An important new monograph from the American Jewish Committee: Bernard Harrison, “Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Free Speech."
The relationship of certain Jewish intellectuals to the “anti-Zionist” left among whom they locate themselves does somewhat remind me of that between Louis Philippe Joseph II, Duc d’Orléans, known as “Philippe Egalité,” and the revolutionary cliques with whom he aligned himself before they ultimately executed him. But the relationship of “committed” intellectuals to radical causes is a long, mostly sad, story, and in no way a specifically Jewish one.
In any event, my own interest in this has nothing to do with allegedly “anti-Semitic Jews,” “self-hating Jews,” or any of the other obsessions of that sort that Rosenfeld’s paper called from the woodwork. I am not in the business of fingering anybody with that sort of abuse. I am not even interested in undermining left-wing ideas; large sections of the current left are already doing that job too well to need any help.
I am interested solely in combating the spread, this time around, among large numbers of “progressive,” well-meaning, but not always well-informed, people, mainly in the universities, the media, the arts, and the professions, of a complex of delusions — virtually entirely Gentile delusions, but with a remarkable power, on occasion, to infect Jewish minds — which have over the past century partly destroyed a people to whom we all owe much, and which certainly retain the power to do so again, if not stopped.
It is a long but compelling essay, written by a righteous gentile of extraordinary erudition, whose latest book ("The Re-Surgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion") has still not been reviewed by the paper of record for liberal opinion. (Hat tip: Robert Hessen, The Hoover Institution).