t
in deterrence and retaliati•
PRESENT
TENSE
91 J
other. To say that
"true"
·
in peace afforded to
Israc
onciled and forgiving neigt
move away from politics :
(September
1982)
raphy into
utopi~.
We hav
or
the present without
wl
will
be no future.
The argument that, in v
long-range shells and
miss
tiers no longer matter doc
vince me. Every inch ma
advance
of
the"Syrian tat
Yom Kippur War has left
it
scar in
our
memory.
Now it
is
possible that at
in the future, in the course
predictable shifts
of
powea
.
precisely, the Powers), such a Pal-
estinian state will
.be
established any-
how. When that .happens,
we
shall
have to work
at
oar
salvation within
/
Fighting
Intellectual
Anti:.Semitism
t
.,
n
the new parameters. I only hope that,
Jonathan
D.
Sarna
if such a time comes,
we
.shaU have
the opportunity
to
write to each
other
to discover what we think!
And in the meantime
we
must try
to make the best
of
this unhappy sit·
uation. Protect ourselves against at-
tack; control
our
·own extremists;
grant as much autonomy and freedom
as possible; foster friendly contacts
and show ourselves to be fair and rea-
sonable and, whenever
we
can, gen-
erous. Since we cannot command
affection, we must strive to
earn
re-
spect,
Jor
our
own sake as much as
theirs.
It
iS
possible
to
imagine, is it not,
that with the passage
of
yean
the an-
tagonisms will get blunted and some
of
the bitterness will fade? The lead·
ers
on
both
sides who are associated
with the unyielding hostility will have
left the scene. The loyalties and .at-
tachments in successive generations
will have loosened; the hankering for
return and revenge will have lost its
edge.
The
magnet
of
the unmitigated
Arab
wealth
wiU
have gradually emp-
tied the refugee camps; After all, it
.is
not as
if
objectively ·the refugees
had nowhere else
to
go and could not
fashion a construdive life for them·
selves.
By the
end.of
the century (not
aU
that long.to go), the vast majority
of
people in Israel
wiU
have been bQm
there.
·ne
roots will have been ·struck
ineradicably
decp:Tbe
fact ·9f Israel's
existence will
be
time-honored and
beyond questioning. A degree
of
ac-
Among the many forms
of
contem-
porary anti-Semitism,
few
are more
pernicious than the intellectual vari-
ety-;that
is, anti-Semitism
-with
aca-
demic
pretensions.
The
problem
is
not new. Almost' eighty years ago,
Solomon Schechter, then president
~f
the
Jewish"
Theological Seminary,
coined the term .. higher anti-Semi-
tism" for that .. which bums the soul
though it leaves the body unhurt,"
and pointed
out
that it
was
a partic-
ular feature
of
.. so-called civilized
countries."
.. Higher anti-Semitism" in Schech·
ter's .day took the form
cf
pseudo-
biblical scholarship attached to ven-
omous attacks against Judaism and
the
Jewish people. Hatred
also
masked
itself as the .. science
of
race," which
purported to demonstrate, in the
words
of
Madison Grant, author
of
The
Passing
of
the
Greal
·Race,
that
..
The
cross between a white man and
an
Indian
is
an
Indian; the cross be-
tween a white man and a negro
is
a
negro;- and the cross between any
of
the
three European
~ccs
and a Jew
is a Jew."
Today such intellectual anti-Semi-
tism
has
largely disappeared. It
has
been replaced by hate-mongering in
loMduua
D.
Sarna
is
the
author
of
the
forthcoming People
Walle
on
Their
Heads: Moses Weinberger's Jews and
Judaism in New York (Holmu
&:
Mtitr).
the cloak
of
history. Modern practi-
tioners call it historical revisionism',
and through it hope to achieve a rad-
ical reinterpretation
of
the past. At
the center
of
revisionist studies stands
the Institute for Historical Review.
Among its publications
is
The
Journal
of
Historical
Review,
which describes
itself
as
a "scholarly" journal, and
comes .complete with the usual aca-
demic trappings.
A quick reading
of
The
Journal suf-
fices
to penetrate its objective ve-
neer. Featured in the first issue
is
an
article by Arthur R. Butz,
·an
asso-
ciate professor
of
electrical engineer-
ing and computer sciences at
Northwestern University, on
"The
International 'Holocaust' Contro-
versy," which discusses the widely
publicized theme, advanced in his
book
of
the same name, that the Hol-
ocaust
is
"The
Hoax
of
the Twentieth
Century." Subsequent articles, many
by
~cademicians,
.. expose"
other
al-
leged .. myths," employing tortuous
logic, arguments
"from
silence and
misreading
of
evidence-all
accom-
panied by extensive
footnotes-to
"prove" that concentration camp gas
chambers were in reality nothing
more than ••cold storage rooms," that
evidence documenting the Holocaust
is
.. faked" and that .those who truly
suffered in World War U were non-
Jews, Germans in particular.
Articles parroting Arab ·propa-
ganda, with titles such as
•ne
Men-
dacity
of
Zion'":
and
..
Palestine: Liberty
ana Justice," extend
the
process
of
.. revisionism" to the Middle East cri-
sis. Snide comments about
the
Tal-
mud (such as ..
That
particular·tome
is
brim
fuU
of
allusions to toiletary
[sic J and sexual functions and dys-
functions"), and
on
worldwide Jew-
ish power prove that ••revisionism"
is
firmly planted in traditional anti-
Semitism.
How
can Jews respond to this ma-
licious rigamarole?
Four
strategies
suggest themselves. They are best
described as outrage, silence, instruc-
tion and obstruction. Each has been
put to use in different places
at
dif·
ferent
t.imes.
Outrage
involves strong expres-
sions
of
stunned shock with emotion
detennining response. Those
who··
loudly express their feelings
do
·so
because they insist upon remember·
ing Holocaust marlyn .. in ·their ve
