretz answered that he would not print my letter. Thinking the problem one of space, I cut the letter and resubmitted it: "There follow the relevant passages ..." etc.

Mr. Podhoretz replied that it was "out of the question" to publish even my excerpts of what I had originally written. He would publish only a letter in which I could dispute his interpretation of a column which his readers were not to be permitted to read. I told him to forget it. (My offer stands. Commentary can run the column--the whole text--any time it wants. So, for that matter, can NR.)

It is again on the basis of what Mr. Podhoretz has written that Mr. Buckley describes me as saying that Jewish-Americans attempt to "manipulate" U.S. policy. Nonsense. That is paranoia language. I don't believe it and have never said it. They try to influence policy--as well they might; why shouldn't they? So do I.

MY COMPLAINT aside, of the great deal more to be said on the larger controversy Mr. Buckley admirably addresses, the issue of selective criticism of Israel strike me as fundamental. Israelis, and Israel's friends, often complain that Americans (and Europeans) attack Israel for faults they ignore in the conduct of other countries. This is true.

I do so myself because I consider Israel part of the political and moral community in which I live, to which I am committed, and for which I feel a responsibility. I am surprised that anyone would wish Israel to be judged by any other standards than those of the liberal democratic Western community.

I write critically about Israel--and even more often about France, Britain, Germany, etc., and above all, the United States -- because I expect much of them. These are my people, democrats, members of Western liberal culture, part of a civilization and a moral inheritance to which I, as an American and a Catholic Christian, belong, and which is shared by a very small minority of those alive in the world today.

The survival and success of this community is by no means assured. One reason for that is its amply demonstrated tendency toward abandonment of its own standards and hence toward suicidal conduct. Its values must be defended internally as well as externally, or we all risk sinking. On the other hand I don't often write columns deploring the failure of Syria or Sudan or Burma or China to meet Western standards of behavior because I don't expect much of their political conduct to begin with. To say that is, I know, highly "incorrect" in the United States today, but I have been politically incorrect all my life and am too old to change now. That of course is exactly my problem with Mr. Podhoretz.

5. A Letter from Irving Kristol

MY FIRST reaction to Bill Buckley's article was that it was very long. Even the quotations were long, though the quotations from me seemed not so long.

My second reaction was one of surprise. I am certainly not insensitive to anti-Semitism, but it has been my distinct impression that there is probably less of it today than at any other period in my lifetime. I grew up in the

shadow of Hitlerism and was disturbed (to put it mildly) by the echoes of Hitler's anti-Semitism to be found on the fringes of the America First movement--and sometimes not only on the fringes. When I went into the army, it was in a Midwest regiment recruited mainly from Chicago and Cicero, and the anti-Semitism I encountered was blatant, often brutal. So I have vivid memories of the "bad old days" and I therefore have been inclined to be rather dismissive of the current intermittent, marginal symptoms that one occasionally reads about. After all, today something in excess of one-third of all Jews marry Gentiles, and I have been more interested in this fact, as a portent for American Jewry, than in some young punks defacing a Jewish cemetery or vandalizing a synagogue. But then I recall that the intermarriage rate in Germany, under the Weimar Republic, was just about as high as that, and I begin to wonder whether there is a kind of auto-immune response within a body politic still overwhelmingly Christian.

Bill's essay has persuaded me that I have indeed been too complacent. Some months ago, The New Republic sent around a questionnaire asking respondents their opinion as to whether Pat Buchanan's columns were anti-Semitic, as some were claiming. I said then that I did not believe that Buchanan--whom I have known for some years--was personally or politically anti-Semitic but rather had allowed his irritation with the liberal commitment of the majority of the Jewish community to spill over into remarks that, if uttered by someone else, could easily be taken to be anti-Semitic. I would now revise that judgment.

I STILL cannot find it in my heart to say that Pat Buchanan is personally anti-Semitic, but he definitely is politically so. There is no other way of explaining his newfound compassion and concern for Palestinians on the West Bank, or his harsh judgments for Israeli policy there as being "unjust" and morally reprehensible. Whatever one thinks of that policy, it makes no sense for Buchanan to single it out as his sole, moralistic venture into international compassion. The whole tenor of his approach to American foreign policy has been narrowly "realistic"--too narrow and simplistic, in my view. Yet when he talks about Israel he sounds as one would expect him to sound were he talking about Saddam Hussein, about whom, in fact, he is so reticent. A reasonable interpretation is that this is a rhetorical sublimation, for reasons of political expediency, of a deeper anti-Jewish impulse.

But how important is Pat Buchanan, anyhow? As a national political figure, not important, I would confidently assert. But so far as American conservatism is concerned, he is very important. Pat Buchanan is ostensibly running for President, but in truth his ambition is to assume leadership and to reshape the American conservative movement. Should he succeed, this movement will have suffered its greatest defeat since the election of 1964, which set the liberal tone for American politics for the next 15 years.

Pat Buchanan is not a conservative, he is a reactionary. Now, I am fond of cultural reactionaries, because the reactionary impulse can be so creative and fruitful in its cultural dimensions. After all, the three greatest poets in the English language this century--W. B. Yeats, T. S. Elliot, and Philip Larkin--have been reactionaries. So have been some of our finest novelists (e.g., Evelyn Waugh). But in a dynamic, capitalist society, being a political reactionary is a ticket to oblivion. We have seen this happen with some of our Southern novelists, poets, and critics--among our finest--who tried, back in the 1920s, to translate literary nostalgia into a sort of pseudo-agrarian social program. This was, and remains, little more than a cultural oddity. Similarly, Pope Pius IX's, Syllabus of Errors ought to be studied by all liberals, who would benefit from the challenge to their basic beliefs. But political conservatives who take it too seriously are doomed to irrelevance.

Pat Buchanan is seeking to shape the conservative movement along reactionary lines. And behind him there has formed a curious coalition of what have been called "paleo-conservatives"--i.e., conservatives of the 1930s--1950s vintage. These include Taft Republicans, America First isolationist, passionate anti-statists, and a sprinkling of "Southern" intellectuals who admire Jefferson Davis at the expense of Abraham Lincoln. But the basic thrust of this mini-movement is, in a profound sense, radical and anti-political. These people really do wnat to turn the clock a long ways back--a proper aesthetic agenda but never a serious political agenda. Only a revolution can turn a society's clock back to any substantial degree, and the "paleos" may have revolutionary enthusiasm but nothing of great interest to say to the live human beings who constitute the American public.

It is important to note that we are not dealing here with a pro-Reagan reaction to George Bush's centrism. Though Pat Buchanan has too much political sense to say so, the quasi-official view of the "paleos" is that Ronald Reagan betrayed conservatism because he didn't simply abolish the welfare state, lock, stock, and barrel. Admirers and supporters of Ronald Reagan understand that, while reforming the welfare state is a proper conservative goal, abolition is not in the cards--as the experience of Margaret Thatcher, with her Conservative majority in Parliament, conclusively demonstrates. One might leap to the conclusion, as many "paleos" have, that the people in our Western democracies are all in a sad state of corruption. But abolishing people who get in the way of a political agenda is a left-wing idea, not a conservative one.

And how does anti-Semitism fit into all this? It is a symbolic issue, a signal light that holds this radical coalition together. It is, after all, a coalition with many internal stresses and contradictions. The Jews provide--as they always do--a scapegoat, which is also a unifying force for people of various frustrations. I do not believe for a moment that these people really have it in mind to persecute Jews (though they may decide to persecute Israel as a proxy). But who knows what fires a few random sparks can set off? In any case, by importing into American conservatism a set of anti-Semitic innuendoes, they are debasing the conservative movement and robbing it, in the eyes of the public, of its political legitimacy.

That is why I think, in the end, that Bill Buckley's essay is so important. It is a forceful statement, by our leading American conservative, as to what kind of political body and what kind of political soul American conservatism is to possess.

6. An Editorial by James M. Wall

WILLIAM BUCKLEY, who first achieved fame with his book on the anti-religious environment at Yale University, recently addressed the issue of secularity in a lengthy and carefully nuanced essay on anti-Semitism in NATIONAL REVIEW. Acknowledging the difficulty of identifying anti-Semitism, Buckley nevertheless boldly concludes that he has found anti-Semitism in the writings of some of his colleagues on the political Right as well as among those on the Left such as Gore Vidal.

NATIONAL REVIEW Editor John O'Sullivan points out that Buckley's essay is "ten times as long as the average cover story," but he says the topic was important and sensitive enought to dictate printing the entire article. It was a good decision. As one of the chief figures in American conservatism, Buckley is well situated to address a topic which has unfortunately been introduced into the 1992 presidential campaign by Republican candidates David Duke and Pat Buchanan. Buckley's careful treatment is especially valuable because Buchanan and conservative writer Joseph Sobran are among his close friends. Much of his article focuses on whether it is possible to criticize the state of Israel without being labeled anti-Semitic. Buckley believes it is, but he argues that Buchanan and Sobran have gone beyond such criticism.

The essay will no doubt become an important guide in the public debate on Israel and its critics, for it outlines the complexity of an issue that touches upon politics, human rights, and religion. In a concluding section Buckley turns his attention to the religion clauses in the Bill of Rights, which, he believes, provide a second point of tension in our current concern for properly identifying anti-Semitism. Buckley quotes from an essay by Irving Kristol published three years ago in NATIONAL REVIEW, because, he admits, Kristol is Jewish, and because "I cannot surpass him in lucid social analysis." Kristol points to the "tension that is now building up between Jews and Christians," a tension that "has very little to do with traditional discrimination, and everything to do with efforts by liberals--among whom, I regret to say, Jews are both numerous and prominent--to establish a wall between religion and society, in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state."

Two hundred years after the adoption of the religion clauses, Kristol argues, the prevailing liberal mindset is far more concerned with avoiding religious establishment than in encouraging religious expression. Specifically, Kristol says, "the major Jewish organizations proceed from the correct proposition that legally and constitutionally we are not a Christian nation, to the absurd proposition that we are in no sense at all a Christian society." Even though the overwhelming majority of Americans are Christians, these Jewish organizations insist that Christians' religion "be a totally private affair, one that finds no public expression and receives no public deference. Such insistence shows a lamentable ignorance of history, sociology, and psychology."

Kristol offers a devastating critique of the liberal Protestant organizations that have been "more keenly interested in social reform than in religious belief." Lukewarm Christianity, Kristol suggests, is more attractive to Jews because they assume, incorrectly in his view, that social-minded religious people will be less likely to produce the sort of anti-Semitism "our Jewish ancestors experienced for centuries in Europe." He thinks this is a faulty assumption because vicious anti-Semitism is not Christian anti-Semitism, but neopagan (Nazi and fascist), Muslim fundamentalist, Marxist, or "simply nationalist chauvinist anti-Semitism, of a kind one now finds in Japan (of all places!) or Latin America."

The Framers of the Bill of Rights could not have anticipated the rich pluralism of contemporary America, but they give us a framework in which pluralism is something to cherish, not to fear. We must be vigilant in protecting minority rights. But we must also be careful not to read the "no establishment" clause so as to restrict all public expressions of faith and hence dilute the meaning of "free exercise."

The "free exercise" clause applies to all faith groups equally and should not be seen as a threat to those that are in the minority--precisely the groups that the "no establishment" clause was designed to protect.

Mr. Wall is the editor of The Christian Century, from whose January 15 issue this editorial is excerpted.

7. A Letter from A.M. Rosenthal

ONE POINT I would like to clear up for your readers has to do with the mysterious three weeks between the time Mr. Buchanan made his comments about the "amen corner" and the time I attacked him in my column.

Mr. Buchanan, as you knew when you brought up the issue in your article, made this time-lapse the basis for saying that the Anti-Defamation League and I had been parties to some kind of plot--which I am sure you recognize as the old Jew-conspiracy bit.

You did not say that directly, of course, but you did call attention to the "whole three weekds," suggested orchestration, and left it all in an air of mystery.

All you had to do clear up this mystery was to lift up the phone and ask me; you never did. I would have been happy to tell you that I was out of the country when Buchanan made those cracks on NBC. I was on vacation in Majorca and previously in Oslo, attending a conference on hatred.

So I did not know a thing about Buchanan's statements that only the Israeli Defense Ministry and its American "amen corner" wanted war in the Gulf until I returned to the United States.

I found waiting for me communications from the ADL, an admirable and useful organization, which I believe were sent to other journalists they hoped would pay attention but who did not and from a couple or three readers sickened by Buchanan's nastiness. I played one of the tapes of the broadcasts I received. Thereupon I pulled out my file on Buchanan and anti-Semitism, a plump one, and decided the time had come to do a column on the man, overcoming my distaste at the idea.

Later, an executive of the ADL sent out a memo to his board rejoicing in and taking credit for the ADL part in calling my attention to the broadcast. I am delighted to thank the ADL for alerting me, as I thank others who did so.

The only real mystery in the affair is why in those "whole three weeks" no other columnist, to my knowledge, wrote about the Buchanan performance and why it has taken you a year and some months even to dance ginerly up to what should have been obvious at once--that what he has had to say could only come from the mouth, mind, and motivations not of somebody who just said "anti-Semitic things" for reasons you cannot seem to fathom, but from an anti-Semite, whose reasons grow out of his very condition.

Comment by WFB

Sorry, I fail to see your point. 1) It is obvious that an Anti-Defamation League should protest to its principal constituency evidence of anti-Semitism. 2) Whether that protest ignited your column, or whether you'd have noticed the inflammatory comments by Pat Buchanan if you had been in America, isn't especially important. 3) It is above all interesting that the question of Buchanan's anti-Semitism became a national question only after the publication of your column: If Buchanan were as conspicuously evil as you take him to be, one must suppose that someone else would have raised an alarm. Otherwise we are required to deduce that every time you go to Oslo or to Majorca, the conscience of America sleeps.

Column by AMR,

New York Times, January 21

AFTER more than a year of study of the abundant record, William F. Buckley Jr., columnist, novelist, television host, lecturer, and distinguished sailor, finally has delivered the judgment that Patrick Buchanan, Republican candidate for the Presidency, relly has said "things about Jews" that are anti-Semitic.

For this discovery, part of a voyage for which he felt it his duty to skipper first his intellecutal ship and now the readers of his magazine through 40,000 words, Mr. Buckley is receiving the applause of those editorial writers, columnists, and friends who had worried about him while he was pitching so far out at sea.

He devotes a whole issue of his NATIONAL REVIEW to the article, which he calls "In Search of Anti-Semitsm" and will preserve as a book. Obviously he considers he has made landfall after an arduous and significant exploration, although it may surprise many that anti-Semitism is so very difficult to find.

Mr. Buckley is considered the delineator of American conservatism. Mr. Buchanan now is thoughtfully trying to transfer this weight from Mr. Buckley's shoulders to his own.

So the judgment by Mr. Buckley is understandably welcome to Americans--conservative or otherwise--who have long regarded Mr. Buchanan as an anti-Semite, even though Mr. Buckley still cannot bring himself to use so blunt a noun about him.

Also, Mr. Buckley's article will buoy those who felt they had to wait for somebody certificably both conservative and non-Jewish to lead before they spoke up about Mr. Buchanan's "things."

But unfortunately Mr. Buckley's pronouncement is not likely to change the minds of readers inclined toward Mr. Buchanan, in New Hampshire or anywhere else. One reason is that Mr. Buckley does not even try to make sense of Mr. Buchanan's anti-Semitism by dealing with its roots--and particularly its political motivations. And he does not even suggest to fellow Republicans that Mr. Buchanan's anti-Semitic comments might be a reason to vote against him.

Moreover, the Buchanan section is so genteel about him, written with such absence of real censure, with such contradiction and evasion, and is so late and tortuous that politically and intellectually it destroys itself--a pity.

Mr. Buckley's only outrage is for those who had previously attacked Mr. Buchanan as an anti-Semite. For instance, Mr. Buckley was ballistically annoyed when on September 14, 1990, I wrote that Mr. Buchanan's demeaning of Holocaust reality, his lie that only Jews wanted war with Saddam Hussein, and so on, were anti-Semitic and dared suggest that anti-Semitism could lead to Auschwitz.

In the current article, Mr. Buckley reprints his column denouncing the idea. He now assures us that "an anti-Semitic crack like Buchanan's isn't of the kind that threatens" what Mr. Buckley delicately calls the "discrete territory of Auschwitz." In the post-Hitler world, he says, "workaday" anti-Semitism is not genocidal.

Workaday.

But then he writes about people trying to distinguish between "country club" anti-Semitism and "naked anti-Israelism and genocidal indifference." And he adds that the "pain"--whose?--comes from the "historical knowledge that prejudice of the first kind can metastasize--and has done so, to be sure by mutation--into Auschwitz."

So what does he really believe about Mr. Buchanan? Not much. In 1990 Mr. Buckley found Mr. Buchanan guilty of nothing worse than "clumsy forensic" manners. Even now, musing on the mystery of Mr. Buchanan's anti-Semitism, he suggests graciously that it may be an "iconoclastic temperament," which implies bravery.

No: anybody who keeps saying anti-Semitic "things" is no mystery, just one more anti-Semite. Over the centuries, as now, that has taken no iconoclastic daring, just hate and cowardice.

Since the 1990 explosion about his anti-Semitism Mr. Buchanan has refused to retract a word. But he keeps his obsession about Jews better zippered. Temporary, but it does demonstrate that the best weapon against anti-Semitism is to spot it and expose it fast and plain.

Mr. Buckley has often shown himself a man of intellecutal clarity and good heart. So I hope he gets back in the boat and keeps sailing and searching. If he makes true landfall he can send us a more helpful log.

8. A Letter from Alan M. Dershowitz

William Buckley observed that "even Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, ordinarly an outspoken advocate of the First Amendment, declared that Buchanan should be removed from the national media." Here is precisely what I said:

"If the issue were whether the government should censor Buchanan's bigoted views, I would fight for his freedom of speech as forcefully as I fought for the rights of Nazis to march through the city of Skokie, Illinois. But the question is whether private American newspapers and television stations should continue to give Buchanan a mainstream platform for his anti-Semitism."

Not only is my approach entirely consistent with the First Amendment, it is precisely the approach taken by William Buckley, in dissociating NATIONAL REVIEW from right-wing bigots. Private publications have a First Amendment right not to publish objectionable views; there will always be enough bigoted publications that are willing to.

Mr. Buckley also neglected to mention my criticism of the ACLU for not defending the rights of the Dartmouth Review students.

9. A Letter from David Frum

My reaction on reading your brave essay on anti-Semitism was apprehension that you might be about to encounter the form of ingratitude that the late Isaac Bashevis Singer described to Sanford Pinsker, who retells it in Toronto's Idler magazine:

"Singer was once invited to read a story to a group of Yiddishists in Brooklyn. They begged him to come, even though they were too poor to be able to pay him. But, their spokesman argued, at least he would be among landsmen, people who understand Yiddish, not like when he visits fancyshmanzy colleges and people make fun of his accent.

"'What could I do?' Singer told me. 'These are old people, so I went. The cab ride to Brooklyn cost me $35. And when I finally arrived, who was there? Maybe 12 people altogether. So I read them a new story. No sooner am I finished than the first person gets up and says the following: This is not a good story. This is not a Zionist story. I spit on your story. And he proceeded to spit on the floor in anger, and then to sit down.

"'At that point the next person gets up and says: This is not a good story. This is not an orthodox story. This is a dirty story, so I also spit on your story. And like the first man, he spat on the floor in anger and sat down.

"'Others objected that the story was not a socialist story or a nice story or even a properly Yiddish story; but about one thing they agreed: it was definitely not a good story. In fact, one man spat on the story twice--once because it was not a Zionist story and once because it was not an orthodox story. So from 12 people I collected 13 spits.'"

Just in case some tiresome self-appointed defender of the faith like Alan Dershowitz or Richard Cohen has been spitting on the floor and complaining that your essay was not written exactly as he would have it written, I wanted you to know that in this house it was greeted with applause and thanks.

10. A Letter from Robert D. Novak

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY'S exploration of anti-Semitism leads, I fear, into a trap where any criticism of Israel exposes the critic to being branded with the scarlet A as an anti-Semite.

Let me begin with the reason why I have been invited to contribute to this discussion: my response to David Frum's attack on Pat Buchanan published in The American Spectator. Mr. Buckley misrepresents me as follows: "Novak had made a vulnerable point when he wrote that Buchanan has after all written millions of words that do not even touch on Jewish questions (the classic antecedent of this form of casuistry is the legendary Irishman being tried for murder who volunteers to bring in thirty people who did not see him commit the crime)."

What I actually did write was quite different, that "the body of his writing" does not "support the indictment" of anti-Semitism. But even that arguable contention has to be placed in perspective. Mr. Frum's long assault on Buchanan as a "bully-boy" outside the mainstream of conservatism does not allege anti-Semitism by other than insinuation until the last paragraph, when he asserts that Buchanan's "real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting."

My position on the danger of this mischief was spelled out in this response:

"It is particularly reprehensible that an article that starts by questioning Buchanan's criticism of neoconservative funding ends with a gratuitous accusation of 'Jew-baiting.' The connection is ludicrous. The two targets most vocally unhappy about Buchanan's [anti-]neocon column--[Bob] Tyrrell and Bill Bennett--are, like Buchanan, Roman Catholics.

"A final word on anti-Semitism. In the wake of Hitler's Holocaust, it is unpardonable and impermissible. But the very unacceptability of the offense mandates that any accusation must be founded in fact, not in surmise or fancy. Buchanan is no anti-Semite, as anybody who knows him well will avow. Nor does the body of his writing support the indictment."

Unlike the case of Mr. Buckley's Irishman, that is not merely a case of Buchanan now and again failing to attack Jews. If it can be stipulated that no supporter of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, how can Buchanan's previous writings in support of Israeli policy be explained? Did he awake one morning and suddenly find himself a full-blown anti-Semite compelled to attack Israel? On the contrary, he simply changed his mind about Israeli government policy.

Yet, Mr. Buckley decrees that Buchanan's writings "could not reasonably be interpreted as other than anti-Semitic in substance." But there is nothing in those writings that degrades Jews or calls for their exclusion from this or that activity.

Buchanan's specific sin that caused all the commotion was to state an indispustable fact: that Israel and its American-Jewish supporters were uncommonly anxious to commence the war against Saddam Hussein, while the amount of Jewish-Americans in the fighting force was quite small. Buchanan hyperbole, but it is quite a stretch to call it anti-Semitic.

His overriding sin, since he changed his mind a few years ago, has been to seem "anti-Israel." Mr. Buckley implies that is prima facie proof of anti-Semitism, while he excuses what seem clearer cases of hostility toward Jews by conservatives Stephen Tonsor and Russell Kirk. Mr. Buckley calls it "mischievous" to ascribe creeping anti-Semitism to Tonsor's claim that conservatism must be Christian and to Kirk's allegation that the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol is just a ploy to help Israel. You could have fooled me.

Mr. Buckley similarly seems far less concerned by country-club anti-Semitism than "naked anti-Israelism." Yet over the centuries hatred of Jews has been expressed by exclusion: exclusion from the country club at the lowest level ranging up the scale at the lowest level ranging up the scale to exclusion from Yale University, exclusion from the old German general staff, exclusion from Spain for half a millennium, and, ultimately, in the case of Hitler, exclusion from the living.

The very notion that "naked anti-Israelism" connotes anti-Semitism charges into a semantical thicket. Anyone who opposes the idea of Israel's existence today has made a good case for calling him anti-Semitic. General George Marshall was not anti-Semite when he opposed the creation of the Jewish state a half-century ago because of what he perceived as threatened U.S. interests, but he could not continue to take that position today without being presumed guilty of bias. If on the other hand a writer recognizes Israel's right to exist (as Buchanan surely does), his culpability as an anti-Semite is markedly reduced.

But Elie Wiesel brands Buchanan as an anti-Semite "because he is a man who is constantly critical of Israel." Thus, it is not necessary to be anti-Israel, only critical of Israel. But is criticism of the current government of Israel really being critical of Israel? If so, Abba Eban and even Yitzhak Rabin would, absurdly, qualify for Mr. Wiesel's anti-Semitic condemnation.

Mr. BUCKLEY correctly suggests the existence of taboos in writing about Israel and incorrectly implies that observance of these taboos will avoid allegations of anti-Semitism. Here, I must refer to the experience of the Evans & Novak column, whose criticism of Israeli government policy dates back to the aftermath of the 1967 war. A note on why we have written so much about the subject: the Middle East has been both an incubator of war and a vital area for U.S. economic and strategic interests, which we do not feel are inconsistent with the health and security of Israel.

We have carefully scrubbed every one of the hundreds of such columns we have written to eliminate all wording that might be deemed offensive. For example, when the Israeli government complained years ago that our reference to it as "Tel Aviv" (as the American government is called "Washington" and the former Soviet government was called "Moscow" in journalistic jargon) came straight out of Arab propaganda, we instantly stopped the practice even though few states recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

To no avail. We have been continually accused of anti-Semitism, even though our criticism of Israeli government policy mirrors the position of many prominent Israelis. When A. M. Rosenthal says, "I didn't attack him [Buchanan] because of what he said about Israel and Iraq but because he put in anti-Semitic language," he is disingenuous. When we recently published new information about the 1967 sinking by Israelis forces of the U.S.S. Liberty in language that contained no taint of anti-Semitic rhetoric, Mr. Rosenthal assailed us vigorously (and unfairly). He is the journalistic cop on the beat guarding against any criticism of the Israeli government's conduct.

Making accusations of anti-Semitism is a serious business. In the nearly 29-year run of the Evans & Novak column, we have been attacked, properly, by those we attack. But the only sustained, serious, and organized effort to silence us has come from the pro-Israel lobby. Attempts have been made, often by advertisers, to remove our column from newspapers--occasionally with success.

It is distressing to see Mr. Buckley, whom I so greatly admire as one of this nation's great forces for good during my lifetime, ally himself with those who feel that views contrary to the Israeli government must be suppressed. "It would not have been inappropriate," Mr. Buckley writes, "for newspaper editors who publish Pat Buchanan to decline to publish those of his columns that touched on Jewish or Israeli questions, pending evidence that he would more carefully observe the civilized distinctions."

But what are the "civilized distinctions"? When AIPAC urges readers to write editors to remove columnists opposed to its views, it is trying to prevent full discussion of the Israeli question. This intent is only obscured when criticism of the Israeli government's policies is equated with the evil, immoral sin of anti-Semitism.

11. A Letter from Hugh Kenner

The points on which I agree with Joe Sobran are 1a) that the state of Israel is mighty arrogant in its presumption of entitlement to U.S. handouts and general compliance; 1b) that a large & influential U.S. Jewish population shares this presumption (and of course must be taken stock of by U.S. Administrations); 2) that "anti-Semitism" is a rather facile label for habitual objection to 1a and 1b. Also, I did think that in your NR piece you were rather freely pasting the anti-Semitic label on people whom Jewish opinion calls anti-Semitic because they balk at 1a and 1b.

I note from a recent New York Times that Abe Rosenthal (whose company, by the way, I've enjoyed on two occasions) was not satisfied with your treatment of Pat Buchanan. It is surely evident that such as he will never be satisfied by anything short of a casting of whoever annoys them into outer darkness, and I think it is a mistake to let them control the terms of discourse. "Anti-Semitism"--here I agree with Joe--has no stable meaning; it can run all the way from gas ovens to a mere wish that Abe R. would moderate his frenzies. And a term that has no stable meaning is simply not a profitable head for rational discussions.

12. A Letter from Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

As one named as a party to earlier discussions of the subject of anti-Semitism, I must invoke a personal privilege. Mr. Buckley has unintentionally mislabeled me as one of those who share "the conviction . . . that U.S. policy is manipulated by Jewish Americans who are hell-bent on serving Israeli interests and are prepared to use the weapon of alleged anti-Semitism to immobilize their opponents."

In fact, I have never stated any such view and do not hold it now. Perhaps such an inference could be drawn from my intervention in the Vidal-Podhoretz controversy. My two cents' worth on that matter was prompted by a historical point: the curious report or allegation that Norman Podhoretz had said the American Civil War was as unengaging to him as the War of the Roses--a view which, I am assured,he did not and does not hold.

After long and vigorous support of Israel, I suddenly find myself mistaken for one possibly hostile to its interests. This is positively Kafkaesque. I have written critically of Israeli leadership and policy on occasion--I was irritated by the Pollard affair and abhorred the invasion of Lebanon. For the rest, I have written favorably of both scores and scores of times over more than three decades.

I confine myself to a single example. As editorial-page editor of the Washington Star in 1981, I wrote our lead editorial endorsing Israel's bombing strike on Iraq's nuclear facility--an act harshly condemned in the press and at the UN. (I am pleased to think that later developments tended to vindicate our judgment.) . . .

Just to be crystal clear on the main point: in my view, Israel enjoys strong support in virtually every sector of American opinion for exactly the right reasons--its redemption of a shattering crime against a people; its democratic traditions and creeds; its loyalty to Western interests; and the vision and civility of such leaders as David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Teddy Kollek. This support has been frayed a bit, in my judgment, by the exasperating policies of Mr. Shamir. But it cannot be accounted for on any theory of "manipulation" by lobbies--not even by AIPAC, though AIPAC enjoys extraordinary and perhaps excessive influence on Capitol Hill . . .

Anti-Semitism is a heavy term, fraught with the darkest history. I am in agreement with Bill Buckley that we should not trivialize the word or the idea (as "racism" is today being trivialized) by brandishing it in every petty dispute.

13. A Letter from Murray Reswick

This letter is written in the hope that it will be directed to your attention. Hope bolstered by the fact that a letter requesting my release from Vichy France, once written by my nobody-special father to Marshal Petain, was not only read but favorably acted upon.

I do not entertain the slightest hope of improving on today's Rosenthal column in the New York Times. But I do believe that my credentials in respect of the ability to distinguish a fun-loving iconoclast from an anti-Semite are unrivaled.

I am a highly recognizable Jew with the physiognomy of a Hittite camouflaging the mindset of an atheistic cosmopolite. Moliere might have described me as a Juif Malgre Lui. I also happen to be a Medecin Malgre Lui but that is beside the point. Growing up in France, I swam, with no discernible discomfort, in a world replete with people harboring multiple hues of antagonism toward Jews. I've always known that you cannot shoe-horn all anti-Semites into one foul box. I also knew that many of my friends would mouth anti-Semitic utterances that they did not truly believe and that most such utterances were unfraught with any possibility of serious mischief. Having said all that, may I now tell you flat-out that Buchanan is an anti-Semite. Oh, a jovial one to be sure--but unmistakably a vicious one, whether or not you or he believes this to be the case. And to arrive at this diagnosis, the cumulative effect mentioned in your study need not be considered. There is only one of his statements that truly counts. It is the crack about the names of the boys slogging up the road to Baghdad. A purely factual observation, since there are so few black Jews in the armed forces of this country, but consider how potentially damaging had we suffered heavy casualties. At the risk of appearing immodest may I state that my own skirts are unsullied by this particular bit of mud-slinging, since I served in the armies of France and the United States of America, during WW II, without waiting to be drafted.

I fully understand and accept that, as the father of the conservative movement in this country, you carry responsibilities that by far outweigh any consideration of an objective and dismissive assessment of Buchanan's misdeeds, so that there are good and just reasons for you to dilute a feeble paragraph about his anti-Semitism in the midst of your exhaustive survey of the current dimensions of the problem in our country. Moreover the text as a whole was enlightening about things I did not know, such as the rejection of the neoconservatives by the original crew (country-club anti-Semitism?) and the finely reasoned Michael Kinsley condemnation of the Jewish bigotry regarding Christmas trees and creches.

14. A Letter from Eliot A. Cohen

LET ME EXPRESS my admiration for the thoughtfulness with which you address this issue, and the courage you have shown in confronting it, now and in the past. Parts of this must have been very painful to write, dealing as they did with friends, allies, and even family. Indeed, I read the article not to find out your position--it is as well known as could be--so much as to see how you expressed it, and it was gracefully done.

You began your article by describing some of your personal experiences in this matter, and so should I. I have not been exposed to much in the way of anti-Semitism, really: some taunts and bullying when walking home from the Hebrew day school I attended; casual insults--most thoughtless--from a variety of persons some of whom did not realize they were speaking to a Jew; more recently, a guarded suspicion about my loyalties hinted at by government officials preoccupied, I suppose, by Jonathan Pollard. In my parents' generation it was different, of course, but anti-Semitism did not prevent them, or their immigrant fathers and mothers, from making their way, protected by a regime that, as Washington said to the Jewish community of Newport, "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

That is at one level. Yet at another level any religiously and historically conscious Jew lives with an awareness of anti-Semitism. Not just the Holocaust but all that preceded it: the rabbis teach the Biblical story of the Amalekites who attacked the stragglers of the Israelite camp in the desert as a prototypical and enduring story of malice. That kind of hatred is not ascribed to the non-Jewish world in general, but to the small part of it (which includes some of Jewish birth) which despises the Jewish faith and people. It is the kind of irrational loathing that manifests itself in such bizarre phenomena as "anti-Semitism without Jews," or such grisly deeds as the massacres of Jews in Poland in 1945--after the Germans had been driven out.

Curiously, perhaps, this view of anti-Semitism as an evil and rather mysterious disease disinclines me to probe the origins of anti-Semitic behavior in America. In what I have seen of Joe Sobran's, Pat Buchanan's, and Gore Vidal's writings on this subject, there is a tinge of this madness. Now in these cases it is not a violent kind of craziness, and their venom is not directed solely against me and my people, but sickness is how I think of it. I am only glad that their cases are mild and that the great majority of my fellow-citizens are inoculated against the disease.

Let me suggest two reasons why Jews are sometimes hypersensitive about anti-Semitism. One has to do with the historical character of Jewish religious practice, for Judaism leads its adherents to ponder their history long and hard, and not merely contemplate that past, but live in it. The destruction of two Temples; the massacres that marked the routes of march of the Crusaders to the Holy Land; the expulsions from Spain and otther European countries; the pogroms which my grandparents' generation fled--these are all more vivid in the consciousness of many Jews than one might think. My point here is that it is not the Holocaust alone that makes American Jews, who have had such an extraordinarily easy time of it, touchy about anti-Semitism.

Consider further that for Jews who care about their Jewishness, survival is at stake, even in America. Anxiety about survival is only partly reflected in an intense reaction to anti-Semitism, and is often conflated with it--even by Jews. The survival of the Jews is at risk in the United States, not because of hostility but because of the very reverse--Jewish readiness to abandon our traditions and beliefs in an environment that has been uniquely welcoming. That this may be hard to appreciate was driven home to me in a conversation with a sophisticated non-Jewish friend who simply could not understand what it was to have a collective (not an individual) fear of extinction, be it through physical annihilation or assimilation.

There are Jews for whom anti-Semitism ends by defining their Jewishness. That this is unhealthy and sterile goes without saying--what Jewish child would want to live a Jewish life if the chief characteristic of such a life were the search for (and occasional discovery of) mortal enemies? The greater one's belief in the wealth and richness of Judaism, the less tragedy defines one Jewishness. But to be a Jew is also to be aware that Jewish existence is tenuous.

A few words about Israel. The Jewish affinity for Israel is something deep and abiding. "If I forget thee O Jerusalem let my right hand forget its cunning," said the Psalmist, and the love of Zion is woven through our daily prayers. I will not rehearse for you the story of Israel's precarious geopolitical position, or the history of the attacks launched against it, or the way in which its enemies have not distinguished between Jews and Israelis in their deeds of terror. Nor will I expand on the peculiarly high standards that are often applied to Israeli conduct. But I will say that for better or worse Judaism, including all but the fringe elements of Orthodox Judaism (and Jews have their would-be Ayatollahs), is now tied up with the existence of a healthy state of Israel. Were it to perish I doubt that the Jews could survive as a faith or as a people. I say that knowing well the many problematic aspects of Jewish life in Israel, and its depressing divide between obstinate varieties of religious fanaticism and secular emptiness. And I say that believing as well that the Jewish experience in the United States is blessedly unique; in this country, unlike any other save Israel, full citizenship was not the grudging gift of a ruling class but a birthright.

What I suppose all this means is that your analysis, which was sensitive and careful, did not fully capture some elements of anti-Semitism as felt by a Jew, or by Jews. It would have been quite extraordinary if it had, because it would require more empathy than anyone could expect. But I thought that I might try to convey, in words that I see are inadequate, some of those thoughts and emotions.

One concluding word, along lines already alluded to above. It bothers me deeply that so much attention is devoted to anti-Semitism that the beauties and richness of Judaism are not even mentioned. I hope that we might help rectify that, in some small way, with an open invitation. If you are ever in Washington on a Friday night and can bear the presence of four lively small children, Judy and I would be honored if you and your wife would come to our house for dinner as we welcome the Sabbath. Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, as you know; we would merely like you to see some of its traditions and warmth--and, if you wish, to continue this conversation.

15. An Essay by Manfred Weidhorn

MR. BUCKLEY'S painstaking survey of the state of anti- and anti-anti-Semitism is marked not only by candor (e.g., about his father) but by a scrupulousness that is rare. Right- and left-wing ideologues--that is, most of us--are more concerned with saving the system (or saving face) than with finding the truth. In his assay at extirpating any traces of anti-Semitism among reputable conservatives instead of scoring easy points off the anti-Semitism on the Left, he has not only shown courage but also carried out the function of criticism as Matthew Arnold saw it. For Arnold's ideal critic the solecisms and hypocrisies of one's enemies are obvious and expectable, but the defects in one's own camp are too easily ignored or excused. A true patriot wants to clean up his own nest before setting out to enlighten the rest of the world.

Since one good turn deserves another, here, in the spirit of the ecumenism and good-faith dialogue which Mr. Buckley has conjured up, is an attempt at similar candor by a Jew.

CHRISTIANITY bears a heavy responsibility for the prevalence of anti-Semitism, but not an exclusive one. Anti-Semitism existed before Christianity (Apion, Tacitus, Juvenal) and exists today outside it (in certain circles in Japan and in parts of the Moslem world). The ubiquity of this moral plague can be smugly written off by Jews as the jealousy all peoples have of the one people doing things right. Or it can make conscientious Jews ask themselves whether they are not doing something wrong. All that smoke, and no fire?

Jews are not, in fact, entirely blameless. The concept of the "chosen people" has played a mischievous role in history. Rabbis are always quick to explain that chosenness bears no relation to notions of Aryan supremacy, racial superiority, American exceptionalism, or any of the garden-variety chauvinisms that exist in Japan, France, Russia. Chosenness, they insist, means rather for Jews an extra set of moral obligations: Gentiles only have to observe a few Noahide principles, but Jews are saddled with no fewer than 613 commandments, the majority of them, to boot, beginning with the unfortunate "Thou shalt not." Jews accordingly are not in any sense superior but more burdened.

Modern psychologists and novelists have, however, noted how a burden of this sort has an insidious way of turning into an unacknowledged sense of superiority. "I am more constrained morally than you," some inner voice says, "because I am more worthy of such a mission than you are. Besides, an all-just God would not inflict sacrifices on one set of persons throughout history without rendering some sort of compensation elsewhere or later." Pay now, enjoy later. Expecting such a possible future reward may be seen as a sort of pulling rank.

BEING burdened or victimized, moreover, begets its own form of hybris, or at least of clannishness. Joseph Sobran's remarks on the invidious distinction in expressions like "goyish kopp" ("gentile head," i.e., dumb) touch on such tribalism. The tribal reasoning goes something like this: We are morally and ritually far more burdened than you; therefore we are purified by self-sacrifice and heavenward gazes; therefore we are wiser--and probably nobler--than the spiritually virginal, the naive and untested, gentiles.

Jews may not speak or even think (consciously, at any rate) in this fashion, but some Jews certainly betray such logic by their actions. A joke: A monk lies on his deathbed. His colleagues are seated at a nearby table writing his eulogy. After arduous work, they lean back, saying; "Let's see, we mentioned his charitableness, self-sacrifice, piety, etc. Did we leave anything out?" The dying monk sits up and exclaims: "Don't forget my humility."

In any case, the official rabbinic interpretation of chosenness is not the one that most gentiles, or even many non-Orthodox Jews, are familiar with. To the world at large, the phrase "the chosen people" implies a special status. One can, of course, be "chosen" for extermination, but in everyday parlance, "chosen" connotes "favored," "elect," "privileged." Jealousy--and its attendants, resentment and hate--cannot be far behind. Most people have but to recall the annoyance they felt in elementary school with the classmate who was the "teacher's pet." Whether one buys the rabbinic or the normative understanding of chosenness, the Jews are "God's pet." No favors from those left out need be expected. Nor should one forget that the teacher's pet is likewise a burdened soul; he receives a larger proportion of questions from a teacher confident that one student at least will give the correct answer. Being burdened and being favored are, clearly, not opposites.

Whatever the meaning of chosenness may be, the content of the laws placed on Jewish shoulders is an invitation to trouble. The mandate to be exclusive--the dread of intermarriage, the tradition of looking and acting differently, thef ear of contamination by gentiles (see Shylock), the apparent reluctance to participate in that most civil of ceremonies, breaking bread with outsiders, because the food may have non-Kosher elements in it--generates an aura of unintelligibility and haughtiness about Jews and their ways. That which people cannot fathom, they begin to think the worst of. And if religious Jews are raised not to socialize with non-Jews, how can they avoid beginning to feel at some pre-conscious level that non-Jews are leprous or contaminating? And how can such dis-ease not get itself communicated to the non-Jews.

Then there is an irony. The exclusiveness may well be a necessity for group cohesiveness and survival. It also, however, generates aggression in others, and this hostility (as Sartre et al. have noted) in turn is, curiously, beneficial for group cohesiveness and survival. Full-time, professional, chauvinist Jews exist who, in their heart of hearts, cannot regard anti-Semitism (at least in its milder, genteel form) with complete disfavor.

If this sounds too contorted, blasphemous, or paradoxical a thought, consider the United States. As nations go, it has been by far the most receptive, tolerant, and rewarding nation that Jews have come in contact with during their long and often bitter trek through the regions of the Diaspora. And what has been the result? Gratitude, immense and heartfelt, from most Jews but also jeremiads from the rabbis and chauvinist Jews about, of all things, a holocaust, a spiritual holocaust! The dropping of all barriers has meant rampant assimilation, intermarriage, secularism, homogenization--and the ultimate peaceful, quiescent demise of the Jewish people in America. (Read, for example, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, and he is but a moderate on this.) Truly, anti-Semitism is a subject that grows more complex every time one looks at it.

The hostility directed at Jews throughout history has, moreover, an ambiguous basis. The Hebrew scripture portrays God as ordering the Israelites to do things His way or He will pipe the floor with them. Doing things His way involves, as we saw, a lot of activity that makes Jews different and bizarre. Now comes a bifurcation. If one is a believing Jew or Christian, God would appear to have followed through on his threat; the Jews did not observe the Law too well, and they have accordingly been punished. This is a classic instance of fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Jewish suffering at the hands of others is divinely ordained.

If, on the other hand, one is not a believer, one is left with a psychological reading of events: The Israelites dream up a God who favors them but who in return seems to place burdens on them and who, they imagine, wants them to be different from all other people. This difference arouses anti-Semitism among all those "other people," who see in the Israelites only self-delusion and arrogance. The result is a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy rather than actual prophecy. The Jews are seen to have brough their troubles on themselves by fabricating a very peculiar God. (As a bard says, "How odd/Of God/To choose/The Jews.") The conclusion to all this is, "You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice": Either God's ways are very mysterious, or Jews are peculiarly self-destructive.

Fairness requires, however, the concession that exclusiveness is neither intrinsically evil--it has enabled Jews to survive for millennia--nor specifically Jewish. The Japanese are known for their xenophobia. If the ultra-Orthodox Jews ban TV from their homes for fear of secularization, do not the Amish the same? (And is it such a bad idea?) If the ultras have their own schools and textbooks, do not many Catholics? If the ultras try to sequester themselves from the gentile and even secular Jewish world as much as possible, do not certain Catholic religious orders? If intermarriage is a nightmare in traditional Jewish homes, is it any the less so in traditional Catholic ones? Is even "chosenness" unknown to Catholics and Mormons to Calvinists and other Christians assured of their salvation? If some benighted Jews actually believe that Jews can do no wrong and gentiles can do no right, has one never run across an American who generalizes similarly about his comptriots as against all those others out there?

MR. BUCKLEY'S observations on knee-jerk anti-anti Semitism have nothing to do with the concept of "the Chosen People" and little to do with the existence of Israel and the problem of double loyalties. The phenomenon discussed has much more to do with one of the oldest and most ubiquitous impulses, "Kill the messenger."

When faced a criticism of some policy or action of the Israelis--let us say, alleged torture of Arab detainees--a rational, conscientious Jew would find out whether the charge has merit. If it does and if no convincing justifications are given, he would shoot off an angry letter to those in charge. Such an inquest, however, is time-consuming and extremely taxing. What is worse, if the charge is valid, it calls into question Israel's "most favored nation" status and gives ammunition to Israel's enemies, who can be relied on to exploit it in every unfair manner possible.

How much simpler is it to dismiss the charge by calling the originator of it an "anti-Semite" and resuming one's dogmatic slumber. If the originator of the charge happens to be a Jew and therefore cannot be called an anti-Semite, not to worry! He is, of course, a "self-hating Jew."

A joke: A Jewish boy applies for a job as a radio announcer. He returns home with the news that he did not get the job. "Why not?" inquires his mother. The boy replies: "A-A-Ant-t-ti-sem-m-m-it-t-t-ism-m-m!" Patriotism, we are often and usefully reminded, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. The flag of one's country or the prayer shawl is a handy way of covering one's personal nakedness and shortcomings.

Make no mistake about it, there are real anti-Semites and self-hating Jews out there. Labeling someone in that way just because he raises unanaswerable questions is, however, neither good logic nor fine manners. One's first task is to address the charge and either enlighten the interlocutor or revise one's thinking.

Everyone is wedded to the ideology of his choosing or upbringing. When a theory collides with a fact, the iron law of psychology is that the theory will invariably win out. The theory digests and incorporates the fact, as in the case of the leftist who asserted that proof of Trotsky's prophetic insight is tha none of his predictions has yet come true.

After Don Quixote's gimcrack armor fell apart in the first testing of it, he rebuilt it and then wisely refrained from repeating the test. Not only that, he even went so far as to call it the best armor that ever was. So do we all operate with our cherished ideologies. How many individuals, Jew or gentile, resist the temptation to take this easy way out when confronted with an embarrassment? "He's a commie!" or "He's a kook!" Mr. Buckley himself has had the honor of being called everything from "fascist" to (just recently) "scary." Killing the messenger is, in short, not a Jewish or neoconservative problem, but a human one. In this case, as in so many other matters, Bernard Malamud's aphorism (adapted actually from Montaigne), "Jews are like other people, only more so," is apposite. In two senses: Jews carry normal forms of behavior to a higher or more intense pitch than do gentiles; and whatever Jews do people will take more notice of than if other ethnics do it.

In line with Malamud's Law, Jews are, like the stuttering would-be announcer, sometimes indeed guilty of over-reliance on the ad-hominem argument. Any sensitive Jew who, on the basis of making a legitimate criticism of black leadership or behavior, is irritated at being called a racist should have some understanding of the annoyance gentiles must feel when labeled "anti-Semitic" as a result of making an objective observation on Jewish affairs. Having been deeply seared by the Holocaust, Jews are understandably on the lookout for signs of any resurgence of evil. But overkill sometimes takes place and is counterproductive. Pat Buchanan, for example, has certainly ventured into a grey area on a number of occasions, but are not A. M. Rosenthal and company perhaps a trifle trigger happy?

RECALL THE Abe Fortas case in 1967. His nomination for the Chief Justiceship resulted in a Bork-like imbroglio. There were widespread whispers and rumors of anti-Semitism. What held up his nomination, however, was that, at first, conservatories were leery of his liberalism and, later, that he was found to have an unacknowledged conflict of interest.

Anti-Semitism turned out to have been nonexistent. Recall also the groundless fears that Jewish leaders had over the nomination of George Shultz as Secretary of State because of his ties to Bethel and its ties to the Arab world.

The moral is, when there are other legitimate explanations for a man's behavior or statements, anti-Semitism should be a charge of last, not first, resort. When you have a bona-fide anti-Semite like David Duke on your hands, why add to your problems? The corollary to this rule is that, if you call good-intentioned critics "anti-Semites" frequently enough, they may begin to lose some of their good intentions and you may become a self-fulfilling prophet. Hitler has given anti-Semitism a bad name (hence Mr. Buckley Sr.'s table talk would be out of place in polite company today), but some Jews may be inadvertently allowing it elbow room by mishandling the problem. Recent whispers that President Bush, simply because of legitimate policy differences with the egregious Prime Minister Shamir, is "anti-Semitic" are a definitive instance of disgraceful, whining, self-pitying behavior.

Nor are some Jews, like some or many gentiles, strangers to the use of a double standard, though whether they do so cunningly or unwittingly is best left to the charitableness of the observer. During the Yom Kippur War, Jews were quick to criticize Western Europe and Japan for their reluctance to help Israel (or the U.S.) in any way. Considering that nearly all the oil in those countries came from Arab lands and that a possible retaliatory cut-off of oil would have quickly resulted in paralysis, one cannot so easily blame those advanced industrialized societies, in which oil is the lifeblood, for putting self-interest above principle (if indeed any principle was at stake here for them). Yet one hears little from these principled Jewish critics about Israeli's cooperating with South Africa when that nation was a moral outcast; or her building, by hook and crook, nuclear weapons; or her role in human-rights violations.

WHEN NOT guilty of a double standard, some Jews lapse into something similar--moral deafness or narcissism. Religious Jews who base their claim to the Holy Land (notwithstanding the Palestinians already there) on God's giving it to the Israelites reveal a touching naivete. They seem not to realize that, in the modern world, many people do not believe in the Bible as a sacred text; that even those who accept the Bible as divine do not interpret it in an Orthodox or even Judaic fashion; that even those who do so are not prepared to settle modern boundary disputes by means of religious documents, at least not until the coming of the Messiah or the Second Coming of Christ.

Jews need also to remember that discrimination and subtlety are required where polemics usually dominate. When apprised of Israeli delinquencies, the hard-liners have three stock responses. 1) The charges come from Arab or UN sources and are therefore highly suspect. 2) Why don't you discuss the far greater offenses of the Arabs? 3) The charges may well be true but you have to look at the whole picture and take into account the extreme position Israel is in: in its quest for survival, Israel may need to break a few eggs.

As to the first response, the matter is akin to the problem raised by the supermarket gossip sheets: The stories there appear in sources that are suspect, but they do sometimes turn out to be true (even if certain editorial boards used to have difficulty deciding whether they were "fit to print"). The second response is often correct but ambiguous. A Jew killing an Arab does get far greater coverage than Syrian soldiers massacring thousands of their fellow citizens. That may indeed be due to pure, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Or it may be a compliment: From Syrians, one expects swinishness, but from Israelis one expects civilized behavior. (Is this expectation, by the way, anti-Syrianism? anti-Arabism?) Or it may be due to the marketplace law that violence between ethnic or national groups sells better than violence within a group.

But the third response is the trickkiest. If Israeli's plight is to be looked at in context and if self-preservation is the shibboleth, have not the Palestinians the right to the same considerations? If mistreatment of detainees and bombing of Palestinian camps with only pro forma concern about civilian casualties is justified by reasons of state, so are terrorist attacks by the PLO. Two can play the same game. After all, the Palestinians have their own Diaspora, their own pogroms (Shatila, Kuwait), and their own Zionism. Before Mr. Podhoretz rushes in to complain about that relic from the cold war3 "moral equivalency," he should recall the findings of a British commission (chaired by a prominent Jew) in the 1930s that the contest in Palestine was not between right and wrong but between two rights. That, at any rate, is how the world still sees it, like it or not.

It is an old rule of human behavior that where my enemy's actions are concerned, "the end never justifies the means," but when it comes to my actions, well, the law of self-preservation--and only I can interpret the law as it applies to me--supersedes all other principles and rules.

Hence it is that, for Rosenthal and Podhoretz, Jews like Begin and Shamir used to be freedom-fighters, but Arafat is a terrorist; that Jews from Milwaukee and Odessa and Ethiopia have a special claim to the Holy Land, but native Palestinians (faceless Arabs, to too many Jews) can go live in Jordan, Kuwait, or Yemen. Needless to say, Jews have no monopoly on this doublespeak. The statements of Arabs and their sympathizers are rife with a sort of nonsense that is a mirror image of the Jewish one. But the Jewish behavior is under discussion now, and one is not required to accept gobbledygook from one party to a dispute just because the other party is equally delinquent and irresponsible.

The Rosenthal-Podhoretz faction also is a little too complacent on the role of Jews in recent history. Hitler's venom was directed at all sorts of people. Jews were his earliest and most afflicted victims. That makes it seem as if Jews should get credit for manning the barricades for, and before, the rest of mankind; as if, in short, Jews were premature anti-Nazis. In actuality, however, things were not so simple. Jews did not see Hitler for what he was before others did; they were singled out by him and given no choice in the matter.

LET US test that out with a mental experiment. Imagine a different world, one in which Hitler is everything that he was except for a small detail. He is not anti-Semitic; he thinks as little about Jews one way or the other as about Eskimos or Mormons. What would have happened then? Would Jews have joined the underground, hidden people (Gypsies, Slavs, socialists, dissenting clerics) in the attics, and martyred themselves in great numbers? Probably not. A few saintly (and highly employable) souls like Einstein would have emigrated on principle. Some would have gone into internal exile and avoided cooperation with the state. But many, with jobs and families to worry about, would, like their Catholic and Protestant and agnostic/atheist counterparts, have kept a low profile and done their patriotic duty as good Germans in the war against all those oppressive European peoples. Not manned the extermination camps perhaps, but not done much to stop them either if it involved personal risk. The easy sneer at "good Germans" is inappropriate when coming from those who have not been similarly tested.

Any illusions harbored by the hardline faction about Jews being immunized against the Nazi virus or being quintessential anti-Nazis have surely been destroyed by recent events: to wit, the flirtation with quasi-Nazi ideas--Araber raus!--by the late Meir Kahane (a rabbi, be it noted, a man of God) or by Rabbi, Moshe Levenger, by the far-right religious and nationalist sects in Israel, and by the aggressive Jewish-American settlers on the West Bank. No, Zionism is not racism, but, yes, some Zionists definitely are racists.

And why should there not be some racist Zionists? Jews are not saints, not exempt from the laws of psychology and sociology. When impoverished and disfranchised, Jews drifted to liberalism and socialism; when affluent, they think more along conservative lines. The agonizing over whether group characteristics are essential or accidental can be disposed of rather peremptorily. People possessing a linguistic, religious, and cultural tradition are certainly going to have a set of vices and virtues in common. As long as two conditions are met, nothing is wrong with observing that the Scots are thrifty, the Irish dreamy, the Jews studious and money-conscious, the Hispanics laid back, the New Englanders laconic and puritanical.

One condition is that it is understood to be not a genetic but an environmental matter. Look at Jews and the marital virtues. The Biblical Israelites fought a lot of wars, and, during Roman times, the Jews were seen as a fractious, bellicose crowd, ever ready to rebel and to martyr themselves. Then, during the two millennia of the Diaspora, the Jews became passive. As a minority in alien cultures, they had to learn to survive by meekness, bribery, passivity, by being, as Joyce's Bloom is said to be, the only true cheek-turning Christian in a lapsed, or frequently lapsing, Christian society. Hence the well known group characteristic was that "Jews don't fight." Then came the Holocaust and the consequent resolve of "Never again!" An Israel surrounded by Arab states has produced one of the best armies in the world. In reverting to the style of their ancestors in Biblical and Roman times, Jews--some would even complain--fight too much and too well. At any rate, the arrogance and pugnacity of the aptly named sabra ("cactus"--i.e., native Israeli) is no more a matter of Jewish genes than was the putative physical cowardice in the Diaspora.

THE SECOND caveat on the use of group characteristics is that they not be applied mechanically and that each individual must be judged on his/her own. Using group traits is a sort of early science, a lazy man's attempt to make sense of the multiplicity of facts. But always the individual comes first. Juliet had been raised to believe that Montagues are evil. Meeting an attractive but nameless young man, she fell in love with him. She not knowing him to be a Montague, her vision was not distorted by group traits, and she judged him as an individual. Hence her acknowledgment--"Too early seen unknown and known too late"--that experience takes precedence over theory and that with regard to one Montague, at least, group traits are nugatory.

So much at least needs to be said about Jewish culpability in the generation of anti-Semitism. Jews whose toes have been stepped on in the course of this essay will of course dismiss the whole thing as the rantings of a self-hating Jew telling tales out of school to the goyim. Not so; the goal has been Mr. Buckley's, i.e., to rise above partisanship in order to get at the truth. One must therefore add, loudly and clearly, that we have been speaking throughout of the behavior of some Jews some of the time, behavior which brings opprobrium on all Jews. "Jews are like other people, only more so." Pace Mr. Sobran, most Jews do not use expressions like "goyish kopp" or think that way; pace Mr. Buchanan, most Jews do not think along the lines of the Rosenthal-Podhoretz polemics. The case is similar to that of American tourists abroad yesterday and Japanese tourists today, who were and are known to speak loudly, flash money, and stay among themselves rather than mix with the natives. These are the traits of certain types, such as some members of the nouveau riche class, rather than of the nationalities; most Americans and Japanese never even go abroad.

Once the Jews confront and confess their won role in anti-Semitism, they are morally free to look elsewhere. The lion's share of the blame can be attributed not to Christ but (in line with the distinctions made by Kierkegaard and by Nietzsche) t Christianity and, above all, to Christendom. And that is a long story which the Second Vatican Council, Mr. Buckley, and other conscientious Christians have started to face up to at long last after nearly two millennia of silence or complicity by Church and flock in the face of the most obscene and profoundly un-Christian behavior by people worshipping the putative Prince of Peace and Love, who happened to be a Jew.

And this, only the second annual meeting of the John Randolph Club, celebrates the fact that we have suddenly vaulted from the periphery to a central role in the American Right. The occasion of this dramatic change, of course, has been the entry into the presidential race of our esteemed Randolph Club member, Patrick J. Buchanan. . . .

What has happened is that what I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms old and new inevitably get confusing, with a new "new" every few years, so let's call it the Original Right, the Right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the leviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal.

If we know what the Old Right was against, what were they for? How far would you roll government back? The minimum demand which almost all Old Rightists agreed on, which virtually defined the Old Right, was total abolition of the New Deal, the whole kit and kaboodle of the Welfare State, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, going off gold in 1933, and all the rest. Beyond that, there were charming disagreements. Some would stop at repealing the New Deal. Others would press on, to abolition of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, including the Federal Reserve System and especially that might instrument of tyranny, the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service. Still others, extremists such as myself, would not stop until we repealed the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789, and maybe even think the unthinkable and restore the good old Articles of Confederation.

The proper course for the Rightwing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them. We need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites. We need, in short, the leadership of Patrick J. Buchanan.

But can we call such a strategy "conservative"? I, for one, am tired of the liberal strategy, on which they rung the changes for forty years, of presuming to define "conservatism" as a supposed aid to the conservative movement. Whenever liberals have encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, want to repeal the New Deal or Fair Deal, they say "but that's not genuine conservatism. That's radicalism." The genuine conservative, these liberals go on to say, doesn't want to repeal or abolish anything. He is a kind and gentle soul who wants to conserve what left-liberals have accomplished.

I must admit that, in one sense, the liberals have had a point. The word "conservative" is unsatisfactory. The original Right never used the term "conservative": we called ourselves individualists, or "true liberals," or Rightists. We want to uproot the status quo, not conserve it. The original Right, the radical Right, had pretty much disappeared by 1963. But now, all of a sudden, with the entry of Pat Buchanan into the presidential race, my God, they're back! The radical Right is back, all over the place, feistier than ever and getting stronger!

What happened to the original Right, anyway? And how did the conservative movement get into its present mess? Why does it need to be sundered, and split apart, and a new radical Right movement created upon its ashes?

The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: what happened to the original Right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent and domination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and NATIONAL REVIEW. By the mid 1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement. Senator Taft and Colonel McCormick had died, and many of the right-wing congressmen had retired. The conservative masses, for a long time short on intellectual leadership, was now lacking in political leadership as well. An intellectual and power vacuum had developed on the right, and rushing to fill it, in 1955, were Bill Buckley, fresh from several years [nine months--Ed.] in the CIA, and NATIONAL REVIEW, an intelligent, well-written periodical staffed with ex-Communists and ex-leftists eager to transform the Right from an isolationist movement into a crusade to crush the Soviet God that had failed them.

Very quickly, NATIONAL REVIEW became the dominant, if not the only, power center on the right wing. This power was reinforced by a brilliantly successful strategy (perhaps guided by NR editors trained in Marxist cadre tactics) of creating a battery of front groups: ISI for college intellectuals, Young Americans for Freedom for campus activists; moreover, led by veteran Republican politico and NR Publisher Bill Rusher, the NATIONAL REVIEW complex was able to take over, in swift succession, the College Young Republicans, then the National Young Republicans, and finally to create a Goldwater movement in 1960 and beyond.

And so, with almost Blitzkrieg swiftness, by the early 1960s, the new global crusading conservative movement, created and headed by Bill Buckley, was almost ready to take power in America. But not quite, because first, all the various heretics of the Right, some left over the original Right, all the groups that were in any way radical or could deprive the new conservative movement of its much desired respectability in the eyes of the liberal and centrist elite, all these had to be jettisoned. Only such a denatured, respectable, non-radical, conserving Right was worthy of power.

And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and NATIONAL REVIEW purged and excommunicated all the radicals, all the non-respectables. Consider the roll call: isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, the John Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early NATIONAL REVIEW, to dare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil-rights revolution.

So that's how the dice have been loaded in our current political game. And virtually the only genuine Rightist spokesman who has managed to escape neocon anathema has been Pat Buchanan.

It was time. It was time to trot out the old master, the prince of excommunication, the self-annointed pope of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. It was time for Bill to go into his old act, to save the movement that he had made over into his own image. It was time for the man hailed by neocon Eric Breindel as the "authoritative voice on the American Right." It was time for Bill Buckley's papal bull, his 40,000-word Christmas encyclical to the conservative movement, "In Search of Anti-Semitism," the screed solemnly invoked in the anti-Buchanan editorial of the New York Times.

The first thing to say about Buckley's essay is that it is virtually unreadable. Gone, all gone is the wit and the sparkle. Buckley's tendency to the rococo has elongated beyond measure. His prose is serpentine, involuted, and convoluted, twisted and qualified, until virtually all sense is lost. Reading the whole thing through is doing penance for one's sins, and one can accomplish the task only if possessed by a stern sense of duty, as one grits one's teeth and plows through a pile of student term papers--which, indeed, Buckley's essay matches in content, in learning, and in style.

NATIONAL REVIEW is no longer the monopoly power center on the Right. There are new people, young people, popping up all over the place, Pat Buchanan for one, all the paleos for another, who frankly don't give a fig for Buckley's papal pronunciamento. The original Right, and all its heresies is back! In fact, Bill Buckley is the Mikhail Gorbachev of the conservative movement. Like Gorbachev, Bill goes on with his old act, but like Gorbachev, nobody trembles any more, nobody bends the knee and goes into exile. Nobody cares any more; nobody, except the good old New York Times. Bill Buckley should have accepted his banquet and stayed retired. His comeback is going to be as successful as Muhammad Ali's.

For Pat Buchanan's race for the Presidency has changed the face of the righ wing. It's now a brand new ball game. By his very entry, Pat Buchanan has changed and redefined the entire nature of the conservative movement. He has created a new radical, or Hard Right, very much like the original Right before NATIONAL REVIEW. For all their wealth, media influence, and seeming power, it is now the official conservatives and the neoconservatives who are on the periphery. The right wing shall hence forth only be defined in relation to the Buchananite movement. That movement, neither kind nor gentle, now sets the agenda, and sets the terms of the debate.

17. A Letter from John Kiley

It tracks like some implacable heat-guided missile to its important target. Beautifully argued and written.

18. A Letter from Christopher Ricks

Congratulations on the patience, exactitude, and justice of your substantial and substantiated essay on anti-Semitism. It had, if I may say so, all your characteristic virtues, and (I betray my injustice?) some virtues that I'd not thought characteristic of you, though I'd not supposed them alien to you. We have a common friend . . . I'm in his debt for letting me be in yours.

19. From a Column

By Joseph Sobran

The conservative reaction to the piece is overwhelmingly negative. "Why did Bill write it?" and "What does he think he's accomplishing?" are the questions one keeps hearing, along with the adjectives "turgid" and "unreadable."

20. A Letter from Henry Hyde

1. I hope you and yours have a Blessed Christmas and most fulfilling 1992!

2. Your article on Pat & Joe was painful but essential.

21. A Letter from John Roche

Wanted to tell you what a splendid piece of analysis your anti-Semitism study was. One of the things that has always annoyed me was the assertion that Marshall, Acheson, Rusk, were anti-Semites (Forrestal was) in 1947-48. They simply did not want another loose cannon in the Levant and--as Rusk told me once--wished "to hell that God had promised them Nebraska."

22. A Letter from Jeff Nelligan

Once again, you've demonstrated the Right can look at itself honestly and even-handedly--something the other side has yet to do.

Superb job.

23. A Letter from Eric Alterman

I appreciated your use of my Rosenthal/Buchanan argument in your recent opus and found myself in accord with a surprisingly large percentage of what you had to say. Two points, however:

1. I think it wrong and unfair to hold "the Left" responsible for Vidal's mean-spiritedness and Navasky's blind spot--particularly when, in my essay, I condemned Vidal in the pages of The Nation.

2. I wrote Navasky exactly the letter that Podhoretz said he wanted--without any invitations--when I was being considered for the job of Nation Washington editor. I promised, I think, "to dance the hora for 24 hours straight if Commentary were defunded by the American Jewish Committee," but unfortunately, in the Vidal case, "Norman was right, Victor was wrong." I ccd a copy to Norman at the time, as I recall.

In any case, I salute the care and grace you brought to the subject.

24. A Letter from Patrick Andretta

In over 25 yrs of subscribing to NR I don't think I've ever read a piece as awful as B. Buckley's screed on anti-Semitism: it was too long, too boring, unconvincing, and misplaced. Mr. Buckley is obviously ready for permanent retirement.

25. A Letter from John E. Folan

I have canceled my subscription to your publication. You are, I think, too arrogant to know your sins.

I hold you in total contempt.

26. A Letter from Sam Tanenhaus

I've just read Mr. Buckley's essay on anti-Semitism. Its immediate readership may be limited to the cultural-political cloister; but that narrowing is what makes the piece so strong. What seems at first a limitation is instead a spiritualizing discipline. Time chastens, and future readers will demand essences; Mr. Buckley has provided an essence. The essay is narrow as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is narrow--it opens onto very wide vistas, like a diagnosis of distemper that includes a geography of the central nervous system.

Another metaphor also imposes itself: he has created a king of music. Instead of simply stating his opinions--and how tiresome opinions become--he has orchestrated voices (Buchanan, Judis, Kinsley, Kristol, Podhoretz, Sobran, etc.) that heard together give us the whole range and register of our political journalism. The essence again. How liberating to hear what it all sounds like--not just the individual diatribes but their cumulative resonance, something to which we are chronically deaf because we overlook, or refuse to acknowledge, that all disputants are, despite themselves, collaborators, united by their passion for the very thing that drives them apart and that compels them into mimicry of one another's words and phrasings, so that an outsider, overhearing the debate, has trouble untangling the strands and determining who stands where. A guess: a future biographer will conclude that this essay is the beautiful synthesis of 1) the many public debates Mr. Buckley has led over the years and 2) his personal "performing" journalism.