In search of anti-semitism: what Christians provoke what Jews? Why? By doing what? - And vice versa

It is appropriate, on my own behalf and on that of my other senior colleagues, to comment on what is becoming a public quarrel involving Joe Sobran and those who impute anti-Semitism to him.

What needs to be said first is that those who know him know that Sobran is not anti-Semitic. Neither is he begin counting) a) anti-black, b) anti-Italian, c) anti-women, nor even d) anti-gay, to list some of the controversies he has got into that have resulted in such allegations. He is against a) some things done by blacks, b) some things done by ItalianAmericans, c) some things done by the women's liberation movement, and d) some things done by gays. With learning and eloquence, his acute eye roams the universe day and night in search of paradox and irony. In doing so he finds his quarries; but sometimes, in exposing them, he expresses himself with excessive liberty from accepted conventions.

Now ethnic sensitivities vary. It doesn't much matter what John Cheever or John O'Hara or John Updike or anybody else writes about them--you cannot really succeed, in America, in riling the WASPS. Their sense of security is as solid as Plymouth Rock, and incidentally as insensate. Blacks, yes, are sensitive, but black lobbies are not powerful enough to punish non-political transgressors against such taboos. (A black book-buyers' boycott against a novelist would not impoverish.) If the spoken or written offense is egregious enough, as in the case of the joke told [in 1975] to John Dean by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, a Cabinet officer gets fired. If a district attorney is named to a federal judgeship and it is revealed that he once made a pot-valiantly genial reference to the Ku Kaux Klan, he can be defeated on the floor of the Senate. And no one running for office in a state in which the black population is significant would consider, post 1965, violating the taboo. On the other hand, there is discussion of such questions as relative black intelligence, sexual promiscuity, and upward mobility that still gets a sober hearing in sober surroundings. About the American Indians one can say most things with impunity; about gays, progressively less as, emerging from the closet, they consolidate and give strength to their retaliatory powers.

In respect of American Jews, the sensitivity is of an extremely high order, and for the best of reasons. The toniest "liberal" universities in America would not, until about the time Joe Sobran was born, give tenure to Jewish professors. To elect a Jewish student to most social fraternities was quite simply unthinkable a generation ago. The designation of Jews as mortal enemies of civilization by the same European power that had given us Bach and Goethe, Kant and Einstein, reminded the Jews (those Jews who survived) that no society, however civilized its pedigree, can complacently be trusted to desist from the most ferocious human activity: genocide.

It is a far cry from Auschwitz to the suggestion (Joe Sobran's) that the Israelis are "frequently duplicitous" in their behavior toward America: but it ought not to surprise Sobran that such charges tend to alarm American Jews. And given Sobran's high intellectual acumen, one wonders that he should, on the one hand, quote with evident concurrence an anonymous friend's warning that the word "anti-Semitic" "... means that you ultimately approve of the gas chambers," and yet be surprised-indeed, be deeply hurt--by the intensity of the criticism he has experienced. When, 35 years ago, I wrote that an anti-conservative, anti-Christian consensus prevailed in the Yale faculty, I would not have been justified in registering surprise when conservative Christian scholars at Yale failed to achieve tenure.