Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University, has published “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism” (American Jewish Committee December 2006). It is essential reading.
He argues “the genie [of anti-Semitism] is once more out of the bottle” and that “while much of it resembles the anti-Semitism of the past, certain features of present hostility to Jews and sometimes also to Judaism do seem new.” The monograph describes a widespread phenomenon among progressive intellectuals and activists — ideologists “proud to be ashamed to be Jews” (the phrase is that of Anthony Julius, the brilliant British lawyer who represented Deborah Lipstadt):
In some quarters, the challenge is not to Israel’s policies, but to its legitimacy and right to an ongoing future. Thus, the argument leveled by Israel’s fiercest critics is often no longer about 1967 and the country’s territorial expansion following its military victory during the Six-Day War, but about 1948 and the alleged “crime,” or “original sin,” of its very establishment. . . . As Jacqueline Rose, the author of The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press, 2005), puts it, “the soul of the nation was forfeit from the day of its creation.”
Rosenfeld notes that there “are many like Rose today” (he mentions, among others, Noam Chomsky, Tony Judt, Joel Kovel, Adrienne Rich, Sara Roy, Marc Ellis, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Adam Shapiro, Steve Quester, Ora Wise, Michaell Neumann, and Seth Farber) and writes that one of the most disturbing consequences of “this Jewish war against the Jewish state” by “progressive” academics, radicals and rabbis is that:
Because the ideological package that informs progressive politics today links anti-Zionism to anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-globalization, anti-racism, etc., one is expected as a matter of course to be against Zionism and the supposedly “racist,” “colonialist,” and “oppressive” state it has created. As political scientist Andrei Markovits puts it [in a 2005 article in Dissent entitled “The European and American Left since 1945”], “If one is not at least a serious doubter of the legitimacy of the state of Israel (never mind the policies of its government) . . . one runs the risk of being excluded from the entity called ‘the left.’”
Rosenfeld is the author of "Imagining Hitler" and "A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature," among other books, and is knowledgeable on Holocaust literature, Jewish writers in America, Jewish autobiography, the Adolph Hitler mystique, anti-Semitism, and Anne Frank. His new monograph is an important document.