A note to our readers

WILLIAM BUCKLEY is no fool, but as so often before, he is strolling in where angels fear to tread. In the essay beginning on page 20 he tackles the topic of anti-Semitism at its most combustible. His essay is not a history of anti-Semitism, nor a social-psychological definition of anti-Semitism, nor a survey of anti-Semitism in the world today (although he reflects on some of these matters in a final chapter). An entire language has been invented by social science so that such questions can be discussed in the most obscure possible manner. Instead he examines how anti-Semitism is treated when it appears, or is alleged to appear, in the limited but influential milieu in which he happens to live-opinion magazines, op-ed pages, syndicated columns, television talk shows. And because Mr. Buckley is incapable of being dull, he has written an essay that treats a recalcitrant subject with some wit as well as perception.

When I saw the first draft, my immediate reaction was that it was a great read." But it was also about ten times as long as the average cover story in NATIONAL REVIEW. While I reread it to select the best passages for publication, I sent it to my senior colleagues for their comments. We reached the same conclusion: It was not an easy book to excerpt. Either one cut whole chapters and incidents, inviting charges of selective coverage and partiality;

or one cut evenly throughout-which would risk distorting what are often finely balanced conclusions and a complicated message. The upshot was that the senior editors and the publisher unanimously agreed to publish the entire essay in a special issue of the magazine, and later to republish it-along with responses from those mentioned in the text--as a NATIONAL REVIEW book.

There was also a more public-spirited motive at work. On a number of occasions since its foundation, NATIONAL REVIEW has quietly played the role of conscience of the Right. As Mr. Buckley parenthetically records, this magazine pushed both the cranks of the John Birch Society and the anti-Semites associated with The American Mercury (in its decline) from the ranks of respectable conservatism. At the time I received Mr. Buckley's manuscript, however, we had not dealt in anything like detail with the recent and highly publicized allegations of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism often inspires both hasty judgments and harsh condemnations, and therefore entails the possibility of injustice to individuals. Before pronouncing, we wanted to be sure on two counts. Was there something real and substantial beneath the allegations? And if there was, was it a serious sin deserving ex-communication, an error inviting a paternal reproof, or something of both?

Mr. Buckley seeks to answer these questions in his essay. And since much of his criticism is devoted to writers who appear in our pages or who are associated with conservative causes dear to the magazine's heart, some personal interest is added to the innate fascination of the subject matter. One might stretch a simile and say that it is rather like recognizing your next-door neighbors in a pornographic film.

But one oddity strikes the reader very soon into the argument. Except for the episode of Gore Vidal and The Nation, all the instances of alleged anti-Semitism examined here--and the adjective alleged" should be understood to accompany the noun "anti-Semitism" for the rest of this editorial note-are cases of anti-Semitism among conservatives. The suspects are Joseph Sobran, Patrick J. Buchanan, and The Dartmouth Review. And this is not because Mr. Buckley has unreasonably decided to concentrate on conservative sins and charitably minimize liberal vices. The controversies he examines, in effect, selected themselves. These are the four cases that aroused a general brouhaha in the world of intellectual debate. Other expressions of anti-Semitism might have done so; these actually did.

MY REASON for calling this an oddity is that the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is now found only rarely on the respectable Right. Indeed, those conservative groups in the United States traditionally suspected of harboring anti-Semitic opinions (e.g., rural fundamentalists) have consciously abandoned such prejudice and embraced a thoroughgoing philo-Semitism, based in some cases on Biblical prophecies about Israel's role in Armageddon and in others on repentance for what is seen as Christian complicity in the Holocaust. It is remarkable that two of the strongest supporters of Israel in America today are the Reverend Jerry Falwell, for mainly religious reasons, and Senator Jesse Helms, for mainly strategic ones. Their forebears, both ideological and genetic, in the 1930s and before would very likely have been suspicious or even hostile toward the Jews they seldom if ever actually met.

When anti-Semitism appears today outside the restricted confines of the country club (which is seen as right wing by the Left and as "establishment" by the Right), it is almost invariably a left-wing phenomenon. Mr. Buckley's chapter on The Nation and Gore Vidal deals with one variant of this. But there is also the anti-Semitism of radical black consciousness as exhibited by Professor Leonard Jeffries and the Reverend Al Sharpton; the anti-Semitism of radical Arab or Palestinian nationalism (yes, I realize that the Arabs are themselves Semites); and the anti-Semitism which blends the two in a rainbow coalition of radical leftism and Third Worldery as exhibited by the Reverend Louis Farrakhan and, on occasion, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.