So, on January 6, two pieces by me had appeared—one in “After-Dark” on the Jewish museum boom so that readers could get into New York’s Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue to see the remarkable exhibition on the Dreyfus Affair before it closed on January 14, and the other, the controversial one on my misgivings about Jewish sensitivity to non-Jewish criticism.
As any contributor
to the paper knows, Dan is the quintessentially autonomous editor. If something
doesn’t teach him anything new, he returns the piece promptly. If it does teach
him something new, he acknowledges it as about to appear “in the not too
distant future,” as he searches for congenial pairs on his front page.
So the simulcast of
the front page piece on Jewish sensitivity and the Hazard-at-Large column on
Dreyfus was completely fortuitous. But I was retroactively pleased by the
juxtaposition—while because I expected that some readers were going to be shook
up by he former (I had been shook up myself by the gradual erosion of unquestioning
belief in whatever happened to be current Israeli domestic or foreign
policies), it caught me by complete surprise (and not a little dismay) to learn
that readers were reading anti-Semitic sentiments into my praise of the Jewish
museum boom.
What’s going on? I
muttered across the tundra and mountains and plains of Canada, as I strained at
the bit to get a look at the “hate mail.” I even went to the Post Office in
Winnipeg to see whether Dan expressed me a swatch of the letters on a Thursday,
I could formulate a response and have a rebuttal in his office by Monday. But
Canadian metabolism doesn’t work that fast. My personal pique had arisen
originally years ago from the gross unfairness of a few academics with whom I
had policy disputes stooping to unfounded charges of anti-Semitism when they
couldn’t meet my arguments fairly, and openly.
I had no idea
either when I wrote the piece during Hanukkah week that it would be swept up by
another fiercer firestorm in the Gaza and West Bank. All across Canada I read
the Canadian and International press (learning incidentally a lot more than I
do from the American media which tend to favor the client state statute of
Israel) as the crisis deepened.
The term “anti-anti-Semitism” I had coined in
June at the Academy of Music in a conversation with Earl Abrahamson between
sets of the Humor Summit; later that evening I explored it further at the Pen
and Pencil Club with David Friedman, TV critic of the Daily News. The NPR piece
on JAP-Bashing, then, merely precipitated a point of view that had been
focusing for months. (The “simmering, simmering” metaphor, by the way, is what
Walt Whitman said reading Emerson did to him—it gave him the courage to
articulate his immensely unpopular vision.)
I don’t see how
anyone can read the Museum piece and consider me an anti-Semite. But no one was
required to read both articles. Still it is a grossly bum rap to infer
anti-Semitism because I say Europe is “awash” with demobbed Israeli soldiers on
their “Wanderjahrs.” I describe them as “extremely attractive young men.” To see
negative connotation in “awash” is simply to invent figments. And to imply that
the widely used term Wanderjahrs betrays Nazi sympathies is, to put it bluntly,
fatuous.
I repeat: JAP and
yenta are not terms invented by the goyim. The Jewish subculture devised them
to deal with deviations from their spiritual traditions. I identify with those
spiritual traditions. Let me tell you briefly why.
Until I entered the
Navy in 1944 at 17, I had never known a single Jew, personally, so cocooned was
I in the Irish Catholic ghettos of Michigan. Since I was in a high IQ aviation
radar unit, I met a good many Jews in my boot camp company and in tech schools.
The nuns who reared me at Holy Rosary were anti-Semitic. (They used to listen
to Father Coughlin Sunday afternoons), but I was very early as contemptuous of
that lack of Christ-like charity as I was of their racism toward the “colored.”
So, in the Navy, at
the risk of parody, I must say that some of my best new friends were Jews.
But that was only
the beginning. After a Catholic university education (which perversely deepened
my radical rejection of American Catholic bourgeois values) I entered graduate
school in Cleveland where my two mentors were Harvey Goldberg, a Marxist
historian whose dissertation was a biography of the French socialist Jean
Jaures, and Ray Ginger, whose biography of Eugene Victor Debs gave me an
aphorism that has centered my life: “Intelligent discontent is the mainspring
of civilization.” Harvey Wish directed my doctoral dissertation, and if he
considered me an anti-Semite, he never mentioned it when he praised my research
in his book on the history of American history.
At Michigan State,
Herb Weisinger and Adrian Jaffe were the two best English professors I had
there, Milton Stern was the graduate student I was closest to, and the Marxist
art historian Walter Abell taught me more about looking at art than anyone else
has since. And intellectual Charlie Hirschfeld insighted me into his field.
I later chose as my
role models two Jewish literary critics, Irving Howe, because he alternated
books, one on unions and politics, one on literature, throughout his prodigious
career, and Leslie Fiedler, well, because he’s Leslie Fielder, a madcap quirky
original. Not to be too boring about it, but my visual tastes ran to Ben Shahn,
Philip Evergood and Jack Levine. My ear was in fealty to Aaron Copland and
George and Ira Gershwin. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Stan Getz illumined my
isolated youth. What rot to impute anti-Semitism. Harvard sociologist David
Riesman’s teasing me twenty-five years ago as a certified Philo-Semite is
closer to the mark.
When I became
Radio-TV Editor of Scholastic Magazines in 1955, senior editors Ken Goldstein
and Eric Berger became my mentors there. Al Holman (torchsinger Libby’s bro)
gave me my first college teaching job at Trenton State. And when Walter
Annenberg gave Penn $2 million while I was a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow in
American Civilization, I helped organize the first Annenberg School. It was I
who recommended that Gilbert Seldes be the first dean because he had written
the first book on American secular culture in 1924, The Seven Lively Arts.
Finally, my
greatest hero in journalism was and remains Isidore Feinstein Stone, the
inimitable Izzy. In 1975, when I was on the Board of Directors of the Friends
of the Free Library, I organized an arts festival, the centerpiece of which was
an award for the best undergraduate journalism in Izzy’s tradition. So it’s
simply poppycock (and prima facie evidence of the dangers of
anti-anti-Semitism) to call me an anti-Semite.
I may be wrong, I may be
impatient, I may even sometimes be arrogant. But I’m no anti-Semite. Any more
than I’m a racist when I chide Oliver Franklin for helping to establish an
imperial mayoralty in Philly, far from his original Third World idealism; I’m
having a lover’s quarrel with Oliver, just as my fear that the garrison state
is undermining Zionist idealism deeply disturbs me as a partisan of Israel.
I also disagree
with the publisher of this paper’s belief that “outsiders” shouldn’t criticize
other subcultures. Every religion, ethnic group, and voluntary association in
America has two dimensions—the private and the public. Its private domain is
its own business, but when those beliefs and actions impinge on the common weal
or ill, it is the duty of outsiders who value pluralism and diversity to have a
lover’s quarrel with those they fear are harming themselves and the community
at large in the process.
I grant that such
external criticism should be done with tact and compassion. And there is at
least one aspect of my original statement (implying that Jews were not much
help to the NAACP while they made good use of colored ladies as help in their
homes) which I feel was intemperate. While not perfect, the American Jews’
support for the beleaguered Negro has been so far ahead of the rest of the
society that it was churlish of me to imply less. I apologize for that.
On the other hand,
I’ve taken a beating that I didn’t earn. For God’s sake, I’ve even heard the
preposterous hypothesis that because my ex-wife ran off (well, walked away,
fast) with a Jewish man twenty years ago that I’m ipso facto an anti-Semite.
Come on, hate mongers, you can do better than guilt by disassociation.
The publisher,
finally, made a very shrewd observation when she noted that not a single
non-Jew entered the forum with a letter. Odd, isn’t it? All the more so when
the day after my casual encounter with Ms. Seiderman, a letter arrived praising
my article on R. Tait McKenzie, Penn’s fabulous doctor / sports sculptor
featured at the Calgary Olympics (February 17) and signing itself hate-filled
self off with a jaunty “and beware of JAPS.” Yes, Susan, there’s hate out
there. But it’s not Hazard’s…
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